God Help the Beasts in Us.

Take one low-rent apartment on the wrong side of London. Add the two most woefully underused actors in Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade. Throw them together with the two most libertine Americans in Paris, circa 1784. Then add a sizable dollop of (Big Gay) Al Swearingen and what do you get? Why, enough bottled-up testosterone to kill a small horse, naturally.

Well, that and Malcolm Venville’s very theatrical-seeming 44 Inch Chest, a play-like disquisition on primal, wounded masculinity-in-early-winter brought to you by Louis Mellis and David Scinto, the writers of Sexy Beast. (In fact, by the transitive property of fandom, I could’ve opened this review instead with 2/3rds of Beast + 2/3rds of Paris, 1784 + a very ornery Winston Smith, most definitely post-Julia, and the math still works out.) Put in brief, this film was aptly summed up by David Edelstein in one sentence: “It starts to feel less like a thriller than an actors’ workshop.” That’s very true, but, ah, what actors they are.

Edelstein is entirely correct that 44 Inch Chest is mostly all dressed up with no place to go. More than anything, this film just tries to convey a mood of wallowing in the wounded male id for 90 minutes, and the movie ultimately has so little to do that it eventually starts adding random, ill-thought-out dream sequences and clips from the 1944 version of Samson & Delilah just to pad the running time. Still, much like The Men Who Stare at Goats, I’m inclined to forgive a movie some serious flaws if I enjoy the company of the actors involved. And, in that sense, I’ll concede to having a better time at 44 Inch Chest than it probably deserved.

The story here is very simple: Colin Diamond (Ray Winstone) is a broken man. His beloved wife of 21 years (Joanne Whalley) has not only fallen out of love with him, but betrayed him with a handsome French waiter (Melvil Poupaud, who took the same situation much more sanguinely in A Christmas Story.) And now he’s a weeping, blubbering, suicidal, homicidal mess. So much so that his four best mates — amiable Archie (Tom Wilkinson), suave Mal (Stephen Dillane), the happily out Meredith (Ian McShane), and the vindictive Old Man Peanut (John Hurt) — decide to take drastic action.

They capture “Loverboy,” throw him in a wardrobe in the aforementioned rundown flat, and wait around for Colin to exact his revenge. And if he won’t “man up” enough to get the dirty deed done, well, somebody else will have to step in to do it. Because, in this day and age, and men being what they are, cuckoldry is a crime against nature that simply cannot go unavenged. As this crew tell us time and time and time again, usually using even more colorful language, “you just don’t f**k another man’s wife.” But, to paraphrase the inimitable Lloyd Dobler, if these guys know so much about women, how come it’s 3am at the London equivalent of the Gas-and-Sip, and there are absolutely no females around?

If this all sounds like a Harold Pintery, foul-mouthed cockney version of those egregiously mook “men under the gun” Superbowl ads we were regaled with last weekend, well, maybe we’re sorta in the same ballpark. But I would qualify that. First off, just as NIN’s Pretty Hate Machine or, say, (500) Days of Summer capture some of this angst on the young-man side, 44 Inch Chest is really less about misogyny as a dubious lifestyle choice and more just about Men of a Certain Age being burned alive in the horrible flames of thwarted love. Put another way, this movie is a pretty exact cinematic equivalent of Tom Waits’ towering “Make it Rain” or Nick Lowe’s “The Beast in Me” — which, as you know if you have one, is “restless by day, and by night, rants and rages at the stars…(God help the Beast in Me.)”

And speaking of the Beasts in Us, the Sexy Beast influence is pretty strongly felt throughout this movie, and not just because Winstone, McShane, and countless iterations of the C-word are back. Most obviously, John Hurt is now in the over-the-top Ben Kingsley role (also appropriated by Ralph Fiennes in In Bruges), and he has a good deal of fun with it. But other elements of Sexy Beast also came to mind throughout Chest — the dream sequences (better executed in Beast), the men-writhing-underwater bank heist (surely a good visual metaphor for the delving into the male id here), and, maybe most notably, Gal’s memorable profession of love over the phone from London: “I love you like a rose loves rainwater, like a leopard loves its partner in the jungle, like…I don’t know what like.” (And, come to think of it, Sexy Beast has a cuckolding subplot too, with Aitch, Don, and Jackie.)

To be clear, Sexy Beast is, by all accounts, a much better and more interesting film. (It made #29 on my Decade top 100.) But, even though this movie doesn’t really work on its own, I enjoyed 44-Inch Chest as sort of an extended, actors-studio riffing on the same themes. For all the posturing machismo in both movies, Chest and Beast are really both about closet romantics bottling up their feelings behind a tough guy veneer, and the awful consequences that arise when those feelings finally, irrevocably spill out. (In addition, both films feature crimes of passion, and here Winstone is even more tortured by his horrible deed as he is his initial predicament.) To put it another way, 44-Inch Chest is Sexy Beast with its leg caught in a coyote trap, gibbering and howling into the wind in primal misery.

Now, if you haven’t seen Sexy Beast, and don’t much feel like dwelling at length about the similarities, I’ll leave it at this: 44 Inch Chest is basically a filmed play about manliness-gone-sour that’s far too meandering after awhile, and it completely loses the thread in its last half-hour. Still, to my mind, there are worse ways to pass the time than seeing Ray Winstone sweat out several choice monologues, a snarling John Hurt getting to chew the scenery for once, Ian McShane deadpanning a few choice quips, and Stephen Dillane stealing several scenes just by his very presence. (Wilkinson, for his part, should’ve been given more to do.)

This, by the way, is the same trick Dillane often pulled on poor Paul Giamatti in John Adams. Give Mr. Jefferson his due — he might just be operating at a Tony Leung threshold of cool right now. The guy needs more parts and stat…and he’d make a great Doctor when Matt Smith retires the police box…

The Sweet Hereafter.

That other “vaguely religious-themed movie” I mentioned I saw between The Book of Eli and Legion? That would be Peter Jackson’s well-meaning, meandering adaptation of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones. And in all honesty, given the atrocious reviews it received, The Lovely Bones was better and more enjoyable than I had feared going in. Still, it works better as What Dreams May Come-style eye candy than as a movie on its own terms.

Put simply, the main problem here is the source material. Even more than John Hillcoat’s take on The Road, which I thought was an admirable adaptation of a so-so tome, The Lovely Bones the movie is, imho, about a good a film as you could make from such a lousy and overrated book. Now, I understand Sebold’s novel has spoken to a lot of people. But I am not one of those people. I found it to be ghastly, overwritten. Oprahesque nonsense, and finishing the durned thing felt like a chore. And even with PJ at the helm, sadly, The Lovely Bones remains several hours of mostly needless despair-pr0n.

If you haven’t read the book, the gist is this: It’s early December, 1973, and our 14-year-old narrator, Susie Salmon (here, a very good Saiorse Ronan, formerly of Atonement), one day makes the mistake of following her creepy neighbor (Stanley Tucci) into his newly-constructed evil underground lair. There, she is raped and murdered. (This grisly event takes us to about page 20, iirc.) Susie goes to Heaven — or a Heaven-like Limbo, in any event — while her family grieves and gnashes and laments and wails for 300 pages. Oh, and eventually there’s some ghost sex. Yes, really.

Fair enough, but how do they gnash and wail? Well, Ma Salmon (Rachel Weisz) refuses to deal with the loss and its consequences — She turns Susie’s room into an untouched tomb, has an escapist affair with the detective on the case (Michael Imperioli), and eventually runs off to pick grapes somewhere. Pa Salmon (Mark Wahlberg) handles it even worse — The murder upsets his primal sense of order about the universe, and he obsessively tracks down the killer on his own for years to come. Grandma (Susan Sarandon) moves in to try to fill the void left by the distant parents, when she’s sober. And Susie’s siblings, Lindsey (Rose McIver) and Buckley (Christian Thomas Ashdale), grow up and live their lives, although Lindsey has some sneaking suspicions about the creep next door…

Peter Jackson and his LotR writing team (Fran Walsh and Philippa Boyens) have made a few changes here and there. Most notably (and very thankfully), Susie’s rape is now only vaguely implied rather than shown. (To those who question this change, I’m with Ronan: What in blue blazes is wrong with you?) Here, Susie’s murder is quite gracefully handled, although I could’ve done with less spider-toying-with-the-fly type stuff before the horrible deed is committed. And Ma Salmon’s romance with the detective is gone — now it’s just occasional long looks. Otherwise, they follow what I remember of the book pretty closely here.

Which is a lot of the problem. Like the book, The Lovely Bones is mostly inchoate and shapeless. As in the novel, there’s no real through-line or sense of momentum in the story. It moves without purpose — Time passes, stuff happens. Look, Susie is playing in her beautiful heaven…oh wait, she’s sad…hey, let’s have a grandma montage…ok, Tucci is still creepy…hey, look, more heaven….oooh, Marky Mark is on the warpath…and so on. I suspect folks who complain about the last thirty minutes of Return of the King will not have much fun with this one — the whole movie has that languid, meandering, “oh and another thing” feel to it.

That being said, The Lovely Bones is quite pretty to look at. (Thanks, Team WETA!) Despite the awfulness of the subject matter, Bones has a very crisp and colorful presentation that soothes the eye even as the story bogs down. And the performances are all pretty good here — especially Ronan — with one minor exception. His Oscar nod aside, Stanley Tucci is probably the weak link here. Like Peter Sarsgaard in An Education, he’s way too much of an off-putting mouth-breather to take seriously. Playing the killer as more sociable and self-assured — like Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu in the original version of The Vanishing — would’ve added a lot more menace to this thankless character.

So, given what he had to work with here, I thought Peter Jackson et al actually turned in a pretty quality product. (The real problem was trying to adapt Sebold’s book in the first place.) So, no harm, no foul, so to speak: The Lovely Bones is by no means a bad movie — It just sorta is. If you really want to see Peter Jackson tackle a story involving fantastical visions, teenage girls, and unspeakable acts of murder, I’d recommend his earlier classic, Heavenly Creatures. As for Bones, my thoughts on it are pretty much akin to my sneaking suspicions about a film I haven’t yet seen, Lee Daniels’ Precious. In this world, sadly, really horrible things happen to good and innocent people every single day…but that doesn’t mean we have to wallow in the fact.

They Kick Ass for the Lord!

(With all apologies to Father McGruder.) Yes, y’all, the End of Days has come. There is a hole in the sky. John Cusack is off floating on his ark. Hobo Viggo and son are somewhere on I-95, “carrying the fire.” And, for their part, bad-ass evangelist Denzel Washington is apparently the last Jehovah’s Witness on Earth, and the fallen angel Paul Bettany is trying to take his broken wings and learn to fly again. (Did you know that every time a bell rings, an angel is shooting somebody in the face?)

In any event, I saw Allen and Albert Hughes’ The Book of Eli and Scott Stewart’s Legion on subsequent weekends (with another vaguely religious-themed movie in between, which I’ll get to in a bit), and they seem like they merit discussing together. Both are post-apocalyptic B-movies, and, weirdly enough, that’s B as in Bible: Both use Judeo-Christian themes as a pretext for ninety minutes or so of Matrix-y ass-kicking. And neither are as smart, entertaining or satisfying in their B-movieness as the Spierig’s recent Daybreakers. Of the two, Legion probably comes closer to finding that popcorn movie groove, just because it makes no bones about being unabashedly dumb — but it too slips off the rails in the final half-hour.

More on that in a bit. Let’s take the Hughes’ Book of Eli first. I should start by saying that I’m glad to see the Hughes brothers making a movie again, although I wish it was one a good deal better than this goofy drek. Their assured, eminently quotable 1993 debut Menace II Society is one of my favorite films of the nineties, and in a perfect world it should have gotten all the many props that went to John Singleton’s more Hollywood’y Boyz n the Hood of 1991. (“Now O-Dog was America’s worst nightmare: Young, black, and don’t give a f**k.“) And their take on From Hell in 2001 was laudably strange and decently compelling — It’s definitely not the worst Alan Moore adaptation out there, by a long shot.

To their credit, the Hughes give this post-apocalyptic America a bleached-out, Big Sky look that’s eye-catching…for the first half-hour of so. (After awhile, there get to be way too many slo-mo hero shots of Denzel and his eventual protege, Mila Kunis.) And, during that opening half-hour, it seems like Book of Eli might make for a pretty solid spaghetti western or samurai flick. There are two kinetic six-or-seven-on-one melees in particular, wherein a motley assortment of Borderlands-style goons and Mad Max castoffs meet the business end of Denzel’s machete, that suggest The Book of Eli will make for a pretty fun B-movie ride.

But then it all starts falling apart, mainly as a result of terrible writing. For it soon becomes clear that Denzel, a.k.a. Eli, is attracting attention in this World Gone Wrong because he is carrying — I kid you not — the Last King James Bible on Earth. Yes, somehow — only thirty years after the nukes fell — every single bible out of every single house, apartment, bookstore, mega-mart, and motel room on the planet has been destroyed…but one. This is apparently, it is said, because the survivors blamed the Bible for the End Times coming and destroyed them all. How the few remaining survivors managed to relay this message all around the world after communications had stopped is left unexplained. Nor do they show the poor irradiated schmoes who were forced to wander from burnt-out church to broken-down motel over those thirty years, scouring the Earth for the estimated 7.5 billion copies of the world’s most reproduced book. And they only missed one!

But that’s not all. So, Denzel is toting around that last Good Book, and the Big Bad of the local Bartertown — Gary Oldman — wants its immense persuasive power for his own. I forget the exact wording, but he does some monologuing to the effect of: Only with that bible in my possession will I have the words to exert my domination over the remnants of humankind! So, in other words, if he gets the Book under his thrall, Oldman will be the new prophet-king of social control. To which I say…huh? First off, at the risk of offending certain readers’ religious sensibilities — move along, Tom Cruise — hasn’t Oldman’s character ever heard of L. Ron Hubbard or Dianetics? (Or seen Zardoz, for that matter?) If you want to set up a new religion with yourself at its center, you don’t really need a KJV bible to do it. Second, it’s made abundantly clear that Oldman knows the bible pretty well from his early days anyway. He can’t just…wing it? How much more would you need other than the stories, which everybody knows, and a few choice excerpts like the Lord’s Prayer?

Not to give the game away, but The Book of Eli also suffers from a truly dumb Shyamalan ending which I will not disclose here. (Suffice to say, A Clockwork Orange notwithstanding, Malcolm McDowell showing up in the late going of any film isn’t usually a mark of quality. And if you really want to know the final turn, I’ll give a hint in spoiler-vision: “What do Rutger Hauer and Zhang Ziyi have in common?“) Now, to be fair to The Book of Eli (and as an AICN commenter pointed out), a lot of sci-fi and fantasy B-movies have plot devices that make it hard to sustain disbelief — time-traveling robots from the future, for example. True, Eli‘s central conceit is roughly similar to the plot of the very good A Canticle for Leibowitz (although that book takes place centuries after the nuclear holocaust, and the Catholic priests involved aren’t trying to preserve the Bible per se.) And, even the next movie I’m about to discuss makes less sense up front than Book of Eli‘s goofy “all the Bibles are gone!” schtick.

The difference is, in those other movies (Legion aside), once you accept the premise that robots can time-travel, Earth is now populated by damn dirty apes, vampires have taken over or whathaveyou, the rest of the story makes decent sense in that world, and is pretty darned entertaining to boot. The Book of Eli…not so much. For one, Denzel’s character is too superhuman throughout — After the first few fracases, there’s no sense at all that he ever might be in danger. More problematically, perhaps realizing that fundamental problem, the screenwriter (Gary Whitta) instead decides to punctuate pretty much every scene with women in sexual peril, a decision which is supremely lazy and, after awhile, borderline misogynistic. (Were you to play a drinking game involving one beverage for every time Mila Kunis, Jennifer Beals, or any other woman in The Book of Eli is threatened with rape or violence, or those threats are acted upon, you may just end up drunk enough to stop wondering what the hell is wrong with Gary Whitta.)

Anyway, all that aside, there are a few small glimmers of entertainment here and there in the later going, although they’re mostly meta moments: Michael Gambon and Frances De La Tour escape Hogwarts long enough to show up as gun-totin’ redneck cannibals, and both play it like they’re on some kind of dare. And Dracula does get to share another scene with his Renfeld, the inimitable Tom Waits. (Oldman and Washington are professionals anyway — neither condescend to this lousy material.) In the end, though, The Book of Eli is a bad movie with a dumb premise that doesn’t even seem to understand how bad or dumb it is. And that ultimately just makes it worse.

Now Scott Stewart’s Legion, on the other hand, wears its B-movie badness like a badge of honor, and that gets some points from me. I mean, Dennis Quaid and Charles Dutton as two short-order cooks, fending off demons in their middle-of-nowhere diner (in a place called Paradise Falls, no less)? These guys are hardened veterans of this sort of thing. They know the score, and they help bring the right sense of proportion to the rest of the survivors, including Adrianne Palicki, Tyrese, Kate Walsh, Willa Holland, and the underrated Lucas Black (who, on Sling Blade alone, really should’ve played Jake Lloyd’s part in The Phantom Menace.) In every scene they’re in, Quaid and Dutton manage to wordlessly convey their understanding that: Look at best, we’re making Tremors here, people.

In Legion, the End of Days wasn’t a man-made screw-up this time. Rather, in a fit of Old Testament wrath, our Father who art in Heaven decides that the whole mankind experiment has totally and utterly failed (maybe He caught wind of the whole reality-TV thing) and thus sends down a few plagues — locusts, angels, and whatnot — to smote us all into oblivion. Fortunately for us, the archangel Michael (Paul Bettany) isn’t down with the new program, and so he clips his wings, dons some choice duds and a ridiculous amount of firepower, and becomes humankind’s protector, or at least the protector of an unborn child that apparently will be some kind of second Messiah. (Think John Connor, but biblical.) And if he can save a few diner patrons while he’s at it, well the more the merrier.

So, in other words, if The Book of Eli was a post-apocalyptic western — a Stranger comes to Town and all that — Legion is really more of a zombie movie. It’s a bunch of random strangers thrown together by crisis, trying to survive against impossible supernatural odds without killing each other. Or, in other words, it’s The Prophecy meets Night of the Living Dead meets The Terminator meets Assault on Precinct 13. (At times, it also feels a lot like the considerably better Prince of Darkness, but without Alice Cooper around to play the possessed folk.) And, even more than with Eli, I vibed into its flagrant b-movieness for the first hour or so of its run.

The problem is, Stewart and co-writer Peter Schink don’t really seem to know where they want to take this thing. You know that old saw about throwing a bunch of characters together in a room and pretty soon they start to write themselves? Well, if Legion is any indication, sometimes they don’t. And so the movie starts to lose its early head of B-movie steam by the middle going, as the various survivors pair off and spin their wheels with “character-building” conversations that go nowhere. There are a few funny exchanges, most of which made it into the ubiquitous trailer. (“I don’t even believe in God!” “That’s ok, He doesn’t believe in you either.“) But even more than in most of these flicks, I found myself sitting around waiting for the next attack just to get things moving once more.

And that brings us to the other big problem. The ground rules here don’t make a whole lot of sense. So these zombies are angels? Clearly, gunfire cuts through them like butter, so they don’t seem any different from, you know, zombies. And why are they attacking in waves like this? What’s the plan here? I know the Lord works in mysterious ways, but…is He really one for acid-drenched booby traps? Schink and Stewart have one clever conceit here — that the most innocuous-looking people around are the ones you’ll really need to worry about to go bugnuts evil at the drop of a hat. But they just keep reusing it. When an old lady attacks (again, as per the trailer), it’s a clever reversal of expectations. But when little kids and the ice cream man later do the same, it all gets a bit redundant.

By the time the archangel Gabriel (Kevin Durand, seeming, in all honesty, pretty straight-to-video) shows up in the last half-hour, Legion just gives up any pretense of coherence. I can barely explain anything that happens after the remaining few souls scramble out of the diner, other than to say it really isn’t worth trying to explain anyway. To its credit, Legion may not suffer from the dreary self-seriousness of The Book of Eli, but the last reel is just as convoluted and nonsensical. And, as such, both movies end up feeling a bit like the lurid daydreams of an ADD-afflicted teenager, one who’s fallen asleep after way too much Red Bull, Bible Study, and Modern Warfare 2. It’s time to wrap this up, so if you’ll forgive a really terrible pun: Lacking conviction and passionate intensity, sadly, neither of these flicks are worth a second coming.

Tender Mercies 2: Sing Tenderer.

Ok, so maybe Texas is a Country for Old Men. A kissing cousin to 2008’s The Wrestler and a close nephew to 1983’s Tender Mercies, Scott Cooper’s Crazy Heart, which I caught last night while fighting off a nasty cold, is, well, thoroughly ok. If you see it, you won’t feel cheated. If you don’t, well, you haven’t missed all that much.

Like its main character Bad Blake, a former country-and-western star now way past his sell date, the movie sorta grows on you in its middle hour with its sly, drawling wit. But, taken as a whole, we’ve heard this particular song — Old Guy in a Rut slouches toward a New Leaf — quite a few times recently, in The Wrestler, Gran Torino, The Visitor, About Schmidt. And, as such, there’s not really enough new here to recommend the experience, not even the admirable (and likely Oscar-procuring) performance by the consistently excellent Jeff Bridges.

Here, Bridges is a washed-up country singer and (barely-)functioning alcoholic, not unlike Robert Duvall (who also appears here as Bad’s bartender pop) in Tender Mercies. Left behind, financially speaking, by his ex-sidekick and protege Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell, playing it nu-country), Bad now ekes out a living as a King of the Road: In his long-suffering ’78 Suburban, Bad drives hundreds of miles a week to play run-down bars and out-of-the-way bowling alleys with pick-up bands for petty cash. (In fact, Bad’s first line is something along the lines of “Ugh, another g*dd**n bowling alley.” — So, yes, the Dude is rolling again, although now he’s been pretty-well fused with Sam Elliot’s Cowboy.)

Anyway, it’s a godforsaken living and no mistake, and it’s either made slightly better or considerably worse by Bad’s trademark penchant for McClures (re: cheap) whiskey, not to mention his tendency to smoke like a chimney. And so he rambles on through Texas and the Southwest, nursing his grudges and his booze as best he can. Until one day, he makes the acquaintance of a bright-eyed new ladyfriend (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her young son Buddy (Jack Nation) — (More shades of Tender Mercies here, which, by the way, is a movie I saw in English class in high school and didn’t much care for. But, given my age, it could’ve been a pearls-before-swine type of thing.) Will Bad take this opportunity to change his ways, maybe mend some fences with both his former apprentice and the son he left behind years ago? Well, old habits die hard, and at least so far, the bottle’s never let him down.

For most of its run, Crazy Heart is decently entertaining from moment to moment, although I suppose folks who don’t dig bar-band-type country may well get sick of some of the extended musical scenes. And, until the last half-hour or so, when the movie bogs down in both child-in-peril cliches and rehab platitudes — it ain’t much fun once he quits drinking — I felt like this flick was slow-paced but pretty engaging. It mostly follows a tried-and-true chord progression, sure, but the film still plays it lively and switches up the melody enough to make it seem like you were experiencing something new.

But by the end, when everything falls into order just a little too tidily, Crazy Heart loses its rhythm and starts to feel more than ever like just a country-style cover version of The Wrestler — or worse, like The Wrestler for folks who wanted a little more sugar to ameliorate that film’s downer ending. (And weirdly enough and compounding the Wrestler similarities, it looks like Bridges will be the Mickey Rourke to Colin Firth’s Sean Penn in this year’s Oscar race. That is, of course, Clooney notwithstanding, and despite the fact that I’d probably still go with Sam Rockwell in Moon.)

Speaking of which, Bridges is a consistently great actor who by now deserves an Oscar for something. But I’m not necessarily sure that the collection of boozehound, Leaving Las Vegas-y tics on display here is really what I’d honor him for. It’s not a bad performance by any means — To the contrary, Bridges rings true throughout. (And in fact, the Dude isn’t even all that bad a country singer. Just don’t ask him to play the f**king Eagles.) But, however much Bridges wisely underplays his character, Bad’s story here feels so thrice-told and Oscar-baitish at times that I found it hard to feel too much for the guy. There’s a Devil in the Bottle? There’s a Tear in My Beer? If that ain’t country, I don’t know what is.

Evil Twin Theory.

And now to the third and final film of last Friday’s quality triple-feature, Miguel Arteta’s solidly entertaining Youth in Revolt, based on the novel by C.D. Payne. (I haven’t read this book, but judging from its Wikipedia entry and a la A Single Man last week, it sounds quite different.)

As I said back over in the Daybreakers review, my view of all three of these back-to-back-to-back movies is pretty similar — Each accomplishes what it aspires to do pretty well. If you like clever, gory, unabashed B-movies, you’ll enjoy Daybreakers. If you warm to the tics (and foibles) of Terry Gilliam unleashed, you’ll probably like The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus. And if you find Michael Cera and his awkward attempts to score inherently amusing, you’ll probably dig Youth in Revolt.

So, yes, this is another film in a long line of them where Cera, deeply uncomfortable in his own skin as usual, is trying to figure out What Women Want. (And, by that, I mean that, as in Superbad, he’s frantically trying to lose his virginity once more, and, as in Juno, he may or may not succeed.) The wrinkle this time is that Cera has willfully concocted his own Tyler Durden to help him out — a lascivious, mustachioed, (creepily) blue-eyed Frenchman named Francois Dillinger. In other words, imagine Cera playing both his and the Jonah Hill role in Superbad. Or, to go back to the source, just pretend George Michael had another cousin other than Maeby, and he was Gob’s kid.

So that’s the basic gist. Cera’s Nick Twisp has a few other hurdles to navigate — his mom (Jean Smart)’s worthless trucker boyfriend (Zach Galifanakis), his dad (Steve Buscemi)’s refusal to fund him, his neighbor (Fred Willard)’s general strangeness, his increasing problems with the law (as represented by cop-for-life Ray Liotta). But, mainly, he’s just trying to get to know his new girlfriend Sheeni (Portia Doubleday) a bit better. And, to do that, he’ll have to get past her uber-Christian parents (M. Emmet Walsh and Mary Kay Place), the considerable shroom collection of her older brother (Justin Long), the many impressive qualities of her other squeeze, Trent (Jonathan B. Wright), and all the long-distance problems involved. At least Nick has Francois aiding and abetting him in his shenanigans and providing that alpha-male tang when needed. But, as Nick fast discovers, there’s a reason the real Dillinger died in a hail of lead.

I know Michael Cera is verging on over-exposed right now, and I’ve also heard from several corners that people are tiring of him. Ok, fair enough. I kinda felt the same way going in, and I even skipped Nick & Nora’s Infinite Playlist and Year One. But it didn’t take long before Cera won me over again. The guy’s got impeccable comic timing, and nobody — not even Anthony Michael Hall in his prime — does awkward teen quite as well. Scott Pilgrim vs. the World aside, I’m not sure how much longer he’ll be able to milk this character — he’s getting a bit long in the tooth at this point — but he’s darn good at it. And, at least with Francois, he gets to play outside his usual sandbox for awhile.

In the end, the occasionally bawdy, mostly good-natured Youth in Revolt reminded me less of Superbad or Juno than it did the John Cusack/Savage Steve Holland teen-classics of the ’80s, Better Off Dead and One Crazy Summer. (This may be partly because, like the former, Youth in Revolt goes for the hand-drawn animated credit sequence.) And, you know what, Cusack pretty much always played the same guy back then too — you could argue he’s still doing it now. So let’s cut Cera a break already. After all, if we keep pushing him, he may up and pull a Francois and burn down the banana stand again later this year…

Unfinished Symphony.

The second installment of Friday’s triple-threat, Terry Gilliam’s The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus is an often meandering, occasionally magnificent beauty, and a film that I expect will satisfy Gilliam fans, and those with a tolerance for his indulgences, more than it does people just looking to take in Heath Ledger’s last curtain call.

To be honest, this motley extravaganza ends up running a bit too long. And Parnassus is a ragged carnival at that, becoming more inchoate as it spins its wheels. Plus, Ledger’s final performance, alas, is mostly just set-up without the follow-through — Other actors play the meat of the character. Still, despite the movie’s very visible faults, Imaginarium nonetheless feels like a loving throwback to the days of Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Imagination,” particularly Time Bandits and The Adventures of Baron Munchausen. (In fact, Gilliam now argues that this film replaces Brazil in that trilogy.) And, if, like me, you have any fondness for the old-school, crazy-cartoonist, anything-can-happen Gilliam, Imaginarium is a very worthwhile experience nonetheless.

True, Parnassus is nowhere near as good or as perfectly formed as Brazil, which remains Gilliam”s magnum opus. (Although one reason this movie may have that “classic” Gilliam feel to it is the presence of co-screenwriter Charles McKeown, who helped pen Brazil and Munchausen, and appeared in the former as “Harvey Lime,” Sam Lowry’s desk-mate.) Nor is it as taut and self-contained as the three quality entrants in Gilliam’s “Trilogy of Americana” — The Fisher King, 12 Monkeys, and Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. All that being said, Parnassus is the best movie Gilliam has made in over a decade, and it definitely allows him the chance to let his freak flag fly.

For Imaginarium centers on a portal — a magic mirror — that keeps leading into a “world of pure imagination,” one that bears some unmistakable glimmers of the old Monty Python scrapbook-cartoons. Kept in the possession of an immortal sage named Dr. Parnassus (Christopher Plummer, in the plummiest (Plummiest?) role he’s had in years), this mirror has been used as a field of not-so-friendly wagering between he and the Devil (Tom Waits, a casting coup) for thousands of years. Through this garden of Gilliamesque delights wander the unknowing souls who happen upon Dr. Parnassus’ roadshow and walk through the mirror. And, more often than not — people being people — they make lousy decisions and end up in the bad company of Old Nick.

Now, thanks to another ill-advised bet with the Devil, the eternal soul of Parnassus’ only daughter, Valentina (Lily Cole), is at stake. And, given that this good Doctor only has two allies in the world — Percy, his diminutive and long-suffering #2 (Verne “Mini-Me” Troyer), and a young orphan lad named Anton (Andrew Garfield) — it doesn’t look like there’s much help on the horizon. (Troyer, by the way, [a] cannot act worth a damn and [b] seems game for pretty much anything. But Garfield is really good. I kept thinking “Who is this guy? he’s solid” throughout. And, unlike Sam Worthington, he actually seems deserving of some of the Next-Big-Thing hype he’s getting right now.)

Anyway, as the tarot cards predicted, Dr. Parnassus’ troupe encounters a hanged man underneath a bridge (Ledger — yes, this intro is more than a bit eerie now.) Once revived, this fellow — Tony, formerly a charity organizer who ran into trouble — is something of an X-Factor in the age-old battle between Parnassus and the Devil. Whose side is he on? Well, as it turns out, he’s on Tony’s side. And, once he gets wind of the mirror, and the world that lies on the other side, he finds himself contemplating, almost despite himself, how he might best take advantage of the situation…

So, the elephant in the room — Heath Ledger. As it turns out, The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus represents both an amazing stroke of luck and a mild disappointment. The stroke of luck is that very few stories out there could accommodate Ledger’s unfinished turn as well as this one. Here, the fact that Tony’s appearance changes every time he steps into the mirror-world — he becomes Johnny Depp, Jude Law, or Colin Farrell — feels almost intuitive and organic, as if it could have been written this way in the first place. But that being said, most of Tony’s major character-beats happen in the mirrorverse, and so Ledger’s role in “our” world — which is mostly just set-up — feels unfinished all-the-same.

In fact, “unfinished” is a good way to sum up both the weaknesses and the strengths of Imaginarium. About 20 minutes in and after several early mirror-world reveries, right as we venture into the past to witness the Doctor’s first Faustian wager, I was thinking this was turning out to be easily one of Gilliam’s best films. But the movie loses its way in the muddled middle going, and by the time, late in the show, when Valentina dances with the Devil in the pale mirrorlight, I had sorta emotionally checked out of Parnassus. (Even then, it’s still fun to watch random items well up from Gilliam’s mindscape — say, the upscale shopping mall and dowdy, pearl-clutching madam of Brazil (“My complication had a little complication“), or the fantasy-on-the-social-fringes aspects of The Fisher King. There’s even a random musical number — sung by policemen in fishnets, no less — which just about screams Monty Python.

So, yes, Ledger’s performance seems only half-there, and the rambling story at hand could’ve probably done with some screw-tightening. But, Imaginarium also feels “unfinished” in a happier sense. Whether this was a strange example of kismet or the script was tinkered with after Ledger’s passing, several of the scenes — most notably Johnny Depp’s — seem to comment directly in tribute to the fallen actor. (“Nothing is permanent, not even death.“)

And in a sense, the whole movie works like that too. As we find out in flashback, Dr. Parnassus once headed a devout order of shamans committed to the Tinkerbellish proposition that, so long as somebody was telling a story, the universe would always continue to exist. Similarly, so long as people keep watching The Dark Knight or The Patriot, I’m Not There or Brokeback Mountain, Ten Things I Hate About You, or, yes, The Imaginarium of Dr. Parnassus, so too will Heath Ledger.

Before Sunrise.

Twilight, True Blood, The Vampire Diaries, Let the Right One In…it seems creatures of the night are everywhere these days. The conceit of the Spierigs’ clever and satisfying Daybreakers is to go the next step and make the situation literal: Everyone’s a vampire now, and blood — particularly the primo-quality human stuff — has become the new oil. Also, there are no sparkling teenage nosferatu here — quite the opposite, really. If you don’t get your hemoglobin fix on the regular…well, let’s just say you won’t end up looking like Robert Pattinson.

Daybreakers was the first leg of a Friday night triple-feature for me, and, if you’re not one for reading long-winded reviews today, I had much the same reaction to all three films: If this particular genre is your cup-of-tea, you’ll probably have a grand ole time. In this case, if you’re someone who enjoys a smart, unabashed B-movie with several dollops of gore, a side of cheesy action, and a patina of political allegory, then Daybreakers should definitely satisfy your nocturnal cravings. On the B-movie scale, I’d say Daybreakers is quite a bit better than, say, Equilibrium or Reign of Fire, and hits at about the level of minor-canon John Carpenter, like They Live! or Prince of Darkness. And, while I think I prefer Stephen Norrington’s Blade in the end, this vampire-noir outing by the brothers Spierig sits very comfortably next to those two flicks on the vampire B-movie shelf.

After an opening tone poem involving a pre-adolescent vampire suicide (a la Claudia in The Vampire Lestat), Daybreakers begins in the near-future: 2019, to be precise. (Given all the vampire-friendly tech on display here — camera-driven cars, “subwalks” to get about during the day — I might’ve moved that date a little further down the line.) We’re now a decade into the infection that turned everyone — or all of those who weren’t eaten, at least — into vampires, and blood is getting scarce.

Enter vampire hematologist Edward Dalton (Ethan Hawke), who has been tasked by the now-reigning Big Pharma overlords (most notably Sam Neill) to develop a safe and adequate blood substitute and prevent panic in the streets. But, unlike his military-minded kid brother (Michael Dorman), who loves being a vampire and hunting down the last remnants of humankind, Edward is conflicted about his condition: He’s basically a vampire-vegetarian, who refuses to drink human blood and tries to help the food he encounters whenever possible.

As such, after a chance encounter with a gaggle of humans where he acts surprisingly honorably for his kind, Edward gains the trust of one Audrey Bennett (Claudia Karvan). And she, in turn leads him to Elvis (Willem DaFoe), a mechanic and now ex-vampire. Ex-vampire, you say? Yep — apparently there might be a cure for the blood thirst, if the strange happenstance that un-turned Elvis can be recreated. But, of course, many folks enjoy their new lifestyle, and have no desire to be “cured.” And, be they human or vampire, pharmaceutical companies tend to operate along similar principles: Namely, who wants a cure when they you can just string out a financially lucrative “treatment” over the course of a lifetime?

Kicking the vampires of Big Pharma in the eyeteeth is just one of the reasonably clever political analogies at work here — there are also some Syriana, Crossing Over, and Food, Inc nods along the way, as well as a class-war aspect within vampire society and an exceptionally gory military fracas near the end that has its own allegorical resonance.) But, mainly, the Spierig brothers just want to tell a cool vampire story, and I like the way that the film sets down a few basic ground rules — 1. Everyone’s a vampire and needs blood. 2. Not getting blood will turn vampires into crazed man-bat-type beasts. 3. Drinking vampire blood will accelerate this process — and then just lets the story unfold from there. (That being said, I do think the story opens itself to trouble by giving these vampires some of the old mythic qualities, like not appearing in mirrors and being susceptible to stakes in the heart. If that’s the case, why aren’t all these humans wearing garlic necklaces and carrying crosses?)

Similarly, almost all of the scares here fall on the cheap side — a sudden loud noise or a man-bat leaping out of the darkness. Otherwise, as you might expect from a story where the protagonist is already a vampire, the film isn’t what you’d call particularly frightening. But for what it is — a fun, vampire-centric B-movie with a lot of grist to think over once safely back in the daylight — Daybreakers delivers the goods rather well. And, if you’re a genre fan, there’s a certain pleasure to be taken simply in watching Sam Neill play the Big Bad, not unlike seeing Michael Biehn showing up in Robert Rodriguez’ Planet Terror. (In fact, it’s exactly the type of fanboy thrill one gets from seeing Tom Waits play the Devil, but more on that in due course.)

One Last Time ‘Round the Horn.

If you’re here on GitM’s front-page, I presume you’re already up on recent posts. But, just as an FYI: While doing some overdue site clean-up this morning (including updating GitM’s neglected sub-site spawn, Small-R Republic and GitM Reviews), I re-posted the recent 5-part Top 100 Films of the Oughts list all in one place — here (or, alternatively, http://bit.ly/100films.) So, if you haven’t perused it yet, enjoy.

GRIEF™, by Ralph Lauren.

Ladies and gentlemen of discriminating taste, be the first in your coterie to experience the strong, clean lines and dramatic intensity that is GRIEF™, the new winter 2010 collection from Ralph Lauren. Witness, for example, the suicidal despair — and casual-yet-professorial elegance — of Colin Firth, here drowning in inconsolable sadness in a double-breasted silk blazer ($3,740), cotton shirt ($500), silk pocket square ($105); cotton trousers ($395), and alligator belt ($995). Or consider the boyish innocence and androgynous suavity of Nicholas Hoult, here in pink angora sweater ($285), khaki trousers ($350), suede-leather shoes ($250), and cotton undershirt ($85). In short, feel horrible about the untimely death of your one true love — and look great doing it! — with GRIEF™, in stores this mid-winter.

Ok, ok, I’m admittedly being uncharitable towards Tom Ford’s A Single Man (and, being sadly fashion-disabled, I stole Firth’s outfit language from here.) But only a little. Let me put it this way: Two recent films came to mind while watching this sad, slow story unfold: Lone Scherfig’s An Education, in that Colin Firth — like Carey Mulligan — rises above the material and gives an Oscar-caliber performance in a movie that’s ultimately only ok. And James Cameron’s Avatar, in that, like life on Pandora, A Single Man has moments of shimmering beauty and yet still, weirdly, remains inert and uninvolving for most of its run.

I’ve never read the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood, but I’m pretty sure the problem here lies with Ford. Granted, this is a pretty good attempt at a first film from someone who’s not a filmmaker — anyone remember artist Robert Longo’s stab at Johnny Mnemonic? Still, particularly in its first hour, the pacing of A Single Man just feels off. Ford keeps putting forth an image he likes (girl-skipping-rope, Firth-moving-against-a-crowd, bare-chested-men-playing-tennis) and then holds it for several beats too long. As a result, and even despite the best efforts of its lead actor, A Single Man often struggles to achieve any dramatic momentum. (This tendency is at its worst during the English class scene. Oh, and by the way, worst…prof…ever. He veg’s out for the duration, kicks some k-nowledge at the end, and leaves. Huh?) The individual images here are all very pretty, yes, if a bit fussed-over. But the film itself moves at a lurching, stop-and-go pace, if it moves at all, to the detriment of the story being told. It’s like watching a slide show.

And the story here is actually pretty simple and straightforward, and should be elemental in its power — It’s Love Lost, basically. The year is 1962, and George Falconer (Firth) — a closeted English professor teaching in Los Angeles — has just lost his partner of 16 years, Jim (Matthew Goode, a.k.a. Ozymandias), in a tragic car accident. Given the times, George cannot even mourn publicly or attend his beloved’s funeral. In fact, he only finds out about the crash a day later, via a call from the deceased’s cousin, Donald Draper — yes, really.

And so the abyss yawns beneath George, and a suicidal depression takes hold. The only person he could possibly confide in about his terrible ordeal is his old friend Charley (Julianne Moore), a woman he slept with years ago and who apparently has been carrying a torch for him ever since. But she’s got her own problems, and so George — unable to face a life without Jim — starts making (very fastidious — see below) plans to go out with a bang. Can anything prevent the grief-stricken Prof. Falconer from losing out to his sorrows and taking wing on a bullet? Well, there is one fetching student (Nicholas Hoult, formerly of About a Boy), and his pink angora sweater ($285)…

Again, I haven’t read the Isherwood novel and don’t know how it’s been tinkered with. But, even despite Ford’s tics, there are some problems here. This is one of those stories where the main character is deeply and utterly depressed — suicidal, even — and so naturally he keeps being pestered by extraordinarily handsome potential significant others, wanting to save him from himself. Um, yeah. (I’ll give it this: A Single Man works better than Sideways in this regard, if only because Paul Giamatti is Paul Giamatti and Colin Firth (when he’s not Mr. Darcy, of course) is Colin Firth, and thus much more likely to draw attention, I would think.) Also, for someone who’s depressed to the point of planning his own suicide, George sure seems to sweat a lot of not-very-important details. (Consider, in contrast, In the Valley of Elah, as Tommy Lee Jones’ early military rectitude completely falls apart as he succumbs to his sadness. When you stop caring, you stop caring.)

But those are basically quibbles. The larger problem of A Single Man is that, all of Firth’s impressive efforts notwithstanding — and mind you, he is very, very good here — A Single Man ends up feeling like a stylistic exercise more than an actual emotion-driven story. Ford finds a neat trick here where he turns the color saturation up or down depending on George’s mood: When life improves, however briefly, his world literally gets more colorful. But Ford keeps dialing it back-and-forth like a child with a new toy, and the effect eventually loses its luster. And that gimmick is as close as Ford gets to connective tissue sometimes. Otherwise, A Single Man feels like a collection of static images out of…well, a fashion catalog. They’re often striking in their lush melancholy, yes. But they’re static all the same.

Rugby > Racism. (Rinse, Repeat.)

I’ve got bad news, folks. It’s nothing personal, I’m sure, but Clint Eastwood apparently thinks we’re stupid. That seems like the best way to account for the ridiculous redundancy built into Invictus, his well-meaning but over-broad account of South Africa’s victory in the 1995 Rugby World Cup. Sadly, this is the type of flick where characters keep intoning the obvious take-away message from the scene you just watched — “This country’s changed. We need to change as well!,” “He’s not a saint! He’s a man, with a man’s problems!” — just in case you’re, y’know, a little slow on the uptake. And every single point here gets hammered on three or four times, when once would’ve usually been quite enough, thanks much. In all honesty, I came out of Invictus feeling like I’d just been trying to guard Jonah Lomu for two hours. In a word, bludgeoned.

Don’t get me wrong — The movie has its heart in the right place, and I wholeheartedly agree with many of its basic contentions. I too believe Nelson Mandela is a great man, and that he was just the right man to lead his nation at the delicate hour when apartheid finally fell. I believe that racism is a moral failing that must be overcome, and that forgiveness is a more enlightened path than revenge. (As A.O. Scott aptly pointed out in his more-positive review of this film, Invictus is as committed to examining the issue of vengeance, and its overcoming, as Unforgiven, Gran Torino, Mystic River, and countless other films in Eastwood’s oeuvre.)

And I even think there’s a sophisticated story to be told here about the role of symbols (the Springboks), iconography (green-and-gold), and sports teams in politics and nation-building. (Throughout much of Invictus, I was reminded of a book from gradual school days: In the Midst of Perpetual Fetes, historian David Waldstreicher’s book on the early national period of the United States, when (as the title indicates) our Founders threw galas, parties, and festivities pretty much constantly to help engender a healthy nationalism in newly-minted Americans.)

Both in terms of fostering forgiveness on both sides and as a sheer political play, the basic “human calculation” made here by President Mandela — getting behind a team loathed by blacks and beloved by whites in order to signal good-faith intentions to Afrikaners and to help forge a new national unity — is a very savvy one. (You might even say it’s a Lincolnesque move, and in fact, there’s a good bit of Lincoln’s blend of folk wisdom, bonhomie, and ruthless, clear-eyed political calculation in Mandela as portrayed here.) And, of course, there’s a great underdog sports tale at the actual Cup itself — South Africa versus the mighty All Blacks of New Zealand.

The point being, Eastwood had a lot of good raw material to work with here in Invictus…but the final product, alas, is not so good. The film is competently-made, sure, and everyone from Morgan Freeman (not just being himself) to Matt Damon (great job with the accent) on down does a solid job with what they’re given. But the movie still ends up being more Flags of our Fathers than Letters from Iwo Jima: It’s so ham-fisted so often that it hardly ever gets off the ground. And it just doesn’t trust that the audience will pick up on anything unless it’s spelled out for them and underlined a few times. (I presume this is Eastwood’s fault rather than the source material, John Carlin’s Playing the Enemy — One definitely gets the sense from Invictus that Clint may have watched Idiocracy recently.)

One example should explain the problem. In one scene in the middle going, the all-white Springboks (Chester Williams notwithstanding) venture to a run-down shantytown in Soweto to teach young black South Africans the sport of rugby. (In this case, Invictus is smart to spell one thing out to the audience — the basic rules of play.) The kids generally seem excited by the trip, some of the Afrikaner meatheads who were complaining before start smiling and getting into it, and everybody — white and black — is clearly having a good time. The basic point is obvious from the entire scene: The fun of the game and the day is bringing former adversaries together. But then Clint has to pan over to a sign saying something like “One Team One Nation” or somesuch, and right thereafter some not-very-good pop song blares over the soundtrack with hokey lines like “we are color blind.” Ok, Clint, we get it.

Invictus does this throughout its run. Just in case we somehow miss the racial-reconciliation-through-sport point of the entire movie, there are multiply-redundant systems built into the narrative. There’s a divided Greek chorus of security guards that, like the Springboks, gradually come together as a team. There’s the black maid of Matt Damon’s somewhat haughty white family, who finally gets included as an equal. And there are even cuts to some random once-racist white cops and the black youths they would’ve undoubtedly spent the day harrassing, if it weren’t for the healing benediction of rugby, all jumping up and down together and enjoying the Big Win. After awhile, it all gets to be overkill.

Put simply, Invictus has great and laudable intentions, and I guess I wouldn’t call it an out-and-out fumble. But it definitely should’ve taken some lessons in subtlety from the real Nelson Mandela: Sometimes a quiet word in the right moment speaks louder than the mightiest of trumpets.