Magic Mike (Sunday, July 1, 2012) (62)

Film directors these days seem to trip into genre holes, where they make one kind of movie, either action movies, comedies, dramas, trashy popcorn fare, etc. Steven Soderburgh, on the other, hand makes all sorts of different kinds of movies, and seems to approach the movies he makes these days as experiments in genre analysis, more than just story-telling itself.

Last year he made Contagion, which, although being disappointing, was a contemporary effort at a disaster flick. Earlier this year was Haywire, a very small and totally solid bite-sized action movie. Now he comes out with Magic Mike, a movie that is more about an examination of trashy exploitation fare (something out of the late-'70s and early-'80s) than it is about male strippers. To look only at the beefcake on stage is to miss the point of the movie. This is a send-up of that moment when B-movies went mainstream, the kind of thing you would have seen playing on a loop on some Turner network in the late-'80s and groaned but continued to watch (and now quote to your friends nonstop).

The eponymous Magic Mike (Channing Tatum) is a scrappy young man in Tampa who works as a roofer and handyman during the day and a stripper at night. His boss, Dallas (Matthew McConaughey), the entertainment boss of the review show is a bit older and has bigger dreams than just taking over the Gulf coast. Mike seems to have no problems with the women, sleeping with whomever he wants. One day he takes under his wing a younger guy at the construction site, Adam (Alex Pettyfer), who is a bit of a lost soul and lives on the couch of his (super hot) older sister, Brooke (Cody Horn).

Mike gets Adam to strip one night and Dallas believes he has the goods to do the work and become part of the troupe. Mike and Adam become best friends, of course, until Adam gets naively involved in side projects like drug deals. Mike has to figure out what his figure is (if it's with Brooke or not) and how he can work with Dallas and Adam going forward.

On its surface, this is a ridiculously stupid movie. There is nothing complicated about the plot and the elements of the narrative (from the guys being construction workers to Brooke being silly hot but unable to connect to guys) seem banal or even forced. Yet Soderbergh is too smart a guy to not know what he's doing. He includes all of these details because this is what the genre dictates. (This reminds me a bit of Verhoeven's Showgirls, a superficially ridiculous movie that recasts All About Eve as a story of strippers in Las Vegas. But there too, a surface look misses the point of what the director is doing. He's mocking the genre and mocking the ridiculous consumerist culture of entertainment and movie-going.) 

Soderbergh is also, of course, very interested in an examination of the genre and how more broadly it can be a Nicholas-Ray-like critique of masculinity in our culture. These men are all perfect physical specimens, of course, but they generally function only a half-level above drooling dogs. The lifestyle that Dallas represents and advocates is empty and impotent in the long run, and Mike has to go through the journey to discover this. Throughout all of this there's the paradox that these super-men are doing a job that's incredibly homoerotic, but makes women get horny. 

For me, this is a really fun and interesting film, partly because it's just silly and sexually interesting and partly because, on a meta level, it's a very harsh criticism of our culture. I love that for most it comes off as not being political in the slightest, just being an easy-to-swallow pill. Soderbergh shows (again) that he's a great actors' director and gets a hell of a performance out of Tatum, that's both multi-faceted and profound. Listing the actors the director has worked with over the years shows that he knows what he's doing on set; watching this movie shows that he's really thinking about a lot of interesting stuff behind the camera as well.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Bernie (Saturday, June 2, 2012) (51)

Bernie is a very clever and funny comedy by writer/director Richard Linklater (co-written by Skip Hollandsworth). In era when auteurist theory dominates film thinking in the critical and popular world, I really appreciate Linkater's oeuvre as it seems like he makes movies that he likes and always tries to tell good stories. This is not to say that I love everything he does. I don't. In fact, I probably don't really connect to most of what he's made, but I recognize that he's very technically daring and accomplished. I also like that fact that he seems to have a more "blue-collar" way of approaching his craft, rather than making movies that are necessarily going to be popular or art-house darlings. I think there is some line from Sam Fuller (or was it Billy Wilder?) who once said something about how directing is a job and you have to go and do it. Linklater does it well and doesn't get bogged down in his cult of personality or his auteurist canonizers.

Bernie is based on a true story about the eponymous guy (Jack Black) who moves to the small town of Carthage in East Texas in the early/mid-'90s to work in a funeral home. It seems he is a bit of an eccentric for this tiny place, but also a multi-talented ball of energy. He's basically the best undertaker anyone has ever seen, brilliant at up-selling people on bigger and better caskets and more elaborate ceremonies. He's a singer in the funeral services he oversees as well as in the church choir. He's also involved in the town's community musical theater. He's probably gay, though in in East Texas in the '90s that's something that's only whispered about.

One of his biggest impacts on the community is that along with his standard work-related duties, he takes it upon himself to continue to look after the widows of the town after he buries their husbands. All the old ladies love him, and, like a world-class walker, he loves them back. One widow, however, is a bit harder than the others. Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine) is a bitter old crow who hates everyone, including her own family. Her husband was the richest man in town (oil money) and she has a team of people looking after her at all times.

After awhile, she starts to spend more and more time with Bernie and he becomes her main caregiver and helper. Meanwhile, she's a mean woman and treats him terribly. He decides one day to kill her, not because he's a bad person (he's quite the opposite), but really out of self defense from the psychological trauma. He then has to face the D.A., Danny Buck (Matthew McConaughey) when he's tried for her murder.

The film is mostly told through interviews with the townsfolk of Carthage. Linklater scripts their dialogue, but they are by and large people from that town who truly knew Bernie. These are generally funny and silly interludes between stretches of narrative, but really do effectively and efficiently move the story along and set a bright and fun tone. All these people really loved Bernie when they knew him and really hated Marjorie, so it's interesting to see how what they say directs our view of the story.

Bernie is a totally lovable guy -- in large part because Jack Black is really great in the role. In most of his movies, I find Black to be a bit too big for life. His outsized temperament is generally too big for the films he's in and he falls back too frequently on cheap physical comedy. Here he's much more restrained and really gives us a lot of soul with the comedy.

Bernie is clearly a lonely and nice guy who sorta doesn't belong where he is (perhaps he would have done better in a bigger city or not in Texas). He's somewhat pitiful, which also adds to the humor of the story. When he gets dressed up to sing "76 Trombones" in a local production of The Music Man, it's silly because the costume doesn't fit well around his weird body, but there's also a sadness and desperation to his situation that's implied.

I also have to mention that Shirley MacLaine is really wonderful in this role. She's totally bitter, mean and unlovable... and yet we're weirdly attracted to her still... just like Bernie is. MacLaine's body of work is really amazing and over the years she's really mastered a keen ability to play straight characters in dark comedies. Yes, this role is not the same as her Fran in The Apartment or her Ginnie in Some Came Running, but we get a similar sense of a character at the end of her rope, and again, a deeply sad context.

This is a really good movie. It's funny and sad, it's efficient and original. I'm not sure how it will hold up over time, as it sorta feels small, even compared to other Linklater films, but it's really well made and well acted.

Stars: 3.5 of 4

Dark Shadows (Saturday, May 12, 2012) (48)

I have absolutely no connection the the TV show "Dark Shadows" that ran in the late 1960s and early 1970s. I have no context for the tone of the show, the relative merits of the acting or writing of the show and no hangups about excavating some remote and sacred part of my past and my psyche. So I went into Tim Burton's new film Dark Shadows (based on the TV Show) as a totally blank slate... except for the fact that it's a Tim Burton movie and features Johnny Depp and Mrs. Burton, Helena Bonham-Carter, whom he works with always.

Regardless of what one might think of the television show, this is a generally enjoyable, pointless movie. There is really nothing terrible about it and it falls in line with much of the very average Burton has put out for much of the past 20 years. He has taken "weird" to such an extreme that the style and concept has folded back on itself, making the uncanny and strange become banal in his universe. What saves this film (if only slightly) is the very bright acting of Depp and the generally snappy writing of his character here.

Barnabas Collins (Depp) is a colonial-era rich man living in a town his family owns in Maine. One day, as he's chasing his girlfriend, the witch Angelique (Eva Green) turns him into a vampire, ultimately leading to his burial in the town graveyard for safekeeping. Flash forward 200 years to the 1970s and Barnabas' coffin is exhumed (by mistake) and he gets out. His family still owns his mansion, but has lost a lot of their status in town, particularly their cannery. His rival Angelique is now the king (er... queen) fisher in town.

He is introduced to his family members, including Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer), the head of the household, Dr. Julia Hoffman (HBC), a live-in shrink and Victoria Winters (Bella Heathcote), the kids' tutor, who bears a striking resemblance to Barnabas' old girlfriend from way back when. It seems Angelique hopes to ruin the family (again) as long as Barnabas doesn't fall in love with her.

The story is a bit convoluted, and, frankly, unmemorable... though it is pretty fun as it rolls along. Depp has a great sense of comic timing (and a strange resistance to playing characters who don't have English accents) and the script (by Seth Graham-Smith) showers him with great moments and lines to ham up. That the the film is so forgettable is probably the main factor in saying it's not really all that great. It's not that it's really bad, the good stuff is pretty good, but the rest doesn't really any connections and slides away into the ether.

Stars: 2 of 4

Damsels in Distress (Sunday, April 15, 2012) (40)

What the hell happened to Whit Stillman? He made three movies in eight years in the '90s and then nothing for the next 14 years. Now he comes out with Damsels in Distress, which has his typically staccato, arch dialogue, but none of the charm of the earlier efforts (if you want to call that charm... or maybe cynicism is a better word).

Set at the posh Northeastern liberal arts college of Seven Oaks (really, Whit? That was the best you could do for a fake college name? Read more Phillip Roth, please...), the film deals with a rather recycled Mean-Girls-meets-Pygmalion story of three girls Violet (Greta Gerwig), Heather (Carrie MacLemore) and Rose (Megalyn Echikunwoke) who dress and act much better than their classmates, whom they judge relentlessly. At the beginning of the school year, they meet Lily (Analeigh Tipton) a transfer student who they feel needs their direction. Violet is the self-possessed boss and she gives most of the advice, despite almost never being right about anything.

She dates a dumb, beefy frat boy, because she says dating good looking and smart men doesn't work well as such guys are too hard to control. She organizes the schools suicide prevention program where she insists that tap dance is the best way to cure the students' sads. There isn't really much of a story, as the metamorphosis story of Lily never really fully develops and the plot devolves into a series of generic college movie elements (fights with the school paper, girls dropping out, different boys entering and leaving for no reason).

While I admit that Stillman's three earlier films are not perfect and are sometimes a bit annoying, this film seems to be a sarcastic riff on the sardonic tones of those pictures. When a very dumb joke about frat boys not knowing the names of colors (not because they're color blind, but because they're too stupid to know that blue and green are different and what they are called) falls flat once, we get that same bit three more times... as if it would improve on seeing it over and over again (it doesn't).

This is the most desperate and base comedy imaginable. What Stillman used to do well was take a rather remote corner of the world and examine it with a ridiculous bitterness. Here he takes a rather obvious target and makes banal jokes about the topic. It's very not funny. What's worse, the very mannerist, exacting speech patterns of the first three films kills any element of realism here, making it all seem like a weird, silly, Brechtian play. Sarcasm is its own tone -- you don't need to add silliness to it to improve it.

As a Gerwig adorer, I have to say my girlfriend really does struggle with the material here -- though the material is so bad to begin with, it's hard to blame her. I worry she's not best suited for overly conceived and scripted material and does better working with more personal, artistic control over the material, either meaning less style and more naturalness or more improvisational leeway. The fact is that this movie will be forgotten in a few weeks, so Greta doesn't have to worry about it dragging down her career.

Stars: .5 of 4

The Five-Year Engagement (Thursday, April 5, 2012) (34)

In the ever-rising tide of adult-themed romantic gross-out comedies comes The Five-Year Engagement, a totally preposterous film with one of the weirdest, most fat-laden stories and scripts I've seen in awhile. There are lots of funny moments (many provided by Jason Segal, who is quietly turning into one this era's most talented comics... er, except for the fact that he co-wrote this screenplay... OK - so let's call him inconsistent...), but much more excess and overly graphic situations, making watching it more of a chore than a joy.

Directed and co-written by Nicholas Stoller (of Forgetting Sarah Marshall and Get Him to the Greek fame), the movie revolves around Tom (Segal), an up-and-coming chef in San Francisco, who gets engaged to Violet (Emily Blunt). They fully plan to have a timely wedding, until she gets into grad school in Ann Arbor. They move and his life begins to spin out of control after he's unable to get a "respectable" restaurant gig (featuring a fun "A-squared" resto montage, for anyone who went to school or ate dinner there). She thrives and he shrivels and their wedding moves further away. In the meantime his best friend (Chris Pratt) and her sister (Alison Brie) get married and have babies and the world moves along. Just when you think they're gonna figure it out, everything falls apart, possibly irreparably.

Typical of many recent gross-out comedies, the stakes are raised to silly heights as we see the characters behaving ridiculously and see frank pain and embarrassment in every other scene or so. At one point, when Tom freaks out about their pending wedding, he gets drunk and sleeps in the woods in the middle of winter, almost naked. He wakes up with frostbite on one of his toes, which has to be cut off. In another scene, the couple's niece shoots one of Tom's arrows (he's a bow hunter) into Violet's leg -- but just for shits and giggles and no real plot point.

I actually appreciate the frankness of these moments, and the reaction they bring to us in the audience (shock and horror with uncomfortable laughter), but they're especially difficult to endure as they're interspersed with typical RomCom comedy and come generally as surprises. It's all a bit too much for too little pay off.

The real sin of this film, of this script, is that it's just not very efficient and almost every scene goes on about one to four minutes too long, making the whole film feel bloated and cumbersome. The transitions between one bit and another are clumsy and the amount of serious reflective time allotted to each character is too much, making this weirdly heady at times -- not the best tone for a stupid comedy.

This really feels like it was cut down from a script that was probably twice as long, a script with every joke and every set-up the writers could imagine, but then cut it to this overweight 120-some minutes. I think if they had trimmed the script more (like by another 30-40 mintues) they could have had a pretty good movie. Instead we get a weird movie that's not really enjoyable and doesn't move well, despite some honestly funny moments.

Stars: 1 of 4

Turn Me On, Dammit! (Monday, March 26, 2012) (32)

It seems like most teen-angst-high-school-sucks movies come in two tones: one is a rather silly comedic one where adults look back on their time as teens and amplify silly traits of kids and adults; the other way is a bit darker and presents the story from the kids' point of view, resulting in kids talking, feeling and thinking like grown-ups. Jannicke Systad Jacobsen's Turn Me On, Dammit! is different from both of these styles as it seems to present the story from a teen girl's point of view, but in a frank, non-condescending way. Lead characater, Alma (Helene Bergsholm), is not biterly sarcastic like a Juno or a Mean Girl (because no girls talk or think like 30-year-old screenwriters), but is filled with self-doubt, fear and lots and lots of libido.

Set in a a tiny village in rural Norway, the story deals with a small event in Alma's life that turns into a major high school drama, as frequently happens with 15-year-olds. Alma is always incredibly horny and when she's not masturbating in her bedroom at night (loudly) she calls phone sex hot lines and masturbates on the kitchen floor (while the dog watches). One day at a party her crush, Artur (Matias Myren) pulls out his dick out of his pants in front of her and rubs it on her skirt. Not knowing how to react, she goes to the bathroom and masturbates again (of course!).

When she gets out she tells her two best friends, Sara and Ingrid (Malin Bjorhovde and Beate Stofring). Ingrid, a classic mean girl, is jealous of Alma because she's also in love with Artur (it's a really small village, so he's one of only a handful of boys) so she tells everyone that Alma said this and is lying. Immediately Alma becomes a social pariah and is desperate to regain her friends and her mid-level status... but kids are shits and irrationally mean.

There's a wonderful joy to the film that one rarely sees in movies (almost never in American fare). Alma is clearly awesome and her advanced sexuality feels natural (and deeply erotic). The film opens with a clever montage showing static shots of the village's highlights with voice-over by Alma listing what we see: mail boxes, a bus stop, a mountain, stupid sheep. This bitterness doesn't take over the story, like it does in Juno, but just gives a realistic frame for the story. Alma herself is upbeat and hopeful. Yes she's sarcastic and has an active fantasy life (sometimes shown in action, sometimes wonderfully presented in black and white stills), but she's totally normal and not smarter or more beautiful than anyone else there.

In this debut narrative feature, Jacobsen beautifully shows the world from Alma's point of view. Her emotions are frequently underlined by soundtrack cues -- it wouldn't be a melancholy though oddly optimistic Norwegian moment without a Kings of Convenience song or two. At other times we see Alma's fantasy life jump into her story momentarily confusing us (and her) as to what is real and what is a dream. It's totally fun, interesting and compassionate to Alma, who is a totally awesome but normal teenage girl with a very active imagination.

There's something so refreshing about seeing naturalism on screen that's happy and unembellished. This is a movie that does exactly that. Life goes from normal to chaos to normal, much like any one of a hundred days in a teen's life, or in anyone's life, really. Despite the fact that this setback hurts Alma deeply for a period of time, even she can see that it's a small thing in the long run.

Stars: 3 of 4

Turn Me On, Dammit! opens in New York City on March 30 and in Los Angeles on April13.

Natural Selection (Saturday, March 17, 2012) (29)

There is a single brilliant shot in Robbie Pickering's Natural Selection and it comes in the first minute of the film. We see the grass collection bag for industrial lawn mower slowly open and a man emerge gradually, fall on the ground and then raise up to his feet. There is some suggestion that this is some sort of birth, or a rebirth, but that's the end of the symbolic or thematic interest in the movie. Sadly, this one shot is the last interesting element of the film, and it devolves into stupid and recycled, unbelievable garbage after.

Writing a punchy short movie is a much harder skill than one might think, and Pickering does a terrible job with his script. It's packed with tons of excess shit that leads nowhere and comes off mostly as cloyingly cutesy or strangely judgmental (that is, LA people judging the middle part of the country).

Linda (Rachel Harris) is a middle-aged woman married to a bible thumping middle aged man. She is unable to have a baby, so they decide that, following the story of Onan in the Book of Genesis, they won't have sex -- because sex not for the purpose of reproduction is sinful. Regardless of this, Linda wakes up and tried to have sex with her husband... even though the answer has been 'no' for twenty-some years no. Dumb.

But then he has a sudden heart attack in the office of his sperm bank (the definition of "spilling his seed") and Linda has to deal with the reality of their marriage being based on lies of celibacy and his seemingly imminent death after his emergency.

To help her get in contact with her feelings, she searches out one of the children he fathered through the bank. She tracks him down in a terrible drug-addled state and convinces him to go back to visit his father in the hospital by his deathbed. He's all too willing to go along as he's trying to get out of town before he's arrested for escaping jail (see: the man escaping jail by hiding inside a lawnmower bag in the first scene).

This story is the definition of "convoluted". The plot weaves around and back on itself more times that we can count and every decision each character makes has no basis in natural life, but is forced by a clumsy writer (deus-ex-lawnmower-bag).

Harris is pretty good in the role, but I can't help but feel that she's cynically laughing at her character rather than playing her with any sort of respect. (She might say she's respectful of the character, but she seems to overdo it frequently enough that it comes off as a bit mean.) When the story goes from exaggerated to ridiculous (in the last 20 minutes), she all but vanishes, as the silliness of the narrative distracts from any sympathetic moments she might act.

This movie represents to me all that is wrong with the non-studio Hollywood. It's absolutely respectable that this movie was made for almost no money and was written and directed by a newcomer with only one semi-star attached to it. But it's ridiculous that it was even made in the first place. It's an absurd story that has a rather condescending tone (I think Pickering is from the South where the story is set) that shows foolish religious people to be foolish because of their religion. Hollywood liberals indeed. This is a dull and stupid movie that should be mocked rather than appreciated.

Stars: .5 of 4

Jeff, Who Lives at Home (Friday, March 16, 2012) (28)

I have a very strange relationship with the films of the Jay and Mark Duplass. I find their movies really interesting and impressively made, especially considering their low budgets, but I find myself always a bit disappointed with the final products.

Their films are almost entirely made from their own original scripts and I think that is where the problems are. They write very weird scripts with strange forced moments and uncomfortable changes from slow to face pacing. They also have no idea how to end their movies, frequently going with an idea that doesn't totally work.

Their latest film, Jeff, Who Lives at Home is another example of a movie that is interesting because it almost works, but ultimately falls apart when the pieces don't connected well.

The eponymous Jeff (Jason Segal) lives at home with his mother Sharon (Susan Sarandon) in Baton Rouge. One day he gets a wrong-number phone call that convinces him to believe that there is a meaning to his otherwise ordinary, empty day. When Sharon (who is dealing with a secret admirer at work) sends him on an errand he gets sidetracked following up on the trail of the wrong-number.

He then bumps into his brother Pat (Ed Helms) who is dealing with a midlife crisis and the dissolution of his marriage to his wife Linda (Judy Greer). The two brothers go on an odyssey through south-eastern Louisiana looking for meaning in their boring, shity lives.

The biggest problem with the film is that it has way too much plot packed into a tiny shell. There is barely any room to breathe and almost no space to develop any emotions, as audience members, aside from what is clearly presented to us. It is clear who is good and who is bad, what forces are working with and against the characters -- but there is no ability to have any deeper connections to characters or their actions. What's that old chestnut about "comedy is tragedy plus time"? Well, here's it's really "comedy is tragedy plus no distance." Considering the central story is about Jeff and his weird Bloom-like day, strangely proving a fatalism in the midst of gonzo neorealism, we don't really need the side stories about Pat and Linda or Sharon.

I still have a sweet spot in my heart for the Duplasses, but desperately wish they could work on a film with another writer's script. I feel their intimacy with their process gets in their way and they can't see the shortcomings of their stories. This is probably a generally average example of their work (a far cry from The Puffy Chair or Baghead -- their two mumblecore features), but not entirely bad.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Friends with Kids (Saturday, March 10, 2012) (26)

The fundamental flaw with Jennifer Westfeldt's Friends with Kids is that it serves no audience, or, rather, it serves an audience who doesn't totally get the jokes its making. In her directoral debut (after writing the 2001 indie comedy Kissing Jessica Stein), Westfeldt presents a film that is really meant for an audience of single, middle-30s, cosmopolitan white people who don't have kids and hate people who do -- those people are known as New Yorkers (everywhere else people get married by 28).

The problem is that the film gets New York so incredibly wrong and is so banal in its judgments that it would only appeal to people who don't live here... or who pay rent here and think 59th Street is waaaaay too far south for them. Westfeldt (who also wrote the script) adds to this a lot of foul-mouthed dialogue to show that this is a young-hearted movie that might upset your parents, about which you can talk with your girlfriends (Carrie, Miranda, Samantha) at brunch... because all young people talk about how they like "tight pussies" (how scandalous!).

Julie (Westfeldt) and Jason (Adam Scott) are best friends who are both serial daters. They love playing around with the hot people they meet and like the freedom of being able to live in the same Riverside Drive rental building (on different floors). They're close with two couples, Ben (Jon Hamm, Westfeldt's own life partner) and Missy (Kristen Wiig, who is barely in the movie) and Leslie (Maya Rudolph, who's working way too much these days) and Alex (Chris O'Dowd, thankfully playing an American). Both couples have babies (or will be having them soon) and are totally boring and square and live in Cobble Hill, Brooklyn (which is a $77 cab ride away from somewhere in Manhattan... which is impossible and stupid).

Julie and Jason decide to have a baby together as friends and raise the kid together, but not get married and continue to date other people... because, well, it's never really clear. They have a baby and all is great. Jason meets a Broadway chorus girl (played by Megan Fox, one of our greatest actresses) and Julie meets a contractor and divorced dad (played by Edward Burns, who will always just be a contractor in our eyes). Things get a bit dicey, however, when Julie starts to fall for Jason (didn't see that coming!) and he doesn't see her in the same way.

It's all so boring and stupid, so banal and recycled. There's never any chance that they'll do something unexpected. They break up, they get back together... big whoop! I've seen it all before (in When Harry Met Sally, if not in It Happened One Night or any number of screwball comedies from the pre-war era). Westfeldt trades originality and surprise for style... but that style is predicated on the false idea that just saying "fuck" makes something edgy and "realistic". It doesn't -- it makes it garbage that I could have read about on dozens of mommy blogs and Glamour Magazine ("Hello, Vagina, Are You Alive Down There?").

This is a weird pastiche of romantic comedy, screwball comedy and gross-out comedy, but is not really all that romantic, screwball or gross. It's so incredibly safe that it's totally uninteresting. ("Oh! There's that scene when they're all at a ski lodge and Scott and Fox are fucking really loudly -- that's just like when I went skiing with all my friends and there was that couple who fucked so loudly! It's funny because it's true!" Vomit.)

To be unfairly picky, I have to also say that Westfeldt's characterization of New York City living (Manhattan and South Brooklyn) is so completely off it's embarrassing. One unfunny set-up requires Julie to buzz a date into her building... but she lives in a doorman building that wouldn't have a buzzer... because it has doormen. In another scene, Fox talks about how she does eight performances a week in her Broadway show, "and has to be ready to go out of town for other work at a moment's notice." But why? You're on Broadway! Might you have to go out of town to perform in a road company in St. Louis? I'm not sure when the last time Westfeldt lived in New York was, but all the detail feels very stupid, fake and forced.

This desperate movie has the gauzy characteristics of an old-timey comedy, but made in this very contemporary, cynical voice that relies mostly on dirty words to convey naturalism. That style doesn't really change the fact that it's a dull movie with a bunch of painful jokes that are only funny if don't really know why you're laughing. This has a terrible script and is directed equally hamhandedly. There is no subtlety to this film. That wouldn't sell well on the check-out aisle and you might miss the joke or not know exactly when to laugh. How dumb.

Stars: .5 of 4

Footnote (Friday, March 9, 2012) (25)

Joseph Cedar's Footnote was Israel's entry into the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar race this year - and it is a very good film, well worth watching. It has a very dark and cerebral tone that generally has the comic feeling of Jonze's Being John Malkovich -- a bit of a latter-day screw-ball with lots of bleakness.

Uriel (Lior Ashkenazi) and Eliezer (Shlomo Bar-Aba) Shkolnik, are two leading Talmudic professors in Jerusalem. Father, Eliezer, a broken man filled with almost no love left inside, has spent his entire life researching variations in versions of the Talmud, only to blocked by his main academic rival. His greatest accomplishment is being referenced in a footnote by his mentor. Uriel, his son, a joyful husband and father himself, has become a leading expert on Talmudic traditions, softer subject matter that the father resents. He seems to be a pushover in life and in his family, but a very good man.

One day Eliezer is surprised to get a phone call that he won the most prestigious national prize for scientific research, after he tried for dozens of years, but always came up blank. He seems like a changed man all of a sudden, finding some joy in his accomplishment. The next day, however, Uriel is called to the prize committee's office where they tell him that he was supposed to win rather than his father and that his father got the phone call by mistake (they're both Professor Shkolnik, after all). He now has to figure out a way of convincing the committee to give his father the prize despite internal academic political issues.

The film explores the intersections of truth and fiction, hard scientific research and fluffy social scientific observation. Both men would argue their work is hard research, but Cedar certainly suggests that there's some chest puffing involved in all academic work. There is also a very glib idea that all academic work really doesn't amount to a hill of beans in the real world -- that internal politics of any organization have as much to do with what gets out and its impact as the significance of the work has.

Cedar uses a very sarcastic style throughout, both in his script and in the formal presentation. When Uriel visits the committee in their offices to discuss the problem, there are seven people (he makes eight) in a tiny closet of a room. Whenever anyone wants to get in or leave, they have to rearrange the chairs in a funny bit of physical comedy. Cedar cleverly mixes wonderfully rich long takes (the first shot lasts for about 8 minutes) with elegant dutch angles and interesting lenses. At times there's a jokey score, at other times there is pure silence, as different characters struggle with internal hopes and fears.

There are also, sadly a handful of untied up elements that seem to lead nowhere, but also don't really act as MacGuffins (the big prize itself is a true MacGuffin). There's a bizarre suggestion that Eliezer has a former girlfriend who comes back (actually it's really not clear who this woman is... I'm just guessing that she's an ex) and Uriel struggles with his ne'er-do-well son who is happy to sit and watch TV rather than studying. These things really should have been cleaned up and cut out -- the film would have been a lot tighter without them.

This is a very funny and smart movie and a lot of fun to watch, with great acting throughout (because everyone really plays it straight and not over-the-top, which it really is). I'm happy it doesn't dwell on the rather tired trope of father-son relationships and deals more with the means of academia and the reality of "Truth" and acknowledgment as these are much more interesting ideas with more room for fresh comedy.

Stars: 3 of 4

Boy (Friday, March 2, 2012) (20)

Boy is a film about a boy named Boy (James Rolleston). He lives in a Maori village in 1984 and says his biggest interest and biggest hero is Michael Jackson. He's the oldest of four brothers and sisters, his father is in jail and his mother died in childbirth several years before.

Boy has a rich and wonderful imagination, somewhat reminiscent of Napoleon Dynamite (ugh), which is to say fantastical and exuberant, though a bit crappy and taped-together. Rather than believing his father is in jail, he has several other secret-agent, super-warrior-type ideas of where he is.

One day his father, Alamein (writer-director Taika Waititi) comes back to the home and picks up his light and moronic criminal activity that got him put in jail in the first place. Of course Boy is thrilled by his return and immediately his dad becomes his biggest hero (he imagines him in several Michael Jackson music videos). But his dad can't be trusted to do anything, let alone manage four kids. As Boy's hopes grow for the life they're embarking on, Alamein falters and everything seems to fall apart.

Formally this is a really fun and wonderful film. The magical realism of Boy's imagination is absolutely adorable and exciting to witness - and Waititi does an amazing job of blending different elements together. There are great small cuts to small and silly side things related to what Boy says, frequently they're animated in a naive, childish style on lined school paper. There are hilarious sequences with Boy imagining his father as Michael Jackson in the Billie Jean or Beat It videos.

This is also a rather small movie that works well and doesn't make anything too cute, which is always a risk with a film about kids. Rolleston does a great job and Waititi doesn't dwell too much on him being in peril or other cheap tricks used by lazy directors around children.

Cuteness can sometimes be cloying for some, of course. It has the bizarreness and gonzoness of The Flight of the Conchords, but a bit more soul than that. It's not a straight comedy, as there are more important family stuff in it, but it's also not a tear-jerking story of a dad trying to clean up his act for his kids. It's a nice, happy medium and works well.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Cedar Rapids (2011) (Wednesday, February 29, 2012) (156)

I had missed Cedar Rapids when it came out in theaters, but then it showed up on a handful of best of the year lists by several critics, so I decided to give it a chance. It is a funny gross-out comedy, but less than overwhelming.

You say that insurance sales is a prime subject for juvenile comedy? Well, you're in luck!

Tim Lippe (Ed Helms) is an insurance salesman at a small company in rural Wisconsin. After the death of his colleague (by auto-erotic asphyxiation, of course) he's sent to a regional insurance conference in Cedar Rapids, an annual event of drunken debauchery. Tim is a grown nerd and a manchild who is having a relationship with his former junior high teacher (Sigourney Weaver). He has never done anything substantial in his life and the puddle-jumper flight to Cedar Rapids is his first time on an airplane.

When he gets to the conference he finds he'll be sharing a room with Dean Ziegler (John C. Reilly) a wild man who loves to drink and party more than he loves selling insurance policies. Tim has to concentrate on the task of getting a top rating from this regional group while Ziegler pushes him in all the wrong directions, including into bed with Joan Ostrowski-Fox (Anne Heche), a married red-head from Omaha.

There is a lot of funny and silly stuff here, and a lot of surprises including one of the strangest and most straightforward crack-pipe-smoking sequences I've ever seen (because that's funny!). There's also a lot of rather dumb, preachy sentimentality that really has no place in the story.

The third act is typically dull here -- I say typically because it's rare for a comedy like this to be solid for three-straight acts. I don't really care that Tim is a moralist or that he loves being a goody-two-shoes. This movie is not about good people - it's about bad and dirty people. Stop trying to force me to feel something deep for these cartoonish characters.

This is an OK movie. It's not brilliant, but much better than a lot of stuff out there (30 Minutes or Less, Bridesmaids). I don't know why people would say it's one of the best of 2011... but some people thought that about The Help, which is much more offensive.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Fairy (Thursday, February 23, 2012) (15)

In their last film, L'Iceberg, Dominique Abel, Fiona Gordon and Bruno Romy created a wonderful film based on dance, movement and physical comedy. It is a film reminiscent of the best of Jacques Tati, but a bit more gonzo, a bit off. In their newest film, The Fairy, they bring the same brightness and exuberance back for another tale of love and janky magic.

Dom (Abel) is a night clerk in a hotel in Le Havre, France. One night, as he's working, a woman shows up (Gordon) saying her name is Fiona and that she is a fairy who can give him three wishes. A bit surprised, Dom asks for a motor scooter as his first wish and unlimited gas as his second wish. Before he can come up with his third wish, the two begin making out and have sex.

It seems Fiona is the worst fairy ever, as her idea for unlimited gas for the scooter is to buy an oil container at the port that Dom can re-fill his small tank out of. She doesn't seem to have any really strong magic skills (though she does make one man fly) and her powers are mostly based on misdirection and cunning (like when she steals an outfit and shoes to wear on a date with Dom). As frequently happens, she gets pregnant and gives birth in a few minutes, and Dom and her have to care for their baby and avoid the people who get more and more frustrated with their clumsy, goofy behavior around the port city.

For me physical comedy is a really difficult thing. When done well (by masters like Chaplin, Keaton, Lloyd or Tati) it is some of the most wonderful stuff on film; when done badly it's painful and forgettable. Gordon and Abel are new masters of physical comedy and add their own hilarious and off-beat twist to the gags. Certainly part of what makes them so appealing is that they're both individually rather strange looking (she's a bit like a more voluptuous Tilda Swinton, he looks like a drag queen out of makeup) and they play a lot with this.

They also run around Le Havre, which is a bit like a movie being set in Jersey City or downtown Miami (not the beachy part), it's ugly and is a failed Modernist concrete hellscape. They're laughing at the averageness of this world, and the idea that such a simpleton as Dom would want a scooter as one of his three wishes (when another man asks to be able to fly).

This is one of the most fun films I've seen in a long time. It's weird and hilarious, silly and wonderful.

Starts: 3.5 of 4

Hipsters (Thursday, February 16, 2012) (11)

Do you sometimes feel like there are too few musical-comedies in theaters? Do you wish they were more political and historical in content... but not about the French Revolution? Did the death of Josef Stalin make you want to get up and sing and dance? Well, if you answered yes to any of those then Valery Todorovsky's film Hipsters is the movie for you!

A brief note for the youngs: There was a time about 60 years ago when the term "hipsters" was used to describe people who saw themselves as separate from the rest of society, who looked down their noses at "normal" people (sometimes called "norms"), who distinguished themselves by listening to music you never heard of and had a sartorial style and hairstyles that norms might think of as embarrassing. No, they didn't live in Northern Brooklyn, but in Moscow in 1955.

Such is the setting for this story of rebellion and youth. As the film opens in Thaw-era Russia, there is a dance party where hipsters are listening to American rock, jazz and R&B music and another group of square kids, party members, comes in to break up the fete. The deputy of that group is Mels (Anton Shagin), who is a future leader, but also really interested in the style of the hipsters he's harassing. By chance he meets hot blond Polly (Oksana Akinshina) and falls in love with her. He then decides he will let his hair down (that is, put it up into a pompadour) and become a hipster to try to have a chance with Polly.

This is a very Jacques Demy-style musical, with big choreographed numbers that grow out of every-day life. We see factory workers dancing as they do their work and just about all the songs are about sex and kids being in love or being told to straighten up by their narrow-minded folks. Todorovsky does a wonderful job of using color (and hair) to highlight characters and actions so we can easily tell which side people are on and who is a friend (a bit like Quadrophenia as well, with the two waring sides of hipsters and norms rather than mods and rockers).

At times the subtext is a bit overdone, as we are beaten over the head with the concept that this American music is particularly black and that it is tantamount to sex (yeah - no, I get it - be-bop is like sex - the montage of dancing to the music and screwing is unnecessary). Still, this is a nice and fun film, generally well put together and rather clever about the intersection of these historical moments (the rise of rock music and the Thaw). The last number is a bit too much (a bit reminiscent of the "What the World Needs Now is Love" song at the end of Bob & Carol & Ted & Alice) with all the youth from all times singing together about peace and love, but it's musical-comedy, so it does tend toward overstatement.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

HappyThankYouMorePlease (2011) (Thursday, January 26, 2012) (146)

It's an old story. A guy on a subway train, who is late for a meeting, finds a lost little boy and takes him in, learning more about himself as he teaches the boy things about life and the city. No, this isn't Chaplin's The Kid, nor is it Adam Sandler in Big Daddy. It's HappyThankYouMorePlease, Josh Radnor's pet project that he wrote, directed and stars in.

This is a nice little ensemble comedy about Sam (Radnor), a New York writer who is rather stuck in his life. He meets Rasheen (Michael Algieri) on the subway and all of his friends think he's nuts for not going to the cops to find his family. It seems that Rasheen is a foster kid and is just as happy with Sam as with his foster people. Sam's cousin, Mary Catherine (Zoe Kazan), is an artist and in a rather rocky relationship with her boyfriend and his best friend, Annie (Malin Akerman), has alopecia and works in a law firm where she's hit on by all the nerdy lawyers, despite not having any hair on her head. With Rasheen as the catalyst everyone finds their own happy way.

There's nothing particularly wonderful about this film, but nothing really terrible about it either. It's a movie I've seen a few times already and nothing really fresh at all. The best thing in the film is the discovery of young Algieri, who seems to really have something... but he's a kid and those things are designed to be cute.

I give Radnor credit for writing a movie and casting the beautiful Kate Mara as the romantic love interest. That's a great idea, bro. I'd have done the same, I'm sure!

Stars: 2.5 of 4

Arthur (2011) (Tuesday, January 18, 2012) (140)

This new Arthur movie, with Russell Brand, Hellen Mirren and Greta Gerwig, is a remake of the 1981 comedy of the same name with Dudley Moore, John Gielgud and Liza Minnelli. Today we find ourselves in another economic pit and what will make us happier than watching a drunk asshole win by being sober and less of an asshole.

There are a handful of updates or tweaks, but most of the story is the same. Arthur (Brand) is an out-of-control billionaire who does anything and everything he wants to do in New York City. His best friend is his butler Hobson (Mirren), who constantly insults him with a sharp tongue and generally looks after him. He is told he'll lose his money unless he marries Susan (Jennifer Garner), the heiress of another gigantic fortune, partly because she is a proper fit socially and partly because it would be a good business move for his family company.

Just as he's about to settle down against his well, he meets Naomi (Gerwig) who is a middle-class girl from Queens who runs illegal tours of New York (which is almost the same as stealing from Bergdorf Goodman, of course!). He falls head over heels for Naomi because she's honest and smart and has to figure out how to keep his money and win her over.

I like the original film, but I don't love it, yet it's much, much better than this heap. Brand is a total asshole and not appealing at all. Part of the reason the first film works at all is that Moore is charming and generally likable, even in his drunkest. Brand is a lot more juvenile than Moore was, more like a kid with a lot of money than a man who behaves badly.

Mirren is great in this role, though I think it's the ultimate straight-man and it's written well (Gielgud was also great in this role as well). Gerwig is always fabulous, though it's still weird for me to see her all clean and with makeup on as I always think she does better when she's more natural and awkward, less scripted. Her character is less loud and crazy -- because she's not Liza, with all that she brings -- and I think the connection here between Arthur and Naomi is more suggested by the context of the story than shown clearly.

This is a totally recycled film that really has no business being remade. I don't think this adds anything to the original film (which is still pretty funny) and I can't figure out why anyone would want to watch Brand, who is a total hack.

Stars: 1 of 4

Carnage (Saturday, December 17, 2011) (117)

I didn't see the Yasmina Reza play "God of Carnage" when it played in New York a few years ago. Something about the celebrity cast and the concept of the story turned me off. Now Roman Polanski and Reza have adapted the play for the screen and I see why I avoided it to this point.

Carnage is a movie about American liberalism run amok. Two couples, the Cowans (Jodie Foster and John C. Reilly) and the Longstreets (Kate Winslet and Christoph Waltz), meet in a North Heights/DUMBO apartment to discuss a violent fight their sons had. Nobody wants to really say what is on their mind (that they are incredibly embarrassed and that they are somewhat ashamed of their sons' bad behavior) but nobody really wants to let the situation pass without getting in the last word. Their discussion begins with an agreement of guilt and then devolves into a shitshow of accusations and torturous interactions where each of the four people show themselves to be disgusting for what they say and do.

I read the tone as particularly anti-Liberal and specifically anti-American (though I guess that has a lot to do with me). The idea that these people are obsessed with this event and can't see how unimportant it is, shows how shallow they all are. When Foster's character talks about a book she is writing, about Darfur, our eyes all roll as we realize she's that fucking person... obsessed with saving the world as she lives in a gorgeous apartment with the view of bridges.

Polanski and Reza seem obsessed with showing that this is reality - that these people are you and me - but it all comes off just a bit off-key. It's 98% real, but that missing 2% is rather painful. To be picky: At one point, Waltz looks out the window and comments at a passing train, "Look, you can see the El." Sorry, buddy, but the El is a thing in Chicago -- in New York and Brooklyn it's called a "subway" or a "train"; there is a lot of discussion of the "flower shop up by Henry," but Henry Street is a North-South street and if you're talking about it, you say "over by Henry" or "up on Henry". (Prepositional shibboleth... like how you live in Manhattan but on Miami Beach.) I know these are really small and insignificant things, but they point to the "fun-house mirror" quality to the film and its conclusions, rather than it being a real reflection of anything in our world. I can imagine a guy getting a phone call while at a friend's house, but I can't imagine a guy taking a call every three minutes and not excusing himself. (This is something I blame on the transition from play to movie, where a small thing we must suspend disbelief for onstage doesn't work onscreen.)

This is all further magnified as the actors all speak in a very deliberate, enunciated style, highlighting the written-quality of their language. Sadly Waltz's American is rough and has rounded consonants... and Reilly is not really that kind of actor, so we end up with the two women speaking in this style and the two men struggling to catch up. It seems very unintentionally Brechtian and uncomfortable (to say nothing of the Brechtian idea that this is was not shot on location in Brooklyn and is a reconstituted apartment, shot somewhere in Europe).

I can't totally understand what Polanski is trying to achieve with such an expressionistic film. Is he criticizing American liberalism because it has directly affected his life? Am I reading too much into that? Is that the very point? It all seems interesting as a curiosity, but a bit shallow. As much as I love Brooklyn apartment porn, this all feels more like snuff than anything particularly erotic.

Stars: 1.5 of 4

Young Adult (Thursday, December 15, 2011) (116)

Young Adult is the second movie by the writer-director duo of Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman. Their first effort, Juno, was peppered with the cool lingo of the youngs and seemed to convince people for a minute that it was an accurate depiction of what young culture was like - honest to blog! And yet, Juno was one of the most shrill and frustrating films I've seen in a long time. It was totally cutesy and overdone, to say nothing of the ridiculous decision to keep the baby - which relegates the precocious high school girl to a life of subservience and mediocrity.

Young Adult is a similar window into a world that we all feel familiar with, but wish we could forget or ignore. It's as much an attack on Middle America, its values, aesthetic and gestalt, as it is an exploration of a reckless misanthrope. What comes off, though is much more cruel and mean-spirited than anything I would have expected from this tandem.

Mavis Gary (Charlize Theron) is a young-adult fiction writer in her mid-30s whose life in Minneapolis seems to have hit the rocks in recent years. She's divorced and lives alone in a nice-looking condo with her purse dog. She drinks a lot and falls down drunk in bed alone most nights. One morning, when struggling with a writing assignment, she gets an e-mail from the wife of her high school boyfriend that they had a baby.

This sends her into some bizarre manic episode where she drives to her small hometown, ostensibly far away and in the middle of nowhere (though it looks like it's in the Minneapolis suburbs), so she can reconnect with the ex, Buddy Slade (Patrick Wilson), and woo him back to her. While there she meets up with the nerd from her high school, Matt (Patton Oswalt), who has grown up to be a nerd, but nice a nice one, and runs into her parents a few times. She finds that life is not as wonderful in a small town and that she's much more messed up than she wanted to admit... and that she really doesn't want to go back to her glory days of high school.

My biggest problem with the film is that it's never clear to me what the hell Mavis is looking to find. We understand her life is a mess, but she seems to deny it to herself (or if she is aware of her issues, she doesn't want to face them and keeps doing the stuff that's bad for her) (a comedy about an alcoholic is pretty thin, no?). It seems she wants to regain the stature she had in high school, when she was "cool" and hot and had lots of sex behind the football field (even though she was dating Buddy...?), but it's never clear what her ultimate goal is. Does she want to ruin Buddy's happy life for the schadenfreude? Does she really give a shit about what happened to her 20 years ago? This feels like an atmosphere piece and really under-developed, more concerned with cutesy jokes and "remember-whens" more than a Sweet Home Alabama return-to-glory piece.

The troubling part throughout this film is that it has a very mean undertone to it. Mavis looks down on the losers of her hometown because she lives in the big city... of Minneapolis (which I'm not judging). The weird thing is that the film's basic premise of city vs. small town doesn't work because the small town looks really sweet and rich. Despite the abundance of fast food (which Mavis seems to relish), there's nothing really wrong with the place. The finale has a bitter tone to it, when Mavis and Matt's sister (of all tertiary characters!) have a discussion at cross-purposes about what they want and hope for. That no characters' stories really ever end (Matt is asleep and unresolved; Buddy will probably hate her, but we don't know) is particularly frustrating.

I'm not really sure what I'm supposed to feel and think about Mavis by the end of the film. She seems mostly aloof, self-centered and mean and doesn't seem grow at all from the first scene (OK - she says she'll clean up... which you can totally believe from an addict). I don't know why I have to sit through this whole film if Mavis neither learns a lesson to be better or pays for her shitiness. I'm not sure Cody and Reitman know the answer to this. Basically she goes from shity, to lady who wants to regain her lost youth, to shity. That's pretty silly, I think.

Stars: 2 of 4

The Sitter (Friday, December 9, 2011) (113)

There are two tracks to director David Gordon Green's career in film: a gritty, dirty, independent, Southern American Gothic dramatic line featuring films like George Washington, Undertow and his best film, All the Real Girls; and a totally different, goofy, gross-out, pot-hazed comedy thread featuring Pineapple Express, the brilliant Eastbound and Down TV show and his latest film, The Sitter. It would be easy to dismiss this latter category as "director-for-hire movies," though I think that would miss the point. I see these two streaks as closer to a director more like Howard Hawks, who made brilliant westerns (Rio Bravo), brilliant film noirs (or is it films noir?) (The Big Sleep) and hilarious screwball comedies (His Girl Friday). I'm not saying DGG is as good as Hawks (that would be silly), but he's just about the only active director now who has that same flexibility with tone and genre. (For what it's worth, he only wrote the dramas he directed; the other films were written by other people.)

Sadly, the script for The Sitter is pretty typical, which results in a rather average movie, rather than a hilarious one. It's a pretty typical babysitter movie. The loser dumbass sitter, Noah (Jonah Hill), gets into all sorts of shenanigans when he's looking after three very self-determined kids (one of whom is played by the brilliantly named Max Records from Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are). They get wrapped up in a chase with drug dealers and cops and have to end up back home by 1am. It's very light, very dirty and has a very warm heart throughout.

Green does a great job with one of the funniest tongue-in-cheek gay camp sequences I've seen in a long time. He's clearly a talented guy. I just wish he would make a few more small dramas again, as his comedies are a bit too silly for his chops.

Stars: 2.5 of 4

The Artist (Friday, November 18, 2011) (101)

The Artist is a silent movie about silent movies. It's totally charming and has a lot in it for cinefiles who love silent movies. It is set in 1928 Hollywood and follows the fictitious George Valentin (Jean Dujardin), a silent leading man from the era of great silent stars. He finds that once 1929 comes around and studios begin to experiment with talkies, he is not able to make movies anymore because he doesn't translate well to sound pictures. His life is turned upside down as he gets a divorce, has to sell all his belongings and move out of his gorgeous mansion and into a modest flat.

Meanwhile, as his star is falling, that of Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) is rising. She had a small part in one of Valentin's last silent pictures and fell madly in love with him then. As she climbs the ladder of success in Hollywood in talkies, she never forgets him and always keeps an eye out to make sure he doesn't get into too much trouble.

This is all a very sweet story of romantic love and all that, but the really great thing that I liked is that it's a silent movie about silent movies. It's very clever and very funny - but smart funny, not just silly funny. There's a very clever nightmare scene, where Valentin worries about literally not being able to speak in a sound world. There's a wonderful sequence on a beautiful staircase that feels like it was pulled right out of a Murnau film. There's also a lot of very clever use of music and print color, where some of the reels seem to have a yellow or blue tone to them, just as old reels of silent films sometimes have. There's a very clever use of Bernard Hermann's score for Vertigo, at a particular moment when the idea of image and possession is very important.

Overall this is a very good movie with lots of good stuff in it. It would not surprise me if it gets lots of Oscar nominations and wins (for direction, acting, costumes and picture, just to name a few). Hollywood loves movies about Hollywood and this is a great one for that. My only real issue with it is that it's a bit too sweet at times and relies on our desire to "fall in love", more than any particularly effective storytelling... that said, it is a very good movie.

Stars: 3.5 of 4