Unknown

PG-13 | 1 hr 49 mins | Thriller Movie
A man (Liam Neeson) wakens from a coma while on a business trip to Europe only to watch that some other man has taken his identity and stepped into his life.
Synopsis:
Dr. Martin Harris (Liam Neeson) wakes up after a car accident in Berlin to discover that his wife (January Jones) suddenly doesn't know him and another man (Aidan Quinn) has assumed his identity. Ignored by disbelieving authorities and hunted by mysterious assassins, he finds himself alone, tired, and on the run. Helped by an unlikely ally (Diane Kruger), Martin plunges rush into a deadly mystery that will force him to question his sanity, his identity, and just how far he's willing to go to uncover the truth.

Director: Jaume Collet-Serra
Starring: Liam Neeson, Diane Kruger, January Jones

Rango

Director: Gore Verbinski
Starring: Johnny Depp, Isla Fisher, Abigail Breslin, Alfred     Molina, Bill Nighy, Ray Winstone
Release Date: UK & US – 4th March
 
An unnamed chameleon (voiced by Johnny Depp) finds himself stranded in the Mojave Desert after his terrarium falls off his human family’s car.  Rather than try to find his way home (he’s not a dog), the chameleon desperately hunts for water and his search leads him to the Western-style town of Dirt.  Once there, his instincts as an actor/writer/director kick in and he decides to assume a new identity: Rango, meanest reptile in the west.  The gullible townsfolk believe him and after he accidentally defeats a hawk, he’s made sheriff by the Noah Cross-esque mayor (Ned Beatty).

Rango proudly wears its Chinatown inspiration on its sleeve.  The major conflict in the film is that Dirt is almost out of water, which functions not only as a refreshing beverage, but as the town’s currency.  Every Wednesday, the town lines up to do an intricate line dance in order to appease the mighty desert faucet, which is now only pumping mud. After the water reserve is stolen from the bank, Rango gathers up a possum posse and seeks to reclaim the reserve (neglecting to mention that he stupidly helped the supposed thieves tunnel their way into the vault).
Everything in Rango is done with a great deal of charm.  There’s plenty of slapstick and a little bit of bathroom humor, but I find these aspects far less grating when they’re coupled with a desire to be strange.  The script has no problem giving its characters SAT-level vocabulary or providing the love interest (Isla Fisher) with a malfunctioning defense mechanism.  Verbinski makes room for the broad comedy that everyone will enjoy and a bunch of movie references and wordplay jokes that only adults will get.

What’s wonderful about Rango is how it deftly balances the light, silly humor with the darker, more thoughtful aspects of the story.  There’s pathos to Rango’s story as he struggles to make his own identity and there’s smart commentary about the nature of authenticity against the backdrop of Hollywood’s facade of the west.  But then you’ll see a hawk inserting quarters into a vending machine or Rango quickly explaining that camouflaging is “an art not a science,” and the movie continues on at its brisk pace.  Only when it reaches the third act does the story begin to feel a bit drawn out and in need of some trimming.

However, the length isn’t too much of a problem because Verbinski has created such a delightful world.  All of the voice acting is terrific, but Depp in particular does tremendous work with his Rango voice and you can really hear him throwing himself into the performance.  The animation of the characters is equally outstanding.  The cast is comprised of southwestern fauna such as reptiles, amphibians (“Ain’t no shame in that.”), and rodents, and Verbinski doesn’t try to make them look cuddly.  He understands that giving them big, expressive eyes will make them relatable to the audience, and then he can let the animators do impressive work when it comes to how their skin shifts and moves.  And it’s all tied together with some gorgeous visuals, which should comes as no surprise when you consider that cinematographer Roger Deakins (True Grit) served as a visual consultant on the picture.

Megamind

With the voices of:
Megamind Will Ferrell
Roxanne Tina Fey
Hal/Titan Jonah Hill
Minion David Cross
Metro Man Brad Pitt

"Megamind" was the third 3-D movie I'd seen in a row, and as I struggled to free my glasses from their industrial-strength plastic envelope, I wasn't precisely looking forward to it. Why do 3-D glasses come so securely wrapped they seem like acts of hostility against the consumer? Once I freed my glasses and settled down, however, I was pleased to see a 3-D image that was quite acceptable. Too dim, as always, but the process was well-used and proves again that animation is incomparably more suited for 3-D than live action is.
I'd just been rewatching "Superman" (1978) and felt right at home with the opening of "Megamind," narrated by a bright blue alien over flashbacks to his infancy. Born on a distant planet, he's packed into a rocket ship and blasted off to Earth, just like the Man of Steel. En route, he meets his lifetime nemesis, a golden child who lands on Earth and in the lap of wealth. The blue child, alas, lands in a prison and is raised by hardened convicts.

As they grow up, these two super-beings are destined to play crucial roles in nearby Metro City, where they're named Megamind (voice of Will Ferrell) and Metro Man (Brad Pitt). We may remember that Superman was given his name by Lois Lane, and here the story of the two superbeings is covered by a TV reporter named Roxanne Ritchi (Tina Fey). Roxanne's cameraman, Hal (Jonah Hill, looking rather Jonah Hill-like), later morphs into yet a third super-being named Titan.

This set-up is bright and amusing, even if it does feel recycled from bits and pieces of such recent animated landmarks as "The Incredibles" with its superpowers and "Despicable Me" with its villain. "Megamind" even goes so far as naming Megamind's fishy sidekick "Minion" (David Cross), a nod to the Minions who serve the despicable Gru. I enjoyed Megamind's conclusion, after being bullied as a child, that if he can't get credit for doing anything good, he might as well become a villain.

It is a truth universally acknowledged that a hero requires a villain, and "Megamind" has some fun by depriving Megamind of Metro Man. Left without an opponent, he loses his zeal for evildoing, and actually clones Titan to cure his loneliness. All of this of course is accomplished with much slapstick and sensational action, in a population which consists entirely of super-beings, plus Roxanne, the prison warden and cheering thousands of anonymous humans.

Tina Fey does a spirited job with Roxanne, and again I was reminded of "Superman" and Margot Kidder's high-spirited, unafraid Lois Lane. This time Roxanne isn't smitten by anyone, which is just as well because these guys are aliens, after all.

"Megamind" is an amusing family entertainment and gains some energy from clever dialogue and the fun Will Ferrell has with his character. I like the way he pronounces "Metro City" like "metricity," for example. The 3-D is well done, if unnecessary. Nothing in the movie really benefits from it, and if you can find it in 2-D, that's the best choice. Save the surcharge and see those colors nice and bright.

Drive Angry 3D

John Milton Nicolas Cage
Piper Amber Heard
The Accountant William Fichtner
Jonah King Billy Burke
Webster David Morse
Frank Todd Farmer
Mona Christa Campbell
Candy Charlotte Ross
Cap Tom Atkins
Fat Lou Jack McGee

"Drive Angry 3D" opens with a muscle car racing across a burning bridge out of Hell, while we hear a famous 12-letter word used three or four times. So right away we know where we're at. Here is an exercise in deliberate vulgarity, gross excess, and the pornography of violence, not to forget garden variety pornography. You get your money's worth.
A movie review should determine what a movie hoped to achieve, and whether it succeeded. The ambition of "Drive Angry 3D" is to make a grind house B movie so jaw-droppingly excessive that even Quentin Tarantino might send flowers. It succeeds. I can't say I enjoyed it. But I can appreciate it. It offends every standard of taste except bad. But it is well made.

Of course it stars Nicolas Cage. Is there another actor who could or would have dared to sign on? Cage is a good actor in good movies, and an almost indispensable actor in bad ones. He can go over the top so effortlessly he rests up and makes lemonade for everybody. Here he plays a man named John Milton, a reference I fear will be lost on the film's target audience. Milton is hell-bent to rescue his baby granddaughter. A Satanic cult enslaved and murdered his daughter, and now plans to sacrifice the infant by the light of the full moon. This Milton cannot abide.

The cult is led by Jonah (Billy Burke), who is obeyed by slavish followers he seems to have recruited from porn movies and guests on Jerry Springer shows about redneck incest. Their idea of partying is a topless orgy around a fire in an abandoned prison yard, while swigging Jack Daniels and warming up for a midnight infanticide. Their ranks are swelled by the usual shaved-headed and tattooed fatsos. There must be a pool of Hollywood extras who play big, bald guys who can take three steps forward and glower into the camera.

Anyway, Milton's quest begins in a bar named Bull by the Balls, where he meets a barmaid named Piper (Amber Heard). After inconceivable violence, they link destinies. You've heard of girls attracted to the wrong kinds of guys? Nic Cage plays a guy here who, if he was a girl, Nic Cage would be afraid of. Piper inexplicably stays with Milton, despite many questions which are even better than she thinks. Heard makes a plucky heroine who, although Piper's sexy and Milton likes the ladies, doesn't fall into the usual abyss of "love interest" but slugs it out like a cage fighter.

On their trail is the enigmatic Accountant (William Fichtner). This seemingly spoiler supernatural figure is relentless in pursuit, yet moves with the speed of a plodding gumshoe when he's not at the wheel of a muscle car or, oh, say, a tank truck filled with liquid hydrogen. (The movie of course contains the official quota of Walking-Away-From-Fiery-Explosions-In-Slo-Mo Shots.) As Milton chases Jonah and the Accountant chases Milton, Jonah's followers chase Milton, which is a great convenience, allowing "Drive Angry 3D" to be more or less nothing but chase scenes, except for some interior gun battles and much portentous dialogue. (Cage brings an inimitable personal touch to "The bullet is still in there." Pause. "I can feel it.")

Gene Siskel drew the line at Children in Danger. As a father he disapproved of thrillers that exploited violent scenes involving kids. What would he have made of an extended sequence here where Jonah commands one of his followers to sacrifice an infant? He would have despised it, I believe. The only justification for it is that this entire movie is so broadly, grotesquely over the top that the baby is more of a prop than a human child. And "Drive Angry 3D" trusts its audience to put every principle of Western civilization on hold.

So my review is a compromise. I'm giving it two stars. That's halfway between three stars (well made) and one star (loathesome). Nic Cage once again provides the zeal and energy to wade through a violent morass. William Fichtner makes The Accountant so intriguing that, although all CPAs aren't from Hell, we know this one is. He has a nice twitchy reserve. Amber Heard and Billy Burke do everything that can possibly be done with their characters, and don't stop there.

Oh, and the 3D? For an extra charge you get to wear glasses that make it look like it was shot where the sun don't shine.

Hall Pass

Rick Owen Wilson
Fred Jason Sudeikis
Maggie Jenna Fischer
Grace Christina Applegate
Leigh Nicky Whelan
Coakley Richard Jenkin

I was just reading an article about the oddly prolonged adolescence of American males, especially those in the movies. There's a common fantasy where the guys get away from their wives and girlfriends, and escape to where they're free to guzzle beer, eat sloppily, belch, fart, leave pizza boxes on the floor, scratch their butts, watch sports on TV, and in many other ways become irresistible to hot chicks. When was the last time you saw a man under 30 in the movies who had a stable marriage, a job, children, and a life where he valued his wife above his buddies?
“Hall Pass” extends the 20s and 30s into the 40s, and imagines a world in which there are no grown-up men at all. We meet two pals named Rick and Fred (Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis) who are well married to Maggie and Grace (Jenna Fischer and Christina Applegate), and yet lust improbably after every nubile woman who strays into their target zone. Rick in particular is always being caught by his wife while checking out the passing parade.

It is perhaps hard-wired into men that their eyes should be constantly on the prowl. Maybe it's an evolutionary trait, and our species has developed it to encourage the sowing of human seed in many fields. Women, by contrast, have evolved to be sure their mates gaze in admiration at them alone and nobody else. There's a famous story by Irwin Shaw, “The Girls in Their Summer Dresses,” about an estranged couple who decide to make up. They go for a stroll down Fifth Avenue, but break up all over again because the man can't prevent his eyes from straying. He loves his mate — yes, he really does — but you see the girls are so pretty in their summer dresses.

Maggie and Grace eventually get fed up with the vagrant eyeballs of their husbands and decide to call their bluff. They issue weeklong “hall passes,” which are permission slips to allow both men seven days of unsupervised and guiltless sexual freedom. Maybe then they'll get desire out of their systems? Rick and Fred rejoice, and so do the members of their posse, because of course men when set free seek the protection of the pack. Any real man would hunt alone, the better to sneak up on his prey. A woman does not respond eagerly to flattery emanating from a booth jammed with guys at Fuddrucker's.

“Hall Pass” is by the Farrelly brothers, Bobby and Peter, who are in the unfortunate position of forever being judged against the impossible standard of their "There's Something About Mary" (1998). That remains the only movie where I literally, cross my heart, saw a man laugh so hard, he fell out of his chair. One of the essential qualities of “Mary” was the performance by Ben Stiller as a man with much dignity, easily offended. Stiller can evoke a kind of vulpine cunning that is funny when thwarted.

A problem with “Hall Pass,” I think, is that both Owen Wilson and Jason Sudeikis are affable, and the movie wants us to like them. It is often more useful for a comedy to have characters whose embarrassment we enjoy. I suspect we're expected to empathize with the lads here in their inept attempts to plunder the netherlands of steamy chicks.

The truest words in “Hall Pass” are spoken by Joy Behar, as a more experienced older woman who tells the two wives that their husbands, like all men, believe only marriage is preventing them from being irresistible to women. It is probably a good thing for the species that so many men believe they're irresistible, because so few are.

The plot of the movie is meh. It involves the lads and their posse being cycled through several unsuccessful and quasi-slapstick situations showing their cluelessness, immaturity and how women easily see straight through them. Meanwhile, the wives and their posses have a great time on a getaway retreat. Women seem to get along perfectly well when set free from men, but men seem uncomfortable without women. It probably all involves which gender has the greater need to be reassured.

I Am Number Four

John Alex Pettyfer
Henri Timothy Olyphant
Number 6 Teresa Palmer
Sarah Dianna Agron
Sam Callan McAuliffe

"I Am Number Four" is shameless and unnecessary. That's sad, when a movie casts aside all shame, demonstrates itself willing to rip off anything that might attract audiences, and nevertheless fails. What we have here is a witless attempt to merge the "Twilight" formula with the Michael Bay formula. It ends with sexy human teenagers involved in an endless special effects battle with sexy alien teenagers who look like humans, in a high school and on its football field.
Let's pause for a moment to consider this apocalyptic battle. It is all special effects. None of it is physically possible. It might as well be a cartoon; it's essentially CGI animation intercut with brief bursts of inane dialogue. Brief, because the global action market doesn't much care about dialogue, and besides, when people start talking about something you could run into the hazard of having actual characters in a plot. Minute after relentless minute, creatures both human and alien, who we care nothing about, wage war and occasionally disintegrate into clouds of tiny pixels for no particular reason.

I like science fiction. The opening shot of "I Am Number Four" holds promise, as John (Alex Pettyfer), the narrator, explains that he is a Mogadorian, no doubt from a planet named Mogador. Specifically, he is Mogadorian No. 4. Don't expect me to explain the Mogadorian numbering system. He is hiding out on planet Earth and doing everything possible to disguise himself as a box-office attraction like Edward Cullen. They have already killed Nos. 1, 2 and 3.

Consider. The "Twilight" movies were about a handsome and sexy teenager who exerted a powerful attraction upon a virginal young girl, and yet held himself aloof because he was a vampire. Here John is a handsome and sexy teenager who is technically unavailable because he is an alien, although it appears that Mogador may luckily have evolved teenager boys indistinguishable from humans to such as Sarah (Dianna Agron).

John has been on the lam around America to remain in hiding from those who would kill him, and is accompanied by his fellow Mogadorian, Henri (Timothy Olyphant), who poses as his father and cautions him that his real father didn't die only to see John marry an Earth girl. Whether John has the option of returning to Mogador and settling down with a nice Mogadoress to raise Mogadorlings, I am not certain.

The high school elements in the plot revolve around John's popularity in some areas (he's an ace on a Jet-Ski) and non-conformity in others (his palms function like high-powered searchlights). He is also free of the ordinary constraints of gravity and can leap for dozens of yards and even fly. What this means is that the climactic battle scene can take place largely in the air, and Harry Potter's Quidditch games join the honor roll of the plundered.

There is no doubt a degree of identification available for the primary audience of "I Am Number Four." Many teenage girls have perhaps imagined themselves in love with a handsome hunk with tousled blond hair, a three-day stubble, incredible athletic abilities and hands that glow in the dark. That he is Not From Around Here makes him all the more attractive.

In the film, we see native Mogadorians, whose faces are deeply scarred with gill-like extrusions. I am not completely sure if this is how John really looks and he has somehow morphed into teenager form, or if he was forced to flee Mogador because he looked like an alien Edward Cullen. I'm sure this is all spelled out in the movie. Sometimes I find it so very, very hard to care.

Now imagine "I Am Number Four" as a "novelization." There would be the setup, a little dialogue, and then pages and pages of violent action: John leaped 100 yards into the air and struck him with a deadly ray! An enemy fighter disintegrated into an ashy grey cloud of pixels! Number 6, her hair flowing in slow motion, whirled around and kicked the Mogadorian Commander! "Look out!" John shouted! "Behind you!" cried Sarah.

This would quickly grow old. Why audiences enjoy watching protracted sequences of senseless action mystifies me, but they do. There is no strategic or spatial way in which the battle in "I Am Number Four" makes any sense. It is movement and conflict edited together in incomprehensible chaos.

Where is Mogador? Why did nine of its citizens flee to Earth? How did they do so? How is it they breathe our air, eat our food and make such expert use of our grooming products? Why didn't the other Mogadorians say to hell with it and leave them on Earth? What is a Mogadorian life span? Given what we know about the time and distance involved in space travel, are these the same nine individuals who fled Mogador, or their descendants after many generations in an interstellar ark? What's the story on those spotlights in their hands?

In all modesty, I think my questions are more entertaining than this movie.

Justin Bieber: Never Say Never Review

Pop sensation Justin Bieber’s first single hit the radio waves on May 18th, 2009. 20 months later, a documentary of his 16-year-old life hit theaters in 3D under the title Justin Bieber: Never Say Never. While it succeeds as a concert film, it struggles to be the uplifting documentary that was promised.
A documentary is only as entertaining as its main subject – luckily for Never Say Never, the young performer has every bit of charisma and style a boy his age can possess. For this reason, Never Say Never is watchable, but still lacks any real value as a film other than a money-making machine for Paramount Pictures. This is simply Hollywood implementing every strategy in the books to make big bucks on a low cost product.

Justin Bieber’s story is inspiring enough in an age where anyone can become a star thanks to the power of the Internet. Unfortunately, it is only as interesting as a typical 60-minute VH1 Behind The Music episode. Justin Bieber is not a misunderstood superstar. He has avoided controversy and maintained a very positive public image. The film presents this and repeatedly shouts, “Pay attention to this kid!” There is not a single negative connotation with the name Justin Bieber. So far Bieber has managed to stay out of the negative limelight, and hopefully he doesn’t end up going down the same road as Lindsey Lohan, Britney Spears and other young music superstars.

However that is also where Never Say Never falls apart: It is perfectly acceptable as an early recap of Bieber’s rise to stardom, but his life story has nothing to offer dramatically to sustain a 105-minute documentary beyond his meteoric rise in popularity. Whenever he is on camera, young girls in the theater swoon and react, but eventually those reactions tapered off. By the halfway mark of the film, those same girls were only reacting to the concert footage – singing along to his catchy tunes and even dancing in the aisles. The actual documentation of Bieber’s life is plentiful – he’s been on camera since the moment he touched a drum set, but the documentary offered little to no drama via way of any conflict – and this is why there’s really not much point to this film at all.
The trailers promote a movie that will inspire others to go out and pursue their destiny, but the actual movie is a 3D love letter to fans of Justin Bieber. Never Say Never doesn’t try hard enough to send a positive message to the youth watching the movie. While at times it shows off a child who developed his own talents and inspired everyone around him to join him on the unlikely journey to fame, and it shows that positive influences and faith can drive anybody to success – at every opportunity it has to convince us he is more than what he seems, it cuts to a concert performance and the fans just start singing along again.
Over half of the movie is spent watching fans cry and overreact to Bieber. We get it – young girls love him. Why does the documentary care so much about showing the fans instead of actually telling us a story we don’t know? The film misses out on the true power of documentary storytelling. In fact, one could argue the movie made a joke out of Bieber’s fans by showing them as rabid sheep to their Little Bo Peep. Documentaries can be powerful, sending us to places we could never go on our own. While Never Say Never shows us a small part of the behind-the-scenes life of this superstar, it does not go any further than a short segment on VH1 or MTV could do in a quarter of the time.

Many have praised the cinematography of Never Say Never. While the images are slick and the shallow depth of field makes for nice imagery, the cinematography is another one of the film’s many hindrances. It makes no sense to call the imagery great when much of it includes either roving crowd cameras showing girls dancing and crying or standard definition home video footage. The only real utilization of 3D in the documentary was the concert footage, and that was arguably the best cinematography of the entire film.
Bieber had a blast playing with the 3D component, tossing his hat at the camera and reaching out to the audience and camera in the classic pop star dance move we’ve seen for decades. It’s hard to look back on the film and understand why it cost more than a regular ticket – roughly 25% of Never Say Never was actually in 3D. The most memorable moment of the entire film (which was shot in 3D) involves Bieber and friends pulling off Jackass-style stunts during a test session that probably was never even meant to be in the film in the first place.

With all its flaws, Never Say Never is not without entertainment value. As a concert movie, it is a rousing success. The coverage of his extensive tour leading up to the Madison Square Garden performance is worth watching, but it offers nothing as a narrative production. It has little value other than to show Bieber’s charisma and likability – and this is not enough to carry a theatrical documentary. This is why it’s important to let a star form in his or her entirety before reflecting on their existence – a la Michael Jackson’s This Is It.
If you enjoy Bieber’s music, or simply want to watch something light-hearted and fun, Never Say Never is probably worth your money. But if you want something that moves you or tells you a story truly worth telling, you won’t find it here. It is rare that a movie presents such an entertaining lead character and offers so little to the audience.
Sometimes we just have to accept a movie for what it is – an easy buck for the studio.

Sanctum

Josh Rhys Wakefield
J.D. Christopher Baker
Judes Allison Cratchley
Frank Richard Roxburgh
Carl Ioan Gruffudd
Victoria Alice Parkinson
Crazy George Dan Wyllie

The 3-D action-thriller Sanctum, from executive producer James Cameron, follows a team of underwater cave divers on a treacherous expedition to the largest, most beautiful and least accessible cave system on Earth.  When a tropical storm forces them deep into the caverns, they must fight raging water, deadly terrain and creeping panic as they search for an unknown escape route to the sea.
Master diver Frank McGuire (Richard Roxburgh) has explored the South Pacific’s Esa-ala Caves for months.  But when his exit is cut off in a flash flood, Frank’s team—including 17-year-old son Josh (Rhys Wakefield) and financier Carl Hurley (Ioan Gruffudd)—are forced to radically alter plans.  With dwindling supplies, the crew must navigate an underwater labyrinth to make it out.  Soon, they are confronted with the unavoidable question: Can they survive, or will they be trapped forever?
Shot on location off the Gold Coast in Queensland, Australia, Sanctum employs 3-D photography techniques Cameron developed to lens Avatar.  Designed to operate in extreme environments, the technology used to shoot the action-thriller will bring audiences on a breathless journey across plunging cliffs and into the furthest reaches of our subterranean world.

Gnomeo & Juliet in 3D

Gnomeo is a retelling of the classic Shakespeare tragedy of forbidden love, dueling sides and a lawn mower from hell.   Gnomeo is a Blue garden gnome and his natural born enemies are the Red’s, although these two sides are separated by their homeowner’s fences, they still live a very frail neutrality line that is tested constantly by both sides.  When Gnomeo’s best friend is cut down in a fight, he ventures out and finds the adventurous Red Juliet who has escaped the bounds of her yard to retrieve an elusive flower.  Both being disguised as ninja’s, neither knows which color tribe the other belongs to.  With gnome color not a question, they’re kismet is given a chance to form.  Sparks fly for the doomed lovers and from that comes ancient grudge and ancient mutiny (is that Shakespeare’s?).

Gnomeo, voiced by James McAvoy (The Last King Of Scotland), is really a cool and loveable character.  Noble, self-sacrificing and when viewed through the resplendent detail of 3D, is quite the handsome little garden gnome.  I’ve always been amazed how foreign born actors can switch their accents on and off consistently.  Having seen (and heard) him as so many English speaking characters it almost seems like greater acting even though he is speaking natively.   Filling out the cast are just a great display of Hollywood and show biz talent whose voices are just as powerful even when sight unseen.  Emily Blunt (Devil Wears Prada), Jason Statham (The Transporter), Michael Caine (Batman Begins), Maggie Smith (Harry Potter films), and even Ozzy Osbourne’s voices are on display.  Hulk Hogan (Rocky III) steals the show as the outrageously funny voice-over in an infomercial for the Terrafirminator!; a monstrous lawnmower integrated with every lawn killing device known to man, coupled with artificial intelligence, and packing 75% more horsepower than you’ll ever need!

Its whimsical at times, endearing, and when you think about the supposed world of true-to-life garden gnomes, surprisingly imaginative.  The screenwriter Kelly Asbury (Beauty & The Beast) takes great poetic license with Shakespeare’s original material.  The film almost serves as a kiddie ‘Cliff’s Notes’ to the classic.  It doesn’t end in suicide like the original, but it does do a great job of bringing the macabre of death from the original story into the film.  I like how they give you the idea that gnomes can’t be seen moving around by humans, so when they venture beyond their own backyards, into our world or their owners are looming - they freeze.  Interestingly, they never explain which one drives their sudden stop in motion.  Is it an ancient system that just freezes them when we’re near, or can they choose to not turn to stone?  Either way, the attention to detail in these gnomes and the film is truly overwhelming.  Check out the moss streaks on the various garden pieces that don’t move.  Even the detail within the gnomes faces is crisp and vivid.   The animators do a striking job of detailing them down to pore, yet they still look as though they’re completely made of stone.

Tron: Legacy

Kevin / Clu Jeff Bridges
Sam Garrett Hedlund
Quorra Olivia Wilde
Alan / Tron Bruce Boxleitner
Jarvis James Frain
Castor / Zuse Michael Sheen

To the sad story of a father who was trapped inside a snowman for the winter ("Jack Frost"), we must now add "Tron: Legacy," where the father has been trapped inside a software program for 20 years. Yes, young Sam Flynn has grown up an orphan because his dad was seduced and abducted by a video game. Now a call comes for the young hero to join his old dad in throwing virtual Frisbees at the evil programs threatening that digital world.
This is a movie well beyond the possibility of logical explanation. Since the Tron universe exists entirely within chips, don't bother yourself about where the physical body of Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) has been for the last two decades; it must surely have been somewhere, because we can see that it has aged. The solution I suppose is that this is a virtual world and it can do anything it feels like, but how exactly does a flesh-and-blood 20-year-old get inside it? And what does he eat?

Joseph Kosinski's "Tron: Legacy" steps nimbly over such obstacles and hits the ground running, in a 3-D sound-and light show that plays to the eyes and ears more than the mind. Among its real-world technology is a performance by Jeff Bridges as Kevin Flynn at two different ages — now, and 20 years ago. The original "Tron" was made 28 years ago, but that would have made young Sam Flynn, his son, nearly 30, which is too old for the hero in a story of this sort. The ideal age would be around 12.

In a flashback, we see Kevin, lord of a mighty software corporation, taking leave of his son as a child. At first, you think Jeff Bridges looks younger in this scene because of makeup or Botox or something, and then you realize this is Bridges' body and voice but his face has been rendered younger by special effects. They're uncanny. The use of profiles and backlighting makes the illusion adequate for this purpose. The real Bridges turns up later inside the program, whiskery and weathered, but the CGI version of younger Jeff sticks around to play Clu, a digital doppelganger he created, who now desires (you know this is coming) to control the world.

Kevin and Sam reconcile and bond. They join other cyberspace allies, notably including the beguiling Quorra (Olivia Wilde), who cyber-Kevin has apparently been fathering instead of poor orphaned Sam. Does this symbolize the ways video games can destroy real-life relationships? Just asking. I'm thinking of Quorra and Sam as a possible romantic couple, but there's the pesky problem that she is virtual, and he bleeds when he's cut — I think, although maybe not inside the program. This brings us back to a central question about "Avatar": What or who, precisely, was Neytiri falling in love with?

I'm giving this more attention than the movie does, which is just as well. Isaac Asimov would have attempted some kind of scientific speculation on how this might all be possible, but "Tron" is more action-oriented. (Personal to sci-fi fans: If "2001" is Analog, "Tron: Legacy" is Thrilling Wonder Stories.)

The first "Tron" (1982) felt revolutionary at the time. I'd never seen anything like it. We showed it again at Ebertfest a few years ago. It was the first movie to create a digital world and embed human actors; always earlier that had been done with special effects, matte shots, optical printers, blue screen and so on. "Tron" found a freedom of movement within its virtual world that was exhilarating. The plot was impenetrable, but so what?

"Tron: Legacy," a sequel made 28 years after the original but with the same actor, is true to the first film: It also can't be understood, but looks great. Both films, made so many years apart, can fairly lay claim to being state of the art. This time that includes the use of 3-D. Since so much of the action involves quick movement forward and backward in shots, the 3-D effect is useful, and not just a promiscuous use of the ping-pong effect. It is also well-iterated. (A note at the start informs us that parts of the movie were deliberately filmed in 2-D, so of course I removed my glasses to note how much brighter it was. Dimness is the problem 3-D hasn't licked.)

A long time ago in 1984, Jeff Bridges appeared as an alien inhabiting a human body in John Carpenter's "Starman." An article in the New York Times magazine called him the perfect movie actor. He wasn't flashy; he was steadily, consistently good. Now that he has won an Oscar for "Crazy Heart" and is opening soon in "True Grit," that is still true. Here is an actor expected to (1) play himself as a much younger man, (2) play himself now, and (3) play a computer program (or avatar?), and he does all three in a straightforward manner that is effective and convincing (given the preposterous nature of the material).

Sam (Garrett Hedlund), circa 20, is well-suited to his role, somewhat resembling Bridges. Olivia Wilde makes a fragrant Quorra. In some inexplicable way, these actors and Bruce Boxleitner (Tron) and Michael Sheen (Zuse) plausibly project human emotions in an environment devoid of organic life, including their own.

The artificial world is wonderfully well-rendered, building on the earlier film's ability to bring visual excitement to what must in reality, after all, be slim pickings: invisible ones and zeroes. I soon topped off on the thrill of watching Frisbees of light being hurled, but some of the chases and architectural details are effective simply because they use sites and spaces never seen. And the soundtrack by Daft Punk has such urgent electronic force that the visuals sometimes almost play as its accompaniment. It might not be safe to play this soundtrack in the car. The plot is another matter. It's a catastrophe, short-changing the characters and befuddling the audience. No doubt an online guru will produce a synopsis of everything that happens, but this isn't like an opera, where you can peek at the program notes.

I expect "Tron: Legacy" to be a phenomenon at the box office for a week or so. It may not have legs, because its appeal is too one-dimensional for an audience much beyond immediate responders. When "2001" was in theaters, there were fans who got stoned and sneaked in during the intermission for the sound-and-light trip. I hesitate to suggest that for "Tron: Legacy," but the plot won't suffer.

True Grit (2010)

Rooster Cogburn Jeff Bridges
LaBoeuf Matt Damon
Tom Chaney Josh Brolin
Lucky Ned Barry Pepper
Mattie Ross Hailee Steinfeld

In the Coen Brothers' “True Grit,” Jeff Bridges is not playing the John Wayne role. He's playing the Jeff Bridges role — or, more properly, the role created in the enduring novel by Charles Portis, much of whose original dialogue can be heard in this film. Bridges doesn't have the archetypal stature of the Duke. Few ever have. But he has here, I believe, an equal screen presence. We always knew we were looking at John Wayne in the original “True Grit” (1969). When we see Rooster Cogburn in this version, we're not thinking about Jeff Bridges.
Wayne wanted his tombstone to read, Feo, Fuerte y Formal (Ugly, Strong and Dignified). He was a handsome, weathered man when I met him in the 1960s and '70s, but not above a certain understandable vanity. Roo­ster might be an ornery gunslinger with an eye patch, but Wayne played him wearing a hairpiece and a corset. Jeff Bridges occupies the character like a homeless squatter. I found myself wondering how young Mattie Ross (Hailee Steinfeld) could endure his body odor.

Bridges' interpretation is no doubt closer to the reality of a lawman in those years of the West. How savory can a man be when he lives in saloons and on horseback? Not all riders on the range carried a change of clothes. Of course he's a lawman with an office and a room somewhere in town, but for much of the movie, he is on a quest through inauspicious territory to find the man who murdered Mattie's father.

As told in the novel, Mattie is a plucky young teen with a gaze as level as her hat brim. She hires Marshal Cogburn to track down that villain Tom Chaney (Josh Brolin). She means to kill him for “what he done.” If Bridges comfortably wears the Duke's shoes, Hailee Steinfeld is more effective than Kim Darby in the earlier film, and she was pretty darn good. Steinfeld was 13 when she made the film, close to the right age. Darby was a little over 20. The story hinges on the steely resolve of a girl who has been raised in the eye-for-an eye Old West, seen some bad sights and picked up her values from the kind of old man who can go and get hisself shot.

What strikes me is that I'm describing the story and the film as if it were simply, if admirably, a good Western. That's a surprise to me, because this is a film by the Coen Brothers, and this is the first straight genre exercise in their career. It's a loving one. Their craftsmanship is a wonder. Their casting is always inspired and exact. The cinematography by Roger Deakins reminds us of the glory that was, and can still be, the Western.

But this isn't a Coen Brothers film in the sense that we usually use those words. It's not eccentric, quirky, wry or flaky. It's as if these two men, who have devised some of the most original films of our time, reached a point where they decided to coast on the sheer pleasure of good old straightforward artistry. This is like Iggy Pop singing “My Funny Valentine,” which he does very well. So let me praise it for what it is, a splendid Western. The Coens having demonstrated their mastery of many notes, including many not heard before, now show they can play in tune.

Besides, isn't Rooster Cogburn where Jeff Bridges started out 40 years ago? The first time I was aware of him was in “The Last Picture Show” (1971), where he and his friends went the local movie theater to see “Red River,” starring John Wayne. Since then, that clean-faced young man has lived and rowdied and worked his way into being able to play Rooster with a savory nastiness that Wayne could not have equaled.

All the same, the star of this show is Hailee Steinfeld, and that's appropriate. This is her story, set in motion by her, narrated by her. This is Steinfeld's first considerable role. She nails it. She sidesteps the opportunity to make Mattie adorable. Mattie doesn't live in an adorable world. Seeing the first “True Grit,” I got a little crush on Kim Darby. Seeing this one, few people would get a crush on Hailee Steinfeld. Maybe in another movie. But the way she plays it with the Coens, she's more the kind of person you'd want guarding your back.

Matt Damon, Josh Brolin and Barry Pepper have weight and resonance in supporting roles. Damon is LaBoeuf, the Texas Ranger who comes along for a time to track Tom Chaney. Glen Campbell had the role earlier, and was right for the tone of that film. Damon plays it on a more ominous note. His LaBoeuf isn't sidekick material. He and Cogburn have long-standing issues. Nor, we discover, is LaBoeuf a man of simple loyalty.

As Tom Chaney, Brolin is a complete and unadulterated villain, a rattlesnake who would as soon shoot Mattie as Rooster. In the Western genre, evil can be less nuanced than in your modern movies with all their psychological insights. Barry Pepper plays Lucky Ned Pepper, leader of a gang Chaney ends up with, and part of the four-man charge across the meadow into Rooster's gunfire, a charge as lucky for them as the Charge of the Light Brigade.

The 1969 film, directed by Hollywood veteran Henry Hathaway, had glorious landscapes. The meadow and several other scenes were set in the San Juan Mountains of Colorado, near Telluride. This film's landscapes are all in Texas, and although some are beautiful, many are as harsh and threatening as the badlands described by Cormac McCarthy or Larry McMurtry.

I expect Bridges and Stein­feld have good chances of winning Oscar nominations for this film. Steinfeld is good the whole way through, but the scene audiences love is the one where she bargains with a horse trader (Dakin Matthews) for the money she feels is owed her. Here the key is the dialogue by the Coens, which never strains, indeed remains flat and common sense, as Mattie reasons the thief out of his money by seeming to employ his own logic.

I'm surprised the Coens made this film, so unlike their other work, except in quality. Instead of saying that now I hope they get back to making “Coen Brothers films,” I'm inclined to speculate on what other genres they might approach in this spirit. What about the musical? “Oklahoma!” is ready to be remade.

True Grit (1969)

Rooster Cogburn John Wayne
Emmett Quincy Jeremy Slate
Mattie Ross Kim Darby
Ned Pepper Robert Duvall
"La Boeuf" Glen Campbell
"Moon" Dennis Hopper

here is a moment in "True Grit" when John Wayne and four or five bad guys confront each other across a mountain meadow. The situation is quite clear: Someone will have to back up or die.

Director Henry Hathaway pulls his telephoto lens high up in the sky, and we see the meadow isolated there, dreamlike and fantastic. And then we're back down on the ground, and with a growl Wayne puts his horse's reins in his teeth, takes his rifle in one of his hands and a six-shooter in the other and charges those bad guys with all barrels blazing. As a scene, it is not meant to be taken seriously.

The night I saw a sneak preview, the audience laughed and even applauded. This was the essence of Wayne, the distillation. This was the moment when you finally realized how much Wayne had come to mean to you. I have on occasion disliked his movies, most particularly "The Green Berets." But Wayne has a way of surmounting even bad movies, and in 40 years he has also made a great many good ones. In the early ones, like "The Quiet Man" or "The Long Voyage Home," he was simply an actor or simply a star. But long before many of us were born, John Ford began to sculpture the actor and the star into the presence. Today there is no actor in movies who is more an archetype.

One of the glories of "True Grit" is that it recognizes Wayne's special presence. It was not directed by Ford (who in any event probably couldn't have been objective enough about Wayne), but it was directed by another old Western hand, Hathaway, who has made the movie of his lifetime and given us a masterpiece. This is the sort of film you call a movie, instead of the kind of movie you call a film.

It is one of the most delightful, joyous scary movies of all time. It goes on the list with National Velvet" and "Robin Hood" and "The African Queen" and "Treasure of the Sierra Madre" and "Gunga Din." It is not a work of art, but it would be nearly as good if it were. Instead, it is the Western you should see if you only see one Western every three years (an act of denial I cannot quite comprehend in any case).

It is based faithfully on Charles Portis' novel, and it tells the story of Mattie Ross from near Dardanelle, in Yell County. One day her father rides off to the city and is murdered by a cowardly snake. Mattie (played with the freshness of sweet cream by Kim Darby) rides to town to hire somebody to go into the Indian Territory and capture the scoundrel.

She strikes a bargain with U.S. Marshal Rooster Cogburn (Wayne), who is a one-eyed, unwashed, sandpapered, roughshod, fat old rascal with a heart of gold well-covered by a hide of leather. Then a Texas Ranger (Glen Campbell) gets into the act when he turns up and claims he has a reward for the killer (who also, it appears, plugged a state senator in Texas). "It is a small reward," the ranger explains, "but he was not a large senator."

After two horse-trading scenes in which Mattie outtalks the horse trader and drives him to distraction, the three set out into Indian Territory. Rooster and the ranger can't get rid of Mattie so she comes along. And we embark on a glorious adventure not far removed from Huck Finn's trip down the Mississippi, for this is also an American odyssey. Portis wrote his dialog in a formal, enchantingly archaic style that has been retained in Marguerite Roberts' screenplay.

Campbell, who needs some acting practice, finds it difficult to make the dialog convincing but Hathaway pulls him through. And Miss Darby, especially in the horse-trading scenes, is a wonder. You may even laugh aloud when she observes that geldings, in her experience, are not a good buy if you mean to breed them. And as for Wayne, I believe he can say almost anything and make it sound convincing. (In Otto Preminger's "In Harm's Way" he had to say: "I mean to get into harm's way," and he even made that convincing.)

Wayne, in fact, towers over this special movie. He is not playing the same Western role he always plays. Instead, he can play Rooster because of all the Western roles he has played. He brings an ease and authority to the character. He never reaches. He never falters. It's all there, a quiet confidence that grows out of 40 years of acting. God loves the old pros. 

The Green Hornet

Britt / Green Hornet Seth Rogen
Kato Jay Chou
Lenore Case Cameron Diaz
Mr. Reid Tom Wilkinson
Chudnofsky Christoph Waltz
Scanlon David Harbour
Axford... Edward James Olmos


"The Green Hornet" is an almost unendurable demonstration of a movie with nothing to be about. Although it follows the rough storyline of previous versions of the title, it neglects the construction of a plot engine to pull us through. There are pointless dialogue scenes going nowhere much too slowly, and then pointless action scenes going everywhere much too quickly.
Seth Rogen deserves much of the blame. He co-wrote the screenplay, giving himself way too many words, and then hurls them tirelessly at us at a modified shout. He plays Britt Reid, a spoiled little rich brat who grows up the same way, as the son of a millionaire newspaper publisher (Tom Wilkinson, who apparently remains the same age as his son ages from about 10 to maybe 30). After his father's death, he shows little interest in running a newspaper, but bonds with Kato (Jay Chou), his father's auto mechanic and coffee maker. Yes.

Kato is the role Bruce Lee played on the TV series. Jay Chou is no Bruce Lee, but it's hard to judge him as an actor with Rogen hyperventilating through scene after scene. Together, they devise a damn-fool plan to fight crime by impersonating a criminal (The Green Hornet) and his sidekick. This they do while wearing masks that serve no purpose as far as I could determine, except to make them look suspicious. I mean, like, who wears a mask much these days?

The crime lord in the city is Chudnofsky (Christoph Waltz, the Oscar winner from “Inglourious Basterds”). That provides the movie with a villain but hardly with a character.

The war between Chudnofsky and the Hornet is played out in a great many vehicle stunts and explosions, which go on and on and on, maddeningly, as if screenwriter Rogen tired of his own dialogue (not as quickly as we do, alas) and scribbled in: Here second unit supplies nine minutes of CGI action.

There is a role in the film for Cameron Diaz as Lenore Case, would-be secretary for young Reid, but nothing for her to do. She functions primarily to allow the camera to cut to her from time to time, which is pleasant but unsatisfying. Diaz has a famously wonderful smile, and curiously in her first shot in the film, she smiles for no reason at all, maybe just to enter the smile on the record.

The director of this half-cooked mess is Michel Gondry, whose “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind” is as good as this one is bad. Casting about for something to praise, I recalled that I heard a strange and unique sound for the first time, a high-pitched whooshing scream, but I don't think Gondry can claim it, because it came from the hand dryers in the nearby men's room.

Note: Yes, it was in 3-D. The more I see of the process, the more I think of it as a way to charge extra for a dim picture.

The Town

Doug MacRay Ben Affleck
Claire Keesey Rebecca Hall
Agent Frawley Jon Hamm
Jem Jeremy Renner
Krista Blake Lively
Dino Titus Welliver
Fergus Pete Postlethwaite
Stephen MacRay Chris Cooper

There's a scene in Ben Affleck's "The Town" that expertly exploits the conversations we have with film characters. In critical moments, we urgently send mental instructions to the screen. Let me set up such a moment here. Doug cares for Claire. There's something she mustn't know about him. If she should see the tattoo on the back of Jem's neck, she would know everything. Jem unexpectedly joins Doug and Claire at a table. With hard looks and his whole manner, Doug signals him to get the hell away from the table. So do we. Jem is a dangerous goofball and sadistically lingers. He doesn't know the tattoo is a giveaway.
If a film can bring us to this point and make us feel anxiety, it has done something right. "The Town," Affleck's second film as a director, wants to do something more, to make a biographical and even philosophical statement about the culture of crime, but it doesn't do that as successfully. Here is a well-made crime procedural, and audiences are likely to enjoy it at that level, but perhaps the mechanics of movie crime got in the way of Affleck's higher ambitions.

There are two fairly extended scenes in the film, for example, during which bank robbers with machineguns exchange fire with a large number of cops. My opinion is that when automatic weapons are used by experienced shooters at less than a block's distance, a lot of people are going to get killed or wounded. It becomes clear in "The Town" that nobody will get shot until and/or unless the screenplay requires it, and that causes an audience letdown. We feel the story is no longer really happening, and we're being asked to settle yet once again for a standard chase-and-gunfight climax.

I believe Affleck, his writers and their source (the novel Prince of Thieves by Chuck Hogan) know better, and their characters deserve better. But above a certain budget level, Hollywood films rarely allow complete follow-through for their characters. Consider the widespread public dislike for this year's best crime film, George Clooney's "The American." People didn't want a look into the soul of an existential criminal. They wanted a formula to explain everything.

In "The Town," Ben Affleck plays Doug MacRay, the next generation of a bank-robbing family in the Boston area of Charlestown. This square mile, we're told, contains more thieves and bank robbers than anyplace else in the country. It's a family trade, like cobbling or the law. Affleck heads a four-man crew, most notably including Jem (a pudgy, loopy Jeremy Renner, miles different than in "The Hurt Locker"). They plan their jobs meticulously going to lengths to eradicate DNA traces and confiscate security tapes. But Jem has a wild streak. He injures civilians when it's not necessary, and during one job does what is forbidden: He takes a hostage, Claire (Rebecca Hall). Kidnapping is a heavy-duty crime.

They release Claire unharmed. Turns out she lives in Charlestown. Jem gets paranoid. Doug trails her to a Laundromat, meets her by "accident," gets to know and quite unexpectedly gets to like her. This is what "The Town" is really about: how getting to know Claire opens Doug's mind to the fullness of a life his heritage has denied him. The film could have continued to grow in that direction, but instead pulls back and focuses on more crime. We meet Doug's hardboiled father (Chris Cooper) in prison, and a local crime lord (Pete Postlethwaite, unrelenting). And we follow an FBI team led by Jon Hamm. They have a good idea who they're looking for; you don't make a career out of bank robbery in Charleston without the word getting around. But they lack evidence they can take to a jury.

The most intriguing character is Jem. As played by Renner, he's a twisted confusion of behavior, a loose cannon on a team that requires discipline. He's furious when he finds Doug friendly with the woman who could finger them, and the jumpy way he plays friendly is chilling. There's something interesting going on here: Doug is the central character and all interest should move to him, but at about the halfway point, it becomes clear that his character has been deprived of impulse and committed to an acceptable ending. Jem, however, remains capable of anything. If you've seen a lot of Jeremy Renner before, you may need to look twice to recognize him; it's like the hero of "The Hurt Locker" moved to Boston and started on a diet of beer, brats and fries.

"The Town" shows, as his first film "Gone Baby Gone" (2007) did, that Affleck has the stuff of a real director. Everything is here. It's an effective thriller, he works closely with actors, he has a feel for pacing. Yet I persist in finding chases and gun battles curiously boring. I realize the characters have stopped making the decisions, and the stunt and effects artists have taken over.

Love and Other Drugs

Jamie Jake Gyllenhaal
Maggie Anne Hathaway
Bruce Oliver Platt
Dr. Knight Hank Azaria
Josh Josh Gad
Trey Gabriel Macht

"Love and Other Drugs" stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Jamie Randall, a pharmaceutical salesman who sells love, Zoloft, Viagra and other products with equal sincerity. He's a charmer, determined to sell his way out of Ohio and into the big Chicago market, and if that involves flirting with the receptionists in doctors' offices, it's a tough job but somebody's got to do it.
The movie takes place at that point in the 1990s when Viagra was tumescing in the marketplace, and Jamie is riding the success of his employer, Pfizer. He infiltrates hospitals, befriends doctors, pushes drugs and sabotages the best efforts of his aggressive rival Trey Hannigan (Gabriel Macht), whose product Prozac is outselling Zoloft. Whether these products, or any of their products, works very well is not a concern of the salesmen. They sell.

James is egged on by his supervisor Bruce Winston (Oliver Platt), and it seems quite possible he'll make it to Chicago when his life makes an unexpected course correction. He's buddies with Dr. Stan Knight (Hank Azaria), who introduces him as his intern and allows him to observe as he palpitates the breast of his lovely patient Maggie Murdock (Anne Hathaway). Strictly speaking, doctors aren't supposed to do that. Maggie discovers the fraud, and in the course of an argument with Jamie about it they both grow so passionate that, well, they rip off each other's clothes and fall upon a bed in a confusion of sheets and moans.

Maggie and Jamie discover that they really, really like each other. She has something she wants to tell him. She is in the early stages of Parkinson's disease. This introduces an unexpected note into what seemed to be a screwball comedy. Hathaway brings such tenderness and solemnity to her role that she moves the film away from comedy and toward “Love Story,” and from then on, we never quite know where we're headed.

The emotional tug-of-war intensifies because of the presence of Jamie's brother Josh (Josh Gad), who seems to have been imported directly from an odd buddy movie. Josh is helpless in the area of appropriate behavior, seems to have selected his wardrobe in high school for the rest of his life, has made millions of dollars in the markets and has a disastrous personal life. Although he could buy a hotel, he lacks the skill or the courage to check into one and seems intent on living for the rest of his life on the sofa in Jamie's small apartment.

That would be permissible in another kind of movie. Not in this one, where matters grow serious between the two lovers — so serious, indeed, that they begin to discuss how their love will prevail through the difficult road ahead. The movie gives full weight and attention to the subject of Parkinson's and doesn't trivialize it or make jokes (how could it?).

But the more weight the story of Maggie and Jamie takes on, the more distracting is the screenplay's need to intercut updates on the pharmaceutical wars. Nor do we continue to care much about Bruce and Trey. The movie's most effective single scene occurs at a meeting of people with Parkinson's and their loved ones. The husband of a victim describes to Jamie in stark, realistic detail the possible course of the disease and how it may affect the woman he loves. After this scene, the movie has definitively introduced a note that makes the rest seem trivial.

The director is Edward Zwick, a considerable filmmaker. He's essentially working with a screenplay (by Charles Randolph, Marshall Herskovitz and himself) that doesn't work. Given that problem, you have to observe that he is a capable filmmaker even in bad weather. He obtains a warm, lovable performance from Anne Hathaway and dimensions from Gyllenhaal that grow from comedy to the serious. The scene with the husband of the Parkinson's survivor has a simple grandeur. As a filmmaker by nature, Zwick gives that scene its full weight, no matter that it's not a good fit in his movie. That counts for something.

The Tourist

Elise Angelina Jolie
Frank Johnny Depp
Acheson Paul Bettany
Jones Timothy Dalton
Ivan Steven Berkoff
Englishman Rufus Sewell

There’s a way to make a movie like "The Tourist," but Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck doesn’t find that way. Here is a romantic comedy crossed with a crime thriller, shot in Paris and Venice, involving a glamorous mystery woman and a math teacher from Wisconsin. The plot is preposterous. So what you need is a movie that floats with bemusement above the cockamamie, and actors who tease each other.

As the mystery woman, Angelina Jolie does her darnedest. She gets the joke. Here is a movie in which she begins in a Paris cafe, eludes cops by dashing into the Metro, takes an overnight train to Venice, picks up a strange man (Johnny Depp) and checks them both into the Royal Danelli without one wrinkle on her dress or one hair out of place. And is sexy as hell. This is the Audrey Hepburn or Grace Kelly role, and she knows it.

Depp is in the Cary Grant role of the obliging, love-struck straight man who finds himself neck deep in somebody else’s troubles. In theory, these two should engage in witty flirtation and droll understatement. In practice, no one seems to have alerted Depp that the movie is a farce. I refer to farce in the dictionary sense, of course: a comic dramatic work using buffoonery and horseplay and typically including crude characterization and ludicrously improbable situations. Depp, however, plays his math teacher seriously and with a touch of the morose.

The plot involves — oh, hell, you know, the usual mystery man who has stolen millions from a gangster and gone into hiding while smuggling instructions to Jolie, his lover, instructing her to take the train to Venice, etc. And the cops from Scotland Yard who are tailing her in hopes of nailing the guy. And the gangster and his hit men who are also on the thief’s trail. And chases over the rooftops of Venice, dinner on a train, a scene in a casino, designer gowns and a chase through the canals with Jolie at the controls of a motor taxi, and...

Well, there was really only one cliche left, and I was grateful when it arrived. You know how a man in a high place will look down and see a canvas awning that might break his fall, and he jumps into it? Yep. And it’s shielding a fruit cart at the open-air market and he lands on the oranges and runs off, leaving the cart owner shaking his fist. This is a rare example of the Vertical Fruit Cart Scene, in which the cart is struck not from the side but from the top.

The supporting roles are filled by excellent actors, and it’s a sign of the movie’s haplessness that none of them make a mark. You have Paul Bettany and Timothy Dalton as cops, Steven Berkoff as the gangster and Rufus Sewell as "The Englishman," who must be important because he hangs around without any apparent purpose. Once in London, I saw Berkoff play a cockroach in his adaptation of Kafka’s "Metamorphosis." It might have helped if he’d tried the cockroach again.

A depressing element is how much talent "The Tourist" has behind the camera. Writer-director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck made "The Lives of Others," which won the 2007 Oscar for best foreign film. The screenplay is by Christopher McQuarrie (Oscar winner for "The Usual Suspects") and Julian Fellowes (Oscar winner for "Gosford Park"), along with von Donnersmarck. It’s based on a French film written by Jerome Salle, which was nominated for a Cesar. All three "Tourist" writers seem to have used their awards as doorstops.

It doesn’t matter that the plot is absurd. That goes with the territory. But if it’s not going to be nonstop idiotic action, then the acting and dialogue need a little style and grace and kidding around. Jolie plays her femme fatale with flat-out, drop-dead sexuality. Depp plays his Wisconsin math teacher as a man waiting for the school bell to ring so he can go bowling. The other actors are concealed in the shadows of their archetypes. Cary Grant would have known how to treat a lady.

Just Go With It

Danny Adam Sandler
Katherine Jennifer Aniston
Devlin Adams Nicole Kidman
Eddie Nick Swardson
Palmer Brooklyn Decker
Maggie Bailee Madison
Michael Griffin Gluck
Ian Maxtone Jones Dave Matthews
Adon Kevin Nealon 

Danny (Adam Sandler) broke off his wedding at the last minute, but continues to wear the wedding ring. Women find the ring seductive, and cannot resist having sex with a married man. Therefore, most (not all) of the women in his life are stupid. This works for him for approximately 25 years. In the meantime, he becomes a famous plastic surgeon in Beverly Hills. He is assisted by Nurse Katherine (Jennifer Aniston), who has two kids.

On the one day he isn't wearing his ring, he spends an idyllic night in the beach with the delicious 23-year-old Palmer (Brooklyn Decker). Then she finds the ring in his pocket and thinks he is married, and he lies and says yes, but his divorce is almost final. She insists on meeting his wife. He makes Nurse Katherine pretend to be his wife. He buys her several thousand dollars worth of clothes for her one (1) meeting with Palmer.

For reasons having to do with Palmer's love of children, they all fly to Hawaii together with Nurse Katherine's two kids and Danny's high school buddy Eddie (Nick Swardson), who pretends to be the Nurse's fiancé. Eddie disguises himself with thick glasses and the worst German accent since the guy who worshipped Hitler in "The Producers." He also brandishes a meerschaum pipe, because everyone who has seen "Inglourious Basterds" knows all Germans smoke meerschaum pipes.

This might work as a farce. Maybe it did, in France. It worked as a Broadway play by Abe Burrows. It worked as a 1969 movie with Walter Matthau, Ingrid Bergman as the nurse and Goldie Hawn as the young girl. It doesn't work now. The problem is the almost paralytic sweetness of the characters. Nobody is really trying to get away with anything. They're just trying to do the right thing in an underhanded way. Walter Matthau was crafty in the cradle. Goldie Hawn was the definitive ditz. Ingrid Bergman was *sigh*. The 1969 screenplay was by I.A.L. Diamond, who knew a thing or two about farce when he wrote "Some Like It Hot." They made a good movie.

So nice is everyone here that even the completely surplus character played by Nicole Kidman is undermined. She plays the old standby, the popular girl who was mean to Nurse Katherine in high school. We know the cliché. Kidman could have done something with it, but the screenplay gives her nowhere to go It's painful to endure the cloying scene where they kiss and make up.

"Just Go With It" is like a performance of the old material by actors who don't get the joke. The movie doesn't even have the nerve to caricature the Devlin character, who is presented as a true-blue, sincere Bo Derek clone. Adam Sandler stays well within the range of polite, ingratiating small-talk artists he unnecessarily limits himself to. Jennifer Aniston is alert and amused, but by giving her the fake boyfriend with the meerschaum the film indicates that she, too, is one tinker short of a toy.

There is one funny scene in the movie. It involves a plastic surgery victim with roaming right eyebrow. You know the movie is in trouble when you find yourself missing the eyebrow.