FunBlog

Granted, I haven’t seen every movie that Woody Allen ever made, but it’s quite possible that Vicky Cristina Barcelona is the most depressing Woody Allen move ever. I find it a bit reminiscent of Annie Hall, though not as funny.

The story revolves around two friends who spend a summer in Barcelona. Cristina (Scarlett Johansson) is a free spirit who ends up having affairs with some emo artists. Vicky (Rebecca Hall) is a girl of more conventional tastes who marries her convential American boyfriend but secretly wishes she was having an affair with an emo artist. Neither ends up very happy.
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Tropic Thunder is a hilarious sendup of war moves, particularly Apocalypse Now (not to mention Hearts of Darkness.) It is also a sendup of Hollywood itself, a place where people are so busy putting on an act that they lose all connection with reality.

The story focuses on four actors: a washed-up action hero (Ben Stiller), a fat comedian who specializes in fart jokes (Jack Black), a rapper best known for promoting a beverage called “Booty Sweat” (Brandon T. Jackson) and an obsessive method actor (Robert Downey Jr.) who dyes his skin to play an African-American and insists on staying in character even off camera. They are the leads in a doomed movie based on the memoirs of a Vietnam War hero (Nick Nolte).

Filming is going nowhere due to the titanic egos and general incompetence of the actors, so the director decides to dump them somewhere deep in the jungle and film them with hidden cameras, hoping for some documentary-style realism. Things go horribly wrong and soon the actors are being hunted by drug smugglers, all the while assuming that this is just part of the movie.
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It stands to reason that a musical featuring ABBA songs won’t get much respect. After all, ABBA didn’t get much respect even back when they were popular. Still, they were popular for a good reason. Sure, they wore funny costumes and memorized the lyrics phonetically, but the songs were a lot of fun: bouncy, energetic and life-affirming.

So I went into Mamma Mia! hoping for some good mindless fun, and I got it. For the first few minutes, listening to the inane dialog, I was worried. Then Meryl Streep started belting out “Money, Money, Money” and everything fell into place. There’s some serious talent here, not to mention pretty scenery.

I’m not going to try to describe the plot. It’s some sort of silliness about a wedding on a Greek island, obviously strung together for the sole purpose of fitting in as many ABBA song and dance numbers as possible. It doesn’t mean anything. The only thing to do is sit back and enjoy it.

How many people remember when Batman was a lighthearted tongue-in-cheek TV show about a somewhat pompous “Caped Crusader” who battled absurd over-the-top villains? That era seems pretty distant now.

The Dark Knight is the latest and darkest in a series of movies in which Batman is a grim, somewhat alienated hero, struggling furiously against a dark world dominated by corruption, inhumanity and madness.

(I don’t mean to suggest that the lighthearted Batman was the “real” Batman who has been lost. The Batman story always had dark elements. Batman, after all, is the guardian of Gotham City, and “Gotham” was the name of the English town that was famous in the late Middle Ages for being inhabited solely by lunatics.)

In any case this movie manages to be grimmer than any of its predecessors, and is definitely not for kids.
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It’s no secret that movies based on old TV shows generally stink. In many cases that may be because the original source material wasn’t very good. In the case of this movie I don’t think that’s the case. For those too young to remember: Get Smart was a 1960s spy spoof created by Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, probably the two funniest comedy writers of the era.

The movie doesn’t try to follow the original too closely. This is a Get Smart with high production values and cool special effects, with a Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) who is intellegent, nerdy, neurotic and clumsy, an Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway) who is cool and snarky, a hot-tempered Chief (Alan Arkin), a Siegfried (Terence Stamp) who is a creepy psychopath who is not at all funny, and a Larabee (David Koechner) who is not stupid but a total jerk.
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Maybe being a superhero isn’t all it’s cracked up to be. You find a whale stranded on the beach. You pick it up and toss it back into the ocean. Then you get a bill for the yacht it landed on.

Nevertheless the hero of Hancock seems to handle it worse than most. At the beginning of the movie John Hancock (Will Smith) is a drunken bum living in a shabby trailer. He has a bad habit of flying low over the streets of Los Angeles while swigging from a whiskey bottle, colliding with birds, traffic signs and the occasional building. Indeed, the opening scenes provide graphic illustrations of why you shouldn’t use superpowers while under the influence of alcohol.
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WALL-E, a gentle children’s sci-fi movie from Disney and Pixar, starts out on a future Earth that has been abandoned by humans because it has been covered with garbage. The hero, a robot whose name stands for Waste Allocation Load Lifter Earth-Class, spends his days picking up the trash, crushing it into cubes with his built-in trash compactor, and stacking the cubes into gigantic pyramids.

He has been at this for 700 years. His fellow robots have all broken down. His only companion is a pet cockroach which he feeds with 700-year-old Twinkies (still good as new.)

One day a spaceship lands and disgorges a beautiful, shiny flying robot named EVE. WALL-E is instantly infatuated. EVE turns out to be sort of a robot tsundere, but he eventually wins her over. (Awww…Robot love!)
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OK, let’s agree up front that I’m not in the target demographic for this movie. I watched a few episodes of the TV series and found the story of four rich, witty and somewhat shallow young women trying to make it in New York City mildly amusing, but not amusing enough to watch regularly.

The movie is pretty much like the TV show, but with a bit more nudity. (Or if you’ve been watching on basic cable, a lot more nudity.) Probably most readers are already familiar with the TV show and thus already know whether they would like the movie.
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Dreamworks brings us a new animated film which is both funny and a worthy addition to the canon of great Kung Fu movies.

The story is set in ancient China, where Master Oogway (Randall Duk Kim), a large tortoise who invented Kung Fu, has a vision that tells him that Tai Lung (Ian McShane), an evil snow leopard, will soon escape from prison and lay waste to the valley. He decides to find a worthy student to whom to give the Dragon Scroll, which will grant invincibility.

Master Shifu (Dustin Hoffman) is sure that the honor will go to one of his five top students: Tigress, Monkey, Mantis, Viper or Crane (played respectively by Angelina Jolie, Jackie Chan, Seth Rogen, Lucy Liu, and David Cross.)
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Probably everyone knows what to expect from the latest Indiana Jones movie: thrills and chills leavened with cheerful good humor; lots of fun with no concern about passing the refrigerator test.

Actually this sort of thing is much harder to pull off than it looks–you have to keep the audience so enchanted while they are watching that they won’t ask questions. Get things a little bit wrong and it will become annoying or tedious. No one does this kind of thing better than Steven Spielberg.

This one is reminiscent of the first movie in the series: Raiders of the Lost Arc (1981), but it’s set in 1957, which I think is about 17 years later in movie time. Instead of Nazis for villains it has evil KGB agents. Once again there’s a quest for an implausible treasure. Its witty and thrilling and fun, but mostly forgettable.

The full title of this movie is The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian, but nobody is actually going to say that. It’s a sequel to 2005’s The Lion, the Witch and the Wardroble and the first thing I should warn you about is that if you haven’t seen that movie, or read the book by C.S. Lewis on which it was based, you shouldn’t bother with the sequel. Prince Caspian jumps right into the action, and without that previous exposure you won’t know what is going on, or who the main characters are, or why you should care what happens to them.

On the other hand, if you saw and liked The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (I’m just going to write TLTWTW henceforth) then it’s probably worth seeing the sequel. The spectacular final battle sequence is worth the price of admission by itself.
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The season of Summer blockbuster action flicks is upon us, and the first one will probably prove to be one of the best of the lot.

Iron Man is quite likely the original mecha story from which the entire genre descends. (The original comic book was created by Stan Lee in 1963–though Lee may have been influenced by Robert Heinlein’s novel Starship Troopers which was published in 1959.)

The film’s most notable feature is Robert Downey Jr.’s performance as Tony Stark. He is not your typical run-of-the-mill tormented, angst-ridden superhero. Stark starts out as a wise-cracking, irresponsible playboy (though a brilliant inventor), and that’s pretty much how he ends up too, though he does develop something of a social conscience after being held prisoner by Afghan terrorists. Downey manages to make a potentially unlikeable character seem sympathetic, as well as devilishly charming.

The other big star is the computer-generated gadgetry. Like all mecha shows this is largely about gadget porn, but it is gadget porn done right. The gadgets look cool and fun and at least vaguely plausible. I tend to have trouble with mecha shows because too often the technology is painfully, self-evidently absurd. This movie manages to pull it off. It’s a wild, fun ride, and no fair applying the refrigerator test.

You may need to be in the right mood to watch this one. It’s very funny, but much of it is painfully funny, the sort of humor that strikes home and makes you wince even while laughing. I guess that there is a certain amount of pain in all humor, and a really skillful humorist can invoke a lot a pain and make it really funny. That’s pretty much what happens here.

Peter Bretter (Jason Segel) is something of a schlub. He’s actually a decent guy, but he’s not terribly good looking or immensely talented. He makes a decent living as a musician but he’s never going to be a star. He has a bad habit of sitting around eating vast quantities of Froot Loops.

Peter is in a long-term relationship with Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), the beautiful blond star of a popular TV series. She’s everything that he is not: effervescent, popular, the center of attention. There is a certain feeling of inevitability when she dumps him.
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Did you ever have a college professor who was a complete, total insufferable jerk? I suppose in my time I may have had a run-in or two with a professor, but I don’t think I ever had one as bad as Lawrence Wetherhold (Dennis Quaid) in this edgy comedy.

Lawrence is an English Lit. professor who likes to humiliate his students, or anyone else whom he takes to be less intelligent, including his slacker brother Chuck (Thomas Haden Church.) Actually Chuck is his “adopted brother”, as Lawrence points out at every opportunity. The plot takes off after Lawrence, as a result of his own arrogance, suffers an injury that leaves him temporarily unable to drive, and Chuck moves in as his live-in chauffeur.

The best thing in the movie is Ellen Page as Lawrence’s daughter Vanessa. She manages to be both cute and scary as a smart and talented apprentice jerk. (Despite her snarky remarks she wants to be like her father, which I suppose in a twisted way suggests that he isn’t totally unredeemable.)

A movie with such an unlikable main character might be pretty unpleasant, but this has some pretty funny material that kept me entertained. (I particularly liked the dysfunctional Christmas dinner.) Some people may have a hard time swallowing the hero’s ultimate redemption, but by that time I was in a good enough mood that I was willing to make the effort to go along with it.

What would you get if you gave Makoto Shinkai, who created Voices of a Distant Star on his personal computer, enough money to hire a professional staff and make a theatrical feature? Apparently the answer is this movie, a gentle, wistful tale of young love and loneliness. Maybe this is the story that he was really trying to tell with VODS, now stripped of its science fiction elements and reduced to its bare essentials.
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Guinevere Pettigrew (Frances McDormand) is a failure as a governess. She has been fired from her last 3 jobs for gross malfeasance and no one else seems likely to hire her. In desperation she resorts to a bit of subterfuge to wrangle a job as a social secretary to Delysia Lafosse (Amy Adams), an American actress. Delysia clearly needs a social secretary (or at least some sort of professional help) in order to juggle the 3 men in her life.

Miss Pettigrew Lives for a Day is set in 1939, and it is actually the sort of screwball comedy that was popular at that time–right down to some overly broad acting. Nevertheless it is pretty funny, and anyone who has a certain fondness for that sort of movie is bound to like it.

Amy Adams is delightful as a scatterbrained actress prepared, if necessary, to sleep her way to the top. McDormand and Ciarán Hinds (as a jaded lingerie designer) provide a slightly more serious tone. It’s all totally implausible, but satisfying.

The Other Boleyn Girl is a 16th century soap opera. At the beginning of the story Sir Thomas Boleyn learns that King Henry VIII’s marriage is on the rocks. Naturally he orders his daughter Anne (Natalie Portman) to try to become the King’s mistress. She agrees readily enough, but unfortunately the King’s eye falls instead on Anne’s gentle, pure-hearted younger sister Mary (Scarlett Johansson.)

I presume most readers will know the rough outlines of what is going to happen: Henry VIII marries Anne Boleyn and the marriage ends badly, but not before producing the future Queen Elizabeth I.
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Definitely, Maybe is a romantic comedy with a twist. Or maybe it’s a twisted romantic comedy. Will Hayes (Ryan Reynolds), is a political consultant who is about to get divorced. He tries to explain the situation to his eight-year-old daughter Maya (Abigail Breslin). For complicated reasons she demands to know his entire romantic history.

Amazingly he agrees, but he changes the names so Maya won’t know which girl in the story is her mother. So we see the story unfold as a series of flashbacks, and it turns out to be pretty entertaining. It’s a story about smart but flawed people, which is naturally more interesting than the usual comedy about stupid people.
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At about the same time that the Air television series was released, an alternate version of the story, made by another studio, appeared in movie theaters. After renting the TV series I decided to rent the movie version as well to see how they compared.

After watching both, I definitely prefer the television series.
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Persepolis is the first animated movie that I’ve ever seen that is a non-fiction film on a serious subject. It’s based on Marjane Satrapi’s autobiographical graphic novel about growing up in Iran. As far as I can tell it’s all more or less true–at least as true as any autobiography.

The movie is a French production, in French with English subtitles. (It would be hard to imagine an American studio investing in a 2-D animated film on a serious subject, or indeed on any subject.) It is quite well done. It is sharp and insightful and dark and witty and ultimately rather depressing.

I should add that parts of it are quite funny. You can get quite a few laughs when smartalecky kids confront the sanctimonious representatives of a repressive dictatorship. But a lot of the kids end up dead.
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Isn’t it massive consumer fraud to charge $10.50 for a barely hour-long movie? Perhaps, but it would’ve been unforgivable to make Meet the Spartans any longer than an hour. This was the worst movie I’ve ever seen, so bad that I hesitate to label it a “movie” and thus reflect shame upon the entire medium of film. Friedberg and Seltzer do not practice the same craft as P.T. Anderson, David Cronenberg, Michael Bay, Kevin Costner, the Zucker Brothers, the Wayans Brothers, Uwe Boll, any dad who takes shaky home movies on a camping trip, or a bear who turns on a video camera by accident while trying to eat it. They are not filmmakers. They are evildoers, charlatans, symbols of Western civilization’s decline under the weight of too many pop culture references.

–Josh Levin in Slate

There Will Be Blood was not quite the movie I was expecting. Hollywood loves to tell stories about evil oilmen, not only because everyone hates oil companies these days, but also because petroleum itself makes such a great visual metaphor for evil, all black and slimy and oozy.

However this is not so much the story of an evil oilman as a mentally ill oilman. Daniel Plainview (Daniel Day-Lewis) is a superficially charming and plausible fellow, but this is a thin veneer that barely conceals a deep, violent and uncontrollable rage. Indeed the more intelligent characters seem to realize this after talking to him for a few minutes, but for various reasons, mostly their own greed, they are typically unable to distance themselves from him.
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I probably wouldn’t have seen 27 Dresses except for the fact that my daughter is a big fan of Katherine Heigl. Now that I have seen it I can say without hesitation that it is harmless.

What else can I say? Let’s see…

1. Does the writing show the same cleverness and insight that one would expect of a show on the Disney Channel? Yes.
2. Does the acting rise to the same high standards? Yes.
3. Is it predictable? Yes.
4. Since this is a comedy, does anything happen that is particularly funny? Not really.

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Since I gave a favorable review to The Golden Compass, a movie based on a book by Philip Pullman, perhaps it’s only fair to link to an article in The Register which points out that Pullman seems to have some nasty, misanthropic views.

The Register’s snarky commentary aside, if we go to the original interview Pullman comes off as a typical self-righteous ass, pontificating on things about which he knows little and tossing off proposals without thinking through the implications.
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The Savages is a well-written, insightful and often funny movie with a talented cast, but I find it strangely unsatisfying. The subject matter sounds disturbing, but it really isn’t upsetting to watch; it’s more of a comedy than anything else. Maybe that’s the problem.

Lenny Savage (Peter Friedman) is an old man who is left with no place to live by the death of his long-time girlfriend. Since he is suffering from dementia the responsibility for seeing that he is taken care of falls on his two grown children, who have been out of touch with him for decades. They are somewhat flakey characters but they want to do the right thing and try their best.

Wendy Savage (Laura Linney) is an unproduced playwright who spends her days as a temp worker while carrying on a pitiful affair with an older married man. Her capacity for self-deception is remarkable.

Her brother Jon (Philip Seymour Hoffman) is a drama professor at a New England college, specializing in the works of Bertolt Brecht. He is hard-headed, rational and unsentimental, or at least that’s how he thinks of himself.
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I had some idea what to expect going into this movie. As expected, the sets were dark and gloomy, the blood spurted high and the orchestra roared dramatically like surf pounding on the rocks. What I didn’t expect was how unmoved I would be by the whole thing. This has to be a major artistic failure.

It shouldn’t be this way. On paper this is a story of tragedy and horror, and I think I am capable of appreciating either or both. But it doesn’t feel tragic because there is nothing in the way the characters are portrayed that makes me care about them in the least. As for horror, I admit that there are a few moments that are sort of gross, but mostly it just seems silly.
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My initial reaction to Juno was a mixture of amusement and annoyance. As the movie went on I started to get drawn in and I ended up enjoying it a great deal.

Juno MacGuff (Ellen Page) is a 16-year-old goth girl whose major talent is making smart-ass remarks. (She must spend hours thinking of funny/insolent things to say and saves them up for the right moment.) She is also, due to a moment of total irresponsibility, pregnant. This comedy is about how she choses to deal with the situation.

And that’s about all that I can say without spoiling things, except that the movie turns out to be insightful and touching. Ellen Page is really, really good here, initially showing us a character who doesn’t seem particularly likable and gradually revealing her to be vulnerable, decent and brave.

To begin with, I haven’t read the book by Philip Pullman that The Golden Compass is based on. I also don’t know the details of Pullman’s feud with the Catholic Church.

Apparently all the elements of the book that might offend Catholics have been removed from the movie–infuriating fans of the book. Nevertheless the Catholic League has called for a boycott of the movie on the grounds that it might encourage children to read the book. The Vatican has condemned the movie as “cold and hopeless” because it does not hold out the possibility of salvation through Jesus Christ. (It seems to me that very few movies could pass this test.)

All I can do is evaluate the movie in isolation: how does it stand up as a piece of entertainment?
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This movie is primarily a parody of 3 classic Disney features: Sleeping Beauty, Snow White and Cinderella. The producers didn’t need to worry about the iron fangs and razor claws of Disney’s Intellectual Property lawyers because Disney is the distributor.

In the magical kingdom of Andelasia a beautiful maiden named Giselle (Amy Adams) falls in love with a brave, handsome and somewhat dim-witted prince (James Marsden). Before they can get married the evil queen (Susan Sarandon) banishes her to “a place where there is no ‘Happily Ever After’” (New York City); a place so awful that the only person willing to help Giselle is a cynical divorce lawyer (Patrick Dempsey).
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This movie is a gentle, lightweight romantic comedy. It doesn’t have much in the way of dramatic tension, but it is still fun to watch.

Dan Burns (Steve Carell) is a widower with three lovely daughters. He is a responsible man and a good father, perhaps just a little overprotective. He meets a beautiful woman (Juliette Binoche) in a bookstore and falls for her hard.

When he learns that she is actually his brother’s girlfriend he becomes a little bit unglued and starts acting like a jerk. Sort of. Actually he doesn’t do anything really horrible, but he has the misfortune to be a member of The World’s Most Obnoxiously Perfect Extended Family, which makes even small deviations look pretty awful by comparison.

As I said, there’s not much dramatic tension here. It’s pretty obvious from the start how things will work out. Nevertheless it manages to be very funny and heartwarming and entertaining.

Rated PG-13 for no particular reason. I can’t imagine that any child would be harmed by it.

Has anyone noticed that Bill Murray is starting to look just like Karl Malden? I don’t know about you, but I find that rather disturbing. Fortunately he has only a small walk-on role in this movie, but I thought I’d mention it anyway.

The Darjeeling Limited is actually a comedy about three brothers who are idiots eccentric. The oldest brother (Owen Wilson) has just suffered a near-death experience, so he decides to round up his younger brothers (Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman) and take them on a spiritual journey centered around a train trip through India. His ultimate goal, which he doesn’t mention, is to arrange a reunion with their estranged mother (Anjelica Huston) who is also eccentric.

Naturally things don’t work out according to plan.

It’s an amusing comedy, at times semi-heartwarming. If you like the sort of movies Owen Wilson has done in the past, you will probably like this one too. It was written by Wes Anderson (The Royal Tenenbaums, Rushmore, Bottle Rocket.)

In 1990 Christopher McCandless graduated with top grades from Emory University. A few days later he gave his life savings of $24,000 to charity and vanished for parts unknown. By April 1992 he had made his way to central Alaska, where he hiked into the wilderness to live by himself. 113 days later he was dead. This outcome is hardly surprising. Alaska is a tough place and has killed many men who were better equipped and prepared than he was.

This movie (by Sean Penn, based on the book by Jon Krakauer) is obviously not going to be to everyone’s taste, but I’m still glad that I saw it. It’s a fascinating, disturbing and puzzling story. McCandless (Emile Hirsch) was obviously pretty smart, yet he did something extremely foolish and died as a result–a graphic illustration of the difference between intelligence and wisdom.
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Since I really enjoyed the Shakugan no Shana television series I was eager to see the movie. Unfortunately it was a bit of a letdown.

The movie turns out to be a retelling of the first story arc of the TV series (the Friagne arc.) I’m OK with that in principle. That arc is a powerful story; some people consider it the best part of the series. I’m willing to judge the movie on its own terms without comparing it to the series–if they’ll let me.
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In recent years there have been several movies that tried to relate Jane Austen to the modern world. Sometimes Austen stories have been retold in a modern setting. Examples include Emma, Pride and Prejudice and Persuasion. Of course there are alternate approaches such as “Mansfield Park as Jane Austen would have written it if she had had the advantage of my enlightened modern perspective”.

The Jane Austen Book Club, takes a different approach. It doesn’t attempt to retell a Jane Austen story (thus depriving me of the opportunity to make invidious comparisons between the movie and the original.) Instead it tries to show the effects of Jane Austen on the modern world, or at least on six people who decide to read all of her novels in the space of six months.

The result is reasonable light entertainment, often funny and sometimes charming. The movie’s greatest weakness it that it depends a lot on the audience being familiar with Austen’s work. If you are a Jane Austen fan you will probably like the movie. If you are not, it may not make much sense to you.

(This is in contrast to the movies I mentioned in the first paragraph, all of which can be enjoyed by people who have never heard of Jane Austen, and for one of which that might be an advantage.)

In the Shadow of the Moon is a documentary, currently in limited release, about the Apollo space program. The narration is provided by eight of the surviving Apollo astronauts, the men who actually went to the Moon. The film is not flashy or pretentious; it lets the astronauts and the spectacular archival footage speak for themselves.

If you’re interested in this stuff then you want to see this movie, preferably in a theater. (If you’re not interested in this stuff then you’ve probably stopped reading already.)

Many of the images are familiar of course, but there is some spectacular footage that I had never seen before. Particularly impressive is a sequence in which a lunar lander training simulator spins out of control, hits the ground and explodes in a fireball, just as Neil Armstrong’s parachute opens in the sky above. (If he had been a fraction of a second slower, someone else would have had to be the first to walk on the Moon.)

This is an inspiring story about men who took great risks and pushed their technology to the limit to achieve a dream that was widely assumed to be impossible. It’s well worth seeing.

(The movie poster implies that it comes from Ron Howard, the director of the fictionalized blockbuster Apollo 13. However I don’t see his name on the actual credits, so I suspect this is just marketing hype.)

How many miles to Babylon?
Three score and ten
Can I get there by candlelight?
Aye, and back again
If your feet are nimble and light,
You’ll get there by candlelight.
–Traditional Children’s Rhyme

For what it is, this movie is just about perfect. What it is is a fairy tale, brimming with energy and imagination, featuring thrills, chills, the requisite happy ending, and above all a sense of wonder.

The story begins in Nineteenth Century England, in the ancient village of Wall, so named because of a long stone wall which separates our world from the magical kingdom of Stormhold. Tristan (Charlie Cox) a good-hearted but inept young man sees a falling star. Seeking to impress a pretty girl, he promises to cross the wall and bring it back to her. But the laws of nature are different in Stormhold, and he is astonished to discover that the star is actually a beautiful young woman (Claire Danes.)

This is only the beginning of his adventures, for many people are seeking the star for their own nefarious purposes, including a wicked witch (Michelle Pfeiffer) and two ruthless princes. Robert De Niro makes a startling appearance as a ruthless but sensitive pirate captain.

This is a wonderful and satisfying movie, but the fact that I called it a “fairy tale” does not mean that it is OK to take your five-year-old to see it. It is too violent and scary for small children. Ten years might be a reasonable minimum age. (It is rated PG-13 for “fantasy violence” and some mild sexual humor.)

This is a mildly amusing romantic comedy. Actually it’s light on the romance and even lighter on the comedy (meaning that there are no big laughs.) However it is definitely heartwarming and fun to watch.

Catherine Zeta Jones plays a workaholic chef with no interests outside of work. Her life is disrupted when her sister is killed in an automobile accident, leaving her in charge of her nine-year-old niece (the adorable Abigail Breslin.) At the same time she is forced to work with a happy-go-lucky sous chef (Aaron Eckhart) who irritates the Hell out of her. Will this group somehow form a family? I’ll give you one guess.

This is a remake of the 2002 German film Mostly Martha (Bella Martha). Since I never saw the original I am in no position to make invidious comparisons.

I can’t believe we’re paying to see something we could watch for free on TV. Everyone in this theater is a sucker! Especially YOU!
–Homer Simpson

Regrettably it has been an awfully long time since an American movie studio released a 2-D animated feature. The last one I can remember was Waking Life in 2001, and that was a very obscure art-house picture. So The Simpsons Movie is notable on that basis alone.

If you are familiar with the TV show (and who isn’t?) then you pretty much know what to expect: sharp, funny writing, good voice acting and grotesque character designs. The animation quality is somewhat better than on TV, but not so much that you will really notice the difference.

The plot is fairly standard: Homer adopts a pig and as a result ends up triggering an environmental catastrophe. He has to flee town before an angry mob, but in the end he manages to more-or-less redeem himself.

The main reason that I am giving it a high rating is that it is the funniest thing I have seen so far this year by a substantial margin.

I’m probably not representative of the target audience for this movie. I only read the first book in the Harry Potter series, though I have seen and enjoyed all of the earlier movies. I suspect that most of the audience went into the movie having already read (and perhaps memorized) the book it is based on.

Thus I have no way of knowing whether flaws in the move are due to flaws in the book, or are the fault of the director. Part of the problem may be due to the fact that it is a very thick book. The movie feels like too much material has been crammed into too little time. Plot points are checked off rather than developed and key events rush by almost unnoticed.
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Given that Pixar’s latest movie was written and directed by Brad Bird (The Incredibles) and tells the tale of a rat who doesn’t want to eat garbage and dreams of becoming a Parisian chef, I went in expecting it to be hilarious. Actually it’s more cute than laugh-out-loud funny. Not kawaii-cute, but cute in a grotesque way.

If you are very squeamish about watching streaming hordes of rats you may have a real problem with this film. On the other hand, if you think that a rat can be sort of appealing in a sort of ugly way then you will probably like it.

I don’t think the movie is really trying to be hilarious. It seems more interested in being heartwarming. Unfortunately “heartwarming” and “rat” don’t go too well together, at least when the rats are rendered in 3-D with Pixar’s usual skill. Whatever the movie is aiming at, I don’t think it quite achieves it.

Nevertheless, even though this isn’t a great movie it is fun to watch. Kids will enjoy it and adults (at least those who are not rat-phobic) will not feel that they have wasted their time.