RATING:

Robert Zemeckis’ 3-D animated Disney's A Christmas Carol is clearly a labor of love and, like so many labors of love, it feels slightly ill-advised.
Yes, the motion-capture animation is gorgeous—saturated, detailed, almost hyper real. But Zemeckis seems strangely intent on showing us just how real it can be.

In one of the opening scenes, an undertaker’s apprentice is shown with a bulbous pimple on his chin. Later, the ghost of Marley spits some sort of otherworldly sputum at Scrooge. The Ghost of Christmas Present is a half-malevolent, half-jolly red head with a big beard and—ew!—a hairy red chest (he looks, disconcertingly, like the Burger King).

No one can argue with the depiction of Scrooge himself: Sunken-chested, hook-nosed, hunched, and thoroughly miserable, he seems, at first, to be a man completely devoid of spirit. But during the course of his night visitations, this character comes to life—he’s infused with dread, then sadness, then empathy, until he actually experiences a rush of unadulterated joy. The changes in Scrooge, both in terms of animation and in Jim Carrey’s pitch-perfect vocal  performance (he voices all of the Christmas ghosts, too, which is a bit of overkill) are revelatory—and capture the true essence of Dickens’ tale.

Still, why make this movie again? Zemeckis, I suppose, thinks he’s bringing this classic to a whole new generation. But when both Mickey Mouse and the Muppets have already had their crack at the material, I’d say the gig is up. (Also, though I'm sure this wasn't Zemeckis' call, the whole Disney in the title makes me a bit ill. What next? Disney's Hamlet? I shouldn't give them any ideas.)

In the end, as lovingly rendered as his A Christmas Carol is, I’m not sure young people will flock to it. It’s far too scary for small children and perhaps a bit too ponderous for older ones. Fans of Edgar Allan Poe and Hitchcock might appreciate Scrooge taking a creaky stair one by one or staring with dread at a slowly ticking clock, but young people are probably thinking, “Just die, old man!”

RATING:

When I saw the trailer for The Men Who Stare at Goats, I got pretty excited. A military satire based on a true(ish) story about a secret branch of the army that tried to develop human super powers, staring Jeff Bridges as its baked commander and George Clooney as a wild-eyed true believer? Count me in.

But here’s the problem: The trailer is better than the film. The trailer lays out the storyline and shows some of the film’s best jokes—men trying to rush through walls and drive while blindfolded; George Clooney giving a death stare to a goat; Kevin Spacey expressing his regrets about a couple’s divorce at their wedding—but the movie itself is glib and unfocused. Sad to say, it works better edited down to four minutes.

Ewan McGregor plays Bob Wilton, a recently divorced reporter looking to prove to his ex-wife just how macho he is. He goes to Kuwait where he meets Clooney’s Lyn Cassady who tells him about the First Earth Battalion, a classified military program started in the ’70s that practiced mind control.

“We were Jedi Warriors,” says Lyn.
“What’s a Jedi Warrior?” says Wilton. (How meta.)

Lyn at first says he’s retired, but later claims he’s been reactivated for a top-secret mission. To Iraq they go, where Lyn does things like try to break up cloud formations with the power of his penetrating gaze and disarm hostage takers with his mind. Is Lyn a loon or a gifted psychic? The answer, in short, is both.

The First Earth Battalion, apparently based on a real army program, is a fascinating oxymoron: A non-violent military division that tried, in vain, to be in step with the anti-war times. (Hey, if the whole world is flashing the peace sign, why can’t the military join in?)

In a way, I think I would’ve liked to have seen a whole movie about the unit’s heyday, when Lyn was a rising star, Bridges’ Bill Django was an inspirational guru, and Spacey, who plays Lyn’s rival in the unit, was a jealous Iago-type, seething in the shadows.

Instead, we flashback and forward, watch as Lyn and Wilton get into various scrapes, and eventually get to Lyn’s secret mission—which is pretty silly and, yes, involves goats.

The Men Who Stare at Goats feels like a wasted opportunity—as though they used a notebook filled with clever jottings where a script should’ve been. Someone should’ve seen this coming.

RATING:

After seeing Amelia, you can only assume one of two things: That Amelia Earhart herself was an insipid, uninspiring woman or that filmmaker Mira Nair just blew it.

I think we can all draw the same conclusion.

How did this film go so far afoul? You have a talented director (I loved Nair’s The Namesake), a perfectly cast Hilary Swank as Earhart, and the kind of subject matter that seems destined to land on critic’s Top 10 lists.

But Nair made the classic mistake. She was so concerned with mimesis—yes, Swank looks like Earhart, the aviator-chic clothing is spiffy, and the planes look sufficiently rickety—that she didn’t bother with story. You can’t just present us with the details of Earhart’s life. You have to show us what drove her, what gave her lift off.

Instead, Earhart is depicted as an earnest, cheery lady who simply wants to fly. She wants to be free, she says over and over again. She wants to soar like a bird, roam like the buffalo. Oh, how I wish I was making this up.

“It was a night of stars. Of tropical loveliness,” Earhart intones from the sky.

“A fairyland of beauty lay below and above me,” she says later, as I tried not to laugh out loud.
(She’s a pilot folks, not a poet.)

The film gives us two equally uninspiring romances—one between Earhart and her doting publicist/publisher husband George Putnam (Rirchard Gere); the other, an affair between Earhart and fellow pilot Gene Vidal (Ewan MacGregor). (If the story is to be believed, it turns out that 7-year-old Gore Vidal was afraid of tigers. And yes, folks, that is quite possibly the most interesting revelation of the film.)

Amelia is slick, handsomely mounted and really just a colossal dud. Oh, and I’ll go ahead and ruin the ending for you now—they never find the plane.

RATING:

The trials of Job in 1950s Midwestern Jewish suburbia. That might be the best way to describe the dark comedy A Serious Man, which many are saying is the Coen brothers most personal film to date.

What, then, to make of the film’s protagonist, Larry Gopnik, played by New York theater vet Michael Stuhlbarg, and clearly a stand-in for Joel and Ethan’s dad? Yes, Larry is a decent man—his quest to be a serious one is open to debate. But he’s also a total doormat.

Early in the film, Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick) tells him she’s leaving him for family friend Sy Abelman (Fred Melamed). Somehow she manages to turn this announcement into a harangue—she’s annoyed at Larry because he forced her to cheat on him (or something like that). Sy, on the other hand, wants to prove what a mensch he is by comforting Larry. “It’s going to be okay,” he repeats unctuously, enveloping Larry in an unwanted embrace.

At the university where Larry teaches physics, a Korean student (drolly funny Danny Kang) tries to blackmail Larry into giving him a passing grade. Larry is outraged, but doesn’t act. Indeed, his entire personality seems to revolve around fretful ineffectualness.

Everyone seems to recognize what an inconsequential man Larry is, including the three rabbis he turns to for advice. One pawns him off on an underling, the other tells him an empty parable that seems to bear no relationship to Larry’s troubles, the third claims he’s too busy to see him.
The Coen brothers point in all of this seems to be: Life sucks and then you die. Or perhaps: Don’t attempt to look for meaning in your life—there is none. Or perhaps that old Jewish chestnut: It could always get worse.

I had assumed that since the Coen brothers were mining such personal territory, it might curb some of their misanthropic tendencies. Au contraire. Virtually every character in this film is repulsive in some way; Larry is taking care of his gambling addicted brother (Richard Kind) who mopes around the house in saggy underpants and periodically drains a cyst on his back; Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolf) is more concerned with getting high and watching F-Troop than noticing (or caring about) his family’s unraveling; Larry’s vaguely menacing next door neighbor—the neighbors call him “the Gentile”—takes his son out of school to go hunting.

A Serious Man opens with what seems to be an old Jewish parable about an old man who may or may not be a dybbuk (evil spirit) who helps a villager in the snow and then is killed by the villager’s wife. Was the old man really a dybbuk? Or did the wife just kill a kindly do-gooder? Either way, the couple seems cursed.

The parable’s relation to the rest of the film is never made clear—is the couple supposed to be a descendant of the Gepniks? Or are the Coens suggesting that all Jewish people are cursed in some way? Or is the opening parable an object lesson of sorts—we try in vain to find meaning in the story, just as Larry tries, in vain, to find meaning in his own suffering?

Whatever the case—bummer, man.

RATING:

It just makes sense that Spike Jonze, whose imagination is seemingly limitless and who always manages to bring a sense of off-kilter joy to his films, would be the perfect director to adapt Maurice Sendak’s beloved children's book, Where the Wild Things Are.

In the opening scenes, we meet Max (iconically adorable Max Records), a little boy who wears a wolf suit and runs around his house like a “wild thing.” In Sendak’s book, it’s not completely clear why Max is being naughty—he’s just being a kid—but in this film's bold reimagining, Max’s father has died, his older sister ignores him, and his stressed-out mother (Catherine Keener) has started dating a new guy (Mark Ruffalo). Max has all these feelings—anger, loneliness, uncertainty—and, of course, the boundless physical energy of an 8-year-old.

Jonze uses a hand-held camera, always from Max’s perspective, as Max flies through the house, builds a fort in the snow, starts a snowball fight—pow! When he is lying under a desk while his mom tries to work, we see his mother’s legs, plus the legs of the desk and chair—and it’s all so evocative. Who among us doesn’t remember life from that sneaky vantage—the safety of mom’s legs, plus the largeness, the sheer unknowableness, of the giant world?

In the book, Max is banished to his room where he imagines the island populated by Sendak’s fearsome and lovable wild creatures. In the movie, he escapes into the night and takes a boat.

The book and the movie are about the same thing: A child’s need to gain control over a sometimes overwhelming world. In both cases, Max thinks he wants power—and he does, a little—but he also wants the stability and constancy of his mother’s love. But in the book, which is a mere 9 sentences longs, the Wild Things have very little to say or do. At first they want to eat Max, then they want to make him their king, and then they decide they might want to eat him again.

In the movie, however, the Wild Things are sort of like a tribe of overgrown, motherless children. Without a mother-figure, they are rootless and depressed. There’s the burly Carol (James Gandolfini, menacing and endearing, as only James Gandolfini can be), who pines away for KW (Lauren Ambrose) and sabotages his own desire for a family. There’s the squabbling couple Judith (Catherine O’Hara) and Ira (Forest Whitaker). Plus, Carol’s loyal right-hand bird Douglas (Chris Cooper) and the goat-like misfit Alexander (Paul Dano). They accept Max as their king because he promises to make the sadness go away.

Jonze has created a most incredible world—he uses people in animal suits enhanced by CGI—and the results are like nothing you’ve seen before. Something about tiny Max’s presence among these giant tactile creatures—Carol often has a bit of snot caked up in his furry nose; Ira licks Max with a long, slippery tongue—set against the rough, naturalistic backdrop (the film was shot in Australia) is uncanny and poetical. (The ecstatic indie-folk soundtrack, by Karen O of the Yeah, Yeah, Yeahs, is perfection). In one scene, Max sleeps among the creatures in a cocoon-like pile. In another scene, Max rides on Carol’s horns and surveys the world of which he is now king. There is more than one “wild rumpus” as well as the building of an awesome fort. Eventually, Max realizes that he misses his mother and wants to go home.

Where the Wild Things Are is not without its flaws—the story is somewhat desultory and we never really believe that these world-weary characters are projections of Max’s imagination—but it’s a work of genius all the same. You’re still absorbing Jonze's and Sendak’s wondrous world when the film, sadly, comes to an end.

RATING:

I had something of a revelation about Michael Moore during  his latest, Capitalism: A Love Story: The man just can’t help himself.

Many of us watch Moore’s films and think: If only he’d be a little more temperate, if only he would lay it on a little less thick, if only he could avoid the easy mark or the knee-jerk sentimentality—then he could successfully deflect all of his critics.

But then, I realized, Moore wouldn’t be Moore. His mournful over-identification with the plight of the working man—and his sense of himself as their champion—isn’t manufactured or cynical in any way. It is who he is. It makes him great. It also, let’s face it, makes him a bit of a pain in the neck.

So it is with Capitalism: A Love Story, which is not Moore’s best work (I’d vote for Bowling for Columbine), but carries his usual sense of impeccable timing: America is just about as fed up with capitalism as he is.

Moore is grappling with his favorite themes here: Greed, government collusion, the exploitation of the working man. And he asks a rather provocative question: Has the American public been sold a bill of goods about the inherent fairness of capitalism? Is capitalism really a system where everyone can succeed or, instead, a system designed to create an inordinate gap between the super rich and the rest of us?

He shows us several families being evicted—in one case, a man being thrown off his farm bitterly thanks the bank for paying him $1,000 to do the cleaning and excavation of his own home.

He introduces us to a real estate agent in Miami, who owns the eerily titled Condo Vultures, scans the Internet for eviction notices, and proudly boasts that taking advantage of others’ misfortune is the very foundation of capitalism.

He shows us a group of laid-off factory workers in Chicago who stage an old-fashioned sit-in to receive the severance pay and benefits they are owed.

He shows how the corporate bailout bill was rushed through Congress with such obfuscation and alacrity that a few representatives, including our own Elijah Cummings, still seem shell-shocked by its passage.

And he takes us back to his home town of Flint, Michigan and uses it, again, as a symbol of the American dream deferred. Here were people who worked hard, raised families, believed in everything America stood for—and were still royally screwed by greedy corporations. (He even interviews his now feeble father, who looks on sadly at the sight of his old destroyed GM plant. “The people,” he responds when his son asks him what he misses most about his old job.)

Some critics have taken Moore to task for a gimmick where he pulls up in an armored truck, wraps Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms in yellow crime scene tape, and attempts to make a citizen’s arrest. But my audience cheered at those scenes—they were a much-needed catharsis.

Still, Moore’s cheap shots at Bush seem a bit tired at this point (didn’t he get in enough swipes in Fahrenheit 911?). And he sidesteps his hero Obama’s role in continuing the corporate bailouts (and, so far at least, in not backing the public health care option that Moore so persuasively argued for in Sicko.)

But say what you will about Michael Moore, when you see one of his films you know that you’ll laugh, you’ll cry, and you’ll leave the theater with a little more outrage than when you arrived. I know I did.

RATING:

I think we can all agree that Drew Barrymore is one of the most lovable human beings on the planet. Not only is she totally BFF-approved, but she’s overcome a well-documented childhood-from-hell to become a major Hollywood player, both as actress and producer—all without losing her giddy flower girl charm.

I think the thing I like most about Whip It!, Barrymore’s directorial debut, is that it manages to capture so much of Drew herself. It’s spunky, it’s spirited, it has an undeniable indie cool—and it cheerfully celebrates female sisterhood and girl power.

Ellen Page—wisely choosing her first starring vehicle since her breakout role in Juno—plays Bliss Cavendar, a misfit from the small town of Bodeen, TX, who longs to escape the world of barbecue, beauty queens, and football. When she goes on a shopping trip to Austin with her hovering mom (Marcia Gay Harden), she sees a couple of loud, fierce, and sexy girls on roller skates—they’re roller derby players. These girls are not demure like her mother’s beloved pageant queens—they are defiantly badly behaved. Bliss is mesmerized. So she drags her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat) to a roller derby match and, afterwards, shyly approaches Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig) from the Hurl Scouts. “You guys are my heroes,” she says sincerely. “Strap on a pair of skates and be your own hero,” Maggie replies. Which is exactly what Bliss does.

Turns out, Bliss is good—she’s small and quick and stronger than she looks (her smallness, of course, might be a virtue of the fact that she is 17, four years below the allowable age for roller derby). Freshly dubbed “Babe Ruthless,” she immediately joins the pugilistic Smashley Simpson (Barrymore herself, hilariously playing against type) as the Hurl Scout’s newest striker and faces off against the nasty Iron Maven (Juliette Lewis).

Of course, there’s a boy (Landon Pigg) and of course, he is cute and wears a tattered army jacket and plays in a band. But Whip It!—which also features a juicy part for Daniel Stern as Bliss’s goofy and doting father, and a funny role for Andrew Wilson (the other Wilson brother), as the team’s beleaguered coach—is not about boys. It’s about girls finding their own bliss (get it?) and supporting each other and being messy and loud and even a little bit nasty in the process. And seriously, what could be better than that?

RATING:

After the brilliant Shaun of the Dead (and the decidedly less than brilliant Zombie Strippers!, among others), I figured the zombie spoof genre had played itself out.

Zombieland proved me wrong. The genius of the film is that it’s more buddy flick than horror spoof. And director Ruben Fleischer keeps things fresh with a freewheeling, anything-goes narrative (out of nowhere, for example, he will cut to the “Zombie Kill of the Week”) and a blissfully short attention span (the film clocks in at a perfect 82 minutes). It’s also funny. As hell.

Jesse Eisenberg plays Columbus, one of the few survivors of an epidemic virus that turned most people into flesh-eating zombies. How did a scrawny, brainy outcast (he even has iritible bowel syndrome) like Columbus survive the zompocalypse? By adhering to his own very strict sense of rules. (One rule: “Always Check the Back Seat.”)

Columbus meets another survivor—an alpha male brimming with guts and swagger dubbed Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson, who hasn’t had a role this juicy in years.) Under normal circumstances, these men would have nothing to do with each other. In Zombieland, they team up to kick some zombie butt (well, Tallahassee does most of the butt-kicking; Columbus is very good at running and hiding).

Into the mix comes tough-as-nails Wichita (rising star Emma Stone) and her spunky little sister Little Rock (Abigail Breslin). A pair of Paper Moon-style con-artists, they use their wits to survive. Of course, the earnest Columbus will fall hard for the unsentimental Wichita.

Yes, Zombieland tries a bit too hard to be a cult classic (one particular cameo feels forced and Tallahassee’s Twinkie obsession is bordering on cutesy). But writers Rhett Reese and Paul Wernick not only have a sharp sense of comic dialogue, they clearly spent their formative years coming up with hilarious and creative ways to kill zombies. Their misspent youth is our gain.

RATING:

Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying is sneakily subversive. It starts out as a very clever science fiction comedy: We’re in an alternate universe where lying doesn’t exist. As such, there is no fiction, and total truth in advertising.

“A Sad Place for Hopeless Old People,” reads the sign on the entranceway to an old age  home.

“When There’s No Coke,” reads a billboard for Pepsi. (Heh.)

People, too, feel compelled to blurt out the truth: “I’m embarrassed to work  here,” says a waiter as he approaches a table where our hero Mark (Gervais) is on a date with beautiful Anna (Jennifer Garner.) “I’m out of your league,” she tells mark matter-of-factly.

When Mark gets fired from his job as a “screenwriter” (films are essentially historical readings) he finds himself in danger of being evicted. He goes to the bank to withdraw his final $300 and, in an epiphany, discovers that he can lie about the amount he has in his account. (He’s a nice guy. He says he has $800.) He has, as the title says, invented the lie.

Now he’s the most powerful person in the world, the only one who can wield the mysterious and magical power of falsehood.
All this is great—and laugh out loud funny at times. (The film also has some A-list cameos, including Phillip Seymour Hoffman as a bartender and Edward Norton as a cop.)

But things start taking a turn for the philosophical when Mark “invents” heaven to soothe his dying mother.

Suddenly, Mark becomes a prophet, who also invents an all-knowing being called “The Man in the Sky.”

In other words, the film could also be called The Invention of God. Clever, yes. Subversive? Depends on your own set of beliefs. But once Mark turns into Moses (he uses Pizza Hut boxes as tablets), the film gets weighed down a bit by its own ambition. Still, you’ve got to give Gervais credit. The man does nothing halfway.

RATING:

You know what has changed the most since Fame, Alan Parker’s beloved 1980 film about a New York performing arts high school? The nature of fame itself. Today, fame is a reality TV show, viral video, or testy town hall meeting away. The question isn’t who gets to be famous? It’s who doesn’t get to be famous? So the stakes are pretty low on this update—and the film clearly knows it.

I mean, say what you will about Parker’s original (I loved it), but it was made with a real affection for the young cast and a kind of messy, earnest joy. This update is as slick and calculated as a McDonald’s commercial.

Sure, there are some show stoppers. Newcomer Naturi Naughton gives Irene Cara a run for her money as Denise, the classical pianist who really just wants to sing. (Of course, I hate films that depict classical music as somehow stifling, but that’s a personal pet peeve.) And the inevitable cafeteria music extravanganza, while cheesy, is fun to watch.

But for the most part, we don’t care about these kids, whose stories are barely developed beyond the most glancing cliches (angry young man; shy girl; spoiled spawn of backstage parents). I found myself more interested in the teachers, played by a wily cast of old pros, including Charles “Roc” Dutton, Bebe Neuwirth, Megan Mullally, and Kelsey Grammer. Always a bad sign.

My advice? Watch Glee instead. It’s awesome.