Step Brothers

By Elise Nakhnikian

“Genre films essentially ask the audience: ‘Do you still want to believe this?’” wrote film scholar Leo Braudy. “Popularity is the audience answering, ‘Yes.’ Changes in genres occur when the audience says, ‘That’s too infantile a form of what we believe. Show us something more complicated.’”

That “something” may involve parody, stripping a genre back down to its bare essentials, or taking it to an extreme. Think of what’s been happening to horror movies lately, from the affectionate satire of the Scream series to the retro feel of all those zombie movies – including new installments from old master George Romero – to sadistic gorefests like the Saw and Hostel series. Or look at Step Brothers, which both exaggerates and parodies its genre.

Step Brothers is the latest in a long line of American comedies that celebrate arrested adolescence. The heroes of these Peter Pan comedies– and they’re always heroes, not heroines – are youngish men who refuse to grow up. Sure, sometimes they see the light at the end and promise to become responsible adults, but that’s about as convincing as those Hayes Code endings where “bad girls” and criminals paid for their crimes. After they’ve knocked off Jimmy Cagney or sent Barbara Stanwyck to prison, you’re not left thinking about the tacked-on takedown. What sticks is the gutsy rebel’s stardust and spunk.

In Peter Pan movies, our heroes rebel by refusing to grow up. That refusal is seen as a sign of integrity, and they’re richly rewarded for it, winning improbably hot chicks, maintaining airtight friendships, and shutting out the competition in the ultimate American sport: the pursuit of happiness. Audiences show them a lot of love too: Forbes magazine’s 2008 list of the 10 best-paid male actors of the previous year included four – Mike Myers, Ben Stiller, Will Ferrell, and Adam Sandler – who specialize in Peter Pan roles.

That run of movies has only lasted for five years or so but, thanks to the ever-shortening evolutionary cycle of American pop culture, we’re already ready for something more complicated. And the makers of Step Brothers – who include producer Judd Apatow, the Midas of the Peter Pan genre, and director/cowriter Adam McKay, director of the very funny Talladega Nights – intend to oblige.

The “kids” in Step Brothers – Brennan (Ferrell) and Dale (John C. Reilly) – aren’t just young adults trying to cling to adolescence; they’re solidly middle-aged. At 39 and 40, with receding hairlines and softening stomachs, their impulsiveness, impracticality, dependence on their parents and fierce attachment childish things isn’t just laughable; it’s ludicrous.

These two don’t act like teenagers; they act like grade school kids – totally clueless grade school kids with overactive libidos. And, unlike most of the man-children in Peter Pan movies, whose innocence is paired with a softhearted sweetness, these guys aren’t even likeable, at least not at first: Brennan is a mewling mama’s boy, and Dale is a swaggering parody of manhood who has, as his fed-up father points out, a hair-trigger temper and an utterly unearned sense of entitlement.

The other characters are drawn with a very broad brush. The women, who are typically treated with the awed, somewhat awkward respect accorded one’s first love in Peter Pan movies, are pushed so far into the background this time that they’re barely visible. They’re almost entirely irrelevant too -- except for Brennan’s indispensable mother, Nancy (Mary Steenburgen), the endlessly loving, resignedly tolerant, unthreateningly sexy mother of every boy’s dreams.

Dale and Brennan meet when Nancy marries Dale’s father, Robert (a nicely acerbic Richard Jenkins). Both sons are appalled at the prospect of sharing the parents they’ve been mooching off for all these years, so they engage in an instant sibling-rivalry battle but wind up “best friends for life.”

The filmmakers keep winking at us, to let us know they know we know how ridiculous it all is, but they’re clearly rooting for the “boys” to stay boys – and I’ll be damned if they didn’t bring even me around, and men being boys is not my favorite brand of comedy. Reilly and Ferrell are just too much fun to watch, particularly after they bond with each other and drop the sulking.

Just the way Reilly walks, with a stiff-legged imitation of a macho strut, made me laugh. And when he and Ferrell get going, reigniting the spark they lit as another dumb-buddy pair in Talladega Nights, they come up with wonderfully goofy stuff, like when an awestruck Dale tells Brennan his singing voice is “like a combination of Fergie and Jesus.”

Some of the jokes fall flat, like the noncompliant guide dog that pops up every so often for no apparent reason, but for every bit that fizzles there’s one that pops. Ferrell and Reilly are great at physical comedy, like a bit involving a cobbled-together bunk bed and their flailing fights. And they’re just as good at verbal silliness, like their grandiose plans to start “a huge multinational corporation.” Their job interviews are funny too, though chances are you’ve already seen the best parts in the trailer.

But what makes this movie endearing rather than annoying is the sheer intensity with which they bound around like overripe eight-year-olds. “Can you imagine how cool this would be if we got this when we were 12?” Brennan asks Dale as they try his night-vision goggles.

“Even better,” Dale says, “we get it when we’re 40!”

Tell No One

By Elise Nakhnikian

The vertigo you get from watching footage shot with a shaky handheld camera is such a cliché that it literally makes me feel a little sick. But Tell No One, a beautifully executed old-fashioned murder mystery, rejuvenates even that tired convention.

An everyday hero caught in a Hitchcockian maze mined with deadly traps, Alex Beck (François Cluzet) is relentlessly focused on solving the mystery of his beloved wife’s death – and clearing himself of the murder rap someone is trying to pin on him. A man of deeply felt but closely held emotions, he doesn’t have a moment to waste on self-pity or panic. So when the camera starts to shake during two or three moments of particularly high stress, it’s not just a gimmick: It’s a highly effective way of delivering a jolt of the emotion he’s working so hard to suppress.

That’s typical of the intelligence and artistry that forged this gem of a thriller. It’s also a reminder of something that’s true of all movies, but especially genre films: What matters is not so much what story you tell as how you tell it.

Tell No One opens as Alex relaxes after a booze-soaked dinner with his wife, Margot; his sister, Anne, and Anne’s partner, Hélène. The grown-ups talk and laugh; Hélène rolls a joint; Alex plays with Hélène and Anne’s baby; Margot watches him with a little half-smile. Director, co-screenwriter and co-cinematographer Guillaume Canet says he told the actors to improvise because they were having trouble with the lines. Whatever he did, it worked, doing enough in one brief scene to make us feel Alex’s loss, later that night, when Margot is killed at the lake where they have swum together since childhood.

Flash forward to eight years later. Two bodies have been found at the lake, so the case is reopened – along with a number of long-buried questions. The cops, who had suspected Alex of having killed his wife before pinning the murder on a serial killer, get suspicious all over again. Meanwhile, he begins to believe that she’s still alive but hiding, though he doesn’t know where or why.

Canet is best known in his native France as an actor, though his first feature as a director, My Idol (2002), was nominated for two Césars. He says he was attracted to Tell No One, a novel by Newark native Harlan Coben, because “It contained many strong characters, which was perfect for me because I have a particular weakness: each time I meet an actor or actress I like, I want to work with them.”

And boy, does he ever work with them. Cluzet, who’s on screen for practically the entire movie, is a revelation, reminiscent of Dustin Hoffman in Marathon Man, though a few years older. A regular guy (Alex is a pediatrician) with regular flaws (his temper can be downright scary), he proves capable of near-heroic ingenuity and toughness without ever seeming superhuman. The fact that Alex sometimes falls down only ups the ante when he’s on the run.

One heart-pounding chase conducted entirely on foot, in which he threads himself between speeding cars on a freeway, is the best I’ve seen all year, partly because it’s so well edited but also because it feels so real that the risks really count.

Marie-Josée Croze’s Margot has a slightly haunted look that makes her feel a bit absent even when she’s onscreen, yet her presence imbues the movie even when she’s not in it. Kristin Scott Thomas gives a strong, unusually loose performance as Hélène, and Jean Rochefort is magisterially icy as Gilbert Neuville, a multimillionaire whose name keeps surfacing (Canet plays his sociopathic son).

Also mesmerizing are vivid minor characters like Alex’s tightly wound, hotshot lawyer, played by Nathalie Baye, and the female mercenary (this is a movie full of interesting and unconventional female characters) who tortures and kills with deadly, near-silent efficiency. When this pain-generating machine is shot point blank, she just walks away and we watch with dread, half-convinced she could survive even a bullet to the heart.

The story was originally set in New York City, but it transposes surprisingly well to Paris – though it does seem a bit odd that Margot’s death is attributed to a serial killer. The Bronx of the book becomes a hardscrabble banlieue in the movie, where Alex holes up with a grateful patient named Bruno, and the tour we get of Paris, from the high-society perch of Neuville’s horse shows to the seedy back alleys of Bruno’s neighborhood, adds to the movie’s appeal.

Despite all the characters and the constantly mutating plot, we never get lost, in part because so much is conveyed without words. Funny moments relieve the tension and artfully planted red herrings add texture and suspense while the fast-flowing plot keeps your nerves humming at a pleasurable level of dread. And somewhat miraculously, especially since there isn’t a moment of tiresome exposition, every loose end is tied up – after one final twist just before the end credits.

They don’t make suspense thrillers any better than this. In fact, if you could just lop off that saccharine (but mercifully short-lived) coda at the end, this might just be a perfect movie.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army

By Elise Nakhnikian

Let’s just get this out of the way: I’m in no way part of the Hellboy demographic. In fact, I never even knew the big lunk existed until I saw the humongous line for Hellboy at the 2004 South by Southwest film festival. So when I say that I only liked director Guillermo del Toro’s Big Red One, that doesn’t mean you won’t love it if you’re a fan of the first one and/or the comic book series.

What finally drew me to Hellboy was my admiration for del Toro’s two tales of the Spanish civil war: The Devil’s Backbone and Pan’s Labyrinth, and I found a lot of similarities between the four. All are beautifully shot and meticulously art-directed yet sometimes hard to watch, showing sympathetic characters in mortal danger or excruciating pain. All share an open-hearted embrace of humanity that leaves you buoyant with hope. They all contain creepy creatures from some supernatural netherworld who cross the barrier into contemporary time and space (in Hellboy II, the battleground is the streets of present-day Manhattan and Brooklyn). And fighting those creatures – or working with them – is a hero or heroine brave enough to look horror straight in the eyes, even if those eyes are embedded in its wings or the tips of its fingers.

Which brings us to Hellboy. There are plenty of superheroes whose greatest battles are with their own demons, but only Hellboy (Ron Perlman) is a demon. Summoned from Hell by the Nazis in 1944 to destroy Earth, he was saved by an expert in paranormal phenomena who could see that he was “just a boy” and raised him as such. Now a red-blooded (and red-skinned) American guy, he lives in the basement of the Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense, a secret agency disguised as a waste management plant and stashed safely out of the limelight in Trenton.

Hellboy’s main companions are his girlfriend, Liz (a wooden Selma Blair), who struggles to channel her humiliating habit of bursting into flames when she’s angry, and his best friend, Abe. Abe,who’s played by the elegant Doug Jones, a del Toro favorite who played both Pan and the albino wraith with eyes in its fingertips in Pan’s Labyrinth, is a fish-man who spends most of his time in a tank.

Liz is human and can pass for “normal” when she isn’t on fire, but that option’s not open to Hellboy, with his beet-red skin, sawed-off horns, huge stone hand, and Schwarzenegger-squared physique. So he doesn’t get out much – except when the bureau calls on him to kick some supernatural tail, which he does with grim relish.

Hellboy is a cigar-chomping, beer-swilling, cannon-toting, authority-touting bad boy, the Dirty Harry of the netherworld, but he’s a little more well-rounded than most other movie hard guys. The self-mocking, smart-ass humor that runs through the Hellboy movies like coolant through a radiator lets us see that pose as a mask rather than taking it at face value. We know what a geeky, needy, sheltered kid Hellboy used to be, and we see the childlike insecurity and hunger for approval that fuel him still. And so, when he poses for the news cameras after beating down yet another set of monsters, the heroic half-sneer thing he does is kind of funny – and endearing.

It’s endearing mostly because the crowds don’t love Hellboy: in fact, most people mock or revile him. Coming on the heels of Iron Man, the story of an American arms dealer trying to undo the harm he has done in the world, and Hancock, another story about a superhero who creates a lot of collateral damage and is generally hated or mocked, it’s enough to make you wonder: Could our superhero movies be telling us something about America’s image in the rest of the world?

Del Toro has worked with cinematographer Guillermo Navarro on nearly all his films, and it’s easy to see why. The underworlds these two create together are densely textured, lived-in-looking realms, their velvety blacks shot through with shafts of light that illuminate murky yet detailed depths.

But the art direction is weaker than in other del Toro movies. While there are plenty of clever visual effects and memorable monsters, the special effects aren’t always all that special. A troll market has the synthetically busy, lifeless feel of a too-fussily designed CGI scene, for instance, and the head of an obsequious chamberlain (also played by Jones) looks like a papier mache bag that’s short a few coats of paste. The soundtrack leans too much on ominous mood music and expository pop songs – though Hellboy and Abe’s off-key duet to a Barry Manilow song is sweet. And a lot of what happened just felt too familiar to me, with echoes from some other movies – particularly Men in Black and Lord of the Rings – ringing loudly enough to interfere with my enjoyment.

But the main thing that kept me from surrendering to this movie was that I never believed Hellboy could get seriously hurt, let alone die. It’s not enough to keep hearing about what’s at stake in a movie like this: you have to really feel it.

Without that, epic battles just play like championship wrestling matches.

Babel and The Edge of Heaven

By Elise Nakhnikian

The Edge of Heaven is one of the best movies I’ve seen this year—and if that sounds like faint praise, it shouldn’t; it’s been a good year. The gracefully interwoven stories of three sets of people covers a lot of emotional ground as it shuttles between Turkey and Germany. You learn so much about its six main characters—three parents and their adult children—that, by the end of the movie, you feel almost as if they were part of your own family. It’s an amazing achievement: an intelligently structured, deeply felt, ultimately uplifting story about the power of old-fashioned virtues like kindness, foregiveness, and love.

It’s also amazingly similar to Babel, at least on paper. Both are cautionary fables for a globalized world, following several sets of people from distant cultures who intersect with one another in unpredictable, life-altering ways. Violence and death disrupt both stories—there’s even an accidental shooting in both of a woman by a young boy. Political disagreements quickly escalate to accusations of terrorism. Everyday people suffer, struggling with political corruption and repression in their own lands and xenophobia and alienation abroad. Lapses in communication cause crises, and so does Western imperialism.

Both movies are also about a sometimes fatal failure to communicate, but in both there are more good people than bad wherever you go, and when good people from different cultures connect, they generally manage to reduce the walls between them to rubble.

So why does the sadness-tinged optimism of Edge of Heaven stay with me like a benediction, while Babel’s portentous gloom dissipated as quickly as an early-morning mist? What makes Edge the kind of movie where you can imagine all the main characters’ lives continuing after the credits roll, while in Babel you can never quite forget that you’re watching what Jon Lovitz’s smoking-jacketed ham used to call “THESpians — ACTing”? And why did Babel get so much more attention — so many more awards, so much more press, and, most of all, so much more screen time — in the U.S.?

The things that made me love Edge are probably the same ones that made it teeter on the knife edge of the U.S. distribution network. For instance:

No huge international stars
If you're making a movie about how global politics affect regular people, you might want to go easy on the big international movie stars. I don't mean great actors who are beloved in their own countries and among film buffs, like Babel's Adriana Barraza or Edge's Hanna Schygulla, both of them fairly bursting with sad-eyed, full-hearted soul. I'm talking stars so big they can't just disappear into a role any more even if they want to—and let's face it, most of them don't.

This seems pretty obvious to me, but then I'm not a producer, and I'm sure casting Brad Pitt and Cate Blanchett as a married couple from the U.S. whose Moroccan vacation goes horribly wrong didn't hurt Babel when it came time to raise money or get booked into theaters. Yet it's the cast of Edge of Heaven that gets under your skin—people like Baki Davrak as Nejat, a Turkish-German professor, and Tuncel Kurtiz as his life-loving father Ali, whose natural empathy is tragically overcome by his threatened machismo.

No melodrama
Sure, melodrama tugs at our heartstrings, but realistic, human-scale drama can play them like Itzak Perlman. Judging by how rarely it's done, I'm guessing that mimicking the random encounters and seismic emotional shifts of an average day is one of the hardest things you can do in a movie, but done right it's utterly engrossing, and Edge of Heaven does it right. The only time I came up for air while watching it was when the main characters' paths crossed two or three times too often, drawing attention to a thicket of Dickensian coincidences.

But Babel kept distracting me, trying to dazzle me with its Important Movie moves. Like the way every main character has one big conflict, which you learn about as soon as you meet them. ("Why can't we just relax? Why are you so stressed?" an annoyed Pitt asks a sullen Blanchett in their first scene together. Looking at him accusingly, her eyes brimming over, she says: "You don't think I tried?" Ooo-kay, folks; I think we got it.) No subtext or indirection here; everyone just blurts out whatever they're thinking. Maybe that's why the story of the deaf Japanese girl was my favorite part of Babel: While Rinko Kikuchi's Chieko is morose and inarticulate, her lively friend's broad smile and easy giggle is like the release valve on a hot air balloon.

A little mystery is a good thing
While everything in Babel is spelled out in capital letters, like the captions in a Barbara Kruger photo, and all the big events are foreshadowed, it sometimes takes a while to figure out what's going on in Edge. That can be a little disorienting—you don't know what the opening scene is about until it's replayed at the end, by which time the context of the rest of the movie gives it resonance to burn—but you always wind up learning what you need to know. Meanwhile, trying to figure it out helps keep you on your toes, and makes the movie feel that much more like life.

You have to know your characters inside out
It might have helped if Babel had only covered three stories instead of four, like Edge, but that probably wouldn't have made much difference. Its characters are too flat, lacking the complexities and contradictions of real life—and of Edge. There are also lots of wordless montage sequences in Babel, which I see as a sign that screenwriter Guillermo Arriaga and co-creator/director Alejandro González Iñárritu just didn't know their characters well enough to let them talk very much, aside from those expository speeches.

Avoid the National Geo close-ups
Babel is big on lingering on picturesquely winkled faces. This just makes people seem more foreign and "other," more set dressing than autonomous beings.

Go easy on the portentous music
The gloomily plunk-plunking strings and eerie keyboards that play behind virtually every scene set in Morocco set the mood a tad too insistently in Babel, while Edge uses its sad Turkish music with typical restraint and sensitivity, providing emotional release rather than constantly yakking about how you should be feeling.

Use silence judiciously
Those montages Babel keeps hurling our way may be wordless, but they never feel quiet, as one clichéd image tumbles after another onto the screen. In contrast, several key scenes in Edge are played out purely visually, and they are among the most haunting in the movie.

In one bracketed pair of scenes, a coffin holding one of the main characters is taken on or off an airplane, the first one going from Germany to Turkey and the second heading in the opposite direction. And in the last scene of the movie, Nejat sits on a beach on Turkey's Black Sea coast and waits for his father to come in from fishing as the camera sits patiently behind him. We can look on too, absorbing his measured excitement and soaking in the calm beauty of the scene. It may be silent, but it's breathtakingly eloquent, giving us space to contemplate the journey he has made and to wonder what his future may hold.

Written for The House Next Door

Wall-E

By Elise Nakhnikian

If only we Americans were as good at running things in real life as we can be at making movies. We could just put the people at Pixar in charge of the nation and sit back, as carefree as the obese former Earthlings who endlessly orbit their trash-strewn planet in WALL-E, socked into their mobile easy chairs with their built-in video screens and giant sippy cups while an army of robots attend to their every need….

Okay, bad idea. But it was pure genius on Disney’s part to put the Pixar lunatics in charge of their asylum when they bought out the smaller, far nimbler, and infinitely more creative studio.

Pixar isn’t perfect – Cars felt familiar to the point of banality – but at their best, its animators are as intelligently inventive as Max Fleischer and as optimistically all-American as Chuck Jones, creating parallel worlds that distort some part of our own just enough so we can see it clearly.

This time around, their target is our relentless trashing of our own environment, and the machine culture that keeps making us more sedentary and less capable. The movie starts several hundred years in the future, in a city that looks like Manhattan except that towers of compacted trash have sprouted up between the skyscrapers.

Those towers were presumably built by WALL-E, a stalwart little robot whose purpose is to collect and compact trash (his name is an acronym for Waste Allocation Load Lifter - Earth-Class). And so he does, every day – even though, as we eventually find out, the humans left the planet centuries before, after rendering it uninhabitable.

Orbiting in a giant space station, people have steadily devolved, achieving a state of infantilized, comfort-sucking uselessness. They’ve even changed physically, becoming slug-like ur-couch potatoes, with neckless torsoes, soft bones, and attenuated limbs.

But the humans are just the sideshow. This is WALL-E’s story, and since he’s a romantic it is, at heart, a love story.

It’s a sweet one, too, with its earnest, unabashedly smitten hero and its glossy, initially impenetrable heroine. By the time Eva, WALL-E’s robot love, is unceremoniously dumped on his turf by a space probe, we’ve spent more than half an hour just watching him go through his daily routine, and we’re as solidly in his corner as Angelo Dundee.

WALL-E, who was based in part on Buster Keaton, is curious and sweet, the kind of non-materialistic dreamer who will toss out a diamond ring and keep the box it came in. Alone except for a companionably clicking cockroach pal, whose indestructibility is a running (but not overdone) joke, WALL-E seems lonely only when he bunks down at the end of the day. The metal container he’s made into a home is cozy enough, but there’s not much to do there, other than add a new treasure to his trove of reclaimed trash. (Bringing home a plastic spork, he hesitates over where to put it: With the spoons? No… With the forks? No… Spoons? Forks? Spoons? Forks?)

His other favorite way to unwind is by watching a battered video of Hello Dolly, from which the hopeless romantic learns to yearn for a soulmate who seems fated never to arrive – until, one day, she does.

WALL-E’s love, Eva, is a fearsome thing, a blue-eyed, platinum blond-skinned Amazon. A sort of cross between an egg and a bird of prey, she’s prone to blowing things up when she’s angry, and at first she seems likelier to incinerate him than to fall for him. But his devotion eventually wins her over. As they explore his blighted city to the tune of La Vie en Rose or dance an impromptu pas de deux in the peaceful beauty of outer space, they flow together like Rogers and Astaire.

The story gets a bit bogged down on the space station, dwelling a little too long in what my husband called the Titanic portion of the movie, in which the two run about the spaceship, trying to rescue one another or escape while calling each other’s names (“WALL-E!” “Eva!” “WALL-E!” “Eva!”)

But the pleasure of watching these beautifully detailed, thoroughly engaging, soulful characters in this delicately spun cautionary fable outlasts any minor quibbles about the plot. The dust and grime of WALL-E’s sepia-toned city, with its motion-detector-activated Buy ‘n Large superstore billboards still flickering to life when WALL-E passes, feel eerily realistic, as do the antiseptic brightness and order of Eva’s space station.

Pixar’s masterful simulated camerawork and lighting also help bring the story to life, making this feel so much like a live-action movie that you subconsciously buy into the characters more than you probably would if they were set against the flatly lit, static backgrounds of an old-school Disney cartoon.

It’s all very well to see Earth turning green again at the end, but the real satisfaction comes from witnessing WALL-E and Eva’s reunion. Here’s hoping they live happily ever after.

Literally.

Get Smart

By Elise Nakhnikian

By the time I caught the Get Smart series in reruns, the suave misogyny of spy movies and the casual xenophobia of the Cold War already seemed ludicrous on the face of it, too laughable to need spoofing. To me, secret agent Maxwell Smart’s struggle to appear urbane while stumbling from one pratfall to the next was not so much satire as slapstick, more Inspector Clouseau than “Bond, James Bond.”

So I’m not arguing for the TV show as some kind of brilliant and inviolable text, yet it stuck in my craw to see Smart defeat the bad guys, unmask a double agent, and scoop up the girl (Ann Hathaway’s appealingly tart Agent 99) in the movie version that opened last week. This time around, the ironically named Smart actually lives up to his name. It’s as if the hapless idiot had commandeered the script, turning himself into the kind of can-do action hero he had always tried so hard – and failed so utterly – to be.

True, Smart 2.0 still needs to be rescued every so often by 99, and he makes some pretty boneheaded moves along the way. But somewhere in its transition from an intentionally cheesy TV spoof to a glossy tentpole summer movie, Get Smart morphed from a quirky, borscht-flavored spoof to a standard-issue comic spy caper with some slapstick salted in.

Well, why not? It’s not as if we’re talking about defacing the Dead Sea Scrolls here. Besides, if Mel Brooks, who created the series with Buck Henry, says he likes the movie, who am I to quibble?

Besides, there’s a lot to like here, starting with the cast. Steve Carrell was an inspired choice to play Max. More vulnerable than stiff-necked Don Adams and harder to resist than a house-trained puppy, he gets major mileage here from his gift for making humiliation simultaneously funny and poignant. Alan Arkin’s warmth and his talent for revving up from 0 to 60 emotionally in under a second make him ideal as Max’s perpetually beleaguered mentor, the chief of Control. Terence Stamp is icily elegant as the head of Control’s evil counterpart, Kaos, Dwayne Johnson (the artist formerly known as The Rock) is endearingly light-footed as the self-infatuated jock at the top of Control’s high school-ish pecking order, and there’s a tasty Bill Murray cameo.

The actors all spar well with one another, yet the movie’s timing is often off. It’s kind of funny at first when the “cone of silence,” one of the many absurd Bond-like gadgets introduced in the show, malfunctions. But the scene goes on too long, and it just peters out rather than building to a climax. Another sequence, which involved jumping from a plane, lasts way too long, and a bit that precedes it, in which Max is mistaken for a terrorist on the plane, was done a lot better in the Harold and Kumar sequel. Probably as a result, the whole thing feels overlong at just under two hours.

Writers Tom J. Astle and Matt Ember, who moved from TV to Failure to Launch before writing Get Smart, salt in plenty of catch phrases and familiar characters for fans of the original. Just hearing “Sorry about that, chief,” “missed by THAT much,” and “would you believe…?” will give a lot of baby boomers a lot of pleasure, as will cameo appearances by Hymie the Robot (played here by Patrick Warburton) and Bernie Koppell, the original Siegfried.

There are a few funny bits anyone can enjoy, even kids who’ve never heard of Max, let alone Hymie. But a lot of the jokes just don't work. The flabby scenes shot in an ineffectural, embattled Homeland Security department only made me nostalgic for that great “No fighting in the war room, gentlemen!” scene in Dr. Strangelove.

There are way too many gunfights, fist fights, explosions, adrenaline-pumping music, and chase scenes. And what is the deal with comedies that that depict our president as a sweet, harmless party boy, a pawn of the powerful v-p without a shred of responsibility for what’s done in his name?

If would be annoying enough if one movie let the president off the hook so easily, but I can think of three: Harold and Kumar Go to Guantanamo Bay, American Dreamz, and now Get Smart. Ah, yes, the old trying-to-pass-off-flattery-as-satire trick.

Pretty lame.

Making It was the Easy Part: Marketing an Indie Documentary

By Elise Nakhnikian

Sara Taksler and Naomi Greenfield are an inspiration for aspiring indie filmmakers. Or are they a cautionary tale?

The two good friends, who met as students at Washington University in St. Louis, co-directed Twisted, a warmhearted charmer of a documentary about people who twist balloons into animals and other shapes. Their “balloonamentary” played film festivals for almost a year, starting with South by Southwest (SXSW) 2007, where it played to sold-out, smitten crowds and was nominated for the best first feature award.

A lot of distributors came sniffing around—but none of them picked it up.

So Taksler, an associate producer at The Daily Show, and Greenfield, a creative producer at FableVision Studios, which produces educational animation and other media, took the marketing skills they’d honed on the festival into turbo drive. They got a DVD distributor and an international distributor. And one by one, they booked Twisted in nine theaters.

When we talked last month, Taksler and Greenfield were coming off a good week—a successful first showing in St. Louis and a piece in The New York Times.

EN: Were you surprised it’s been this hard to get into theaters?

Naomi: I guess I had no clue about whether it would be hard or easy. Right after SXSW, a few big distributors voiced interest, so we thought it was going to happen then, and we were a little surprised that it didn’t.

Sara: It’s been a hard year for independent films, so I think a lot of the distributors are a little wary about trying films that are different. And we’re a little hard to place. We’re a documentary about a kind of quirky subculture, but we’re not a competition film, like most of the documentaries that got distributors recently.

Naomi: We fit into the niche of quirky documentaries. There’s an audience of people that are interested in that, but there are also people who are tired of it. Then again, our documentary doesn’t totally fit into that niche because we really focus on a few people and their stories, so it’s not about ‘Look at these crazy twisters.’ The best way to explain what it’s about is just to have people watch the film.

Sara: Yeah. Even with distributors and theater owners, the trick has been getting them to watch it. Once people see it, they generally really like it.

EN: Now that the technology has made it relatively easy and cheap to make a movie, so there are so many good movies out there, do you think it’s getting to be essential for new filmmakers to be almost as good at marketing as they are at filmmaking?

Naomi: When we were in Boston (http://www.iffboston.org/past/filmlist.php?year=2007), they created an award just for us: the best marketing award. And they’ve continued that award this year, in recognition of the fact that, if you want to get an independent film seen, you do have to market it.

EN: What did you do to market Twisted?

Naomi: We made a big marketing plan for SXSW that we started there and carried out in every city we’ve been to: Build a big balloon sculpture, have lots of people making balloon animals and wearing balloon T shirts, have pumps [to inflate balloons] and balloons everywhere, distribute flyers and postcards.

Sara: We mail postcards and 11x17 posters to friends in each city where we'll be playing. They form a street team and put up posters in popular spots and hand out postcards on the street. We also send postcards, posters, balloons, and pumps to the theaters in advance to put out. The balloons and pumps are provided by Qualatex, a balloon company that’s helping sponsor the theatrical run. We look up every newspaper, radio station, and TV station in each city and email them. We send advance screeners to any interested press. We're on YouTube – in fact, somehow we became the site's featured video this weekend and have 200,000 hits so far!

Naomi: We’re lucky in that we have things that we can market – we can make the balloon animals and sculptures and hats. There are a lot of documentaries right now about the Iraq war or Afghanistan, and even if your Iraq war documentary is totally amazing, it’s going to get lumped in with the other ones.

Sara: Yeah, it’s hard to make a fun sculpture of the Iraq war.

How did you get into all these theaters that are giving you limited runs?
Sara: Several months ago, when we realized we weren’t going to get a distributor, we compiled a list of independent theaters that other festival films had gotten into and started calling and emailing them. We didn’t hear back for a while, and then we got a lot of rejections.

For a little while, we didn’t think it was going to happen because we’d already gotten our DVD producer. A lot of people weren’t interested in screening a movie that was already on DVD and didn’t have a distributor.

But finally a few said yes, and then it started to snowball. Once a few theaters were willing to stand by us, others were willing to take a chance.

EN: It sounds like your first theatrical showing was a success.

Naomi: We did really well in St. Louis. We outsold all the films that were being shown in the theater that weekend.

Sara: We had four screenings a day, and we didn’t have the support of a festival behind us, so we had no idea what to expect. But the balloon twisters in St Louis were fantastic. They arranged four spots on a local show for us, so a lot of people came because they’d seen us on the morning show or read the review in the paper. And a local place donated pumps and balloons for the theater.

It was great to have our first showing in St. Louis, because we met in there and talked about doing some kind of creative process together some day.

Naomi: I remember sitting in our dorm brainstorming. It was a “What do you want to be when you grow up?” kind of conversation.

Sara: We probably first discussed that in 1999. And now, in 2008, we got to go to the coolest in theater in town and have this experience. It was really fun to see our names on the marquee. We had a really good time hearing all those people laughing and crying and enjoying the film.

Also, the guy who made the popcorn told us he had just gotten off the phone with his girlfriend in Thailand, and when he told her what was playing in the theater she said she had just seen our movie on TV. We had no idea we were on TV in Thailand.

EN: How have you managed to make and market a movie while holding down full-time jobs?

Sara: The movie is like a nights and weekend job. And we’ve always taken all of our vacation time for our movie.

Naomi: Actually, this year each of us did take one non-movie-related vacation. It felt funny to not be consulting each other before our vacations.

For a while, we weren’t doing much with it, but right now we’re in the same routine we were in during the hardcore part of making the film: We go to our jobs during the day, and then we each have a long list of things to do at night. Sometimes at 1 in the morning I’ll be sending an email to Sara and she’ll write right back.

EN: When I saw you at SXSW, you seemed to genuinely enjoy talking up your movie, which is probably part of what makes you so good at it. How much of the marketing you’ve done is pure drudgery and how much do you actually enjoy?

Naomi: For me, this week was really fun when the New York Times article came out and random people saw it, and it got picked up by a lot of blogs that our friends know about. Our trailer on YouTube, which had about 1,000 hits at the beginning of the week, all of a sudden had, like, 8,000 views. It was fun to know that 8,000 people who aren’t all our family are genuinely intrigued by it.

And it still is fun to talk about the film, even though we’ve had so many Q and As, because people ask good questions and it’s interesting to see the things people ask about.

But there is a lot of work with putting together the lists and getting ready -- especially now, since there are nine cities at once to prepare for.

I’m intrigued by your partnership. Is it easier to easier to deal with the rejection and indifference you get when you’re making an independent film if you have a partner?
Sara: I don’t exercise, but I think it’s like having a running buddy, where you have someone you have to answer to, who helps you stay motivated. And just to have someone else to share it all with. There were so many things to do, so many ups and downs. It was great to have someone else who knew exactly what you were going through.

EN: How do you work together? Do you divide everything down the middle or play different roles?

Naomi: We started out both doing everything, but in the process of making the film, we naturally started going in two different directions. I got more interested in doing the camera work, and Sara got more interested in doing the interviews. Now Sara’s been doing all the press contacts and I’ve been putting together the marketing materials and getting new stuff printed. We have an email system, which is that one of us will write something and the other will check it and then we’ll send it out. It’s amazing how many emails go between us during the day.

Sara: We both have a say in everything. We consult each other every day on what we’re doing for the film.

Naomi: We try to do all our interviews together too. There was one radio interview I did where they had just one line, so I did it on my own, and it felt weird. There are certain questions that I’m used to Sara answering.

EN: It's also unusual that you’re both women. Most of the moviemaking pairs I can think of involve two brothers or two male friends: the Coens, the Wachowskis, the Duplass brothers, the Farrellys. Do you think being women made your work any harder -- or easier?

Naomi: I worked for a weekend on audio for another filmmaker’s documentary. There was a great moment in the interview, and he asked a question that felt really shallow. And I thought, “If he was a woman, he would have asked a smarter question.” I do think we were very sensitive to our subjects, and very careful to develop relationships with them so that we were able to get good information out of them.

Sara: I think it made the interviewing easier. In our culture, people might be a little more comfortable being emotional with women. It might be a little less intimidating for two women with a camera to come up and talk to you. And I do think we had an interest in making sure that people felt comfortable.

Also, we’re both pretty young-looking. A lot of people thought we just had a school project. We were just, like, two little girls making a movie.

Naomi: I think people were more inclined to be nice to us than if we were two older guys.

Sara: And in editing, our process was to show the film to focus groups, which was all about being open to other people’s ideas.

How long have you been working on this movie?
Sara: We started filming summer of 2003 and finished just before we premiered at SXSW in March 2007, so three and a half years of filming and editing, then about a year on the festival circuit.

EN: What kept you going?

Naomi: Initially, we made the movie after Sara and I got entry-level jobs in TV and film. They were in the industry we wanted, but we were kind of creatively stifled. So we were ready to work on something where we could use our creative energies.

Sara: And then it became partially that we owed it to ourselves to see where we could take it. It was something we’d put so much into.

Naomi: Sara’s just doing it because she wants to get on Oprah. [they laugh]

Sara: The article about us in the New York Times was right under an article about Oprah. I was almost as excited about that as I was about being in the Times.

EN: What would you do differently if you made another movie now?

Sara: If I did another documentary that looked like it would be a long-term project, I would probably want to find an executive producer at the beginning, because it takes a long time and a lot of money to make a movie. I would go in with more of a plan before I started it. I’m more interested in the director role than the producer role, so I like the idea of moving away from organizing things and figuring out money and the details of camera equipment and all those sorts of things and just being the filmmaker, planning out story lines and asking questions and that sort of thing.

Naomi: We did everything at first. We learned so much from the shoots we went out on when it was just the two of us, but we could have used an extra hand. The two of us were figuring out the shots and how to set things up, and also figuring out where we were going to eat and how to get places. That’s why you have production assistants and a crew.

Sara: We had a running joke at the beginning about a fictional PA. When we would forget something or leave something behind, we would blame the PA.

Naomi: We had two other people when we shot the conventions – an extra camera person and an extra sound person – because we knew how much work that would be. And it was amazing how much more creatively we could interview people when we had other people helping out.

EN: What surprised you about this process of getting your movie seen?

Naomi: We were surprised by how hard it was at first to get it seen in festivals. We got how many rejections before SXSW?

Sara: Oh, I forget. A lot.

Naomi: There are so many movies, it’s hard to stand out, and you need the seal of approval by a quote unquote good festival for others to take a chance. SXSW opened a lot of doors. It was a great fit for us.

Sara: Some festivals had an artsier, more serious air that we just weren’t going to fit into. But we surprised by how much people got into the balloon animals and the balloon hats everywhere. We went to the festival in Newport, and we went to a very fancy party at one of those mansions. Around midnight, nobody was dancing, so we thought, oh, we’re just going to have fun. We started dancing and someone made balloon hats. Suddenly everyone there was dancing, in their tuxedos and formal dresses, with balloon hats on.

War, Inc.

By Elise Nakhnikian

Nobody plays slightly cynical sincerity better than John Cusack. But just because he does wry self-awareness so well doesn’t mean he can handle any kind of comedy. And judging by War, Inc., he should stay away from satire.

Cusack has called this antiwar farce a kind of unofficial sequel to Grosse Pointe Blank. There are certainly plenty of similarities between the two black comedies, starting with the fact that Cusack shares the writing credit (High Fidelity is the only other movie he cowrote.) In both, Cusack plays a mercenary who has lost his taste for killing but is too depressed to stop – until falling in love jars him out of his funk. But Blank is a tangy little sweet tart of a movie, an offbeat tale of redemption and love, while War, Inc. is one of those movies whose gears you hear loudly grinding away as it tries to do too many things, doing none of them well.

War, Inc. takes place in the fictional country of Turaqistan – or what’s left of it. Tamerlane, a fictional conglomerate that has made the US government into a mere corporate “subdivision,” has nearly pulverized the place, waging “the first war ever to be 100 percent outsourced to private enterprise.”

Brand Hauser (a dead-eyed Cusack), who works for the corporation, has been sent to dispatch a local politician. His cover is to pose as the director of a huge trade show, Brand USA, that’s being staged in Turaqistan’s capital to sell the locals on the American way.

It’s a ripe subject for satire, and I was rooting for Cusack to nail it, but the timing is off in this tone-deaf story. Cusack told one interviewer that his inspirations included Dr. Strangelove and the Marx Brothers. Films like this remind us how delicate a balance of anarchy, outrage, and pure silliness is needed to make an antiwar masterpiece like Strangelove or Duck Soup.

A bit in War, Inc. involving a chorus line of amputees, for instance, feels more creepy than funny, thanks to the heavy-handed narration that accompanies it, a chirpy paen to the wonders of the corporation whose bombs blew off the limbs and whose prosthetics replaced them. And another clever concept, the glorified screening room where journalists “experience” the war every morning by watching videos accompanied by Disney-like special effects, soon degenerates into slapstick as one particularly gung-ho participant gets way too far into her daily dose of virtual reality.

The filmmakers don’t seem to trust their audience to get anything unless they write it out in caps and underline it. Signs and other set dressing that might be funny if they were left in the background for us to discover in passing are hauled out front and center, the action stopping while the camera zooms in on them. And a nightmarish father-daughter dilemma that Soapdish managed to make painfully funny lacks all subtlety here, playing out as simply mawkish and icky.

The filmmakers also seem to lack faith that audiences would come out for an anti-war farce that wasn’t wrapped in yet another tale of a lost man who finds himself through love. That’s too bad, since the dissolute Hauser’s pursuit and conquest of Marisa Tomei’s Natalie, a hard-hitting and (self-)righteous journalist, is improbable and hackneyed.

The actors are badly directed, too. Ben Kingsley, who should have been able to play the heavy in his sleep, is laughably unthreatening with his badly faked Southern accent and his conveniently timed on-camera confession. Cusack’s sister Joan, one of her generation’s most gifted comediennes, seems to have been airlifted in from some alternate universe – and pumped full of amphetamines en route – to play his assistant, popping her eyes and straining her neck like a refugee from a minstrel show. Tomei is simply miscast as Natalie, though the real problem is in how the role was written.

Somebody’s wet dream of liberal-lefty investigative reporter, Natalie is a doe-eyed young thing so luscious and pure that men fall for her like dominoes. Lining up an interview? No problem. Just give the girl a stick to beat off all those would-be sources.

Hillary Duff comes off better than most of her elders, but even her shaded performance and innate likeability couldn’t get me to give a damn about her poor-little-rich-girl character, a grossly oversexed teenage pop princess named Yonica Babyyeah. Yes, even the names in War, Inc. try too hard.

After a while, the whole thing starts to feel like a spoof cooked up by a couple of talented middle school kids in their backyard. Even the story’s internal logic sometimes gets muddled. Dude! you want to ask. What happened to that cobra Hauser was milking when Yonica comes in his office? When Hauser’s pretending to be a customer at that Popeye’s that’s a front for his boss, why does he blow his cover by leaping over the counter after going through all the trouble of placing an order? And when he shoots those guys at a bar, why does everyone just ignore him while he walks out, as if nothing had happened?

Then again, never mind. I really don’t care.

Baby Mama

As a member of the oops-I-forgot-to-have-a-baby generation, I have a love-hate relationship with movies about pregnancy and parenthood. Parenthood is to me what a Barbara Cartland novel is to a hopeless romantic without a soulmate: intense vicarious pleasure. But that pleasure can morph into pain with alarming speed, like the time I mortified myself by sobbing as a nurse comforted the Charlize Theron character in The Cider House Rules after her abortion, reassuring her that she’d have beautiful children someday.

All this is by way of explaining why I didn’t see Baby Mama until last weekend – and why this feel-good movie left me feeling so bad.

A comedy is about something as primal as a woman’s longing to have kids can have enormous lasting power if its humor is rooted in real situations and feelings. That’s what made both Juno and Knocked Up so funny last year, and what made so many of us care about their characters – in spite of Juno’s sometimes annoyingly mannered dialogue and the fairy-tale Beauty-and-the-Beast mismatch at the heart of Knocked Up.

Like Juno, Baby Mama is about class in America – specifically, the strained intimacy that can develop when working-class women birth babies to be raised by upper-class women. In a refreshing twist, both movies empathize with their tightly wound, yuppie would-be mothers as well as their more emotionally accessible, working-class baby mamas.

The women in both stories support each other, too, for the most part, and their heroines are gratifyingly self-sufficient, making their own decisions and living their lives without apology or crippling self-doubt while their men flit about the edges of the story, offering themselves as romantic partners or sympathetic sounding boards.

But Baby Mama lacks Juno’s spark and originality, falling back on canned characters and stock situations.

Kate Holbrook (Tina Fey) is a 37-year-old executive in a Whole Foods-style organic food company who has worked her way up to a vice presidency by doing “everything I was supposed to do.” She’s used to taking care of business, so when she begins to yearn for a baby, she hires a surrogate mother to bear her one. Enter Angie Ostrowiski (Amy Poehler), a gum-snapping, working-class woman who’s as irresponsible as Kate is responsible.

Almost immediately after Kate hires her, Angie’s chaotic life collapses and she moves into Kate’s spotless apartment. Much Odd Couple-style wackiness ensues, but Kate and Angie develop (surprise!) a warm, mutually nurturing friendship.

Together they go to a humorously New Age-y birthing class, test super strollers, and encourage each other to branch out and take risks. They have their inevitable falling out, but they clear that up pretty well in the obligatory court scene.

Poehler and Fey have worked together for years on Saturday Night Live, where writer-director Michael McCullers (Austin Powers in Goldmember) also worked as a writer. Their comfort with and delight in each other makes Kate and Angie’s friendship almost believable, especially during the few times – like when Kate and Angie sing karaoke together – when the actresses break out of the sit-com-y mold that entraps them, evoking the spontaneity of real life.

The rest of the cast is also fine. Kate’s mother is a walking stereotype, a stiff-necked, narrow-minded patrician -- but if that’s the part you’re casting, you can’t do much better than Holland Taylor, who brings her usual satiric edge to the role. As Kate’s married-with-kids sister, Maura Tierney has almost nothing to do but does it well, suggesting both sympathy and smugness. As Kate’s doorman and confidant, Oscar, Romany Malco makes a likeable and funny “magical negro,” as Spike Lee calls the subordinate black characters whose only function is to help a movie’s white protagonists. And Steve Martin is clearly having a blast in full-blown supercilious/oblivious mode as Kate’s boss Barry, a self-infatuated hippie entrepreneur who likes to brag about the time he “toasted pine nuts at the mouth of an active volcano.”

Their charm and goofiness gives Baby Mama its moments. But for the most part it’s dully formulaic, even mean-spirited.

The script shows no mercy to Chaffee Bicknell (Sigourney Weaver), the head of Kate’s surrogacy agency, who commits the apparently unforgiveable sin of having children well into middle age. Granted, she’s a pill, flaunting her pregnancy in front of her frustrated clients, but must she be treated like a biological freak?

Baby Mama raises and refutes the usual objections to surrogacy, asking us to empathize with Kate’s decision to go that route. Fair enough, but why isn’t that same charity extended to women who get pregnant in their 50s? Haven't we always winked at men having babies much later in life that that?

To Kill a Mockingbird

By Elise Nakhnikian

To Kill a Mockingbird is not that Great American Novel that people used to be so eager to discover, but it is a great story for and about children. And both the book and the movie adapted from it are quintessentially American, in both their failings and their accomplishments.

Mockingbird’s most compelling subplot is about the trials – and trial – of Tom Robinson, an upstanding black man unjustly accused of the rape of a white woman. But the real subject of Horton Foote’s 1962 screenplay, as of Harper Lee’s 1960 novel, is the moral education of young Scout Finch (Mary Badham), the story’s narrator, and her big brother Jem (Phillip Alford).

Lee got an awful lot right about childhood, including the myths kids invent about their neighbors, the speed with which they can make new friends or enemies, and the sense of adventure and risk that can be involved in a simple walk – or run – down the block. Scout learns to respect and empathize with other people; Jem struggles with wrenching truths about how the world works. Mixed in with those big themes are plenty of light moments that ring just as true, like Jem’s longing for a gun of his own, or the ham costume Scout wears for her school’s Halloween pageant and gets stuck wearing home.

The picture Mockingbird paints of a particular place, time, and stage of life is its main strength, but it’s a heavily touched-up portrait. The little 1930s Alabama town of Lee’s memory was fighting some ferocious demons, including the Depression and the crippling effects of Jim Crow racism. Lee also has some things to say about the damage done by poverty and sexism. But viewing it all through the eyes of a young white lawyer’s child blinds us to some hard truths.

Scout’s Maycomb is a neighborly place, full of people who are essentially decent, even if they sometimes do indecent things. Its terrors are almost all imaginary, like the reclusive neighbor, Boo Radley, (Robert Duvall, looking affectingly spooky in his first movie role) whose image the kids conjure up to scare themselves, each other, and their summer friend Dill (the Dumbo-eared John Megna, playing an endearingly fanciful emotional orphan based on Lee’s childhood playmate Truman Capote). And though her mother is dead, her father, the estimable Atticus Finch (Gregory Peck) is a one-man band of parental virtues: eternally wise, unflashily heroic, unflappable, devoted to his children, and positively brimming with life lessons.

Director Robert Mulligan, who specialized in earnest TV dramas before Mockingbird, and cinematographer Russell Harlan, who did mostly B-movie Westerns, shot in a beautifully composed yet unshowy black and white that is a visual match for Lee’s combination of realism and nostalgia. Foote’s elegantly structured screenplay carries Lee’s poetic/ironic voice into the movie in the form of a voiceover, which is read in a wise and world-weary drawl by Kim Hunter. And the brilliant Elmer Bernstein score includes a sparingly used theme song that contains the children’s hopes, fears, and sense of wonder.

It all adds up to a compelling but suspiciously comforting tale – a declaration of faith in the essential goodness of human beings, the power of one extraordinary man to change everything, and the moral superiority of who else but you and me.

To Kill a Mockingbird infantilizes its African-American characters, stripping them of any individuality other the palpable personalities the actors endow them with. There can be a luxurious self-flattery in shaking your head as Tom Robinson’s wife crumples in despair on hearing of her husband’s fate, or in crying when a dignified African-American minister tells Scout to rise from her seat in the courtroom balcony to join the others in showing respect as her father heads out (“Miss Scout, stand up!” he says. “Your father’s passing.” Gets me every time.)

Crying puts us safely on the side of the good guys, short-circuiting any doubts that might have otherwise surfaced about our own complicity in American racism, past and present. And just as it lets us off the hook as individuals, Lee’s story lets the Jim Crow South off too easily – the same way we so often let ourselves off the hook in America for crimes committed against our black citizens.

There’s something downright distasteful about how accommodating and self-effacing Tom Robinson is. Did Lee believe that a black man had to be a saint in order to gain a white audience’s sympathy? Or, worse yet, did she think only a man who voiced no objection to his own objectification deserved our sympathy?

Surely not, yet Tom is almost childlike in his malleability. And if he and the other African-American characters are too passive, the white characters can be too heroic, accomplishing superhuman feats on behalf of the silent mass of suffering black folks. Even six-year-old Scout single-handedly vanquishes a lynch mob at the jail where Tom’s being held.

William Faulkner’s Intruder in the Dust offers a mirror image to Mockingbird. The unjustly accused black man in Faulkner’s story meets a better fate than Tom Robinson, yet the story feels bleaker and tougher. That’s partly because it holds white Southerners accountable for racism in a way that has to do with atoning for crimes, not with Atticus’ sense of noblesse oblige. But it’s also because of the anger and resistance exhibited by some of the black people in Faulkner’s story.

Faulkner’s Lucas Beauchamp doesn’t get into trouble with his poor white neighbors because, like Tom Robinson, he has the temerity to be nice to them. He is targeted because he has the nerve to do better than them, and to make it crystal clear that he doesn’t care what they think of that – or of him. A proud, angry man, he calls the shots from jail as surely as he did in his own home. Faulkner also gives us a much richer portrait of the poor whites who target Beauchamp and the resentment that motivates them. In the process, he delivers a more nuanced telling than Mockingbird of a startlingly similar story.

So if you want a realistic, complex, grown-up picture of race relations in the Jim Crow South, read Intruder. But if you’ve got kids, you might want to introduce them to Mockingbird. It may tell us as much about the time when it was made as it does about the time its story is set in, but it’s a fascinating slice of Americana.

Iron Man

By Elise Nakhnikian

I once read a comparison of Jeff Bridges’ movies that said you could predict how well they’d do by the length of his character’s hair. If the hair was long, the picture would tank; if the hair was short, it’d do good business.

If short is good, bald must be better. And sure enough, judging by Iron Man’s $100-million-plus opening weekend, Bridges blows the doors off the box office when he gets rid of the hair altogether.

Of course, it’s really Robert Downey Jr.’s mojo in the title role that makes this movie work. A billionaire playboy and inventor based partly on Howard Hughes, Tony Stark lives way large, but he has no superpowers – just super-cool inventions. Iron Man tells the story of how and why he created his ultimate boy toy, a full metal body suit that gives the former war profiteer a new name and a new role as a crusader for justice, as he rockets halfway around the world to blow up his own warheads and rescue some of the people whose lives his weapons have torn apart.

Downey's not the first guy you’d think of to portray a comic book hero, but his emotional complexity, congenital cool, and smartest-kid-in-the-room vibe make him just the sad-eyed charmer to play this haunted genius.

Stark’s suit is like a wearable F16. When Stark puts it on, he can mow people down, do loop-de-loops at 15,000 feet, and deflect bullets better than Wonder Woman’s bracelet. It even has a built-in flamethrower. That's all pretty typical comic-geek wish fulfillment, but the surprise of Iron Man is how well it works even for liberal-humanist, non-fanboy types like me.

Director Jon Favreau developed the script with two sets of writers (first Art Marcum and Matt Holloway, then Mark Fergus and Hawk Ostby, who adapted Children of Men for the screen). Their briskly paced, intelligently told story and Downey’s finely calibrated acting, tell you everything you need to know about the character without bogging down in backstory or boring exposition.

They also came up with clever ways of updating the story, which was created by Marvel’s Stan Lee in the ‘60s, mainly by switching the initial setting from Vietnam to Afghanistan. Taken prisoner by a group of insurgents and charged with building a super-weapon, Stark hammers out the prototype for his Iron Man suit instead and uses it to bust out of the cave where he’s being held.

Another smart change was the autonomy upgrade given to Stark’s right-hand woman, Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). In the comic, Favreau says, Potts “fawns over him a bit.” In the movie, the briskly competent Pepper clearly adores her boss, but the adoration is mutual – and so is the façade of tart detachment that both wear to protect themselves. Their awkward tenderness and well written dialogue gives their scenes warmth and wit, and Paltrow sparkles and shines, sparkles and shines.

The always excellent Bridges is rock solid as Obadiah Stane, the long-time ally who helps Stark run his company. Bridges even looks bigger than usual, his bald pate exposing a surprisingly thick neck and broad shoulders.

Not everything works. The Afghan insurgents come off a little like extras from The Mummy, and the action scenes are hard to follow. When Stark defeats his nemesis, you can see more or less what he’s doing, but I had no idea why – though it’s probably best not to look too hard for logic once things like “arc reactors” start being invoked.

Early on, when Stark is nearly killed by his own weapons, Iron Man looks like it’s dangerously close to becoming Irony Man. Then it skates past that sinkhole, leaving us free to enjoy the vicarious thrill of watching cool people operate cool gadgets – and the comforting dream of a quick, clean exit from the morass we’ve waded into in Afghanistan.

We see Stark’s sexy-sleek metal suit from all angles: as it assembles itself smoothly around him, as his robot assistants help him take it off, as he spirals through space or touches down to wage battle. When the camera closes in on Stark’s face inside the helmet, he looks like one of America’s last cowboys, the astronauts who explored outer space around the time Iron Man was born.

It’s a resonant image, calling to mind those cockier and more innocent days and reminding us of how things have changed. So it feels right that Iron Man’s mission is to undo damage he has done, not to explore new territory. And it feels sadly inevitable that his own inventions – even his iron man suit, which his arch nemesis sees as the ultimate weapon – should be used against him. Because if our recent past has taught us anything, it’s that technology and Tec-9s create more problems than they solve.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

When Harold (John Cho) and Kumar (Kal Penn), those goofy post-racial potheads, first ambled into theaters in 2004, they must have been a little startled by the stir they created. After all, our underachieving heroes were just fighting for their right to party – and satisfy a monster case of the munchies. But a lot of us gobbled up Harold and Kumar Go to White Castle as greedily as the guys lit into their burgers. Maybe we were hungry for something that defanged ethnic stereotyping so deftly, reducing it to a punchline.

Harold’s parents are from Korea and Kumar’s are from India. That’s part of who the two best friends are, of course, but it hardly defines them. In fact, the main conflict in Kumar’s young life has been his struggle to break out of the good-Indian-boy mold his family wanted to fit him into, which would have dumped him out into the world as a doctor – and, as we see in a flashback in Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay – a bit of a nerd.

Writer-directors Jon Hurwitz and Hayden Schlossberg told the New York Times they based the two on friends from their “very multicultural” New Jersey high school. “Harold and Kumar’s attitude toward racism is more frustration at having to deal with idiocy than moral outrage. We try to create a world where racism is stupid,” said Schlossberg.

The first movie succeeds by playing everything for laughs, but the second tries too hard for political significance, falling as flat as a punctured helium balloon when it tries to be more than an absurdist road trip with the occasional rest stop to skewer a stereotype or let the boys get their weed on.

The Flight of the Red Balloon

By Elise Nakhnikian

Ever since movie cameras were invented, people have tried to use them to cheat time, freezing shards of life at 24 frames per second. But since the camera changes everything, from how things look to how people behave, making a fiction film that feels like an undoctored slice of life is a complicated act of alchemy. A lot of people may try, but not many pull it off.

Fewer still can string together a series of realistic moods and moments in a way that concentrates life’s poignancy into a pungent broth. That takes a real artist – like Taiwanese filmmaker Hou Hsaio-hsien (Three Times, The Puppetmaster).

Hou’s latest feature, The Flight of the Red Balloon, was commissioned by Paris’ Museé d’Orsay as part of a series of films by prominent directors that the museum financed on one condition: at least one scene had to be filmed there. Hou’s contribution, which he cowrote as well as directed, is an homage to Albert Lamorisse’s 1956 classic, The Red Balloon.

The Flight of the Red Balloon is a lovely work, delicately observed, emotionally resonant, and reminiscent of the great poetic realist Ozu, whose Tokyo Story inspired Hou’s other homage, Café Lumiere.

Nothing momentous happens in Flight, yet it contains a whole world. As in The Red Balloon, a young boy finds – or is found by – a large red balloon, which seems to follow him of its own volition. The camera follows the two through the city as the mysterious balloon floats over the boy’s head like a benediction. Its string is generally just out of reach, though it dips down occasionally to let the boy catch hold of it.

But the similarities end there. The original story, in which the solitary boy defends himself and his balloon from jealous peers and imperious adults, is about the forces that erode childhood innocence and joy, but Hou’s Paris is a kinder and gentler place than Lamorisse’s. Simon (Simon Iteanu), the well-loved seven-year-old of Hou’s film, may exude the scent of only-child solitude, but he’s rarely alone, and the adults in his life are almost universally loving and respectful.

In fact, Flight is at least as much Simon’s mother’s story as it is his. Maybe that’s why Simon’s balloon doesn’t trail him like a faithful dog or appear in every scene. Instead, it bobs up periodically after a long absence, looming outside a window like an old friend.

Simon’s nurturing but harried mother, Suzanne (an electrically alive Juliette Binoche), is a puppetmaster engaged in staging an adaptation of a Chinese fable. Suzanne has created a cozy nest for herself and her son in a bohemian section of Paris: Though she’s breaking up with her absent boyfriend via long-distance phone fights, there’s a constant ebb and flow of visitors in her comfortably cluttered apartment. The high-strung Suzanne can’t relax even in her own home, thanks in part to a dispute with a tenant who’s months behind on the rent. Calm and in control only when she’s working with her puppets, Suzanne uses art to make sense of the chaos of life.

The other main adult character is Simon’s new nanny, a Chinese film student named Song (played by a Chinese former film student of the same name). Like Hou, Song is shooting a tribute to The Red Balloon with Simon cast as the boy. We often see her work as well, and her movie parallels and sometimes overlaps the one we’re watching. Watching the two women work or talk about their work lets Hou explore the intersection between life and art, mulling over some of the ways they enrich each other.

But you never for a moment lose your footing in Suzanne’s and Simon’s world, thanks in part to the strands of real life that Hou wove into his script. The director based the fight between Suzanne and her tenant on a real conflict involving the woman whose apartment they filmed in, who was one of the movie’s producers. He also gave the actors a lot of leeway in shaping their characters and their dialogue. “There was no [scripted] dialogue,” Binoche told Time Out Chicago. “There was no indication of sitting here or going there. It was all free. And the [cinematographer] had the same situation. He could shoot whatever he wanted to shoot.”

Cinematographer Pin Bing Lee, who has shot several other Hou movies, finds a soft beauty in old-city Paris, whose silvery grays make an elegant backdrop for the pomegranate-red balloon. He also brings out the eloquence in inanimate objects like Suzanne’s puppets and Simon’s balloon.

Lee and Hou layer their compositions, feeding that sense of life being captured in the raw by showing two or three people doing unrelated activities in one shot. Watching it all from a bit of a distance,in long shots that let things unfold in real time, they create a quiet, contemplative rhythm that draws us in further, encouraging us to notice things we might otherwise overlook.

The pace picks up and nerves get jangled periodically when Suzanne, that human whirlwind, injects a jolt of adrenaline into the mix. But in the end, this quietly moving film leaves you feeling as buoyant as the balloon that floats in and out of its frame.

Street Kings

By Elise Nakhnikian

“We’re the police. We can do whatever we want,” says Detective Tom Ludlow (Keanu Reeves) in Street Kings. “Doesn’t matter what happens: It’s how we write it up.”

Reeves’ Tommy (as most of the guys call him) is a 21st-century Dirty Harry. A maverick in conflict with his own department, he acts as judge, jury and executioner to the suspects he tracks down. But in this casually fascistic vigilante fantasy, that implacable drive to hunt people down and kills them makes him not a sociopath but a hero – or, as Tommy’s captain puts it, “the tip of the f--ing spear.”

Street Kings is nonstop action, but most of its tension comes from the interplay between Tommy and his captain, Jack Wander (Forest Whitaker), who seems to be on the scene whenever Tommy needs rescuing from the trouble he keeps slipping into.

Reeves’ Excellent Adventure-era California cool has solidified into a mask-like stiffness that fits this character nicely. Tommy is a none-too-bright middle-aged hard guy gone a bit to seed. His stubbly jowls, heavy gait, and constant procession of airplane-sized bottles of vodka mark him as a man in retreat from life – and so do Reeves’ guarded eyes.

Reeves’ underacting is thrown into relief by Whitaker’s overacting. When the captain gets worked up – and he usually does – spit flies out of his mouth, his face glistens with sweat, and Whitaker’s wider eye works overtime to register emotion. The actor is the epitome of soulful peace in that phone ad where he talks about spirituality, but in recent roles like this one and his Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland, he looks like he’s about to blow a gasket. You feel his pain, all right, but you don’t want to sit too close to the screen.

Street Kings was cowritten by James Ellroy, who wrote the story it’s based on. It was directed by David Ayer, who wrote Training Day. Both men are LA natives who specialize in hard-guy stories about cops, criminals, and the permeable line between the two. But Street Kings, like Training Day, has a hyperbolic adolescent swagger that undercuts the hard-edged realism it strives for. Several other directors turned down the script – including Spike Lee, which is a pity. His version of Ellroy’s cynically hopeful urban drama might have been a minor classic.

You wouldn’t want to live in Tommy’s world, but it’s a titillating place to visit. There’s a gun or a body in every car trunk and a double-cross around every corner. And there are plenty of colorful characters, like the cocky Sergeant Clady (the nicely acerbic Jay Mohr) and the enigmatic Terence Washington, Tommy’s former partner. Terry Crews, who played President Comacho in Mike Judge’s underappreciated Idiocracy, plays Washington with just the right amount of gravity - and a face that would fit right in on Mount Rushmore.

There are a couple of token love interests – most notably Washington’s babelicious wife, played by the always riveting Naomie Harris – but the only real love on display is the bond that forms between brothers in blue.

There’s no love lost between Tommy and the criminals he chases. He tracks one down by getting him snarled up in barbed wire – and leaves him there, howling in pain, after questioning him. That kind of police work looks awfully ugly. But, according to Street Kings, it has to be done – to “keep the animals at bay,” as Captain Wander puts it.

When the first of the Dirty Harry movies trumpeted that message, a lot of people dismissed it as fascist propaganda. But we’re in the age of Dexter now, and a movie like this raises barely a peep of protest.

Have our streets become that much more violent over the past 30 years? Or are we being brainwashed by the politics of fear?

Leatherheads

By Elise Nakhnikian

“I liked George Clooney’s smile,” the woman in the bathroom told her friend. “And I liked the relationship between him and Renée Zellweger. But I kept looking over and seeing Earl asleep.”

I’m with Earl. I didn’t buy the relationship between aging jock/con man Dodge Connelly (Clooney) and perky newsgal Lexie Littleton (Zellweger) in Leatherheads for a nanosecond. And when they started twitching and twinkling at one another in a strenuous effort to generate sparks, even Clooney’s piano key smile looked forced.

Leatherheads starts with the Universal logo from Hollywood’s golden age of the late 1920s and ‘30s. That’s a wink from director Clooney, who did such an elegant job of evoking the ‘50s in Good Night, and Good Luck. It’s a pledge that his latest movie will capture the stardust from those long-ago years, like some kind of cinematic Hubble Telescope, but this time he can’t keep his promise.

Set in 1925 (and how), Leatherheads is about the birth of professional football – well, sort of. It actually bears the same relationship to pro football as The Bad News Bears does to Little League: the sport is just the backdrop for a comic drama. But that’s not a fair comparison, since Leatherheads makes The Bad News Bears look like Shakespeare.

It’s impossible not to think of other films as you watch this one – and to wish you were watching them instead. A magpie of a movie, Leatherheads stuffs its nest with shards of other films: the romantic triangle in Bull Durham, the tough-cookie newsgal in His Girl Friday, the sepia-toned look of O Brother Where Art Thou, and so on. But borrowing so obviously was a mistake, since this movie suffers in comparison to every one that it pilfers. It even made me miss the flawlessly executed visual style of O Brother, itself a riff played on better films from the 30s that worked much better as a soundtrack than it did as a movie.

You can tell by their comic-book names how deep the characterizations of Lexie and Dodge are – and they’re two of the three main characters. Imagine how stunningly little is done with minor characters like the sadly wasted sports reporter (now there’s a fresh idea), who’s played by the sadly wasted Stephen Root.

The other main character is Carter Rutherford (nicely played by John Krasinski of The Office), who is all-American to the point of parody. A war hero and a football star, Carter draws far bigger crowds to his college games than Dodge’s scruffy professional team, the Duluth Bulldogs, can attract. So Dodge recruits Carter to play for the Bulldogs, figuring the publicity will draw the crowds needed to keep his team – and the sport as a whole – alive.

Will it or won’t it? I couldn’t care less, yet that’s pretty much the plot. Well, that and the inevitable love story, which plays out as a triangle between Dodge, Carter, and Lexie, whose Chicago paper assigns her to do a story on Carter.

Zellweger plays another of her patented spunky, smiling-through-her-tears, game little gals next door. She’s Jean Arthur all over again, that one, but this time she’s trying to play Roz Russell in His Girl Friday, and she just doesn’t have the vinegar or the salt – or the chemistry with her costar. When those two woo, Zellweger pruning up her kewpie doll lips while Clooney twitches his in an exaggerated pantomime of desire, you just feel sorry for them both.

Truth be told, Dodge seems a lot more interested in Carter. Homoerotic undertones are a cliché of sports movies, but they’re highlighted in this one, by the excess of male bonding over fistfights and a climactic football game that looks more like mud wrestling.

The pace is choppy, starting in a jerky setup-punchline mode and degenerating into shapelessness. It’s all strenuously underscored by Randy Newman’s self-consciously, often ironically, perky score, which leans on period pieces like “Toot Toot Tootsie Goodbye,” lest we forget for a moment that we’re in the ‘20s.

Things like the headlines twirling as papers come off the press in some of the way-too-many montages only make you conscious of how hard Clooney is trying to evoke the movies of the ‘30s. The joy of those movies came largely from their inventiveness and wit and the trust their makers had in the audience’s intelligence. Trying to revive those qualities by recreating now-cliched scenes like a speakeasy raid and a frenetic press conference, complete with popping flashbulbs, is like trying to create life by reanimating a corpse.

The dialogue – the crown jewel of those ‘30s comedies – lurches to life for a moment here or there, mostly when Dodge and Lexie are trading insults. But for the most part it’s either pedestrian or labored.

The camera is lumbering too, coming in tight to magnify the mugging rather than hanging back far enough to focus on relationships. And the pacing is way too slow. The great screwball comedies moved twice as fast – and that was before our attention spans had been so famously amped up.

Even the story’s internal timeline is off. If Carter was a WWI hero, why is he a fresh-faced undergraduate seven years after the war has ended? How do we go so fast from pro football being written off to sellout crowds? How did all those ads and posters with Carter’s face on them get produced so soon after he goes pro?

But hey, if Clooney doesn’t care, why should we?

Stop-Loss

By Elise Nakhnikian

Stop-Loss is a flare sent out on behalf of all the soldiers who’ve served in Iraq and Afghanistan. It’s partly a tribute, partly a protest, and partly a promise to never forget, either the individuals who died or what those who survived experienced. It also acknowledges the price paid by families and girlfriends when soldiers are away, when they come home, and when they don’t.

Sergeant Brandon King (Ryan Phillippe) as always been an upright soldier, but he rebels against the Army when he’s told he must sign up for a second tour of duty. The “stop-loss” policy that keeps him from going home is a loophole in the armed forces’ contracts that lets the government ensure that it will have the people it wants to fight overseas without reinstituting the draft. According to a title card at the end of the movie, it has been used on 81,000 of the 650,000 troops to serve in Afghanistan or Iran since 2001. Stop-Loss wants us all to feel as outraged as Brandon does when he first learns about it.

Stop-Loss has some serious flaws. The filmmakers sometimes wander off on tangents, making Brandon’s journey feel more like a greatest hits – or misses – tour of the Iraq war’s consequences than one man’s story. They wrap it all in a loose-fitting road-trip cloak and give Brandon a problematic love interest, Michelle (Abbie Cornish), leaving the relationship unresolved at the end. And some of the characters are so underwritten that even fine actors like Ciarán Hinds (as Brandon’s father) and Mamie Gummer (as his friend Tommy’s wife) barely register. But it carries out its larger mission, delivering a love letter from America to all those kids who’ve lost their limbs, their lives, or their peace of mind in Iraq.

This is the first non-documentary American film about our post-9/11 presence in Iraq that has the heft and urgency of truth. Last year’s lugubrious In the Valley of Elah and talky Lions for Lambs were preachy fables, weighted down by their sense of self-importance, but Stop-Loss is as unpretentious as its blue-collar characters. When director Kimberly Peirce (Boys Don't Cry) nudges you, it’s not to deliver a moral. It’s to say something plain and true, like: “Look at what these guys have been through,” or “Look at how much they love each other,” or “Hey, guys. I know you think we don’t care, but some of us really appreciate what you have done.”

Peirce and her cowriter Mark Richard, an award-winning author of literary fiction, always keep things on a human scale. They neither lionize nor demonize Brandon and his friends, and they never judge what they do. They just look on sympathetically as these very young men mess up, joke around, and commit casual acts of heroism. That humanity, along with their fierce loyalty to one another, makes it easy to relate to them even when PTSD makes them do scary stuff.

Phillippe is particularly touching, manning up to make Brandon believable as a natural leader, even a “true Texas hero,” as a smarmy senator calls him. So are Linda Edmond as Brandon’s mother and Victor Rasuk as Rico Rodriguez, a soldier in Brandon’s unit.

Interviews Peirce did before writing the script contribute to the sense of realism. A lot of the things her characters do come from the stories soldiers told her about themselves, like when Tommy takes his unopened wedding presents to a homemade shooting range and blasts them full of holes, after his new wife kicks him out. And having a brother who served in Iraq put Pierce in touch with the family members’ feelings. “My own mother would call crying about not knowing what's happening to her son,” she told Rotten Tomatoes.

Peirce also watched a lot of videos soldiers shot in Iraq, modeling the “home videos” that stud her movie on them. Faked amateur video footage can easily feel like a cliché in a mainstream movie, but she uses the device sparingly and well, cutting to the footage for just a few seconds here and there to provide context to the soldiers’ lives in the U.S.

She and her cinematographer, the great Chris Menges, also capture some powerful images in the “present-day” shots. When Brandon visits Rico at a military hospital, the first thing you notice is how badly he is hurt, with two limbs truncated and half his face – including both eyes – half-melted by fire. Next you focus on his admirable good cheer and lack of self-pity.

Then his visitors leave and the camera stays on Rico as he gets back into bed, his blasted features settling into an expression of patient resignation that is, you sense, his new true face.