Nanny McPhee Returns (2010)

When last we visited Nanny McPhee (Emma Thompson), she was helping frazzled widower Mr. Brown (Colin Firth) to manage his unruly mob of children in Victorian England. Nanny McPhee was a stern, menacing and mysterious figure who dispensed disgusting medicines to malingering little ones and found ways to give wicked kids a taste of their own medicine too. Though she dressed (more or less) like Mary Poppins, she was warty and blobby and had unfortunate teeth. She did not sing. But she was patient and loving, although for Nanny McPhee, love means teaching children to do what's in their own best interest (and to be kind and helpful and all that).

Nanny McPhee is back, warts and all, in Nanny McPhee Returns, although the setting is now the English countryside during World War Two. Nanny McPhee (Thompson) looks none the worse for her decades of caring for misbehaving miscreants. This time around, she's summoned to assist Isabel Green (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a frazzled mother  who does her best to keep the family farm afloat while her husband is off fighting in the war. Her three children, Norman (Asa Butterfield), Megsie (Lil Woods), and little Vincent (Oscar Steer) are a bit naughty, but they turn into violent monsters when their haughty, snooty cousins arrive from the city. Cyril (Eros Vlahos) and Celia (Rosie Taylor-Ritson) are ill-mannered brats who instantly judge the farm to be a sea of poo, and their cousins to be poo-wallowing hayseeds. Meanwhile, Isabel is constantly pestered by her brother-in-law Phil (Rhys Ifans), who wants her to sign over her family's half of the farm. Phil's got some hilarious heavies (Sinead Matthews and Katy Brand) leaning on him for the deed to the farm. As has become traditional in *Nanny McPhee* movies, illustrious British thespians make right fools of themselves playing English caricatures. To wit, Maggie Smith is family friend dotty old Mrs. Docherty (who has a secret identity) and Ralph Fiennes turns up as a stodgy, stern, stiff upper lip military man.

Nanny McPhee Returns, written, like the original movie, by Thompson, lacks some of the menace and also some of the charm of the first movie, but this might be in part because the story's essential mystery is gone. The movie's a bit tamer too -- as directed by Susanna White, it lacks the acid colors and vinegary bite of the first movie and opts for a more muted, earthy palette to go with a slightly gentler approach to herding children. One hates to think that Nanny McPhee is becoming a soft touch! 

The movie goes for a broad, slapsticky brand of comedy, involving a great deal of barnyard animal waste, and Nanny McPhee makes more liberal use of her unspecified supernatural powers -- she can make children want to behave, but she can also make a motorcycle fly, and, for that matter, she can make pigs fly too. The movie makes more liberal use of compter-generated special effects as it hurtles through the plot and the life lessons. Nanny McPhee Returns, like its predecessor, is chockablock full of twists and turns and antic, frantic activity, embracing the kitchen sink approach to storytelling. Nanny McPhee is always the calm eye of the hurricane,  while everyone around her swirls and spins and frets and breaks things, and burps. Did I mention the burping blackbird? His name is Mr. Edelweiss, and he figures prominently in the story's wacky conclusion.

My 8 year old companion to Nanny McPhee Returns is a huge fan of the nanny, and she was not disappointed by the sequel. It's funny, and sweet, and endearingly quirky, with cute kids, cute pigs, and much agricultural mayhem. 

Eat Pray Love (2010)

Julia Roberts is immensely likable in Eat Pray Love. She's as likable onscreen as Liz Gilbert, on whose memoir the movie is based, is on the page. Funny, charming, witty, self-deprecating, neurotic, brutally honest about her own shortcomings, fully aware that she might rightly be accused of whining at times. Anything less and the reader or viewer might come away thinking this Liz Gilbert character is a little spoiled and full of herself -- who gets to take a year off to find herself and, by the way, travel to Italy (to eat), India (to pray) and Indonesia (to fall in love)? (The love part was a surprise -- the eating and praying were premeditated.) Writer-director Ryan Murphy (who co-wrote the screenplay with Jennifer Salt) has managed to preserve much of Gilbert's charm and sense of humor, as well as her supple and straightforward language in the movie adaptation of Eat Pray Love.

There's something very retro about the navel-gazing wanderlust of this sensual, picturesque travelogue and spiritual quest. Eat Pray Love is, in its way, an Easy Rider or On the Road for the modern thirty-something woman (the Neil Young songs on the soundtrack add to the retro mood). Gilbert is in search of peace and enlightenment, but also liberation and autonomy, and what she hears, constantly, is not the mantra of feminist liberation, but of marital bliss and coupled contentment. She is interrogated about her single status (she's recently, painfully divorced) in Italy; she comforts a friend on the verge of an arranged marriage in India; she's told she needs to get laid in Bali. That she's in search of something other than love puts her at odds with the Hollywood tendency to place romantic love first and foremost among the things women desire and need to find fulfillment and feel whole. "I am woman, hear me roar" has been replaced by "Get thee to an altar, spinster!" Yet here's Liz Gilbert, smart, capable, single, and determined to figure out how to move past needing a husband or boyfriend to get right with herself.

The book was glorious in its descriptions of the sensual pleasures of the mouth in Italy -- the food and the language. Likewise the movie, which revels in the luscious indulgence of linguini and lingua. The book was wonderful in India, where Gilbert spends time at an ashram and encounters Richard from Texas (Richard Jenkins), who nicknames her "Groceries" and speaks in  homespun aphorisms layered over deep spiritual wisdom. I thought the book petered out when Gilbert landed in Bali, and unexpectedly fell in love. The movie, on the other hand, is just getting warmed up when Javier Bardem arrives to light up the screen as Gilbert's charming Brazilian paramour Felipe, and Hadi Subiyanto steals scenes as the adorably toothless medicine man Ketut. What gets slighted in the movie (in favor of the Indonesian happy ending) is the ashram interlude, which was the soul of the book and gave the fullest exploration of Gilbert's spiritual quest, her soul-searching, and her inner struggle to love (herself, her god, her world) without being the object of love. I could have done with a whole lot more of Richard from Texas too -- reading the book, I always pictured Richard as M.C. Gainey, but Jenkins totally owns the part with his warm, funny, natural performance.

Eat Pray Love is not an entirely unconventional movie adaptation -- it's a little more superficial than the book, and a little less insightful (in a nutshell, a little light on the "pray"). But it's the exceptional movie that can do enlightenment and capture numinous, divine experience as well as movies can do love and food and the sacred love of food. This is a minor complaint, because the movie is, all things considered, warm, genial, and delicious, a nicely balanced blend of the serious and the sensuous, with beautiful scenery and unconventionally beautiful people. 

The Other Guys (2010)

The other guys in The Other Guys are ordinary, workaday cops, as opposed to the kind of cops movies are made about. The movie star style cops are represented too -- Dwayne Johnson and Samuel L. Jackson poke fun at themselves, and their action hero personas as a couple of greatly admired, but not terribly useful NYPD supercops. They break a lot of windows and cause a great deal of vehicular mayhem. The other guys are Allen Gamble (Will Ferrell), a milquetoast forensic accountant who gets very worked up about building permits, and Terry Hoitz (Mark Wahlberg), a good but extremely unlucky detective who achieved notoriety by shooting a beloved New York athlete. His penance is to be partnered with Gamble. They are a classic odd couple -- Hoitz is crabby and has a short fuse; Gamble's a slow-burner. Hoitz is an able fighter and an excellent marksman; Gamble is a large, lumbering clod who can barely shoot a gun, and would prefer to sit behind a desk pushing papers all day.

Gamble and Hoitz stumble upon a hot case involving a crooked equity fund manager (Steve Coogan). Hoitz sees a chance to be a hero and redeem himself, and Gamble gets to put his accounting skills to good use, but they find their investigation thwarted at every turn by politicians, ruthless corporate sharks, and a weary, hapless police chief (Michael Keaton) who doesn't want anyone in his precinct making waves. The plot doesn't really matter, however. (Although in the closing credits, it does: Rage Against the Machine performs "Maggie's Farm" while colorful graphics detail the outrageous perfidy of Ponzi-scheming Wall Street swindlers.) The story merely creates assorted occasions for a lot of funny riffing and bickering. The latter is particularly inspired in The Other Guys, which features long, meandering, nonsensical contretemps involving the relative badassery of tunas and lions, among other things.

Director Adam McKay (who cowrote the script with Chris Henchy), has collaborated before with Ferrell (on Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy, Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby, and Step Brothers), but Gamble is an uncommon character: he's gullible, sincere, timid, officious, irresistible to beautiful women -- including his hot wife (Eva Mendes) -- but apparently immune to their charms, he prefers easy listening music. He's also cheery and smart. He can't understand why Hoitz hates him, and Hoitz can't understand why women throw themselves at him (the movie offers no explanation). I've never found Ferrell especially hilarious, but he's really funny as Gamble, and he doesn't play him as a mere caricature, but digs beneath the character's skin to find a kind of suppressed belligerence. Wahlberg has turned out to be a stealth comedian (and a pretty good dramatic actor too). Ferrell and Wahlberg, with their high voices, are like a couple of bellicose roosters together, which adds to the overall comic effect. They both simultaneously play the straight man and the joker, the comic and the foil. The screenplay provides them with plenty of goofy, raucously funny material.

The Other Guys spoofs the conventions of supercop/buddy cop movies, but it throws in plenty of car chases, explosions, and shootouts just the same. It tries to walk the fine line between making fun of witless guns-a-blazin' action movies, and actually being one. It succeeds, not because it does anything especially great or innovative plot-wise or action-wise, but because it is completely committed to its snappy, waggish nuttiness, prolix illogicality and extended incongruity. 

Dinner for Schmucks (2010)

Dinner for Schmucks is about a  couple of nice guys who do rotten things. One of them does rotten things on purpose, although he doesn't want to; the other one can't seem to control himself -- he hardly does anything intentionally, but leaves destruction in his wake.

The comedy, directed by Jay Roach (Meet the Parents) and written by David Guion and Michael Handelman, is based on the French farce Le Diner de Cons by Francis Veber. The obscene title notwithstanding, Dinner for Schmucks has been sanitized for your protection. Notably, no one in the movie ever utters the word "schmuck," and the ending is positively heartwarming in the way that everyone -- good and bad -- gets what's coming to them. Dinner for Schmucks balances its fairly mild meanness and crudeness with an equal measure of mild sweetness and affirmation, and a weirdly zig-zaggy script that's loaded with goofy oddities. The movie, like its protagonists, is nice at heart, but sometimes behaves badly.

Tim (Paul Rudd) is a nice guy who works in a shark tank, also known as  an equity firm. He'd like to get ahead in the company, and comes up with a bright idea that gets him noticed by his boss, Fender (Bruce Greenwood). He's invited to attend a "dinner for idiots," where everyone brings as a guest the biggest eccentric they can find, so that Fender and associates can humiliate them. Then they give an award to the "best" of the unsuspecting victims. Tim's tempted to do it, because he'd like to get a promotion and impress his girlfriend Julie (Stephanie Szostak), an art curator. This is a stupid plan, because Julie thinks the whole thing is so appalling and cruel that she walks out on Tim just for considering it. 

As fate would have it, Tim literally runs into Barry (Steve Carell). This is because Tim was driving while texting, which is an idiotic thing to do. Barry, on the other hand, was in the middle of the street retrieving a dead mouse, because his hobby is amateur taxidermy, and he specializes in incredibly detailed mouse dioramas, which he calls "mouseterpieces." (The mousterpieces, replicas of great works of art, and reenactments of historical events, with mice, are really pretty cool.) Tim concludes that Barry is just the sort of guy one invites to the idiot dinner, which is how it comes to pass that over the course of 24 hours, well-meaning, kind-hearted Barry almost single-handedly destroys Tim's life.

What's the deal with Barry? Perhaps it's the formaldehyde fumes, because he's not particularly sharp, and he's apparently incapable of interpreting even the simplest social cues, but he's also genuinely nice. His true eccentricity is that he is apparently so clueless, so guileless, so gentle and so sincere that he's virtually impervious to cruelty. He's like the proverbial rubber in the great rubber vs. glue, everything-you-say-bounces-off-of-me-and-sticks-to-you debate. Although he doesn't know it. He just *is* it. With the best intentions, Barry manages to sabotage Tim's relationship with Julie, help Tim's stalker ex-girlfriend (Lucy Punch) find him, and cause general mayhem. Barry also introduces Tim to Therman (Zach Galifianakis), a nutjob who believes he has the power to control minds. 

Galifianakis would have walked away with the movie if not for Jemaine Clement (*Flight of the Conchords*), who plays Kieran, a pompous, pretentious artist who says funny, outrageous, utterly nonsensical things. Barry's a master of tiny, adorable, melancholy and slightly macabre works of art; Kieran specializes in massive, self-aggrandizing self-portraits of himself dressed as a goat. Clement, Galifianakis, and to a lesser extent Punch and Kristen Schaal (Tim's assistant Susana) keep the movie lively, offbeat and interesting, and run circles around Rudd and Carell, who are stuck playing out the inevitabilities of the plot. That is, what's least interesting about Dinner for Schmucks is the main course -- the best and most memorable bits are all the weird, unexpectedly inventive side dishes.

The point of all this, of course, is that the real idiots are the people who think everyone else is an idiot. Or something like that. If you're an idiot for thinking other people are idiots, and Dinner for Schmucks forces you to conclude that the idiots are the people who think other people are idiots, then doesn't that also make you an idiot? Maybe that's too meta for this movie. Probably. But conveniently, the biggest idiots of Dinner for Schmucks are arrogant rich men who work in finance -- easy targets, surely, ever since Christ let the moneychangers have it in the temple. (There's a Christ mouse in Barry's replica of The Last Supper, for what it's worth.) The movie, anyway, is not idiotic. It supplies an ongoing parade of quirky oddballs,  misunderstandings, miscommunications, surprises, and moments of slapstick, culminating in a farcical dinner party of epic eccentricity.

The Kids Are All Right (2010)

Since the birth of Louise Brown -- the world's first "test tube baby" -- the creation of families has become ever more medically, ethically, and emotionally complicated. Scant attention has been paid in movies to the complexities, and the inherent drama and comedy of truly modern families. The Kids Are All Right does it -- it's a funny, honest, affecting portrayal of a family, of a couple, and of kids spreading their wings. It is, among other things, about a completely ordinary family in which the kids were conceived with a little help from an anonymous sperm donor. Joni (Mia Wasikowski) and Laser (Josh Hutcherson) are teenagers. She's about to leave home for college, and he's spending more time with his bullying, knuckleheaded friend Clay (Eddie Hassell) than his moms would like. The kids' moms, Jules (Julianne Moore) and Nic (Annette Bening) are, like lots of couples married a long time, engaged in a constant renegotiation and reassessment of their lives together. They drive a Volvo. They worry about their kids like devoted helicopter parents do. They are starting to fret over the emptying of their nest. What their kids think about is a bit of a surprise to them: Joni and Laser want to know about their donor dad, and secretly arrange to meet him.

Donor dad is Paul (Mark Ruffalo), a scruffy, charming bachelor restauranteur and organic farmer. Joni's wildly impressed by his locavore-organico cred; Laser's not so sure, although Paul's motorcycle might win him over. Paul's existence as a freewheeling and sympathetic outsider -- more like a cool older cousin than a father -- and his sudden presence in the family's settled, comfortable and routine life, is an instant and potentially troublesome disruption. Complications ensue.

Directed by Lisa Cholodenko (who co-wrote it with Stuart Blumberg), The Kids Are All Right is more than all right. The script is insightful, heartfelt, and funny, and casually and nimbly navigates emotionally complex and occasionally uncomfortable terrain. The Kids Are All Right effectively plops the audience into the midst of a family in progress, and manages to tap into the underlying comedy of everyday existence. Cholodenko and Blumberg perfectly capture the way that, in a longterm relationship, conversations flow from a source far removed, part of an ongoing river of dialogical interaction fed by many streams (and occasionally tumbling through rough waters).

The characters are people you wouldn't mind spending more time with, which sets them apart from the usual loudly dysfunctional families portrayed in movies. Nic is an OB-Gyn, and the family breadwinner, and she can be a bit caustic, while Jules is a kind of New Agey, flaky project starter who is still trying to find herself. They don't communicate perfectly with each other or with their kids. Moore and Bening are superbly attuned to their characters quirks and rough callouses, their sensitivities and vulnerabilities, and their inherent goodness. Their portrayals are honest, sympathetic, and unadorned. (And while we're on the subject of honesty, it's nice to see two middle aged actresses not only acting their age, but looking it, and looking absolutely lovely.)

The plot complications occasionally veer towards the predictable, yet the characters are so real and engaging, and the portrayals so honestly casual, that the movie's novelty -- a lesbian couple with two kids conceived with donated sperm -- all but evaporates. It's not just that families like this are no longer that unusual. There is really nothing unusual about the family in The Kids Are All Right. They struggle with the same kinds of problems -- boredom, routine, miscommunication, kids who don't listen, parents who don't understand -- that every family contends with. This is surely by design. There is no point at which it is a social or political issue for anyone in the movie that Nic and Jules are a couple, or that they have kids. If gay marriage is a contentious political or moral issue anywhere, it is not the issue in The Kids Are All Right, which is instead concerned with the drama and comedy of family life, the chafing irritations of the ties that bind, and the soothing, healing balm that those same ties provide.

Inception (2010)

Christopher Nolan supposedly started writing Inception a decade ago, when he was making Memento. I can see how it would take a long time to write. The labyrinthine, dream within a dream within a dream structure of Inception would have made rewrites confoundingly difficult. And in between, Nolan was writing and directing other complex films like The Prestige and The Dark Knight. Nolan has a real knack for reinventing fundamental genre films, whether its superhero movies or detective stories or, in the case of Inception, espionage films.

The plot of Inception is simplicity itself; the execution is mind-bogglingly complex. A corporate spy/con artist named Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio) steals secrets from people. He's also in trouble with the law, and separated from his young children, whom he desperately wants to see again. The reason for Cobb's troubles has to do with his methods for extracting information from his marks: he infiltrates their minds, and steals the ideas he finds therein. This involves a complicated process requiring sedatives, some kind of mind-linking machine, and a dream architect who builds the subconscious landscapes in which Cobb and his team do their spy work. These dreamscapes tend to be pretty pedestrian, and so are the actions in the dreams. Foot chases, unexpected plot twists, and familiar faces all turn up. And this is also true -- in a dream, you don't know that you're dreaming -- that was Descartes' argument, anyway -- so Cobb's victims never realize they've been robbed. Cobb knows when he's dreaming and when he isn't -- although it may be the case that he's losing his mooring in reality, tripping on the dream-reality line. Some Cartesian skeptical confusion plays a key role in complicating Cobb's life, and is embodied (in his dreams) by his wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), who, for reasons I won't divulge, tends to turn up at the most inopportune times while he's at work.

Cobb's latest assignment is one that almost everyone thinks is impossible: inception, or implanting an idea in another person's mind. A powerful Japanese businessman named Saito (Ken Watanabe) hires Cobb to implant an idea in the mind of Robert Fischer (Cillian Murphy), the heir to a vast business empire. Saito wants Fischer to break up his corporation -- Cobb's role is to plant the germ of an idea that will grow so organically that Fischer will think he thought of it himself. Inception is far more complicated and dangerous than just swiping information, and Cobb knows the dangers first-hand -- it's an unpredictable process because once an idea takes hold, it takes on a life of its own. He takes the job because Saito promises to fix his problem so that he can be with his kids once more.

And so, in true con movie style, Cobb assembles a team: there's Arthur (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), his right-hand man; Eames (Tom Hardy), a forger who's good at being someone else; Yusuf (Dileep Rao), a creative pharmacist; and Ariadne (Ellen Page), a young architect who is good at creating spaces. Cobb auditions the new recruit Ariadne -- named after the Ariadne who helped Theseus escape the Minotaur's labyrinth? -- by asking her to design a maze. 

Nolan designs a complicated multi-level labyrinth with Inception, with interlinked layers all operating in their own separate dreamspace and dreamtime. What happens in one subconscious layer affects what happens in the layers above and below it -- the dreams within the dreams unfold independently, but with their gears linked so that when one turns, so does another. But reality (such as it is) slips in too -- it's a running gag in the movie that one character's full bladder means a torrential downpour for the duration of the dream. Something that can infiltrate every layer simultaneously -- providing a kind of constant and signal for the dreamers -- is music. (Edith Piaf music, to be precise, bringing to mind Cotillard's best-known role).

Cinematographer Wally Pfister (who's been behind the camera for all of Nolan's features since Memento) does exceptional work in Inception, in a vast array of spaces -- bright beaches and crumbling cities, hotel rooms, elevator shafts, warehouses, the inside of a van during that torrential downpour. What Inception doesn't do is trade in fanciful, surreal, irrational dreamscapes of the sort that only exist in movies -- those, Cobb tells Ariadne, can tip off the dreamer-target, triggering the mind's rational defenses. The movie-goer's too. Part of what makes Inception work so well is that the dreams are mostly so ordinary, as most dreams are. They are anchored in reality, but also infiltrated by movies. This makes sense, given how dreamlike movies have always been, but also how movielike dreams (or at least my dreams) can be.  The stuff that happens to Cobb and Co. is the stuff that happens in, say, James Bond movies -- shoot 'em ups in the Alps, crazy cool car chases -- but also Matrix-y stuff like zero-gravity fight scenes (how do you pound a guy when there's no gravity?). The story manages to integrate, in a logical way, some pretty cool special effects too -- like a city that folds over on itself, and an Escherian infinite staircase.

Inception is an entertaning puzzle -- the dream within a dream (movie within a movie) multi-layer structure is demanding. Teasing apart the layers, keeping the whole tangled web straight requires more attention than your run-of-the-mill industrial espionage caper. Inception is smart and original, a nonderivative, non-remake, non-sequel, brand new thing that's constructed out of familiar pieces assembled in an uncommonly imaginative way.

Despicable Me (2010)

Supervillains, as everyone knows, are indispensable. Without them, superheroes wouldn't have much to do, except maybe wait around for random natural disasters to occur. Without supervillains, superhero and spy movies would be kind of boring. Just imagine Batman without the Joker, or Spider-Man without Doctor Octopus or James Bond without Goldfinger. As it turns out, however, superheroes are not indispensable, at least not in Despicable Me, a movie that pits supervillain against supervillain in a battle to be baddest. 

The Me in Despicable Me would be Gru, a meanie with a long, pointy nose and no forehead. He wears turtlenecks and speaks (via funnyman Steve Carell) with a vaguely Eastern European accent. His underground lair is in the sub-basement of his suburban home. Gru has Mommy issues, thanks to his disapproving mother (Julie Andrews), who never thought he would amount to much. "Ehhhhh" she says, no matter what he does. Gru's minions, however, worship him. They're little yellow guys who look like supersized jellybeans, with blue overalls and either one or two eyes. They chirp and twitter and manage to goof up whatever task they've been assigned, which does not help Gru with his plans to be numero uno evil mastermind. Neither does he get much assistance from his partner in crime, the ancient Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand). What really gets his knickers in a twist, though, is when a newbie supervillain named Vector (Jason Segel) steals the Great Pyramid of Giza, thereby becoming the world's greatest villain. Gru's plan to retake the mantle of villainy is to steal something even bigger: the moon.

His plan is excessively complicated, as supervillain plans frequently are, and involves adopting three adorable orphans. Why? Because they sell the cookies that Vector can't resist, of course (and blah blah robots, blah blah shrink ray, blah blah...). The moppets are Margo (Miranda Cosgrove), the smart one, Edith (Dana Gaier), the tomboy, and little Agnes (Elsie Fisher), who loves unicorns like crazy. They live in a Dickensian orphanage run by Miss Hattie (Kristen Wiig), so they're pretty happy to be adopted, even if it's by a persnickety, curmudgeonly weirdo like Gru. Will these cute girls melt Gru's hard ol' villainous heart and turn him into a superdad? Faster than you can say 3-D rollercoaster ride.

Despicable Me is the first feature film from animation house Illumination Entertainment, and was helmed by a pair of French directors, Pierre Coffin and Chris Renaud. It's a kitchen sink production -- everything is in there. Cute kids. Slapstick minions. Sharks, nerds, ray guns, rockets, amusement parks, orphans, sight gags, funny accents, funny voices, elderly people, some heartstring plucking, all in glorious 3D. Well, the 3D is no more glorious than usual, except for that rollercoaster ride, which is almost authentic enough to make  your stomach flip flop. There's surely an untapped market for 3D Imax movies of rollercoaster rides -- perfect for those who want the thrills without the long lines and death defying. I'd like a 3D surfing movie too, please.

Despicable Me is perfect for those who want a movie with a little bit of everything, but not a lot of anything. It's hectic and colorful, intermittently cute and fitfully funny, and it works really, really hard to please. It's passably entertaining, but doesn't leave a lasting impression. Gru's mom would surely give it an "Ehhhhh."

The Twilight Saga: Eclipse (2010)

The Twilight Saga isn't shy about drawing literary parallels. In New Moon, the second movie in this apparently unstoppable franchise based on Stephanie Meyer's best-selling books, it was Romeo and Juliet. Hey, if you're gonna aim, might as well aim high, right? Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), the 109 year old teenage vampire, and his beloved Bella (Kristen Stewart) watch Romeo and Juliet in their English Lit class. Later Edward tries to kill himself when he thinks Bella is dead. But she isn't. And then he isn't. Well, technically he is, but apparently there's dead and there's really dead when you're a vampire. But if you're gonna go all Shakespearean, you'd better be willing to kill off your heroes and heroines (even the undead ones), which is one thing The Twilight Saga will not (at least not yet) do. Romeo and Juliet might have ended tragically, but New Moon was a bummer from start to finish. The major crisis was instigated by Bella getting a paper cut. (I'll admit that's pretty original. Shakespeare never used the paper cut as plot device.) Never has love made so many so unhappy for so long. Never have paper cuts been so deadly. (Twilight the first, on the other hand, was a hoot -- even if it was unintentionally funny.)

Which brings us to The Twilight Saga: Eclipse, in which Edward and Bella continue to be desperately in love, and Bella remains wary of sharp envelopes. (No, not really. Not the envelope part.) But Bella's getting more desperate by the minute, weary, perhaps, of this extended exercise in delayed gratification. Even if Edward is immune to teenage hormones (an apparent perk of being undead), Bella is still human, so she isn't. Such is Bella's love (and lust) for Edward that she wishes to be made a vampire. Such is Edward's love for Bella, that he wants her to be spared from undead immortality. Methinks the boy's got a point.

Part of Bella's problem might be that teen wolf pal of hers, Jacob (Taylor Lautner). Jacob is desperately in love with Bella, so much so that he has apparently misplaced all of his shirts. He's tan and buff and warmblooded. Edward is pale and sparkly and cold as the grave, but fully clothed. Poor Bella -- so many choices. Which is why she is reciting Robert Frost's "Fire and Ice" to Edward as the movie begins. In a sunny meadow filled with wildflowers. With Edward wearing a shirt and sparkling in the sunlight as vampires do in Twilight world. I'd bet good money Frost never imagined his poem being read in quite those circumstances.

In addition to practicing abstinence (if that's something one can actually practice), Twilight steadfastly hews to the law of narrative economy -- there are no Macguffins in Twilight, no poem is recited and no Native American legend is recounted that will not figure later in the movie. And so, bitter rivals Jacob and Edward (aka Fire and Ice) face some choices in Eclipse too, for someone has raised up a vampire army to slay Bella. The vampire army is made up of "newborns," newly-minted vampires who are the most vicious and bloodthirsty vampires of all. Bella must be saved, for if Twilight is anything, it is an old-fashioned damsel in distress story, and Bella is the damsel, and she's in distress... again. She's in all kinds of distress, of course, because what Bella wants most is what is most dangerous of all: sex. That her two would-be beaus are both monsters who must suppress their wild natures and appetites for the sake of love is the simmering subtext behind everything that happens in The Twilight Saga, and, I suspect, its main appeal. Twilight is all about the safe sex, which is no sex at all. (Edward refuses, being the courtly, marriage-minded guy that he is, telling Bella, vaguely, that it is too dangerous.) And yet Bella is, it becomes quite clear, a tease. There's a word for the particular type of tease she is, and I bet that word never appears in the chaste Twilight books. 

The two rivals for Bella's undying affection must join forces to protect her from the crazy killer baby vampires, which makes Eclipse the best Twilight movie ever. Which may be damning with faint praise, but it's really not bad. 

Direrctor David Slade (who made the fast and furious vampire movie 30 Days of Night), has taken the mopey, morose, swoony Twilight Saga and given it a lusty, vital shot in the arm with competent, energetic directing. There's a lot more action, a lot more romantic comedy, and the characters actually show some personality, all of which is good. Fun, fighting, people doing stuff, vampires doing stuff, personality -- all good things in a movie. There's more violence, more feeling, and for the first time, a sense of what is at stake for Bella -- not just what she hopes to gain by her transformation into Edward's eternal one and only, but also all that she stands to lose. In making that more manifest, the movie also (finally!) starts to account for the devotion between Edward and Bella. It was just a given before, but the two of them were always so miserable (although admittedly more miserable apart than together) that it was never clear why their romance was worth the candle. There's still a fair bit of trademark Twilight silliness in Eclipse too -- strike a pose, you vampy vampires! -- although it feels a bit more like the cast are in on the joke this time around. At any rate, The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is a movie that actually aims to entertain, and it mostly succeeds.

05Jul2010

Knight and Day (2010)

Why is this movie called Knight and Day? The knight part makes sense -- it's the real name of superspy Roy Miller (Tom Cruise), who, early in the movie, picks up a knight figurine from an airport gift shop. And Miller is a kind of a knight in body armor to June (Cameron Diaz). That's June Haven. Nobody in the movie is called Day. And while a goodly portion of the movie takes place in daylight, and on assorted days, the same is true of many movies that do *not* have Day (or Knight) in the title. The only logical explanation is that someone was taken with the punny possibilities of calling a movie Knight and Day, and forgot to include a Day. But Hard Day's Knight, or Knight Moves, or several other possibilities would have made more sense. The porn movie based on Knight and Day will probably be called Long Day's Journey into Knight. You heard it here first.

Maybe the nonsensical title is meant to be a MacGuffin, but once you get past thinking about who the heck Day is, Knight and Day is rather fun and enjoyable. The movie aims to combine the contemporary action-spy film and the romantic thriller-mystery movies of the forties and fifties. Sort of. It more or less succeeds, although the romantic part never convincingly gets off the ground, and the thriller-mystery stuff takes a back seat to the cars-flying, bullets-flying, helicopter-and-jetliner-flying, bulls-runnning action. Lots of things fly in Knight and Day, and lots of things crash too. The movie, in true spy movie fashion, hops the globe, and lands in Pamplona just as those bulls start a-running. It also goes to Austria, Boston, California, and the Azores via various motorized conveyances. The body count is quite high, although the movie is generally bloodless, and most of the casualties involve various anonymous peons of various bad guys.

Roy may or may not be a rogue spy, and he may or may not be crazy. Cruise, for all that he lacks as a thespian, does crazy pretty well, with manic eyes and a toothy grin that immediately set him apart as the go-to guy for crazy-but-competent running about and carrying on. He even says, at one point in the movie, "I'm the guy." Yes, he's the guy. Roy bumps into June -- she's the gal -- in Wichita, where she is trying to catch a plane home to Boston for her sister's wedding. June restores vintage American cars, for what it's worth. Several dead bodies and a plane crash later, June is being pursued by either the CIA or an arms dealer, or both, and also by Roy, who may or may not be a good guy who is trying to protect her from the bad guys. Roy is also trying to protect a nerdy scientist (Paul Dano) who has invented some kind of super-duper energy source. Maybe. 

It doesn't really matter. Roy has a mission, there are bad guys, and some top secret thingie that must be kept safe. What works about Knight and Day is that the movie is pretty much implausible from start to finish, but nobody ever pretends otherwise. Realism is not what this movie's about. It's about a guy who can dispatch his enemies with maximal efficiency while simultaneously trying to reassure his increasingly hysterical hostage and/or protectee June that things are not as bad as they seem in spite of all the bullets and bombs and assassins and crash-landings. Roy's a real chatterbox, which is a most unexpected character trait in a superspy-assassin type. He's like Jason Bourne played by Cary Grant -- all talk, all action. June, for her part, holds up her end of the increasingly absurd conversation, although why she sticks with Roy when to do so is to live in mortal peril is... well, there's no reason she should, but if she didn't, this would be an entirely different movie, so it's just as well. There's nonstop banter in the script by Patrick O'Neill, and it sets Knight and Day apart from the action pack. There could have been more talk, and less action, but director James Mangold manages to juggle both the snappy patter and the hectic crashings and smashings and maintain the movie's sense of humor. In addition to laying on a thick base layer of chatter, the movie has fun elbowing all kinds of spy movie conventions in the ribs. Speedboats? Check. Parachutes? Check. Motorcycle chase? Got it. Mysterious meetings in narrow alleyways in Salzburg? It's in there. Post-it notes? Yup.

Knight and Day is fun, which is something spy movies usually are not. They can be cool, and intriguing, and exciting, and insightful. Knight and Day is not really any of those things. It has stuff that's sort of exciting and there's a little bit of mystery, but that's not the stuff that really matters. And the romantic part of the romantic comedy gets waylaid, because Roy and June are not very convincing as sweethearts -- they seem decidedly undecided about the whole thing. But that might just be the secret of their success -- they kind of grow on each other, and on the audience too.

1Jul2010

Toy Story 3 (2010)

The delight of the Toy Story movies has always been that they take very seriously the childhood belief in the realness, the genuine being of toys. Toys have adventures, and complicated lives, and do fantastic things, and can go anywhere that the fertile mind of a child can imagine (and to infinity... and beyond). But a toy also has a precarious existence. One day, you're shiny and new, and the next day, you're broken, or relegated to the depths of the toy box. You might be the favorite one day, only to be replaced by the latest, greatest thing again and again. And eventually, your child outgrows you, and you're kicked to the curb, sold at a yardsale, stowed in the attic. Or worse.

And so, the Toy Story saga is poignant because of the impermanence of a toy's life, and the sorrow and heartache that comes with attachment. That theme was explored with richness and emotional complexity in Toy Story 2, and it is more or less reiterated in Toy Story 3, although this time everything is a little darker, and grimmer.

The peril for Andy's toys in Toy Story 3 is that Andy (voiced by John Morris, who has been Andy for 15 years) is going away to college. Mom (Laurie Metcalf) has delivered an edict: everything must go. It's either the box bound for college, the box for the attic, the donations for the daycare center, or the trashcan. Andy's perennial favorite Woody (Tom Hanks) is ready for college, but through a mishap, the other toys -- Buzz Lightyear, Jessie the Cowgirl, Hamm the piggybank, Rex the dinosaur, Slinky Dog, and Mr and Mrs Potato Head -- end up at the Sunnyside Daycare Center. There, they are greeted warmly by the resident toys, including their leader, a purple bear named Lotso-Huggin' Bear (Ned Beatty), and the creepy, sad, droopy-eyed doll Baby. Lotso promises an idyllic life of play and leisure. Just what every toy wants. 

Life isn't as sunny as it seems at Sunnyside, however, especially after the newcomers are assigned to the toddler room where horrible things are done to toys. And then it gets worse, as they discover that Lotso runs a sort of fascist prison camp for toys. Lotso is a good toy turned bad, a broken bear embittered when he was, long ago, replaced with a newer model.

Lotso changes the mood and the stakes in the Toy Story 'verse in a way that is not especially welcome. He's a genuinely mean, depraved toy, not just a play nemesis, and he threatens the very existence of Andy's beloved (if neglected) playthings. While the movie remains playful, having fun with classic prison escape movie tropes and bringing a punny and literal *deus ex machina* in to save the day, the tone of the story is darker and the peril has been amped up. I guess I can't stand to see a toy in mortal danger, because I found Toy Story 3 less enjoyable than the previous two movies, and occasionally even unpleasant.

All of that is, I suppose, part and parcel with taking toys seriously. But just what are we taking seriously here? Toys are real because they are animated by a child's love and freed from mere thinghood by the life breathed into them by their little creators. They come to life, as do we all, at their peril, for life is treacherous and full of sorrow, full of leavings and returnings, but also full of joy and laughter and fun. Toys get old, as do we all, and must face their own kind of mortality. In Toy Story 2, Woody was forced to choose between sterile immortality in a museum, and his loyalty to Andy, and the messy, temporal love of a fickle child. My objection to Toy Story 3, I suppose, comes down to this -- the existential crisis of toy being, as eloquently and poignantly depicted in the previous movies, is not literal annihilation, but the loss of meaning, the loss of significance, the indignity of being forgotten and unloved. (Arguably, this is also the existential crisis of human beings -- not death itself, but the loss of everything else that is valuable to us.) Toy Story 3 threatens the toys with literal extermination at the same time that they wrestle with all the other losses that come with being the playthings of a grown up child. Which is to say that Toy Story 3 rehashes the major theme of Toy Story 2, and then adds an element of additional (trumped up) danger that is, frankly, kind of cliched. It stops being uniquely about the toy experience (and the unusual perils of toyhood, and the toy's eye view of the world), and more about the kinds of experiences that characters in action-adventure movies have. Toy Story 3 is less emotionally resonant and satisfying because it is less about how toys are us, and more about how toys are just a filmmaker's playthings.

21June2010