Takin’ That Ride to Nowhere.

Gray. Ash gray. The sky was ash gray, and the air was heavy. Yes, the air tasted like rust and the tang of remorse. And the ground, it crunched like gravel under a boot, tho’ all the boots were long gone — they had marched on into that last blinding sunset, without remorse and without complaint. Soon it will be black, deepest black, like charcoal or the souls of thieves or the eyes of dead men in their shallow graves, stinking of rot and putrefaction.

And so the Man sighed. For it was Thanksgiving, a good time to repent. To forgive, even, and be forgiven. (But, no, ye will not be forgiven, not in this lifetime, nor the next.) And so the Man sighed again. And with that sigh that carried a whiff of the Old West and better, simpler times when Men were Men and were good with their hands and knew the old tongues, he leaned to his Sister (for it was Thanksgiving) and said, wearily, “Ok, The Fantastic Mr. Fox was pretty solid. Let’s go hit up The Road.” And so they went, into that ash gray, charcoal black in-between, where violent men prowl and shriek and beg for forgiveness (it will not come), and the good dreams cough up their last.

Or something like that. I wouldn’t say Cormac McCarthy is a bad writer, because he quite obviously isn’t. (Tho’ Salon‘s Stephanie Zacharek does seem to have his number.) But his voice, and his penchant for wallowing in He-Man pretension, definitely don’t speak to me, and my enjoyment of the Coens’ No Country for Old Men notwithstanding, I tend to find his books significantly overpraised. I’ve heard people call Blood Meridian the best American novel since Moby Dick. But, personally, I found it overwrought and tedious, and I put it down in boredom after 150 pages of meticulously detailed vignettes involving blood spatter, entrails, scalps and the like. (Of course, your mileage may vary.)

That was also my sense going into John Hillcoat’s adaptation of McCarthy’s The Road. As post-apocalyptic sci-fi goes, I thought the book was a solid foray into the genre, and I thought it a well-done, if very depressing, beach read. But I was a bit surprised to find it heralded thereafter as a Big Important Book, when, to my mind, it didn’t seem any more or less deserving of acclaim than, say, On the Beach or Alas, Babylon or The Death of Grass or The Stand or (probably my fave of the bunch) A Canticle for Leibowitz. As I said here, “I thought The Road was post-apocalyptic sci-fi for people who normally condescend to the genre, and thus haven’t read/seen very much of it.”

If I’ve gone on at length here about my thoughts about the book rather than John Hillcoat’s movie, it’s because Hillcoat’s film version felt more than most adaptations like its source material, with all of its strengths and weaknesses. The Road is not as moody, evocative, and weirdly twisted as Hillcoat’s The Proposition, a movie I caught on Netflix and for several weeks thereafter felt like I had dreamed. But it does set a strong and consistent tone, even if that tone is one of grim, monochromatic despair. And, while it’s hard not to conjure visions of Aragorn of the Dunedain when a scruffy Viggo Mortensen leads a small child ’round the wilderness, he’s pretty good in the part, and it’s hard to think of very many other actors who could have pulled it off as well. (Although Guy Pearce makes his case as a contender for the role, late in this film.)

If you haven’t read the book, basically it is the near future — let’s say 2013, after John Cusack and co. have dipped out on their arks — the End has come and gone, and the tattered remnants of mankind have been cast back into the primeval wild. Through this bleak and battered valley of the shadow walks a Man (Hobo Viggo) and his Child (Kodi Smit-McPhee, also quite good.) Unlike so many other of the remaining survivors, they forego cannibalism and scrounge to survive, with the Man remembering the good old days and the Boy sweetly, perhaps mercifully, oblivious of life before the Fall. And so, bereft of the Woman (Charlize Theron) in their life — she took the quick ticket out — they traverse south, hoping that a new, better life might await them somewhere along the coast.

And that’s about it, really. Our father and son run into various HBO all-stars along the way (Garrett Dillahunt of Deadwood is still a skeez, and, even amid the ruins of human civilization, Omar comin‘! (Michael Williams)). And they encounter Robert Duvall, who damn near walks away with the film in a jaw-droppingly good cameo. For my part, the movie conjured up a few new questions for me (why isn’t anybody using bicycles?) to go along with the ones I still carried from the book (why would you ever leave that bomb shelter?) But, it’s basically The Road, filmed. For better or worse, it has that’s book’s melancholy soul, its occasional moments of horror, and its grim sense of inevitability and cynicism about the last days of Man.

Now, I personally happen to think there’d be a bit more banding together and ad-hoc families created a la Zombieland and, I hate to say it, 2012, than the blistering, relentless pessimism in evidence here. But I suppose McCarthy would just argue I’m flinching in the face of God’s indifference to our plight. Eh, we’ll manage. You may think Man has no sense of decency, sir, but don’t worry — It’s alright, baby, it’s alright.

Fear and Loathing in New Orleans.

“I was right in the middle of a f**king reptile zoo, and somebody was giving booze to these godd**n things!” For reasons that will be apparent if you see the movie, the memorable lizard sequence from both versions of Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas comes to mind while watching Werner Herzog’s highly entertaining Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans last Friday. And for good reason — with both imaginary iguana and melancholy crocodile POV shots herein, not to mention sharks, dogs, fish, and sundry other of God’s creatures well-represented, the animals are basically running the compound in Herzog’s Big Easy. And the king of the animal kingdom here is a primal, animalistic, and drugged-out-of-his-gourd anti-hero, Nicholas Cage. Yes, folks, he’s been given a whole lot more than booze…Let the wild rumpus start!

Partly a Chandleresque crime movie in the key of Southern Gothic (it made for a great counterpoint to my weekend immersion into L4D2, which also takes place in the Quarter), and theoretically a remake of Abel Ferrara’s tortured Harvey Keitel vehicle of 1992, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is a dark acidhead comedy that’s much more freewheeling and enjoyable than I expected going in. And, rather than get bogged down and belabored by the arch-Catholic, sin-and-redemption motifs of the Ferrara version, Herzog and Cage mostly just groove along here to a trippy gonzo beat. The good Doctor‘s soul is still dancing.

After a swimming snake sets the stage for the proceedings, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans begins with, and mostly centers around, the shady escapades of one Lt. Terence McDonagh (Cage, more on him in a bit.) Ostensibly some of the Big Easy’s, uh, finest, McDonagh and his partner (Val Kilmer, not given much to do) are surveying the mid-Katrina wreckage of their precinct when McDonagh figures out that someone is locked in the flooding underground jail. They go downstairs, find this poor, trapped prisoner, and proceed to heckle him and make sidebets on his unlikely survival. But, eventually — and for reasons that seem unclear even to himself — McDonagh jumps into the murky, fetid waters to save the guy. And since no good deed goes unpunished, he is repaid with a excruciatingly painful back injury that puts him on Vicodin for the rest of his life. Well, that and a promotion.

Cut to six months later, and now-Lieutenant McDonagh finds himself with a new lurch in his step, several high-maintenance addictions to feed, and a big case brewing — the execution-style murder of five Senegali immigrants, including two small children. The cops have a pretty good sense of who the prime suspect probably should be: the local drug kingpin, Big Fate (Xzibit). But they have nothing to pin on him, and neither his two lieutenants nor anybody else seem to be talking. And in fact, McDonagh doesn’t particularly seem to care about the case — he’s too busy with his extracurriculars, which include but are not limited to: garnering choice illegal drugs by means foul or fouler, getting in way too deep with his long-suffering bookie (Brad Dourif), and/or keeping his hooker girlfriend Frankie (Eva Mendes) in the style to which she’s accustomed. Still, amidst all the lines of coke and the freebasing, something’s nagging at him lately — is that a pang of conscience struggling to break free, or is he just fiending for another massive hit?

Y’know, it’s easy to playa-hate on Nicholas Cage, and I’ve been known to indulge in it myself. And it’s true that, on account of his well-publicized money problems, the guy will appear in just about anything, from PG-ish family-fare (National Treasure, which I actually enjoyed) to slapdash genre pics (Knowing, Ghost Rider, Bangkok Dangerous) to out-and-out crap (LaBute’s Wicker Man travesty.) Still, his wild, weirdly hypnotic performance here in Bad Lieutenant reminds us that he’s also an exceedingly rare bird, and he’s given us more than his fair share of quality turns in the past, from Raising Arizona and Wild at Heart to Adaptation and Lord of War. (Not to mention his tour de force in Werewolf Women of the S.S.) Say what you will about the man, but from Vampire’s Kiss to Leaving Las Vegas to this flick, he’s not afraid to let it all hang out.

Of course, it helps to be aided and abetted in your crazy-man schtick by none other than Werner Herzog, who knows a thing or two about certifiably nutso leading men. (See also: Grizzly Man.) A lot of reviews seem to argue that this movie has absolutely nothing to do with Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant, but that’s only half true — A lot of the plot points remain the same: the carnal appetites, the grotesque abuse of power for sexual ends, the losing gambling streak, the conscience-tugging case despite it all. Where the difference lies, and why the films seem completely distinct, is in the valence of the tale. Ferrara’s movie (and Keitel’s performance) is grim, haunted with Catholic remorse and self-loathing, and, frankly, not much fun at all. But Herzog’s film, even in the most decadent parts, abstains from judgment, or even seems vaguely bemused by all the sordidness. (Also, fwiw, Herzog has replaced all the Biblical allusions of Ferrara’s movie with Cajun voodoo and animal/nativist spirits.)

Simply put, Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans is clearly a film made by a man who’s comfortable with teh crazy. And, rather than condemn all the druggy depravities on display here, Herzog keeps a light touch, and usually just lets them unfold without much editorial comment. As our dear late Hunter Thompson put it on his own drug-inspired binge, “Buy the ticket, take the ride.”

Do NOT Press This Button.

To start with the good news, Richard Kelly’s moody, convoluted, and unwieldy adaptation of The Box — previously a Richard Matheson short story (“Button, Button”) and a memorable episode of the ’80s Twilight Zone reboot — is definitely a better movie than his nightmare last outing, Southland Tales. So there’s that, I guess. But then again, pretty much every movie I’ve seen in the past ten years, with the probable exception of Ronald Maxwell’s Gods and Generals, is a better movie than Southland Tales.

And, once you get that subterranean standard out of the way, The Box is sadly more of the same. Pretentious, overwrought, interminable, unnecessary…The Box is just irritatingly bad at times, and it makes the original Donnie Darko look more and more like a random fluke (or, given the lesser state of the over-explained director’s cut, an actual case of timely intervention by the studio suits.) I like The Twilight Zone, I like science-fiction, I like NASA, and I like most of the other things Kelly throws into the blender here. But, after an hour in this inane, sophomoric Box, I’m sorry to report, I wanted to push a button myself — fast-forward.

If you’ve never read or seen the story before, Kelly’s version goes like this: It’s 1976, and a young Virginia couple (James Marsden and Cameron Diaz) — he’s a NASA physicist, she’s a schoolteacher — are barely making ends meet in the ‘burbs. Then, one winter night, a plain-wrapped box appears on their doorstep. Accompanying this mysterious receptacle eventually is a visit from one Arlington Steward (Frank Langella), a courtly gentleman with a horrible (CGI-enhanced) disfigurement. For reasons that are not immediately clear, Steward makes this couple a horrible proposition: Push the red button on the box, and they will receive one million dollars. Also, somebody they don’t know will die. Should they press the button? Well, it’s a lot of money, and people die every day. I dunno…would you?

That’s the basic gist of Matheson’s story (Marsden’s character does make a brief nod to the original, biting ending) and the Twilight Zone version (different ending, but still decent). But here, there’s more. Much, much more. Y’see, Mr. Steward may or may not be a visitor from another realm. And, when I say “another realm,” I could mean Mars, where NASA’s Viking probes just kicked up a lot of dust, or I could mean the Hereafter –After all, “any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic,” so the converse probably applies as well. And he can possess dozens or hundreds of people at a time, at the risk of giving them nosebleeds, and have them do things like babysit and hector people in libraries. Steward’s wife is also running around, and she, as Convert #1, presumably, can create watery teleportation doors when the need arises — like, when you want to play Let’s Make a Deal for no reason at all. Ah, yes, and did I mention there’s a follow-up corollary to the original deal? It actually has nothing to do with the “someone you don’t know” part of the equation, or, really, with anything that’s come before. But, hey, that’s apparently how we roll in the Kellyverse.

In essence, Richard Kelly here has taken an eerie and perfectly self-contained 30-minute story and overburdened it with ninety more minutes of half-baked riffs on The Abyss and Invasion of the Body Snatchers, grandiose allusions to Sartre’s No Exit and Clarke’s Profiles of the Future, and oodles of quasi-scientific Trek-speak like “the altruism coefficient” and vaguely threatening flimflam like “the Human Resources Exploitation Manual.” The end result is subtraction by addition — the longer Kelly ties himself and his characters up in nonsensical knots, the more and more ludicrous the whole enterprise becomes. (Apparently, the first cut of this film was over three hours long — baby Jesus wept.) In fact, Kelly throws so much at the wall here to see what sticks that he completely forgets about the money. Once the million is paid out, our couple locks it in their safe and never mention it again…um, ok.

Sure, there are a few moody images interspersed throughout The Box, as well as solid performances by Marsden and Langella and brief, enjoyable turns by wily veteran hands James Rebhorn, Holmes Osborne, and Celia Weston. (For her part, Cameron Diaz seems off.) But, otherwise, The Box is eminently missable — it would probably seem an even worse disaster to me, were it not for the lingering stench of Southland Tales. Here’s a proposition for you: Keep your ten bucks and go let someone else see it — preferably someone you don’t know.

Paranormal Activity.

Less a scathing Catch-22-type satire than it is just a jaunty road movie-type yarn, Grant Heslov’s The Men Who Stare at Goats, which I caught last weekend, is basically a Coen-lite cinematic bon-bon for the fanboy-inclined. It’s never really laugh-out-loud funny, and something much more dark, resonant, and Strangelovian could (and probably should) have been made from this choice material, particularly as the story moves into Iraq mode. After all, this is basically the true story of how we, the United States of America, ended up torturing people with Barney the Dinosaur.

But however frothy about its subject at times, The Men Who Stare at Goats manages to sustain a low-key whimsy and amiable weirdness for most of its run. If anything it feels a bit like the much-maligned and underrated Ocean’s 12: a bunch of exceedingly likable actors — George Clooney, Ewan MacGregor, Jeff Bridges, Kevin Spacey, Stephen Root, Stephen Lang, Robert Patrick — all enjoying an extended goof. Consider it the Road to Iraq, Hope and Crosby-style. David Crosby, that is.

Loosely based on the book by British journalist Jon Ronson, The Men Who Stares at Goats begins with an ambiguous disclaimer (“More of this is true than you would believe“), a Kitty Pryde-experiment gone awry, and a voiceover by one Bob Wilton (MacGregor), a down-on-his-luck reporter for the Ann Arbor Daily-Telegram. (Wilton, unlike Ronson, is an American, although MacGregor’s scattershot accent may make you wonder. Ewan’s a fine actor, but, lordy, he can’t get the Yankee patter down to save his life — yes, it’s worse than Peter Sarsgaard’s British accent, although it’s still better than Don Cheadle’s cockney.)

Anyway, after a chance interview with a psychic hamster-killer (Root) and a falling-out with his cuckolding wife and their mutual boss, Bob alights to Iraq, where he presumes he’ll learn how to impress his now-ex with grim tales of life as a veteran war correspondent. But unfortunately, he can’t even get into the country…until he happens upon Lyn Cassady (Clooney). Disguised as your run-of-the-mill private contractor, Cassady in fact turns out to be a psychic spy, a master of the “sparkly eyes,” a, as he puts it, “Jedi warrior.” (To which MacGregor consistently responds, “Jedi?,” with an arched eyebrow. Like, who in their right mind would spend years doing that?)

Cassady, it turns out, was trained in the psychic arts by his very own Qui-Gon, Bill Django (Bridges). A Vietnam veteran who discovered his own psychic powers through a rigorous regimen of Hippie indulgence, Django managed to convince the Pentagon powers-that-be back in the day that the Age of Aquarius would soon eclipse the Atomic Age on the battlefield — we’re talking peace warriors, psychic samurai, astral projectors, the awesomely unstoppable power of good vibes, brah, you know? (Put simply: “This aggression will not stand, man.”)

Some of the brass (mainly Lang) become fervent believers in Django’s New Age warfare. Others figure, heck, if there is something to this paranormal business, we’d really hate to be on the wrong side of the ball when the psychic shooting starts — Let’s throw some money at it just in case the Russkies are reading our minds right now. And so the First Earth Battalion is born. (And, yes, it really was born — your tax dollars at work.) But, of course, problems emerge — Not all the recruits have Django and Cassady’s intrinsic shamanic gifts. And once the Jedi are founded, there is naturally a Sith waiting in the wings…and, he (Spacey) has no compunction about using the team’s psychic powers for evil. Ya fook one goat…

The rest of the story involves Wilton and Cassady having crazy misadventures in Iraq, while Lyn fills us in on the rise and fall of the First Earth order…which may or may not be gone for good. (After all, someone’s gotta put the psy- in psy-ops.) I presume much of the Iraq narrative was added by Heslov, and sometimes it’s a bit hit-or-miss, frankly. There are brief encounters with Iraqi bounty hunters, ne’er-do-well Blackwater types, and even the infamous Barney-fueled detention chambers, but the tone is too breezy to sustain any kind of edgy or cutting critique of this stuff — It’s more like Syriana on nitrous oxide. (There’s also a sequence involving a LSD-crazed soldier shooting up his army base, which feels more uncomfortable than probably intended, coming right after the tragedy at Ft. Hood.)

Still, while Syriana, or Three Kings, for that matter, — My, Clooney has done a lot of tours in the region now — offers more in the way of food for thought, The Men Who Stare at Goats has its own low-key charms. As I said, the actors are all top-notch and clearly having fun with this project. It’s always good to see the Dude again, even in passing. And the script is relentlessly witty, with wry jokes that slowly creep up on you like a psychic ninja — For example, Spacey talking about the power of subliminal messages, then being distracted by Twizzlers. Mmm, Twizzlers.

Speaking of subliminal messages, I’ve had Boston’s “More than a Feeling” stuck in my head for over a week now thanks to this movie, and I really can’t stand Boston. So, well-played, Jedi, well-played.

When Things Go Bump in the Night.

A less shakicam-ish Blair Witch Project for the Oughts, writer-director Oren Peli’s reasonably unnerving if somewhat longish Paranormal Activity looks like a million bucks — which is impressive, given that it actually only cost 15 large. (And it’s already the most profitable film of all time, pulling in a 434,000% return and counting.) So, if nothing else, HD cameras have come a long way in the past ten years.

And Paranormal Activity is…decently unsettling, I suppose. I give props to any scary flick that goes the J-horror route over Saw-style serial killer torture porn, which is a tired, boring, and lazy subgenre at this point. And I admired the film’s narrative economy and inventiveness — With nothing much happening most of the time, Paranormal Activity has we, the audience, doing almost all of the heavy lifting for it by sitting around, waiting for the other shoe to drop, and scaring ourselves. Paranormal Activity is basically Hitchcock’s ticking-time-bomb (or, to take a more recent application of the principle, Don’s-mistress-sitting-in-the-car on Mad Men) for 90 minutes. And I give it definite points for cleverness.

That being said, I also found the original Blair Witch — lost in the deep dark primordial woods, and unable to escape supernatural forces — to be a more fundamentally frightening experience than this film, which involves hanging around a San Diego split-level, and doing really dumb things to provoke supernatural forces. (For that matter, the similarly-premised Drag Me To Hell earlier this year was a good deal more fun.) And the movie has a bit of a Cloverfield problem, in that the main characters grow increasingly unsympathetic — particularly you-know-who — to the point where I stopped caring after awhile if bad things happened to them. Nonetheless, I could see this being a very creepy rental, under perfect (re: at home by yourself at 3am) conditions.

After a brief thank you to the families involved and the San Diego police department (wink, wink), Paranormal Activity begins with a young day trader named Micah (Micah Sloat) noodling around with his brand-new video camera. After showing us around the house, he goes to pester his live-in girlfriend Katie (Katie Featherston), just arriving home, with his new acquisition. It seems Micah is a bit of a tech-geek (and has control issues — more on that later), and he’s procured this top-end video equipment to catch some paranormal activity — namely, the same weird happenings that Katie has been complaining about since the age of 8 — on tape. And that’s about it, really — Katie, Micah, and the video camera, hanging around the house, trying to make sense of the increasingly obvious encroachment of a Malevolent Force from Beyond.

This is all fine and well, although maybe a bit repetitive after awhile. (Katie and Micah do enlist a kindly, New Agey, certifiably So-Cal psychic (Mark Frederichs) at one point, and the funniest moment in the movie is him showing up to make everything seem so much worse.) But the real problem with Activity isn’t the repetition or the lack of events, but the blatantly stupid behavior by our two principals here. Y’see, Micah apparently is a firm believer that his home is his Castle. And, when presented with more and more evidence that what he and Katie are dealing with is out of human control, he tend to double down and become more belligerent about the situation (“Is that all you got, demon?”), to the point where it’s hard to take either of them seriously as characters anymore.

I don’t want to give the game away, but at a certain point an old photograph is found in the attic which has absolutely, positively no business being there. If they hadn’t done so already, this is pretty much the moment when 99.9998% of the population would say, “Uh, ok, we really need to enlist some outside experts on this. Ghostbusters stat!” But, no, Micah gets weird and territorial again, and there’s more interminable wrangling over whether or not to call a demonologist. Wrong answer.

Not coincidentally, this is about the point where I finally checked out of Paranormal Activity for good and started rooting for the Thing from the Nether Realms. As in any horror flick, once folks have gone above and beyond the call of stupid in order to stay in harm’s way, it’s hard to take the supernatural threats to their person all that seriously. Still, aside from making mad bank and injecting a little extra fear into those creaky stairs and hissing pipes late at night, Peli’s Activity does make one thing emphatically clear: Women haunted by demons from an early age should probably try to stay out of relationships with Type-A control freaks, and vice versa.

A Star is Bored.

While not a particularly memorable movie — it’s basically a by-the-numbers coming-of-age flick coupled to a standard-issue, May-December arthouse romance — Lone Scherfig’s (and Nick Hornby’s) An Education does include an obvious breakout performance by British newcomer Carey Mulligan. The jury’s still out until Avatar on whether Sam Worthington of Terminator: Salvation and the forthcoming Clash of the Titans remake is worth all the Next Big Thing hype that’s accompanied his being cast in so many high-profile projects of late. But (as everyone who caught her as Sally Sparrow in the memorable Doctor Who episode “Blink” already knew), Mulligan seems to be the real deal. This is as star-making a turn as Chiwetel Ejiofor’s headlining of Dirty Pretty Things in 2003, with a touch of the “Who is THAT girl?” head-swiveling that accompanied Jessica Alba in the background of 1999’s Never Been Kissed. And with both acting chops and an apple-cheeked allure in her arsenal, I would expect to see quite a bit more of Mulligan in the very near future.

But, all that being said and Mulligan’s future potential aside, I didn’t find An Education to be all that interesting a film, sadly. And if you took her away from its center, you wouldn’t be left with very much movie at all. Here’s the set-up: It’s 1961, and while Betty Draper is chafing at the oppressive confines of suburban domesticity in the former colonies, young Jenny (Mulligan) is being groomed for an Oxford education by her social-striver parents (Alfred Molina and Cara Seymour) and her elite private girl’s school, mainly just so she can go get her M.R.S. Her English teacher Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams) thinks Jenny should aim much higher than a well-off husband and pursue the academic life she seems clearly suited for. But Jenny — a budding Francophile and connoisseur of fine art, fine literature, and fine smokes — wants more out of life than either the domestic or academic path provides.

Enter David (Peter Sarsgaard), a thirty-something fellow who spies Jenny out in the rain with her cello one afternoon and offers her a ride home in his spiffy automobile. This should probably set off bells and alarms for Jenny (and her parents, who soon meet this potential beau and rather illogically warm to him), even if they’ve never heard the Police song. But, as we’re still a few years shy of Emma Peel and Swinging London, or for that matter the lads from Liverpool, David seems like a pretty good opportunity of escape for young Jenny. He goes to concerts and auctions in the city, hangs out with interesting people (Dominic Cooper) and their well-meaning girlfriends (Rosamund Pike), and generally seems to be much more a Citizen of the World than anyone in the stuffy suburbs. But is it possible that David is just too good to be true? Well, it wouldn’t be much of a movie otherwise, now would it? And sure enough, one she gets past all the preening finery and being tipped in cigarettes, Jenny finds herself peering into the corners of a very Dark Life.

There are a lot of little things that don’t really work in An Education. Some of the characters are written too broadly. particularly Alfred Molina as Jenny’s overbearing-with-a-heart Pop and poor Rosamund Pike as a dim bulb London party-girl. The ending seemed way too overdrawn to me — Yes, adulthood is mostly a condition imposed by the passage of time, but I still think it takes more than one dodgy and/or bad relationship to become mature and worldly-wise. And, like I said above, I don’t think it makes much sense, given how protective they are of her at first, that Jenny’s folks would go along for the ride as they do here. They would have to be willfully obtuse not to catch on what a weekend in Paris would entail, for example.

That being said, the biggest problem here is that Peter Sarsgaard seems miscast to me. He’s an actor I usually root for, but he’s way too creepy to be plausible as a suitor Jenny might actually be interested in. (Either that, or he carries the baggage from too many creepy roles in the past. As David Edelstein noted, he gives off a definite Malkovich vibe here, and the occasionally slipping accent doesn’t help.) This is a part I could see Ewan MacGregor or James McAvoy or Orlando Bloom (originally cast in the Dominic Cooper role) pulling off with more aplomb. But Sarsgaard just seems too blockish and needy to me in the part, and any gal as ostensibly on-the-ball as Jenny is portrayed here to be would see through his wheedling and double-talk pretty quickly, I should think. Just because the year is 1961 doesn’t mean young women (and their parents) can’t spot an obviously bad apple. But here’s hoping Mulligan fares better in her next few roles, which are no doubt forthcoming.

When a Problem Comes Along.

Forget the bruises, broken bones, and need for better-than-average health insurance (if such a thing even exists right now) that accompany the sport of roller derby. If you were a parent, would you really want your child indulging in any subculture that had at its center someone as douchey as Jimmy Fallon? Such is the crux of contention between lonely teen Ellen Page and mama-bear Marcia Gay Harden in Drew Barrymore’s breezy, forgettable Whip It. Now, I know that — as with Jennifer’s Body — I’m really not the target audience for sort of pic: I’m 15-20 years too old and likely the wrong sex. Still, if I had to recommend a recent extreme-sports, coming-of-age, grrl power flick, I’d probably direct people toward Blue Crush. Good-natured but also somewhat cloying, Whip It rolls ’round the rink well enough, I guess. But it doesn’t set off much in the way of sparks.

As the film begins, the surly teen in question, a young Texan by the name of Bliss (Page), has just let down Ma once again, by dying her hair blue before the latest stereotypically stifling beauty pageant. (Page didn’t bug me so much in Juno — I blamed the excessive quirk then on screenwriter Diablo Cody. But, for some reason or another, I found her “who-me?” simper and hipster-schtick irritating pretty quickly in this film.) Anyway, Ma (Harden), a postal worker with her own beauty-queen dreams deferred, takes the blue-hair fiasco as well as she can, but it doesn’t change the fundamental problem for Bliss. She — and her best friend Pash (Alia Shawkat, a.k.a. Maeby Fünke) — are just dying in this one-horse town.

But, on a trip to nearby Austin one day, Bliss finds a D.I.Y.-looking flyer advertising the local roller-derby league, featuring the current reigning rinkstress, Iron Maven, in all her glory. (That would be Juliette Lewis, doing her standard queen-of-the-skanks routine. Weirdly enough, Woody Harrelson brought back Mickey Knox just the week before, and now Lewis is channeling Mallorie again.) Anyway, after a visit to the Big Dance, Bliss is completely smitten with this strange new world of bad-ass chicks and furious body blows. Even better, there’s a spot open on the “Hurl Scouts” — who consist of Maggie Mayhem (Kristen Wiig), Rosa Sparks (Eve), Bloody Holly (Zoё Bell) and Smashly Simpson (Barrymore) — and Bliss just happens to be lightnin’-fast in her old-school Barbie skates. But, even as Bliss grows to relish her new role as “Babe Ruthless,” there’re still the dreams of dear old Ma to contend with…

Although not as surprisingly promising as Ben Affleck’s 2007 directorial debut, Gone Baby Gone, Drew Barrymore acquits herself pretty well here behind the camera, all in all. Things move at a pretty brisk clip, and I could generally follow the roller derby scenes pretty well. (It may be the writer or the source material’s fault, but there are definite shades of the Drew Barrymore-produced Donnie Darko here too — in the “Sparkle Motion”-like little sister (Eulala Grace Scheel), the goofball dad (Daniel Stern), and the dysfunctional-yet-oddly-functional parents.)

That being said, there are a few problems here. I went on in my World’s Greatest Dad review recently about the “Big Lie,” usually seen in rom-coms, whereby the audience spends most of the film just waiting for some obvious problem to [a] be revealed and [b] then resolve itself. Well, this movie is based on two of ’em — Bliss is underage for the league, and the aforementioned mother-daughter dispute — and waiting for these cycles to play out frankly isn’t all that interesting. Throw in the usual set of standard-issue sports-movie tropes — the rookie-makes-good sequence, the “getting stronger!” montage, the Big Game — and Whip It is basically cliché grafted to cliché.

All that being said, I still could have cottoned to Whip It more, I think — it has its heart in the right place — if it weren’t one of those movies that plays an arch indie song every time you’re supposed to have any sort of emotional reaction to it. (And don’t get me started on the subplot involving Bliss’ potential emo-rocker boyfriend (Landon Pigg) — That guy just drove me up the wall from Jump Street.) Let me put it this way: Throughout the movie, Bliss tends to wear a Stryper T-shirt, as in the ultra-cheesy Christian metal band from the 80’s. (It becomes a plot point, eventually.) Now, some might see this as a very post-ironic, clever, hipster thing to do. Others might say it seems like trying too hard.

Good for the Jews.

He may seem cruel and indifferent. He may even be vain and jealous (Exodus 20:5.) Still, thank HaShem for the Coens! Like manna from Heaven, the brothers are the cinematic gift that keeps on giving. At this late date, you probably know if you vibe to the Coen’s mordantly kooky aesthetic or not. And if you do, A Serious Man, their sardonic reimagining of the Book of Job set in late-sixties Jewish suburbia, is another great movie in a career full of them.

Assuredly better than the fun but uneven Burn After Reading, this is basically the film The Man Who Wasn’t There aspired to be, and I’d say it sits comfortably next to the likes of Fargo, No Country for Old Men, Raising Arizona, and Barton Fink. (That being said, I still reserve a place of honor for Miller’s Crossing and The Big Lebowski.) A word of warning, tho’ — Despite the funny on hand here, and there is quite a bit of funny, in a way this world may be the Coens’ darkest yet. True, God may have forsaken the bleak Texas landscape of No Country back in 2007, but at least He wasn’t laughing at us then.

Why so serious? Well, it’s 5727, and Professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) is having a very bad time of it. After a brief fable involving the visitation of a possible dybbuk a century or so earlier, and a few moments of Larry’s son Danny (Aaron Wolff) communing with the Rabbi Slick, we get to see poor Larry navigate a frozen run of luck like you read about. He has quite literally become his brother’s keeper — Arthur (Richard Kind) lives in the bathroom, draining his sebaceous cyst at all hours of the day. Larry’s wife (Sari Lennick) wants a get (a what?) so she can remarry a family friend, the exasperating and sonorous Sy Ableman (Fred Melamed.) One of his physics students (David Kang) is trying to bribe him for a better grade (and, to his credit, both he and his father do seem to understand Schrodinger’s cat pretty well.) His tenure committee chair is acting squirrelly, and receiving hate-filled letters about Gopnik from an unknown source. His son has bully problems, his daughter wants a nose job, his very goy neighbor is encroaching on the property line…

When the truth is found to be lies, and all the joy within you dies, where do you turn? Well, Larry is physicist enough to realize that one of these many accumulating straws is eventually going to break his back. And so, in the manner of generations before him, he decides to look for rabbinical wisdom into his plight. Alas, easier said than done. The first rabbi he visits (Simon Helberg) can offer only the altered perspective afforded by the synagogue parking lot and the threat of an angry HaShem. The second (George Wyner), only a bewildering mashal about “The Goy’s Teeth.” And the third — well, he’s as inscrutable and as hard-to-reach as HaShem Himself…although perhaps a bar mitzvah kid might have an in.

There’s a lot going on in A Serious Man — much of which, being of the goy persuasion, undoubtedly flew over my head — and this definitely seems like a movie that will reward repeat viewings and/or a Jewish upbringing. (Knowledge of the Old Testament will help too — I knew enough to recognize Jacob’s Ladder to the roof, but was the all-hearing, F-Troop-bestowing antenna up there the angel Larry must wrestle or a potential Burning Bush? Seems like Larry kinda saw another angel up there.) But, in making heads or tails of it all, I did fall back on a few touchstones. (They could be the wrong touchstones of course, so your mileage may vary.)

One was also the basic conceit of Darren Aronofsky’s Pi, that the Torah is basically a number set, so conversations here about high-level physics (Schrodinger, Heisenberg) are one-of-a-piece with the existential or Talmudic questions presented. (The Coens give us a hint in this direction with the “Mentaculus,” a complex numerology system that Larry’s brother Arthur uses to cheat at cards.) So, when Larry lectures his student about knowing math rather than understanding math, for example, I think there’s a good bit more in play for later on.

The other work that came to mind, and this was a more impressionistic connection, was Phillip Roth’s American Pastoral, another Jewish-American tale of things-falling-apart, and America reaping the whirlwind of the late sixties. It’s hard to say, and fun to think about, what exactly is going on here in the closing moments. (Is this punishment for straying from the path, or just another outbreak of Chigurh-like randomness? I think the former, but I could be wrong.) But perhaps the Airplane, who (almost) start and (almost) end the film, is on the right track here, particularly given that they’re basically paraphrasing the wisdom of Shammai: “That which is hateful to you, do not unto another: This is the whole Torah. The rest is commentary.“

Land of the Lost.

Ever wonder what Shaun of the Dead would’ve been like if it had been an American studio film? Well, I suspect it’d have been bigger and broader in every facet of the game. It’d have more action, more violence, more bodily humor, more star wattage. And it’d probably be less droll, less unconventional, and less memorable. In short, it would probably have been much like Ruben Fleischer’s well-meaning but frothy Zombieland. Don’t get me wrong — Zombieland is a decently fun Friday night, and most of the audience clearly enjoyed it more than I did. But it felt very by-the-numbers to me, and I suspect I’ll remember very little about it after a few weeks, even if the dread zombie apocalypse doesn’t happen between now and then.

So, what’s the rumpus? Well, after a quick breakdown of the rules of surviving said zompocalypse (For example, “Rule 1: Cardio…Fatties die first“), Zombieland basically follows the travails of five of the last humans on Earth. There’s:

Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a nebbishy UT student who survived the initial outbreak mostly by dint of being an OCD Warcraft shut-in. (Eisenberg has put in some good performances in movies like Roger Dodger and The Squid and the Whale, but he’s slumming it here. In fact, I like them both, but Zombieland makes a strong case for staging a “two-man-enter-one-man-leave” arena deathmatch between Eisenberg and Michael Cera. They’re becoming redundant.)\

Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), a Twinkie-loving good-ole-boy who’s atoning for a family tragedy by cutting a swath through the undead and being damn good at it. (Harrelson seems to be channeling his Mickey Knox from Natural Born Killers again — not sure what it says that the same guy’s gone from being creepy lunatic anti-hero in NBK to unironic, even compassionate hero here. Tone is everything, I guess.)

Wichita (Emma Stone), an alluring grifter (she’s basically Mila Kunis’ character from Extract) who’ll double-cross everyone around and do whatever she has to to protect her little sister. (I started thinking of her as Left 4 Dead‘s Zoey after about five minutes of screentime.)
Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), said little sister, wise beyond her years yet still really looking forward to a trip to Pacific Playland (a.k.a. Wally World.) (FWIW Breslin, most memorable as Little Miss Sunshine, seems to have made it across the child-star gap that swallowed Jake Lloyd, Haley Jo Osment, and Jonathan Lipnicki whole, and appears to be settling well into a young-Jodie Foster vibe.) And…
“Hollywood” (Semi-Secret Cameo), a movie star who the first four encounter along their road trip. As most other reviews have noted, this extended second-act sequence is probably the highlight of the film, and the biggest laugh I enjoyed was when this character is asked at one point about his/her regrets. Still, I also found this section not as funny as it’s being made out to be, for the same reason — my bro and I have a long-standing argument about this — that I don’t much like Family Guy and think Robot Chicken is lame: Just making some random pop-culture reference willy nilly — oh, yeah! I recognize that! — isn’t, to my mind, all that funny. (Imho, the South Park guys pinned this problem to the wall with their classic manatee episode.) Similarly, just recreating moments from this particular star’s back catalog, as happens a few times here, just feels sorta ho-hum to me.I’ll concede that I’m probably being harder on Zombieland than it deserves. It’s a harmless thrill-ride-type entertainment, and I’ll bet it was quite a bit better than a lot of the past summer’s tentpole releases, most of which I skipped. (I’m looking at you, X-Men Joeformers: Salvation.) Still, maybe I’m just an insufferable zombie-snob — this isn’t The Walking Dead or World War Z by any means — but I left Zombieland feeling underwhelmed. To me, it just felt by-the-numbers, with a tired “family is what you make it” plot and a certain laziness — how is the power on everywhere, by the way? — about it. And if anything, the zombies, never once very frightening, seem like a plot convenience more than anything else.
Also, it’s hard to escape the nagging sensation that this movie is basically just Shaun of the Dead for mooks. This feeling isn’t helped by the earlier-mentioned Family Guy-isms, or the Beavis-and-Butthead-y “I like breakin’ things!” messaging of the middle-going. (Sometimes it’s not even Fleischer’s fault — On its own, the slo-mo credit sequence is good, imaginative fun, but it also can’t help but recall the very similar Watchmen opening, which then involuntarily brings to mind the current mook-King of Hollywood, Zack Snyder.)

Lemme put it this way: Throughout the movie, the previously-established Zombie Rules — “Beware of Bathrooms,” “Double-Tap,” “Don’t be a Hero” — will flash up on the screen whenever they become pertinent. This often gives Zombieland the feel of the introductory levels — “Press X to jump” — of a not-very-interactive xBox game. And, while I can’t say I had a bad time at Zombieland, it’s hard to shake the sense that that 81 minutes would’ve been much better spent at home, playing Left 4 Dead. Now there’s a zombie-killing quartet I can get behind

Sex and the Single Succubus.

Back in junior high in the late ’80s — at the height of Mall Culture, before cellphones and the Internet, and when we were all too young to drive or really get into trouble — the It thing to do on a Friday night in Florence, SC was to hang around the Magnolia Mall. Basically, a goodly portion of the seventh/eighth-grade class would be dropped off there by our folks, and after falling into our predetermined social units — jocks, goths, freaks, geeks, etc. — we’d loiter around and continue our conversations from the school day. We’d chat up members of the opposite sex (who’d recently become much more intriguing), tool around B. Dalton and/or the Record Bar, and eventually get kicked out of the Spencer’s Gifts for being unruly wiseasses. And, when the mall closed at nine, most of us would file into the movie theater there, hopefully (but, for me at least, not usually) with a “date” of some kind, and catch whatever the big movie that week was: Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, Back to the Future II, Ghostbusters II, etc.

All of which is to say that, were I still 14 years old, nurturing a painful crush on somebody or another, and catching a Friday night movie with a significant minority of my eighth-grade class, Karyn Kusama’s Jennifer’s Body would probably have been a total hoot. But, without those ideal circumstances on hand, Body isn’t much to write home about. It’s not particularly scary, or sexy, or funny — It just is. And, even despite the movie’s sexual frankness, I suspect I, and most people, would be too old for it even by high school. I won’t try to outdo screenwriter Diablo Cody in the hyperliterate tweener hipsterisms that characterize both the overly precious Juno and this flick. Suffice to say: Jennifer’s Body basically ends up being just a Big Ball of Meh.

After a few flash-forwards — one in a teenager’s bedroom, another in an Arkham Asylum of sorts — that give quite a bit of the game away, Body introduces us to Devil’s Kettle, a sleepy little all-American town that happens to reside next to a possible inter-dimensional portal (Think Buffy and the Hellmouth.) Naturally, Devil’s Kettle is also home to an archetypal High School USA straight out of any movie from John Hughes‘ oeuvre to Mean Girls. One distinguishing difference, tho’: Here, the head cheerleader/queen bee, Jennifer Check (Megan Fox, more plausible as a demonic succubus than a high school student), is best friends of long standing — “sandbox love never dies” — with the town’s bookish, nerdy Hermione, Anita “Needy” Lesnicky. (Only in Hollywood does the “homely girl” look like Amanda Seyfried.)

Jennifer and Needy aren’t what you call birds of a feather, but they’re basically inseparable…even when Needy’s kindly boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons, looking like a baby Brolin) tries to separate them. But, one night at the local watering hole, these two best friends run afoul of Low Shoulder, some eyeliner-sporting wannabe indie-rockers from the city (fronted by Adam Brody, so you know they’re shady.) Strange things are soon afoot, a Carrie–by-way-of-Great-White tragedy ensues — it’s never explained very well — and Jennifer, making the eternal mistake of getting into a van with strangers, is forever transformed.

After this horrible night, the town of Devil’s Kettle is pretty well shook up…all except Jennifer, who seems remarkably sanguine about recent events. She’s blase not only about the devastating club fire she barely lived through, but also about her behavior later that night, when she showed up at Needy’s house covered in blood and vomited forth spiky black bile. (Needless to say, this infernal effusion makes more of an impression on Needy.) And, as Needy starts to wonder what dark, demonic spirit has taken hold of her cheerleader friend, the all-new Jennifer exults in her newfound powers, particularly those she holds over boys…(Unfortunately for the wayward males of Devil’s Kettle, Jen’s gotta have it.)

From Alien to Cronenberg to Stephen King, almost all memorable horror — underneath its fantastical agenda — plays on very real fears. And in the hormonal body-horror and the reveling in (and fear of) newfound sexuality that Cody and Kusama offer here, you can see hints of an interesting “Girl, you’ll be a Woman Soon” subtext to Jennifer’s Body. (See also: Carrie.) But it’s not really fleshed out, and soon gets buried in quirk and cliche anyway. All the arch Codyisms aside — “You need to move on.org!“, “You’re so lime-green jello right now!” [a.k.a. jealous] — the script never really builds to anything, and much of the story just feels haphazard and not-very-well-thought-out. (Did the BFF necklace harbor supernatural powers? What was the point of the Jen-Needy make-out scene, other than to increase box office? Are guys really going to croon “867-5309” in that situation? And, as my friend pointed out, wouldn’t Jen want to feed before prom?)

Nevertheless, even if you find Diablo Cody’s dialogue somewhat headache-inducing after awhile (it’s less cloying here than in Juno, at least, since Kusama’s visuals don’t follow Cody down the indy-kitsch road like Jason Reitman did), Jennifer’s Body is mostly harmless. There’s even some fun to be had occasionally: Boyfriend Chip has a few choice lines, and special props to wily veterans J.K. Simmons and Amy Sedaris, who steal every small scene they’re in. Still, in the end Jennifer’s Body could have used a lot more personality. If you’re looking for a satisfyingly scary recent flick about women wrangling with demonic possession, I’d say skip this one and track down Sam Raimi’s Drag Me to Hell.