Planet Utah

Merry Christmas!

Christmas isn't really a big deal for me, so I decided to stay in Austin and keep my head down. I did, however, manage to get out last night and see "Up in the Air."

It's a good movie. It's a grown-up movie, too, that isn't dour or political. It's just a movie about life, what's important, what's not, relationships, getting older, etc. It has a lot of laughs, or at least chuckles, and very little artifice. It even has some surprises. I thought I knew the formula for this movie when I went in, but it ended up not following the script I had sketched out in my head.

So, it's probably worth your time. It won't make you say "Wow," and probably won't make you think, either, but it's well done, and has a lot to say to men (and women, too, but mostly men) who either live or fantasize about a life free from the responsibilities of a house, a spouse, children, etc.

Now, three random notes about actors in the movie:

First, George Clooney, while still preposterously handsome, is beginning to show the wear and tear befitting a man his age. I know, I know...it's probably because he gained, or lost, 25 pounds for this role or something like that. Maybe out in Hollywood, in his real life, he's still got the skin of a 30-year-old. But in this movie he looks a lot closer to 50 than to 30.

Second, still on Clooney, it's nice to see him play something/someone a little different. This is only half a normal Clooney character: charming, funny, in control, self-assured. I'll let you discover the other half for yourself.

Third, if you know what you're looking for, and if you care, you will see one of the two murderous teenagers from "Heavenly Creatures"--and I'm not talking about Kate Winslett.

Spoiler-free thoughts on "Avatar"

Okay, here they come, in no particular order:

-- While I wouldn't call this a great movie, it's a great movie-going experience.

-- If you were a bartender and wanted to know how to make a pitcher of "Avatar," here's what I'd tell you: Mix equal parts "Matrix," "Jurassic Park," "Dances with Wolves," and "Total Recall"; serve in 3-D glasses. Seriously, this movie will probably remind you strongly of all four of those movies. (One thing that should tell you: The story here has been told before.)

-- As for the 3-D, the real innovation is that the action doesn't look like a 3-D movie. It looks the way life looks, which is not the way normal movies look. Normal movies look flat. This movie has depth, perspective, and texture, so that it just plain looks real. (So real, in fact, that at one point I reflexively tried to swat away a bug that appeared to be in my face...but that was really on the screen. No joke. I was embarrassed, but it was dark so no one saw me blushing.)

-- What man in Hollywood writes stronger female characters than James Cameron?

-- Another thought about Cameron: He's obviously got superhuman imagination, drive, and ambition.

-- During the course of this movie, a few adjectives spontaneously popped into my head: "gorgeous," "amazing," and "spectacular," among others.

-- It's fun to watch this movie and see echoes of the entire Cameron oeuvre. "Titanic" and "Aliens" in particular came to mind.

-- Giovanni Ribisi is to "Avatar" as Paul Reiser was to "Aliens." (Paul Reiser was in "Aliens"? Yeah, in retrospect, it was actually a brilliant piece of stunt-casting. Looking at the rest of Reiser's career, you'd hardly think him capable of pulling off the evil corporate weasel in "Aliens" if you hadn't seen it with your own eyes.)

-- Michelle Rodriguez is the sexiest tough chick on the planet, except for maybe Gina Carano. (I know there are some haters out there, and I've never been a big Michelle Rodriguez fan myself, but she's got something going on in this movie.)

-- Shocker: another Hollywood movie in which both the military and corporations are depicted as evil.

The problem(s) with "Paranormal Activity"

I caught this film last night at a midnight show (which was packed to the rafters, to my surprise). Notwithstanding all of the buzz, it's only a so-so movie.

In order to work well, any hand-held/shaky-cam/documentary-style movie has to address these four issues:

1. Hey, you: Why don't you drop the camera and get your ass out of there? (Or at least fight the monster that's trying to eat your friend, rather than film the monster trying to eat your friend.)
   
2. When confronted with a scary problem, most people will try to solve it. That doesn't make for an interesting movie.
3. When the camera's turned on all of the time, you catch a lot of details of people's day-to-day life, which can be really tedious.
4. It's very hard to end one of these movies. The climax of a typical movie comes when one of the main characters does something critical to the plot, or has something done to him/her. But when that character is also responsible for filming the action...well, you see the problem: "Now I'm going to film myself slipping a banana peel under the Cloverfield monster's paw..."

"Paranormal Activity" didn't deal with any of these issues very well.

First issue: the movie blew a great opportunity. All it had to do was have the main characters set up stationary cameras around their (haunted) house, allowing them to catch the action in whatever room it might occur. With the advent of cheap Web cams, there's really no excuse for NOT doing this. But they don't. Instead, they track the comings and goings of their resident demon with a single digital video camera. Most of the time, the camera is mounted on a tripod in their bedroom, which is where most of the haunting occurs, so it does catch a lot of the demonic action. But when the action takes place elsewhere, the male lead must (completely implausibly) first grab the camera, and then go protect his beloved from the demon.

Second issue: The movie explains that it won't do the couple any good to leave their house because it's not really the house that's haunted. It's the girl. In other words, the demon will pursue her wherever she goes.

Okay, fine. But wouldn't you want to be in an open space somewhere so that at least you can run when the demon comes? In your house, it's so easy to get trapped in a corner, in a closet, behind a door, wherever. Or maybe you rent out a conference room, put a cot in the middle for the girl to sleep on, and encircle her with tough-guy priests bearing holy water. Maybe you take up residence inside a church. Maybe you go to one of the Benelux countries and hope that the demon doesn't carry a passport.

The one thing you do NOT do is stay in the house, where the demon obviously feels comfortable escalating things. As noted, though, if you try to solve the problem rather than just filming it, you're left with a much less interesting movie.

Third issue: If the nights were tough for the characters in this movie, the days were tough for the audience. The days were full of tedious arguments, plan-making, plot exposition, crying, and mundane conversations. That's what you get when the camera is on all the time.

Fourth issue: Let me just say that the gold standard here is "The Blair Witch Project." There, the movie ends with the camera operator walking into a trap that has been set by the Blair witch. You don't have to see what's happening to the operator to understand it, because the movie gave the witch's modus operandi within the first 20 minutes. So, as Heather (who is running the camera in "Blair Witch" at the end) films the final scene, the viewer thinks, "Oh no...this is the set-up they talked about earlier in the movie." And then--clunk--the camera goes black. Chilling.

"Paranormal Activity" doesn't end with the same shivers. That's all I'll say.

The invention of being able to refrain from saying whatever you're thinking

The headline above indicates the first thing you need to know about "The Invention of Lying." About 90 percent of the laughs in the movie depend on people blurting out whatever they're thinking--which is not really the same thing as being unable to lie. The other 10 percent of laughs do depend on people being unable to lie, even when self-interest or common courtesy would dictate not telling the truth.

The second thing you need to know is that only about half of the movie is a comedy. The other half is a pretty somber reflection on what life would be like in a world in which people always tell the truth, even when the truth is painful and sad.

The third thing you need to know is that the movie violates its own set-up, early and often. If you're paying attention at all, you'll notice within about 10 minutes that people refrain from saying whatever they happen to be thinking...even though they're not supposed to be able to do that. If you pay a little more attention, you'll notice two different characters saying things that aren't true in order to ease the awkwardness of a situation--again, something they're not supposed to be able to do. And you'll see one character make, and another accept, flatly contradictory assertions, even though flatly contradictory assertions are supposed to be an impossibility in this world.

Now, for all of you thinking, "It's just a movie!", remember my standard: I will play by any rules a movie lays down, as long as the movie plays by those rules, too. If the set-up for a movie is that in the future, the space program will be run exclusively by Hasidic Jewish armadillos, no problem. You won't hear me say, "Don't be ridiculous. Armadillos can't understand the concept of religion, let alone monotheism. They can't grow those curly sideburns, either. And there's just no way they could run the space program. For one thing, they don't have an adequate grounding in physics." You'll hear me say, "Devout mini-dinosaurs at NASA? I'm in!"

In other words, confronted with a preposterous set-up, I'm totally prepared to say, "It's just a movie. Might be fun."

But if at a crucial plot point, without explanation, there's a tortoise running part of the space program, or a Quaker armadillo running part of the space program, yeah, I'm going to have a problem with that. I'm going to say, "The whole set-up for the film was that the space program was being run by Hasidic armadillos. You can't change that in mid-film without explaining it."

But that's what happens in "The Invention of Lying." I'm not sure if Ricky Gervais didn't realize this or just didn't care, but it made the movie a lot less funny than it could have been.

Footnote: I didn't read any reviews of this movie before I saw it, but I read a bunch after. Can you guess the one hacky thing that almost all of the reviewers did? They very self-consciously used phrases such as, "To tell the truth" and "To be honest," as in, "To tell the truth, I enjoyed this movie more than I expected."

Hysterical. Next thing you know, someone will call Arnold Schwarzenegger "Ahnuld," or maybe even "the Governator." (Oh, and by the way, if I don't post for a while, don't worry: "All be bock!")

Who cheats on Jennifer Connelly?

In the last two Jennifer Connelly movies I saw, her movie husband cheated on her.

Really? I mean, REALLY? You're gonna do better than Jennifer Connelly?

If you're a moviemaker and you ask me to believe that life as we know it is a mere computer program invented by machines and broadcast directly to the human brain, while human bodies serve as batteries to power the aforementioned machines--until, that is, humans are liberated by a messiah with Christ-like powers, who leads them in an epic war against the technologically superior but philosophically handicapped machines, well, all of that I'm going to buy into. But a guy cheating on Jennifer Connelly? No way.

Footnote: In truth, guys will cheat on anybody, though you'd be throwing away a LOT when it comes to Jennifer Connelly. Perhaps because of that, she's played dull and somewhat shrewish characters in the couple of movies to which I referred above. I mean, if she were laid back and fun AND gorgeous, it just wouldn't be believable that a guy would cheat on her.

That got me thinking, though...she hasn't showed much range in her choice of roles over the past decade or so. I wonder if she just doesn't have range.

By way of contrast, think about the guy who plays Don Draper on "Mad Men." In that show, he's your classic alpha male, master of the universe sort, though in the Gary Cooper strong/silent way, not in the Donald Trump self-promotional way. The same guy, though, has had a recent story arc on "30 Rock," in which, despite being very handsome, and despite playing an M.D., he is actually kind of a hapless beta male. He's believable in both roles, too.

I'm not sure JC has that kind of range. Even so, I still wouldn't cheat on her.

Hey, Clive Owen: Stephen Dorff called; he wants his career back

Now that "The International" has become the latest in a series of Clive Owen disappointments, I wonder if he's regretting taking himself out of the running for James Bond...

Footnote: What, you ask, is up with the Stephen Dorff reference? In 1992, he won the "Male Star of Tomorrow" award from the National Association of Theater Owners. More than 15 years later, we're still waiting for tomorrow. Sure, Stephen Dorff remains a working actor, but so does Matthew Modine. Dorff's last four theatrical releases were "Felon," "The Passage," "Botched," and ".45." I literally could not tell you a single thing about any of those movies. I'd never even heard of them until I checked IMDB tonight.

If Clive Owen isn't careful, he's going to end up following the same career trajectory. You can only make unsuccessful movies for so long before you get bumped down to the B-list, then the C-list, and then find yourself in Dorffville, population three: Stephen Dorff, Matthew Modine, and you.

Anklenote: Edward Norton seems pretty eager to push that number up to four, notwithstanding the mild success of "The Hulk," which most likely succeeded because it had a built-in audience of comic book geeks and action movie fans, not because Edward Norton was in it.

The Wicker Man

Right around Halloween I rented "The Wicker Man"--the original version, not the more recent one with Nicolas Cage. If you've ever heard of this movie, you may have heard it called "the 'Citizen Kane' of horror movies." Other than that, I knew nothing about it when I rented it.

I'm happy to report that this is a great, great movie.

If you're thinking to yourself, "But I don't like horror movies," don't worry. This is not the ax-wielding-psycho-chases-kids-through-the-woods kind of horror movie. There is no gore or violence here, no cheap scares, no bloodthirsty beasts from some other dimension. But it is definitely a horror movie.

VERY basic set-up: police officer travels to isolated Scottish island to investigate reports of a missing girl.

If I told you any more, I might ruin it for you. Seriously. Just go rent it, and enjoy it as the completely original movie experience that it is.

Footnote: I also rented "The Descent," a story about a group of female spelunkers who get trapped underground and find themselves face-to-ugly-face with a very hungry pack of mole-people. Largely stupid, but fun in parts. I have to ask, though, how is it that average Janes and Joes in the movies suddenly know how to fight like Jackie Chan when they find themselves in danger?

Anklenote: And, just for good measure, I rented "Halloween." I remembered it being both spooky (scenes of Michael Meyers stalking Jamie Lee Curtis) and scary (unthinking, unfeeling, unstoppable evil wants you DEAD!). Upon a second viewing, I found it a little spooky still, but not at all scary and even fairly hokey in places. And come on...Jamie Lee Curtis as a nerd who has a hard time getting dates?

Quantum of Solace: brief review

I saw this last night, just past midnight. Three separate auditoriums were jam-packed, mostly with kids, and I was lucky to find a seat.

First things first, this film has one of the worst, most forgettable theme songs in Bond history. Whereas you can still hear "Nobody Does it Better" on the radio, I doubt you'll be hearing the new Bond theme much after Thanksgiving.

As for the movie itself, there were a few things to like. Daniel Craig as Bond is a tough SOB. The Bond of my youth, Roger Moore, would have been killed five or six times in the two films starring Craig. The new Bond can fight with his hands, and he does--often, and lethally. Also, lots of screen time for Judi Dench, who has a very interesting relationship with Bond: his rogue ways are constantly getting her in hot water, so she must try to restrain him. At the same time, she knows that his disregard for procedure, and for human life--sometimes including his own--is what makes him so valuable. And she feels just the tiniest sliver of maternal instinct toward him. Finally, there are some nice real/human moments in the movie: bits of humor here and there, a nod toward normal interpersonal relationships, and a balanced look at a couple of CIA schlubs who are neither all good nor all bad.

And now for the not-so-great stuff. There really is no plot or story here to speak of: it's primarily a tale of revenge. In that respect, it's not unlike "License to Kill," which was a disappointment after "The Living Daylights." The stunts, and Bond's talents, and his capacity not just for survival but for minimal injury, are beginning to tend toward the superhuman (as they did, interestingly enough, in "License to Kill"). Then there are the Bond girls. The only reason they are here, apparently, is because this is a Bond movie, and you have to have Bond girls. They add almost nothing, though, to the story line or to Bond's character development.

To conclude, I guess I'd say see it because you have to, but don't go in expecting "Casino Royale."

Footnote: I know this is too much to ask, but I'd really like to see Bond foil an Islamic terrorist plot in one of these movies.

An American Carol: I did my duty, for an hour

Yes, I paid my nine bucks and saw an hour's worth of this movie last night. They can keep my money, but I really wish I could get that hour back.

This is a bad, bad, BAD movie. I thought it might just be a slow starter, but after an hour I could see that things weren't going to get any better, so I left.

It's so rare that movies like this get made, you hate to see the job bungled. Now anyone who gives it a chance will walk away saying, "If this is the kind of movies conservatives make, I'll stick with liberal cinema, thank you very much." I mean, "American Beauty" and "Fahrenheit 9/11" may be crap, but at least they are entertaining crap. "An American Carol," however, was an embarrassment.

Footnote: And now that I've lowered your expectations sufficiently, I'm sure many of you will see it and love it. Good! I hope you do.

"Tropic Thunder" + "Pineapple Express" =

One good comedy.

I recently saw these on successive nights, and neither one had nearly enough laughs, or big enough laughs, to fill a single comedy. Put them both together, though, and you'd have a worthwhile moviegoing experience (at least in terms of number/magnitude of laughs).

I actually considered walking out of "Pineapple Express" about halfway through. There just wasn't enough funny stuff going on. But I stuck it out, figuring I'd already lost 45 minutes of my life and about $15 in cash. (This decision was the moviegoer's equivalent of the American experience in Vietnam.) I won't say that I regretted my decision to stay, but I didn't feel entirely vindicated either. "Pineapple Express" was just so-so, with James Franco being the definite highlight, and Danny McBride having some funny moments, but also seeming to blow some great opportunities for laughs.

I never considered walking out of "Tropic Thunder"; there were just too many interesting people on screen. This was a film, though, that really couldn't decide what it wanted to be: a Ben Stiller movie? a satire of Hollywood? a broad, gross-out comedy? an action movie? By far the most interesting of these potential movies was the Hollywood satire. Those were the moments I enjoyed the most (the fake trailers, the scenes with Tom Cruise as a Hollywood mogul, the actors' comments on "the craft" of acting and on the way Hollywood works). I suspect, though, that this sort of satire would have grossed about one-tenth of what "Tropic Thunder" will gross, if that. Plus, it's been done before, by a better director than Ben Stiller.

You've probably heard a little about Danny McBride in this movie, and a lot about Tom Cruise. The former was very funny. One of his best lines is easy to miss, so if you see the movie, listen carefully after he and Nick Nolte are freed from their captivity in the heroin camp. As for Tom Cruise, he was good, just as you've heard. Despite the bald head, though, and the copious body hair, and the fat suit, and the jewelry, and the beard and the glasses, he is still completely recognizable as Tom Cruise. You see the face, you hear the voice, and you know it's Tom Cruise. It's almost as if they said, "We don't want him to be totally recognizable as Tom Cruise, but we want him to be recognizable enough so that people know we got Tom Cruise to do something totally different." The effect for me, though, was to see Tom Cruise and hear Tom Cruise, even though I was supposed to be seeing and hearing a short, bald, stocky, hyper-masculine, and very Jewish Hollywood mogul.

On that last point, I wonder if any Jews will be, or already have been, offended by the crudeness of the stereotype represented by Cruise's character. I haven't read anything, but in a day and age when offense is so easily taken, someone, somewhere must be unhappy.

Footnote: by the way, Robert Downey was very good, too, and his character, unlike Cruise's, wasn't based on a blatant stereotype.