FunBlog

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.

This is a quirky little Irish musical that is getting a limited distribution in the U.S. I enjoyed it; the music is great, but I suspect it will have limited appeal for mainstream American audiences.

A street musician (by day he’s a vacuum cleaner repairman) meets an unemployed pianist. They decide to try collaborating, assemble a makeshift band and sort of fall in love. The songs are worked in as a natural part of the story–unlike most musicals there’s no need to suspend disbelief when the characters burst into song.

Don’t expect a conventional happy ending. It isn’t tragic (parts of it are quite funny), but there’s a typical Irish melancholy tone to the story as a whole.

This movie is the third in a series that has been going steadily downhill. The first movie in the series (Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl) confounded my expectations by being both hilarious and exciting to watch. The second (Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest) tried the audience’s patience by stopping half-way through the story, leaving us to wait until the next movie to find out the ending.

The next movie is finally here and it turns out to be a spectacular shark-jumping exhibition. It is full of amazing computer-generated visuals and action sequences that should be thrilling but are not. This is probably because in order to thrill us the people telling the story need to actually believe in it at some level–not just think that they are making up a bunch of crap to sell tickets. There is a romantic ending that on paper should have made me choke up, but didn’t, mainly because it seemed to me that the actors were struggling to avoid laughing. There are a few mildly funny moments but there is none of the hilarity of the original.

At the end of the movie they make it clear that they intend to do yet another sequel. Given this film’s spectacular box office results I’m sure the sequel will be made. I can only hope that the audience, after being burned twice, will stay home next time.

This is a well-made and well-acted film, but ultimately one that I find unsatisfactory.

Jenna (Keri Russell) is a strikingly beautiful waitress with a fantastic talent for making pies. She is also miserable. She is trapped in a marriage with an abusive husband, and she has just discovered that she is pregnant. On the other hand her handsome new doctor seems to be falling in love with her. She believes adultery is wrong, but she is tempted to reach out to him anyway…

This is being marketed as a comedy, and there certainly are some funny lines, but fundamentally this is a very sad story and everything in it points to a very sad ending. Instead we get a happy ending, one that strikes me as totally facile and extremely improbable (not to mention possibly harmful to an impressionable segment of the audience.)

Everything depends on this. If you believe the ending you will probably like the film; if you don’t you won’t.
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This movie is a British parody of American cop/buddy/action thrillers. That’s an easily parodied genre, but the dry British humor makes this surprisingly quirky and interesting.

Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) is the most outstanding police officer in London. So outstanding, in fact, that his fellow officers worry that he is making them look bad, and arrange for him to be transferred to a sleepy little village that has not reported a murder in 20 years. Nick is, of course, incredibly straight-laced and marks his first night in town by arresting about a quarter of the population for various alcohol-related offenses. Clearly somebody is going to have to make some adjustments.
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This is an earnest, heartfelt and well-intentioned movie, and I really wish that I liked it more than I do. It’s basically about some immigrants from India who name their son “Gogol” after the Russian writer, and when he grows up he isn’t happy about that.

More specifically, it’s about an upper-middle class couple from India who move to the United States, work hard and prosper. They send their children to elite universities. The children are a little bit rebellious, but not very. The children seem a bit shallow, but probably they will outgrow that. They all seem pretty well-adjusted. Sometimes they are unhappy but mostly they are happy. Nothing particularly unusual seems to happen to any of them.

This is all very admirable but it doesn’t make much of a movie. A movie needs to show us something dramatic, or something absurd or something exotic; something that we haven’t seen before. There are a few nice scenes set in India that give us a glimpse of the culture, but there isn’t very much of this. For the most part these people don’t seem very different from people whose ancestors have lived in America for a dozen generations. I suppose that might be an interesting insight in itself, but the filmmakers themselves don’t seem to be aware of it, and even if they were I’m not sure that it would be enough to sustain a two-hour movie.

There have been countless movies made about the American immigrant experience. Unfortunately almost all of them have been more interesting than this one.

In 1970 Clifford Irving, a minor writer best known for a biography of a notorious art forger, approached McGraw-Hill with an astonishing proposal: he had made a deal with reclusive billionaire Howard Hughes to collaborate on Hughes’ autobiography. He produced handwritten letters from Hughes which experts declared to be genuine. Based on this evidence McGraw-Hill and Life Magazine came up with an unprecedented advance of $765,000.

It was actually one of the most audacious scams in history. Selling a fake autobiography of a living person required unbelievable chutzpah, but Irving and his researcher Richard Suskind believed that since Hughes never appeared in public he would not come out to deny it.

This movie provides an entertaining and semi-reliable depiction of the fraud.
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This movie managed to surprise me: it is the first computer-generated 3-D animation that I have seen in which at least some of the human characters did not seem either grotesque or scary.

This is no small matter. You have probably noticed that 3-D animation is the only kind that American movie studios are willing to produce these days. (Computers are cheaper than human artists, or something like that.) You may also have noticed that these films are almost always about animals, monsters, robots, cars, or anything but people.

There is a good reason for this: it is really hard to do acceptable human characters this way. Any competent cartoonist can draw a 2-dimensional human face and make it look appealing, even when including all sorts of distortions (e.g. enormous eyes and no nose at all). The human brain is just very forgiving is interpreting 2-D images of people. On the other hand with a 3-dimensional image of a face, any significant distortions will make it look ugly and disturbing. And if you try to make the computer generate and animate a realistic human image it will seem creepy, like a walking corpse.
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Go tell the Spartans, stranger passing by,
That here, obedient to their laws, we lie.
–Simonides of Ceos (Epitaph on the burial mound of the Spartans.)

There are few turning points in history as improbably and dramatic as the Persian Wars of the early fifth century BC, and none of the events of those wars is more dramatic and improbable than the Battle of Thermopylae in 480 BC. It might be interesting to see a move that told the story of that battle in an impartial and fair-minded way, with strict attention to historical accuracy.

300 has no intention of being that movie. Based on a graphic novel by Frank Miller, it avoids any pretense of realism, aiming for mythic power instead. To a large extent it succeeds, overwhelming the audience with amazing glorious images, graphic non-stop violence and most of the great lines from Herodotus.
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Last Friday was the 200th anniversary of the passage in the House of Commons of the Slave Trade Act of 1807, which largely eliminated the Atlantic slave trade. More significantly, the Act laid the groundwork for the eventual abolition of slavery throughout the British Empire in 1833. In less than 100 years the rest of the world followed suit.

It took some extraordinary people to eliminate an institution that had previously been unquestioned in every civilization since the dawn of history. It required men an women of great passion, courage and dedication. The movie Amazing Grace, released on the anniversary of the passage of the Act, focuses on William Wilberforce (Ioan Gruffudd) the politician who led the fight to get the Act through Parliament, a process that took almost 18 years.
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Quite why the majority of US critics are so offended by this particular outrage remains a mystery. Hollywood has always had a somewhat cavalier attitude towards foreign accents, as those of you scarred for life by Dick van Dyke’s chirpy Cockney in Mary Poppins will attest.

–The Register: US film critics slap Calcutta-born Welsh

Actually I was scarred for life by Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

This movie is most notable for Peter O’Toole’s Oscar-nominated performance as an elderly actor who is witty, charming and something of a reprobate. It is a superb performance, but somehow I wonder if it is really much of a stretch for him.

We start with two over-the-hill actors, Maurice (O’Toole) and Ian (Leslie Phillips). Ian is a fussy old hypochondriac who has just agreed to allow his grand-niece to move into his apartment to take care of him. He anticipates home-cooked meals and tender loving care, so he is bitterly disappointed when Jessie (Jodie Whittaker) turns out to be a foul-mouthed, ignorant girl who can’t cook without a microwave and drinks up all his Scotch.
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Guillermo del Toro’s new movie, also known as El Laberinto del Fauno is a very dark and very violent fantasy. It is brilliantly imaginative and filled with astonishing imagery. Yet I never warmed to it.

I think the problem is in the “magical realism” which in this case involves too little magic and too much realism. The net result is more repellent than inspiring. It may well be that this is the effect that del Toro was trying to achieve, but it doesn’t work for me.
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This movie is a companion piece to Flags of Our Fathers, which I saw a few months ago. (Both were directed by Clint Eastwood.) I found this one even more impressive.

The earlier film showed the Battle of Iwo Jima from the American perspective. Half the screen time was devoted to the aftermath of the battle for three of the participants, and the survivor’s guilt that they felt. The second film shows the battle from the Japanese perspective, so survivor’s guilt should not be much of a problem.
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If I tell you the premise of this movie it is going to sound awfully familiar. There’s an inner city high school, plagued by gang violence. Within that school there are some kids who are considered the worst of the worst. A bright, enthusiastic but naive young teacher is assigned to teach them. At first they treat her with disdain, but she gradually wins them over, teaches them to respect themselves and turns their lives around.

Hollywood manages to release a movie like this every few years, all supposedly based on a true story. Take the Lead was one of the most recent (and most ridiculous.) The classic of the genre has to be To Sir with Love (1967).
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This movie is a class act: a historical drama filled with beautiful images, well-drawn characters and fine acting. Based on a novel by W. Somerset Maugham, it has a rather old-fashioned sensibility, but I don’t think that is necessarily a bad thing.

Naomi Watts plays Kitty, a London society girl in the 1920s, who marries a taciturn, undemonstrative doctor (Edward Norton). She doesn’t love him, but he wants to marry her and she is under pressure from her family to marry someone. (Apparently the First World War had killed off most of the eligible bachelors.)

He takes her to Shanghai, where he manages a medical laboratory. She doesn’t like it there and ends up having an affair with a smooth-talking diplomat. When her husband finds out he is furious, and forces her to accompany him to a remote town that is suffering from a massive cholera epidemic.

This is the beginning of a story of self-discovery and personal growth, set against a backdrop of tragedy, suffering and violent social upheaval. This is a thoughtful story for adults, and well worth seeing.

This is a film adaptation of the Broadway musical about a singing trio with a suspicious resemblance to The Supremes. It is top-level entertainment with rousing songs and some first-rate performances that are already generating Oscar buzz.

Jamie Foxx does a fine job playing the brilliant but unscrupulous manager who masterminds the group’s rise to fame and fortune. Beyoncé Knowles delivers a workmanlike performance in the thankless role of the singer who get the lead because her looks and voice have a bland commercial appeal (in other words, the Diana Ross character.)
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This movie is about penguins that sing and dance.

It also has a plot, I think. There is a young penguin who can’t sing and wants to tap dance, but tap dancing is forbidden for some theological reason that I can’t follow, so the tribal Elders expel him from the flock and he goes on a quest to find the aliens who have been stealing all the fish, and…

Oh never mind. It has penguins. Thousands and thousands of penguins, singing and dancing under the aurora australis. What can I say? “Pengin-san, pengin-san, pengin-san!”

Robert De Niro’s new movie (his second attempt as a director) is a long, dark and convoluted psychological thriller about the early days of the CIA and the men who founded it. This is a bit more serious than the usual spy thriller. Though most of the events in the movie are fictional, most of them are inspired by something that actually occurred, or at least which somebody claims actually occurred. (It’s a business where it is often difficult to separate history from disinformation.)

Matt Damon plays Edward Wilson, a character based very loosely on James Jesus Angleton, who was head of counterintelligence for the CIA from 1954 to 1974. Angleton was a controversial figure who is remembered most for his obsessive search for Soviet “moles” in the agency.
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This movie starts with a statement that it is “inspired by a true story”. Of course that is Hollywood-speak for “there is not a grain of truth to be found here.” Fortunately something doesn’t have to be true to be a good story. In fact this one is a real charmer.

Chris Gardner (Will Smith) is a smart man (though without much formal education) but he is very unlucky. Life seems determined not to hand him a break. He has invested all of his meager savings in a business selling bone-density scanners, but though he seems to be a competent salesman nobody wants to buy them. He is behind on his rent and taxes, and his wife is sick of working double shifts to make ends meet.
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Mel Gibson’s latest movie is a dark, bloody, riveting action-adventure thriller. Actually “bloody” is the operative word; I can’t recall seeing a man getting his face chewed off by a jaguar before.

This undeniably has a certain entertainment value, at least for those with strong stomachs. I couldn’t take my eyes off the screen. However I didn’t feel very good about it afterward. I am not against violence in the movies in principle, but I feel that the use of violence needs to be justified by artistic necessity and by the importance of the story being told. The greater the work and the more important the story, the more violence I am willing to tolerate.

In this case I ended up feeling that this is basically a movie about cheap thrills. For that I would prefer a little less horror and gore.
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I’m a great fan of Christopher Guest’s “mocumentaries” and I enjoyed his latest: For Your Consideration, but while it has some hilarious moments it is not as consistently funny as some of his earlier works such as Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman.

Part of the problem may be that by setting the story in Hollywood and making it about professional actors and filmmakers he has aimed too close to home. The characters sometimes seem a bit too real and we feel their pain a bit too much, so that we are tempted to cry with them instead of laughing at them. And this isn’t supposed to be that sort of movie.
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I associate Will Farrell with comedies that are funny but rather dopey; his last movie Talladega Nights is a classic example. However his latest movie is different. It’s a low-key fantasy; clever, witty and somewhat dark.
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(…moving from the sublime to the ridiculous…)

I’m giving this movie a mild recommendation because it is extremely funny, and I’m prepared to forgive just about anything if it is funny enough. However be warned that it is also very offensive. In fact, however offensive you think it might be based on what you have heard, it is probably a lot more offensive than that.
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I can’t avoid comparing The Prestige with The Illusionist, a movie that I saw a couple of months ago. Both are rather dark stories about stage magicians practicing their craft in Europe about one hundred years ago.

However they are actually quite different. The Illusionist is fundamentally a romantic tale of the supernatural. The Prestige is a grittier story with no supernatural elements (science fiction maybe, but nothing supernatural). Most people will probably prefer the ending of The Illusionist but from a purely technical standpoint The Prestige is the superior film: exquisitely crafted with a tight though convoluted plot.
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If there is a lesson to be taken home from Martin Scorsese’s new movie, it must be that Irish gangsters are more ruthless and bloodthirsty than Italian gangsters. This is a dark and gritty crime thriller that clearly draws some of its inspiration from recent Boston police scandals. If the premise didn’t warn us that this is going to end with bodies stacked like cordwood, the name of the director should be a tip-off.

This might make an unpleasant film but it is saved (at least for me) by the charisma of the actors. Rarely do we get to see such talented performers having so much fun portraying really evil people.
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Everyone who has taken photographs knows that sometimes you get a great picture by pure luck. If you take enough pictures, sooner or later you will press the shutter at just the right moment when the combination of circumstances will produce a much better picture than you had anticipated. It was a fortuitous photograph of this sort that forms the centerpiece of Clint Eastwood’s new movie Flags of Our Fathers, a dark meditation on the nature of heroism and our (perhaps foolish) need for heroes.
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This movie is set during a week in 1997 that most of us can remember. At the beginning of the week Princess Diana, the divorced wife of the Prince of Wales, was killed in a car accident. Tony Blair, the newly elected prime minister, appeared on television with with a statement that eulogized her as “the Peoples Princess”.

As the nation mourned the popular princess, Queen Elisabeth and her family remained in seclusion at Balmoral Estate in Scotland. The Queen had been trained from childhood never to display any emotion or other weakness in public, and she presumably also wanted to keep her grandchildren away from the press whose paparazzi had played a major role in their mother’s death.

But as the Royal Family remained silent, public opinion began to turn against them. A poll published at the end of the week showed 25% of the respondents in favor of abolishing the monarchy. At that point the queen reversed herself, brought her family to London, and addressed the nation on television. This quickly restored her popularity and soon everything was forgotten and forgiven.

(Forgive me for giving away the ending, but I’m assuming that everyone already knows this.)
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This is one of those quirky British film comedies, actually a bit quirkier than most.

The Reverend Walter Goodfellow (Rowan Atkinson) is the Vicar of the tiny village of Little Wallop. He is a good man, but rather dreamy and unobservant. Among the things that he has failed to observe are that his son is being bullied in school, his daughter is sleeping around and his wife (Kristin Scott Thomas) is thinking about running off to Mexico with her sleazy American golf instructor (Patrick Swayze).

Obviously this family needs help, and what could be more helpful than a cheerful, competent, wise old housekeeper (Maggie Smith) who will show up one day and gently show them how to solve all of their problems.
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Full Disclosure: Since I have a collie I am obviously biased…

At this point there must be hundreds of movies and television episodes featuring the lovable super-intelligent collie. Some of them (let’s face it) have been pretty bad (including a hilariously awful Canadian television series aired in the late 1990’s).

However the latest movie is a class act, with good writing, a great cast, and beautiful locations filmed in Scotland, Ireland and the Isle of Man.

This movie goes back to the original source material: the 1938 novel Lassie Come Home by Eric Knight, which spawned an entire genre of stories about faithful pets traveling incredible distances and braving impossible odds to be reunited with their owners. This book has already been made into several movies, one of which managed to turn Lassie into a horse.

This version sticks much closer to the original material and is all the better for it. Any animal lover will probably find it irresistible.

The movie is easily suitable for ages 7 and up. Some younger children may be able to enjoy it but might find some of the scenes upsetting.

This is an entertaining little gem of a movie: dark, atmospheric and romantic. It is set in the decadent world of Imperial Vienna at the beginning of the twentieth century. Eisenheim the Illusionist (Edward Norton) is a stage magician who creates illusions of such marvelous subtlety and beauty that most members of his audience are convinced that he must really have supernatural powers.

But Eisenheim, a mere commoner, has fallen in love with the beautiful Sophie (Jessica Biel), a duchess who is the intended bride of a powerful and ruthless prince (Rufus Sewell). Obviously nothing good can come of this. Chief Inspector Uhl (Paul Giamatti), who is in the pay of the prince, warns Eisenheim to stay away, and sends his agents to tail both Eisenheim and Sophie.
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This movie doesn’t really tell the story about what happened to the World Trade Center on September 11, 2001. It just focuses on a tiny part of the story, what happened to a handful of people, in particular to two people who were rescued from the wreckage.

(I’m not going to worry about giving away the ending. Presumably everyone knows what happened. If you don’t know and want to watch the movie anyway, this would be a good place to stop reading.)
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America is all about speed. Hot, nasty, badass speed.
– Eleanor Roosevelt, 1936

As can be seen from the opening quote, this is an evil, wicked movie.

Ricky Bobby was born in a car travelling 100 mph as his speed-crazed father drove past the hospital. As a boy he drove everyone crazy by constantly saying “I want to go fast, I want to go fast!” Naturally he grew up to achieve fame and fortune as a NASCAR driver.

Ricky gained all the trappings of material success. He had a big house, a hot trashy wife, and two adorable trash-talking sons named “Walker” and “Texas Ranger”. A simple patriotic man, he would engage in interminable debates over whether it is better to pray to baby Jesus or grown-up Jesus.

But Ricky’s life took a turn for the worse on the day that he met his nemisis and arch-enemy: Jean Girrard, a French Formula One driver. A French existentialist Formula One driver. A gay French existentialist Formula One driver.

This is not a deep or uplifting movie. It is a movie about fast living and fast driving and fast women and product placement. (Loads and loads of product placement. This is NASCAR, right?) It is a movie that bombards you with absurdities until you are helpless with laughter.

Rated PG-13 for crude and sexual humor, language, drug references and brief comic violence.

When I go to see a movie in an art-house theater I know I’m taking the risk of coming out feeling depressed. The opening of this one had me a bit worried:

• A motivational speaker gives a rousing talk about how to be a winner and not a loser, to an audience of about seven people.
• An old man snorts a couple of lines.
• A little girl watches a videotape of a beauty contest and imitates the contestants’ moves.
• A middle-aged woman goes to the hospital to pick up her brother who has attempted suicide. She brings him home and tells him he has to share a bedroom with his teen aged nephew, who reads Nietzsche and doesn’t speak.

Things get progressively stranger as the family decides to embark on a road trip to help the young daughter enter a beauty contest.

It ends up being a very funny movie. It isn’t particularly original. The basic elements of the road trip and the lovable losers (who in the final analysis probably aren’t really losers at all) will be familiar from a lot of films. Still it kept me laughing and I would generally recommend it.

Even though one of the main characters is seven years old, I wouldn’t recommend it for someone that young. It’s more suitable for teenagers and up. It includes bad language, drug use (presented in a disapproving light) and “mature themes”.