Recently Seen

Diary of a Wimpy Kid: Dog Days continues in the successful vein of the very good Diary of a Wimpy Kid.  Greg Heffley continues to try to make a go of adolescent life, though he struggles with concepts like honesty and selflessness that seem, to him, to come naturally to everyone else.  His is the struggle of ego and id translated for the pre-teen set.  Oh, and this is very important: made laugh-out-loud funny.

Microcosmos delivers a mesmerizing documentary about icky bugs.  Showing life on their scale with no narration and a wonderful score, the film just us the majesty of an animal kingdom right beneath our feet.  At least, it tries to.  While I admired the effort, I just couldn't get past the fact that bugs are icky.

The Crimson Rivers gives us Jean Reno and Vincent Cassel in a buddy cop murder mystery.  Reno's the famous detective brought in from Paris to solve a particularly gruesome murder, which Cassel's the impetuous young chief from a nearby ville.  Can this mismatched pair catch the killer and, perhaps, become friends?  Well, naturally, but it's the execution that matters.  Reno and Cassel are both fun to watch, there are some well-done fistfights, and I didn't see the twist coming.

Flyboys

You’ll like Flyboys if you like aviation history.  You’ll like Flyboys if you like “historical recreation” movies.  You won’t like Flyboys if you like, y’know, good movies.

In WWI, France established the Lafayette Escadrille.  Think of it as a Foreign Legion, but with American pilots.  This film is, generally, based on their story.  Many of the people portrayed here really existed, and many of the things we see them do actually happened.  So, hey, so far so good.

But here’s the problem: the screenplay’s just too tight.  Every fact about the escadrille’s planes that we learn early in the film becomes important in combat later on.  The love story feels like a detour from the plot.  We predict nearly every beat and, though the planes look pretty and the uniforms crisp, this film offers no suspense, no surprise, nothing that we expect in narrative cinema.  This feels like a story that’s hitting all the marks from one of those screenwriting books, and it certainly has the best intentions of hagiographying the Corps.  But there’s no soul here, no fuzziness, nothing that makes it feel like it’s about real people and not just lists of traits noted on index cards.

Nevertheless, I like aviation history.  I like  “historical recreation” movies.  Flyboys wasn’t much good, but it did teach me something about its world.  I guess there’s that.

Flushed Away

Poor Hugh Jackman. The guy's trying to be a movie star: he really is. He made a romantic comedy with Meg Ryan, an action movie with Stephen Sommers, even a prestige picture with Christopher Nolan. What does he have to show for it? More flops than a skid row hotel. FLUSHED AWAY, with Jackman voicing the lead, was another in the long list of studio loss-makers. Check off "kid's film," Hugh. Perhaps you'll have better luck in a zombie movie.

FLUSHED AWAY looks like a successful kid's movie. It's structured like one, with all the beats, gags, and character moments we'd expect, and it's a perfectly fine entry in the genre. It's lacking something, however - that heart, that hook, that special something that makes it the kind of picture you don't mind seeing again and again. Here's the setup: Roddy (our hapless Hugh) lives the sweet life in Kensington, which, I infer, is a posh London borough. He's a housepet, and a happy one, until circumstance conspires against him and he's literally flushed away into the London sewers. There, he discovers Rat Culture, finds a place in it, and even defeats the evil Mr. Toad (whose toadies include Le Frog, whose henchmen respond to the command, "Fight like Frenchmen!" by raising their hands in surrender).

The movie's visually rich, it has gags galore, it features character design in the beloved Aardman style, and it feels like the kind of thing that went through committee after committee until every cog in a soulles creative machine was happy with the output, right down to the musical number that closed things out. There's no "there" there and, compared with a masterpiece like RATATOUILLE, FLUSHED AWAY is merely a trifle, something to sedate the kids while you mow the lawn.

Better luck next time, Hugh. And really, think about that zombie movie. It might finally put you over the top.