Let the Wild Rumpus…Mope.

Well, I had high hopes for this one, and getting the whole front row at the Uptown to myself last Friday evening seemed auspicious at the time. But sadly, Spike Jonze’s adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are is a well-made but disappointing piece of work, and the really great trailer of two months ago is as good as it gets.

I know this film is eliciting some very positive responses, and I definitely admired the craftsmanship on display. WTWTA is not a bad movie, nor is it an embarrassment or anything like that. But, as the movie moped along, I kept having the same reaction to it: I just don’t remember my childhood, or Sendak’s book for that matter, being so emo. Sure, I guess I remember being angry or depressed or sad every so often — nothing a good 30 minutes with the Star Wars figures couldn’t remedy — but that didn’t mean there was always a Cure song ready to break out right around the corner. (That was adolescence.) And I just don’t get the sense that nine-year-old children really spend a lot of time pondering things like the Finite, their feelings, or their soon-to-be-lost innocence. They live in the moment. They just are.

In fact, to my mind all the introspective, autumnal, fall-from-Eden-type musing on hand in WTWTA is less a tendency of irate 9-year-olds than it is one of writerly adults…particularly, grandiloquent and exceedingly self-absorbed writerly adults like Dave Eggers, who penned the screenplay here (and accompanied it with a 300-page fur-covered “novelization.” That’s almost a page for every word of Sendak’s original book.) Your mileage may vary, of course — Clearly, the movie is affecting a lot of folks pretty strongly. But Where the Wild Things Are did not much speak to my inner child. In fact, my inner child was pretty well bored by it.

I would guess most people, in America at least, know the story of Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are — either they read it to a child or remember reading it as a child. (I’m in the latter group, so the quotes below may be inexact.) Nonetheless, in the original story, Max is a bit too bratty to his Mom one night (“Feed Me, Woman!“), is sent to his room as a consequence, and enjoys a reverie in which he is King of the Wild Things. (“Let the Wild Rumpus Begin!“) Eventually, as his anger dissipates, Max grows homesick and returns “home” to a nice meal. The End.

In the movie, however, the story has been expanded in various ways. Max (Max Records) now has a older sister (Pepita Emmerichs) who seems to feature prominently in his imaginings (Lauren Ambrose.) Ok, fine. Mom (Catherine Keener) has an exasperating job and a new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo). Eh, Ruffalo is pretty overexposed, but he’s here for all of 10 seconds, so no harm, no foul. And the now-highly mopey “Wild” Things (James Gandolfini, Chris Cooper, Catherine O’Hara, Forest Whitaker, Paul Dano) sound like Snuffleupagus, think like Eeyore, and are all in dire need of prescription-strength antidepressants and/or therapy. Uh, hold on…what?

Oh, ok, they’re all psychological manifestations of Max’s various black moods — snippy downer (O’Hara), feeling ignored (Dano), etc. — give or take the quick-to-anger Carol (Gandolfini), who may or may not be a proxy for Max’s father, the best friend Max never had, or even Max himself. And now these Mopey Things want a king, except the monarchy of Max the First keeps letting everybody down. Perfect government, it seems — even on issues as innocuous as dirt-clod fights and fort-building — is as ephemeral as everlasting innocence, the feeling of being loved, the last shaft of sunlight wending through the forest at twilight, our own human frailty…wait a second, stop the reel. Wasn’t this movie supposed to be about a little kid hanging with monsters?

Props to Jonze and Eggers for trying to do something different, I guess. When you put WTWTA up against recent hackmeisterly cash grabs like The Cat in the Hat, well, there’s no comparison really. And the creature FX here are simply stunning, so there’s that too. Still, I found myself increasingly put off by all the overwrought glumness on display in WTWTA. Max and the Wild Things should be primal little hellions, unstoppable forces of Nature. They should not be miserably sad head cases, or at least they weren’t in my imaginings. And I don’t think the problem is I’m too adult for this movie — This version of WTWTA ends with a misplaced Grey Havens-y, “I’ll miss you most of all, Scarecrow!” farewell on the beach, where Max and the Wild Things howl in lament at the passing of childhood. All I could think was “What’s the problem here? I was howling along with Berk just this morning.”

Which reminds me — I’ve always found Philip Pullman to be a considerable wanker, but it was thinking about a central conceit of his His Dark Materials trilogy that crystallized one source of my discontent with WTWTA. I guess, like Pullman and unlike Jonze and Eggers, I don’t necessarily see growing out of childhood as such an inexorable loss of innocence or horrible fall from Eden. Rather, I think kids — myself back in the day included — are mostly primal, needy, and half-formed (like Lyra), and becoming an adult is instead a boon, a caterpillar becoming a butterfly, an expansion of the possible. It is a door opening, not a door closing. Well, you definitely don’t get that sense from Where the Wild Things Are. In fact, if my own younger days were as flat-out miserable as those of poor Max here, childhood’s end couldn’t have come fast enough.

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.

Checks, Lies, and Audiotape.

[Ugh. It seems corporate ne’er-do-wells at Archer Daniels Midland conspired to erase this whole review just as I pressed publish. Here we go again…]

Give Steven Soderbergh credit: He’s astonishingly prolific — This is his second film of the year, after The Girlfriend Experience. He’s as at home in the arthouse (Sex, Lies, & Videotape; Kafka) as he is in the multiplex (Oceans 11, 12, 13.) He’s clearly animated by an interest in politics and a strong social conscience (Traffic, K Street, Erin Brockovich, Che 1 & 2.) When he’s on, he’s really on. (The Limey, Out of Sight.) And he’s not afraid to take stylistic risks to see what comes of them. (Solaris, Full Frontal, Bubble.)

The Informant!, a strange embellishment on the real-life story of whistleblower Mark Whitacre and the ADM scandals, shares many of these Soderberghian qualities. A merging of sorts of his indie and mainstream bodies of work, The Informant! also isn’t afraid to go out on a limb and try new things. But alas, partly because of those risks, the film doesn’t really hang together, and feels more like an experiment than an entertainment. It’s not a bad movie by any means, but it sadly never really lives up to the Coenesque promise of that exclamation mark in the title. I’d say, Netflix it.

On the interesting side, Soderbergh has dolloped everything in this movie with a sickly, buttery orange-yellow sheen, as if this entire ADM-run universe has been dipped and slathered in high-fructose corn syrup. But other stylistic ventures go less well. Matt Damon’s Whitacre is saddled with an in-head voiceover — we hear what he’s thinking — that pays considerable dividends in the final act, but often results in a lot of pointless meandering on the way there. (Like all of us, Whitacre’s mind tends to wander, and he tends to go about porsches, birds, and sundry other randomness at various times.) And, in the Big Mistake department, Soderbergh has farmed out the score to 70’s maestro Marvin Hamlisch, and the incessantly perky, bells-and-horns retro sound he’s come up with feels both tonally off and is consistently distracting. It is, in a word, corny.

The thing is, it’s not entirely clear The Informant! even needed all this flair. As the film begins, Mark Whitacre (Damon) rhapsodizes to his son about the many splendiferous virtues of corn — it’s in everything, it binds us, surrounds us, permeates us. And putting it there is ADM, “Supermarket to the World,” where Whitacre works as a biochemist and the youngest vice-president in the company’s history. Life is good, profits are made, the corn flows. But the view from the top gets shaken up a bit when some Japanese competitors of ADM ostensibly try to extort the company using a lysine-eating virus. And when a friendly FBI agent (Scott Bakula) arrives on the scene to investigate this corporate crime, Whitacre — propelled by his wife (Melanie Lynskey of Heavenly Creatures) into a burst of conscience — furtively tells him of even more sordid goings-on in the ADM empire: price-fixing. Soon, with Whitacre as their Inside Man, the FBI are on the case, trying to unravel this criminal corporate conspiracy and get ADM’s Masters of the Universe to compromise themselves on tape. One big problem, tho’: Whitacre. To their dismay, the Feds soon discover that their mole — who learned everything he needed to know about espionage from Michael Crichton movies — is not only a risky asset, but a compulsive liar, one that’s been keeping some very big cards close to the vest. Sometimes, it’s not even clear if that boy is right in the head.

To play Whitacre, Matt Damon has gone through a pretty substantial physical transformation here. He’s gained thirty pounds of paunch and topped it off with a Ned Flanders moustache and a bad Shatner hairpiece. (Not that I’d advocate that he — or anybody — get on the Christian Bale method-actor binge-and-purge bandwagon, but he probably should’ve done something similar to make Robert DeNiro’s The Good Shepherd even remotely plausible.) Even notwithstanding the corn-fed “young John Bolton” look he’s taken on, however, this part suits Damon. His inherent likability dovetails nicely with the congenial aw-shucks Midwestern blandness that Whitacre uses both as a shield and a key weapon in his arsenal of misdirection.

Damon aside, one of the minor pleasures of The Informant! is getting to see a bevy of character actors play against type. (The exception being Bakula, who once again is the still, calm center of the world. Then again, few do fundamentally decent as well as Quantum Leap‘s Sam Beckett.) Joel McHale of Talk Soup — soon, no doubt, to be Joel McHale of Community — is both deadly serious and believably earnest as Bakula’s partner. The Kurgan, a.k.a. Clancy Brown, exudes a ruthless professional mien as ADM’s top corporate lawyer — It’s his intelligence, rather than his bulk, that is sinister and frightening this time. Funnyman Patton Oswalt shows up in the later-going as an FBI accountant and plays it laudably straight and dull. And, perhaps most surprising, Buster Bluth (Tony Hale) also shows up in the third act and manages to come off as hypercompetent. (No small feat — every time he appeared on screen, my brain still went “Hey brother!“)

This, I think, speaks to yet another of Soderbergh’s strengths as a director — he’s clearly good with actors, and gives them the freedom to take the same types of risks that he does. The Informant! never really coheres, true, but I’d much rather see a talented director like Soderbergh continue to stretch himself and experiment, rather than bask in his safe, tried-and-tested wheelhouse. In the end, The Informant! probably counts as an amiable misfire, but those will happen. Stil, so long as Soderbergh keeps making movies, I’ll likely keep watching them…perhaps with some ADM-enhanced popcorn on hand.

Lest Ye Be Judged.

For completion’s sake, two comedies I caught over Labor Day weekend and have already almost forgotten about: Mike Judge’s Extract and Bobcat Goldthwait’s World’s Greatest Dad. One is generally optimistic and humane towards its fellow man, the other misanthropic and downright grim. Alas, neither, in the end, turned out to be particularly funny. If you’re looking for a good laugh at the theater right now, I still stand by In the Loop.

Of the two, it’s probably more surprising — and disappointing — that Mike Judge’s Extract turned out so pedestrian. As most everyone knows, Office Space is a certifiable classic, and however you feel about Beavis & Butthead, the basically straight-to-video Idiocracy was reasonably clever about bringing that duo’s schtick to its logical endpoint. (Idiocracy is also uneven, but its highs — the opening, the Wal-Mart greeter gag, etc. — are much higher than those to be had here.) At any rate, perhaps because of the Idiocracy snafu — there was really no good reason for Fox to bury it like they did — Judge seems to be playing it far too safe here. Extract mostly just feels like leftover vignettes from King of the Hill scripts, perhaps ones that were slightly too risque for television.

It’s hard to put a finger on exactly what’s wrong here (as it always is with funny), but perhaps it’s this: Office Space is much-beloved because it’s involves situations that anyone who’s spent any amount of time in cubicle life (or, per Jennifer Aniston’s “flair,” in food service) could identify with. Ok, most of us have never pulled the Superman III con, but who hasn’t been tsk-tsked for lack-of-TPS cover sheets, or wanted to go yard on a hiccuping fax machine? The humor of Office Space revolved around the penny-ante frustrations of work life, like getting stuck in traffic or losing your stapler, and in that sense it feels — almost — universal.

I had assumed going in that Extract would be the Office Space of the factory floor, but it isn’t. For one, it mainly revolves around the trials and tribulations of Jason Bateman’s factory owner — a small businessman, basically — and all the folks on the floor (including Judge himself) are mostly secondary characters, however sympathetically drawn. But, more to the point, Extract doesn’t really rely on workday nuisances for its humor like Office Space. Instead, it revolves around increasingly outlandish situations like, say, sorta accidentally buying your wife a sweet but lunk-headed gigolo (Dustin Milligan) while zonked out on ketamine. I can’t say I’ve ever worked in a factory, but I can’t imagine gigolos, femme fatale drifters (Mila Kunis), or even horrifying Rube Goldberg disasters resulting in testicular detachment play much of a day-to-day role in things.

And, divorced from that everyday humor that Judge does so well, Extract just feels episodic and throwaway. The funniest scene in the movie involves Bateman’s getting stoned out of his gourd with absolutely the wrong guy — let’s just say he’s slightly aggro — and even that goes on for too long. (Also, I missed Pineapple Express, but I get the sense that this very same joke was half the movie.) I didn’t mind throwing money at Extract in the end — after what happened to Idiocracy, Mike Judge probably deserves it. But I can’t really recommend the film either — there’s just not much there there.

Speaking of one-joke movies, and this probably counts as very big spoiler, Bobcat Goldthwait’s mordant squirmathon World’s Greatest Dad — which I caught with my priest on Labor Day (think Orgrimmar, not the Vatican) — is basically an extended riff on the “Teen Suicide: Don’t Do It,” “I love my dead gay son!” antics of Heathers. I didn’t loathe World’s Greatest Dad like my friend — he walked out around the eighty minute mark — but, again, there’s just not enough here to sustain a full movie.

The single-parent dad in question is Lance Clayton (Robin Williams), a failed writer laboring in (and loathing) obscurity as a poetry teacher at a private high school. In danger of losing both his job — nobody much cares about poetry anymore — and his surreptitious girlfriend Claire, the school’s art teacher (an appealing, if chirpy, Alexie Gilmore), Lance’s biggest problem these days is just trying to raise his really wayward son, Kyle (Daryl Sabara). Kyle is…well, Kyle is a douchebag, pure and simple. The kid has no redeeming qualities whatsoever — He terrorizes his father into submission on all manner of issues, and nobody can stand him, except for one long-suffering friend (Evan Martin) with his own problems at home. And that just about sums up Lance Clayton’s life, until an deadly (and embarrassing) accident — think David Carradine or Michael Hutchence — presents some horrible new opportunities…

The film’s big credit here is Robin Williams, who gives one of his better performances in recent years. To my mind, Williams can be hit-or-miss. He’s often excellent when he finds a role that balances comedy and drama (The World According to Garp, Dead Poet’s Society, The Fisher King, Good Will Hunting), but deteriorates rapidly if the script pushes him too far in either direction. (On one hand, abominations like Patch Adams or Mrs. Doubtfire; on the other, one-note performances like Insomnia and One Hour Photo.) Here, Goldthwait serves Williams well, and vice versa — The only thing that makes WGD work at all is Williams’ often surprisingly nuanced performance. (His reaction to “Parenting is the toughest job you’ll ever love” still makes me laugh every time I see the trailer.)

That being said, World’s Greatest Dad ends up being mostly a one-note film. (Part of the problem is the set-up: The movie is driven by a Big Lie, and so, just as you always end up waiting for the couple to get (back) together in a standard-issue rom-com, a lot of the time here is spent just waiting for the other shoe to drop.) I admired WGD‘s intentions — Get past the kink and the misanthropy, and the movie is an pretty timely riff on the blatant white-washing that often attends our public mourning rituals. But, in the end, it’s not particularly funny, and it beats its one dead horse so thoroughly that WGD loses steam well before its final act. Next time, Dad, cut to the chase.

State of Play.

Some folks in this film would probably call me a right bleedin’ tosser (and much, much worse) for starting off this post as such. But Armando Iannucci’s hilarious In the Loop, which I caught Sunday morning, has only one real flaw — It feels like it’s coming out a few years too late. This faux-documentary-style disquisition into Britain and America’s joint lead-up to war in the Middle East, and the shrewd, venal bureaucrats who got us there, can’t help but feel very 2003. (Which is not to say Washington politics is now a beacon of optimism and good faith in the Obama era, only that the political zeitgeist has shifted some since the events depicted here.)

But, that one small caveat aside — and to be fair, In the Loop is apparently based on a British TV show (The Thick of It) that was more timely (and is going in the Netflix queue) — this is a gut-bustingly funny film. I honestly can’t remember the last time I laughed so hard in a theater. (Alas, it was probably 21 Grams, and that was for all the wrong reasons.) True, given that this is a sharp-edged, basically anti-Dubya political satire that goes out of its way to reward pop-culture geekery (Frodo, Ron Weasley, and the White Stripes are all used as epithets at one point or another), I’m probably as close to a target audience for this sort of movie that’s out there. Nevertheless, if your sense of humor runs anywhere from squirmathons like The Office UK or Curb Your Enthusiasm to sardonic political comedies like The Candidate or Bob Roberts to the current-events commentaries of Stewart and Colbert, this movie is a must-see. (And if you don’t find hyperarticulate Scotsman Peter Capaldi spewing forth rococo profanities funny just yet, you probably will after watching In the Loop.)

Iannucci’s film begins with another day in the life of Malcolm Tucker (Capaldi), the tough-as-nails, take-no-guff director of communications at 10 Downing St. (Think Rahm Emanuel, but funny.) This particular morning, Tucker quickly becomes enraged by the latest slip-up by the seemingly ineffectual Minister for International Development, Simon Foster (Tom Hollander, best recognized in America from the Pirates sequels.) To wit, Foster responded to a direct press question about an impending Mideast conflict by blurting out that “war is unforeseeable.” This is not “following the line,” as Tucker puts it, but after a stern rebuke, the Minister — and his communications team, new guy Toby (Chris Addison) and competent veteran Judy (Gina McKee) — only compound the error. Foster gets completely lost in the thicket at a follow-up press avail, and soon manages to mangle his way through to an even more unwieldy soundbite: “To walk the road of peace, sometimes we need to be ready to climb the mountain of conflict.” (Tucker’s livid response to this policy breach: “You sound like a f**in’ Nazi Julie Andrews.“)

Nonetheless, this sort of Zen pronunciamento is exactly the sort of thing the big boys in Washington want more of, even if no one (least of all Foster) seems to know what exactly he was driving at. Soon both the Hawks (represented by a Rumsfeldian David Rasche) and the Doves (mainly State Dept. deputy Mimi Kennedy and peacenik general James Gandolfini) think they’ve found an ace-in-the-hole in the confused minister. Meanwhile, this being Washington, a town that’s “like Bugsy Malone, but with real guns,” there’s another tier of shenanigans brewing under the principals. State Dept. aide Liza Weld (Anna Chlumsky) has penned a career-killing memorandum — soon acronymed, in DC fashion as “PWIP PIP” — that outlines the few pros and many cons of the imminent war. And Foster’s new man Toby has managed to inadvertently leak the real name of the War Committee to his friend at CNN — naturally, it was the committee with the most boring-sounding title.

Throw in a few more byzantine political subplots — more aides, committees, leaks, and whatnot — and simmer, and you have what amounts to the smartest, funniest political satire I’ve seen in a good long while. This is also clearly a movie that will reward repeat viewing, and I could see In the Loop someday being quoted as often and as lovingly in certain circles as The Big Lebowski. It may not be everyone’s cup of bile, I suppose, but if you’re generally a reader of this site, I’m guessing you’ll probably enjoy it as much as I did. So, if this movie is still playing in your area, go check it out…or brave the unholy wrath and frightening verbiage of Mr. Tucker. War may be “unforeseeable” — your enjoyment of In the Loop is not.

Your Lonely Souls.

After Friday’s Basterds came a Saturday morning expedition to Sophie Barthes’ minor-key Cold Souls. I was sold on this film as soon as I heard about the sci-fi premise — once again there’s some weird science for sale in and around New York City — and it’s worth a rental at least, particularly if you’re a fan of Paul Giamatti. But Cold Souls also feels vaguely underwritten: The ideas it puts in play are more interesting than the execution, and it’s hard not to think of the movie as just another well-meaning but flawed act of Existential Schlub Theater, a la Charlie Kaufmann’s Synecdoche, New York.

So what’s the score here? Well, world-renowned screen thespian Paul Giamatti (Paul Giamatti) has lately been pouring his heart andsoul into a Broadway production of Chekhov’s Uncle Vanya, and it’s killing him even worse than that John Adams gig back in the day — he lies awake nights, brain and stomach churning. So, after being clued into a New Yorker story about a Roosevelt Island firm that temporarily stores souls, Paul takes the plunge. Without even telling his wife (Emily Watson, bestowing her indie imprimatur), he takes a cable car over to yonder island, listens to the sales pitch from the eminently reasonable Dr. Flintstein (David Straithairn), and gets his chickpea-sized soul (or at least 95% of it) extracted from his person.

As you might expect, this has some strange side effects — The soulless Paul, for example, is completely impervious to the charms of a cute bunny (I mean that literally, although the extremely underused Lauren Ambrose doesn’t seem to have much of an effect on him either.) He’s also now a terrible actor — Without his broken soul propelling him along a dark and agonizing path, Giamatti’s Vanya flies over Russian pathos and lands somewhere in the Borscht Belt. But, when Paul heads back to Roosevelt Island to get his soul back…well, his complication has developed a little complication. For it turns out there is a brisk black market going on in the soul business, and Giamatti’s personal chickpea has been sent via mule (Dina Korzun) to St. Petersburg, where it’s being used by a beautiful Russian soap star (Katheryn Winnick) who now believes herself in possession of Al Pacino’s actorly chops. (Al Pacino has a soul?) Meanwhile, the avuncular Dr. Flintstein suggests, perhaps Giamatti could just pick a soul out of the black market catalog…word is Russian poets are going cheap these days…

There’s a lot to admire in Barthes’ Souls — It’s nothing if not clever throughout, and there are definitely a few chuckles to be had. Every member of the cast here is pretty darned good, particularly Giamatti and Watson, who manage to make a compelling, multi-dimensional marriage come across with very few lines. And I admired that the movie had thought through some of the second-level ramifications of a soul commodities business — black markets, for example.

All that being said, Cold Souls ultimately feels like something of a non-starter. As with The Brothers Bloom, a third act in Russia feels meandering and purposeless. The glimpses we do eventually get of people’s soul-landscape — a sort of Mark Romanek afterworld of out-of-focus children and creepy oldsters — are, frankly, less interesting than the ideas that were already put into play. And there’s just not much there there. In the end, the movie is better at the set-up than the follow-through. Cold Souls is worth watching on IFC some day, but, like poor Paul Giamatti after the operation, it ends up feeling curiously hollow.

Swatting at Nazis.

A weekend chock-full of movies on this end, beginning with a Friday night outing to Quentin Tarantino’s striking, rambling Inglourious Basterds. I’ve been down on pretty much everything QT has done over the past decade — Kill Bill, Vol. 1, Kill Bill, Vol. 2, Death Proof — but Basterds at last feels like a movie by the writer-director who gave us Reservoir Dogs, Pulp Fiction, and the underappreciated Jackie Brown. To be honest, it’s hard to say whether Tarantino has finally reversed his decade-long slide into his own solipsistic, homage-heavy universe (which is the three-dollar way of describing his recent tendency to disappear up his own ass), or — more likely — that QT’s riffing on European film as much as 70’s exploitation flicks here makes this movie feel broader than the last few forays. Nevertheless, for whatever reason, Basterds works, and it is a welcome return-to-form.

Perhaps part of the reason I enjoyed the film was that I went in with egregiously low expectations. Particularly with Hostel director Eli Roth skulking about the premises — he’s Donny Donowitz, a.k.a. the “Bear Jew,” a Boston-born basterd who likes to go yahd on Nazi skulls with his Louisville Slugger — I went in thinking that this movie would basically be two and a half hours of grisly torture porn — or , in other words, the ear scene from Reservoir Dogs over and over again, made “ok” because the victims are Nazis. But Inglourious Basterds is both broader and more subtle than that. Yes, there’s some of that going on — particularly in Chapter 2 — but it’s handled much more expertly than I feared. (Nor are the victims in question just cartoon Nazis out of Raiders of the Lost Ark, but multi-dimensional individuals in a huge spot of trouble.)

And, in any case, the Basterds are really a small part of the film as a whole. Borrowing liberally from The Good, The Bad, and The Ugly at the start, the movie begins in 1941 France with the interrogation of a French farmer (Denis Menochet) who may or may not be harboring his Jewish neighbors. His interlocutor is the courtly SS Colonel Hans Landa (Christophe Waltz, a bit over-the-top but probably a shoo-in for a Supporting Actor nod) who, in a wide-ranging conversation about milk, hawks, pipes, and paperwork, methodically picks apart the poor dairy farmer like a boy pinning down a butterfly. Then, we meet the Basterds, the elite unit of Jewish soldiers — led by “Aldo the Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt, also playing it broad) — who are kicking ass and taking manes all across Europe. Their dastardly exploits have even caught the attention of the German High Command — including the Fuhrer himself (Martin Wuttke), who wants them dead, like, yesterday. (Speaking of which, the early scenes in the FHQ, with Hitler throwing a tantrum over the Basterds, felt a lot like how I’d imagine a WWII-era Captain America film might pan out.)

Minister of Propaganda Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), meanwhile, is more interested in getting his newest propaganda film — A Nation’s Pride, about the Sgt. York-like heroics of one German sniper (Daniel Bruhl) — the grand opening it deserves in Nazi-occupied Paris. To that end, and on the advice of said sniper (who’s a bit smitten with the proprietor), he looks to book the premiere at a theater run by a melancholy French beauty named Emmanuelle Mimieux (Melanie Laurent). But Emmanuelle, it turns out, is in fact named Shoshanna — we met her earlier in the film — and she more than most has a score to settle with these godawful Nazis. And, like Herr Goebbels, she knows a thing or two about using the cinema to make a dramatic statement…

I haven’t even mentioned the German actress/double-agent Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), or the dashing British film critic-turned-lieutenant, Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender), or Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), the expert Nazi-killer sprung by the Basterds for bad behavior, or military mastermind Gen. Ed Fenech (Mike Myers, distracting but getting to live out his Peter Sellers dream some more), the man with a plan to knock out the German High Command in one fell swoop. Yes, this film is a truly baroque creation. It’s more a collection of loosely-related setpieces, to be honest, and some work better than others (A vignette involving a rendezvous-gone-south in a basement pub is a masterpiece of slowly-ratcheting suspense; the scene where Shoshanna is forced to eat dinner with a gaggle of Nazis feels ten minutes too long.)

Although most of the speaking here is conducted in French, German, or really-bad Italian (it’s all lovely to listen to, by the way — the musicality of QT’s dialogue definitely carries over into other languages), this is a Tarantino movie through and through. We have the long, meandering conversations punctuated by staccato bursts of violence. (See also: Any other Tarantino film.) We have the throwback homage-ridden score (Mostly Morricone, but David Bowie’s “Cat People” shows up in a truly odd spot.) We have the random digressions on “Pop Culture According to QT.” (There’s an extended riff on King Kong here that momentarily took me out of the film.) We have an obvious lapse into foot fetishism (the Cinderella scene, which, imho, doesn’t make much sense given what happens later.) There are, of course, several Mexican standoffs. It’s all very Tarantino, alright.

And we have the powerful ending, which I won’t give away in detail here. [Warning: This rest of this review is spoilerish.] As several characters say in Chapter 5, “the shoe’s on the other foot now.” And it is — After the tension-wracked first chapter, Basterds completely inverts the usual Cat-and-Maus relationship inherent to almost all movies of this genre. The political economy of IB is hardly what you’d call Zen, and if “turn the other cheek” is your moral touchstone, then the ending is deplorable in many ways. (Even Tarantino seems to think so, given that we the audience have basically the same reaction to Basterds as the Nazis do to A Nation’s Pride.) That being said, it’s a weirdly and undeniably intoxicating thing to see the Jewish Basterds being the guys holding the guns for once, and to witness their disembodied, cackling Avenging Angel exult in a vengeance long denied.

After all its Eurocinema-meets-The Dirty Dozen twists-and-turns, Inglourious Basterds ends up being a sort of a Leni Riefenstahl film for the Jews. And, well, propaganda it may be, but you don’t have to be a Tarantino-level foot fetishist to find it at least somewhat refreshing, even exhilarating, to see that boot on the other heel for once.