Chinatown (1974)

The 1930s and 40s were a great time for film noir.  This genre basically dealt with hardboiled men living in corrupt times and places, often corrupt themselves, the women who tempt them and the odds they face to even begin to do the right thing.  It's not a genre that sees a lot of usage today.  The most recent, popular example I can think of is 2005's Sin City, though that one comes across as more cartoon than anything else, even with the stylish flashes of color and the highly hardboiled dialogue spoken by, oh, every character onscreen.  Perhaps there is simply too much trust in various institutions in this day and age, along with the predominance of the idea that most private detectives these days are hired to find evidence of adultery or something much less glamorous, and its no small wonder why this style of film seems to have disappeared.

Maybe this is why 1974's Chinatown works so well.  First, the movie's private eye, Jake Gittes, specializes in the aforementioned divorce cases.  Second, the time period puts it squarely about the time of the Watergate scandal forcing an American president to resign for the first and to date only time in our history, making it easier to believe our institutions might be corrupt.  Third, even with all this, the movie is set in the same time period the best and best-remembered film noirs were produced, the 30s.

Chinatown is actually one of my favorite movies.  The only movie I love more than Chinatown is the Japanese samurai/unsolved murder mystery Roshomon.  It turns out my grandfather's favorite movie was The Maltese Falcon with Humphrey Bogart, so for all I know this is genetic (it probably isn't).  But for all that at least one friend of mine can't watch this movie in light of both director Roman Polanski's personal scandals and the big reveal about Faye Dunaway's character near the end of the movie, I still find this a compelling film that holds up to mutliple viewings.

The movie opens with one poor, working class slob finding out his wife has been cheating on him, as he suspected.  Had he not, he wouldn't have hired Jake "J.J." Gittes to look into it.  From the second Gittes, played to perfection by Jack Nicholson back in the days when he didn't just ham it up onscreen most of the time, enters the frame and begins talking he pretty much never leaves our sight for more than a few seconds at a time.  Even when we don't see him, he's just off-frame somewhere.  This accomplishes something for the audience worth noting:  the first time viewer only ever knows as much as Gittes does at any given moment in the movie.  The clues come out, slowly and surely, parceled out bit-by-bit as needed.

And what a mystery!  Two, actually.  The more obvious one is who killed the honest water company engineer, and former owner, Hollis Mulwray.  The second, tied to it, is who was the young girl Hollis was hanging out with, and why do so many people seem so interested in her.

The answers point to the standard for noir films:  corruption in the higher ranks of society.  Dishonest cops on the take are one thing.  Downright evil public works executives, who apparently can never have enough money, are something else.

The Chinatown of the title barely features in the movie.  Instead, the place is more symbolic, a place where corruption happens and there isn't anything an honest person can do about it.  It's the reason Gittes went from being a cop to a private eye.  Gittes, unlike Sam Spade in The Maltese Falcon, actually is a moral person, and his righteous indignation can only be calmed with an associate's reminder of where he is when the climactic showdown goes down.  Like any good noir, good doesn't really triumph here.  The best any noir hero can hope for is for a slight improvement in the world around him, and Chinatown doesn't even offer that much.

Hugo (2011)

CGI is, above all else, a tool.  Overuse it, or use it the wrong way, and it can affect your movie in only a negative way.  Use it correctly, and there's even a chance your audience won't even notice it's been done.  Sometimes, this particular tool has been used to create entire worlds from scratch, which no doubt save filmmakers money in trying to recreate sets.  Done right, this worldbuilding can be incredibly impressive and dazzling.  George Lucas has perhaps been the most famous of moviemakers to take advantage of this technology, with the various Star Wars prequels showcasing vast alien landscapes instead of more remote parts of Tunisia or Norway filling in for various planets.

Why then did I feel the opening few minutes of Martin Scorsese's 2011 movie Hugo far outstripped anything Lucas' production company has ever done along those lines?  Especially since all Scorsese was trying to do was recreate 1920s Paris?

Possibly because audiences don't expect this sort of razzle-dazzle from the man who directed gritty movies like Taxi Driver and Raging Bull, or even more recent, fairly low-tech all-told features like The Departed and Shutter Island.  There probably has been some CGI in a few of Scorsese's films, but nothing on the scale of the zooming around of the Paris train station that opens what would be Scorsese's foray into family films.

It's more than that, of course.  The story of a young orphan boy, living in the train station and keeping the clocks running and happens to find former magician/filmmaker Georges Melies reduced to near poverty selling wind-up toys out of the station isn't the sort of thing that attracts the kids these days.  Maybe if a few of those automatons talked, but even the robo-man Hugo's been trying to rebuild only draws a very elaborate picture.  This movie is a celebration of the movies, what they do for people and the wonder that can come from just being transported to another world.  This is a movie where the closest we have to a villain is Sacha Baron Cohen's nameless station inspector, and even he is painted in a sympathetic way with his creaky knee brace and unrequited love for a flower vendor.

The main plot has Hugo trying to repair a robot his clockmaker father brought home one day.  His father (Jude Law) died suddenly in a fire, and Hugo was more or less adopted and subsequently abandoned by his drunken uncle (Ray Winstone).  An orphan like himself would probably be sent away to an orphanage, and the station inspector is the kind of guy who will bust an orphan for going through a discarded bag looking for food, so he stays hidden and lets people think Uncle Claude is still running the clocks despite the fact the man's been gone for a very long time.  He sees the toymaker from afar, and swipes little bits and pieces until he's caught, then does what he needs to to get his father's notebook back from the man he doesn't know is responsible for many a silent movie classic.  Indeed, Hugo loves the movies and introduces the man's niece to them while rhapsodizing about his father's favorite, the famous Melies feature in which the man in the moon gets a rocket to the eye.

Will Hugo fix the machine, realize his new boss is the long-since-believed dead Melies, re-inspire the man, get out of poverty, and land on his feet?  Of course he will.  That's not the point, though.  It's the journey in movies like this, not the destination.

A special note on Cohen's French policeman:  as with here and his role in Talladega Nights:  The Legend of Ricky Bobby, he has a very nice way of doing a comedic French accent, on par with the one the late Peter Sellers had used as Inspector Clouseau.  It's a bit of a shame the makers of the remake of that series didn't hire him instead of Steve Martin, a funny man in his own right, but not in the way Cohen inhabits his various foreign caricatures.

Almost Famous (2000)

Writer/director Cameron Crowe has a long, personal history with Rolling Stone magazine.  He worked there as a teenager before deciding to strike out on his own, going undercover as a high school student, and later writing the book that would become the basis for the movie Fast Times at Ridgemont High, featuring a script by Crowe.  Crowe's affections for that time in his life, and the music he covered, is highly evident in his 2000 film Almost Famous.

Almost Famous tells the semi-autobiographical story of William Miller, a 15 year-old writing prodigy who manages to get a job over the phone for Rolling Stone.  His initial job, getting an interview from Black Sabbath, fails miserably, but he manages to get in to see the opening act, up-and-coming band Stillwater, thanks to help from a few groupies who call themselves "Band-Aids".  The "leader" of these girls, played by Kate Hudson in what may be her best role to date, goes by the name Penny Lane and has a special attraction to Stillwater's lead guitarist, Russell Hammond (played by Bill Crudup).  William, as played by newcomer Patrick Fugit, seems to bond with Penny too, and she may be looking out for him more than anyone else on the tour, though not as much as she is fooling around with the very spoken-for Russell.

Crowe's script created Stillwater as a composite of many of the various bands he used to cover, so the pressures to perform and the pleasures of the flesh all seem to be most of what the band wants.  Petty jealousy from the lead singer (Jason Lee) clashes with the aloofness of Russell on more than one occasion, as drinks and drugs are consumed and the Band-Aids are used as unknowing chips in various poker games.  There's still a great love for the music itself, as William tries to stay out of whatever is going on (mostly successfully), something that would have been a great relief to his overbearing mother (Frances McDormand) who is both a prude and a forward-thinker at the same time (she thinks Christmas is too commercialized and pushes her son to excellence and her daughter out the door, but still thinks rock music is all about drugs and sex).  It's this outsider, forever getting his interviews with Russell put off, who can see that Penny Lane is an actual person, can lecture the band on its failings to its own fans, and come out of the whole experience somehow making all involved better people, and not in a way that comes across as corny or contrived.

Early in the movie, William meets real-life figure Lester Bangs, as played by Philip Seymour Hoffman.  Lester takes the role of a professional guardian angel, always advising William on how to keep ahead of his deadlines and keep his Rolling Stone editors happy, all while not letting those self-same editors know he's a juvenile.  Lester predicts that rock'n'roll is a dying form of music.  He may be right on that.  Glam rock, disco, hair metal, and the rise of pop are all on the horizon for the fans like William and the bands like Stillwater.  As such, its very nice to be able to see the (minor all told) warts-and-all story from the days where rock was the music of the young as seen through the eyes of someone who saw it up close.

Trading Places (1983)

Once upon a time, back in the 80s, movie producers could make an R-rated comedy.  At some point, film comedies became a lot more castrated, even the sex romps.  Judd Apatow has made some in-roads towards reclaiming comedies with actual vulgar jokes that are really vulgar, but even he has some limits he can't cross.  I was thinking about this when I caught 1983's Trading Places on HBO last week.

This was a movie featuring two former Saturday Night Live castmembers, though neither were members of the cast at the same time, and the one who got top billing was Dan Aykroyd.  These days, Aykroyd is mostly trying to get a third Ghostbusters made without Bill Murray and taking supporting roles in other comedies.  His last starring role was as the title character in Yogi Bear and then it was only his voice.

The other fellow was a young Eddie Murphy.  Murphy still gets the starring roles, more so than Aykroyd does, but his parts are a lot more family friendly since he donned multiple fat suits for The Nutty Professor.

The basic plot is simple:  two greedy billionaire brothers, the Dukes, make a bet over whether nature or nurture determines whether or not someone will be a criminal or not.  Randolph (played by the late Ralph Bellamy) believes nature does it.  His brother Mortimer (played by the late Don Ameche) doesn't seem to care much, but ruining people's lives seems to be beyond the consideration of either man.  They opt to take a young stockbroker that works for them, Louis Winthrope III (Aykroyd), make him destitute without a home or friends, and bring in a street hustler that was begging on the streets while pretending to be a legless Vietnam vet, Billy Ray Vallentine (Murphy).

The bet is "the usual" (which turns out to be a dollar) and it turns out when a rich guy loses everything and a poor guy gains it, well, they do switch places in every way.  But the tables get turned when Vallentine overhears the brothers settling their bet, learn that both he and Louis won't be coming back to the firm, and further, one of the Dukes drops a certain N-word about Vallentine.  See, that N-word is something that doesn't appear in too many comedies these days either.

There's a team-up then between Louis and Vallentine, along with helpful butler Denholm Elliott and really helpful prostitue Jamie Lee Curtis.  Why they need to dress up and pretend to be foreigners I am not sure, but this does afford us the sight of Aykroyd in blackface pretending to be Jamaican.  That's one last thing you don't see much anywhere these days.

Despite cameos by Frank Oz, James Belushi, future senator Al Franken, and Franken partner Tom Davis, plus a gorilla, I don't really get into this one all that much.  Truth be told, I much prefer Murphy and director John Landis' Coming to America which, as a bonus, gives us a cameo by the Duke brothers getting their fortunes back in the most happenstance of ways.

Toy Story (1995)

In 1995, the concept of a feature-length computer-animated feature was probably about as likely to audiences as a feature-length hand-drawn animated feature was in 1937.  In 1937, Walt Disney premiered Snow White and the Seven Dwarves.  In 1995, Disney and Pixar produced Toy Story.

Toy Story in many ways established the Pixar brand.  The cast was made up primarily of actors with distinct voices and personalities, not huge name marquee celebrities.  Yes, there was Tom Hanks as Woody, but after him was Tim Allen, still mainly the star of TV's Home Improvement and whose film credits were largely limited to the starring role in The Santa Clause from the year before.  After that is a series of actors with distinct voices but none of which seemed likely to open a movie all by him or herself:  Don Rickles, soon-to-be Pixar regular John Ratzenberger, Annie Potts, R. Lee Ermey, Wallace Shawn, and Jim Varney.  Varney had been the main star for a film series, but was probably better known as the character of Ernest P. Worrel than by his own name.  The voices were all distinct and well-chosen for each of their required roles.

Likewise, despite the appeal of good animation, the story came first.  The core concept of what life is like for a child's playthings, toys that are eventually outgrown, and how they might feel about that, is explored as well as could be (a theme that would continue for each of the sequels too as the child/owner continues to get older and the toys fret about being lost or never played with again).  There is, as should be expected of Pixar, a moment when a character reaches the lowest low, though here Buzz Lightyear realizing he really doesn't fly isn't anywhere on the caliber of, say, an old man's heartbreak in the opening minutes of Up.  The characters emerge fully formed in a single movie, with Woody being at first jealous but basically a good soul, Buzz being confused about what he actually is, and the antagonistic, Rickles-voiced Mr. Potato Head causing problems and leading the other toys, including loyal Slinky Dog and besmitted Little Bo Peep, away from Woody when he needs them the most.  Of course Woody and Buzz end the movie the best of friends, but that's to be expected.

That said, like a good TV series trying to figure itself out in the early episodes, this first Pixar movie can be a bit of a shock when it is compared to anything the studio has put out the last few years.  The details to Merida's frizzy hair, the vast view of space from WALL-E, or even the marionette show Woody watches of himself in Toy Story 2 are still not in the technological cards yet.  Movie villains Sid and his dog Scud look rather bad, and backgrounds look flat in comparison to what's to come.  There's still some great details, like Buzz seeing his own reflection as he looks around Andy's room for the first time, but the studio will do better with its future features.

Plus, truth be told, the film pulls out a few too many Randy Newman songs.

All in all, the movie holds up rather well, establishes the quality and voice of the Pixar brand, and manages to make the view care what a cowboy doll and a space man action figure are going through.  Not a bad accomplishment for any first time studio.

The Amazing Spider-Man (2012)

In my last entry, I mentioned how Marvel Films required studios that bought the film rights to various characters to continue making movies with said characters or else lose the rights to said characters.  This is the basic explanation for why the reboot The Amazing Spider-Man exists at all.  Efforts to get another trilogy or so out of director Sam Raimi and star Tobey Maguire fell flat so in order to keep the cash cow that is the webslinger, Sony just went for a reboot.

All in all, it isn't a bad movie.  It just feels somewhat pointless.  Director Marc Webb, new to the genre and not at all named ironically, does a fair job, and new Spider-Man Andrew Garfield does bring both the manic energy of Spider-Man and the lowkey nerdiness of Peter Parker out well.  He also looks more like a movie high school student despite being in his mid-twenties.  Emma Stone takes over the role her castmate from The Help Bryce Dallas Howard played in the previous series of Gwen Stacy, and we get another take on the Spider-Man origin, complete with a villain Raimi hinted at with brief cameos but never let go full evil, Dr. Curt "The Lizard" Connors.

As always, the true challenge is to make a movie, so close in time to the last Spider-Man film, seem like it is different and unique enough to justify itself to anyone besides a Sony Pictures beancounter.  Webb's take is to give us a younger Spider-Man with some kind of corporate espionage backstory.  We get to see his parents before he is hustled off to his Aunt May and Uncle Ben's.  Then they die in a mysterious plane crash that eventually leads Peter to look up his dad's old partner, Curt Connors (played by Rhys Ifans).

As his aunt and uncle, Sally Field seems largely wasted.  She seems to have maybe four or five scenes and while she isn't the frail version as seen by Rosemary Harris, she isn't given much to do besides look upset.  Martin Sheen as Uncle Ben seems to be coasting a bit.  He does OK, I suppose, but I was never convinced he was the guy who made Peter feel the need to act after he gets shot.

For all that, there is a scene where Spider-Man catches a car thief that I think got more about Spider-Man than any of the other movies.  The irreverent clown Spider-Man has been largely absent from the movies, and Garfield seems to be genuinely funny in the role.

A sequel is apparently already in the works, with a teaser at the end with a mysterious man (probably Norman Osbourne) confronting the imprisoned Connors who implores the man to leave Peter alone.  We all know that won't happen.  The only question is whether or not audiences will do the same.

The Avengers (2012)

Marvel Comics slowly worked its way into the film world.  While superheroes had appeared in the movies for many years, most were limited by special effects technology being unable to completely translate the four color medium from pulp page to silver screen.  There was a big screen Superman, a Batman, and a few TV shows, including Marvel's own Hulk as played by a bodybuilder painted green.

Initially, Marvel licensed its characters out to various studios under contracts requiring regular sequels in order for the studios to retain the rights, as well as keeping popular characters like Spider-Man and the X-Men in the public eye.  Eventually, Marvel Films managed to work out a deal to produce their own films, and started with second stringer Iron Man getting his own movie in 2008.  Making the Golden Avenger a household name and revitalizing the career of a could-not-have-been-cast better Robert Downey Jr. was, it turned out, only the first step towards what was probably the biggest movie of 2012, The Avengers.

What is perhaps most amazing is that somehow this plan worked.  Introducing different characters in different films over the course of four years, with even the worst of the bunch (The Incredible Hulk starring Edward Norton) being for me highly watchable and a good bit of fun, with little or no connecting material aside from Samuel L. Jackson's Nick Fury popping in for a scene or two, The Avengers had the potential to be a godawful mess.  This was a movie that pondered that an egotistical inventor, viking demigod, timelost soldier, femme fatale superspy, master marksman with a bow, and an unstoppable rage monster would somehow belong all in the same movie to stop a guy whose main superpower may be incredibly effective lying.  It could have been terrible.

It wasn't.

For one thing, Marvel and new owner Disney brought in a highly talented cast and director.  Of the actors playing the main team, most had appeared however briefly in previous films, with Mark Ruffalo replacing the reputed hard-to-work-with Edward Norton as Bruce Banner.  Downey, Jackson, Ruffalo, and Jeremy Renner (as marksman Hawkeye) all had Oscar nominations for past work, with Scarlett Johansson (the Black Widow) and Tom Hiddleston (as the villain Loki) both showing potential to go their if they play their careers right.  Even the two Chrises, Evans and Hemsworth, as Captain America and Thor respectively, acquit themselves well for roles that would be very easy to get wrong by being too bland (for Cap) or too overtly ridiculous (for Thor).

On the other side of the camera was cult favorite writer/director Joss Whedon.  I'm not really a fan of his, having never gotten into Buffy the Vampire Slayer, but he knows how to write humorous dialogue for characters beloved by geeks, as well as how to create the right balance of action and drama.  Yes, the early scenes seem more rote, but by the time the team is assembled on the S.H.I.E.L.D. helicarrier and interacting, the chemistry comes out.  Just about every character gets some time to shine, including one created for the movies, S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Phil Coulson, played by Clark Gregg, who gives the bridging between movies a more personable touch.  The only character who maybe gets shafted, no pun intended, is Renner's Hawkeye, who spends most of the movie brainwashed.

The final battle, between Loki and his alien army, and the newly reunited Avengers, now with a good reason to go by that name, is probably the grand spectacle every superhero fan, with widescale destruction, creative use of superpowers, and lots of anonymous creeps getting slammed, with one long tracking shot following the heroes as they zip around the fight doing what they do best.  As expected, the team seems to be losing until some last ditch heroics, sparked by character growth (Iron Man learning to be less selfish and willing to sacrifice himself for something much bigger than himself and his company) save the day.

Marvel has referred to this movie as the end of "Phase One".  If this is the first part, and it ends this big, the obvious anticipation will surely have people like me lined up for more in the near future.

The Help (2011)

As with many inspiring historical events, such as beating the Nazis, the Civil Rights Movement of the mid to late 60s has inspired many films on the events of that period, both real and fictional.  Sadly, many of these well-meaning movies take the wrong tact and show how equality for African-Americans came about because, in the world of the film, white people got involved and helped out.  Now, surely there were plenty of white people involved in the struggle, and some movies are worse than others, but this basic description does include The Help.

Of course, some movies are worse than others about this sort of thing.  True, the various maids don't feel the slightest bit empowered enough to actually do something about their lives in the small Mississippi town where they toil for their more affluent neighbors, such that it only takes the return of white girl/budding feminist/believer in equal rights Skeeter Phelan (played by Emma Stone), who decides the way to start her career as a writer is not to toil away on the local newspaper's cleaning advice column, but rather to write about what it's like being a black maid working for white people.

(It's probably worth noting you know this is a movie when a woman who looks like Emma Stone is considered to be less attractive than any of the other girls in town.)

Still, what could end up being a very by-the-numbers tale of personal empowerment comes out better than perhaps it should due to powerful performances from the two principal maids, Aibileen (Viola Davis) and Minny (Octavia Spencer).  Davis' Aibileen has "world weary" stamped all over her, from her walk to her eyes, only really coming to life when she is working with her current employer's neglected baby girl.  Spencer's Minny, the finest cook in town, has a temper, but also a deep sense of propriety (a necessity for the maids of this town) and when the one causes her to temporarily forget the other, she finds herself going to the one place in town someone like her might be really appreciated, working for the social outcast white woman Celia Foote (Jessica Chastain), who actually seems to treat her as a friend, and even allows her to stick around when the title book is published revealing all the dirty, race-related laundry for the whites who think they need to keep black people in their place.

This is actually something of a small problem for me.  Bryce Dallas Howard's Hilly Holbrook seems almost cartoonishly evil.  While I know, objectively, that there were highly racist people in the United States at that time (and still today, only then it was more socially acceptable), part of me thinks the moviemakers went a bit overboard with their depiction of the self-centered woman who seems to run the entire town's social scene.  Skeeter's lack of interest in Hilly's newsletter, as Skeeter seems to feel compelled to actually attend meetings for bridge or other social events, all run by Hilly, show she hasn't gotten too far from a woman she may consider a friend, but Hilly's gossipy ways and the treatment she issues to her own somewhat senile mother (played by a daffy Sissy Spacek) suggests the woman had no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  Given what kind of pie she eats, maybe this was to cut out any potential for sympathy the viewer might be tempted to feel for her.

The movie does depict that not all whites were equally horrible to their maids.  Skeeter keeps asking about her own family's maid, and when she finally learns the awful truth, also learns the family tried to get her back from Chicago only to learn the old lady died there.  Skeeter's formidable mother (Allison Janey, who's in, like, everything) becomes one of the few people to take her side when things go bad, but this sadly plays more into the cliched narrative of the movie, perhaps suggesting it was from her family, not Ole Miss, that Skeeter learned her sense of right from wrong.

Part of my reason for wanting to see this recently had to do with a radio interview I heard from Precious director Lee Daniels, who said that he had older relatives who were the hired help, and they had it rougher than the help in The Help.  This also leads me to think it may be time for me to finally watch Spike Lee's Malcolm X.

The Exorcist (1973)

I find it odd that, somehow, the only version of 1973's The Exorcist is one that the DVD labels as "The Version You've Never Seen".

OK, moving away from the fact that I've only seen a longer cut of the movie, one that includes a scene of the girl crab walking upside down to the bottom of the stairs and vomiting up some blood, I think there is a good deal to say about this movie on its own.

This is a movie about faith and the role it plays in a very modern world.  A Hollywood star, also a single mother played by Ellen Burstyn, Chris MacNeil is raising her daughter Regan (Linda Blair) the best she can.  The two are close, but then some weird things start to happen.  There are sounds in the attic that Chris initially thinks are rats.  Regan has an imaginary friend that talks through an ouija board.  Oh, and Regan has taken to very harsh swearing and acts of violence and/or depravity.  Things move on their own.  And the voice that is coming out of Regan's mouth isn't hers.

Nearby is a young priest, Father Damian (Jack Miller), who is both trained as a psychologist and is losing his own personal faith.  Damian's mother has just passed away and he seems to be contemplating leaving the priesthood.  A strange homicide of Chris' director friend, combined with the horrific desecration of the statue of the Virgin Mary in the church he works out of, seem to give him pause but even he is reluctant to believe in Satan inside a young girl.  Eventually, he is convinced.

The story is, as noted, about faith.  Chris is an atheist.  She doesn't believe in any sort of God, but when it becomes clear there's no other explanation, especially when it appears her friend was murdered by her daughter (by twisting his head in a 180 degree turn and then tossing him out a window and down a steep flight of stairs), she becomes desperate enough to try the religious ceremony.  Damian is losing his, but has to make the supreme sacrifice at the end of the movie to save a young girl's soul.

Of special note is the great Swedish actor Max von Sydow as the elderly Father Merrin.  Merrin demonstrates faith in his every move.  A gentle man, he first appears at an archeological dig in Northern Iraq, which may have somehow released the demon, then returns.  Damian's attempts to discuss the case with Merrin are always politely rebuffed.  Merrin doesn't need to know the symptoms or how many personalities are coming out of the girl, or even the particulars of the case.  He already knows them.  While Damian struggles, Merrin simply charges forward against the foe, reciting the prayers, and doing his best.  His quiet example helps Damian rediscover his own faith by the end of the movie.

Billed as one of the scariest movies ever made, the movie has a fairly low body count of three victims, four if your count Damian's mother dying of old age, and one of these bodies is never seen on camera.  The horror comes more from the psychological such as Chris' concerns for Regan as her behavior grows worse and worse.  The way medical science can't find a single thing wrong with her before resorting to the exorcism suggestion.  Lee J. Cobb's homicide detective clearly being out of his depths (and, truth be told, not really adding anything to the movie), and just plain random creepiness and weirdness.  Director William Friedkin seems to have only one other great movie in him (1971's The French Connection), but having The Exorcist on his resume means he'll be guaranteed a spot on any decent Halloween horror marathon for all time, and a well-deserved spot for it too.

Midnight in Paris (2011)

Woody Allen has been steadily making movies for longer than I've been alive.  His current rate seems to be to make on movie, usually about 90 minutes or so long, every year.  Now, of course, producing a movie a year for a career as long as Allen's means many may not match up to the quality of his best films, most of which are behind him.  But every so often, he comes out with another one worth seeing, including 2011's Midnight in Paris.

It is worth noting, of course, that Midnight in Paris, though fun, is rather light fare from Allen.  It lacks the experimental story structure of Annie Hall or the deep character work of Vicki Christina Barcelona.  There isn't even the wacky slapstick of his early comedies like Sleeper.  There's comedy to Midnight in Paris, just for me mostly to make me smile as opposed to really laugh out loud.  I don't get the idea that there's much to this that's all that deep.  The movie, basically, has two things going for it.

The first is Owen Wilson.  Allen has reached an age where even he can no longer play the neurotic romantic lead to increasingly younger actresses (if he ever could post Mia Farrow).  Instead, he's cast a variety of Allen stand-ins, many of whom channel Allen's own film persona to one degree or another.  Larry David's take, in the so-so Whatever Works, basically comes across as a half-assed, or maybe whole-assed, Allen impression.  With Owen Wilson, there's a shift.  Though Wilson has some lines and scenes where he confesses to be afraid of death and making very Allen-like statements, none of this seems to wash away the screen persona of Wilson himself.  He seems more like an Owen Wilson character, something of a carefree slacker, then he does the overly analytical Woody Allen character he might have been in anyone else's hands.  Wilson's Gil seems inclined to stay in Paris like he just drifted there and seems to like the place.  Allen's own take probably would have been due to a romantic ideal that the past somehow seems superior to the future.  Yes, that is written into the character, but it comes across as more of an excuse for Wilson to enjoy the bohemian joys of Paris.

The second strength is Paris itself.  The film opens with a series of shots of Paris before breaking into the main action.  Allen's used this technique before, mostly with his native New York City in movies like Manhattan.  This establishes Paris as a character, and a fairly romantic character as it is.  The viewer can much more easily believe that so many people have fallen in love with the City of Lights, in ways that are lacking in other movies where a trip to Paris seems to be the highlight of a person's life (I'm mostly thinking here of Anne Hathaway's trip there with Meryl Streep for The Devil Wears Prada).  It is also easy to believe that just waiting at the right spot could allow a person to visit the time period of the city that they most want to see.

The movie opens with Wilson's Gil on a trip to Paris with his fiancee and her parents.  They're there for business.  Gil is talking about moving there.  He's a frustrated writer trying to finish a novel instead of being a Hollywood hack, and Paris has a long history of attracting artists.  His wife-to-be and in-laws-to-be, sadly, are merely materialistic rightwing stereotypes, something Allen doesn't paint as full-characters as well he does Gil himself.  Included are fiancee Inez's know-it-all male friend (the kind of guy who thinks he knows more than a native French tour guide played by the former French First Lady Carla Bruni), and it becomes clear Gil is not going to be happy with this match even if he doesn't realize it yet.

Then, while out walking, he gets a ride to the 1920s, hears Cole Porter perform, meets Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald and then Ernest Hemmingway, and starts to get some real writing advice from people he really respects but have been dead for decades.  He goes back to the present but can't get Inez to go with him, and starts up a tentative relationship with a woman (played by Marion Cotillard) who's about to break it off with Pablo Picasso.  She herself longs for another, long gone Paris in the 1890s, and it is this that leads Gil to learn a valuable lesson about the grass and when its always greener.

Midnight in Paris is a fun movie, where atmosphere adds more to the movie than anything particularly deep the characters learn.  It's hardly Allen's best, but its above average for the man this late in his career.  His best films may be behind him, but that doesn't mean he still can't produce an enjoyable flick worth 90 minutes of the viewers' time.

Saved! (2004)

My wife has over the course of our relationship introduced me to various movies she loved.  I've done the same, which means she's seen Ghostbusters and I've seen 2004's Saved!.

Saved! tells the story of a young, confused Christian girl named Mary.  Mary is part of a super-Christian cliche that seems to rule their Christian high school in a manner similar to the plastics in Mean Girls.  Mary, being raised by her single mom (Weeds' Mary-Louise Parker), is shocked, SHOCKED, to learn her chaste boyfriend Dean is actually gay.  Having been told for her whole life that being gay is a major sin, she takes it upon herself to "fix" him by having sex.  Not only does it not work, Mary's pregnant, Dean's father found his gay porn and shipped him off to the ominously-sounding Mercy House, and the cliche leader Hilary Faye (Mandy Moore) seems to be increasingly controlling over Mary and the other members, as well as Hilary Faye's wheelchair-bound brother Roland (Macaulay Culkin).

Culkin, actually, is one of the gems of this movie.  The Christian stuff seems like too-easy satire.  Culkin as a sarcastic voice of, well, not-quite reason plays off well with the school's transfer student Cassandra (Eva Amurri Martino).  Cassandra is suspected of being everything the Christians are out to oppose as stereotypically as possible.  She's said to be a stripper and Jewish!  This makes her a prime target for Hilary Faye's attempts to save a soul.  Predictably, they don't work.

As a whole, it's not an awful movie, but at the same time I don't think it's saying anything new.  The aforementioned, far superior Mean Girls goes out of its way to humanize all the sides, making the movie's ostensible villain out to be sympathetic by the end of the movie.  Saved! does not grant Hilary Faye the same treatment.  She's the bad guy, a Christian bigot and hypocrite, the only one who seems unable to learn a lesson about what it really means to be a Christian or even just a decent human being.  She's caught in her lies, loses her prestige, and crashes her van into a giant Jesus billboard.  Mary, her mother, her new boyfriend, her old boyfriend, Roland, Cassandra, even perhaps the minister, all seem to learn something about forgiveness and being a real Christian or even just a decent human being given Roland and Cassandra are more or less athiests.

As much as this movie is played for laughs, some of them a little too easy, upon seeing this all I could think of was Jesus Camp, a documentary that came out two years after Saved!  Jesus Camp takes all the stereotypes of unyielding Christian schools and shows that it is, sadly, very real, if not outright worse than anything shown in this movie.  Saved! is charming enough on its own, but knowing there's people out there really like the Hilary Faye character, only not being played for laughs, takes some of the humor off an otherwise fairly harmless movie.

The Town (2010)

Not that long ago, Ben Affleck was probably not the most respected Oscar winner around.  True, he'd won it for co-writing a screenplay, but everyone knew him more or less as an actor, a so-so one at that, and as half of the odious "Bennifer".  Truly, whoever came up with the idea of combing celebrity couple names into one moniker has earned a place in Hell.

At some point, Affleck dumped one Jennifer in favor of another one, settled down, started making better choices in his career, and now is a fairly good director as evidenced with The Town.  He's not a great director, not yet, but he's apparently learned quite a bit about how to frame a film and keep it moving.  While I doubt Affleck will ever get a second Oscar for acting, perhaps someday a second for directing could be in the cards.  But, as I said, not yet.

The Town starts off with a simple statement of fact:  one neighborhood in one city has produced more bank and armored car robbers than any other place in America.  Whether this is true or not is immaterial.  This is the premise, that this has been going on so long it's become a family business passed along from father to son, and here we have Affleck's Doug MacRay, a one-time aspiring hockey player now following in his incarcerated father Chris Cooper's footsteps.  He has a crew of childhood buddies, all of whom have a role to play, and best friend Jim "Jem" Coughlin, played by the great Jeremy Renner, may need a special eye kept on him since he seems the one most likely to fly off the handle and commit an act of violence, something Affleck really doesn't want his boys to do.  By their calculations, if everything goes right, no one needs to get hurt doing what they do.

Of course, there are wrinkles.  Movies like this do not exist solely to show off Affleck, Renner, and Co.'s ability to plan the near-perfect heist and get away.  First up, Affleck falls hard for a bank manager the group took hostage after one robbery, and though at first trying to make sure she doesn't recognize the gang unmasked, the relationship continues.  I don't think I've seen Rebecca Hall in anything other than Woody Allen's Vicki Christina Barcelona, but she does a fine job here.  Jim's sister Krista, a drug-addicted single mother who used to date Doug and may or may not claim her daughter is his (it isn't) seems to lack much of a purpose, but the usually ironically named Blake Lively has enough good scenes to warrant her presence.  The late Pete Postlethwaite in a fairly small role is the surprisingly sinister mob boss who runs a cover business inside a florist shop, a man who doesn't seem to do much until near the end of the movie when he shows just how dangerous he really is.  Finally, Jon Hamm's FBI agent in charge of the investigation is there to bring the boys in.  He knows who they are; he just has to prove it.  Hamm's basically a straight-arrow good guy, and that may be enough for this film, which ultimately doesn't ask him to do much else.

Aside from Renner and Hall, I didn't find too many of the actors leaving too much of an impression, but as a crime movie, the film works well, establishing character and motivation for most of the major players (Hamm being the exception), and giving a thrilling escape or two.  Affleck, shooting in Boston near his childhood home in Cambridge, acts also as a co-writer, wisely choosing to up the ante on each successive crime until the ultimate robbery of Fenway Park.  The neighborhood, Charlestown, seems to have its own morals and honor code, and the crew largely obey it, but when Hall, Hamm, and Postlethwaite get involved, there can be only ending for the crew, and it won't be a good one.

King Kong (1933)

At some point, someone, somewhere, thought it would be pretty cool to unleash a giant animal in the streets of a modern city.

The original King Kong may not have been the first, but it was certainly the most memorable.  The movie has, after all, been remade twice, to say nothing of letting the big ape hang out with Godzilla, and served as inspiration for every large ape that ever climbed a skyscraper with a woman in his hand, or in the case of author Terry Pratchett's Discworld humor/fantasy novel series, had a giant woman climb a tall building with an ape in her hand.  By the standards of modern movie making, Kong doesn't hold a candle.  He's clearly created in a more claymation-style effect as opposed to the 1970s guy-in-an-ape-suit or Peter Jackson's CGI overlaying of Andy Serkis, but there's something to this, the original Kong, that still packs a punch.

What may be most interesting is how little Kong is actually in his own movie.  He doesn't leave the screen for very long once he appears, but you have quite a wait for that.  The movie clocks in at just under an hour and 45 minutes, with an overture, and Kong appears sometime after the 45 minute mark.  All the really memorable stuff with Kong happen in the last hour of the film, and aside from the promotional material, audiences seeing the movie for the first time in 1933 probably had no idea what Kong was.  Certainly the characters in the movie do not.  Producer/director Carl Denham, playing by the fast-talking Robert Armstrong, only knows of a mythical god-like thing on a mysterious island known as "Kong".

As much as I really enjoy this movie, there's a lot the audience needs to take with the metaphorical grain of salt.  Denham is apparently making a movie with himself as the only crewmember, no script, and one actor, the just-off-the-streets Ann Darrow (playing so memorably by Fay Wray).  Anyone who knows anything about dinosaurs knows most of the ones seen on Skull Island were not carnivorous, plus basic science tells us no gorilla could ever get that big without being crushed to death by the weight of its own body.  Plus, no one stops Denham with the basic thought that whatever it is he wants with a giant gorilla that has been anything but friendly could possibly be a good idea.  His arrogance causes a lot of death and destruction, none of the which the movie faults him for (perhaps the sequel Son of Kong does, but I haven't seen it in a while).

What the movie has, though, is a highly memorable monster in the form of the title character.  The first 45 minutes are rather slow, and don't seem to be going anywhere.  It's largely stuff that is important to the plot, such as Denham's luck with finding a girl for the voyage to a place only he knows about, his finding and recruiting of Ann, what he has on board, some screen tests and other character-based stuff to establish Ann and love interest John Driscoll's (played by Bruce Cabot) personalities and some sort of 1930s film idea of love and courtship.  Once Kong emerges from his jungle retreat, the movie turns to straight action as Kong takes on and defeats all comers on his island, is brought to New York, goes on his famous rampage, and dies the iconic death fighting some biplanes.

While Denham's final line on how beauty killed the beast is indeed noteworthy and memorable, I was inclined to see an inadvertent environmental message here:  importing a nonnative species to a region that's never seen anything like it before is a really bad idea.  Keep the rabbits out of Australia and the King Kongs out of Manhattan and everyone will be better off in the long run.

Signs (2002)

There was a point in the past where M. Night Shyamalan was considered a director of quality films and Mel Gibson a bankable, perfectly sane actor.  Those days are past for both men, with Shyamalan making a series of films that at the very most seem to have impressive trailers, and Gibson being relegated to straight-to-DVD features since being outed as an anti-Semite and possibly a misogynist.  When the cast of The Hangover II prevent Gibson from giving their movie a cameo due to his past actions while convicted rapist Mike Tyson doesn't warrant so much of a peep, that's not good.

But that's the present.  The past had both men working together to give the world Signs.

In terms of where this is for Shyamalan, it's probably safe to say that he's reaching the end of his credibility as a filmmaker here.  The guy was known for his plot twists, most notably in The Sixth Sense, and to a lesser extent Unbreakable, but has since become the guy who made a movie about killer trees and having a fairy tale creature declare a character played by himself will write a story that will change the world.  Signs, with its alien-invasion-foiled-by-water scenario somehow manages not to get there.  Yes, as Cracked.com has pointed out these aliens might have been more successful if they'd just managed to invent pants, or maybe the raincoat, but that's not the issue.  Bruce Willis being dead the whole time is less shocking since the clues are all there.What Signs has going for it instead is simply that Shyamalan manages to keep things moving well enough that maybe the viewer doesn't notice the whole water thing during the movie.  It can strike later, surely, but the movie has a good deal of suspense going for it, good pacing, and a good score, all to keep the viewer off-balance.

It also helps that the movie is more about one man's faith than it is about the aliens.  These days it would impossible not to know Mel Gibson is a very...devout man.  The Passion of the Christ is proof enough of that.  Having him play a man struggling with his own faith after the very freaky death of his wife is something else.  Gibson is capable of a great deal of onscreen charisma, so it's easy to get wrapped up in his problems.  Round out the cast with Joaquin Phoenix, Rory Culkin, and Abigail Breslin and you have a fairly potent core cast.

The movie is far from perfect, obviously.  Future Shyamalan problems are cropping up here.  He gives himself a small but crucial role to pass along important information, and no matter how wrapped up you are in the movie, that water thing will eventually get back to you.  Still, its a mild, fun ride that can hold the viewer's interest (maybe) long enough to tell its story, and that may be all that matters for a filmmaker like Shyamalan.

War Horse (2011)

No one would doubt Steven Spielberg's credentials on the antiwar front.  The famous opening D-Day sequence in Saving Private Ryan is every bit as brutal and awful as its reputation and it would be impossible for him to top it with the remainder of the movie (and he doesn't).

For all that Private Ryan shows the bloody consequences of young men on both sides of a conflict being chewed up and spat out by war as realistically as the medium of film will allow, War Horse manages a similar feat with more symbolic methods set during an earlier World War.  After a disastrous cavalry charge right into German machine guns, alternating shots show riders on horses being replaced by riderless horses dashing past the guns.  The effect is about the same.

Based on the stage play, War Horse shows the horrors of war through the eyes of a complete innocent, the title character, a horse named Joey.  Early in the movie, we see Joey's birth and training under the watchful eye of a kid named Albert Narracott.  Albert's parents are poor farmers behind in the rent, so Joey is sold to a cavalry officer and sent off to war.  Once there, the horse changes hands and sides multiple times, witness to the horrors that happen, both in and out of combat.  No one the horse encounters is free of the war, and Spielberg manages to show the piles of bodies, both human and equine, whenever he really needs to, but neglects to show much of the actual violence that kills man or animal.  The revolving sails of a windmill, for example, cover up the execution of some deserters quite effectively.

If anything, Spielberg does a better job this time around in keeping both sides of the conflict morally similar than he did in Private Ryan.  German soldiers, as well as British ones, are just as likely to be portrayed positively, something Private Ryan's climax fails to do.  Also gone is the dehumanization process of Private Ryan, however, given how much Joey's presence seems to bring out the best in most people he encounters.  One effective scene shows a British and German soldier working together to free Joey from a tangle of barbed wire.

While generally I'd say something about the acting in most movies I discuss, War Horse puts me in an odd position.  None of the humans are bad.  In point of fact, all of them do an effective job, and few are what might be classified as name actors.  I was curious to see how well Tom Hiddleston did when he wasn't being smacked around by a large Aussie with a big hammer, and as the cavalry officer who first buys Joey, he does very well.  And for some reason, I can't escape Benedict Cumberbatch, who I saw not 24 hours earlier in Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, and appears here as another cavalry officer.  The biggest name in the cast is probably David Thewlis, best known for the Harry Potter series, and I had a bad case of "I know who that is!  Where have I seen him before?" for Liam Cunningham as an army surgeon before looking him up and seeing he is Davos Seaworth on HBO's Game of Thrones.

But the real stars, besides Spielberg's ability to craft a story, were the horses.  Animal actors are almost certainly hard to get a good performance out of.  They don't have human emotional ranges and they can only be trained but so much.  And yet, the various horses, maybe by simply being there and looking in the right direction, alongside Spielberg's ability to get the right shot at the right moment, creates the illusion, which is all film is anyway.

Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy (2011)

The spy movie, for many, is the high-flying adventure epitomized by James Bond.  Bond shows up, grabs some gadgets from Q perhaps, goes off, blows some stuff up, beds at least one girl, makes some quips and saves the day.  The quip part, at least, has been tempered if not outright removed with the ascendency of Daniel Craig as a more serious 007, but the basic idea of Bond as a guy who gets things done in exciting ways is what draws the viewers back again and again, with fans discussing who the best Bond ever is (it's Sean Connery, though Craig comes close).

Real espionage, of course, would probably look very different.  It's quiet by nature.  The only time a good spy agency's actions would get out would be when it screwed up.  And this initial screw-up is what sets in motion the plot of 2011's Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy.  There's nothing remotely Bondish about Gary Oldman's George Smiley, who actually says very little and, though armed for a crucial scene, never even fires a gun.  In fact, guns play very little part in the action of this movie, which has a low body count even if you count one unfortunate bird that flies into a classroom.

Much has been made of Oldman's Oscar-winning performance, so I suppose I should add to the Greek chorus here.  My first exposure to Oldman was in Bram Stoker's Dracula, where he hammed it up as the title character.  Later there were the turns he had in both The Professional and The 5th Element.  All of these movies showed a big ham of an actor.  I might have written the guy off had I not noticed how much of a non-presence he took as Commissioner James Gordon in Christopher Nolan's Batman movies.  That is hardly an insult.  Oldman's Gordan is a quiet family man, not the kind to run around in padded armor to save the day but still willing to work just as hard and not to show off.  It makes sense that Gordon would be quiet, honest, hardworking, and dedicated to doing what was right (as seen when, in Batman Begins and he's still just a street cop, he refuses to take any bribe money like his partner, something that apparently he is alone in, and still insists he's not a snitch either so as to uphold both his personal integrity and his sticking to the cop code of keeping quiet on such matters).

Oldman's Smiley is much the same way.  I said in my previous entry that Moneyball is a movie often defined by silence.  Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy makes Moneyball look like your typical Michael Bay film by comparison.  Oldman's lead character doesn't even speak for the first fifteen or so minutes of the movie, and seems more intent to simply watch what is unfolding around him, to say nothing of letting other characters tell him what he needs to know.  He has one long monologue about halfway through, detailing his attempts to get a Soviet to defect only to have the man rebuff him, explaining that to Smiley the most dangerous man is the true believer, and that's about it.  He has conversations, but generally says less than everybody else in the room.  Add to this that the viewer (and other characters) rarely know what's going on inside that man's head.  Fortunately, Smiley isn't a cold man.  He seems to be genuinely delighted to be figuring things out as he goes along.

This comes in handy.  The movie begins with Mark Strong (in what seems to be a rare good guy role) as a British spy, going to meet with a potential defector in Hungary, when something goes wrong and he appears to be shot.  His boss, John Hurt's "Control", is out due to some politicking and he's taking the silent Smiley with him (which seems to please everyone left behind).  A year or so later, after Control has died, Smiley is quietly brought back in to figure out which of the men just under Control (which included Smiley himself) is a secret mole working for the Soviets.  Since he'd been gone for so long, Smiley is not only the perfect man to look into things, he's also the only one of the group that is known to be innocent.

Besides Oldman, Hurt, and Strong, the movie does have a good number of familiar faces, many with very unfamiliar hair cuts, including Colin Firth, Toby Jones, Tom Hardy, Ciaran Hinds, and the BBC's Sherlock star Benedict Cumberbatch.  The net result is an excellent spy movie that doesn't revolve on brawn and gadgets but brains and observations, where the quietest man in the room may be the only key to figuring out what happened and who's to blame.

Moneyball (2011)

For most movies about sports, the basic plot deals with an underdog who after a series of setbacks comes back to, if not win the big game or match, but at least will win the respect of the fans.

As for writer Aaron Sorkin, it seems his writing tends to deal with fast-talking, clever repartee that emphasizes the characters believe what they are doing is massively important, because they're so darn smart, and everything they do is of an earth-shattering significance.  This tendency is why I haven't seen Sorkin's new HBO drama The Newsroom, since it would seem obnoxious there and the ads annoyed, but I didn't mind it too much in The Social Network because, since it was essentially about Facebook, I can write off the paradigm-shift talk Jesse Eisenberg and Justin Timberlake as the usual sort of self-importance some young people possess for no reason, while an over 40 anchorman should, ideally, know better.  Maybe I would dig The West Wing since the American President actually does make earth-shattering decisions.

What made 2011's Moneyball so fascinating is that, despite being a sports-based movie, and having Sorkin as a co-writer on the screenplay, neither of the above stereotypes really fit.

To be sure, this is an underdog's story, but the underdog in this case deals with the business side of baseball.  There is also a big game where the underdog players triumph.  And there is a bit of clever repartee, but coming from the mouth of Brad Pitt and former-Superbad-kid-turned-Academy-Award-Nominee Jonah Hill is quieter, more earnest without being righteous or with the characters too concerned with their own cleverness.

But the thing that actually impressed me with this movie is that, even with the Sorkin pedigree, it is very concerned with, and does a good job dealing with, silences.  The above-mentioned big game has patches of no sound which really drives home the tension.

Pitt plays Billy Beane, a one-time player turned general manager for the Oakland A's.  After a heartbreaking lose in the playoffs, he sees his two star players poached by bigger market teams and has to rebuild.  While visiting Cleveland, he spies Hill and sees Hill seems to have some real influence in the office.  Hill, as Yale-educated economist Peter Brand, has a theory on how to best put together a team, using only stats, not star potential or how handsome the player might look on a box of Wheaties.  As a result, Beane hires Brand as his new number 2, returns to Oakland, and in defiance of all his scouts, picks up a team of has-beens, nobodies, and never-weres, players who have troubled history, odd playing behavior, or even seemingly career-ending injuries  Manager Art Howe (a head-shaved Phillip Seymour Hoffman) initially refuses to play the players Beane and Brand bring in (trying saying that five times fast) until Beane figures the way to force Howe's hand by trading away players Howe refuses to bench.

Surprisingly, Beane and Brand are proven correct.  Or perhaps not so surprising, as the movie is based on a true story, and it seems doubtful a movie, or the book it was based on, would be made had the plan been an abysmal failure.

In fact, Beane's program was too successful.  After a few years, he gave his secret to author Michael Lewis, who wrote the book this movie was based on, and now many teams with more money than Oakland could ever hope for are winning with Beane's formula, putting the real Beane back where he started.  This is a movie, though, about the business of sports, and how a man comes to see numbers as a key to success, and then even comes out of his shell to actually interact with players (Beane makes it a point to never even be in the ballpark during a game due to his own superstitions and won't talk to players he's traded at the start of the movie).  Beane both denies and affirms the romanticism of the game, and that makes for an interesting take on the traditional sports film.

My Own Private Idaho (1991)

As a fan of the works of William Shakespeare, I really get a kick out of seeing the different variations film has done for the works of the Bard of Avon.  Maybe one of the strangest I've seen is 1991's My Own Private Idaho.

The plot lifts a bit, including dialogue, from Shakespeare's Henry IV Part I and Part II.  Not the whole play, since the story of a prince coming of age and realizing his responsibilities while helping his father fight off various rebellions doesn't really fit completely into a story about teenage prostitutes in modern day Portland. Yes, Shakespeare's plays titled "Henry IV" are more about his son, the future Henry V, but he's a heck of a lot more interesting, given Shakespeare pairs him off with the completely fictional fat knight Falstaff, and then proceeds to eventually cut him off and be England's great warrior king (unlike Richard the Lionhearted, Henry came back to England after winning his big war).  To accommodate Shakespeare's play, writer/director Gus Van Sant plops a Prince Hal stand-in in the form of Keanu Reeves' Scott Favor, son of the mayor of Portland, a teenage runaway selling his body for sex, mostly to gay men, but he makes it clear he's not really into the gay stuff if he's not being paid for it.  Scott's Falstaff is an overweight homeless man named Bob who leads a gang of thieves, most of whom double for hustlers like Scott and his friend Mike Waters.

Van Sant does some interesting stuff here with the plays.  It isn't enough to borrow the plot, but he actually drops Shakespeare's actual lines into the movie here and there, mostly from Bob, with a name change here and there...and it works.  It really works.  The language is more formal, maybe a bit archaic, but it still conveys a hell of a punch.  Given Van Sant doesn't seem interested in making a particularly realistic film, why not have some iambic pentameter?  He even gives Shakespeare a writer's by-line in the closing credits.

But the Shakespeare is not the real plot as it turns out.  River Phoenix's Mike is the real focus of the film.  He's a hustler, but actually gay since he's in love with his wealthy friend Scott, he suffers from narcolepsy and may fall asleep at the drop of a hat, and he really misses the mother who abandoned him as a child.  Scott offers to help Mike find his long lost mom, which takes the pair from the mean streets of Portland to a largely deserted road in the middle of Idaho (the same patch Mike begins and ends the film in), and finally to Rome, where Mike's mom went, but didn't stay.  There, Scott meets an Italian girl, falls in love, and leaves Scott to his own devices.  Here, like with Prince Hal, Scott assumes his responsibilities and rejects his old life, doing so to Bob directly but implying as much for Mike who he never speaks to again in the course of the movie.

Van Sant also does one of the more unusual sex scene techniques I've seen.  Rather than show the sex, he has his actors pose still for a series of shots.  These aren't still shots as you can see the actors breathing, and it happens twice.  The first is a gay threesome between Scott, Mike, and Udo Kier's eccentric German character Hans.  The second is between Scott and his new Italian girlfriend Carmella, played by Italian actress Chiara Caselli.  The second scene neatly displays the moment when Scott embraces his role as the mayor's son and comes home, Carmella in tow (she silently stays with him for the rest of the movie).

Now, personally, I'm no fan of Keanu Reeves.  I think he's largely a wooden actor who does best when he doesn't really talk much, like in The Matrix.  Sylvester Stallone displays a similar ability for First Blood until his weepy monologue at the end of the movie.  Here, though, given it is an inherently unrealistic movie, with dialogue that at times strives for the high theatrical, it actually works.  He isn't as good as Phoenix by a long shot, but he makes this role work somehow.

Guess Who's Coming to Dinner (1967)

As a movie fan, I have oftentimes purchased DVDs based simply on the knowledge it is an older, well-known movie, and considered something of a classic.  For the most part, this has worked out well for me as few of these purchases have left me feeling burned.  That said, there are a couple exceptions, movies that are ultimately disappointing for me as a viewer.

One such film is 1967's Guess Who's Coming to Dinner.

There's no reason for Guess Who's Coming to Dinner to be disappointing on the surface.  There's a well-known cast of quality actors, with leads Spencer Tracy and Katherine Hepburn having another of their legendary team-ups.  Director Stanley Kramer had done quality work during his career behind the camera with movies like The Defiant Ones and Inherit the Wind.  And it features the usual good, solid acting work of Sidney Poitier, one of those actors I always find compelling and charismatic.  Poitier could give Steve McQueen a run for his money as Coolest Man In The Room.  The movie also tackles an important issue of interracial love.

Actually, that last part is what's more or less "wrong" with the movie.  It just plain isn't subtle.  Maybe Kramer and the people he worked with didn't believe a more subtle film could be made on this topic in 1967.  I don't buy that, as To Kill a Mockingbird is much better at examining racial issues, though missing some of the subtlety the book it is based on has.  Granted, Mockingbird is dealing with an actual life-or-death situation for poor Tom Robinson, but that movie dealt the goods better, and earlier by five years, than Guess Who's manages.  The theme of this movie could be dispensed with a sledgehammer.

To review, we are introduced in the opening credits to Poitier's Dr. John Prentice and his fiance Joey Drayton, as played by Katharine Houghton.  They're in an airport, acting very lovey-dovey, and after collecting their luggage and calling a cab, the driver is shocked, shocked to see a black man and a white woman kissing in the back of his cab.  The driver (and the audience) sees them through his rearview mirror, and his eyebrows go up to show how shocked, outright shocked he is.  This may have been all the producers could get away with in 1967.  I wasn't there, so I don't know.  I do know, as a modern viewer, it seems tame to me.

That said, once the cab pulls away from the curb, this is the last time Poitier will act even a little lovestruck.  He and Houghton are on their way to meet her parents (Tracy and Hepburn) to explain that the two are in love and are going to get married.  And while Joey continues to gush nonstop over Dr. John, Dr. John mostly just acts as her companion.  If not for the opening sequence, you'd never know he's in love at all.  I don't think he so much as holds her hand.

The plot goes from there as Hepburn accepts the couple almost immediately, while Tracy, a leftwing newspaper editor, has to grapple with his feelings on the subject of his daughter marrying a black man.  He's not certain.  Basically, though, the deck is stacked against him.  Poitier's John Prentice is a doctor, fairly well-off, does oodles of charity work overseas (this being how he met Joey in the first place), he offers to step aside if Tracy and Hepburn don't approve, and he's freakin' Sidney Poitier, the aforementioned Coolest Man In The Room.  The only possible objection to the man, aside from a noticeable age difference, is he's black.

See what I said about lack of subtlety?

So, Tracy thinks over the whole situation, evaluates his own feelings on race and a black man, who's perfect, marrying his daughter, consults his wife, the family priest, and John's parents (John's dad is also against the marriage, as mothers are just SO understanding in this movie), and comes to a decision.  He then gives a speech at the end of the movie, and here was where, for just a moment, I thought the movie might dip into some complexity.  Tracy begins by saying how he didn't like how everybody spent the whole day telling him how he should feel.

This would be a fantastic way to turn the movie on its ear.  It wasn't as simple as black-and-white marriage that was bothering ol' Spencer Tracy!  It was how everyone was telling him how he should feel, and he resents that, because he's a good dad and he's been worried about society and what might happen to his little girl and John is a great guy and all, but really, father's worry and stuff like that.

Instead, he launches into a speech on how love is all that matters and he invites everyone to have a nice dinner, with his blessing on the union, and his hopes John's father will come around.  Movie ends with a sappy song over the closing credits.

After seeing this, I was somehow less surprised a more recent remake was some sort of slapstick comedy, races reversed, with the late Bernie Mac in the Tracy roll and Ashton Kutcher in the Poitier roll.  As much as I felt the original didn't age well or show anything like a complex idea, it still had the Coolest Guy In The Room, and not a onetime host of Punk'd.

The Muppet Movie (1979)

In general, I don't like nostalgia.  I lived through the 80s, for example.  I was about 6 when they started and about 16 when they stopped.  They were pleasant enough, I suppose, but I much prefer to live in the now and not salivate over every revived 80s property given a new spin.  The new Thundercats series looks OK, I suppose, but I was never that big a fan of them in the first place, especially when you realize every third episode involves one of the cats needing to rescue the others, often from mind control.  The less said about Transformers on the big screen, the better, and I was a fan of those.  I also have the first movie on DVD, so maybe I am a hypocrite.  The second sucked, though, and I still have not seen the third.

But, dang it all, I still love The Muppets.

Long before Jason Segel thought to revive them in a project that actually felt like a real Muppets movie, indeed, even before he was born, there was The Muppet Movie.  The feature, written by the writers of The Muppet Show captures the pure anarchy of the series well, with all being chaos while a single, forlorn frog tries to hold the whole thing together.  Most, if not all, of the recognizable Muppet characters get at least a small speaking part (including Sesame Street mainstay Big Bird, who's looking to go to New York City and break into public television).

Muppet humor, especially in this, the best of their feature films, takes many forms.  Puns are inevitable, but word play works with these guys.  A small sampler:

Fozzie:  I don't know how to thank you guys!
Kermit:  I don't know why to thank you guys!

That's a basic joke, it works well for the kids, and adults will probably dig it too, though that may come from not seeing just how awful Dr. Teeth and The Electric Mayhem's paint job on Fozzie's uncle's Studebaker went, something that adults might be more inclined to see as something less than desirable.    That the disguise of the car almost works is something else altogether.

Next there's the celebrity cameo.  Some have what I think of as the Muppet cameo, where the famous person turns around and faces the camera for just a second so the audience at home can go, "Hey, it's so-and-so!" and go from there.  Most seem to be having some fun at least (hard to tell with Charles Foster Kane himself at the end), but this is a movie that trots out for at least a minute or so the likes of Dom Deluise, James Coburn, Madeline Kahn, Cloris Leachman, Eliot Gould, Paul Williams (who also wrote all the songs), Telly Savalas, Edgar Bergen and Charlie McCarthy (the only ones to play themselves), Bob Hope, Richard Pryor, Mel Brooks, Steve Martin, Milton Berle, and uttering a single line, Orson Welles.  It's somewhat depressing most of these people aren't around any more.

And then, finally, there's the meta-humor, before meta was hip.  The Muppets are watching a movie of themselves, the audience sees them in a viewing room at the movie studio in various bridging scenes, but the movie they're watching has them more or less fully aware they're in a movie and are simply characters in such.  Fozzie's script allows the Electric Mayhem to catch up on the plot, and because he leaves it behind, they can rescue the others when they're stuck in the desert without a ride.

And with all that, you get some good music.  Gonzo of all people (?) gets a rather sad-sounding one about three-quarters of the way through the film, and this is the movie to feature one of the Muppets' signature songs, "Rainbow Connection".

The Muppets' films while Jim Henson still lived were often sweet movies, OK for the whole family, with a lively energy and generally speaking original stories.  When he died and his son took over, the Muppets, when they appeared at all, seemed to be making a new attempt at the old Muppet Show with new characters that people may or may not have cared about (what was up with that Frank Sinatra type with an ape for a manager?), or recasting classic stories with the Muppets themselves.  That never felt right to me, so I've largely avoided those movies.  In the meantime, there's this old chestnut, that still brings out the kid in me.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004)

There aren't many screenwriters that gain any notoriety of their own that don't also direct.  Off the top of my head, I can think of three, one great, one better off forgotten, and one last one.

The great one is Paddy Chayefsky.

The one best forgotten, and largely has been near as I can make out, is Joe Eszterhas.

And the last wrote today's movie entry, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.  That would be Charlie Kaufman.  The man seems to be branching out into directing, but really, he's good at what he does, and his films are enjoyably quirky.

This is not to take anything away from director Michel Gondry, either.  Between the two of them, they have put together a movie that probably perfectly captures what it means to remember a loved one, and the paradox that losing that person, even temporarily, can give.

The movie opens with a usually-manic-but-not-this-time Jim Carrey as a humdrum guy named Joel who, on the spur of the moment, cuts work on Valentine's Day to go to the beach.  Along the way he meets Clementine, played by Kate Winslet, with blue hair and what looks like the inability to sit still.  The two hit it off, have a pleasant day together, and love seems to be in the air.  But there are some odd things going on, such as Elijah Wood tentatively asking Carrey if he's supposed to be waiting outside Clem's house for her, or the weird dent in Carrey's car, or the simple fact he doesn't seem to know who Huckleberry Hound is.

It turns out there are reasons for all this.

We then go to a few days earlier where Carrey is driving home crying his eyes out.  It seems that Clem has no idea who he is and was chatting away with a new guy Carrey only saw from the rear (turns out later it was Wood).  He finds out from friends that, after a fight, Clem went to see about a new medical procedure that makes a person completely forget some aspect or person (or in the case of one woman in the waiting room a pet) that is making them miserable.  Clem did this to herself and in short order, Joel decides to do the same.

After getting some kind of MRI to find where his memories of Clem are stored, Joel goes to bed and Wood (who works for the clinic and stole Joel's mementos in order to romance Clem himself) and Mark Ruffalo show up to hook his sedated head up to a gadget and erase his memories of Clementine.  This leads to the film's most innovative work, with Joel inside his own head watching his memories disappear.  At first, it looks like a smart choice as the memories disappear:  he and Clem fight a lot, mostly because she grew bored with his repressed nature and he got annoyed at her irresponsibility.  Then as the memories continue to disappear, we get back to the early ones and see the two were happy.

And therein lies the metaphorical rub!  Why does the memory of Clem cause so much pain for Joel (and presumably vice versa as we never see inside Clem's head but see her confusion out of it)?  Because as with all people, the good times are soured by the memory of bad times to come, and the bad times are so bad because there used to be really good times with the same person.  Such is love.  Not surprisingly, Joel changes his mind and does his best to hold onto something.  He "hides" Clem in other memories, hence why he has no recollection of his favorite childhood cartoon, Huckleberry Hound.

But it seems lack of memory doesn't mean people won't make the same mistakes again.  It's hardly surprising that Kirsten Dunst's Bartlett-citing receptionist has a thing for her boss given all the praise she lavishes on him in front of Ruffalo.  When we find out she was an early patient and had an affair erased already and she is falling back towards that...

The movie ends on an ambiguous note.  Joel and Clem learn they were treated, that she'll get bored with him and he'll get annoyed with her, and the two deciding to give it a try anyway.  Maybe they get it right this time, maybe they don't, but maybe the movie is saying that ultimately, we're more than just what we remember and things beyond memories shape who we are and what choices we make. 

The Last Man on Earth (1964)

Richard Matheson's novella I Am Legend has been adapted for the screen three times.  Only one was based on a screenplay by the author and remains the most faithful to the original work, that being The Last Man on Earth starring Vincent Price as the title character,  I've seen one of the other two, the 2007 version featuring Will Smith kept Matheson's title and had a chance to go with his original intentions on the ending but which wussed out before the theatrical release.  That alternate ending is still available as a DVD extra, which can make the movie-as-released a lot more frustrating since the alternate ending actually made a hell of a lot more sense with everything that came before.  1971's The Omega Man I haven't seen yet, but it looks like your sort of prototypical 70s pre-Star Wars sci-fi, with Charlton Heston doing his screenchewing best, so I'll be sure to check that out in the future to see how it turned out.

That said, Last Man was the first to reach the silver screen, and if you need a go-to guy with a creepy voice back then, you hired Vincent Price, long before he was terrorizing either the Brady Bunch or Scooby Doo.  He's unlisted for his two lines in Abbot and Costello Meet Frankenstein, though if you don't know he was the Invisible Man at the end of the movie (a role he played elsewhere), then you just plain have never heard the man speak.  His voice is that distinctive.

This is a good thing too, because one thing I didn't know about Last Man is that it was a joint American/Italian production and Price seems to be the only American cast member in the movie.  Everyone else was an Italian actor with obviously dubbed dialogue.  On the plus side, Price is alone for the first third to half of the movie, aside from the occasional mindless vampire/zombie lurking outside his fortified house, trying to get in and calling him by name.  Price's voiceover explains the situation quite well as he goes about his business acquiring food, garlic, gas, and disposes of the motionless bodies on the side of the road when the sun is out.  No doubt due to budgetary limits, these vampires don't die in sunlight:  they merely stop moving like a bunch of corpses until Price can either stake or burn them, which he does.  Without exception.  Or mercy.  Even when he finds a small dog, the only living thing he's seen in ages, he ends up staking the poor mutt and burying it somewhere.

But then the flashbacks come along, and the dubbing becomes more obvious.  Dubbing is one of those things that a moviegoer might have to deal with, but many (myself included) would rather deal with subtitles.  Of course, the characters here are all supposed to be Americans speaking English, so maybe this doesn't work so well, and I have to wonder how well I'd take rewatching some of those Eastwood Spaghetti Westerns now.  More often then not, dubbing is more of a distraction than an aid.  Here, it's too obvious and doesn't work too well.

As it is, Matheson reportedly didn't care for this movie and had his name removed in favor of a pseudonym.  The basic plot of his story is usually the same no matter what the film.  The hero is a man who, somehow, has avoided being infected by some kind of plague that has turned everyone else into vampire-like creatures.  By day he goes around, conducting experiments on the monsters, gathering supplies.  There's usually a dog and/or a dead wife and child.  At some point he finds a woman and figures out something that explains Matheson's title...or else it should.  Price's version goes for a more action-filled Hollywood ending, though not as over-the-top as Will Smith blowing himself up to save some people from the CGI horrorfests that have broken into his house.  Matheson's story itself is, in my opinion, only so-so except for the ending, so I might have to check out Heston's version at some point to see if any of these stick the landing better than Price and Co. did.

Who Framed Roger Rabbit (1988)

I wasn't going to use my next entry on Who Framed Roger Rabbit.  It's a fun film and all and shows director Robert Zemeckis' growing comfort with technology that will allow him to go on to make Forrest Gump before he stepped too far into the Uncanny Valley of motion-capture film making.  Quite frankly, if you use your massive computer technology to create a character that looks exactly like Tom Hanks, but not quite, and is voiced by him, why not use the actual Tom Hanks and not a (not really) reasonable facsimile?  Pixar and others have shown you can have good animation without motion capture, and modern CGI means you can put actors into anything, but the hybrid just does.  Not.  Work.  Not as the whole feature.  Creating a nonhuman thing like Gollum or various apes, or anything played by Andy Serkis, really, interacting with real people seems fine, but those things are not meant to look like the actor playing him/her/it.  When Dr. Manhattan has more humanity about him than half the cast of Beowulf, then you have problems.

But I am digressing.  I was originally considering writing about the old Vincent Price horror film The Last Man on Earth next, but then I was flipping channels and found good ol' Roger on the Cartoon Network.  I'd seen the movie a few hundred times as a kid and knew it fairly well.  I remember seeing it in theaters and hearing the closest it comes to real profanity (the gorilla bouncer at Jessica's toon review nightclub calls Eddie Valiant a "wiseass") then be tamed to a different word for the Disney Channel ("wiseguy").  So, basically, I know the movie.  And for reasons unknown, Cartoon Network cut the hell out of it.  And the choices were baffling.

Take this exchange:  Eddie, Roger, and Benny the cab are making a getaway from a pair of motorcycle cops and Judge Doom's weasels.  Benny drives a bit recklessly, to say the least, and shoots down an alleyway.

Roger:  Benny, they're right behind us!
Benny:  Not for long, Roger!
(Benny spins around and is going backwards, facing the cops)
Benny:  Now they're right in front of us!

Is it funny?  From any other movie, probably not.  For a movie about 1940s cartoons, yeah, it works.  Now imagine that exchange, everything above happens, but Benny's punchline is absent.

That's what Cartoon Network did, and this was hardly the only example.

It's not even an offensive line, unless someone thought it was too bad to include.

Meanwhile, Jessica Rabbit's attempts to seduce Eddie in his office, complete with boob humor, stays intact.

I turned the movie off shortly thereafter.

Roger Rabbit is a nice curio.  Disney tried to make Roger a star at the time, alongside Mickey Mouse as often as possible.  I haven't seen Roger outside the movie and the handful of shorts he made in a while, so I don't know if some poor "castmember" is still wandering around DisneyWorld dressed like him.  The at-the-time cutting edge special effects mean Roger and co. tote real world stuff, despite being two-dimensional beings (which largely works).  And given the major crime being revealed is the birth of the Los Angelos freeway system, I've heard and can easily see Roger's story is the unofficial sequel to Chinatown.  Truth be told, not many directors can get the feel of 1940s crazy animation down right, but Zemeckis did.  Now, so long as the rumored all-motion-capture sequel aren't true, and he can actually do something again with live actors, I think that would be a good thing.

Given all the cameos, and how this will probably be the only time Bugs Bunny and Mickey Mouse share a screen (to say nothing about a certain pair of ducks), the attention to detail (Eddie's cartoon gun has a thank you plaque from Yosemite Sam on the inside of the case), there's not much to not like about this movie.

Unless some TV network cuts a lot out of it for no discernible reason.

Two more things:  I read a plot summary of the novel the movie was based on once.  Winston Groom has been less than happy about the changes made to his novel for the movie (I've read that book, the changes are very noticeable), but that's nothing compared to the changes made to Roger's source novel to bring it to the big screen.  Basically, there are toons, Roger, Jessica, and Eddie exist, and that's about it.

Second, I am wondering if the upcoming Wreck-It Ralph is going to do for videogames what this movie did for old cartoon characters.

Brave (2012)

I'm probably not going to be updating this every day, but I'll make an effort to do so a couple times a week, and any time I see something new.  Last night was something new as Carly and I took in Brave, the newest from Pixar.  I, generally speaking, love Pixar's movies, though I have somehow missed both Bugs Life and Cars 2...though the second was more intentional.  I only saw the first Cars on a long flight back from a solo London vacation, and by my way of thinking, movies you have only a little interest in are more than fair game for a flight, especially if you can pretend you didn't pay to see the movie.  It's the only reason I saw (and didn't care for, frankly) The Expendables.

Brave, though, I wanted to see, and it was good.  But the movie-going experience can temper enjoyment, and ours was, sadly, not that good.

It started out OK as we arrived just in time and I learned we were a screener audience with Pixar asking us to fill out a quick survey.  Me, I'm a cooperative fellow, so I agree to do so.  Previews have started, we go in, I spot two seats in the lowest part of the stadium seating and we quickly sit down.  Herein is where our troubles begin.  Behind us is a family with a baby, maybe 2 years old at the most.  The kid never cried, but he or she never stayed quiet for long either.

The family spoke Spanish.  I know this because one took or sent a phone call in the middle of the movie in Spanish.  Now, every movie theater I've ever been to, including the art house Carly and I saw Midnight in Paris in has a nice, "please turn off your cell phones" message.  Good to see other people matter to some people.

And then Carly got spat on by some kid behind her.  We moved forward a few more rows for the rest of the film.  No apologies were ever given.  Maybe the parent didn't notice, but still...

Anyway, the movie itself was fine.  For a Pixar film, it wasn't as emotionally devastating as many of their films, like Up or either of the Toy Story sequels.  Maybe if I was somebody's mother or daughter.  Pixar deserves a good deal of credit for, as always, improving their animation ability (I rewatched the first Toy Story last summer, and it is amazing how far those people have come), and also for having a mostly actual Scottish cast for a movie set in Scotland.  Emma Thompson obviously isn't, but I was a little surprised to learn Robbie Coltraine is.  Oh and John Ratzenberger isn't either. 

Yes, he's in there too.

As always, there's a lot of high energy to the movie.  Characters, like heroine Merida's three younger brothers do.  Not. Sit.  Still.  The humor is great, and despite some initial selfishness on the part of Merida, the characters are likeable enough.  Good music, and scenes that might make a viewer want to visit the actual Scotland.

This was not a perfect film, though.  The plot was rather straightforward and simple by the standards of the company.  It's basically a fairy tale that runs smoothly from A to B.  That's not a bad thing by any stretch of the imagination, but there aren't any sort of major twists unless you count a teenage girl learning a valuable lesson a twist.  I more or less knew the real secret of the demon bear before the movie told me, to say nothing of the real way to break the daffy witch's spell.

But, my thoughts may have been tempered by the bad experience, so I may revisit this when I see the movie a second time on DVD in the future.

Spaceballs (1987)

I've seen many a movie, but picking out just one to start with seemed to be a bit of a rough thing to do.  So, I'll go with a movie my wife and I both enjoy.  Future entries may be longer or shorter, depending on what I have to say.

Do I need to mention at this point that, yes, there will be SPOILERS most likely in this discussion?  The movie is 25 years old, so chances are, anyone reading this has probably seen it, and it's not like this movie has a complex plot to spoil for anyone, but this will be the general rule going forward so everybody knows.

Anyway, the movie for today is 1987's Spaceballs.

I basically figure all movies fall into two broad categories:  fun or meaningful/artistic.  Very few movies are both, and as long as you recognize which category any given movie you are encountering, you should be fine.  Steven Spielberg used to be able to do both, and Martin Scorsese still can, and off the top of my head, Wes Anderson and a few others also fit the bill.  Mel Brooks, however, is not one of them.

Fortunately, Spaceballs is flat-out fun.  It's highly quotable for people who want to throw out random one-liners and confuse their friends, features two SCTV alumni who, for very different reasons, do not make movies anymore, and, well, is the last really funny Mel Brooks movie.

Don't believe me?  Here are the movies Brooks directed post-Spaceballs.

Life Stinks
Robin Hood:  Men in Tights
Dracula:  Dead and Loving It

Small wonder he decided to remake himself through converting his older films into Broadway musicals.  Unlike another former Sid Caesar writer, Woody Allen, Brooks mostly seems to want to be funny in his work.  There's nothing too deep about the human condition in a movie like Spaceballs, unless you think over merchandising  of movies is a surprise of some kind.

Now, as much as I enjoy this movie, its not Brooks' best work.  Bill Pullman and Daphne Zuniga do OK, but neither seem to have the vigor for these sorts of roles that Gene Wilder or Madeline Kahn would be able to put in.  John Candy and Rick Moranis both are fine in their respective roles of Barf and Dark Helmet, and Brooks himself livens things up as evil President Skroob and wiseguy merchandiser/schwartz intstructor Yogurt.  What makes the movie work as much as it does is the sheer volume of jokes that get tossed out, some of which may not work, but don't worry, another one will be along in a second.

In fact, here are some nice touches the movie has that work for me:

Meta-touches, where the characters knows they're in a movie and sometimes you might accidentally capture the stunt doubles.   That's also Stephen Tobolowsky as the officer there, a character actor that gets around, perhaps best know as Ned Ryerson in Groundhog Day.

John Hurt (painfully) reprising his role from Alien.

That self-same creature suddenly deciding he's Michigan J. Frog.

Renting the movie before its finished.

"Who made that man a gunner?"

And, of course, Ludicrous Speed.  Moranis screaming as Dark Helmet plunges forward and crashes into a wall when Spaceball One hits the brakes always makes my wife laugh.  I have a similar reaction to Nic Cage and some other guy doing the same in the middle of Raising Arizona.

Not everything works.  "Gone to plaid" always seemed a little odd to me, and I always thought Pizza the Hut was more disgusting than funny.

Of course, there's nothing overly deep here.  Lone Starr will get the girl, and everyone will live happily ever after, unless you're a high-ranking Spaceball on a planet with some unhappy apes.  But that goes without saying.