Head over heals for 'Up in the Air'

This time of year, studios release movies they hope will win awards. "Up in the Air" is a definite -- and deserving -- contender. My review is here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=357:up-in-the-air&catid=74:movie-reviews

Avatar, shmavatar

Looking for my brilliant and witty discourse on "Avatar"? Look no farther. Well, maybe a little farther. Just go here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=356:avatar&catid=74:movie-reviews

MST Alert!

Hey, fans of Mystery Science Theatre 3000. Do you have a hankering once again to hear the comic musings of Mike, Crow and Tom Servo? You can catch them at 8 tonight at the Virginia Center Commons in a special closed-circuit show, making wild but not unerudite fun at a host of worthy Christmastime short subjects throughout the years.

It's a two-hour show, with a special price of $12.50. And it won't exactly be the old MST set-up -- there are intellectual property rules about such things. But it will be the guys themselves (apparently unseen) along with guest Weird Al Yankovic (also unseen) making their giddy comments about cinematic silliness.

And if you, like me, would rather see Joel than Mike, then you're screwed.

Rugby liberates the soul?

The first non-combat movie about Vietnam was “The Boys in Company C,” a ridiculous film about Marines playing soccer to survive the war. It was a flop.

But other movies came along later that explored the American adventure in Southeast Asia with considerably more success.

Now comes the first movie to deal with a subject of equal importance, South Africa after the era of Apartheid. And this one turns out to be about rugby.

“Invictus” isn’t as painful as “The Boys in Company C,” of course -- the people who made it could pile up their Oscars like beer cans. And several scenes have a strong emotional resonance. It is just that the rest of the movie is pure blather.

Morgan Freeman stars as Nelson Mandela, one of the saints of the last century. It is 1994 and Mandela has just taken office as president of South Africa after spending 27 years in a tiny jail cell (which is shown to us, fascinatingly but gratuitously). Mandela’s first order of business in his mind is to unite a deeply divided country.

With some justification, blacks and whites fear and hate each other (no mention is made in the movie of coloreds and Asians, the country’s other two formerly official groups). Mandela needs something the entire population can get behind, and he decides the perfect unifying force is rugby. With the Rugby World Cup scheduled to be played in Johannesburg the following year, the timing is perfect.

All Mandela needs is to get the almost entirely white national team behind him, and then the country behind the almost entirely white national team. So he elicits the help of the team captain, played by Matt Damon.

Even if you know nothing about rugby -- and that’s a pretty good bet -- you already know what is going to happen in this film. So the question becomes: How well is it told?

Clint Eastwood behind the camera is a good start, and on a relatively regular basis his sense of humanity shines through. But he often cannot cut through the simplistic sentiment and syrupy script by Anthony Peckham. Working from a book by John Carlin, Peckham is unable to meet the challenge of keeping Mandela a man. He yields to the temptation of putting Grand and Eloquent and Frankly Overstated sentiments in his mouth.

“Forgiveness liberates the soul. It eliminates fear. That is why it is such a powerful weapon,” Mandela utters casually. When asked about the health of his family, he soberly says, “I have a very large family. Forty-two million.”

This isn’t a dramatization, it is hagiography. And the man is still alive.

It’s all a bit much for a movie that turns out to be about rugby. And although Eastwood gets some of the dramatic scenes right, he misses with the rugby. We have no sense of the progress of most of the games as they are played, and only a little of the final game. And the rugby action we see looks a bit restrained and tentative. Americans who are not interested in the sport will find their minds unchanged after watching the film.

A large number of excellent movies have been made about Apartheid, from “A World Apart” to this year’s “District 9.” And excellent movies will be made about the transition to majority rule. But “Invictus” doesn’t quite do it.

It comes across as a volume of “Post-Apartheid South Africa for Dummies.”

'Brothers' tries to raise cain, but it isn't able

The movies “Brothers” could have been are better than the one it turns out to be.

It could have been the story of one good brother who has his life together and a bad brother who does not, and how their lives change places as the result of loving the same woman. It could have been the story of how the good brother is killed in war and how the bad brother works through his survival guilt by falling in love with the good brother’s widow. Or it could have been the story of how the good brother returns from war so crazed by his experiences that he goes on a killing spree.

The movie’s trailer, incidentally, favors this last scenario. The psycho good brother is outside his house, gun in hand, confronting the police. He is so dangerous that his wife and brother are yelling to the police, “Shoot him! Shoot him!”

What a great scene. And wouldn’t it be cool if it were actually in the film?

Instead, “Brothers” turns out to be about Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder and the need for communication. It’s not a bad topic, but it could have been so much better. Considering the potential, the cast and the director, “Brothers” is a disappointment.

Tobey Maguire gets top billing as the good brother, a captain in the Marines who is a loving husband and father. Just as he is about to be redeployed to Afghanistan, he goes to bring his ne’er-do-well brother, Jake Gyllenhaal, back from prison. Things between them become tense when their father, Sam Shepard, lets them know that he prefers the good brother.

When the good brother is listed as killed in action, his wife -- played by Natalie Portman -- descends into depression. The bad brother decides to try to bring her out of it. The two grow close for the first time in their lives, and they have a positive effect on each other; the presumed widow finds happiness once more, and the bad brother turns good.

Up to this point, the story is at its best, but paradoxically the movie is at its worst. The actors don’t click together, the scenes don’t quite feel real. It is as if everything is slightly off-beat. Despite the exceptional cast (which also includes Mare Winningham as the brothers’ step-mother), the only natural acting actually comes from the young actresses who play Maguire and Portman’s daughters.

With this movie, which is based on a Danish film, director Jim Sheridan makes a misstep. Sheridan has previously made the wonderful “My Left Foot” and “In America” (and also the 50-Cent atrocity “Get Rich or Die Tryin’), but here the sense of family dynamics eludes him. Although some of the scenes in the second half of the film do work well -- the best is a tense birthday party scene, and Maguire does Crazy Eyes better than anyone in the business -- Sheridan cannot string enough of them together to create the power he is looking for.

The harsh and unshaded lighting indicates that Sheridan used digital cameras, so perhaps he had to make this film on the cheap. That could be the problem, but it is more likely to be just that the story (by David Benioff from the original Danish script) goes astray.

You can tell, because the ending feels so weak. Two of the characters are more interesting than the third, but the ending is about the least interesting one. And this story needs a catharsis, yet the ending lets us down.

It’s a viable ending. It just isn’t cathartic.

'Everybody's' terrific

In a world of Transformers and vampires, it can be such a pleasure to see a movie made with maturity, delicacy and heart.

“Everybody’s Fine” is a movie for grown-ups. It’s about real people and real situations, where what isn’t said is more important than what is.

Giuseppe Tornatore made the original film in Italian back in 1990; it was moving and affecting, but not the sort of thing you would ever expect to be remade in English. For one, where could they find an actor to replace its star, Marcello Mastroianni?

It turns out that the perfect choice is Robert De Niro. I know -- duh, right? But in recent years, De Niro has slipped too easily into caricature. Yet in the new version of “Everybody’s Fine,” he reminds us why he can still be the best actor in America. You never catch him acting here, not for a moment, and he seems to truly live the role.

De Niro’s acting here is so good because it does not seem like acting.

He plays Frank, a lonely widower of eight months. At the film’s beginning, he is eagerly anticipating a visit from his far-flung children. But they all cancel. So he decides to travel and make a surprise visit to each one.

Surprise visits are never a good idea. In movies, they tend to reveal uncomfortable truths about everyone concerned.

In the intelligent script of writer-director Kirk Jones (based closely on the intelligent script of the original), these revelations are not overly dramatic. They are believable, even likely, and spring organically from the characters. That’s where the maturity comes in.

Jones, who is British, previously made “Waking Ned Devine” and the wonderful “Nanny McPhee,” and he is clearly becoming a master of his craft. His delight in the majesty of the American West -- and even the tacky magnificence of Las Vegas -- is matched by his delight in working with capable actors. Here he draws emotional performances out of his strong supporting cast.

Like De Niro, Kate Beckinsale has been inconsistent of late, but she returns to form her as one daughter, a Chicago advertising executive. Sam Rockwell -- always an intriguing actor -- affectingly plays a son, the conductor of the Denver orchestra. And Drew Barrymore continues to impress as a successful dancer in Las Vegas.

Their shaded, careful acting makes it clear to us that their characters are lying to their father. But what makes the movie work so well is that it is clear to the father, too, though he never says a word.

One scene alone rings a false note, which only brings into perspective how perfect is the rest of the film. The climactic lunch scene, which takes place outdoors, is a victim of cinematic overkill -- Jones manipulates the color too much, he has too much going on cinematically. Even so, during the scene De Niro never wavers.

It’s a fine piece of acting in a compellingly bittersweet film. The other actors are fine, too, and so are the writer-director and the cinematographer. In fact, everybody’s fine.

A solid A-- for 'An Education'

In 1961, when “An Education” is set, Jenny would have been considered a good girl gone bad.

At 16, she is tops in her class at a London school for girls. She is clever, engaged and eager to begin her life and experience the world.

It is when she meets a dark, handsome and vaguely mysterious older man that she realizes there is more than one way to experience the word. The conventional way is to go to Oxford, get an education and move on to one of the few professions open to women at the time. The other way is on the arms of a dashing, handsome and vaguely mysterious older man.

“An Education” (note the double-edged title) is generally lighthearted, a fond memory of youth, based on the memoir by English columnist Lynn Barber. To tell the truth, sometimes the story feels like it is bragging a bit, but that’s OK. Isn’t that the point of a memoir?

The revelation in this film is not the story (it’s unsurprising, as these things go) but the starring turn by Carey Mulligan. Mulligan plays the role of Jenny as if she were born to it; we believe her, utterly. She’s smart, sassy, worldly, innocent, romantic, bull-headed and prone to showing off by spasmodically speaking in French. N’est-ce pas?

Peter Sarsgaard is smooth and slightly oily as David, the older man who sweeps Jenny off her feet. David is sophisticated and wealthy; he makes his living, he says, by “buying and selling this and that.” His profession turns out to be a little less savory than that sounds, but to Jenny this added air of mystery only adds to his appeal. The only problem with this older man, at least for the audience, is that he is such an older man. David is twice her age, and Jenny is only 16. I generally have no problems with age differences in relationships, but David (perhaps unintentionally) comes off as a bit of a pervert.

It is to this picture’s considerable credit that it has amassed such a strong supporting cast. Alfred Molina stands out, as he always does, as Jenny’s disapproving, but easily co-opted, father. Rosamund Pike is a comic presence as a chic woman unencumbered by knowledge (in a coincidence, Pike played Mulligan’s oldest sister in the Keira Knightley version of “Pride & Prejudice”). Olivia Williams is surprisingly dowdy as Jenny’s English teacher, with Emma Thompson sublime in a couple of scenes as her headmistress.

Heading up the production with authority, compassion and understanding is Dutch director Lone Scherfig, who has a solid yet solid feel for the material. Scherfig keeps the tone light in what could easily come off as a heavy-handed and serious morality tale -- a decision that pays off with dividends from the contrast when the material does become weightier. Scherfig is known in this country for the lovely “Italian for Beginners,” and she scores another hit here.

Ultimately, “An Education” may seem a little slight -- perhaps the light tone keeps ups from taking it seriously enough. But for what it is, it’s fine. It’s a pleasant diversion, one with superior acting.

'Fantastic'? Almost!

Even though it is about talking animals, it’s animated and it’s rated PG, “Fantastic Mr. Fox” isn’t really a movie for children.

Adults, however, will find it delightful and enchanting -- almost effervescent.

The humor is not risqué, offensive or otherwise improper for children; it’s just that 90 percent of it will be over their heads. The jokes are sophisticated and urbane in precisely the way that children aren’t.

For the last several years, director Wes Anderson’s movies have mostly been about how fabulous and quirky Wes Anderson is (“The Darjeeling Limited,” “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou”). But this time out he is working from a book by the preternaturally odd English writer Roald Dahl, and Anderson is helped immeasurably by having an actual story to follow.

This story follows the Fox family and their anthropomorphic wildlife friends as they become embroiled in a war against three mean and powerful farmers. Mr. Fox, who has the voice of George Clooney, is charming and loquacious, a natural leader. Though he is a newspaper columnist and the proud owner of a fancy new hollow tree, part of him still yearns to steal the occasional chicken from a chicken coop -- one of the actions that start the war.

His wife disapproves (Meryl Streep with a fox accent) and gently urges him toward safer paths. Their son Ash (voice by Jason Schwartzman) is considered “different” by other foxes and only wants to be accepted by his father. The father, however, is fonder and more impressed by his athletic nephew Kristofferson, whose voice is courtesy of Eric Anderson. Aware of the rivalry between the younger foxes, the father will eventually try to bond with his son.

Yes, it’s that tired, old, threadbare subplot, trotted out yet again; the subplot filmmakers turn to whenever they want to give their otherwise lacking story a quick dose of feel-good emotion. Reportedly, Anderson and his co-writer Noah Baumbach changed some parts of Dahl’s book and added others -- anyone wanna bet the father-bonding-with-son plot was one of their inventions?

Still, Anderson and Baumbach provide plenty of wit, from using the word “cuss” as an all-purpose cuss word (it even appears as graffiti in one background) to imagining a law firm called Badger, Beaver and Beaver (Mr. Badger is a badger; we don’t meet the Beavers) to having a mole, which is nocturnal, play a swanky version of “Night and Day” on the piano.

And all of this is played out in the difficult and extraordinarily time-consuming medium of stop-motion animation. Using puppets and three-dimensional sets, the crew shot the entire movie two frames at a time, moving the figures ever so slightly between the photographs.

It’s a huge amount of work and it results in animation that is lifelike, yet vaguely surreal. But it was worth it. “Fantastic Mr. Fox” is fun, amusing and enchanting.

You can even bring kids to it. But you’ll enjoy it more than they will.

'Precious' and few

“Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ By Sapphire” takes a reverse three-and-a-half somersault dive into a deep pool of squalor. But it looks so pretty on the way down.

The movie’s point appears to be that no matter how badly off we may be or how low we may feel, our lives are blessed compared to what we see on the screen. The film imagines the worst life possible, and then imagines some more bad things happening to it. All of this is so we can feel better about ourselves -- “At least we aren’t leading the life of Precious,” we think, “even if she is based on the novel ‘Push,” by Sapphire.”

The story may be squalid, but it is made surprisingly well. Although the story tends to ramble toward the end, and has little focus at the beginning, the acting, directing and script are strong enough to make the film almost as good as its high-level buzz.

Gabourey Sidibe makes a striking debut as Precious, an illiterate, morbidly obese 16-year-old mother of a Down Syndrome child. Her abusive, vicious, worthless, welfare-scamming mother (a heartbreaking performance by Mo’Nique) treats her like a slave, assures that she has no self-esteem, knocks her out with heavy objects and on at least one occasion tries to kill her.

At the film’s beginning, Precious is pregnant again, and the father is once again her own father, who casually rapes her.

For too much of Geoffrey Fletcher’s script, this exposition is mistaken for story. Rather than showing us what Precious does, or what happens to her, the picture is content merely to pile on the suffering. Only in its latter stages does the film break free from being a compendium of misery. As it must, the story follows one of two trajectories -- either Precious survives against the odds or she is swallowed by her horrific circumstances.

Paula Patton makes a strong impression as a saintly teacher at Precious’ new school, and Mariah Carey turns on her native New York accent as a welfare caseworker with a heart. And a number of actresses enliven the classroom scenes with a spontaneity and vitality that seems real and unforced.

It is largely due to these classmates that the suffering is not entirely unrelieved. In the second half, the filmmakers remember that teen-age kids are funny. Even Precious manages a smile once when joshing with her new friends, and she becomes so bold as to tell us a clever joke in narration: When observing two educated women, she says, “They talk like TV channels I don’t watch.”

Director Lee Daniels produced “Monster’s Ball” and directed the underrated “Shadowboxer,” so he is no stranger to making bold cinematic statements. He may be a little prone to unnecessarily zooming the camera, but “Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire” is compellingly filmed and acted.

It’s a different kind of feel-good movie. You feel good, knowing that you don’t feel that bad.

Less true than 'True Blood'

My review to "New Moon" is up; you can find it at: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=348:the-twilight-saga-new-moon&catid=74:movie-rev

Ambivalence

“Blind Side” would be better if so much of it weren’t so bad.

Overall, the scales still tip to worthwhile viewing. The movie easily has more strong scenes than squishy ones, but it would be foolhardy to overlook completely the squish factor.

The film is based on a true story, but unless Michael Oher’s life has been nothing but a parade of Hollywood clichés, the filmmakers have imposed a formulaic structure on it. The result is an enjoyable movie, but one in which everything is predictable and nothing is a surprise.

Oher, played not without affect by Quinton Aaron, is an enormous teen with an equally enormous heart. But he has never had a break -- he grew up in poverty (he never even had a bed), the son of a drug-addict mother and an absent father. Shifted from foster parent to foster parent and school to school, he lands at a wealthy private school, largely because the coach wants him on the football team.

As practically the only black student on campus, and showing no apparent ability to read, he is shunned by the students and teachers alike. But one mother of a student shows him a kindness, giving him a place to sleep on a cold night. Moved by his gentle nature, she begins to show him more kindness on a truly remarkable level.

For the entire film, we expect to be put off by the sight of a well-off white woman swooping in to turn around the life of a disadvantaged black youth, but it never feels condescending. And that is the movie’s greatest success.

In one of her most emotionally true roles, Sandra Bullock plays the woman -- very blonde, very rich and with a heart as big as Oher’s. She’s a no-nonsense, type-A, Memphis gal who is determined to get what she wants, particularly when she is doing the right thing. Her husband is played by Tim McGraw, a likable enough performance of a likable enough character, but he is overshadowed by Bullock.

But the supporting characters tend to trip up the film. The worst offender is the ridiculously precocious young son of Bullock’s character; he’s like a sitcom kid, witty and wise and glib. In an atrocious idea that is carried on too long, it is this boy, at perhaps 10 years old, who helps serves as Oher’s conditioning coach and teaches him the fundamentals of football. Kathy Bates has one great moments as a tutor but is otherwise awash in cliché, and the filmmakers trot out a series of college coaches to play themselves.

One of the unconvincing acting performances you will ever see is Nick Saban playing himself.

John Lee Hancock writes and directs, and the film is uneven exactly where he is uneven. Many lines are funny, a tribute to the wit with which he embellished the script. But all of the oppressively predictable parts are due to his script, too. And while the emotionally satisfying scenes resonate because of his direction, it is this same bald, unnuanced direction that makes the movie feel immature.

Of course, part of the problem stems from real life. In high school, Oher played offensive left tackle. They may try awfully hard -- a little too hard, maybe -- but it is impossible to make football footage seem exciting when focusing on an offensive lineman. Yes, they’re critical to a team’s success, but no, what they do is not dramatic.

“Blind Side” is remarkably ambitious, and it does score. But it’s just a field goal.

Not in a whimper, not in a bang, but in a blah

It’s the end of the world as we know it, and I feel bored.

“2012” is a disaster film about the biggest disaster of all, the end of virtually all life on the face of the Earth. That’s the sort of thing you would think it would be impossible to make too big.

Meet schlockmeister director Roland Emmerich, who covered much the same territory in his 1996 apocalyptic disaster film “Independence Day” and his 2004 apocalyptic disaster film “The Day After Tomorrow.” For his third try at the exact same story, Emmerich leans heavily on the greatly improved special effects to make his movie bigger than big. And not coincidentally, longer than long.

“2012” is so big and so long (and so clichéd and so predictable and so cheesy) that it becomes quite dull. There are only so many special effects a fellow can take, especially since it is the same two or three effects repeated over and over, and so much pounding music.

At no point in this film is there any doubt about who will survive the apocalypse, and who will die. Seven billion people will die. The cute little dog will survive.

One of Emmerich’s many problems is that he shows us far too many of the seven billion, scattered in too many places around the globe. We have John Cusack as a writer and Amanda Peet as his estranged wife and the mother of his two children in Los Angeles (anyone want to take bets on whether they reconcile?). We have Danny Glover as the thoughtful and noble president in Washington, Thandie Newton as his daughter and Oliver Platt as a high-ranking official.

We have astrophysicists in India, a welder and his Buddhist brother in China, and two old codger musicians (including George Segal) wistfully noting the passage of time on a cruise ship in the Pacific. We have Woody Harrelson as a nutcase ex machina in Yellowstone National Park, and Chiwetel Ejiofer as a scientist pretty much everywhere. We have a Russian billionaire with a blonde girlfriend and twin sons in Las Vegas, and some generic Arab sheik in some room somewhere.

It gets to the point that when we see the Indian astrophysicist late in the film, we think, “Oh, yeah, I forgot he was in this movie.”

The main characters who do not make it to the end are generally all given the chance to make a noble speech, or at least share a tearful goodbye. As for the potential survivors on whom we focus the most, we are not worried about them because they have a statistically improbable ability to outrace whatever disaster is immediately behind them, no matter how fast it is closing.

At one point, Cusack is even able to run and catch up to a plane that is in the process of taking off. That’s some mighty fast running.

The catching-up-to-the-plane scene might well be the movie’s most ridiculous, but it has plenty of competition. About half of the time that we laugh at this movie, it is at something that is intentionally humorous. The other half is at things that are just…so…stupid.

The point of movies such as this is to see special-effect destruction on a massive scale, and many of the effects here are indeed fairly spectacular. Others, especially when several things are happening at once, tend to look flat, badly animated or silly. But even when the effects are good, what is missing from them is the sense of fun. If you see one landmark being destroyed (as Emmerich did with the U.S. Capitol in “Independence Day”), it can be enjoyably cathartic. But a dozen or more landmarks crashing into the earth results only in apathy born of repetition.

“2012” is so big because it wants to be the end-of-the-world movie to end all end-of-the-world movies.

We can only hope.

We love you Leeds! Leeds! Leeds!

An overblown, detrimental sports rivalry in “The Damned United” is revealed to be caused by two coaches who are petty and childish.

Do you, like me, secretly suspect that a lot of coaches are like that?

“The Damned United” tells of the rise and fall of English soccer manager Brian Clough, a man probably completely unknown to the vast majority of Americans. That the film is so enjoyable in this country, and enlightening, is a testament to its universal truths: Some talented people are jerks, and their personalities can get in the way of their successes.

A considerably fictionalized true story, the film bounces back and forth in time between 1974 and 1968, in that order. In 1974, the brash, young Clough replaces the greatly beloved Don Revie as manager of the fearsome Leeds United football team. In 1968, we witness a match between what was then Revie’s Leeds United team and the little heralded team headed by Clough. Leeds plays dirty and Revie snubs the previously adoring Clough, leading to the unhealthy, long-lasting rivalry.

“I’m just going to have to beat him, Pete,” Clough says. “Beat him if it’s the last thing I do.”

The Pete in that quote is Pete Taylor, Clough’s longtime assistant coach. He is an integral part of Clough’s success, but the film never makes clear what it is that he does, other than recommend that Clough hire expensive, but able, older former players.

If that is a flaw, the filmmakers get the rest of the film right, starting with the casting. The extraordinary Michael Sheen stars as Clough, and once again he disappears into his role, as he has done in “The Queen,” “Frost/Nixon” and a host of other films. His version of the coach is cocky and cheeky, too high strung and loose-lipped for his own good.

“I wouldn’t say I’m the best manager in England, but I’m in the top one,” he jokes.

Revie is played by Colm Meaney, whose personification of the part extends to an extraordinary resemblance to the real coach -- kudos to the first-rated makeup staff. Among the other familiar faces (hello, Jim Broadbent!) is Timothy Spall of “Enchanted,” the Harry Potter movies and many other pictures.

Peter Morgan is the writer, from David Peace’s popular (in England) novel. Morgan created complex characters, but well-defined and real. Not only do we believe what is on the surface of the characters, we buy what they hide, their motivations and secret desires.

Morgan and the actors are helped in their quest by director Tom Hooper, who spent considerable time in Virginia directing the “John Adams” mini-series. He makes the story accessible even to people who don’t much care about soccer by focusing on the personalities and their conflicts.

A few of his camera angles are a little strange. But otherwise, “The Damned United” is an admirable and often fascinating work.

Goats staring back

Somewhere in "The Men Who Stare At Goats" is a great comedy straining to get out. I know, I know -- somewhere in my review is a great review straining to do the same. You can find it at: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=343:the-men-who-stare-at-goats&catid=74:movie-reviews

Tepid 'Coco'

It is the little moments in “Coco Before Chanel” that are supposed to enthrall us. But they do not, unless you’re captivated by advancements in fashion, and maybe not even then.

The life of Coco Chanel before she became famous is not by itself fascinating enough to command our attention. So director and co-writer Anne Fontaine seeks to enliven the picture with dangling little pretty baubles of recognition. When the pre-famous Coco makes a Halloween costume to look like an orphan’s uniform, we are to recognize the collar that will become the iconic Chanel collar. When she admires a fabric that turns out to be jersey, we are to understand that that is a fabric that will help define her style. When she goes to the shore and sees fishermen in their striped sweaters, we are instantly to glean something or other.

Beats me what it is. I’m not captivated by advancements in fashion.

The story, which is taken from a book, is simple and not unfamiliar: She falls for the wrong man, and then she falls for the right one.

Audrey Tautou stars as Gabrielle Chanel, whose nickname comes from a popular song she sings at what appears to be a combination music hall/brothel. Her sister introduces her to the wealthy Etienne Balsan (Benoit Poelvoorde), and she soon gives up a life of entertainment for a life as a kept woman. But she is moody and unhappy with him, so she becomes attracted to his equally wealthy English friend, Arthur “Boy” Kapel (Alessandro Nivola).

Tautou plays the character as enigmatic, which does add a whiff of mystery to the role, but it also makes her hard to get to know. We develop little empathy or passion for her, and only rarely care what happens to her. The film’s best scene stands out for his very reason -- it is the only one with any emotional heft. The scene comes when Etienne forces Coco to sing for his party guests; it is heartbreaking and, alas, singular.

As is perhaps not surprising for a movie about fashion (even when it pretends not to be about fashion), the picture is most successful in its visual presentation. The sets are sumptuous, the costumes crisp and evocative. And the composition within the frames is, at times, a marvel. An image endures of Coco alone outside on a vast estate, another showing her lying among (artfully arranged) leaves. Best of all is a scene at the sea, where everyone else is dressed in shades of cream, while she wears a dark plaid.

The meaning is obvious -- she stands apart from the rest of the world in her attitudes and ideas as well as her fashion sense.

True enough, perhaps. But it doesn’t seem to be enough for an entire movie.

3/5 of a mile in 10 seconds

Some critics have been calling the Coen Brothers’ “A Serious Man” a black comedy. Some have been calling it a drama.

I think it’s a horror film.

Protagonist Larry Gopnik is living a life in the Jewish version of Hell. His wife has fallen for an oily acquaintance and wants a divorce. His brother’s temporary stay with them is threatening to become permanent; he spends all his time draining a cyst. His 13-year-old son is a stoner and his older daughter washes her hair all day and dreams of getting a nose job. He is physics professor up for tenure, and one of his students tries to bribe him for a passing grade. He lives in a horrible 1960s house (the artwork is exquisitely awful) bounded on one side by an angry neighbor and on the other by a temptress.

Larry is a modern Job, or at least a Job in 1967, when the film is set. God is testing him for reasons he will never know, testing him severely. The question -- answered, but never asked -- is whether he will be able to remain moral in the face of all the stress.

The Coens are looking at the Big Questions here. What is God’s plan for us? How do we know what he wants? And as Larry himself asks, “Why does he make us feel the questions if he’s not going to give us the answers?”

Unfortunately, as sometimes happens when filmmakers begin poking around in the Big Questions, the film becomes a wee bit pretentious. And maybe more than a wee bit.

A certain smugness radiates from the screen as the Coens briefly touch upon Schrodinger’s paradox, Heisenberg’s Uncertainty Principle and the stoned wisdom of Jefferson Airplane, specifically the Surrealistic Pillow album.

Hey, I like Surrealistic Pillow, too. But I’m not sure what point they’re trying to make by using it so much in a movie focusing on the idea that religion, specifically Judaism, has no answer for God’s questions. There is a disconnect in this film between what they are trying to say and how they say it.

The Coen Brothers, Joel and Ethan, have introduced a number of fine movie actors over the years, and they do it again here with Michael Stuhlbarg, who stars as Larry. With a pained, blank look, Stuhlbarg is unsurpassable as the passive, manipulated professor, the pawn in everyone else’s game. The other actors are strong, too, but as the movie wears on we begin to feel as if their efforts are unrewarded by the lackadaisical plot.

Perhaps the best scene -- and certainly the most gripping -- is the first. Set in 19th century Poland and performed entirely in subtitled Yiddish, it tells of a poor and simple man and wife who are visited either by a blessing or a curse. The scene, which is narratively unrelated to the rest of the story, suggests the difficulty one has in determining good from evil. Or maybe it’s about how religion is just destructive superstition.

It’s kind of hard to tell.

Michael Jackson is it, mostly

Ordinarily, a movie audience should not be distracted by thinking about the process of making the film. But the viewers of “This Is It” have no choice -- this is a movie that must be judged in the context of how it was made.

“This Is It” is enlightening and entertaining, given the circumstances.

A concert film of sorts celebrating the final tour that Michael Jackson never got to perform, it was cobbled together from rehearsal footage that was not intended to be seen. All things considered, it holds together fairly well.

Shot at what appear to be uneven intervals over a three-month period earlier this year, the footage was meant to be just a keepsake for Jackson (and, one assumes, the basis of a making-of documentary). So the quality of the filming is not what we are accustomed to seeing on the big screen -- the digital cameras are not worthy of a feature-film, the focus is iffy and the sound can be indistinct.

Yet what these sub-par cameras catch is an astonishing performer, still in his prime, working hard to perfect what looks as if it would have been an absolutely astounding show. At one point, Jackson says he wants to show the projected audiences something they have never seen before, and he was well on his way to fulfilling this wish -- from Cirque du Soleil-like aerialists (seen altogether too briefly) to a bit of black-and-white video magic, seamlessly inserting himself into the movies “Gilda” and “The Big Sleep.”

Jackson revolutionized dance, and he spends most of his songs showing off his moves. He has an extraordinary ability to move seemingly without friction -- it’s an illusion he created for moonwalking, in which he appears to put his weight on one foot while actually transferring it to the other. Even knowing how he does it, it still looks shockingly unreal every time.

And of course he grabs his crotch a lot. I’ve never understood that.

If the dance is the best part of the movie, the singing is the weakest. That’s another inevitable result of having to use rehearsal footage -- he wasn’t practicing his singing, he was working on the staging, the music and the dance moves. For several songs, including “Billie Jean,“ he sings half-heartedly, trying to preserve his voice.

In other numbers, such as a group of songs he performed as a boy with the Jackson Five, he isn’t doing anything full strength. These rehearsals of works he has been performing since he was 6 were staged entirely for the benefit of the technicians, the back-up singers and the stellar troupe of dancers.

Jackson had his pick of some of the best dancers in the world b
because, face it, he’s Michael Jackson. A montage of some of them at their audition reveals the esteem they have for him; one man tearfully tells Jackson “You’re why I dance.”

The musicians, too, are absolutely top notch, another advantage to being Michael Jackson. Drummer Jonathan Moffett impresses with a driving, steady beat, but the stand-out is guitarist Orianthi Panagaris. Not only does she make her ax wail, but she’s also hot. It’s a good combination.

The show itself only stumbles once, but it’s a terrible stumble. For “The Earth Song,” it mixes simplistic ecological lyrics with embarrassingly childish images, including a little girl with butterflies facing down a bulldozer. “I love the planet. I have respect for trees,” he says, though we don’t know when he says it or whom he says it to.

You can never quite escape the freakishness of Jackson’s face, and viewers who are not inveterate fans might find themselves getting bored for 15 or 20 minutes. But even though it goes on too long, the movie leaves us wanting more.

We don’t want to watch more of the movie. We just wish it could have ended with actual footage of the concerts.

Things that go zzzzz in the night

A more precise name would be “Paranormal Inactivity,” but that would not be as marketable.

And marketing is what “Paranormal Activity” is all about. The film is a triumph of marketing. Story, character, dialogue, photography -- not so much.

Reportedly shot in one week on a budget of $15,000, the picture is in a theater near you as a result of a brilliant viral advertising campaign. The studio, Paramount, let it be known that this is the scariest movie ever made. It will terrify you so much that you will sleep with the lights on for a week after you see it. But the studio didn’t know whether it should show it. If you want it to come to your town, you have to go to a Web site and vote to see it.

How could it fail? The people who came up with that idea are marketing gods. They deserve a hefty portion of what are sure to be massive profits -- it’s hard not to make a profit when the picture only costs $15,000.

What they don’t tell you is that you’ll be so bored by the movie that you won’t have to sleep with the lights on, you’ll just be able to.

Katie Featherston and Micah Sloat play Katie and Micah (another clever idea), an attractive but insanely dull young couple who are hearing bumps in the night. Micah has bought a camera to record whatever goes on in their house while they sleep, and it is these tapes that make up the entirety of the film.

In other words, it is another version of the camcorder first-person point of view pioneered in “The Blair Witch Project” and “Cloverfield.” It seems like an effective tool, but it would be so much more effective if we wanted to watch the tapes. At least in “Cloverfield,” the camera catches the characters in reasonably interesting lives before the beastie comes calling.

In “Paranormal Activity” Katie and Micah are banal. Their conversations become repetitive -- each character has about three things to say, and they say them over and over and over. He wants to get a Ouija board to help find out what is happening. She doesn’t want him to. He wants to keep the camera on at all times. She doesn’t want him to. She wants to call a demonologist, he doesn’t want her to.

Thirty-five minutes into the film, you wish the demon would come out and eat them, already -- if just to shut them up. Every once in awhile, Katie and Micah hear a thump and a low-frequency hum, which isn’t scary. It might be scary if there were something interesting to distract us, such as other characters or a subplot. But all we get essentially is these two characters and their house.

When Micah in frustration addresses the unseen demon, “Hey, we haven’t had anything interesting happen in awhile,” we can’t help but agree with him.

Featherston and Sloat do a fine job of making their relationship believable, and their conversations seem true to life. We just don’t want to hear the same ideas repeated so many times without any frights to enliven them. And when something does happen -- they find a photograph -- it is only unintentionally funny. The demon hasn’t just been stalking her, it turns out to be a bit of a perv.

A man named Oren Peli wrote and directed the film, but you wouldn’t know that from watching it. Neither his name nor anyone else’s appears in the credits. That is because there are no credits, another devilishly clever ploy from the marketing department.

Those guys are great. Maybe they should be the ones making the movie.

Not enough lift

Was Amelia Earhart really this dull? My review of "Amelia" is here:
http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=341:amelia&catid=74:movie-reviews

Your patience will be rewarded

For years, we’ve witnessed a never-ending stream of movies about fathers learning to bond with their sons or, just as frequently, surrogate fathers bonding with surrogate sons.

It can be maddening. But every once in awhile, a picture comes along that gets it right.

The (mostly) Australian film “The Boys Are Back” takes awhile to come into its own, but it eventually blossoms into a heartfelt and moving example of the genre.

Joe is an English sportswriter living in Australia, a single father raising a 6-year-old boy by himself. The fact that his beloved wife is dead is made clear in the opening scenes, rendering pointless the next 10 minutes of will-she-die-or-won’t-she flashbacks.

Joe is apparently the worst father in the world (he is also possibly the worst sportswriter, though the film doesn’t seem inclined to agree). He is a laissez faire parent, he has no rules and not boundaries and he apologizes for everything -- even things that are not his fault. Fortunately, he receives occasional parenting advice from a hallucination of his late wife.

This device is hackneyed and shameless, but somehow it works.

“Somehow it works” is the watchword of “The Boys Are Back,” but the film’s quality isn’t really that random. The movie succeeds because of fine acting all around and the sensitive direction of Scott Hicks.

As Joe, Owen may not be brilliant the entire time, but he seems to grow into the role as the film goes along. He shows genuine love for his son, and just as important, he acts as if he believes in the terrible decisions he is making.

Emma Booth also stands out as the quietly hopeful (and conveniently available) mother of a classmate of the son, and George MacKay also makes waves as an older son who lives in England. But the whole movies hangs on the slender shoulders of Nicholas McAnulty, who plays 6-year-old Artie. His performance is so unforced, so natural and b
believable that we have to remind ourselves that he is acting.

Hicks, the director, has made one good movie (“Shine”) and a host of lesser efforts (“No Reservations,” “Snow Falling on Cedars” and the Richmond-filmed “Hearts in Atlantis”). “The Boys Are Back” falls on the more positive side of the ledger. He gives the story an unhurried sense of momentum; the scenes are just the length they need to be and they are all necessary to the plot, aside from the flashback at the beginning.

Alan Cubitt’s script suffers from the occasional howler (“So, what is it you want?” “Something I can’t have”) and is not overburdened by subtlety. Still, all movies hinge on their screenplays, and this one’s script eventually works its magic on the audience.

Hankies will not be needed. But by the end, “The Boys Are Back” will have you entranced.

Just for the hyphenate

Not to be persnickety, but shouldn't the title "Law Abiding Citizen" have a hyphen in it? You can read my review, including that tidbit, here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=340:law-abiding-citizen&catid=74:movie-reviews

Couples...Retreat!

Think of it as a warning. My review of "Couples Retreat" can be found here:

http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=336:couples-retreat&catid=74:movie-reviews

Shining brightly, for a while

It’s a pity. “Bright Star” is such an entrancing and exquisitely crafted movie, yet it drags so noticeably toward the end that you walk away from it only wishing that it had been shorter.

Like a bright star, the film shines like a supernova before it burns out too soon, collapses on itself and leaves us with a cinematic black hole.

OK, that’s overstating it. It’s still a good movie. But by the end, it is no longer a great movie.

What we get too much of is the death of poet John Keats. This story of his great love and muse, Fanny Brawne, must by necessity end with his early death. This isn’t a surprise: We know from English class that Keats died young. All the Romantic poets did, except Worsdworth, who should have.

Keats is played by Ben Whishaw and Fanny by Abbie Cornish, and it is to the film’s considerable benefit that it concentrates mainly on Abbie. As shown here, she is the one with the spark of life, she is the one who is flirtatious and funny and interesting, she is the one whose emotions spring from things that affect her. Keats, on the other hand, is just morose and moody and, you know, poety.

Cornish, an Australian actress little known on these shores (she was in the disappointing “Stop-Loss) is a revelation as Fanny. Intentionally made to look plain, she plays her as a frothy, good-time girl, in an early 19th century sort of way. She loves to dance and she loves parties, her seeming insubstantiality heightened by her interest in fashion.

But beneath this exterior gloss lies real depth of feeling, as Cornish makes clear in her carefully nurtured performance. She is smart and quick-witted in a time when intelligence and wit were not necessarily desired in women. And her fashions do look fairly stunning.

It is clear what Keats sees in her, but less obvious is what she sees in him. In this picture, he is a drip, given to prolonged periods of inactivity while waiting for inspiration to strike. When she first meets him, his poetry isn’t even all that good -- a situation that is resolved when she becomes his muse, and he matures.

We can assume that she also sees in him a certain attractiveness. Whishaw (he starred in “Perfume” and was Sebastian in the theatrical version of “Brideshead Revisited”) is darkly handsome as the doomed poet. But he’s kind of dull.

Writer-director Jane Campion specializes in movies about strong, multifaceted women -- her best films include “The Piano,” “An Angel at My Table” and “Sweetie.” Fannie Brawne fits in nicely with those characters, which is why we can’t help but wish Fanny would fall for Keats’ strong and personable best friend, Charles Armitage Brown, played by Paul Schneider (the brother in “Lars and the Real Girl”).

Understandably, however, Campion feels compelled to adhere to what actually happened.

To this end, she quotes with good effect from Keats’ letters to Fanny (her letters to him have been lost), and even from a few of his poems. The poems do show his brilliance, and they are less of a drag on the story than you might think.

But other parts of the film are. A great Romantic poet deserves a great romantic movie, and “Bright Star” fits the bill. One just wishes the last act -- the prolonged dying act -- were cut in half.

'Silence' is golden

“Lorna’s Silence” is the story of a woman who falls for her husband.

He’s a junkie and a thief, and she is part of a plot to have him murdered. But he’s a generally good person, if needy, and when he tries to kick heroin, she experiences something she has apparently never felt before -- sympathy.

“Lorna’s Silence” is the story of a cold, calculating and ultimately selfish woman who falls for her husband and learns to think about someone other than herself.

It’s an inhuman story into which creeps a little humanity. And that’s what gives it its charm and its power.

Arta Dobroshi stars as Lorna, an Albanian working scams in Belgium. She is married to the junkie Claudy (Jeremie Renier), who has been paid to marry her so she can obtain Belgian citizenship. The marriage is a sham; they sleep in separate rooms and she can’t even work up the energy to tolerate him. Her sole interest is money -- the first few scenes are all monetary transactions -- which she hopes to use to open a modest snack bar with her Albanian lover. It’s a banal dream, considering the circumstances, and that is the point.

With her newly acquired citizenship, Lorna plans to marry a Russian so that he, too, can become Belgian. For this service, he will pay her enough money to open the snack bar. But first she has to get rid of the other husband. If he doesn’t die of an accidental overdose, her unsavory associates will help him along with one.

Brothers Jean-Pierre and Luc Dardenne direct from their own screenplay, and they take their directorial cues from their heroine’s moods. At the beginning, they direct with ice water in their veins -- they keep an emotional distance from the story as Lorna keeps a distance from the other characters. But as she warms, so do they; the film moves from inorganic to organic. Even the setting slides from generic urban sprawl to the outdoors.

Their work, both on paper and behind the camera, is notable for its subtlety and restraint. The script, which won the best screenplay award at the Cannes Film Festival, does us the favor of refraining from explanations; it trusts us to be able to figure out what is happening. In a bold move, one that pays off handsomely, the most striking action in the film takes place off-screen and is never directly referred to.

Their work is so fine, we can almost forgive them the de rigueur use of a hand-held camera. Almost.

But the real find here is Dobroshi. The Kosovo-born actress was previously unknown in this country, but she is marvelous in the role -- you couldn’t make the film without her. She plays Lorna with a deadened soul, but you can see the flicker of hope in her eyes, the seed of humanity that takes root within her. Although her performance is strong throughout the film, she is at her best when Lorna is changing. She is quietly stunning in a scene with a couple of cops, but maybe even better in the scene with her husband where she finally realizes what it means to be needed.

She makes this bitter tale sing.

The best movie ever about roller derby

Roller derby has rules? Who knew?

“Whip It” is a coming of age story set against the decidedly unusual backdrop of the great tacky sport of roller derby. What a pleasant surprise it is -- frankly, it comes as something of a shock -- to find that the movie is this entertaining.

Drew Barrymore makes a notably solid debut as a director -- it turns out she was paying attention all those years. And equally impressive is the strong performance by Ellen Page, who shows that “Juno” (and the little-seen “Hard Candy”) was no fluke.

Page stars as Bliss, a high school student dreaming of leaving her small town, the amusingly named Bodeen, Texas. Her mother (Marcia Gay Harden, excellent in the role) wants her to compete in the same beauty pageant the mother won as a teen, but Bliss has other interests.

She is attracted to the lights, the sounds and the pseudo-legitimacy of roller derby. On a lark, she decides to try out for a team in Austin. Even though the waiflike Page is smaller than petite, Bliss is picked for the team.

Quickly, the plot heads out into three all-too-routine directions -- the film’s major flaw is that it is formulaic. The most important thread involves Bliss’ breaking away from the influence of her parents, including Daniel Stern as her likable but passive father. The second thread is about Bliss falling in first love with a sweet musician, Landon Pigg. And the third part is the competition, the roller derbies themselves. Bliss’ team, the Hurl Scouts, are perennial losers until she joins them, and soon they are in contention for a title.

OK, you probably won’t care about who wins the roller derby contests, but they’re enjoyable enough to watch if we care about the characters. And we do, courtesy of the winning performance by Page and, to a lesser extent, work from Barrymore, Kristen Wiig and Juliette Lewis as a rival player.

As a director, Barrymore keeps things peppy and full of life. She avoids the common first-time-director trap of calling attention to her work behind the camera, but she does suffer from a couple of minor missteps. A food fight feels a little staged, and a scene in which Bliss looks blissfully (so to speak) at her lover is so false it almost overshadows the inventive underwater love scene that precedes it.

Writer Shauna Cross based the screenplay on her own book, which she based on her own experiences as a roller girl. Her familiarity with the sport and its practitioners comes through, or at least her familiarity with the rules, and she has crafted believable characters who say witty things.

“Whip It” may make the case for grrrl power a bit too emphatically at times for some tastes, but it’s mostly a lot of fun. If I could think of an appropriate phrase taken from the world of roller derby, I’d use it here, but I can’t.

Hurrah for zombies!

So now we have a shiny new sub-genre, the zombie horror-based comedy.

First there was “Shaun of the Dead.” Now it is joined by “Zombieland.” In the world of shiny new sub-genres, two is a trend.

As funny as “Shaun of the Dead” is, “Zombieland is at least as good. The two films perfectly demonstrate the difference between English and American senses of humor. “Shaun of the Dead” is quiet and dry, drawing its laughs from its restraint. “Zombieland” is in your face and physical, reveling in irony and crudity. But it’s funny crude, not crude crude.

Zombies have taken over the world, killing nearly everyone and turning the planet into a zombie wasteland (although Garland, Texas, we are told, always looked like that).

Our hero from Garland, Jesse Eisenberg, suspects he may be the last human alive. He is a wimp, with numerous phobias and Irritable Bowel Syndrome. Perversely, his failings have helped keep him alive -- he has no close family and friends to feed on him, and his default mode of fear makes him extra cautious at all times.

Naturally, there are a few other survivors -- otherwise we wouldn’t have much of a movie. Our unnamed hero (none of the characters have names) meets his opposite in Woody Harrelson. Harrelson plays a tough, hard-living, macho redneck, the sort who would find Eisenberg’s sniveling character an annoyance and an irritant. Nevertheless, with their survival on the line, the two join forces, at least for a while.

Eventually, they meet two sisters, played by Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin. The younger girl (Breslin) has been bitten by a zombie and needs to be put down. But this is a comedy, and Breslin currently has the best career in the cast, so it is easy to guess that she will be around for most of the film.

The potential concern in a movie such as “Zombieland” is that it is just one joke, or at least just one note, and that will tire of it long before it ends. But writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick, and director Ruben Fleischer keep the laughs coming throughout the picture. Part of their secret is that much of the humor is based on the characters’ reactions to one another (the rest tends to be about the funny way zombies go splat -- it’s not quite gross-out humor, but it’s not for the faint of heart). And part of it is that although the story is simple, it is always interesting. We like the characters an we hope they succeed in their efforts to survive.

And although zombie movies have been done to death, so to speak, “Zombieland” manages still to be inventive. It makes good use of its locations -- the amusement-park climax is particularly satisfying -- and it never forgets that it is a comedy, not a horror film.

When you think about it, the concept of zombies has always been kind of funny. It just took “Shaun of the Dead” and “Zombieland” to figure that out.

Zellwegeria

“My One and Only” tells the story of a life so interesting that they ought to make a movie about it.

Just not this one.

“My One and Only” is not quite a comedy, not quite a drama and not quite a movie. It is mostly just an idea, and it meanders and ambles around until it occasionally hits on it. But mostly it just meanders. And ambles.

This is the intermittently true story of Anne Devereaux, who comes home one day in the 1950s to find her no-good bandleader husband in bed with his lead singer. She piles her two teenage sons -- one by that husband, one by another -- into a new Cadillac Eldorado and sets off on a journey to find a husband who can support her and them. This trip takes them through a number of towns (mostly played by Baltimore) and introduces them to a number of men of varying degrees of inappropriateness.

All the while, the no-good bandleader husband lurks. That’s what he does, he lurks. He’s a little sleazy, this guy.

Renee Zellweger stars as Anne, and it has to be said that she is looking a little weird. Weirder than usual. Her performance is mannered and is marred by an inconsistent Southern accent, but either she improves or we become more used to her as the film rolls along. Although we never accept her belabored characterization, we do (perhaps begrudgingly) warm to the theatricality of the performance.

At first, her sons seem like appendages to the story, even though it is being narrated by the more bookish of the two, George, played by Logan Lerman of “3:10 to Yuma.” The other son (Mark Rendall) is gay, and his effeminism is thankfully treated with affectionate humor. The two boys eventually come into their own in the picture, and the film’s big surprise concerns one of them.

This surprise, incidentally, has been revealed by practically every other critic in the country. Sigh.

Veteran British director Richard Loncraine has made such notable films as “The Missionary” and the Ian McKellen version of “Richard III” -- and he directed an episode of “Band of Brothers” -- but “My One and Only” simply gets away from him. He seems at a loss about what tone to take, and all to often winds up with no tone at all. It is as if a somnambulist made the film; the actors are particularly lethargic, waiting half a beat too long to speak, and then in a near monotone.

And what they have to say is rarely interesting. Writer Charlie Peters has made a career of scripting terrible, terrible films, from “Paternity“ and “Hot to Trot” to “Her Alibi” and “My Father, the Hero.” Actually, “My One and Only” is one of his better efforts, if only because it boasts two genuinely amusing scenes. In one, a hitchhiking adventure takes an unexpected turn in the desert; in the other, David Koechner explains the secret to keeping women happy (they get cold a lot, so bring a sweater).

There are certainly worse movies than “My One and Only” playing at the multiplex. But if you see them, you’ll remember how terrible they are. If you see “My One and Only,” you’ll have forgotten it by the time you walk out the door.

Informative

Steven Soderbergh is back with Matt Damon (and George Clooney producing) in the whimsical, surprising and sort-of true "The Informant!" Read my review at: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=305:the-informant&catid=74:movie reviews.

With the laughs "Extract"ed.

"Extract," the latest film by Mike Judge, is everything that "Office Space" is, but less. My review is at: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=302:extract&catid=74:movie-reviews.

Don't eat the brown acid

My review of "Taking Woodstock" is up and ready. You can find it at: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=300:taking-woodstock&catid=74:movie-reviews.

Soulful, but not powerful

Rock documentaries of the 35 years ago invariably had two things they do not have today: a lot of backstage scenes and drum solos.

Who says the movies haven’t changed for the better?

Empirical evidence proves that movie audiences over the years do not want either of these things. No one ever talks about how memorable are the behind-the-scenes sections of “Woodstock” or “Gimme Shelter.”
The raw footage of “Soul Power” was shot 35 years ago, leaving the filmmakers with an implicit question: Should they edit it the way they would now, or should they respect the era and make it like it would have been in 1974?

Alas, they made the wrong decision.

The first half-hour of “Soul Power” is devoted exclusively to the nuts and bolts of putting together a large music festival. We see the stage builders build the stage and the sound-and-lights guy rigging the sound and lights. We see the producer having trouble hearing his walkie talkie.
Walkie-talkie problems from 35 years ago is never the most fascinating of topics. But if you can sit through all of that, at least there is some pretty great music on the other side.

The film is a document of a 1974 music festival in Kinshasa, the capital of what was then called Zaire. The festival was apparently the first time black American music stars came en masse to Africa to play alongside African performers, and much of the film is devoted to the performers congratulating themselves on the historical moment of it all. The history seems only slightly more meaningful now than the walkie-talkie problems, but the performers were certainly feeling it at the time.

And what performers they were: James Brown is featured most prominently, and if you’ve never seen him in his prime it might be worth the price of admission alone to see his three songs. B.B. King performs “The Thrill is Gone,” a song I personally believe is impossible to hear too many times.

The Spinners turn out their smooth-as-silk synchronized dancing for “One of a Kind (Love Affair)” and Bill Withers sings a powerhouse version of “Hope She’ll Be Happier,” which is unappreciated by the African crowd that is more attuned to rhythm. Unknown to me, at least, is a spectacular funk band, The Crusaders (they later had a modest hit with the familiar “Street Life”). And Celia Cruz is, as always, an irrepressible force for salsa.

For some American audiences, the African performers will be revelatory, from the godmother of African music, Miriam Makeba, singing “The Click Song” to the complex rhythms of OK Jazz, featuring Franco, and Tabu Rey and Afrisa (though one of their dancers probably should have thought about wearing underwear).

As impressive as the music is, though, it makes up no more than half of the film. Even the festival scenes are interspersed with shots of street performers (the idea is to show a connection between grass-roots African music and American superstars) or posters of scary dictator Sese Seko Mobutu.

And the still-young Muhammad Ali gets more than his share of camera time to espouse his racial politics and crowd-pleasing egotism. Ali is part of the film because the festival was originally scheduled to be part of the festivities surrounding his boxing match with George Foreman, the Rumble in the Jungle. The fight was delayed when Foreman was injured, but the music went on as scheduled.

A brilliant documentary was made about the fight, “When We Were Kings.” “Soul Power” is meant as a companion piece to that film, but it is not in the same league. The music is great, but too much of the movie isn’t music.

Mute, inglorious bastards

Unlike a strikingly large number of other critics in this country (Hi, Richard Corliss; greetings, David Denby), I do not give away the ending of Quentin Tarantino's "Inglourious Basterds." Unbelievable. My review is here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=299:inglourious-basterds&catid=74:movie-reviews.

Post Grad, and definitely post-"The Graduate"

“Post Grad” is like “The Graduate,” without Dustin Hoffman. “Post Grad” is like “The Graduate” without Mrs. Robinson. It’s like “The Graduate” without the social commentary.

Without Simon & Garfunkel. Without “plastics.”

It’s like “The Graduate,” without “The Graduate.”

At the filmmakers were ambitious. They didn’t just stick with one movie. It’s also like “Little Miss Sunshine.”

The difference is that “The Graduate” and “Little Miss Sunshine” were funny. And, you know, good.

A comedy presumably aimed at teenage girls, “Post Grad” tells the story of Ryden Malby, who graduates from a tiny college (we only see a couple of dozen students at graduation) and is ready to take on the world. So convinced is she that she will be hired as an editor at a big publishing house that she rents an expensive loft in downtown L.A. But, obviously, she doesn’t get the job. Perhaps the publishers see, as we do if we look quickly enough, that her diploma says she has a bachelor of science in English. Bachelor of science. I wouldn’t hire her, either.

A couple of months later, she still doesn’t have a job, even though “I thought I’d be doing something amazing by now.” It’s kind of hard to sympathize with someone who thinks in those terms.

While not looking for jobs, Ryden spends her time ignoring the guy who loves her and occasionally pursuing the studly middle-aged Brazilian who lives across the street, except when she (and we) forget about him. And in a completely unrelated part of the film, she hangs out with her quirky family.

Oh, are they quirky! They’re professionally quirky. They’re strenuously quirky. And they’re played by such quirky actors as Michael Keaton (in the Greg Kinnear role, although he’s mostly riffing on the character he played in “Night Shift”), Jane Lynch (in the Toni Collette role) and Carol Burnett in a ghastly wig (in the Alan Arkin role).

The part of Ryden falls to the moderately appealing Alexis Bledel, who has spectacular blue eyes and a lot of freckles and spectacular blue eyes. You could spend the whole movie looking at those blue eyes, and we do, partly because director Vicky Jenson spends so much time focusing on them and partly because there is nothing else to watch.

Bledel talks quickly and animatedly to get across the idea that Ryden has spunk. Lots and lots of spunk. And in the immortal words of Lou Grant, I hate spunk.

Kelly Fremon’s humorless script is utterly formulaic and is not above looking to other movies for its jokes. And those are the best of the mediocre jokes. Too many of the worst ones involve Michael Keaton stepping in cat poop.

Leaving the theater, we kind of know how he feels.

'Time-Travel' -- honeyed and romantic

Sure, it's sappy. But it's a good kind of sappy. My review of "The Time-Traveler's Wife" is here (sorry, don't know why the link isn't working. You'll have to cut and paste the address):

http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=297:time-travelers-wife&catid=74movie-reviews.

'O'Horten' -- Shhhh!

“O’Horten” is a quiet film about a quiet man, filmed with quiet humor. In its entire length, there is not one single big explosion.

Ordinarily, that is to be desired. But this Norwegian export proves, for most of its length, that it is possible to be too quiet.

Bard Owe stars as a newly retired train engineer who discovers, at age 67, that it is never too late to start living. And that moment is uplifting and moving and sweet -- when it finally comes. It just takes too long to get there; or rather, too little happens before it does.

Owe stars as Odd Horten. Odd may be a perfectly normal Norwegian name, but its English meaning is not entirely inappropriate for him. He lives a life almost unnoticed, leaving his modest flat only to go out for a quiet (of course) beer, to visit his invalid mother and to drive a train from Bergen to Oslo, and then from Oslo back to Bergen.

His mother, we learn, was in her youth a ski jumper. But Odd would never do anything that dangerous, that out of the ordinary. He is a simple man with simple tastes; his chief (and possibly only) joy is his pipe.

As the film begins, Odd is about to retire. Shy and self-effacing, he is not looking forward to the inevitable retirement party (“Odd does not enjoy the limelight,” says the host), with its tributes and its humorously bizarre, train-related rituals.

Most of the rest of the movie shows Odd continuing not to enjoy life, but becoming increasingly aware that things are happening around him -- an unexpected arrest, a couple of young lovers finding what they think is privacy, a man trying to dodge a dinner party with his wife.

It is a chance encounter with a diplomat played by Espen Skjonberg that changes him, and it is certainly welcome when it comes. Too much of the rest of the film centers on such breathless questions as whether or not he will sell his boat. Not why he is thinking of selling it, just whether he will.

Owe is fine as Odd, a man in whom still waters run…still. He can’t be captivating, though, because there is so little of him. We have the sense that Odd isn’t a man who sits and thinks, he’s just a man who sits.

There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. It’s just a little quiet.

'District 9' -- aliens, gore and apartheid

If it’s true that there are only six basic stories to tell, “District 9” manages to combine its familiar elements in marvelously inventive ways.

What starts out as a straightforward analogy of apartheid turns into an alien horror interspecies buddy-film action-picture mockumentary, with a Transformer.

It’s been weeks since we’ve had one of those.

A giant spaceship hovers inert and ominous over Johannesburg. Its inhabitants, more than a million of them, are malnourished and listless; they are taken down to earth and housed in a temporary camp. This temporary camp becomes a permanent slum larger than most big cities, where the aliens live in crime-ridden squalor.

The giant corporation that runs South Africa (the film is set in 2010) decides that everyone would be happier -- the humans, at least -- if the shrimplike aliens were moved to an even worse place a couple of hundred miles away to do it.

The person they put in charge of the evictions, Wikus is the wrong man for the job. He’s weak, he’s ineffectual and he has the sometimes cruel hubris assumed by people who are certain they are of a superior race. His evictions lead to harassment, bullying and more killings than are strictly necessary.

But as played by the strikingly effective newcomer Sharlto Copley, Wikus changes. The more he learns about the humans’ treatment of the shrimp-like aliens (they’re derogatorily called “prawns”), the more sympathy he has for them. The evil corporation is especially interested in the prawns’ powerful weapons, which can only be fired by prawns.

The quasi-governmental corporation turns out to be the second largest producer of arms in the world, and is willing to go to great and greatly evil lengths to master the alien technology.

Director and co-writer Neil Blomkamp has given a great deal of thought to his premise -- it’s based on a six-minute short he made a few years ago -- and his filmmaking technique. The documentary style, featuring interviews with experts, each with his own agenda, is a hugely efficient way to present complicated exposition. Most of Blomkamp’s previous work has been in visual effects, which helps make the computer-generated imagery in this film shine, from the misty, looming spaceship to the precise, fluid movement of the aliens (except when they jump).

The film isn’t always easy to watch; it has a super-high ick factor. It has blood galore, and gore, and that thing, first seen in “Private Ryan,” where exploding bodies turn to red splashes of plasma. Even though it is well done, the violence becomes repetitive, and because of this the film goes on about 10 minutes too long.

But that’s a minor quibble. With “District 9,“ even though you’ve seen it all before, you’ve never seen anything like it.

G.I. Joke

Brendan Fraser won. Dennis Quaid lost.

Fraser, the amiable goofball star of such films as “The Mummy” and “Gods and Monsters,” has a small role in “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” and chose not to receive credit for it. Quaid, the generally more serious star of “The Rookie” and “The Big Easy,” has a slightly larger role in “G.I. Joe,” but his name is in the credits.

Poor Quaid. The man had a reputable career.

The same will never be said of Channing Tatum, the film’s actual star. Tatum is hilariously inept as a sensitive tough guy who speaks in a monotone without inflection or punctuation.

In one of those jaw-droopingly awful performances that are just so deliciously entertaining to watch, Tatum stars as Duke, whose name, you will notice, is not G.I. Joe. The term “G.I. Joe” initially referred to the ideal of the U.S. soldier, an ordinary grunt plugging away in the infantry with the strength and courage expected of an American fighting man.

That was the meaning in the 1945 William Wellman movie “The Story of G.I. Joe,” starring Burgess Meredith (as reporter Ernie Pyle) and Robert Mitchum. But the new “G.I. Joe” movie isn’t based on the old “G.I. Joe” movie, it’s based on a television cartoon series that was created to sell toys that took their name from the old “G.I. Joe” movie.

Throw in the explicit (and almost certainly failed) desire to become a franchise picture, the worst script of the year so far and the gloriously incompetent direction of Stephen Sommers and you wind up with a film that could only appeal to 6-year-old boys playing with their action-figure toys, but with a plot, violence and language sufficient for a well-earned PG-13 rating.

In this film, Duke and his friend Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) aren’t grunts, they’re in Special Ops. And then they are recruited to a team of Extra Special Ops, an international group of soldiers inexplicably called G.I. Joes. They’re the people who keep the world safe for democracy, or at least blockbuster movies, by fighting evil megalomaniacs bent on world domination.

Enter a wealthy arms merchant played by Christopher Eccleston, who plans to destroy many of the world’s biggest cities while cackling such things as, “When these missiles detonate, the world will turn to the most powerful man on the planet!”

His equally evil villainess, Sienna Miller, turns out to have been Duke’s former fiancee. What are the odds? She joined the dark side after blaming Duke for the death of her brother, Joseph Gordon-Leavtt. We know this because we see it in two or three flashbacks. “G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” is not afraid to ask “How many flashbacks can you put in one movie?” even when the answer is “Too many.”

One of these flashbacks shows the sparsely attended military funeral for the brother, held in the rain, at which Duke arrives late, on a motorcycle, in black leather and dark glasses (in the rain!) and keeps his distance as the graveside service ends.

“G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra” is not afraid to ask “How many clichés can you put in one movie?” Heck, it’s not even afraid to ask “How many clichés can you put in one scene.” Why is it that leather-wearing motorcycle guys always come late to their best friend’s funerals? Do they have something more important to do? Do they say, “My best friend is getting buried and I really want to be there, but first I think I’ll stop in for a cheeseburger?”

Speaking of clichés, the torturously drawn-out and poorly edited climax is shamelessly stolen from aspects of the first three “Star Wars” movies. As bad as the film is, it isn’t completely, scorchingly horrendous until this climax. But it goes on so long, it officially renders the film unwatchable.

It’s so bad, there may not even be a sequel.

"Julie & Julia" -- Sweet confection

It's about food, it stars Meryl Streep and Amy Adams -- of course it's good! Read my review of "Julie & Julia" here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?=com_content&view=article&id=294:julie-a-julia&catid=74:movie-reviews

"Asperger!" "Gesundheit!"

Pleasant but minor, “Adam” is one of those movies that treat fairly serious ailments as if they were cute.

The ailment in this case is Asperger’s Syndrome, a high-functioning form of Autism (Autism, you will recall, was little known to the public until the release of “Rainman,” which also made the ailment seem cute, though with more success).

Hugh Dancy stars as Adam, who, as a result of his condition, does not pick up on social cues. He rarely knows what to say, or when to stop talking, and his conversations tend to be exclusively about astronomy, about which he knows a great deal (he is an Asperger’s savant, like Rainman was an autistic savant -- it makes it easier for the audience to like them).

His new neighbor upstairs -- their apartments are huge by Manhattan standards -- is elementary teacher Beth, played by Rose Byrne. Beth finds Adam good looking and sweet and good looking, but a little odd, and she begins to fall for him for no reason we can see except perhaps his good looks.

There is no particular chemistry between the characters, but we are certainly not opposed to their falling in love. Actually, we are more concerned with Beth’s happiness than Adam’s, which is fine, except the movie isn’t called “Beth.”

Also in the cast are familiar faces Mark Linn-Baker (briefly) as an attorney, Amy Irving as Beth’s mother and most notably Peter Gallagher as Beth’s investment-banker father. He is actually the most interesting character throughout most of the film, until the last reel or so, when he starts to act out of character.

Actually, that is when the whole movie gets a little fuzzy, and it never entirely regains its momentum. Writer-director Max Mayer obviously knows where he wants to take the story, he just doesn’t know how to get it there. When lost, he leans heavily on the music, with such lyrics as “When I find you, I’ll find me.” Needless to say, such songs should be leaned on lightly, at best.

People with Asperger’s can fall in a large range of functionality, and Adam is generally on the low end of that. He doesn’t understand irony, he doesn’t understand jokes, and he says things like “I can see that you’re upset, but I don’t know what to do.” On the other hand he does have a friend, a sagacious, older black man played by Frankie Faison. Morgan Freeman must have been busy on a different movie that week.

Food (Inc.) for thought

You might want to think about eating before you see “Food, Inc.” You sure aren’t going to want to eat after you see it.

If an advocacy documentary is judged by how much it makes you agree with its point of view, “Food, Inc.” is one of the best documentaries in years. The film wants to scare you into action, and it sure scares you.

The subject is food, and how it is increasingly unhealthy for us. It doesn’t just cite statistics, it takes us inside chicken coops where genetically manipulated, oversized chickens lie dead on the floor, and (via hidden camera) slaughterhouses that are, the film persuasively argues, petri dishes for e. coli.

And then it goes a step farther and introduces us to a nice woman from Colorado who has become a food-safety advocate. She makes the rounds in Washington, talking to sympathetic Congressmen and showing them a picture of her cute little son. He ate a tainted hamburger and was dead within days, she explains.

“Food, Inc.” is the “The Jungle” of the 21^st century, with the same kind of impact. It will have you looking at your food in a whole new light, examining its labels (and wondering what has been left out) and quite possibly avoiding the products of certain companies.

A lot of this film’s revelations have already come out in the news and other reviews, but one that has not been widely broadcast is perhaps the most shocking one. The giant chemical company Monsanto makes the weed killer Roundup, and also engineered a strain of soy bean that is resistant to Roundup -- it can be safely planted where Roundup is sprayed. But because Monsanto created the gene, it owns the intellectual property rights to the seeds. This means that farmers who try to save their seeds from one year to the next -- as they have been doing since mankind has been farming -- find themselves sued by Monsanto for intellectual property theft. Fighting the company in the courts has been prohibitively expensive for most farmers who have tried it.

The right of a company to claim a gene as its property -- in essence, to get a patent on a life form -- was decided by the Supreme Court. The justice who wrote the decision, Clarence Thomas, was for two years a corporate attorney for Monsanto, in its pesticide and agriculture division.

The movie’s central thesis is that the advent of fast food has resulted in unprecedented consolidation in the agriculture business, turning it into more of an industry than ever before. To feed America and the world’s fast food habit, giant agricultural corporations have been engineering ways to make food products bigger, faster, fattier, cheaper. As a result of these efficiencies, the quality of food has declined and the likelihood of disease has increased.

And through government subsidies, corn has become less expensive to sell than to grow. Because it is so cheap, corn is being used for everything from ketchup and peanut butter (in the form of high fructose corn syrup) to feed for cows and pigs -- and now even farm-raised fish are being taught to eat corn.

“Food, Inc.” is one shock after another, presented in what seems to be a fair and evenhanded way. It is almost entirely one-sided, though, although it is through no fault of the filmmakers. Offered the chance to respond to the charges made against them, one large company after another declined to be interviewed for the movie.

Considering the fascinating and horrifying case that is made against them, you can’t really blame them.

Apatow Re-re-re-re-re-re-re-redux

Judd Apatow is back...yet again. "Funny People" is his eighth film in a year and a half. My review of it is here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=287:funny-people&catid74:movie-reviews

I hate you, "I Love You, Beth Cooper"

“I Love You, Beth Cooper” may be the funniest book I have ever read.

The movie? Not so much.

The author, Larry Doyle, also wrote the screenplay. So that isn’t the problem.

It’s amazing how important to a movie good acting and direction are.

Physical comedy is hard -- much harder than it looks. At best, it requires a sublimely talented athlete, someone who uses grace and strength to represent an absence of grace and strength -- I’m thinking a Chaplin here, or a Keaton. Peter Sellers could do it, too.

But simply running around frantically and making funny noises does not constitute physical comedy, especially when (it needn’t be said) the funny noises aren’t funny. And in “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” it isn’t just that the actors are not capable of performing the comedy, it is also that the director hasn’t got a funny bone in his body.

Not even his funny bone is a funny bone.

The director is Chris Columbus, whose last funny movie was “Mrs. Doubtfire,” which came out in 1993 -- sixteen years ago. And that was only funny because he could turn the camera on Robin Williams in drag and let him go to town. Whatever he knew about comedy he has forgotten, and especially what he knew about comic pacing. Any comedian will tell you that pacing -- timing -- is the most important element in comedy.

In “I Love You, Beth Cooper,” the pacing is off; the jokes are too slow, but performed too frantically. And in Columbus’ leaden hands, every joke is emphasized about a half-step too much.

The story itself has potential (and, as mentioned, it makes a hilarious book). Nerd high school valedictorian Dennis makes the worst valedictory speech ever, using the platform to proclaim his love for the head cheerleader Beth, who barely knows he exists. This speech sets off what is supposed to be a wild night in which Dennis and his best friend Rich, along with Beth and her two best friends, go on a riotous spree of rowdy fun.

If only it worked that way on the screen.

The exceptionally miscast Paul Rust plays Dennis, and he tries so hard to make the character seem sympathetic that he only comes off as annoying. The object of his dreams, Beth, is played by the exceptionally miscast Hayden Panettiere, who is on the TV show “Heroes” and is definitely not ready for the big screen. As lightweight an actress as she is, she is even less successful as a comedienne.

The best friend, Rich, is played by Jack T. Carpenter. He makes Rust and Panettiere seem like the Marx Brothers in comparison.

The book is great, but as a movie, “I Love You, Beth Cooper” should have had its plug pulled. If you can’t get good actors and you can’t get a good director, don’t make the movie.

Not great, but good enough

Critics are calling “The Hurt Locker” the most intense, best movie to come out of the war in Iraq. Some are calling it the best movie of the year. And they’re right.

Up to a point.

That nagging feeling you get while watching the film that something is missing eventually coalesces into an unmistakable truth: This movie has no story.

It’s strictly an episodic film; soldiers go out on a bunch of dangerous missions and we never know whether some or all of them will not return.

On the fighters’ level, war may very well be exactly like that. So “The Hurt Locker” brilliantly portrays the experience of war from the point of view of the men fighting one.

But that doesn’t make for a dramatic movie.

The extraordinary tension, which is built up so magnificently well, starts to dissipate like air out of a tire. There is no sense of progress. The narrative does not move toward anything other than the day the unit’s tour of duty is over. And that is why the climax and conclusion feel like such letdowns -- the plot does not necessarily move toward them, they just happen.

Still not convinced? Consider this: Two main characters have an important conversation at the end that is supposed to sum up their feelings about what they do. But they same conversation could have been held at the beginning of the movie or at any point in between. It explains or reveals nothing.

This is not to diminish the riveting work of director Kathryn Bigelow and writer Mark Boal. They have created a movie that succinctly re-creates the life-or-death intensity of war. They just don’t know what to do with it.

Jeremy Renner stars as Sgt. Bill James, an expert in disarming bombs. At one point he admits to having disarmed 873 bombs, a figure that impresses a colonel, who admiringly calls him a “wild man” (colonels do not come off well in this picture).

James is a wild man, true, and a maverick. But his go-it-alone antics worry Sgt. Sanborn (Anthony Mackie), who knows that a bomb squad needs to work together as a well-coordinated team if its members are going to survive, especially in a hostile land.

And in this film, Baghdad (played by Jordan) is a hostile land. What the filmmakers do best is to communicate the suspenseful insecurity felt by the soldiers when they see Iraqi residents. They don’t know who is on their side, who is just watching and who may be hiding a cell phone, ready to detonate a bomb.

Bigelow shoots the entire picture with hand-held cameras, which certainly increase the audience’s anxiety. Hand-held cameras have become a cliché over the last few years, but Bigelow’s use of them rivals the work of Paul Greengrass of “The Bourne Ultimatum,” the undisputed master of the hand-held camera.

The difference is that Greengrass knows the importance of a story. Bigelow and Boal have forgotten.

"(500) Days of Summer" -- Twisting the night away

“(500) Days of Summer” tries to answer a lot of questions about the nature of love and even about fate, but the most pertinent question is this: Is the female lead in a romantic comedy worthy of pursuit, even though she shows no discernible personality, just because she is played by Zooey Deschanel?

The answer turns out to be yes.

Deschanel stars as Summer, the sometimes obscure object of desire in this low-key but pleasant romantic comedy with a few twists. It is the twists, by and large, that make it so pleasant.

The film tells the story of the 500-day (give or take) relationship between Summer and Tom, played by Joseph Gordon-Levitt.

It’s Tom’s film all the way, told entirely from his perspective. He’s the one we come to know (Summer is a character almost entirely without a backstory), he’s the one looking for our sympathy and understanding. Summer is just the (almost overly) typical Zooey Deschanel character -- quirky, a bit aloof, but ubercute.

Although there is a general progression from the first meeting to the break-up -- we know from the start that they have broken up -- the story is told non-linearly. That is the most mundane of the twists; the others are usually more effective and interesting. First-time director Marc Webb does not hesitate to pull out every idea he has, no doubt, been saving up since film school.

Perhaps the most notable of these is a split screen during a party scene in which Tom’s expectations of what will happen are shown on one side, and what really happens on the other. Almost as good is a fantasy dance sequence that suddenly breaks out when Tom is happy. It is not the sequence itself that is so intriguing (it’s been done before, a lot), but the subtle way Webb connects the sequence to the reason for its being. Tom is happy because of Summer, who, though it is never mentioned, always wears blue. In the dance sequence, everyone dancing also wears blue.

Film geeks will also appreciate the parodies of “The Red Balloon,” “Persona” and “The Seventh Seal” that Tom goes to see when he is unhappy. A title card showing which day of the 500 we are on is also nice, because a tree in the corner changes its foliage depending on the mood of the scene. The overused trick of filming the characters as if they were in a documentary, however, is less successful.

It’s a good thing the twists are included, because the film’s flaws would otherwise be more noticeable. Writers Scott Neustadter and Michael H. Weber have their share of sitcom moments, from Tom’s precocious younger sister dispensing sage advice to his two standard-issue friends: one wacky, the other a humorous loser. Summer, in the meantime, does not appear to have any friends at all.

Gordon-Levitt, just a teen on “Third Rock from the Sun,” has matured into a fine actor. Here he plays a awkward and likable guy, trying his best to navigate the treacherous shoals of love. Deschanel just plays Deschanel.

Her last few films have been misfires, but in this case, that’s enough.

Harry Potter and the Mysteriously Disappearing Forehead Scar

Here's what I have to say about "Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince":

http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=255:harry-potter&catid=74:movie-reviews.

Bruno -- it's "Borat"-lite

My review of "Bruno" is less crude than the movie, and funnier. At least, it's funnier than some parts of the movie. You can find it here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=253:bruno&catid=74:movie-reviews.

Public Enemies

Looking for my review of "Public Enemies"? You can find it here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=252:public-enemies&catid=74:movie-reviews

"Ice Age 3" -- thawed

More than $100 million to make and market it, and a good 500 man-years’ worth of effort, and all they could come up with was “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.”

Thoroughly mediocre and mildly entertaining at best, this second sequel to “Ice Age” shows what happens when filmmakers stop thinking in terms of making movies and begin thinking about making franchises. They can throw all the money and effort they want into a movie, and it still comes down to the script.

The script to “Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs” plays out like a first draft. The story isn’t focused, the jokes aren’t sharp and the plot skims through the path of least resistance. The one part that does seem polished is the atypically well-conceived and well-executed climax. It is both relatively thrilling and somewhat funny, and the movie may have been an artistic success had only the entire thing been made with this kind of care and effort.

We’re talking about the first climax here. The utterly unnecessary second climax is just lame, and in fact it detracts from our memories of the first. It also points out just one of the ways that this movie (like so many others) simply does not know how or when to end.

Once again, we follow the exploits of Manny the Mammoth. Manny -- his voice is by Ray Romano, who is clearly just picking up a paycheck -- is now a family mammoth. His mate, Ellie (Queen Latifah), is pregnant, and Manny is doing fatherly things, like panicking unhumorously when he believes Ellie is about to give birth and building a playground for the kid.

When Diego the Sabretooth Tiger (Denis Leary) makes an unsuccessful bid to escape from the movie, Sid the Sloth (John Leguizamo -- no wonder he isn’t funny!) feels left out and decides to adopt three eggs he finds in an ice cave. They turn out to be dinosaur eggs, which may be chronologically inexact but at least the babies are awfully cute.

Our heroes wind up going to The Lost World, where dinosaurs still cavort under the icy crust of Earth. There they meet the fearless Buck, a crusty Cockney pirate weasel with the voice of Simon Pegg.

We can see the thought process going on here. Kids love dinosaurs. Kids love pirates. Let’s throw them together in a story about the Ice Age.

And that’s the difference between a franchise and a movie.

That squirrel trying to get the acorn is back this time, too, adding nothing to the story (again) and in fact acting completely independently of the story (again). This time, he fights and falls for a comely flying squirrel to musical variations on the Lou Rawls hit “You’ll Never Find Another Love Like Mine.” Kids won’t get the joke; their parents will get it but they won’t find it funny.

Which is the problem with the film. Too much of it just doesn’t try hard enough.

Keeping Michael at Bay

Is the "Transformers" sequel as bad as you think it is?

Nope. Worse.

You can read my review here: http://boomerlifemagazine.com/ver2/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=251:transformers-revenge-of-the-fallen&catid=74:movie-reviews.