Category: Movies

In theaters.

The periodic narrator of (500) Days of Summer announces early on that “this is not a love story; this is story about love.” I disagree. This is neither a love story nor a story about a love but rather a story about narcissism, passive aggression, and rank immaturity, and as such, it’s not a particularly enjoyable tale.

God knows it’s not unusual for a romantic comedy to traffic in all sorts of twisted ideas about love and romance, but (500) clearly—and incorrectly—fancies itself unusually wise, which makes it unusually annoying. For one thing, despite its pretensions, the movie dabbles in plenty of the usual clichés (the impossibly wise child adviser being a particularly obnoxious element), but it’s the warped “romantic” hero that really gets me. The movie knows he’s in the wrong, but it never truly acknowledges just how in the wrong he is, and although it wants to pretend that Tom has Learned Lessons and Grown over the course of the movie, that’s not really the case—mainly because the filmmakers seem a bit foggy on what lessons he should have learned. They make a joke about Tom having badly misinterpreted the ending of The Graduate, but the joke’s on them: frankly, I don’t think they completely get it either.

In theaters.

I wouldn’t have thought that a war movie, much less a contemporary war movie, could be apolitical, but The Hurt Locker comes close. Whatever the personal beliefs of director Kathryn Bigelow and journalist-screenwriter Mark Boal, their film is a relatively open text, focused not on the political implications of the U.S. military presence in Iraq but on the day-to-day experiences of a single three-man team of Army explosives technicians, tasked with dismantling improvised explosive devices (IEDs) on the streets of Baghdad.

This is not to say, however, that The Hurt Locker is an morally empty experience, just guns and explosions and flash. For all the well-wrought tension and artfully constructed set pieces, the movie is powerful and thoughtful, an unflinching but compassionate look at the lives of three soldiers. Boal (whose journalistic work has been published in Rolling Stone, The Village Voice, and Playboy) spent time embedded in an Army bomb squad stationed in Iraq, and that experience reveals itself in every well-observed scene and every finely drawn character. The movie feels lived-in, populated by real people, not cinematic cannon fodder or propaganda pawns but true human beings, both flawed and heroic. It’s a thrilling, engrossing, almost too intimate film.

In theaters.

If you’re going to put a talking computer in space, you’re going to make people think of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It’s unavoidable, especially if that computer is talking in smoothly uninflected yet conversational voice. Especially if you give it a cutesy human name. So at first Moon seems kind of hackneyed, what with the lone guy and his dependable-but-maybe-kind-of-ominous GERTY on an isolated outpost on the Moon. You think you know how things are going to go, and then they don’t go there, not really, and Moon turns out to be far less hackneyed and far more intriguing than you expect.

Special showing at the IFC Center. Also on DVD.

Castle in the Sky is one of animation master Hayao Miyazaki’s early films, but in it, you can see glimmers of his later, more polished works. There is the old woman who is more than what she first seems to be and the young woman whose past holds a mystery, even from herself (Spirited Away). There are the environmental themes, explored with gravity and reverence and just a trace of horror (Princess Mononoke). There are the outrageous, elaborate, ravishingly detailed flying machines (Howl’s Moving Castle and, really, just about every other Miyazaki movie—he’s obsessed).

Without question, those later movies are far more ambitious and innovative than the comparatively modest Castle in the Sky, but frankly, Castle is pretty damn ambitious and innovative in its own right. And like all Miyazaki’s films, no matter how sophisticated, it is childlike in the best sense: possessed of a luminous, ageless sense of wonder that makes the fantasy story come alive.

In theaters.

The premise alone is enchanting: Overwhelmed by grief, an old man launches his tumbledown house into the air with thousands of brightly colored helium balloons. Soaring above the clouds into a soft blue sky, the flying house represents escapism at its loveliest, unbound by any hard laws of physics, the realization of a blissful dream.

It’s a testament to how high the standards for Pixar are that this glorious image isn’t a surprise. We expect greatness from the studio that gave us Wall-E and Ratatouille and Finding Nemo, to name just a few, so it feels almost redundant to report that yes, once again, the animation studio has delivered. But deliver it has. Up is tender and funny and imaginative and beautiful—no less so for having been preceded by other such gems.

In theaters.

The Brothers Bloom takes the structure of a caper movie—with two con men, their accomplice, and their mark at the center—but that’s not what is. The con isn’t the point of the movie any more than it’s the point for the con men. Stephen, the mastermind, is an artist. In the words of Bloom, his brother and longtime partner in crime, Stephen “writes cons like dead Russians write novels.” But Bloom has tired of playing parts in Stephen’s games, no matter how well written they might be. He feels lost, without his own identity, and he struggles to find the words to express his frustration: “I want—” “You want an unwritten life,” Stephen provides. Bloom emphatically agrees, repeating the words, and then his face falls. Stephen winks.

If you don’t find that exchange utterly charming and poetic, you’re never going to like this movie. Hell, you’re never going to get through the prologue, a fable-like tale from the brothers’ childhood, narrated in verse (verse!) by the incomparable Ricky Jay. Writer-director Rian Johnson has no use for realism and no aversion to contrivance. In fact, he embraces the contrivance, toying with it and admiring it, because in the end, this is a story about contrivance, a story about storytelling: fictions we tell about ourselves and fictions we tell to ourselves, fictions that confine us and fictions that expand our world, fictions that remain fictions and fictions that come true.

For all its ambition, The Brothers Bloom doesn’t quite reach the heights Johnson is aiming at, but it has such warmth and so much color that its shortcomings don’t bother me much. True, I’m a sucker for this kind of movie—the self-conscious, hyperstylized, but exquisitely heartfelt melodrama—but Johnson really does have a flair for language, its rhythms and subtleties, and with such a talented cast breathing life into the artfully crafted turns of phrase, The Brothers Bloom is a joyful, winsome experience.

In theaters.

Now this is a summer movie, which is great because after (ugh) Wolverine, I was thinking about ditching the movie theater until October. But director J.J. Abrams’s Star Trek is the perfect summer movie event, the kind of flick that, like a great carnival ride, is so much fun that when it ends, you seriously think about getting back in line to go again.

Suspenseful and witty and poignant, by turns, with deftly sketched characters and thrilling action sequences, Star Trek entertained the hell out me. No, it’s not going to change the world. It doesn’t even indulge in a big metaphor-with-a-message, the way the television shows so often did. (I don’t mean that as criticism of the TV shows, by the way. I’m a sucker for a well-executed metaphor-with-a-message, though admittedly the emphasis is on the well-executed.) But it’s fun, well-crafted and affectionate and just clever enough to keep from bubbling into froth.

In theaters.

Wolverine is the kind of movie that gives summer movies a bad name. The action scenes have no flair, just some fake-looking explosions and uninspired, poorly filmed martial arts. The humor is cheap and limp; one scene is just one long, stupid fat joke, like something from one of Eddie Murphy’s recent execrable “comedies.” The plot is hole-ridden and predictable, the pacing is saggy, and the director never comes across an emotional moment he can’t ruin with a trite, tacky flashback.

The whole thing never tries to be more than third-rate. It’s lazy and dumb, coasting on the charm of its star and the durability of the preexisting characters. In fact, Wolverine is the most pathetic sort of summer movie: something that had potential, that could have been good, if the filmmakers had only taken the time and nurtured the talent to create something worthwhile. True, it isn’t as actively bad as the repellent X-Men: The Last Stand—Wolverine might be half-assed, but it’s not an infuriating, character-assassinating mess—so … yay, I guess. Hooray for low expectations.

In theaters.

My thinking on this movie is utterly predictable, but I can’t help it. The most noteworthy thing about the animated Monsters vs. Aliens is that it’s a major studio flick featuring a woman as the central protagonist with a character arc that is not about getting the guy. Quick! How many other big tent-pole movies can you think of that fit that simple description? It’s ridiculously unusual and thus disproportionately endearing. The rest of the movie is cute enough—I enjoyed it—but it’s Susan and her story who stand out.

In repertory at Film Forum through March 31.

Z is forty years old, but it could have been made yesterday, assuming the filmmakers could acquire financing for their bitingly leftist, disillusioned, yet gripping thriller. The direction—briskly paced and versatile, shifting between documentary-like realism and more subjective flashbacks and ramping up toward its climax with rhythmic drive—feels effortlessly contemporary. But even more than the aesthetics, the subject matter of Z resonates all too well with the present day.

Based on a novel that dramatizes the 1963 assassination of a Greek anti-war leader, the movie could have relied simply on paranoia and knee-jerk cynicism to fuel suspense, but it’s smarter and more thoughtful than that. We see, from the outset, who kills the Deputy—there’s no mystery there—so the tension comes from the way the film gradually pulls back to reveal the infinitely more interesting hows and whys and then whats. With blistering insights into the psychology of cover-ups, the manipulation of political foot soldiers, the dangers and limitations of ideology, and the moral compromises of political action on both left and right, Z easily transcends the 1960s. It’s not a museum piece; it’s timeless.