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.

Tell No One

TELL NO ONE is a tightly plotted thriller with enough red herrings and sudden turns to keep you guessing nearly to the end. But it lacked that certain something that takes a movie from "pretty good" to "great."

Upon reading other reviews of the movie, I think I've figured it out. It's an adaptation of a Harlan Coben novel. I dislike Harlan Coben novels because I feel that they're too tightly plotted, to crisp in their execution. When reading a Coben novel, I don't feel like I'm embarking on a dangerous and gripping adventure. Rather, I feel like I'm inspecting the work of a watchmaker, a fine craftsman who knows how to make all the gears match up just so. But I don't look for soul in a watch, and I can't find a soul in Coben's work.

Anyway, here's the deal: Alex is a French pediatrician who's a heavy smoker because hey, he's French. Years earlier, his wife was murdered under circumstances that made him a suspect. Now, two things have happened: new evidenced has turned up that has the gendarmes sniffing around again, and he gets an e-mail message with a current image of a woman who looks just like his wife and an admonition -wait for it- to tell no one. As are all the men in movies of this stripe, Alex is also a crack detective when his back is against the wall and, in an interesting twist, can outrun a man roughly one decade his junior even though the younger man, Frenchman or no, doesn't appear to suck the sticks of death.
So the twists twist and the turns turn and the obviously bad guy turns out to be bad and the obviously good guy turns out to be good, and sure, there are plenty of surprises along the way. But never once did I feel caught up in the action. Never once did I wonder how things would turn out. Never once did I scratch my head, because I could see the gears turning, new the oil had been applied, and had no doubt that this movie would bring it all in on time.

C'est la vie.