FunBlog

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.

I had fairly low expectations for Confessions of a Shopaholic and they were mostly fulfilled. There are some funny moments, but on the whole the script is hokey, predictable, uninspired and full of obvious plot holes.

The best thing about it is Isla Fisher who is cute and engaging enough to make us like a character who through most of the movie is thoughtless, irresponsible and dishonest. She has some talent for physical comedy and might be really good in a real screwball comedy, but this movie is not nearly clever and witty enough to succeed at that level.
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I’m not much of a comic book reader. Occasionally I am intrigued enough by an anime to check out the original manga, but that’s about it. As a result, I never read the seminal graphic novel by Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons on which Watchmen is based. It seems that some people who are familiar with the graphic novel are unhappy with the movie. I can only judge how it stands by itself, as a movie, for someone unfamiliar with the source material.

For me it’s thrilling. It will not be to everyone’s taste. It is very violent, and dark (and darkly funny.) It is full of splendid imagery, great lines, and wonderfully drawn, over-the-top, larger-than-life characters.

The story is set in 1985; an alternate 1985 in which Richard Nixon is beginning his fifth term in office. His popularity is much greater in this timeline, apparently due to his decision to use superheroes to bring the Vietnam War to a quick and bloody end. However the public has become disenchanted with these masked vigilantes, and superheroics have been outlawed.
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I thought everyone followed Jonathan, but apparently the way he mixes up anime with the hollywoodism repulses people. It’s understandable…

–Author, アニ・ノート, Those Pesky Pronouns

Well, of course I write to please myself, and I take it for granted that my tastes may not be the same as yours. Still, it’s a bit unnerving to hear that this site “repulses” people.

So if you feel that the combination of anime and movies is too much like steak slathered in strawberry sherbet, let me remind you that you can bookmark or subscribe to a subset, e.g.

Category: Anime
Category: Movies
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In 1999 Studio Ghibli was approached by the owners of a theme park who wanted a 20 minute animated short subject featuring cats. Hayao Miyazaki thought it should feature the cat characters from the movie Whisper of the Heart, so he went to Aoi Hiiragi, the author of the original manga, and asked her to write the story. She did, and it was eventually published as a manga called BARON: Neko no Danshaku (Baron: The Cat Baron).

However the deal with the amusement park fell through, so plans to make the anime were put on hold. Miyazaki, who was trying to nurture a new generation of anime directors, started to assign aspiring directors the task of drawing storyboards for the defunct “Cat Project”. A young artist named Hiroyuki Morita produced a massive set of storyboards that was so impressive that he was given the go-ahead to create a full-length movie.

The resulting movie is bound to interest any fan of Whisper of the Heart, even though it is not a sequel to that movie and the style is quite different. WOTH was a fairly realistic coming-of-age story, while this is a classic fairy tale. Aoi Hiiragi thinks of this as a story written by Shizuku, the heroine of the earlier movie, and that’s probably the best way to view it.
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Waltz with Bashir (Vals Im Bashir) is an interesting experiment: an animated documentary. It has received numerous awards and been nominated for the Foreign Language Oscar. While it is a fascinating effort, I found it ultimately unsatisfactory.

Writer/director Ari Folman hears an old friend tell of a recurring nightmare in which he is pursued by 26 vicious dogs. They decide that it must have something to do with his experiences during the 1982 Israeli invasion of Lebanon, which they both experienced as infantrymen in the Israeli army.

Folman realizes that he himself remembers almost nothing about the war, so he sets out to interview the other men who served with him to try to recreate what happened. As he interviews them their memories are shown in flashback sequences. The use of animation avoids one common issue with documentaries: there is no confusion about whether we are seeing actual footage of the events or staged re-enactments.
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Frost/Nixon is a semi-fictional account of an event of little historical importance: the 1977 televised interviews of Richard Nixon conducted by David Frost, a British talk-show host. As far as I know, the interviews didn’t reveal any facts that were not already known. Nixon did make a sort of half-hearted apology for his part in the Watergate scandal, but I doubt anyone today really cares whether he apologized or not.

The movie succeeds however as a compelling psychological drama, a sort of duel between two driven, flawed men.

Frank Langella dominates the film with his portrayal of Richard Nixon as a smart, wily and ruthless man whose confident demeanor barely conceals a boiling cauldron of resentment and feelings of inferiority. This is an introverted, socially awkward man who has struggled all his life to fit in and be liked, but whose efforts at cordiality and humor still tend to make people wince. The fact that a man with such handicaps could ever have become President is evidence of his talent and determination. Now disgraced and exiled to his villa in San Clemente, he is still surrounded by a small group of loyal followers who assure him that he was unfairly treated.

David Frost (Michael Sheen) is a young, handsome, glib and charming man with an eye for the ladies. A successful talk show host in England and Australia, he has made a career of pitching softball questions to celebrities. Yet he also feels himself to be in exile. His American talk show was canceled and he longs to return to American show business, which he regards as the big time.

So Frost pays Nixon $600,000 (a huge sum for that time) to appear in series of television interviews. Because no network will touch the project, Frost ends up putting up most of the money himself, taking the responsibility to line up sponsors and sell it to television stations.

Aside from the money, Nixon is looking for a chance to present his side of the story and rebuild his reputation. He assumes that with a lightweight interviewer like Frost he will be able to dominate the interviews and make his case both to the American people and future historians.

But Frost knows that no one will want to watch a Nixon puff-piece. If he is to salvage his career and avoid financial ruin he will have to remake himself into a tough, prosecutorial interviewer who can hold Nixon’s feet to the fire, and symbolically hold him accountable for what he has done. Yet Nixon is an old hand at this sort of thing and Frost finds himself severely outmatched. As the interviews proceed, his upbeat facade becomes increasingly shaky.

Studio Ghibli is the most prestigious of all anime studios. A small studio founded by acclaimed director Hayao Miyazaki, it primarily does theatrical movies with clever, original screenplays and top-quality animation. Disney has an exclusive deal to import these movies and usually gives them a limited theatrical run.

I can’t say for sure that every Studio Ghibli movie is worth watching, since I haven’t seen all of them, but I’ve been pleased with all the ones that I have watched (and someday I’ll get around to reviewing all of them.)

Whisper of the Heart is one of the less known Studio Ghibli films. It’s a small, simple story, but just about perfectly executed. It could hardly be simpler: a teenaged girl finds her ideal boyfriend, then learns that he is about to move out of the country, and she has to decide how she is going to deal with that. And that’s it; no battles, no explosions, no monsters, not even any magic.

Or maybe there is some magic. (That cat sure looks like he knows more than he’s saying.) Let’s just say that everything has a possible rational explanation. Perhaps the real point is that the heroine has the ability to see the magic underlying ordinary life.

I can’t help comparing this to Revolutionary Road, the last movie I reviewed, not because they are similar but because they are opposites. Revolutionary Road explores the dangers of not having a dream (while thinking that you do.) Whisper of the Heart is about what it really means to have a dream.
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I’m giving this movie a cautious recommendation because it is well-written, well-acted and thought-provoking. The reason for caution is that it requires spending 119 minutes with some very unlikeable characters.

Revolutionary Road is the story of an unhappy couple living in a Connecticut suburb in the 1950s. At first it looks like a standard Hollywood condemnation of suburban life, but it quickly becomes clear that in this case the suburbs did not make these people unhappy; they brought their unhappiness with them.

I remember reading about a sixth-grade class whose members all said they wanted to be “celebrities” when they grew up, but none of them were able to explain what they planned to do to become famous. Frank Wheeler (Leonardo DiCaprio) is the grown-up version of one of these kids. He has always talked a good line about wanting to live an unconventional, exciting life, but at age 30 he finds himself living in a boring suburb and working at an office job that he hates. He has no idea what else he might want to do with his life, but he has a vague disgruntled feeling that he is better than his vapid neighbors and annoying coworkers.

His wife April (Kate Winslet) had a more specific dream: she wanted to be an actress. However she has been forced to confront the fact that she has no talent and no future in acting. She and Frank deal with their disillusionment by tearing each other apart and making each other miserable.

(Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio, eh? Is this how they would have ended up if the Titanic hadn’t sunk?)
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For an arthouse film that isn’t in many mainstream theaters, Slumdog Millionaire has been getting a lot of buzz and picking up a lot of awards. It’s pretty well done, but if you go in expecting an upbeat feel-good picture you may be in for a bit of a shock, since most of it is surprisingly dark and gritty.

Jamal Malik (Dev Patel) is a contestant on the Indian version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire. He is one question away from winning the big 20M rupee prize when he is arrested on suspicion of cheating. The police try to beat a confession out of him, replaying each question in turn and challenging him to explain how he could possibly have known the answer. For each question there is a flashback to his experiences growing up in the slums of Mumbai. At some point in each story is a incident that caused him to know the answer.

It becomes clear that his real motivation for going on the show is not the money. He want to be reunited with his childhood sweetheart Latika (Freida Pinto).

There is a fair amount of humor in the flashbacks, but mostly they are very grim, depicting a world of extreme poverty, violence and cruelty. Some Indians have protested this depiction of their country. (It doesn’t help that this is a British production, though filmed in India with Indian actors.) Still it’s probably fair to say that most of the things depicted in the movie really do happen.

Writing in Slate Emily Bazelon describes how her children were frightened by the 3-D animated movie The Tale of Despereaux and wonders how to determine if a movie is to intense for a small child. Clearly a “G” rating is no guarantee.

This strikes a chord with me. Regular readers know that I always include a “Parental Guidance” section in my anime reviews, and I sometimes include similar notes in my short movie reviews. I do this because of some experiences that convinced me that this is important.

I remember taking my daughter to see Disney’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs when she was 5 years old. She watched the movie in rigid silence and afterward said that she liked it, in a tone that didn’t sound very convinced. Years later she admitted that the movie terrified her. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been surprised. Snow White, after all, is basically a story about infanticide. You can sort of see why a small child might have a problem with that.
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This movie shines from a technical standpoint, with competent acting and advanced makeup and special effects, yet as a story it leaves me cold.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, very loosely adapted from a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, tells the story of a man who is born old and ages backwards, growing younger as time passes. Part of the problem with this is that we know from the start pretty much how this has to turn out, and indeed it is all very predictable. Worse, while there are many colorful characters, none of them really came alive for me. They are all stock characters that we have seen many times before.

The whole thing seems like a tall tale, and it might have worked well at that level, but a good tall tale is generally short and witty. Fitzgerald was wise to make it a short story. The movie, at 2 hours and 40 minutes, wants to be an epic, and it drags as we wait impatiently for the next predictable stage in the hero’s life.

Usually Will Smith makes upbeat movies, either comedies or uplifting dramas like The Pursuit of Happyness. Seven Pounds is different; it’s rather dark and sad and not everyone is going to like it. It’s also the sort of movie that tries to hide the real story until near the end, revealing it bit by bit.

Will Smith portrays an IRS agent who clearly isn’t following the rules. He seems to want to play God, using his position to reward the virtuous and punish the wicked. Also there seems to be something that’s troubling him, but we don’t know what it is.

And that’s about all I can say about the premise without giving too much away. This is a powerful, tragic story. It’s well done, and worth watching if you are up for that sort of thing.

I going to try to be fair with this one, since I’m clearly not the targeted demographic. This movie delivers what it intends to deliver, which is a 90 proof dose of teenage girls’ sexual fantasies.

Twilight involves a girl named Bella (Kristen Stewart) who goes to live with her father in a small town in a remote part of Washington state. At her new high school she is fascinated by Edward Cullen (Robert Pattinson), a pale young man with large sensuous lips who stares at her with a look of burning hunger. (Or maybe it’s just a bad case of indigestion. It’s a bit hard to tell at first.)

Actually all the members of Edward’s family look like that: pale and sort of gothic, and with good reason, since they are all vampires. However they are good, “vegetarian” vampires who eat only animal blood.

To my mind, this sort of thing robs the vampire myth of much of its power. If you are immortal and beautiful and rich, but you aren’t actually undead and you don’t have to kill humans, that doesn’t seem like much of a curse, no matter how much Edward wails about it. These vampires are just having too much fun.

There are also some bad vampires who do want to kill humans, and some Native Americans who obviously don’t approve of vampires (though it is strongly hinted that that is because said Native Americans are actually werewolves.) There’s plenty of action and brooding passion and romance, and it all builds up to a suitably thrilling climax.

Then after the climax they spend at least 10 minutes setting things up for a sequel. Fair warning: my daughter is skeptical about whether the sequel will be worth watching. She says that the second book in the series this is based on is mostly an extended setup for the third book. But we’ll leave that problem for another day.

OK, you know the drill. The far-flung members of a family return to their parents’ house for Christmas (or for Thanksgiving, or whatever) but things aren’t what they used to be. Kids grow up; people change. A series of crises flare up. Hopefully everything will work out satisfactorily before the closing credits. (Cue the group hug.)

Nothing Like the Holidays is a better-than-average example of the genre. Alfred Molina and Elizabeth Peña play the parents of a Puerto Rican family in Chicago. They have three sons: one is sort of a goofball; one has become a Yuppie New York lawyer, married to career-driven Jewish woman who isn’t enthusiastic about having children; and the third is a veteran just back from Iraq. There’s also a daughter who is a Hollywood actress, but is wondering whether it’s worth continuing to pursue a marginally successful career.

It follows the standard formula, and perhaps inevitably the ending feels just a little too pat. However the acting is good and there are some very funny moments. You could do a lot worse for a holiday movie this season.

Note, however that this is PG-13. Do the preschoolers a favor and take them to something else.

Australian director Baz Luhrmann seems to be trying to recreate the sprawling, glamorous blockbuster movies of the 1940s and 1950s. I think he does a pretty good job of capturing both the good and bad points. This is a long movie that starts out much like a John Ford western, then turns into something more like a wartime romance.

Australia involves an English aristocrat (Nicole Kidman) who comes to Australia just before the outbreak of World War II to round up her husband, who has been playing at being a cattle rancher. She intends to sell the place and drag him home. But it turns out that her husband has been murdered, the overseer is a crook, and the only potential buyer for the place is your standard-issue Evil Cattle Baron.

After thinking it over she decides to save the ranch by driving a herd of cattle across the badlands to Darwin to sell to the army. She will have to rely on the assistance of an Aboriginal boy and an uncouth and cynical, but ruggedly handsome cowboy (Hugh Jackman).

As I said, this has many of the same weaknesses of the films that inspired it. It’s long, hokey, sentimental and implausible. Also the attempts at political correctness may make it embarrassing for people a few decades from now to watch. (The difference between “respectful” and “patronizing” can be subtle and is not always immediately apparent.)

Nevertheless it’s beautiful to look at, and if you are able to just get into the spirit of things and sit back and enjoy it, it’s a ripping good story.

I’m not sure that Bolt qualifies as a “classic” but it may well prove to be the best family film of this holiday season.

Bolt (John Travolta) is a dog who stars in a TV show about a dog with super powers. Being ignorant about how special effects work, he thinks that he actually does have super powers. Due to a series of unfortunate events he gets loose and ends up being shipped in a box across the country to New York City. If he is to be reunited with his beloved Penny (Miley Cyrus) he must make his way back across the continent, aided by a street-wise alley cat (Susie Essman) and a deluded hamster (Mark Walton).

This is lightweight material with a predictable ending, but it’s funny and charming. The animation is also pretty good–and I say that as one who is not a great fan of 3-D computer-generated animation.
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I guess that after writing movies like Adaptation and Being John Malkovitch Charlie Kaufman decided that he wanted to do something really weird and surreal. The sort of movie where a character might decide to buy a house that happens to be on fire, then live in it for many years. Still on fire. (OK, I get it. It’s a metaphor for…something or other.)

Synecdoche, New York is extremely weird, sometimes hilarious and often confusing and disturbing. It tells the story of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) a hypochondriac theater director in Schenectady, NY. He receives a MacArthur Foundation “genius grant” and decides to use the money to produce a play that will reveal some sort of universal truth about life, based of course on his own life. He rents a huge warehouse in New York City, hires a bunch of actors and begins the construction of a giant set that gradually seems to become a duplicate of the city outside. As the actors strive to portray Caden and the people he knows, the characters become more real than the real people they are based on and seem to take over their lives.

This doesn’t really do justice to it. The movie is actually much stranger and more surreal than my description suggests. This is definitely not going to be to everyone’s taste.

Still there may be a logical explanation for everything that happens, something that is hinted at but never confirmed.
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In any case there are many other possible interpretations and you are free to pick the one you like.

The standard formula for a movie comedy these days seems to involve thirty-something men who haven’t yet grown up. There is nothing particularly original about Role Models but it manages to be one of the funnier examples of the genre, with a satisfying balance of off-color humor and sentimentality.

At least in this case the heroes have jobs and don’t live with their parents. Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott) work for a soft drink company, traveling from school to school lecturing the kids about drugs. “Remember, if somebody offers you drugs, just say ‘No thanks, I’m having a Minotaur!’”. (Minotaur is a powerful energy drink. It’s made from caffeine and ginseng, and it can turn your urine bright green.)

Wheeler is perfectly content with this life, but Danny is fed up. He’s disillusioned, depressed and angry, and he’s drunk enough Minotaur to anesthetize a bull. He ends up assaulting a cop and driving the Minotaurmobile into a statue.
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Happy-Go-Lucky is a mostly-cheerful, mostly-upbeat slice-of-life film featuring a character who is so perky that she at first seems rather annoying. After a while it becomes clear that she is deeper than that; the forced perkiness is one way she reacts when she is ill-at-ease.

‘Poppy’ (Sally Hawkins), a London elementary school teacher, has her bike stolen, but instead of getting upset about it she cheerfully decides to learn to drive. This leads to a series of slightly out-of-control lessons with a tightly-wound angry driving instructor (Eddie Marsan). In between we have interactions with her roommate and her sister, an over-the-top flamenco teacher, an angry young student, a babbling homeless man and a tall, handsome social worker.

That’s about it. There’s no real plot, just a portrait of an upbeat, unflappable young woman. For those who like this sort of thing it’s pretty good.