Apropos of nothing, my favorite moment in last month’s Oscars broadcast:

‘Member when I said I’d put out more movie lists this year? No. 2 coming your way. This is the list of eleven movies (yes eleven: this is a quirky list) you may very well have never heard of but which I quote regularly. See? You’ve been thinking I’ve been being a little free with the vodka when I yell out unrecognizable non-sequitor quotations, haven’t you? Well, you stand corrected. These aren’t classics or on any best lists but they’re excellent entertainment.

1. Mumford,1999, Lawrence Kasdan (weird, right?) with lots of people you know. A comedy about a guy named Mumford pretending to be a therapist in a town called Mumford.
2. Home Fries, 1998, Dean Parisot with Drew Barrymore, Luke Wilson and Catherine O’Hara (Best In Show? Anyone?) Incorrectly marketed as a romantic comedy when it’s actually a weird, cheerful black comedy about a knocked-up drive-through-window waitress, the misguided boy who falls in love with her, a military helicopter and a homicidal stepmother.
3. Happy, Texas, 1999, Mark Illsley. Ex-cons passing themselves off as gay, kiddie-beauty-pageant coaches in small-town Texas. Where else can you find Jeremy Northam, Steve Zahn and William H. Macy all playing light in the loafers?
4. The Imposters, 1998, Stanley Tucci. It’s on all my lists. Wanna-be actors in the 1920’s end up as stowaways on a cruise ship full of insane people.
5. Addicted to Love, 1997, Griffin Dunne. Meg Ryan pre-lip-inflation with Matthew Broderick and Tchéky Karyo in a romantic revenge comedy. Imperfect but original. And funny.
6. A Midwinter’s Tale or In the Bleak Midwinter, 1996, Kenneth Branagh. The most marginal on the list. It’s a slapstick, black and white faux documentary about a production of Hamlet patched together one Christmas. I think Branagh was using it as a workshop before he filmed his full-length Hamlet the next year. Some really excellent actors in it. (Fair warming: Might only be lovable by theaterphiles.)
7. Hamlet, 1996, Kenneth Branagh. The only un-cut version on film, certainly the only one with serious production values. I imagine Branagh cashed in a lot of favors to get this made. No weird interpretations and thankfully missing the Olivier Oedipal hammer, just the entire play with (mostly) good actors. Brace yourself: 4 and a half hours. Yes, that is Jack Lemmon as one of the guards.
8. Emma, the BBC version, 1997, Diarmuid Lawrence, with Kate Beckinsale before she went all Hollywood hottie and Mark Strong before he went all evildoer (which he’s very good at, I agree). The most true-to-the-text Emma out there. I should know.
9. Something to Talk About, 1995, Lasse Hallström. Remarriage comedy with horses and sarcastic southern women (Julia Roberts, Kyra Sedgwick and Gena Rowlands in the role that made me want her to be my bad-ass mom). Also, the only movie in which I have ever liked Robert Duvall.
10. Stranger Than Fiction, 2006, Marc Forster. Brilliant cast, potentially disastrous concept brilliantly executed. Very, very funny. And touching. But not in that creepy Hollywood way.
11. Frost/Nixon, 2008, Ron Howard, with Michael Sheen and Frank Langella (and Oliver Platt - hooray!). I know: it’s Ron Howard, so maybe more than eleven people saw it. On the other hand, it was written as an un-filmable play by the excellent Peter Morgan, so maybe not. David Frost interviews Richard Nixon post-Watergate. (What is up with Michael Sheen being so good and still moonlighting as a campy vampire?)

It’s January and that means it’s time for lists. Lists of last year’s bests, the last decade’s bests (which shouldn’t come out until the end of the new year, right?), resolutions for next year and the next decade, lists of all the things I didn’t do over the holidays, lists of things I could do instead of all those things, lists of how to make better, more effective lists.

I like lists but they’re tricky. For instance, over the holidays, two people - a teenager and a septuagenarian - asked me to provide a list of the top ten movies they should have seen. Those lists can’t possibly be the same, can they? I majored in film (roughly) in college and have seen far more peculiar and probably a broader range of movies than most people really should. Also, I have strong opinions about “good” and “better” and the canon in general, so I would seem to be a solid candidate for generating lists of things, especially directive lists.

Sadly, not so.

I sink early: do you want a list of the absolute best movies? Because you probably won’t like a lot of them and then you might take it out on me later when I’m trying to have a nice cup of coffee with you and you’re bent on revenge because I made you watch that bit where the weird man cuts the girl’s eyeball with a razor blade. What you probably mean, when you ask for “the movies I should have seen” is “the movies you think I should have seen that you think I will like.” Which is, as I’m sure you know if you think about it for a second, a very different list.

Or maybe you mean a list of my favorite movies, which are certainly not the best movies ever made or ones which you might enjoy and, unless you’re my therapist, will probably just confuse you. Then I’d have to provide explanations with each one about why it made the list so you don’t think I’m a standard-less idiot for loving French Kiss but not The Godfather.

Any of the above will expose me to censure. If it’s a list for just you and I choose titles you don’t like, you may very well end up thinking I don’t know you at all. If it’s a list of my favorites, you may end up thinking you don’t know me at all. If it’s a list of best overall, you will either lose respect for me because I omit a film you worship or you will think I am a snob/deranged/unfeeling because I include things you have not seen and, after you have seen them, wildly dislike.

See? It’s kind of a lose-lose for me. (Also clear: I’m a little neurotic. Just a little.)

It’s a new year, however, and we’ll soon have a small child to imprint with good taste, so I’m going to have to buckle down, channel my inner Harold Bloom and commit to some kind of canon.

Let’s start with a set you’ll find hard to judge: I’ll list the top ten movies I can think of right now that I saw at exactly the right time and to which I have irrationally attached myself. I guess that makes this my Top Ten Favorite Movies list. Of course, I reserve all available rights to change my mind immediately when I think of other movies I like, my mood alters, the weather alters or whatever else alters, so don’t get all worked up if I left something off: it might make the revisions round.

1. 8½, Federico Fellini, 1963, with Marcello Mastroianni . Even after doing a frame by frame analysis of one of the scenes, on a VCR no less, I still loved it. See it some rainy Saturday afternoon: you’ll need daytime levels of focus and the time afterwards to have a nice dinner and calm down your crush on Mastroianni.
2. The Grass Is Greener, Stanley Donan, 1960, with Cary Grant and Deborah Kerr. Flawed but hilarious and brilliantly written romantic comedy. An oddity really: starts with them already long-married + no melodrama around the infidelity (hers, no less).If it feels a little jagged and talky, it’s because it’s from a play - just go with it.
3. French Kiss, Lawrence Kasdan, 1995, with Meg Ryan and Kevin Kline. Again with the excellent script. Again with the romantic comedy. Also again: not your usual path to the altar, thank God.
4. The Imposters, 1998, Stanley Tucci with Oliver Platt, Stanley Tucci and 1000 other fantastic actors. You have to see this movie. Old-school clever, ridiculous, bizarre and possibly my all-time favorite movie. On the strength of this film, I will go see Stanley Tucci act in a dumpster for the rest of my life if I have to.
5. Nobody’s Fool, 1994, Robert Benton, with Paul Newman. A near-perfect film, narratively speaking. No pyrotechnics, no groundbreaking cinematic techniques. It’s all story and acting. Cemented my hope that Newman would finally leave Joanne and marry me.
6. Grosse Pointe Blank, 1997, George Armitage, with John Cusack and Minnie Driver, Dan Aykroyd and Joan Cusack. Whoever doesn’t want to attend your high school reunion, raise your hand. If I were an assassin, I’d go though. Really.
7. Monsters, Inc., 2001, Peter Docter. I didn’t see an animated film until I was 23 but R has converted me to the cause. I keep this on my iPhone to watch when I’m so jetlagged I can’t sleep. Beautiful writing, fantastic story, amazing tech (watch the blue fur move in the air).
8. The Philadelphia Story, 1940, George Cukor with Cary Grant, Katherine Hepburn, and Jimmy Stewart. You could watch it or come by and I’ll quote you the entire script. Your call. The classic romantic comedy to trump all others.
9. My Blue Heaven, 1990, Herbert Ross, written by Nora Ephron, with Steve Martin, Rick Moranis, Joan Cusack. Not a masterpiece but definitely what the rest of Steve Martin’s films should have looked like. Quirk and laughs. Thank you, Nora Ephron.
10. When Harry Met Sally, 1989, Rob Reiner, written by Nora Ephron, with Meg Ryan and Billy Crystal. It’s a little harder for me to love Meg and Nora and Billy these days as they’ve headed for schlockier waters, but this movie is a monument of romantic comedy. Can’t be helped: must be on the list.

See? I told you: you think there’s something wrong with me now, don’t you? No Star Wars on there. No Godfather or Ghandi or Lawrence of Arabia. Remember though that a.) I’m a writer, so James Cameron and George Lucas types irritate me, despite their strides for the industry, and b.) these are the movies that have been important to me, not the ones I think have been important for a large population or the general advancement of cinema. Those are different lists.

On that subject, A.O. Scott wrote up an excellent piece in November here. Click through to his Movies of Influence list and Movies of Quality list. He’s pretty on-track, with the exception of Shrek on the former (what the what?!) and Gosford Park (possibly the most boring movie ever) on the latter.

At the very least, none of the above will bore you. Movies are supposed to entertain, after all, right? Right. So enjoy. Maybe I’ll produce a ton of lists in 2010 and you can wake up each morning and sputter into your coffee as you read through my Top Ten Bedspreads and Top Twenty Picks for UN Ambassador to Paraguay. It’ll be fun.

Just to be clear, I’m talking about 9, the movie about little burlap people making their way in a post-apocalyptic world of scary machines, not Nine, the movie about big-busted women making their way through Fellini’s anti-apocalyptic world of surreal parties. I can feel a burlap bachanal mash-up coming on when the latter gets released later this fall, but for now, we’re just going to chat about the former. A plot device of the latter to be specific. A plot device that drives me completely insane to be even more specific.

What plot device is that? The one where the “hero” does something unbelievably stupid that serves to set in motion a terrible string of consequences from which he (usually he) then “saves” the rest of the characters/the world for which he is then, in a mindbending perversion of cause and effect, rewarded. We, the gullible audience, are supposed to not only forgive him but embrace him because he has recognized his error and because he “makes up” for his stupid, stupid mistake.

There’s a category for that kind of incompetence in the business world: it’s called “grounds for dismissal” and, to my mind, it should be more liberally applied in the world of fiction.

Don’t get me wrong, I’m all for personal growth, even in tiny people made of hessian, but it strains my sense of justice that the guy who, however accidentally, caused the death of more than half of the remaining population of the planet not only keeps his job but gets promoted and lives out his days as the sole male in a tiny harem of little cloth ladies. What the hell is up with that?

Mistakes happen, sure. People are flawed, absolutely. Regrettable but true. But I’d rather watch a plot driven by a more complicated confluence of events and, yes, mistakes, than a plot driven by someone tripping on their shoelaces and setting off an atomic bomb. Although, actually, that might be entertaining. Let me try again: someone playing with the fuse on an atomic bomb and then acting like it wasn’t his fault when it goes off ‘cause he “didn’t know”, and then “saving” the remaining world and getting the girl.

What happened to the step where you pay your debt to society for killing a bunch of people and screwing everything up for everyone else because you couldn’t be bothered to stop and think in the first place? It’s like a little tiny Bush Administration and it makes me nuts.

It’s the age of Obama, little burlap dude: time to man up and accept responsibility for your actions. In the meantime, the smart ladies can be in charge. They’re the ones who were running the joint before you came along anyway. Plus they’re made out of cotton and have better hats, so case closed.

“I’ve always believed that because you have access to people’s minds and communicate to people that there is a corresponding responsibility: the responsibility of being a good citizen and also recognizing that if you have the ablity to transfer ideas from one point to another that those ideas should cause no harm.” - Milton Glasser

This is exactly what I was getting at when I wrote about the upsetting irresponsibility of District 9. So there.

Simon: It’ll be easy peasy lemon squeezy.
Toby: No, it won’t. It’ll be difficult, difficult lemon DIFFICULT.

Take a note District 9: ditch the aliens, find a kick-ass script and a swearing Scotsman and you’ll get further with that whole ‘lessons learned from apartheid/war mongering/being jerks’ thing.

(You’re going to hear me saying “lemon difficult” a lot from now on. Just fair warning.)

It’s a rare thing for me to walk out of a movie. I can only remember skipping out three times, which is saying something since I was a film student and had to sit through hundreds of screenings of marginal, odd and foreign films on top of the usual number of recreational trips to the cinema.

I dropped out of Unforgiven due to overwhelming boredom with massive male self-involvement. I’ve left A Streetcar Named Desire no less than five times. (It’s Marlon’s muttering. And the self-created southern drama. Maybe if I were southern it’d mean more. Or if I weren’t already busy with my own self-created northeastern drama.) I can’t remember the third one - I think it was something R and I went to by mistake so maybe it doesn’t count. Let’s drop Fame into that slot. My dad took us to that when we were little and ushered us out after the first blast of nudity. I don’t know what he thought we were going to see. Maybe an Andrew Carnegie documentary?

District 9 joined that motley crew on Thursday. I had a bad feeling going into it: I don’t particularly like sci-fi unless it’s ironic or big Hollywood, in which case it’s BYOI*. From what I read, District 9 also seemed like a tricky set-up: it’s filmed like a documentary, it’s meant to be an allegory, but really it’s an alien action flick. That sounded to me like trying to pass off aspic as Jell-O. The bright green food coloring you used made me think it was a low-cal American dessert but in fact it’s made from gelatinized meat and tastes like what you find at the bottom of a swamp. You gotta know I’m going to have an issue with that, and, lo and behold, I did.

In brief, the aliens arrive over Johannesburg but instead of being aggressive, they’re starving refugees. The South Africans set them up on the ground in - what else? - a refugee camp called District 9 which rapidly becomes a slum complete with little kid aliens digging through piles of garbage, alien-human violence and a lot of weapons-for-catfood bartering. (That last one doesn’t seem to be a hallmark of most slums I know about, but presumably it’s a marker for something less ridiculous like rice or heroin.)

A Blackwater stand-in is assigned to relocate the aliens to another camp and, in the process, one of the manager’s arms is injured and - Sigourney Weaver’s tank top! - turns into an alien claw which is capable of firing the heretofore-aliens-only weapons the refugees brought with them. Hilarity ensues.

We didn’t leave because the plot was so heavy-handed but because of my issues with violence. It’s not just that I can’t stomach graphic violence, it’s that I have a moral objection to it. To my mind, the more realistic the violence you depict, the greater burden you assume for its effects. Fictionalizing human rights abuses is a messy business: you run the risk of making them less horrifying and more digestible because, “It’s just a story.” The shock value of real abuses - the photos from Abu Ghraib, for instance - is blunted when the public has been fed a no-consequence Hollywood diet of similar scenes. The non-fictional atrocities that happened in the slums outside Johannesburg during apartheid are, needless to say, diminished by projecting them onto subhuman, unsympathetic, catfood-eating aliens.

(Yes, Michael Bay and Co. have collectively killed far more henchmen and villagers and jungle-based mercenaries than Neill Blomkamp (District 9’s director) has killed refugee aliens. I don’t love that ridiculous and clearly fictional violence either and it presents its own set of problems, namely, “Is exposure to ludicrous and improbable killings the first step toward dulling audiences’ senstivity to more realistic and disturbing material?” but as long as the general reaction to those movies’ liberties with the laws of reason and physics is, “No f’ing WAY!” I don’t think they pose as serious a threat of corruption as the face-to-face violence of films like District 9.)

District 9 has been promoted and reviewed as an allegory, a fiction of a non-fiction. Setting aside that I very much doubt that 90% of the largely young and male audience picked up on the connection to real events because of the vast gap between reality and fiction in this case, that form has a long and respectable history in the arts: if you can’t get the public’s attention with reporting and documentaries, try the multiplex. Fine. But in the same way that a biopic has a greater responsibility and a steeper climb because it’s depicting a real person, so too must a film about real events try its damndest not to glorify the worst elements of the story to reap greater box office rewards. Neill Blomkamp didn’t rise to that responsibility. As a result, District 9 is rife with stomach-turning violence that feels pointless instead of pointed. I didn’t need to stay for the second half of the film to endorse that failure.

So, in case you missed it, that’s a thumbs down from me.

*Bring Your Own Irony

I went to see the Transformers sequel the other night. I know. You don’t have to say it. I knew before I went that it was going to be terrible and yes, it was terrible, but, in my own defense, I was really tired and I wanted to get my hearing loss back on track.

I can’t seem to learn my lesson about going to action movie sequels. I think I must have seen The Empire Strikes Back when I was too young: the idea that the second movie in a series can be better than the first was imprinted on my impressionable little brain and now I’m doomed to a lifetime of “Son of…”, “…: The Return” and “…: Overkill.”

I am right there with the reviewer at the Guardian who said, “I found it at once loud and boring, like watching paint dry while getting hit over the head with a frying pan.” It was exactly like that. Two and a half incredibly loud hours of a way too complicated plot that, I hope, relied on some kind of source material from Hasbro or it’s even more inexcusable.

You would think, given that two and a half hours, Señor Bay and Co. could keep a grip on all those plot points and tie them up nicely with a motor-oil-soaked bow, but no. I explained to R several of the things that didn’t add up (not counting the induced deafness and Megan Fox’s lip inflation) and he looked at me with that face that said, “They’re trucks that turn into aliens with feelings. Really, you’re going to go there with the believability?”

Yes. I am. Because I am fine with suspension of disbelief. As long as the requested suspension is consistent and obeys the bounds of human logic, I can hover right there with ‘em. If a monster shark, a flying house and innumerable conspiracy theories can be made into sympathetic movies, you can damn well make a sports car that talks through its radio feel like my new best friend.

Everyone’s a critic at the movies. It’s the boon and the bane of popular culture: since your $10 ticket + $47.50 for snacks are paying for the movie, you get a vote. Especially if you’re an 18-34-year-old male or a 13-year-old girl. God help us if the studios ever figure out how to reliably get that money in the cash register. All we’ll ever see at the multiplex is Transformers XXVII and Harry Potter and the Plastic Seive. (Not that I wouldn’t enjoy both of those, mind you, but the steady diet might kill me.)

I, like everyone else, has something to say when I leave the theater, but mostly I don’t write about it (even though, unlike most everyone else, I actually have a degree in film). Why? Because there are a lot of people already saying things about the movie I just saw and I don’t like crowds.

Today, however, I’m going to make an exception. Again with the, “Why?” My, aren’t we inquisitive, this Monday morning! Well, I’ll tell you. Because yesterday, R and I saw The Hangover and I spouted on a bit about some other movies we’ve seen recently and how to rate them and R said he’d like to hear more, so here we are. That just goes to show how much I like him. And if you disagree with me on any of these, you can take it up with him.

I rate movies based on how successful they are at doing what they set out to do, not how they stack up against the best movie ever made. If it weren’t on a relative scale, Casablanca and The Philadelphia Story would get A’s and Bad Boys, all of the James Bonds and the VeggieTales would get F’s. I love Pierce Brosnan too, but you know I’m right.

Angels & Demons. C minus. Even without the godawful haircut Tom Hanks sported in the first one, this sucked almost as much. Without the overlay of religion, the plot looks like something out of Superfriends, especially when you count the exploding helicopter. If Ewan McGregor weren’t so good at being good while shoveling down a plate of ham, I’d have given it a D.

Frost/Nixon. A. While we’re on the subject of Ron Howard, this is recently out on video. Given his abysmal record (Apollo 13 was a long time ago and no one but me loves The Paper) of directing quality (not “money-making” but “quality”) movies, I was very worried to hear Howard had gotten his hands on Peter Morgan’s (The Queen) script and might cut out Frank Langella (who played Nixon in the stage version and - bizarre and irrelevant - dated Whoopi Goldberg for ages). Glory be, though: he kept Morgan and Langella’s work intact and the movie kicks some Watergate ass. Also: extra points for the super-effective preview.

Up. A. Yes, I’m upset too that there wasn’t a not-dead girl in sight in the movie but them Pixar boys (yes, they’re mostly boys) produce some quality entertainment. 3-D was an OK gimmick but inessential. It’s quite a feat to make a movie that everyone from my management-consultant father to my urban artist friend to an eight-year-old is quoting three weeks later.

While we’re on the subject, that animation crowd needs some therapy re: killing moms. Either they can’t write ‘em (which is a sign of laziness but not malice) or going home for Thanksgiving must be quite the ordeal.

The Hangover. B minus. It lacked the poignance of The 40-Year-Old Virgin and some of the brilliant banter, but the premise was excellent, the resolution not cringe-inducing and Zach was weird but not outta hand. Whew. (Is Bradley Cooper shark-y or what?)

Terminator Salvation. D. Trust me: there’s no salvation for anything/one/cyborg here. Completely forgettable. Thank you, Christian Bale, for forcing them to dilute the original storyline so you could get more camera time. I love Batman as much as the next guy, but McG, this ain’t no music video: the star doesn’t rule the shoot. Also, stop being a schmuck and using your ghetto nickname in the credits like you’re not an overpaid, blonde white guy.

X-Men Origins: Wolverine. B minus. Brace yourselves: there are, like, 50 X-Men named in the previous movies, so this Origins series is gonna be a long one. Thank God they started up with the hot one. I hate the facial hair, but I can’t forget Hugh’s tragic look and slim hips or Liev’s vicious incisors and claws, so they must’ve done their job. And by “job” I mean “getting me into the theater even though I saw part of the pirated version and it looked like it might be a complete train wreck but decided that seeing it on an extremely large screen might make up for its obvious shortcomings in plot and execution.” Well done, boys.

Star Trek. Drag Me to Hell. Oh wait, are those two separate movies? Not for me, they’re not.

Transformers: The College Years. C. No, I haven’t seen it, but I’ve done the math.

Muscle cars (hot in 1983)[-72]
+ Shia LaBeouf (over-exposed a la Jude Law circa 2004)(-23)
+ Megan Fox (get over your-“I’ve never been a big believer in formal education”-self)(-NC17)
/ sequel [possible -37]
-3.02 (which is about a C).

We saw X-Men Origins: Wolverine this weekend. Just a couple of notes.

First, it doesn’t seem fair that eight gajillion people on the planet know where Wolverine came from before he does. (In case it’s not clear, Origins takes place before the rest of the previously released X-Men movies, like Batman Begins and those godawful Star Wars prequels.) I wasn’t paying super close attention to the details of the previous X-Men movie (because it was unbelievably terrible which made me faint/squint/go get popcorn), but I seem to remember that the last time we saw Wolverine, he was still trying to sort out his, um, origins.

Just doesn’t seem right that I know and he doesn’t. It’s his life, after all. Although, I guess there’s a good chance that one of those eight gajillion people is gonna let it slip to him at a barbeque. Or he’ll pass one of the billboards and go see it himself, which would be kind of a shock to the system but probably more efficient than 10-15 years of psychotherapy.

Second, I do not like sideburns, ergo mutton chops make me gag and I wish they would stop. Someone who knows way too much about X-Men told me that Wolverine, in the comics, isn’t tall like Hugh Jackman, but kind of squat and broad, like, well, a wolverine. If the studio was going to compromise on the short, they could have cut out the nasty (mutton chops) as well and just hung onto the brutish.

Third, and this is unrelated to the movie but it also contains the word “wolverine” so it’s relevant, remember that piece on The Morning News from last February that walked you through getting your beloved a wolverine for Valentine’s Day?”Once she accepts the animal’s presence…it won’t be long before she develops a deep, maternal love for her wolverine—much like she would for a puppy, except that this puppy has razor-sharp claws and eats cats.” You should read that again. It’s funny.

Also, it will remind you about wolverines and make you wonder what [insert name of dude - and I’m 100% certain it was a dude - who came up with X-Men] was thinking. Wolverines are not sexy. You know who is? Hugh Jackman. You know how I know? ‘Cause People Magazine said so. (Also, I am alive and a girl.) So it’s not quite the right match. Maybe they should’ve gone for, like, a toughened up Peter Lorre or Danny DeVito (with fur).

But they picked Hugh and he’s a good guy and Liev Schreiber is always interesting to watch, so yeah, go see it. Just don’t expect too much and keep your mouth shut about it at your next barbeque until you’ve looked around to see who’s hanging out by the chips.

Let today be remembered as the day I officially admitted that our Netflix queue has gotten out of hand. The current crop of films is living in a stack in front of the television like friends of friends who crash on your couch for a weekend and just won’t leave.

Currently in-house and holding on for the eighth straight week: Rachel Getting Married, the well-reviewed but very possibly depressing story of an annoying, alcoholic chick played by a very possibly annoying starlet going to her sister’s wedding and wreaking havoc. A perfect choice for those of us already completely paralyzed at the prospect of planning a wedding. Possible happy ending: I have no sister and therefore this movie will not happen to me.

In a close second, Happy-Go-Lucky, a movie about an incurable optimist (likely deeply irritating) directed by Mike Leigh (known to be deeply irritating. To me. I don’t like disorder, and people who don’t use scripts reek of disorder. I like scripts. It’s why I write them. Don’t ask me why I put Leigh in our queue. It was a trap.)

Closing out the list and holding on for a month is Keane, the tale of a man who lost his kid at Port Authority a while ago and is still really upset about it. Which is understandable. Port Authority is pretty upsetting all on its own without layering the whole losing your kid thing on top of a visit.

I know. You don’t have to say anything. I don’t know what I was thinking.

Once those go back though, we’re all teed up for Shark Week: Ocean of Fear: Disc 1. It’s going to be awesome. I can feel it.

Me: It’s exactly what I thought it was going to be. Cheerful, not complicated. Like children. Like Harriet the Spy. Amateurs. God. Middle-aged women.
R: What are you going to be like when you’re middle-aged?
Me: Complicated. And I’ll wear a turban.
R: You’re going to be a freak, aren’t you?
Me: And you’ll be right there next to me.

R: We could go see Wendy and Lucy. What’s that?
Me: We’re not going to Wendy and Lucy.
R: Why not?
Me: Because you’ll hate it…it’s, like a girl…and her dog…it’s a bad situation….
R: A girl in a bad situation…with her dog?! Sweet. Say no more. I’m there. Where do I invest?

1. Best-Dressed (And Let’s Not Be Stupid Here) Award:

• Tina Fey. Definitely went a long way to make up for that terrible number she wore to the Golden Globes.


• Jennifer Aniston. Didn’t love the front braid on the hair, but the dress was lovely.


• Meryl Streep - not the dress but the color of it. Why? Because I look great in that color and I’m the one handing out these awards.

2. “Girlfriend, Please” Award: Screw the “fashion-forward” garbage, Reese Witherspoon’s dress was terrible. Close runner up: Amy Adams’ necklace. Seriously people. I don’t care how much it cost, it looks like it escaped from the circus.

3. “Worst Feeling I Avoided This Year By Losing All My Bets” Award: You know when you want something to win, like, Best Screenplay, because you’re a writer and dammit that one screenplay deserved it but you don’t vote for it because you think it has an ice cube’s chance in hell of actually winning but then it does win and then you feel like a heel for not trusting your instincts and for voting against something you thought deserved it and you lost the point on your ballot as a result? Yeah. That feeling sucks. Know how I avoided it this year? I voted for what I thought would win and what I wanted to win and I lost on both counts. Whew. Close one.

4. “You Suck and You Never Should Have Been There In the First Place But Your Show Is On the Network That Broadcast the Oscars” Award: Zac Efron. Did we all catch his comment on the red carpet when asked about Slumdog Millionaire?

Interviewer: What do you think of the movie? We just spoke with Dev Patel and…

Zac Efron: Yeah, he’s a great kid.

I’m sorry, what? “Kid”? You, my condescending friend, are all of three years older than he is. And by the way, Patel is always gracious and enthusiastic - and was in an actual f*cking quality movie that, by the way, WON and you are on a stupid teen musical television show. Geez. Get over yourself.

5. “Thank You For Remembering” Award: To the producers for making sure Harold Pinter was on the In Memoriam list. I am so sorry he’s gone. I always hoped I’d meet him. Rough year losing Paul Newman and Paul Scofield as well.

6. “I Am So Right and Stop Arguing With Me” Award goes to ME. Yes, me. For what? For knowing that Hugh Jackman is completely gay and saying it all these years and now we all know it, so don’t deny it. The man is a song and dance machine, a total charmer and I love him even through his mutton chops Wolverine look. There’s nothing wrong with being gay and stashing the wife in a different apartment and having kids with her. Well, maybe there is something wrong with that, but we all have to get ahead how we can. But stop telling me he’s straight, ‘cause he ain’t. And I have no gaydar at all, so if I think he’s gay, he’s gay. Full stop.

7. “I Feel The Same Way, Sean Penn, and Thank You To Everyone I Know”: “I want to be very clear that I do know how hard I make it to appreciate me, often.” (Although I definitely would’ve remembered to thank my wife, especially after I cheated on her with Russian prostitutes.)

8. “Thank You For Making a Liar Out of Me” Award goes to the Oscar producers. They said it would be different. They said they were changing it up. They said they recognized that they sucked at keeping the show interesting. The first step is recognizing you have a problem, so good for them, but I never thought they’d deliver anything interesting. And they did. Quibble with some of the details if you will, but overall the show rocked a new vibe.

I was trying to text R (who’s on a train to Baltimore) about how fantastic Tina Fey looked presenting for the screenplay awards and my phone suggested “Tuna Dry”. I hate my phone.

“You look like you work at a Hassidic meth lab.”

- Natalie Portman to Ben Stiller dressed as Joaquin Phoenix

I’m not kidding, she just said in reference to Sex and the City: The Movie, “Best movie of the year. No question.”

Is six feet too far to tackle someone from a sitting start? I’m not sure what I’d do with her once I got her down. Maybe extraordinary rendition back to her homeland? Germany, she’s coming back your direction. Brace yourself.

I accidentally watched The Da Vinci Code again this weekend. It suuuuucked. Again. I was in a stress stupor around leaving my job or I never would have watched it. I couldn’t help myself. Dysfunction gravitates towards dysfunction, I guess. My “favorite” (read: totally ludicrous) line? “I have to get to a library fast!” Who’s heard that outside of a chipmunk saying it in last week’s Weekly Reader special?

Let Me Hold You (Little Man)

“I stand today for the midget at the size of a regular guy.
As the big parade passes by
Let me hold you little man:
We’ll make believe you can fly.
You shout me for me to put you down,
But I’m marching today for your cause.
I’m banging the drum:
Your big day will come
When they re-make The Wizard of Oz.

Let me hold you little man
Thank God I am tall
I won’t let you fall
We’re all midgets and some are just small.”

You need to rent Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story today. If you want more John C. Reilly, hit the Fresh Air interview here.

Stress on “hell” I am telling you what. This movie sucked. Here’s what: 

1. The plot and mythology were a total ripoff of just about every fantasy movie in the last ten years, from Lord of the Rings to The Mummy. And not in a good way. 
2. The character development was entirely referential, as in, “Hey, remember those movies where the hero has a drinking problem but turns out to be a good guy after all? Since you already know how that works, we don’t need to bother to go through it all again, right?”
3. Related, the “anti-hero” is actually an adolescent pain in the ass with no redeeming characteristics…and he doesn’t develop any either. 
4. I do not understand the hoopla surrounding Guillermo del Toro. His visual vocabulary may be unique but if it’s used in service of garbage like this, it’s wasted. Keep to your directing and design, del Toro and keep your hands off the story and script. 
5. The best thing I can say about this movie is that perhaps the editing ruined it. But I doubt it. 

It’s the second day of summer and Midsummer’s Eve and hot as blazes in San Francisco. Even if you didn’t know how hot it is, you’d know something was off because the tourists have come out of their hovel hotels and are crawling all over the place. Go home silly people blocking my bike’s path! Go home! This city is not for visiting.

Our place is usually lovely and breezy but since we’re on the third floor, beneath the black tarpaper roof, we bake in the heat. I make spa water - charcoal filtered water with oranges or lemons - so we stay hydrated. Glasses of spa water are everywhere. Our studio has begun to resemble the house in Signs. Remember that movie? The last good one Shyamalan did?

The little girl is always asking for a glass of water and leaving half-full glasses all over the house. And it turns out that the aliens are burned by water. Remember? And the brother is a former baseball star. And just before the wife died years earlier, she tells Mel Gibson to tell him - the brother - , “Swing away, Merrilll. Swing away!” And Mel Gibson doesn’t know what she means, thinks she’s delirious from pain, until the aliens are there in the house and the water glasses are everywhere and Merrill’s bat is above him on the wall. And Mel Gibson says, “Swing away, Merrill! Swing away!” And he does, breaking the bat and the alien and shattering glasses and glasses of water onto the otherwise invincible alien. Remember?

That’s what our apartment looks like, minus the alien.

Everyone remembers Brokeback Mountain. Everyone talks about The Joker. Some even mention 10 Things I Hate About You and The Patriot, but only one review of Heath Ledger’s career that I’ve read mentions A Knight’s Tale.

I love A Knight’s Tale. I own A Knight’s Tale. What’s not to like about a medieval jousting movie that features hard rock ballads, Rufus Sewell being villainous, Alan Tudyk being ridiculous and Paul Bettany in the buff? It is entirely what it set out to be: extremely entertaining garbage. There’s no reason to judge it by any other standards. If I’d made that movie, I’d be proud of it and I wish a few more critics and eulogizers would get on board.

You’ve got to love a guy willing to make all of those movies. One of the women I admire the most once said that the point of education and experience was to make your mind an interesting place to live. I think Heath Ledger’s mind must have been. I hope it was. I’ll miss him.

I re-watched the latest Bourne movie tonight. You know the scene where Jason takes out Desh, the counter-assassin? All I have to say about that is what did that dude think was going to happen? Bathrooms are the #1 location where accidents in the home happen. Never shoulda taken the fight in there, man. Never.

This movie is definitely not helping my completely unrealistic belief that you CAN prepare for every possible contingency if you just train long enough. Definitely not helping.

I am not a Harry Potter fan. I was but then the movies came out and I think the kids they cast, poor things, are terrible, terrible actors and have awful, awkward, irritating fake laughs. I can’t help myself though. When one comes out, I watch it, hoping that this new director (each movie’s had a different one since they canned that master of kiddie pandering, Chris Columbus after movie #2) will somehow pull a Tim Burton and make Batman cool again. That hasn’t happened. They just keep adding more and more illustrious actors in supporting roles - Alan Rickman, Emma Thompson, Fiona Shaw, Ralph Fiennes and so on. Unfortunately, it’s the emperor’s new clothes all over again, kids: acting like you’re acting doesn’t count as actual acting.

I want to be clear that I don’t blame the actors personally. Who wouldn’t turn up for that audition, for Pete’s sake? Not that, at ten years old you’re turning up for anything on your own (moms) or have anyone around you who will give you an objective opinion of your acting skills, current or future, you little cutie pie! Smile big! (Moms again.)

Am I the only one who saw Showbiz Moms & Dads? I think everyone who takes their child on an audition should be forced to watch it until they can pass some sort of self-awareness test and swear that they’re not living through their kid. When you’re revving up the minivan for that cross-country drive to LA, parents, just remember that for every talented little Dakota Fanning, there are twenty Emma Watsons who will try and try and try and still not make the grade even if they do get hired for millions. You should still love them, moms, they just shouldn’t be in movies.

Come to that, I’m in favor of people having to pass parenting tests before they can keep their kids, too, but no one agrees with me on that one either. Something about how some people are OK with “expressing emotion in public” or Chuck E. Cheese or high-pressure tactics on pre-schoolers or how not everyone finds the Teletubbies alarming. (It’s not the gay thing, it’s the retarded thing.) To my mind, the Harry Potter movies are just teaching kids to tolerate poor acting skills at an early age. That can’t be good. Then they’re going to move on to be Gary Busey fans or tolerate Demi Moore and then try telling them not to snort coke or just be mean, mean, breast-implanted, cradle-robbing meanies.

In the meantime, I can’t get Daniel Radcliffe’s utterly painful smile out of my head long enough to make it through the 8000 pages of book four, which is the last one I tried to read.

This doesn’t mean I don’t follow the Harry Potter news. I just follow it a.) late, b.) scornfully and c.) use a really bored voice when I report that spoilers and antics of the crazed fans. These methods have convinced no one that I am not a fan. I just like books. And money. And clever, scrappy writers who become billionaires after re-purposing every archetypal myth ever put on the page. Go you, J.K. Rowling. Although, you know what? I don’t even like her that much anymore now that she’s all manicured up and has nice hair. I prefer to think of her in a café (like me), with no money (almost like me), and a dream that someday a band called Draco and the Malfoys will belt out, “My Dad’s Rich, Your Dad’s Dead,” in Harvard Square at midnight in tribute to my books as I count my money in Scotland.

Get on your dancing pants, kids, there is finally a movie worth the $12 of a pre-order ticket. Stranger Than Fiction is an understated movie with an original premise supported by an excellent script and performances of just the right size.

“Understated” isn’t a word anyone’s ever used to describe Will Ferrell. In a recent interview on Fresh Air, he characterized his usual roles as “men with unearned confidence.” As a 180-degree departure from that history, this movie is going to do for him what Lost in Translation did for Bill Murray, what 40-Year-Old Virgin did for Steve Carrell and what Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind almost did for Jim Carrey. This is a career-shifting movie and a joy to watch.

Harold Crick (Ferrell), an IRS agent with a highly routinized and largely empty life, begins hearing narration of his activities in his head. Emma Thompson plays the novelist with writer’s block who is unknowingly writing his life, Queen Latifah is the assistant hired by Thompson’s publisher to make sure she finishes the book, Dustin Hoffman - in a welcome departure from his recent scenery-chewing roles - plays the professor of literature Harold enlists to help him sort out what’s going to happen, and she of the rosebud mouth, Maggie Gyllenhaal, plays a baker and tax anarchist targeted by the IRS.

The most striking feature of the film is its simplicity. There are no unnecessary diversions into side plots. There are none of the winks and nods that have ruined other comedies with disbelief-suspending premises. The characters are all fully realized when we meet them. There are no explanations offered: everything you need to know is on the screen. I’d almost forgotten how lovely good editing and a script that gives the audience some credit can be.

Director Marc Forster guides the film quietly, following in the footsteps of Finding Neverland’s gentle appeal, never overplaying the jokes or idiosyncrasies. There’s a touching moment when Will Farrell sings. The audience laughed, prepped by years of Marty Culp and Ron Burgundy’s jazz flute, but settled down as it became clear that Farrell was actually going to sing and it wasn’t meant to be funny.

The best way to cast stars is to leverage their history without relying on it. Unfortunately, to enjoy Tom Cruise in MI3, you have to have the springboard of Jerry McGuire to make him likeable and Mission Impossible to make him believable because MI3’s not going to cover either of those bases. On the other hand, when we see Bill Murray shilling for Santorti whiskey, we remember him selling Swill - but Lost in Translation doesn’t need that knowledge to succeed. Shopgirl is a pleasant surprise for Steve Martin fans because it’s such a far cry from wild and crazy guys and from the schlock of Cheaper by the Dozen. We’re so pleased he had it in him. Likewise, Stranger Than Fiction is the realization of Ferrel’s potential as glimpsed in the slightly out of the groove Anchorman. He’s not parodying his past, he’s extending into the future and, like Harold’s epiphany that he should live a better life in the face of death at the hands of his narrator, we are warmed to see someone doing better, improving his seemingly inevitable fate.

David Edelstein called Murray’s Lost in Translation, “Saturday Night Live meets Chekhov.” Stranger Than Fiction is Lost in Translation meets Old School.

We just saw Cars at the huge multiplex. There was a guy, about 30, wandering around in a full pirate gear. Plastic dagger, open shirt, 3/4-length pants with a rope belt and so on. He was waiting to see Pirates of the Carribean and, turns out, a not too shabby girlfriend.

I guess it’s like they say about women who date married men: they have a demonstrated ability to commit (need for divorce or extensive therapy be damned).

I am fed up with television. My parents would be so proud. They raised me on a strict diet of poor reception. We watched Julia Child and Monty Python and Sesame Street and the original Flash Gordon (or maybe that was just static) and that was it.

As a result, when I got my first television in college, I spent hours, days, months catching up on all the shows I had missed. I watched Mad About You and Lois & Clark and saw the first episode of Friends, back when it had good writers and the buddies weren’t tanned and taut with riches. I became conversant in the language of television. I had watched The Simpsons and Northern Exposure and I Love Lucy and I knew the names of all the actors on the new shows.

I slowed down for a few years before the advent of Tivo. Only The West Wing got my religious attention, but when Aaron Sorkin left, watching my pals in Washington became like talking to that friend who married that awful girl that turned him into a different person and then you finally stopped inviting him out to dinner because he kept saying “no” or he came and it just wasn’t the same. I tried to get attached to Alias, but I was just faking it: I was only watching for Michael Vartan. He should have been my French boyfriend who spoke perfect English and beat people up.

Then came Lost.

Lost is like Survivor: Bizarro Island. There are so many characters that if one starts to get on your nerves, you know they’ll focus on a different one next week. The same is true of the multiple plot lines. There’s always some revelation waiting in a flashback or via the introduction of some new character who’s been running around on that beach, nameless for two whole seasons. After a second season, Lost is still the most suspenseful thing on television.

Several characters were killed off this season, most of them suddenly and preceded by much internet speculation. I don’t miss most of them, but I wish they’d get around to Michael (Harold Perrineu), the excitable non-custodial parent of Walt, the boy who was kidnapped by the natives at the end of last season. Harold Perrineu has proved himself to be an awful, awful actor. His switch is set on high, come hell or high water (or both, on this island): there is no line too small that it doesn’t require Michael to get hysterical and shout. Harold and his one really angry red crayon. “Angry” is a cheap acting choice and its inappropriate application - say, when he’s trying to be persuasive or sneaky - makes the character seem deranged and the role of the concerned father entirely unsympathetic. To keep myself entertained while he’s on-screen - well, really to prevent myself from doing bodily harm to the television - I imagine a competent actor saying Michael’s lines right after he says them. Usually, I imagine Naveen Andrews, who plays Sayeed, the local Iraqi torturer. Even a torturer is sexy when he plays things close to the chest.

I’ve been optimistic that they’d kill Michael for some time now and spent most of this season pleased that he was off looking for Walt and, more imporantly, keeping his mouth shut. Any Wednesday night without Michael is a good Wednesday. Then he came back. Rats. Then I got my hopes up all over again when he shot Anna Lucia (Michele Rodriguez, she of the multiple drunk driving arrests). For some time before her demise, I’d been hoping her similarly one-note acting would be eliminated and presto! Gone with a single gunshot to the stomach. Maybe wishing does make it so and Michael would be next. I thought maybe I was magic.

No such luck. After last night’s finale, it’s clear he’ll be here into next season. And instead of just being annoying, he’s become weak, unprincipled and homicidal. Great. Now everyone can hate him. I guess the writers figured that since he’s already unwatchable, they might as well make him evil. Evil in that really weak, sniveling rat bastard kind of way, not in the “that’s almost impressive how good he is at being evil” way. Like Joe Pesci get-off-my-screen evil, not Gene Hackman/Ian McKellen hammy excellent evil.

What gets me is that they have the means. It’s not a sitcom. They’re on an island. They kill people all the time. No one cares. Take the law into your own hands. It’s TV carte blanche to eliminate the characters no one likes. Even better, why not kill off Michael at the end of every season? Here’s where the freaky magnetic island is your friend. Just bring him back and nail him again next year. It’d be a huge crowd pleaser. I would have been delighted if he’d been taken out last May and I promise I would have watched again this year if they’d taken him down again.

Anyway, I’m fed up with TV. I’ve deleted most of my Season Passes on Tivo. (Except for Supernanny, which is a reminder to me that maybe, with some British assistance and a high school education and a house not entirely devoid of furnishings or standards, I could be a parent someday.) I’m signing off for the summer. I’ll be back in the fall to see if they finally get around to killing Michael.

This is my first destination film festival and I expected two things. First, challenging films. Second, rough production quality. Neither proved to be true and the official opening night film, Marilyn Hotchkiss’ Ballroom Dancing and Charm School, was no exception. It prompted me to locate the single descriptive adjective I stuck with for the rest of the weekend: palatable. The plot follows a man as he copes with the death of his wife and re-starts his life. The man is played by Robert Carlyle and the re-start is played by Marisa Tomei.

I loved Robert Carlyle in The Full Monty. However, while it catapulted his career forward, it has forever undermined his credibility as a ballroom dancer. There is not a moment he spends on the dance floor when we do not expect him to disrobe. It’s a too bad for him, but there it is and it does this film no favors. His equally redundant sad sack widower/menial laborer status matches up with Tomei’s semi-abused (one unexplained black eye which we are meant to believe she received from her stepbrother), pouty but feisty re-dux of all her other movie roles. Don’t get me wrong: I have a soft spot for Tomei’s less than stellar movies of the last decade (The Paper, Only You), but the same pursed lips, the same hand gestures and the same New Jersey inflections eventually get old even for me.

Typecasting is an unfortunate fact for actors but it serves directors well. It’s that much less story they have to tell. Everyone in the audience knows that Harrison Ford = there’s a bomb/terrorist/booby-trap/simplistic happy ending on the plane/in the White House/under the temple/in the cinema. This is understandably frustrating for Ford and requires him to really reach (e.g. Frantic) and keep reaching, even when movies fall flat at the box office, until he re-trains the audience. In Marilyn Hotchkiss, the director was fortunate enough to get actors whose known images could stand in for a substantial or complex plot. It worked fine but I guarantee that within a month, I won’t be able to remember anything about the movie except that I saw it.

The secondary plot relied equally heavily on stereotypes. John Goodman, choosing to speak in an inexplicable near-falsetto due to abdominal damage sustained in a car accident, tells the backstory of his tenure at Marilyn Hotchkiss’ school in grainy flashbacks to a cleaner better time in America when little boys hated little girls, all the children got together after school to play gender-specific games, and all the mommies wore gloves and drove wide cars. It was like an ad for the AARP or the Republican Party and everyone in the wealthy, 50+ audience ate it up like sepia-tinted ice cream.

The director explained after the film that the flashbacks were pieces of a student film he did ages ago. While incorporating them into a feature-length film may have been unique and satisfying for him, it did no favors for the sentimental and under-developed film that was the result.

Last night was the pre-opening night of the Sonoma Film Festival and the only movie slated was Favela Rising. I can’t tell if it’s an endorsement to have your movie show all by itself or a slight to have it run before the festival’s even opened. Despite the Festival’s recommendation that we queue up an hour in advance due to the popularity of the documentary, we showed up about fifteen minutes before showtime and easily got seats in the half-empty theater. Seems the management had over-estimated the popularity of the subject matter - Rio’s slums and hard-driving Afro-Reggae music. Basic demographic analysis could have told them that: the average age of the passholders, as far as I can tell, is about fifty. Guns and drugs and rap don’t seem high on their list.

I’m probably more the target of the film - young, liberal, susceptible to drumbeats - but I didn’t love it either. Favela Rising is a documentary about Anderson Sa, a founder of the Afro Reggae movement in the crime and drug-infested slums, or favelas, of Rio de Janeiro. Following a retaliatory police massacre of twenty-one innocent people, including his brother, in the early 90’s Sa turned to non-violent protest via a drum, rap and dance movement he and his fellow reformers dubbed Afro Reggae. The movement has drawn some 2000 kids away from the drug trade and into its schools and performance groups. Compelling social upheaval subject matter. I wish they’d stuck with that.

I can’t tell if the filmmakers a.) didn’t have enough footage, b.) lacked imagination, or c.) suck at editing. Whichever it is, they did their film a disservice by focusing on Sa like he’s Jesus. Instead of painting a broader picture of Rio and its obvious and violent class issues, which would have leant substance to the picture, they follow Sa’s personal ups and downs more and more closely as the film goes on. Gradually, this anecdotal approach undermines the potency of the story.

I have no reason to disagree with their belief that Sa is a living saint, but it doesn’t make for a very interesting film: lots of mini climaxes, repeated usage of the same inspiring shots, and very little substantial information about the history, present and future prospects for the favelas and Rio. By the end, much as I admired Sa’s work, I felt manipulated and annoyed rather than galvanized. The filmmakers should take a lesson from other, more excellent documentaries (see review of Pursuit of Equality) and use the individuals’ stories in service of the bigger story, not vice versa.

I was going to start off by saying that you you’ve got to hand it to Steven Spielberg for yet again turning in a clean audience winner, but I’d like to preemptively take that back. You don’t have to hand it to him. Just about everyone already has at some point and, if one of them wasn’t you, you just go ahead and stick to your anti-cute-kid, anti-Semitic, anti-fun-loving guns. What I’m about to hand it to him for is War of the Worlds and its wall-to-wall action. The latest offering is a descendent of Jaws and Close Encounters of the Third Kind rather than an earnest sibling of The Terminal and Saving Private Ryan, so wire your jaw shut and get to the closest large-screen theater. While this movie has really no redeeming personal value, don’t wait to rent it if you’re going to see it. Its size is what it has to offer and its hyper-realistic effects are best experienced on as massive a screen as possible. In an hour and forty-nine minutes, the first fifteen are set-up - divorced, irresponsible machinist dad, Ray, gets resentful teen son and precocious ten-year-old daughter for the weekend at his dingy Bayonne, New Jersey home - and the rest is non-stop aliens, near escapes and exhaustion.

Thank God for that, come to think of it. After his recent small-screen performances, it’s hard to watch Tom Cruise engage with other human beings without thinking about what a total nut he’s turned out to be. (If you’ve been attending to some sort of blind-deaf emergency, you can find the outtakes succinctly highlighted at the aptly titled Tom Cruise Is Nuts.com .) Fortunately for the movie, he’s only allowed to smile that smile a couple of times at the beginning and spends the rest of the movie running from New Jersey to Boston to get the kids back to their mother (Miranda Otto, looking luminous) who’s remarried a wealthy yuppie several steps up the evolutionary ladder from Cruise’s Ray. Speaking of which, little sideways props go out to Spielberg for not making the new husband a jerk and playing the “we never should have gotten divorced/broken up/not gotten married and I’ve only just realized how much I love you when I’m about to die” card so common to action flicks (see Die Hard, Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow, Godzilla, etc.). In fact, the only personal development preoccupation here is the usual Spielberg flawed dad/kids are cool theme (see Catch Me If You Can, A.I., Indiana Jones 3, Hook, etc.) and even that isn’t given much room to roam in War of the Worlds.

In this movie as in all of his previous ones, the interpersonal track takes a backseat to the story. Forward movement, not restless but inexorable, is a Spielberg hallmark that sweeps his characters along with its good nature. Characters are written to imply who they are using highly accessible markers and smart (but not too smart) dialogue. We sympathize with them immediately: as archetypes, we can project onto them anyone we like and, as a result, we are immediately comfortable with these consistent, likable protagonists. They are us or our friends or our Uncle Mort except they have a clear plot and better lines. They (and we, as a consequence) face no challenges that cannot be met successfully with the bringing to bear of our good character. There are no pregnant silences, no in-depth conversations, no isolation that is not occupied with planning for this action. (I suspect in looking at his CV that the same is likely true of Spielberg himself. You have to go all the way back to 1978 to find a year in which he does not have either a producing or directing credit, due in no small part I’m sure to the marketability of this clean breed of technologically advanced filmmaking. He does not appear to be any more tortured than his characters’ aren’t.)

This appealing emotional brevity is as part of the Spielberg’s formula as the insistent action. The third spoke of the wheel is the spotless special effects. A stand-up comic recently noted that the next step in video game reality is to just go over to your friend’s house and hit him over the head with a sword. That’s where we’re at with War of the Worlds which presents a reality so real it circles back very close to feeling unreal. (Again here, Tom Cruise is not his ally, synthetic self-righteous Michael Jackson freak that he’s turning out to be, but how was Spielberg to know Cruise would saunter around the bend during the publicity tour?) With the exception of one strange scene where something seems to have gone very plastically wrong on some farmland covered with red roots, War of the Worlds is an impressive re-imagining of the original story and the details of the disastrous alien invasion are flawless.

Remember that time you met a celebrity or saw a tiger when you were a kid or you got to the Eiffel Tower for the first time and you thought, “Shit. She/he/it looks exactly the way she/he/it looks in the picture. Only more so. How odd!”? That’s what this movie is like: everything except the aliens (the neighborhoods, the people, the disaster scenes) is entirely, crystal-clear recognizable from your life or CNN. That context makes the aliens seem all the more real. That convergence of imagination and reality leaves my eyes crossed a bit, which is exactly what Spielberg intends, as did Orson Welles with his panic-inducing radio broadcast in 1938 (played as a newscast) and H.G. Wells with his book (written as if by a scientist). (What saves War of the Worlds from the fate of recent Scorcese?s dull as dirt accuracy fests is the aforementioned action.) It’s the Spielberg three-prong attack.

As A.O. Scott has pointed out, War of the Worlds and The Terminal are clearly Spielberg’s alternate responses to 9/11 and, in broad terms, that’s clear (most notably that death is represented by gray dust reminiscent of downtown Manhattan during those dark days of 2001). There are a couple of missed opportunities in that vein. First, there is no mention in Wells’ text of the alien ships having been buried and, in the course of the story, activated rather than just landing here. Spielberg adds this bit to the plot, seeming to imply that we have been building and living on top of our own destruction since human time began. It’s a clever aside, particularly in light of recent history which has cracked the American optimism that we are so happy and advanced that we are impervious to harm. Unfortunately, Spielberg takes this no further than a quick footnote in the script. An even more baffling example is Spielberg’s reluctance to fully commit to a point of view is his handling of the story’s ending. Without going into spoiling detail, the source of the aliens? eventual demise (yes, there is a demise - this is Spielberg) is sudden and unsatisfying in the book. In the movie, Spielberg has keep this perfunctory close wholly intact. I feel that he’s missed a golden opportunity to do better by both the story and his film, particularly in the modern world, shadowed by the threat bio-terrorism as Wells’ was not. I’m at risk of ruining the end, so I’ll leave it there. You’ll notice it when you see it. It’s that large, unattended Mac truck lurking right before the end credits.

Sometime in the last few years, I picked up the phrase, “It is what it is,” to describe situations in which the given factors ought to be accepted with a shrug. It is not intended as a dismissal of the subject but a dismissal of the tiring and irrational expectation that something unpredicted will happen. This attitude frees up a lot of time I used to spend on fruitless frustration that more perfect things did not happen. (“You ruined my sweater/forgot to call the cleaner/didn’t feed the dog? All right.”) Progress is generally glacially slow, no matter how sudden the realization of its necessity, so you may as well take pleasure in the details and their variety. The truly surprising and new is rare and there’s a real pleasure in knowing what you’ll get, like a favorite ice cream. So I say about War of the Worlds, “It is what it is. Enjoy it.” It’s clean Spielberg, another step in his progress which is safely, comfortably slow and continues to follow our own steady pace into the future. There’s a happy, Zen quality to these movies: even if it’s candy with a largely hollow center, it’s really, really high quality candy and, to borrow A.O. Scott’s take on another recent blockbuster, “Candy doesn’t have to have a point. That’s why it’s candy.”

I hate musicals. I have always have hated musicals. For a short period, I thought that perhaps musicals can’t get much done because the action keeps being interrupted by, well, music. Turns out the music is the point, but mostly I don’t like the music, so I just went back to hating them.

They do not make me want to dance or sing. They do not excite my sympathy for their wholesome heroines. They leave my sympathetic heart cold. The entire cast could be wiped out in a freak Oklahoma flood or slaughtered by a deranged butcher in the first act and I would feel only relief. I feel about music in the theater the way I feel about sleep: keep it to the absolute minimum required. Everything else is just dawdling.

Understandably, these feelings have limited the number of musicals I have seen. In fact, it had been so long since I had seen a musical that I had begun to doubt my historical distaste. Absence made me weak and the corrective smackdown was painful. The Phantom of the Opera is the worst musical I have ever seen. It was awful. It was horrendous. It was barely bearable. One more time: it is just an awful, awful musical. It is so awful that I am almost scared of musicals now.

Why did I go?

Reason: I heard it wasn’t that bad.
Reality: It was.

Reason: In every theater conservatory I attended, there was always one beefy, lion-haired guy who lived for that Lloyd Weber high tenor line. Having heard it so often and always out of context, I developed a dangerous curiosity about the plot. I assumed there must be more to it than just the wail.
Reality: There isn’t.

Reason: It was our anniversary and I was feeling generous.
Reality: Not anymore.

There is a German phrase, “Gott straft so vort!” It translates roughly to “God punishes immediately!” and is often used in an absurdly retributive sentence, as in the following situation:

You sneak up on your sibling. You hit him over the head with a board. Coincidentally, your beloved treehouse tumbles to the earth, crushing you beneath it. Your injured sibling says happily, “Gott straft so vort!”

Two hours and twenty minutes of the most mindnumbing mediocrity I’ve ever seen on the screen (including that appalling Kevin Costner vehicle Revenge) happened to me for abandoning my hard line on musicals.

What is so bad about it? For starters, the music is rotten and unbelievably, totally redundant, so it goes on and on and on. And then it starts all over again like a cheap, punishing music box. As if that weren’t bad enough, there is a total of about ten minutes of plot, which is also mindlessly redundant, so there’s nothing to distract you from the music. All in all, The Phantom of the Opera bears a striking resemblance to Meatloaf’s rock classic, “I Would Do Anything for Love.” If you thought this song was a.) wonderful, or b.) comprehensible, you should definitely go see this movie. For my part, I got out of bed at 1AM to hunt down that very track because I thought it was the only thing that could cleanse my brain of the whining music of the night that was stuck on repeat, like some halucinogenic bad dream that won’t end even after you’ve been fully punished for your illegal, hippie ways. “Fire with fire!” I thought, stumbling through My Music in the middle of the night. It did the trick. The music is gone from my mind. The terror of musicals remains.

Post script: The only remotely redeeming thing about the movie is Minnie Driver’s Italian diva. In fact, she is on-screen for most of the first fifteen minutes of the film which leads you to believe that perhaps the movie will be an entertaining spoof instead of the self-absorbed drivel that it turns out to be. Alas, even Minnie’s over-acting is no match for the massive banality that is the rest of the movie.

Post post script: The author would also like to add that she is fine with music on its own and has been a musician for the better part of her life.

Post post post script: The author would also like to note that she is fine with some music in the theater. It’s fine if used for manipulative plot support. Or interludes. Or opera. Well, some opera anyway.

Note: They do not demonstrate how to do all the cool things they do with their phones. This is not an instructional video.

Basic plot: Kim Basinger’s suburban mom is kidnapped for unknown reasons and manages to piece together a smashed phone in her prison sufficiently to dial one random number, surfer at large Chris Evan’s cell phone.

This is a strong movie. I liked it. This does not mean you should go see it. I say this because of the puzzled (best) and resentful (worst) responses I got after recommending another Jason Statham movie, The Transporter, a recommendation by which, incidentally, I still stand. So here you go, “I liked Cellular. Do not go see it.” (If, by chance, you see it with no reference to my non-recommendation or through some administrative error, let me know you liked it and I’ll be happy to say, “I f#$&#$ told you so!”)

Cellular is very good at what it is, which is really an unashamed B movie.* Cellular is not just comfortable with it’s B-ness, it’s settled onto the couch with a cold beer and some nachos. It has a limited number of characters, most of whom lack full names, and, importantly, a limited scope with which it is very comfortable. This unabashed embrace of a single, ridiculous plot line - like a bus (Speed) or gypsy vampire slayers (Van Helsing) - is the age-old marker of the true-blue B.

Historically, B movies were the ones that ran before the main feature and themselves featured low budgets and small-sweatered, big-breasted girls. Today, it’s harder to spot real B movies outside the horror genre (which are really more camp than B). Most of what we’d call B movies nowadays didn’t set out to be B movies. They’re failed blockbusters (think Waterworld) that were trying for so much (epic budget, epic reach) with so little (script, characters, plot) that they got tangled up like a kid in a lie. It’s also hard to spot real B’s because today’s B’s are pretty sleek (think Italian Job, Starship Troopers) and may contain one or several second-tier stars instead of rank unknowns. (Admittedly, Kim is an Oscar winner but who really thinks the Oscar’s worth anything since Gwyneth shut out Cate?)

Cellular is the best of another rare breed, the Phone Philm. Granted, the only other member of the category is the really embarrassing Phone Booth, but I am sure others will follow and for now, Cellular’s the hands down winner.** First things first, let’s get it out of the way and on the record that I am not a Kim Basinger fan. This does not mean I just hate hate hate her movies. I lost that argument a few years ago against Quentin Tarantino in reference to John Travolta’s movies: just because an actor is weak and pandering does not mean that s/he makes bad choices of material or necessarily ruins that material. (Well, Quentin didn’t say anything about pandering. That was me. But the point was his.) Second things second, Wm. Macy is in Cellular. His ubiquity is nearing Buscemi-like proportions, but he’s always welcome as far as I’m concerned. Third, despite the preponderance of button-pushing (no pun intended), the movie is rarely heavy-handed with its humor or references, any one of which it could have played too long. We all cringe sympathetically as the phone signal fades in stairwells and tunnels or when Ryan (Chris Evans) pulls up next to an obnoxious convertible or a pounding stereo, but the movie moves on quickly instead of beating a horse that’s already down. Fourth, let’s not forget that Jason Statham is the lead baddie, played with his flat-mouthed masculine charm. Fifth, I was impressed with the producers’ restraint in not actually plugging any one cell phone brand. (Although it’s got to be an American one with that crappy interface.) Sixth, and by no means last, Ryan appears to have actually seen some other movies, avoiding behavior that other movies happily include as if their characters lived in a media wasteland that doesn’t have Law & Order, with all its handy lessons, on cable 24 hours a day.

Overall, Cellular is very watchable and totally amusing. If I weren’t afraid of your non-B-loving wrath, I’d actually tell you all to go see it.

*A.O. Scott made reference to this in his review this week in the Times. I’m with him. Take a look.

**There are those who would say that my opinion of Phone Booth was skewed by being severely hungover and under-slept and watching it from about two feet away and at an 85-degree upward angle from the Aerobed. Forget it. It sucked. Rankly.

I survived this movie last week, viewed at about « its intended size in a tiny town far away from the destruction it wreaks on New York, whose major draw is, of course, as yet un-blown-up large, recognizable landmarks. Emmerich does leave the Statue of Liberty standing though, beacon of our evergreen relationship with France and our welcoming of immigrants from all nations. No, wait. Well, aren’t we all about blind optimism these days, unswerving belief in our ideals, however recklessly we endanger and, hell, violate them? Sure we are! Bring on the big freeze, baby! It’s just like bio-terrorism: with enough duct tape and plastic wrap, we can make it through anything!

But I digress. Back to destruction. I would venture, and let me know if I’m wrong here non-New Yorkers, that Emmerich may have relied too heavily on people’s knowledge of the city by centering it on the Public Library at Bryant Park. Also, what’s with the readily available books for burning? Did someone let Newt Gingrich out? It’s not that I object to burning books - which I mostly do but, come on, I’m not made of stone: Jake Gyllenhall is in danger! - but that anyone who’s been to the mother ship of the New York Public Library system knows that there aren’t actually any accessible books. I seriously doubt the encounter with Nietzsche’s work on an open shelf, although the to-hand tax code could be true. They have to line those rooms where you wait with something that won’t distract you from your purpose. Who hasn’t been led astray in a normal branch by “The Guide to Western African Traditional Earware” with all its naked women, while seeking out the more sober “Walden”?

As we exited, I said to my boyfriend, “What was the deal with the President hanging out on the phone? There’s no way they would let him be the last person evacuated. Who was he waiting for?” Rational Boyfriend replied, “That’s the thing you found implausible about the movie?” He has a point. Although, in my defense, years of rabid West Wing watching have taught me that the Secret Service are sexy and forceful when the President is in peril.

I’d like to also raise a question about tidal currents within the confines of Manhattan. It just seems really implausible to me that a huge Russian tanker would just drift straight up 5th Avenue. Particularly since 5th Avenue doesn’t start until halfway up Manhattan and there are some seriously large buildings between open sea and the library. I suppose it could have come in on a side street from the docks on the west side and made a sharp uptown left onto 5th, but that seems pretty unlikely. To ease to that convenient berth directly at the prime real estate intersection of 42nd St. would require a feat of navigation which I don’t think the inexplicably absent crew could pull off. Perhaps they died of aneurysms when contemplating the challenge. Perhaps there is some obscure ironic joke in there about Russia and mid-town traffic that I just missed. Maybe Emmerich hoped I would forgot about a punchline or plausibility in my excitement that there was available penicillin. Which I almost did, soft-hearted movie go-er that I am.

So enough arrogant detailing of my familiarity with the city, an unpleasant but apparently unavoidable byproduct of living there. Let me say that this movie is a four-years-of-frustration-surviving Democrat’s best-case scenario. How many liberals (read: environmentalists) have not dreamed that someday Dick Cheney would have to issue a worldwide mea culpa on the Weather Channel? (If you haven’t, it’s just because your imagination could not stretch that close to nirvana.) The vice president even looks like Cheney, is belligerent like Cheney and ignores advice like Cheney. (Emmerich’s President, on the other hand, listens to the climatologist, unlike Dubya whom one could well imagine already on his ranch in Texas and in no need of rescuing.) This was very satisfying. What was less satisfying was my mid-movie realization that the plot did not seem too far off my worst global warming fears. Rational Boyfriend’s comforting, “It’s just a movie!” to my distressed expression was surprisingly ineffective. I never realized that I do actually think that this is how it will go down. I am a radical environmental conspiracy theorist and I didn’t even know it. That’s like the deepest cover conspiracy there is.

Reading the New York Times Book Review the next morning, in which are reviewed four books on global warming, didn’t help. One of the books apparently suggests that recent sudden shifts in temperature could indicate an accelerated path to disastrous warming, although he sets the clock at 10 years rather than 10 minutes from when it all starts. There are also no mentions of instant freeze down drafts or Ian Holm’s fate. (The omission of insta-freeze does not adequately reassure me about that mastodon that apparently froze with food still in its mouth, like in an icy Pompeii. I think that one’s actually true and I remain concerned.) The whole thing is just downright frightening. Emmerich is no fool: he has enough science in there to keep you just beyond paranoid, with the “pshaw!” catching in your throat.

On political issues, my generalized “We’re ruining everything!” anxiety has been eased by Noam Chomsky, who, though always more critic than cheerleader, wisely notes that this is the best it’s ever been, despite everything that’s being done wrong. I try, when I think of it, to take the long view, the “everything balances out” perspective. I still don’t have the faintest idea how Republicans can think what they do with a straight face and a working mind, but I can buy it that we all even each other out somewhere close to the middle. But here, with environmental problems, there is a problem I’m not sure we can solve on our current path.