Terminator Salvation (2009)

Terminator (1984) was built on two stock science fiction ideas. One was the old worry that machines would one day become intelligent and take over the world, threatening the existence of humanity. The other was akin to the Grandfather Paradox: if you traveled back in time and killed your grandfather, you would not exist, and therefore would not be able to travel back in time to kill your grandfather, and then you would exist to travel back in time... and so on. Thus proving (or so it is said), that time travel is either logically impossible, or it is impossible to alter the past whether time travel is possible or not. In Terminator, the artificially intelligent machines of the future sent a T-800 killer robot (who would one day become the governator of California) back into the past to kill Sarah Connor (Linda Hamilton) so that she would never become mother to John Connor, who would grow up to become a resistance leader in the future human struggle against the killer machines. So, apparently the machines do not (did not?) believe that time travel is impossible, or that the past cannot be changed. Turns out they failed to prevent John Connor's birth (because the guy sent back by the humans to save Sarah Connor fathered future John), and subsequent efforts to kill John as a child also failed. And since all those killer robots kept a'coming after him all his life, Connor grew up to be somewhat hostile to killer robots, and became a leader of the human resistance against the robot overlords. So did the machines alter the past after all?

Terminator Salvation, the fourth installment in the Terminator saga, isn't all that interested in finding out. The year is 2018, some time after Judgment Day, when Skynet, the self-aware machine network, blew everything all to pieces in its ongoing effort to destroy humanity for some reason or other. Scattered pockets of survivors and resistance fighters exist throughout the California wasteland. The machines are headquartered in the Silicon Valley area, and cattle cars of humans are rounded up and taken there, never to be seen again. The puny humans are prepping to launch a final assault on the machines. Meanwhile, the machines have a hit list, and John Connor (Christian Bale) is number two on that list. Who's number one? Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin), a scrawny lad who seems insignificant, except that Connor and the machines and we all know that he will some day be Connor's future-past father. (Just how does Skynet know, I wonder.) And so, the son must save the father so that the son will exist in the future to save the father so that the son will exist... and so on. But beyond that, Terminator Salvation doesn't especially care about the vicissitudes of time travel, or the fact that Connor must save his father now so that dear old Dad can die in the past. You might think he'd feel a little conflicted about that, but apparently not. The movie is only marginally more concerned with artificial intelligence (and artificial life) in the form of one Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington), a criminal who was, in the pre-apocalypse past, executed, and who donated his body to science, or rather to one genetic scientist named Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter). And then he woke up and it was the apocalypse. It doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out what happened to him (anyway, it was revealed in the movie's trailers months ago).

I would have liked to see Wright explored more as a character. He's conflicted about his human-machine hybrid status, he's loyal to humanity and full of unexplained self-loathing, and the humans, especially Connor, hate him just as much as he hates himself. His is the Terminator Redemption aspect of movie, and its most interesting innovation, but psychological depth and character are not the strong suits of Terminator Salvation, so any possibility of exploring fascinating ideas about humans and machines are pretty much tossed on the scrap heap. It's pretty obvious why Connor (or J.C. as the case may be) hates terminators, and why he's determined to save Kyle Reese, but it cannot be said that Bale's talents as an actor are fully utilized here. He's grim-faced and raspy-voiced and... well, that's about it. Maybe that explains Bale's now infamous on-set, potty-mouth apoplexy. It was a cry for more dialogue, more substance. Connor lives (if you can call that living), but humanity is nearly extinct and civilization is in ruins -- what's he still fighting for? He's a guy apparently condemned to remember the past and repeat it, but to what end? What, Mr. Method Actor might have asked, is my motivation?

That's what I wanna know too, but as directed by McG (Charlie's Angels), Terminator Salvation is scanty on plot and substance, fairly disinterested in big ideas, but big, big, big on action: car chases, helicopter chases, robot chases, explosions, gunfights, fistfights, and (true to Terminator creator James Cameron's original vision of the terminators) killer robots that keep coming and coming even after you blow them up, dismember them, shoot them, melt them, and crush them. The robots come in all shapes and sizes -- from chompy, swimming hydrobots to gigundo bots with clampy hands and gun turrets for heads. The Transformer-style motorcycle bots are pretty cool, but really, they'd better be since Terminator Salvation is basically a movie about animated mechanical stuff. The end of the world looks like a big junkyard -- the carcasses of robots, helicopters and cars litter a landscape where the ruins of human civilization amount to broken pylons and bombed-out gas stations. The resistance fighters are pretty well-armed with fighter jets, land mines, submarines (!) and various implements of destruction. Skynet has a factory where it manufactures more and more terminator bots. It also apparently manufactures handy dandy sets for meat versus metal action sequences that include fight scene standbys: steam, smoke, flames, and catwalks.

Is it too much to ask for anything really new from T4? This movie recycles elements from Terminator and T2: Judgment Day (fair enough), and from Road Warrior, Transformers, and X-Men, and maybe Pinocchio (what with all the humanoid robots and the machines that believe they're people too). It recycles elements from those movies, but unlike those movies, it fails to be about anything. The movie looks good enough: it is mostly stripped of color, except for all the big orange fireballs. Everything else is metallic blue-black and dusty-beige, with a coating of grime. But this is a fairly standard depiction of Earth after Armageddon, and I just can't help feeling like I've seen all this stuff before. Terminator was all low-budget moxy and basement workshop innovation -- T4, like the other sequels, is clearly an expensive movie, but one that has forgotten everything that's interesting about the Terminator saga, making it completely forgettable itself.

25May2009

Angels & Demons (2009)

A whole load of narration begins Angels & Demons, the sequel to The Da Vinci Code. A beloved pope has died, the grieving masses have gathered in St. Peter's Square, red-robed cardinals have assembled in the Vatican to select a new pontiff, and a priest known as the Camerlengo is temporarily in charge of Vatican City in the interregnum. Once we're all up to speed on the details of papal succession, Angels & Demons kicks into gear, with another story of ancient Catholic secrets, this one involving an underground sect of scientists known as the Illuminati, who counted Galileo among their membership. The Illuminati were harshly persecuted and killed by the Church, it seems, and now they're back... with a vengeance. The four cardinals in line to succeed the pope have been kidnapped, and even worse, a cylinder containing antimatter has been snatched from CERN, and is now somewhere in Vatican City, a ticking time bomb set to obliterate the Holy See at midnight. It's a smackdown between faith and science, see. Like this past weekend's Notre Dame kerfuffle writ large, but instead of heroic Obama representing the voice of reason and reconciliation, Angels & Demons has Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks), Harvard symbologist and man of action. Oh, the irony... Langdon's the nemesis of the Vatican, but now they've called on him to help due to his singular expertise regarding the Illuminati.

Langdon's great gift is his ability to make baloney sound like ancient wisdom, and to simultaneously walk and talk, lecture and sleuth. Angels & Demons, like its predecessor, is directed by Ron Howard and written by Akiva Goldsman and David Koepp, but the movie is less hysterical than The Da Vinci Code, and overall better. The Da Vinci Code admittedly set the bar pretty low, but Angels & Demons is decently diverting and fast-paced, as Langdon and his sidekick, CERN physicist Vittoria Vetra (Ayelet Zurer) vandalize the Vatican archives, decipher clues, uncover Illuminati mysteries, and run around trying to save the world from a small Big Bang. Dr. Vetra specializes in something called "bioetanglement physics," but her role here is to be the "talk-to" -- the audience stand-in to whom Langdon explains what's going on and why and what it has to do with Galileo and obelisks and the sculptures of Bernini. She also translates a little Latin (which, somewhat incredibly, the Harvard symbologist can't manage on his own), and, being a physicist, stands ready to change some batteries in that antimatter container, should it be found in time. Langdon gets himself into several close scrapes -- including a few with the kidnapper/cardinal torturer/assassin (Nikolaj Lie Kaas) -- and proves to be a resourceful and resilient scholar in the Indiana Jones mold. He doesn't have a whip or fedora (or a sense of humor), but he's got God on his side. Or maybe it's science. Or both. Or neither.

Meanwhile, there's a jurisdictional cat fight and power struggle within the Vatican: the head of the Swiss Guard, Commander Richter (Stellan Skarsgard), Inspector Olivetti of the Vatican police (Pierfrancesco Favino), the vaguely menacing Cardinal Strauss (Armin Mueller-Stahl), and the devoted, doe-eyed Camerlengo Father Patrick (Ewan MacGregor) all compete to aid and/or obstruct Langdon's investigation, rescue the papacy, and protect the Church and its faithful. It all comes to down to faith versus science, capital T Truth versus Big Lies, religion versus the Catholic Church. I take it these are the standard themes of Angels & Demons author Dan Brown, along with a general preoccupation with conspiracy theories about the Catholic Church's centuries-old C.Y.A. mission.

Angels & Demons is fairly silly and generally implausible when you pay any attention at all to the details, and the dialogue is utterly bursting with poppycock and bunkum, but it has been expertly constructed by an able team, so it looks great and moves briskly (despite clocking in at well over two hours). The costumes and sets (needless to say, access to the actual Vatican was denied) are glorious, and Rome looks wonderfully picturesque even on the eve of the apocalypse. The international cast of potential heroes and villains performs with enough subtlety to maintain a modicum of mystery about who will be the angels and who the demons when the plot finally turns its last twist. Hanks is in serious scholar mode as Langdon, which I suppose is a necessity given the assortment of half-truths, urban legends and conspiracy theories that count for serious scholarship here -- hey, he's from Harvard, so it must be smart stuff, right? I'm all for intellectualizing summer blockbusters, although Angels & Demons achieves this not so much by undumbing the action movie than by tossing some half-smart sounding jargon and Latin at it. At least they give props to Galileo. It's a start.

18May2009

Star Trek (2009)

For a TV show that had such a brief run, and which has been the subject of so much mockery, Star Trek has lived long and prospered. For some four decades, various iterations of Star Trek have come and gone, the best of them retaining the optimistic, inclusive, multicultural, cerebral, exploratory, bright and shiny future spirit of Gene Roddenberry's original. Director J.J. Abrams (Lost) reimagines the original series and its characters, boldly going back to the future in Star Trek. This is an origin story, but with a very neat twist: time travel. Time travel is nothing new in the Star Trek universe, but it is here ingeniously deployed to reinvent familiar characters and storylines in a way that would be objectionable only to the most orthodox *Trek* constructionists. And they'd be missing all the fun. Losties can take note: Abrams does not subscribe to the boring time travel orthodoxy that the past cannot be changed. What fun is time travel if you can't change the past? (Hey J.J., while you're at it, could you make it so that Data doesn't die at the end of Star Trek: Nemesis? I'm still kinda bitter about that.)

Time travel paradoxes aside, the movie reinvents the pasts (and futures) of Trek antagonists/protagonists/odd couple James Tiberius Kirk and Spock, with an assist from a bitter and vengeful Romulan renegade named Nero (Eric Bana). Red matter, black holes, planetary destruction and a slakeless thirst for revenge have Nero wandering time and space in search of Spock who, as the story begins, is a hotheaded young geek rebel trying to reconcile his emotional human half and his coolly logical Vulcan half. Meanwhile, Kirk is born in the middle of a celestial battle, during which his father is killed by Nero. He grows up to hotrod around Iowa and get in bar brawls with snooty Starfleet types. Cocky Kirk (Chris Pine) and cerebral Spock (Zachary Quinto) lock horns at Starfleet Academy, where they once again embody the rationality vs. emotionality, body vs. mind, thought vs. action, hot vs. cold antagonism that makes them, together, the very soul of Star Trek, and a source of both great conflict and great humor. They complete each other.

The gang's all there too: Bones McCoy (Karl Urban) is a crazy-eyed paranoid medicine man with little faith in the miracle of space travel; Uhura (Zoë Saldana) is a young hottie who gives Kirk the cold shoulder; Chekhov (Anton Yelchin) still has that thick Russian accent; Sulu (John Cho) is now a cool warrior; and engineer Scotty (Simon Pegg, brilliantly cast) is still the funny Scottish fella who's a whiz with a transporter. There's an ill-fated Ensign Redshirt here and there too. And there's some Nimoy fella who's pretty good as Spock Prime, an old clock watcher who offers some pearls of wisdom to young Kirk and Spock. Abrams, and writers Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman (who also collaborated on the *Transformers* reboot), are not slaves to the sacred text of Star Trek, and liberally reimagine the characters within their altered, almost-anything-goes universe, while keeping them just familiar enough that the tweaks both make sense and are a lot of fun. Pine and Quinto are especially good at evoking their original series progenitors (which they now, in narrative and space-time terms, predate), while making the characters, shaped and altered by changes in their future-pasts, completely their own. Pine's devilish performance is briskly funny, and includes subtle hints of the not-so-subtle Shatner, but without the goofy excesses of the elder Kirk, and with a youthful vigor and rawness that makes some sense (finally) of original Kirk's somewhat implausible universal sex appeal.

The story is unexpectedly poignant at several points, and frequently quite funny, in keeping with a general leaning towards feeling over rationality (you win *this* round, Kirk!). At the heart of Star Trek is a complex tale of parents and children, of lost boys and heroic fathers and father figures, (and heroic and lost mothers too) and blackening, character-twisting grief that works all the Greek tragedy angles. The father-son thing gets especially complicated in relation to Spock and Spock Prime, with a kind of noodle-cooking, gasket-blowing entanglement of the younger-elder/father-son/before-after roles.

Times have changed not just for Spock and company, but for the science of science fiction too, and Abrams deploys some cool special effects and riveting action that are nicely balanced by the fast-talking philosophical and techno chatter. Star Trek whizzes along at warp speed, and packs a whole lot of entertainment into its alternately light (and enlightened) and apocalyptically dark plot. Welcome back to the future.

11May2009

X-Men Origins: Wolverine (2009)

There's a reason why Wolverine is a perennial X-Men fan fave. Several reasons, really: he's funny, he's unlucky at love (very unlucky, though not so much as his almost invariably dead lady friends), he's politically incorrect, he's got those way-cool adamantium claws, and he's Canadian. Also, "wolverine" is a fun word to say. There's one reason why Wolverine took off as a character in the X-Men movies: Hugh Jackman. Jackman's back as Wolverine in X-Men Origins: Wolverine, the title of which suggests that many more non-Wolvie X-Men origin stories from the X-pantheon are in the pipeline. The movie efficiently ticks off plot points, characters, and backstories, as if working through a to-do list for future X-Men Origins movies.

The story begins in 1845, when young future Wolverine James Logan suffers through a difficult adolescent transformation (as all young mutants must). His transformation achieves completion when he murders the man who murdered his father, who wasn't really his father, although the man who murdered him was. The filial situation is a little sketchy on details. The incident, at any rate, leaves both his fathers dead, and James and his brother (or is it half brother?) Victor Creed, also a mutant (the future Sabretooth), are soon on the lam. Next stop, the American Civil War, where young Canadians were known to escape their troubles. A montage of conflicts -- from World War I through Vietnam -- follows, with Victor and Logan always there. They are, thanks to their mutant powers, indestructible and unkillable, and rather good at fighting and killing. Logan, the more sensitive of the two, eventually loses his taste for war and murder. Victor (Liev Schreiber) is just getting started.

So, some time in the 1980s, Logan and Victor go their separate ways. Logan sets up housekeeping in a nice cabin in the Canadian Rockies with his girlfriend Kayla Silverfox (Lynn Collins). Then Logan's former mutant cohorts -- part of an elite government assassination squad called the X-Team -- turn up dead. Logan is unlucky at love, becomes Wolverine (thanks to government-issued adamantium-infused bones and claws), escapes government custody (duh -- he's indestructible!) and goes after Victor while being chased by the military. This occasions several expensive-looking action sequences.

There is nothing really wrong with XMO: Wolverine. Nothing, that is, that a little rewrite couldn't fix. The movie focuses rather single-mindedly on plot, on laying out all the pieces of the origin story and programming Logan's revenge motive in a way that is fairly mechanical. The result is a movie in which all the gears mesh neatly, but the messy and appealing complexity and incongruity of Wolverine as a character is blunted. XMO: Wolverine is about the creation of the berserker Wolverine, and about showing off that super strength, and Jackman's seriously jacked up biceps, which are as well-oiled as this machine of a movie. But by rubbing off the rough edges that give his character depth, Wolverine is diminished. The psychological complexity of Marvel Comics characters has always been their distinguishing feature, but XMO: Wolverine reduces the hairy, beastly Wolverine to a sleek, shiny, revenge-seeking missile.

Director Gavin Hood (Rendition) is known for movies with social and political themes, and there are hints here of some effort to make more than a clockwork superhero movie, to reveal what really makes Wolverine tick, and to show the softer side of the adamantium man. But the emphasis on action over character makes the movie feel both rushed and hollow. Humor surfaces all-too-briefly -- XMO: Wolverine is not filled with the kind of eminently quotable one-liners that make their way into the pop culture canon, despite Wolverine's well-known (among fanboys and girls, at least) rep for remarks that are almost as cutting as his ginsu claws. On the other hand, the movie is not terribly chatty altogether, except when mutant-exploiting William Stryker (Danny Huston) is around -- he's definitely a villain in the expository mode. A movie in which you're looking forward to a long-promised decapitation to make things more interesting is a movie that really needs to be sharper and brainier. XMO: Wolverine is unpretentious and all-business, which is good, but it feels more like a coming attraction than a proper introduction.

4May2009

The Soloist (2009)

The title might refer to the musician, a former cello prodigy, now fallen on hard times, a soloist who plays for the pigeons on street corners and under the freeways of Los Angeles. Or it might refer to the newspaper columnist, another soloist, who hasn't fallen on hard times, but who falls, hard, just as The Soloist begins. The latter, Steve Lopez, faceplants off his bicycle. The former, Nathaniel Anthony Ayers, lives out of a shopping cart. They meet under a statue of Beethoven, where Lopez (Robert Downey, Jr.) discovers that the sweet violin music he hears is played on an instrument with only two strings.

Lopez channels his amazement and curiosity into a column, digging into the past of the not-so-random man on the street: Ayers (Jamie Foxx) was once a promising Juilliard student who seems to have been waylaid by mental illness. The story turns into a rescue mission. Lopez tries to get Ayers off the streets, but encounters the hard truth about homelessness and mental illness -- there are no quick fixes or simple solutions. Good intentions are not good enough.

To his credit, Foxx does not give in to the impulse to offer up a showy or sentimental performance. Ayers is a volatile personality -- when he speaks, words flow out of him like a river, drifting and getting stuck in little eddies, swirling around, tumbling through turbulent rapids. It's a stream of raw consciousness, where the molecules of thought are connected only tenuously. He is a difficult man to understand, and someone frustratingly resistant to, and suspicious of Lopez's overtures of friendship and assistance. Yet Ayers is, despite his almost nonstop patter, fairly still, and his ability to immerse himself in music is his saving grace, if anything is. Lopez is a fast talker too, but also a listener, and The Soloist is about his education in the bleak reality of homelessness. Downey just insists on doing everything right as an actor these days, and he brings an acerbic compassion to Lopez's do-gooderism, which is more hardheaded than softhearted. It is a virtue of The Soloist, which is based on a true story (and Lopez's book), that it does not go for easy uplift at the expense of difficult truths.

Director Joe Wright (Atonement) can be a bit obvious and heavy-handed as a director, but he generally does right by The Soloist. There are only a couple of moments that are conspicuous for their unsubtle symbolism, some high-flying folderol that stands out in a film that otherwise keeps its feet on the ground. What the film does well, in its tale of two individuals, is continuously and insistently return to the bleak streets where all those anonymous, largely invisible people live -- and to underscore that they are all unique (and difficult) individuals as well. Wright takes an almost documentary approach at times, immersing the film in the dark, grimy, rat-infested streets. The movie employs as extras some of the homeless clients of LAMP, the L.A. homeless shelter where parts of the story take place. They can be fascinating and fantastically engaging people, and the film accepts them "as-is" without any obvious effort to exploit them or turn their eccentricities into feel-good quirkiness. So while it focuses on Ayers and Lopez, The Soloist succeeds in grinding, just a little, a political ax about the plight of all those who, for their various reasons, live on the streets. At the same time, the movie resists the urge to oversimplify or offer up comforting platitudes and bromides -- it is moving and sincere, and does not completely abandon all hope of a happy ending. But the real strength of The Soloist is not its softheartedness but its hard eye, and the willingness to look and not look away from the unfortunate, however uncomfortable, unpleasant, and uneasy looking might make us feel.

27Apr2009

Crank: High Voltage (2009)

You may have noticed by now, dear readers, that I do not offend easily at the movies. I was offended by Crank: High Voltage. It's dumber than dumb, it's loud, it borders on the pornographic both in its sadistic violence and its violent sex, but... and stay with me if you aren't convinced yet... it's boringly repetitive and virtually unwatchable and demands attention only by being more of the above. It's a long 85 minutes, let me tell ya.

It made me reassess several of the lesser film efforts to which I have been less than kind over the years. Maybe they weren't so bad after all. At least they were not Crank: High Voltage.

It's about a man looking for his heart. Literally. Three years ago (in Crank) Chev Chelios (Jason Statham), a hit man, survived being poisoned, and then fell out of a helicopter. In Crank: High Voltage, he lands, at last, and surprisingly (or not) survives the fall. As he lies splayed on the pavement, Chinese mobsters (using a shovel) scrape him up and haul him off. Chelios' indestructible, poison-withstanding heart is removed and transplanted into an ailing Chinese mob boss named Poon Dong (David Carradine). For some reason, the mob docs keep Chelios alive by implanting him with an artificial heart. It's equipped with an external battery pack that requires frequent recharging. Thus Chelios must regularly electrocute himself with jumper cables, high voltage power lines, and Tasers. I'll confess it was the idiotic notion that a guy would have to defibrillate himself with jumper cables that drew me to Crank: High Voltage. I won't fall for that one again.

Did I mention the porno part? Turns out you can generate electricity to recharge your heart by having public sex on a horsetrack, during a horse race, with a stripper named Eve (Amy Smart). I'm sure that scene was meant to operate on all kinds of subtle levels having to do with metaphoric hearts and the rejuvenating power of love and interpersonal sparks and bare-breasted souls and horse penises -- you know, the kind of stuff Byron and Shelley would have written about if they were going to make an action movie about a hitman looking for his heart. But Byron and Shelley, alas, did not make Crank: High Voltage. Neveldine/Taylor (aka Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor) did, and they bring a sledgehammer sensibility to the movie. If you are still watching after ten thumps, they hit you with another ten.

So, Chelios goes off in search of his heart, zapping himself periodically, dodging bullets, and laying waste to the greater Los Angeles area. In addition to the stripper, there are several hookers in Crank: High Voltage, notably Ria, played by Bai Ling, who is notable mostly because, although she is a celebrity best known for wardrobe malfunctions, she keeps her private parts under wraps in the movie. The same cannot be said for the other women therein, who all lack clothing, and who, if they are not hookers or strippers, serve as harems to various Chinese Triads and South American mobsters. The mobsters all want Chelios dead.

I'll say this for Neveldine/Taylor, who wrote and directed Crank: High Voltage: they have a lot of ideas. Unfortunately, 85% of those ideas involve trying out different close-up camera angles of butts and boobs. The other 15% are more interesting, and include mixing animation, satire, riffs on Pulp Fiction, and parodies of Kaiju (Japanese monster movies), talk shows, and cheesy 50's sci-fi into the choppy-chop, bang-bang, rapid-fire, sensory overload action. The movie is an equal opportunity offender that features a great deal of diversity: Asians, Latinos, African-Americans, gay bikers, porn actors, and the disabled are all depicted in broad stereotype meant to be maximally offensive. It was probably meant to be funny too, but my funny bone was crushed early on by this movie, so I can't say for sure. There's also some dialogue in the movie, but about 80% of the words start with the letter F, which can work if the other 20% were written by, say, Tarantino, but they were not. Neveldine/Taylor are clearly pulp aficionados with Tarantino-aspirations. They're smutty gutter tourists who aim, more than anything else, to shock and offend. They're like attention-seeking kids trying to see how much they can get away with. If you don't ignore them, they'll just keep doing it.

20Apr2009

Observe and Report (2009)

Weird and unexpected are good things in a comedy, and they are good things in Observe and Report, a dark, bleak, violent comedy from writer-director Jody Hill (The Foot Fist Way). Hill has said Observe and Report was inspired by Taxi Driver. Hill is no Scorsese, and Seth Rogen is no DeNiro, but Ronnie Barnhardt, the mall cop in the middle of Observe and Report, acts like a guy who maybe coulda seen in Taxi Driver's Travis Bickle a role model of sorts. Ronnie likes guns. He fancies himself a defender of justice and helpless women. He has bipolar disorder (or so he says), and pops prescription meds all day, but he still toggles rapidly between sweetness and rage. He lives in a trailer with his loving but inept alcoholic mom (Celia Weston).

As security chief of Forest Ridge Mall, Ronnie's a petty dictator who rules with an iron fist and a Taser. He experiences a crisis of leadership when a classically trench-coated serial flasher stalks the mall, exposing himself to hapless customers in the parking lot. When the flasher flashes Brandi (Anna Faris), a vain, cruel, slutty cosmetics counter salesgirl and the object of Ronnie's unrequited affection, the long simmering mall cop boils over. It gets worse when the mall calls in a real cop -- hotheaded detective Harrison -- to catch the pervy perp. Mutual hatred, professional rivalry, and escalating violence follow -- and that's just between Ronnie and Harrison.

Observe and Report is a misanthropic, foul-mouthed, politically incorrect, deepest dark comedy -- it mocks everyone, and likes no one. It has that in common with the work of the Coen brothers, but it is much looser and far less stylized (one might say sloppier and more anarchic too). It is also sadder and more weirdly melancholy -- the characters in Observe and Report are not so much stupid as they are petty, mean, and profoundly insecure. Behind his tin badge, Ronnie is full of bravado and contempt, but he's also unexpectedly competent. "Overkill" would seem to be his personal motto, but loneliness and insecurity are his demons. His mall security team includes his lisping right hand man Dennis (Michael Pena), who harbors his own dark, dank secrets, and gun-worshipping twins John and Matt Yuen (played by twins John and Matt Yuan).

The mall's equal opportunity offenders include the foul-mouthed vendor Ronnie calls Saddamn (Aziz Ansari), pesky, vandalizing skateboarders, and the zombie-like consumers Ronnie has vowed to observe and protect. And then there's that flasher (Randy Gambill), whose proud, mall-wide display of his wobbly junk is a reminder of Borat's misdeeds, and of those days, not so long ago, when male full-frontal nudity was strictly verboten in R-rated entertainments, let alone malls. The mall, it turns out, is a teeming cesspool of sex, drugs, and violence, a veritable bedlam disguised as a tranquil shopper's paradise. Ronnie is its self-appointed, self important protector, and Rogen does a fine job of roughing up the soft, pudgy edges of his generally affable, likable screen persona, replacing the usual tomfoolery with a streak of brutality. All of which makes Observe and Report an unjokey, uncartoony, moody comedy that's funnier than it ought to be specifically because it's also sometimes deeply disturbing, surprising, and unsafe.

13Apr2009

Adventureland (2009)

As any class of '87 college graduate can attest, it was the best of times, it was the worst of times. But mostly, it was the worst of times. It was the time of Reagan, covert wars, recession, and the crack epidemic. Throw in a liberal arts college degree in one of the humanities (with subsequent poverty), malaise, angst, and ennui, and that's why I don't heart the 80s. And so it goes for James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), the hopeless romantic on the verge of a late blooming coming of age in Adventureland.

James has fairly modest dreams of a budget-conscious post-college summer in Europe, followed by grad school at Columbia, where he plans to study journalism and change the world. These dreams are unceremoniously scuttled by his parents (Wendie Malick and Jack Gilpin), who inform him that Mr. Brennan's downsizing will result in some downscaling of the family lifestyle. James will have to get a summer job. As it turns out, a degree in comparative literature has given him surprisingly few skills considered marketable in Pittsburgh, which is how James ends up working the midway at Adventureland, a low-rent amusement park where other misfits misspend their youths.

Will James' stint as an underpaid carnie teach him things he never learned, but should have, in college? Duh. He'll also find love, and find that the course of true love never did run smooth (but he knew that from being a comp lit major), and discover that a baggie full of joints is a great way to win friends and influence people, including Lisa P. (Margarita Levieva) the hottest, most coveted girl at the park. The true object of James' affection, however, is Em (Kristen Stewart), a smart, mopey NYU student with an emotionally complicated life.

Adventureland, written and directed by Greg Mottola (The Day Trippers, Superbad) travels a well-trod path, but with a light step and unconventional tone. Adventureland eschews the dopey immaturity one might expect from a story that features sex (and male virgins), drugs, teenagers, and carnies, and is instead surprisingly smart and sweet (and bittersweet), adding a few new twists to the old young-man-coming-of-age story. Sex and drugs and rock and roll figure prominently, but of course. The music is rolled into the story, however, in keeping with Mottola's general tendency to avoid exploiting the 80s for comic-nostalgic effect. James endures the torture of "Rock Me, Amadeus" because Lisa P. is a would-be dancer and because the local disco is one of the few places to hang out when Adventureland closes. Lou Reed's "Satellite of Love" is James' favorite song, but it's equally important because it's a song that Connell (Ryan Reynolds) doesn't know. Connell is the park maintenance man, slightly older (and therefore more pathetic) than the other employees, married, and the kind of guy who carries a guitar case and a tool belt to work. Legend has it Connell once jammed with Lou Reed. The age-appropriate soundtrack also features Hüsker Dü and a Foreigner tribute band. As I said, the best of times, and the worst of times.

The ensemble cast is large, and includes Bill Hader and Kristen Wiig as the park's silly-serious owners, and Martin Starr as James' pal Joel, an overeducated, pipe-smoking Gogol fan. Adventureland gives all of the secondary characters unexpected depth and complexity (even when they are not very deep or complex persons). They supply more than local color or comic relief, and go beyond mere caricature to become substantial and interesting characters in their own right. The film meanders and drifts pleasantly, like a mildly buzzed park patron, from one attraction to the next with a narrative that captures the aimlessness and endless possibility (including the possibility of disappointment) of a summer night.

6Apr2009

Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)

Monsters vs. Aliens parades and parodies a long line of sci-fi horror B-movie tropes and cliches. Much of the audience for this movie will have never seen any of the original creations being gently goofed on. That's okay, because as is true of many of the movies that come out of DreamWorks Animation (Kung Fu Panda), Monsters vs. Aliens is a freestanding parody, an amiable comedy-adventure that requires no previous knowledge of pop cinema's rich and ridiculous history to enjoy its good, gooey fun. (My astute, B-movie deprived six year old companion enjoyed it very much.) There's a supersized, superstrong, possibly 50-foot woman, a blob, a mad scientist/insect man (complete with skinny Vincent Price mustache), a creature who could be from the Black Lagoon, or some pond nearby, a giant insectoid thing that roars like Godzilla, and a bunch of trigger-happy military guys pointlessly shooting ineffectual bullets.

The gigantic woman is an unhappy bride-to-be named Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), who is about to marry a self-absorbed cad named Derek Dietl (Paul Rudd) when a meteorite ruins her wedding day and causes her to grow to enormous proportions. She's quickly whisked away to a secret government facility where she meets her fellow monstrous inmates: B.O.B. the blue blob (Seth Rogen), a shiny, gelatinous, elastic, one-eyed glob of goo; Dr. Cockroach, PhD (Hugh Laurie), a formerly human, now cockroachian mad scientist; The Missing Link (Will Arnett), a macho, finny amphibian; and a cute, enormous, fuzzy bug known as Insectosaurus, who is the big-eyed anime progeny of Godzilla, Mothra and all those monsters who ate Tokyo. When a gigantic alien robot invades Earth, the government calls on its captive monsters to save the planet.

What follows is familiar, wacky, and good-natured, and turns a previous generation's paranoia about the impending nuclear apocalypse into a shiny-happy fable of goofy goodness versus goofy evil. Monsters vs. Aliens promotes the values of loyalty, friendship, individuality and iconoclasm (monster-style) over mindless conformity. But it does not eschew mindlessness altogether. B.O.B. the blob is the gooey, shimmery, brainless heart and soul of the movie, the nice guy who gets the girl (well, sort of). Rogen's stoner-dude delivery -- you can hear the smile in his raspy voice -- makes the guileless B.O.B. the poster boy for heart (metaphorically speaking) without smart, which, in the sci-fi/robot/alien menace/war of the worlds/the end is nigh context, is always a safer bet than smart without heart.

Employing the relatively new and newfangled Real 3-D technology (which is immeasurably superior to the oldfangled 3-D), plus, in some locations, IMAX, Monsters vs. Aliens ups the ante on animation and visual spectacle. The 3-D really gives the animation visual depth and pop, making everything look bigger, shinier, blobbier, and richer. Because relatively few locations have 3-D screens yet (around here you'll have to trek to Albany or Poughkeepsie), the animation has to work on a "flat" screen too, so for the most part the gimmicky "thing zooming towards you" effects are minimized in favor of more subtle 3-D. Subtle, but definitely noticeable.
If the animation is crystal-clear and visually memorable, the movie's plot and gags stand out somewhat less, but Monsters vs. Aliens maintains a consistently slapsticky affability, with a decent share of laugh-out-loud moments and enough zippy action to ensure that a good time is had by all.

30Mar2009

Duplicity (2009)

Three movies jockey for position in Duplicity: one is a charming, seductive love story; one is a sleek, spy vs. spy tale of intrigue; one is a satire of industrial espionage and corporate greed. They're all fun, and funny, and they all center on a pair of paranoid spies -- he's former MI6, she's former CIA -- now romantically involved with each other (maybe genuinely), and in the midst of a long con. But who is conning whom? That's the key question in Duplicity, and the answers, when they come, reveal additional layers of sneaky, twisty intrigue and duplicitousness (is triplicitousness a word? -- it should be).

The chief con man in Duplicity is writer-director Tony Gilroy (Michael Clayton), who is utterly at ease with both the spy games and the witty banter. Here is a different kind of spy movie, in which guns are never drawn (nor even seen), nothing explodes, and no one is killed. There are fisticuffs, of a rather amusing sort, when the doughy CEOs of rival corporations have at each other in a symphony of slapstick violence on a rainy airport tarmac, but Duplicity is otherwise a bloodless movie. Which is not to say that the stakes are not high. Millions of dollars are on the line -- but it's not exactly life or death. Indeed, the object of all the intrigue and paranoia and lust (of the standard kind, and the corporate kind), is rather frivolous (although for a certain segment of the population, perhaps not).

The multinational, highly diversified corporations at the center of all the intrigue are Burkitt & Randle and Equikrom, headed by Tom Wilkinson and Paul Giamatti, respectively, as different species of ruthless executive predators. One can imagine them reading Sun Tzu over their morning steak and eggs, and drafting Patton-inspired speeches about the premium diaper wars. Each corp has a spy division, running security, psy ops, and counterintel, spreading disinformation, bugging phones, hacking office equipment, spying on rival employees, spying on their own employees, and spying on their own spies, including Claire (Julia Roberts), Ms. CIA, now deep undercover infiltrating a rival firm, and Ray (Clive Owen), Mr. MI6.

Ray and Claire have history, dating years back to an incident in which she seduced him and stole some secret codes. Love followed (or was it an elaborate revenge plot?), as it so often does after the unwilling exchange of top secret intel. They find common ground, professionally and sexually, but they both have trust issues, and good reasons to be wary and suspicious of each other, and one of the fun questions Duplicity asks is whether they are paranoid because they're spies, or whether they're spies because they're paranoid. And whether a spy should date another spy, or if a spy could ever really date anyone else. Owen and Roberts are perfectly matched, evoking old Hollywood glamour (think Grant and Hepburn) and adding real sparkle and sharp teeth to their quick-witted, hot- and cold-blooded banter. Theirs is a battle of wits between evenly matched opponents, and they simmer and boil over with romantic comedy regularity and fizz. They're greedy, sneaky, and suspicious, but they're also charming, smart, sophisticated and handsome. Is it just me, or do most romantic comedies seem to feature cute, bickering idiots these days? Ray and Claire act like grown-ups, not cute idiots, which is a refreshing change.

The story, with its back and forth, convoluted timeline, reveals tiny bits of intel to the attentive viewer without ever giving up the game. Treachery, double and triple crosses, a complex and constantly shifting emphasis on different plotlines -- the whole movie is a big, elaborate con of the most enjoyable kind.

23Mar2009