FunBlog

The Last Station is an interesting, well-acted and poignant film about the last year in the life of the great Russian novelist Leo Tolstoy.

In 1910 Count Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) is perhaps the worlds most celebrated writer. He is also the guru of a movement called the Tolstoyans whose members believe in the abolition of private property, pacifism, vegetarianism, sexual abstinence, dressing like peasants and living in rural communes where they work the land with their own hands. The movement’s chief organizer, Tolstoy’s friend Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti) is a dapper fellow who prefers nice suits and the city life for himself. He is dedicated to spreading Tolstoy’s ideas, but his foremost concern at the moment is to make sure that the old man leaves his valuable copyrights to the organization, thus effectively disinheriting his wife and children.

This earns him the enmity of Tolstoy’s wife Sofya (Helen Mirren), a smart and strong-willed woman who thinks that Tolstoy’s more radical ideas are a bunch of hooey. (Their marriage has been passionate but contentious.)

Chertkov recruits Valentin Bulgakov (James McAvoy), a naive and idealistic young Tolstoyan, to serve as Tolstoy’s private secretary and instructs him to spy on Sofya and help undermine her influence on Tolstoy.

Valentin’s experiences lead him to question his faith. Tolstoy turns out to be a friendly and charming old man (though sometimes cantankerous and confused) who freely admits that he is not a very good Tolstoyan. He seems much more nuanced than his humorless followers. Valentin finds himself feeling increasing sympathy for Sofya in spite of her obstructiveness. Worst of all he falls in love with a pretty, free-spirited young woman (Kerry Condon), an embarrassing problem for someone who believes in sexual abstinence.

The ultimate message seems to be that love is more important than ideals, or at least that it should be.

Whew–try to say that title without pausing for breath!

Some people say that Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lightning Thief is a second-rate imitation of Harry Potter. That seems unfair. There is no way this movie can qualify as “second rate.”

J.K. Rowling is no Shakespeare but she is a competent storyteller. The Harry Potter movies are state-of-the-art professional efforts which are often visually amazing. This movie, on the other hand, is notable for its uninspired story, cheesy dialog, wooden acting, and unconvincing special effects, which it tries to disguise with murky cinematography.

The story is based on Greek mythology, a body of material that has inspired some of the world’s greatest poets and artists. I guess there’s no reason it can’t inspire the less talented as well.
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An Education reminds me a little of those comedies where teenagers spend most of the movie doing dumb things, yet everything works out all right in the end. The difference is that this is a lot smarter and more believable.

The story (loosely based on an autobiographical essay be British journalist Lynn Barber) begins in London in 1961. Jenny (Carey Mulligan) is a 16-year-old schoolgirl. She’s clever and talented and bored with her life and the people around her.

She is thrilled when she meets David (Peter Sarsgaard), a charming and good-looking (though somewhat oily) older man. He takes her to places where she has never been, to a sophisticated world of concerts and fancy restaurants and nightclubs. She watches with bemusement as he cons her parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) who are ambitious but rather dim.

Jenny is not dim, and she can see that David is dishonest, but she doesn’t care. She’s caught up in the thrill of it all and impatient with suggestions that she may be jeopardizing her future. In fact she gets few warnings since most people are charmed by David.

Still this is basically a comedy and things don’t end as badly as they might have.

Crazy Heart is a well-made film with a really good performance by Jeff Bridges, but somehow I can’t get too enthusiastic about it.

Bridges plays “Bad” Blake, a boozy old country singer, once a big star but now reduced to singing in bowling alleys. The remaining fans who show up to hear him need to be very forgiving, though he occasionally shows flashes of his old charisma.

He agrees to be interviewed by Jean Craddock (Maggie Gyllenhaal), a free-lance reporter and single mother. Somehow they end up falling love. (What is she thinking? He’s not just older than she is; he’s downright decrepit!)

This is, of course, mostly a story about alcoholism. Part of my problem with it may be that the combination of alcoholism and country music reminds me too much of Walk the Line, a much more compelling movie.

Crazy Heart tries hard and has it’s heart in the right place. Like many such movies it seems torn by the question of whether to have an overly pat, cheerful and crowd-pleasing ending, or an ending that is more believable but depressing. It eventually compromises in a way that is sort of satisfactory.

It is probably fair to say that Queen Victoria saved the British monarchy, mainly by NOT being a national embarrassment, unlike her immediate predecessors. She also presided over the British Empire during the time when it grew to its maximum power and extent. This all makes her fascinating to the sort of people who like BBC dramas.

The Young Victoria is not a BBC production but it is still a typical offering in the “Masterpiece Theater” genre: serious, elegant and very British. If you like that sort of thing you will probably like this one.

The young Princess Victoria (Emily Blunt) was raised in near-isolation by her overbearing mother, the Duchess of Kent (Miranda Richardson) and her slimy advisor Sir John Conroy (Mark Strong). They hoped to keep her dependent on them so that when she inherited the throne they could rule England in her name, but she stubbornly resisted.

She was aided at first by Lord Melbourne (Paul Bettany) the good-looking but devious Prime Minister. Later she found a more reliable ally in her cousin Prince Albert of Saxe-Coburg and Gotha (Rupert Friend), whom she married. Albert was young, handsome and straight-laced, but also an idealistic social reformer whose influence was to leave England a more humane and democratic place.

Naturally the movie focuses on the romance between Victoria and Albert. In the history of a royal family that has had more scandals than happy marriages, theirs is certainly the most impressive love story.

Nevertheless if you are interested in the history of the period you would probably do better to rent the 2001 BBC TV series Victoria and Albert which was a bit stricter about maintaining historical accuracy. The Young Victoria mostly sticks to actual historical events, but it is not above rearranging and exaggerating them for dramatic effect.

…maybe you shouldn’t see Avatar. The Register describes some overreactions by deranged fans.

Millennium Actress is something of an overlooked gem. The movie won all sorts of awards in Japan and was widely praised by critics, but its American release sank without a ripple. This supports the general rule that an animated film that doesn’t even pretend to be for kids has no chance in America. For anime fans it is worth a second look.

The movie is reminiscent of Citizen Kane, though it is less political and more romantic. The basic structure is the same: an investigator explores the life story of a public figure, seeking some key insight that will explain the life and give it meaning.
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The trailers for Up in the Air do their best to suggest that this is a formulaic romantic comedy about two people who initially hate each other but end up falling in love. It isn’t anything of the sort. Nor is it a cynical black comedy like Office Space, as one might guess from the premise. It’s something different, a bit smarter and subtler than either.

Ryan Bingham (George Clooney) works for an outplacement firm, and what with the current economy he is very busy flying from city to city to companies that have layoffs scheduled. Mostly his job consists of firing people whose managers are too cowardly to do the job themselves. In between he gives motivational speeches in which he preaches a Zen-like avoidance of attachments and commitments.
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Avatar, James Cameron’s first movie since Titanic (1997), is a solid science fiction story, probably a classic. It is a visually stunning extravaganza which seems to have required the contributions of just about every CGI effects studio on this planet.

A lot of people are saying that while the movie is visually stunning the story is weak. I wouldn’t call it weak; I found it exciting and rather affecting. It is certainly very derivative and rather predictable, but that seems to be true of just about everything that comes out of Hollywood these days.
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The Princess and the Frog is something that we haven’t seen in a long time: a traditional hand-drawn animated film from Disney. The last one was 5 years ago. (It was called Home on the Range and it’s understandable if you don’t remember it.)

After Home on the Range flopped, Disney announced that they would not make any more hand-drawn films, and would instead use computer rendering for all future animated theatrical movies. Apparently they changed their mind, and I think that is worth celebrating.

The Princess and the Frog is not quite as good as the best of the classic Disney animated films, but that’s holding it to a very high standard. It has a solidly entertaining story, and much of it looks very good. If you care about animation, you should probably see this, if only to encourage Disney to keep trying.
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When I saw the trailer for Fantastic Mr. Fox my initial reaction was “Wow, that’s pretty bad animation!” This was quite unfair.

My reaction was based on an unconscious assumption that this was an example of computer-generated animation, the approach used in most animated movies today. In fact, if you are an animation fan Fantastic Mr. Fox may be worth seeing because it may well be the last major motion picture ever made using the much older technique of stop-motion animation. The sad fact is that today’s computer technology can create a very similar look with more realistic motion, all at a much lower cost.
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The Blind Side is a mostly-true biopic. It tells the story of Michael Oher (Quinton Aaron), a homeless, functionally-illiterate teenager who ended up winning a football scholarship to the University of Mississippi; made the honor roll in college; and recently signed a $13.8 million contract with the Baltimore Ravens.

The movie is so sweet and upbeat that my cynical side wishes I had a good excuse to trash it. However the truth is that I had a good time. It avoids the trap of excessive sentimentality; in fact most of the time it manages to be quite funny. It’s a good approach. The director is smart enough to realize that the story inherently has enough emotional punch that there is no need to indulge in mawkish tricks.

Sandra Bullock, who plays Oher’s adoptive mother, is the heart of the movie. Her warm-hearted but tough-minded character dominates every scene she is in (which is most of them) and as often as not has the audience rolling on the floor.

Twilight, the original movie, was cheesy fun. The sequel New Moon is not as much fun, in fact much of it is rather tedious.

The sequel picks up where the original left off (and does nothing to bring you up to speed, so forget it if you didn’t see the first movie.) To begin with Edward decides to leave Bella (for her own good of course.) Bella gets depressed and mopes around for a loooooong time. She takes up risky activities and hangs out with Jake, the nice hunky Native American boy, whom she leads on and treats rather badly in my opinion.

It’s not until half-way through the movie that the werewolves finally appear. This is a great relief since the werewolves are good hokey fun, but we don’t see enough of them. The part of the movie that isn’t about Bella moping is perhaps one-third about werewolves and the rest about the emo vampires.

This is too bad since I like the werewolves better. I’m sick of hearing the vampires whine about what a dreadful curse it is to be eternally young and beautiful and rich. The werewolves are working-class monsters. They have a less-privileged life, but they are proud and good with their hands and generally don’t complain as much. Bella prefers the vampires, but that just shows her poor taste.

In 1966, a time when British performers were revolutionizing popular music, the British public had surprisingly few ways to listen to them. The BBC had little interest in broadcasting rock n’ roll, so British fans tuned their radios to “pirate” stations broadcasting from ships anchored in international waters.

(There was a somewhat similar phenomenon in America at about that time. The government did not own the radio stations, but it limited their number and regulated their content. Fans of cutting-edge music tuned to powerful stations broadcasting from Mexico, where the government was inclined to let broadcasters do as they pleased.)

Pirate Radio is a good-natured nostalgic comedy that takes place mostly on “Radio Rock”, a fictitious pirate radio ship. (Claims that the move is “based on a true story” are overblown, though some of the characters are very loosely based on real people.)
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Ewan McGregor

“More of this is true than you would believe.”

The Men Who Stare at Goats is an offbeat comedy that gains a certain edginess by making us wonder how much of it is based on fact. I doubt that there is much truth in it, but it is still hilarious.

Bob Wilton (Ewan McGregor), a down-and-out reporter, is waiting in Kuwait in 2002, hoping to get an “embedded” position with a U.S. military unit. He meets Lyn Cassady (George Clooney), a hard-bitten ex-soldier who claims to be a “Jedi Warrior”, trained in paranormal fighting techniques in a top-secret U.S. Army project. Ignoring the telltale signs that Cassady may be totally nuts, Wilton agrees to accompany him on a secret mission into Iraq.

During the trip we gradually learn the story of how back in the late 1970s and early 80s, the Pentagon, worried about Soviet psychic research programs, allowed the charismatic Lt. Colonel Bill Django (Jeff Bridges) to form a top-secret unit called the “New Earth Army”, in which soldiers were trained to be “warrior monks” using an eclectic mix of New Age techniques. However the experiment had tragic results due to machinations of a malicious recruit named Larry Hooper (Kevin Spacey).

The movie claims to be a work of fiction based on a non-fiction book. The book is apparently totally serious but the movie takes a whimsical approach to the question of whether the program ever existed, let alone whether the soldier ever developed deadly psychic powers.

Amelia, a biography of aviation pioneer Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank) is interesting but curiously unengaging. It is reasonably historically accurate (at least by biopic standards) and may be worth watching if you want to learn about the life of this remarkable woman. However as entertainment, as story-telling, it isn’t very successful.

Surprisingly little time is devoted to the dramatic flights that made Earhart famous. The move seems more interested in her personal life, particularly her relationship with her husband and manager, publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere). Yet it doesn’t really succeed as a love story either. Much of the time it just seems to be checking off the significant events in her life.

The only part of the move that achieves much dramatic tension is the final sequence depicting her doomed last flight.

Before that we are treated to a long conversation between Earhart (in New Guinea) and Putnam (in California). Even though they are speaking over short-wave radio, they somehow manage to get a perfect fiber-optic-quality connection, allowing them to whisper endearments to each other instead of shouting over the static. This is probably a good indication of the movie’s commitment to technical accuracy.

Wow! Ethan and Joel Coen must have been in a really dark mood when the made A Serious Man. It is a very, very dark comedy, essentially a retelling of the Book of Job, with no sugar-coating.

Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is the Job character, a physics professor at a small Midwestern college in the late 1960s. He’s an ineffectual nebbish who tries earnestly to do the right thing, though he isn’t sure what that is. The people around him tend to push him around and take advantage of him, while Fate deals him one nasty blow after another. (I use the term “nebbish” advisedly. The story is set in a mostly-Jewish community and has a strong Jewish sensibility.)

The move is painfully funny. I found myself laughing quite a lot, and when I wasn’t laughing I was wincing. You can choose to see this as a bitterly comic commentary on the human condition. If you can’t see it that way, it will probably be like watching a kitten being tortured. Not for every taste, in other words, and you need to be in the right mood to enjoy it.

The Informant! is an offbeat, funny movie based on a true story. It imitates the visual style and musical score of a 1970s crime caper movie, perhaps because that’s what the protagonist thinks he’s involved in.

Mark Whitacre (Matt Damon) is one of the top executives at agribusiness giant Archer Daniels Midland (ADM). He is under pressure to figure out why the new lysine factory is failing to produce enough lysine (an agricultural feed additive.) He tells them that he has been contacted by an extortionist who says that the plant is being sabotaged by an industrial spy.
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District 9 is a violent and disturbing science fiction thriller. It is also thoughtful and clever, and probably worth seeing if you have a strong stomach.

The premise is that back in 1990 a giant alien spaceship appeared over Johannesburg, South Africa. The ship was disabled and filled with half-staved alien refugees. The government reluctantly took responsibility for resettling them in a refugee camp called District 9, a squalid shantytown that quickly became a crime-ridden hellhole.
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A while ago I suggested that Hollywood could alleviate the headache-inducing tendencies of 3-D movies by developing a holographic projection system.

I was only semi-serious, but apparently it is possible. All it requires is processing power several orders of magnitude greater than what we have today.

Post Grad is no great classic, but it’s rather cute and pretty funny–not a bad way to spend 89 minutes.

Ryden Malby (Alexis Bledel) has just graduated from college and is confident that she will quickly land her dream job with a publishing company. Unfortunately though she’s book-smart she is rather ditsy and not as good at interviews as she thinks she is. She’s also not very smart about romance. Her hunky “platonic boyfriend” (Zach Gilford) is crazy about her but she just isn’t interested in him that way.

The job-hunting and romantic subplots are pretty predictable. What makes this worth watching are the comic contributions of Ryden’s oddball family (Michael Keaton, Jane Lynch, Bobby Coleman and Carol Burnett). They turn what might have been an uninspired story into something hilarious. The movie is warm and upbeat and doesn’t overstay its welcome.

Finally after all these years I got to see a Hayao Miyazaki movie in a theater on a big screen. This mini-review is based on the dubbed version currently in the theaters. When I get hold of the DVD I will probably write a more detailed review with pictures.

Ponyo is a gentle children’s story comparable to My Neighbor Totoro. If you are in the mood for something like that, this is pretty good. The story is supposedly inspired by “The Little Mermaid”, but it has little resemblance to either the Disney version or the grim original story by Hans Christian Anderson.
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Henry DeTamble (Eric Bana) has a problem: a time travel disorder. Every so often he has something like a epileptic seizure which causes him to vanish from the present and appear somewhere and sometime in the past or the future. He has no control over it. To make things even more inconvenient, he always arrives naked.

One day a pretty girl (Rachel McAdams) walks up to him and acts like she knows him. Apparently his future self has gotten acquainted with her during visits to the past. He has no idea who she is, but she claims that he is her best friend.

The Time Traveler’s Wife can be appreciated as a bittersweet romance, but what really appeals to me is the dexterity with with it handles the time travel paradoxes.

Most movies about time travel just pull a resolution out of the air without much concern for whether it actually makes sense. This movie on the other hand is a meticulously plotted tour de force in the tradition of Robert Heinlein’s “By His Bootstraps”. As in that classic story the ground rules are totally deterministic, so there is ultimately no ambiguity about whether the convoluted plotline is workable or not. In this case it works.

Hayao Miyazaki’s second most successful movie (after Spirited Away) is a dark, exciting adventure story that resonates with the power of myth.
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The Hurt Locker is a riveting film, thoughtful and realistic. It is a slice-of-life (and death) story about a bomb squad stationed in Baghdad in 2004, about the time that the insurgency was really starting to ratchet up.

The movie centers on Staff Sergeant William James (Jeremy Renner), who is more than a little crazy. He’s extremely capable; he’s defused an incredible number of bombs and the brass adore him. However he takes unnecessary risks and sometimes puts his teammates in danger. Basically he’s an adrenaline junkie–and I’m using that term literally, since the movie seems be be making the explicit point that adrenaline is an addictive drug.

The film is shot using hand-held cameras, giving it the gritty immediacy of a documentary. It is refreshingly free of any political message; though it does take the point of view that people who plant bombs to blow up random victims are scum.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince is the sixth movie in the series, and I actually liked it more than the previous two. It is dark, stylish and witty. Like the early movies in the series it tries to impress us with the richness of its imagination, as opposed to just overwhelming us with pyrotechnic special effects.

Unlike most of the audience I have not read any of the Harry Potter books except the first, so my opinion of the movie is based solely on the movie itself. I can recommend it highly, but with one big caveat: if you have neither read the books nor seen the earlier movies in the series you are going to be pretty lost. No real attempt is made to fill in the backstory, and a lot depends on us already knowing the characters and what they have been through previously.

The ending leaves a number of questions unanswered. Rather than being a complete story in itself, this seems more like the beginning of a grand closing arc that will be completed in the final two movies.

The movie delivers the usual spectacular scenery and state-of-the-art special effects, but it also has subtler pleasures. I particularly like how the characters are gradually maturing. For a 17-year-old boy surrounded by adults who expect the world of him, but won’t give him a straight answer, Harry seems commendably self-possessed. He’s less angsty than he was in the last film and he seems well on the way to becoming an adult hero.

At this time of year the theaters are filled with action movies based on comic books. Public Enemies has a similar style even though it is actually based on a non-fiction book by journalist Bryan Burrough.

If you don’t already know the story of John Dillinger, Pretty Boy Floyd and Baby Face Nelson, you are likely to find the first part of the movie pretty confusing. There’s a large number of men in suits and they spend a lot of time shooting at each other with submachine guns. It’s hard to be sure which ones are the cops and which ones are the robbers.

Eventually the story takes shape as a contest between two larger-than-life characters. John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) had a lot of the characteristics of a comic book or pulp fiction hero. He is depicted as wily, handsome and charming, given to wisecracks and heroic pronouncements. He takes pleasure in outwitting his foes, escaping from tight spots through resourcefulness and physical courage. He is sort of like Zorro, except that instead of succoring the oppressed he robs banks for a living and kills without remorse.

Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale), the FBI agent charged with tracking Dillinger down, is a man so straight-laced that when he gives marching orders to his men they look at him dumbfounded, as if they can’t believe that this guy is for real. Efficient and cold-blooded, Purvis kills bank robbers without showing any emotion. He also doesn’t display any particular concern for the innocent bystanders who might be endangered by all the machine gun fire.

In addition to bank robbers, Purvis has to deal with his boss J. Edgar Hoover, who is portrayed by Billy Crudup as a pompous, publicity-hungry weasel.
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Away We Go is an offbeat take on the road movie genre. Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are a 30-something couple expected their first child. They suddenly realize that they don’t know how they want to raise a child, or indeed what kind of a life they want for themselves. So they set out on a journey to visit an assortment of friends and relatives, hoping to find an appropriate role model.

The movie is comprised of a series of visits with various families. Some of these people are horrible. (These sequences are very funny.) Some of them are nice people. (These sequences are sad.) Eventually of course Burt and Verona decide to stop looking for a perfect couple to imitate and look for a way to create a life that is appropriate for themselves.

One thing that surprised me is that Maya Rudolph doesn’t get to do anything funny. She plays straight man to the other characters’ comic bits, and otherwise treats this as a straight dramatic role. Perhaps this is why her character strikes me as rather unsympathetic.

O’ Horten is a quirky little Norwegian art-house film. The aptly-named Odd Horten is a shy, taciturn railway engineer who retires and then wanders around for the rest of the movie having a series of comic adventures. Eventually he is inspired to do something that may or may not transform his life.

Maybe I would like this more if I were Norwegian. It isn’t as funny as I hoped. Most of the material is mildly amusing. The ending is mildly inspiring and mildly heartwarming. The hero is so withdrawn that we never really get into his head or identify with him.

The movie isn’t awful, but you may or may not find it worth your time to watch.

This may not be Hayao Miyazaki’s most profitable film, but it is probably the most beloved. Totoro toys and memorabilia are perennial favorites, and his image appears on the Studio Ghibli logo. The film is a family classic, appealing to even the youngest children, but still interesting to adults.

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Up is probably the best movie Pixar has made since Toy Story. It isn’t the sort of game-changing breakthrough that Toy Story was in its day, but it is a solid, workman-like piece of storytelling that hits all the marks it aims at. It is funny, heart-warming and technically excellent, one of the best American animated films of the last ten years. If it doesn’t win this year’s animation Oscar I will be very surprised.

Carl Fredricksen (Edward Asner) is an old man who has spent his life dreaming of adventure. In particular he wanted to go off to the mysterious land of Paradise Falls in South America to search for the legendary explorer Charles Muntz (Christopher Plummer). However life got in the way and he never got around to it. Now his home is about to be razed for an urban renewal project and the authorities are about to bundle him off to a nursing home.

So he ties thousands of balloons to his house, rigs up a primitive steering system and takes off for South America. Too late he discovers that a little boy named Russell (Jordan Nagai), who has been trying to earn a merit badge in Helping the Elderly, has stowed away under his porch. Neither of them imagines the surprises that await when they finally reach Paradise Falls.

Some of the younger members of the audience seemed restless. This is probably best suited for ages 10 and up; probably a 5 year old would find much of it difficult to follow. It is not particularly scary by the standards of recent animated films. Certainly there’s nothing nearly as nightmare-inducing as the climax of Toy Story. Many people have remarked on how sad the opening sequence is, but I think it is the sort of thing that seems sad to adults and tends to go over the heads of children.

Management is a small, low-budget screwball comedy. It’s lightweight, but parts of it are very funny.

Mike (Steve Zahn) is stuck in a small town in Arizona, working as the night manager for his parents’ motel. He is clearly unhappy and wants a different kind of life, but he doesn’t seem to know exactly what. When a pretty, 30-something traveling saleswoman (Jennifer Aniston) checks in he makes a clumsy attempt to seduce her. She is bored and frustrated with her life and his lost-puppy charm is sufficient for them to end up having clumsy sex in the laundry room. Then she leaves with no intention of ever seeing him again.

Mike decides to go after her, and follows her to Maryland and then to Washington, hoping to win her love and lure her away from her maniacal ex-punk boyfriend (played by Woody Harrelson, whose performance is in itself worth the price of admission.)

Doesn’t this constitute stalking? Well yeah, but it has always been an article of faith in Hollywood that it is OK to stalk someone as long as you look like a movie star and there are pratfalls involved. Just remember, it’s not OK for ordinary peons to do it. The result in this case is predictable but amusing.

TRAFFIC COP: Citizen, what is your name?

BLOND PUNK KID: My name is James Tiberius Kirk!

If you were a fan of the original Star Trek TV series, you pretty much have to go see the new Star Trek movie. This is a witty but respectful tribute to the original series, with the same spirit but better special effects.

Director J.J. Abrams reimagines the beginning of the story, showing us younger versions of Kirk, Spock, Bones, Uhura, Scotty, Sulu and Chekov as they enter Star Fleet Academy, meet each other and gradually bond as a team while confronting a threat to The Universe as They Know It.

This probably wouldn’t look as good to someone who was unfamiliar with the original TV show. To someone who didn’t know the original characters and the Star Trek universe much of the humor would fall flat, and many of the actions might seem puzzling. Such a hypothetical naive viewer might judge this to be routine sci-fi, perhaps even somewhat incoherent.

Still, anyone from a hard-core Trekkie to a casual fan will almost certainly enjoy this.

State of Play is a solid, professional thriller, sharply written with some fine performances.

The Washington Globe is a major metropolitan newspaper with a newsroom full of the usual assortment of colorful characters. Cal McAffrey (Russell Crowe) is a crusty, disheveled investigative reporter who has been in the business a long time and knows where the bodies are buried (or failing that, knows someone who does know.)

Della Frye (Rachel McAdams) is an enthusiastic young reporter who writes a blog for the paper’s online edition, covering the Capitol.

Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) is an ambitious young Congressman conducting hearings on the activities of a shadowy security firm called Blackwater PointCorp, employed by the Pentagon to perform support operations in Iraq and Afghanistan. All hell breaks loose when one of the Congressman’s staffers dies in a subway accident, a suspected suicide.

Della pounces on the story, assuming that the Congressman and the staffer must have been having an affair.

Cal also gets involved. He sees connections with a murder investigation that he has been working on, and suspects that the aide must also have been murdered. But he has personal connections to the story that threaten his objectivity: not only is he an old friend of Congressman Collins, but he once had an affair with Collins’ wife.

Helen Mirren is typically delightful in a secondary role as Cal’s editor.

Technically this wasn’t made by Studio Ghibli but most people think of it as a Studio Ghibli film, since this was the movie that got the studio started.

Hayao Miyazaki had worked on the 1978 anime TV show Future Boy Conan (director, character designs and storyboards.) This was a lightweight series with a rather simple-minded plot, set in a post-apocalyptic world.

In the early 1980s Miyazaki tried to get funding for an animated feature film that would also have a post-apocalyptic setting but with a more sophisticated story. Unfortunately, no one seemed interested in financing an animated film that was not based on a successful manga or light novel series.

Toshio Suzuki, the editor of Animage magazine, encouraged him to develop the story as a manga, which was serialized in Animage. The manga was a big hit, and suddenly financing for an animated movie became available. The success of the film exceeded all expectations, paving the way for Suzuki, Miyazaki and fellow director Isao Takahata to start Studio Ghibli.

This is one of Miyazaki’s earliest films. I wouldn’t say that it’s his greatest work, but it’s still well worth seeing. Many of the standard trademark elements of a Miyazaki film are visible, including ecological and anti-war themes, dramatic flying sequences, fantastic flying machines and a dynamic young heroine.
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Adventureland is being marketed as a a typical teen coming-of-age comedy, and it sort of is that, but it may not be quite what the fans expect. It’s a bit more serious and low-key than the raucous comedies popular today, more like the teen movies that were popular in the 1980s. If this turns into a trend I won’t be disappointed.

The story takes place in the summer of 1987. James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg), a young college graduate who had planned to take a European vacation before graduate school, is forced by his family’s financial reverses to take a summer job in a run-down amusement park. Lots of predictable hijinks ensue with his young coworkers, but there is an edgy undertone, a sense that these kids are taking risks that they don’t really understand.

Bill Hader gives a hilarious performance as the sleazy owner of the park, and Kristen Stewart is charming as the main love interest.

The movie industry is thrilled with the first-weekend box office success of Monsters vs Aliens and is convinced that 3-D movies of this sort are the wave of the future. Well, I never claimed that my reviews reflect popular tastes. Nevertheless I remain convinced, based on my own experience, that this sort of stereoscopic imagery is a gimmick that actually detracts from the movie-watching experience, and I don’t think it will succeed in the long run.

I think I have figured out what the problem is, though this is just speculation and I don’t have any solid scientific evidence for it.

When you first look at a movie like Monsters vs Aliens it initially looks very “real”, like looking at a scene through a window. Most descriptions of the experience never go much beyond that initial impression.

However there is an important difference: when you look at a real scene, or for that matter at a hologram, and you move your head, the image will shift with nearer objects moving more than more distant objects. With a stereoscopic image you can move your head all you want, and the image will remain unchanged. The part of the brain that processes this kind of distance information finds this very unsettling.

When you look at a normal “flat” projected image, it also doesn’t change when you move your head, but that’s no problem. The low-level neurons that infer depth from parallax shifts know that it is a flat picture and shouldn’t change. The ability to infer depth in a flat image based on perspective cues is a higher-level brain function and is to some extent learned. (Dogs and cats have stereoscopic vision, but they generally ignore the TV screen because it’s just random patterns of light to them; they can’t see it as a three-dimensional image.)

I noticed that to avoid the disturbing behavior of the stereoscopic image I was unconsciously holding my head rigid. The strain of doing this was probably why I got a headache.

If this analysis is correct then Hollywood needs to forget about stereoscopic projection and concentrate on developing some sort of system for holographic projection. This of course will require numerous technological breakthroughs, so they had better get cracking.

UPDATE: Daniel Engber makes much the same point in greater detail. His explanation is a bit different from mine, but I think the bottom line is that there are multiple perceptual pathways that don’t work right with the current 3-D technology.

I went to see Monsters vs Aliens partly because I had a chance to see it in 3-D, and I wanted to see how good the latest version of the technology is. There have been waves of enthusiasm for 3-D (stereoscopic) movies going back to the early 1950s. In the past the enthusiasm has faded as it became clear that the technology of the time did not look very realistic and tended to induce mild headaches, and for the most part all that directors did with it was to use it to throw things in the audience’s faces.

The latest fad is to combine stereoscopic imaging with computer-generated animation, which eliminates the need to fiddle with temperamental stereoscopic cameras. Dreamworks in particular has committed to making all of their future animated films in 3-D.

Initially I was quite impressed by how it looks. The new technology has tremendous depth of field; it really is much like watching the action through a window. Gradually I became less impressed. The action looks somehow unnatural, so that I was constantly being reminded of the technique rather than being immersed in the story. After a while I started to get a mild headache. And the main artistic purpose still seems to be to throw things at our faces.

Oh well. As Jerry Pournelle likes to say, “I do the stupid things so you don’t have to.”
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This is probably the most acclaimed anime ever made. It won the 2002 Oscar for Best Animated Feature, the only foreign-language film ever to do so. It is one of the great classics of animation, and if you haven’t seen it you probably should.

This movie shows Hayao Miyazaki at the top of his form. It is a splendid example of the art of storytelling, with a main character who is both believable and captivating. The artwork is absolutely stunning. My screen captures don’t really do it justice; you just have to see it for yourself.
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Few things are sadder than a good idea badly executed. Knowing seems to have a good idea at its core. If it had a talented writer and a skilled director who knew how to make the impossible look plausible, it might have been a true classic. Instead, burdened with clunky dialog, indifferent acting and cheezy digital effects, it drifts into the territory of “unintentionally funny.”

Back in 1959 the administrators of an elementary school decided to bury a time capsule to be opened 50 years later. The kids were told to draw pictures of what they thought the future would be like, to be put in the capsule. Instead of drawing a picture, a spooky girl named Lucinda covered her paper with a long sequence of numbers.

Now in 2009 the capsule is dug up. The paper ends up in the hands of John Koestler (Nicolas Cage), an astrophysicist from M.I.T. whose lectures sound like they were prepared for an audience of fifth graders. He figures out that the numbers encode the dates and locations of all the major disasters that have occurred in the intervening 50 years, plus a few that haven’t occurred yet. So of course he has to prevent the remaining disasters from happening, assuming that is possible.

Few actors are better than Nicolas Cage at conveying internal torment and suffering, although in this case I can’t help wondering if he is tormented by the lines he has to deliver. The other actors are less expressive. In some cases the word “wooden” comes to mind. The flashy special effects are so obviously computer-generated that I was left with no feeling of emotional involvement, even while watching disasters. All in all, a disappointment.