AVATAR – james cameron – 4.4 / 10

An awful lot has been made about James Cameron’s first film in twelve years being some kind of game changer that takes cinema to a new level or some such nonsense. To be sure, Avatar is visually very impressive both in its utilization of 3D and in its photorealistic environments that only ever existed in a computer mainframe. Unfortunately, being visually stunning is only enough to occupy the audience’s mind for half an hour or so. At that point there needs to be some kind of story or character development in order to sustain the audience’s interest for the remaining two hours, and Avatar provides none.

UP IN THE AIR – jason reitman – 3.9 / 10

Unlike most movie stars who really only play minor variations of a single character (Will Smith’s everyman good guy, Brad Pitt’s coolest guy in the room, Tom Cruise’s all American hero) George Clooney has a couple default modes. He’s either the witless idiot (O, Brother Where Art Thou?, Burn After Reading, The Men Who Stare at Goats) or the suave sophisticate who’d rob you blind and get thanked for the privilege (Ocean’s Eleven, Three Kings, Michael Clayton). Up in the Air sees him earning critical raves for doing a combination of the two. And to be sure, Clooney’s performance is at least half of the (very limited) appeal of this boring, completely obvious ode to normal workaday life. Unfortunately, that’s not enough to save what is, at bottom, a very tedious and rock solidly conservative piece of awards-baiting nonsense.

THE BLIND SIDE – john lee hancock – 1.5 / 10

If anything about film can be said to be dangerous it’s that a movie can be simultaneously both horribly offensive and skillfully made. John Lee Hancock’s latest is a case in point. If you’re not paying all that much attention, The Blind Side seems like an enjoyable, if somewhat hackneyed and clichéd, crowd-pleaser. But if you look a little closer, it becomes clear just how horrifyingly racist the film is.

NEW MOON – chris weitz - 1.9 / 10

The experience of watching the second installment in what’s been dubbed, rather grandiosely, The Twilight Saga, is akin to getting kicked in the brain: disorienting and painful. It’s disorienting because there’s just no reason that something like this should have earned the shrieking adoration of millions of people, and painful because nothing in it has been crafted with any tact, subtlety or skill.

HE'S JUST NOT THAT INTO YOU - ken kwapis - 0.1 / 10

Before even sitting down in the theater, I knew this was going to be bad. The signs were all there. Its release date had been pushed at least twice. The studio that made it sold it to another studio before distributing it (something you don't do if you think you have a decent product on your hands). And I'd seen the trailer so many times I could quote most of it (always a bad sign as it means they're trying to get everyone to see it opening day because they know word of mouth will be so awful that it'll soon kill the film). But even knowing it was going to be bad, I didn't expect it to be this bad, and outright offensive besides. He’s Just Not That Into You is one of the most offensive, most odious films I've ever seen, and certainly the most offensive film I've seen this past year (one that included cinematic gems such as Rachel Getting Married and Twilight).

PARANORMAL ACTIVITY – oren peli – 4.0 / 10

I’m not sure if the backlash against Oren Peli’s no budget horror film has already begun, but if it hasn’t, let me start it now. Far from the ‘scariest film ever made,’ Paranormal Activity is little more than long stretches of boring people talking about themselves punctuated by the occasional jump scare that could’ve been rigged up by any fifth grader with a decent imagination and a couple hours to kill.

RATATOUILLE - brad bird - 9.2 / 10

Creating art of any kind and then sending it out into the world to be evaluated, critiqued and judged is a singularly strange experience whether the ‘art’ in question is a book, a movie, a song, a meal or even a letter to the editor. Though the creator of this object-- whatever it may be-- didn’t necessarily create their work to satisfy other people, there’s no doubt that the reward of seeing an audience (even an audience of one) appreciating what you’ve created can be very great indeed. Just as, similarly, the disappointment of failing to connect to your audience can be crippling. Something that you’ve trained for years to do, thought and planned about for days on end, and worked tirelessly to perfect is then sent out into the world to be judged by people who may or may not even give your work their full attention. The artist knows that their opinion shouldn’t matter. And yet, pleasing them is validating in a way that nothing else in life ever really can be. And when that satisfied audience is a knowledgeable one-- a critic, say, or a friend whose opinion you value-- the satisfaction is that much sweeter. That singularly gratifying feeling is what Ratatouille, the story of a rat who becomes a gourmet chef, is really about; and it’s what provides the film’s deeply satisfying climax.

ALL THE REAL GIRLS – david gordon green – 8.6 / 10

It would, of course, be an oversimplification to say that there are only two kinds of film dramas. There are, however, two opposing, polar opposite kinds of dramas with everything else (more or less) falling somewhere in between. On the one side you have the kind of drama that attempts to mimic life as closely as possible. The characters, settings, structure and style are almost indistinguishable from that of a documentary. Scenes can be long and meandering or short and seemingly without purpose. The actors are often not very attractive (or, if they are attractive, they’re dressed in such a way as to de-emphasize that attractiveness). The lighting is often drab. The shots are almost uniformly handheld. And, much like in life, this sort of drama almost never has any real sense of closure. For lack of a better term, let’s refer to this sort of film as ‘realist.’

DISTRICT 9 – neill blomkamp – 7.5 / 10

Compared to the average summer blockbuster, G.I. Joe or Transformers for instance, District 9 is something of a masterpiece. It manages to be entertaining and engrossing while also having something on its mind. That’s a rare and somewhat special accomplishment that should be celebrated. Unfortunately, that doesn’t mean the film is actually a masterpiece.

The back story and plot of District 9 are actually rather basic. Three decades ago, an alien spacecraft entered our atmosphere and began hovering over Johannesburg. After months with no activity, the South Africans boarded the ship and found about a million aliens (whom they dubbed, rather derisively, ‘prawns’) alive but seemingly stranded. The aliens were moved to a makeshift camp outside Johannesburg, the titular district 9, where they’ve lived as outcasts and second class citizens for the past thirty years. As the film opens, district 9 is in such a state of lawlessness and disrepair that the government has decided to move the aliens into a newly constructed facility 200 miles away from any human population centers. The plot of the film concerns the difficulties encountered during this forced relocation.

That the film is set in a ghetto just outside the South African capital is a deliberate attempt to draw a parallel between the back story of this film and apartheid. And, indeed, the similarities between the treatment of the aliens at the hands of the humans and the treatment of the native African population by the ruling white Afrikaners during Apartheid is a rich one. It’s impossible to listen to the humans talking about the aliens as if they were unwelcome pests over images of the aliens’ terrible living conditions without drawing the shudder-inducing conclusion that we’ve done the same sort of thing to our fellow humans for almost all of our history. It’s a bold and thorny issue to raise in what’s basically just an action picture and is thus all the more effective because of it.

Wikus van der Merwe (a terrific Sharlto Copley, in his first film role) is the bureaucrat charged with relocating the aliens. And as he sets about evicting them from their pathetic hovels, District 9 can be hard to watch. Backed by a team of elite military troops who shoot to kill at the slightest provocation, Wikus forces the aliens to do whatever he wants with no explanation and complete disregard for the havoc he's introducing into their lives. In these sequences, the humans treat the aliens so inhumanely that the audience’s sympathies are firmly on the side of the rather grotesque looking ‘prawns.’ And as the film progresses and Wikus (rather predictably, I’m afraid) finds himself becoming more and more aligned with the aliens, the humans become the villains and the aliens the heroes.

This is a rather bold approach to what is essentially an alien invasion film. In the long history of such films (which dates back at least to the first Invasion of the Body Snatchers in 1956), you’d be hard pressed to find more than a few films (ones with any real budget anyway) that attempted to get their audience to root for the destruction of human life in order to preserve the lives of the aliens. That District 9 is able to so thoroughly accomplish this role reversal is a testament to how powerful the film can be.

Unfortunately, as solid as the film is thematically, its execution leaves something to be desired. The first ten or so minutes of District 9 sets the film up to be a sort of documentary from sometime in the future, after the events which are about to unfold have happened. The film begins with what appears to be outtakes from a cable news interview with Wikus as he prepares to begin the alien relocation program. This footage is intercut with other interviews of the various players in the coming drama talking about the events of the film as if they had already happened. In essence, these first minutes set the film up as a something of a video history of the fictional events we are about to see. Thus we get lots of shots of news camera footage, some video shot by surveillance cameras, footage Wikus’s team shot during the forced relocation and even what appears to be video taken by some random bystanders.

But then, out of absolutely nowhere, the style of the film suddenly changes. Director Neill Blomkamp (making his directorial debut) cuts away from all this ‘real’ footage to show a couple of the aliens talking to each other. The film continues in this way for a little while before switching back to the news, surveillance and other ‘found’ footage. But then, a few minutes later, Blomkamp cuts to back to the aliens. Then, a few scenes after that, we start to see Wikus outside of the footage shot by either a news crew or his team. We see him at home, at work, even in the bathroom.

It’s such a radical shift in point of view that it jars the viewer completely out of the movie. Why bother going through all the trouble of establishing the point of view of the film as that of a distant, removed bystander only to suddenly shift to the point of view of Wikus and his alien allies halfway through? Why set up the film to be a faux documentary only to break that format almost as soon as it’s been established? On top of that, the un-sourced footage is shot in the same handheld style as the sourced footage, which blurs the line between the points of view and makes it seem like Blomkamp was aware of what he was doing and trying to hide it so that the audience wouldn’t notice.

Eventually, as the film uses more and more narrative, un-sourced footage and less and less of the news and surveillance camera footage, the shift in point of view becomes slightly less jarring. But it’s always there, on the edges, nagging at you. And it left me wondering, more than once, why the audience was allowed to see what we were seeing. If the filmmakers weren’t going to follow the rules they themselves had established, why go to the trouble of establishing them in the first place?

If, however, you can get past the point of view problems in District 9, there are plenty of little grace notes in the film that play like a breath of fresh air in a genre that had lately become old and tired. Take, for instance, the fact that our human weapons can destroy the alien technology. So conditioned are we, from countless other alien invasion films like Independence Day or The Day the Earth Stood Still, to think that alien technology is impervious to our puny weaponry, that it comes as something of a shock when a human missile is able to severely cripple one of the alien spacecraft.

There’s also the matter of the human names that are given to the aliens. Though it goes largely uncommented upon by the characters in the film, the idea that we would force such mundane names upon these creatures calls to mind the way we forced slaves to adopt the surnames of their masters in the antebellum American south or the way the Australians forced the Aborigines to take on ‘normal’ English names in early twentieth century Australia.

Small moments like those add up to a rich, complex and detailed film that has an awful lot on its mind. That it manages to raise all those questions while also being a genuinely gripping action film is a testament to the filmmaking skill on display here. If they'd just dispensed with the distracting and convoluted faux documentary set up, District 9 might have been truly great without having to tack on the qualifying phrase ‘for an summer action film.’

INGLOURIOUS BASTERDS – quentin tarantino – 8.8 / 10

The further away from Pulp Fiction you get in Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre, the slower the pace of the films becomes. Jackie Brown, while still of a piece with his earlier criminal underworld films, has more than a few extended digressions. Kill Bill is so overstuffed with meandering subplots that it had to be split into two films to accommodate them (apparently he really needed to include that momentum killing final sequence in Part 2 where the Bride, after finally finding Bill, sits down with him for a half hour discussion of Superman and child rearing). And Death Proof spends its entire first act in a bar as a group of friends slowly get drunk while Eli Roth and Kurt Russell mug for the camera.

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER – marc webb – 5.5 / 10

Though it deserves some credit for being one of the funnier romantic comedies out there (although that really isn’t saying all that much) and for telling its story in an appealingly unconventional way, (500) Days of Summer ultimately fails because the relationship at the center of the film just isn’t worth rooting for. Perhaps this owes to the fact that well over half the film is spent either with the central couple already broken up or in the initial throes of their infatuation. And while it might be true that those are the moments a person is most likely to focus on after the relationship has ended, in the film it means that there’s an awful lot of cute banter and agonized heartbreak but precious little evidence that these two people worked well as a couple and deserve the audience’s rooting interest.

Much of the blame for that can be attributed to the fact that Summer (Zooey Deschanel) is a bit of a cipher. After ninety plus minutes of watching Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) obsess over her, the audience still has no idea who she really is. She likes The Smiths, wears quirky clothes, doesn’t particularly believe in love and is prone to all sorts of random behavior (sprinting through Ikea or shouting ‘penis’ at the top of her lungs in a crowded park, for instance). But she has no family, no friends, no ambition to speak of and seemingly no life outside of the moments she spends with Tom. She’s the type of character who only exists in movies (and maybe in the mind of a certain type of twenty-something writer) precisely because there’s nothing to her. She’s a fantasy, all surface and no substance.

If the film had bothered to delve into Summer’s character a little bit more, it might have been an interesting investigation into why this sort of relationship always ends in disaster; namely that the person we think we want to be with almost always turns out to be quite different from the type of person that can really make us happy. Unfortunately, the filmmakers seem to be as smitten with Summer as Tom is. They have no interest in fleshing her out into a real person, confident in the belief that the audience will be as in love with her as they are.

Maybe it’s because Zooey Deschanel has played this role countless times before (in everything from All the Real Girls to Elf to Yes Man) or maybe it’s because I’m a little too old to find that sort of flighty superficiality appealing, but I often found myself wondering what’s so great about this girl that Tom thinks his life is going to end if he can’t be with her. She’s cute and fun and all but she’s really not worth the complete meltdown that Tom suffers after they break up.

But for a certain type of guy at a certain time in his life, a girl like this is pretty much catnip. She likes the music he likes, is (seemingly) completely unself-conscious and spontaneous, sports a cute retro haircut, is just the slightest bit damaged, etc. In short, she fits almost exactly the blueprint this type of guy would draw up if he was designing his perfect girl. ‘She’s better than the girl of my dreams,’ Tom says at one point. But since even children know that a fantasy is, by definition, unattainable, there’s no reason to care about the fact that Summer and Tom’s relationship implodes. She even tells him flat out when they first get together that she isn’t looking for anything serious. So the guy has no one to blame but himself for his heartbreak. And I just don’t see how anyone can muster up even the slightest bit of empathy for a character who gets exactly what he should have known was coming and then spends days and weeks on end completely falling to pieces because of it.

Which is the film’s other major flaw: that Tom spends countless days wallowing in self-pity. We get it, man, having your heart broken sucks. But of the 500 days chronicled in the film, it seems that more than half of them involve Tom either drinking himself into a stupor, failing to show up for work or to do his job because he’s sad or talking some poor bystander’s ear off about how great Summer was. I just wanted someone to tell him to stop being such a little bitch and grow up already. Or just to slap him really really hard.

Eventually, of course, Tom does pull himself back together. He quits his shitty job writing greeting cards (with a big speech about how the whole industry is bullshit, which, for some reason, the film seems to believe is tremendously insightful), gets a job as an architect (what he really wanted to do before getting sidetracked into the greeting card gig) and meets cute a new girl that promises to fulfill all his (now more realistic) fantasies. So, you see, it was all worth it in the end. He may not have ended up with the girl he thought was The One but his life is that much better for it. Hooray.

Bullshit. Worse, it’s just as much bullshit as any big budget Hollywood romantic comedy you’d care to name. (500) Days of Summer (and no, the film doesn’t offer an explanation as to what the parentheses are doing in the title) is a smug, self-satisfied film made by filmmakers who seem to think they deserve some sort of special consideration because they’ve noticed how hollow and ridiculous the Hollywood romantic comedy is. Big fucking deal. Even the people who watch those movies know they’re absurd. (500) Days of Summer might declare itself to be the antidote to that sort of film but it ends up in more or less the exact same place. It just takes a different route to get there. And while that route is occasionally amusing, it certainly doesn’t elevate the film out of the rom-com ghetto.

PUBLIC ENEMIES – michael mann – 5.9 / 10

As great as some of his earlier films undoubtedly are, Michael Mann has of late become about as reliable for delivering solidly middlebrow entertainment as Tony Scott or Ron Howard. A lot of that owes to the devolution of his visual style. His images, once so immaculately composed and carefully choreographed (in films like Heat or The Last of the Mohicans), have become increasingly lackadaisical and haphazard. A straight line can be drawn from The Insider (Mann’s first film to heavily feature the handheld camerawork that has lately become his trademark) through Ali (his first foray into terrible looking digital photography) to Public Enemies (the unholy combination of those twin aesthetic disasters).

I should admit, right up front, that I have a strong distaste for both digital filmmaking and handheld camerawork in general. When applied to the right story and for the right reason, both of those techniques can work brilliantly (digital photography worked wonders for The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and the handheld aesthetic perfectly suited Quarantine) but I’m hard pressed to find a compelling reason as to why Public Enemies should look this bad. It looks like it was shot on a consumer level video camera from a couple years back by someone who had only recently figured out which end of the camera to point at the actors. There are all kinds of weird smearing effects whenever something moves quickly across the frame (pretty much every shot since the whole film features a shaky handheld style), white areas of the frame are routinely overexposed resulting in that weird (and distinctly digital) ‘popping,’ blues and greens just look wrong both for the time period and real life. And the overall effect is an off putting one that distances the audience from the events on screen simply by constantly making them aware of how terrible the film looks.

For some reason, period gangster films tend to be some of the best looking movies out there (Road to Perdition, Miller’s Crossing, The Godfather, etc.). And given Michael Mann’s reputation as a ruthless taskmaster director who carefully pores over every detail of his films, it’s tempting to think that the terrifically ugly look of Public Enemies was a deliberate artistic choice, a way to differentiate this film from others of its genre, as if Mann was attempting to force the audience to get some distance on the film in order to make them think more critically about it. But when you take into account that Mann has been moving in this aesthetic direction for a decade now, that scenario seems less likely. And anyway, even if the putrid color scheme and blown out lighting was on purpose, that can’t compensate for the fact that it’s still a very ugly film. The trade-off-- assuming there even is one-- just isn’t worth it.

At the heart of pretty much every Michael Mann film is a pair of male antagonists who dance around one another like champion prizefighters before finally destroying one another (either literally or figuratively). In Heat it was Robert De Niro’s Neil MacCauley against Al Pacino’s Vincent Hanna. In The Insider it was Russell Crowe’s Jeffrey Wigand against Pacino’s Lowell Bergman. In Collateral it was Tom Cruise’s Vincent against Jamie Foxx’s Max. And in Public Enemies it’s Johnny Depp’s John Dillinger against Christian Bale’s Melvin Purvis. But this time, unlike in those earlier films, Dillinger and Purvis just aren’t all that compelling. Some of that, I suppose, might owe to the fact that anyone who knows anything about Dillinger knows how this story ends. But even if Public Enemies wasn’t based on a true story, there’s really only one way the film could have ended. By the mid-1930s Dillinger had become an anachronism, a product of an age that no longer existed (as is made very clear in the many scenes featuring Frank Nitti and his Chicago syndicate who make more money in a day than Dillinger does in two months). Besides, this is a big Hollywood blockbuster; the bad guy isn’t going to win.

No, the problem isn’t that the ending is a foregone conclusion but rather that when it finally does come, no one in the audience cares what happens to either Dillinger or Purvis. Nothing that either one of these men has done over the course of the film’s bloated two and a half hour running time (and, in truth, it feels a lot longer than that) is all that interesting. Thinking back on it now, I’m hard pressed to remember anything that Purvis does other than to suck up to J. Edgar Hoover at a press conference. Of course, that might be at least partly due to the fact that Purvis is played by Christian Bale, one of the dullest actors around. But Johnny Depp’s Dillinger doesn’t fare much better. As likeable as Depp is in the role (though isn’t he always likeable?), at the end of the film Dillinger remains a frustrating enigma. His reasons for doing anything are completely inscrutable, which might have worked if the rest of the film (plot, action, etc.) had been compelling; but it isn’t. And so we’re left with a long, meditative film about a man we never really get to know despite having spent a lot of time with him.

Chief among the things about Dillinger that are never adequately explained is his relationship with Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard). He meets her while out in Chicago one night in 1933 and decides that he wants to spend as much of his (probably limited) remaining time as he can with her. But because he’s an outlaw and constantly on the run, the amount of time the two get to spend together ends up being pretty limited. And when Dillinger executes an elaborate plan to reunite them, it seems like he does so less because he wants to be with her and more because he wants to piss off the FBI. In the end, all their relationship does is provide a (likely fictional) coda to the film that attempts to shoehorn in some unearned pathos right at the very end. If I had to guess, I’d say that Mann, displeased with the relatively low key way in which Dillinger meets his end but unable to change it because it’s so well known, added the coda in an attempt to bring some emotional weight to the end of the film, which, if this were fiction, he would’ve put into some sort of massive shootout or back alley confrontation between the two antagonists.

The coda that ends the film is immediately followed by a title card that reveals that Melvin Purvis left the FBI a year later and eventually took his own life in 1960. The fact that he left the FBI shortly after taking down Dillinger fits neatly into the dominant theme of Mann’s work, that of two antagonists pitted against each who ultimately destroy one other. Dillinger, of course, dies at Purvis’s hand. And the implication of that title card is that without a man like Dillinger to hunt, Purvis found the work hollow and quit. But what to make of the last second (literally) reveal that he killed himself? It seems like a parting shot at the guy for no good reason. He doesn’t kill himself for almost thirty years. By 1960, the man’s circumstances might have changed dramatically. His wife and kids might have been killed in a car accident and he could have felt himself unable to deal with the grief. Or he might have had terminal cancer and killed himself so that he didn’t have to spend the last few months of his life in agonizing pain. There are any number of reasons Purvis might have killed himself and there’s a good chance it had nothing at all to do with what happens in this film. It’s borderline ridiculous that Mann would boil the rest of the man’s life down to those two simple facts; and it colors the audience’s impression of Purvis at the very last second. It’s as if Mann is saying, ‘Look, this guy killed himself. He wasn’t worthy of taking down Dillinger.’ And maybe worst of all, committing suicide doesn’t seem like something the Melvin Purvis we’ve seen over the last two and half hours would do. So either Mann hasn’t been faithful to the character of the real man or something changed in the intervening decades. Either way, it’s a clumsy and ungraceful way to end the film. It feels like a bit of a ‘fuck you’ to the character and to the audience. And it makes absolutely no sense as a post script to a film that is ostensibly about John Dillinger.

Make that a very boring film that is ostensibly about John Dillinger. Aside from the dreadful color palette, the downright confusing camerawork and the muddled character motivations, the fatal flaw of Public Enemies is that it’s boring. There are really only one or two moments in the whole two and half hours (the best of which is when Dillinger’s escape from an Indiana jail is momentarily stalled by a red light) that are in any way compelling. Even the massive action set-pieces-- the sort of thing Mann usually excels at-- have no life to them. They’re just a confused mess of loud gunfire and people yelling. There’s no sense of where anyone is at any one time or what’s actually happening from one minute to the next. And while the argument could be made that this is what it would it be like to actually live through something like that, it doesn’t change the fact that these scenes are just too confusing and headache-inducing to be engrossing in any way. And when you have a film centered around two characters who are never clearly defined, doing things that are never quite made clear, all filmed in a (deliberately?) off putting way, what you get is a muddled mess of a film.

TRANSFORMERS: REVENGE OF THE FALLEN – michael bay – 0.1 / 10

Is Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen the worst movie ever made? Probably not (though it definitely deserves to be part of the conversation). It is, however, profoundly unsatisfying, deeply stupid and painfully unfunny. It’s as if, when the script was being written, the filmmakers asked themselves, ‘What would be the most obvious, most stereotypical thing to do in this situation?’ and then proceeded to do exactly that. The film makes no sense whatsoever, has no compelling action scenes (none that I could follow for more than a couple seconds at a time, anyway), no believable characters, nothing at all at stake and overstays its welcome by at least half an hour. In other words, Michael Bay’s latest is a complete and total failure on every level.

ROAD TO PERDITION – sam mendes – 9.8 / 10

Given that it was shot by perhaps the greatest cinematographer in the history of the medium (Conrad Hall), it’s no surprise that Road to Perdition is among the best-looking films ever made. That alone would be enough to secure it a place in cinema history, but what makes this film truly remarkable is the assuredness of the direction (which is all the more amazing given that this is only Sam Mendes’s second directorial effort). Every scene-- indeed every shot-- is so perfectly composed, so flawlessly executed, that the film achieves a level of visual sophistication that prompted, in this viewer anyway, cautious use of the M-word after only one viewing ('masterpiece,' that is).

From the opening scenes (wherein Michael Sullivan Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) rides his bike through town, sells some newspapers and returns home), it’s clear that the viewer is in for something special. What appears to be, on the surface at least, a somewhat subdued title sequence has an ulterior motive. The real purpose of this sequence is to firmly entrench the audience in Michael’s point of view. This is his story. The audience sees what he sees and hears what he hears, experiencing the world as he does. That is, until he hides in the back of the family car so that he can tag along on one of his father’s late night ‘missions.’

In the subsequent scene at the warehouse, everything is shown from Michael’s point of view. The confrontation between Connor Rooney (Daniel Craig) and Finn McGovern is filmed just as Michael sees it, through a hole at the base of a wall. But once the shooting starts and Michael witnesses his father (Tom Hanks) shoot Finn’s henchmen, the perspective suddenly shifts. Seeing his father kill another man is such a profoundly traumatic event that it not only changes Michael’s life forever, it also alters the entire structure of the film. The effect of this shift in perspective, though subtle, heightens the emotional impact of that moment in a way that is only possible because, prior to that, the audience spent every minute of the film firmly in Michael’s point of view.

But, again, the effect is subtle, a trait shared with the rest of the film. Though it involves multiple murders and some very dark twists and turns, Road to Perdition is not a film that wears its emotions on its sleeve. There are no high-speed car chases or knockdown drag-out brawls. It’s a controlled, almost rigid film that relies on much less demonstrative means of eliciting an emotional response. But when every action, word and movement in the film means something, even the smallest gestures carry a lot of weight. Eventually, as these small moments begin to accumulate, the film earns a far greater emotional impact than would be achieved by a fistfight or a shouting match.

The stately precision of the film is only interrupted twice. In both instances, handheld cameras are employed to draw a parallel between the two father-son relationships at the center of the film. In the first such scene, John Rooney chastises and physically assaults his son Connor because he has disobeyed him. In the second scene, Mike Sullivan yells at his son Michael for not immediately doing as he says. Both scenes, obviously, are about the frustration a father feels when his son doesn’t do as he would like. But more than that, these scenes also mark a turning point in these two relationships. Although John Rooney begins the scene by berating Connor, he ends it by hugging him close. Without actually saying it, he’s acknowledging that, if forced to, he would choose Connor over Mike, a decision that ultimately costs him his life. In the other scene, Mike begins the confrontation by commanding Michael to listen to him from now on. But by the end of the scene, Mike has realized that there was much more to Michael’s disobedience than he thought. And from that point on, he makes his son a partner in their endeavors in a way that allows Michael to eventually become the man Mike wanted him to be. These two scenes are where the father-son relationships around which the plot turns are solidified. By using a handheld camera in both instances, Mendes links the scenes together, asking the viewer to compare and contrast them and, through those scenes, the central relationships themselves.

Clearly, Road to Perdition is a film with a lot on its mind. But the pleasure to be had in watching the film has as much to do with the beauty and intricacy of the images as it does with the thematic elements. Take, for instance, the way the film pings off of our collective memory of that period in America. Almost no one now living can personally attest to what life looked like in the early 1930s. A modern audience’s ideas of that period are refracted through the paintings of artists like Edward Hopper and the photographs of people like Weegee. And so Mendes composes shots that look like Hopper paintings and has one of his characters take photos akin to Weegee’s. Whether or not this accurately depicts the period is beside the point. It gets at what we think the period was like, making the film resonant more than it would if it were merely historically accurate.

Mendes also continuously uses the visual frame to comment upon the action and the relationships in the film. For instance, after Michael has witnessed his father kill three men at the warehouse, Mike tries to explain himself as best he can. The scene takes place in the car and is shot in such a way that the column of steel that divides the windshield from the passenger window draws a line directly between them. This is a subtle visual cue pointing out the split that has just formed in their relationship. Later in the film, after Mike has completed his quest for vengeance, he returns to the hotel where his son is waiting for him. During this shot, the frame is neatly divided in half with the entrance hall on one side and the bedroom on the other. On the left stands Mike, representing the life they used to have and the violence upon which that life was built. On the right sits Michael, representing a new start both to their relationship and their lives. By crossing from the left to the right of the frame, Mike is making the choice to finally leave the old life behind and embrace the new life.

Those sorts of directorial flourishes are present throughout the film, deepening and enhancing the viewing experience even if the audience is never consciously aware of them.

Another visual cue used throughout the film to great effect is the way water is equated with death. Established early on in a funeral at the Rooney house where the body is packed in melting ice, the symbol reappears every time a character is killed on screen. Connor murders Finn McGovern while Michael watches in the pouring rain. Mike shoots Tony Calvino in the back of his speakeasy while water drips from a leaky pipe overhead. Connor murders Peter and Annie while she is toweling him off after a bath. Mike shoots John Rooney and his henchmen in a torrential downpour and kills Connor Rooney as he sits in a bath. And Mike is himself killed as he watches his son play with a dog on the shore of Lake Michigan.

Mendes is hardly alone in using water as a metaphor for death (see also: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button). But what’s interesting about its use in Road to Perdition is that, by the end of the film, it has been repeated so many times that the audience has unconsciously come to associate water with death. Thus an overwhelming sense of foreboding accompanies the shot of Mike standing in his sister-in-law’s house watching the gently lapping waves on the shore of the lake. There’s nothing in the way this moment is filmed or in the music or even in the look on Mike’s face that would indicate anything bad is about to happen. And yet, because water has been present at every death in the film, the audience can’t help but feel afraid. The real trick of it is that they probably don’t even know why. Through careful and rigorous use of this metaphor, Mendes has provoked a genuine emotional reaction without having to resort to any of the more conventional methods filmmakers usually employ (ominous music, unbalanced compositions, etc.). And because of that, this moment catches the viewer off guard and unprepared, affecting them more than if he had used one of the more traditional methods.

Manipulation of the visual medium in such a complex and multi-faceted way marks Road to Perdition as a uniquely accomplished piece of filmmaking. That Mendes achieves that level of visual sophistication (on only his second outing as director, no less) while also maintaining a sense of forward momentum in the film is remarkable. Add to that Conrad Hall’s breathtaking cinematography and you have a film that deserves consideration for best film of the last decade. It’s the sort of film that alternately enthralls and impresses, both a masterpiece of the craft and a damn fine piece of entertainment. There are any number of films that do one or the other but precious few that manage both. And for that, seven years (and a dozen screenings) after that first viewing, Road to Perdition has unquestionably earned the use of the M-word.

THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 – tony scott – 2.9 / 10

Tony Scott’s films have a completely unique look, feel and sound, so much so that by this point in his career he could almost trademark his style: sickly green, yellow and red color palette, abrupt (and random) zooms, pans and changes in film speed and stock, and handheld camerawork featuring lots of close-ups. The shame of it is that this extremely distinctive style isn’t very appealing and is employed in the service of some of the most ardently middlebrow films of the last twenty years (e.g. Man on Fire, Déjà Vu, Domino, Enemy of the State, Days of Thunder, etc.). Scott’s remake of 1974’s The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is no different. If anything, it’s worse. There’s so much wrong with the film, in fact, that cataloguing its failings would probably take longer than actually watching the film.

First and foremost among the film’s many faults is the way it deals with its female characters. There are only four women with speaking roles in the entire film and one of them, the conductor of the subway train hijacked by John Travolta’s Ryder, is gone from the film before giving any indication as to her character. The other three (not counting a couple reporters who yell questions at the mayor) are all reprehensible.

The woman given the most screen time is the wife of Denzel Washington’s Walter Garber who’s given a whopping two scenes, both of which are on the phone (therefore disconnected from every other major character and plotline and thus feeling completely superfluous). She doesn’t care about anyone other than her husband, going so far as to say, when Garber tells her that he’s delivering the ransom money himself because otherwise Ryder will kill a hostage, ‘then someone has to die because you can’t go down there.’ At which point she then goes on and on about how they need milk and Garber should make sure to pick up a gallon before he comes home. She’s keeping him from getting in the helicopter to go save the day because she wants to talk about milk? I can’t imagine that Scott would intend for the audience to hate Denzel’s wife, but if that was the goal, mission accomplished. No wonder the film ends with Garber on his doorstep smiling to himself rather than following him inside to see his wife.

One of the other two female characters is a passenger on the train who, along with her young son, eventually becomes a hostage. She basically does nothing except cower in fear and fail to shield her son from what’s going on around him. That, of course, makes her a terrible mother, and makes me wonder whether or not Scott has kids himself, but it really isn’t reason to indict the film for anti-feminism, just stupidity.

It’s the third ‘major’ female character that really galls. She’s the teenage girlfriend of one of the hostages who, through a video chat that was left open when the gunmen took over the train, gets to watch most of the crisis unfold on her computer. During the occasional stolen moments of conversation between the two of them, this girl harangues her boyfriend into declaring his love for her. She’s so completely self-absorbed and clueless that she uses this most inopportune time to emotionally blackmail her douchebag boyfriend into a (probably false) declaration of love. It’s a moment that, I guess, is supposed to be funny but it’s so crass, tone deaf and insulting that it beggars belief.

Taken together these three characters paint a pretty clear picture of the filmmakers’ attitudes about women. At best, they seem to be saying, women are an annoying distraction and, at worst, they’re clueless, stupid, emotionally needy bitches who have to be placated so that they’ll shut up and leave the men alone.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 doesn’t treat the men of the NYPD much better. The first time they appear on screen, they can’t even park their cars outside the entrance to the subway station without hitting each other. Then, tasked with getting the $10 million ransom from Brooklyn to Midtown in half an hour, they decide to drive it rather than take a helicopter and proceed to crash into enough obstacles that the money is delayed and a hostage is killed as a result. And then, on top of that, one of the ESU snipers accidentally shoots one of the gunmen because a rat in the subway tunnel momentarily startles him. A rat in a New York City subway tunnel? Unheard of.

Eventually, after a lot of back and forth between two guys on microphones (Garber at the MTA headquarters and Ryder in the motorman’s cab of the hijacked train) that Scott heroically tries (and fails) to make interesting by zooming and panning his camera all over the damn place, a couple of supposedly interesting tidbits come to light. See, Garber used to be a bigwig at the MTA and is only working as a dispatcher because he’s under investigation for taking a bribe. (It’s okay, though, because the company that gave him the bribe, a Japanese train manufacturer, really did make the best trains and he was going to recommend the MTA buy them anyway, even if he wasn’t bribed.) And Ryder used to be a stockbroker (before bilking the city pension fund for millions and going to prison) who is using the dramatic stock market drop induced by his terrorist action to make a killing in gold futures (or something).

These pieces of information are supposed to both humanize the adversaries and piggyback on our recent financial troubles in a blatant grab for topicality, but all they really do is muddy the waters. I suppose there are circumstances in which taking a bribe might be acceptable (not that I can imagine any right now) but the one offered here severely taints Garber’s character to the point where the only reason to root for him is because he’s played by Denzel Washington. And the stuff about Ryder being a former stockbroker doesn’t jibe with the only other piece of information we know about him: that he met the rest of his team of gunmen in prison. In what world do white-collar criminals and murderers serve time in the same cellblock? For that matter, I can’t imagine white-collar criminals growing ridiculous facial hair (like Ryder’s Fu Manchu) or giving themselves neck tattoos either.

It should be no surprise by now, after almost three decades of mediocre movies, that the new Tony Scott film isn’t very good. What’s surprising is that there really isn’t anything about it that’s entertaining or interesting. Usually Scott’s films can be counted on to have a bunch of ridiculous stock characters, some borderline racist or misogynist undertones, an annoyingly in your face aesthetic and one or two decent action scenes. If you can get past the silliness of everything else, the action is usually enough to sustain at least one viewing. Not so in The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. The action scenes are rote and boring, offering few surprises and nothing that hasn’t been done at least a dozen times before. Add that to all of the other failings of the film and there's really no reason at all to see this one. In fact, if you’ve seen another Tony Scott film, you’ve really already seen this one. Save your money and go see Up again.

TAKEN – pierre morel – 4.3 / 10

Considering that it’s well plotted and features a rather compelling lead performance from Liam Neeson, and especially considering the film has such a large female following (giving the lie to the idea, expressed by many a studio and network executive, that women won’t watch movies about men), it’s a shame that Taken is so incredibly misogynistic. Rarely do you come across a mainstream film that hates women this much. It’s tempting to blame at least a little of that on cultural differences (director Pierre Morel and co-screenwriter Luc Besson are French) but there really is no excuse. Every single woman in the film is either a harpy, a cowering damsel in need of saving, a clueless airhead, a spoiled brat or a pawn to be used as leverage. There’s not one female character in the entire film who has more than one dimension or who matters to the story in any real way. Even Kim, the kidnapped daughter Neeson’s Bryan Mills is tearing up Paris to find, is little more than a MacGuffin. She’s the thing that makes the story go and nothing more.

More damning even than not featuring a single strong female character, is the fact that the filmmakers go out of their way to get the audience to dislike many of the women in the film. Bryan’s ex-wife, Lenore, for instance, takes Bryan to task for his hesitancy to let Kim go to Paris with her friend. But since the audience already knows that Kim is going to get kidnapped, and thus that Bryan’s fears are very warranted, it makes Lenore look like a stuck up, ignorant moron. And when Bryan eventually has to tell Lenore that Kim’s been taken, there’s a weird feeling along the lines of ‘serves the bitch right.’

The only other female character of any real note in the film (aside from Kim and Lenore) is Amanda, the friend with whom Kim goes to Paris. Amanda is little more than a stereotype of the stupid American tourist, obnoxious, annoying and anxious to get it on with a Frenchman because ‘they’re good in bed.’ When Bryan eventually finds her dead from an overdose in a rundown apartment complex, the audience’s reaction, if it has one at all, is not one of sadness or sorrow but a shrug, as if to say, ‘She sucked anyway.’

Despite being the object of our hero’s attention, Kim doesn’t fare much better. Played by the twenty-six-year-old Maggie Grace, Kim behaves more like a pre-teen than the seventeen-year-old she's supposed to be. Dressed in incredibly conservative and childish clothes (especially considering that she lives in Beverly Hills), Kim is constantly running everywhere, hopping up and down when she gets her way and declaring her love for her father and stepfather only after they give her gifts. It’s the sort of behavior one would call childish in a fourteen-year-old. I’d be terrified to let someone like that go to Europe unsupervised too.

That European trip is another example of where the film is inexplicably out of touch with reality. Though she tells Bryan that she’s just going to visit museums in Paris, Kim’s secret plan is to follow U2 around the continent for a couple weeks. U2? Really? What year is this, 1987? What teenager in 2009 is that into a bunch of past their prime rockstars from the 80s?

You could say I’m making too much out of what turns out to be a relatively minor plot point (especially considering that Kim and Amanda never actually make it to a single concert) but it’s indicative of the lazy writing all around. Any time one of the characters opens their mouths (as opposed to just bashing each other with their fists, in which case the film usually satisfies), anything that comes out is incredibly banal and nowhere close to how people actually speak. Take, for instance, an early scene where Bryan hangs out with his old CIA buddies. The point of the scene is to establish that Bryan used to be a CIA operative and that he gave it up so he could be closer to his daughter. If that last sentence was an actual line of dialogue, it would have sounded more natural than the clumsy way those two points are inserted into the conversation. And it only gets worse from there.

What then to make of the film’s massive popularity? The action sequences, while directed in that inexplicably popular, shaking-camera, no-sense-of-geography, impossible-to-tell-what’s-going-on sort of way, are effectively suspenseful and brutal. Liam Neeson’s performance is committed and compelling. And the actual plot of the film is pretty smart for a standard genre film. But none of that sufficiently explains why people like the film as much as they do.

I think there are a couple reasons for this. The first is that Neeson is a very unlikely actor for the role. He looks and acts just like any other average middle-aged guy. So it’s something of a thrill to see him being such a bad ass. And since the audience never sees what he was like back when he was in the CIA, they can almost imagine that this quest for his daughter has given him these abilities. After all, we’d all like to think that if we were in his shoes, we’d be capable of doing what he does. And since Neeson looks like an average joe, that feeds into the audience’s delusion just enough so that they get more of a kick out of the film than if, say, Bruce Willis was in the lead role.

The second reason I think the film has connected with audiences is that the steps Neeson takes on his quest to get his daughter back are smarter and more interesting than what you’d expect from a film like this. (Mills’s hiring of a translator to decipher the bugged conversations of a couple of Albanian gangsters is a particularly clever highlight.) Even stupid thrillers tend to be at least a little entertaining because, whatever their faults, they’re suspenseful and action packed. But the fact that Taken’s plot mechanics are smart, allows the audience to unapologetically enjoy the film. And that’s a crucial difference. Thrillers of this sort always have an audience (or else people like Luc Besson, responsible for the abhorrent Transporter films, wouldn’t have a career), but if you can trick people into thinking there’s more to the film than the standard thriller machinations, people turn out in droves. Even the cineastes, who love to abhor most films like this, can support it because it has the illusion of being intelligent.

Unfortunately, when you look a little closer at Taken, you find a film that’s a whole lot uglier than most others of its ilk. In fact, were it not for the effectively rendered thriller aspects, the film would have long since been vilified for its rampant misogyny and promptly forgotten. I guess it just goes to show you that a little bit of intelligence and a couple decent action scenes cover up a multitude of sins.

THE HANGOVER, LAND OF THE LOST & EASY VIRTUE

none of these films warrant spending more than a couple paragraphs on, so i've grouped my thoughts on them together

THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON – david fincher – 9.7 / 10

More than simply an investigation of what would happen if youth weren't wasted on the young (though it's certainly that as well), David Fincher's technical marvel of a film attempts to deconstruct what we fear about old age and death and what we celebrate about youth and life. We celebrate the promise of youth while simultaneously lamenting that it can't be properly appreciated until it’s been squandered. And we fear death because we have no idea what it holds in store for us until it’s too late to do anything about it.

BAND OF BROTHERS – 8.1 / 10

Every war has certain elements, plotlines and characters that are nearly universally depicted in the various films, books and television shows about that conflict. After a while, these specific traits begin to take hold of our collective consciousness such that the mere mention of a particular war evokes a certain set of images and characteristics for the audience whether or not they were alive during the time of that conflict. The Vietnam War, for instance, conjures images of draftees, soaked by unending rainstorms, out of their minds on hash, lost in an unforgiving jungle wilderness where the rules no longer apply. World War I evokes images of men huddled in the cold damp mud of the trenches forced to summon the courage to mount the walls and attack the enemy in a futile charge that is sure to take the lives of at least half their number for no discernible gain in territory.

World War II, of course, is no different. But what separates Band of Brothers from other depictions of WWII on film is not that it portrays the war in a way that’s all that different from what we’ve seen countless times before but rather that, because it’s based entirely on the recollections of men who were actually there and goes out of its way to be as historically accurate as possible, it breathes new life into some of the more hoary clichés of the World War II film. Even though we’ve seen the gung ho private hell bent on bringing a German Luger back to the States for his younger brother or the reluctant hero whose quiet strength is ideally suited to leading men into combat, Band of Brothers manages to evoke these clichés in a way that rings truer than most similar films, even ones lauded for their realism such as Saving Private Ryan.

Some of that, of course, is borrowed pathos. World War II so fundamentally shaped twentieth century American life that any audience sitting down to watch this miniseries brings with it at least a cursory understanding of why this war was fought and the toll it took both at home and abroad. For instance, the viewer knows, even if the soldiers don’t yet, that while they were landing at Normandy the Germans were busy trying to exterminate an entire race of people. The viewer knows that the eventual loss of life due to this war was staggeringly high, reaching well into the tens of millions. And that the toll this conflict took on anyone who lived through it, whether they fought in the war or not, was felt for years to come, such that it shaped the character of two generations of the population of the entire world and was the defining moment of the last century. With that sort of backdrop always present somewhere in the back of the audience’s mind, the events of the Band of Brothers miniseries take on an emotional weight that they almost certainly would not otherwise have.

That added pathos, together with the fact that the events depicted on screen are as close to real as they could possibly be (a fact that is cleverly evoked by having the men upon whom these characters were based interviewed at the beginning of each installment), creates in the audience the sense not that they’re watching some filmmaker’s idea of what the war was like but rather that they’re watching the actual war. Because of that, the characters and events of the film become real in way that no other war film can even come close to. The virtuoso D-Day sequence that opens Saving Private Ryan, for instance, might get as close to the experience of war as cinema is capable; but the emotional impact of that admittedly powerful sequence pales in comparison to watching two beloved characters blown in half by artillery fire seven episodes into Band of Brothers.

The emotional impact of the deaths and catastrophic injuries in Band of Brothers owes its weight to a number of factors. Knowing that these men were real and that this really happened is a big part of it. Having been with them through training and D-Day and countless skirmishes and night patrols is part of it. And listening to the men who actually knew and were friends with the soldiers who died is part of it as well. Taken together, these elements add up to an emotional impact far beyond what's usually possible in a war movie. To even attempt to conceive of what that must have been like to live through is almost impossible. And yet these men managed to continue to fight, to pick up and move on despite such debilitating loss.

It’s commonplace to call the soldiers of World War II heroes. Tom Brokaw wrote a book calling them The Greatest Generation, an appellation that has since entered common usage as a way of describing anyone over the age of eighty. Predictably, of course, they all shirk that label, saying instead that though they served in the company of heroes, they themselves were not. To me, the real heroism on display here is not that these were mostly uneducated men— boys, really— who knew little of the world or what was in store for them but chose to go anyway. That’s courageous, of course, but can also be chalked up to a sense of honor or duty, or even just plain naïveté. What I find heroic about these men is that they kept on going. Seeing what they saw on D-Day, they still managed to fight on through France and into Holland, where they suffered unimaginable loss during the long winter in Bastogne. And still they kept on and continued into Germany and then Austria. It’s hard not to imagine giving up and packing it in after even one of those experiences. Hell, even one single day of what they saw would be enough to make anyone want to head for home. But they didn’t. Surrounded and all but engulfed by pain and fear, they kept on.

If there’s one thing that stands out at the end of Band of Brothers it’s the immeasurable sense of loss hanging over these men. More than just the lost friends and fellow soldiers, more than just the loss of innocence, there’s the very real sense that, by the end of 1945, these men had lost something ineffable about being human that they would never quite be able to recover. Though obviously none of us can know what it was like for these men, it certainly appears that much of their idealism died on the battlefields of Europe. Seeing what they saw, the pain and death, the horrible torture one group of people inflicted upon another and the way that a whole country stood by and watched it happen, they lost their faith in mankind. With that faith gone, all they had was each other.

At the close of the tenth and last episode of the miniseries, a voiceover describes the lives of each of the surviving members of Easy Company after they returned home. To a one they lived simple, modest lives, lives that today, in our celebrity obsessed, everyone is special and important culture, might be looked down upon as being normal, ordinary and, well, boring. But maybe those men learned something on the beaches of Normandy and the forests of Bastogne that only the experience of war can teach. When death closes in all around you and is ever present just over the next hill, all you really have to hang on to are the relationships you have with those closest to you. Maybe what you do isn’t nearly as important as how you do it and who you do it with. Maybe that’s the lesson these men took away from the war. It might have cost them their innocence, their youth, their idealism and their faith in their fellow man, but it certainly gave them a clear idea of what was important. It’s a lesson probably unknowable to those who were never there, but the fact that Band of Brothers drives that point home is what elevates it above other films of its kind. There might be nothing in the miniseries we haven’t seen before, but nothing before it has made that point so clearly and so forcefully.

UP – pete docter – 8.3 / 10

The bar for a Pixar film is set pretty high-- perhaps unreasonably so-- but personally I’ve only really loved the Brad Bird entries in the Pixar catalog (The Incredibles and Ratatouille). Last year, I was particularly annoyed that the general consensus seemed to be that Wall-E was Pixar’s best film to date. Seeing as it had major problems in its last third, a completely predictable (not to mention poorly thought out) ending and a couple of action sequences that seemed more suited to something in a Dreamworks animation film, I couldn’t see how anyone could think it the best film Pixar had yet made.

Even though I only really enjoyed the first forty minutes or so of Wall-E, I was still heartened by the fact that Pixar didn’t seem to be resting on any particular formula or taking the easy way out and making more films about talking animals, toys, cars and other inanimate objects; something they could probably do for decades with great financial (and possibly even critical) success. Indeed, it almost seems as if they've purposefully decided to make films centered on topics and ideas that, on the surface, appear least likely to produce great films. Three years ago they made a film about a rat, possibly the most hated creature ever to get a starring role in a major film. They followed that with a story about the last inhabitant of a blighted earth, a robot without a voice. And now, with Up, they’ve made a film about a cantankerous old man biding his time on his porch as he waits to die.

And yet, somehow, Up turns out to be the funniest and possibly most moving Pixar film yet. And while it isn’t my personal favorite from the studio (that would be Ratatouille), it gets pretty close. Much of the emotional heft of the film owes to the incredible, wordless, ten-minute sequence that comes near the beginning of the film wherein we see young Carl and Ellie grow from young children into senior citizens, facing some serious (and very adult) problems along the way. Aside from the incredibly assured storytelling on display in this sequence, you also have to love the fact that the film doesn’t pander to the children in the audience. There’s no way, for instance, that a child of eight or nine would understand, from the quick shot we see here, that Carl and Ellie can’t have children. But rather than explain it with dialogue, the filmmakers (Pete Docter and co-director Bob Peterson) seem fine with the kids not getting it and seem to think it won’t impact their enjoyment of the film negatively. The level of confidence that choice displays is truly remarkable.

That moment is also, in a nutshell, the difference between a Pixar film and an animated film from one of its rivals (Dreamworks especially). Whereas in a film like Shrek or Kung Fu Panda, the stuff for adults is simply a random smattering of pop culture references, with Up the adults in the audience are experiencing the film in a whole different way than their kids. That difference in approach tells you everything you need to know about what sort of films Pixar is making (and, conversely, it also says a lot about what sort of films Dreamworks is making).

Whatever I might have thought of the ending of Wall-E, the first, mostly wordless half of the film works spectacularly well. It’s emotionally affecting, highly entertaining and remarkably assured. Aside from the aforementioned ten-minute wordless sequence at the start of Up, the best moment in the film is a similarly wordless sequence wherein Carl empties his house of all the worldly possessions acquired in his life with Ellie. It’s both a way of saying a last goodbye to his beloved wife and of finally choosing to begin the next phase of his life. In particular, the shot of their favorite chairs sitting side by side on the plateau just as they had sat for so many years in their living room is heartbreaking.

That the filmmakers at Pixar can achieve such poignancy without employing a single word of dialogue is extraordinary. And it’s become pretty clear after these last two movies (plus their last few short films (Lifted, Presto and Partly Cloudy) which have all been free of dialogue) that Pixar has a command of the visual medium that surpasses just about anything since sound first entered the picture in the late 1920s. That’s a tremendous achievement for any filmmaker but for a group who-- ostensibly at least-- make kids’ movies, it’s downright incredible. In fact, you could probably watch Up with the sound off and not miss out on any of the emotional impact of the film.

That’s not to say that the voice acting in Up is without merit. Indeed, the voices of the various dog characters are used to great comedic effect. In particular, Dug (voiced by co-director Bob Peterson who also voices Alpha) is given just the right mix of silliness and pathos that he stands out as one of the more memorable talking animals in a genre overrun with them. My personal favorite Dug moment comes right at the end when Carl and Russell (the stowaway on Carl’s floating house) are playing a game involving spotting different colored cars. Dug, color blind obviously, shouts out that he sees gray cars. It’s a moment that probably (though obviously I can’t say for sure) works for the kids in the audience just because Peterson’s deliver of the line is funny on its own. But it’s an added treat for the adults, one more way in which the filmmakers refuse to pander to their audience.

Up is not, however, without its problems. Perhaps owing to the fact that it’s more aggressively comedic than any film Pixar has yet produced, Up falters a little by telegraphing its jokes and repeating a few of them one time too many. Whereas with the dramatic elements the film is assured and nearly flawless, the comedic elements seem forced and occasionally labored. One such example is the bit where the dogs become distracted by the sight of a squirrel. Though it’s paid off pretty well in it’s final iteration, the joke becomes a little annoying after the second or third time it’s employed.

There’s also the clumsy way in which the film deals with its cartoonish, capital 'E' evil villain, especially since this is the first Pixar film that has resorted to such a stereotypical villain. There’s nothing redeemable about Charles Muntz and no sense of what might have made him the way he is (that the world didn’t believe his discoveries were real is not sufficient motivation for becoming a old Hollywood style, scenery chewing villain). He’s just a plot device to kick off the really nifty jungle chase sequence in the middle of the film and the elaborate airborne battle at the close of the film. And he’s dispatched in a rather bland and predictable way, almost as if he’s beside the point. And, really, I guess he is. The film isn’t about him. It’s Carl and Russell’s journey. Muntz is just there so that we can get some cool action. There’s nothing wrong with that, necessarily, but I’ve come to expect more from a Pixar film.

But comparing Up to other Pixar films is a little unfair. After all, The Incredibles, Ratatouille and the first half of Wall-E set the bar so high that a failure to clear it seems like something of a disappointment when the fact that Up even gets close to scaling those heights should be celebrated.

Besides the obvious jokes and stereotypically cartoony villain, perhaps what most keeps Up grounded where other Pixar films soared is the smallness of the story it has to tell. Up is the story of one man coming to terms with the death of his wife and finding his place in a world without her. And while that’s certainly a resonant story to tell (and one that's told with incredible grace and skill), it’s not exactly an earth-shatteringly important story. It’s a modest movie I guess is what I’m saying. There’s nothing wrong with that, of course. And the film tells its modest story extremely well. It’s really only in comparison to other Pixar films that Up falters. And while that’s incredibly unfair (after all, nobody judges Terminator Salvation on how it compares to The Dark Knight just because they were produced by the same studio), that’s just the way it is sometimes.

DRAG ME TO HELL - sam raimi - 3.5 / 10

It’s reassuring, in a way, that even after achieving massive success in mainstream action movies (the Spider-Man franchise) Sam Raimi is still capable of delivering the same sort of movie he used to make on a shoestring budget with a couple friends at a cabin in the woods. The director’s latest, Drag Me to Hell, is tonally and thematically very similar to his horror comedies from twenty years ago (Evil Dead and Army of Darkness). That said, I still didn’t enjoy Drag Me to Hell all that much. I guess I should have expected that since I really didn’t care for Evil Dead or Army of Darkness all that much either. But the one new element Raimi adds to Drag Me to Hell is the one that really turned me off to the film, and that’s the cringe-inducing comedy of the Ricky Gervais / Danny McBride / Will Ferrell school. And since I generally hate that sort of humor, it’s no surprise that I was pretty much repulsed by Drag Me to Hell.

THE JERK - carl reiner - 4.6 / 10

Comedy is one of those things that, for whatever reason, often just doesn’t age well. No one watches Charlie Chaplin films today and thinks they’re hilarious. Critics like them and film students respect them but I find it impossible to believe that either of those groups really thinks they’re all that funny. And you don’t have to go back nearly that far to find something that was once beloved but no longer makes anyone laugh. The TV show M*A*S*H, today known mostly as the signal for a whole generation of twenty- and thirty-somethings that it’s time for bed (because reruns aired every night at 10:00 when we were kids), was thought to be pretty outrageously hilarious in its day. But to almost anyone under the age of thirty-five, the show falls completely flat. For whatever reason (socio-political, cultural or just because the way stories are told on television has evolved), the show didn’t age well.

That’s not to say that no comedies age well. I still found Annie Hall hilarious the first time I saw it more than twenty-five years after it was first released. New and younger viewers discover the Monty Python films everyday and think them uproarious. But by and large comedy is measured in dog years. The pop culture references and in-jokes that litter even solid comedies like Role Models are going to be seem hopelessly dated in five or ten years. And though the film will still work for those of us who remember those jokes, to a younger generation they will be lost. And so our kids will look at us with amazement as we laugh our asses off at old South Park reruns (though I hold out hope they might still enjoy The Simpsons).

All that’s a long way of saying that despite its reputation as one of the best comedies of the past half century, The Jerk is pretty boring to a modern audience. This has less to do, I think, with the jokes in the film and more to do with the way in which the story is told. If it were made today, The Jerk would probably have employed a different structure and would have been a little less crudely produced. Those two things might add to the charm of the film for those who grew up with it, but for someone coming to the film now, it’s a fatal flaw.

The structure, in particular, is the film’s Achilles’ heel. It opens on Steve Martin’s Navin sleeping on the street outside a theater. The camera tracks over to him and he begins to tell his story, saying that he was once rich, powerful and famous but is now a bum. Then the story proper begins. But because the viewer knows Navin ends up penniless and sleeping on the street, there’s always a sense of waiting for the other shoe to drop. And because of that, a weird sort of tension is created in which the audience can’t fully enjoy what they’re seeing on the screen because they’re thinking about how this could lead to Navin’s downfall.

Whatever you might think of Forrest Gump (a film that seems to have borrowed quite heavily from the structure of The Jerk), the film only works because the framing story (the one where Forrest sits on the park bench and talks to strangers) takes place before the end of the main story. If Forrest had been telling his tale after having visited Jenny, found out she was dying and that her son was his, a lot of air would have been let out of the film. There would've been much less to hold the viewer’s interest and the film would certainly have been long forgotten by now (though I suppose you might think that would be a good thing).

The Jerk, of course, is primarily a comedy so aside from getting in the way of the humor, the clumsy structure really shouldn’t matter all that much. But because the comedic parts of the film have aged poorly and are no longer all that funny to a viewer who didn’t come of age during that period (or at least it’s not funny to this viewer anyway) all that’s left is the story. And what could have been a compelling tale is robbed of any emotional weight by the knowledge of how it’s going to end. Thus the film is pretty much a failure for a modern audience. It’s easy enough to see why audiences at the time thought it a classic, but comedy’s a very fickle thing. Here’s hoping that The Simpsons ages better.

ANGELS & DEMONS - ron howard - 2.2 / 10

Ron Howard has always been a competent filmmaker. And while he was never going to make a masterpiece, his films had an amiable quality that made them easy to watch and hard to hate. That was especially true of his earlier work like Splash, Gung Ho and The Paper. None of them were particularly good, exactly, but they were well made, well acted and pleasant enough. Not the kind of thing you’d rush out to see again or to tell your friends about, but not a bad way to spend a couple hours. There was never going to be anything controversial or provocative, nothing risqué or even all that challenging, but a Ron Howard film could always be counted on to be entertaining. In fact, that was sort of the trademark of a Ron Howard movie.

But that all changed when Howard hooked up with Akiva Goldsman in 2001. Goldsman, perhaps the least talented, most simplistic writer currently working in major studio movies, is the man responsible for destroying the old Batman franchise (having written Batman Forever and Batman & Robin), no mean feat considering Batman might be the world’s most popular and enduring fictional character. He’s never met a cliché he didn’t love and writes as if he has a screenwriting textbook next to his laptop at all times. The man has never written anything that wasn’t oversimplified, diagrammatic and just plain boring.

When Goldsman and Howard teamed up for A Beautiful Mind and were inexplicably rewarded with a fistful of Oscars, it solidified their creative partnership. Since then they’ve collaborated on The Da Vinci Code, Cinderella Man and now Angels & Demons, growing more formulaic and dull with each film. Where a pre-Goldsman Ron Howard movie could be counted on to be entertaining and pleasant, even occasionally affecting, a post-Goldsman Ron Howard movie can be counted on to be bombastic, boring and borderline insulting in its pandering to the lowest common denominator.

In the specific case of Angels & Demons, it means that every vital piece of information is repeated at least three times so that even the least attentive viewer can follow along (e.g. the fact that the bomb is set to go off at midnight is said at least four times by four different characters). It means that there are long, incredibly dull passages of exposition that make no sense in the context of the film but ensure that the less intelligent members of the audience know exactly what’s going on (e.g. Robert Langdon’s many long digressions about Vatican history to a bunch of Vatican employees who really shouldn’t need to be lectured by some Harvard professor). And it means that making sense falls a distant second behind looking and sounding cool.

It’s filmmaking by idiots for idiots is what I’m saying. And it’s downright insulting to anyone capable of following a plot more complicated than that of the average American Idol episode. And while that might lead to a box office bonanza (indeed, Howard’s collaborations with Goldsman have been his highest grossing movies), it also makes their films nearly impossible to sit through.

I could go on and on about the myriad issues I had with Angels & Demons, like why, for instance, when Langdon and a Vatican police officer are locked in a airless vault and suffocating to death it takes them minutes to figure out that maybe shooting the glass would be a good idea. Or, for that matter, how it’s even possible that two guys could use up all the oxygen in a massive room in just a couple minutes. Or why the power was shut down that long in the first place since a ten second power outage would have accomplished their goals just as easily. But once you start down that road you get sucked into a never-ending spiral of nonsense and idiocy; each instance of absurdity leads to another moment even more ridiculous and on and on. Nothing makes any sense and pointing out the exact ways in which it all fails to cohere would require more brainpower than was used to make the film in the first place so I won't bother.

Suffice it to say that Goldsman and Howard continue their unbroken streak of commercially successful, artistically bankrupt films. And know that if you pay good money to see Angels & Demons and you have more than a couple functioning brain cells, you’re going to be disappointed and extremely bored.

TERMINATOR SALVATION – mc g – 2.3 / 10

When you get right down to it, none of the Terminator films really make all that much sense. Why, for instance, if the machines could send three terminators back through time to kill Sarah and then John Connor, couldn’t they send a hundred? Why couldn’t they send a terminator every single day until they had a whole army of terminators? Why couldn’t they send a terminator further back in time to go after Sarah when she was still a little girl? For that matter, why couldn’t they send a terminator back to the 1800s to kill Sarah’s ancestors? Wouldn’t the technological advantage the terminator would have make them easy prey?

STAR TREK - j.j. abrams - 8.0 / 10

Describing a particular film as a rollercoaster thrill ride is about as cliché as it gets and usually the last refuge of the lazy critic, but that phrase is uniquely appropriate as a description of Star Trek in that the film is as fast moving, exciting, enjoyable, harmless and ultimately forgettable as any ride at Six Flags. To be sure, that’s no small accomplishment. I’m hard pressed to think of more than a handful of films that offer as much genuine enjoyment as this one. But like a rollercoaster ride that’s been enjoyed by thousands of theme park attendees without any real incident, the thrill of Star Trek is just in taking the ride, not in being asked to contemplate what any of it means.

And that’s a really good thing for the film because if you stop and think about what’s actually happening at any given moment, none of it makes any damn sense. For instance, is it really believable that Captain Pike (Bruce Greenwood, outstanding) is able to convince Jim Kirk (Chris Pine, appealingly arrogant) to enlist in Starfleet that easily after he’s spent his whole life running away from the institution that took his father? Does it make any sense that a stowaway on the Enterprise (Kirk) would be promoted to First Officer before having done anything to deserve it? Is there really no one on that massive ship more qualified? (The same could also be said for Uhura and Dr. McCoy who go from cadets to bridge officers in what has to be world record time.) Or, for that matter, what the hell is Winona Ryder doing in old age makeup playing Spock’s mom? Couldn’t they have found someone age appropriate to play the part?

Thankfully, however, it’s pretty hard to concentrate on these questions and inconsistencies while the film is unspooling. It’s only afterwards in thinking about it that they crop up. During the film, the terrific cast glosses over any holes by having so much damn fun flying a spaceship, teleporting into hostile environments, parachuting from outer space (another thing that I’m pretty sure is impossible) and knocking the crap out of each other. Their sense of wonder, adventure and excitement is so infectious that it’s impossible not to get caught up in it. There’s no guile, introspection or brooding. Everyone is just loving whatever it is they’re doing. From Chekov running down the halls to get to the teleportation room so he can rescue Kirk and Sulu to Scotty’s glee at seeing a fistfight on the bridge to Kirk’s amused grin pretty much all the time, it’s abundantly clear that everyone is on the adventure of their lives. And it’s pretty hard to hate on the film in the midst of that.

Similarly, this shared sense of glee between the audience and the characters is what made Iron Man work as well as it did (and earn as much money as it did). The film might be flawed (hell, it’s really flawed) but Tony Stark is having so much damn fun being Iron Man that the audience has fun too. With so many revered blockbusters of late (The Dark Knight, Superman Returns, etc.) making it seem like being a hero is a lot of work and inflicts some serious psychological damage, seeing the characters of Star Trek almost giddy at the prospect of saving the day is pretty remarkable and extremely satisfying. Just like a rollercoaster, there’s all the fun of actually doing something harrowing and death defying with none of the attendant danger or stress that would come with doing it for real.

That, of course, is also why the film falls short of real greatness (well, that and all the plot holes). There’s just no way that real people put in situations like these would behave the way these characters do. And because they wouldn’t, the film really doesn’t have all that much to say beyond simply entertaining its audience. But given how few would-be blockbusters accomplish even that, Star Trek is sort of remarkable.

If that seems like I’m damning the film with faint praise, perhaps that’s because I wasn’t quite as taken with it as I think I could have been had I known nothing about the Star Trek universe going in. There were a few too many nods to the original TV series and movies for my taste and they kept knocking me out of the film. Any time some tidbit of Trek lore was referenced (the Vulcan death grip, the guy in the red suit dying first, etc.), it momentarily broke the fourth wall and took me out of the film. And I’m not even that big a fan of the original series. I’ve only seen a handful of episodes of the show and only the first two (out of six) of the films. I imagine that if I’d seen them all this film might have been little more than a long string of inside jokes.

That being the case, I wonder if the film is actually less entertaining for hardcore Trekkies (or Trekkers or whatever they’re calling themselves these days). They might be pleased at having been kowtowed to, but having in-jokes constantly taking you out of the film is more annoying than anything else. I imagine they’ll also complain that even though the new film is a lot more visually impressive and emotionally thrilling than anything the original series and films were able to do, that misses the whole point of Star Trek. The point, at least as I understand it since I’m not much of a fan, is that the lack of pleasing aesthetics is the point. The show made its audience work to enjoy it. And though this turned off a lot of people, if you managed to stick with it, the reward was (supposedly) great.

I can’t really speak to that but I think rebooting Star Trek this way, as a fun, enjoyable ride, was the only way to make the series relevant again. The introspection and deeper meaning can came in the inevitable sequels. For now I’m content to marvel at the way in which J.J. Abrams and Co. (a group of people I honestly never thought would create anything of real merit) have reinvigorated an all but deceased franchise simply by making it fun. They made the world of Star Trek—a world that had, in the last decade or so, become all but synonymous with nerdy geekdom—a place that the average filmgoer who has never read a science fiction book in his life would want to visit. That alone is a remarkable feat. But that they did it with such unfettered joy makes Star Trek the blockbuster to beat this summer.