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.