Chaos Theory

Spoiler level: Moderate

Chaos Theory is not, alas, two hours of Jeff Goldblum dripping water on Laura Dern’s hand to see which way it rolls, before being attacked by dinosaurs. Oh, that it was. No, Chaos Theory is a comedy with no laughs and a drama with no heart. There isn’t a single moment of truth to be found anywhere in its 90 minutes; instead, it replaces any sort of meaningful insight into the lives of its characters with continuous frantic manipulations by the screenwriter.

We’ll get back to Truth with a capital T in a minute. First, let me lay out the story for you. In one of those tiresome framing structures that hasn’t been effective since War of the Roses, a middle-aged Frank Allen (Ryan Reynolds with gray in his beard = middle-aged) tells a story to the young man who is having second thoughts about marrying his daughter. This tale is the story of Frank’s married life, and how he went from being super anal-retentive to, well, going batshit crazy. It’s apparently supposed to be an inspirational yarn; I just wanted this poor kid to get the hell away from this bunch of lunatics.

The flashback portion of the story begins with young Frank (clean-shaven Reynolds = young) and his band of unconvincing friends lounging around a bar on New Year’s Eve. His friend and object of desire, Susan (Emily Mortimer), improbably announces that her New Year’s resolution is to marry one of her friends, and that she will select which one based on the nickname they have for their penis. Ah yes, we are firmly on CBS sitcom territory here. Tee-hee! Penis nicknames! The other men have laugh track-ready names like Pink Bald Avenger, or whatever. Frank’s frank’s nickname? Truth. “It was always going to be you,” Susan coos to him a minute later as the clock strikes twelve. Wait, what? Did she forget that he just called his penis “Truth”? Do you want to spend the rest of your life with *that* guy? Does anyone?

Apparently, Susan does, because the narrative jumps ahead seven years where they are married with an adorable daughter. Frank, sporting a late-twenties/early-thirties dark beard, is fastidious about time and organization. Naturally, he has the favorite job of screenwriters everywhere – the motivational speaker. On the morning of a big presentation, Susan, in an attempt to be helpful, changes his clock to give him more time, but changes it the wrong way. Ho ho! Frank is late and misses the ferry (the preferred method of transportation of screenwriters everywhere), making him late for his speech. This sets off a series of unfathomably ridiculous consequences and misunderstandings that even Three’s Company’s writers might balk at. This is one of those movies where everything could be settled in a minute if only the characters stopped hanging up on each other and yelling at the top of their lungs.

I won’t get into the soap operatics of it all, but suffice it to say, the uptight Frank becomes suicidal, homicidal, and vows never to make another decision for himself. Instead, he carries around a few index cards and writes down possibilities for every situation, then shuffles them and draws one at random. If this means performing some PG-13 streaking across the ice at a hockey game, so be it.

I can’t remember a recent movie with such a schizophrenic tone. As Frank is making choices on his cards that include killing himself and/or other people, the score gives us some winking pizzicato music cues. “It’s all in good fun,” say the plucking strings. “He’s probably not going to kill anyone! Ha ha! What a lark!” Similarly, the movie uses weepy semi-indie rock to indicate deep sadness, which the film itself has done nothing to earn. The whole thing feels like a mess that they tried to focus-group into something salvageable, but didn’t quite succeed.

Reynolds himself is fine. He’s spent much of his career following in the footsteps of Jim Carrey, moving from sitcom cut-up, to frat boy hero, to more serious work. This, then, is his Majestic – a bilious bit of sap, masquerading as something meaningful and true. He tries to give a grounded performance in this hurricane of tones, but is betrayed at every turn by the screenplay, written by Daniel Taplitz, also the writer of the Jamie Foxx vehicle Breakin’ All the Rules, and the weird religious black comedy Commandments. The director is Marcos Siega, mostly known for TV and music video work, but also the director of Pretty Persuasion and Nick Cannon’s Underclassman. Clearly, Siega is trying to branch out and cover more adult territory, but this movie has no idea how adults really talk and behave. If someone were sequestered inside a bubble with no contact with the outside world, aside from sitcoms and soap operas, and they decided to make a movie, the result would be a lot like Chaos Theory.

Apparently, the movie was made under Warner Independent, but got bumped up to the majors, and is now being given a limited release by Warner Brothers proper. This would, I suppose, explain some of the poor editing and ADR work; I imagine it was an R-rated movie trimmed to a more audience-friendly PG-13. But it’s kind of a sad commentary on the state of independent films that someone deemed this material strong enough to be made at all. It is movies like this one that give “art-house” films a bad name. It’s pretty sad when a movie about theme park dinosaurs has more to say about the human condition than a low-budget would-be indie drama. Truthfully.

Stop Loss

Spoiler level: Moderately low

“You’ve been stop-lossed.”

It sounds like the signature dismissal from a particularly obnoxious reality show, designed for t-shirts and talking bobble heads. In reality, though, its meaning for today’s soldiers is almost the opposite of The Donald’s snappy Apprentice catchphrase – not only are you not fired, your contract has been involuntarily extended, and you are required to report back to the battlefield, even though you have already served your term. This loophole in military law is the core of Kimberly Peirce’s Stop Loss, the long-gestating follow-up to her acclaimed Boys Don’t Cry.

In interviews, Peirce has stated that she had difficulty finding a suitable topic for her next film in the nine years since Boys won Hilary Swank her first Oscar. She’s definitely found a hot button topic to explore for this movie, though it has the misfortune to arrive at the tail end of a glut of sub-par war movies that have made brief appearances in theaters over the past few months. The main difference between those films and Stop Loss is, frankly, Peirce herself. She has taken what is a fairly conventional premise and made it her own, by bringing the unique voice that she demonstrated in Boys to the proceedings.

The first fifteen minutes of Stop Loss are an exciting and terrifying shoot-out between American troops in Iraq and local insurgents. Peirce uses hand-held cameras for this sequence, and, like in the Bourne sequels, they don’t seem to anticipate what will happen next. The camera seems as caught off-guard by the scene as the soldiers, as it struggles to keep up and record the action. We have barely had time to meet the soldiers before the gunfire kicks in, so it’s a little difficult to parse out who is who at first. But we immediately understand that Sgt. Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) is the glue holding this group together. He barks out orders and tries to keep a level head as things begin to go wrong in this encounter, and it becomes clear that his men need his voice of reason.

As the survivors return home, greeted by friends, lovers, and an old-fashioned Welcome Home parade, it is apparent that the soldiers’ reliance on Brandon extends beyond the battlefield. This is the meat of Stop Loss’s story – the obligations King feels towards his men and country, and his need to do what is best for himself. His main two friends are both severely emotionally damaged – Steve (Channing Tatum), who digs a hole in his yard to sleep in and hits his girlfriend, and Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), sunken-eyed and darkly introspective, who seems incapable of living without some sort of violence around him. Even Brandon, ever struggling to be the reliable one, hears gunfire on the edge of his dreams and sometimes has trouble staying in the moment. These are men who undeniably need to come home and get treatment. Brandon is rational enough to realize this, so when he receives the news that he and Steve have been stop-lossed, he takes the only course of action he can imagine – driving from Texas to Washington DC to talk to a senator he met at his homecoming parade.

This is where a director with a heavier touch would run into trouble. Brandon, who is now AWOL, takes a trip up north with Steve’s girlfriend, avoiding the police while his friends melt down back home. It would be very easy for all this to veer into melodrama, but Peirce is a smart filmmaker who realizes that sometimes less is more. She gets a terrific performance out of Gordon-Levitt, who has quietly become perhaps the best actor of his peers. His Tommy manages to be heartbreaking and frightening at the same time, and we can see that he is aware that he is losing control over his life and emotions, but is helpless to stop it.

Ryan Phillippe is an actor who spent most of his early career being miscast as vacuous pretty boys in mostly forgettable movies. But with last year’s Breach and now this film, he has shown a new-found ability to hold his own with powerful co-stars. His characterization of a man desperately trying to hold it together for the sake of his friends and family anchors the movie in place. There is a scene where he confronts some petty criminals who have broken his car window, and his shocking behavior fills us with dread, because we, like his men, have come to rely on Brandon to be the level-headed one, the one who will make everything okay, and with that gone, it seems like almost anything can happen.

There will be those who call Stop Loss anti-military or anti-American. But maybe the most surprising element of the film to me is that it is not even very interested in the war in a political sense. I was expecting to be preached to Lions for Lambs-style, but Peirce is almost wholly focused on these men and the people around them. They are called “heroes” in the movie and Peirce seems to agree with this; she just wants her heroes to get the help and rest they are entitled to.

Stop Loss will not be the most fun you have at the movies this weekend, and if you buy a ticket hoping for the romantic drama the ads and posters are trying to sell, you will be severely disappointed. But this is a film with some important things to say, and most of it feels truthful, rather than just some standard election-year rhetoric. You will leave wanting to talk about it, instead of just vacantly nodding along to sentiments you already share, and that alone is enough to make Stop Loss a film that deserves to be seen.

Late Breaking Oscar Predictions!

These aren’t necessarily what I want to win, but, rather, what I expect will win.

Picture : No Country For Old Men
Director : Joel and Ethan Coen
Actor : Daniel Day Lewis
Actress : Marion Cotillard
Supporting Actor : Javier Bardem
Supporting Actress : Cate Blanchett
Original Screenplay : Juno
Adapted Screenplay : No Country For Old Men
Animated Feature : Ratatouille
Foreign : The Counterfeiters
Documentary Feature : No End in Sight
Short : Sari’s Mother
Cinematography : No Country for Old Men
Animated Short : I Met the Walrus
Live Action Short : At Night
Editing : Bourne Ultimatum
Art Direction : Sweeney Todd
Costumes : Sweeney Todd
Makeup : La Vie en Rose
Song : That’s How You Know (Enchanted)
Score : Atonement
Sound Editing : No Country for Old Men
Sound Mixing : No Country for Old Men
Visual Effects : Transformers

February Film Forecast

Goodbye January! Fare thee well! Never again will we have to cast our eyes upon your insipid teen spoof movies. Your resurrected 80s action heroes. Your nauseating Oscar castoffs (I’m looking at you, Bucket List). For now, we enter into a bold new month, crisp and full of promise. We welcome you, February! O February, with your glorious… er, Jessica Alba J-Horror remakes. Your, um, Paris Hilton romantic comedies. Martin Lawrence? Hannah Montana? Larry the Cable Guy’s Witless Protection? February, you are a cruel, cruel mistress. Come back January! All is forgiven!

1) The Spiderwick Chronicles
Look, if Alvin and his “raisin” joke can gross $200 million, it seems obvious that family audiences will pretty much throw their money at anything that caters to them. And since Alvin and National Treasure: Book of Secrets are old-timers at this point, and there hasn’t really been anything else to drag the kids to, I feel like there is some pent-up demand for an all-ages flick, and this looks to be it. The trailers are enticing, mimicking the spooky-yet-not-too-scary territory that has worked so well for the Harry Potter movies. Freddy Highmore is a familiar face to family audiences, from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory and Finding Neverland, though he is not really a box office draw. The main appeal is the story, about a boy who can see the world of fairies and goblins when he opens a book, and the special effects, which look decent.

2) Semi-Pro
Will Ferrell is never going to stop making these sports comedies. Even when he’s dead, his digital likeness will be inserted into curling footage, as he wanders around the ice in his underwear, shouting about brooms. His latest, Semi-Pro, is about basketball, and, in my mind’s eye, it’s the Jim Carrey basketball scene from The Cable Guy blown up to an hour and a half. This might not be accurate, but I haven’t seen too many ads for it, so I’m only speculating. It also stars Woody Harrelson and Andre Benjamin. Oh, and it takes place in the 70’s, so there are many opportunities for hair style hilarity. Ferrell’s a smart guy, and must realize he’s coasting with these movies, but they make money, and I guess that’s all there is to it. This one shouldn’t be any different. Yawn.

3) The Eye
I still can’t believe that Jessica Alba continues to find work. She, along with Hayden Christensen, is the great charisma void of young Hollywood. Her “screen presence” consists of blankly and awkwardly spouting dialogue while men go crazy over her. I guess she fills out a bikini nicely in the poster for that Paul Walker beach movie you and I didn’t see, but that seems to be all there is to her. And yet, every two or three months, she’s in another movie.

This time it’s a remake of the disturbing Hong Kong horror flick Jian Gui. Alba plays a blind woman who gets a cornea transplant and starts seeing some strange stuff. The original film is terrifying and really dark, with one of the all-time great downer endings. I would be very surprised if the American-ized version manages to sustain the same tone, and I kind of doubt the ending will remain intact. Despite all that, there’s been something of a horror lull at the box office for awhile, and the Friday teen crowd needs a new film to watch while they text their friends, so this should at least have a good opening weekend. I’m hoping for some inadvertent humor, with Alba playing both a blind person AND a violinist, but everyone else will just be looking for a good scare or two to liven up the mid-winter blahs, and this should fill that role.

4) Jumper
Director Doug Liman has four terrific movies to his credit — Swingers, Go, The Bourne Identity, Mr. and Mrs. Smith — and he’s looking to make it five with his latest, Jumper. This is a sci-fi flick about a young man who discovers he has the ability to teleport from one place to another. He thinks there are no consequences to his “jumping”, but like Sam Jackson says in the trailer, “there are ALWAYS consequences.” Jackson plays an agent who tries to destroy the jumpers because of the dangers they pose. This sounds like a good time. However, the lead jumper is played by Hayden Christensen, and his ability to suck the energy out of a cinematic room is unmatched by anyone who hasn’t played Sue Storm. It’s like hiring a black hole to anchor your film. Plus, it also stars some girl from The O.C. That said, the trailers are fairly intriguing, and with Liman’s track record, there is some hope. Sci-fi fans will be there, of course, but its appeal should expand beyond just that base.

5) Vantage Point
The President has been shot! Or has he? I wish I didn’t know, but the trailer is one of those “let’s give away everything but the ending” kind of trailers, so I know a lot more than I wish I did. Anyway, the action is seen from differing viewpoints by such diverse actors as Forest Whitaker, Sigourney Weaver, Matthew Fox, and Dennis Quaid. The President is played by serial over-actor William Hurt. We see the minutes leading up to the assassination attempt from these other perspectives as we and the characters try to sort out what happened. That blasted trailer makes the movie look genuinely exciting and suspenseful, and this should have pretty broad appeal, particularly to the older crowd, who appreciate a smart action movie.

6) Hannah Montana/Miley Cyrus: Best of Both Worlds Concert Tour
I neither have The Disney Channel nor am I 12 years old, so here’s everything I know about Hannah Montana:

A. If Hannah Montana lived in Tennessee, her name would be “Hennessee.”
B. Maybe Hannah Montana’s not even from Montana. Who the frig knows?
C. Hannah Montana is played by Achy Breaky daughter Miley Cyrus
D. There are performances by both Hannah Montana and Cyrus herself, which strikes me transparently as a demand by her agent to try to avoid having her typecast already
E. Kids apparently throw Super Sweet Sixteen-worthy fits if their parents don’t take them to see Hannah Montana concerts, which are supposedly pre-pubescent mob scenes

Since I only know five things about her, I feel ill-advised on where to place her concert film on my list. Has there ever even been a kiddie concert film before? Raffi: Bananaphone – The Concert Experience? The film is in Disney Digital 3-D, which, at least with theaters around me, means a ticket costs a few bucks more. Will that be a consideration? And what about the dirty old man contingent? A b.o. factor or not? I have no idea, though I suspect in any case it will be mostly a one weekend sensation.

7) Welcome Home Roscoe Jenkins
Everybody loves Undercover Brother. Can you think of anyone who doesn’t? No, of course you can’t. And Roll Bounce, the rollerskating movie with Bow Wow, was a truly sweet slice of 70’s life. So, the good news is that the man behind these movies, Malcolm D. Lee, is back with another one. The bad news is that it stars Martin Lawrence. Lawrence, once upon a time a welcome supporting player in movies like House Party and Do the Right Thing, has increasingly become a force to avoid as he shifted to the center of his films. Black Knight, Big Momma’s House 2, and What’s the Worst That Could Happen? I rest my case. Not to mention his penchant for playing multiple characters in the same film (if you haven’t seen his double turn in Rebound, my nightmares wouldn’t make any sense to you). But hey! It’s a new year, and we’re feeling charitable. If anyone can rein in Lawrence’s worst tendencies, I think Lee is the person to do it. First, it appears that Lawrence is only playing one character, which is a good start. Also, Lee has surrounded Lawrence with a terrific cast, including James Earl Jones, Margaret Avery, Cedric the Entertainer, Mike Epps, and the occasionally funny Mo’Nique. The story, about a successful talk show host who returns to his hometown and is taken down a peg, feels a little generic and predictable, but I’m willing to give Lee the benefit of the doubt, and I suspect a lot of others will too. Films with largely African American casts have doing well at the box office lately, including Why Did I Get Married and This Christmas. Roscoe Jenkins should benefit from this momentum. I expect it will have a decent opening weekend, and should play well through the rest of the month.

8 ) Fool’s Gold
I was thinking awhile back that Romancing the Stone would be a good contender for a remake. Girl and guy bicker while skirting danger and looking for fortune. Comedy, action, romance. It’s a solid concept, and Fool’s Gold looks to have at least borrowed the formula. Reteaming Kate Hudson and Matthew McConaughey after their successful rom-com How to Lose a Guy in 10 Days, Fool’s Gold casts them as married treasure hunters whose passion is re-ignited as they look for the buried treasure mother lode. The trailer isn’t anything great, probably because it is working so hard to fit the action, romance, and comedy into a two minute clip. I trust the film itself will not be quite so schizo. The director is Andy Tennant, who, with hits like Sweet Home Alabama and Hitch under his belt, knows his way around this territory. The treasure angle may make it more palatable to guys than a straight-up romantic comedy, so this looks to be the date movie choice of the month.

9) Vince Vaughn’s Wild West Comedy Show
In the tradition of Kings of Comedy and The Blue Collar Comedy Tour, Vince Vaughn and his comedian buddies hit the road, do some stand-up, and film the results. This seems likely to appeal primarily to the actor’s frat boy fans, and not so much to the family audiences he picked up with Fred Claus. It’s being released on a limited number of screens, but with its low cost and Vaughn’s name, it should be a profitable little movie. Plus, it has a buzz-cut Peter “Ralphie from A Christmas Story” Billingsley in it. Added value!

10) Step Up 2 the Streets
Kids dance. In the rain! Oh, look out, they’re fight-dancing! Now, they’re going to use dancing to make better lives for themselves!! Dancing really is the great equalizer!!! Someday, these movies will make great material for VH1’s I Love the 00’s as The Jonas Brothers and Abigail Breslin pine for the simpler days of their youth, when kids went to see movies about dancing. In the meantime, this will be good for maybe a weekend or so of popularity among the junior high set.

Bonus!
11) Be Kind Rewind
This is my most anticipated movie of the month by far. After a magnetized Jack Black erases all the tapes in a VHS rental shop, he and Mos Def recreate the movies and rent out the tapes of their performances. They make low-budget recreations of Ghostbusters, Driving Miss Daisy, and 2001, among others. They’re just like the originals, but only 20 minutes long! Be Kind Rewind is from director Michel Gondry, the fabulous French fabulist behind Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and The Science of Sleep. Plus that YouTube video where he solves a Rubik’s Cube with his feet. After his more serious turn in Margot at the Wedding, Black is back doing that JB thing we all know and love. And Mos Def is my favorite rapper-turned-actor — he has a real screen presence, and his on-screen chemistry with Black looks great. I don’t think this movie will set the box office on fire; it’s a little too whimsical, and self-reflexivity is not usually embraced by general audiences. Plus, it’s being distributed by New Line, who has been having a tough time connecting with audiences lately. Still, I hope it finds its audience. I can’t wait to see it.

Also coming out: Over Her Dead Body, with Eva Longoria and Paul Rudd; Strange Wilderness, with Steve Zahn, The Hottie and the Nottie (shudder), with Paris Hilton; In Bruges, with Colin Farrell and Brendan Gleeson; Definitely Maybe, with Ryan Reynolds and Isla Fisher; Witless Protection, with Larry the Cable Guy; Babylon A.D., with Vin Diesel; Possession, with Sarah Michelle Gellar; and something called The Signal.

National Treasure: Book of Secrets

Spoiler level: Moderate 

National Treasure: Book of Secrets is maybe the dumbest movie I have ever seen. And I’ve seen that movie where Whoopi Goldberg and a T-Rex fight crime.

BoS posits itself as a sort of modern Indiana Jones with a decidedly family-friendly sensibility. But Raiders of the Lost Ark is one of the all-time great action scripts, exploding with clever plotting and witty dialogue, and manages to make the impossible seem, well, possible. BoS, on the other hand, has some of the laziest writing and plotting you can imagine. I’ll give you an example. There may be some minor spoilers.

Nicolas Cage’s history-lovin’ treasure hunter, Ben Gates, needs some information that can only be found in the titular book, a possibly mythological tome which contains the most classified information in our country’s history, and to which only the President has access. Gates cooks up a plan to get the book, and somehow (with powers left over from Next perhaps?) correctly foresees that all of the following will happen: a) the Secret Service agent at a party the President is attending will not be suspicious of Gates when he stumbles out of the woods and will admit him into the party; b) the President will just be doddering around this party aimlessly; c) the President will know who Gates is and be interested in a map he has showing underground passages below the hotel where the party is; d) the President will immediately want to explore said passages and take Gates along with him; e) the President will tell his Secret Service bodyguards to wait outside the secret cave, and they will comply; f) after he has been kidnapped by Gates, the President will still tell him about the book and where it’s located.

I’m serious when I say this is dumber than a sneaker-wearing T-Rex cop.  At least Theodore Rex acknowledges that it takes place in an alternate universe. BoS, on the other hand, thinks it is set in our own universe, and in our universe, THERE’S NO FREAKING WAY THE PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES IS GOING TO GO TROMPING AROUND SOME UNDERGROUND TUNNELS WITH NICOLAS CAGE!! *whew* Sorry about that. It’s just that that is only one example in a sea of ridiculously contrived setups. For instance, there are apparently no security cameras and no guards in The White House, Library of Congress, or Buckingham Palace. Feel free to rustle through the Queen’s things – who’s going to stop you? Oh, and here’s a handy tip – if Ed Harris is ever holding you at gunpoint, just tell him to leave the gun and his henchmen behind, and he will, without even arguing about it. It really works!

I suppose I would be more inclined to overlook these, uh, plot developments if the story were more engrossing, but it’s so simple-minded that the brain tends to wander. The main thrust of the film is Gates trying to clear his ancestor’s name in the assassination of Abraham Lincoln, while a sneering, Southern-drawling Harris tries to stop him, using every PG-rated means at his disposal. Along the way, we get not one but two bickering couples who rekindle their romance while picking fake spiderwebs out of their hair and pouring Aquafina on rocks (at least they’re not drinking the stuff…). Plus, there’s some “comic relief” courtesy of Ben’s associate Riley, played by Gigli’s Justin Bartha, who seems embarrassed to be spewing out endless lame bon mots, like some sort of sidekick robot with a quip switch permanently locked to “on.” Steve Zahn did the goofy, wisecracking, de-sexualized buddy thing much better in Sahara. Yup, Sahara, which is like The Treasure of the Sierra Madre compared to this mess.

Look, I’m all for escapist fun, and, I won’t lie, watching Academy Award winner Helen Mirren swing over a bottomless chasm clutching Academy Award winner Jon Voight has some undeniable appeal. But this is inexcusably lazy, paint-by-numbers filmmaking, with absolutely no passion or reason for existence beyond hoovering up some holiday B.O. loot. There are a lot of really worthwhile movies playing right now – Juno, No Country for Old Men, Atonement, just to name a few. These films crackle with wit and originality that make BoS feel downright depressing by comparison. Give your brain a holiday treat – skip the gaudy Treasure, and take in one of these gems instead.

The Darjeeling Limited

Spoiler level: Moderate

I feel like I need to give you a bit of background information for this review. Rushmore is my favorite movie. The Royal Tenenbaums is in my top five. I think Bottle Rocket is a great debut film, and I even love The Life Aquatic, though I’ll admit it’s not up to the standards of the others. Basically, I’m a Wes Anderson superfan. So it pains me greatly to say that his newest film, The Darjeeling Limited, doesn’t work. At all.

The style of Anderson’s films is instantly recognizable — the pan shots, characters peering into the camera, obsessive attention to color and small details, the omnipresence of Futura font. Lately, he’s been using his bag of tricks in a series of entertaining ads for American Express and AT&T. I like these commercials, but I think they are part of the problem with Darjeeling. Now that he’s ubiquitous, it’s hard to get excited about his work, which seemed so fresh even just a couple of years ago. Anderson isn’t doing anything here he hasn’t done before and better, and for the first time, his stylistic flourishes completely overtake the plot.

It’s not much of a plot though. The story, written by Anderson, Roman Coppola, and Jason Schwartzman, is a road-trip/travelogue/family drama concerning three estranged brothers journeying on a train through India. The brothers, played by Schwartzman, Owen Wilson, and Adrien Brody, are the usual Anderson specimen of man-child, each with their own layers of damage. Wilson, doing a slightly toned-down version of the same character he always plays, takes the position of leader and organizer of the trip, including hiring an assistant who types up and laminates itineraries for the brothers every morning. Brody is the middle son, whose main attribute seems to be stealing their late father’s personal belongings. And co-writer Schwartzman is the youngest, eager to please, and, maybe a little implausibly, also a lady-killer.

Anderson very obviously does not care about India, aside from the way it allows the brothers to act as fish out of water. They spend a great deal of time on the titular train, which is as exhaustively detailed as the house in Tenenbaums and the boat in Aquatic. But despite all the talk of “spiritual journeys,” Anderson could have filmed most of Darjeeling on a set in Burbank. Anderson was never going to make a travelogue — his obsession with emotionally wounded upper class white Americans doesn’t allow much breathing room for outsiders — and I, for one, wouldn’t want him to, but even I am taken back a little at the near-complete lack of interest in the country itself on display here. It’s like a frat boy who went to Cancun for a week talking about his journey through Mexico.

I think it’s just that India is too sprawling and complex to fit into Anderson’s hyper-focused vision. Something happens in the middle of the film, something significant that makes the entire beginning, with the bickering, scheming and lying, seem like the waste of time that it is. And here is where I figured Anderson would drop the affectations and domino-precision of his film-making style and really let the story take over. He doesn’t, of course. It’s the same elaborate tracking shots and choreographed acting, more out of place than ever in this poor Indian village. And it’s really a missed opportunity. The story ultimately, as with all his films, is about learning to face responsibilities and finally grow up, and he had the perfect platform to indicate this visually. After an hour’s worth of running time in which the brothers are immune to everything around them but their own broken lives, Anderson could have used this event to open up the world and take a look around. By filming it in the same style as the rest, it makes the emotional impact seem as artificial as everything else.

I’ve always loved the artificiality of his style before, but I always figured it was tied into the movies themselves. The Tenenbaums, for instance, are trapped in childhood, with their house being a physical manifestation of their inability to move on with their lives, so of course it is packed with an insane amount of detail. Even Anderson’s OCD filming style seems to be a symptom of their dysfunction, and the songs, from Rolling Stones to Charlie Brown, act as their comfort food. Darjeeling’s soundtrack, on the other hand, uses many themes from Merchant/Ivory’s Indian movies, which is clever if a bit precious, but it’s like he’s trying to buy some India cred which he clearly hasn’t earned. And the camerawork this time hurts the performances, rather than bolstering them. All three of the main actors are often appealing and engaging in other projects, but here Anderson doesn’t give us any reason to like them or want to spend time with them. I simply didn’t care enough about any of them to wade through their seemingly endless self-journeys. Darjeeling is the shortest of the Anderson films, but feels interminable.

There is a set of luggage that the brothers spend the entire movie carting around. The baggage is given a staggering amount of screen time, and is the subject of many plot points and visual jokes. The suitcases were apparently designed by Marc Jacobs, and are, naturally, painstakingly detailed, with multi-colored animals and monograms. Two things about the luggage: 1) The payoff with the baggage is so incredibly literal and simple-minded that I wonder if Crash writer/director Paul Haggis did a script polish. 2) There couldn’t be a better metaphor for Anderson himself than this bulky set of bags being carried around for far too long. His characters may have ditched theirs, but he still has a huge, immaculately designed steamer trunk on his back, weighing him down.

3:10 to Yuma

Spoiler level: Moderate

Russell Crowe likes to be in manly movies about manly men doing manly things. And if he gets to be the manliest man around, all the better. Well, it doesn’t get much more manly than this. James Mangold’s absolutely fantastic western 3:10 to Yuma is veritably dripping with sweat, bullets, dirt, testosterone, booze, and sheer unadulterated manliness. It practically oozes through the screen, and you may want a shower after watching it.

Mangold’s film is a remake of the 1957 movie of the same name, much beloved by others but unseen by me. Both films are based on a short story by Elmore Leonard, the writer of novels like Get Shorty and Rum Punch, among many others. The film’s plot is fairly straightforward — a principled rancher (Christian Bale) agrees to help escort a notorious stagecoach bandit (Crowe) to the titular train to jail, in exchange for some money that will help keep his ranch in business. There are, of course, many complications, but Yuma is primarily about these two men who develop a grudging (if wary) respect for each other over the course of the movie. It’s a little like Midnight Run, but with fewer F-bombs and more cattle.

Mangold’s last movie was the Johnny Cash story Walk the Line, which garnered an Academy Award for Reese Witherspoon and a nomination for Joaquin Phoenix. I was impressed by the performances in that film, but felt like the movie itself failed to live up to them. In Yuma, Mangold gets another pair of outstanding performances from his leads, but here has crafted a movie that bolsters his actors instead of leaving them out to dry. The film has pretty clear-cut good and bad guys, but with more interesting shading than the standard “black hat vs. white hat.” The screenplay for Yuma is all understated dialogue and glowering. Nobody talks too much, and they don’t have to — everything is in the eyes.

This reliance on subtle acting over words requires really skilled performers, and Mangold lucks out with his Crowe/Bale dream team. For reasons that I don’t understand, Bale often is overlooked, both by the Academy and viewers in general, when it comes to great working actors. He doesn’t bring any star baggage to his parts, and therefore still seems like a regular guy and can pull off these everyman roles. Even though he is, you know, Batman. In Yuma, he plays a good man struggling just to keep himself and his family afloat. He takes the assignment, mostly for the money, but also to try to be a hero to his teenage son (Logan Lerman, a long way from owl movie/yaoi fantasy Hoot!). Bale has incredibly expressive eyes, and you can feel his struggle to be righteous, even in the face of the temptations placed before him.

Crowe, on the other hand, brings an airport’s worth of star baggage to his roles, which sometimes works for him (Master and Commander) and sometimes doesn’t (A Good Year). Crowe is Hollywood’s go-to alpha male, at least now that Mel Gibson has gone insane. He excels in roles where he is the one in charge, and he’s a good fit with this character — the much-feared leader of a pack of vicious robbers. His eyes always seem to be smiling a little, like he’s one step ahead of everyone and knows how everything will play out. He doesn’t overdo this smugness in a way that, say, George Clooney might. But he has a innate charm that draws us (and several characters) to him. He’s a smooth talker, and it’s easy to forget how dangerous he really is.

This leaves the overacting duties to Malkovich-in-training Ben Foster. After memorable appearances in “Freaks and Geeks” and as the lead in the affable teen movie Get Over It, Foster would seem to have been destined for a Jason Biggs-like career. But after some over the top performances in Hostage and “Six Feet Under,” Foster has cornered the market on “young crazy guy.” In Yuma, he plays Crowe’s sociopathic, strangely fey right-hand man. He is cold-blooded in a way that even Crowe seems to find disturbing, and he supplements his violence with weird facial tics and odd phrases. It’s a classic bit of scenery-chewing, but it works.

Maybe the most impressive aspect of Yuma is that it has given new life to an old genre. All the standard western elements are here (horses, guns, saloons), but Mangold modernizes everything while staying true to the formula that has worked for so long. This is a great-looking movie, from a locomotive’s steam billowing against the blue sky, to a frightening barn fire that casts flickering shadows on faces already devastated by the economic ruin it’s causing. There is a simple scene with people eating dinner in a dining room that is loaded with tension and is shot a bit like a horror film. It is these unexpected touches that make Yuma such a memorable experience.

I’ve never been a big fan of westerns, something I think is common to many people born after the 60’s. They just seem so foreign and antiquated. How can a movie with dusty guys riding around on dusty horses possibly be relevant to my life in any way? Well, the moralistic story of Yuma, with its struggles about trying to get by in an unfair-seeming world couldn’t be more timely or relevant in today’s climate. The highest praise I can give to the movie is that it has ignited a curiosity in me about other westerns, and a desire to see what I’ve been missing all this time. Maybe all those dusty manly manly men aren’t quite the dinosaurs I had always thought them to be. In any case, 3:10 to Yuma is a definite must-see and one of the year’s best so far.

Superbad

Spoiler level: Low

If Judd Apatow were a snack food, he would be Beer Nuts. Like that bar favorite, the comedy style now synonymous with Apatow’s name is a delicate balance of salty yet sweet. And Superbad, the latest movie from 2007’s comedy Svengali, is the Beer Nuttiest of them all. With language so salty, it makes 40 Year-Old Virgin look like Newsies, and a sweeter heart than Knocked Up, Superbad is not just the funniest movie of the year – it’s also one of the flat-out best.

Man, though, these kids can cuss. Jonah Hill went from wanting us to ask about his wiener in Accepted, to not shutting up about it here. He plays Seth, a chubby motor-mouthed fountain of profanity, hurling expletives in all directions, as if they were a shield protecting his many insecurities. His best bud is Evan (Michael Cera from Arrested Development), the sweater-wearing level-headed half of the duo. Evan is like an 18 year-old Bob Newhart, constantly marveling at the craziness swirling around him, trying to keep things on course with clear thinking and a sturdy conscience.

Several critics have compared this pair’s chemistry and dynamics to some of the classic comedic duos, like Laurel and Hardy or Abbott and Costello. I would say they’re more analogous to Lethal Weapon’s Mel Gibson and Danny Glover. Hill is like Gibson’s Riggs — a little crazy and unpredictable, the “loose cannon.” Cera then, is the Murtaugh character — a straight-shooter who usually plays by the rules, but can be persuaded to bend them if the situation calls for it. Superbad even has its own version of Leo Getz, the annoying jabberjaw played by Joe Pesci in Lethal Weapon 2. His name is Fogell, aka McLovin.

Ah, McLovin – seller of tickets, creator of catchphrases. As played by casting call find Christopher Mintz-Plasse, McLovin, an uber-nerd so dorky that he comes all the way back around to cool, manages to act as comic relief in a film that doesn’t require any. Superbad would already have a dizzying amount of laughs without him, but with McLovin, this one goes to 11. He has the manic, nerdy energy that DJ Qualls brought to Road Trip, but even more so. He’s like the character in a sitcom that the audience goes crazy for every time they enter a scene. Mintz-Plasse has a lifetime of “Hey! McLovin!” to look forward to/dread, and I don’t think you can overestimate how much of the film’s popularity he is personally responsible for.

Which is not to say that our main two characters aren’t terrific. Most of the sweetness of Superbad comes from how these two best friends interact, and how they attempt to forget that this is summer’s last hurrah, before they are forced to go their separate ways to new colleges. Being teenage boys, they can’t seem to communicate their affection for each other, lest they come off “gay.” Instead, their anxieties mostly take the form of arguing and cursing. Much of the action centers around their attempts to procure alcohol for some girls at a party, possibly get laid, and enjoy one another’s company while there’s still time.

Like Dazed and Confused, Superbad takes place over the course of one day and night, give or take a little. And, while Superbad is situated in the present, it seems to have absorbed a little of that movie’s grooviness, from the 70’s-riffic opening to some of the retro clothes the characters wear. Dazed is one of my all-time favorites, mostly because the dialogue and situations are so authentic. That film’s director, Richard Linklater, set up workshops for his huge cast, and much of the naturalistic work from the actors came out of improvisation. Apatow, who produced Superbad, also reportedly works this way on his many projects, and the director, Greg Mottola from The Daytrippers, gets some great, nuanced performances out of his young cast. The difference between this new strain of cringe comedy and its 80’s counterparts like Porky’s and Class, for example, is that Superbad and its ilk don’t feel like there’s a 40 year-old trying to write for a 17 year-old. These performers, only a little older than they are playing, bring something of themselves to the roles, and that makes all the difference.

Part of the credit, of course, must go to Superbad’s writers, Evan Goldberg and Seth Rogen. They wrote the film when they were teenagers themselves, and, while it has gone through some revisions over the years, there’s still something unshakably authentic about the story. The two main characters are named after themselves, and while they say it’s not explicitly autobiographical, they did draw from their real lives for the premise. Rogen, deemed too old to play his fictional counterpart, instead has a role as a rookie cop. He and his partner, played by SNL’s Bill Hader, are not any more mature or responsible than the high school kids. They abuse their power to blow through intersections and get free drinks, use their guns irresponsibly, and above all, desperately want to appear “cool.” I imagine some police groups won’t be too happy about how they are portrayed here, but Superbad offers more of a blistering attack on the “eternal child” syndrome than making any kind of statement about cops at large.

It’s a little ironic that the same weekend Superbad opened to great success, Disney Channel broadcast High School Musical 2, (perhaps Superbad’s polar opposite) also to overwhelming response. The HSM movies are the phoniest, most superficial representations of high school life since, I don’t know, maybe Head of the Class. This must be a comfort to millions of parents who like to imagine their children drinking milk, obsessing about prom, and singing pop ditties even Pat Boone would approve of. They would probably do well to steer clear of Superbad if they want to maintain that illusion.

But maybe the most surprising thing about Superbad’s porn-watching, sex-craving, alcohol-swilling teens is they seem to be alright. Unlike HSM’s lunchbox-ready mannequins, the Superbad kids actually acknowledge that they live in modern times, and just want to have a little fun before they are weighed down by more adult responsibilities. If today’s parents can’t relate to that, then they really have forgotten what it’s like to be young. They can have their tan-blasted, mascara-wearing Zac Efron. I’ll take the shlubby foul-mouthed losers any day of the week. Choose a side. The war is on.

Sunshine

Spoiler level: Low

With a quarter of the budget of most of this summer’s tentpole movies, dark (dark dark) horse Sunshine somehow emerges as the season’s most satisfying entry. Like Darren Aronofsky did in last year’s The Fountain, director Danny Boyle used his limited financial resources to reinvent special effects, and delivers astonishing visuals that puts the muddy, cartoon-y CGI of your Spider-Man and Pirate sequels to shame.

With Sunshine, Boyle moves to the head of the eye-candy class. I can’t think of another mainstream director working today with such a mastery of visual flourishes and camera tricks. Eyeballs scanning frantically in closeup. Sunlight growling like a monster as it moves across someone’s face. Digital displays glowing and pulsing to the ethereal electronic music of Underworld. You might call all this gimmickry; I would say that Boyle is merely interested in showing us things in ways we haven’t seen before.

Boyle’s frequent collaborator, screenwriter Alex Garland, has come up with the perfect story to show off the director’s style. The plot, an attempt by a crew to restart the dying sun by bombing it, sounds more like the territory of Michael Bay than the man behind Trainspotting, Shallow Grave, and Millions. But Boyle likes to genre-hop, and unlike Bay, he cares more about humans than hardware.

Truthfully, the story isn’t anything that hasn’t been done before. The crew-on-a-possibly-doomed-mission thing is very reminiscent of Alien. There is a crew member with an oxygen garden that seems inspired by Silent Running. And there is a plot twist not too dissimilar from that of space atrocity Supernova’s. There will be those for whom these similarities will ruin the movie. But Boyle makes this material his own. I can’t overstate how far his magnificent visuals serve to distance the movie from its inspirations.

Helping matters is the great cast he’s assembled. Chris Evans is most famous for having managed to eke out some laughs as the Human Torch in the otherwise wretched Fantastic Four movies; he seems to be a born comedian/wise-ass, so it’s something of a surprise that he pulls off this serious role so well. He has some of the most intense blue eyes in Hollywood, and yet, his are only the second-most intense blue eyes in Sunshine, because his costar is Cillian Murphy, whose eyes are so blue, they look like he should be in Dune. Murphy plays the ship’s physicist, who must decide if the crew should detour and investigate the wreckage of a previous mission. It’s a heavy decision, fraught with perilous consequences, but Murphy, so often a passive cipher in his movies, seems up to the task of deciding this crew’s fate. This may be as close as we ever get to Cillian Murphy: Action Hero.

Rounding out the cast are familiar faces like Crouching Tiger’s Michelle Yeoh, Cliff Curtis from Live Free or Die Hard, Troy Garity from the Barbershop movies, among others. Reportedly, Boyle had the eight main cast members bunk together in dorms during filming to build a sense of familiarity (and possibly annoyance) among the crew. This pays off, as their scenes really feel like these people have been isolated together for far too long.

If there’s a criticism to be levied at Boyle and Garland here, it’s that they seem to want to be all things to all people. The first half is a hard sci-fi movie with plenty of punching-in-of-coordinates and math calculations. It turns into a different kind of movie at one point, and I can understand why some audiences may not like the direction it takes. It might be a bit of bait and switch, but it’s a pretty good switch, I think, and if it saved Sunshine from turning into Soderbergh’s turgid Solaris remake, so much the better.

There are a lot of movie-going choices out there right now, but few as deserving of a look as Sunshine. With its heart-pounding suspense, interesting characters, and visuals and sound designed to blow you out of your seat, it’s everything you could want out of a night at the movies. Sunshine is easily one of the best movies of the year.

Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Spoiler level: Moderate

The Harry Potter in the latest film, The Order of the Phoenix, is a different wizard than the one we’ve come to know from the earlier installments. Gone is our sweet little Harry in the red and gold scarf. “I’m angry… all the time,” he complains, and even Hermione and Ron seem to hang back a little from him. That this is eventually explained away in magic terms does not diminish the subtext – our boy is growing up and it ain’t pretty.

Adolescence is kind to few, but the genius of Jo Rowling’s series is that it makes literal the perils of teenagerdom. We all felt like we were going to die in junior high, though usually of embarrassment. In Rowling’s world, real lives hang in the balance as the forces of good and evil collide, but the everyday concerns of adolescence are given nearly as much weight. Yes, yes, Voldemort has returned, but is Harry going to kiss Cho? Are Ron and Hermione secretly in love? And what about poor Ginny Weasley? Aaaaah! Potions aren’t the only things bubbling up at Hogwarts this time around.

Speaking of Hogwarts, British TV director David Yates doesn’t quite seem to be under the magic spell of the institution as much as the previous filmmakers. For the first time in the series, Hogwarts feels dingy and dangerous. The enchanted staircases and portraits are barely glimpsed, and I don’t remember seeing the resident ghosts wafting through the halls. Even an impromptu display of joyous fireworks is cut short by tragedy. The unthinkable has happened – Hogwarts has turned into your terrible middle school. I might be suffering from a mild case of schadenfreude, but I like this new dreadful Hogwarts. There’s no time to stop and smell the vomit-flavored jellybeans when you’re fighting for your life.

The Order of the Phoenix finds Harry and headmaster Albus Dumbledore becoming pariahs in the magical world. Nobody is willing to believe that Voldemort has made his comeback, and The Daily Prophet, the wizard version of Star Magazine/Fox News, has launched a successful campaign to discredit Harry and Dumbledore’s version of the events of the last movie. The clueless and reactionary Ministry of Magic assigns one of its own, Dolores Umbridge, to be the new Defense Against the Dark Arts instructor. She dresses in pink Jackie O. type outfits, and has plates with mewing kittens on her office wall. She’s very clearly evil, and sort of reminiscent of Joan Cusack’s pastel gold-digger in Addams Family Values. With the Ministry’s backing, she gains more and more power and enacts more and more rules limiting the freedoms of the students, ostensibly for their own safety. Hmm. This sounds a little familiar.

In fact, this is the most overtly political of the Potter movies, and there was a danger that it could have ended up as dreary as one of those Star Wars prequels. But screenwriter Michael Goldenberg, taking over for Steve Kloves who scripted all of the previous installments, chose carefully what to include and what to keep out, and he’s managed to turn the most overstuffed book of the series into the tightest film. There’s less action, at least until the finale, but the interpersonal dynamics are rewarding enough for this to dodge the mantle of the “filler chapter.”

Yates has the fortune of working with a top-flight cast of British vets, but the standout in this film is Imelda Staunton as Umbridge. She gets more screen time than any other adult, and sure makes the most of it. There’s a scene where a student is given a pen with no ink, and her reaction as the scene plays out its horrible conclusion is absolutely chilling. Umbridge is a one-note character, but Staunton manages to transcend that and deliver a fully-fleshed out monster.

With the emphasis on Harry’s internal struggle, coupled with the shorter-than-usual running time, some of the favorite characters from the other movies get the short end of the (broom) stick here. Hagrid and Dumbledore are noticeably absent for most of the film, and offer barely a line apiece to explain their disappearances. Ron and Hermione spend a good deal of the movie exchanging worried glances about Harry. Emma Thompson and Julie Walters basically have cameos, and aside from one virtuoso scene with Staunton, even the great Maggie Smith is pushed into the background.

Make no mistake — Order of the Phoenix is The Harry Show all the way.

Fortunately, for maybe the first time in the series, Daniel Radcliffe is up to the task. Yates clearly spent time with the actors, and the performances are better than ever (with the possible exception of Emma Watson, who seems to be developing some unfortunate actor-y mannerisms). Radcliffe has never been the most naturalistic actor; in the earlier installments you could almost see the director coaching him from the sidelines. But being around these great thespians seems to have finally paid off. He even manages to share a few scenes with that master of intensity, Gary Oldman, and not get blown off the screen. This movie, much more so than the others, rests on his shoulders, and part of the exhilaration here is seeing him finally bloom into a real actor.

And this feels like a real movie too, not just a cash-generating machine (which, of course, is precisely what it is). Alfonso Cuaron’s Prisoner of Azkaban is still my favorite of these movies so far, with its nice balance of whimsy and darkness. Order of the Phoenix may be a little harder to love, mostly due to the grim nature of the source material, but it has its rewards. The final battle is the best set piece in the series yet. The opening scene with the Dementors is wonderfully shot and scary. And the glimpse of Snape’s own lousy childhood is a welcome bit of backstory. I would call Order of the Phoenix the second best of the series, and, while I would like to have seen Cuaron’s take on one of these later chapters, I look forward to Yates’s work in next fall’s Half-Blood Prince. He’s laid the groundwork for something great.