Neil's Movie Reviews

The Grey

2012-01-29T17:24:00.000-08:00

There was a really good article in the New York Times lastweek about a storytelling guru named Lindsay Doran who’s preaching a somewhatfresh take on making movies that resonate.

Her insight is that audiences care most about relationships,and the positive resolution of those relationships, not whether the maincharacter achieves their stated goal.

I really love that phrase: “the positive resolution ofrelationships.” That truly is the magic nectar of good storytelling, isn’t it?

Casablanca is often cited for its bittersweet ending.Bogart loses Ingrid Bergman, but he resolves his relationship with her in themost positive way imaginable – “we’ll always have Paris” – and goes off tofight Nazis with his true soul mate, Claude Reins. That’s not a bittersweetending. That’s a sweet-sweet ending. And it’s because all the relationships gettied up positively. All of them. The Nazi Colonel gets shot – I can hardlythink of a more positive resolution for a Nazi – and even romantic rival VictorLaszlo shakes Bogie by the hand and declares, “Welcome back to the fight. Thistime I know our side will win.” Woo hoo!

Bogie gets his bar taken from him, loses the love of hislife and goes on the run as a fugitive behind enemy lines. And it’s thegreatest ending of all time. “The positive resolution of relationships” indeed.

Which brings us to The Grey and that damned ending.

The Grey is a primal tale about man versus nature. Itfollows the grim adventures of Liam Neeson (character name irrelevant andundesirable; we paid for a Liam Neeson movie, dammit), a sniper who protectsoil pipeline workers in the arctic from the predation of local wolves.

Neeson’s whole life is grey in the wake of his wife’s death,and he’s on the verge of suicide when his arctic tour expires and he’s senthome on a charter plane.

Well, almost sent home.

The plane crashes somewhere in the arctic waste, sparingonly half a dozen of its passengers. Gathering survivors and assessing theirsituation is a task that must be quickly achieved, because there are wolves inthese here parts, and they come calling sooooon.

Neeson has the greatest knowledge of wolves, so he’s the onewho suggests abandoning the plane and making for a tree line in the distance,which will hopefully be a defensible position.

This strategy has its detractors, and leads to a strugglefor dominance within the group that makes the six men resemble theiradversaries quite closely.

But hey, Neeson is Neeson, and before long our guys areheaded for those trees. The wolves follow along, and the rest of the movieconsists of homo sapiens getting their asses handed to them by canis lupis.

All the way to the end, it’s good to be a wolf and bad to bea human. And that’s the problem with the movie. It eschews a Hollywood happyending – and the usual Hollywood heroics throughout – in favor of a grimartsiness, but whatever was achieved by abandoning the standardingenious-humans-dig-deep-and-beat-the-odds scenario feels lost in the end,when Neeson finds himself in the very den of the wolves, a place he can’t – anddoesn’t – survive.

Presumably Neeson achieves some transcendent self-knowledge,and peace with the memory of his father (yeah, lots of dead family membersintrude on the action) in his last few moments, but I don’t think this wasworth two hours of feeling cold vicariously. And the reason I don’t think itwas worth it is because it’s too self-directed. It’s all about Neeson, and notabout his relationships with others.

If Neeson were with even a single companion, and theyachieved an understanding of each other, or appreciation of each other, in themoments before their death, that might have made for a satisfying finale. Nosuspension of disbelief would be required, but at least we would feel that somethingworthwhile transpired onscreen.

Instead, we’re treated to the best day the wolves have hadin years. It’s like a pizza party from the perspective of the pizza.

The Grey is what would probably happen if a group of guys weredropped into the arctic near the den of some ravenous wolves. But realism doesn’tnecessarily illuminate, nor does it necessarily ennoble. What The Grey couldhave used is a little color.

Oh, that’s awful. I’ll change that ending next time I perusethese reviews.

I promise.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 61/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 63/100

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

2012-01-29T12:19:00.000-08:00

This movie contributed to my recent hiatus from reviewing. Isaw it weeks ago, but I didn’t know what to say about it.

And I still don’t.

The story is now so well-known I hesitate to evenencapsulate it, but here goes:

Swedish journalist and social crusader Mychael Blomqvistgets summoned by a rich old man on a snowy island, who tasks him to discoverwho on the island killed the old man’s niece Harriet some twenty years ago. Theold man is convinced the killer is still alive, and he suspects it is a memberof his own extended family.

Blomqvist accepts the assignment because his own career isin jeopardy after making some powerful enemies. Over the course of theinvestigation he surprises himself by making a powerful friend: goth punkcomputer hacker and sexual abuse victim Lisbeth Salander. Together they huntdown a killer and learn that they really, really like each other.

This story works. It worked as a novel – smashingly well –it worked as a Swedish movie, and it works as an American movie.

But of the three, it works least well as an American movie.

I think it’s because the tone is fundamentally un-American:intelligent (ha!), brooding, pessimistic, and consumed with the smotheringweight of the past.

The American movie closest in tone to Dragon Tattoo isSilence of the Lambs, but the differences are instructive. Silence was allabout remaking oneself, turning a tragic past into a heroic present, andlearning you have more in common with the worst serial killer in history thanwith your boss or your peers – and learning that such a similarity speakspretty well of you.

“Oh Clarice, people will say we’re in love…”

Dragon Tattoo is a good story, but it’s not really ourstory, and even if you throw our best writer – Steven Zaillian – our bestdirector – David Fincher – and one of our best musicians – Trent Reznor – atthe project, it’s STILL not our story.

This is all a little airy, though.

Maybe the problem is that Rooney Mara, while good in theiconic role of Lisbeth Salander, isn’t pitch-perfect the way Swedish actressNoomi Rapace was. It’s hard to follow a performance like that a scant few yearslater.

Maybe the problem also lies with Fincher’s decision toextend the drama many minutes too long after the climactic death of thedreadful killer. The discovery of lost Harriet should fall fast after thekiller’s death; it shouldn’t be its own mini-plot. There’s no more danger inthe story, and thus no suspense.

No project in Hollywood looked like more of a sure thingthan The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo last year. Hottest property, brighteststars, studio backing… how could it go wrong? Yet it barely managed to coverits costs, and was shut out of every major Oscar category.

Sometimes a movie is too obvious, too straight a shot, tooeasy an accomplishment to be any good.

Art has to be hard.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 71/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 72/100

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol

2012-01-29T10:53:00.000-08:00

I saw this movie when it came out a month ago, and I’ve beenstruggling with the review ever since.

The problem stems partly from the fact that MI:GP issomewhere near the middle of the scale, neither remarkably good nor bad. Thatalways makes it tough for me to psych myself up for a review. But the biggerproblem is that MI:GP only barely qualifies as a movie at all. It’s more like aseries of clever action shorts connected by quickly-spoken dialogue onfast-moving vehicles en route to our next location.

Here’s my take on the evolution of the franchise:

Mission Impossible 1 – the one where Jon Voight betrays TomCruise, forcing the MI team to break into CIA headquarters itself – wascompetent but utterly forgettable. It was directed by a Brian de Palma sodesperate to earn one last studio check that he framed each shot with thepredictability of a “directing for dummies” manual. The movie was a commercialsuccess on the strength of efficient marketing. Which led us to…

Mission Impossible 2 – the one John Woo directed with hisusual operatic absurdity. This is the one where it turns out everyone’s wearingextremely realistic masks, which they start yanking off in Act Three for aseries of dramatic reversals. I think Tom Cruise was actually wearing two masksat one point. This was the worst movie of the year 2000.

Then along came Mission Impossible 3, and shockingly, it waspretty good. This is the one where Phillip Seymour Hoffman – an actual actor! –kidnaps Cruise’s wife and won’t give her back until Cruise steals and thendelivers a mysterious doomsday device known only by its codename, “rabbitfoot.” This is an actual bad guy plan! Hooray! I do not feel MI:3 got slightedby failing to win the Best Picture Oscar, but it had narrative logic, goodpacing and flow, and even a couple relationships we could hang our emotionalhats on. The movie was directed by JJ Abrams and was part of his ascent to theA-list, which he is currently defiling with films way worse than MI:3.

Now we’ve got Mission Impossible 4, directed by Brad Bird ofPixar fame. I’m a bit of an iconoclast on Pixar. I like all of their movies butlove none of them. The Pixar writers room is a self-described “factory” wherescripts are hammered into shape by thirty or forty very good writers. And thestories all feel that way. You have to be a team player to get along at Pixar,and Brad Bird is the teamiest of all the team players.

But don’t go looking for artistic vision from him. Andespecially don’t go looking in Mission Impossible 4.

Theoretically the movie is about “Ghost Protocol,” thelast-resort disavowal of the entire mission impossible task force by the U.S.government itself in the event IMF does something very bad.

In this case, the entire Kremlin gets blown up while TomCruise and company are within a couple hundred feet of the place. They getblamed by the Russians and disavowed by the U.S. Just like that, IMF doesn’texist. Cruise and company – british comedian Simon Pegg, American beauty PaulaPatton and the next Jason Bourne, Jeremy Renner – must band together to cleartheir names and restore the IMF to the world’s good graces.

How do they do this? Oh heck, I don’t know. There IS no realstory in Mission Impossible 4. I’ve just described the set-up, but everythingthat follows should be described in terms of its accomplishments in the art ofstuntwork and pyrotechnics, not the development of story.

I’ll take a stab at the story anyway:

Someone’s got a satellite that controls some nuclear missiles,which may have to be shot down with a laser, but the good guys have to get theoverride codes for the laser, and they have to pay for the codes with stolendiamonds, but there have to be some glass diamonds to fool the other peopletrying to get the codes, but once the other people get the codes anyway, thegood guys have to chase them into a sandstorm, where they discover the bad guywas wearing a mask all along…

As you can tell, I have no clear idea what happened inMission Impossible 4 or why. And I like action movies.

The reason I don’t hate this movie is that narrative clarityisn’t the only virtue a movie can have. There’s also those stunts andpyrotechnics. In MI:4, they’re excellent, especially the deservedlytalked-about “spiderman” sequence, where Cruise climbs the side of a Dubaiskyscraper wearing a pair of electronic sticky gloves that start to malfunctionat a very inconvenient time.

The movie is loud, swift and sleek. It’s not very good, butit’s not very bad. It does pull off the trick Hollywood has been trying tomanage for a century – the trick of making an enjoyable movie without a story –but it does so on a technicality, since it’s only barely enjoyable.

And man is it tough to review!

SCORE

How Accomplished: 58/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 56/100

Shame

2011-12-31T11:48:00.000-08:00

What jumps out about Shame is that NC-17 rating.

You don’t get the NC-17 for violence. You only get it forsex.

Extreme sex.

So it was with great eagerness I waited for the movie tobegin. I was about to see material that people under seventeen simply could nothandle.

As a deeply serious and mature person, I knew I could handlewhatever sexual abominations the movie presented, and furthermore I coulddiscern the artistic intent of said abominations, probably coming away withsome very trenchant insights into the human condition. Oh yeah, I could handlethe NC-17.

But boy was I curious to know what envelope was gettingpushed.

I knew the movie dealt with a sex addict played by thearthouse version of Ryan Gosling, 2011’s hottest serious actor, MichaelFassbender.

I also knew the movie co-starred Carey Mulligan, thearthouse version of Emma Stone, as Fassbender’s equally screwed up sister.

Incest was certainly in play. Heck, with sex addiction,almost anything was in play. I was giddy as the curtain raised on thefilm.

In the first scene we meet Fassbender’s character on acrowded subway train. He spies an attractive woman sitting opposite him. Healso spies the equally attractive diamond on her fourth finger. Undaunted, hegives her the smoldering, unwavering stare of the primeval hunter.

The woman tries to ignore him, but he’s so damnhandsome, and his gaze is so intense and unapologetic, she gets into a hotlittle exchange of googly-eyes.

Then the train arrives at her stop. She gets off with acrush of other commuters. Fassbender leaps off the train to follow her, thoughthis is not his stop. He trails her through the crowded station, but quicklyloses sight of her. Despite his best tracking efforts… she’s gone.

He gets back onto the train, defeated and unfulfilled.

Welcome to his world.

Shame is a character study, and, happily, the characterbeing studied is a pretty interesting guy. Not because he’s smart, or deep, ortalented, or unusual. He’s none of these things. He can’t even keep up a decentconversation on a date.

But he’s an extremely well-drawn specimen of homo urbanicusmodernicus. He’s got a good job – the nature of which is wisely left generic –aren’t all jobs generic these days? – he’s got a good apartment and a goodwardrobe, and because he’s super-handsome and because he’s a smooth,instinctive sexual shark, he does extremely well with the ladies.

But of course it’s not enough.

It’s not enough because he lives in the modern world, whichmeans his life is a howling void of meaningless ennui.

(I know, life turns into a howling void in almost any era –Thoreau certainly appreciated this fact – but Shame approaches the universalthrough a very current specificity which, again, is wise.)

Fassbender fills the void with his sex addiction. This meanshe’s hitting on every attractive woman around him, all the time.

All.

The.

Time.

When he’s not having sex with someone he picked up, he’shaving sex with a prostitute. He hires them so often he gets discount cardslike at a frozen yogurt shop.

And when he’s not doing that, he’s masturbating to internetporn.

You could say the guy’s got a real problem.

What I like about the movie is that it’s not really aboutsex addiction. Movies that are about what they’re about are superficial andboring. Instead, Shame is about that ennui, that sense of purposelessness,that afflicts many/most of us. Its real cause is Fassbender’s inability tocreate emotional relationships. He’s deeply, desperately alone in life, whichhelps explain that manic drive toward sexual connection. It’s all he has.

Enter his sister.

She comes to live with him, having bailed on the latest of astring of loser boyfriends. Fassbender’s exasperated by her presence, and they end upin a subtle kind of war with each other, but the two are a lot alike. They areboth sad, they are both alone, and they are each other’s best hope of having ameaningful relationship in life. Or of learning how to have it with others.

So of course they alienate each other as much as possible.

Shame is a smart and perceptive film, but given itssubject matter and reputation, what’s surprising is how conventional it is.Replace sex addiction with Asperger’s or alcoholism and we’ve seen this movie ahundred times. Before the film began I was ready to be scandalized. By the timeit ended I had long stopped fearing/hoping for novel forms of perversity.Instead I appreciated Shame for the honest, simple film about human beings that it is. I’malmost tempted to call it sweet.

So where the heck did that NC-17 come from?!

It’s the sheer volume of sex in the movie. Maybe twentypercent of the running time is a sex scene.

Think about that.

Nearly twenty percent of the running time is a sex scene.

Which is unconventional and daring, I suppose, but as everysavvy modernist knows, it’s not the quantity of the sex that matters, it’s thequality.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 81/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 84/100

Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy

2011-12-14T14:29:00.000-08:00

Boy, is that a good title.

I'm sure it was a fine day for author John LeCarre -- sometime in the early 70's? -- when the title struck him. He was probably thinking of something else, maybe even working on the text of the novel, but in the back of his mind he was reciting the list of characters at the center of this story, the codenames of the four top intelligence chiefs in the British SIS:

Tinker. Tailor. Soldier.

...

Poorman.

That's right, Poorman. The list comes from a children's rhyme I have never heard of, and it runs "Tinker, tailor, soldier, poorman."

And what an awful title that would have made.

But one of those four characters is a spy, whom George Smiley, played by Gary Oldman in the new film version, is tasked with uncovering.

It's the central, relentless question of the movie:

Tinker, tailor, soldier, or poorman?

Which of these is a spy?

So LeCarre was turning the question over in his mind, probably for years: Tinker? Tailor? Soldier? Poorman? He said it over and over to himself. Then, one day (like I said, probably while he was actively thinking about something else), he said, "Tinker, tailor, soldier..."

...

SPY!

It must have hit him like a thunderbolt. What rhythm, what snap, what intrigue and allure. LeCarre had his title.

Almost forty years later we've got the movie Tinker, Tailor, Soldier, Spy, a smart, thick, atmospheric, authentic slow burn of a movie.

And I do mean slow.

Tinker is a thriller that moves through molasses.

There are lots of silences in the movie. There are lots of characters and lots of subplots. There are flashbacks.

It's a movie that could very easily have lost its way, if it didn't have two things going for it: 1) that central, driving, relentless question: tinker? tailor? soldier? spy? and 2) a really good bad guy.

The bad guy exists entirely off-screen, a la Kaiser Sose (or Sauron the Great!), but he exerts a monumental pull on the story. He is Karla, director of Soviet Intelligence. He is the chessplayer to end all chessplayers, the master manipulator, the unbeatable schemer. We never see his face.

Gary Oldman's weary, wary spyhunter has met the man, only once, many years ago, and he is haunted by the feeling that he revealed too much of himself in that meeting.

It's a dangerous thing to reveal something of yourself in the shadowy world of spycraft -- at least in the fictional version of said world, which is all we're concerned with here.

And that gives a necessary personal edge to the proceedings.

There was a danger that Tinker would come out like a Mission Impossible movie, just infinitely slower and with a less attractive cast -- nullifying the only two positive qualities of a Mission Impossible movie.

But the danger is deftly avoided. Tinker stays true to what it is: a grainy, dimly-lit, whispery journey into a world of complicated politics and even more complicated machinations. A world where personal relationships always get sacrificed at the altar of the espionage business. That's a sad thing, and everyone involved registers the sadness.

It may not be great, and it's certainly not exciting. But Tinker shows what you can achieve off the strength of a great title and a powerful central question.

Tinker?

Tailor?

Soldier?

Spy?

--spoiler alert--

Tailor!

SCORE

How Accomplished: 69/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 72/100

The Artist

2011-12-03T14:44:00.001-08:00

This movie is an old-fashioned people pleaser.

It’s so old-fashioned that it’s in black and white, andsilent.

You wouldn’t think a movie could get away with being asilent film these days, but, delightfully, The Artist gets away clean.

Fittingly, the protagonist is a silent film star. His nameis George Valentin, and in the year 1927 his celebrity is at its peak – as ishis personal wealth. He’s a little pompous and a little vain, but we like himbecause he’s got a winning smile, he’s always nice to his co-workers, down tothe least of the P.A.’s – secretly a huge ingredient in likability; if you wantus to bond with a character, just show us he’s on first-name terms with thejanitor and the job is done – and also he has the approval of his perky co-starUggy, a Jack Russell Terrier who netted himself the Palm Dog at Cannes thisyear.

(I’m not joking! You can look it up.)

Valentin’s star is so bright that he launches the career ofa fresh-faced starlet without even trying. That starlet is Peppy Miller, agutsy groupie who kisses Valentin on the cheek during a photo shoot, whichgarners her fifteen minutes of fame. She wisely parlays that into a small roleon Valentin’s next film.

While on set, Valentin and Peppy fall for each other. What’swonderful, though, is that nothing happens between them – there’s a big agedifference and, oh yeah, Valentin is married. Instead, the relationshipdevelops purely through subtext, showing that good writing is good writingwhether or not there’s actual dialogue in a film.

Valentin and Peppy go their separate ways. Then the stockmarket crashes, and their ways diverge even further. Valentin loses everythinghe had. Making matters worse, “talkies” have just come onto the scene, andsuddenly Valentin is out of a job. His pantomimed acting style no longer playswith audiences in the age of sound.

Conversely, Peppy’s career takes off. She’s the new It girlin the world of talkies.

Peppy’s fortunes just go up, up, up, while Valentin’s goequally far down. So much so that the second half of the movie loses much ofthe pleasant charm of the first. We’re subjected to a few too manyValentin-down-and-out scenes.

Fortunately, there’s a happy ending, and overall TheArtist is a good time at the movies, especially since it’s the only silentfilm you’re going to see this year.

There’s a lot of talk this movie might take home BestPicture, but I don’t think it’s substantive enough to really contend – at leastin a perfect world. An indication of the movie’s shortcomings lies in thetitle, and its failure to resonate. The title doesn’t really mean anything in thecontext of the story. Valentin doesn’t consider himself an artist, nor doesanyone else. And if a movie’s title has little meaning, odds are the movieitself isn’t exactly bursting with significance.

But hey, it’s still got the neat gimmick of no dialogue, it’sstill got some winsome characters, and above all, it’s got Uggy, theprize-winning Jack Russell Terrier.

I'm pulling for him to win Best Supporting Actor this year. The speech would be awesome.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 76/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 77/100

My Week with Marilyn

2011-12-02T12:47:00.001-08:00

Ah, Oscar season!

It’s nice to see award contenders finally appearing intheaters. Surely in the running for Best Picture will be My Week withMarilyn, based on Colin Clark’s 1996 memoir of his time spent on the set of aforgettable romantic comedy in 1957, starring the unforgettable Marilyn Monroeand a British actor named Laurence Olivier.

Monroe was, um, trouble on the set.

She was always late, she never knew her lines, and she wasterminally insecure around the accomplished cast of British actors. Oh, and shepopped a lot of pills.

But man was she gorgeous.

So gorgeous that everyone on set was effectively in lovewith her. And yet, it was 23 year-old Colin Clark that got to be her specialcompanion, at least for one memorable week, during filming.

This came about because Marilyn’s erratic behavior graduallyalienated everyone else, including Olivier – played terrifically by one-time“the next Olivier” Kenneth Branagh. As a consequence, the set grew increasinglyantagonistic toward Marilyn, which made her insecurities skyrocket and herdiva-ish behavior even worse.

Enter starstruck, lovelorn, third assistant director Colin.So unstinting and unconditional was his affection for Monroe that he became herbuffer against the judgmentalism of the others. She took him everywhere,including visits to Buckingham Palace, jaunts to the country – which includedskinnydipping! – and even snuggle sessions in bed.

The story is presented as if they didn’t actually have sex,but Monroe certainly used her sexuality to bind Colin to her completely. Colinis sweet and simple, and on the surface, Marilyn seems the same. But thoughOlivier’s warning to Colin, that Marilyn is savvier than she appears, is loston Colin, it is not lost on us.

Marilyn DID know what she was doing.

The week ends as we knew it must, with Marilyn sayinggoodbye – though if the movie is true to life, her farewell to Colin was bothclassy and considerate – and Colin returning to his life of obscurity. Also alife without Emma Watson, a fellow production employee whom Colin was courtingbefore the Marilyn Monroe train chugged into station.

All in all, Colin seems mostly enchanted by his week withMarilyn, and in the end he seems to regret nothing, not even Emma Watson.

The whole thing reminds me of my favorite movie from 2009, An Education, with the gender roles reversed. These are classicsadder-but-wiser stories, and maybe the reason I like An Education more isthat the protagonist of that film was made significantly sadder by the end ofher affair, and so, became commensurately wiser.

Unlike Carey Mulligan, Colin just wishes his week withMarilyn could go on forever. He doesn’t really learn anything about Marilyn, orhimself.

And so we’ve got a good film, not a great one. We do,however, have a great performance from Michelle Williams. Her Monroe is utterlybeguiling, and I don’t see any way on this Earth she doesn’t win the BestActress statuette for her efforts.

Not to say she deserves it – who deserves any of theseridiculous awards? – but she’s impersonating a famous figure in a period drama,everyone in town knows her and likes her, she’s never won an award, and she’sgot the tragic background thing in spades.

So put all your money on Williams to win, and My Week withMarilyn to place.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 83/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 81/100

Immortals

2011-11-30T11:39:00.001-08:00

It was a nice warm day in Los Angeles yesterday, so I didsomething not unusual on a day off from work.

I took a book over to the Century City shopping center, satoutside reading in the sun, then ducked into the movie theater for a show.

The book was a brand new translation of The Iliad byStephen Mitchell. It places an emphasis on accessibility and flow rather thanstrict fidelity to sources that are questionable anyway.

As a consequence, it’s a delight to read.

My pulse actually pounded as I read of Achilles’ fatefulsplit with Agamemnon, Odysseus’ repeated demonstrations that he is a cleverbastard, and Hector’s gradual approach toward a climactic fight with anadversary he simply can not overcome.

Then it was time to see the movie: Immortals, directed byTarsem Singh, the heavy-on-visuals auteur behind The Cell and The Fall, aswell as some lavish music videos and commercials. He’s about a third of aKubrick, which means he has a better eye for visuals than almost anyone else outthere right now.

The writers are a couple of newbies, a pair of Greekbrothers who refashioned old myths into cinematic shape.

So how do they stack up against Homer?

Um, not too well.

Henry Cavill plays Theseus, a handsome but stupid peasantwho spends much of his time chopping wood shirtless. He’s a favorite of Zeus onaccount of his tremendous courage, though how that courage has beendemonstrated chopping wood is unclear.

Our story gets rolling when the dastardly King Hyperionrolls into town with an army of Cretans, intent on getting his hands on the Bowof Epirus, a magical weapon capable of freeing the ultra-powerful Titans, whoare caged beneath the earth after losing a prehistoric battle against theOlympian gods.

Because naturally a magic bow is what you want to freepeople from a magic prison.

Don’t you know anything?

The only person who can stop Hyperion – played by asatisfactorily growling Mickey Rourke – is the wood chopper himself, Theseus.First, Theseus tries to keep the bow hidden from Hyperion by escaping withFreida Pinto’s oracular Phaedra, the only person who knows where the bow is.

Failing this, he tries to run off with the bow himself, buthe gets knocked on the head by one of Hyperion’s soldiers, and Hyperion gets thebow instead.

So Theseus runs to the walled palace where the nefariousTitans are housed and organizes a defense against the approaching Cretans.

This defense doesn’t work too well – maybe because Theseus’rousing speech to the defenders was so cliché-ridden – so Hyperion gets to fireoff a magic arrow at the magic prison, and voila, Titans are running around.

The movie climaxes in a predictable and drab action finale,wherein the Olympian gods take on the Titans while Theseus tracks down Hyperionto engage him in fisticuffs.

Immortals has its visual treats, but whenever the movieslowed down for a dialogue scene between two characters, I slipped into thelighted hallway to read a couple pages of The Iliad. I kept an ear on themovie’s dialogue, just to make sure I didn’t miss any plot points (I didn’t),but there’s not a single memorable line – or action, for that matter – in theentirety of the film.

By contrast, everything that happens in The Iliad seems monumentallyimportant, driving toward a fated climax that encapsulates the grandeur andsadness of the human condition itself.

For all her beauty, Helen is doomed to unhappiness. For allHector’s nobility, he is doomed to die. For all Odysseus’ smarts, he is slatedfor a long, long trip home.

Great stories like this are so unthinkably difficult tocompose that we still retranslate epic poems that are three thousand years old.We do so because great stories are just that awesome, and there are never enough ofthem to go around.

And Immortals certainly isn’t adding to their number.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 28/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 24/100

Hugo

2011-11-29T20:57:00.001-08:00

A setting can be an enormous boon to a story. It can also swallow it whole.

Recently I criticized the movie In Time for not fleshing out its setting enough. I couldn't buy into the reality of the movie, so I couldn't enjoy the story.

The new Martin Scorcese-directed, family film Hugo has the opposite problem. It is so in love with its environment that it utterly derails the protagonist's narrative in order to explore the private lives of secondary characters with insane amounts of depth.

As a consequence, the movie feels episodic to the point that it's almost an anthology of unrelated tales, all of which happen to take place at a bustling train station slash shopping plaza in Paris in the 1930's.

At first we're led to believe the central character is Hugo, a pre-teen street urchin who lives inside the station's clock. Hugo is trying to repair a clockwork person, an automaton, who is Hugo's last remaining link to his father, a clockmaker who died in a museum fire.

Hugo keeps body and soul together by stealing food, which he must do while avoiding the cruel station inspector and his agressive german shepherd.

The station inspector is in love with a pretty florist, by the way, who lost a brother in World War One, but he's self-conscious about his gimpy left leg, a wound also acquired in the War -- whoops, whoops, I'm losing the thread here. Sorry.

Anyway, one day Hugo runs afoul of toy store owner Ben Kingsley, who steals the notebook which contains all of Hugo's mechanical sketchings. This leads Hugo to go to Kingsley's house, where he meets Kingsley's goddaughter Isabelle, a friendly girl who pledges to help Hugo recover his notebook.

Isabelle is a cheerful girl, but kind of lonely. All her friends are books, really, and she spends so much time at the bookstore she's on familiar terms with the owner, Monsieur Labisse, who -- whoops, off track again. My bad! Back to the main story.

Hugo and Isabelle discover, by sheer chance, that a key on a chain given to Isabelle by her godmother fits neatly into a lock on the automaton, which triggers the automaton to make a drawing, which leads Hugo and Isabelle to uncover the fact that the Ben Kingsley character was a prolific cinematographer in his younger days.

Kingsley is a bitter old coot at this point, but only because he'd rather be making movies than selling toys.

And... and... and...

...and the rest of the movie is pretty much about Ben Kingsley.

I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, wait a second, what about that notebook Hugo was after? Did he ever recover that? Did it make any difference to the plot? The answers, in order, are 1) What about it? 2) No, and 3) No.

Nothing really matters to the plot in Hugo because everything is carefully contrived to reveal character backstory. It's the backstory that matters to Scorcese, overrated screenwriter John Logan, and perhaps author Brian Selznick. (I can't be sure. I haven't read the novel.)

What's missing, unfortunately, is frontstory.

The things that happen in the here and now of Hugo are mostly irrelevant and always meandering.

The movie is rendered entirely in 3D computer graphics, which are now so convincing I almost remember the movie as live action. This raises the curious question that if CGI starts to look identical to live action -- if computerized Ben Kingsley looks just like real Ben Kingsley -- then why not just shoot the thing AS live action?

I'm not sure. And I'm not sure why the movie loses interest in the quest of its main character so completely that it devotes itself to alternate characters like Kingsley and the station inspector.

But it does.

Unfortunately, Hugo is all setting, and, in the end, only setting.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 18/200

How Much I Enjoyed: 22/100

The Twilight Saga: Breaking Dawn -- Part 1

2011-11-27T21:49:00.001-08:00

So I've got a theory on why there are so many Twilight haters out there.

(Obviously you'll want to stop whatever you're doing immediately.)

My theory is this:

The Twilight stories deal with adolescence. They are one big metaphor for sexual awakening. They begin when Bella Swan enters Forks, Washington; a symbolic passage into a "foreign land" which is the opposite of her old home. Whereas Arizona was sunny, happy and dry, Forks WA is wet, gloomy and overcast. Welcome to adolescence, Bella!

Bella soon meets a handsome guy who, now that we're freshly adolescent, is practically a different species altogether. Very attractive, but also somewhat scary and dangerous.

She falls for him, he falls for her, and we're launched into a series of hugely melodramatic adventures that magnificently capture the emotional experience of being a teenaged girl. All sixteen year-olds are Bella, and they've all got an Edward.

And that's amazing. Huge kudos to Stephenie Meyer, the writer who pulled it off.

This is actually the POINT of literature. To put us in a fictional setting that utterly captures the spirit of our (alas) non-fictional lives.

So why all the haters?

My theory says, it's because of the subject matter, and I don't mean vampires and werewolves. I mean adolescence.

I'm racking my brain trying to come up with a classic novel or movie which deals with adolescence. Not pre-adolescence, there are a billion of those, from E.T. to Harry Potter, and not post-adolescence, which comprises 98% of all stories.

But adolescence itself, in all its awkward, fumbling, pathetic glory.

My theory says that Twilight haters are embarrassed by memories of their own adolescence, and the Twilight stories bring all those memories back. Childhood's fun to revisit, with its uncomplicated friendships and its long summer days, and early adulthood too, with its heady optimism and newfound independence.

But adolescence, with its work-in-progress social skills, brutal high school hierarchy, and emerging sexuality -- also verrry much a work-in-progress -- well, heck, who wants to revisit that?

The haters sure don't. And they hate the fact that the Twilight stories force them to do so. Even if they refuse to read the books or see the movies, it's impossible to avoid all the posters and magazine articles. Wherever you go these days, Edward and Bella are staring back at you.

(I have a corollary theory about all the Kristen Stewart hatred. I think the prospect of being stuck with Stewart for the next forty years, constantly reminded of stupid things said or done when we were seventeen, is too much for some to bear.)

Anyway, that's my theory.

Armed with it, I was looking forward to seeing the penultimate Twilight movie. I had enjoyed the previous three, and when I enjoyed this one, I knew I would have the added satisfaction of demonstrating my calm sense of self-acceptance, and maybe even striking a blow for artistic integrity.

Woo hoo!

Then I saw the movie.

Part One of the filmic version of Book Four in Stephenie Meyer's vampires series simply doesn't work.

And truth be told, I'm not sure why. I probably spent all my intellectual energy thinking about why the overall series does work.

But here are some thoughts:

-The first half of the book, any book really, is all set-ups and exposition, with precious few payoffs. Cutting a book in half and making two movies from it can result in a very limp, overdrawn first movie. See the Harry Potter finale for an example.

-We've sort of wandered off the central metaphor with the plot of this book -- oh, I guess I'd better recount that plot. Here it is:

The first quarter of Part One deals with the wedding of Bella Swan and Edward Cullen. The second deals with their romantic honeymoon on an island off the coast of Brazil, during which Bella and Edward have interspecies sex. The third and fourth quarters are preoccupied with Bella's unnatural pregnancy, the imminent battle between vampires and werewolves this pregnancy precipitates, and the birth itself, which practically defines the word "complications."

So if the central metaphor stands for adolescence -- and it does -- you can see how we're dealing with some not-very-adolescent issues all of a sudden.

Compounding this...

-Bella plays a passive role in the story. Things are done to her, not by her, and she has little freedom of action throughout. She's bedridden the whole second half of the movie.

Curiously, Stephenie Meyer was quite cognizant of this, and did something very clever with the book. As soon as Bella gets back from her honeymoon, Meyer shifts the POV over to werewolf and spurned lover, Jacob.

This has a bunch of positive consequences. It puts us in the shoes of someone who gets to run around and confront real adversaries -- his own werewolf clan, intent on killing the woman he loves. It also puts us back on familiar thematic ground. Jacob pines for Bella, but because of apparently insuperable obstacles in the way, he can't be with her. That's adolescence in a nutshell. Good POV shift, Meyer!

But the movie can't do that. It can't have Jacob stand there telling us about things. It has to show them. When it does, Jacob's POV is lost, and (new to the series) director Bill Condon doesn't show much interest in replicating it visually. Jacob, pivotal in the first half of the book, is relegated to minor status in the movie.

Maybe that's why the scene where the werewolf clan convenes to bark at each other was so embarrassing to watch.

Maybe it's also a function of the fact that the superatural elements of the story, once the undercurrent of the fictional world, are now very much in the open. Vampires don't live in the shadows anymore. We live with them. Werewolves don't lurk in the forest. They have staff meetings!

This can work okay in a book, where our imagination can beat any special effects house in the world. But on screen, squabbling werewolves just look silly. And even vampires lose much of their charm when we flip through their CD collection and see what's on their DVR list.

Breaking Dawn -- Part 1 disappoints, but Part 2, due in a year, will feature vampire Bella smashing trees, killing baddies, and getting mistaken for a fashion model.

And that's gotta be an improvement.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 44/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 49/100

In Time

2011-11-22T07:42:00.001-08:00

I felt morally obligated to see this film because it's science fiction, the genre I care about more than any other.

But sheesh.

I really had to make an effort.

Everything about In Time says "don't bother," starting with that lame title.

In Time?

Come on.

At least call the thing Just in Time, which has more heft, better rhythm, and the possibly dubious virtue of punning off the name of its lead, Justin Timberlake.

Yes, I would've been much happier going to see Just in Time.

But there's still that cast. Timberlake is pretty bland and inexperienced to carry a movie on his own -- no shame on him; it's a Herculean task -- Amanda Seyfried shouldn't really be in a movie at all, unless it's an E.T. remake and she's playing E.T., and Olivia Wilde, hotter than a nuclear furnace, still hasn't gotten herself into a decent movie. Does she even read the scripts she gets sent?

This means it's going to be the writer/director who will shoulder the burden of greatness. If [Just] In Time is going to succeed, it'll be because of Andrew Niccol, the man who brought us the forgettable sci-fi thriller Gattaca, and the further lumpen efforts, S1m0ne, The Terminal, and Lord of War.

The man has made a career of mediocrity.

Soooo it's off to the movies!

In Time explores an absurd near future where money has been replaced by time. You don't have dollars in your bank account, you have hours, days and weeks. Rich people have whole centuries. Working man Justin Timberlake -- suspension of disbelief begins now -- has less than a day. This means when he wakes up in the morning, he better show up at work to earn more hours than he spends. Otherwise the glowing digital clock on his forearm will dwindle to zero and he'll keel over dead.

Not content with this much stress in his life, Timberlake throws himself into harm's way helping a well-heeled but dissolute stranger escape the local gang of street toughs from a scrap in a bar.

In gratitude for Timberlake's help, the stranger gives him roughly a hundred years -- all the time he's got -- and then jumps off a bridge. Because he's depressed. Or he read the script and realized he was the catalyst who must provide the inciting incident.

The whole movie plays out like it was written by someone intimately familiar with Hollywood formula, as Niccol surely is, and someone devoted to slavishly following that formula, rather than using it as a springboard for creativity.

So there's a clean break into Act Two when Timberlake takes his bundle of time into the privileged sector of west L.A. -- oops, I mean New Greenwich -- and immediately checks into a ritzy Century City -- oops, I mean New Greenwich again -- hotel.

There he runs across Amanda Seyfried's sheltered heiress, and for reasons I can't determine, goes to the nearest casino and takes on Seyfried's dad in a high-stakes game of poker that will mean death for Timberlake if he loses.

The deck is clumsily stacked in his favor by Niccol, however, so he doesn't lose. (How cool would that have been?) Instead he gets invited to a fancy party in Malibu -- dang it, I mean New Greenwich again -- where he skinnydips with Seyfried and gets confronted by "timekeeper" police detective Cillian Murphy, who accuses Timberlake of having stolen his time from the dead, depressed guy.

You're not going to believe this, but a chase results, and the rest of the movie follows the conventional chase formula. Timberlake and Seyfried turn Bonny and Clyde slash Robin Hood, stealing time from the dastardly rich and redistributing it to the desperate poor.

What's most lame about In Time is not the paper-thin characters, rote plot or gimmicky premise. It's the utter lack of world-building. Beyond the time-for-money substitution, there is absolutely no difference between our world and the In Time world. That's an abdication of the central responsibility of the science fiction writer: to take us somewhere different.

Both Bladerunner and The Matrix took place in a contemporary or near future L.A., just like In Time does, but hoo boy, is there a lot going on behind the scenes in both worlds. One gets the sense there are many stories taking place every day in such imaginary worlds. The one we are watching just happens to be in the foreground.

That's a place worth visiting.

By contrast, In Time transports us nowhere visually, conceptually or thematically.It's just a cheesy crime thriller with a hasty coating of sci-fi varnish.

Which means it's not really sci-fi at all.

I've been had.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 28/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 26/100

The Descendants

2011-11-20T15:25:00.001-08:00

Dramatic tension.

It’s the name of the game. The most fundamental buildingblock of drama, more fundamental even than conflict.

Dramatic. Tension.

If the outcome of a scene, subplot, or overall story isuncertain, and if it matters, then we’re hooked.And if it keeps being uncertain, and keeps mattering, we’ll stay hooked. We’llwatch your two-hour movie with unwavering attention.

We may not love it. We may not remember it. But we’ll watch.

And that gives you, the filmmaker, time and opportunity tounspool thoughts on character, setting, theme and whatever else isbouncing around that cranium of yours.

But you’d better bring the dramatic tension.

Sadly, the new George Clooney movie, The Descendants, hasnot the slightest whiff of dramatic tension anywhere in it.

The story follows a middle-aged father of two who lives inHawaii, has a wife in a coma, and is debating to whom he should sell hisfamily’s historic – and immensely valuable – stretch of seafront property.

Clooney soon learns his wife will never come out of hercoma. The doctors will have to pull the plug on her, so it’s up to Clooney totell the rest of his extended family and make preparations for the funeral.

This entails bringing back daughter Alexandra from boardingschool. Alexandra’s a misbehaving seventeen year-old brat – at first – and she onlyadds to Clooney’s woes.

But she does the plot a valuable service by revealing anearly secret, and plot-driver: Clooney’s wife, it turns out, had been cheatingon him.

The movie treats this revelation like it’s the shocker ofthe century, but in dramatic terms it’s pretty humdrum. After all, we’ve nevereven met the wife, and from what we can tell of Clooney, his law practice comesfirst anyway. Who cares if his wife – who is dead now and out of the story –was cheating or not?

Unfortunately, the Clooney character cares. He wants todiscover the identity of his dead wife’s secret lover. He spends much of themovie trying to do so, with the help of Alexandra and her dim-witted boyfriend Sid,and with younger daughter Scottie tagging along, oblivious.

The investigation is haphazard and meandering, interruptedfrequently with visits to various cousins – which comprise the real estate subplot – visits to his wife’s parents, and other tangents.

Mercifully, the relationship between Clooney and Alexandra thaws,and they become allies in the search for the dead wife’s secret lover. Thisreduces the annoyance factor of bickering co-leads, but it doesn’t do anythingfor the overall problem: the lack of urgency and stakes in the plot.

As befits a pointless quest, the discovery of the secretlover is anti-climactic. He’s just a normal doofus, a married real estate agentwho happens to have a stake in Clooney’s upcoming land deal.

This makes Clooney rethink selling the land at all. He findsa sudden moral center, and decides that Hawaii itself will be better off if theland is not developed at all. As a cousin tells him, however, all he can do isslow down the sale of the land, not prevent it entirely.

So even that plot has no real consequences.

The Descendants tries hard to be a movie about real life,filled with real characters in real(-ish) situations. The trouble with this, asalways, is that real life makes for bad drama. Dramatic authenticity must comefrom capturing the spirit of everyday life, not the form of it.

Because the form of it really sucks.

And so, ultimately, does The Descendants. Don’t listen towhat the critics will say about this movie. They will give itplaudits merely for not having special effects or car chases. But there’s moreto artistic achievement than that. You have to have scenes and subplots that are theemotional equivalent of special effects and car chases.

You have to have dramatic tension!

SCORE

How Accomplished: 26/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 24/100

Anonymous

2011-11-18T19:15:00.001-08:00

The opening credits announce "a film by Roland Emmerich."

The movie hasn't even started, and already we're in trouble.

Emmerich is the arch-fiend behind such atrocities as Independence Day (many like that movie, but they are criminally insane), The Patriot (worst historical drama ever?), Godzilla and 10,000 B.C.

Emmerich is every bit as bad a filmmaker as Michael Bay, but somehow he avoids the scathing reputation Bay is saddled with. I don't know why.

Anonymous would probably hurt his reputation, if anyone were to see it. But that's unlikely. It was originally slated for a wide release, but once distributor Sony saw the finished movie and spit their coffee all over the theater floor, they quickly scaled back its debut to 250 theaters, with the idea of expanding that number if, by some miracle of God, the movie found traction with critics and/or audiences.

But God was not in a miracle kind of mood. The movie, which cost $30m just to make, let alone market, has grossed less than $5m in its first two weeks.

That makes it a big enough flop to have gotten Emmerich's next project, a massive sci-fi movie called Singularity, put into turnaround.

I bet Emmerich wishes he'd never even heard of the Shakespeare authorship question.

Said question has been bouncing around academic circles for at least a hundred years. It rises from two principal facts. You'll notice both are a little slippery.

Fact One: We don't have any solid evidence Shakespeare did write the plays. The surviving copies are all in someone else's hand. In fact, the only penmanship we have from Shakespeare comes from his will, in which he spells his name three different ways, apparently by accident. Hmmm.

Fact Two: Whoever did write the plays seems to be well-read, well-traveled, comfortable in several languages, and possessed of a keen insight into the psychology of the nobility. All qualities hard to imagine existing in the elementary school dropout and wannabe actor named William Shakespeare.

And that's pretty much it.

However, there's another strongly compelling reason to doubt Shakespeare's true identity, and that reason is: it's fun to doubt Shakespeare's identity. It's fun to debate the evidence, it's fun to speculate about who might have really written the plays, and it's fun to watch certain Shakespeare-loving geeks turn bright red when you say, "There's no way some average schmoe like Shakespeare could have written those plays. Impossible."

Boy, does that drive them crazy.

So Emmerich got pulled into the Shakespeare authorship question because it seemed like a good time, but then he had a very bad thought. Why, he thought, hasn't this idea been turned into a movie?

Uh...

So here's the movie he came up with.

The real author of the plays is Edward de Vere, Earl of Oxford and clandestine lover of Queen Elizabeth. As a youth, de Vere gets separated from his true love by a scheming courtier who wants de Vere to go back to his wife, who happens to be the scheming courtier's daughter.

That's one half of the movie. (We jump back and forth.) It happens when de Vere is in his twenties. The other half takes place when de Vere is in his sixties. It concerns de Vere's attempts to -- okay, brace yourself here -- warn Elizabeth of a palace coup being fomented by the son of the original scheming courtier. The way he does this is by writing genius-level plays and filling them with secret codes that will get Elizabeth's subconscious mind spinning until she realizes her life and crown are in imminent danger.

I know, I know, you've got a million questions, starting with: "Wait a second, why not just TELL Elizabeth her closest advisor is plotting against her? Why go to the trouble of writing the cornerstone of the western literary canon?" There's no convincing answer to this question, nor to all the others that spring up, and get roughly trampled, throughout.

Part of the problem is that we are subjected to a massive array of characters, events, locales and subplots, as often happens when writers have to do historical research. This lack of focus is magnified by the chronological back-and-forth, whose confusion is absurdly amplified by the fact that young Edward de Vere looks nothing like old Edward de Vere.

Thus, a misconceived premise, haphazard structure, unrealized characters, a phony setting, embarrassingly stilted dialogue, and one of the most insultingly shallow lines ever uttered about art, by the man who theoretically wrote Shakespeare's plays -- "All art is political," he says, "otherwise it would be mere decoration" -- which is so offensively off-base I don't want to get into it or I'll start turning bright red myself -- as a result of all this, it's easy to think Emmerich maybe shouldn't have made a movie about Shakespeare at all.

But he did. His name's right there on the credits.

Though he probably wishes it weren't.

That authorship thing cuts both ways.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 18/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 17/100

Margin Call

2011-11-12T15:35:00.001-08:00

Best movie of 2011 so far.

It probably won't win Best Picture, since it's fundamentally about business, instead of a disability, or an historical event, or a disability during an historical event. (The King's Speech was perfectly designed to win that Oscar.)

But it probably should win Best Picture. It's the movie The Social Network was trying to be: a socially relevant exploration of the most impactful phenomenon of our time.

Maybe the problem with The Social Network was that Facebook, despite being really cool and really useful, is simply not the most impactful phenomenon of our time. The 2008 recession is. And that's what Margin Call explores.

Sort of.

By conscious intent, the year is never mentioned, nor is the investment firm at the center of the story ever named. In this way, the movie transcends the current moment. It's not just about the 2008 recession, it's about the 1928 crash, it's about the Panic of 1835, it's about every bust in the history of the boom-and-bust cycle.

And it's about how people handle that transition from boom to bust.

The genius breakthrough of the story -- written and directed by first-timer J.C. Chandor on a very low budget with a bevy of stars working for essentially no pay -- is that the action takes place in a mere twenty-four hours.

Those twenty-four hours begin with a round of layoffs at a major Manhattan firm. The people getting laid off are risk-management executives. Who needs them anyway? One of them is Stanley Tucci, who has been nibbling around the edges of a troubling development in the company's overall portfolio projections.

Before leaving the building, Tucci passes his work via flashdrive to a subordinate who survived the culling, Zachary Quinto, with the admonition to "be careful." This warning sets Quinto's mind spinning. He stays late at work that night, plotting out the ramifications of the projections Tucci had examined, and he comes to a startling conclusion: the global economy is about to crater. And no one knows it yet.

He jumps on the phone to his even-younger colleague Penn Badgely, who is at a nightclub with their new uber-boss Paul Bettany. At Quinto's urgent request, Bettany and Badgely return to the office. Bettany takes one look at Quinto's projections, puts down his bottle of champagne and calls his own boss, Kevin Spacey. It's after midnight now, and Spacey is mourning the death of his beloved dog, but Bettany convinces him to drive all the way back into the city.

Spacey's not happy to do this, but as soon as he sees Quinto's projections, he calls his OWN boss, played by the Mentalist himself, Simon Baker. The Mentalist is a cold, ruthless blue-eyed killer who convenes an immediate conference with all our known players, plus Demi Moore. His primary goal is to determine if Quinto's projections have merit. Once he's satisfied that they do -- he gives Moore forty-five minutes to crunch the numbers -- he calls in HIS boss, a friendly, charming, thoroughly terrifying corporate titan played by Jeremy Irons.

This is called escalating action, and it makes the middle act of Margin Call an awful lot of fun.

Once the entire upper echelon of the investment firm -- plus underlings Quinto and Badgely -- are on the eightieth floor of the darkened skyscraper at two in the morning, an earnest, smart, high-stakes discussion unfolds over what the firm's proper course of action now is.

Brilliantly, the film handles complicated economic concepts without ever delving into jargon -- except for one brief speech from Quinto, which Irons confesses to not understanding. Likewise, it broaches major philosophical questions of the modern world, such as the moral responsibilities of a massive international corporation to the economic environment in which it thrives, and it does so without demonizing or exculpating anyone.

Every character in Margin Call has a different perspective on what is going down, a different view of what it means, and a different idea of what must be done now.

In the end, they all come together to sell a hell of a lot of worthless stock derivatives before everyone else figures out what's happening.

In interviews, auteur Chandor has said he conceived the original idea in 2006, two years before the recession happened. His inspiration was a real estate deal he was involved in. A friend with a godfather in high finance suddenly warned him to sell his stake in the deal.

Chandor wondered what that guy in high finance knew, and he wondered what it felt like to walk around with information no one else had.

"What if" questions like these are often fruitful, and the timing of this one gave Chandor a serious head start over competitors who might also have liked to write a smart script about the onset of the recession. Since it takes roughly five years for a script that's going to get good to get good (most scripts won't be good even after a million years of revision; sadly, you never know which is which till you invest your five years), the earliest we should be seeing good movies about the recession is 2013. And that's the very earliest. But Chandor had his head start and he took full advantage. Good for him.

My only real question about Margin Call is whether the movie will age well. I'm curious if it's still engaging in twenty years, when we're in the midst of the Great Boom of the 2030's.

Because I'm already convinced it's a great film now.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 92/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 93/100

Paranormal Activity 3

2011-10-31T20:24:00.000-07:00

Okay, that’s enough Paranormal Activity for me, thank you very much.

I enjoyed the first two installments, even though they were identical movies, but the third iteration is too much of the same. I’m out.

This is why the Saw franchise has petered out after seven cloned outings, Final Destination looks kind of shaky after five, and even the original Friday the 13th series managed a mere thirteen films before finally collapsing of ennui.

More of the same can be good. But only to a point.

And we have reached that point with the Paranormal Activity series.

Perhaps the reason we got here so fast is the nature of this particular formula. In a PA movie, the first forty-five minutes – more than half of the eighty minute runtime – consist of a slow procession of random scenes from daily life, alternated with creepy happenings that may or may not have a paranormal source.

The characters are convinced that ghosts aren’t real, of course, which was always one of the strengths of the formula – it puts the audience in superior position! – but at this point, it feels obligatory. What was once a savvy way to ground the movie in verisimilitude now feels like a cheap attempt to fill out a thin story.

And maybe it’s not just the repetition. Maybe the story really is thinner this time out.

PA3 follows the original hauntee from PA1, Katie Featherston, but this time she’s a ten year-old girl.

Her parents -- this is 1988, mind you -- have the exact same fascination with videotaping every aspect of their existence that Katie's ill-fated boyfriend did in the first movie, and the ill-fated husband of Katie's sister did in the second movie.

But plausibility's not the problem. Repetition's the problem.

Once again, the female character whines and nags about all the videotaping. The male character takes an inordinately long time to realize what he's videotaping is an evil demon, and the kids -- kid singular in the second one, family dog in the first one -- know way more than anyone else does about what's going on.

The only real innovation in "3" is the creation of the oscillating fan cam, which is a video camera attached to the base of a room fan, which enables side to side viewing as the fan base slowly pivots the camera. Much enjoyment is had from the fact that we have to wait a good twenty seconds for the camera to pan from left to right, then back to left, while we squirm in anticipation of what's changed while we were forced to look the other direction.

Thrills like this one are merely tactical, though. Overall, the problem with PA3 is that it explores a backstory that was best left as backstory.

When, in PA1, Katie Featherston, speaking to her sister, alluded to the strange happenings of their childhood without going into detail, we were spooked. But seeing that backstory play out moment by moment, the mystery and intrigue is stripped from it.

The frightening truth is that some things are not meant to be known.

And one of them is the backstory of the Katie Featherston character from PA1.

Chilling, isn’t it?!

SCORE

How Accomplished: 34/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 29/100

The Rum Diary

2011-10-30T15:21:00.000-07:00

This movie cost $45,000,000 to make.

Which is unforgivable.

It is a vanity project made at the behest of a movie starwho has generated billions of dollars by making movies that are the exactopposite of The Rum Diary.

So why plug forty-five mil into a movie with an artsy title,an obscure source – at least among mainstream moviegoers -- and a nearlynon-existent story?

Heck if I know. But someone got left holding the bag fortheir lack of judgment. (Editor’s note: It’s probably Graham King, thebillionaire financier whose GK films produced the movie.) And it’s not JohnnyDepp. His was an upfront payment.

The Rum Diary pulled in a measly five million dollars atthe box office its opening weekend by following the wacky exploits of a low-leveljournalist in the 1950’s who moves to Puerto Rico to work for the newspaperthere, and drinks a lot.

In one sense, there is a lot more to The Rum Diary thanthat.

There’s Aaron Eckhardt as a shady businessman who involvesDepp in a plot to publicize a land development deal underwritten by corruptpoliticians.

There’s Amber Heard, Eckhardt’s unbelievably beautifulgirlfriend, who flirts with Depp, dances her way into danger with the locals,and then vanishes to start her life over again in New York City.

There’s Michael Rispoli and Giovanni Ribisi as Depp’seccentric colleagues who help in the effort to publish a dramatic final editionof the failed newspaper by winning a series of cockfights, consulting a voodoopractitioner and enlisting the help of a group of disgruntled proto-Occupy WallStreet types.

Yep, there sure is a lot going on in The Rum Diary.

But in another sense, absolutely nothing happens in The RumDiary, since none of these characters, subplots or sidebars go anywhere atall.

That land deal? It comes off just fine, but without Depp’sparticipation, since he flakes out, as much from laziness and drunkenness asany moral objection.

The relationship with Heard? Transitory and pointless.Neither character is changed in the slightest by their interaction. She wouldhave gone off to New York with or without his influence, and he would have sataround drinking with or without hers. (It’s interesting how Depp has nevershown romantic chemistry with a female lead, even if he’s working with thesexiest actress in the world, like he was with Jolie in The Tourist. Depp hasan almost entirely asexual onscreen presence. I think it drains a lot oftension out of his performances.)

And that final edition of the failed newspaper? It nevergets printed. It seems the bad guys took the sensible precaution of removingvital pieces of the printing presses when they closed down the paper. So that’sthe end of that.

Overall, The Rum Diary suffers badly from the fact that itderives from a work of non-fiction. After all, the non-fictional world weinhabit tends to play out in meaningless, anti-climactic ways. In that sense,there is honesty and accuracy in The Rum Diary, but little drama and lessrevelation. It’s just a bunch of slightly odd stuff that happens.

No Country for Old Men featured a similarly anti-climacticfinale, but that deviation from standard screenwriting practice was, in myopinion, a dramatic masterstroke. No Country built so relentlessly toward theinevitable showdown between Javier Bardem and Josh Brolin that, when it didn’thappen, it left us reeling. For days I couldn’t stop thinking about the factthat Josh Brolin’s character died off-screen, and at the hands of someone otherthan Javier Bardem. And that’s what an artist can do: make you think, andstruggle, and shake your head as you try to comprehend the world through theprism of a film.

By contrast, the lack of a satisfying resolution in The RumDiary left me mildly annoyed. The whole movie rambled to no effect, so Iwasn’t much surprised when it ended that way too.

The book version of The Rum Diary is presumably aworthwhile read because of the strength of Hunter S. Thompson’s prose. But ofcourse, prose does not appear in a movie unless the voice-over technique is mercilessly abused, so I remain confused as to why this film was ever made atall.

Beyond the fact that Johnny Depp wanted it to be made.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 27/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 18/100

The Thing

2011-10-26T18:02:00.000-07:00

All these remakes are starting to freak me out.

I know I'm behind the curve here. Everyone with a shred of artistic integrity, intellectual pretension or simple iconoclasm has long since decried Hollywood for its shocking lack of originality, which has felt more pervasive every year since the major studios bought up the independent prodco's in the late nineties and then dismantled them.

But I never liked being part of the crowd ripping on Hollywood. It seemed too easy, too self-congratulatory.

On top of that, storytellers have ALWAYS ripped off their predecessors.

Shakespeare wrote only a handful of original plays in his life. The rest were all adaptations of other authors' work. They were remakes.

Just as evolution proceeds by repurposing existing genetic materials, so too storytelling proceeds by telling old stories in new ways.

And maybe that's what Hollywood was doing when it began this era of sequels, prequels and movies about board games.

But now we're not even telling old stories in new ways. We're telling old stories in old ways.

By way of evidence, I give you The Thing, a remake of John Carpenter's classic 1982 movie, which was itself a remake of a 1951 flick.

When Carpenter made his remake, he did something so obvious no one even gave it a second thought. He took the original story, set in 1951, and transposed it to the year 1982. Makes sense, right? The update allows the story to employ modern characters from modern society to explore an old plot in a -- that's right -- modern way. It freshens up the story.

So now we've got a remake of Carpenter's 1982 flick, only it's 2011 now.

Guess what year the 2011 flick takes place?

If you're really cynical about Hollywood, you'd say 1982. And you'd be right.

Isn't that awful?

Isn't that an abdication of the basic artistic responsibility to do something new with the material you're adapting?

And hey, I get the fact that the story intends to portray events that were suggested in the Carpenter movie but never shown -- namely, the fate of the Norwegian research base found destroyed by Kurt Russell's helicopter pilot McCready early in the 1982 film.

Couple problems with this:

One, the two main characters -- the fetching Mary Elizabeth Winstead and the fetching Joel Edgerton -- are both Americans. Pretty quickly, then, the movie feels less like an adjunct to the Carpenter film and more like a straight remake.

Two, the 1982 movie itself answers the question of what happened to the Norwegian research base. The dead Norwegians are only a mystery until Americans start turning up dead too, and then we sort of know what happened.

So if there's no good justification for setting the 2011 movie in 1982, why did the studio do it?

Because it makes the storytelling a lot easier, and a lot less risky.

The 1982 story worked in 1982, and is still popular today, so let's just re-gloss it and see if people will pay money to see it again.

And I did. I paid money.

I'm sort of a movie junkie, so I don't feel I had much choice.

But you can be free. You can still have a normal life.

If you love the Carpenter film, rent it.

If, on the other hand, you're a hopeless victim of the Hollywood marketing machine, then at least you're going to find some kernels of enjoyment in this -- ahem! -- modern version of The Thing.
You're going to enjoy Mary Elizabeth Winstead.

Those big wet eyes, that nerdy gracefulness, that nice deep voice that lets you take her a little seriously as a scientist.

She's great. And you're going to enjoy her.

You're also going to enjoy the second act of the movie. The first act is unbelievably wooden and sterile, the third act is incredibly implausible and contrived -- it takes place on board an alien spaceship, which has never yet worked on screen -- but that second act -- which captures the cool central idea of The Thing storyline -- antarctic scientists trapped in a storm trying to figure out who among them is human and who is a murderous alien -- works pretty well.

You're going to be surprised by how much you enjoy scenes that are flagrant reproductions of iconic scenes from 1982 -- from the "test" to determine who is alien; in the Carpenter film, blood samples were heated with an electric coil; in this one, a flashlight is directed into the mouth to look for metal fillings -- to the frantic anxiety over a flamethrower that sputters at the absolute worst time. You're going to say "Sheesh, this is almost a scene-by-scene refilming of Carpenter." But you're still going to enjoy it a little.

Which goes to show just how good those 1982 scenes were.

Overall, you're going to have an okay time watching 2011's The Thing.

But if you have any conscience at all, you'll feel bad about yourself afterward.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 22/100

How Accomplished It Would Be if the Carpenter film did not exist: 62/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 66/100

The Ides of March

2011-10-25T19:11:00.000-07:00

Everyone's annoyed with politics.

All the time.

You can look up the writings of people who lived thousands of years ago and read a familiar complaint: namely, that all politicians are phonies who will sell their souls -- and yours too -- to get elected.

Because of this, it's dicey to make a political drama whose central thematic twist is the explosive claim that politicians are not to be trusted.

We already know.

Having said that, it's surprising how much fun The Ides of March is, despite the fact that, thematically, it is the least provocative movie since Transformers 3.

In the movie, based on a stage play -- aha, the story has had time to go through multiple revisions; a good sign! -- George Clooney plays Mike Morris, a handsome, charismatic presidential candidate (you're not going to believe this, but Clooney plays a Democrat) undergoing a closely contested primary battle.

The story joins Clooney in Ohio, a state he needs to win the nomination. His handlers are Phillip Seymour Hoffman and 2011's hunk of choice, Ryan Gosling.

Hoffman's a good guy. Experienced, self-deprecating, calm. Gosling's a good guy too. Young, smart, cool. And boy is Clooney ever a good guy. He is the Real Thing, an idealistic politician who seems to really believe in his ideals, who seems committed to actually changing the world for the better.

The movie's first act is a fun, fast-paced look inside the fictional campaign. The dialogue is sharp and the action convincing, so much so it almost feels like one of the better non-fiction books about campaigns, like 2010's outstanding Game Change.

Then a sexy twenty year-old campaign intern -- uh oh! -- played by Rachel Evan Wood is added to the mix, and all those fine ideals go straight to hell. God damn it.

Our first act ends when Gosling and Wood end up in her hotel room. She sort of seduces him and he sort of seduces her. They're both unattached, so it's a mostly innocent secret campaign fling. At least it is until Gosling accidentally picks up Wood's ringing phone at two in the morning and discovers, on the other end of the line...

...our boy George Clooney.

Oops.

It turns out, idealistic -- and married -- Clooney had a one-night stand with Wood at the start of the campaign. Even worse, she is now pregnant with his movie-star spawn.

Now events are in motion that could very well derail the campaign of crusading Clooney, end the career of hopeful Gosling and despoil the reputation of young Wood.

Among the dangerous players who could exploit this situation are Marisa Tomei, as a reporter, and Paul Giamatti, as the opposing campaign manager, but the real danger lies within. Under the pressure to win, Hoffman and Gosling soon turn on each other, then Clooney turns on Gosling, then Gosling goes rogue, then Wood starts throwing back sleeping pills...

And it all gets ugly fast.

Almost too fast. I never really bought Gosling's transformation into a jaded villain. Incidentally, this is the hardest thing to pull off in drama. It's what made The Godfather a classic, and it's what makes Breaking Bad the most respected show on television. But it's hard, hard writin' to pull off.

What we've got with The Ides of March is a good movie, but because it's more concerned with politics than humanity, it really had no chance of becoming a great movie.

It's entertaining, it's interesting, it's well-acted, -shot and -edited. It just doesn't doesn't mean a hell of a lot.

Kinda like politics itself.

Whoa. Maybe this movie's deeper than I thought.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 74/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 71/100

Drive

2011-10-24T18:25:00.000-07:00

This is an arthouse movie. Which is strange.

Because, at first glance, it sure doesn't look like an arthouse movie.

The story follows a stunt driver, played by Ryan Gosling, who moonlights as a getaway driver. He falls in love with his neighbor, played by Carey Mulligan, and gets in trouble with a pair of mobsters, played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman.

It's full of car chases and macho showdowns, shootings and stabbings.

Sounds like a Hollywood actioner, right?

Wrooooong.

Because it's also full of long, long, long stretches of dialogue-free, action-free staring on the part of Gosling.

Sometimes Gosling is staring at Mulligan. Sometimes he's staring at the sidewalk. Sometimes he's staring at a pretty bird flying by.

Gosling's the star of the movie, but he only has about twelve lines of dialogue over the space of two hours.

That's because the focus of the movie is not on dialogue, or action, or romance, or character, or even the plot I've described. These things all exist, but only to serve the sweeping, languorous camera shots that comprise the heart of the film.

It's really a photo essay masquerading as a movie.

Realism is out the window. Early on, Gosling goes all Jason Bourne in an elevator, defeating a trained killer in hand-to-hand combat, but at the end of the movie, he suffers a fatal draw in a short-lived knife fight with Albert Brooks. Albert Brooks!

Fantasy is also out the window. The first scene of the movie masterfully establishes Gosling's expertise as a getaway driver. No one, but no one, can drive a car better than him. Typical Hollywood convention demands that Gosling's driving skills therefore be put to the test in the final act of the movie.

But it doesn't happen. Gosling hardly drives at all in the last half hour of a movie called "Drive."

The audience I saw the movie with was decidely unhappy with what they were watching. The reason is that "Drive" was marketed as mainstream entertainment, when in fact it deserved a quiet eighty-screen release at the nation's haughtiest art cinemas.

There's virtue in knowing what kind of movie you are, and "Drive" certainly knows it's an esoteric arthouse flick, despite its deceptive marketing campaign, but there's still greater virtue in bringing together disparate elements like popular appeal and moral profundity.

Once upon a time, Steven Spielberg made such movies. "Jaws" is about getting eaten by a fish. But it's about a lot more too. Just what was it in New York that Chief Brody was running away from, after all?

Nowadays Spielberg picks one side of the divide or the other, just like everyone else. He's making "Jurassic Park IV" next, then he's making an Abraham Lincoln biopic. The first will be sheer nonsense, but possibly fun nonsense, and the other will be sheer drudgery, though possibly thoughtful drudgery.

No one combines the ambitious and the fun anymore. And that's a shame. Because it's where masterpieces come from.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 38/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 25/100

Moneyball

2011-10-02T09:33:00.000-07:00

Here's an insight that's gotten a lot of currency over the past ten years, but is nevertheless hard for many to accept:

No one who ever lived has been significantly smarter than anyone else who ever lived.

You could call it the "no geniuses" theory, and boy do people struggle with it.

What about Plato? What about Newton? What about Steve frickin' Jobs?

Not all that smart, the theory says.

I know. Hard, right?

The thinking goes like this (I'm going to get to Moneyball in a sec; promise): critical leaps forward in human thought do not occur because certain individuals are born with superior brainpower. They occur because circumstances line up in particular ways at particular times to give perfectly placed individuals a rare vantage point on an important truth -- a truth that will forever change the way the rest of us look at a subject.

Enter Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland A's and the focus of Moneyball, and his particular set of circumstances.

Beane's Oakland A's are engaged in a losing battle. They don't have the same amount of money as do the behemoths of their sport, so they consistently lose their best players to those deep-pocketed rivals.

Or do they?

The way Beane turned around Oakland's fortunes in the 1990's was to reconsider the definition of the term "best players." He did it with the help of a young Yale grad played by Jonah Hill (a composite character), who was part of a growing movement among stat-nerds who believed traditional baseball statistics were incomplete at best and downright misleading at worst.

By the end of Moneyball's first act, Beane -- played by Brad Pitt -- and Hill are making player moves considered ridiculous by everyone outside -- and inside! -- the A's organization. They start acquiring players who draw a lot of walks (!) and who are positively inept in the field.

As in all sports movies, the structure of the story derives from the arc of the sporting season. The A's start the season poorly, which calls into question Pitt and Hill's radical philosophy. Then, lo and behold, the A's start winning.

Then they start winning a lot.

At one point they win twenty straight games, which provides the movie its climax -- since the A's went out in the first round of the playoffs that year.

So that's the intellectual side of Moneyball, and it's interesting. It kept me engaged. But of course, if there's no emotional aspect to the story we're going to be stuck with another Social Network.

So how does Moneyball work emotionally?

Surprisingly well. The plot of the movie organizes the entire fictional universe against sexy Pitt and nerdy Hill, giving us the all-important unity-of-opposites central relationship.

There are side relationships along the way, namely with Pitt's ex-wife and daughter, and while they make for some effective scenes, they belong to a different movie. We would have been better served if the movie had stayed entirely in the baseball clubhouse.

If the movie fails to reach its potential, it's because the relationship between Pitt and Hill doesn't get the full attention it deserves -- and the full attention it is structurally set up to receive. Pitt's final decision, whether to accept an offer to work for the Boston Red Sox and leave Oakland, plays out as a struggle between the value Pitt places on his baseball work and the value he places on his relationship with his daughter.

The absence of any question about whether he would miss Jonah Hill reveals that the strength of the movie, the Pitt/Hill relationship, isn't so strong that it permeates every aspect of the story. Which is too bad.

Because as intriguing as advanced sabremetrics and "no genius" theories are, every great story is about two people who are in love with each other.

And I think Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill only really like each other.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 75/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 77/100

Contagion

2011-09-30T09:52:00.000-07:00

It's the most common complaint people make about movies.

"Why couldn't it have been more realistic?"

Well, you sorry bastards, you've finally gotten your wish. You've gotten all the realism that could possibly be crammed into a 102 minute film.

I hope you're happy.

That's Gwyneth Paltrow, playing the first victim of a pandemic that shoots around the globe in Steven Soderbergh's new medical thriller.

It's a brave performance. It must have gone against the grain of every movie star instinct for Paltrow to allow herself to be portrayed, albeit briefly, as a sick, vulnerable, vomiting woman of questionable moral fiber, and then finally as a slab of meat on an autopsy table.

But she did it. And she wasn't alone. Contagion boasts a cast of all-stars, and they each seem willing to play real human beings caught in very plausible situations. From Matt Damon's luckily immune father desperate to protect a not-so-immune daughter; to Jude Law's opportunistic video blogger peddling a fake cure; to Kate Winslet's energetic front-line CDC researcher who gets infected while trying to rescue others.

There are even subplots that have no bearing on the plot -- just like in real life! One such is Marion Cotillard's strange abduction by Hong Kong medical colleagues who want to ransom her for early doses of the cure.

That cure, incidentally, is discovered by Jennifer Ehle, who bears an uncanny resemblance to Meryl Streep -- I figured she was Streep's daughter till I looked her up -- and only differs from Streep in one way I can determine. Unlike Streep, Jennifer Ehle can't act.

Not on film, anyway. She's won a pair of Tony awards, and that's the source of her problem. She hams up every line of dialogue and overplays every facial expression like she's still on the stage. She has a lot of scenes with Laurence Fishburne, and his relaxed, natural delivery makes Ehle's performance seem doubly-forced.

Hers is the only weak performance of the film. Overall, I never disbelieved what I was seeing on screen. It all felt real.

But that doesn't mean I liked it.

Okay, maybe I did like it, but that doesn't mean I loved it. And it doesn't mean my pulse rate ever got above eighty beats a minute.

Contagion is a smart movie that concerns itself with intellectual themes. It explores ethics, not morals. It considers society, not individuals. It deals in issues, not truths.

Ultimately, the movie is about a very bad virus, like SARS or the bird flu, that got out of hand, killed many millions of people, then got cured and life went on like normal.

And... well...

...that's fine.

But this is a movie, isn't it? I paid fourteen dollars to see this, didn't I? Can't I expect more from a movie than a level-headed look at how society might plausibly endure a major health crisis? Can't I expect larger-than-life heroes and villains? Can't I expect absurdly dramatic events I will never experience within the cruelly narrow confines of reality? Can't I expect more?

Well, that's the big question. And the way I see it: realism gives, and realism takes away.

What you gain with realism is superficial credibility. What you lose, potentially, is a stirring metaphor that can invoke deep emotional responses and make us look at the world through a different emotional lens for the rest of our lives.

The Godfather is about the mob, sort of. Really it's about families. And it doesn't have anything to say about families except that the ties that unite us can also strangle us. Is this profound? Is this original? Not really. But oh how deeply the movie feels this observation. And through the movie, we feel the observation with equal power.

By contrast, Contagion has no underlying emotional life. It's a movie about a pandemic that is really a movie about... a pandemic.

So there you go.

You got your realism at long last.

And I can already hear your reaction:

Why couldn't it have been more exciting?

SCORE

How Accomplished: 74/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 71/100

The Help

2011-09-28T07:55:00.000-07:00

I would not see this movie in a million years.

Why? Because its marketing campaign did a great job.

It showed exactly what kind of movie The Help is: it's the dreaded historical Message Movie.

Present are all the tropes of that abhorrent genre: the noble and downtrodden black woman, the spunky white protagonist whose virtue lies in extraordinary empathy (and a downright suspicious sense of where history is going), and of course the gallery of sneering villains and villainesses just waiting to be exposed for the shallow-hearted snobs they are.

It's the kind of movie where characters say "Pshaw!" a lot more than seems conversationally plausible.

But I saw the movie anyway, because it was number one at the box office an astonishing four weeks in a row. This is the movie that dominated the month of August.

It follows the inhabitants of the town of Jackson, Mississippi, around the time of Medgar Evers' assassination.

Prodigal daughter Emma Stone returns to Jackson, after a few years spent in New York, to discover her old stomping grounds unacceptably racist. Tellingly, the movie never explores any possible racist feelings or actions in Emma Stone's own childhood. Instead, flashbacks reveal a young "Skeeter" -- yeah, her name's Skeeter; I don't know what to tell you -- who was extremely kind to, and well-loved by, her own black family maid. The decision not to reveal any defects in the protagonist's own character, or any guilt on her part, is an act of authorial condescension that permeates the entire ridiculously judgmental and simple-minded film.

Not only is Skeeter without the slightest hint of blame, neither are Viola Davis' pillar-of-the-housemaid-community, Abilene, or fellow maid Minny, or anyone else whose skin color is black. But if you're white and your name isn't Skeeter, God help you, you awful bastard.

It's largely because of this "easy choices" plot -- should I root for the racists or the non-racists? -- that the acting performances are unavoidably phony. Viola Davis is phony as Abilene, Emma Stone is phony as anyone not born in the late 1980's, and most dreadfully of all, Bryce Dallas Howard, an actress I love, is the phoniest of all phonies as frosty socialite and anti-civil rights crusader Hilly Holbrook.

Hilly wants to befriend the newly-returned Skeeter, so she tries to recruit her to the local chapter of Smug Jerks Against Civil Rights.

Skeeter wants to fit in with the local high society, so she does not spurn Hilly outright. Instead she secretly works on a scathing expose of southern racism by conducting covert interviews with Abilene, Minny and eventually all the black maids in Jackson.

The book goes on to become a runaway bestseller -- which is odd because it plays out like the book takes two weeks to write, one week to publish and a fourth week to become the talk of the whole country. The plot rests on these developments, so their inauthenticity -- both the ease of publication and the speed of it -- is jarring.

But then again, the wretched Help, the novel on which the movie is based, got published, became a best seller, and even got made into a terrible movie!

So I guess anything is possible.

Obviously I didn't respond well to this flick, but lots of people did. The movie has racked up a hundred and fifty million dollars so far. Obviously someone out there likes it.

And I can't fault them. The Help is a bad movie, but it's really not as bad as I'm making it out to be. It's just that I personally prefer my trashy movies to come right out and embrace their trashiness. If their plots revolve around spaceships found mysteriously adrift, or a pair of cops who are complete opposites but discover a mutual respect when they are both framed by a common enemy, so much the frickin' better.

But that's just me.

If self-important melodramas about beautiful social outsiders undoing hundreds of years of prejudice and humbling little miss perfect Hilly Holbrook by scribbling a bestseller on college-ruled notebooks are your cup of tea, then you'll probably enjoy The Help.

Your tastes could not possibly be more different from mine.

But that's not necessarily a bad thing.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 43/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 04/100

Apollo 18

2011-09-07T07:08:00.000-07:00

Some movies just hit you where you're weak.

Such a movie is Apollo 18.

It imagines a 1973 mission to the moon that was not scrapped due to budget constraints and a fuzzy sense of purpose. It imagines an Apollo mission that was, instead, covertly launched and secretly conducted to avoid revealing its frightening, almost nefarious agenda.

Said agenda is to investigate mysterious signals detected near the moon's south pole in previous missions. Signals that are almost certainly of alien origin.

It's nefarious because the astronauts have no idea what they're doing. The transmitters they're setting up outside their lander are designed to summon the hostile alien lifeforms, and they don't even know it. Those bastards in the Department of Defense are using our brave astronauts as guinea pigs in some twisted experiment.

How am I supposed to resist a premise like that?

It's got mystery. It's got danger. It's got space travel.

I am in.

The movie is assembled just like the recent Paranormal Activity movies, which is to say, pretend-edited out of supposedly non-narrative film footage. Therefore some sections are almost willfully boring, to create a sense of verisimilitude and hopefully growing tension.

This worked really well in the Paranormal Activity flicks, and it works okay here too, though you have to get used to the jumpy cuts and slower pacing.

Once you do, you spend most of your time with square-jawed hero-type astronauts Nathan Walker and Benjamin Anderson, who perch their lander near a vast shadow-filled crater they can't go into, since it's too cold inside. This doesn't mean they can't ride their rover around it, and it doesn't mean they can't find another spacecraft on the far side. A Soviet lander, it turns out.

Plenty happens in Apollo 18, and the story is fairly conventional in structure. So much so, it might have been better served with the full studio treatment: a couple movie stars in the leads and a hundred million-dollar budget.

That might have forced upon the filmmakers a more rigorous consideration of what exactly the aliens are, and more importantly, who exactly the human characters are. Creative constraints arise from the fact that the protagonists are going to be 70's-era astronauts no matter what you do, but come on, you've got evil aliens living in a crater on the moon, you can take a little license.

And while they were at it, the writers might have given thought to what the movie's really about, under the surface. Theme is not a filthy word. It's okay to use it when coming up with your story.

As it stands, A18 is less idiosyncratic than PA 1 & 2, and ultimately less effective. Its scares are a little predictable, its characters a little bland, its underlying energy a little manufactured rather than inspired.

Thus, the movie resembles the Apollo lander, which was so historic and so iconic, less than it does the space shuttle, which finally got mothballed this year after two explosions and a mixed bag of accomplishments.

Nothing spectacular, but hey...

...it's STILL a spaceship.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 58/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 71/100

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-13T11:48:00.000-07:00

Wow, this movie's been getting a lot of good reviews.

Here's why: critics absolutely hate action movies. Hate them. And if there's anything they hate more than action movies, it's science fiction movies.

They hate these movies because such movies are popular entertainment, and there's absolutely no reason to be a fifty year-old movie critic if you like what everyone else likes. Your defining purpose is to shine a light on what people should like, not what they already like.

Thus, critics generally like foreign art dramas nobody has seen, nor will see.

None of this is groundbreaking analysis.

Here's where it applies to Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Every movie critic in the country had this movie's release date circled as their own personal "worst day of the year." After a loud, stupid summer dominated by Michael Bay and Harry Potter, critics were going to have to watch a prequel of a movie about supersmart, diabolical apes.

You could hear the collective groan.

Then they saw the movie, and got the surprise of the year. Rise wasn't an action movie at all. It wasn't even a science fiction movie in any meaningful or embarrassing way.

It was a straight-up character drama.

Hardly anything happens in Rise. Every scene consists of people talking. Er, well, except the scenes that consist of an ape talking. That ape is Cesar, and he doesn't even talk, he just signs.

Almost everything in Rise -- excluding the last twenty minutes -- could actually happen.

Well heck, it's no wonder the movie nailed an 83% composite score on Rotten Tomatoes. Expectations are everything, and for most movie critics, their worst day of the year didn't happen. Instead of being subjected to a brilliant, exciting, dynamic sci-fi action pic, like the 1968 original, they got to watch a character drama.

A character drama! On their worst day of the year!

So they were thrilled. But is Rise of the Planet of the Apes a good character drama?

Of course not. It's dreadful.

But boy is there a lot of it. James Franco plays the least convincing hyper-intelligent scientist since Denise Richards' turn as Doctor Christmas Jones. He's a biotech researcher intent on curing Alzheimer's because, you see, his father John Lithgow has Alzheimer's, which we get to see Lithgow act out in ridiculous caricature.

There's virtue in simple, primal character motivations. But a line exists between that territory and this-is-the-first-and-most-obvious-thing-the-screenwriter-could-come-up-with-and-he-was-on-deadline-so-what-do-you-want-from-the-guy.

Franco's motivation falls on the wrong side of that line.

Franco also has a relationship with a zoo employee played by Frieda Pinto, and over the course of the movie's five year span (which often feels like it unspools in real time -- I've been telling people I'm 43 ever since the movie came out) they even get married.

But the real relationship that gets the hell dramatized out of it is that between Franco and Cesar, the baby chimp Franco raises to help him with his Alzheimer's cure. Cesar is the offspring of an experimental test subject, and as a consequence, has an almost-human level of intelligence.

Alas, Cesar can't really talk, so his interactions with Franco are usually limited to Cesar whimpering, followed by Franco saying, "Everything's going to be okay, Cesar."

A few random thoughts:

-The apes in this movie aren't diabolical at all, despite what the trailer suggests. They just want to escape to the Redwood Forest. This is a problem because it means the movie has no antagonist. Therefore minor characters like Brian Cox's primate house administrator have to be buttheads in order to inject some conflict into the story. Otherwise, there would be practically none.

-Absent an antagonist, the movie better have a hell of a protagonist. But he's missing in action too. The movie doesn't know if James Franco or Cesar is its main character. Franco dominates the action for the first forty minutes, but it's Cesar who drives the story in the last forty, when Franco practically disappears. Bad, bad structure.

-The last act of the movie is a prolonged action sequence wherein the ape troop, led by Cesar, escapes from the city into the Redwood Forest. Thus, one belated section of the movie actually is a pure action movie. Switching genres midstream like this usually means the writers don't know what they're doing.

-There's a side effect of the chemical that enhances ape intelligence. It's also a highly transmissable plague virus that will wipe out humanity, it is suggested, shortly after the movie ends. This is a lame cop-out making the putative ape transition to rulership of the planet ludicrously easy and fast. It's a convenient way to "make something happen" in the story without laying that burden on the actual characters. One of many examples of how superficial and shoddy the screenplay is.

-I know I mentioned this before, but Franco really shouldn't play a scientist. He doesn't have the "smart" look at all. This part needed Guy Pearce.

Of course, this is all merely my take on the movie, and I'm a populist reveler in sci-fi action movies, so I was just as disturbed by the genre bait-and-switch as most critics were delighted by it.

Which means you might need to disregard this review and simply ask yourself, what are you expecting from Rise of the Planet of the Apes?

Quite possibly, that'll determine what you think of the movie.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 37/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 33/100

Cowboys & Aliens

2011-08-05T12:11:00.000-07:00

Ideas are slippery little things.

Sometimes the tighter you grip one, the more likely you are to lose it.

Which is why there's been lots of skepticism over the new film Cowboys & Aliens. Its central idea, embodied in the title, comes across more like a brute-force mashing together of genres than an elegant pairing. It's the sort of creativity that comes from someone trying really hard to be creative.

And that's usually a bad sign.

But then again, the concept is indisputably different from its stay-in-your-lane peers. And different is good. Right?

Well, that sort of depends on the secondary and tertiary ideas that spring from the original concept. After all, a good movie contains about eleven hundred really cool ideas, all of which must trace their origin to the central cool idea that launches the story.

Thus, we might distinguish between ideas that are terrific and also fertile, and those that are merely terrific, while spending their lives in melancholy isolation.

At first glance -- and that's all we have of Cowboys & Aliens from the title -- it can be extremely hard to know which is which.

This is one of the many terrifying aspects of moviemaking. Studios can't really be sure how dynamic their idea is until they are many millions of dollars into its development.

So which is Cowboys & Aliens? A bountiful wellspring or a shooting star?

Things start out well, with James Bond -- I mean Daniel Craig -- waking up in the scrublands of the Old West with a curious device attached to his wrist. Craig has no memory of how he got the device, how he got where he is, or even who he is.

What ensues is thirty minutes of an old-fashioned western that brings Craig into conflict with the lawful authorities of a nearby town, as well as the rich cattle baron, played by Harrison Ford, who practically owns the town.

It's such a straight-up western that you don't even notice the mechanical device still attached to Craig's wrist.

Until it starts beeping.

This beeping foretells the arrival of a squadron of alien fighter craft, which strafe the dusty streets and rickety buildings of the set -- oops, I mean the town -- with rapid-fire laser cannons.

The alien fighters also make off with a good number of townfolk, including Harrison Ford's rotten apple of a son.

United by a common foe and a diversity of motivations -- Craig seeks to find out who he is, while sexy triggerwoman Olivia Wilde pursues an even more mysterious agenda -- a posse is formed. This posse tracks its alien quarry across the blindingly hot landscape of the Old West, where broad daylight conceals many perils, among them bandits, Indians and, oh yeah, evil alien monsters.

There's a lot of good storytelling employed in Cowboys & Aliens. There's character arcs, there's setups and payoffs, there's tension and suspense, there's action and backstory. A lot of effort from a great number of talented people went into the story.

And it shows, for the most part. The flick is an entertaining romp, but in the end, of course, you can never hide who you truly are, and a movie will always reveal itself in the third act.

Here, Cowboys & Aliens devolves into a mindless, frenetic mess as the cowboys, with some help from their friends the Indians and a newly-revealed alien ally in Olivia Wilde, attack the aliens' desert fortress.

It's all highly implausible, even within the context of lowered expectations, and sadly, the aliens are never given personality, nor a genuine feeling of menace. They're mostly lifted from the Whitley Strieber school of cold-bastards-who-experiment-on-humans, with some Predator-like mandibles and cougar-like growls thrown in for good measure.

During the attack on their fortress, the aliens mostly run around like idiots and get shot with arrows and flintlocks.

Once again, I'd like to issue a proclamation to all fictional aliens considering an invasion of the Earth: please do your homework before leaving home. If you can't see well in the bright light of our desert plains, as the Cowboys & Aliens aliens cannot, then invent yourselves a pair of sunglasses and keep them on at all times. Don't, repeat do not, accept this as an insuperable obstacle and content yourselves with taking us on half-blind.

You're just going to get your interstellar starship blown into a million pieces, as happens at the climax of C & A.

Someday I'm going to write a screenplay about a race of aliens who invade our planet, completely roll over us, and become masters of the Earth for the rest of time.

And it's going to be really, really good.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 67

How Much I Enjoyed: 69

Crazy Stupid Love

2011-08-02T18:55:00.000-07:00

Dan Fogelman is a very hot screenwriter.

You wouldn't know it to look at his produced credits. By those he appears to be mostly a writer of kid flicks, with credits on Pixar's Cars and Cars 2, and also the Disney pics Fred Clause, Bolt and Tangled.

In screenwriting terms, this is only okay. It means he's made a lot of money, but it doesn't make him a force to be reckoned with.

What makes him a force to be reckoned with is the fact that Steve Carrell has apparently decided to be in all of Fogelman's projects, and at the moment, Carrell is the hottest comedy star in Hollywood.

The relationship began in 2009, when Carrell attached himself to Fogelman's script for Crazy, Stupid Love, a move which sparked a bidding war and netted Fogelman a charming two and a half million dollars for the script.

The next year, Fogelman secured a three million dollar deal for writing and directing his upcoming John Lennon-inspired comedy Imagine. Steve Carrell is starring. (But not as John Lennon. Whew!)

He also sold his road trip comedy, My Mother's Curse, which has Barbra Streisand and Seth Rogen attached, though not Steve Carrell. Yet.

So within Hollywood circles, Fogelman is suddenly considered very, very A-listy.

And it's the script for Crazy, Stupid Love that got Carrell interested and kicked off this whole run in the first place.

So.

Does the movie justify the millions of dollars now in Fogelman's bank account?

Um, sort of.

It's a well-executed comedy with plenty of laughs constructed along very familiar plot lines.

And since Hollywood's never trying to break new ground -- in fact they'd much rather not, thank you very much -- then yeah, Crazy Stupid Love is a pleasing confection bound to entertain a wide audience and rake in more than enough money to cover Fogelman's scriptwriting fee.

So go for it, Hollywood. Oops, they already did.

The movie stars not just Steve Carrell, who plays a middle-aged husband and father recently separated from wife Julianne Moore, but Ryan Gosling, a much-younger-than-middle-aged super-handsome ladykiller who gets drawn into Carrell's life when he has to listen to him repeatedly drone on about how much he misses his estranged wife at the trendy bar where Gosling likes to pick up chicks.

Partly because he's a decent guy, and partly because he wants Carrell to stop harshing his buzz, Gosling offers to tutor Carrell in the art of modern dating, to transform him from sad sack to lothario.

This story has been done about a hundred thousand times, as recently as 2005's Hitch and as distantly as 1912's Pygmalion. (At least.)

But, of course, I liked Pygmalion. I liked Hitch. And now I like Crazy, Stupid Love too.

Obviously originality isn't everything.

It helps that Carrell and Gosling are both embraceable actors playing lovable characters. It helps that Julianne Moore, Emma Stone, and Marisa Tomei also have good characters to play. Yeah, CSL is almost an ensemble piece. Sideplots go not just to our dual protagonists, but to Julianne's fling with Kevin Bacon, and newcomer Jonah Bobo's teenage crush on babysitter Analeigh Tipton, who in turn has a crush on Carrell.

Fogelman says his inspiration was the movie Love Actually, another relationship ensemble, but really it's the young-man-tutors-older-man dynamic that makes CSL tick.

That dynamic follows all the usual twists and turns, though there is one big reveal that makes for a delightful surprise at the end of act two. I like it enough not to reveal it here.

The movie is conceived and executed in a spirit of good fun, and I enjoyed the two hours I spent with it.

It would be nice, of course, if I could give higher praise to a script from one of the hottest writers of 2011, but instead Fogelman proves you don't have to be great to have great success.

You just have to be better than your competition.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 71/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 72/100

Captain America: The First Avenger

2011-07-31T19:26:00.000-07:00

Let's get something straight:

Characters are not people.

They can't be. People are too random, too incomprehensible, too messy, too contradictory, too irrational.

Most distressingly, your average person is a living symbol of utterly nothing.

And that's the opposite of what a character must be.

Whether we like to admit it or not -- and this depends on our level of comfort with the permeable, diaphanous, wholly mysterious membrane we call the suspension of disbelief -- a character must represent something.

Even if we don't know exactly what that something is, everyone can feel when a character takes on a mythic dimension. When they stop being that person on the screen, and they become, instead, the embodiment of a primal quality. That's when their stories have something to offer.

Forget about stories being "about" something. Characters themselves have to be about something.

Which brings us to our old friend, Captain America.

What does Cap represent?

Can't say "America," it's too easy, and too abstract. After all, what does America represent?

In the context of the Captain America comics, I'll venture that America -- and by extension, the Captain -- represents victory.

Captain America always wins. Period.

Think how this sets him apart from other superheroes. Peter Parker's life is a mess, Superman runs into kryptonite every damn way he turns, the X-Men are fighting prejudices and fears they will never wholly overcome, Iron Man can't beat alcoholism and the Hulk wishes above all that he weren't the Hulk.

For all their powers, superheroes lose their battles just as often as they win.

That's where Cap's different. He always wins.

And that's America.

Okay, Vietnam was a defeat, and the Korean War can only really be called a draw, but this misses the larger point. Which is: in the history of civilization, there have been two empires whose massive successes have dwarfed all others. One is the ancient Roman Empire. The other is the United States.

And Rome fell.

America hasn't yet, and despite its problems lifting the debt ceiling, it is currently impossible for a reasonable person to foresee America's fall. It's hundreds of years in the future.

Which means, as of right now, America is the most successful example of a group of people uniting under a common banner. Ever.

More than democracy, human rights, capitalism, or anything else, America symbolizes winning.

And that's why Cap always wins.

Enter Captain America, the movie.

There are a host of problems in Captain America -- there's not a single good line of dialogue, there's not a single original action sequence, there's not a single moment of suspense, the diabolical villain's plan is to "target everything," which is murky and stupid, the movie is set during World War II, an arena so well captured by modern stories like HBO's Band of Brothers that it's nearly impossible to convince us we're actually there without going to infinitely greater effort than Captain America seems capable of, the special effects are shaky and the ending, where Captain America pilots an airborne superfortress into the arctic ice to prevent a crash over populated territory is obviously a necessary and therefore obligatory move to get Cap into the present for the upcoming Avengers movie; come on, there wasn't a parachute anywhere on the whole plane?! -- but despite all these problems, the real source of rot at the core of Captain America is the absence of Captain America.

Handsome young actor Chris Evans plays the title role, but the movie is thematically obsessed with the idea that Cap is "just an ordinary kid from Brooklyn," and not special at all, which assigns to Cap humility as his central virtue.

This is patently ridiculous. Captain America has an abundance of good qualities, as does the USA, but humility doesn't exactly rank high on the list.

I don't mean to imply the writers and director of Captain America thematically failed to match my answer, and that's why I'm condemning the movie. I mean to say that the movie was horrible, and my best guess as to why is that they whiffed when trying to capture the character's central theme.

It's either that, or the bad special effects.

But I think it was that.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 26/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 21/100

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

2011-07-24T16:25:00.000-07:00

I've been mostly out on the Harry Potter movies.

The first two were slavishly mechanical adaptations. The next two were occasionally interesting failures. So I bailed.

Meanwhile, the series has made thirteen hundred kajillion dollars while burning itself into the brains of an entire generation. And somewhere along the way, something must have changed, because the eighth movie is fast, engaging and fun.

It helps that the movie covers the events of the second half of the final book by Rowling, which is the good half.

It's the half that contains "The Battle of Hogwarts."

A battle is a wonderful thing to center a movie around. It's primal, it's visual, it's decisive, and it lends itself to all manner of metaphorical application. In movies, a battle is always a welcome event.

So it is in HP 7.2, which opens with a sensational image: a long-shot of Hogwarts, School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, surrounded on all sides by floating dementors, faceless wraiths who inspire fear and despair in all who encounter them.

The dementors have been engaged to protect Hogwarts against the growing army of Lord Voldemort, but reliance on dementors is a suspect tactic. Voldemort hasn't even arrived yet, and Hogwarts is already under siege.

This is the grim, tense tone that permeates the movie.

Harry and his chums Ron and Hermione are on the run, both from Voldemort and the lawful authorities. Partly this is because Voldemort has the law in his pocket, but partly it's because our heroes must frequently break the law to obtain the rare artifacts called horcruxes which contain digital duplicates -- or the magical equivalent -- of Voldemort's wicked soul.

Unless the horcruxes are destroyed, it will do no good to defeat Voldemort himself.

This veers perilously close to a common fantasy formula, the "plot coupon" story that revolves around the recovery of a certain number of magic items required to defeat a nefarious adversary. This formula enables an author to churn out hundreds of pages of text -- as well as repeating it through endless books -- without once resorting to something as mundane as an actual story.

(It's also why The Lord of the Rings remains the best fantasy plot ever conceived. There are no plot coupons involved. The hero must simply take the Enemy's greatest weapon and dump it into a volcano in his own backyard, or everything the hero loves will be destroyed. It's ironic, impossible, and still the reigning champion of plots.)

Fortunately, four of the horcruxes have already been gathered up in the previous installment, leaving only three to manage here, which is borderline acceptable. Also, there's the Big Battle.

The battle lasts a meaty hour of screentime, as a good battle should.

In the midst of it, Harry, Ron and Hermione scurry around Hogwarts looking for horcruxes.

The battle is frequently more compelling than the horcrux hunt, as when clumsy underdog Neville Longbottom holds off an army of werewolves with nothing more than a little bravado and a massive magical shield exerted by the castle itself.

The acting is superb throughout, which is no surprise since it's British actors in every part. I've even warmed up to Ralph Fiennes' wheezing portrayal of the noseless Voldemort. He gets a lot of screentime in this final flick, which helps the actor fill out the character.

Overall though I think the bulk of the credit has to go to director David Yates -- the franchise finally found its director, and it only took five movies to do so -- and author JK Rowling, whose story and world-building efforts made the movie fundamentally what it is, with an assist from series screenwriter Steve Kloves, who implements several tweaks to the book that are pretty sensible, overall. Though it did hurt to lose the final scene with Dumbledore's talking portrait, as well as the line that, to me, summed up the entirety of Harry's accumulated wisdom: "Ron, that wand's more trouble than it's worth."

Considering the series as a whole, it's still nothing more than a multimedia expansion pack that does not in any significant way enhance our understanding or enjoyment of the original books.

In this way, it's different than the concurrent Twilight movies, which have been indelibly stamped by their actors. Stewart and Pattinson might not be the next coming of Taylor and Burton, but they were perfectly cast. They now ARE Bella and Edward, whereas Radcliffe, Grint and Watson don't embody Harry, Ron and Hermione as much as they borrow their identities for a time.

We live in a movie culture in which Robert Downey Jr. now plays Sherlock Holmes and Chris Pine plays James Tiberius Kirk. It's easy to imagine a reboot of the Harry Potter movie franchise -- maybe in 2025? -- featuring a different group of twelve year-olds as Harry, Ron and Hermione.

This won't represent a condemnation of the existing film series. It'll reflect the fact that the books are simply too good to be confined to any one set of actors, or any one set of directors.

In a way, the conclusion of the movie series has set the Harry Potter books free.

As Secretary of War Stanton said when closing Abraham Lincoln's eyes for the final time, they belong to the ages now.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 84/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 85/100

Horrible Bosses

2011-07-22T12:16:00.000-07:00

In screenwriting circles, this advice is often given:

Before you begin writing, visualize the movie poster. Does it look appealing? Is it commercial? Does it have a good title?

This is meant to steer a writer's efforts into profitable channels. To avoid time-wasting detours. But there's a big problem with the advice.

It plunges the story into the deep waters of commercial acquisition well before it knows how to swim. Ironically it can end up dooming a movie's chances of fulfilling its potential, commercially as well as artistically.

But a quick buck is often made for all concerned, and Hollywood is nothing if not a quick buck industry.

Enter Horrible Bosses, a comedy about three thirty-something guys bedeviled by -- you guessed it -- horrible bosses, whom they plot to murder.

I like the idea. Everyone's had a horrible boss, and everyone's contemplated homicide of said boss. You can kind of already tell the main characters aren't going to go through with the murders, since they are played by likeable actors Jason Bateman, Jason Sudeikis and TV actor Charlie Day.

Opposite them are horrible bosses Kevin Spacey, Jennifer Aniston and Colin Ferrell.

Playing street tough mentor to the would-be killers is comedian and comedic actor Jamie Foxx.

So you've got your poster. You've got your title. All that's left now is to survey the wreckage of the story.

Let's start with a structure problem. Jamie Foxx's character is only in two scenes. That's barely a cameo. Yet his structural role as mentor to the protagonists suggests he should play a vastly more prominent role in the story.

So why didn't he? My guess is, with three separate protagonists to track, along with three antagonists, there wasn't enough screen time to give Foxx his due. Beyond which, multiple protagonists usually serve as mentors to each other. So technically Foxx probably doesn't belong in the movie at all. And his scenes do feel like they slow the movie down rather than amp it up.

Now let's move to a casting problem. Jennifer Aniston's sexual-harassing dentist makes no sense whatsoever for the obvious reason. No man currently alive would mind being sexually harassed by Jennifer Aniston. The character belongs in the movie Awesome Bosses.

If they had cast a revolting woman in the role, they'd have had something, but since ugly women can't get SAG cards, it was a nonstarter I suppose.

Ugly men are in though. Or at least, really handsome men with prosthetic makeup to look ugly. That's Colin Ferrell who, frankly, is fantastic here, like he is in everything. He's the bulbous-headed nimrod with the heart of coal who tortures Jason Sudeikis by making him choose whom to fire in the office. He too is in only a couple scenes, and not nearly enough humor is mined from his character.

Indeed, the bulk of the movie concerns itself with the antics of our three main characters performing surveillance on their bosses, efforts which quickly turn into cliched slapstick situations. Dropping Colin Ferrell's cocaine bowl on the floor and accidentally inhaling it was the most obvious thing that could have happened when they broke into his house, so of course that's what happens.

Horrible Bosses is a wasted opportunity from the get-go, but where it devolves into true horror is act three, which is a prolonged action sequence between Kevin Spacey and the guys. It's stupid and phony and utterly unfunny, and when the credits finally roll they're a blessing from the gods.

Hurry out of the theater, though, because there's a post-script with nonagenarian Bob Newhart that delivers one final cringe meant to be a joke.

The reason Hollywood's product is almost uniformly better than that of Hong Kong or Bollywood -- Hollywood's two biggest rivals -- is because Hollywood, being much more financially well-heeled, takes a lot longer to make a movie than either of those entities.

But sometimes it still doesn't take long enough.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 28/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 31/100

Green Lantern

2011-06-30T18:56:00.000-07:00

A fellow named Michael Hauge once wrote a good book about screenwriting.

In it, he offered the notion that most successful movies contain something called a "second level of sell." What he meant was, there is usually a cool idea BENEATH the cool idea on which the movie is marketed.

Take the movie Amadeus. The first level of sell is that it's a movie about the murder of the world's most talented musician. Sounds pretty good, right? Are you ready for the second level of sell?

It's this:

The murderer is our main character. He's a mediocrity who is jealous of Mozart, and he is our main character, our protagonist. And do you know why?

Because you are a mediocrity.

As am I. We all are.

So we identify with Saliere, the murderer, more than we ever could the greatest composer ever.

This involves us in the story. It sucks us in, and we hang on the outcome.

Second level of sell.

Very, very smart.

And with that, we take a plunging step from the sublime to the moronic.

Green Lantern, and the comic from which it hails, barely contain a single level of sell.

The movie/comic is about a hotshot test pilot -- Jesus, I hate it already -- who gets handed a power ring by a dying alien which gives him almost unlimited power.

But it's kiddie power. The ring enables the wearer to create shapes out of anything he can imagine. So if he wants to hit someone really hard, he conjures a gigantic fist which smacks his opponent, cartoon-style.

If he wants to defeat Fly-Man (patent pending), he conjures a giant flyswatter with the ring and swats away.

Now, it's hard to fault the creators who birthed this idea in the late fifties for doing exactly what they were trying to do: concoct a character who could be enjoyed by pre-adolescent boys with limitless power fantasies.

But geez, the character just wouldn't die, and now we're stuck with a four hundred million dollar movie starring Ryan Reynolds and Blake Lively, and the concept hasn't been improved a jot.

And it's glaringly obvious that underneath the big idea -- power ring! -- is a yawning chasm of emptiness. There's nothing else going on in this story. There's no second level of sell.

Reynolds' Hal Jordan is a sexy, popular dude with lots of money who flirts with a sexy, popular gal with lots of money. He has a personal problem, of course. He's scared of intimacy, so instead of settling down with Lively, he cavorts with a changing roster of supermodels.

Poor guy. If anyone needs an alien power ring, it's him, right?

Along with the ring, he inherits an enemy named Parallax who has more might than every power ring in the universe combined -- there are lots of them -- yet gets destroyed in the end -- spoiler alert -- by getting pushed into Earth's sun.

This is a big problem, but it's just emblematic of a million loose threads and logical inconsistencies that reveal a lack of gravitational attraction at the center of the story. That unifying force has to come from the core concept, and a second level of sell can take that concept from good to great.

And the lack thereof can send a story from bad to Green Lantern.

One post-script: this movie provides another entry in the growing body of evidence that amorphous clouds make ineffective antagonists.

The movie's diabolical Parallax is a big space cloud, reminiscent of V'Ger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture, Galactus in Fantastic Four 2, or even the big flying ball of evil in The Fifth Element.

Good antagonists are people. If they're clouds, maybe you haven't figured out your antagonist yet.

It's just a theory.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 28/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 25/100

The Tree of Life

2011-06-20T17:51:00.000-07:00

What jumps out about The Tree of Life is how astonishingly beautiful it is.

Every shot in the long film could hang in a museum.

I haven't seen a series of pictures as lovingly committed to celluloid since Terrence Malick's previous film, The New World, and I suspect I won't see another as gorgeous until his next one.

The reason for this is that Malick labors over his films -- it seems a shame to call them movies -- in a way no one has done since Kubrick.

Now, he doesn't labor over his scripts -- we'll get to that. What he labors over is the visual presentation. His efforts are so excruciating he has made only five films in forty years and, like The Tree of Life, every one is a masterpiece of evocative imagery.

The current film opens with one of the most mesmerizing tours of cosmic history I've ever seen. We zoom past Saturnian rings, startle at fateful celestial impacts, and even peep a few dinosaurs traipsing through a Jurassic habitat.

Malick's work is a shocking reminder of how easy it is to fall into visual cliche. It isn't until you see someone like Malick approach his material with an utterly fresh perspective that you realize how tired and boring are all our Science Channel documentaries, which cover the same territory the same way it's been covered a million times, using the same stock footage and the same computer-model renderings.

By contrast, Malick's images feel at once brand new and achingly familiar. We're looking at our home, as we've never seen it.

And it's just magnificent.

Okay, now to the... um, story.

Spoiler alert -- there is no story. Not really. Not unless there's a story in your average person's life itself.

The average person in question is young kid Jack, eldest of three brothers who live in the suburban Midwest of the 1950's with parents Brad Pitt and Jessica Chastain.

Pitt is an archetypal difficult dad: tyrannical yet distant, loving but pushing, always judging and never quite satisfied with his progeny. Chastain is his opposite number: gentle, kind and unconditionally giving.

Caught between them is Jack, trying to make sense of the world around him, of right and wrong, of happiness and misery.

Premier Hollywood script guru Blake Snyder would call this a "rite of passage" movie, and he'd be right. But most such movies organize their stories around a specific event of some kind. In the superb Ordinary People it was young Timothy Hutton's struggle to discover the secret of why his mother was treating him so coldly.

When we learn that secret, the entire movie comes into focus. Everything that happens is really about that one thing, and that's what makes OP a coherent story.

Malick disdains such convention. He doesn't want to tell a story about life. He just wants to show life. Whatever conclusions we draw are pretty much up to us.

This makes his films a lot like modern art; an unguided tour of the human experience. A rejection of insight and reason, an embrace of sensuous nihilism.

Not that there's anything wrong with that.

I enjoyed The Tree of Life, but the film is a test of patience. You have to suspend your sense of narrative anticipation. There aren't going to be set-ups and payoffs. There aren't going to be resolutions or catharses -- there's just life, snaking along all its tendrils and leafy fronds.

It's a different kind of film than we're used to seeing. It does not think deeply, but it feels deeply. And mostly what it feels is a sense of overwhelming beauty.

In many ways, The Tree of Life is the perfect reflection of its star, Brad Pitt. It may not have much going on between its ears...

...but damn if it doesn't look good.

SCORE

How Accomplished -- Visual Department: 96/100

How Accomplished -- Story Department: 42/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 73/100

Super 8

2011-06-17T09:30:00.000-07:00

Steven Spielberg sucks.

There. I said it.

I can now proceed directly to hell.

The thing is, though, he sort of does suck, if you restrict your analysis to the previous seventeen years.

Jurassic Park 2, Amistad, the atrocious Saving Private Ryan, A.I., Minority Report, Catch Me If You Can, The Terminal, Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull. This is a Hall of Shame list of bad movies.

There are all kinds of caveats here, so let's acknowledge the first: "Seventeen years? Oh, you mean since his miracle year of 1993, when he directed the number one box office hit of the year with Jurassic Park and also won every Oscar with his masterpiece Schindler's List?"

Um... yes, that's right.

Spielberg's my favorite director of all time. (I know, it's a bold choice.) But his unprecedented, unrivalled and unequalled run from 1975 to 1989 -- from Jaws to the third Indiana Jones movie -- was so good it burned the concept "Steven Spielberg is a genius" into the very core of our psyches. It burned it there so intensely the premise would prove almost impossible to reconsider for the rest of the man's lifetime, no matter how much useless dreck said lifetime resulted in.

Same thing happened with Einstein.

In Einstein's case, the result was a Grand Unified Theory which Einstein never did discover, and which probably does not exist.

In Spielberg's case, the result is Super 8.

Super 8 is not of course directed by Spielberg -- it is directed by devotee JJ Abrams, doing a spot-on imitation of Spielberg behind the camera -- but it is executive produced by him, and it's hard to imagine another movie where the executive producer is more present in the finished product.

The movie tracks a group of kids who spend their spare time making earnest but cheesy films using an eight-millimeter camera, as Spielberg famously did and JJ Abrams famously claims to have done.

It is set in 1979, a timeframe which does little for the movie beyond preserving the title: 1979 is just about the last year someone could plausibly use a super 8 camera.

The kids are using that camera when a train derails around them. (Don't ask. The laws of physics go out the window throughout the whole sequence, and indeed, throughout the movie.)

But this is no ordinary train. It's a military train with a top secret cargo which escapes during the derailment.

In the biggest non-surprise in marketing history, the secret cargo is an alien creature that proceeds to sort of terrorize the small town where the kids live.

"Sort of" is the key phrase here.

The movie tries to have its monster both ways. It attacks people seemingly at random -- though secretly for plot reasons; it kidnaps the sheriff, which puts the main character's dad in charge of the town police; it kidnaps love interest Elle Fanning so our bland protagonist has to go rescue her -- but at the same time the movie tries to play up sympathy for the monster. It has been abused by military scientists, you see, and it only really wants to go home, E.T.-style.

Except that E.T. didn't have huge, slavering mandibles, nor did E.T. string victims upside-down in his cavernous lair.

At least I don't think he did.

Every aspect of "Super 8" is indulgent and sloppy, from its refusal to commit to a genre (is this horror or adventure?) to its multiple plot threads that go nowhere, like the pointless sidebar concerning Elle Fanning's alcoholic father.

I'd say we could use a bunch more drafts of the script, but I'm not sure the basic premise is worth investing time on. Everything feels done-before, which in a way is the point of the movie.

It's a stroll down memory lane for Spielberg, and a "movie camp" fantasy for Abrams -- "you get to remake The Goonies with Steven Spielberg himself!"

Abrams took full advantage of the opportunity, totally disappearing into his Spielberg impersonation.

He's even wearing Spielberg's glasses...

No matter who directed it, Super 8 is most definitely a Steven Spielberg movie. And it's 2011, not 1981, so that it means it's really, really bad.

The truth is, Steven Spielberg is not a genius. He's just a competent film director who made movies with a bunch of crazy good screenplays for fifteen or twenty years, then made movies with a bunch of crazy bad screenplays for the next fifteen or twenty years. He didn't change, the screenplays did. And it's not his fault. It's just the way of the world. How many brilliant screenplays are out there, anyway?

Spielberg is not an idiot, nor is he a genius.

He's just a guy currently in talks to make Jurassic Park 4.

SCORE:

How Accomplished: 28/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 21/100

X-Men: First Class

2011-06-08T07:47:00.000-07:00

Prequels have a dubious history.

The earliest high-profile prequel was 1974's The Godfather Part II, a movie which only I seem to understand is pretty awful. The De Niro segments in early-century Italy are the worst parts.

The next big prequel was 1984's Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom, the atrocious second entry of the Indy saga. Happily I am not alone in hating this flick.

But the prequels that really fried brains were the Star Wars ones. They gave us Jar Jar Binks, Jango Fett and a Darth Vader who was a scowling teenager and, apparently, a bad actor.

The greatest storyteller of all pegged the problem with prequels:

"Part of the attraction of the L.R.," Tolkien wrote, "is due to the glimpses of a large history in the background: an attraction like that of viewing far off an unvisited island, or seeing the towers of a distant city gleaming in a sunlit mist. To go there is to destroy the magic."

(Yes, Tolkien wrote that beautifully even when jotting off quick notes to fans.)

Nonetheless we've got X-Men: First Class on our hands, a prequel to the outstanding "X-Men" movie trilogy.

In FC, a young Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr, AKA Professor X and Magneto, find themselves enrolled in a government program where they are instructed to advance American interests by gathering more mutants like themselves, and helping them develop their various powers.

None too soon either, because bad guy mutant Sebastian Shaw, played by Kevin Bacon, is plotting the Cuban Missile Crisis with his paramour Emma Frost, played with Keanu-like stiffness by January Jones, along with a couple other evil-looking muties who don't have lines.

Shaw's plan is to provoke World War Three, whose radioactive aftermath will presumably generate even more mutants. Why Shaw thinks this will happen is a mystery -- the current crop of mutants are not the result of radioactive waste. And why he would want this -- wouldn't he be less powerful in a world where his powers are ordinary rather than unique? -- is equally perplexing.

But he's a bad guy. And he wants to blow up the world. That's just going to have to suffice.

Enter the first class of what will eventually be called the X-Men.

They consist of a bland teenager called Havoc, a bland teenager called Angel, a bland teenager called Darwin... uh oh! A pattern's developing.

They also consist of Beast, played by Nicholas Hoult of About a Boy. Just thinking of About a Boy provided me minutes of enjoyment.

What didn't provide enjoyment was the sight of Beast in all his blue-furred, ridiculous glory. He looked like the kind of animatronic dummy that freaks out seven year-olds at places like Chuck E Cheese's. I think it's safe to say computer graphics aren't up to the challenge of Beast yet.

Rounding out the team is Mystique, played by flavor-of-the-month Jennifer Lawrence. Her makeup and effects are fine, but tragically, the girl can't seem to act. She delivers lines as if she's reading the bottom line of letters during an eye test. As soon as someone tells her it's okay to reveal emotion WHILE acting, she oughta be fine.

Mystique's in love with Charles Xavier because he's the only one who ever accepted her mutant nature, but she soon falls in love with Beast because he's kind of cute in a nerdy way. She then makes a play for Magneto because he's even more accepting of her than Xavier is. Yeah, this is all kind of confusing for me too.

Meanwhile, Moira McTaggert, a federal agent, also sort of falls for Charles Xavier...

And here's the movie's big problem.

There's too much going on. There's love quadrangles and pentangles, there's multiple groups of villains with shifting alliances, there's armies and navies, there's powerpoint presentations (or their sixties equivalents), there's just a lot of stuff thrown against the wall. Some sticks. Some doesn't. But this is the feeling that should come from a middle draft of a script in progress, not a supposedly finished movie.

In a finished movie, everything should hang together. Every subplot should reflect the main plot. Every character's core dilemma should be a different way of looking at the same problem. There should be a central idea at work.

In X-Men: First Class, that idea doesn't exist.

There are way more good scenes than bad scenes, but taken together, the good scenes don't mean anything. It's just a superpowered showcase, with a theoretically bombastic but emotionally empty action climax that takes place on a beach in Cuba and has too many moving parts.

In truth, there's no such thing as an ensemble. Every movie has to have a main character. Otherwise it's not a personal journey. It's just a bunch of stuff that happens more or less simultaneously.

And that's how I'd describe X-Men: First Class. A movie with no roots in a fictional past, only trace amounts of plausibility and clarity, hit-and-miss in terms of casting, acting and special effects, and, ultimately, no real understanding of what the hell it's about.

Let's have a moratorium on prequels.

If Tolkien thought they were a bad idea, they're a bad idea.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 32/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 31/100

The Hangover Part II

2011-05-31T14:49:00.000-07:00

Originality.

Is it worth a damn?

Before you answer, bear in mind that this is THE question in Hollywood right now; at least on the creative side.

Also bear in mind that the accumulated evidence of the past ten years points strongly to "no."

Yes, Hollywood is hurting financially, but that's because the dvd market has dried up thanks to the digital revolution.

In fact, Hollywood is NOT hurting at the theatrical box office. It continues to break all-time records nearly every year.

And that brings us to The Hangover Part II, which just became the highest-grossing live-action comedy of all time.

Rising ticket prices certainly diminish the luster of this accomplishment, but considering that every other entertainment venue is suffering from audience fragmentation, no one can dispute the fact that HO2 did huge, huge business over the weekend.

And it doesn't have a shred of originality in it.

The movie follows the continuing adventures of Bradley Cooper, Ed Helms and Zach Galifianakis as they drink too much, lose a friend and wake up with no memory of what happened.

What's changed is the setting -- we're in Thailand now -- and the prospective groom -- Ed Helms is the one with a wedding the next day; the missing friend is the brother of his bride.

The newborn infant of the first movie is replaced by a capuchin monkey. The role Ken Jeong played is now occupied by Paul Giamatti.

Faces have changed, but fundamentally it's the exact same story.

And here's why people struggle with the originality question: because this mindless retread of a sequel is really funny and thoroughly enjoyable.

I know. I'm surprised myself.

It's hard to explain why this movie works so well without regurgitating my praise of the first movie. The thriller plot structure makes a great counterpoint to the comedic content. It also keeps the stakes high and the clock ticking, things which make comedies more funny, not less.

Only the jokes are different, so the experience of watching HO2 is a lot like watching HO1 after an interval of several years, long enough to forget the particulars and be surprised again by the humor.

So it works. And it makes money.

And I ask again: is originality worth a damn?

Such a question is too broad for a curt answer, so let's narrow it down a bit. Does originality matter in the movie theater in 2011?

Nope.

And that's okay.

A strange thing has happened to visual entertainment. Premium cable tv, with its small niche, paid-subscription audience, has found an environment conducive to original storytelling. Thus we have Mad Men and Breaking Bad and The Wire and all the groundbreaking work a consumer could ask for.

With their high production values and serial natures -- as opposed to episodic -- these shows don't resemble traditional television series nearly as much as they resemble... well, movies.

Meanwhile, the movies have morphed into something much more like television. We have episodic franchises where every installment has the same basic formula, but we enjoy it anyway because we like the characters and don't expect the same level of quality as, say, we do from our television.

(!!!)

So if you think about movies as the new tv, and tv as the new movies, it's a lot easier to take in stride -- and perhaps even enjoy -- the current slate of sequels, adaptations and remakes being served at the movie theater.

You just have to relax a little.

It's only the cinema.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 48/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 72/100

Midnight in Paris

2011-05-28T19:04:00.000-07:00

When he was a young stand-up comic, Woody Allen told the following story:

"I once had a pain in the chestal area.

"Now, I was sure it was heartburn, y'know, cause at that time I was married and my wife cooking with her Nazi recipes, y'know, chicken Himmler.

"I didn't wanna pay 25 bucks to have it reaffirmed by some medic, that I had heartburn. But I was worried 'cause it was in the chestal area. Then it turns out my friend, Eggs Benedict, has a pain in his chestal area, in the same exact spot. I figured if I could get Eggs to go to the doctor, I could figure out what was wrong with me, at no charge, so I con Eggs. He goes.

"Turns out he's got heartburn. Cost him 25 dollars, and I feel great, cause I figured I beat the medic out of 25 big ones, y'know. Called up Eggs two days later... he died.

"I check into a hospital immediately, have a battery of tests run... x-rays. Turns out I got heartburn. Costs me 110 dollars.

"Now I'm furious. I run to Eggs' mother, and I say 'Did he suffer much?' And she said: 'No, it was quick. Car hit him and that was it.'"

Funny guy, that Woody Allen.

His cheerfully absurd sense of humor exploded in a spate of early films: Take the Money and Run, Bananas, Sleeper. Pure laughers, every one.

But Allen was not just funny.

He was also a smart guy consumed with philosophical issues. When his humor and philosophy converged, the result was an artistic peak that resulted in his strongest films: Annie Hall, Manhattan, Hannah and Her Sisters.

This was Allen's golden period.

It was fated not to last, of course, and when it was over, Allen would never again combine philosophical thoughtfulness with shuddering hilarity quite as well.

Nevertheless, Allen has continued to generate lots of fine movies.

Lately, however, the equilibrium between philosophy and comedy has swung decisively in favor of philosophy -- or theme, as it's called in drama.

In these latter days, Allen likes setting forth the theme of his movies right at the outset. Who can forget the opening of Match Point, with its tennis ball bouncing atop the net. In the first scene of Whatever Works, Larry David address the camera directly to inform the audience of theme.

So too with Midnight in Paris, a breezy and charming film about a young American screenwriter visiting Paris. The screenwriter, played by Owen Wilson, is engaged to marry Rachel McAdams, but he's not in love with her nearly as much as he's in love with the City of Light.

We get the theme early on, through a friend of McAdams', who pedantically -- but, Allen will show, accurately -- derides nostalgia for the past as a deluded manifestation of one's inability to cope with the present.

This describes Owen Wilson's screenwriter, who isn't in love with Paris of the present nearly as much as he's in love with Paris of the 1920's, that bohemian paradise which sheltered Ernest Hemingway, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Gertrude Stein and pretty much every other major artist of the era.

Wilson's character rejects the theme statement and continues to yearn for Paris of the 20's. He yearns so hard, in fact, he ends up getting transported there.

The whys and hows are unexplained and unnecessary, which gets at the point. Allen isn't strictly concerned with dramatic plausibility, narrative coherence or even humor. All the above are present in Midnight in Paris, but only in moderation. What dominates is theme.

Theme is in the driver's seat in Woody Allen films now. And while that's not ideal, it's not a terrible situation either.

Theme so often seems trite, lame or completely absent in Hollywoood films. In arthouse films, theme is often ridiculously obtuse. So it's kind of nice to see someone set up a simple thematic premise, then work it through scene by scene with mildly comic characters and situations.

Manhattan it's not.

But the days of Allen making films like Manhattan -- or telling jokes as funny as "Eggs Benedict" -- are long gone.

And we shouldn't yearn for those days. We should be happy with what we have in the present.

At least, that's what Midnight in Paris tells us.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 67/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 71/100

Bridesmaids

2011-05-26T08:52:00.000-07:00

Every so often a movie comes along that is written by women, features women and deals with a woman's perspective on love and life, and you realize that if more Hollywood decisions were driven by women, the resulting movies would be every bit as shallow and phony and shoddily crafted as they are now.

Such a movie is Bridesmaids, the badly-structured and poorly-conceived new comedy written by hands down the best performer on Saturday Night Live, Kristen Wiig. Co-writing is Wiig's old Groundlings chum, Annie Mumolo.

The movie is currently lighting up the box office on the strength of the movie's good qualities -- its title, its relatable premise and its poster --

--and also the strength of circumstance: the female audience is massively underserved and, given the chance, they will turn out in droves to see a movie directed at them.

They will even convince themselves they like said movie, but when it comes around on cable, no one will watch it, and when future movie conversations take place, no one will mention it, because the truth is, Bridesmaids is terrible.

The story follows a bankrupt, unlucky-in-love thirtysomething former bakery owner, Wiig, who gets drafted into the wedding party of a childhood friend.

Within the wedding party, Wiig discovers a classier, wealthier rival for the bride's affections, a heavyset, foul-mouthed mother of three, a heavierset, fouler-mouthed mother of none, and a thin, wispy nonentity.

The obvious comparison is to the comedy across the gender aisle, The Hangover, whose sequel comes out in a couple days. But unlike the unfocused Bridesmaids, Hangover features only three main characters, all of whom represent completely different aspects of the male psyche.

By contrast, Bridesmaids is saddled with six principal characters, and it can't even pull off two.

The Hangover also put its characters into an ingenious situation with dire consequences, so the tension was high and the laughs were proportionately bigger. Bridesmaids literally has no situation. It's just a normal build-up to a normal wedding.

On the surface, Bridesmaids is about Wiig's struggle to reconnect with her childhood friend, outdo her rival in the wedding party, find love with the right man and rediscover her passion for baking.

But under the surface, Bridesmaids is about... well, nothing.

The movie has no heart. In fact, it has no internal organs at all, and this perhaps is the reason the structure is so weak.

Structure, after all, is about the placement of Important Moments. And Important Moments don't exist if character is faked, conflict is contrived and emotional purpose is murky.

And hey... how could it have been otherwise?

Judd Apatow approached Wiig with the idea that she should write a movie -- ANY movie -- and he would produce it. Wiig quickly grabbed her acting buddy and wrote a movie. As well she should have. Right now, Apatow's got the clout to get anything made, but that won't last forever.

(I think he's got about fourteen good months left in him.)

Sadly, it's just not possible to put a rush order on things like plausible characters, meaningful conflict or wracking emotional purpose.

So we get Bridesmaids, a movie that looks funny and sounds funny, but it's about fifteen drafts and four years away from being worth the price of admission.

And we shouldn't be too hard on it. The most impossible thing in the world is to infuse your story with heart and substance and a portion of our own reality.

It doesn't happen here.

No big surprise.

The surprise is that it ever happens.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 26/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 23/100

Thor

2011-05-16T18:35:00.000-07:00

Boy, I loved this movie.

I loved the look, the tone, the casting, the special effects, and I especially loved Kenneth Branagh's superb direction.

In case you don't know, Thor is based not on the Norse legend slash religion, but rather the Marvel comic book, which itself is based on the Norse legend -- but set in the present day, so that Thor might interact with Spider-Man or the Hulk, and have memorable fights with them.

He doesn't -- the crossover movie The Avengers isn't coming till NEXT summer -- but he does interact with a group of humans, including astrophysicist Natalie Portman -- who conjures uncomfortable shades of Elisabeth Shue's nuclear physicist in The Saint -- jokey sidekick Kat Dennings, and gruff but congenial mentor Stellan Skarsgard, essentially reprising his role as the math professor in Good Will Hunting.

The reason Thor interacts with these people is that he's been banished from his home dimension of Asgard by his father Odin, due to a combination of his own reckless arrogance and his brother Loki's machinations.

This estranges Thor from his nifty uniform, his famous hammer, and his companions-in-arms, the boisterous "Warriors Three."

Even his famous strength isn't what it used to be, so when Natalie Portman runs him over with her car, it hurts.

He, by the way, is Chris Hemsworth, a newcomer to the Hollywood scene selected by Branagh to portray the more-than-human Thor. In a lot of ways, the success of a superhero movie hinges on how well the lead actor captures the essence of the comic book character. Hemsworth makes for an energetic, bellowing Thunder God not without a streak of charm. Check, check and check.

But what draws the eye in Thor is Branagh's direction. He has the right idea for how the movie should look:

Vivid.

Thor sports a lipstick red cape. The quasi-divine realm of Asgard shimmers in gleaming pastels. Literally, a rainbow bridge connects Asgard to Earth, as well as other realities, like the perilous domain of the warlike, blue-toned Frost Giants.

This is all well and good. Thor should be colorful, the same way a Superman movie should be. When you're dealing with a cosmically powerful character -- and to put it in perspective, Thor could go toe-to-toe with the Man of Steel any day of the week -- it's no good to play for realism. You have to go for grandeur. Branagh goes for it and gets it. The Asgardian scenes dazzle.

The Earth scenes work for the most part, too.

Thor's enemy on Earth is the FBI-like government agency called SHIELD, a group of men-in-black types who descend on Thor's fallen hammer and try to unlock its secrets. Not only are they incapable of doing this, they can't even lift the thing, since anyone who knows anything about comics knows that "whosoever holds this hammer, if he be worthy--" and ONLY if he be worthy "--shall possess the power of Thor."

Sorry, bureaucratic paper-pushers, you don't make the cut.

Sadly, not even Thor can lift the hammer these days, having been judged unworthy by Odin. And this is where Thor's character arc comes into play. He's got to learn a bit of humility, and getting beat up by guys in three-piece suits is enough to humble any kind of god, let alone the thundering kind.

But he's got to learn fast, because back on Asgard, Loki is plotting Odin's overthrow, and if Thor can't get back in time to thwart these designs, he'll never get the chance to redeem himself in his father's eyes.

There are some moments of genuine excitement in Thor. There are moments of genuine emotion. And there's lots and lots of solid craft in every phase of the film-making process.

Yes, I thoroughly enjoyed Thor.

Then I talked to my friend Mike.

Mike is the biggest Marvel fan I know.

In high school he grew sideburns like Wolverine. He's exactly the person you want to talk to after seeing a Marvel comic book adaptation.

Alas, Mike was not as high on Thor as I was.

He disparaged the flick for its strategic choice to create two different casts of characters, one on Asgard -- Odin, Loki, Frost Giants, the Warriors Three -- and one on Earth -- Natalie Portman, Stellan Skarsgard, SHIELD.

These are two separate worlds, Mike complained, that generate two different movies.

As a consequence, the amount of time Thor can spend with any group of characters is cut in half, and so is the emotional impact those relationships can achieve.

In particular, the wannabe romantic subplot between Thor and Portman fails to convince. Toward the end of the movie, Thor tries to give Portman a courtly kiss on the hand. Instead, she thrusts her lips on his, giving him a passionate kiss so unsupported by the story it felt like sexual assault.

Mike also hated the fact that it's never clear who's tougher than whom in a given fight. Sometimes Loki seems much weaker than Thor; sometimes he's an equal. The giant robot served with the under-imaginative name "The Destroyer" is sometimes the most implacable force in the universe; other times, a solid hammer-blow to the noggin will take him out.

Mike calls this effect "stacking." When it's done right, the viewer knows that in a straight-up fight, character A can beat character B but not character C. Character D can beat character C, but not character E. Mike likes to know where all the forces of a fictional universe rank, and he's right to want that. And he's right that Thor doesn't deliver.

But for all Mike's objections, I stand by the movie's good qualities, and the fact that Thor is still an effective visualization of the comic book Thunder God.

And that's more than I could have hoped when the movie first appeared on the summer '11 slate. Enough for me to give the movie the following

SCORE

How Accomplished: 63/100

How Much I Enjoyed (pre-talk with Mike): 88/100

How Much I Enjoyed (post-talk with Mike): 67/100

Fast Five

2011-05-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

You know what always works in movies?

When there are two good guys.

And even though we love them both, they can't stand each other.

So they spend the first two-thirds of the movie fighting. But they are so evenly matched, neither can get a real edge on the other.

Then...

...they overcome their differences. They join forces to take on the bad guy. And together, they are unstoppable.

The first Pirates of the Caribbean was structured like that. Seeing Orlando Bloom and Johnny Depp one-up each other was arguably more fun than the climax against Geoffrey Rush.

Star Wars was like that too. Han Solo is a good guy, but he's essentially opposed to the other good guy, our boy Luke. They don't really join forces till the last five minutes.

Midnight Run. Rocky III. Heck, Sense and Sensibility.

It always works.

And it works in Fast Five, the latest installment in the sensational and increasingly popular series of movies about street-racing virtuosos turned international fugitives.

The movie opens with an action sequence every bit the equal of any James Bond teaser in memory.

Former Fed Paul Walker, who gave up his badge but found his integrity -- man, I wish someone would describe me that way someday -- and his girlfriend Jordana Brewster, sister of the mysterious and missing Vin Diesel -- find themselves trying to steal a few million-dollar cars off a train in South America.

(Don't ask.)

Alas for them, the job goes sour.

Turns out, the sketchy characters who set up the job have sketchy intentions. Just as the valuable cars are off-loaded onto a car hauler speeding alongside the freight train at about a hundred and ninety miles an hour, the menacing baddies are going to stab our heroes in the guts, then spit at them and taunt them as they lie bleeding on the floor of the empty freight car.

Except it doesn't play out that way, because the missing Vin Diesel suddenly gets a lot less missing.

Fast Five isn't big on plausibility, but the level of dramatic tension it achieves is consistently stupendous, especially considering we know full well no recurring characters were harmed during the filming of Fast Five, nor will they be in any of the next ten sequels.

Nonetheless, we're pretty absorbed by events on screen when Vin and Paul take one of those million-dollar cars off a cliff, then plunge a few thousand feet into a river.

Of course, they pop up sputtering a few seconds later, but since the baddies have them surrounded, we don't have time to wince at the unlikeliness of their survival.

Which is a neat trick, one which writer Chris Morgan and director Justin Lin practice throughout the movie. Our team -- yes, it grows to a team, comprising seven or eight characters from previous Fast and Furious movies -- is always on the brink of disaster, so the fact that they keep getting out of said danger by leaping through windows, dodging bullets or even, in Vin's case, romancing a sexy Brazilian translator working for the cops (!) doesn't bother us much.

I'm glad I mentioned the cops.

They're not just any cops. They're US Federal Marshals, a super-team of their own, led by Duane "The Rock" Johnson, the former pro wrestler with the cocked eyebrow, steroid-amplified physique and happily abundant charisma.

The Rock is a single-minded predator intent on catching his man, Vin Diesel.

And this is where the "two good guys" dynamic comes into play. The Rock, you see, is a hero in his own right. He believes in truth, justice and the American Way, and he thinks Vin has violated all three.

So he's going to bring Vin down even if he has to shoot the hell out of the entire city of Rio to do it.

But it turns out, Vin and Paul, in their quest for enough money to stop thieving and racing and running from the law, have targeted the nastiest druglord in all of Rio, a snarling mustachioed blackguard named Reyes.

If the Rock catches Paul and Vin before they steal Reyes' vast, ill-gotten fortune, he'll just be doing the druglord's dirty work for him.

Once the Rock realizes this, it sets up another great moment of schmaltzy, brilliant dramatic intensity. It also sets up act three, in which Vin, Paul and the Rock try to steal a bank vault the size of a Brinks truck from the basement of the central police station in the heart of Rio.

What follows is a massive street race involving superfast sports cars, fleets of police cruisers and helicopters; and which results in the city of Rio pretty much getting trashed. There are doublecrosses, triplecrosses, even a quadruple-cross, and in the end, Reyes is transformed into a charred flake of cinder.

Which is fun.

That accomplished, we're left with the question of whether the Rock will let Paul and Vin get away with their stolen money, or whether he'll return to his role as adversary.

Two good guys. Such a great technique.

The Fast and Furious franchise has really found its stride and, judging by its box office performance, its audience.

Here's hoping #5 isn't the high-point of the series, but just the start of its macho, ridiculous, thoroughly satisfying prime.

Vroom vroom!

SCORE

How Accomplished: 77/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 85/100

Source Code

2011-04-09T13:45:00.000-07:00

When a movie is neither bad nor good, it can be hard to summon a thoughtful reaction.

There's nothing about Source Code to inspire love or hate, praise or vitriol.

It's science fiction, but not really. It's a thriller, but not really. It handles complex themes, but not really.

The movie follows Jake Gyllenhaal's train passenger, who wakes from a nap with total amnesia. He doesn't know where he is or why. Eight minutes later the train explodes. He dies.

Except he doesn't. He finds himself in a metal capsule, where he communicates by video connection with Vera Farmiga's army officer, who is very sparing with information -- our boy Jake still doesn't know what the hell is going on -- but very forthcoming with urgent instructions.

Farmiga tells Jake he's going to be put back on the train, and eight minutes later it will explode again. But this time he has to do everything he can to learn why it explodes. Where's the bomb?

And more importantly, who's the bomber?

This is the science fiction-y aspect of the movie. A new technology's been invented that allows law enforcement/the military to go back in time -- sort of; it may be an alternate reality; the movie throws some meaningless mumbo jumbo at this question -- and live an eight-minute sequence over and over again. Nothing done here affects outcomes in the real world. It's merely an information retrieval mission. If the identity of the mad bomber can be determined, he can be stopped from triggering bombs promised to go off later that day.

So it's science fiction, but the whole thing takes place on a commuter train outside Chicago.

Okay.

Jake keeps going back to the train, interrogating passengers, getting to know a pretty girl sitting next to him, and getting blown up again and again.

So it's a thriller, but there are no stakes we care about as an audience. Jake can't die, and he can't stop the deaths of anyone we meet. He can only stop other bombings that will victimize nameless characters in an undefined future.

Now, it turns out Jake's superiors -- Farmiga and a really hammy Jeffrey Wright -- don't have the purest motives. They're using Jake to save lives, true, but to them Jake himself is just another tool. His "real" self is a ruined human body mostly destroyed in action in Afghanistan but preserved in a cryo-tube down the hall. Once this mission is over, Jake's memory will be wiped clean and he'll be sent into the source code multiverse again and again to track down an endless number of culprits.

Damn those Washington bureaucrats.

Source Code has such a limp premise, executed with marginal competence and filmed with grinding mediocrity, that I really don't know what to say about it.

However...

The writer of a superb screenwriting blog called Scriptshadow absolutely adored this screenplay. He gave it a rave review, and once the movie came out, he wrote a "script to screen" review comparing the differences between the two.

Carson Reeves thought the movie wasn't as good as the script (I thought they were equally bland,) but he made an outstanding observation worth considering.

He pointed out that the weakest elements of the movie were the alterations to the original ending. He didn't disparage these changes for the mere fact that they deviated from a script he liked. Instead he said:

"Whenever you rewrite a script, you’re adding new elements to each draft. Remember though, that while you may be on the 7th or 8th draft of your script, that new element you just added? It’s only on its 1st draft. If you don’t rewrite the script a few more times to get that element into its 4th or 5th draft, it’s going to stick out like a sore thumb."

In a good story, individual events are not interchangeable. They're coded, so to speak, into every other event of the story. So you can't just change endings, or openings, or the gender of the main character -- hello Salt -- and expect the changes, however well-intended and, quite possibly, however correct -- to benefit the story.

It's a great point, and it's no surprise it comes from someone who, at least at some point, felt passionate about this story.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 47/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 48/100

Sucker Punch

2011-03-31T17:20:00.000-07:00

I don't want to talk about Sucker Punch.

It depresses me.

I was so excited to see it. I love director Zack Snyder. He broke into the public consciousness four years ago with 300, a great big testosterone booster about the Spartan defense of ancient Thermopylae.

He followed this up with Watchmen, a moody, philosophic superhero fable about the limits of power.

Now comes Sucker Punch, a tale of girls trying to escape a sadistic insane asylum, layered with fantasy episodes involving samurai robots and clockwork Nazis.

If that doesn't pull you in, consider that this is the first of Zack Snyder's movies to come from Snyder's own imagination.

300, you see, springs from an amazing graphic novel by probably the greatest graphic novel writer of all time, Frank Miller.

Watchmen springs from an amazing graphic novel by probably the second greatest graphic novel writer of all time, Alan Moore.

In Sucker Punch, Snyder's finally flying solo. This one's all him!

The movie was actually promoted that way.

And I actually bought into it.

Stupid, Neil. Stupid.

Sucker Punch is a colossal failure, the kind of failure only a movie protected against its own studio's mighty imperative towards mediocrity can be a failure.

In this, it's reminiscent of The Phantom Menace or Inception. It's so bad, it would never get made if it didn't have a director with extraordinary clout pushing it through the system.

But it did get pushed through, and I suffered a miserable couple hours as a result. Maybe you did too.

The movie is incoherent, indecipherable and so implausible it goes beyond implausibility. It's anti-plausible.

To start with, the insane asylum is only an insane asylum by day. By night, it's a burlesque dance club where the city's powerful but sleazy elite come to watch the inmates dance away the night--

Ack! I said I don't want to discuss the film, and I don't.

What I want to discuss is the curious fact that Sucker Punch is directed...

...brilliantly.

Anyone familiar with Snyder's work can see his signature fluidity with the camera, his marvelous feel for scale, and the strong sense of locational logic so crucial to any action sequence.

It's all here.

And it doesn't soothe the pain. Not one bit.

Which raises an interesting question.

If sterling direction can fail so utterly to salvage a bad script -- and conversely, if bad directing can so utterly fail to sabotage a brilliant script -- see the work of Woody Allen and just about every movie made before 1960 -- then... really... of what use is good directing?

Let's take complicating factors out of the equation. Let's eliminate music -- which is ridiculously important -- set design, costume design and so forth. Surely they impact a movie, but they don't bear on the question of directing's importance relative to writing.

To anticipate an objection: yes, a director consults with the composer, with the set designer, with everyone. But to say a director is responsible for the achievements of these departments is hero-worship at its worst. Most often a director can't read sheet music. Let's not go giving him credit for John Williams' scores.

Let's throw out acting too.

Let's really throw out acting. The number of times we've seen so-called inferior actors, like Stallone in Rocky, Costner in Dances With Wolves and Tom Cruise in Rain Man do sensational work with sensational material has reached the point where we really have to reject the idea that "good" acting has any impact on a movie whatsoever.

Good casting -- hey. That matters. An actor has to be right for a part. But good acting? That's hard to even define. What the hell is good acting without good writing? Does it even exist? Let's forget about good acting.

And let's look at what directing is.

It's a million things, because a director is the administrative head of the enterprise, but the studio that makes a movie happen requires two things of primary import: it expects a director to 1) pick a good story -- not create a good story, not bring a good story to life, but to pick a good story and 2) get that story on film within a specified time and budget.

Easy? Oh heck no. This is really hard from the perspective of the individual director. But it's also unimportant from the perspective of the moviegoer.

What do we care if a movie comes in on time and on budget?

What do we care if it's Steven Spielberg who literally saw a script for Jaws sitting on a producer's desk and asked, "What's this?"

Does it really matter it was Steven Spielberg who asked that question?

The greatness of Jaws depended on lots of things. It depended on the basic story; though it wasn't obvious at the time, the tale of a monster shark terrorizing the town of Amity was going to work on film with just a little help. It would help if the actors were cast perfectly, right down to Robert Shaw the actor actually hating Richard Dreyfus the actor, just like his character hated snotty Matt Hooper.

It would help if the mechanical shark would sink during the early days of filming, forcing the production to leave the shark out of lots more scenes than originally intended, which would end up making the shark that much scarier. (If you haven't read Jaws Log, the producer's take on the making of Jaws, you're missing out. It's thirty years old and still reads like the crack of a whip.)

The greatness of Jaws depended on many things, but it didn't depend on Spielberg's skillful camera work and visual flare. And if a movie ever did depend on such things, this would be the one, because I cheerfully admit Spielberg is the best in the business when it comes to camera work. And story selection, for that matter.

But Spielberg's magical run through the 80's and early 90's -- E.T., Raiders, Jurassic, Schindler's -- ran into a decidedly non-magical 90's and early 00's -- Jurassic 2, Amistad, A.I.

Yet his physical directing skills didn't erode. His passion for film didn't wane. He was doing everything the same as he'd always done it.

But Melissa Matheson didn't offer up another E.T. Nor did Kasdan, Crichton or Zaillian offer up more masterpieces of theirs. Not that they didn't try. Masterpieces are rare, that's all.

And so, Spielberg and his directing skills were kind of useless until more masterpieces got handed his way.

It turns out, directors are like stockbrokers. If enough people muscle their way into the stock-picking arena, some will have luck-driven hot streaks. Some will have longer hot streaks than others, and some will have the longest hot streaks of all. That's simple statistics, but this latter group will come to be called legends of Wall Street. This doesn't mean they know what they're doing. It means that when you're successful, moneyed interests don't look too closely into why you're successful. They don't want to discover that skill in this field is an illusion. They just want to keep making money.

So, too, with directors. These guys -- and increasingly, gals -- play the lottery with every movie they make. Catherine Hardwicke did Twilight a few years ago and won the lottery rigged for her by Stephenie Meyers.

A few weeks ago Hardwicke did Red Riding Hood, based on her own script.

And she just lost the lottery.

You could, of course, take this logic one step further.

You could say that writers play the lottery too, since a writer is only as good as the story he or she happens to be working on, and there's as much chanciness in that as anything. A writer walks into a producer's office, too, sees a script and asks "What's this?" Only the producer's office exists inside the writer's mind.

So you could say a writer is no more important than a director.

You could say that.

And I think you'd be onto something.

In the end, maybe The Matrix had it right. Maybe bending a spoon with your mind isn't so hard, once you fully accept the fact...

...that there is no spoon.

Limitless

2011-03-28T18:09:00.000-07:00

We all have good days and bad days.

We have days we're functioning at peak productivity. Full of energy and creativity.

Then we have those other days.

But what if every day were a peak day? What if every hour were a peak hour?

That'd be pretty cool, right?

Turns out, it'd be much cooler than the movie based on that premise, called Limitless.

Said premise: Bradley Cooper plays a down-and-out novelist, vexed by writer's block, poor fashion sense, and a suddenly ex-girlfriend.

But then he runs into an old buddy who turns him onto a new street drug called NZT. You know how you only use ten percent of your brain? Well, on NZT, you get to use ALL of your brain.

(Yes, the ten percent factoid is a ridiculous piece of apocrypha. Roll with me, people.)

Now "limitless," Bradley Cooper turns his life around. He writes that novel, restocks that wardrobe and starts playing the stock market using his new brain.

Curiously, and insightfully, Cooper becomes happy. Not because he enjoys exercising his creativity -- he never bothers to write a second book; he devotes himself exclusively to stock trading -- but because he enjoys the material benefits that derive from said creativity. He likes his new cars, his new haircut, his new overall status in society.

If this strikes you as superficial and vain, welcome to Limitless!

If it also strikes you as vaguely familiar, it may be because this is the same idea behind the short story Flowers for Algernon, which became a novel, a play, and a movie starring Cliff Robertson.

Algernon was a little different from Limitless, of course.

In Algernon, the main character was a mentally retarded adult who took an experimental drug that not only cured his retardation, but gave him cognitive powers that put him in the IQ 200 range.

We spend the first third of the novel with the retarded Charlie, whose grammar is poor and whose spelling is worse. We almost need to read his writing as if it were a foreign language we understand only dimly.

He consents to an experimental trial, but he doesn't really understand what he's doing. He just wants to make the nice doctors happy.

Then something strange happens. Charlie's grammar gets marginally better. So does his spelling.

And it keeps getting better.

The fascinating insight in Algernon is that increased intelligence does not make Charlie happier. It makes him less happy.

Yet we still can't avoid a feeling of sadness when his intelligence starts slipping away, when he begins the descent back to retardation. In Algernon, we're screwed either way. That's why the story is a work of art. It captures an aspect of the human condition, lovely and sad.

By contrast, Limitless offers the message that boundless energy and creativity is boundlessly good, provided you can keep yourself in supply of the little white pills that make it all happen.

This may reflect Hollywood's idea of the key to happiness, but it's too simple and self-deluding for the rest of us.

Flowers for Algernon is the first novel I remember reading in one sitting. My body ached afterward and my sleep schedule was thrown off. But it was worth it. It was a great story.

Limitless is the same essential story, stripped of emotional power and thematic heft.

In other words it's the Hollywood version.

Jane Eyre

2011-03-27T20:41:00.000-07:00

You know which one Jane Eyre is, right?

It's not the one about the crazy guy who ruins everyone's life because he didn't get the girl he wanted... that's Wuthering Heights.

It's not the one with all the formal dances and sternly-worded letters... that's Pride and Prejudice.

Jane Eyre's the one where the girl who grows up in an orphanage finds work in an ominous castle owned by Mr. Rochester, who is gruff and direct and has a secret locked in one of the turrets of his castle.

Because Jane -- played by Mia Wasikowska of Alice in Wonderland -- is also direct, on top of being brave, clever and quite pretty, she and Mr. Rochester promptly fall in love.

They also promptly do nothing about it, since they are characters in a nineteenth century British novel, and for such characters, barriers of class and money always but always stand in the way of true love.

Nevertheless, the story of their relationship, stifled as it may be, is so good and so enduring it's hard to screw it up.

Happily, no one screws it up here.

Not rookie director Cary Fukunaga. Not newish adaptrix Moira Buffini. And not the principal actors, Michael Fassbender and the aforementioned Wasikowska.

They're all good, and so, everything works out for Jane Eyre.

Though not for the characters, of course. Not perfectly, anyway.

But it works out for me, the modern American moviegoer, thoroughly enjoying and somehow relating to a story of manners and morals written almost two hundred years ago in a land I've never been.

And that's as happy an ending as any story needs.

Battle Los Angeles

2011-03-27T20:35:00.000-07:00

The reason I saw Battle Los Angeles is the title. That really suckered me in.

But it's false advertising.

"Battle" is too grandiose a term for what happens in the movie, and LA never enters the picture except in wide shots.

Squad Action Santa Monica suits the movie better.

And it's not even Santa Monica. It's a soundstage strewn with rubble referred to as Santa Monica.

And the marine squad in question doesn't act like a marine squad. It acts like a high school football team dressed as a marine squad for Halloween.

These "marines" run around the soundstage all movie long, firing at blurry movement in the shadows and shouting things like "Copy that!" and "Fire in the hole!"

This is pretty much the sole extent of the plot.

You see, robotic aliens have landed in the coastal shallows off Los Angeles. They proceed to wade onto Santa Monica beach and start machine gunning tourists.

Those damn aliens!

A fierce battle with the US military ensues, in which the aliens manage to push a surprised human resistance almost back to Century City, which means an interplanetary invasion force is able to secure some thirty blocks of real estate before their offensive grinds to a halt.

When you consider this movie alongside last summer's District Nine, you're forced to conclude that the major starfaring species in Earth's vicinity have been drastically cutting their military budgets of late.

Given this, I urge them to reconsider any and all invasion plans until they have squared themselves away.

I'm sure they long for the days, as I do, when alien invaders were formidable, sometimes overwhelming, adversaries of humanity.

So please stop launching these half-assed invasions.

And come back when you're ready to kick some human butt.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 14/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 10/100

Red Riding Hood

2011-03-27T20:31:00.000-07:00

This movie's awful, don't get me wrong.

But it contains an interesting idea that keeps it from being the year's worst movie so far.

The idea is that the wolf which terrorizes a remote, vaguely medieval mountain village is a shapeshifter. When it's not being a wolf, it can resemble a human. So the ravenous beast might be your brother, your friend, your lover.

All we can really be sure of is, it's probably someone whom E.T. the Extra-Terrestrial -- oops, I mean, Amanda Seyfried -- as the eponymous Red Riding Hood already knows very well.

This is the cool idea that generates a few micro-watts of suspense and intrigue.

And it's all we've got on the positive side of Red Riding Hood's ledger.

Now on to the negative side...

The story meanders, the rules of the world are inconsistent, the setting is dreary and implausible, the genre veers all over the place -- is it a mystery? is it a romance? is it a horror flick? -- the characters are paper thin, the dialogue has less taste than a communion wafer, the acting is sub-professional, and the music kinda sucks.

The ostensible reason you even bother to make Red Riding Hood: The Motion Picture is to somehow modernize the old fairy tale. To give it a fresh take. But director Catherine Hardwicke -- of the first Twilight movie -- doesn't have a take on this story. Her take is to simply reduce the pace of the tale until it can fill an abominable two hours.

This is the kind of movie you watch with a dazed scowl while a voice inside your head hammers away, saying, "I can't believe it's this bad, I can't believe it's this bad, I can't believe it's this bad..."

Aw, screw it.

One cool idea's not enough. This is still the worst movie of the year so far.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 11/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 08/100

Drive Angry

2011-03-03T17:44:00.001-08:00

Wow, this movie got stomped at the box office.

And I'm trying to figure out why.

It's got action vet Nic Cage. It's got fresh starlet Amber Heard.

It's got the words "drive" and "angry" in the title.

It's got a delightfully outlandish premise: Nic Cage plays a man who has spent the last thirty years in hell. Literally. He has recently busted out to save his infant granddaughter (you don't age in hell) from getting sacrificed to the dark lord by a group of sadistic cultists.

To save the baby, he's going to have to shoot a messload of cultists and drive right over a bunch more.

Did I mention it's in 3D?

This is a throwback film, a seventies exploitation flick, more grindhouse than Grindhouse.

It features lots of brassy situations, like the slow-mo hotel room gunfight that takes place while Nic Cage has ongoing sexual intercourse with a middle-aged waitress.

He wins the gunfight.

Amber Heard plays a girl Cage picks to be his adventurous sidekick for two reasons. One, because she's got a great car -- a '69 Dodge Charger -- and two, because he figures she will make a good mother for his orphaned granddaughter when this is all over.

Why on Earth he thinks this is open to debate, but he himself is headed back to hell, so I guess his surrogate parent options are limited.

He's headed to hell because he is pursued by an implacable and well-dressed fury who will inevitably hunt him down in time: a man called only The Accountant, played by the urbane William Fichtner.

The Accountant provides more than his share of Drive Angry's fun.

He shows class and taste, and even a touch of humor, while everyone else in the movie mostly scowls.

He also reveals some insights into the movie's version of hell -- "essentially a large prison" -- and the Devil himself -- "introspective and surprisingly well-read."

When The Accountant finally catches up with Cage, he allows him the freedom to kick some cultist ass. It turns out, the Accountant is no fan of Satan-worshippers. Even Satan thinks they're scum.

Drive Angry features lots of carnage, lots of quips and some clean lines of action.

So why did it get killed at the box office?

You'll hear a variety of answers. People will say Nic Cage is no longer a bankable star. Which is fine, until his next movie opens to fifty million.

You'll hear the 3D format is losing its novelty, and that's fine, until the next 3D movie hits a billion dollars worldwide.

You'll hear that seventies throwbacks can't play today, but Stallone's eighties throwback The Expendables played just six months ago.

The truth is, we don't know why Drive Angry suffered a fatal accident at the box office.

The movie was carefully crafted to please large, primarily teenaged, male audiences. It's an over-the-top, outrageous piece of action trash that makes for rollicking good fun.

If that kind of movie can't make money, what movie can?

SCORE

How Accomplished: 58/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 72/100

Unknown

2011-02-23T19:30:00.000-08:00

I once read a writing manual called 36 Master Plots.

It categorized every story ever told into one of 36 templates. I remember "Love Returned" and "Love Not Returned" were among the 36.

Another guru posited 12 basic stories. Another pegged the number at 7.

I think it may be true there is a finite number of story shapes. Or at least a finite number of shapes we've discovered and passed down in the last few thousand years.

And I suppose we add to the total every now and then.

After all, it's hard to imagine "mediocre-court-composer-murders-world's-greatest-musician-and-steals-his-music-only-to-mourn-him-the-rest-of-his-life" existed as a story type before Amadeus hit theaters. Who knows, though.

What's easy to imagine is that the new skull-cracking action thriller Unknown is NOT a new entry into the Master Plots pantheon.

This is a story we've seen many times before.

And I always love it.

The movie places Liam Neeson's biotech scientist and his lovely wife Betty Draper -- I mean January Jones -- in Berlin, where Neeson is set to participate in an important conference on the Food of Tomorrow.

Neeson reaches his fancy hotel only to discover he's left his important briefcase at the airport.

He jumps in a taxi, sans wife, to go back for it.

Then fate intervenes.

A truckload of spilled barrels creates a dangerous situation on a bridge over an icy river, and faster than you can say "action set piece" Neeson's cab is IN THE RIVER, and he's unconscious, and it's sinking, and he's saved only by the quick thinking of his scrumptious Eastern European cab driver, sexy Diane Kruger.

Neeson is revived on the scene by paramedics. He awakens in the hospital four days later.

With--

WITH...

...amnesia.

Sort of. It's more like reverse amnesia. He remembers who he is -- a biotech scientist in Berlin to give a talk at an international seminar -- but no one else's memory agrees with his, including his own wife's.

To make matters worse, Neeson finds Betty Draper carousing with another man, a man with Neeson's name, credentials... his entire life.

So maybe Neeson isn't actually who he thought he was.

But if that's true, why are there shadowy figures following him around and trying to kill him?

Answer me that!!!

Despite the "reverse" wrinkle, this is still the basic amnesia plotline, and it works here just the way it worked in the Bourne movies and the great Roger Zelazny Amber novels.

Hero needs to figure out his real identity before it catches up to him and kills him.

Awesome.

This basic story shape is so much fun -- it's an action movie wrapped around a mystery -- that it's hard to screw up, even if you cast implausibly attractive women in the role of cab drivers and uncork a third act twist so head-spinning I actually heard a voice in my head say "Uhhhhhhhh... prob'ly not." But then another voice in my head said, "Shhh, Neeson's about to go on another killing spree" and I quietly enjoyed the rest of the movie.

Does it hold together? No. Does it makes sense? No.

Is it fun swirling around a vortex of total plot collapse for a hundred minutes before getting sucked in and crushed?

It's a heck of a lot of fun.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 62/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 80/100

Young Adult

2011-02-20T10:20:00.000-08:00

So I watched Rocky recently.

Good golly, that's a great movie.

Here's what I love about it:

It's a metaphor for the supreme challenge of life. The challenge of self-worth.

Rocky is a guy whom life has passed by. His number never came up. For most of us, it never does.

As a consequence, Rocky lives in uncertainty as to what exactly his real worth is.

Maybe he is just another bum from the neighborhood. Maybe he was lucky to be spared an opportunity to prove himself. Maybe he would have failed the test anyway.

Maybe he's just another worthless piece of human garbage.

Guess who was going through precisely these emotions during the writing of the script? A lumpy-faced, speech-impaired, struggling actor named Sylvester -- not yet Sly -- Stallone.

Stallone was a guy who liked to work out, and enjoyed following the sport of boxing, but he was not a fighter himself in any conceivable way. He was a wannabe pretty boy actor. On the most obvious level, there was no way he could understand the travails of a character like Rocky, whose entire life was devoted to the urban Philadelphia fight game.

Except he did understand. While he didn't resemble Rocky -- Stallone was bright whereas Rocky was dim-witted, Stallone was a charmer whereas Rocky was a lonely introvert -- Stallone resembled Rocky in the way that mattered most. They were dealing with the same issue in life: the demon of failure, and the ensuing crisis of self-worth.

It was this very paradox -- Stallone's similarity to and difference from the character of Rocky -- that made the movie a deeply affecting parable of the struggle for achievement; its real pitfalls, and its real rewards.

It's hard to imagine Stallone could have written a more honest script if he had written about a struggling actor. It would have been too close to reality in the superficial ways. There would be no metaphor for the artist to filter away inconsequentials.

Which brings us to Diablo Cody and her new script, Young Adult.

Like Stallone, Cody broke into Hollywood by writing about a character who seemingly had nothing in common with her -- a pregnant sixteen year-old named Juno. But underneath the surface, the two were close kin. They both coped with insecurity by employing a caustic wit and keeping others at an emotional distance.

This paradox made Juno rich, interesting and universal the same way Rocky was. It wasn't the details that mattered, it was the substance. It was the humanity.

Cody's next script was Jennifer's Body, about another teenaged girl whose best friend experiments with sex and consequently turns into a blood-sucking fiend. An experience Cody probably knew nothing about and, simultaneously, probably knew everything about.

Jennifer's Body was pretty good, despite a lambasting from critics who wanted it to be a dramedy instead of a horror flick.

Now we have Young Adult, a movie written by Cody, produced with Juno partner Mason Novick and directed by Juno helmer Jason Reitman.

Good chance of catching some magic again, right?

Too bad Young Adult is about a female writer in her thirties returning to her small town roots in rural Minnesota.

The Cody stand-in is Charlize Theron, a wonderful actress who gives her best Diablo Cody impression, walking around her apartment in sweat pants, swilling Diet Coke out of a two-liter bottle and tapping away on her laptop the latest chapter of her pop novel about a teenaged girl.

Hmmmmm...

The story takes Diablo Cody -- oops! I mean Charlize Theron -- back to fictional Mercury, Minnesota, where the successful but romantically unfulfilled Theron aims to woo back her high school sweetheart, the ruggedly handsome but happily-married-with-a-baby Patrick Wilson.

Theron is a flagrant anti-hero, and an inept one at that, clumsily plying her wares as a seductress to a man who isn't the slightest bit interested. Meanwhile, fellow high school classmate and schlub, comic Patton Oswalt, provides sarcastic and judgmental commentary.

It's a dull little piffle with utterly no claim on the audience's emotions.

The reason is that Cody is not and never has been a vain, homewrecking loser whose best days are irrevocably behind her.

If she were, Young Adult might have been a great movie.

But she's merely a female writer of teen-centric fiction with roots in Minnesota. Who wears sweatpants and drinks a lot of Diet Coke.

The superficial details of reality are faithfully represented in Young Adult, but the inner truths are completely absent.

Diablo Cody's stories can take any imaginable form she wants them to. But she'll be best served if she sticks to soulful main characters with thin skins whose above-average intelligence only serves to make them isolated and hostile. It's what she knows, and I mean that in the most complimentary way.

She should forget about writing what she knows in the literal sense. That just obscures the issue.

Movies are metaphors. Usually, the more disguised the metaphor, the better.

Diablo Cody forgot that.

And wrote a movie it's hard to sit through.

SCORE:

How Accomplished: 26/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 24/100

The Adjustment Bureau

2011-02-13T18:48:00.000-08:00

"High Concept" isn't what it used to be.

In the eighties, the notion of "high concept" swept Hollywood. The term denotes a story idea whose broad appeal is instantly surmisable and, therefore, easily marketable.

One of the best examples of this is the 1985 comedy about a teenager who travels backward through time -- in his scientist chum's electric blue DeLorean, no less -- where he accidentally prevents his father and mother from meeting and falling in love.

Instead, his mother falls in love with -- gulp -- the time traveller himself.

Now, if our boy can't re-engineer his parents' first kiss at the "Enchantment Under the Sea" school dance, his entire existence will be wiped out and he will fade into eternal oblivion.

High concept!

(For those who don't know, I just recounted the plot of The Hunt for Red October.)

But something happened in the nineties. Something awful.

The independent film boom turned movies into art.

High-quality but low concept movies like Pulp Fiction and Swingers hijacked the culture. This made film aficionados happy, but studios furious. While these films made money, they didn't make crazy money, and crazy money is why Hollywood studios and the multinational conglomerates that own them exist.

Enter the 2000's. Hollywood bought up or drove out of business every independent film production company, then proceeded to reboot the 1980's with high concept back in place.

Except it was a different kind of high concept.

Mindful of the fact that moviegoers -- tainted by those awful 90's -- were now averse to the outright campiness that made the 80's so profitable, the new high concept had nothing to do with story.

And everything to do with branding.

It was the perfect evolutionary adaptation, really. Edgier, more mature stories could continue to play, but only if they bore the stamp of success in a previous format. Only if their very titles were ALREADY a cultural force to be reckoned with.

Suddenly, the graphic novel -- and its more popular sire, the comic book -- took over the town.

Old-fashioned, non-illustrated novels -- or the much more preferable series of novels, like Harry Potter and Twilight -- continued to generate ever greater franchises.

Remakes became even more ubiquitous as film vaults and television libraries were pilfered till nothing but scraps were left.

Even Pixar, the great bastion of original content in the last decade, has made movies that closely resemble each other in theme, tone and visual affect.

Why?

Because they have a brand to protect.

The brand is everything now. It's the new version of high concept. And unless 3-D knocks it off its perch -- which could happen, we could be entering an era of pure visual effects -- it seems poised to stick around awhile.

This makes it strange that a movie like The Adjustment Bureau could get itself made.

It's the tale of David Norris, a rising young politician played by Matt Damon.

Damon has a good news/bad news situation early on. He loses an election for Congress, but while composing his concession speech in a men's room, he meets a gorgeous and spunky young woman played by Emily Blunt. They hit it off right away, and her influence inspires him to make a concession speech full of rare candor, which is a hit with the public and lines him up for another great run at Congress next time 'round.

The next day something strange happens. Damon jumps onto a city bus and finds himself sitting with Emily Blunt, purely by chance. They strike up another conversation. She gives him her phone number. They are equally smitten, and something is Definitely Going to Happen Between Them.

Except that it's not supposed to.

And that's where the Adjustment Bureau comes in. Said Bureau is a group of sinister gentlemen in 1920's-style suits and hats.

They carry books with lots of squiggly lines indicating the course of events which are supposed to happen in the world. When something happens that isn't in the books, like Damon meeting Blunt on that bus, they step in and set things right.

But Damon really likes Blunt. She's super hot, she's got that awesome British accent, and her acting career is really taking off. In the movie she plays a ballet dancer, but that career is taking off too.

Therefore Damon resists the Adjustment Bureau's attempts to separate him from his Friday night dinner/movie/question mark.

Even when Damon is told he will be President of the United States one day -- but only if he abandons Blunt -- even then, Damon strives to undo the Bureau's plans, and those of its mysterious Chairman.

As you can tell, this is a very concept-driven piece.

Almost the definition of High Concept.

There are a lot of things you have to take on faith in this movie -- goofy rules like "water inhibits the ability of Bureau members to read the future" and niggling details like the plausibility of Damon risking his life and taking on the Bureau to be with a girl he hardly knows -- but if you can get past those ancillaries, the concept provides enough framework for a diverting pair of hours at the cinema.

It's not great. It's not going to win any Oscars. But it's enjoyable, indisputably high concept, and entirely unbranded.

And in 2011, that's unusual.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 71/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 74/100

The Hunt for Red October: 99/100

The Eagle

2011-02-13T18:40:00.000-08:00

I have a brother who's a history ph.D, and he once told me that ancient history doesn't really deserve to be called history. Not in the academic sense, anyway.

The reason is that the sources for ancient history are so few, and so unreliable, that if ancient history were held to the same standard modern history is, not a single new book would ever be published.

The more I've delved into ancient history, the more I've come to think this is true.

And it may explain why I love the field so much.

In the absence of detailed records, it's generally the most compelling story, not the most defensible argument, that carries the day.

Which is oh-kay by me.

Enter The Eagle, a tale of adventure set in the reign of Hadrian, the last emperor of Rome's expansionary period.

The mystic grecophile doesn't make an appearance. Instead we're asked to settle for Channing Tatum's Marcus Flavius Aquila, a young Roman officer with a bit of a chip on his shoulder.

You see, Aquila's father commanded an entire legion in Britain. The Ninth Legion, in fact, which vanished one day in the northernmost wilds of the empire. Not a single soldier was ever seen again. Nor was the legionary battle standard, a gold Eagle of immense symbolic importance, ever recovered.

Our boy Aquila has gotten himself assigned to the same region in Britain, with the intent of finding the lost Eagle and thereby restoring his family's honor.

And maybe discovering along the way just how his father met his end.

Needless to say, the plot makes this difficult.

Before the story even starts rolling, Aquila gets himself injured fighting psychotic British barbarians. He is hurt so badly he is discharged from the legions, albeit honorably.

While he heals in a nearby town, he comes into possession of a British slave named Esca. This young lad is quiet and sullen, but also fearless, and utterly bound to his word of honor. He has pledged himself to serve Aquila, and serve him he shall.

Even when Aquila asks him to play tour guide in the desolate realm of proto-Scotland, where Aquila intends to seek his father's lost Eagle without the benefit of the Roman Legions, who no longer journey so far North.

Over the course of their travels, Aquila and Esca explore some strange and dangerous lands.

They encounter friends, enemies, bad weather, worse luck, and in the end they find the Ninth Legion's lost Eagle.

They also become good friends.

The movie is based on a popular book called The Eagle of the Ninth Legion, by Rosemary Sutcliff. The book is categorized as Young Adult fiction, and you can see why. A young man in search of his father, entirely on his own save for one loyal companion, exploring a world of danger and mystery entirely devoid of sexual or societal dynamics.

It's pretty much classic YA fiction.

Since I like YA fiction, especially if it's set in ancient Rome, I liked The Eagle.

In point of fact, however, modern scholars believe Rome's Ninth Legion may not have been lost at all. And if it was, evidence suggests it was lost on the Empire's eastern frontier, not its northern.

And no matter where it was lost, the legion's Eagle was certainly not returned to Rome by the dead commander's avenging son.

Or was it?

When it comes to ancient history, you can never be sure.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 62/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 77/100

Season of the Witch

2011-01-31T12:18:00.000-08:00

What I really wanted to see was Sanctum.

That's the upcoming cave-divers-trapped-underground-by-a-flood movie shot in 3D and executive produced by James Cameron.

And it's why I drove all the way out to the Hollywood and Highland complex through rush hour.

A first-come, first-serve screening was being held. These occur from time to time in LA. Often they're press screenings. Studios want critics to see a movie with a full house; they feel critics are more inclined to like the movie that way. For us street urchins, these screenings are a great way to see a movie for free a week or two before it's released.

Unfortunately, I was not first-come, and I was definitely not first-served.

Instead I was standing on the Walk of Fame with my friend Ray while tourists had their pictures snapped with Catwoman and Spider-Man.

What to do now?

Traffic was a nightmare. The evening was getting away. If only there were another movie playing nearby.

Enter...

...Nic Cage!

Playing a hundred feet away, at Grauman's Chinese Theater, was Cage's new medieval actioner, Season of the Witch.

I had been meaning to take in this movie for weeks. After all, Cage is a guilty pleasure and I like medieval actioners. Who doesn't?

But I was having a hard time finding a theater in my neighborhood that was playing the movie.

Released January 7, Witch was out of wide release something like forty-five minutes later. In four weeks it has hauled in twenty-three million dollars domestic which, combined with twenty-six million overseas, makes it an incredibly big bomb for an action movie starring a supposedly bankable movie star.

Our evening was saved.

The situation got curioser when Ray and I entered the theater.

It was empty.

Ray and I took seats near the center and waited to see if anyone would dribble in.

No one did. The movie played only to Ray and myself.

Bear in mind, the theater holds 1152 seats, it's maybe the most famous movie house in the world, and it was 8 PM on a Thursday.

Somehow, Season of the Witch was emptying rooms faster than the calamity at the center of its plot, the Bubonic Plague.

Said plague was just starting to get nasty in the late 1330's, when Nic Cage's crusader knight and his buddy Ron Perlman were cutting a bloody swath through Arab lands on one of the Crusades.

Cage and Perlman cheerfully fought and pillaged for their God, but as we know in 2011, the Crusades were unjust acts of barbarism, and this is the revelation Cage has when he accidentally kills an innocent woman during the sack of a castle.

Burned out on carnage, he and Perlman desert the Armies of the Lord and start making their way back to Europe.

Along the way, they are arrested by the authorities of a plague-stricken town with an unfortunate witch problem.

The witch in question is a twenty-something girl already in custody. She protests her innocence, but the authorities -- religious and civil -- are pretty sure she's not only a witch, but that her particular witchcraft is behind the outbreak of plague. Thus, they need her brought to a distant mountaintop abbey, where the monks can not only deal with the witch, but reverse the ill effects her powers have wrought on the town.

Unfortunately, the town's authorities are low on manpower at the moment, so when they catch Cage and Perlman for deserting, it occurs to them that if they could convince the duo to help transport the dangerous captive over unsafe lands to the forbidding mountain Keep, it would make for a great Nic Cage movie.

And, crazily, it sort of does.

The suspected witch is guilty as charged, and she causes all kinds of trouble for her armed escort: from summoning packs of wolves to preying on their psychological weaknesses, Hannibal Lechter-style.

Eventually Cage and company get the witch to the abbey, but they don't find what they'd hoped. Instead, CG effects light up the screen and we've got a demonic battle royale on our hands.

It makes for a surprisingly good time, considering how cheesy and under-ambitious the movie is.

Maybe it's because I'm partial to a little Dungeons & Dragons-style hack 'n slash, but I thought the action was reasonably well-choreographed, Cage and Perlman had some real chemistry, and the witch was just vulnerable and innocent enough to be formidable.

It's still not a good movie, but on a Thursday night when you're shut out of Sanctum, it'll do.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 40/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 65/100

The Green Hornet

2011-01-31T11:54:00.000-08:00

It's easy to think the superhero genre was born in the 1960's, with the creation of Marvel comics and Stan Lee's stable of now-familiar faces.

But of course the 1930's gave us a bumper crop of costumed crimefighters too.

There was The Shadow, who could see what evil lurked in the hearts of men. There was The Phantom, with his unfortunate purple leotard. And there was Dick Tracy, who had weirder villains than anyone before or since.

These characters all had one thing in common.

They sucked.

At least by modern standards.

The concept of the super-powered hero hadn't caught on yet. Sure, there was Superman, but he's the exception that proves the rule. In the 30's, superheroes carried pistols and could be effectively neutralized if tied up with a lenth of rope.

Things have changed. Try tying up the Incredible Hulk with rope. See how far that gets you.

What we discovered in the 60's is this: superheroes are supposed to have superpowers.

This concept has advanced so far that the past year saw a big-budget movie called Kick Ass, an action-comedy whose quirky premise centered around a costumed hero who DIDN'T have powers.

Imagine that!

This explains why Hollywood has had no success adapting 1930's heroes to the big screen. We've seen movies of The Shadow, The Phantom and Dick Tracy, and they've all flopped.

So here comes The Green Hornet, another 1930's, powerless crimefighter -- unless you count a stylish car and a martial artist sidekick as powers. And, remember, we don't.

Mindful of the impossibility of a straight-up adaptation, the forces behind the new, $120m The Green Hornet have opted for self-parody. They've made a self-conscious action-comedy striving for a tone like that of Kick Ass, but hopefully with more mainstream yuks to draw in a larger audience.

Hence, they enrolled comedic hotshot Seth Rogen as both screenwriter and star, and put the French whimsicist Michael Gondry in the director's chair.

But it's one thing to decide to make a comedy, it's another to make it funny.

None of the jokes in Hornet fly. The dialogue is flat and the situations are static. For a hundred million dollar movie, there are a LOT of two-people-in-a-room-talking scenes.

On top of this, the central relationship, between Seth Rogen and the aforementioned martial artist sidekick Kato, is poisoned by the fact that Kato doesn't like being a sidekick to anyone, and they're both competing for the same woman -- office temp Cameron Diaz, who looks twenty years too old for either of them.

Thus, the Green Hornet spends much of the movie fighting Kato instead of the evil ganglord Chudnofsky, played by Christoph Waltz, who was great in Inglourious Basterds but has nothing to work with here.

Example: toward the end of the movie, in order to keep up with the Hornet, Chudnofsky changes his name to Bloodnofsky. Get it? And he dresses in red.

Red.

There are also structural problems and plausibility issues, but I don't know that it matters. If a comedy isn't funny, it's dead.

1930's-crimefighter-serial dead.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 24/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 23/100

Best & Worst of 2010

2011-01-24T14:48:00.000-08:00

I'm about a month behind schedule on this, but here's a quick list of the ten movies I esteemed most highly in 2010, followed by a list of the ten movies I esteemed least.

And it's all scientifically formulated with scores and everything, so there's no point arguing.

The best and worst:

BEST

91 - True Grit

91 - 127 Hours

91 - Splice

89 - The King's Speech

86 - The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

86 - Twilight: Eclipse

86 - Agora

85 - The Book of Eli

84 - The Runaways

84 - Green Zone

84 - Frozen

WORST

09 - The Wolfman

10 - The A-Team

17 - Never Let Me Go

17 - Salt

22 - Clash of the Titans

22 - Brooklyn's Finest

24 - The Fighter

24 - Valentine's Day

24 - Extraordinary Measures

26 - Robin Hood

26 - The Lightning Thief

The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest

2011-01-23T13:11:00.000-08:00

Normally, I hate realism.

There's plenty of realism outside movie theaters. Who needs it inside?

But I have to grudgingly admit realism is the stock that makes drama into soup. And author Stieg Larsson served up lots of good soup. It'll be interesting to see how Hollywood, a bastion of fantasy, adapts this realistic, very adult trilogy of stories.

In the meantime, we've got the Swedish film version, of which The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest is the third and final entry.

Sort of.

It's the final entry only because Larsson died after writing it. But he conceived his book series as a decalogy, so the relationship between co-heroes Mikael Blomkvist and Lisbeth Salander is not resolved with the finality a true end-of-series finale would probably give us. Since the man is dead, it's the best we're going to get.

I enjoyed the first two installments, but I thought the third entry was the best of the bunch.

Which was a pleasant surprise, since I'd heard it was the most problematic of the books, due to the fact that the character we love to root for -- bad-ass goth punk, Lisbeth -- spends most of the story laid up in a hospital bed recovering from injuries sustained at the end of the previous story.

And while that's true, she's the most active hospital patient in recent memory.

It's a good thing too, because a diabolical conspiracy inside the Swedish government is actively trying to kill her.

They're concerned that in the course of her upcoming trial over the events of the previous movie, she'll reveal the role of the Swedish spy agency in protecting the dastardly Soviet defector Zalachenko, who also happens to be Lisbeth's father.

"Happened," rather. He gets assassinated by the spy agency early on. The assassin tries to get into Lisbeth's hospital room as well, but can't quite get the job done.

Meanwhile, Lisbeth's half-brother, the menacing monster Ronald Niedermann, is also trying to kill Lisbeth. His motivation is personal -- he loved daddy Zalachenko, and he's pretty lost without him. He thinks he'd feel better if our girl were dead.

Fortunately, and as always, Lisbeth has crusading journalist Mikael Blomkvist in her corner.

Blomkvist is forced to carry more of the investigative burden than usual due to Lisbeth's confinement, and he thereby earns the ire of the Swedish conspiracy, nearly getting himself killed once or twice.

Though he's not alone either. The Swedish version of the FBI believes Blomkvist's insistence that Lisbeth is a) innocent of murder and treason, b) not at all crazy, despite appearances, and c) the target of an evil cabal of mostly retired Swedish spymasters.

They believe him so much they form a task force to help him uncover the cabal.

This they do, though Lisbeth is left, in the end, to face half-brother Ronald Niedermann by herself.

It's a gripping tale, but an intellectual one more than an emotional one. It reminds me of some of the better British detective mini-series, like Inspector Morse or Prime Suspect. (My personal favorite is Robbie Coltrane's Cracker.)

I saw this movie with my Dad, and what he loved about the flick was how it forsook typical Hollywood conventions in its pursuit of realism. Lisbeth spends most of the movie in a hospital because real injuries take a long time to recover from.

Blomkvist only overcomes one government-sanctioned agency with the help of another government-sanctioned agency.

And I have to agree: for a movie about a journalist and a computer hacker trying to stop a mute, blond-haired behemoth who can't feel pain from getting revenge for the death of a sociopathic Russian defector, it's a damn realistic flick.

I guess it's all about the execution.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 86/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 88/100

True Grit

2011-01-23T11:51:00.000-08:00

True Grit is utterly immersive storytelling.

It pulls us in with an opening voice-over from the coolest character we've met at the movies all year: 14 year-old Hailee Steinsfield's Mattie Ross, a poor orphan whose father was just murdered by a snake of a man named Tom Chaney.

But Mattie isn't just any poor orphan. She's a hard-bitten, world-weary cowgirl who knows her legal rights and has it in mind to hunt down and kill that bastard Chaney.

That fella over her shoulder is of course Rooster Cogburn, the veteran of a thousand manhunts, played by Jeff Bridges.

He agrees -- after a lengthy negotiation -- to help Mattie bring her man to justice.

Matters are helped, then hurt, then helped, then hurt, by the intervention of Matt Damon's far-from-home Texas Ranger, who is pursuing Chaney for another murder.

These three soon find themselves in the lawless American outback, where they encounter danger, death and the meaning of friendship.

Because friendship is what makes True Grit a great movie.

I like to preach that the engine of every story is a pair of unlikely companions who learn to love each other in a non-romantic way, but Grit goes one better. It gives us THREE unlikely companions, and not a one of them -- not the hostile and unforgiving Mattie Ross, not the priggish, insecure Texas Ranger LeBoeuf, and certainly not the unfeeling piece of leather called Rooster Cogburn -- harbor the slightest affection for either of the others. All they have in common is a task drenched in blood. But somehow, by the end, there's more love in this than any other movie this year.

The transformation is anything but easy. It can only happen in the crucible of fear. It can only happen through a confrontation with Tom Chaney and the worldly evil he represents. It can only happen against all odds, at the brink of death, and it can only happen through wrenching self-sacrifice.

But it can happen.

And that's the central miracle movies offer us.

I think True Grit makes an instructive counterpoint to its Oscar rival, Black Swan. Grit is a warm movie where Swan is cold; it's a talkative movie where Swan is brooding; it's a visceral movie where the other is abstract.

It combines hard and dusty landscapes with gushing emotion to achieve its effect. Swan has no such contrast within it.

My only real knock on Grit is that the last two minutes don't have the emotional punch I want from a denouement. They comprise a regrettable flash-forward, giving us a glimpse of Mattie as an adult. I'm sure the Coens had a thematic purpose in mind for such an afterword, but dramatically all it does is muffle the emotional crescendo reached in the climax.

The film would be better off without it.

But it's a great movie even with it.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 91/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 93/100

The Tourist

2011-01-22T17:45:00.000-08:00

The story behind the story:

This movie's hundred million dollar budget was fully financed by railroad and fiberoptics magnate Graham King.

King has financed more than a dozen movies over the last decade, including the Scorcese films Gangs of New York and The Departed.

Forbes Magazine puts King's net worth at seven billion dollars. And boy does he like spending that money making movies.

The Tourist, which is based on a 2005 French spy thriller, is his latest project.

The production was troubled. After going through a handful of directors and just as many stars, Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck was finally brought on board by Angelina Jolie. Like many, Jolie liked Donnersmarck's 2006 The Lives of Others, a foreign-language-Oscar-winning arthouse flick about state surveillance in Cold War East Germany.

Donnersmarck reworked the Tourist screenplay significantly enough to get co-writing credit. He also used his editor from previous films, Patricia Rommel.

The shoot was extremely rushed, due to Jolie's schedule and a clause in co-star Johnny Depp's contract which states that his movies can't be released too close to each other. Depp's Pirates of the Caribbean 4 comes out in May.

The movie was therefore filmed quickly, first in Paris, then in Venice, as befits the setting of the movie.

What's the point of all this backstory?

Only to show that The Tourist, a Hollywood movie featuring a pair of quintessential Hollywood stars, had very little Hollywood influence on it.

Due to the speed of the production, its distance from Los Angeles, the fact that the studio had none of its own money at stake, and that three key jobs -- writer, director and editor -- were in the hands of non-Hollywood people, The Tourist is just about the most non-Hollywood movie Hollywood will ever release.

And yet...

...it WANTS to be a Hollywood movie.

The story tracks a Wisconsin math teacher named Frank -- played by our boy Depp -- on vacation in Venice, trying to forget a past relationship.

Depp's Frank is meek and mild, a gentle, inoffensive soul.

Travelling by train, Depp randomly finds himself sitting across from Jolie's Elise, a British femme fatale surreptitiously followed by Interpol. Elise's paramour, the mysterious Alexander Pearce, is a wanted man after stealing a fortune from a Russian gangster, and Interpol hopes Jolie will lead them to Pearce. (I'm not sure why Interpol cares, but they do.)

Jolie romances Depp in an attempt to convince her Interpol tail that he is in fact Alexander Pearce (whose appearance has been altered by massive cosmetic surgery and is now unknown,) so she can sneak off and find the real Pearce, who is the love of her life.

Or so it seems!

All she succeeds in doing is convincing the Russian mobster that Depp is Pearce, which results in math teacher Depp getting into lots of dangerous situations.

Whenever he escapes those situations, he pursues Jolie, which gets him into even more dangerous situations, but our boy is smitten with the sexy siren, so what else can he do?

The movie has a playful tone, a handful of action set-pieces, and just as many twists and turns.

Like I said, vintage Hollywood.

But something about the movie is... off.

The pacing's all weird, the camerawork is a bunch of years out of date, the music is low-rent. The whole feel of the movie is that of a copy of a copy of a Hollywood romantic thriller.

I believe this is why the movie received such a critical lambasting, not because it's terrible -- it's not -- but because it isn't quite Hollywood. It's almost Hollywood, but not quite.

As a result, the experience of watching the movie is a little strange.

As movie-goers, we're precisely attuned to the specifications -- tangible and intangible -- of Hollywood films. And The Tourist is just close enough to those specs to pass as authentic, but not close enough to keep us from wondering if the projector is out of focus or something.

I never thought I'd say "the studio should have been more involved," but God help me...

...the studio should have been more involved.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 42/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 51/100

The Fighter

2011-01-22T16:06:00.001-08:00

Gotta step on some toes here.

Lots of people loved this movie.

I hated it.

Don't get me wrong: it's dull enough, and dreary enough, and self-serious enough, that it's sure to rack up plenty of Oscar noms in a few weeks.

But that doesn't mean it's any good.

All good stories transform their main character. Not only does The Fighter's Mark Wahlberg fail to change, no one changes; not his girlfriend, not his mom, not his brother.

Oh, I understand Christian Bale's character supposedly arcs from being a drug addict to no longer being a drug addict. I understand the mom and the girlfriend arc from disharmony to partnership. I understand Wahlberg arcs from losing fights to winning them.

But I haven't the faintest idea what brought on these changes, and I was looking for clues throughout the movie. Honest!

The movie's about a boxer -- Mickey Ward, a real-life fighter -- with a dysfunctional, white-trash family.

Wahlberg's Mickey Ward is a nice guy trying to do right in life, and that means dating local bartender Amy Adams, who's flaunting a spare tire over her belt in a bid for some Oscar attention.

But she's outdone by Wahlberg's cynical chain-smoking manager mom, Melissa Leo, who just won a Golden Globe for her fidgety, Bawston-accented performance.

For sheer acting effort, they're all surpassed by Christian Bale, who lost his standard hundred and ten pounds to play Wahlberg's gaunt, crack-addicted brother. Did I mention he also sports an authentic Bawston accent?

Everyone acts really hard throughout. The script is written hard, so hard that no detail of Ward's life seems left out, no matter how irrelevant to the story at hand. And indie auteur David O. Russell directs pretty hard too, supposedly modeling the fight sequences on the actual HBO footage of the fights, resulting in "the most realistic fight scenes ever."

This may be true, but if it is, the most realistic fight scenes ever are leagues away from the best fight scenes ever.

There's a ridiculousness to the operatic slugfests of a movie like Rocky, but there's also a grandeur; an epic scope that transcends mere realism to capture the spirit of boxing better than a more literal interpretation like The Fighter can dream of matching.

The Fighter, it turns out, is all talk.

It copies the sport of boxing, but never reveals its essence.

It tells us everyone's changed at the end, but never shows how the change occurred.

The Fighter looks good, it sounds good, but it's not art.

It's just another loud-mouthed chump.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 24/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 20/100

How Do You Know

2011-01-22T15:35:00.000-08:00

You don't.

You just never know.

Take the new film by writer-director James Brooks, who's given us Broadcast News and The Simpsons.

It stars Reese Witherspoon, Paul Rudd, Owen Wilson and Jack Nicholson.

It's gotta be good!

Right?

Am I right?

I'd attribute the failure of How Do You Know to the Big Wig theory. According to this theory, if a filmmaker has enough clout -- like, oh say, James Brooks -- then he can get a movie greenlit by simply picking a popular genre, attaching a bunch of stars, and riding his reputation.

Such a movie gets greenlit before anyone -- perhaps even Brooks -- takes a close look at the script.

One reason this happens is that Hollywood studios can pre-sell foreign distribution rights, cable rights, broadcast TV rights, and a bunch of other fungibles based on the prominence of the talent involved. By doing this, they can come close to breaking even well before a movie even hits theaters.

Maybe this explains why we've got a romantic comedy with a hundred and twenty million dollar budget -- yes, you read that right -- about a retired Olympic softball player and the romantic choice she must make between a Major League pitcher and a Wall Street stockbroker under indictment because of financial fraud committed by his father.

Oh, and that's Witherspoon, Wilson, Rudd and Nicholson, respectively.

On the surface, this isn't a terrible premise for a movie. But the Witherspoon character is pretty nonplussed by both her suitors, and so is the audience. Wilson is a dim-witted cheat and Rudd is a panicky little girl.

Then there's Nicholson's hoarse and heaving crook of a father.

For a movie full of likable actors, there's not a likable character in sight.

Even Witherspoon is too whiny and indecisive to hook us.

Part of the problem is that no one has any good lines. The dialogue is every bit as limp and flat as the plot, which consists of a string of causally unconnected scenes.

I'm not exaggerating when I say nothing really happens in this movie. Over the course of ninety minutes, Witherspoon merely gets so sick of living with Wilson, she ends up giving Rudd a try. The end.

A lot of critics lambasted this year's Morning Glory, which superficially resembled one of James Brooks' early works, by saying some variation of: "Despite its pretentions, Morning Glory is no Broadcast News."

And they were right. It wasn't.

But James Brooks himself came out with a movie this year, and How Do You Know is not Broadcast News either!

Making good movies is hard.

Even if you're a big wig.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 36/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 39/100

Tron: Legacy

2011-01-21T16:48:00.000-08:00

This movie should be way more fun than it is.

It should be weirder and more extreme. It should be a bizarre visit to a place that could never exist, like the Mad Max movies or the early Schwarzenegger flicks Total Recall and The Running Man.

It should be larger than life, and therefore, easy to parody and mock. It should be a Saturday Night Live staple.

Unfortunately, this incarnation of Tron -- and, arguably, the 1982 original -- plays its premise way too straight. And that's a shame. Because it could have been a wild head trip.

You know what the premise of Tron is, right?

It's about a guy -- Jeff Bridges in 1982, generic studling Garrett Hedlund today -- who gets trapped in a video game world of his own design, and menaced by the fast-moving digital foes inside.

Now, this is stupid, and pretty screwy, but it lends itself to a few memorable visual effects. We all know the Tron look -- the neon lights, the bicycle helmets, the computer grid overlay.

And we all know the basic Tron pastimes: the lethal games of frisbee and the precision-steering motorcycle races.

Within this, there's the potential for goofy, over-the-top villainy and lots of macho showdowns.

But we never get it.

Instead we get a story that takes itself way too seriously. We get Garrett Hedlund hiding out in his dad's remote, computer-generated bunker (Jeff Bridges reprises his role) talking about the history of the Tron world, including the saga of the ISO's, a new species of artificial lifeforms exterminated years ago by Bridges' doppelganger, Evil Young Bridges: an entirely computer-generated character.

We get Evil Young Jeff Bridges stalking our heroes in a sneering, joyless fashion.

We get character revelation and we get a father-son dynamic.

And it's all pretty boring.

Here's what isn't boring. One of those ISO's I mentioned -- in fact, the last surviving member of her race -- is Olivia Wilde, the super-sexy vixen with the futuristic bangs.

Wilde has just the right look for this kind of movie -- exotic and edgy -- but Wilde's role is too small. The same can be said of bit part characters Castor and Gem, played by British ham Michael Sheen and pale model Beau Garrett.

In lieu of these delightfully weird creatures, the lion's share of screentime goes to Bridges, computer-generated Evil Young Bridges, and Hedlund, all of whom are about as interesting as a bar of soap.

Overall the movie's still a pretty slick and efficient time-waster -- and there IS a lot of frisbee-throwing -- but the filmmakers' play for Serious Storytelling wrecks its chances of becoming part of the culture. Once it's over, the movie doesn't linger on the brain any longer than it takes to get the 3-D glasses off your head.

So much so, I'm only partly sure I even saw it.

I better jot down the score before I forget the movie even existed.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 52/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 55/100

The King's Speech

2011-01-21T15:41:00.000-08:00

Awwwwww...

It's a love story!

And a moving one.

The lovers in this story are Colin Firth's royal prince and Geoffrey Rush's working-class speech therapist. Their relationship is not physical, but it's just fulla love all the same.

The plot brings these two together in an urgent way. It's the late thirties, and the German war machine is gearing up to march across Europe. Firth's father, the King of England, has just died, and his older brother Edward has just abdicated, thanks to that disgraceful American trollop Wallis Simpson.

This means our boy Firth will soon be King of England in its darkest hour.

Fortunately, England's Prime Minister during the war -- his name escapes me -- will turn out to be a competent public speaker. But in the meantime, Firth has a coronation ceremony to worry about.

He'll be expected to speak a few words on his own behalf. And the entire country will be listening.

But there's a hitch: Firth has a stammer so profound he can hardly utter a straight sentence in under a minute.

Enter Rush's speech therapist. Through determined effort and personal growth from both parties, Rush helps Firth overcome his stammer well enough to deliver a dignified speech to the nation.

That's the plot.

But the STORY is the relationship that develops between Firth and Rush.

Like any good pair of lovers -- romantic or otherwise -- these two are complete opposites. Firth is an aristocrat. He's cold and reserved. He's defensive and distrustful. Rush, meanwhile, is warm, loquacious and impishly funny.

Their relationship follows the stereotypical pattern of a love story:

At first, they spar. They are mutually intrigued, but careful to hide their interest.

They embark on a shared journey, wherein they learn an appreciation for each other's strengths and weaknesses.

They reveal things about themselves they wouldn't tell anyone else.

They "kiss" -- not literally; in this case the kiss is the moment they become genuine friends, not just work associates.

Then they break up! Firth thinks Rush is using him to advance his career, so he promptly drops him. Leaving us to wonder if the REAL reason Firth didn't drop Rush is because he's afraid of how close the two are becoming. Love is scary!

They spend time apart -- too much time, in my opinion, and the appearance of the standard dull spot at the two-thirds mark of the movie is one of my only criticisms -- in which they discover their lives apart are much more drab and loveless than when they were together.

Under the pressure of crisis, in this case the coronation ceremony, they reunite, overcome a final crisis, and vow to be friends forever.

Voila! The King's Speech is your standard Hollywood love story, garbed in the formalwear of a royal history period piece.

And this is the essence of storytelling: to tell an old story in a new way.

The King's Speech deserves the plaudits it's been getting. It's a marvelous movie, not just because it's solemn and serious and features a Character With a Disability, but because it's soft and sad and emotionally stunted, and then it's happy and warm and forgiving of us all.

I bet this one wins the Oscar.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 89/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 89/100

127 Hours

2010-12-10T16:15:00.000-08:00

The year's best movie?

Maybe.

Danny Boyle, the sensational director of Shallow Grave, Trainspotting, 28 Days Later and Slumdog Millionaire has another superb entry into his filmography.

127 Hours is, of course, based on the story of Aron Ralston, the hiker who got his arm stuck under a boulder in a Utah cavern in 2003.

Ralston was trapped under that rock for five days -- I'm not sure what the total number of hours was -- until he made the desperate decision to cut off his own arm.

By and large, that's the entire plot of the movie.

Guy trapped under a rock. Gets out.

The end.

But ahhhhhh... the character.

Ralston is played by the extremely likable James Franco, who gives Ralston an energetic, gung-ho attitude which contrasts perfectly with his situation. For the rock, you see, doesn't care about Ralston's great attitude. It doesn't care about his likability. The rock is implacable. The rock is the cold, impersonal universe. The rock is death.

And when that character comes into conflict with that rock, wonderful drama results.

The movie proceeds along two tracks: the external problem of the rock, and the internal problem of the character weakness that led Ralston to his predicament.

The character weakness is an old, old, old one.

The Greeks called it hubris.

One reason Ralston spends 127 hours in a ravine is because a rock has him pinned there.

Another reason he spends 127 hours there is because no one comes to help him. This is because no one knows where he is.

And that's just how he planned it.

Ever the free spirit, Ralston never lets himself get too dependent on others. Before leaving on his ill-fated hiking trip, he avoids phone calls from his mother and sister. He leaves no one a note. He practically goes out of his way to keep his weekend hiking location a secret.

He does this because, on a psychological level, he needs to feel in command of his own destiny. His outdoorsy self-reliance gives him this.

Until it comes crashing down on him about twenty minutes into the movie.

It doesn't let up until he makes his gruesome, desperate decision twenty minutes from the end.

This decision may be the reason the movie isn't doing much box office business. Despite the pedigree of Boyle and Franco, it seems most of America just doesn't want to see a young man cut his own arm off.

That's really too bad, because there's nothing senselessly grisly or macabre about Ralston's act. In the context of the film it's an incredibly life-affirming action, and Ralston's words, spoken to the boulder after extricating himself from its death grip, are among the most moving I've heard in years.

127 Hours is an exuberant journey with a wonderful sense of momentum, despite its static situation, and a deep sense of hope and love, despite its grim scenario.

The movie is, in a word, awesome.

Is it the year's best?

Aw, heck yes.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 91/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 92/100

Black Swan

2010-12-07T15:50:00.000-08:00

Director Darren Aronofsky's been known to take chances.

His first movie, Pi, culminated with its mathematician protagonist, a man driven insane by number theory, boring a hole in his own skull with a power drill.

And I loved it.

His subsequent films -- Requiem for a Dream, The Fountain, The Wrestler -- have been up and down affairs, as one would expect of someone who takes on a lot of creative risk.

Sadly, Black Swan is big career down, in my opinion.

At least in creative terms.

The story follows Natalie Portman's ballet dancer as she quests for the starring role in a big New York theater company's presentation of "Swan Lake."

Portman's character is disciplined and ambitious to the point of obsession.

Her rival is the more laid-back and fancy-free Mila Kunis.

They compete for the role of Swan Queen, and while Portman nabs it, she feels Kunis' hot breath on her neck throughout.

Thus, Portman's stress level -- always quite high -- goes to stratospheric levels. It goes so high, in fact, she begins to hallucinate. Soon she appears to be making an actual physical transformation into a black swan.

Oh, and monsters appear to chase her around from time to time.

But none of it's real, or so we're led to believe.

Therefore, we have something unusual on our hands: an art house horror flick.

It's certainly... different.

But alas, it just doesn't work.

Portman's character, so humorless and brittle, is hard to sympathize with, and the gruesomeness of her physical torments and hallucinatory transformations make the minute-to-minute experience of watching the movie mostly unpleasant.

There's a ton of startling "boo!" moments, but no real tension, since we know none of the predators stalking Portman are real.

Also, there's lot of ballet dancing.

It's just a weird, cold, distancing mixture that offers neither insight nor pleasure. I get that Portman's character is too much of a perfectionist for her own good, but I got that in the first five minutes, and no other layers to her character are ever revealed.

The movie holds so little sway over our emotions that it is instantly forgettable, which is surprising given that it's so different from every other movie playing this year.

In the end, I guess it's all about heart.

However, as weak as Black Swan is, it looks, walks and quacks like a Serious Oscar Contender.

And in Hollywood -- and elsewhere -- there is often less than a quantum of difference between perception and reality.

Aronofsky and Portman have been hitting the intellectual talk show circuit hard lately. They know it's a weak year for Oscar nominees, and they know they have just the kind of weird, inscrutable movie that might attract votes.

This is a big career moment for both of them, but artistically it's just another bust.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 36/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 38/100

Red

2010-11-30T16:04:00.000-08:00

Graphic novels are a blessing to Hollywood.

They allow that critical “dry run” for a movie. They aren’t just animated screenplays, they are WELL animated screenplays, and they let executives take a gander at a movie before it’s actually made.

Previous graphic novels that have made happy transitions to the movie theater include Sin City, 300, – okay, I’m cheating, both of those are from writer Frank Miller – The Watchmen and A History of Violence.

Those are just the first four that jump to mind.

Graphic novels have become so popular in Hollywood that if it’s not based on an old-fashioned non-graphic novel, the movie you’re watching is probably based on its graphic cousin.

Apparently, comic-book writer Warren Ellis’ graphic novel Red looked good enough for a go-ahead, and I’m glad it did, because it’s a comfortable, familiar tale, told with characters we quickly learn to like.

It helps that we already like the actors playing those characters.

Bruce Willis plays Frank Moses, a retired CIA agent. His status is RED – which means “retired, extremely dangerous.”

Hey, at least it’s catchy.

One night a “wet” team (the liquid generated by a wet team NOT being water) shows up at Frank’s suburban household door looking to kill him.

Frank escapes because he’s Frank. He quickly gathers a bunch of old friends – also of RED status – and starts investigating why the CIA wants some of its best ex-agents dead.

Frank’s friends include Morgan Freeman, John Malkovich, Helen Mirren and Brian Cox.

Also along for the ride is regular-girl Mary-Louise Parker, playing Frank’s love interest who gets dragged into a situation above her skill level.

The face of the CIA is a cold, calculating agent played by Karl Urban, Star Trek's Doctor McCoy, and he’s excellent as the new breed of super-agent trying to take down the old breed at the same time as he tries to figure out what’s going on.

Red gives us everything we want in a movie. It gives us banter, it gives us car chases, it gives us gun fights, it gives us larger than life characters, and it keeps a playful tone throughout.

Realistic? Heck no, there’s a million plot holes, and more to the point, a million scenes we’ve seen in movies before. E.g., the CIA agent on the run who must break into CIA headquarters itself!

But Red doesn’t care to break new ground. It cares to let you spend time with Willis and Malkovich and Mirren and enjoy yourself.

The movie doesn’t leave much of an impression on the mind, but it’s two hours pleasantly spent with friends.

That's what it advertises, and it's probably what producer Summit Pictures saw in Warren Ellis' work.

Graphic novels don't make movies surefire successes, but they make a completely uncertain prospect slightly less completely uncertain.

And that's worth its weight in gold.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 62/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 80/100

Unstoppable

2010-11-29T17:39:00.000-08:00

Momentum can be a powerful force, both in movies and in physics.

Take a train, for example, hurtling down a track at full speed, without a conductor, and loaded with enough toxic chemicals to poison any or all of the innocent Pennsylvania towns in its path.

Now give it a nasty name like "Triple Seven," paint it siren red, and you've got a lot of bad-ass momentum on your hands!

You've got so much momentum, in fact, that the train turns downright evil, targeting schoolchildren and roaring like a bear when it sees something it doesn't like.

Not to fear, however. Momentum works both ways.

If Denzel Washington and Star Trek's Chris Pine, playing engineer and conductor on another train, could, I don't know, "run that bitch down," they could apply full power in the opposite direction, stealing momentum from Triple Seven and bringing it to a gradual halt.

But they have to accomplish this before 777 -- interesting they didn't go with 666, I bet they thought about it -- hits the steep "S" curve in highly-populated Stanton, because when that happens, the evil train will fly right off its tracks, into the terribly dangerous fuel tanks stored thirty feet away, and untold amounts of havoc will be wrought.

That's right, Unstoppable is an utterly ridiculous farce.

It's also a good deal of fun, partly because of the camp factor -- which I would have liked more of; where's Martin Sheen as the mayor of Stanton? -- but partly because there's an undeniable build-up of tension any time you have a freight train getting closer... closer... BLARE of a horn... closer!... and...

ROAR!

There's a reason one of the first motion pictures ever made was a reel that showed a train steaming relentlessly toward the camera.

It was a great gimmick then, and it's still pretty good for generating suspense.

Unstoppable, then, is the rare movie which has good parts that are mildly enjoyable, and bad parts that are also mildly enjoyable.

I was never bored during Unstoppable. Director Tony Scott and salt mine screenwriting slave Mark Bomback got Triple Seven going early, they kept it going, and I had no choice but to stay in my seat until it reached the dreaded Stanton "S" curve.

I was carried along by the movie's momentum.

Side note:

The railroad employee who causes all the trouble by getting out of Triple Seven to throw a switch, but lets the train get away from him before he can get back on?

It's not his first experience with trains.

We saw him in Groundhog Day, where he was a passenger in Bill Murray's car when Murray decided "I'm not going to follow their rules anymore. Eat your vegetables. Be nice to your sister. Oh! And don't drive on the train tracks."

Maybe it's not just the same actor; maybe it's the same character. Both movies take place in Philadelphia. He could have worked for the railroad during Groundhog Day, and we just didn't know it.

It's possible.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 57/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 67/100

GROUNDHOG DAY

How Accomplished: 99/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 100/100

Morning Glory

2010-11-29T17:35:00.000-08:00

Some movies aim right down the middle.

Their themes are safe and predictable, like "we must balance work and home life to be happy."

Their plots are simple and sweet, like "an unquenchably optimistic young morning show producer tries to turn around the ratings at a stodgy network program headed by cantankerous anchors."

Their stars are big, like Harrison Ford, Diane Keaton and Rachel McAdams.

The music is intrusive, the set design overly bright, and the shot list is chock full of closeups.

There's a place in the world for these happy, harmless, formulaic piffles of movies.

And that place is filled by Morning Glory.

Originally conceived by screenwriter Aline Brosh McKenna, and greenlighted (essentially) by J.J. Abrams, who heard the pitch over breakfast one day and said, great, I'd like a producer credit, "Morning Glory" is a movie that could have been written by a sophisticated screenwriting computer program. Though not Final Draft; it's too buggy.

Every trope of the plucky-newcomer-struggles-to-make-it-in-the-big-city subgenre is put into play, including the relationship subplot with the handsome guy who works in "real news."

But all these tropes are underserved because what the movie really cares about is the relationship between Rachel McAdams and her grumpy, Pulitzer-Prize winning anchor, Harrison Ford, who doesn't like to read stories about kittens and never, ever would lower himself to do that morning show staple, the kitchen segment.

I can't really fault the movie for focussing so tightly on this relationship. I've said it myself enough times: affectionate but non-sexual relationships between a man and a woman always work magic on screen.

Especially when the man and the woman are complete opposites, say if he's old, self-absorbed and cynical whereas she is young, idealistic and self-sacrificing.

Ford mostly sleepwalks through his performance, and the director let McAdams get too cartoonish with hers, but it's still a decent relationship, and it's almost enough to save Morning Glory.

But I just didn't laugh enough for it to work as a comedy, and I didn't care enough for it to work as a drama.

Morning Glory is not a bad film, it's just an easy, obvious film, and there will always be a demand for such films.

Hollywood should keeping making them. It's what Hollywood does.

They should just do it a tiny bit better.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 46/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 43/100

Fair Game

2010-11-11T10:37:00.000-08:00

Politics.

So tricky.

Fundamentally, how one feels about Fair Game will reflect how one feels about the news story on which it's based.

Said story concerns Valerie Plame, a CIA agent whose husband, Joe Wilson, wrote an editorial in the New York Times in 2003. The editorial claimed the Bush Administration's rationale for going to war in Iraq -- namely, that an African country called Niger sold vast quantities of yellow-cake uranium to Saddam Hussein -- was bogus.

Piqued by this, the Bush Administration -- embodied by vice-presidential chief of staff Scooter Libby -- leaked Valerie Plame's name to the press, identifying her as a CIA agent.

This was an unkind thing to do, because you can't be involved in covert operations if everyone knows you're involved in covert operations.

Therefore, Plame's career at the CIA was over.

Wilson retaliated on behalf of his wife by going on a bunch of talk shows and bashing the administration.

The administration and its allies responded by bashing Wilson and Plame on the same talk shows.

What does it all add up to?

Ummm...

I don't know.

Oh, I understand what the perspective of the movie is. The movie opines that a terrible injustice was committed by the U.S. government, and until it is called to account, all our freedoms are in jeopardy.

I understand it. I just don't feel it.

Like the recent Facebook movie, the level of craft here is fairly strong. Sean Penn and Naomi Watts are typically good, Doug Liman of the immortal Swingers and the more recent The Bourne Identity does a good job behind the camera, and screenwriter Jez Butterworth is at least competent, having written the fun Roman-soldiers-running-around-Britain movie The Last Legion for young audiences in 2007.

But like I said, politics are tricky.

And the passion that drove the creation of this film, while undeniably genuine, is not something that taps into anything primal or universal. It taps into something political.

So if you voted Democrat in the recent elections, I imagine you'll really like Fair Game.

If you voted Republican, you'll probably hate it.

If you didn't vote at all, like my humble and deeply apologetic self, you'll likely be nonplussed.

Fair Game is smart and authentic, but it's not exactly JFK or All The President's Men, because the stakes are so low.

No one dies, no one almost dies, and the principles at stake are buried a little deeper in the US Constitution than behooves most Hollywood films.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 56/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 54/100

Paranormal Activity 2

2010-11-07T12:31:00.000-08:00

I like a good scary movie.

And Paranormal Activity 2 is a good scary movie.

It pulls off the odd feat of mimicking its predecessor in almost every way without feeling redundant.

Like its parent movie, PA2 is about a young couple in a suburban home terrorized by an invisible demon.

It uses actors we've never seen before and "found footage" comprised of home video and security camera shots to a) keep costs down and b) make the events of the movie feel more real.

This seizes on an important insight. If the subject of your movie is inherently implausible -- for example, if it involves a mean-spirited ghost -- then making that subject seem real is all that matters for the movie to be successful. If we buy into that ghost, you win, Paranormal Activity 2.

It helps that we never see the ghost. We only see its effects.

These effects start reeeeeally small. In the early scenes, the evil demon limits itself to lifting the mechanized pool cleaner out of the pool each night.

That's not too bad, is it?

But then it starts making thumping noises inside the house. That's a bit creepy.

Then it starts opening doors.

And our skin starts to crawl.

The sequel retains a couple elements from the original -- a female lead who correctly intuits the supernatural, and a boneheaded male lead whose so-called rationality dooms everyone -- while adding three new ones.

One of the additions is a family dog, who participates in the story enough that I hope it gets residuals. Another is a sixteen year-old daughter named Ali, and the third is a baby boy named Hunter.

The presence of the kids jacks up the stakes. We're ready for adults to be terrorized and killed by a demon. We're not so ready to see it happen to kids.

The movie walks the line just right, threatening to kill those kids without actually doing it.

The Paranormal Activity franchise has discovered a simple, effective formula. They make what is essentially a home video gone terribly wrong in predictable, escalating and unstoppable ways.

There's some neat narrative work also. The wife/mom of the household is a sister to the first movie's Katie Featherston, who pops in for a few visits.

The audience assumes Featherston is demon-possessed -- which is where the last movie left her -- and that gives heft to scenes in which she's holding baby Hunter.

Soon we understand that PA2 takes place BEFORE the events of PA1, and in creepy ways it actually gives rise to those events.

It's a surprise prequel.

PA2 didn't freak me out for days, the way The Ring or The Grudge did a few years ago, but it did scare me while I was in the movie theater, and that alone--

------BOO!---------

See?

It's hard to scare people, even for a second.

Got to give a good scary movie its due.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 76/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 78/100

The Social Network

2010-11-04T15:47:00.000-07:00

You know who's a great Hollywood screenwriter?

Aaron Sorkin.

He wrote A Few Good Men and created the show The West Wing.

You know who's a great director?

David Fincher. He shot Se7en and Fight Club.

You know what's a great story? The story of the creation of Facebook, that ubiquitous web site that everyone on the planet under fifty uses.

It's a great story because there's a lot of dispute about who actually created Facebook. The dispute is understandably contentious, since Facebook is considered to be worth something like ten billion dollars.

So The Social Network, written by Sorkin, directed by Fincher, about Facebook, just HAS to be good.

Right?

Am I right?

Maybe we should get back to that "great" story.

In broad strokes, Facebook was invented by a nerdy freshman at Harvard named Mark Zuckerberg, who may or may not have stolen the idea from a couple snooty upperclassmen before developing it with a small group of friends in his dorm.

As the website took off, Zuckerberg cut all contact with the snooty upperclassmen, met and got charmed by glitzy showman and Napster founder Sean Parker, and got persuaded to freeze out his closest friend and co-founder.

Pretty soon Zuckerberg, though enormously rich, found himself all alone in the world, left only with his svengali Sean Parker, a ton of lawsuits, and of course, with Facebook.

The screenplay is focused, witty and fast-paced. The directing is swift and sure. The acting is uniformly excellent -- including Justin Timberlake, who's completely unselfconscious as Sean Parker.

With all these elements in place, The Social Network must be an instant classic.

Except it isn't.

The reason is hard to pinpoint. It's true Zuckerberg isn't terribly sympathetic, but movies have done better with less sympathetic protagonists than him.

It's true the movie plays fast and loose with the facts, but so did Citizen Kane.

So why doesn't TSN grip the imagination?

Maybe it's the caveman theory.

The caveman theory says the only good movies are movies that would be equally effective shown to an audience of prehistoric cave-dwellers.

The thinking being: unlike a book, a movie is a visceral experience, a sensory experience, and its characters need simple, primal motivations for the movie to succeed, because a movie engages us on a simpler level of the brain than a book does.

If this is true, it might explain why a civil court deposition between claimants who want credit and profits deriving from a popular social networking web site yet to be effectively monetized... might be emotionally underwhelming.

Which is a shame, because it really is a great story.

It's just not a great movie.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 64/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 62/100

Wall Street 2: Money Never Sleeps

2010-10-08T10:48:00.000-07:00

You can't go home again.

Or can you?

It's a question Hollywood has been determined to solve, in the affirmative, for almost a decade now.

The movie-going audience is long-accustomed to sequels and threequels and fourquels, remakes and reimaginings, adaptations and even the newfound "reboot."

But we're hitting fresher ground still with Wall Street 2, a sequel of a movie that seems almost impossible to sequelize. And why would you want to? The original Wall Street wasn't an action/adventure franchise, it was a trenchant slice of mid-80's cynicism; a critique of consumer culture in the midst of said culture's glory days. It was a welcome antidote to money mania.

The new movie's PR flacks contend that the collapse of the economic bubble started in the 80's makes this a perfect time to revisit the characters who embodied the bubble's creation, but if there's one thing we DON'T need in 2010, it's another cynical take on corporate greed.

We've got plenty of that, thank you very much.

But because corporate greed never goes away, we've got a sequel anyway. In this version, Charlie Sheen's Bud Fox is replaced by goody two-shoes stock trader Shia Lebeouf.

Strangely, Michael Douglas' Gordon Gekko is replaced -- at least in story terms -- by Josh Brolin's titan of the banking industry.

NOTE: One way to tell a sequel is inferior to the original is to see how the names of the characters become less suggestive. Where once we had Gordon Gekko mentoring Bud Fox, now we have Bretton James mentoring Jake Moore. Downgrade!

In Money Never Sleeps, Michael Douglas' role is reduced to trying to reconnect with his estranged daughter, played by Carey Mulligan. The fact that she is engaged to marry Shia Lebeouf is what brings Douglas into our main plot.

That main plot deals with Lebeouf's attempt to get revenge on Josh Brolin for ruining the financial fortunes of Lebeouf's father figure, Frank Langella, who was the chairman of a Lehman Brothers-type banking house driven under in the collapse of 2008.

If you think this is getting complicated, you are right, and it doesn't stop there. Lebeouf is looking to gather money for a company trying to invent a cold fusion process, Carey Mulligan is pregnant, and Lebeouf's mom, Susan Sarandon, is a real estate agent who keeps borrowing money from her son because her properties are declining in value.

Money Never Sleeps tries to capture every aspect of the financial collapse, and it tries to do so by layering subplot upon subplot, character upon character.

This strays from the blueprint of the original, which captured the spirit of the 80's boom through a narrow plot with few characters -- nice guy Bud Fox gets mentored, and corrupted, by charming but diabolical Gordon Gekko.

All is not lost, however. To flesh out the screenplay, director Oliver Stone employed writers Allan Loeb and Stephen Schiff, who do an excellent job with indvidual scenes. The problem in Money Never Sleeps exists at the story level, not the script level.

Also shoring up the weakness of the story is some fine work from the brilliant cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto, the visual maestro behind the movies Lust, Caution, Brokeback Mountain and 8 Mile.

Money Never Sleeps is entertaining, well-crafted and worth seeing.

But it's not iconic and it's not a contribution to our culture, the way the first one was.

Hollywood has proven you can go home again.

But, as any real estate agent will tell you, home values aren't what they once were.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 67/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 66/100

SCORE FOR WALL STREET (1987)

How Accomplished: 94/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 96/100

You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger

2010-10-04T10:34:00.000-07:00

At a screening in Toronto for his latest movie, Woody Allen -- who churns out a movie a year, and has done so for the past four decades -- was asked if his movies might benefit from, uh... more time spent in front of the keyboard.

Allen replied:

"They wouldn't be better. I have thought about that, yes, but they wouldn't be. When I've had time to do something, it doesn't come out better. There's no correlation between the time spent and how it comes out. It's really about the luck of a good idea. If you get a good idea you can execute it quickly."

So how good is the idea behind You Will Meet a Tall, Dark Stranger?

Mediocre, alas.

The story follows a family composed of members with varying levels of self-delusion.

The most deluded is aging mother Gemma Jones, who has just been dumped by long-time husband Anthony Hopkins. He has taken up with blonde bubblehead and up-until-five-minutes-ago call girl Lucy Punch, a turn of events which sends Gemma to a sham of a psychic named, of course, Cristal, for guidance.

Their daughter Naomi Watts is married to Josh Brolin, a layabout who foolishly quests to write the Great American Novel. While waiting impatiently for this to happen, Watts has fallen in love with her married boss, Antonio Banderas, whom she hopes will some day leave his wife...

And so the plot tangles and tangles and tangles.

The central theme -- that we all depend on self-delusion to an alarming degree, and that the most deluded among us are often the happiest -- is really cool. And it shows why Woody Allen is such a brave artist. Allen himself has few delusions, but he can't bring himself to scorn those who do. Not overly much, anyway. The truth is, delusions are effective.

The problem with the story isn't thematic, and it has nothing to do with craft. Allen has more craft at screenwriting than anyone alive.

The problem is in the emotional underpinning of the story.

No one in Tall, Dark Stranger seems to like anyone else very much. The marriages are a wreck -- that goes with Woody Allen territory -- but even the familial relationships lack warmth.

Ultimately, there is no love in this movie, which makes it hard to hook into the characters. The unwavering affection between the brothers Colin Farrell and Ewan MacGregor made Cassandra's Dream work, as did the stormy, primal passion between Penelope Cruz and Javier Bardem in Vicky Cristina Barcelona.

In movies, it's okay to be unhappy, it's okay to be ignoble and it's even okay to commit murder. But you have to love someone, somehow. We demand it.

Since there was no love within Tall, Dark Stranger, I have no love for it.

But it's only another twelve months till the next Woody Allen film rolls into theaters.

Maybe he'll have better luck with that one.

We'll see!

SCORE

How Accomplished: 44/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 44/100

Easy A

2010-10-03T10:04:00.000-07:00

Lots of things have to come together for a movie to work.

In Easy A, lots of things come together.

Young screenwriter Bert Royal -- you wouldn't think he'd be so young, age 33, with a name like Bert -- gets things going with his witty screenplay about a high school virgin who develops a reputation as a slut by pretending to sleep with a series of unpopular boys to boost their reputations.

"Pretending" is the key word here, a clever conceit which makes the virgin's character extremely likable because a) her motive is compassion, and b) the outcome of said compassion makes her a victim of undeserved punishment, two qualities that glue audiences to a character in a hurry. Throw in a sense of humor and we're in love.

Director Will Gluck, of last year's fizzy FU, adds his restless camera technique and affinity for speedy dialogue.

Then there's Emma Stone, the rising star of Zombieland, whose sarcastic smirk and comfort with big words (and lots of 'em) makes her ideal to play Olive, the virgin at the heart of Easy A.

There's something very modern about the movie, not only in the freshness of its fast-thumping, music-heavy approach but in the subject matter itself.

A slutty reputation would doom a heroine in any past era -- as it did in Easy A's literary forebear The Scarlet Letter -- but in our culture a scandalous reputation is not the end of dignity, it's merely a speed bump on the road to public recovery.

Also reflecting the cultural moment, Olive's scandal creates a split between social progressives and religious conservatives. The progressives are represented by gal pal Aly Michalka, currently starring in the new WB series Hellcats, while the conservatives are represented by Amanda Bynes, who plays the spiritual leader of the school's devout Christians.

There's a lot of good chuckles in the movie, a sparkling main character, a few thoughtful lessons on the nature of private and public morality, and a meandering dull spot where it always is, at the two-thirds mark.

This is not the deepest, most serious-minded film ever made, but it's eminently well-crafted and thoroughly enjoyable.

Easy B.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 75/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 77/100

Devil

2010-10-01T11:01:00.000-07:00

I have this friend.

His name is Evan.

He called me about a year and a half ago with an idea for a script. In it, six strangers are trapped on an elevator by a sinister villain whose voice is the only one to come out of the emergency call box. Every fifteen minutes, the lights go out. When they come back on, another passenger in the elevator is dead.

One of the trapped riders is a murderous ally of the voice in the call box. But which one?

I told my friend it sounded great and he should get to work on it right away. He did, and the result was an excellent, tightly-written thriller called Elevator.

He got an agent excited by the project. A production company even started lining up financiers.

Then came word that M. Night Shyamalan, writer/director of the early hit The Sixth Sense and a string of recent bombs, had a very similar idea.

Shyamalan's project would be called Devil, and it too would involve average people trapped on an elevator. Every fifteen minutes the lights would go out and another passenger would be dead. Shyamalan's project -- which he conceived but did not write or direct -- had one additional element. Instead of being terrorized by an antagonist looking for Swiss bank account numbers, the opponent in Devil would be, well, the Devil.

Shyamalan always did love the supernatural.

My friend's project fell apart -- at least at the time -- and it was back to the drawing board. This is a somewhat common experience for aspiring screenwriters, but it's an awfully demoralizing one.

So this past weekend was especially tough for him, as he had to endure advertisements, reports and reviews of Shyamalan's exciting new thriller about -- are you ready for this? -- people trapped on an elevator!

He even had well-meaning but naive friends calling to congratulate him on his success in getting his story to the big screen.

Ouch.

Which leaves us with Devil. How is it?

For my friend's sake, I'd like to say it's an unmitigated disaster, but the key breakthrough seems to have been not letting M. Night Shyamalan write or direct his own movie.

Instead, Brian Nelson, who wrote the terrific Ellen Page thriller Hard Candy in 2005, takes scripting duties, and John Erick Dowdle, who directed 2008's fast and fun vampire thriller Quarantine, mans the camera.

No-name actors give life to the characters in Devil: the passengers trapped in the elevator, the building mechanics trying to get the elevator doors open and the police detective trying to figure out what's going on.

It's the police detective who takes center stage. He's the one who begins to understand the supernatural aspect of the situation, courtesy of a whispery latino building mechanic whose grandmother told stories of el diablo testing human morality.

It's also our police detective who arcs over the course of the story, for he too is being tested.

Much as I hate to admit it, Devil, while low-rent and cheesy, is also simple, efficient and even a little moving. I may not have cared much for the people stuck in the elevator -- all of whom personified various levels of guilt, but I did feel for our police detective, who carried a tragic past and had a big surprise in store for him.

Yep, there's a twist in this M. Night Shyamalan-inspired movie. Hard to believe!

But it's the kind of twist that makes a story better, not worse. It's the kind of twist that helps us understand character. It's not a show-offy trick.

Okay, I have to spoil the twist. I can't help myself. Here goes:

One of the inhabitants of the elevator is connected -- in a very culpable way -- to the personal tragedy in the police detective's past. So once the police detective gets that person out of the elevator, you can imagine the temptations that bedevil him. So to speak.

Like an episode of the old Twilight Zone TV show, Devil is a little spooky, a little mind-bending and, in the end, a little touching and hopeful.

Defying expectations, Devil isn't bad at all. It's even kind of good.

But Evan's script was better.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 58/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 61/100

How Bad I Feel for My Friend Evan: 92/100

The Town

2010-09-19T17:58:00.000-07:00

This is Ben Affleck's second outing as a director, and he's making it very clear what kind of director he wants to be.

The boring kind.

Affleck won an Oscar for co-writing Good Will Hunting, but writing original material is difficult and chancy, so Affleck has settled into a career path with a well-established pedigree.

The path is: 1) go with a stodgy, old-fashioned genre -- in this case the crime story -- 2) grab the rights to a somber, serious novel spiced with just a couple car chases and gun fights, 3) don't deviate from said novel at all -- just film the damn thing -- 4) delve into cliche just deeply enough to set back the art form eighteen months or so, and through it all 5) give no one -- and I mean no one! -- the slightest reason to even think about mocking you.

In other words: play it safe.

Well, I'm not going to mock Ben Affleck. So... mission accomplished.

SCORE

How Accomplished: 57/100

How Much I Enjoyed: 54/100

Okay.

The Town refers to blue-collar, post-industrial Charleston, Massachusetts, supposedly home to the most bank robberies of any city in the country.

Perpetrating some of these robberies is our four man crew: Boston-native Ben Affleck himself, The Hurt Locker's Jeremy Renner -- who is sensational -- and two no-name chums distinguished by being fat and skinny and having hardly any lines of dialogue.

Renner's sister and Affleck's one-time love interest is played by gorgeous teen siren and Gossip Girl Blake Lively.

The crew's FBI pursuer is played by gorgeous male siren and Mad Man Jon Hamm.

Its nefarious criminal connection is played by the old Merchant and Ivory vet, Pete Postelthwaite.

Affleck's imprisoned father is played by Oscar winner Chris Cooper.

As you may have noticed, I haven't gotten to the movie's plot yet.

The plot involves recent indie darling Rebecca Hall, a bank employee who happens to spend time with the crew because they use her as a temporary hostage. No problem, though, they're wearing masks, so she won't be able to identify them.

Until...

Jeremy Renner discovers, by looking at the driver's license he lifted off her, that Ms. Hall lives a mere four blocks from her temporary captors.

So worried is he that Rebecca Hall will somehow identify them, he suggests they kill her.

Instead, through a complicated series of events, Affleck falls in love with her.

This strains credulity, but it's not the worst story in the world. A bank robber falls in love with the one person who can point him out to law enforcement. There's some nice irony there.

No, the problem is, this relationship, and this story, have a hard time making headway in the face of all those characters I listed.

Endless time is spent following Affleck as he bounces between Renner, Cooper, Lively, Postelthwaite and Hamm. I'm surprised he found time to date Hall, let alone fall in love with her.

This surfeit of characters can work great in novels, but if you're going to make a two-hour movie you have to reduce the characters and subplots to a number the audience can handle.

And that means messing with it! Which entails accepting a level of personal responsibility and artistic risk Affleck is apparently unwilling to take. Instead he just filmed the damn thing.

Safe. Boring.

He protected himself further by filling every inessential role with attention-grabbing, name actors. That cushions him from criticism -- the movie will certainly FEEL surefire -- but it also makes off-spine scenes extremely hard to cut in the editing room.

Cooper shouldn't be in the movie, but how do you cut him out? Heck, Hamm probably shouldn't be in this movie. But he's in the trailer. You're using him to sell the thing. How can you cut him out?

Sadly, Affleck has put the safety of his own reputation first, the crackling heart of his movie second.

And it reminds me of another actor-turned-director, Clint Eastwood.

Eastwood's movies are characterized by nice camera-work, solid production values and overall competence.

But they're rarely better than okay, because Eastwood never, but never, takes risks.

Curiously, when fellow actor Mel Gibson gets behind the camera he makes vastly more interesting films. They are less refined, less polished, and a hundred million times less tasteful, but there's a crazy hotblooded artist behind Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ and Apocalypto.

And you can't say that about a single movie Eastwood has ever made.

The difference between Eastwood and Gibson, clearly, is that Gibson doesn't give a damn what the respectable people of the world think -- something the tabloids have made ABUNDANTLY clear -- while Eastwood does.

Ben Affleck gives a damn too.

I find Affleck a tremendously smart and likable person in interviews. I like Eastwood too.

Therefore, let's blame their artistic mediocrity on the respectable people of the world these directors are trying so hard to please.

Screw you, respectable people.

You're getting in the way of good movies.

YOUR SCORE: 14/100