Man in a Box.

A man of dubious character, a desperate and beautiful woman, an illicit romance, a cuckolded criminal, some arsonists-for-hire, and a ginormous bag of money: Clearly, this is not going to end well. But as with most exercises in noir, it’s all in the telling. And, while you could argue that Nash Edgerton’s The Square sorta loses its footing in the last fifteen minutes or so, it’s still a reasonably decent Aussie thriller in the vein of other recent neo-noirs like A Simple Plan, Fargo, or One False Move. No need to rush out and see it, I don’t think, but it’s definitely worth adding to the Netflix queue, if you’re a fan of the genre.

This particular tale of the evil that Men do and the fickleness of Fate begins with a tryst — Underneath the overpass and watched by their respective canine companions, two lovers enjoy a brief flurry of passion in a parked car. (As in Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead, this is the fleeting moment of ecstasy that sets up the tale of woe to follow.) The man here is Ray (David Roberts, most recognizable to me as one of the “other” captains in the Matrix sequels), a married construction foreman not above taking a few kickbacks on the side. The woman is Carla (Claire van der Boom), also married, who works at the local beauty salon and spends her nights deflecting the advances of her thug husband’s creepy, ne’er-do-well friends.

The trouble emerges when said husband, Greg (Anthony Hayes), brings home a ginormous satchel of blood-soaked cash one night, and Carla happens to notice him — unbeknownst that he’s being watched — stowing it away in the attic space above the bathroom. Now that kind of money could change lives, and if she and Ray got their hands on it…They could skip this town, flee their respective spouses, and start anew. Ray has doubts when he hears of the plan (and seems less happy that a decision point has been reached anyway.) But if his choice is Carla and the Big Steal or a return to his loveless marriage and workaday construction life…well, that’s really no choice at all.

And so Ray and Claire enlist the aid of a professional but vaguely dodgy-seeming arsonist (Joel Edgerton, the director’s brother and Uncle Owen of Episode II) and his in-over-her-head girlfriend Lily (Hanna Mangan-Lawrence) to set off a fire that will give them a cover story for when they abscond with the missing loot. But, the best laid plans and all that. Inevitably, something goes horribly wrong…several things, actually. And not only that, but somebody else seems to know about The Plan, and starts blackmailing Ray after the fact. Is it Eddie (Damon Herriman) or Leonard (Brendan Donoghue, eerily Bale-like), one of the aforementioned creepy friends? Or is it one of the guys at his site, like Ray’s #2 Jake (Peter Phelps)? Whoever it is, Ray needs to lock him or her down, before a suspicious husband or an agitated arsonist take matters into their own hands…

That should give you the gist of it — The Square is one of those movies where a seemingly simple criminal plan, through happenstance, incident and a steady confluence of minor screw-ups, just takes one wrong turn after another. (In a way, this is a grimmer Aussie version of The Ice Harvest, except now Xmas is a summertime holiday.) And to its credit, not only do the characters rarely do dumb things in this story, they sometimes do surprisingly smart things: See, for example, Ray’s detective work in his office involving the scented card. Of course, smart, dumb, or otherwise, the gods tend to laugh at the plans of men, and, in this particular world, Edgerton is a cruel master indeed.

In fact, the Fates are so remorseless here that Ray and Claire’s frozen run of luck starts to bleed out into the population at large. It’s not just the supporting cast who have to worry: Bystanders and even pets just minding their own business also have catastrophic events befall them as the story moves on. (C’mon now, the swimming incident was gratuitous.) For what it’s worth, this anything-can-happen-to-anyone feel of The Square was anticipated by Spider, an Edgerton-directed short shown just before The Square here at the Landmark E-Street, about a man’s disastrous attempt to kiss-and-make-up after a recent feud with his girlfriend. And when the writer-director of your movie is also a full-fledged stuntman, you have to expect that some really bad things might happen in the story.

In any case, I have some quibbles with the very end of The Square, which I can’t really talk about in specifics without giving the game away. (To speak in general terms: basically, unfortunate happenstance even trumps plot dynamics at the end — The story doesn’t build to an inevitable conclusion so much as more bad stuff happens.) But, up to that point, The Square is for the most part a crisp, atmospheric, and laudably intelligent neo-noir from the Land Down Under. My advice: You better run, you better take cover.

Some Assembly Required.

Alas, while Tony Stark’s original outing was a smart and surprisingly fun thrill ride that kicked off its summer in grand fashion — put another way, it was the Kick-Ass of 2008 — I am sorry to report that Jon Favreau’s leaden, unwieldy Iron Man 2 falls back down to Earth. In short, it’s basically the so-so, overripe, big-dumb-action flick I expected the first time around.

To be clear, the movie isn’t an embarrassment — On acting alone, it’s miles above recent big-budget studio dren like Alice in Wonderland or Clash of the Titans. But, if the first Iron Man soared, this one dutifully plods along, earthbound. Usually, comic book franchises, freed of their origin story, gain momentum in their second chapter — Superman II, Spiderman 2, X2, The Dark Knight. But here, unfortunately, we’re closer to Quantum of Solace territory — after a promising opening round, both films relapse into the lazy writing and unseemly summer-blockbuster habits whose surprising absence had defined their first go-round.

The thing that makes Iron Man 2 so maddening, and even kinda sad in the end, is that the powers-that-be clearly tried to capture the same lightning in a bottle that propelled the first one. As such, this movie feels like it was made by a committee, who sat down with Iron Man, a DVD player, and some notepads and tried to figure out exactly what made the first one tick. Then they took the various strands they came up with, made each one bigger-faster-stronger, and tried to recombinate them for Iron Man 2. Blammo, we have a sequel!…Only, it doesn’t quite work like that. That sort of reverse-engineering may work in advanced weapons manufacturing — but for movies, not so much. And, as a result, Iron Man 2 doesn’t cohere nearly as well as the original. It feels disparate and shapeless and, well, rusty.

So, let’s see here, we have Robert Downey, Jr. being charmingly egotistical, tossing off off-kilter line readings, wooing Gwyneth Paltrow, mouthing off to authority figures (this time, Senator Garry Shandling), and trading in on his troubled past to bring pathos to alcoholic billionaire Tony Stark. Check. We have a few exceedingly likable actors known for talent rather than bankability — Mickey Rourke, Sam Rockwell — in the villain roles. Check. We have lots of future-think computer displays in Tony’s office, maybe a funny robot or two. Check. We have plenty of state-of-the-art military-grade hardware for the boys-and-their-toys crowd, and a bunch of random “Avengers! Coming-soon-to-a-theater-near-you” comic nods to keep the rest of the fanboys happy. Check. Oh, yes, ‘splosions too, and don’t forget the extra Bigger Robots Iron Man has to fight at some point. Check and check.

All the right boxes are checked off, and they even add a few more. (Hey, everybody digs Mad Men. Roger Sterling? Check!) And yet Iron Man 2 still ends up feeling more like an attempt to sell happy meals at Burger King and cups at 7-11 than an actual, full-fledged movie experience. Why? Well, I’m guessing it’s because the film is undercooked. Simply put, the whole thing just feels like it was rushed out of the gate to make this 2010 release date, most notably in the writing department. Screenwriter Justin Theroux is a decent actor (Mulholland Drive, Six Feet Under), and he obviously scored a hit as one of three writers on Tropic Thunder (with Ben Stiller and Etan Cohen.) But, to say this plot has holes would suggest it’s somehow more form than void in the end. As told, this film barely makes any sense whatsoever. You may have heard that Mickey Rourke recently admitted he doesn’t know what the movie was about. Well, I sat through the durned thing, and I’m not sure myself.

There’s no point in nitpicking every little thing that doesn’t make sense in Iron Man 2 — it’s a fool’s errand. But even by the lax standards one must accord a film about a guy in a flying metal tuxedo, it just doesn’t hang together. You could wrestle over the basic plot points: What is Whiplash’s plan here, exactly — just to hope he picks up a benefactor? How does he know Tony will be racing at Monaco, and how does he — or Pepper or Happy — get on the track? Why does Justin Hammer want shoes? For what crime do the cops go after him in the end? Or you can go bigger with it: Why is Pepper Potts the head of Stark now? Why is Rhodey so trusting of the Big Bads? You’re kidding me with this new element stuff, yes? Why can the Black Widow turn off some suits and not others? For that matter, why is she even in this film? But the answer seems to be: Sorry, because that’s all we could think of to keep the story moving along. Sheesh, get over yourself, will ya? Sit back, eat some popcorn, don’t think so much.

Well, maybe they’re right, but the beauty of the first Iron Man is that it was slick, smart, and reasonably self-contained — It hung together quite well, and you didn’t have to turn your brain off to enjoy it. But this one’s lumbering and bric-a-brac and all over the place in that summer-action-movie way, partly because I guess they wanted to top the first film, and partly because it’s overburdened with all the random Avengers-prequel nonsense. See: Samuel L. Jackson as (nu-school) Nick Cage and Scarlett Johansson as the Widow. (I don’t want to hate on Johansson too much, although I still think somebody like Olga Kurylenko was a much better fit to play a sleek Russian super-spy. Suffice to say, they didn’t even give her an accent for some reason, and, when it comes to her big Trinity-ish action setpiece…well, I found Hit-Girl more plausible.)

So, is there a silver lining here? Well, Mickey Rourke isn’t given near enough to say or do, but he’s fun while he lasts. And, while Sam Rockwell may be slumming in a well-worn groove as “the guy who’s not quite as cool as he wants to be” (Galaxy Quest, Zaphod), he just about steals the movie away every time he shows up. (Consider the scene where he’s arming War Machine, and that business with the little nuke — a joke lifted from MIB‘s “noisy cricket,” by the way.) So, there’s hope for the franchise yet, if they keep up the quality casting and just spend a little more time putting it all together next time. The first weekend alone already suggests Iron Man 3 will be a go. Here’s hoping Favreau, Downey, et al get the pieces in order first before embarking on part III. Gotta break that rusty cage, y’all.

Forget It, Jake. It’s Buenos Aires.

This weekend seems to be the last lull before the summer-movie storm begins in earnest with Iron Man 2 next Friday. (I almost talked myself into Samuel Bayer’s Nightmare on Elm Street remake, out of a fondness for the original, before looking at the reviews and deciding that maintaining my perfect record of never throwing money at Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes was a better way to go.) Nonetheless, if you’re in the mood for some quality cinema, I highly recommend a film I saw last weekend, and the 2010 Best Picture winner, Juan Jose Campanella’s The Secret In Their Eyes (El secreto de sus ojos.)

At once a police procedural, political thriller, chaste love story, and remembrance of days past, Secret is a hard movie to categorize, but Dana Stevens’ concise summary at Slate — “Imagine a really long, really awesome episode of Law & Order set in Buenos Aires” — is a pretty good start. The thing is, Law & Order in Argentina, particularly ’round the time of the Dirty War, isn’t as black and white as it usually is in our 42-minute visits to the island realm of Jack McCoy and Adam Schiff. In Buenos Aires, as in life, everything gets complicated.

So, how to explain Secret? Well, I was reminded occasionally here of David Fincher’s Zodiac, in that the lingering case at the heart of the story drives some of our characters slightly mad. (The difference being, here an eventual resolution brings little comfort — There are still guilt, complicity, and consequences to contend with.) There’s a bravura sequence in a futbol stadium in the middle going which recalls some of the extended-shot marvels of Alfonse Cuaron’s Children of Men. There’s definitely some of The Wire‘s workingman’s blues and gallows humor here, and and as one of my friends noted, there’s also a good bit of The Remains of the Day in this story too. Taken as a whole, Secret moves to its own unique rhythm, and it is a film that’s definitely worth catching.

The tonal ambiguity of Secret is reflected in the opening moments, as we first meet Benjamin Esposito (Ricardo Darin) — a recently retired ex-lawyer now settling into the writing life — going through the author’s quandary of figuring how to start the book on his brain. First we see and hear that tired romantic cliche, a sad parting at a train station, and a lover chasing down the train. Wait, scratch that. Let’s start with a final breakfast together with the lost lover, and all the details — the honey, the fruit, her floral-print dress, her sun-dappled smile — that can now never be forgotten. No, that’s not it either. So Benjamin falls back to the case file and we witness some brief and dreadful moments in a brutal, bloody rape/homicide. Ugh. That’s no way to start this tale.

Still struggling with his opening chapter, Benjamin visits his old friend and colleague Irene (Soledad Villamil), now a judge in Buenos Aires, who is not particularly enthused to hear that he’s decided to reopen old wounds and write about the tumultuous Morales case. Nonetheless, she gives him an old typewriter (with a broken A) and some excellent advice — Start with what you remember best. And so he does. And soon we find ourselves thirty years in the past, in the small, paper-strewn offices of Ben, Irene, and their semi-functioning alcoholic co-worker Sandoval (Guillermo Francella), just before they pulled the case that transformed their lives.

Particularly by L&O standards, the whodunit aspect of the story is not all that baroque (although it does rely on some potentially clever, potentially dubious po-lice work that helps give the film its name. While I’m on the subject, there’s some implausibly successful good-cop, bad-cop interrogating later on that took me out of the film.) Instead, our investigative trio has much more trouble finding, catching, and holding on to their man after they’ve made him. After all, Argentina between 1976 and 1983 is a slippery place — down is up and up is down, and searching for criminals is no longer a very safe pastime once the criminals are in charge…

I said in my review of Jacques Audiard’s A Prophet that “if The Secret in Their Eyes is better, it must be really something.” And, while I think I ever-so-slightly preferred A Prophet in the end — due to the earlier noted implausibilities here, and because this film’s various acts sometimes feel disconnected from each other– my strong advice is: See them both! A Prophet is a young man’s movie, a coming-of-age, learning-the-ropes story of an ascent into power, while Secret is an older man’s tale, a wistful look back at earlier times and the mistakes, regrets, and chance circumstances that haunted a life. And along with Red Riding, Ellsberg, Terribly Happy, and Kick-Ass, they’re both at the top of my 2010 list so far.

Got No Secrets to Conceal.

Let’s get right down to brass tacks: Sylvain White’s The Losers is not very good. Both the second edgy comic adaptation (after Kick-Ass) and the second elite-ops-on-a-suicide-mission movie (after Clash of the Titans) in a summer full of them (The A-Team, The Expendables, arguably Salt), The Losers feels shoddily written, by-the-numbers, and altogether pedestrian. (In fact, notorious hackmeister Akiva Goldsman has a producer cred here – that’s a pretty good tip-off for what you’re in for.)

And yet, even though The Losers is one of those movies where you sit around dutifully ticking off the one-liners, action beats, and omg-‘splosions from the trailer as they happen, just so you can figure out when you get to go home, I’ll say this: The movie’s got charisma to spare. I mean, The Comedian, Stringer Bell, Johnny Storm, Uhura (or, if you liked Avatar more than I did, Neytiri)…all in a B-movie, rock-’em-sock-’em action flick? That should work, right? And that’s not even counting appealing presences like Columbus Short, Oscar Jaenada, and Holt McCallany along for the ride.

And so there’s a strange, vaguely entertaining tension playing out at the heart of The Losers, almost despite itself. Are the amiable actors on display here enough to compensate for a film that is so lazy and perfunctory in pretty much every other aspect of its production? And, the answer is…no, not really. With one notable exception, all the players here eventually check out and succumb to the lethargy of the proceedings. (Losers, indeed.) Still, unlike Clash or Alice in Wonderland, Losers is never an irritatingly, in-your-face terrible experience. It’s just a ho-hum 100-minutes of blah that I’m sure will end up feeling perfectly harmless when TNT runs it into the ground a few years hence.

Anyway…The Losers, you say? Based on a Vertigo comic by Andy Diggle and Jock (I haven’t read it. The only DC Losers I’m familiar with are the WWII tank outfit that died in the Crisis), The Losers are basically your standard-issue coterie of black-ops, get-any-job-done paramilitary badasses, as per most every other film in this genre. Oh, and, as you might expect, they’ve been betrayed and left for dead by their handler, the mysterious and very well-connected Max (Jason Patric, way over the top but it’s not really his fault. Whatcha gonna do when the part is, for all intent and purposes, Dr. Evil?)

So, yes, this is basically the exact same story as The A-Team, or, for that matter Machete (once of Grindhouse, now, somewhat depressingly, its own full-length flick, coming to a theater near you this fall.) Only this time, somebody’s “f**ked with the wrong Mexican” — that would be laconic, eagle-eyed sharpshooter Cougar (Jaenada) — and his four friends: Clay (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), the hard-livin’ leader with woman troubles; Roque (Idris Elba), the grouchy #2 and knife specialist; Jensen (Chris Evans), the motor-mouthed hacker and comic relief; and Pooch (Short), the pilot and family man.

The X-Factor in this all-too-predictable tale is the lovely Aisha (Zoe Saldana), an alluring assassin who recruits the Losers in Bolivia, as they lick their wounds post-double-cross, and who makes the team a Godfather offer: She’ll get them back in the US if the Losers promise to take out Max for good. That sounds like a win-win for everybody…but what is Aisha’s game, exactly? Well, do you really want me to tell you? There aren’t too many surprises to be had here, so best keep that one quiet for now. (I will give away this: poor Saldana doesn’t get much to do but look great, drop some exposition now and again, and occasionally blow stuff up.)

Then again, she’s not alone in that regard. Anyone who’s ever watched The Wire knows that Elba is a charisma-bomb on most occasions. As Stringer Bell, he always commanded one’s full attention. But, here, he just seems bored and in a funk. Same goes for Morgan, who made a decent impression as the Comedian in Watchmen but, again, doesn’t have either the wherewithal or the ambition to spin gold from lead here. Somehow, someway (and just like Clash of the Titan‘s “power of Medusa”), this movie just seems to suck the life right out of people — It’s as if everyone realized at some point they were in a second-rate action movie and recalibrated their behavior accordingly.

The one notable exception I mentioned earlier, tho’, is the future Captain America, Chris Evans. Perhaps, thanks to his quality turn as the Human Torch in the otherwise atrocious Fantastic Four films, Evans has already had some practice in how to be the best thing in a bad movie. (He’s also quite good in the promising but maddeningly uneven Sunshine.) Or perhaps it’s just because his character, Jensen, is given the meatiest stuff to work with. Nonetheless, Evans sells it — The Losers is a zippier, vervier film whenever he’s onscreen. Which I guess makes him the winner of The Losers [rimshot]…Mama didn’t raise no fool.

Don’t Give a Damn ‘Bout My Bad Reputation.

Not to get all Peter Travers up in here, but, if you’re in any way a member of the fanboy/fangirl nation, Matthew Vaughn’s Kick-Ass is, pure and simple, kick-ass. Much as Jon Favreau’s Iron Man launched the summer of 2008 with a sleek, rousing, highly-enjoyable crowd-pleaser of a comic book film, I’m happy to report that Vaughn delivers exactly what its very quality trailer (not to mention Layer Cake and, occasionally, Stardust) promised — two quality hours of thrills, spills, and vaguely disreputable four-color mayhem.

This is not only a much more entertaining adaptation of Mark Millar’s work than Timur Bekmanbetov’s badly flawed Wanted. It’s also, in some ways and like Brad Bird’s The Incredibles, more Watchmen-y than Watchmen — a sardonic, pleasingly daft evisceration of common comic book tropes. And with a light touch, an impressive funnybook aesthetic, and great comic presence throughout, Kick-Ass is an audience movie if there ever was one, and just an all-around fun night out at the multiplex.

If you’re unfamiliar with the comic (as I was — I just knew the conceit), Kick-Ass basically centers on one question: Given that there are millions of comic book fans out there, and more than a few of them are, put charitably, maybe a little socially maladjusted, how come nobody in our world ever dresses up in a costume to fight crime? That’s the banner idea that occurs one day to thoroughly average high-school kid Dave Lizewski (Aaron Johnson, looking like a lankier Frodo.) And one scuba outfit purchase from Amazon and a few weeks of training (re: fantasizing) later, Dave — now known as Kick-Ass — embarks on his Hero Quest…which, well, doesn’t turn out so hot. (Minor spoiler: He quickly gets shivved, hit by a car, and left for dead.)

The silver lining of this godawful ass-kicking: Dave suffers so much nerve damage from his beatdown that he’s backed his way into a super-power — a higher-than-average pain tolerance. And so he sets out once more to fulfill his destiny, maybe impress a girl here or there also. But, while Kick-Ass is basically freelancing his way into a super-hero career, other folks take the mask-and-cowl more seriously — namely the better-trained, better-armed, and better-motivated father-daughter duo of Damon and Mindy MacCready, otherwise known as Big Daddy (Nicolas Cage) and Hit-Girl (Chloe Moretz). Out for revenge against a drug operation run by kingpin Frank D’Amico (Mark Strong), Big Daddy and Hit-Girl tend to leave a swath of blood and entrails in their wake. This makes D’Amico livid, of course, and so he starts gunning for any and all costumed vigilantes he can find, starting with that goofy kid on Youtube in the green scuba suit…

Admittedly, Kick-Ass is ultra-violent, although always in a hyperstylized comic book sense. (At worst, we’re in Kill Bill territory here.) Like Sin City, the moral economy of Kick-Ass may be somewhat suspect, although it’s nowhere near as craven or reprehensible as some pearl-clutching critics, like, weirdly, Roger Ebert, suggest. (Basically, Ebert is mortified by Hit-Girl. I presume he’s never heard of Robin, Bucky, Kitty Pryde, Jason Todd, or any other number of endangered child sidekicks in comics. That train left the station fifty years ago.) And, yes, it’s occasionally sophomoric — if I remember correctly, we have two masturbation jokes before the credits are even finished rolling. All that being said, Kick-Ass is also breezy, propulsive, and very entertaining, and its pros definitely outweigh its cons.

There are a lot of little things about the movie that work, from Clark Duke’s sidekick banter (he’s much more engaging here than in Hot Tub Time Machine) to Mark Strong (late of Sherlock Holmes, soon of Robin Hood) continuing to grow into an A-list presence. Or seeing a post-Bad Lieutenant Nick Cage offer up a wicked Adam West impression. Or Kick-Ass and Red Mist (Christopher Mintz-Plasse, nee McLovin) getting their freak on to Gnarls Barkley’s “Crazy.” (One minor quibble: From “Crazy” to “Bad Reputation” to even the 28 Weeks Later score, the soundtrack is weirdly rote in its choices, and feels almost temp-track-y.)

But, let’s get real — In the end, this is Hit Girl’s movie, and Chloe Moretz just about runs away with the durned show. As in (500) Days of Summer, Moretz is basically playing another preternaturally adult kid sister, except this time she’s also a certifiable badass with a potty mouth and a way with butterfly knives. (As it turns out, she’ll be doing the Old-Soul routine again this Christmas in Matt Reeves’ American remake of Let the Right One In.) Still, the movie wouldn’t work at all if she wasn’t great, and this is a star-making performance. Get used to the purple wig, y’all, ’cause Hit-Girl, I suspect, is going to be a staple of both Halloween and cosplay types for many years to come. And it’s Moretz’s impish grin and impeccable comic timing that, more than anything else, makes the idea of a Kick-Ass 2 worth entertaining.

It Never Rains (in Southern California).

Noah Baumbach’s surprisingly entertaining Greenberg begins with a long, sun-drenched appreciation of the luminous Greta Gerwig, about as languid and loving a tribute a director has paid an actress since Pam Grier’s “Across 110th St.” entrance in Jackie Brown. And, if that isn’t a weird enough beginning to a film by the notoriously misanthropic Baumbach, Gerwig’s character, Florence Marr, is quickly established as a kind, sweet, and unassuming soul — which, if you’ve seen any other Baumbach movie, makes you feel as if you’re about to watch a small child skip through a mine field. In other words, one quickly gets the sense that this is all gonna end very badly.

The mine field soon to enter this particular tale is the titular Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller), a caustic OCD burnout, mental case, and semi-professional carpenter who’s come all the way out to LA from New York to wreak havoc on both his old friends and his brother’s milieu. (Florence happens to be his brother’s personal assistant.) We’ll get to Roger in a bit. But one of the reasons I found the film surprisingly entertaining is that it manages to sidestep so many of the Bouncing Betties I expected would derail the flick for me from jump street. For one, we’ve basically seen this exact same story — “hurt people hurt people,” as Florence puts it at one point — before from Baumbach, both in his magnum opus, The Squid and the Whale, and particularly in the considerably less-successful Margot at the Wedding.

For another, Greenberg makes no secret of relying on two of my least-favorite movie tropes going. One, the goofy hipster man-child who refuses to grow up and expects the universe to cater to his whims and idiosyncrasies. Probably done best in Knocked Up, the Apatowish “Omega male” — so coined by Slate‘s Jessica Grose — has been ubiquitous in recent years, as The New Yorker‘s David Denby noted back in 2007. And, truth be told, Greenberg the movie is at its most aggravating when it revels in the character’s man-child tics, a la Jack Black’s doofus husband in Margot, such as Roger obsessively applying Chapstick or writing strongly-worded irate customer letters to various corporate conglomerates.

The second irritating trope in play here is one I’ve complained about several times before, from Sideways to A Single Man. And that’s the very cinematic notion that an irascible, ornery, and/or depressed protagonist will invariably meet a smart, beautiful, and long-suffering significant other who really just wants to save him from himself — in this case, Gerwig’s Florence — and he will soon thereafter fall ass-backwards into a relationship he has absolutely no business being in. Um, no. Life doesn’t work that way, nor should it really. And every time Florence, 25, and Greenberg, 41, start falling backwards towards each other here, you kinda want to scream at her to get the heck out of Dodge and find a guy who isn’t, y’know, certifiably bugnuts crazy.

So why does Greenberg work anyway? For several reasons. Perhaps most importantly, it, like all of Baumbach’s films, feels exceedingly well-observed. As a writer, Baumbach has a particularly good ear for dialogue, and gets how a conversation can bring people together or, by tortured increments, spin disastrously out of control. (See, for example, Greenberg’s varied ruminations with his old bandmate Ivan (Rhys Ifans, as good as I’ve ever seen him) or his star-crossed date with his long-ago ex-girlfriend Beth (Jennifer Jason Leigh, Baumbach’s real-life wife.) And, unlike in Squid, with Billy Baldwin’s “philistine” tennis coach, or Margot, with its slew of one-note unneighborly rednecks, this attention to character detail, and even a sense of magnanimity, applies to every person in the film.

Greenberg also benefits from quality performances across the board. I’ve already mentioned Gerwig, who’s an exceptionally low-key, honest, and appealing presence here. (She’s sort of the anti-Scarlett Johansson, an actress who, to my mind, seems to radiate self-entitlement and condescension in most every role.) But Stiller too is quite surprising here. Yes, Roger Greenberg can sometimes seem a collection of very Stillerish tics — the whiny letters and all that. But Stiller sells the character regardless. He doesn’t wink at the audience or let himself off the hook, even when Roger is being totally insufferable (which is basically most of the time.) If I thought the on-and-off love story here should have ended up a lot more off than on by the final reel, it’s a testament to how unlikable and uncompromising Stiller and Baumbach made their central character.

And, who knows? My failure to buy into the love story here probably speaks worse of me than it does of the movie. Sure, Florence ends up stepping on a few nasty mines over the course of this story as expected (one major one, in fact, happens before we even meet her.) But the very fact that Baumbach ends Greenberg on an ambiguous, even hopeful note suggests that maybe one of the more talented misanthropes in Hollywood right now learned a thing or two from the too-bleak Margot, and is getting a little less curmudgeonly in his middle age. And, hey, if he can change, maybe we all can change.

Ghosts, Writers.

Much as the lousiness of Alice in Wonderland drove me right into Antoine Fuqua’s Brooklyn’s Finest last month, I quickly tried to wash out the bad taste of Clash of the Titans this past Sunday with a showing of Conor MacPherson’s moody Irish ghost story The Eclipse. And I’ll give it this — It’s a right strange little movie.

I haven’t seen any of McPherson’s previous films, although my sis and I did catch his play The Seafarer on Broadway a few years ago, about an Irishman (David Morse), his blind older brother (Joe Norton), and their friends (Conleth Hill, Sean Mahon) visited by the Devil (Ciaran Hinds) one gloomy Christmas eve in Dublin. This film — broader and better executed than that rather larky evening of theater, although also somewhat aggravatingly open-ended — carries over some of the same cast (Hinds, Norton), as well as the supernatural goings-on in the Old Country.

And like Seafarer (and, from what I’ve heard of McPherson’s other works, like The Weir), it’s a bit of a strange genre mishmash — part horror flick, part adult romance, part relationship thriller. I can’t say the movie successfully coalesces into anything more than the sum of its parts, but it has the benefit of some likable actors — not only Hinds and Norton but also Iben Hjejle of High Fidelity and Aidan Quinn — and it makes for a decently compelling character piece and Gaelic travelogue for a few hours. Its pleasures may be mostly ephemeral, sure, but I’ve sat through worse ghost stories in my day.

As the film begins, the year is 2008, and in the scenic Irish seaport of Cobh, the locals are preparing for their yearly writing festival, where authors come by to hobnob, do readings, and discuss their latest works. Among the volunteers hosting this event is one Michael Farr (Hinds) a recent widower, shop teacher, and father of two who, late one night, seems to encounter a ghostly intruder in his house. The trick is, the person he thinks he saw — his father-in-law Malachy (Norton) — is still among the living, although he’s definitely withering on the vine in a nearby rest home. Can you see the ghost of someone who isn’t even dead yet?

Before Michael can wrap his mind around this quandary, events at the festival start to consume his attention. Namely, the visit by two authors who happen to share a brief, awkward history: The popular but exceedingly abrasive American writer Nicholas Holden (Quinn), and a lovely but distracted writer of ghost stories, Lena Morelle (Hjejle). Despite his continued grieving for his lost wife — or perhaps because of it, given their mutual interest in apparitions — Michael finds himself drawn to Lena, causing much consternation for Holden, who’s nursing the volatile combination of a giant-sized ego, a drinking problem, and a broken heart. But, quite frankly, angry writers are the least of Michael’s worries — Did I mention this widower has a ghost problem? And they are not going gently into the good night.

To its credit, The Eclipse gets a lot of little things right. The burgeoning romance between Lena and Michael seems natural and unaffected. McPherson subtly underlines the themes of ghosts, memory, and loss by emphasizing empty rooms, empty chairs, and the timelessness of life in Cobh. (The staff at the hotel hosting the festival dress in nineteenth century garb, helping to convey the sense that the spirits of centuries past still inhabit these climes.) And Hinds in particular is compelling throughout, even when the story he’s a part of is not altogether believable.

All that being said, The Eclipse has some problems with tone. It’s not just the sudden lurches from haunted house malevolence to 2nd-chance-at-love-type-stuff back over to unabashed Raimi-esque horror that throw everything off, although they don’t really help that much. (They do keep you on your toes, tho’.) The other issue is Nicholas, who’s written far too broadly compared to everyone else on hand. Michael and Lena seems like real, multi-faceted , and plausible adults, while Nicholas — the best efforts of Aidan Quinn notwithstanding — is basically just an one-dimensional ambassador from the planet Douche, and the movie loses a step whenever it tries to get us to take him seriously.

I also have some quibbles with the ending of the movie, in that the initial haunting aspect is sorta just dropped without explanation. (But, then again, how can you explain ghosts anyway? Maybe this was the best way to go about it.) Still, for all its bizarre shifts in tone, The Eclipse at least has the virtue of originality in its quiver. The Sixth Sense meets Terms of Endearment meets Something Wild in coastal Ireland? I can’t say I’ve ever seen that before.

Made of Stone.

After about a half hour or so of stilted, mind-numbing, make-you-want-to-claw-your-eyes-out exposition, Louis Leterrier’s interminable remake of Clash of the Titans, for some reason or another, takes a brief moment to badmouth Bubo, the metal owl from the 1981 version of the film. Well, say what you will about that goofy Harry Hamlin-Burgess Meredith-Lawrence Olivier flick and its Minervan comic-relief droid — At least it had heart.

This whiteboy-angsty retread of Titans, on the other hand, basically has no pulse whatsoever. It’s just a lumbering, CGI-ridden box office monstrosity not unlike its Cloverfield-ish Kraken, and one that could desperately use the same spark of life Zeus ostensibly once infused in mortal men. You remember that godawful tag line from the first trailer — “Titans will Clash“? Well, the FX processors notwithstanding, that’s about the level of effort put forth by this movie, as in none at all. Granted, Clash isn’t quite as awful as last month’s woeful Alice in Wonderland, but it’s definitely in the same lo-rent ballpark.

This iteration of Clash begins with a starfield and the demi-goddess Io (Gemma Arterton, late of Quantum of Solace, soon of Prince of Persia) in full expository mode, a la Virginia Madsen at the start of Dune. (Or, for that matter, Cate Blanchett in Fellowship — Leterrier explicitly bites from PJ’s Tolkien trilogy several times here — See also all the very LotR-like pans of Perseus & co. walking through Glorious Nature to wherever they’re going next.) So, anyways, this backstory is pretty standard — Zeus defeats the Titans, he, Poseidon and Hades divvy up the universe, etc. etc.

And eventually, along comes Perseus (Sam Worthington, more on him in a bit), a son of Zeus found lost at sea as a babe by a fisherman (Pete Postlethwaite, paying the mortgage). Unlike earlier iterations, this Perseus grows up a sullen, wrathful sort, and particularly after Hades (Ralph Fiennes, wasted) drowns his entire family as an afterthought to a fly-by shooting of sorts. Bent on revenge for these murders, Perseus soon enlists on a suicide mission to defeat Hade’s powerful pet, the fearsome Kraken — which, thanks to a bit of inopportune blasphemy by Cassiopeia, the queen of Argos (Polly Walker, wasted), will either be destroying the city or devouring its sensitive-soul, Peace Corps-ish princess, Andromeda (Alexa Davalos, unremarkable) in ten days time.

So this glum, grim, and altogether peeved demigod sets out with a team of soldiers — let’s just go ahead and call them the body count — to find a way to stop the Kraken, which may or may not include fending off giant scorpions, battling Calibos (Jason Flemyng), bartering with witches, and wrangling with Medusa (Natalia Vodianova). And, given the subject matter, it’s almost weird how boring all of this turns out to be. Partly because Perseus’ fighting style throughout is basically “run-in-the-other-direction-from-the-CGI-thingy.” Partly because the script…well, sucks. It’s just bad one-liners and lazy exposition all the live-long day. And partly because, aside from a pair of Asterix-and-Obelix-style hunters who tag along for the ride (Ashraf Barhom and Mouloud Achour), nobody’s having any fun whatsoever here. It’s all grimacing and cursing the Gods for this, that, or the other thing. Just deadly dull stuff.

Is this innate boringness Sam Worthington’s fault? Well…maybe. I said after the also-terrible Terminator: Salvation that Worthington “has presence, and I could see him being a A-lister if given the right material.” But after Avatar and this flick, I’m revising that statement. He’s had three bites at the apple now, and, while I suspect some female or gay readers may disagree — and making some allowances for the fact that, all three times, he probably spent a good bit of his days on set reacting to a green tennis ball — he’s really starting to come across as a charisma-free zone to me.

But, that being said, everybody here, with the possible exception of Casino Royale‘s Mads Mikkelsen, seems devoid of charisma here, even usual stalwarts like Liam Neeson and Fiennes (both phoning it in, as is brother Poseidon, Danny Huston — But, to be fair, Huston only has one line.) True, handsome/pretty stiffs like Worthington and Arterton so far seem to be shapely blanks no matter what film they’re in. But somehow or another, this movie has the power of Medusa over everyone involved: It just seems to suck the life right out of people. My advice, if it’s not too late: Don’t attempt to look this one in the eyes. By the Gods, save yourselves and turn away.

Look Upon My Works, Ye Mighty, and Despair.

“On the surface, an artist tries to frame his ideals in an image, to challenge his audience and make his vision immortal. But the parasites say ‘NO! Your art must serve the cause! Your ideals endanger the people!’ Lacking its own ingenuity, the Parasite fears the visionary. What it cannot plagarize, it seeks to censor; what it cannot regulate, it seeks to ban. Rapture was founded on an idea, and here they are held inviolate.“Hmm…maybe they should’ve moved the Barnes to Rapture, then. Gamers might recognize the rantings above as those of the Ayn Randish industrial magnate Andrew Ryan, whose Journey to the Surface amusement ride is one of the cleverer setpieces in the recently-released Bioshock 2. But they also reflect the basic conceit within Don Argott’s Art of the Steal, a rather aggravating documentary about the recent moving of the Barnes Collection from Lower Merion, PA into downtown Philadelphia.

Art of the Steal starts off as an intriguing albeit confused retelling of this political story: Intriguing in that there’re a lot of interlocking and complicated motivations at work, and confused in that the documentary assumes certain first principles — and, later, malign intent — without backing them up. And while I was willing to forgive Art of the Steal its imbalance for awhile just because it was so clearly compelled by a sense of injustice done, the documentary gradually becomes so grossly one-sided in its telling that it skips right over myopic and naive and ends up feeling downright corrupt.

The story of the Barnes begins with the rise of our Andrew Ryan figure, Albert C. Barnes, a forward-thinking, working-class Philadelphian who, by dint of extraordinary intelligence and a hole in the pharmaceutical market, was a millionaire by the time he was 35. Considered a curmudgeon and misanthrope even by his friends, Barnes also had an undeniably great eye for art, and he started buying up masterpieces of the Post-Impressionist and early Modern periods — Van Gogh, Cezanne, Picasso, Matisse — well before any other museums caught on to the scene. And when his attempts to show off his impressive collection in the town of his birth are ridiculed by the stuffy, conventional Philadelphia swells, Barnes angrily vows that he will never show off his private collection to these philistines, ever again.

Barnes is nothing if not a man of his word. He builds his own palatial gallery-school in Lower Merion, a suburb of Philly 4.5 miles outside the city center, and decides to restrict access to his collection to art students, working-class folks, and anyone else he deems worthy. The good news is Mr. Barnes’ sense of worthy is actually pretty keen: Barnes is a New Deal man well ahead of his time, particularly on the race relations front, and he greatly enjoys ridiculing the Philadelphia glitterati, most notably the Yang to his Yin, the conservative-minded Annenbergs. But even the Great Man cannot live forever, and when he dies in a car accident at an advanced age, the scions of Philadelphia begin their slow, convoluted plot to wrest Barnes’ art from him…for the good of the City, of course.

To his credit, Barnes did anticipate thus, and so his will clearly stipulates that this world-historical collection of art never be shown nor removed from its Lower Merion stronghold. (And, as a final screw-you to the Philly elites he loathed, he leaves it as a last resort to the local African-American college, Lincoln.) But, as time passes, and people die off, and Fortress Barnes itself starts to decay from within, the dead man’s ghostly hold over his property becomes more and more attenuated. To the point where — when a case is made that the art would be better off in Philly — well, the Great Man himself has been gone for fifty years, right?

Art of the Steal is at its best in the first hour, when it sets up the personalities involved and recounts the byzantine, death-by-increments process by which the Barnes collection finally got relocated. But, quite frankly, I thought there were some problems with its central thesis from the start. The documentary goes well out of its way to depict the people in favor of moving the collection as despicable and/or corrupt (and it is clear that some of the shadier operators, like Walter Annenberg, were indeed motivated by personal pique). But, nobody ever presents the counter-argument, that maybe (gasp!) there is really a legitimate case for moving the Barnes to downtown Philadelphia.

For one, the Barnes is an impressive building, and one of the best arguments the Barnes disciples make for keeping the collection there is the Great Man’s — again, extremely forward-thinking — methods of curation. (Unlike most museums, Barnes never subdivided the work by period or artist. He grouped by aesthetic, across cultural, geographic, and chronological lines, thus emphasizing a universality of art which is only now becoming more popular in museums.) But round the decay of that colossal wreck, nothing beside remains. For all intent and purposes, the Barnes really did seem to be falling apart, and attempts to continue using Lower Merion as a home base for the collection — adding parking lots and such — were roundly fought off by many of the same locals (Barnes might call them elites) later shown, when it’s convenient, to be “friends of the museum.”

And if the Ozymandias quote didn’t tip you off, I would also argue there’s a world-historical eminent domain question here that should at least be addressed. Albert Barnes may have been a Great Man, but…Mistah Barnes, he dead. (“God rest his soul, and his rudeness. A devouring public can now share the remains of his sickness.“) He’s as dead as King Tut, who probably would not have signed off on what Howard Carter et al did to his tomb. (In fact, I’d argue Tutankhamun almost assuredly got screwed over worse than Barnes.) And, speaking of which, there’s a reason why Indiana Jones’ usually undisputed refrain is, “It belongs in a museum!“

You may disagree, of course, and think that Barnes’ will should be held inviolate from now until the End of Days — Ok, that’s cool, we disagree. But a good documentary would at least entertain this obvious opposing argument. Instead, Art of the Steal keeps making overbroad assertions that merit some serious unpacking. This tale, according to the movie, is a devastating triumph of Unbridled Commerce over the Purity of Art. But wait…wasn’t this about Commerce as soon as Barnes bought the art in the first place? He didn’t paint this stuff. And, according to the movie, the Barnes collection stands for Democracy in the face of the Corporatization of Art. It does? I thought Barnes hated “the mass experience” and wanted to show his collection only to the worthy. That doesn’t sound particularly democratic to me.

And in its final half-hour or so, Art of the Steal just fulminates and rages, barely making any sense at all. It accuses City officials of enacting an elaborate and corrupt scam on the people, and then depicts County officials, as well as the area’s GOP Congressman, as if they’re pure art lovers or something. (Like, I dunno, maybe Lower Merion and Montgomery County, etc., have some financial interests at stake here too?) It accuses the Philadelphia Art Museum’s backers of orchestrating this nefarious plot, but never satisfactorily explains how having a rival art museum moved downtown would benefit them. (Presumably, the argument is a rising tourist tide lifts all boats, I guess. The movie has a better case against the Pew Charitable Trust, who pretty clearly use the Barnes rather dodgily as leverage to improve their tax situation.)

And, with the possible exception of Richard Glanton, an enterprising former Foundation head seen as either the first crack in the Barnes dike or, as he sees himself, Cerberus defending the gates of Hell (Apres moi le deluge), the movie keeps shoehorning everyone involved into either hero or villain, without ever conceding that the issues are more complicated than they first seem. (Julian Bond of the NAACP, for example, is a witness for the prosecution here. But one of his more compelling arguments — that the powers-that-be screwed over Lincoln University, an historically black institution, by Bigfooting them into the move — is mostly elided over.) And the movie generates so much heat in the end that the light is lost. At one point, Governor Ed Rendell says the move of the collection to Philadelphia just seemed like an easy call to him, and after watching this documentary, I didn’t see much to disqualify that claim. Other than following verbatim the will of a man with no heirs who’s been dead for fifty years, what were the reasons again for keeping the collection in Lower Merion?

In choosing to be a one-sided screed rather than an in-depth exploration of the subject at hand, Art of the Steal does its very interesting topic no favors. In the end, the movie works less as a definitive statement on the thorny entanglement of art and commerce than as a sad testament to the narcissism of petty differences. And from the muddled picture one gets of Mr. Barnes here, the Great Man deserved a better advocate.

Frat to the Future.

To get in the proper mood for Steve Pink’s ’80s throwback (in more ways than one) Hot Tub Time Machine after a long week at work, I made sure to sidle up to the bar just beforehand — conveniently located, at my “local” (Regal Gallery Place in DC’s Chinatown), just below the theater — and knock down a shot-and-pint (of Jamesons and Guinness respectively, of course.) And my best advice for those of you still thinking about testing these bubbling, lurid, time-traveling waters: Better make that a double.

My feelings about Hot Tub Time Machine are pretty close to how I came down on The Hangover last summer. It’s got some funny moments, sure, and I admire its throw-everything-and-see-what-sticks, Anchorman-y approach to humor. (This is vastly preferable to the “let’s make the audience better people in three acts” schtick that was in comedy vogue for awhile — See, for example, Anger Management.) It’s also sort of a kick to see John Cusack, after fighting it for decades, willingly slumming back to his Savage Steve Holland years, and, I’ll concede, the “I want my two dollars” joke made me smile.

At the same time, and maybe even more than The Hangover (which is no small feat), Hot Tub Time Machine feels like it was penned by and for the Bill “Sportsguy” Simmons nation. You could argue its casual misogyny, homophobia, and dumb raunchiness-for-the-sake-of-it is all part of the return-to-the-’80’s experience, but my guess is it’s really all about catering to the army of 21st century mooks that enlist under the Sportsguy’s standard. I mean, do you know the street value of that mountain? (As an aside, I actually think Simmons is a decent writer, and am crawling through his Book of Basketball at the moment. The problem isn’t his talent or his bball savvy, but his judgment and his (lack of) taste. Nor do I blame him for creating mook culture — he’s just one of its clearest expressions.)

More on the mookness of it all in a bit, but, first, the high-concept gist: Just like The Hangover, we have three friends (Cusack, Rob Corddry, Craig Robinson) and a hanger-on (Clark Duke) trying to find themselves by taking a memorable, life-altering Lost Weekend — only this time, it’s in The Past. Adam (Cusack) has just been dumped by his girlfriend and has his Second Life-addicted nephew (Duke) living in the basement. Nick (Robinson) is a once-promising singer who gave up his dreams for a girl and now spends his day as a personal trainer for dogs. (He touches poo. Ha. That’s funny. Poo.) And Lou (Corddry), the Galifianakis of the bunch, is a perennial loser who may or may not have recently tried to kill himself. (A wasted Corddry plunking out ’80’s power-chords on his dashboard is funny, and one of the many ways he often rises above the material here.)

So, because of Lou’s maybe-meltdown, this ungainly foursome head back to the ski resort idyll of their youth for some manly bonding. Problem is, the Great Recession has hit hard and the place has gone to hell — there’ll be no skiing the K-12 here. And, just when the weekend seems like a total wash, our heroes stumble into the hot tub in question and stumble out 24 years earlier, in the year of our lord 1986 — Adam is still with the “Great White Buffalo” he never should’ve dumped, Nick is still rocking the Kid-‘n’-Play-style hi-top, Lou is…well, still a loser, and Jacob the nephew shouldn’t even exist, and thus has a phasing-in-and-out, Marty McFly in Back to the Future II problem. (And speaking of the McFlys, Crispin “George McFly” Glover is skulking around too, as is Chevy Chase.) Fire up the day-glo and the hair metal, y’all, ’cause it’s time to partay like it’s the MTV era…

And so they do, meaning all the fashion faux-pas and Wang Chung-ish blasts from the past you might imagine from living in the Eighties. But, while there are still a few funny moments here and there, this Hot Tub loses steam and falls ever more flat the longer they spend in the Me Decade. I find legwarmers and Members Only jackets as ridiculous as the next guy, but there are only so many “lordy, the sartorial sense was terrible back then” jokes you can make over the course of two hours. And, other than that, the movie just meanders through its second half without much purpose, or even much sense. Cusack ingests enough shrooms to give the good doctor pause, and is playing Sixteen Candles kissy-face with Lizzy Caplan half an hour later.

And then there’re all the fratboyisms and mookish behavior. To be clear, I wasn’t offended by Hot Tub, per se. (Case in point: I put Jackass in my top 100 films of last decade.) And, to be sure, the sensibilities were different back then in Ronald Reagan’s America — just look at much of Police Academy or Revenge of the Nerds, or even the aforementioned Back to the Future, where, as @kellyoxford recently noted, George wins Marty’s future mom’s heart basically by stopping her from being date raped.

Still, by too often resorting in puerile shenanigans — look, Rob Corddry just got pee on his face! — and particularly in portraying every gal that comes along (Caplan aside) as a dim-witted sex toy, the movie just feels lazy, half-assed, and, well, mook. I don’t want to be the Billy Zabka of this tale, but, while I’m all for nostalgifying the ’80s for a few laughs, at some point, quite frankly, it’s time to grow up.