Not a Review: See How They Run

I used to write about movies here a lot; when I saw more movies. This is not going to be a return to that form in any way.

But I did recently (last weekend) see the newish movie See How They Run, a mostly-British seriocomic detective story set in the early 1950s and centering on the Agatha Christie play The Mousetrap.

And I recommend it, especially to bookish people and those with writer- or editor-brain; it has some nice structural stuff (he said, being vague) and pays off its set-ups very nicely. Parts of the ending had me laughing out loud when I realized what was happening (he said, still trying to be vague).

Without giving anything away: it has a bunch of awesome Chekhov's Guns, and it pulls them down and fires them with magnificent pinpoint accuracy. Lots and lots of fun.

Full of good performances, too.

Movie Log: Catching Up Once Again

I haven't seen a movie in over a month -- at this point, I'm paying Netflix a substantial sum so I can hold onto a copy of The Descendants in case of emergency -- and I'm still a dozen movies behind. So it must be time for another speed round. Here's what I can recall about the movies I've seen in the last six months or so:

We saw Bad Teacher and Horrible Bosses within a week, and don't they just sound like they deserve to be reviewed together? Of course they do. And they're very similar movies: medium-dumb comedies with a lot of earthy humor and just enough titillation to ensure an R-rating. Horrible Bosses is the better of the two, with an ensemble of good actors all having fun and selling the premise -- Strangers on a Train, only they're already friends and want to be rid of their respective supervisors -- pretty well. Bad Teacher is louder and even less subtle, relying primarily on Cameron Diaz's willingness to be unlikable in a horribly wonderful way, and the title is the pitch: she's a really, really rotten teacher, and a worse human being, but (as all protagonists must in modern movies) she Comes To Learn Better by the last reel.

The fourth "Pirates of the Caribbean" movie, On Stranger Tides, has very little of the excellent Tim Powers novel that supplied its title visible. (Probably the most Powersian thing is that an important mermaid is named Serena -- yes, that's how much of the novel survived.) It's better than the flabby second and third movies, with some good scenery-chewing work from Ian McShayne, Penelope Cruz, and (of course) Johnny Depp, and decent action-movie set-piece scenes. But the Lego video game is much, much better.

I nominated Paul for the Hugo last year. It's not that good, honestly, but it was pleasant, and it was an honest-to-God SF movie that I actually saw. And it's not like I have so much respect for the Dramatic Presentation Hugo in the first place, so I'd be happy if it went to pleasant junky entertainment rather than to equally junky entertainment that fans believe is Important and Meaningful. Seth Rogen doing fart jokes in voice-over is what should win that Hugo, in my mind.

Crazy, Stupid, Love is a good movie that hasn't stuck much in my mind; it had a complicated structure (that didn't seem complicated while watching -- a good sign), a passel of fine actors doing mostly subtle work (the big brawl scene being the major counter-example), and stories that were both about and appealed to grownups. There should be more movies like that.

Friends With Benefits was yet another one of those they-start-fucking, he-wants-to-have-a-relationship, she-balks-and-acts-fratboyish comedies that are popping up like weeds. (The best, so far, is the one with Anne Hathaway, Love and Other Drugs, because the girls actually has a good reason there, the plot is specific rather than generic, and the sex scenes are actually sexy.) FWB was a perfectly cromulent date movie, particularly for the younger folks, but nothing more than that.

The Muppets, on the other hand, was totally wonderful and fun, in that inimitable Muppet manner. It has excellent cameos, a great sense of humor about itself and everything else, and could have been perfect if it weren't quite so Mary Sue-ish and the main Muppet character so colorless.

Harry Potter 8 -- don't expect me to type out the full, far-too-long title -- finally ended the series, with lots of action and Mr. Potter acting just as dull and mildly stupid and thoughtless as in the books (and as like far too many real teenagers, I suppose). It's a thing, and that thing is now finally over. Kids 5-10 years older than my sons will be obsessing about these movies for the rest of their lives, which kinda sucks for them, but they're gonna obsess about something, right?

Midnight in Paris is another movie I nominated for the Hugo, and wanted to win (as much as I wanted anything to win that award). I haven't kept up with Woody Allen's movies the way I'd have liked -- some day I need to sit down and run through all of them in order; that would be a great project -- but he's always a smart, thoughtful filmmaker, and stories about stories and art tend to bring out his better tendencies. And Owen Wilson is just fun to watch -- I don't know what it is about him and that marble-mouthed, loose-limbed slacker sensibility, but he just makes the movies he's in more enjoyable just by being there.

50/50 is a Message Movie about a Serious Thing, and also a comedy, which made for some tonal whiplash. It's somewhat above the level of a Lifetime Movie of the Week, but not so far that you couldn't see it from there.



Three and Out was a fun little British movie about a London underground driver who accidentally kills two people with his train (both suicides), and then is told that, if he hits a third within a month, he hits the subway-driver lottery, and is pensioned off with a nice package to assuage his presumed broken spirit. So he sets off in search of that third person to kill...and the movie gets more conventional and less black-comic than I was hoping, since he finds that candidate in Colm Meaney, who wants one last piss-up weekend before he jumps in front of the cow-catcher. I'm afraid this movie has Life Lessons as well, but it's pretty good despite that.

Movie Log: The Illusionist, Win Win, Thor

These three movies have nothing to do with each other, except that I've seen all of them recently. But Three Things Make a Post.

Firstly: There's a particular kind of movie -- often those made in countries other than my own, and with aspirations to Higher Art -- of which my wife will say, after watching for half-an-hour or so, "This is slow." It's not necessarily a bad thing, since a slow movie can still be a good one. But it does mean that this movie is not trying particularly hard to maintain one's attention.


The Illusionist is an exceptionally slow movie; one might feel like wandering out of it, absent-mindedly, several times during its length, and it doesn't really go anywhere, either. It is exceptionally pleasant to look at, I have to admit, but that may not be sufficient for many people. It's also the kind of animated movie -- like The Triplets of Belleville, the previous movie made by many of the same team -- that attempts to maximize its geographic reach by avoiding dialogue, and particularly meaningful dialogue, as much as humanly possible, and by setting its action in an essentially secondary world that doesn't closely match any time or place of our own world. So this is both a story that one understands purely by looking at it, and a story that is in no hurry to go anywhere or show us anything.

Somewhere in France -- probably Paris, says this jaded American -- a minor magician whose sign proclaims his name to be Tatischeff is seeing his career ebb lower and lower with the advent of the first wave of rock & roll musicians. Having lost his gig there, he heads off to a city I could tell was meant to be Edinburgh, though the movie doesn't explicitly say so. (The Illusionist doesn't explicitly say anything.) His gigs there, and elsewhere in the vicinity, don't go much better -- except, perhaps, for on on a remote island, where the daughter of the owner (Alice) becomes fascinated by him.

Tati heads back to the mainland after his show, and Alice follows, eventually living with him in a run-down flat in a hotel full of odd, and mostly declining, performers. Alice thinks Tati can do real magic, and gets him to buy her new shoes, a dress, and other things, though his act is playing to tiny houses.  Minor events pile up, lovingly, until the movie ends, equally in a minor key. It's all very subdued and quiet, to the point of completely stopping in its tracks several times in its mere eighty minutes.

This is a movie to watch if one is in a mood for contemplation and thoughtful slight amusement; anyone looking for even the slightest bit of action in their films should cast their eyes elsewhere. I do have to admit that I wasn't myself in quite the proper frame of mind for it, so it may have hidden depths that I didn't see -- but, if so, those depths are very well hidden.

Secondly: Paul Giamatti is the great sad sack of our time; if he's at the center of a movie, you can be sure that he's a poor schmo weighed down by everything in his life, with very little chance of getting free or finding real happiness. And yet he ends up in movies that are basically comedies a lot of the time, which is mildly puzzling.

Win Win is one such movie: Giamatti is Mike Flaherty, a slowly failing small-town lawyer in suburban New Jersey (New Providence, to be precise) whose second job coaching the local high school wrestling team brings him about as much joy and equally as much success (i.e.: none) as his law practice. He can't afford to keep up the building he uses as an office, and his bills aren't getting paid as quickly as they should be; he desperately needs another source of income. (For some reason the movie never quite states -- despite being made this century, and not the last one -- Mike's wife Jackie, played by Amy Ryan, not only does not work, but the possibility of her doing any sort of work never even comes up, not even at the very end, when it clearly should have been on the table.)

He finds such a source when one of his court-appointed clients -- the aging and increasingly dementia-damaged Leo Poplar (Burt Young) -- needs a guardian, and Mike steps up, ostensibly to help Leo stay in his home when the state would instead put him into a nursing home. Since Mike is played by Giamatti, the very next scene shows Mike putting Leo in that very same nursing home.

Complication arises in the form of Leo's grandson Kyle (Alex Shaffer), who ran away from his mother, Leo's estranged daughter, and is found by Mike on Leo's doorstep. Kyle turns out to be mostly a good thing for Mike's life, though; he moves into the Flaherty family basement and quickly becomes a star on the high school wresting team Mike coaches. But soon his mother, Cindy (Melanie Lynskey) arrives, wanting her piece of Leo's money, and Mike's lies are no longer as easy or defensible. Mike, though, in best Giamatti-character fashion, finds a way to come through, working his essential mensch-ness and hangdog willingness to give in.

Win Win is a comedy in the sense that it's funny intermittently (on purpose), and in the Shakespearean sense that things turn out OK for the main characters in the end. But it's not a genre comedy, and its essential purpose is not to make its audience laugh. And it raises more questions than it really wants to answer, or is able to answer. But it has a collection of good performances, and it's a solid example of How We Live Now -- even if I did wish, afterward, that it had a little more of the focus (and the burning center of Peter Dinklage, an actor who commands attention at all times, and always deserves it) of director Thomas McCarthy's first movie, The Station Agent.

Thirdly: Thor is a big summer blockbuster based on a Marvel comic -- hey, I'm not complaining; I've read comics (and reviewed them!) for ages myself -- so it won't do to place much critical weight on it; this is not a movie that can stand the strain. Anyone who expected more from director Kenneth Branagh -- who once was one of the favorites of The Wife and I, back in the halcyon days of Henry V and Peter's Friends and the sublime Much Ado About Nothing -- will be disappointed; Branagh's Shakespearean ear does keep the Asgardian cod-Stan Lee dialogue flowing smoothly, making sense, and away from the silliness that it wants to fall into, but he otherwise tells this story straight, making the usual Hollywood adjustments to turn a slick comic-booky story into a slick big-movie story. (Both are equally obvious, but with different requirements.)

However, seeing this at home, on a TV that is not 3D and gigantic, in a room that does not have a fancy soundsystem and a method for excluding all light, did emphasize Thor's great drawbacks: it's much too dark too much of the time, with action that can't really be discerned on anything less than a really big, hypermodern screen, and it's alternately too loud (when things are exploding, screaming, smashing, or otherwise being sound-effected) and too quiet (when anyone is talking, usually one second after an explosion, etc.). So I spent my time both squinting and running the volume up and down, which did not make for an immersive, deeply entertaining viewing experience.

Chris Hemsworth, as Thor, is an appealing slab of beefcake, with an engaging smile. And his supposed love interest -- though this is so boyish a movie that it barely halts to hint at the possibility that a boy looking for his lost hammer might possibly want to talk with a girl -- is the always professional Natalie Portman, equally professional here, though I'm beginning to wish that she'd do something with her nice-girl, china-doll demeanor rather than just sitting there, professionally and demurely, all the time. There are a pile of other people in this movie, though most of them aren't given much to do -- the Warriors Three are less dashing and grim and voluminous than they should be, Lady Sif a pale fourth wheel to them, Stellan Skarsgard almost thrown away as Portman's mentor who gets to be the token guy-who-knows-Norse-mythology, and Anthony Hopkins brings his best paycheck-collecting demeanor as a mostly comatose Odin -- with the only exception being Tom Hiddleston's scenery-chewing Loki. (Kat Dennings, as the third speaking role in Portman's scientific crew, is amusing but intersects the plot precisely never.)

So Thor chugs along, just slightly too slow for its own good, from one set-piece fight to another, and -- like every other comic-book movie -- labors under the delusion that what we really want to see is the hero struggle to get his costume/powers/magic plot token, so that he can get to the point where he should be at the beginning of the movie. (Hollywood: no more origin movies! Ever! I don't even want to see a flashback scene. Tell a story of your hero doing something instead.) It does exactly what it was designed to do, which is exactly the same thing as every other movie in this genre.

Movie Log: Rapid-Fire Catch-Up Edition

I've seen a number of movies over the past couple of months -- not as much as I saw at the same time last year, possibly because I'm frenzied at work, or because my other blog (Editorial Explanations) is taking too much of my time and mental energy, or just because my time management skills have gone all to hell -- and neglected to inflict my opinions about them on you folks. But perhaps I can fix that now, and perhaps babbling about minor movies will help take my mind off the hurricane bearing down on me and the twenty million people closest to me.

So, in no particular order:

I saw Rango longer ago than I care to say, and it's not a movie that should be contemplated at leisure after much deep thought. Johnny Depp is the voice of a lizard who is not named Rango -- I don't think we actually ever learn what his real name is, or if he even really had one -- but who takes that name for reasons that the movie belated realizes it should have explained to us, once it's almost too late. Rango is a talking-animal movie set in the desert Southwest, and it looks wonderful, as long as you're fond of beiges, greys, and browns. The lizard who is not Rango, following some well-paid hack's theory of story-making, gets rudely ripped from his cushy but spiritually unfulfilling existence, wanders into the requisite Crooked Town, and bounces off things for a while before meeting the Spirit of the West and learning his True Destiny as a Hero. (He's gets the girl -- well, the female lizard -- along the way as well, because a movie like this can't have any surprises in it.) It hits all of the beats that the suits at whatever this studio this is required, and will reliably entertain anyone who has seen more than five American animated movies.

Love and Other Drugs is the first of several major "she just wants to have sex; he wants a Real Relationship" movies that have been flung at the American public over the past few months; I've got one more immediately below this, and the Mia Kunis-Justin Timberlake incarnation is still slouching through movie theaters at this very moment. It's possibly the best of those movies, partly because it has Anne Hathaway in it, partly because it has a real plot and a real reason for her not to want that Real Relationship (she's very ill with the modern version of Ali McGraw Disease, and wants no part of your pity, no sir!). It starts off shaky, though, with Jake Gyllenhaal careening around as a glad-handing drug salesman in the go-go '90s -- betraying this story's origins in the memoirs of an actual glad-handing drug salesman in the go-go '90s -- and only settles down somewhat once Hathaway fixes her fiery eyes on the camera. It goes pretty much where you expect it to go -- this is an American movie, and true love will win out over all, or it won't get funded -- but it's pleasant to look at all the way. Speaking of pleasant to look at, both Gyllenhaal and Hathaway spend an extensive amount of time naked or partially so, and if there's someone who doesn't like to look at either of those bodies sweaty and thrusting, I feel deeply sorry for you; they're fine, impressive specimens.

No Strings Attached is somewhat of a roadshow version of Love and Other Drugs; Natalie Portman is as good an actress as Anne Hathaway (and Ashton Kutcher, astonishingly to me, can stand up to her in every scene), but she's vastly less physical here, and unwilling to be naked, physically or emotionally. The story here is much more obvious -- clearly coming from a screenwriting workshop rather than the mess of an actual life -- with pat parental conflicts (with the charming Kevin Kline as Kutcher's father), and work-life drama, and other Movie of the Week stuff. Portman and Kutcher are both good and engaging, though, so watching them wander around each other for nearly two hours is plenty of fun.

The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader is about as exciting and adventurous as the first two movies -- The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe and Prince Caspian -- which is to say, not nearly as much so as anyone would like. (Unless one is a timid and easily frightened Christian child.) Most of what was dull and unexceptional about the first two movies is repeated here, though there are no tedious scenes of armies gathering, and the Christian proselytizing is almost entirely absent. In fact, if you happened to find yourself back in the last summer, and wanted to spend a few hours indoors, looking at vaguely adventurous happenings on a very large screen with good sound, Dawn Treader would not at all have been a bad choice. At home on video, though, what virtues it does have are very muted and unexceptional; this is a movie that means well but doesn't really produce.

Cedar Rapids is a funny fish-out-of-water movie that doesn't really aim any higher than that, and that's just fine. Ed Helms is the fish in this particular case, a small-town insurance salesman sent to the slightly larger city (Cedar Rapids, Iowa) for the big convention of his peers, where he quickly runs into his first African-American (Isiah Witlock, Jr.), his first loose cannon (John C. Reilly) and, though he doesn't quite realize it, his second loose woman (Anne Heche). He rooms with two of them and sleeps with the third, and, in best naive-guy fashion, agonizes and feels guilty about all of the parts of that equation. Whitlock is possibly even more square than Helms -- and a movie like this with someone like Whitlock at the center would have been even more interesting -- Heche is smart and sexy in a businesslike way, and Reilly is his usual big-comedy raucous persona. The secondary characters (including Sigourney Weaver, Rob Corddry, and Stephen Root) also work well -- it's an overdetermined movie, but one with a good heart and a strong sense for what it should be doing at any particular moment. It's also one of the sweeter of the recent slew of raunchy comedies; it does have a soft spot for the traditional Midwestern virtues of hard work, sobriety, honesty, and determination.


A Summer in Genoa pretends to be a movie about Colin Firth, but it isn't, at all. Firth plays the father of the real center of the movie, two daughters -- teenaged Kelly (Willa Holland) and ten-ish Mary (Perla Haney-Jardine) -- whose mother we see die in a car crash in the excruciatingly extended opening scene. That scene sets the tone for the whole movie -- it runs on too long, it's shot with a shaky hand-held camera that will give us headaches, and it doesn't quite come to any conclusion even at its overextended length. The movie is about those two girls, and how they cope with their mother's death -- and, particularly, with their guilt about that death. Firth's Joe -- and if there ever was an actor less able to play a standard American named "Joe," it's Firth -- decides to accept an offer to teach in Genoa, Italy, for a year, to get the girls away from the Chicago scene of their mother's death, and they all go off in early June to have a summer together there. But the girls don't want to leave everything they know, and Firth seems to be teaching the minute he gets into town, so the girls are left to themselves. Kelly discovers boys, and Mary, often left behind and, the camera movements and music cues insist, in danger of getting lost, sinks deeper into herself and her guilt. The movie mopes along for far too long, with those too-extended scenes and bouncy camera shots becoming more and more tedious every minute, until, finally, the family comes back together so that the movie can finally, thankfully, end. I saw it because The Wife loves Firth, but I think even she loves him slightly less now than she did before this movie.

I haven't seen the Dudley Moore version of Arthur in at least twenty-five years, if I ever did. (Memory is fuzzy on that point.) But I'm willing to bet that it's better in nearly every way than the recent Russell Brand version of Arthur, down to the fact that the new movie neglects to have the romantic lead on the poster, giving our alcoholic boy-man instead a choice of nanny (the stern but loving Helen Mirren, trying not to be compared to John Geilgud) or shrew (the game Jennifer Garner, as the girl this Arthur is supposed to marry, or forfeit all his millions). This one is cartoonish at every turn -- pleasant and aggressively unoffensive, but never as exciting or interesting as it should be. When you have a movie about a rich, self-absorbed, and childish drunk, you have to let him be less than perfectly likable at least once in your movie, but the makers of this Arthur would not agree; Brand remains pixieish and brightly smiling throughout, except during the laughable "everyone is moving at high speed around me to indicate that I Am Sad" scene. Oh, and I should mention that Arthur's true love -- the one left off the poster -- is played gamely by Greta Gerwig, who nearly makes us believe that she can see something good in Brand's Arthur. This is another agreeable way to waste time, if necessary, but nothing more than that.

Movie Log: Hot Shots!

Hey, remember when my two sons were crazy about watching "spoofs"? Well, it's back -- this evening, we saw -- after several weeks of mild nagging from the elder boy, Thing 1 -- the minor piece of cheese Hot Shots!, which I'd managed to otherwise avoid over the past twenty years.

(There are lots and lots of movies that "everybody's seen" that I never have -- even Top Gun, the movie this one spoofs, is something I only half-saw because it was on the TV at my grandmother-in-law's house fifteen or so years ago during some family function. That side of the family used to be -- they're getting better -- part of the great American tradition of leaving the TV on at all times, to keep from missing anything.)

Hot Shots! comes from the era when Zucker-Abrahams-Zucker was fracturing to run off in their own directions, but they were still all basically making the same kind of movie, and doing a decent job of it. (This one is from Abrahams.) It's a grab-bag of random gags, mostly based on Top Gun, but with Superman and Dances With Wolves and plenty of others tossed in here and there. It's all boy humor -- slapstick, sight gags, and the like -- and my boys mostly liked it, though they oddly had trouble following the plot for a while. (The plot's not complicated in the least; I think they just weren't paying any attention to the dialogue.)

It is indeed a dumb movie, but it's an enjoyable dumb movie, and so, if you have rambunctious boys around the ages of ten and thirteen, I can definitely recommend it. (They won't be sure what to do or think during the making-fun-of-9 1/2 Weeks sex scene, but that's OK: neither will you, since they're also in the room.) 

Movie Log: Enter the Dragon

I probably haven't seen Enter the Dragon since I was about thirteen, so it was an interesting exercise to watch it the other weekend with my own thirteen-year-old older son -- my wife and Thing 2 were off for a weekend of camping, so it was a full-bore Boys' Day for us. (Starting with some time in the city, to have lunch at Schnippers, pop around for a while, and see the Blue Man Group downtown.)

It's still a good martial arts movie, and Bruce Lee's work is amazing -- his emoting, though, does get to be too much pretty regularly -- but it shows its '70s-ness very deeply now, particularly in the ends of the two sidekicks/sub-heroes. (Even if the main hero is Asian, the black guy is going to come up with the short end of the stick, every time.)

My son was slightly annoyed at how long the movie took to get going, and so was I, actually -- first there's the inevitable Bruce-Lee-gets-a-mission-from-his-sensei scene, and then there are a series of long flashbacks, most of them triggered during the character's various boat rides across Hong Kong harbor. (It's far too parallel, and far too obvious -- Thing 1 and I were making fun of it by the second time, and the third flashback made us laugh out loud.)

The movie picks up once they all get to the island stronghold of the evil mastermind, luckily -- though the promise of an actual martial arts contest, with competitions and advancement and everything, is dashed on the rocks. We do see Lee, the ubiquitous John Saxon, and Jim Kelly fight a number of times, both in the pseudo-competition, and in less-structured moments, which is good -- that's the whole point of the movie. And, of course, Lee's big fight at the end with the Big Bad is good -- another one of those early-'70s fights in mirror rooms (like the similar end of Man With the Golden Gun), because I guess mirrors were in the water at the time -- even if the approaching cavalry keeps the ending from being really dramatic and tense.

I've come to find that I prefer my martial-arts movies to be less realistic than this: I want lots of wire-fu, with ancient old men who have unstoppable karate and lots of whooshing noises as the fighters fly past each other. But Enter the Dragon is one of the great highlights of the other kind of martial-arts movie, and it's always heartbreaking to remember what happened to Lee.

Movie Log: How Do You Know?

How do you know when a movie is lousy? Well, one strong sign is if there's a succession of scenes in which two characters emote at each other in a way that seems to be related to the plot and almost makes sense, if you listen very hard, but finally falls apart.

How Do You Know has scenes like that, in which Paul Rudd -- playing the usual nice, befuddled Paul Rudd character, who had some kind of unspecified executive position in an unspecified family business until a loudly unspecified scandal leads to his being shown the door in a vague and unspecified manner -- cringes and whines while Jack Nicholson, overacting even above his usual career highs as Rudd's father, bites off pieces of the scenery and blathers very loudly in terribly Nicholsonian lines that don't actually explain anything, make any sense, or follow logically from the things Rudd says. [1] Every time How Do You Know heads into a Rudd-Nicholson scene, the audience knows that expensive backgrounds will be extensively masticated, but that the story of the movie will be slightly less clear for every one of Nicholson's lines.

Of course, Rudd and Nicholson aren't the center of this movie -- and thank god for that. This is actually Reese Witherspoon's story: she's what seems to be the single most popular and talented player on the US women's national softball team, practically singlehandedly responsible for their recent Olympic gold medal. But she's also getting older, so the new coach cuts her in a way no coach would ever cut his most popular and talented player, and this movie's world is such that the single most popular and talented softball player in the country has no possible career options after being cut. There aren't, oh, let me just pull this out of thin air, several dozen schools that have already made contact with her to talk about her becoming a coach after she retires from playing, because that wouldn't lead to poor spunky Reese Witherspoon having the maximum opportunities to show how determined and spunky she can be, even when horribly downtrodden.

So Rudd is troubled and whiny about it, and Witherspoon is troubled but eternally upbeat about it, spouting a series of sports cliches to anyone who will stand still close to her long enough to listen. They they must Meet Cute and help each other through their respective troubles, yes?

Well, not immediately -- that's only a minor thread here, in a movie that wanders around giving work to a lot of good actors that almost all try to drag this to being a movie about them. The one exception -- and the only still point in this whirling dervish of a film -- is Owen Wilson, preternaturally laid-back as a star major league pitcher who Witherspoon falls into bed with early on and then into a relationship with, more or less. Wilson is the only one in the movie who's just there, inhabiting his character and living in this world, without special pleading or histrionics. We the audience know that we shouldn't be rooting for Witherspoon to end up with him -- we know that Rudd is a bigger movie star this year, and his troubles are too obviously a mirror of hers -- but we just want to see more of Wilson and less of Rudd, so we find ourselves happy when that shock of blond hair wanders into the shot again and again.

How Do You Know is neither a romantic comedy nor a serious drama, though it tries semi-seriously to be the former and wishes that it had the gravitas for the latter. It is a mess, though it was made with great piles of money by a lot of very successful, very rich people, starting with James L. Brooks, who both wrote and directed this. One has to assume that he was having a bad day when he did so. How do I know? I've seen his movie.


[1] By the way, only one of the very many ways in which How Do You Know badly bobbles itself is in its treatment of that corporate scandal. Rudd appears to have been the company CFO, since the dialogue implies that he certified financial statements -- sent him by Nicholson's office -- that were not actually true. And, because of this, he's being investigated by what probably is the SEC in a lackadaisical way that sees him have to lawyer up -- with a very specific, very expensive lawyer, for no stated reason -- but does not have those investigators talk to him, or anyone else in the company, or indeed appear in this movie at all. Plus, the company immediately cuts him loose with no severance, but still seems to think it has a way to hush him up. Oh, and Nicholson admits to breaking an entirely different federal law -- FCPA, look it up -- in what is apparently supposed to be an explanation but fails, horribly, like so much else in this movie. For the final indignity, untrained, not-actually-doing-anything Rudd is supposedly the entire finance department of this unnamed company, since we never hear or see anyone else beside Nicholson, the presumed CEO.

Movie Log: Megamind

There's nothing at all wrong with Megamind, but there's not as much right with it as there could have been. For a while, it flirts with being a demented remake of the first Christopher Reeve Superman movie -- or maybe just appropriates a few ideas from that film in the way all animated movies now shamelessly pander to the assumed tastes of the parents of the rugrats watching it [1] -- but it always settles back into the groove of Kid-Approved Plot #4: Misunderstood Loner Makes Good.

Megamind (voice of Will Ferrell, sounding like he's actually playing a character rather than doing the Will Ferrell thing, and that's good) has the funny version of Superman's origin: rocketed to Earth from a doomed planet, but landed in a prison. His nemesis, Metroman (voice of Brad Pitt, and in the movie much less than you'd expect from the ads), has the good-guy version of that origin, and so they fight, starting when they both go to the same little red schoolhouse as tots. The Lois Lane figure is Roxanne Ritchie (voice of Tina Fey, not really sounding like herself, either), who's feisty enough that you almost don't notice that her entire role in the movie is to be the girl that strong men will fight over.

The bulk of the movie, though, takes place after the Megamind-Metroman conflict has been permanently resolved, leaving Megamind at loose ends. And, since this is a movie for kids, his devotion to evil is purely based in liking to wear capes with dark colors and an appreciation for the stoner anthems of my childhood. To be blunt, he's not actually evil in any sense, and his nefarious schemes were all entirely devoted to killing Metroman -- not to stealing anything, or conquering the world, or any more traditionally evil doings.

And we all know that the ending has to have Megamind turning into a good guy and saving everyone, right? Even supposedly edgy and goofy animated movies these days have to be massively renormative in the end, and Megamind is no exception; everything turns out as nice as nice can be. It is pretty funny along the way, though -- even Megamind's random mispronunciations, which I was expecting to become horrible very quickly, stay few and funny, and even become an important plot point -- which is about what should be expected from a movie like this.  


[1] This movie has one particularly egregious example: all of the music in it is at least twenty years old, the songs we parents remember from our own youths.

Movie Log: Wild Target

The Wife and I have a running joke that there are only twenty working actors in the UK at any one time. It's not precisely true -- the real number is probably closer to thirty -- but we do seem to see a lot of small British movies, and we keep tripping over the same actors again and again. Remembering their names, though, can sometimes be more tricky.

So, as we were watching it, we were thinking of Wild Target as a movie in which the rockstar from Love, Actually was a hit man, trying to kill The Young Victoria, while the red-headed kid from Harry Potter sort-of became his apprentice, and Arthur Dent was hired by Rupert Everett (we instantly remember him; dunno why) to kill the first hit man. Oh, and Judith Starkadder was the first hit man's very supportive mother.

As I've noted before, I am precisely the audience for comedies about hit men -- as previously proved by You Kill Me, The Matador, and Grosse Pointe Blank -- so I wanted to see Wild Target as soon as I knew it existed. And it does what a comedy about hit men has to: it immediately gets the audience on the side of Victor Maynard (Bill Nighy) by immersing us in his world and seeing it through his eyes and his voice. So we want him to continue to succeed in his chosen career -- but that's a problem, since we also see young con artist Rose (Emily Blunt) finagle a complicated double-swap of a counterfeit Rembrandt to a not-quite-crimelord (Everett), and we'd prefer to see her succeed as well, or at least survive.

Unfortunately, they can't both succeed equally, since Everett's character hires Maynard to kill Rose, which he sets off to do in his usual professional manner. But her life is so chaotic and full of unexpected events that he can't quite do it, and, through the sort of unlikely series of events that movies like this are full of, Victor ends up on the run with both Rose and a young man named Tony (Rupert Grint), with another hit man named Dixon (Martin Freeman) after him and Rose. It all ends pretty much the way it should, and goes a lot of enjoyable places along the way.

Wild Target is fun and witty and entertaining, though there's something just slightly out-of-focus about it, particularly in Rose's characterization. (She takes risks reflexively, all of the time, just to do dangerous things, and there's no explanation or excuse or payoff for that -- she also asks every man she meets "how much do you weight," which equally leads nowhere.) But, for those of us who love comedies about hit men, it's a gem, and one easy to overlook.

Movie Log: Harry Potter #7.1

The full title, of course, is Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 1, since this is the movie that adapts the first half of the dullest and dreariest of the series of books by J.K. Rowling. (Not the longest book, nor the book with the most events, but I'm sure Warner Brothers is now kicking themselves and wishing they'd started splitting these back at Azkaban to make twice as much money.)

I haven't changed my opinion of the book -- which is, by far, the worst of the series, with a sag in the middle like a couch that Hagrid just sat on -- and the movie is as deeply faithful to the book in the way that this series of movies always has been...and that means, of course, that it's full of dull, dreary camping sequences, in which Harry, Ron, and Hermoine mope at each other for what feels like the full eight months the book covers.

(Somewhere in the middle of that, my younger son quietly stated that he wasn't having any fun and went up to his room to play. When your movie isn't more entertaining than playing alone with dominoes, you've got a serious problem.)

The plot makes as much sense here as it did in the book: which is to say, it's still the quintessentially English story about a boy who definitely isn't too smart for his station, but is indomitable enough to muddle through because his heart is true. Rowling has no interest in a resistance movement against her magical dictator, nor does she care about what's happening to the UK under Voldemort (much less the rest of the world, which nearly doesn't exist in the Harry Potter world), or even in depicting Harry Potter as any kind of leader or competent hero.

No, instead Deathly Hallows 1 is the story of three friends (who hate each other) hiding out in the woods instead of trying to find the seven magical Plot Coupons Horcruxes, which they need (along with three pounds fifty in coins) to send off to Rowling for an ending. And this movie doesn't even get them to the point where they actually start to accomplish their quest, so it's entirely ominous beginning and dreary middle. This is the movie you have to get through to get Deathly Hallows 2, and you'd have to be a stone Potter fan -- the kind unwilling to admit anything connected to Rowling is less than fabulous -- to strongly enjoy it as a movie in its own right.

Movie Log: The King's Speech

I'm sure someone, somewhere, has begun a review of this movie by imitating stuttering in print. "I'd like to t-t-t-t-talk ab-b-b-b-b-bout The King's S-s-s-s-speech," perhaps. So, since that slot has already been filled, I don't need to be That Guy, which is a relief. (Because That Guy is a jerk, and not funny, either.)

The King's Speech is a very high-minded, serious, life-affirming movie, of the kind that the English film industry loves to make -- probably because the American public, and the public of many other countries, including their own, eats it up every time -- and it will be deeply familiar and utterly unsurprising to anyone who has seen more than a dozen movies in his life. (Let along being even vaguely familiar with WWII, or the recent history of the British monarchy.)

It's all very nice, full of plummy accents, understated posh surroundings, stiff upper lips, and predictable uplift. Movies like this have been winning piles of Oscar awards for eight or nine decades, and there's no sign that the Academy of 2035 will buck that trend, either. The King's Speech is a movie to make adults feel smart and superior and cultured without having to read subtitles, learn anything substantial, or actually consider any unpleasant things existing in the world, now or ever.

Colin Firth plays the younger brother of a bad father whom he nevertheless utterly loves, in the way that only tortured-in-public-school British aristocrats can love their families. (Which is to say: completely undemonstratively.) And he's going to be King as soon as that bad father dies and as soon as his equally-bad-in-other-ways older brother decides to abdicate in favor of marrying an American divorcee. Of course, Firth's Prince Bertie is both utterly devoted to his duty and scared to death of it, which makes him perfect for audience-identification purposes: speaking in public is the #1 fear, so a story about a really rich and powerful guy with that fear (and for a good reason!) is a guaranteed hit.

And so on and on; Geoffrey Rush is the obligatory oddball guru, whose unusual methods dependably deliver the results that the stuffed-shirt "establishment" types can't. And Helena Bonham Carter is given very little to do as the future Queen Mum, but she does it as stiff-upper-lippy as possible. In fact, the story of The King's Speech is so tailor-made for a big feel-good movie that one has to wonder why it wasn't made twenty or thirty years ago, probably by Merchant-Ivory. But it did eventually become the movie that was destined to exist, and now destiny won't rest until we all see it. It's a perfectly pleasant two hours of exposed celluloid, so you might as well get it over with, if you haven't already.

Movie Log: Tales from Earthsea

The family saw this movie a couple of weeks ago, and I see -- given that I have an empty post with this title sitting as a "draft" -- that I neglected to write anything about it when it was still fresh in my mind. And Tales from Earthsea is just mediocre enough that it slithers out of the memory, given half a chance.

It's not a bad movie, though it doesn't live up to any of its heritage -- it's from Studio Ghibli, being the first movie directed by Hayao Miyazaki's son Goro, and of course it's based on Ursula K. Le Guin's excellent novels -- and it doesn't either adapt the original stories well or make a new story of its own to tell. Instead, it mixes and matches elements from three or four of the books in ways that don't really fit together, but still stays with a linear plot so that the word "tales" in the title doesn't make sense.

It looks wonderful, in that usual Ghibli way, and Goro Miyazaki has learned the lesson of stillness from his father -- Tales from Earthsea has a camera that lingers in a way never seen in American animation, or much in any movies these days. But I found myself wishing that I had been watching it in Japanese rather than English, because the story I would have made up while watching it to explain all of the various elements would certainly have held together better, and been a better adaptation of Le Guin, than the actual movie that emerged.

There are probably at least three blogs dedicated entirely to anatomizing exactly what's wrong with this movie; go see them for further details. On the positive side, I will say that it's vastly better than the live-action Earthsea miniseries, and equally better than most of the animated movies I've seen over the last decade. It's not bad at all, as I said. But a Studio Ghibli movie of Le Guin should have been something magnificent, and it isn't, at all. It's a lumpy pudding made from random pieces of Le Guin's Earthsea, and a viewer has to be careful not to crack a tooth on it.

Movie Log: Morning Glory

Several times while The Wife and I were watching Morning Glory, the Blu-Ray quietly skipped ahead a chapter or three, jumping over twenty minutes or so at a clip. Sneakily, it repeatedly tried to do that by jumping between scenes that both featured the young heroine (Rachel McAdams) having a meeting with her boss (Jeff Goldblum). When the movie itself tries to tell you, "You don't really want to watch this," it's not a good sign. Possibly worse, we didn't realize the first jump had happened until the second one hit -- and didn't really miss the twenty minutes in which the movie laboriously explained how McAdams went from a minor producer on a minor early-morning cable show out in the wilds of New Jersey to running the big morning show for what's supposed to be one of the Big Three networks in New York.

Morning Glory for a long time looks like it's going to become yet another story in which a hard-working young person learns to quit and slack off for the greater glory of her soul, but ends up slightly less cliched than that in the end. McAdams is painfully perky, and has the unrealistic klutziness that modern movies use to telegraph that she is the female lead in a romantic comedy, but she does work hard, and she does mean well. Her job, basically, is to drag that morning TV show away from the bottom of the ratings, and her great hope of doing so was to team gruff, grizzled veteran newsman Harrison Ford (playing it by finding the least likable aspects of Dan Rather, Mike Wallace, and Andy Rooney) with the existing female host of the show, Diane Keaton.

And, in a movie made two or more decades ago, the relationship between Keaton and Ford would be the center of the movie -- it should be the center of the movie. But it's not, because the big face at the middle of any movie poster has to be young and perky, so McAdams is shoehorned into every scene. Oddly, her own relationship -- with the nearly colorless Patrick Wilson, there primarily to be the hunky guy who she clearly deserves and so doesn't need to have any characterization of his own -- is mostly filled in through implication and allusion, as if the movie couldn't be bothered to actually have a romance in its romantic comedy.

So Morning Glory is shiny and obvious and constructed entirely according to formula: it's a Hollywood romantic comedy; we all expected that. Keaton and Ford are good in it -- though they could have been much better if the movie were allowed to be about them, and not the random young klutz wandering through their lives. And -- even though I kept a beady eye on the time-code on my disc player throughout the second hour of the movie -- I kept getting the feeling that I was still missing scenes, and this time they were scenes that didn't make it into the movie at all. In any case, Morning Glory won't thrill anyone but died-in-the-wool Harrison Ford fans, but it won't offend anyone but the most Milquetoast of Dubuque grandmothers, either.

Movie Log: The Cannonball Run

As I mentioned in passing the other day, my sons and I watched The Cannonball Run last weekend, as part of their general film education. (You folks can show your kids whatever movies you want; I'm going to focus on the stuff I saw as a kid -- it clearly didn't hurt me, did it?)

We're right in the middle of the Hal Needham/Burt Reynolds cluster of car-chase comedies here, after two Smokey and the Bandit movies and Hooper, but before Stroker Ace and its own sequel. And we're also right at the point where the '70s turned into the '80s, with the gleeful anarchy of the National Lampoon years (Animal House, Meatballs, etc.) starting to turn into the crisp-and-slick sheen of the Reagan years. It's not a bad movie, but it's a silly little movie, and if it were a racehorse it would have been sired by It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World out of Smokey.

If you don't know the set-up -- in which case, I hope you're as young as my sons, or spent most of your life other than in North America -- it's pretty simple: there was a real, essentially "outlaw" cross-country race in the '70s, from the New York area to a Los Angeles suburb, and this movie is the officially-licensed comedy version of those races. A bunch of odd teams -- Dean Martin and Sammy Davis, Jr. dressed up as priests in a Ferrari, Mel Tillis and Terry Bradshaw (and a half-ton of Budweiser) in a painted-over NASCAR vehicle, two guys on a motorcycle, Jamie Farr as a random Arab sheik, and so on -- compete for glory and a big check, by driving as quickly as possible across the country. Our hero is Burt, of course, and his sidekick is Dom DeLuise. They're driving an ambulance, so, for reasons never quite stated by obvious enough for a comedy like this, they need both a doctor and a patient. The former is Jack Elam, in one of his late bug-eyed comedy roles, and the latter is Farrah Fawcett, in a tight shirt and no bra.

A series of gags and car-chase scenes follow, though very little that could be described as a single, coherent plot. But who wanted that, anyway? Eventually, everyone makes it to California and the end of the race. Again, this is a silly comedy, very much of its time -- but that was a fun, easy-going, big-smile kind of time in America, and there's nothing at all wrong with that.

Movie Log: Dinner for Schmucks

Dinner for Schmucks isn't really a good movie in any standard way -- though it does end up being reasonably funny in the last half-hour, to salvage the experience of watching it somewhat -- but it is an excellent object lesson in how to take a good movie and dumb it down in every way possible. Schmucks is a remake of the French film The Dinner Party, which was elegant, smart, pared-down, and absolutely hilarious.

Where Dinner Party had a morally ambiguous man at its center, Schmucks has Paul Rudd, playing Paul Rudd, the good-natured befuddled bright-faced boy-man he always is. Where Dinner Party dove right into its central situation -- privileged folks have a monthly party, to which each of them bring an "idiot" for their secret amusement -- Schmucks has to spend a prefatory half-hour carefully signposting every element of the plot and making sure Rudd's character is up to the Hollywood standard of likability. And in every way that Dinner Party was understated and smart, Schmucks is big and stupid.

So Schmucks spends nearly an hour -- a long, tedious, obvious hour, particularly to anyone who has seen Party -- setting its trite, cliched plot into careful place, and then finally starts running downhill, as much as it can. There is nothing at all that this movie does that Party doesn't do twice as well, and there is no reason to see this movie unless you have a very low opinion of your own standards, or a masochistic taste for bad American comedy.

Movie Log: A Life Less Ordinary

This is a weird movie from just over a decade ago, mostly forgotten (and justifiably so). It's one of the answers to the question "So what did Danny Boyle do in between Trainspotting and Slumdog Millionaire?" (Another answer to that question is Millions, a much better movie I saw a few years ago.)

But A Life Less Ordinary was the movie Boyle did right after Trainspotting, a buddy-heist drama meets romantic comedy in which a befuddled Ewan McGregor kidnaps and then supposedly romances a steely Cameron Diaz. (And both of them look ridiculously young now, since the movie is from 1997.) And I haven't gotten into the weird part yet: the whole McGregor-Diaz plot is run by two angels (the great Holly Hunter, whose voice makes any movie she's in a joy, and the almost as great Delroy Lindo) who have been exiled to earth in penance for a recent huge slump in the numbers of marriages breaking up under their care. (Yes, these are true love angels.) The movie begins in Heaven -- the usual white-on-white treatment, though I saw at least one woman with a skirt I wouldn't expect would pass Upstairs approval -- with Hunter and Lindo being bawled out by their boss and kicked downstairs for the requisite One Last Chance.

And, since True Love is often forged by shared danger and privation, these two angels maneuver McGregor, a recently-fired janitor, into kidnapping Diaz, the spoiled daughter of the tycoon whose company just canned him. And then the angels get themselves hired as bounty hunters by Diaz's nasty father (Ian Holm), so they can increase the danger and fire up that necessary True Love.

A Life Less Ordinary isn't a bad movie: it's full of good actors doing good work, speaking lines that all make sense at the time. But it's bizarre in conception and execution and never finds the tone that will make all of its oddities seem obvious and right. Less importantly, the title has nothing at all to do with the actual plot -- neither McGregor nor Diaz is seeking a particular kind of life, and they're both being very strongly manipulated by the two angels anyway. This is a movie that was at least one major rewrite away from being ready to film -- but it went ahead anyway, and the result was an interesting mess.

Movie Log: Gnomeo & Juliet

The first movie the Hornswoggler family saw as a gestalt entity in a long time was the surprisingly non-stupid Gnomeo & Juliet, which is a decent animated movie that stays solidly aimed at kids but manages to entertain their parents without pandering to them. (As opposed to every Dreamworks animated movie ever made.)

As you probably already know from the ubiquitous commercials, it's a modern retelling of Shakespeare's Romeo & Juliet, featuring a cast of garden gnomes that live in the back gardens of two semi-detached homes in Verona Court, Stratford-on-Avon. Where the more usual animated movies have  jokes about whoever has a show on Bravo or E! this week, Gnomeo substitutes random Shakespeare references -- Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Movers, As You Like It; mostly titles and bits of Hamlet, actually, since those are the most likely to get a spark of recognition -- and that works pretty well for those of us who are moderately Shakespeare-savvy. (Those completely innocent of Shakespeare won't get any of it, and serious Romeo & Juliet scholars will probably be annoyed from beginning to end at the liberties.)

James MacAvoy is Gnomeo, from the Blues, and Emily Blunt is Juliet, daughter of Lord Redbrick. And the plot follows Romeo & Juliet about as well as an Elton John-produced movie for kids about lawn furniture would. It's not a movie for the ages, but it's a decent family movie for this week or this year, and there will be a minor but fervent cult surrounding it in random dorm rooms around the English-speaking world in about twelve years.

Movie Log: Youth in Revolt

A little Michael Cera goes a long way -- his trademark diffident, distracted, high-voiced loser act having been losing interest practically since the moment he unrolled it -- so one might be worried about a movie that has Cera in what's essentially two parts. The good news is that he only plays "Michael Cera" for one of those parts, and the other's role is to shove that character as far away from Cera-ness as is possible in an hour and a half.


Youth In Revolt is funny, in a cartoony way, but never has any underlying seriousness to ground that comedy in anything. Cera's Nick Twisp is a sixteen-year-old boy living in Oakland, CA, whose divorced mother falls for a succession of lousy men and whose father is living with a very young woman whose gorgeousness is just another joke. Nick is our main character, center, and narrator; we never get out of his skull or away from his point of view. (So, if you can't stand Cera at all, stay far away from this movie.) And Nick, like all teenage boys, is obsessed with losing his virginity.

If Youth in Revolt had any balance, or viewpoint outside of Nick, it could have become the Apatow Era's answer to Little Darlings, but it doesn't. On the other hand, it's more sexless than you might expect, since Nick quickly latches onto one girl (Portia Doubleday as Sheeni Saunders) as his True Love and channels all of his adolescent energy into winning her and getting back to her. (They meet at a trailer-park somewhere off to the north of Oakland, where she lives and he vacations with his mother and her then-boyfriend.) For reasons that are sufficient to the plot of the movie, but don't actually make a whole lot of sense, Nick spends most of the running time of Youth in Revolt trying to be "bad," which will get him back to Sheeni but ever-more drive her very religious and controlling parents away from him.

So Nick manifests an alter ego -- the Nouvelle Vague-inspired French-accented "Francois Dillinger" -- who gives him advice on how to be bad at every turn, and rapidly finds himself both in more and more trouble and having more and more fun. If it wasn't so programmatic and constricted, Youth in Revolt could have been honestly, wickedly subversive, so it can be disappointing to see it settle into its solid groove, but there's a long list of good actors working in support of Cera's double act -- from Justin Lond and Zach Galifianakis to Fred Willard and M. Emmett Walsh -- who keep the movie lively.

Cera is fine at the center, and his sunglasses-wearing, smoking Francois could show a way for him to find a different kind of character to play -- he makes a good piece of bored Eurotrash. But Youth in Revolt is, in the end, a movie about revolt that doesn't actually know what it's revolting against; it's funny enough, and a pleasant way to spend 90 minutes, but the fog of lost possibilities is so thick the actual movie can sometimes be difficult to see. 

Movie Log: Speed Dating Edition

It's been a cold and windy day in my neck of the woods, and it's a bit chilly in this basement right now. I'm also tired after a long and busy week, and not really up to writing anything complicated or overly thoughtful. So, instead, I'm going to catch up on all of the movies I saw over the past eight months or so, while my blogging energies were entirely taken up with Book-A-Day. My intention is to write roughly one sentence for each movie...but I usually write longer than I expect, so let's see how that works out.

Movies I Saw on Video
Lupin 3rd: The Castle of Cagliostro -- Hayao Miyazaki's very first full-length movie has some moments and set-pieces that are clearly Miyazaki-ish in retrospect, and is an exciting and always fun entry in a sturdy, audience-pleasing series. But it's clearly a formula, and not a terribly demanding one.


The Dinner Game -- The French original that became Dinner for Schmucks in English (which I still haven't seen). Dinner is remarkably well-written and well-acted, and is staged almost like a play, with nearly the entire action taking place in one apartment. For anyone who can stand reading a movie -- of who speaks French -- it's well worth seeing; it's a great comedy with some real depth to it.
 
Mr. Blandings Builds His Dream House -- Continuing my intermittent self-study course in the great movies of the past; this one is still very funny and true, though the specifics of place and money add some inadvertent humor now. (That money pit was probably worth over a million by the late '80s, for one thing.)



Adam -- A young man with Asperger's Syndrome falls in love for the first time, in a movie that's thoughtful and moving -- and not nearly as mawkish or afterchool-special-ish as you might fear -- and doesn't go the ways you'd expect. Small, but perfectly formed.


My Wife Is an Actress -- Another French movie -- I find that a good French comedy is superior to all but one or two of the best American funny movies a year -- directed by Charlotte Gainsbough's husband, about a man who is married to the gorgeous actress Charlotte Gainsborough. Slightly less sexy than expected, but a lot of fun.

Popeye -- I hadn't seen Altman's Feiffer-scripted version of the E.C. Segar strip in twenty-five years or more, but my two sons were a great excuse, and Popeye is actually a damn good (if utterly idiosyncratic) movie. Yes, it's a musical. Yes, all of the characters are utterly caricatured. Yes, it does lose track of itself more than once, and starts too slowly. And, yes, the spinach thing is done much less subtly or well than Segar would have. But it's indisputably Popeye -- and miles closer to Segar than any other moving-picture version has ever come -- and a hell of a lot of fun.

The Miracle of Morgan's Creek -- It's a 1944 movie about a girl who finds herself unexpectedly pregnant after blacking out during an "all-night party"; how could I not watch it, once I knew it existed? It's quick and funny, and mostly full of actors we don't think about anymore. 

Foul Play -- Another movie that I hadn't seen in twenty-five years, and which still held up, with great funny stuff from Chevy Chase and Goldie Hawn. 

Impromptu -- I've complained about the very stereotyped plots that costume dramas about creative types always fall into, but this one is about Chopin more than George Sand, and, luckily, doesn't try to pretend that this series of events was "the basis" for some famous Sand work. In the end, it's a middle-rank costume drama, but The Wife eats those up.

Hot Tub Time Machine -- There's no excuse for this one; it's silly and obvious and could have been much smarter and sharper if the writers stopped laughing at their own jokes and worked a bit harder. But it is a decent silly comedy, in a vaguely '80s mode, so it's worth wasting the two hours or so to look at it.

Jet Lag -- Yet another French movie, this time a romantic comedy with Juliette Binoche and Jean Reno stuck at an airport. It hasn't stuck in the memory terribly well, but it was enjoyable at the time.

In a Day -- A small-budget British romantic comedy-drama with some slight pretensions; it doesn't work 100%, but it does work well enough.


Strange Brew -- So, like, take off, eh? I will never apologize for loving Strange Brew, and I've now made my sons watch it as well.


Bringing Up Baby -- More classic comedy, with Katherine Hepburn and Cary Grant. You probably shouldn't wait until you're forty-one to watch this, like I did.

Fletch -- Now, this one, I hadn't seen before. It was fun, but not as good as it's supposed to be, with a generic and forgettable '80s plot.


Alice in Wonderland -- Tim Burton really needs a high-profile failure or two to bring him back ot earth and get him to engage strong again; sadly, this movie didn't do that. It's an interesting-looking mess, but it's completely a mess, even by the standards of an Alice movie.
 
Finding Bliss -- Leelee Sobieski is a would-be filmmaker who can't get funding to make her dream script, but (though the usual contrived situations) gets a job editing porn movies and then...you can pretty much work out every plot beat from there. It follows its formula with energy and really believes in itself, but it will never surprise you.


Out of Sight -- I like George Clooney's work, and I've missed a lot of his movies -- this one is a sturdy, smart thriller that I expect most of you saw ten years ago.


Diary of a Wimpy Kid -- This plays really differently in live-action than it did on the page, which I found very interesting to think about while watching it. The book is so cartoony that none of the over-the-top things that happen to Greg are a problem, but they seem less likely with real twelve-year-olds. It's lovable like an ingratiating dog, but about as deep.


City Island -- The comedy version of a kitchen-sink problem movie, circling around Andy Garcia as a middle-aged NYC cop who really wants to be an actor. It all comes together too patly in the end, but everyone is good in it, and it has a fine sense of place.


Date Night -- It fails the Siskel test, in that the viewer keeps suspecting that the jokes that Steve Carrell and Tina Fey told each other in the makeup chair were funnier and less formulaic than this movie, but it is entertaining, and Carrell and Fey are both completely game and utterly likable. Plus, I am one half a boring, married, middle-aged couple in New Jersey.


The Apartment -- Most of the old movies I see are pretty frothy, but this one is more biting, though a lot of that bite is due to the specific sexual mores of 1960, which are solidly exploded now. It certainly had more impact then, and would have more impact for a younger viewer, but it's still a great movie.


Royal Flash -- The only movie made, to date, from George Macdonald Fraser's excellent series of novels -- directed by Richard Lester right after his "Three Musketeers" movies. Malcolm McDowell is a perfect Flashy, and it made me wish I was in the next universe over, where there were half-a-dozen more of these movies, and McDowell was prepping another one right now.

The Taste of Others -- A complicated French romantic comedy -- of the large cast that interacts with each other like billiard balls style -- that I don't remember in detail. Pleasant but forgettable, I suppose.


Ondine -- Colin Farrell drags out his thickest Irish accent in the story of a fisherman who pulls a woman from the sea and can't quite decide if he (and his crippled daughter) want her to be a mermaid or not. It tries really hard, and succeeds at a level only just a bit below what it's aiming for.


Babies -- An entirely unnarrated documentary of the first year of life of four babies, in vastly different parts of the world. Probably only for parents or wanna-be parents, but cute and deeply lovable.


The Secret of Kells -- The surprise Oscar nominee of last year, once it was finally available on video. Visually inventive and heartfelt, but awfully slow for a movie that's not even ninety minutes long, and not without the sound of axes grinding. See it to look at rather than to think about.


Confetti -- A silly British mockumentary about a reality-TVish competition by a bridal magazine for the Most Inventive Wedding of the Year. It doesn't take advantage of all of its opportunities, but it creates some great characters and is entertaining to the end.

Get Him to the Greek -- About as silly and frivolous a comedy as can be imagined, but Russell Brand always delivers, even if Jonah Hill's blustering-twerp persona is wearing ever thinner.


Toy Story 3 -- No one in the family felt the need to see this in the theater; I don't care about any second sequel all that much. It's not as good as #2, but rings some new and thoughtful changes on the thematic material from the first two movies. And there's now a lot of material for a major dissertation on the (almost unveiled at this point) religious undertones of the series.


The Emperor's New Clothes -- Ian Holm is Napoleon, who switched places with a lookalike to escape from Elba back to Paris and reclaim his power. It doesn't work out that way, though he does find love instead. Holm is always fun to watch, and this deviates enough from the costume-drama template to be worth seeing.



Iron Man 2 -- It is what it is: loud, brash, full of itself, but enthralling and ever-so-occasionally smart.

Robin Hood -- Russell Crowe shows us how Hood was dull and depressing, and his life a rough slog through mud and shit. Has almost none of the things anyone wants to see in a Robin Hood movie.


Artemisia -- Yet more costume drama, with a female Italian Renaissance painter who -- in the movie-ized version -- falls in love with her teacher, which leads to Big Trouble. (In real life, he raped and blackmailed her into sex, but that's not Romantic enough for a movie.) It's better if you don't try to learn anything about Artemisia Gentileschi ahead of time.


Shrek Forever After -- Broad, obvious, and massively renormative in all the worst ways. The incidental jokes are funny, as they should be, given how much money and time went into them.


Maybe Baby -- A mostly-forgotten Hugh Laurie movie from a decade ago, which I missed then like everyone else in the world. He's a screenwriter for not-the-BBC, and secretly turns his own wife's fertility drama into a comedy -- the ending runs off the rails for a while, but otherwise it's so good that you'll wonder why it was so forgotten.

Next Stop Wonderland -- A small Boston romantic comedy, except it's not all that funny and not really a romance. It is a good character piece about the two people that the audience knows will eventually get together -- though the movie itself keeps them apart practically the entire time.


The Kids Are Alright -- A masterclass in great acting; there are scenes that hinge on body language or glancing expressions. The central drama is arguably trite -- that a lesbian couple can be just as mixed-up, but still fixable, as anyone else -- but the dialogue is excellent and delivered perfectly.


Easy A -- Emma Stone is damn good, and this movie is smart and sneaky; this is a movie about teenagers, but it's as much for people who were teenagers two or four decades ago.


Soul Kitchen -- A German movie about a restaurant and its various comic dramas; it's sweet and lovable but mildly predictable.


Going the Distance -- The movie that made everyone wonder how close it was to the real relationship of Drew Barrymore and that Mac guy; it's a good view of a relationship that has real strengths and depths but is being seriously tested. All processed through the usual Hollywood rose-tinted lenses, of course.


Inception -- Anyone who had trouble following this is just dumb; I have to say it. It's not as profound or brilliant as some people seem to think, but it's an exceptionally well-constructed and entertaining astonishment machine. (And The Wife and I cracked each other up every time it cut back to the van falling into the water, calling out "Buffering!" as it happened.)


The Other Guys -- The end credits were almost better than the movie, and the movie could have done with a bit more of the credit's viewpoint and cold anger. But the movie, as it did exist, was a decent odd-couple story, and had a particularly watchable set of characters.


Nanny McPhee Returns -- Not nearly as good, or as subtle, as the first movie, and much more of a film for kids. But The Wife and I enjoyed it anyway.



Stuff I Actually Got Into a Theater to See:The Last Airbender -- Yes, well. It's not as bad as some people said, but I saw it in non-eye-straining 2-D, so I may not have seen it at its worst. Shamalyan does have some good camera work, particularly his swooping shots in the battle scenes, but that wasn't enough.



Despicable Me -- This was as good as everyone said, and almost not at all mawkish. I'm beginning to think Steve Carrell can make anything good.

The Sorcerer's Apprentice -- Big, flashy, silly, full of explosions and often losing track of its own rules -- yes, it's a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. It shouldn't be as entertaining as it is, honestly, and no one can see it and feel proud of themselves.

Scott Pilgrim Vs. the World -- I loved it, and my two sons loved it. Hugely visually exciting, and only very slightly damaged by Michael Cera whinyness. It had better become the hugely popular touchstone cult movie of this generation.  

Red -- An action thriller that does everything right, including pandering to its audience. It's cheese, but some kind of very nice, and slightly classy cheese -- say a nice Stilton.


And why did I think writing all that would be quick or easy? Well, I'm caught up (except for Youth in Revolt, which I saw a few days ago) now.