Unreliable Narrator

Interview with Wendell and Muriel Smith - Part 2

2012-01-28T22:14:00.001-05:00

Muriel Smith, 1948

Part 2 of my interview with my parents, Wendell and Muriel Smith. The saga continues...

Dell: That brings us to Muriel...

Wendell: Right.

Dell: (to Muriel) You also grew up in New Jersey.

Muriel: Yes.

Dell: Morristown.

Muriel: Yes.

Dell: During the Depression. Would you say the Depression affected the way you grew up? How things were?

Muriel: Well, it may have affected us but I don’t think so. My particular family. My father had just opened his first auto supply store (Dean Phipps Auto Stores). About 1923 or something. By the time the Depression began at the end of the 1920s, he was doing very, very well. And that was the kind of business that flourished during the depression.

Dell: Sort of a do-it-yourself. Instead of buying a new car you would buy the parts to fix the car you had.

Muriel: Yes. Apparently he was very good at what he did, and so my particular family…my father wasn’t out of work or struggling at all. I remember though him coming and taking us into New York. The day. Anne (Muriel’s sister) and I. I was just a little kid. I was probably around seven, eight years old. And he took us down to the Bowery and showed us the lines of people, the men going in to get soup. Soup lines. To show us what the Depression was like.

Dell: Well there must have been kids at your school who were affected.

Muriel: There were. And my sister took me down the street and around the corner down into the woods. And there was a camp of hobos right along the railroad tracks. These were men who had lost their jobs. And they were living in these outdoor camps. Traveling on the train. They hop the trains. Go where they hope to get a job. (My sister) took me down and showed it to me. It was unbelievable, these men standing around, sitting around. Waiting—

Dell: That’s when you understood a little bit better—

Muriel: I didn’t understand too much. I was pretty young. I was about six in 1933, and that was about the middle of the Depression. It ended with the second world war. And then the country started mobilizing for war and everything speeded up, and everybody got jobs.

Dell: You went to Connecticut College. You went for education?

Muriel: I majored in education. Child development. I was trained to teach nursing school and kindergarten.

Dell: Was it after school that you were a draughtsman?

Muriel: Oh, that was my last job. When I met him (points to Wendell) I was a draughtsman. My first job was teaching in a private school in Madison. I taught kindergarten. And then my second job was teaching first and second grade in a private school in Florida.

Wendell + Muriel, July 1967

Dell: So you moved to Florida?

Muriel: My mother and I went down there for the winter. And then I came back from Florida, and a friend of mine worked at Bell Labs. When I was teaching school I was making $25 a week. And I’d give my mother $10 for rent. So I ended up with $15 a week. Well, it was a lot of money in those days, but it wasn’t that much. So this friend at Bell Labs she said, “You know, they’re hiring at Bell Labs and they’re paying big money.” She was making a $100.00 a week.

Dell: Wow.

Muriel: So I marched myself down there and it turned out I knew the man who was the personnel director. He was a father of a friend of mine. He interviewed me and I got the job. So then my friend Anne Ackerman was working in a bank and she wasn’t making much money and she went down and interviewed and got hired. They were hiring women to be draughtsman and do electric schematics. Which is a certain kind of a drawing. And they hired maybe ten girls.

Dell: Was this during the war?

Muriel: No, the war had ended. But they were still doing war work, because it was the cold war. We were working on Nike.

Dell: What’s that?

Muriel: Some kind of a missile thing. We were working on such small little parts that I have no idea what the whole thing was. So the ten of us, maybe there weren’t that many, maybe six of us were given a six week course on how to do this.

Dell: Yeah, you didn’t have experience.

Muriel: None of us were draughtsman. And the course was given down in Murray Hill where the biggest Bell Labs place was and while I was taking that course, I don’t know if he remembers this, but that’s when I met Wendell. (After the course ended) we went back to Bell Labs in Wippenee and they had a whole room of us girls at our drafting tables doing these schematics. We knew just exactly what to do.

Muriel on the Hudson River with her father, Dean Phipps

Dell: And you met Wendell during this time. You had both grown up in Morristown but you had never met.

Muriel: No, but my sister knew his brother and I think his father was our insurance agent. I had never him. But my mother and I moved into an apartment in—

Wendell: Jacob Ford Village.

Muriel: Jacob Ford Village, it’s like a garden apartment. And we moved in right next door to Bob Smith (Wendell’s brother). And Wendell lived with Bob. That’s how I met him. We were both on the second floor. I’d see him out my window walking around the parking lot.

Wendell: I used to see you going off to work in the morning.

Dell: So, we’ll jump ahead. We know the story of Wendell and Muriel getting married and driving across country and setting up shop at the top of a mountain. (To Muriel) So when did you start to write?

Muriel: Well the first time I remember writing something good was in eighth grade. It was around Christmas and we had read the Christmas Carol. Dickens. And the assignment was to write another episode with another ghost. And my teacher was just thrilled (with the story she wrote). And she read it out loud to the class. And I was amazed. I didn’t know that my story was that good. You know, I just wrote the assignment. That was the very first time I thought that maybe I was a good writer. Because nobody had ever mentioned it to me before.

Dell: So that planted the seed.

Muriel: Yes. Then I thought, Gee, I’m a good writer. And I realized that I liked doing it. It’s fun.

Dell: I remember growing up on Main Street in Orleans and I think you were keeping a journal at that time.

Muriel: Well I wrote a mystery when we lived there.

Dell: All right.

Muriel: A very bad one.

Dell: Okay, I’m glad you can admit that. But that was your first attempt at a novel right? So it’s okay that it was bad.

Muriel: It was really bad. But it was good experience. How are you going to learn if you don’t sit down and do it?

Dell: Every good writer has a couple of books that they don’t show anybody. That never actually go anywhere. That’s part of the learning experience. Now, you’ve written some romance novels.

Muriel: Yes I have.

Dell: Since the ’80s or ‘90s you’ve written a few?

Muriel: Three.

Dell: Did you have an agent at one time?

Muriel: Yes. It was fun having an agent. She was really nice. And helpful. It was just great. And I didn’t realize quite what it meant to have an agent. I didn’t have any friends who wrote. I didn’t have any contact with other writers. Like, Cindy’s in this wonderful group (TARA – Tampa Romance Writers of America). I had nothing like that. I didn’t realize getting an agent was such a big deal. After the third book, which she loved but couldn’t sell—and she wanted me to rewrite it—I just dropped her. Which is so awful. Here she was trying so hard to get my writing going and getting me published, she really tried and was so nice to me. She’d call me up on the phone and everything.

The Incredible Barn, Orleans, MA, 1967

Dell: What was her name?

Muriel: Lettie Lee. She was with the Ann Elmo Agency. I don’t think it exists any more. I think she was older, maybe my age. Because during the course of our friendship her husband died.

Dell: So you dropped her like a hot potato. Said, I’m done with you.

Muriel: I didn’t say anything. I just didn’t feel like rewriting the book. And then I gave up. I decided that I tried it, and it didn’t work. That was it. Which is wrong. Cindy has friends who have written twelve novels before they were published.

Dell: It sounds like you were frustrated.

Muriel: Yeah.

Dell: And you felt like it wasn’t worth it, it wasn’t going anywhere.

Muriel: That’s how I felt. Yeah.

Dell: I remember you going off to stay at the campground in Foster, Rhode Island.

Muriel: Yeah. That was fun. I got a lot of work done. I (had been) dreaming of going somewhere alone and just writing twelve hours a day. That’s what I did there; I worked all day until about four o’clock. And then Laurie and the kids would come over. We’d have a swim and then she’d take me (back to her house) and cook me dinner.

Dell: What were you writing then?

Muriel: I was still writing the romances. I wrote three.

Dell: Do you like them?

Muriel: Yeah.

Dell: The one you recently went back to take a look at, was that the last one you had written?

Muriel: Yes.

Dell: The one the agent wanted you to revise?

Muriel: Yes, that’s the one the agent liked the best.

Dell: Are you revising it the way she told you to, or are you looking at it with fresh eyes?

Muriel: I’m revising it the way she told me to and the way Cindy thought I should. You know, so there’s two people giving me feedback.

Dell: I know that you’ve written some short pieces too, in the last few years.

Muriel: I had always written short pieces, but never got any of them published until the Cape Cod Times took the one about the mouse in my trailer, which was a true story. Back when dad and I had Cindy, we already had two other almost-babies (Robin and Laurie). The three girls were so close (in age). Robin was two, Laurie was one, and Cindy was a baby. (At that time Wendell and I) had a contest about writing little short pieces and getting them published. We used to write these little one column articles and we sent them to these little magazines and we were getting them published. I was writing about the babies and the household and all that stuff. I hired a high school girl to come every day after school to help me with this huge bunch of babies. They were all in diapers.

Dell: At the same time?

Muriel: Yeah. And there was a lot of work to do. So I wrote an article about that. And we were getting these little things published because we were just sending them to little magazines and newspapers. Remember that Wendell?

Wendell: Here’s just an aside. When we moved to the Cape there was a bunch of women who wanted to start a (writing) club. The twelve o’clock scholars. So (one of the women) called up me and Kurt Vonnegut, and we went to see them and they said, Do you think (starting the writing club) is a good idea? And we said, Yes. I talked a while with Vonnegut. He told me, “I’m going to write this book about the bombing of Dresden.” Remember, he was a prisoner of war and they were in a Schlachthof (slaughterhouse) seven, or whatever it was. And he told me that he really had to write about that.

Muriel: And he wrote it.

Wendell: And that’s the last I saw of Vonnegut. (Editor’s Note: Wendell and Vonnegut both went to Cornell around the same time.)

Wendell, waiting for a court

Muriel: But never joined the twelve o’clock scholars, did you?

Wendell: No. I thought it was just for women.

Muriel: It wasn’t just for women. There were men in it. I went to it for a while, but I didn’t like it at all. You know, there are writing groups and there are writing groups. There were too many people in it. It was huge.

Dell: When you had all these kids it must have slowed down your writing.

Muriel: We hadn’t moved to the Cape yet, we were living in North Wales, Pennsylvania. And I don’t know why, but we just decided to have these little competitions and we were just each of us knocking out these little stories. And they were selling. For practically nothing, I mean we weren’t making any money. If they paid us ten dollars we were probably….

Wendell: I had a piece in the Philadelphia Enquirer, the paper.

Muriel: Well he did a lot better than I did.

Wendell: Well, I’d write something. And then say, Well who might need this. And it was an article on commuting, meeting somebody at the station.

Muriel: That was cute.

Wendell: And I usually had two or three places (in mind) so that if the first one turned it down…but now the papers are so strapped they’re not even…

Muriel: They’re trying everything to cut down.

Dell: Robin is writing a blog for the Cape Cod Times website. She’s not getting paid, it’s just an extra thing she’s doing for them. Everything’s changed now. Muriel, who were some of your favorite writers growing up?

Muriel: When I was kid, every year I would read all my favorite books, books like Heidi, and every good children’s book because I loved them so much. And then a whole year would go by and I’d read them again. I’d read them over and over. The Little Lame Prince, do you remember that book? I loved that book. But that’s when I was a child. There’s so many writers I love.

Dell: How about writers who were influential to you when you were in college?

Muriel: My trouble is whenever I’m reading a good book, if I were writing at the same time, I would kind of go into their style. Does that happen to you?

Dell: Probably.

Muriel: It’s not a good idea to do it.

Dell: That’s why you should read good writers.

Muriel: I know.

Dell: Because if you’re going to copy somebody, it better be good.

Muriel: I just read a wonderful book (called) Balzac and the Little Chinese Seamstress. I just read it about three weeks ago and it was fabulous.

Dell: Would you recommend that?

Muriel: Yes.

Muriel on the high seas, 1960s

Dell: Wendell, what book are you reading at the moment that you recommend?

Wendell: I was reading Mayflower (by Nathanial Philbrook). I took it out of the library and I renewed it and I better finish reading it before I get another. Living on the Cape, you learn a lot about the early history of the area. And how the Indians helped the Pilgrims. But then more and more English came, and more settlements. And the poor Indians were backed into a corner. Of course, a year or so before the Mayflower landed, 90 or so percent of the Indians died from disease. It was probably the biggest mass dying in the history of the country really. Thousands of poor Indians. And a few Indians helped the Pilgrims. But (the Pilgrims) were always leery of the Indians. Of course Jamestown, down in Virginia, was damn near wiped out by the Indians. So they were always very leery. And Miles Standish, he was a military leader. And the Indians really were living in (hard conditions). If their crops didn’t come up…well, Miles Standish attacked a little Indian village and a lot of the Indians just got scared as hell and they would run off in the woods and run out of food and die. It was a very harsh time. Well anyway, this is an interesting book.

Dell: Have you read other books by Philbrook?

Wendell: He wrote (In the Heart of the Sea) about the Essex, where the whales sunk the ship.

Dell: You’ve always been interested in history and Cape Cod, and you always seemed to carry a lot of books that had to do with regional interests.

Wendell: Having a bookstore on the Cape, you naturally needed non-fiction on the area. Ships, and whatever.

Dell: Well, I guess that’s it. Do you have anything to add?

Wendell: I just wish I had kept up writing like you have.

Dell: Would you ever go back to the novels you wrote and take another look at them?

Wendell: I might, yes. When you get to be my age you send a manuscript to somebody and they say, Well gee we might like to publish this guy but, hell, he’s 85. How many more books is he going to write?

Muriel: Even when I was writing my romances and I had the agent I thought, well if she ever wants to meet me, what I’m going to do is get Robin to impersonate me and go to the meeting because I didn’t want her to know how old I was. And agents want a writer who turns out a book every year, you know. That’s what she’s building. And if you’re in your seventies, or however old I was, the chances of writing a book every year is slim. So I was going to get Robin to meet her.

Wendell: You didn’t, did you?

Muriel: No, but that’s what I had planned if (the agent) had come to the Cape and wanted to meet me.

Wendell: That’s a good story right there.

Wendell, Grand Canyon (?), circa 1952

Muriel: I never told Robin that, but that’s what I was going to do.

Dell: Thanks for talking.

Muriel: You’re welcome. Any time you want to talk. When I wrote my family history I probably didn’t put anything in about writing, did I?

Dell: Probably not.

Muriel: I was just writing about the family. I think Laurie was the one who kept bugging me to do it and I think she wanted to know who the relatives were and who we’re all related to. That’s what I was trying to get across.

Wendell: That’s what I have to do.

Muriel: Yeah, now she’s bugging dad to do it.

Dell: That would be something you could get down pretty easily.

Wendell: Yeah.

Muriel: You could do it on the new baby (a new computer they bought). I haven’t tried writing anything on it yet but it would probably be fast.

Dell: Well he hasn’t even used the word processor before. He likes to write longhand. (To Wendell) You have to get her to transcribe it for you.

Muriel: I don’t know if I could write a book in longhand. I mean, the thing with a computer is your brain works so fast you know when you’re thinking and so does the computer work fast, so that’s good. But to write long hand which I’ve tried to do, it’s a long tedious job to write. And your brain is right over here about a mile away from your writing, you see what I mean?

Dell: Yeah, but on the other hand you are concentrating on what you’re writing so that by the time you get to the end of the sentence—

Muriel: Your brain has caught up with you?

Dell: Yeah, well it forces you to stick with the sentence and maybe you were changing the words as you went.

Muriel: Yeah. But sometimes you get these wonderful thoughts and you just want to get it down so you don’t forget it. It’s just the right combination of words and it’s just flowing. Which comes out great on the computer but in longhand it would be… (laughs).

Dell: Right. Good point. Get it out. Well, he (points to Wendell) used to bang away on a typewriter.

Wendell: Yeah. I like to write longhand, too.

Dell: Do you still have a typewriter?

Wendell: No.

Muriel: The first computer I ever bought from Steve Green, the only reason I bought it was to write on.

Wendell: Well, if you have any more questions, let us know.

Dell: This has been Wendell and Muriel Smith, chatting with Dell Smith on May 25th, 2009 in Holmes Beach, Florida.

Muriel and Wendell Smith, Cindy Mitchell, and the Unreliable Narrator, Holmes Beach on Anna Maria Island, 2009.

Interview with Wendell and Muriel Smith - Part 1

2012-01-22T12:30:00.001-05:00

In the next few months I'll be posting the writing of my father. As we clean out his bedroom we collect his work, which takes various forms: typed stories, hand-written pieces on lined paper, ideas on index cards, file folders and manilla envelopes with full-length manuscripts, college essays, printed articles. All of it analog, nothing in digital form. Which means it needs to be digitally archived, either transcribed, scanned, or photographed.

Among his papers are: issues of Driftwood, a monthly poetry anthology form the 1940s in which he published early poems; two novels; a book-length exegesis of an ornithologist; type- or hand-written journals detailing the years he met my mother (I found the very entry where he talks about their first date! He was smitten from the first.), a joint journal kept by both my parents during their honeymoon when they drove from the East Coast to California to spent six months atop a mountain where they were employed as fire lookouts, and his journal of the family's move from Pennsylvania to Cape Cod in early 1961.

There are also boxes of family photographs. I don't know if other families took as many photographs in the early mid-twentieth century, but cameras must have been yearly Christmas gifts for the Smith family. Dad was also a painter and illustrator. Aside from his love of birds, he took to doing watercolors and charcoals of beloved Cape Cod themes, adding his spin to light houses and crashing waves and soaring seagulls. He sent me cartoons when I was in college; he was influenced by Trudeau's Doonsbury comic. So I will post some of his artwork here as well.

It all amounts to an archive whose breadth and depth my father only occasionally hinted at during his later life. Wendell was a WWII glider pilot, a used book dealer, a writer, nature lover, a father of four kids, husband of almost 60 years to Muriel, herself a writer and book lover.

To get things started, I'm posting part 1 of the transcript of a recorded interview with both Wendell and Muriel Smith, when they lived in Florida, on Anna Maria Island, May 25th 2009. I'll post part 2 in the next few days.

Topics discussed: writing, reading, agents, literary influences, growing up during the Great Depression, WWII, living on Cape Cod, raising four kids to be readers and writers, buying and selling used books and antiques, how the Internet changed everything, the benefits of writing long hand, publishing cartoons in the New Yorker, publishing articles in Classics Illustrated, and meeting Kurt Vonnegut.

Dell Smith, son, interviewer.

Dell Smith: So, we’re here with Wendell Everett Smith and Muriel Phipps Smith. And we’re just going to be talking a little bit about writing and Smith family writers. (To Wendell) You grew up in New Jersey.

Wendell Smith: In Morristown.

Dell: You weren’t born during the depression, but you were a kid during the depression.

Wendell: Right.

Dell: So that must have had a bit of an impact on growing up and the way your family—

Wendell: Well it did, but you know, you’re a kid. You don’t really know. We weren’t starving to death or anything.

Dell: It was just the way it was.

Wendell: Yeah. Used to be, guys would come down the street and they’d knock on the door for something to eat, you know?

Dell: Yeah. Would you give it to them?

Wendell: Oh yeah. Sure.

Dell: Well, Morristown was a pretty nice town. Not a bad place to grow up.

Wendell: Yeah, it was a good place. We lived close to all the schools. The little elementary play yard backed up to our yard. Then, the next block over was the secondary (school)…I went there as fifth, sixth, seventh grade I guess. Then the high school was two long blocks up the other way, I never rode a school bus.

Dell: Right. You always walked to school.

Wendell: Yeah. Often I’d walk home for lunch. And it was a pretty nice neighborhood. We had probably a dozen or more kids. You know, you could play with kids. So, it was a nice place to grow up ‘cause there were a lot of kids around. There were woods near there and you could go off in the woods and play.

Dell: Now was this the house I remember going to visit grandpa at? Is that where you grew up? Or is this another house?

Wendell: Well I think when you visited grandpa it may have been in Madison because they moved down there. So, I don’t think you ever saw our house in Morristown which was on Early Street. And then there was a pond where you go skating in the winter, you know. And that was fun. And then there was a public swimming pool. A little bit farther on. But I rarely went there because there was still a lot of polio scares. So you didn’t go to a public beach very often.

Dell: Was this during the ‘30s?

Wendell: Yeah, ‘30s and ‘40s. Polio was cured, I think, in the ‘40s. And then suddenly that wasn’t a problem.

Dell: So, now what came first: going in the Army or going to Cornell? Did you start Cornell and then go into the Army?

Wendell: Well I graduated from Morristown High in 1941. And then that fall I went to Cornell. The war started in December of ’41, so I stayed in Cornell through the next spring, summer, and then in the fall of ’42 I enlisted in the Army Air Force as an aviation cadet (where he became a glider pilot). But I wasn’t called up until that winter of ’42 I guess it was. And then I stayed in the Army until the fall of ’45 (when) I went back to Cornell as a sophomore.

Dell: That must have been interesting to start school as a freshman and go away for a few years, and go into training and go overseas and then come back.

Wendell: Yeah, it was. After the war all the guys that had been overseas came back and it was sort of a mixed group of guys.

Dell: Were you on the GI bill going back to school?

Wendell: Yeah. (Laughs.) That was very good. It really was.

Dell: Did you major in writing at Cornell? Or education?

Wendell: No. I majored in English. I probably should have taken teacher’s courses. I should have taught, but I didn’t. Well, I taught in a private school for a while. But private school didn’t pay much. Remember, Muriel?

Muriel Smith: Oh yes.

Wendell: I mean, they didn’t…in a public school you got a pretty good salary. And retirement pay. But I didn’t get that. Obviously.

Dell: When did you start getting interested in writing? Did you write as a kid? I know you published some articles and you did some technical writing.

Wendell: I guess always wanted to write and I majored in English and did as much writing as I could at Cornell. I did some writing after that. But nothing really came of it, you know?

Dell: Well you published some articles back in the day.

Wendell: Yeah, I did some of that.

Muriel: You wrote two novels.

Wendell: Couple of novels. And some short stories. I guess I was most successful at writing short, humorous pieces.

Dell: You had a couple cartoons in the New Yorker.

Wendell: Yeah.

Muriel: You have to show Dell the comic strip that you showed Cindy and I recently.

Wendell: Yeah I did write some comics. Well, comic book scripts. I did that for a while. But it really wasn’t anything great as far as writing is concerned.

Dell: Well it sounds like you’ve always done some writing of some kind. Different types. Long and short pieces.

Wendell: Yeah.

Dell: Do you still have the two novels that you worked on?

Wendell: I think so, yeah.

Muriel: The first book he wrote was his college novel.

Wendell: Yeah.

Muriel: Did you write one about Duckwald? (The name of the mountain lookout where they lived and worked during the months following their marriage in 1952.)

Wendell: I think I did, yeah. When we were out in California, we kept a log. A journal of what we did on the mountain. I still have that around.

Muriel: If you ever come across that I’d like to read it.

Wendell: And I did sort of keep a journal on the Incredible Barn.

Muriel: I don’t remember that. I’d like to read that, too.

Wendell: Yeah.

Dell: Didn’t you both put together a newsletter later on when you lived in Brewster?

Muriel: He did.

Wendell: I did. I used to sell Gladys Taber books. She became sort of a specialty of mine. I thought, well she wrote these sort of country essays. So I started to write (an essay) once a month and called them the Smith Country Letters. And I had a whole list of Gladys Taber customers, see, so I queried a lot of them. Showed them what I was doing. I had about twenty-five people I would send my little newsletter to.

Dell: So you sold subscriptions.

Wendell: I did that for about two years, but then it was kind of a chore and I really wasn’t making that much money on it so I decided to call a halt to that.

Dell: I remember that. That was in Brewster. Sunsmith House.

Muriel: I remember when he cranked it out on the mimeograph machine.

Wendell: Remember the mimeograph machine?

Muriel: Clunkity. Clunkity.

Dell: I remember I could hear it downstairs when you ran it upstairs. You did a lot of writing, not only on the country letters but on the used book catalogues you sent out. You had to write descriptions for all the books (listed in the catalogue).

Wendell: Yeah, I would send a list out.

Dell: I would call that technical writing. You still do that, you still come up with descriptions for your—

Muriel: Well, it’s funny but sending out the list was almost like doing eBay. I would just have like a hundred items to list (she sells antiques). And he’d do the same thing with books. And we’d send these lists out. And I had a pretty good customer base. I had a lot of customers that were very good customers. And I lost all of them when I went on the Internet.

Wendell: The Internet changed everything, you know?

Dell: Well, you gained new customers even if you lost old customers. And it probably gave you a bigger exposure. Anyone in the world could find you.

Muriel: Yes. But it’s not as personal. The other thing was quite personal. You got to know people.

Wendell: Well the book business changed completely with eBay. Used to be, the AB Bookman's Weekly came and give these long lists of what dealers wanted and you’d (send out a) quote here and there. But eBay just wiped all that out. It’s a funny thing.

Muriel: But you do sell quite a few books on eBay. I think you do pretty well.

Wendell: Yeah. They have to be pretty special though, you know?

Muriel: Yeah.

Dell: I’m curious about the articles that you wrote. Did you target specific publications and say I can write an article for this magazine a certain way?

Wendell: Well…I had a few places in mind that might take something like (something I wrote). But it was strictly on spec, in a way. You know. I would write short history pieces. I found them the other day…

(He gets out of his chair and walks off to look for his writing.)

Dell: So you went and got some pieces of writing. A comic strip.

Wendell: When I was living in New Jersey I was going to sort of syndicate articles—little stories—and I would send them out. I had three or four papers that would take them. (He shows me a file folder of clippings.) Anyway, these are little newspaper articles.

Dell: (Looking through clippings.) From New Jersey?

Wendell: Yeah. In fact, I had several of them in Classics Illustrated. And I wrote a couple dozen of those, but it kind of petered out because I couldn’t get enough papers.

Dell: When did you start collecting books? Was it when you had an antique shop in Orleans (on Cape Cod)?

Wendell: Yeah. When we got the Incredible Barn. We put antiques in and I said, maybe I’ll sell some books.

Dell: And the rest is history.

Wendell: That’s right. You were a little kid then.

Dell: I was. And you also love to read, and you’ve passed down your love of books and reading and writing to your kids.

Wendell: Who are now stuck with it.

Dell: Who are now stuck with the reading and the writing. I mean, I for one love to buy books and look for books and I still like buying used books. Obviously something rubbed off. And I mean, you do it for business but there must be a part of you that loves books in general.

Wendell: Oh yeah. Well, it’s the search. And the fun of looking for them.

Dell: Do you have specific types of books that you always look for?

Wendell: Good non-fiction that interests people. You can buy books that are general (interest), but the ones that are more valuable are specific, even a little pamphlet might be more valuable than a great big book.

Dell: Specific to a time? Like a piece of history, or a specific topic? Or regional?
(Wendell goes to get some books.)

Dell: He has a stack of books in the corner that are priced and have descriptions on them.

Wendell: (Looking through his stack of books) This one’s on Colt revolvers. Now that’s very specific book that interests gun people. The more specific (the book) is, the more valuable. But then of course you look for first editions. Because that’s where you really can make some money if you happen to find some good ones. Like everything else the market is not very good at the moment.

Dell: But if you do find something that’s worthwhile there’s always a market for (it).

Muriel: How about the Rex Stout, things like that, you found recently?

Wendell: Yeah. Good, early mysteries, (like) Rex Stout.

Muriel: First editions.

Dell: Do mysteries sell well?

Wendell: Well, the early ones. There’s such a glut of mysteries these days, but the early ones, they’re sort of classics.

Dell: Does non-fiction sell better than fiction?

Wendell: Off hand, as a general rule, I’d say non-fiction sells (better).

Dell: Yeah, I think it’s the same way with new books too. Who are some of your favorite writers?

Wendell: Well, of course I like some of the humorists. I like Ring Lardner and P.G. Wodehouse. James Thurber. E.B. White; wonderful writer. Yeah, they’re some of my favorites. Of course they’re not valuable at all, really.

Dell: A good Thurber may be, once in a while.

Wendell: Yeah, it would be. I like Virginia Woolf. I like her.

Dell: Do you ever find any Gladys Taber books anymore? (Wendell specialized in her books.)

Wendell: Not too often. They’re not quite as valuable as they used to be because so many people have either got them or (don’t know her). A few of her (titles) are pretty valuable, but by and large they’re not really that valuable.

Dell: Was she very well-known beyond New England?

Wendell: Oh yeah, she has, oddly enough, a fan club that has about 500 members that meets and they talk about Gladys Taber like she’s still there. But she’s been gone for 30 years (Editor’s note: she died in 1980 at age 81).

Muriel: Tell him about when they met.

Wendell: We had a sort of an open house (for the Gladys Taber fan club) in the Sunsmith House (Editor’s note: The name of the antique and book shop my parents owned for about fifteen years in the ‘80s and ‘90s in Brewster, MA), down (in the back yard) we had the tent up and we served them and all these crazy women came.

Muriel: The point was, they were buying books in the shop upstairs.

Wendell: Yeah, that too.

Dell: What do you think of all your kids turning out to be writers?

Wendell: Well I think it’s wonderful. I wish you’d all get your novels published.

Muriel: They will. They will. I feel they will.

Wendell: Well, Laurie’s got something out (to agents and publishers). And Cindy’s got two or three novels. She’s going to hit one of these days. She works at it like crazy. (Wendell and Muriel have three daughters, my sisters Robin, Laurie, and Cindy.)

Muriel: How about (points to me).

Wendell: And, yeah the son.

Dell: The son.

Wendell: The good son.

Dell: Yeah, I think we’re all bit by the writing bug to one degree or another. Thanks to you guys. Somehow you came together; two separate people. And you created some writing nuts.

Wendell: (Laughs) Well, I’m supposed to be the writer but (points to mom) she’s good, she’s very good.

Dell: That brings us to Muriel...

Stay tuned for Part 2!

Christmas without Borders

2011-12-09T22:39:00.001-05:00

For the past three Decembers my crafty wife, Liz, has been a craft vendor at the SOWA holiday market. This year’s holiday market is tomorrow, Saturday the 9th. In the past I went with her and hung around if she needed me. More often than not, she didn’t. So I would take a brisk walk over the Pike to Copley Plaza and Back Bay.

There I would camp out in the Borders on Boylston and do some of my Christmas shopping. I would spend a couple hours browsing the current releases, checking out the new-in-paperback table, and trolling A to Z through paperback fiction. I always had a list of books to buy family members. Luckily for this book lover everyone in my family reads. That includes sisters, bro-in-laws, and, to a degree, niece and nephews. Like any fancy big box book store, this Borders also had a decent collection of graphic novels and movies. This is not a plug for Borders, obviously, since in the past year all Borders locations have been liquidated.

Borders was never my favorite bookstore. Borders had no feng sui. I would walk through the front door and be hit with inappropriately placed tables with no flow. Book shelving that was oblique or inconsistent. I smelled a corporate evil amid the stacks. The idea that one person, possibly a committee, decides which books all stores of a franchise should carry is a chilling deception. I know Barnes & Nobel has one buyer, one woman who decides on the book selection. Maybe she has great taste. But no one person should be the arbiter, the gatekeeper, of culture.

Well, that’s another argument. We can all go indie if we don’t like it, so there’s no use complaining.

So then anyway, that brings us to tomorrow. When I drive Liz into the holiday show, will I stick around for the day as I’ve done the past three years, this time searching for a new store? (I know of a bookstore well up Newbury Street, but that’s a pretty long walk. There may be one or two in the upscale Copley malls.) Or will I turn around and drive out to Brookline or Somerville?

The Borders on Boylston was the perfect destination. After I collected my books, I could order a sandwich in the coffee shop (microwaved and rubbery) and of course drink as much Seattle’s Best as I could stomach. Then, dazed, perhaps zapped by consumerism and air freshener and a comprised stomach lining, I’d stumble through the matrix of Boston streets back to the SOWA holiday show to check on Liz.

Yes, bookstores are closing every day. And yes eventually those printed pages between covers will become rare. But, publishing is still a big business, and books are still printed and consumed. The generation brought up with Harry Potter and Twilight may be the last to appreciate the experience of waiting on line to buy a new book by their favorite author. It’s all too easy to buy all the books you could want online, or, if you’re not into the analog, download e-books or audio books. Still, for now, books have a place in our consumer society. And there are millions of readers who are unwilling, just yet, to part with them.

As for Borders, maybe they screwed up. Maybe they dodged left without a plan when Barnes & Noble dodged right with the NOOK. Maybe the marketplace demanded fewer bookstores (although about 40% the Borders locations are being filled with the even more middle-of-the-road Books-a-Million). I was a fan of Borders one time each year, otherwise I would go to Barnes & Noble or, when I had the time to make the drive into Boston, Brookline Booksmith, Porter Square Books, Harvard Bookstore, or Newton to New England Mobil Bookfair, and more often now that my mom is back on the Cape, Main Street Books in Orleans.

I do not rejoice when any bookstore goes down. I will miss Borders. Especially tomorrow. But I'll find another bookstore. Hopefully I always will. Sorry Virginia, there is no Borders this year.

Movie Review Wrap-Up

2011-10-30T20:52:00.000-04:00

The idea was to watch and review a movie a week for a year. It happened, for the most part, as planned. I didn't quite hit the 50 movie mark, but what do you expect from an Unreliable Narrator? For this blog I have written almost entirely about movies since October of 2010. All my literary thoughts got funneled through my posts over at Beyond the Margins.

I had some guest posts, for The Illusionist, Harry Potter, and The King's Speech. That freed me up for a few weeks here and there, and I suppose that's cheating. But sometimes when writing for two blogs and keeping up other non-blog writing, you need a break.

I did not end up reviewing 52 movies. But, I didn't do too badly. I reviewed 38 new releases, along with a couple of older movies I saw on the big screen including Touch of Evil and Tron. I also reviewed the films I enjoyed at the Disposable Film Festival, which the Lowell Film Collaborative brought to Lowell last year. I posted an appreciation of Steel Helmet, the Korean war film by Samuel Fuller and wrote an essay comparing Tarantino and Sam Packinpah. I also ran a duel DVD review of Easy A vs. Machete.

Thanks to this experiment I saw some gems that I may have otherwise passed over, including Cedar Rapids, Limitless, Bridesmaids, Inside Job, The Social Network, and True Grit. I saw The Fighter with an adoring hometown audience (Lowell, MA!) and got my twelve year old on with Transformers, Captain America, Priest, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes.

I would also like to take a moment to lament the eight hours I will never get back watching Battle: Los Angeles, Drive Angry 3-D, The Dilemma, and The Warrior's Way. Also, I found out how crappy a movie-going experience it can be watching a 3-D movie, with those dimming, uncomfortable, very low-tech glasses.

I saw most movies here in Lowell, at the Showcase Cinema, a decent mainstream theater with stadium seating. But I also saw movies in Arlington, Cambridge, Brookline, Oak Bluffs, Woburn, Waltham, and back in Lowell at the Historical Park Visitor's Center theater.

Did I capture that feeling I had when I was a kid? That excitement, that anticipation? Sort of. I have to admit that watching the action spectacle that was The Transformers was a guilty pleasure bar none. And laughing along with a full theater at Horrible Bosses was also an oddly comforting, communal experience. In the same way I groaned along with the audience during Hangover II.

I'll always go to the movies. Just this past week I went to see a great film at the Historical Park Visitor's Center (another unique viewing experience sponsored by Suzz and Brett of the Lowell Film Collaborative!) called Of Dolls and Murder. The director, Susan Marks, was on hand to discuss this documentary about crime scene doll houses created in the 30s and 40s by Frances Glessner Lee and used as forensics training for detectives.

What's next for Unreliable Narrator? Not sure yet. I may go back to writing about writing, books, and reading. I also have another idea, another possible direction for this blog. I'll let you know in the next few weeks.

Thanks to everybody who reads Unreliable Narrator and also to those who leave comments. The comments and views really keep me going.

Happy Halloween. More soon.

Final Review: The Ides of March

2011-10-23T20:17:00.002-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Less plot, more theme. Not to worry.

What? You didn't know these movie reviews were a limited time thing? Yes, I have completed my goal of writing movie reviews for a year. I didn't quite achieve one review per week, but came close. In my next post I'll do a wrap up of my findings and introduce my ideas for the next iteration/generation of this blog (as soon as I figure out what that will be).

Meanwhile, for your entertainment value: The Ides of March:

Politics is fun. Politics is for people who love this country and want to see all people do better. The betterment of humanity. Politics is not boring.

Only one of the above statements is true. Unless you’re a sadist and think politics is actually fun and you are a naïve idealist and believe our political system works as originally designed.

We all know politics is a calling for those who are ambitious, scrappy, and shrewd. But, on the plus side, politics is the most riveting realty show ever created. And it is available for consumption 24/7, in papers, online, on broadcast TV, at work, in your neighborhood, and in your family. Politics in America, for better or worse, is an inescapable fact.

The Ideas of March takes politics today and scrapes away a layer of filth so we can see the filth underneath. Not that we don’t know it’s there. But one thing we don’t always see are all the back room shenanigans, including how decisions are made and at what personal cost. The Ides of March does an admirable job of showing us the cost.

The movie stars heartthrobs of different generations. We’ve got George Clooney (who also directed) as Mike Morris, the democratic governor of Pennsylvania and presidential hopeful in the days leading up to the Ohio Democratic primary, and Ryan Gosling as Stephen Meyers, his devoted, super savvy media consultant. Morris is the frontrunner to win this primary, at least if you ask the voters of the state. This is a big primary, and he may still lose. And if he does, simple math dictates he will go on to lose the democratic nomination.

The mechanics of how this plays out include enough shady deals, misunderstandings, backstabbing, and double crosses to fill a pulp fiction novel. But Clooney isn’t trying to emulate Jim Thompson or James M. Cain, so much as ‘70s film moralists like Sidney Lumet and Alan J. Pakula. Clooney knows modern politics is the reality show we all love to hate, so he tries to bring a human face to the proceedings. He conveys well the aphorism that absolute power corrupts absolutely, and shows that politics is less about how to help people than how to get reelected. He uncovers the greed for power and the greed for money. And how you can leverage all the relationships you’ve fostered working in politics to ease into the private sector where you can make some real money.

That Clooney’s Morris is a flaming liberal is no surprise considering the character mirrors Clooney’s beliefs as well. That Morris makes missteps that eventually compromise his integrity aren’t very surprising either. But it is always a little shocking to discover that the public persona of anyone—politician, movie star, author—turns out to be the opposite of that which is projected. This is an idea the movie plays with throughout.

We see most of the action through the eyes of Gosling’s Meyer. At the start of the movie he is enchanted with Morris, believing in the same causes as his boss. But at every turn he is reminded of the true nature of politics by those around him, including Morris’s seasoned campaign manager, Paul Zara (played with nasty gusto by Philip Seymour Hoffman), who has worked on dozens of campaigns and knows exactly what must be done to win an election. Then there’s New York Times reporter Ida Horowicz (played by Marisa Tomei with a gusto that matches Hoffman’s), who will do what she needs to get a scoop about the candidates.

This wet dream of an indie-file cast is rounded out by Paul Giamatti as Tom Duffy, the campaign manager of Morris’s opponent who is playing a game Meyers may or may not be up to. Jeffrey Wright plays Thompson, a senator who has the delegates to help either candidate win the primary, but in return for his endorsement insists a cabinet position.

Then there’s Molly, an intern in the Morris campaign office. Molly is played by the young actress Evan Rachel Wood, who is something of a revelation here. Molly is a tricky part. At first you don’t understand her motivations. She sleeps with Meyer (well, considering Ryan Gosling plays Meyer, I guess I understand that motivation) but we wonder if she has an agenda. Wood has to convey naiveté, mystery, and fresh-faced idealism. Her agenda is that of an impassioned post adolescent, an innocent who gets wowed by the bright lights of celebrity and power. The series of revelations and events that befall Molly is a shame, but is only a symptom in the wider contagion of betrayal and corruption on a national campaign trail.

The refreshing part of The Ides of March is that it does not stoop to portray us-against-them politics. Clooney—who also co-wrote the screenplay with Grant Heslov, based on the play Farragut North by Beau Willimon—is not interested in the democrats vs. republicans Fox News bullshit. Party affiliation doesn’t matter, because all parties are equally corrupt be they democrat, republican, independent, or libertarian.

It’s more about how even the best political intentions and moral judgments get waylaid by the money-based political process. To say that process is worse than it’s ever been may be hyperbole. But it ain’t great, and this little nasty insider slice of modern politics just wants to remind you that our process is alive and chugging along, if not particularly well. Not that we need reminding, especially as we collectively prepare to trudge into the mud of the upcoming election year.

Caution: this preview gives away more plot points than my review:

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday, October 11th, $6bargain night! Viewed with Liz! Snack: I splurged with two apple donut holes from Parley Farms, and 1 apple, cut and bagged.

Coming Attractions:

Twilight: Breaking Dawn Part 1. Surly teens in the Pacific Northwest. Some are vampires. Some are werewolves. Many are shirtless. Some are pale. Somebody gets pregnant. All hell breaks loose.

Young Adult. The welcome return of Charlize Theron, playing a type of obnoxious, crass character that Cameron Diaz nailed earlier this year in Bad Teacher. Theron plays a young adult author returning to her hometown to bag an old crush, who happens to be married. Co-starring the always welcome Patton Oswalt. From 'Juno' writing/directing duo Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman.

The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Completely superfluous version of the original. Looks about the same: story, look, characters, even accents. Why bother? I'm surprised such a visionary director as David Fincher took this on. Plus, the original wasn't that hot either. I chock it up to a lame, average story.

J. Edgar. Clint Eastwood is still churning out movies. This one stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular character. His aging makeup looks like a triumph, if incredibly creepy and disconcerting.

The Rum Diary. Ah, this is a movie I can get behind. Johnny Depp stars in the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's first novel. It has a playful vibe, a beautiful look, Johnny looks swell, and so do the ladies. Something to do with a journalist covering a story on a Caribbean island. Although that plot seems secondary to the drinking and various other Hunteresque shenanigans. Luckily it does not offer the same vibe as Gilliam's misfire Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Moneyball

2011-09-30T22:02:00.002-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: No worries!

Moneyball is a movie directed by Bennett Miller based on the 2004 book Moneyball: The Art of Winning an Unfair Game by Michael Lewis about Billy Beane, the general manager of the Oakland Athletics. It’s the end of the season in 2001, and the A’s had a decent run but didn’t make it to the playoffs. Again. Not only that, the team loses three of its best players to other teams. You see, Billy’s main problem is that his team only has about 38 million to spend in a season. Compare that with teams like the Yankees and the Red Sox who can spend 135-140 million a season. All the best, big name players go to those teams because they can afford to pay top dollar. Billy needs to change things up, to rethink the way his team acquires players.

On paper Moneyball sounds like a yawn, and in the theaters it has the potential to live up to that promise, yet somehow the movie mostly works due to a emotionally resonant script (by Aaron Sorkin and Steven Zaillian) and a filmmaking style that doesn’t overwhelm the story. The great cast embodies the key players both on the field and in the clubhouse and help breath life into what is essentially a movie about statistics.

Brad Pitt plays Billy. When he was younger, Billy was courted by the majors right out of high school because he was a talented player with amazing potential. Cut to twenty-five years later, and now he’s the guy that goes to the prospective player’s houses to meet and sign them.

Billy’s in great shape, although he scarfs junk food and his job would give anybody anxiety attacks. He’s an athlete who no longer plays the game. He hates losing even more than he loves winning. And he’s tired of his team losing. Pitt’s still vital physique belies his characters’ sense of yearning, loss, and need for redemption. Billy’s sad, tired eyes tell the story of his also-ran life in pro sports. He’s divorced (his wife is played by Robin Wright), and when it’s his turn with his daughter (Kerris Dorsey), she can’t help but worry about him.

Billy meets Peter Brand (Jonah Hill, going effectively understated here), a business major just out of Yale who is a whiz with statistics. Peter tells Billy of his belief in the ideas set forth by analyst Bill James decades earlier but never embraced, including how winning in baseball is a percentage game and that teams are throwing big money at all the wrong players. Peter’s idea is to acquire players based on how often they get on base. Because players that get on base win games. This makes so much sense to Billy that he hires Peter and embraces this new single-minded philosophy when he starts recruiting players for the next season.

The arc of this story concerns Billy recruiting new players, and seeing how this ragtag team plays out their 2002 season. It’s fun watching Billy break the news to his seasoned scouts that they will not be hiring pitchers with the fastest arm and young hitters with a lot of potential (not unlike Billy when he was younger). Their new season starts with a losing whimper, with a team that includes a pitcher who throws sidearm, a former catcher with a bum elbow on first base, aging star hitter David Justice, and various other motley players all cheap enough for the A’s budget.

When it’s clear to everyone that Billy’s new philosophy isn’t working out, he and the team, not to mention coach Art Howe (played by Philip Seymour Hoffman as a seasoned vet whose contract may or may not get picked up), become the brunt of announcer’s jokes and fan’s fury (oh those fans). When the team finally hits on a winning streak, everyone’s amazed.

Moneyball is a heartfelt look at not just the game of baseball, but how the players are pawns in a game where moves are made far above their heads and how they can be traded with a well-timed phone call and a look at the money in the bank. It avoids being a big league Bad News Bears, or a Major League played mostly straight.

I’m fascinated by movies that showcase jobs I don’t know about. I don’t follow baseball, but even if I did, Moneyball shows the inside scoop on how the gears grind behind major league teams and pro sports in America. The movie runs about 10-15 minutes long, as if director Miller didn’t want to disturb his characters, wanting their emotions (mostly Pitt’s Beane) to play out in almost real time. The ending is obvious and redundant, but it doesn’t detract from what came before. Days after viewing, the movie has stuck with me.

Stats
Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Sunday, September 25th, pm matinee. Viewed with Liz. Snack: licorice from the Chocolate Sparrow!

Coming Attractions

Girl with the Dragon Tattoo. Completely superfluous version of the original. Looks about the same: story, look, characters, even accents. Why bother? I'm surprised such a visionary director as David Fincher took this on. Plus, the original wasn't that hot either. I chock it up to a lame, average story.

Immortals. Looks like a bunch of other movies where warriors during a distant past (or future?) era stormed the castle. Bonus: Mickey Rourke!

J. Edgar. Clint Eastwood is still churning out movies. This one stars Leonardo DiCaprio as the titular character. His aging makeup looks like a triumph, if incredibly creepy and disconcerting.

Tinker Taylor Soldier Spy. A jazzed up version of the John le Carré novel. All star cast includes Gary Oldman, Colin Firth, John Hurt, and Tom Hardy.

Drive

2011-09-25T12:45:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Some thematic spoilers, but the trailer probably gives more away.

The first ten minutes of Drive are mesmerizing. In them we follow Driver, a stunt driver and mechanic by day, while he goes about his moonlighting job: driver for heists. He picks up the shady characters doing the job, drops them off at their location, waits at the wheel while watching his watch and listening to the Lakers game and the police scanner both. After his clients get back in the car he drives them away through the Los Angeles streets.

He follows the speed limit and stops at red lights. At one point he’s made but he out maneuvers the police copter. He’s still listening to the game, and makes it over to Inglewood as the game lets out. He parks in the underground lot just as thousands of fans leak out of the stadium. He walks away, wearing a Lakers cap, his clients free to mingle into the crowd.

It’s a bravura sequence, a daring move after another long summer of digitized aliens, wizards, and robots. What fourteen-year-old boy would sit still for this? Well, this fourteen-year-old boy-in-his-heart for one, who remembers the movies of Michael Mann from the eighties and nineties. Thief springs to mind, or Heat, as Driver explains to his prospective clients that he will give them a five minute window in which he is unconditionally theirs. But they are on their own in the minutes leading up to and following those five. This guy is good. This guy knows when to walk away, like any good Mann character. Like Frank, the James Caan character in Thief. Like Neil McCauley, the Robert DeNiro character in Heat.

If the thematic and stylistic elements of Drive’s opening scenes aren’t enough to persuade you that we’re watching a movie from another era, a time where the anti-hero had a code, then just wait for the titles and music. The typeface is hot pink and cursive in a way that recall many eighties movies. And the soundtrack. Contemporary pop songs that sound like refabrications of any number of pop songs that trailed through the Top Guns and Flashdances.

And that’s not all. Michael Mann, for those who might have forgotten, invented the musical montage for Miami Vice, where Crocket and/or Tubbs would cruise Miami looking fashionable and moody. Well, director Nicolas Winding Refn (Valhalla Rising, Bronson) working from a novel by James Sallis, pulls out the stops of his Mann fetish here. There are beautiful shots of the Los Angeles skyline, understated wide-frame compositions that understand aspect ratio, and character placement that all but mimic some of Mann’s framing.

Driver meets his neighbor, Irene (the eternally sixteen-looking Carey Mulligan), and her little boy, Benecio (a natural Kaden Leos). The boy is brown, the girl is white. The husband is in prison. Irene brings her car to the car repair place where Driver works. The owner, Shannon (Bryan Cranston), Driver’s boss and partner in the rest of his driving work, sees their potential and sends Driver to take the lady and her kid home. A gentle, chaste relationship develops, and Benecio falls for Driver as a surrogate dad.

Meanwhile, Shannon goes into business with two aging gangsters, Bernie Rose and Nino, played by Albert Brooks and Ron Perlman respectively, both having a damn good time playing bad. Bernie fronts money to Shannon for a car that Driver will drive on the stock car circuit.

Irene’s husband, Standard (ha), is released from prison. Standard is weary of his wife befriending the beau hunk from next door while he was incarcerated, but soon Driver is caught up helping him pull off a pawn shop heist to pay off an old debt.

The movie is, in its way, quiet up until the moment the husband walks out of the pawn shop, heading toward Driver’s getaway car. The gunfire that erupts in this scene is shocking. Not visually necessarily, but as a new loud effect on the soundtrack. From here the movie shifts from a purely Michael Mann fantasy, into a more 1990s violent revenge drama. There’s still some of that Mann brute nihilism, but the violence onscreen makes your average Mann production seem like a Disney movie.

At moments it seems Tarantino-derivative, except Drive is devoid of humor. I hate characters in movies like this that don’t carry or use a gun for ethical reasons. Here Driver refuses to use a gun. Which means what? Which means he’ll use a knife or anything else he gets his hands on. That seems to go for the aging gangsters as well. I hate knives, but here much of the violence comes at the hands of knives, boots, straight razors, hammers, and a fork. Ouch, that smarts.

The blood starts flowing moments after Driver escapes the botched heist and holes up in a motel room. Two thugs with shotguns ambush the room, and the shots ring out with a thunderous clarity. Again, shocking. And now the visuals catch up to the soundtrack. The bad guys do not make it out alive. Thankfully their deaths come hot and fast, in hairy sticky glee, via angles showing carnage from above and through doorways. I didn’t understand its purpose. Maybe to bring home to Driver just the kind of stuff he has been perpetuating but always somehow avoiding.

There’s no dwelling on the blood in Drive. But there’s plenty of it to look at, so by the time I was registering, say an impaling on the left somebody would get shot on the right. It’s a trick of seeing a movie projected on a screen; your eyes have to search out the action. Different from watching TV where you’re looking straight ahead and everything scopes out within a radius that your eyes don’t need to adjust to.

Driver has a code, and while all breaks up around him, he sticks to it. So do the aging gangsters, who are weaved into the plot in a surprising way (don’t stop to consider these plot points because they easily can become plot holes). The ending is ambiguous, and brings us back around to a Michael Mann ending. It’s on par more with Thief than Heat or Manhunter.

Ryan Gosling’s lunkhead accent, Yonkers by way of Palookaville has served him well in recent movies like Crazy, Stupid, Love and Blue Valentine, fits in well with Drive’s quiet, blue collar loner. This may be the first time Gosling’s taken a role that adds action to the mix, and he handles it well, hinting that with every move Driver makes there’s a rationale behind it. Carey Mulligan plays it quiet as well, as a woman who cannot act on her feelings, caged as she is by a situation beyond her control. She still looks about sixteen, but here it doesn’t take away from story.

Driver is a well-made and enjoyable action flick, if you don’t mind a bit of the old ultra violence.

Red band trailer:

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Sunday, September 18th, 11:50 am. Viewed with Amanda. Snack: Half a peanut butter Builder's Bar - the half that didn't FALL ON THE FLOOR!

Coming Attractions:

50/50. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has cancer. His buddy Seth Rogen is there to support him, and try to get him laid. Hilarity ensues. It looks funny, and heartfelt. Based on the true-life story of the movie's writer, Will Reiser, and his real-life buddy, Seth Rogen.

Abduction. Out this weekend. The actor from Twilight finds his face on a milk carton (bummer) and goes on an action packed trip to figure out who he really is. John Singleton directs this dazzling actioner.

Dream House. Freaky story of a family that moves into a new house. Soon they discover the family that lived there before was murdered. Soon Danial Craig as the father and husband starts to have visions suggesting he is the murderer and his family is actually the originally murdered family. Damn! This is full of atmosphere and dread and could either be laughable or shocking. Co-starring Rachel Weisz and Naomi Watts.

Killer Elite. Also out this weekend. Lame Jason Statham actioner co-starring Robert DeNiro and Clive Owen (how far the mighty have fallen). Not a remake of the Sam Peckinpah 70s flick.

Like Crazy. College-aged love affair between an American and a Brit. Starring Felicity Jones, Anton Yelchin, and Jennifer Lawrence.

Rum Diary. Ah, this is a movie I can get behind. Johnny Depp stars in the adaptation of Hunter S. Thompson's first novel. It has a playful vibe, a beautiful look, Johnny looks swell, and so do the ladies. Something to do with a journalist covering a story on a Caribbean island. Although that plot seems secondary to the drinking and various other Hunteresque shenanigans. Luckily it does not offer the same vibe as Gilliam's misfire Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas.

Our Idiot Brother

2011-09-18T20:13:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few, but you're not really gonna see this movie in the theater, are you?

In the past few years Paul Rudd has acted in movies large and small, in parts dramatic and comedic. Although he is known mostly for doing his comedic roles both dopey and endearing in Anchorman, 40-Year-Old Virgin, Dinner for Schmucks, I Love You, Man, and Role Models, he’s also made smaller, quieter movies like The Château, P.S, and Diggers. He’s played minor and major characters both, although with Our Idiot Brother he, for the first time in a major studio movie, comes out from behind the higher wattage stars to become one himself by playing the lead. A lead he shares with a plethora of actors, many comedians, mostly women.

Rudd pulls off a role that at first blush looks like a variation on the pothead surfer character he walked through in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. But Rudd infuses all his roles with an inherent niceness. So for the idiot brother here, Ned, he’s more than just a clueless goof with a Grateful Dead beard and an attitude forged from Birkenstocks, he’s a sweet guy who really just wants to get along with everybody although everybody makes it hard for him to achieve this goal.

Case in point; while set up at a farmer’s market selling organic veggies grown on the farm where he room and boards, Ned sells a baggie of pot to a small town cop in uniform who just wants to relax after a bad day. For his dimwitted kindness, Ned gets arrested. After he spends 8 months in the slammer, he returns to the organic farm, beard and ‘tude intact, to find that his dim-witted girlfriend has taken up with an equally dimwitted dude. Ned, always wanting to find the good in people, has a difficult time wrapping his mind around this. She won’t even let him take his dog, Willie Nelson.

Next stop, Ned heads home to stay with his mom while he figures things out. Mom’s a gentle dimwitted soul who always has a drink in her hand and wants to take Ned button buying. “Do you need one? We should leave early to beat the crowds.” Nearby live his three sisters, all very set in their ways with their own lives. Not much room for Ned.

His sister Liz (Emily Mortimer) is a dour stay-at-home mom to her dour little son, fathered by a documentary filmmaker, Dylan (Steve Coogan—excellent here in a supporting role). In return for a pittance and a place to crash, Ned helps out around Liz’s household and with her son.

She also gets Dylan to let Ned crew on his documentary. Which means carrying equipment bags and watching the car while he goes and films his subject, a Russian dancer, naked as she “bares her soul to the camera.” Ned bonds instantly with the son, and he introduces him the original Pink Panther movies, which the boy loves. Especially the nutty and playfully violent Kato scenes, much to the chagrin of his parents who smother the kid with PC parenting practices.

Poor Ned has no capacity to lie. His guileless ways end him up in trouble with all his sisters at one point or another. He finds a way to screw up a big interview his sister Miranda (dark hair-dyed Elizabeth Banks, doing her best Parker Posey—although I longed for Ms. Posey to bust on through), a journalist, lines up with the girlfriend of an international white collar criminal. He also opens his mouth at the wrong time with Miranda’s best friend, Jeremy. It’s obvious Miranda and Jeremy should be together, but not when Ned’s finished trying to help.

Zooey Deschanel plays Ned’s third sister, Natalie, a gay aspiring comedienne (a quirky type, which Ms. Deschanel seems to have cornered). Ned manages to spill the beans about a secret Natalie is keeping from her lover, Cindy (Rashda Jones). Soon enough everyone—sisters, brother-in-law, ex-girlfriend, friends of friends, even his parole officer—is pissed off at him. Where’s the love for Ned? Only a dog named Willie Nelson knows for sure.

On the page this sounds odious, dubious, silly, sloppy, hit-or-miss. On the screen it’s actually pretty funny: a shambling, well-meaning if at times obvious movie whose story shows its graying sit-com roots in every scene but whose sweet intentions leave you smiling as you file out and wonder who names a dog Willie Nelson? Paul Rudd’s Ned, Our Idiot Brother, that’s who.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Sunday, September 13th, 7:05 pm. Viewed with Liz! Snack: Licorice!

Coming Attractions:

50/50. Joseph Gordon-Levitt has cancer. His buddy Seth Rogen is there to support him, and try to get him laid. Hilarity ensues. It looks funny, and heartfelt. Based on the true-life story of the movie's writer, Will Reiser, and his real-life buddy, Seth Rogen.

Dirty Girl. Let's see what IMDB says about this one, "It's 1987 and Danielle, the high school 'Dirty Girl', is running away. With her is chubby, gay Clarke, a bag of flour called Joan and a Walkman full of glorious 80's tunes." Hmm, there's more than that to this story of a girl who flees her current family situation to find her real parents. Or something. With Juno Temple, Milla Jovovich, Mary Steenburgen, William H. Macy, and Tim McGraw.

I Don't Know How She Does It. Sarah Jessica Parker overcomes Sex And the City 2 to make another movie. This one, about a woman trying to balance career, kids, loving husband, could have starred Diane Keaton in another decade. With Greg Kinnear, Pierce Brosnan, Christina Hendricks, Seth Meyers, Olivia Munn, and Kelsey Grammer, as another horrible boss.

Like Crazy. College-aged love affair between an American and a Brit. Starring Felicity Jones, Anton Yelchin, and Jennifer Lawrence.

Tower Heist. A movie with a name like that can only be about one thing. A heist. In a tower. A high rise apartment to be exact. It's 48 Hours revisted, with con Eddie Murphy getting sprung from prison by Ben Stiller. Also starring Alan Alda, Casey Affleck, Matthew Broderick, Téa Leoni, and Gabourey Sidibe.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes

2011-08-31T21:42:00.001-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Lots of spoilers ahead, although the movie's title is the biggest spoiler of all.

This newest incarnation of the Planet of the Apes boasts no actors in ape costumes and makeup. The apes are all entirely computer generated. Andy Serkis famously ‘plays’ the main ape, Caesar, by way of motion capture technology. A fancy way of saying that when they shot the movie, Andy wore a body suit and sensors, then the digital likeness of the ape was laid over his form, following his physical lead. Serkis has done this many times before, most notably as Gollum in the Lord of the Rings trilogy.

This technique is at once disconcerting (Caesar at times moves and reacts like a human) and entirely fitting for a movie that wants its audience to feel sympathy for the ape leader of an uprising of apes against humans. More than once a girl sitting behind me in the full theater Ah’d and Oh’d, reacting to an anthropomorphizing Caesar acting cute or sad. This humanizing of the ape took me out of the movie in a fit of knowing giggles.

The movie is a prequel of sorts to the first Planet of the Apes, but also an unofficial remake of the third Apes movie, Conquest of the Planet of the Apes. The ending of Rise is right there in the title of the movie. So, for the entire run-time I knew what to expect. But not how it was going to get there. And when it did end, it wasn’t as I had thought. Again this was good and bad. In terms of what came before it, the ending of the movie was a disappointment. The movie doesn’t cop out so much as set up the next Apes movie. And it does so with the trickery inherent to its story.

The trickery here is that the apes are genetically enhanced. It’s science, not an act of nuclear mutation, god, or evolution. And the ape rising implicit in the title is brought about not because the apes are superior but because (Spoiler Alert: I’m about to give away the ending!!!!) the very serum that makes the apes smarter acts as a deadly virus to humans. I almost would rather not know what makes the apes smart enough to take over the world.

As it is, Rise of the Planet of the Apes comes at you as about four different movies strung together in episodes. It could be a mini series, a short one. Or a TV show canceled after four episodes. The first episode has James Franco (!?!?!) as Will Rodman, a geneticist working on a miracle drug, ALZ 113, which he hopes is a cure for Alzheimer’s. He works so single-mindedly on this project to help his father (John Lithgow playing, for once, over the top for a reason) who suffers from it. They test ALZ 113 on apes. Apes they cart in from jungles around the world, captured by poachers – the opening scenes showing this practice is frightening and all too real.

The serum is supposed to act as a regenerative and patch up damaged brains. After Will’s presentation of findings to the board of directors of the big mean genetic therapy pharmaceutical company goes very wrong, his funding is cut and the test apes are put down. But one was pregnant and they are able to save the preemie. Franco takes the newborn ape home and christens him Caesar. So ends the first episode: science gone haywire.

Episode two: Caesar grows up in suburbia. Will fixes up the attic in home one family house in a suburb of San Francisco like a huge playroom. Here Caesar swings around, bounces, does Flying Wallenda moves, and moons out the window at the kids playing next door. Will discovers that Caesar has inherited the traits of his mother, namely the ALZ 113, passed to him from his mother. It becomes apparent that Caesar is preternaturally smart, and since he wasn’t damaged to begin with, this means that the serum works as an augmentation, giving the normal brain (at least on an ape) enhanced capabilities. Meanwhile, Will tests ALZ 113 on his father—and it works. His father thinks clearly again and he plays the piano as well as he used to.

But apes grow fast. In a scene of violent foreshadowing, Will’s father relapses badly and tries to drive off in a neighbor’s car. When the neighbor gets angry at the old man, Caesar escapes the house and lurches to the father’s rescue attacking the neighbor and drawing blood.

Episode three: Caesar is thrown in ape prison. This episode alone is a reason to see the movie. Here Caesar is separated from Will for the first time. And also mixes with other apes, chimps, and orangutans. Since he’s the super smart one, he quickly assumes dominance over even the biggest and brutish ones. They are all kept in cages and let out in the ‘yard’ for exercise.

The yard is a huge domed playpen. The apes are guarded, I mean cared for, by a young lout who taunts them all, especially Caesar. These scenes carry the fun of a revenge fantasy when their caretaker gets his comeuppance. Caesar also gets his paws on more of the serum and administers it to the rest of the apes. When Will finally gains the means to spring Caesar, he has grown wary of all humans and also realizes his place is not with them but with the apes.

Episode four: Prison break and the rise. The prison break is a sight to behold: legions of apes, all of them now genetically enhanced, leaping and scrambling out the top of the prison yard/play pen and descending onto a sleepy San Francisco dawn. Oh boy, this is going to fantastic, I thought.

I was disappointed. The tension immediately drained out of the movie. As it happened and I sat disappointed watching the apes trounce through downtown and out onto the Golden Gate Bridge, I wondered what I hoped to see. I realized it wasn’t that the movie didn’t live up to my expectation so much as follow through with what it had set up in the earlier scenes. I expected a slaughter, I expected some real warfare between human and ape. I wanted apes to go ape shit. Maybe take up arms, and become as violent as humans. Or something. Wasn’t that the point of the original? Rod Serling’s yawning in his grave.

There was a bit of that, but this is a PG-13 movie, and there were a surprising number of little kids at this viewing. Even an infant in a pram. So, glad they didn’t have to witness a hard R-rated mayhem. And I’m not saying that would have made me a happy movie-goer, but I truly felt that the movie let its audience down.

I wanted a true Rising, and I got some silly message movie about setting animals free to live in their natural habitat. I can get that on the Nature channel. Plus, the GCI effects were not great at this point. While the scenes on the bridge were ominous, creepy, and partly fun to watch, they were overshadowed by some lousy digital work. Everything looked a little off. Maybe they need to make everything move like a metallic blur, ala Transformers.

After the credits started, I hopped out of my seat and lurched toward the exit. Then another scene came on, and I thought, oh yeah, this’ll be good. But I was just set up for the fall of humankind through the ALZ 113 virus, which, as I’ve said in the earlier Spoiler Alert acts as a lethal virus. Cue the next Apes’ installment. Wake me when it’s over.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday, August 23rd, 7:35 pm. Viewed solo. Snack: Slice, diced, and otherwise individualized.

Coming Attractions:

Contagion. All star, big budget disaster movie. About an international lethal virus. Directed by Steven Soderbergh, starring little Matt Damon, Kate Winslet, Jude Law, Larry Fishburne.

The Debt. Stuff that happened 30 years ago comes back to haunt a group of Mossad secret agents. With Helen Mirren and Tom Wilkinson and Sam Worthington and Jessica Chastain. Could be classy, could be dumb.

In Time. Justin Timberlake, Olivia Wilde, and Amanda Seyfried. "In the future people stop aging at 25 and must work to buy themselves more time, but when a young man finds himself with more time than he can imagine he must run from the corrupt police force to save his life."

Paranormal Activity 3. I didn't buy the first one, so there's no reason number 3 will be much of an improvement.

The Sitter. Jonah Hill plays a guy who is talked into babysitting a couple of kids. But he's not much of a sitter, and takes the kids out with him to a drug deal. Or a brothel. Or a bar. Or all of the above. Played for laughs, although humor here is very subjective.

Crazy, Stupid, Love

2011-08-23T07:46:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few spoilers ahead. As much as I'd like to give away the ending, I won't.

Love sucks. Love is like oxygen. Love is a drug. Love like wine. Love like blood. Eternal love. Put it all together and what do you get? Love that is both Crazy and Stupid. Crazy, Stupid, Love (CSL), the movie, wants it every way it can get it. It’s selfish and greedy. It’s romantic and realistic. It plays tricks but means well. It takes you to bed but makes you coffee in the morning and calls you later to see how your day’s going.

Steve Carell plays Cal, a shlubby corporate drone whose wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), sneaks off to the movies by herself when she’s not having an affair with a co-worker (Kevin Bacon). Meanwhile, Ryan Gosling plays chick magnet Jacob who falls for a pretty girl, Hannah (Emma Stone), who is the first to turn him down. At least initially. And so after they do get together he realizes she’s the first girl he wants to commit to.

What do these two disparate couples have in common? After Emily leaves Cal, he ends up at the same singles bar where Jacob plies his trade. Jacob takes pity on Cal and sees a chance to use his talents in a new way. He gives Cal a makeover by taking him clothes shopping and giving him some rules for picking up the ladies.

Carell makes a good schlub, has made a career out of it. Yet he cleans up nice, too. Part of the fun of watching Carell is his reaction to his surprising success with the ladies. CSL is like the 40-Year Old Virgin all grown up. Carell’s Cal is a good guy who married very early. His wife thinks their marriage has run its course, but he still pines for her.

The movie's most touching moments show Cal sneaking over to the house he used to live in to water the grass and trim the hedges, all the while peering longingly through the dining room window at Emily and their two kids. Julianne Moore is stuck in a thankless role of the wife who cheats. But, she’s just confused and feels her marriage has stopped offering her anything. She’s not a villain, nobody is. But she’s no saint, and nobody else is either. That’s the point. Love is all kinds of things, mostly messy, complicated, and with a horrible sense of timing.

Meanwhile, Cal’s son, Robbie (Jonah Bobo), is madly in love with his babysitter, Jessica (played with a clumsy, swanlike grace by former America’s Next Top Model contestant Analeigh Tipton), who, in turn, is in love with Cal. This is the touchiest, sloppiest type of love the movie has to offer. But CSL isn’t interested (much) in titillation, and doesn’t stray into this potentially cringy area of love – namely underage lust and inappropriate love.

How this all gets resolved is part of the fun of this movie. So, who am I to spill all the many beans? I’ll just say that there’s a kind of trick ending, a pre-ending ending that plays a card that is the trick of the movie. I don’t like tricks. If this movie were a book, and I read this penultimate scene, I would be mad at the book for withholding information from the reader. But movies, while they often pale next to their literary counterparts, can get away with these sleights of hand. Movies are often told from an omniscient perspective. And here CSL gets away with it.

What I like about the trick is that it plays out over a scene that, in any other romantic comedy, would be the final scene in which everybody makes up and goes off happy. Here, this scene devolves into chaos and happiness seems farther out of each character’s reach. It’s a wink to the audience, letting us know that it’s smart enough not to give in so easily. It then moves on to the real final scenes, where, while the bow is not wrapped so precisely or so prettily, it manages wraps a lot of the movie’s loose ends up satisfyingly.

Still, as I left the theater I was wondering how the story would have played out if this trick wasn’t played. Or had been played earlier in movie. But CSL is still a good night at the movies, and it’s nice to see a rom-com that treats its characters with some respect. The actors help a hell of a lot to make this watchable.

All the couples have chemistry together; absolutely necessary to any movie even scratching the surface of romance. Ryan Gosling plays a good lunkhead with a hot bod and an apparent heart of gold. Emma Stone turns on the charm and it seems that whoever she aims it at reciprocates with the right chemical mixture. Steve Carell and Julianne Moore are a realistic and likeable couple. You want everybody to be happy, but if getting a divorce falls under the happiness moniker, then let’s not get picky about how to define a happy ending.

Stats:

Theater location: The Island, Oak Bluffs, Thursday, August 11th, 7:00 pm. Viewed with Liz! Snack: Tire Tread Red Licorice.

Coming Attractions:

Change Up.It's already released and tanked. Nothing more to see here. Move along.

The Help. A young white woman interviews a small southern town's worth of black maids to tell their story. Feathers get ruffled. Some people hate it. Some people love it.

Captain America - The First Avenger

2011-08-14T12:59:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few spoilers ahead.

The latest big budget adaptation of a Marvel Comic superhero, Captain America straddles the line that separates rousing action, sincere patriotism, and total cheese. Actually, it does quite a good balancing act. It mostly works as all of the above, and includes another peachy rewrite of history. In this new Hollywood version of WWII, Hitler is still the bad guy, but asks the question (and perhaps invades hallowed ground): what could be worse than Hitler? HYDRA, a wing of one of Hitler’s armies gone rogue. Okay, it actually doesn’t imply that Red Skull, the mad genius leader of HYDRA is worse than Hitler. But he ain’t no picnic.

What makes this movie interesting is the time period. 1942, just as America enters the big war. Enter 90-pound weakling, Steve Rogers (Chris Evans). He wants nothing more than to enlist in the Army to do his part. But because he’s small and asthmatic, among a litany of other conditions, he keeps getting rejected as 4-H. While his best buddy is shipping out, Steve tries again to join the Army using another false name.

But due to his obvious ambition to join, his love of country, and sense of duty, he catches the eye of Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci) who pulls some strings to get Steve enlisted. Turns out Doc Erskine wants Steve to participate in a secret Army project to generate the perfect good soldier in much the same way Erskine created Red Skull as the perfect bad soldier for the Germans (yes, he used to work for the Germans before escaping to America).

Steve is a good soldier – his heart is in the right place. The experiment is a rousing success with Steve literally growing into a massive, muscle-bound soldier with a heart of gold. Did I mention this guy’s got heart? Tommy Lee Jones (good to see him) is Colonel Chester Phillips who considers Steve nothing more than the morale booster that an ambitious senator has pushed Steve into becoming.

But, as part of a USO show in Europe, Steve (as “Captain America,” complete with goofy costume, shield, and a song and dance routine), hatches a plan to save his best friend who, along with hundreds of other American soldiers, happens to be prisoners of Red Skull. As Captain America. Only in 1942 could a character like this get away with the inherent goofiness of this plot device for a modern audience. Funny thing is, we buy it. It works. Mainly because the modern audience wants it to work. Just like any other modern-day super hero on the big screen.

Steve proves he can use his super powers (he’s strong, can run fast, heal quickly, and his fancy red, white, and blue shield returns to him like a boomerang) to aid in the cause in Germany. The hot British captain Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell) falls for him. Tommy Lee Jones gives him the official okay to put together a team of gung ho soldiers to take down Red Skull. Red Skull is played by Australian actor Hugo Weaving, who is probably known to American audiences as Agent Smith from the Matrix flicks, Elrond from Lord of the Rings, and V from V for Vendetta. He is good at playing bad. Tony Stark's father, Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) is a minor character, the industrialist who puts together Cappy's costume and who also helps Doc Erskine put together the machinery for the initial experiment.

There are no big surprises in Captain America: events move along pretty much as they should. The action scenes are good, if not incredible. Much of the action is computer generated and it often shows. A rousing sequence on a speeding train is almost derailed (pun intended) by some cheesy effects, although I'm guessing there is more money muscle behind this new Captain America than behind the version released in 1990 starring Matt Salinger, Darren McGavin, and Bill Mumy. The best use of special effects comes in the early scenes that show Steve as a small young man, with Chris Evans' head seamlessly and impressively grafted on a shrimpy body.

It’s not giving too much away to say that the movie opens and ends in modern times. Seeing Cappy run around Times Square in 2011 like he’s landed on another planet just isn’t as much fun as seeing him fight the Nazis. But it's a chance to bring in Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury, who seems the glue that fits all these Marvel Comics' super hero pieces together in anticipation of next year's The Avengers.

Evans is no stranger to the Marvel universe playing the Human Torch in two Fantastic Four movies. He has always brought a self conscious youthful cockiness to his roles, including one of seven ex-boyfriends in Scott Pilgrim vs. the World, one of the doomed astronauts in Sunshine, and the demolitions expert in The Losers. In the Losers he played a geek, the smart one. But he has the looks of a matinee idol, and so it seems fitting, inexorable, that Evans would step back into the Marvel world as Captain America—part skinny geek who never got the girl, and part matinee super hero god who can do almost everything he ever wanted.

Depending on your view of next year’s The Avengers, beware or embrace the hidden scene that occurs after the closing credits. It's nothing more than a glorified teaser for that movie which collects many of Marvel’s beloved superheroes into one movie. Aside from Captain America (in which Evans reprises his role), you’ll see Thor, Iron Man, Hulk, Black Widow, Pepper Pots, and Hawkeye.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Thursday, August 4th, 7:50 pm. Price: 10.50. Viewed with Liz! Snack: apple, chopped and bagged.

Coming Attractions:

Tin Tin. Spielberg directs this motion capture version. Not my cup of tea, but may be great for ten-year olds.

The Amazing Spiderman. Another reboot. Yawn.

John Carter. "Civil War vet John Carter is transplanted to Mars, where he discovers a lush, wildly diverse planet whose main inhabitants are 12-foot tall green barbarians. Finding himself a prisoner of these creatures, he escapes, only to encounter Dejah Thoris, Princess of Helium, who is in desperate need of a savior." Huh? Notice the initials: JC.

Mission Impossible, Ghost Protocol. Tom Cruise still looks good running fast. This installment actually looks like it could kickstart this franchise, in a good way. This time Cruise has surrounded himself with a good cast, including Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Josh Holloway, and Tom Wilkinson.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Effective and disturbing, this new origins POTA cuts right into our collective primal fears. At least, one of them: apes becoming sentient and taking over. And not in a cuddly way from the look of this mesmerizing trailer. In a way that has them attacking a highway of cars and expertly throwing axes. With James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, and Brian Cox.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part 2

2011-08-03T20:06:00.000-04:00

Guest review by Robin Smith-Johnson.

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Major spoilers ahead so read at your own risk.

With the long-awaited final chapter of Harry Potter in theaters, the big question has to be – was it worth the wait? In a word, yes. The finale provides a nice finish to the huge story arc that J.K. Rowling began in the first book and subsequent movie “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” (2001). Ten years ago, we met an 11-year-old Harry as he embarked on his adventures as a novice wizard. The author opened up a whole magical world of witches and their muggle counterparts (for the uninitiated, a “muggle” is someone from the non-magical, ordinary world).

At the end of “Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows, Part I,” a triumphant Voldemort lifts the Elder Wand from Dumbledore’s grave and raises it to the sky. It would seem that evil is about to trounce good. Ralph Fiennes as Voldemort is granted more screen time in part 2 and he puts it to good use. In this last film, we finally see Harry’s nemesis in all his horrible glory. This villain is ruthless and, at times, unpredictable. As Voldemort’s powers wane, Harry declares that this makes him more dangerous. His pursuit of Harry is so single-minded that anyone in his way will be destroyed.

The film is a complex mix of storytelling and adventure. For those moviegoers who haven’t either read the books or seen the movies, the going might be tough. A quick primer of the action should include the special nature of horcruxes. According to the Harry Potter wiki, a horcrux is a very powerful object in which a Dark wizard or witch has hidden a fragment of his or her soul. In Voldemort’s case, he has split his soul into seven parts in hopes of insuring his own immortality. In addition, there are the deathly hallows, three powerful magical objects that used in tandem can overcome death.

Overall, the cinematography is breathtaking. There is a scene where Hogwarts teachers perform enchantment spells to protect the school against the evil invaders. Statues of armored knights come alive and leap into position. A vast ethereal scrim is unleashed to cover the school. It’s a powerful, emotionally charged scene with great special effects. Indeed, the entire movie is a visual feast.

Throughout the eight Harry Potter films, movie goers have grown up with the young characters. Here, Harry and his friends are finally adults. I loved the quick glimpses of Ron and Hermione's long-time friendship turning into romance. The young trio do justice to Rowling’s idea of the brave, intrepid schoolmates in search of justice.

The real hero has to be the unlikely Neville Longbottom who stands up to the onslaught of Voldemort’s legions near the end of the movie. He risks his life to confront what he believes is a dark obstacle to the truth. Stirring stuff!

It’s always fun to see England’s most esteemed actors taking part in the films. Once again, we meet Michael Gambon as Dumbledore, beloved headmaster of Hogwarts (his character is dead but comes back in an other-worldly scene with Harry at the very end of the movie), Helena Bonham Carter is the over-the-top evil Belatrix Lestrange, the wonderful Maggie Smith as Professor McGonagall and larger-than-life Robbie Coltrane as Hagrid.

The actor who demands the most respect for this film, however, is Alan Rickman as the mysterious Professor Severus Snape. Throughout Harry Potter’s journey, Snape has been both friend and foe to Harry. In the final movie, we finally understand what makes Snape tick. The trip back in time thanks to the pensieve (an object used to retrieve memories) gives Harry a look at the real Snape. This was the most moving part of the film where the film viewer finally understands the depth of Snape’s love for Harry’s mother Lily and the sacrifices Snape has undergone to honor that love and protect Harry.

In the end, this film shows the grand battle between good and evil played out on the school grounds of Hogwarts. Although Voldemort seems all-powerful, his comeuppance is quick and powerfully done. Favorite characters die; others are injured. Somehow, though, the resourcefulness and integrity of Harry and his friends shine through.

Stats:

Theater location: Heritage Cinemas in Sandwich, Friday, July 29, 6:30 p.m. Price: $9.50.
Movie date with hubby Greg. No snack.

Horrible Bosses

2011-07-28T18:57:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Minor spoilers ahead. Nothing to worry about.

Note: This review (like the movie) has been rated

Have you ever hated a boss so much you wanted to kill him or her? Did you watch Hitchcock’s Strangers on a Train (or DeVito’s Throw Mamma From the Train) and think, Yep, that’s for me? Then you’re probably in prison, where you may still have the chance to watch Horrible Bosses streaming on your cellmate’s laptop. You’ll see other hapless dopes scrambling to figure out a way to make their work lives better, or at least tolerable, by killing their respective bosses.

There’s Nick (Jason Bateman), who’s condescending asshole of a boss (Kevin Spacey, dialing it down just a scoche) has been making him work crazy hours for years by dangling the carrot of a promotion to VP of Sales.

Kurt (Jason Sudeikis) has a boss at a distribution warehouse who’s a clueless asshole (played with gleeful abandon by an unleashed Colin Farrell) who is in line to inherit the company business from his nice guy dad (Donald Sutherland). When Dad Sutherland kicks from a heart attack, Kurt’s fate as Colin’s whipping boy is sealed.

Dale (Charlie Day) is a dental hygienist whose boss, an oversexed cougar dentist (Jennifer Aniston), sexually harasses him. That last one, you’re thinking: Oh, that’s not so bad, to be harassed by Ms. Aniston. And that’s what Dale’s friends say. But all Dale wants out of life is to be a husband. He’s engaged to a super nice girl, and this cougar dentist is threatening his dream. Oh, and he’s a registered sex offender (arrested for public urination in a park – at night. Can that happen?), so he’s afraid if he loses this job he won’t find another.

Well, yes, finding another job for anyone can be tough. But not impossible. Why these average dudes don’t even consider such an option is never broached. Okay, suspend your disbelief starting…now! What do you do when you want to kill your collective bosses? Hire a hit man. The hapless boys set their GPS to the bad part of town (Can you do that?) and they end up in a shady bar where they meet one Motherfucker Jones.

Jamie Foxx plays Motherfucker. He charges the boys five grand. Instead of agreeing to kill the bosses, he acts as their murder consultant and suggests that they trade murders. Each kills the other’s boss. Switcheroo. Strangers on a Train. Not a bad idea, the boys think. So much for their five large. It’s fun to see little Charlie Day say things like, “I thought we were hiring you to kill our bosses, Motherfucker.”

From here the movie takes off, as much as this middle of the road comedy can. The boys stake out their bosses' houses to find out information they can use in their dastardly plans. For example, in Colin Farrell’s house they find a stash of cocaine. They discover that Kevin Spacey is allergic to peanuts when Dale resuscitates him after he succumbs to an allergic reaction – saving a life was just more fun then letting him die. And for Ms. Aniston – well, what you see is what you get. She’s nothing more than a sexpot who likes to seduce apparently any random male who happens by her apartment, including Kurt.

These scenes take on a manic energy that carries us through to the ending. Much of the humor comes from seeing these heretofore normal guys thrust into one totally absurd situation after another. Part of the entertainment value is watching how this action plays out. Do they really kill the bosses? And if not, how do they resolve these conflicts? So I won’t divulge too much more here. Except to say that I was pleasantly surprised to see how it all went down.

Like I say, each character confronts his situation a little differently. Nick is the straightest of the bunch, and while he finds himself doing things he probably never imagined (snooping around his boss’s house, witnessing a murder, inadvertently snorting cocaine) he keeps a cool if dumbfounded head. Jason Bateman is often the more low-key cog in any movie he’s in. He perfected this style early on during his stint on the career resuscitator, Arrested Development. Here I would like to have seen him cut loose a bit more. But maybe he was saving his energy for Change Up, his second movie of the summer, which looks equally manic, or more so.

Jason Sudeikis plays a nice, genial guy who gets along with all his co-workers and actually enjoys his job (aside from his boss). Unfortunately he does nothing with this set up and ends up playing Kurt as a single doofus on the make (he’s a ladies man. Go figure. I don’t see it myself.) and much of the last part of the movie he plays it like an extended SNL skit.

Charlie Day is the one to watch. His voice mixes a high and low register at once, meeting in the middle with a gravelly scrape. Like he just finished a pack of filterless Camels or he’s been shouting most his life. He’s the most low-key of the bunch, just a nice guy who wants things to stay status quo. He turns up the energy throughout, and while exhausting to watch, he keeps things rolling. If it weren’t for his Dale, these guys would probably still be working for the same bosses by the end of the movie. That they don’t is a testament to good old-fashioned American doofusity and avarice.

Horrible Bosses is served best in a crowded theater. Yes, I was carried away watching it as a diverting piece of entertainment. It was a hot night in Lowell, and the Showcase was packed. The audience enjoyed it. The actors also seem like they’re enjoying it. There’s probably a great blooper reel, if the outtakes shown over the credits are any indication. Overall, if I knew what I was in for I might have waited for the DVD/Streaming/On Demand/Blu Ray release.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday, July 19th, 7:50 pm. Price: 6.00. Viewed solo. Snack: apple, chopped and bagged.

Coming Attractions:

30 Minutes or Less. A hapless kid and his stupid buddy are forced to hold up a bank for the real bank robbers, who are even more stupid and hapless. It's a comedy! With Jesse Eisenberg, Aziz Ansari, and Fred Ward. From the director of Zombieland.

Final Destination 5 (Or, Can I have just one more destination?). Sorry producers of Final Destination 5, I will never see your movie. You can stop sending me free passes (doesn't happen) or invitations to your Hollywood mansions to see a special screening (would never happen). Seeing a movie about a group of kids who cheat death, only to find out that they have to die systematically anyway unless they murder some random person first is just not my idea of a fun night at the movies. Unless it's in 3-D! It's not, is it?

Footloose. Remake. No improvement over the original here.

Fright Night. Remake. Has potential.

Change Up. Ryan Reynolds is a single guy popular with the ladies, but tired of his lifestyle. Jason Bateman is a married guy with a couple kids, also tired of his lifestyle. After pissing in a magic fountain (seriously!) the two switch lives. It's an R-rated Freaky Friday rip off. But, this one has potential.

Crazy Stupid Love. Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore. A young couple and an older couple going through dramedy romantic escapades, while Ryan, a player, shows Steve, a shy, awkward dude, the ropes to picking up women. At least that's what I think happens. Along with some other stuff.

Larry Crowne

2011-07-17T13:32:00.000-04:00

"I forgot my helmet." "It's only a movie."

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Some spoilers ahead, including many important plot points and an allusion to the ending. If you've seen the trailer you should be able to guess how it ends. But don't let that stop you from reading my amazing review!

What’s in a name? Larry Crowne, the movie starring and directed by Tom Hanks, could have been called Tom Hanks is Larry Crowne. Because at this point, Hanks, and his co-star Julia Roberts, are so well known as movie stars that there can be no way to separate what we know of them as actors from any role they play.

"Take a left on Sunset and there you'll see it, In and Out Burger."

So, you go see a crowd-pleasing movie like Larry Crowne with a certain level of expectation, even if it’s only subliminal. Here, Hanks casts himself as the titular character, a man in his fifties who, after graduating high school, went into the Navy where he was a cook for twenty years. Now he works as one of the most devoted employees you will ever find at a Walmart/Target/KMart-type big box department store called UMart (I had to remind myself it’s not the name of a real chain, so worthy is it of brand name status).

Larry, called to a meeting by some of his managers, discovers to his amazement that he is not employee of the month for the ninth time, but out of a job due to some bogus store policy about not moving anyone up the ladder who doesn’t have a college degree. Out of a job, and with a crushing mortgage over his head, Larry hits bottom.

Hitting the bottom for Mr. Tom Hanks means staring into the mirror with moist, wistful eyes. There’s no time to introduce any trauma or real heartache. It’s mentioned in passing that Larry bought out his ex-wife’s portion of their house, but we never learn anything about her. Larry doesn’t have any kids; in fact this is one summer movie that is gloriously sans tykes. His neighbor, Lamar, played by Cedric the Entertainer, encourages Larry to go to college. For his part, Lamar doesn’t have to worry about his mortgage: he won the lottery and he now spends his day running a perpetual yard sale in his front yard (strange mixed message here—why doesn’t Lamar just talk Larry into buying lottery tickets?).

"And then Cedric, you say, I'll take fifteen for the TV."

Boom, there Larry goes, registering for classes at the nearest college. While initially awkward in a new social milieu, Larry takes to school like he probably took to his menial tasks at UMart: with a spark of seriousness for the work at hand. He signs up for two classes, one that teaches how to speak in front of an audience and an introduction to economics. One can’t help wonder, why didn’t he go back to school earlier?

It’s not like Larry Crowne’s simple. In fact, the movie takes pains to make sure we never think this. Larry’s a special guy, maybe a man out of time, but he ain’t stupid. Larry Crowne, the character, is cute and cuddly and completely non-threatening—tailor made for Hanks, who also co-wrote the screenplay with Nia Vardalos of My Big Fat Greek Wedding fame.

"Line!"

Teaching his speech class is Julia Roberts, as Mercedes Tainot. Mercedes is smart and bitter, and doesn’t enjoy teaching. She goes home after work and concocts lovely frozen drinks and gets quietly blotto. She’s married to a writer (Bryan Cranston), who, after publishing a couple of what look like fantasy/sci-fi novels, stays at home and surfs the web, ogling busty ladies. He claims to be doing some kind of important blog writing. But he only leaves comments on other blogs. Yep, the spark is out of this marriage, although they live in a great house so that must help.

Larry’s economics class is taught by Dr. Matsutani, a professor who shows his class slides from his book on economics which each student in his class must buy and read. Dr. Matsutani is played with bravado and strangeness by George Takei. Takei’s a funny guy, and the movie benefits from his manic laugh and steely eyes.

Larry, riding his scooter to his first day of school (he sidelined his SUV because he couldn’t afford the gas), meets hyper cute Talia (Gugu Mbatha-Raw), also a scooter rider. Turns out she’s in the same economics class. She befriends him and overpowers him with cute, forcing him to join her scooter gang.

"You look like Tom Hanks." "I am Tom Hanks. Wanna be in my movie?"

Yes, scooter gang. The movie strains credulity at this point, as Talia and her hot boyfriend, Dell (!!!!), played by Wilmer Valderrama, take Larry under their wings. Talia is a free spirit, the kind only born and bred in L.A. She and her merry band see Larry as some kind of charity case. They cute their way into his dour, messy house and straighten up while one of them gives Larry a cute hair cut. “It’s like Clueless,” Liz whispered to me. Yes, indeed here we have a makeover scene like so many others.

Erstwhile Sit-Com Star Stare Down

From here it’s business as usual for the story. Can you guess what happens? Larry thaws Mercedes’ irascible heart around the time she kicks her stupid husband out of the house (but, what a house!). You can’t not have Julia Roberts smile her wide Julia Roberts’ Smile™, and during a scene of prolonged (albeit drunken, on Mercedes part) courtship, she finally breaks out that bad boy.

"Julia, in this scene I want you to smile." "That'll be an extra 5 Mil." "Done."

What happens to Larry? Don’t worry, he’ll be fine. You know why? Because Larry is never in any real danger. Turns out he’s the best student in both his classes. What about a job? Larry takes a temporary job as a cook at his buddy’s diner. What about Larry’s house? Larry figures out (he’s taking economics, after all) the best way is to declare insolvency and walk away from his mortgage. And hey, maybe his humungous record collection will bring some money on eBay. And hey, maybe one of the cute scooter kids will help him with that.

"I liked it better without the helmets."

Why does everybody want to help Larry Crowne? It’s impossible to know. There is never a moment of peril. Larry has no real internal struggle or conflict. Nothing really bothers Larry. He’s one of those guys who always lands on his feet. If anything, Larry Crowne is one of those guys everybody secretly hates. Why do these kids, who could be his own kids (ah ha! – but no, this isn’t brought out in the least), give a shit about Larry? Why does Talia, the cutest girl in all of Los Angeles (and perhaps all the world), even give Larry a second glance? The character growth aspect of the story is handed over to Roberts’ Mercedes, as she (Spoiler Alert!) sheds her hard-drinking ways and her no-good, big boob-loving husband, and learns to appreciate teaching again.

"Tom Hanks, can I be in your movie?" "Me too!"

Sure it’s rote, but it’s also a movie that exudes heart and gentleness. One aspect I really enjoyed was the setting. The movie takes place in a real, if somewhat polished, Los Angeles. Not some nameless American every town, but contemporary L.A. It’s nice to see L.A. used for good for once. As Larry and his merry band of scooter enthusiasts cruise the San Fernando Valley, L.A. looks pretty good for once. The palm trees aren’t wilted or dying. The traffic isn’t too oppressive. The ubiquitous plazas aren’t too annoying. Also, Larry is a willing participant in his makeover after which he comes away with the haircut and stylish wardrobe of a twenty-something. But, the movie never makes him look stupid: Larry knows he is not dressing age appropriate, but he’s open to new ideas especially from his new, much younger friends. He knows he’s been due for a makeover for quite some time.

"I throw in all smirks. This is a smirk."

Larry Crowne is an entertainment, starring very good looking actors playing versions of regular people living normal lives. The movie is fun, and there are moments, like that scooter cruise around the Valley, that help it transcend mundane Hollywood boilerplate to become a rousing underdog story. Rousing may be too strong a word. How about gently moving?

"Cut."

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday, July 12th, 6:50 pm. Price: 6.00. Viewed with Liz! Snack: apple, chopped and bagged.

Coming Attractions:

Please release these movies so I don't have to watch the trailers again!

Change Up. Ryan Reynolds is a single guy popular with the ladies, but tired of his lifestyle. Jason Bateman is a married guy with a couple kids, also tired of his lifestyle. After pissing in a magic fountain (seriously!) the two switch lives. It's an R-rated Freaky Friday rip off. But, this one has potential.

Crazy Stupid Love. Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore. A young couple and an older couple going through dramady romantic escapades, while Ryan, a player, shows Steve, a shy, awkward dude, the ropes to picking up women. At least that's what I think happens. Along with some other stuff.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon

2011-07-07T20:55:00.001-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Oh please.

I did not buy the Hasbro action figures. I did not watch the cartoon. I did not see the first two Transformers movies. But it’s summer, right? What better popcorn movie than one about giant action figure robot aliens duking it out in the middle of Chicago? Yes, moments of this movie gloriously tap into my adolescent love of Godzilla, Mothra, Rodan, et al smashing through Tokyo. All those Japanese Toho productions had an inherent cheese factor of men dressed like monsters stomping around a brightly lit papier-mâché set knocking over pressboard buildings and stomping model trains.

Transformers: Dark of the Moon, the third in the series (T3), doesn’t need cardboard and plaster. Director Michael Bay has 200 million plus in our money (money we paid to see the first two movies) and he’s going to spackle the 3-D of our dreams with robot metal that shreds everything in sight.

The visuals are as overblown as the movie’s silly, stuffed-to-the-gills storyline, which makes no sense from scene to scene and, considering it’s based on a set of action figures (says so right in the credits) seems a staggering achievement. It takes about an hour, maybe longer (it’s a long movie) to get to the point where one robot says something like, “These humans have no idea what’s coming to them. Kill them all!” He might as well have said, “Cry havoc and let fly the robots of war.”

Michael Bay never met a shot he couldn’t move, a scene he couldn’t chop into bits, a musical score he couldn’t hit repeat on and let revolve all the way through his movies, cheesy metal and/or pop ballads that hammer you with his message (“Dude, war is, like, totally bad.”), a lovely young model/actress he couldn’t humiliate, history he couldn’t scramble (here, the first moon landing, see also Pearl Harbor), dialogue he couldn’t streamline into boilerplate for an international audience, and heretofore decent actors (John Malcovich, Ken Jeong, John Tuturro, Francis McDormand, Leonard Nimoy's voice) he couldn’t reduce to hammy bit parts.

The story goes a little something like this: Autobots, nice robots from another planet (in essence, aliens) came to Earth seeking, um, a respite? Decepticons, bad robots (obviously—I mean, who named these guys? So much for the element of surprise. “Look, it’s a Decepticon, I wonder if he comes in peace?”) who are warring with the Autobots and have come to Earth to, um, kill some of us and use the rest as slaves to run their maquiladoras. What are the Decepticons’ major industries? Who knows?

The plot hinges on America’s initial moon landing being motivated by a mission to check out what turns out to be an Autobot craft crashed onto the moon’s surface. Astronauts (poor Buzz Aldren, dusted off for a cameo—nice face lift by the way) bring back some metal cylinders that turn out to be important to the 'bots decades later.

Then there’s little Shia LaBeouf, back after the first two Transformer flicks, as Sam Witwicky who apparently is buddies with one of the Autobots who is, during its downtime, a cool yellow sports car. Sam has a hot girlfriend, Carly, who pays the rent on the huge, old apartment they share in D.C. Carly is played by supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley, who is British. The accent goes a long way to mitigating her acting, which actually isn’t bad. Megan Fox was famously not brought back for T3, apparently after she publicly called Michael Bay a Nazi, drawing the ire of T3 producer Steven Spielberg. Anyway, one pretty face replaced with another. This is Michael Bay’s world; we only pay money to see it.

Did I mention what Transformers are? They are robots who are generally about five to ten stories tall and they scan an object of transportation—car, bus, semi truck, garbage truck—and literally transform into the object. These transformations are fast but not immediate, and they usually happen during times of strife—during a chase, say.

These are wonderful moments of flailing, scraping, crunching metal. A great scene involves a high speed chase, Decepticons against Autobots, all sports cars that transform at various moments into fighting robots. Also, call it “Transformertime” when these shots go into slow motion to give a heightened sense of time, action, and sound, and then things speed back up.

In the middle of an average Hollywood product, these little moments of strange transformations are like flashes of anarchy, of suspense and surprise—there really is no sense of reason to these hulking masses of metal. Often these guys roam around (they look like rock ‘em sock ‘em robots, so they can mostly walk, although you also get your blurry spheres that roll along like Tasmanian devils and ones that look like dogs caught in a mad scientist lab) their various parts spinning, whirring, and in some cases, slicing. Stuff that makes my inner twelve-year-old go Yeah Baby!

So, where were we? Patrick Dempsey plays Carly’s evil boss (nothing but good vs. evil in this movie), who, it turns out, is one of many humans who are helping the Decepticons take over the world and hoping that they won’t get killed or be used as slaves in Earth’s new future. He takes Carly to his evil lair on the top floor of Trump Hotel and Tower, Chicago, close to where the Decepticons are firing up their evil cylinders of death to transport a planetful of Decepticons to Earth, not to mention their entire planet (really!).

The movie is stuffed, as I say, so characters come and go. Some have been in the previous movies. John Turturro plays Simmons, a smarmy expert who is helping Frances McDormand’s military boss figure out the Decepticon’s next move.

John Malcovich has fun as a goofy corporate boss who hires Sam for a minute and a half. Josh Duhamel plays it straight as a stalwart Captain Lennox who leads his men into battle through downtown Chicago after the Decepticons have attacked and destroyed half the city. Tyrese Gibson plays Sergeant Epps, another sidekick role (he’s so good at it), and helps Sam navigate a downtown patrolled by Decepticons of every stripe, hovering mother ships, and flying robots. These scenes after the takeover are very reminiscent of Battle: Los Angeles from earlier this year, where alien spacecraft hovered on the skyline, trailing tendrils and releasing deadly patrols.

Sam miraculously always knows where to go and what to do before everybody else, including the Army. He leads a band of Tyrese Gibson’s tough mercenaries into a building which, it turns out, starts collapsing underneath them. It’s a neat special effect as the floor keeps moving from under them and they slip and slide through the inside (and outside!) of the building like a dozen Harold Lloyds on steroids. Or a Looney Tunes short. The building, meanwhile, gets gutted and sliced by the most impressive Decepticon (they all have names, but I can’t remember them all) that looks like a cross between a moving drill bit and a deadly sandworm.

Yes, buildings collapse, metal swings through each shot like wielded ice. The screen is saturated with images. 3-D doesn’t add much to the movie. It’s mostly about bringing the foreground out from the background. (I paid $15 for this?). Also, when you put those glasses on you are looking at a dimmer, darker version of what’s projected. That gives the movie a murky look, where all scenes look like they were shot at dusk. Also, and I can’t ever remember watching a big budget Hollywood special effects spectacle and thinking this, the sound design truly seems like an afterthought. To me, this is a misstep and hurts the impact of the movie.

What’s sound design got to do with it?

Sound design “most commonly involves the manipulation of previously composed or recorded audio, such as music and sound effects.” The sound design for T3 seemed lacking. Too often the sound effects accompanying a particular action was sparse, stripped down. It was as if the sound designer chose to concentrate on one type or layer of sound, forgoing the entire possible sound experience. It was distracting when an explosion, car crash, or some ‘bot destruction didn’t yield expected sound results. The action could have been fuller, more potent, if they had taken more time putting together the soundtrack. The transformers all talk, and sometimes when they transform and fight, they utter clichéd aphorisms. Maybe the sound designer didn’t want to drown out the sparkling transformer dialogue of writer Ehren Kruger.

It could also be a logistics problem for the post production team. Sound is the very last piece of the movie puzzle to be worked on. Before you lock the sound, the picture must be finished. For these huge special effects movies I have a feeling that the sound editors don't have much time with the final picture. And so you get a rushed, incomplete movie as a result. But I’m probably the only sound design geek in the audience to notice or care.

See Transformers: Dark of the Moon if you must. I recommend you skip the 3-D version and head right to 2-D. Your wallet (if not Michael Bay) will commend you.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Thursday, June 30th, 6:40 pm. Price: 15.00! Viewed solo. Snack: Twizzlers, almonds.

Coming Attractions:

Rise of the Planet of the Apes. Effective and disturbing, this new origins POTA cuts right into our collective primal fears. At least, one of them: apes becoming sentient and taking over. And not in a cuddly way from the look of this mesmerizing trailer. In a way that has them attacking a highway of cars and expertly throwing axes. With James Franco, Freida Pinto, John Lithgow, and Brian Cox.

Cowboys & Aliens. The more I watch this trailer, the more likely I am not to see it. It just doesn't look like much fun. Harrison Ford hasn't looked like he's enjoyed himself making a movie since the early '80s. And Daniel Craig sucks any humor or lightness out of all he surveys. But hey, maybe I'm wrong and it's great. As a father said to his son in the row behind me after this trailer ended: "They've run out of stuff to make movies about." Amen brother.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Part 2. Wow, this doesn't look like kid's stuff. It looks intense. It looks like they took all the money made from the previous movies and dumped it into this final installment. And it's in 3-D.

Mission Impossible: Ghost Protocol. Tom Cruise still looks good running fast. This installment actually looks like it could kickstart this franchise, in a good way. This time Cruise has surrounded himself with a good cast, including Jeremy Renner, Simon Pegg, Ving Rhames, Josh Holloway, and Tom Wilkinson.

Real Steel. Oh man, this looks bad. Hugh Jackman plays a father (?) who disappoints some kid (his son?) and makes it up to him by training his dilapidated robot to fight in the ring. Yes, robots. Fighting in the ring. I really thought this was a movie based on Rock 'em Sock 'em Robots. But I guess they couldn't get the rights. The acting looks poor, the film grainy and grimy.

Captain America: The First Avenger. This seems to strike the right balance of action and humor and awe. Which is what comic books are all about. And something last month's Green Lantern lacked. Chris Evans plays the titular Captain. He starts out as a short, 90 pound weakling transformed into Cap America through an experiment. Nice hook. Then he goes and fights Nazis during WWII. Co-starring Hugo Weaving, Stanley Tucci, Tommy Lee Jones, and Derek Luke.

Conan O'Brien Can't Stop

2011-06-30T08:10:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few spoilers ahead.

After Conan O’Brien quit/was fired from the Tonight Show in 2010, he was one late-night talk show host with a chip on his shoulder. Due to the crappy way NBC and Jay Leno handled the debacle, O’Brien was left feeling burned and angry. Conan O'Brien Can’t Stop chronicles the preparation and tour O’Brien launched in reaction to being legally forbidden to appear on TV or the Internet for six months after leaving the Tonight Show.

During Conan’s last Tonight Show appearance he played his swan song on guitar backed by a full, celebrity band. Here, his tour, dubbed the The Legally Prohibited from Being Funny on Television Tour, includes a full band consisting of many members of his erstwhile Tonight Show band and two backup singers/dancers. He gathers around him some of the same writers, producers, and assistants he employed at his old show. He also brings along his longtime sidekick, Andy Richter, who throughout is familiar and welcome face.

Scratch the surface of most of the funniest comics and you’ll find a lethal mixture equal parts anger, shame, guilt, bitterness, bipolar disorder, and other dysfunctions. So it’s no surprise that Conan’s performance on tour is hilarious and scathing. He sings mostly real songs with mock lyrics. He customizes On the Road Again to suit his current situation.

In one faux blues song where he discusses his roots, he mentions how he grew up in Brookline Massachusetts. Where, in the wealthy upper class suburb of Boston, his family was a member of the less fortunate upper middle class. His mother was a lawyer and his father was a doctor. It’s a wonderful pastiche of music and honesty that fuels much of the performance.

Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop is only playing in one theater in the Boston area, Coolidge Corner Theater, which happens to be in Brookline, Massachusetts. The crowd in the very small theater gave a hoot when he referenced Brookline and lyrics like, “My mother, she shopped at Whole Foods.” There were two ladies of a certain age sitting in front of us, and I imagined they could be his mother and aunt. Or maybe neighbors.

Much of the movie consists of backstage tour footage mixed with his live performance. The film does a surprisingly good job of building momentum and keeping you interested throughout. There is no inherent conflict in the story, no ugly secret that needs to be revealed, no end-of-journey plot twist. The drama comes from watching the nights on the tour tick away.

Opening night – everybody thought it went well, but thought it could have gone better. L.A. – a pre-show gathering turns into a full-blown Hollywood party after which O’Brien is wiped out as much as if he done his full performance. By the time Jim Carrey, Jon Hamm, Tina Fey, and other celebs swing by after the performance, you feel Conan’s exhaustion and frustration at being performing monkey. The most disturbing moments come at the expense of 30 Rock actor Jack McBrayer, who (whether staged or not) is forced to endure sarcastic barb after barb from Conan.

Early on O’Brien claims to be one of the least entitled celebrities, yet you can’t help not feeling too sorry for a rich celebrity whom millions of fans adore. Don’t get me wrong, touring is a hard business (I couldn’t do it). And he obviously got almost no downtime on the tour bus, before or after performances. Even his days off were full of obligations, such as performing in a talent show at his Harvard class reunion. Still, the tour was only a couple months long and it wasn’t just for him to let off steam, but to keep himself fresh and in the public eye so that when he did come back to TV, he would still have an adoring audience.

The movie becomes one of the best chronicles of life on the road I’ve ever seen. O’Brien could be a rock star the way his fans wait for him outside his tour bus and vie for an autograph before the show. Indeed, he jams with Jack White for a small but adoring crowd at White's recording studio in Nashville. At one point O’Brien plays the Bonnaroo Music Festival, where he not only performs his act he is also booked to introduce many of the major acts.

Near the end of the tour he is shown scrambling in a huff off the bus during an unscheduled pit stop at a New England service area. He then strikes up a casual conversation with a mini-van load of women heading to Martha’s Vineyard. Here he remains Conan O’Brien, the showman who can’t stop himself from being “Conan O’Brien.” But when they tell him he got a raw deal you realize that’s all he really wants from this tour, for his audience to understand and empathize with his anger. When they ask if they can pray for him, he is surprised but genuinely touched by the offer, and joins them as they bow their heads and wish him a good tour. This shows both Conan O’Briens, the showman and father, husband, and nice guy who just wants to do a good job. And one reason Conan O’Brien Can’t Stop.

Note: During the tour he signed with TBS to do a new talk show which debuted on November 8, 2010.

Stats:

Theater location: Coolidge Corner Theater, Brookline, MA, Sunday, June 26th, 2:40 pm. Price: 9.75. Viewed with Liz! Snack: RJ's Raspberry Licorice Log, Diet Coke with Lime.


Coolidge Corner Theater

Coming Attraction:

The Arbor. It's a documentary. But there is no indication of the story. It looks kind of scary. But who knows?

Short Films:

Charlie Coal. Film by a Emerson film student Olivia Briley, about a guy named Charlie who has no trouble falling in love, but no sooner is he with a girl than he finds out she's not for him. Either she's too fast and runs away, too jealous, too depressed, or too sick. Will Charlie find color-coordinated true love?

The Trip

2011-06-25T23:47:00.005-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few spoilers ahead, but nothing that will ruin your movie-going experience.

British comic Steve Coogan has played many characters including clueless talk show host Alan Partridge, an ego-maniacal movie director in Tropic Thunder, guileless and clueless high school theater teacher in Hamlet II, and a smarmy bad guy in last summer’s The Other Guys. He’s also played a character named Steve Coogan in Michael Winterbottom’s brilliant movie within a movie conceit Tristram Shandy. In that, Steve Coogan is a version of himself at once charming, ego-maniacal, clueless, and often unsympathetic, while he worries about his role in the adaptation of Tristram Shandy while trading competing barbs with his co-star, Rob Brydon.

In Winterbottom’s new film, The Trip, Steve Coogan again plays a version of actor Steve Coogan in the same vein, again trading barbs with his co-star, Rob Brydon. This time, instead of a movie within a movie, the conceit has Steve accepting an assignment from the British magazine The Observer to drive around the Northern England countryside, stay at various inns, eat at restaurants, and report the experience.

Steve had originally planned to take his young American girlfriend, but before the trip starts they decide to take a break and she flies back to Los Angeles. In her stead Steve is forced to take along TV actor/personality Rob Brydon. Rob plays basically the version of himself he played in Tristram Shandy. Steve and Rob’s relationship here is similar to the one on display in Shandy, although in that movie Steve was the bigger star. Or so it seemed. He was, after all, playing the lead character in the movie based on the classic novel.

But you don’t have to know all this meta backstory to enjoy The Trip. After Steve and Rob set off from London in Steve’s Land Rover the movie clicks into a comfortable pastiche of road movie and buddy picture, splashed with the essence of mid-life/mid-career crisis.

Driving into the countryside, they again adopt the rhythm of competition, trying to outdo each other with everything from directions to vocal impressions. Rob is excellent at impressions and a surprising amount of time is spent on these two trying out impressions on each other. The impressions are of actors, including Sean Connery (as James Bond, of course), Michael Caine, Anthony Hopkins, Al Pacino, and Roger Moore. They give Woody Allen a shot, and it’s not bad, but they can’t nail Allen’s nasally upper register.

They gently spar over meals and during visits to historic sites along the way. These scenes register as real moments between the actors, and you can see Rob trying to make Steve laugh. Steve Coogan the character comes across as a classic actor type: pampered, petulant, privileged. Rob Brydon the character has a solid career on TV, and he is happily married with baby (this is a fabrication for the movie—we are after all in a fictional landscape, an alternative world).

In Tristram Shandy the pair’s relationship seemed predicated more on their careers, of which Steve’s was more successful. This makes sense because Tristram Shandy was, among other things, a movie about work; the tasks involved in making a movie. Here, out in the country, Steve seems jealous of Rob’s comfortable if mid-level career. A telling moment has Steve unsuccessfully recreating in front of a motel room mirror Rob’s Small Man in a Box bit, which is apparently quite popular and which Rob is happy to perform for a museum curator in return for letting them enter after hours.

Steve Coogan is perfect at playing agitated. He never really seems relaxed. He is comfortable when buffeting his emotions by always being a little taken aback: by certain accommodations, by a photo shoot, by the spotty cell phone service, and by not remembering if he’s met the beautiful photographer they meet up with at one of the inns (they have met, they’ve already slept together—but that doesn’t stop them from sleeping together again).

Steve is at a crossroads in his acting career; he never really found that breakout role to catapult him to stardom. He’s getting older (“I’ve been 41 for three years,” he says at one point), his relationship with his American girlfriend is on shaky ground, and he’s got a teenage son whom he has a hard time communicating with. When Steve’s American agent calls to tell him he’s up for a co-lead in an American police procedural series, he’s interested only in terms of being closer to his girlfriend—he’d rather do movies than TV.

The insider movie stuff is all wonderful: I’m a sucker for it. I never tired of Steve’s schtick because he wants you to laugh at him, not feel sorry for him. It’s in those rare moments when Rob makes Steve genuinely laugh that you feel the fondness these two men have for each other. Driving through the chilly mountain mornings, bickering over the meaning of an Abba song (Rob makes fun of the lyrics, while Steve sincerely loves the song), you just want to give them a group hug.

The movie has been culled from episodes of a British TV show of the same name in which, one assumes, there was more driving, more eating, more countryside, more of Steve frolicking with the locals, and more comfortable bickering. But it doesn’t feel like scattered highlights, it plays like a complete, if sometimes slight, feature film with at its core, heart, midlife ennui, and a reminder that these two performers could make a performance of any situation worth watching.

Stats:

Theater location: Landmark Theater, Kendall Square, Cambridge, Saturday, June 18th, 4:15 pm. Price: 10.00. Viewed with Liz! Snack: cashews, Diet Coke with Lime.

Landmark Theater, Kendall Square, Cambridge

Coming Attractions:

The Topp Twins, Untouchable Girls. The trailers were full of documentaries. Talk about cheap, fast, and out of control. Let's start with this true tale of sisters who perform together as a singing comedy duo. And then, one of them gets cancer. Funny and sad at the same time.

Conan O'Brien Can't Stop. Cameras follow Conan O'Brien as he toured the country last summer, showcasing his experiences between getting kicked off The Tonight Show to starting his own show on TNT. This one looks good. So good in fact that we're seeing tomorrow. Review forthcoming.

Tabloid. Documentary by Errol Morris about a legendary scandal in Britain about the true-life story of Joyce McKinney. "She was a beauty queen, a hot little number, and she fell in love with a guy. She made the mistake of falling for a Mormon, though, and his family and his community sent him overseas on a mission to get away from her. She followed him. Things got weird. That's all you need to know."

Buck. A doc about the real Horse Whisperer as portrayed in that Robert Redford movie. It's a tear jerker, where the way a horse acts tells more about the owner than the horse. This movie looks pretty emotionally compelling.

Pianomania. About the crazy dudes who the tune pianos of the worlds greatest pianists. Seriously.

The Hangover Part II

2011-06-12T17:11:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Whatever.

The fun of the first Hangover (HO1) was the insanely simple yet clever device of having three disparate buddies wake the morning after a bachelor party in a sprawling Las Vegas hotel suite with everything gone wrong—the groom is missing while a tiger, strange baby, prostitute are present—and a finite amount of time to figure out what happened and make it right. It was exhilarating to watch this rag-tag triptych of guys conjure clues and follow leads, uncovering secrets about the night before. It was like Memento for Dummies, and it worked wonderfully.

In The Hangover Part II (HO2), the “wolfpack” is back, consisting again of mild-mannered dentist Stu (Ed Helms, from The Office and Cedar Rapids), alpha-jerk Phil (Bradley Cooper, from The A-Team and Limitless), and man-child Alan (Zach Galifianakis, from Due Date, Bored to Death, and Dinner for Schmucks) follows an almost identical trajectory. Scratch that: the very same trajectory. But now the stakes are little higher—the self proclaimed wolfpack go international.

They, along with the wayward groom from HO1 Doug (Justin Bartha), fly to Thailand to a lovely island for Stu’s wedding to a beautiful young woman, Lauren (Jamie Chung). Stu, taking a lesson from two years ago when they lost Doug in Vegas, insists on no bachelor party. Phil talks him into allowing them to have a couple beers around a bonfire on a moonlit beach, bringing along Lauren’s younger brother Teddy (Mason Lee). What could go wrong?

Cut to the next morning. Phil, Alan, and Stu wake up in a seedy hotel room in Bangkok. With a monkey who smokes and wears a leather jacket. Meanwhile, Stu discovers he got a face tattoo to match Mike Tyson’s and Alan’s head has been shorn of his long curly locks (he looks much better without the hair). And so it goes. All the elements that made the first movie inspired, surprising, and yes, funny, turn against HO2. This is not a story anyone needed a part 2 to finish. It’s been finished. But now we get to live it all over again. Groundhog Day for Dummies.

This time though they haven’t lost the groom, but Teddy, the bride’s brother. Not only have they lost him, they find his finger in the room, so there’s the possibility that he's dead. Hilarious! It turns out Doug (missing groom from HO1) left the beach party early and is safely back at the wedding party hotel (why don’t they include Doug more in Part Deux? No reason, except that he wasn’t really a part of the first one). Although we do get Mr. Chow (Ken Jeong ) who was the sort-of bad guy from HO1. Turns out Alan has kept in touch with Mr. Chow for the past two years and invited him to the wedding! With lots of bad guys looking for Mr. Chow--Russian thugs, American thugs (who may have captured Teddy), and of course Thai thugs--what could go wrong?

I was rooting for HO2 for a while. I wanted to laugh, I wanted things to work out. Though I wasn’t laughing very often (neither were my theater mates). And I really didn’t care if it worked out, although deep down I knew it would. Because if they all died or something how could the producers and stars and directors milk this cow for more cash with part III?

The movie’s set up takes a while. Around the forty minute mark I did start to groove on the sleazy, skeevy, sweaty desperation of the characters. While Alan supplies plenty of one liners that make many scenes bearable (“I'm a stay at home son.”, “I’m a nurse, I’m just not registered.”, “I wish monkeys could skype. Maybe someday.”) the movie doesn’t contain jokes but situations that you either find funny or you don’t. And many of these situations just come across as forced in a way that asks of the audience, "You think we can get away with this? How about this?"

Here’s the supposed funny stuff: a drug mule monkey (not funny), Stu (the groom!) remembering a night of sex with a she-male prostitute (not funny), the wolfpack getting clubbed by silence-vowed monks for talking (kinda funny), the monkey and Alan checking out what turns out to be a penis nubbin protruding from a pile of blankets (so not funny), a wheelchair-bound monk snorting drugs (no comment), and Alan suddenly remembering the night before as a flashback enacted by ten-year-old versions of the wolfpack (admittedly the most inspired bit of the movie).

HO2 spends much of the last 45 minutes scrambling to tie up all the ends, loose, tight and otherwise, so that by the end we are basically back to where we would have been had the wolfpack not eaten that tainted bag of roasting marshmallows (don’t ask). Then, just before the credits, the entire lost night is shown in a series of digital snapshots supposedly taken over the evening by the various characters. This conceit was one of the funniest, surprising parts of HO1. In HO2 it is just the final ingredient in a predicable slurry.

And so maybe in a couple more years for HO3 we’ll follow the wolfpack to mars or to Atlantis or the center of the Earth. Until then, rent HO1 to find out what started all the fuss.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday night bargain show, June 7th, 6:50 pm. Price: 6.00. Viewed solo. Snack: apple: chopped, bagged.

Coming Attractions:

Horrible Bosses. The summer of Jason Bateman continues. He, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis play guys who have bad bosses. So, what do you do when you have a bad boss? Quit? Complain to their bosses? Not in this movie: They set out to kill their bosses. It's a comedy. Really. Although, with bad bosses played by Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell, and Kevin Spacey, it has potential.

Stupid Crazy Love. Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore. A young couple and an older couple going through dramedy romantic escapades, while Ryan, a player, shows Steve, a shy, awkward dude, the ropes to picking up women. At least that's what I think happens. Along with some other stuff.

Super 8. The kind of movie Spielberg (who produced) would have made when he was ten. It's about a bunch of kids making a little home movie, on Super 8 film, about an alien invasion. And then, guess what happens? Do I really have to spell it out for you? Let's just say, they inadvertently capture some cool stuff on film.

I Don't Know How She Does It. Sarah Jessica Parker overcomes Sex And the City 2 to make another movie. This one, about a woman trying to balance career, kids, loving husband, could have starred Diane Keaton in another decade. With Greg Kinnear, Pierce Brosnan, Christina Hendricks, Seth Meyers, Olivia Munn, and Kelsey Grammer, as another horrible boss.

Midnight in Paris

2011-06-07T22:03:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few mild spoilers ahead.

Light as a soufflé, as insignificant as a chocolate truffle. Yet with a tasty cream in the middle. Woody Allen’s new Midnight in Paris goes down easy and leaves no residue. It’s low-carb movie making but without the guilt of explosions, full frontal nudity, and fart jokes.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood screenwriter who is on a trip to Paris with his self-absorbed fiancé, Inez (Rachel McAdams) and her self-absorbed parents. All Gil wants is to walk around Paris and take in the sights and sounds, and he doesn’t care if it’s raining. He has a romantic view of Paris, one based on the bygone cultural era of the 1920s. If he could he would give up Los Angeles for Paris and finish his novel. Inez for her part appears smitten by a cultural blowhard (played with pitch perfect condescension by Michael Sheen) as she follows him around the museums soaking in his views on art.

Watching the scenes of McAdams’ Inez, preening around as a bottle blond in designer jeans and heels complaining about everything and Wilson’s Gil feeling out of place, it’s impossible to understand what these two are doing together. We never see them have any fun, so unsuited do they seem as a couple. And the parents don’t try to hide their contempt for him.

Gil, more partial to walks around the wet streets of Paris at night than going dancing, is beckoned into a magic taxi whose passengers are none other than F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald, along with other 1920s denizens. They take him to a nightclub where they drink and schmooze. Gil, an obvious anachronism in his chinos and Oxford, mingles with the crowd with a bemused, accepting smile as he enjoys the music and the talk from his favorite time in history.

The movie continues along this tract: following Gil both as he travels to Paris of the 1920s and as he navigates contemporary Paris with his wife and in-laws. Luckily Allen realizes the real story here is not Gil and Inez but Gil’s feelings of being a misunderstood man out of time, and turns Midnight in Paris into a gentle time travel pastiche. Each night at midnight, Gil climbs into his time travel taxi coach and is whisked back in time, falling inexorably under the spell of the 1920s Paris he’s always longed for.

He meets Ernest Hemingway (Corey Stroll, spouting dialogue that sounds like Hemingway’s prose) and immediately implores him to read his novel in progress (wouldn’t you?). Hem declines but directs Gil to Gertrude Stein (a well-cast Kathy Bates), who agrees to help him out, right after she critiques Picasso’s latest piece.

Like a fairy tale character, Gil has to return to his hotel room and his shrill wife before dawn. Rachel McAdam’s has never looked sexier, so we are left to assume Gil’s attraction to her is mostly on a physical level. But McAdams is only given one note to play and any scenes with her become tedious. Owen Wilson brings a fine laid back, but wide-eyed openness to Gil. I’d almost call him an innocent, but whenever Allen lingers his close ups on Wilson’s face we see he’s no longer youthful, rubbery Dignan from Bottle Rocket. He’s aged and he’s lived (and attempted suicide), and this world weary experience works well for the movie.

Gil accepts all of this time travel as if it were his destiny. He mixes naturally with whomever he meets. Artists (Picasso, Man Ray, Salvador Dalí), filmmakers (Luis Buñuel), musicians (Noel Coward, Joséphine Baker), and of course the writers (along with Hem and F Scott we run into T.S. Eliot and Djuna Barnes). Gil meets Picasso’s mistress and muse, Adriana, played by Marion Cotillard. This lovely woman of the 1920s is perfect for him. Much of the fun and heart of Midnight in Paris stems from how Gil comes to realize that pining for some ultimately unattainable time and woman can never work out.

The movie is derailed briefly in the contemporary scenes due to a sit-com plot point device that was stale back on Three’s Company when Jack Tripper pretended to be gay to trick his landlord into letting him live with Chrissy. But that distraction doesn’t last long, and is more than redeemed by scenes such as when Gil meets the surrealists Luis Buñuel and Dalí (a playful Adrien Brody) Gil gives Buñuel one of his themes that will eventually be the basis of his classic The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie.

Midnight in Paris is the first Woody Allen movie I’ve seen in the theater since Manhattan Murder Mystery. While Paris doesn’t always work, it is refreshing to still walk into a Woody Allen movie, see those familiar white titles against the black background, hear some jazz on the soundtrack, and watch a new set of actors play out Allen’s fantasies.

Actors always talk about how, when he contacts them to be in his movies, they jump at the chance. Even though Allen hasn’t made a great movie since the mid-eighties. And some would argue earlier. He’ll never make Annie Hall Again or Manhattan II. He has no interest in it, and it wouldn’t be very good if he tried. What we do have is an iconoclast filmmaker who doesn’t know about trends, makes the exact movie he wants to make (at this point, only in Europe, with European financing), with whomever he wants.

Midnight in Paris is a hoot, a gentle bon bon of a movie that asks that you don’t take it too seriously and to enjoy its simple story. If you see one movie this year that makes a Djuna Barnes cultural reference, it should be Midnight in Paris.

Stats:

Theater location: Coolidge Corner Theater, Brookline, Monday, May 30th, 12:00 pm. Price: 8.00. Viewed with Liz. Snack: Mixed nuts, Diet Coke.

Coming Attractions:

Page One: Inside the New York Times. Documentary about the New York Times. Highlighting the changes over the past few years, to newspapers and to journalism in general.

Tree of Life. Whatever this movie ends up being about, it will look gorgeous. Brad Pitt plays a father in some scenes, and later, after, Sean Penn plays one of his grown up sons. There's shots of oceans and sun and rain and other elements.

Priest

2011-05-30T10:18:00.003-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Lots of spoilers ahead, but does it really matter?

Priest is another movie predicated on the latest fads in pop culture: graphic novels, 3D, and vampires. And other than some wasted opportunity, Priest plays like a cultural placeholder waiting for the next big thing. Not to say that it’s entirely bad, but where the movie takes you is not completely surprising if you have any experience with certain accepted cultural touchstones. Not being an expert on vampires, I can’t say for sure if Priest introduces new paradigms. Unless it's Cowboys & Vampires (much like the upcoming Cowboys & Aliens).

There are vampires that look human, and they can sort of go out in daylight. Then there are more monster-looking vampires that have no eyes and a mouthful of razor-like teeth who move faster than you. Then there’s, like, a mother vampire. If you happen to be a human killed by her you will become a sort of superhuman vampire, with superior strength. The nomenclature goes on.

If you read the graphic novel of Priest upon which the movie is based, then you would know how the movie opens. For viewers coming in cold, Priest The Movie opens with a handy animated sequence with a nifty voiceover that informs us about vampires taking over the country and these class of humans called priests infused with vampire-killing powers and they help contain the vampire break-out. After that, for some reason, Americans either live in dark, Blade-Runnery, Dark City-ish cities overseen by a religious society or they live in barren sundried landscapes that look like the American West.

Lots of set up here, and in terms of the movie, all for naught much. This nomenclature and mythology probably made a lot more sense in the graphic novel. For the movie, it’s just a set up on which to base the last half of the movie. Paul Bettany plays one of these priests (named Priest) who, after the vampires are contained, is given a menial job and shunned by society. Until evidence comes to light that vampires are back and stronger than ever. And this time it’s personal.

Priest heads outside the walls of the city in search of his niece, kidnapped by one of these new stronger breed of vampire. This part plays like a remake of The Searchers. In that movie, John Wayne's niece is kidnapped and he heads off to track the kidnappers. Here Priest rides a motorcycle (hey why not?) off into the bleached landscape, working with a young sheriff who is in love with the niece.

There are some nifty 3-D effects, but mostly the movie forgets all about the 3-D part after the first twenty minutes. The final third of the movie has Priest, the sheriff, and a beautiful young Priestess (Maggie Q) chasing a bullet train full of vampires through the desert. They plan to stop it before it reaches the city and unleashes all the eyeless vampires. Karl Urban plays Black Hat, the main baddie vampire who just can’t forget the time when he too was a priest and was left to die by Priest in a hive during the great vampire wars of, when, last year? Who can say? There’s very little context, and you just watch and nod and say, okay.

Full disclosure of ending: So, there’s the train blasting through the desert, the good priest against the bad priest/vampire and I thought, I’d like to see what happens when that train reaches the city. But, it was not to be. The train was stopped before that. And while that sequence was exciting-ish, it seemed like an anticlimax. Earlier in the movie, when the two priests and the sheriff come across an empty hive, well what fun is that? What if the hive was full? Of vampires?

It's another lost opportunity for the movie to spend some of that production value on something original and worthwhile. Priest makes promises it doesn’t quite keep, predicated on a set up that, to be honest, looked more fun than what ended up on screen. Read the graphic novel, and then watch this Priest if you just haven’t gotten enough.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday night, May 24th, 7:20 pm. Price: 6.00 bargain night! Viewed solo. Snack: Apple, chopped, bagged.

Coming Attractions:

Change Up. Ryan Reynolds is a single guy popular with the ladies, but tired of his lifestyle. Jason Bateman is a married guy with a couple kids, also tired of his lifestyle. After pissing in a magic fountain (seriously!) the two switch lives. It's an R-rated Freaky Friday rip off. But, this one has potential.

Columbiana. Zoe Saldana. "A young woman, after witnessing her parents' murder as a child in Bogota, grows up to be a stone-cold assassin."

Don't Be Afraid of the Dark. Brought to you by Guillermo del Toro. A big screen remake of a 1973 TV movie. With Katie Holmes and Guy Pierce.

Strawdogs. An apparent shot-by-shot recreation of Sam Peckinpaw's Strawdogs. All the violence and half the brains. Why do this? With James Marsden as the Dustin Hoffman character and Kate Bosworth as the Susan George character. Location switched from rural UK to the American South.

Transformers 3. This is the third or fourth variation I've seen in a trailer of this movie. It looks intense, and really, who can see all the details on screen when it moves so fast? Destruction of Manhattan, if that's your thing. Hopefully the good Transformers can (finally) stop the bad Transformers. Supermodel Rosie Huntington-Whiteley replaces not so super model Megan Fox without any real change in the story line. Go figure.

X-Men 1st Class. An origins story, telling you how Professor X and Magneto met. If those names mean nothing to you, then maybe you should watch The King's Speech again. Takes place during the Cuban missile crisis.

Bridesmaids

2011-05-22T11:03:00.002-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few spoilers ahead, but nothing to worry about.

In the new Judd Apatow-produced comedy Bridesmaids, Kristen Wiig graduates from SNL and co-starring/cameoing movie roles (Adventureland, Paul, Date Night, MacGruber, Whip It, Extract, Knocked Up) steps into the forefront and perfects a character type I’ll describe as a charming, passive narcissist. Well, not always that charming. If you’re a fan of contemporary comedies starring today’s funnymen (Adam Sandler, Seth Rogen, Paul Rudd, Jason Segel, Jonah Hill) you already know that narcissism, both passive and aggressive, is definitely a part of these characters' descriptions.

Maybe what makes Bridesmaids so groundbreaking is that all the main characters are women, and they share many of the same characteristics as those funnymen. Except in Bridesmaids they feel like actual people who talk honestly and are allowed to experience honest feelings. It shouldn’t feel like a revelation, but because so few movies explore the relationships between women, it does. [Nicole Holofcener has been doing this for years with movies like Friends with Money, Walking and Talking, and Lovely and Amazing, but her films are niche marketed to the Art House crowd, and aren't laugh-out-loud funny.]

Kristen Wiig plays Annie, a woman in her thirties who is treading water in her life: her bakery has tanked and she now works retail in a jewelry store whose owner is doing her mother a favor by hiring her. Her boyfriend is not really a boyfriend per se, but a sleazy booty call (which Jon Hamm plays with gleeful, guileless douchiness). And her best friend since childhood, Lillian (earthy, straight-gal Maya Rudolph) has just announced she’s getting married.

This news hits Annie hard sending her on a mini mid-life crisis. Next to Lillian, Annie’s life suddenly feels pathetic. As comic fodder, weddings and funerals exacerbate any mid-life reflection, and in Bridesmaids Lillian's impending nuptials are played up for all the comic possibilities.

Lillian chooses Annie to be her maid of honor, but Lillian’s fiancé’s boss’s wife, the rich and perfect Helen (played with condescending snobby perfection by Rose Byrne) decides to trump and/or steal every good idea Annie has for the festivities. Helen can’t help it. She needs to be perfect. And being perfect is a kind of unspoken ideal in Bridesmaids. Either you are perfect, or you have to accept the realization that you aren’t, can’t, and never will be perfect. We can see the concept of female perfection (the right guy, the right marriage, the right job) infect every decision made by these women.

In a male-centric comedies (The Hangover, I Love You, Man, Forgetting Sarah Marshall, Superbad, Funny People, Grown Ups), guys don’t even strive to be perfect. Being perfect is for losers, it’s an idea that doesn’t exist. Guys in modern comedies have other things on their minds and the audience is relieved. A comedy of humiliation plays off of any attempt at guys trying to be normal—talking to the cute girl, sticking up for themselves, dealing with bullies. Just to get through these relatively minor life decisions makes even the most schlubby loser a charming lady-killer. Maybe it’s a revenge of the nerds mentality. Nerds are now cool. Being a popular jock/Adonis type is the new loser.

The ladies of Bridesmaids have it a hundred times tougher. Each Bridesmaid has regrets. There’s Megan (the brilliant Melissa McCarthy), overweight and awkward but dealing with it. Rita (Reno 911’s Wendi McLendon-Covey) is married with kids to a guy who is great in bed but who never kisses her any more. Becca (The Office’s Ellie Kemper) is the young innocent one, a newlywed who is married to a totally sweet guy, and who has a rosy image of what her marriage will be like even if her man is often too tired to make love to her. Even Helen, the pretty perfect one, dislikes herself for how she competes with Annie during the wedding plans. These women have all struggled with their hopes of ideal careers and marriages, and by the time they hit their thirties have to deal with reality.

Okay, if all this sounds internalized, tedious, and the stuff of Oscar-bait drama, it’s not. It’s a Judd Apatow production so there are no dull moments. And director Paul Feig (The Office, Freaks and Geeks, Nurse Jackie, Arrested Development) has the comic timing of a TV veteran (I mean that as a compliment) to craft scene after scene of unforgettable, hilarious, and yes often humiliating set pieces.

There’s the engagement lunch at a questionable ethnic restaurant Annie picks out. Afterwords almost everyone gets horribly sick while shopping for the wedding gowns a chic bridal gown boutique. Oh, you’ve seen men do what these women are forced to endure, but until you see a woman drop to her knees in a wedding gown in the middle of a busy street to take an emergency shit, you have not quite lived.

Then there’s the bachelorette party. After the ladies board a plane to Las Vegas all hell breaks loose. The extended in-flight sequence showcases Wiig’s comic timing; she comes alive as a character within the character she’s playing. Drunk and sedated at once, Annie’s fears and anger bubble up in a tour de force of her id gone wild. And this sudden streak of discomposure rubs off on the rest of the bridesmaids. I won’t give away the many wonderful comic moments of this scene.

The film is never boring, but after Annie’s mid-flight debacle the film lapses into a stretch which finds Annie acting sorry for herself in a way that made me want to reach up and slap her out of it. Lillian rescinds the maid of honor offer and gives it to Helen. Annie gets fired from her lame job because she continually talks customers out of buying jewelry. She ignores the advances of the nice guy cop she genuinely likes. She gets kicked out of her apartment by her creepy British brother/sister roommates and has to move back in with her single mom played by Jill Clayburgh (in her last performance).

And just when I started down the aisle to slap some sense into Annie, the comic wonder that is Melissa McCarthy’s Megan shows up at Annie’s door and does it for me. Another wonderful moment. From here, literally snapping out of her funk, Annie starts taking control to put her life back on track.

Here's to more movies where all the main characters are women. Here's to more movies starring Kristen Wiig. Here's to more ribald, hilarious, and honest movies Bridesmaids.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Saturday night, May 14th, 6:40 pm. Price: Free Movie Passes (thanks Laurie!). Viewed with Liz. Snack: Derrell Lea Strawberry Liquorice, Diet Coke.

Coming Attractions:

Bad Teacher. Cameron Diaz is a sexpot teacher, a role she was born to play if this trailer is any indication. With Justin Timberlake as a hot, nice-guy sub.

Change Up. Ryan Reynolds is a single guy popular with the ladies, but tired of his lifestyle. Jason Bateman is a married guy with a couple kids, also tired of his lifestyle. After pissing in a magic fountain (seriously!) the two switch lives. It's an R-rated Freaky Friday rip off. But, this one has potential.

Horrible Bosses. The summer of Jason Bateman continues. He, Charlie Day, and Jason Sudeikis play guys who have bad bosses. So, what do you do when you have a bad boss? Quit? Complain to their bosses? Not in this movie: They set out to kill their bosses. It's a comedy. Really. Although, with bad bosses played by Jennifer Aniston, Colin Farrell, and Kevin Spacey, it has potential.

Larry Crowne. This one could be cute in a not-too-cloying way. Tom Hanks plays a guy who is fired from his job, downsized because he doesn't have a college degree. He goes back to school, and gets grumpy but cute teacher Julia Roberts. Lessons and love ensue. Tom Hanks also directs.

Super 8. The kind of movie Spielberg (who produced) would have made when he was ten. It's about a bunch of kids making a little home movie, on Super 8 film, about an alien invasion. And then, guess what happens? Do I really have to spell it out for you? Let's just say, they inadvertently capture some cool stuff on film.

Fast Five

2011-05-09T20:06:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A few mild spoilers ahead.

Not having seen the previous four Fast movies, I was afraid I’d be lost in Fast Five. My fears were unfounded. As the fourth sequel to 2001’s The Fast and the Furious, Fast Five does a decent job of setting up the story in relation to what came before. And in Fast Five what came before has as much to do with family relations and friendship than racing cars.

Paul Walker and Vin Diesel (great name) are back as Brian O’Connor and Dominic Toretto, respectively. These guys have a long history, three previous film’s worth (the third in the series, The Fast and the Furious Tokyo Shift, featured different actors and only cadged the moniker). Brian used to be a cop. Toretto has escaped from prison once. Scratch that. Twice.

At least, twice after the opening sequence that starts with Toretto on a full prison bus headed through the desert toward a 25 years-without-parole stint (the reason no doubt shown at the end of the last installment two years ago). The bus ends up flipped, rolled, and flayed, thanks to a daring car stunt pulled by Brian and Mia (Jordana Brewster), Brian’s main squeeze and Torreto’s sister.

With Toretto sprung, the group heads out of the country as wanted criminals. They wind up in Rio de Janeiro, where one of their old gang, Vince (Matt Schulze), is holed up. They find him heavily armed living in one of Rio’s notorious favela neighborhoods that rim the hills surrounding the city. Vince has a job lined up for them already, to steal three cars from a moving train. Cars that have been impounded by the DEA. Oh, and a corrupt Rio businessman named Reyes—who has every cop, drug dealer, and favela resident in his pocket—is after the cars, too.

During the heist three DEA agents are killed by Reyes’ henchmen. Toretto, Brian, and Mia are accused of the murder, which brings FBI agent Luke Hobbs (played by Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson) and his crack team to hunt them down. Reyes is also after Toretto and Brian, after they find a flash drive in one of the stolen cars with information about the locations where Reyes’ keeps his millions of dirty money stashed. So now everybody is after this little team of car thieves.

Many of the actors from the previous films show up (including Tyrese Gibson, Chris “Ludacris” Bridges, Sung Kang, and Gal Gadot) as part of the dream team Toretto and Brian put together to pull off an insane heist of Keyes' cash. Impossible and outrageous are the cornerstones of this movie. I don’t know what humble beginnings The Fast and the Furious franchise started with, but Fast Five traffics in high octane, silly, and slick thrills, with beautiful, multi-cultural characters preening and driving fast.

Due to all the destruction incurred to the streets, buildings, and barrios of Rio, there’s a high body count. But the blood is slicked over PG-13 style. Dwayne Johnson (known in recent years for comedies and kid-friendly flicks) keeps a straight face throughout, but that just adds to the feeling that he’s in the middle of a guest host spot on Saturday Night Live.

The direction, geared toward action as it is, leaves the dialogue and character development in the dust of so many speeding cars. During action scenes, when the actors aren't driving, they hit their mark, pose, announce their lines—Dwayne and Vin mostly shout—skip a beat for effect, and walk out of the shot.

But this is a franchise, and with respect to the target audience (teen-age boys) the movie scratches an itch that young America must continually need scratching. With a military-level shootout in the streets, a daring heist of a police station (!), and a car chase through the streets of downtown Rio with our heroes literally dragging a bank vault behind two speeding customized cars, Fast Five delivers on its promise to move fast and look good, checking its logic at the starting gate.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Thursday night, May 5th, 7:00 pm. Price $10.50. Viewed solo. Snack-Apple; chopped and bagged.

Coming Attractions:

Cars 2. The gang heads overseas for a European race and are mistaken for spies. Looks cute. More Pixar magic for Disney.

Change Up. Ryan Reynolds is a single guy popular with the ladies, but tired of his lifestyle. Jason Bateman is a married guy with a couple kids, also tired of his lifestyle. After pissing in a magic fountain (seriously!) the two switch lives. It's an R-rated Freaky Friday rip off. But, this one has potential.

Cowboys & Aliens. Daniel Craig and Harrison Ford: "A spaceship arrives in Arizona, 1873, to take over the Earth, starting with the Wild West region. A posse of cowboys are all that stand in their way."

Transformers: Dark Side of the Moon. Another Transformers sequel. This time, no Megan Fox. But a surprisingly strong lineup of actors including John Malkovich, Leonard Nimoy (voice), Hugo Weaving (voice), Francis McDormand, and John Turturro.

How to Survive a Writers Conference: Dos and Don’ts to Making it Out Alive

2011-04-27T07:34:00.000-04:00

Putting the flick on hold this week in celebration of the lit. Today, head on over to Beyond the Margins and check out my just-posted interview with celebrated literary agent Mitchell Waters. He's worked for bigtime agency Curtis Brown for 16 years, and gives some great insight into the publishing business today.

Grub Street's Muse and the Marketplace literary conference is this weekend, April 30-May 1st. Beyond the Margins will be there in full BTM regalia. We'll have our own table in the lobby complete with booksmarks, a specially-printed anthology of our work, smiles, and more. Also, from 6-7:30 PM Saturday night we'll be hosting an open mic event at Pairings Restaurant. And now that James Franco has bailed on his Muse appearance, our open mic will be the hottest after-hours event going. Although there's a 50-person limit in the room. But having too many people show up is a good problem to have, so bring it on!

If you're planning on attending the Muse, or just want to learn more about writer conferences, read on to find out what to expect:

Writer conference season is gearing up here in Boston with the upcoming Muse and the Marketplace on April 30 and May 1, and other New England conferences in the coming months—Wesleyan Writers Conference, Cape Code Writers Center Conference, and Bread Loaf. So if you plan to attend a conference, it’s time to brush up on your writer conference etiquette.

Writer conferences offer:

À la carte workshops and panels that usually cover both the craft and business of writing.
The rare chance to have your work critiqued by a professional author, agent, or editor.
Ways to meet like-minded writers interested in starting writing groups, networking, and trading critiques.
The opportunity to compress months of online research and networking into a few days.

No matter your area of interest or level of skill, if you’re a writer planning to attend a conference in the coming months, consider the following guidelines to ensure you get your money’s worth:

Come prepared. Bring an iPad, laptop, or a note pad (paper-based application) to take notes. If you have a business card, bring a stack. This is your chance to meet and greet, to schmooze and show off, and exchange vital stats with other writers. Plus you never know who you might share an elevator ride or cocktail hour with.

Follow the rules. If the conference guidelines state not to bring full manuscripts with you, don’t bring a manuscript with you to hand to every agent and editor you see. Nobody likes a writer who’s too pushy, and you want to make a good impression. If the dress code is business casual, don’t wear your favorite stonewashed jeans, ripped at the knees from stage-diving that Ramones show back in ’87. Dress appropriately.

Put into it what you expect to get out of it. Don’t attend a conference if you don’t plan on doing anything while you’re there. If you don’t attend workshops, readings by guest authors, or panels on the state of publishing, then you will leave with the feeling that it wasn’t worth it. You’ve paid money to attend, so get your money’s worth. If you don’t get your first choice for a workshop or class, make the most of whatever event you’re signed up for.

Bring your open mind. Maybe you have one reason to go to a conference and that is to see your favorite author read or meet with the one agent you know can get your book published. These are good reasons to attend, but you’ll be missing out on other elements of a conference. For example, one year I sat in on a non-fiction workshop on journalism. As a novelist, I had low expectations for learning anything pertinent about fiction writing. But it turned out to be an instructive session where I picked up some great tips about research and how to self edit my writing.

Also, if you’re just interested in learning craft, you may be missing an opportunity to learn more about how to write a query letter or what types of books agents are buying this season. Conversely, if you just want to network, you might miss out on learning about how to fix your novel’s structure problems or how to write better dialogue.

Manuscript consultations. If you plan to meet with an author, agent, or editor to discuss your work, plan ahead and sign up with the person that can provide the most appropriate feedback for your project. If you want a general critique of your work in terms of where it fits into the current marketplace, consider meeting with an agent that handles work like yours.

A publisher, while offering no less wonderful advice, is thinking only of the specific magazine or publication that she works for and not what other publishers want. On the other hand, if you consider your writing perfect for a certain publisher, then this is a great opportunity to get the specific feedback you need to get your foot in the door.

Spend a little extra…. Often conferences offer additional opportunities and special events that cost a little extra but can be worth it. Aside from a manuscript consult, you might also have the opportunity to eat a lunch or two with a selection of literary folk and engage in casual business chat. A little extra might get you five minutes to try out your pitch on an editor or to receive feedback on your query letter from an agent. Who says money can’t buy happiness?

…but don’t spend it all. A few years ago I spent well over a week’s salary on a five day conference. It was a wonderful experience but the expense sent my finances into a hole for months afterward. If you can afford to attend a conference this year, go for it. If you can’t, start saving now for next year. Keep your eyes out for conferences offering grants and scholarships.

Enjoy after-hour events. An average conference day ends around 4 or 5. But that doesn’t mean the day’s over. Often there are related activities to keep you busy well into the evenings. Cocktail hours and open mics and after parties. Often events are coordinated in advance, but sometimes it’s just you hitting the closest bar with a few writer friends to compare notes and dish. If you have the time, these after-hour events are a great way to round off your conference experience. And who knows? Maybe that person you just struck up a conversation with at the bar is an agent who handles manuscripts just like yours.

Follow up. If you garner business cards and some face time with an agent or editor you would die to work with, don’t forget to follow up after the conference to thank them for their time, and remind where you met them and what you write. That way, when you send them a query, you’ll already have been introduced.

Have fun. Yeah, it’s an intense situation: you and hundreds of other hungry writers mixing it up with publishing industry luminaries. Just walking into the conference on that first day can be a fret filled journey of terror into the inky unknown. But remember, all the other attendees probably feel similar trepidation. So with that in mind, take a deep breath, push through that door, and smile. If your smile drops the minute you see that registration line, then go to Plan B: pretend everybody there is naked. Works for me every time. If you don’t know a soul, walk up to the nearest person and introduce yourself. And have fun. Seriously.

This post originally appeared on Beyond the Margins--used with kind permission by me.

The Conspirator

2011-04-21T19:34:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: I won't give away the ending. But you can read all about it here.

Robin Wright plays Mary Surratt in Robert Redford’s new flick The Conspirator, about the Lincoln assassination and subsequent conspirators’ trial. Mary Surratt and her son and daughter, recently moved from the south, ran a boarding house in Washington, where her son, John, met with John Wilkes Booth and others who planned clandestine political shenanigans. The civil war was winding down and of course we all know how that worked out for the rebel south. They were pissed off, to say the least. It is in this atmosphere of never give up, never surrender that The Conspirator begins.

After Booth shoots Lincoln, Mary Surratt is arrested and is to stand trial as a co-conspirator along with a group of young men, many of whom John knew . The movie posits the question, Was Mary in on the whole assassination plot from the beginning? Or was she an innocent woman whose only crime was having a son who couldn’t give up the fight? But John Surratt is not among the men standing trial. He fled town a couple weeks before the assassination. So, why was Mary arrested?

Robin Wright (now entirely Penn free!) plays Mary as beleaguered, dour, secretive. The part does not call for big drama, but Wright endows the character with saintly calmness: Mary would rather pay for her son’s sins than see him arrested and tried. The esteemed statesman Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson), takes it upon himself to see Mary Surratt gets a fair trial. Since it’s basically still wartime (the war is technically over, but not all generals from the south have surrendered), she is not being tried by a jury of her peers but by a military tribunal. At the insistence of the secretary of war Edwin Stanton (played with righteous indignation by Kevin Kline) Mary Surratt is to be used as an example, and found guilty no matter the trial’s outcome.

Reverdy Johnson assigns young lawyer Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) to defend Mary in the courtroom. Here the movie both kicks into gear and stumbles. The story is interesting enough, even for those who paid attention in American History: everyone considers Mary Surratt just as guilty as the other proven conspirators. Aiken is war hero for the Union who agrees that Mary is guilty as hell, why should he defend her?

It’s an order and Aiken is a lawyer first and foremost. He’s smart, if a little naive. Digging into the facts, he realizes not all is as it seems. He rips apart the stories of the two witnesses for the prosecution, which is led by Danny Huston, in righteous bad-guy mode. He also starts visiting the boarding house to see Mary’s daughter, Anna (Evan Rachel Wood) who is understandably upset that her mother is on trial or her brother being sought as if he were a murderer. She’s hiding something. Mary too seems to be hiding something during Aiken’s visits to her cell. What was John Surratt really up to?

James McAvoy plays Aiken as if he is arguing a case in a John Grisham adaptation or trying out for a part in the latest TV show about younger lawyers. This is the mid 1800s but he moves and acts too petulantly, too impatiently. It’s like McAvoy studied the wrong movies and read the wrong books to prepare for the role. He looks good in a beard, but comes across as too contemporary. This is in contrast to many of the other players who have mastered the accents, language, and manners of the time. A beard does not a Civil War era character make. I know what you’re saying: Unreliable Narrator, you just admitted you know nothing about history. That doesn’t matter—what matters is that McAvoy’s Aiken fit well into the rest of the movie, and he stands out as a distraction.

That said, he certainly doesn’t ruin the movie. McAvoy’s miscasting grew on me, especially in the scenes where Aiken starts to come around to the facts of the case. Or rather, to the non-lies. It’s fun to watch him deconstruct the pre-planned testimony of the two witless witnesses to the chagrin of the tribunal. One of the witnesses is played by the wonderful Stephen Root, who has been showing up in lots of surprisingly places lately including Cedar Rapids. He does comedy and historical courtroom drama!

I saw The Conspirator the afternoon it opened. I knew nothing about it except it had to do with Lincoln’s assassination. I stayed away from all reviews—which I try to do anyway if I think I might review the movie myself. I had no idea Robert Redford directed the movie until the closing credits. During the movie it was fun to recognize the actors. The sight of so many well-known faces (the flick also stars Justin Long, Alexis Bledel, Norman Reedus, and Colm Meaney) can be distracting, especially for a movie that peddles in historical events. But without the Hollywood cast, The Conspirator would have played more like a History Channel docudrama with reenactments.

Redford’s direction is straightforward, letting the story and actors lead the way. It’s shot with a sepia tone and a gauzy lens. The politics are strictly liberal. At the end of the movie we are told that after this trial, all citizens arrested for a crime would be tried in a civilian courtroom in front of a jury of their peers (Guantanamo Bay much?). How you feel about The Conspirator depends on how you feel about the excitement and majesty of history and courtroom dramas.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Friday afternoon matinee, April 15th, 3:50. Price $8.50. Viewed solo. Snack-Fancy red licorice and a Builder's Bar.

Coming Attractions:

Circumstance. And I quote: "The audience at the 2011 Sundance Film Festival has given its top U.S. dramatic prize to Maryam Keshavarz's 'Circumstance,' a Farsi-language look at a pair of teenage lesbians in contemporary Iran. Sundance Film Festival Official website writes: 'Splendidly constructed and saturated with a sumptuous sense of style and sensuality, Circumstance marks the arrival of an exciting, original talent. First-time feature writer/director Maryam Keshavarz registers a rare glimpse of forbidden love in today’s Iranian youth.'"

Crazy Stupid Love. Steve Carell, Ryan Gosling, Emma Stone, Kevin Bacon, Julianne Moore. A young couple and an older couple going through dramady romantic escapades, while Ryan, a player, shows Steve, a shy, awkward dude, the ropes to picking up women. At least that's what I think happens. Along with some other stuff.

Everything Must Go. Will Ferrel stars in a movie based on a Raymond Carver short story. The movie's about a guy who's wife throws him out of the house (not quite what happened in the story) and he ends up living in the front yard. And since I based a movie on the same story, I happen to know it's Why Don't You Dance? But who wants to see a movie called that, when you could see one called Everything Must Go. My theory about movies based on short stories is that they have a better chance of being successful adaptations than those based on novels (too long to adapt well). I'm curious.

Larry Crowne. This one could be cute in a not-too-cloying way. Tom Hanks plays a guy who is fired from his job, downsized because he doesn't have a college degree. He goes back to school, and gets grumpy but cute teacher Julia Roberts. Lessons and love ensue. Tom Hanks also directs.

Tree of Life. Whatever this movie ends up being about, it will look gorgeous. Brad Pitt plays a father in some scenes, and later, after, Sean Penn plays one of his grown up sons. There's shots of oceans and sun and rain and other elements.

The King's Speech

2011-04-13T18:55:00.001-04:00

Guest review by Muriel Smith.

Albert was never meant to be King. He was shy, retiring and had that awful stammer. He was the younger of the two brothers and everyone knows that the philandering older brother, Edward, should have been King.

In The King's Speech, Edward (Guy Pearce) comes across as a playboy who would rather be off playing with his friends, drinking, smoking cigarettes and chasing the love of his life, an American divorcee. Meanwhile, dependable, likable Albert (Colin Firth) stays home in the palace with his beautiful wife, the Duchess of York (Helena Bonham Carter) and their two daughters (the oldest little girl will eventually become Queen Elizabeth).

A flashback shows Albert (known as Bertie) at his father’s deathbed, trying to say goodbye. Bertie stammers and becomes flustered, at which point his dying father sits up in bed and bellows at him to stop stammering and learn how to speak. It becomes achingly clear that Bertie has had an unhappy childhood. Even his own brother calls him “b-b-b-b-Bertiie.”

Bertie’s wife helps him find a speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush), an eccentric Australian who, upon meeting Bertie, asks him what he would like to be called. Bertie replies, “You may call me Your Royal Highness,” to which Lionel answers, “I’ll call you Bertie.” Thus begins a lifelong struggle to improve Bertie’s speech as well as a long and happy friendship between the two men which goes on for the rest of their lives.

The acting in The King's Speech is superb. Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush play off of each other with just the right amount of pizazz. Some of the funniest moments in the film are when Lionel has Bertie doing all kinds of acrobatics and histrionics to help him relax, and thus help him speak without stuttering.

When Lionel visits the palace for the first time, he is surrounded by luxury in an enormous room with one elegant chair placed in the center. As Lionel is about to sit down on it, Bertie jumps to attention, grabs Lionel and shouts, “Only Kings can sit in that chair.” Lionel continues to dance around the chair, trying to sit down, while Bertie struggles to keep him out of it. “No other person has ever sat in it,” Bertie says, “only Kings.” When Lionel finally succeeds in pushing Bertie out of the way and sits down, he gloats at Bertie as if to say, “I’ve won this round.”

This is, indeed, a great movie. I recommend it to everyone, young and old. And here lies my one criticism. Because of one short scene where Lionel has Bertie shouting the F-word like a rapid fire machine gun as fast and as loud and as long as he can keep it up, the film is rated R. If only he had used the D-word (duck) or the L-word (luck), then it would have been a perfect family film. Children would enjoy it and learn some history in the process.

I hope Hollywood takes note of the kinds of films millions of people want to see.

(Editor's note: A PG-13 version was recently released in a limited run. So, I think they took Muriel's recommendation to heart. Also, look for the movie on DVD and Blu-Ray on April 19th.)

Royal Cinemas, Harwich 6, $6.50 senior price.

Limitless

2011-04-01T22:17:00.001-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Nothing that you haven't seen in the trailer.

Limitless concerns the simple story of a simple writer, Eddie Morra (Bradley Cooper), who, faced with a book deal deadline and no manuscript, accepts a free pill from a distant acquaintance who promises it will help him access 100% of his brain instead of the usual 20%. The pill works quickly. The first thing Eddie accomplishes is bedding his landlady. Next he cleans his apartment. Then he bears down and writes the first few chapters of his book within a day. This has his agent drooling for more. Problem is, he only had the one pill and after its effects dry up, so does his creative mojo.

He goes back to see his acquaintance. While out running an errand for him, the acquaintance is killed .The funny thing about these crazy pills is that after trying only one everybody needs a big stash of them by any means necessary. Eddie finds the body and, after calling 911, locates the rest of the pills and a convenient wad of cash. Cleared of any wrongdoing by the cops, he goes back to his little apartment and finishes his novel in four days.

With his novel done, he’s bored with writing (the bastard, I guess he was never a real writer to begin with) and decides he wants to use his brain in new and exciting ways. In dizzying succession he learns how to play the market, make some money, and position himself to make more. He finds new friends, and flies around the world to have dinner in any country he wants. He buys a great car and dates hot women of his dreams. He’s charming and outgoing and well groomed. He’s everything he could never be when he was just a slacker, drinking too much and slamming his soused noggin against the unresponsive keyboard.

He’s having such a good time, that he barely notices some shady-looking dude following him. Then there’s a Russian mafia guy he borrowed seed money from to start his money-making venture. That guy wants his money back. Hey, no problem. But after the Russian steals and ingests one of Eddie's last pills, he wants more than just his money. He wants more pills.

The plot, as I say, is pretty simple. But the filmmakers move you smoothly through Eddie's world, throwing curves into the story that you don’t always expect. Also, if you’ve seen the trailer, you may think you know the story already. But don’t be fooled. This is one movie that after the first hour moves beyond whatever the trailer leads you to believe happens, shifting gears and running serpentine through the second hour. The ending (at least for me) came as a pleasant surprise.

Throughout, the camera moves with a sometimes fluid, sometimes manic energy that drops you into Eddie's brain when he’s dosed (for lack of a better term—Eddie is, after all, taking drugs throughout the entire movie). When he takes a pill the world becomes more colorful. He sees mundane details close up as if for the first time—door knobs, the beautiful face of his young Asian landlady, the objects in her handbag, the shade of her fingernails, the logical trajectory of events just before they happen.

When he runs out of pills, as we know he eventually must, we see his world fall back into muddy browns and reds. In a taut scene, his girlfriend, trapped by the aforementioned shady-looking dude in Central Park because she happens to be carrying the pills, takes one so she can focus better and figure out how best to get away. This gives the filmmakers a chance to show how the pill works on somebody else (she runs fast, charts her next moves lightning fast, and uses a child's ice skate blade as a weapon).

The pill is, of course, a hyper-strong variation of medication that has been on the market for decades. Ritalin, Adderall, Dexidrine. All designed to help people with ADD or ADHD focus better. Some people without these symptoms take these so-called smart drugs to not just help them focus, but to feel euphoria and control social anxiety. Students at highly competitive schools may take these meds to cram for exams or write a paper.

But none of these medications is mentioned in the movie. And while we see Eddie withdraw from the effects of the pill after he stops taking it, we don’t really see the kind of rapid decline that a true drug addict might experience going cold turkey. Oh, did I mention how, when you stop taking the pill, you end up a former shell of yourself, or dead? There is a plot twist which takes care of this last detail a little too cleanly. But this is a movie, and it needs to get wrapped up at the end of two hours.

Robert DeNiro shows up as the big wig at a big company that hires Eddie as a consultant to help him with an upcoming merger. It’s fun to watch Eddie outthink and outmaneuver his way to, if not the top, then a comfortable position where he can take care of himself and his girlfriend for the rest of his life. While making money seems to be the only thing he wants to accomplish, the finale reveals he wants to use his powers of perception for good, instead of being just another smart guy who makes money off the backs of people who aren’t as quick.

At times Limitless plays like a long episode of the Twilight Zone. Other times it's like watching a male fantasy come to life—what young male wouldn’t want to date beautiful women, drive fast cars, and access their memories to incorporate the most arcane knowledge they don’t even remember learning into a spry, disarming conversation? Oh, and look like Bradley Cooper, if that’s your thing. It's like Spike TV with an MBA. In a good way.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday night bargain show, March 29, 7:40. Price $6.00. Viewed with Liz. Snack-Fresh sliced apple.

Coming Attractions:

Insidious. Horror movie from the director of Saw and the producer of Paranormal Activity. Looks like a ghost story. Or a kid-possessed-by-devil story. Or both! Out today.

Apollo 18. What really happened on this moon landing (scary stuff) and why we never went back (boo!).

Arthur. Remake. No Dudley Moore. No Liza. Just Russell Brand and Helen Mirren. Too bad...wait what? Helen Mirren? Color me there.

Hannah. Some girl is raised as some kind super, hyper, special human. Is she bionic? Is she just pissed off. You decide.

Source Code. Jake Gyllenhaal has to relive the same eight minutes on a train to figure out who blew it up (hey, I didn't write it). Each time he goes back in, he falls a little more for a young woman, played by Michelle Monaghan, until he's determined to save her from dying in the inevitable train explosion. Out today.

Thor. Third movie with a name for a title. Now in 3-D! Marvel Comics' Thor gets the big-budget treatment. With Chris Hemsworth as the titular hero, along with Natalie Portman, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, and Anthony Hopkins. Not out yet.

Cedar Rapids

2011-03-27T18:18:00.001-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: A couple spoilers ahead, but nothing to worry your pretty little head about.

In Cedar Rapids, Ed Helms plays small-town insurance salesman Tim Lippe who, due to the death of a co-worker, is chosen by his boss (Stephen Root) to represent his company, Brown Star Insurance, at the annual ASMI awards in Cedar Rapids Iowa. Lippe’s company has won the coveted Two Diamond award for the past few years, and it’s his job to see his company continues the tradition.

Lippe lives in the house he grew up in, even though his parents are both passed and he’s well into his thirties. He’s set in his ways and easily impressed, but he’s not stupid or a rube, just stuck in his adolescent world. He even sleeps with his 7th grade teacher, Macy Vanderhei. In bed, post you-know-what, he smiles in genuine disbelief in his luck at dating the hot teacher of his dreams. Sigourney Weaver plays Macy beautifully straight – no winking allowed.

Lippe is both excited about flying to the big city and nervous about his one-on-one presentation with the president of ASMI, Orin Helgesson (played by wonderful character actor and That 70s Show dad, Kurtwood Smith). When Lippe gets to Cedar Rapids even his rental car makes him excited. It’s a sign that he’s moving up in the world, that he’s being trusted to represent Brown Star at the conference. When he calls Macy to tell her he misses her we cringe knowing she doesn’t miss him in the same way, but smile because it’s refreshing to see his guileless love.

The motel where the conference is being held is full of insurance salespeople from the region. Lippe falls in with an odd but likable group. There’s genial, nerdy Ronald (Isiah Whitlock Jr.) who talks like a cross between your elementary school principal and a synthesized computer voice. Anne Heche plays Joan Ostrowski-Fox, married with children, who uses the annual convention as a brief getaway from her family obligations. (What happens in Cedar Rapids is nobody’s damn business). Then there’s John C. Reilly as the wildly inappropriate Dean Ziegler (Deanzie) whom Lippe has been warned away from because of a rumor he poached clients from Brown Star.

During the conference we discover that Ronald, Joan, and Deanzie are exactly the way they seem but also not what you expect. Maybe because most movie's stories are written starting with the plot, characters seemingly retrofitted along the way to suit each plot beat. Cedar Rapids has been written like a short story, starting from the ground up with the characters first.

The movie is a collection of wonderful moments. Each scene is a delight, each plot point a perfect compliment to the last, until, by the time the credits rolled I only wanted to stay to find out what happened next (and I did—stay for the credits for some bonus scenes). The ending, while perhaps a little forced, a little too perfect, actually makes real sense considering what we learn about each character and their lives along the way.

The movie doesn’t judge the events contained in its moments, it presents details in such a way that we aren’t watching things happen, we are riding shotgun as a surrogate lens that observes without malice or bias. I knew Lippe would do the right thing, the right thing for him whatever that would be. So I didn’t watch the movie with an eye to interact by rooting for him. I wasn’t emotionally tied to what he did, because as he moves through the weekend, I trusted him to realize who his real friends were, and how the ones in power turned out to be the real backstabbing assholes.

Lippe’s reach is short but attainable: he doesn’t shoot for the moon, because he can only see the top of the roof. And that’s enough. And maybe, if there’s a judgment to be found in the movie, it’s that we should all shoot a little lower for the small successes that mean more, instead of hoping we’ll win the lottery or pray our way into heaven’s boxseat. The chances of either happening are slim; shooting for what you can see can ultimately brings more happiness and fulfillment.

Fearing he’ll lose his job, which up until now how been his life, Lippe does what he predecessor did in order to ensure the Two Diamond award for Brown Star. But of course it’s the wrong thing to do. And when Tim finally does the right thing, both you and his new friends are rooting for him.

Cedar Rapids was released six weeks ago and has only played in a few hundred theaters nationwide. Part of the reason I wanted to see the movie was to find out why a movie that looked mainstream hadn’t been treated like it with a wider release. Director Miguel Arteta whose previous movies include The Good Girl, Youth in Revolt, and Chuck and Buck, here showcases wonderful comic timing and a thoughtful honesty in presenting his characters as real people, who swear and fight and do drugs and embrace or deny religion and cheat on their spouses.

The men and women of Cedar Rapids are flawed, but not depressed about it or alienated because of it. In one weekend Tim Lippe discovers that his fears about people who act and do things differently are not to be shunned. Maybe America likes its funny in easily digestible slices of pap, the same way it likes its drama with feel-good trimmings and well-demarcated narrative beats of tragedy and redemption.

Cedar Rapids deserves to be a mainstream hit, but that would mean that America would have to discover this lovely, carefully hand-crafted, beautifully written piece of filmmaking. And that would make me jealous, like a music snob who has to share his favorite underground band with the rest of the world after they get a hit record. But I can tell you, dear audience, about Cedar Rapids because you are few and you are discerning and I want the movie to find people and people to find it. Be the first to see Cedar Rapids in your neighborhood. If it’s not playing at a theater near you then pre-order the DVD release. And tell them the Unreliable Narrator sent you.

Stats:

Theater location: Landmark Theater, Waltham, Sunday, March 20, 1:50 matinee. Price $7.75. Viewed with Liz. Snacks-Twizzlers (fresh), Diet Coke.

Coming Attractions:

Water for Elephants: A Big McHuge Hollywood adaptation of the bestselling novel about a traveling circus, starring that guy from Twilight, Reese Witherspoon, and that guy who won best actor last year. Magical whooey. Made the cover of this week's EW.

The Greatest Movie Ever Sold. Morgan Spurlock makes a movie about making a movie about how to make a movie paid for entirely with product endorsements. Not sure I would watch this movie, based on the principle that if I did I would just be paying to see an advertisement for...oh hell, that's what we do every time we watch a video online, a TV show, read any article or listen to any podcast, and of course watch any movie.

Super. Rainn Wilson plays some shlubby guy who gets dumped by his hot wife, Liv Tyler, who is seeing the much more interesting Kevin Bacon. Rainn decides to become a superhero and his buddy Ellen Page gets in the act as his sidekick. Looks like Juno, but with a different story, and entirely different cast and director. Except for Ellen Page. Also starring Nathan Fillion, Linda Cardellini, Michael Rooker, and Gregg Henry.

Win Win. Getting glowing reviews. Looks cute, in a Sundance kind of way. With Amy Ryan and Paul Giamatti. Synopsis from RopeOfSilicon.com: "Tom McCarthy, acclaimed writer/ director of THE VISITOR and THE STATION AGENT, explores the allegiances and bonds between unlikely characters with a lighter touch in his new film. Struggling attorney Mike Flaherty (Paul Giamatti), who moonlights as a high school wrestling coach, becomes legal guardian of an elderly client in an attempt to help keep his practice afloat. When the client’s teenage grandson runs away from home and shows up on his grandfather’s doorstep, Mike’s family life and his wrestling team are turned upside down. Mike’s win-win proposition turns into something much more complicated than he ever bargained for. McCarthy’s deft touch balancing drama and comedy, broken hearts and poignant humanity is at play in WIN WIN."

Battle: Los Angeles

2011-03-19T16:59:00.000-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Everything spoiled ahead!

Battle: Los Angeles makes a great trailer, complete with mysterious music, shots of aliens blasting at buildings and helicopters, and screaming humans running for their lives. That must account for it’s boffo opening weekend numbers, as they say in the biz (38 million in three days). It’s one of those movies not screened for reviewers beforehand. Which usually means it’s trying to avoid inevitable bad reviews for its opening day.

So is Battle: L.A. bad? It’s not as good as the trailer suggests, but it’s not bad quite enough to hold back preview screenings either. The premise is kindergarten simple: what at first appears to be a meteor shower turns out to be aliens invading earth.

All narrative drive is shown from the view of a platoon of Marines stationed in Los Angeles. We are introduced to each character as if this were a documentary (or a disaster movie from the 70s) with superfluous name titles and ranks. But all of this means nothing when the movie deals only in cardboard characters and boilerplate plot-points.

We follow the wet behind the ears 2nd Lieutenant and his platoon, bolstered by Aaron Eckhart’s aging staff sergeant on his retirement day who, rumor has it, got most of his last squad killed in Afghanistan. The platoon gets its first mission: to evacuate all citizens from the Santa Monica coast. This while the aliens quickly show their fangs and start to, in the words of one faux scientist on the tube, colonize earth. Meaning, destroy all human beings so the bad aliens can harvest our water supply.

Sunny Santa Monica streets are turned into a war torn tableau thanks to the aliens on a rampage. These are nasty aliens. After we get a good look at them, we see that they act and move like fleet footed chrome soldiers from a Transformers’ sequel. There are various types: the grunts, the captains, and god-like ones that seem to almost float on tendrils like squids. All metal and gun power, they take orders from a centralized communications orb, the size of ten city blocks.

The first half of Battle: L.A. is bad. I groaned, I moaned, I wanted my money back. It was all superfluous setup details that were dated and hackneyed by the time they were used in movies like Earthquake and Airport ’75. But then something happened. I started rooting for Aaron Eckhart as the forty-something sergeant, helping the younger Marines navigate their way through their first war. Dead bodies litter the streets, shots of high rises getting leveled create a frightening backdrop.

The camera work is shaky, and not in a good way. During scenes where we are introduced to the characters, the composition jerks for no reason, reminiscent of this shaky-cam style introduced in TV commercials in the 80s, then co-opted by shows like NYPD Blue. It worked for Blue for a couple years, but quickly became a parody of itself. Here it’s incredibly distracting, even during scenes of chaos as the aliens blast away at anything that moves (how is it their weapons are nearly identical to ours?). I figure the quick cuts and camera shake mask a budget that doesn't have the scope to fully render the aliens throughout the whole movie.

Regardless of budget, there are some impressive effects. At one point the platoon, having picked up some civilians along the way, end up commandeering a city bus and get onto one of the many elevated highways in L.A. Of course they get stuck without a clear exit, surrounded by the deadly killing machines. It’s here the move takes on the not too subtle tones of a war movie and from here on Battle acts as much a movie about Marines on a mission then humans battling aliens.

In quick succession these Marines figure out not only the best way to kill an alien (“Shoot to the left of where their heart would be.”) to how to take out their communication centers. The aliens are not just attacking L.A., but are hitting all the major cities of the world. Each attack coordinated by those floating communications centers. The rest of the movie follows the remaining troops as they fight to take down the L.A. communications center.

The final battle is as exciting as it is preposterous. Perhaps just slightly less crazy than the ending of any number of humans vs. aliens flicks, topped by the daddy of them all, Independence Day. Where Independence Day was mostly about the fun, Battle is a grim, realistic take on what actual ground warfare would be like with an invasive species.

With images of destruction, and, in the beginning, a big wave overtaking part of a beach, it wasn’t the most calming movie I could have chosen for the weekend of the Japanese earthquake and tsunami. The movie’s images hit a little too close to home, are a little too disturbing, and a little too realistic at times.

Admittedly, since I was a kid I enjoyed watching destruction on screen: Earthquake, The Towering Inferno, Poseidon Adventure, Godzilla, Them. I like things when they blow up, I suppose like any strapping twelve year old. But those movies from my youth were G or PG rated outings. The PG-13 and R ratings of today's end-of-days disaster movies allow for breathtaking scenes of utter death and destruction, dead bodies rendered much too clearly.


The Towering Inferno

It’s no longer a fun time at the movies, but an overwhelming digital effects experience. Instead of recommending Battle: Los Angeles, even for you twelve-year-olds raised on video games and zombies, I suggest you buy the Towering Inferno instead. At least that movie offered some high rise thrills, star power, and a body count kept below two hundred.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Sunday, March 13, 1:00 matinee. Price $8.25. Viewed solo. Snacks-Lucky Country Aussie Style Soft Gourmet Strawberry Licorice (stale).

Coming Attractions:

Apollo 18. What really happened on this moon landing (scary stuff) and why we never went back (boo!).

Bad Teacher. Cameron Diaz is a sexpot teacher, a role she was born to play if this trailer is any indication. With Justin Timberlake as a hot, nice-guy sub.

Untitled Cate Blanchett Film. I didn't catch the name, just that Cate's in it. Lot's of special effects, but I didn't catch the plot either. I suppose you can google it (type in: upcoming Cate Blanchett movie).

Priest.I have no recollection of this trailer. Sorry.

Super 8. The kind of movie Speilberg (who produced) would have made when he was ten. It's about a bunch of kids making a little home movie, on Super 8 film, about an alien invasion. And then, guess what happens? Do I really have to spell it out for you? Let's just say, they inadvertently capture some cool stuff on film.

X-Men, First Class. An origins story, telling you how Professor X and Magneto met. If those names mean nothing to you, then maybe you should watch The King's Speech again. Takes place during the Cuban missile crisis.

Take Me Home Tonight

2011-03-13T11:43:00.002-04:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Mild to medium spoilers ahead.

In Take Me Home Tonight, the new post teen comedy that takes place in 1988, Topher Grace proves he has not aged since his days as Eric on That 70s Show. He plays a variation of Eric, the smart, sarcastic, wimpy kid from Illinois with the bodacious, sweet girlfriend. Here, his character, Matt Franklin, is hyper smart. He’s a whip with numbers and has recently graduated from MIT.

But it’s Labor Day Weekend. He spent the past summer back at home in Los Angeles working at Suncoast Video (RIP), and has no idea what he wants to do with his life. His dad, played by tough guy actor Michael Biehn (The Terminator, Aliens, T2), is an L.A. cop and wants Matt to take some initiative and get an engineering job.

While at work, Matt catches sight of his high school crush, Tori Frederking. Feigning to be a Suncoast Video customer and not an employee, he devises a fib to get her attention: knowing she works for a high powered financial company, he pretends to be an up-and-comer at Goldman Sachs. It works, just enough for him to find out she’s attending the big Labor Day Party being thrown by his sister’s boyfriend.

So, sit-com setup. A storyline that wouldn’t seem out of place on That 70s Show. Call it That 80s Show (not to be confused with the actual 70s Show spinoff with that very name). Tonight resembles a mix of contemporary teen comedies (Superbad, Nick and Norah’s Playlist, Easy A) and teen comedies made in the 80s (The Sure Thing, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, Better off Dead) while also coming across as being not of either era. It looks bright and shiny, with a certain Benetton palate, but doesn’t quite have the zippy, hip quality of John Hughes movie (Ferris Bueller comes to mind as a teen template, as it similarly did when I recently watched Easy A) or the kitchen-sink insanity of a Savage Steve Holland movie (One Crazy Summer, Better off Dead).

As a character, Topher’s Matt doesn’t quite lend himself to the hip but awkward teen and post teen characters Michael Cera has made a bright career playing, starting in Arrested Development and continuing with Superbad, Juno, and Scott Pilgrim vs. the World. Nor is Matt as snarky and knowing as any character John Cusack played with a simpatico ease back in the 80s. Matt doesn’t necessarily think beyond just getting an in to talk to Tori. He’s almost a throwback to a 50s or 60s teen hero, one who just wants a pretty girl to like him, not even considering that she might actually sleep with him.

Matt is too sweet a guy to be considered contemporarily raunchy but the movie is too R-rated to be John Hughes sweet. The raunch, and much of the r-rating, is supplied by Matt’s sidekick, Barry, who, recently fired from his longtime car salesman job, takes revenge by stealing the best car on the lot for the night. The justification being that Matt can’t roll up to the big Labor Day party in just any crappy car. He’s gotta look like a player in the finance world.

Anna Ferris, a comedic actress who has headlined movies like The House Bunny, Scary Movies 1 through 4, and The Hot Chick, here plays the straight second banana of Matt’s twin sister, Wendy. Wendy is dating the guy who’s throwing the big Labor Day party. That seemed to me a little too convenient for the story, but whatever. The plot propels the story, and the story is a very familiar one.

The enjoyment of Take Me Home Tonight stems from the sweet characters. Even when Barry runs around snorting cocaine (hey, it was the 80s) and finds himself in a fancy Beverly Hills’ bathroom with a kinky couple, he still projects an enviable wide-eyed innocence that makes you want to just give him a hug. After he takes a shower, of course.

Australian actress Teresa Palmer plays Tori Frederking with the requisite hotness, but also the underlying sweetnissity that the movie aims for. Palmer looks so much like Kristen Stewart, at least in this movie, that we had to check the actresses’ name in the credits to verify it wasn’t her. She also carries some of Naomi Watts’ Australian cool charm.

Over the course of this Tonight, Matt gets his ‘in’ with Tori, and then some. After he comes clean about working at Suncoast Video, he has to prove to Tori that he’s a decent guy after all. The climax seems cobbled together from the endings of Ferris Bueller and Better Off Dead (the big downhill ski competition especially), but Take Me Home Tonight won us over with its knowing charm for all things 80s and its even more retro wink to an earlier time when boys just wanted to talk to the girl of their dreams.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Tuesday, March 8, 6:55 bargain Tuesday show. Price $6.00. Viewed with Liz. Snacks--one apple, sliced.

Coming Attractions:

Arthur. Remake of the Dudley Moore/Liza Minnelli flick, this time around it's Russell Brand as the spoiled rich guy and Helen Mirren as the butler. Looks like a good vehicle for Brand.

Limitless.A decent idea that goes way too far. A schlubby, slacker of a writer (Bradley Cooper) is prescribed a variation of a smart drug, and he begins using 100% of his brain power, able to complete difficult math expressions, writing a great novel in a few days (ha, this really is a Hollywood movie). Of course, he's being used as a pawn for some corporation, and falls under the thumb of at first daddy-seeming, then evil-seeming Robert DeNiro. Looks like it could be entertaining.

Your Highness. "When Prince Fabious's bride is kidnapped, he goes on a quest to rescue her... accompanied by his lazy useless brother Thadeous." Natalie Portman plays straight lady to a goofy James Franco and Danny McBride.

Drive Angry 3D

2011-03-03T20:45:00.000-05:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: Mild to medium spoilers ahead.

When I was a kid, I went to my local small-town movie theater every weekend. Back when a little-known movie could blow into town without having already been reviewed by Siskel and Ebert on Sneak Previews. Before the Internet made marketing and promotion more egalitarian. Before you could watch trailers for upcoming movies online months in advance. Before every movie had its own official website and buzz from Harry Knowles at Ain’t it Cool News. I saw some clunkers this way, sci-fi knockoffs of Star Wars and Buck Rogers. Crappy retreads of Halloween and Friday the 13th.

So it was in this spirit of unknown promise that I recently drove to the Lowell Showcase on a rainy afternoon—the day of the 2011 Oscar telecast—to watch Drive Angry 3D. I admit I had seen a trailer on YouTube a couple months ago, and was intrigued by the cheese factor of Nicholas Cage dragging the ‘70s grindhouse/exploitation genre into the neo 3D era.

The elements are in place for some primo exploitation flick action. Nicholas Cage plays Milton, an intense bad ass who has escaped from hell (as if it were so easy, like escaping from a minimum security prison) to hunt down a Satan-worshipping cult (hey, shouldn’t these guys already be friends?) who killed his daughter and kidnapped his granddaughter, threatening to sacrifice her on the next full moon. Okay, well…wait, what?

You heard right, that’s the plot. All achieved with hard-R rated aplomb. Add the 3D element and you’ve got severed limbs, knives, boobies, cars, bullets, RVs, and hot rods all threatening to pop off the screen and doink you in the eyeball. Mix in the classic exploitation elements of sex, violence, religion (cults), cannibalism (human sacrifice, blood drinking). Add a pinch of other ‘70’s movie boilerplate like car chases (Gumball Rally, Vanishing Point, Death Race 2000) and the use of RVs as a means of transportation (Race with the Devil, The Hills Have Eyes, Damnation Alley). Then drizzle across the whole mess that most classic cinematic money-making, attention grabbing trope in the book, 3D (the fact that you still have to don glasses to experience 3D still makes me smile). Voilà! You’ve got all the makings of a classic grindhouse movie. Or a dozen.

Milton gets a ride from a hot blooded waitress, Piper (Amber Heard), who just quit her job. She’s cute, she dresses in cut offs, and she can kick ass. She also just happens to drive a restored Dodge Charger and ends up as Milton’s sidekick. (Thankfully sidekick is all she remains.)

Meanwhile the devil’s accountant (Death, by any other name) is on Milton’s trail to bring him back to hell. William Fichtner plays Death like a patient, natty warden super-powered by Beelzebub. It’s fun watching Death run up against, for example, stoner kids and telling them the next time they can expect to see him. “See you in three months,” he tells one kid. “You won’t see me ‘till you’re 73,” he tells the other.

It doesn’t take long for Milton and Piper to catch up with Jonah King, the RV-drivin', baby-sacrificin' leader of the cult. Billy Burke plays Jonah, and looks like a younger Tommy Lee Jones beamed into the movie from the mid-‘70s. All of Drive Angry 3D is one long reference to the ‘70s, but it isn’t a period movie. There are cell phones and 24-hour cable news. Might have made more sense just to put all the set design in the way-back machine and spin the dial to 1973.

Milton confronts Jonah and his clan in their church, where Jonah shoots Milton in the face and leaves him for dead. Milton wakes up, hops back in his vintage Charger, and gives chase to the cult member’s RV in which they’ve kidnapped Piper and Milton’s infant granddaughter. The chase continues down highways and ends up in an abandoned factory.

These are fun, giddy, insane sequences moving quickly to wrap up the movie. While it looked as though the movie’s runtime was going to clock in a little short, I was reminded that the best exploitation flicks of the ‘70s, like all those Roger Corman movies with mobsters and guns and dames, were often sleek cinematic machines with running times under 90 minutes and often under 80.

Unfortunately after that chase scene ended, the movie kept going for another 30 minutes of Death duking it out with Milton. This leads up to the true finale in the courtyard of an old, shuttered prison where it’s good against evil. Or really bad against kind of bad with scruples.

In the end, the 3D effects don't lend much to the proceedings. I did recapture that youthful feeling of the initial unknown and the giddiness that comes with watching an entertainingly bad movie. For a few minutes, anyway. I give Drive Angry 3D an A for being its enjoyable first hour, then a D for ending on the sourest of notes. The filmmakers turned it into another stupid Nicholas Cage movie with an absurd plot and added special effects that sucked all the fun and life out of what could have been a lean, mean exploitation flick.

Stats:

Theater location: Lowell Showcase, Sunday, February 27th, 11:45 matinee. Price $12.75. Viewed solo. Snacks--Licorice Log, Diet Pepsi.

Coming Attractions:

A Better Life. An man living illegally in the states tries to build a better life for his son and keep him out of a street gang.

Limitless. A decent idea that goes way too far. A schlubby, slacker of a writer (Bradley Cooper) is prescribed a variation of a smart drug, and he begins using 100% of his brain power, able to complete difficult math expressions, writing a great novel in a few days (ha, this really is a Hollywood movie). Of course, he's being used as a pawn for some corporation, and falls under the thumb of at first daddy-seeming, then evil-seeming Robert DeNiro. Looks like it could be entertaining.

Red Riding Hood. Okay, I gotta say, this movie is definitely sexy. I know what you're saying, Huh? Red riding hood. You mean, the little girl with the red cape and the wolf. Well, she ain't no girl anymore. And the wolf, well he could be any of the hot young studs in this woodsy hamlet. It's Twilight all over again, with the same director, Catherine Hardwicke, starring Amanda Seyfried as Miss Hood, all grow'd up.

Thor. Now in 3-D! Marvel Comics' Thor gets the big-budget treatment. With Chris Hemsworth as the titular hero, along with Natalie Portman, Kat Dennings, Idris Elba, and Anthony Hopkins.

Source Code. Jake Gyllenhaal has to relive the same eight minutes on a train to figure out who blew it up (hey, I didn't write it). Each time he goes back in, he falls a little more for a young woman, played by Michelle Monaghan, until he's determined to save her from dying in the inevitable train explosion.

Touch of Evil

2011-02-24T20:55:00.001-05:00

Spoiler alert-o-meter: 53-year-old spoilers ahead.

Movies used to be designed, shot, and edited to be viewed on a movie screen. Today, movies seem to be made to be watched on decidedly smaller screens. Evidence of this is reflected in the faster cutting within scenes and the generally manic, disjointed nature of most Hollywood movies.

Have you ever gone to a movie with lots of action and fast cutting and stumbled out of the theater in a daze, thinking the movie made no sense? That’s because your eyes couldn’t adjust to each new shot before it was replaced by the next one. On a movie screen, your eye moves around the screen to discern the focus of each shot. On a TV screen, laptop monitor, or a miniature iPad/iPod screen you basically stare at one point in space and let a movie’s narrative shuffle on by without you having to scan around and get your grip on the action. In other words, the action comes to you – mainlined you could say – without you having to think much about it.

So, watching an old movie on the big screen comes as something of a revelation, a shock, no matter what movie you’re watching. To see an Orson Welles movie, it’s even more thrilling. Screened at the Capital Theater in Arlington (DVD projection, not a 35 mm print), Touch of Evil crackles with Welles' signature deep focus composition, wide angles, meaningfully cluttered shots (what the film students used to call mise-en-scène), and voices overlapping on a soundtrack often dubbed in post production.

It's a film noir fever dream. Probably the last movie to be considered noir as it came out in 1958 at the end of the era, it showcases the classic noir elements of vivid black and white cinematography, on-location photography, and cynical characters. In Touch of Evil we've got corrupt, racist border town cop Hank Quinlan (Orson Welles) who has been dealing dirty all his life.

Touch of Evil chronicles Quinlan's downfall over the course of one day, as he attempts to bring down up-and-coming Mexican do-gooder cop Miguel (Mike to you) Vargas. Vargas is played by Charlton Heston with his signature Hest-rionics dialed down to about a four. Or maybe it just seems that way playing the straight man to Welles' Quinlan, a festering, bloated recovering alcoholic who seals his own fate when he falls off the wagon and implicates himself at the scene of a crime by leaving his cane behind.

Then there's Dennis Weaver as a motel clerk who...I can't explain it, but Heston's performance is nuanced and subtle compared to Weaver's. His character inspiration comes from one of those little dogs who pants and trots and whose eyes belie an internal terror. Mr. Weaver here invents the term manic. He overacts to such a degree that I wanted to extricate him from the movie and plunk him down into some Three Stooges flick.

Elsewhere there's Janet Leigh. Leigh plays Susan, Vargas' very blond wife. Vargas and Susan are newlyweds just trying leave for a honeymoon, but their reverie is interrupted by a double murder at the border crossing. While Vargas remains sidetracked investigating, Susan is kidnapped and brought out to the remote motel that employs Weaver’s clueless night man. Meanwhile, Vargas witnesses Quinlan frame a young Mexican man for the double murder and this sends him on a righteous crusade to bring Quinlan down.

Welles directs Touch of Evil like his life depended on it. He stages a virtuosic, uninterrupted opening crane shot that lasts about 3 and a half minutes ending in a car explosion (the double murder). He starts a scene with a close up of two shot glasses atop a bar, then follows them getting walked to a nearby table as the camera moves back to frame the rest of the bar. What other director would do this in one shot? None director.

Welles puts the camera on the hood of a car and lets Charlton Heston and Mort Mills (as an assistant DA) drive through a street no wider than an alley at high speeds instead of shooting a cheesy rear screen projection. A good noir doesn't just show you the dirt, it pushes your face in it. Touch of Evil is dusty and oily from tequila and hopped up on MaryJane and doesn't shy from seedy whore houses and garbage-filled canals.

Many familiar faces pepper the movie, including Zsa Zsa Gabor as a showgirl and Marlene Dietrich as a madame, who's worth seeing for some great dialogue ("He was some kind of a man... What does it matter what you say about people?"). Then some actors who worked often with Welles, including Joseph Cotton, Akim Tamiroff, and Ray Collins.

If you rent the DVD, ensure it's the most recent version, which has been restored to Welles' original specs after Universal took the film from him, recut it, and even reshot some of it with another director. This latest version was reconstructed based on Welles' notes. There's so much to like in this lost classic, that I won't give away any more details. Just rent it, and enjoy. And if you get a chance to watch it projected on a movie screen, so much the better.

Here's the famous opening crane shot:

Stats:

Theater location: Capital Theater, Arlington, Sunday, February 20th, 3:15 matinee. Price $7.00. Viewed with Liz. Snacks--RJ's Raspberry Licorice Log.

Coming Attractions:

N/A