The Grand Budapest Hotel

I’ve had it with Wes Anderson.

The Grand Budapest Hotel looks marvelous, represents a unique vision, and tells its story with wit and creativity.  I hated it.  It’s the Manic Pixie Dream Girl of movies.

Its love interest has a birthmark the exact shape of Mexico running down her cheek because – whimsy! 

Its one honest and noble character meets a horrific end because – unpredictability!

Its paragon of class and carriage is a vulgar buffoon because – honesty!

It concludes with an image suggesting an entire nation living in grateful wonder at its story because – self-indulgence!

I swear to God, I half-expected this movie to pull out a ukulele and improvise a tune about the wonder of dewdrops.  Up yours.  Entertain me.  Blow up a car.

Midnight in Paris

There are two kinds of people in this world: those who love Paris, and those who have never been. Woody Allen loves Paris, and Midnight in Paris is his song.

Owen Wilson plays Gil, a Hollywood writer who gets paid decent money to crank out stuff like Cheaper by The Dozen 2, but really wants to create serious literature. He's in Paris with his odious fiancée and her odious parents. He wants to move there, as any reasonable person would, and she's horrified by the idea.  {IMPORTANT NOTE: If your significant other can't see her/himself living in Paris, run.  Run as fast as you can.}  But here's the twist: he doesn't just want to live in Paris: he wants to live in the Paris of the imagination of a college-prep high schooler. This is a man who has read A Moveable Feast so many times that he wills himself a seat at the table. Literally. The Fitzgeralds are delightful. Hemingway introduces him to Stein, who likes his work. He's ecstatic, and that's even before Marion Cotillard shows up. Suddenly, Odious Fiancée seems very far away, indeed.

And now we're in the love letter to a city, a time, and the very idea of cities and times and possibilities that may, just may, lie within our grasp. It's capital R Romantic stuff, and Woody makes it sing. Though the film has a jarring propensity to name-check just about everyone in A Moveable Feast, we forgive it because it's so earnest, so Romantic, so in love with its time and its people and its possibilities, and so beautiful. Paris, past and present, looks absolutely charming.   It glimmers in the rain and it holds manifold and wonderful possibilities.  Its denizens look like just the sorts of a people an imaginative man would hope to meet.

Me - I love Paris. I love the way city lights look when reflected on wet cobblestones. I love possibilities. And I love my wife's dog-eared copy of A Moveable Feast.  Midnight in Paris hit me right between the eyes. If you love Paris, I bet it'll work for you, too.

Cars

CARS isn't wildly funny or illuminating or anything else. It just sorta rocks along pleasantly for an hour and a half, content to be content in the journey.

Here's the setup: Lightning McQueen is *this close* to winning the coveted Piston Cup and making all his dreams come true. He's just gotta get to LA in time for the race and the meeting with the big sponsor and the fame and the fans and so on and so forth. But then he gets sidetracked, DOC HOLLYWOOD style, in a litte town on Route 66. Surprisingly, he learns some life lessons about community and selflessness, and he finds out that maybe what he wanted isn't what he wanted, at all. It's a fine chassis for a kids' story, and it works as advertised, with some particularly clever touches in the realization of an all-autos world. This is a Pixar production, so it looks fabulous and has all the marks of a precision machine. It hits its marks and, while not a masterpiece, it answers the mail.

What's more interesting is the trend to focus on the importance of sportsmanship and fair play in kids' movies that I've been noticing. It's a delightful change from the "2nd place is first loser" mentality that I see permeating much of popular culture and a message that's worth getting out there. There's nothing trite about class, and it's good to see that reinforced in popular entertainment.

Wedding Crashers

WEDDING CRASHERS has its moments, but it's ultimately unsuccessful for two reasons: the comedy runs out in the third act and the villain is just too evil.

We've all been to comedies in which story overtakes the humour in the last act, so I won't belabor the point. I'm more interested in the concept of the comedy villain and how WEDDING CRASHERS goes wrong in this regard.

WC's villain is one Sack Lodge, played by Bradley Cooper. Lodge is evil and vicious. Not funny, not idiosyncratic, not an otherwise interesting Baxter. He's just plain evil and vicious. Evil and vicious is not funny. Consequently, the character is a comedy black hole whenever he appears on screen. Not only does he not radiate funny, he sucks the funny out of all surrounding scenes.

In contrast, consider Ben Stiller's White Goodman in DODGEBALL. Goodman's the villain, but he's ridiculous enough to be nonthreatening and, consequently, funny. In Dodgeball, the Goodman character's just villainous enough, just over the top enough, to both keep the story moving and keep the laughter flowing. I with WC's producers had brought Rawson Thurber, DODGEBALL's writer, aboard for a scrub before this production began. He would've known what to do with his villain. He could've taken WEDDING CRASHERS from merely ok to very good.

Unfortunately, they didn't and WEDDING CRASHERS is the worse for it. Too bad.

Idiocracy

IDIOCRACY is a one-joke movie. It's a pretty good joke, and I know this because watched IDIOCRACY in three parts, as dictated by the events of my day. Each time I started (or returned to) the movie, I laughed out loud the first two or three times I got the joke. Then, however, I settled in and hummed along, reasonably amused and a little uncomfortable, until the next interruption (or the end of the film). When you tell the same joke over and over, that's about the most you can hope for.

Here's the joke: the main characters are surrounded by stupefyingly idiotic people. That makes for funny situations at first, but eventually we viewers come to accept the stupidity and move on. If humor lies in the gap between observation and apprehension, IDIOCRACY makes the gap so small that there's no room for a belly laugh.

Here's the setup: Owen Wilson and Maya Rudolph, two extraordinarily average people, are sent into the far future. Once there, they discover that Will Durant was right - the future does belong to the fertile. America's smartest people have underreproduced, while the dullards have multiplied like - well, in creator Mike Judge's estimate - dullards. People of the future are so dumb, so boorish, so easily led, that they dismiss as "faggy" any speech that makes even the most remote sense. They water their crops with sports drinks because they've been told that plants need electrolytes, then wonder why nothing will grow when it's routinely doused with sugar and salted water. They're so dumb that IDIOCRACY has no internal logic because the systems needed to keep this civilization limping along could not have been designed or maintained by this civilization's own members, nor could this civilization have protected itself from smarter, hungrier, more aggressive civilizations. But we're not supposed to pay attention to any of that. We're supposed to laugh down our noses at the inflated stereotypes that Judge trots out before us, even as we meditate on the decline of our own civilization. And we do laugh, at least at first, but then the joke gets old.

While viewing IDIOCRACY, I felt a growing unease. I'm wrapped pretty tightly in the cocoon of my particular class - so much so that I have very little contact with the class that Judge sees taking over world. Is it possible that people who could be the seeds of IDIOCRACY's comic exaggerations actually exist in any significant numbers? Is America really a "Divorce Court" and "Jerry Springer" kind of place? While watching the film, I couldn't decide whether Judge cruelly misrepresents lower-middle America or I am out of touch.

Regardless, I could decide this: IDIOCRACY can be a pretty funny movie, depending on how you watch it. I recommend short, controlled bursts.

Night at the Museum

I wanted to hate NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM. I really did. I'm tired of Ben Stiller. I'm tired of Robin Williams. I'm tired of Owen Wilson.

I'm in the process of teaching my spawn theater etiquette, however, and matinees of kids' shows provide a forgiving environment. NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM hooked both of us, much to my surprise, and we had a good time in the theater.

Here's the hook: Ben Stiller's a divorced dad trying to set a good example for his son. He takes a job as the night guard at New York's Museum of Natural History and, as guards Dick Van Dyke and Mickey Rooney (!) already know, the place literally comes alive at night. Personal growth, and the earning of respect in the little tyke's eyes, follow as surely as landings follow takeoffs.

The thing that makes NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM worthwhile isn't the by-the-numbers plot or even the CGI workmanship, however. Stiller carries this movie, bringing a charisma to the project that I thought he'd lost sometime after MYSTERY MEN. He sells the idea of running from a reanimated dinosaur skeleton and brokering peace between the Western and Roman dioramas. He makes the tired routine of winning his child's respect breathe, and he made me interested in his work again.

Then there's another thing: the chance to see Van Dyke and Rooney is a major theatrical relase. In a sense, I felt like I was bringing my child to the museum: "Hey, that's the guy from MARY POPPINS! That other guard is from -well, I'll have to rent something for you. But he's been around nearly as long as talkies!" What a pleasant surprise.

I honestly thought NIGHT AT THE MUSEUM would be an exercise in tedium, useful only for giving my boy a place to practice whispering and not kicking the seat in front of him. Who knew it would come alive, and prove to be such a fun place to hang out?

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou

I like the combination of the real and the fanciful in THE LIFE AQUATIC WITH STEVE ZISSOU. Elegance, insight, and grace infuse the (only?) real element of the film, the inner life of Steve Zissou; while the fanciful element shines with vision, creativity, and an edge toward fancy.

Steve Zissou is a man in the process of losing his illusions. His business is crumbling, his partner is leaving, and his crew yearns for the days when he had the energy to make illusions seem real. As the movie pares this character down to his vital core, it creates an increasingly fantastical world for him to inhabit. How fitting that his moment of enlightenment should come in the most fantastical scene of them all.

Holy cow, did I like this movie.