The Naked Spur

Somewhere along the way, I picked up the notion that there was a twist ending to THE NAKED SPUR. There is, but not the in the way I thought. It’s a twist so much more engaging than anything I’d have imagined that it elevates the picture from merely good to damn good. Unfortunately, it also makes the film nearly impossible to write about.

I will write that the cinematography is not particularly fascinating and the music is grating, relentlessly telling us what to think and how to feel. Mid-career Jimmy Stewart is fine, as always, and the supporting cast does its job well enough that no one struck me as a “favor cast.”

But the real credit here goes writers Sam Rolfe and Harold Bloom, who fashion a story that appears straightforward, but gets more and more complex as things develop. By the end, even though I knew this was a Western of a certain era, I had no idea how things were going to turn out. And that twist, wow. This movie took me by surprise.

The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle

THE ADVENTURES OF ROCKY & BULLWINKLE represents either a career low for Robert DeNiro and Rene Russo or a fun, silly jaunt for kids that should be taken as it was intended. I’m inclined to go with the former, but my kids would select the latter.

Here’s the deal: an ambitious young studio executive wants to helm her first movie, but every script she sees is too intelligent. Then, someone pitches her a live-action film based on the old “Rocky & Bullwinkle” cartoons, and she’s ready to sign. But there’s a catch: the pitchers are cartoon villains, and the hook is that they’re ready to come into the real world and wreak havoc. And so it is that DeNiro, as Fearless Leader, Rene Russo as Natasha, and Jason Alexander as Boris find corporeal form. And it isn’t long after that Rocky & Bullwinkle, rendered in a level of CGI somewhere below that of the SCOOBY-DOO films, enter the picture to save the day.

But why am I wasting time setting up the plot? It only exists as a vehicle for sight gags, self-consciously bad puns, and general purpose silliness that had me checking my watch and both my boys delighted. This movie wasn’t made with me in mind, but I respect its dedication to kid-friendly humor and its willingness to throw jokes at the wall and see what sticks.

Do I want to see the once-great Robert DeNiro waste his time with stuff like this? Not really, but I still respect the guy’s willingness to go with the cheesy joke even while I grimace at perversions of some of his signature moments. But hey, he didn’t make this movie with me in mind. And he did entertain the hell out of my kids, which made it possible for me to get some chores done around the house. Rather than criticize the man for his involvement in ROCKY & BULLWINKLE, perhaps I should be thanking him.

The Forbidden Kingdom

So, here's the setup: a young man believes that there must be more to life than he's seeing. In fact, he lives in something of a fantasy world. While trying to impress a girl, he's shown up and knocked around by the local bully. Through a mechanism of the plot, he's transported to a magical realm where he has many adventures, fins love, and becomes a man. He returns to his own world, knocks around the bully, and claims his manhood.

Man, wasn't STARDUST a great picture?

But we aren't here to talk about STARDUST. We're here to talk about THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM. In THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM, the mundane bully is so vicious and such a bad actor that he sucks all the fun out of the movie before it can even properly get underweigh (That's how it should be spelled, dammit. The phrase comes from "weighing anchor," not "waying anchor."). Granted, there's a dream sequence of Jet Li doing a fun Monkey King, but I'm tellin' ya, that framing story erased the goodwill the bit earned. Even if it was set in hardscrabble South Boston.

OK, so the framing story sucks. But what about the adventures in the magical realm? I started that part with my arms crossed, wondering why a Jackie Chan / Jet Li teamup even needed a white guy. But then Jackie showed and busted out the "drunken boxing" moves he hadn't used since his last movie with fight choreographer Yuen Woo-Ping, DRUNKEN MASTER II (a film which, by the way, I discovered through the Balcony back in the '90s). So forget about the framing story. Forget about the white guy, even though he was the protagonist. Here was Jackie getting his DRUNKEN MASTER on! That's worth the price of admission, right there! Then Li showed up again, and we got what we came for: a Chan / Li battle, choreographed by Yuen.

Y'know what? I don't care if these guys are getting older and require more quick-cuts to mask their diminished athletic ability. They're still two of the very best, cinematographer Peter Pau (CTHD) is among the very best, and Yuen is the very best. That's worth your rental fee, right there.

Unfortunately, however, THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM isn't an hour and a half of Chan and Li being awesome. It keeps having to make room for this extraneous white guy. Michael Angarano, whom I loved in SKY HIGH, is fine, but I just couldn't see a reason for his character other than marketing. Nor could I see a reason for Yifei Liu, the love interest, other than to have someone to stand around and look pretty. And someone tell Krrish that BingBing Li, as the Bride with White Hair, stole his fan.

This movie could have been great. It could have been awesome. It could have been, well, STARDUST with kung fu. But it's worth renting only if you're a fan of the genre, and even then it's worth renting only for the genre elements. Let's hope that the next time Chan and Li team up, it's for a better project.

Bee Movie

BEE MOVIE is an abject failure.

Well, at least as far as I'm concerned. My 8-yr-old watched it twice. Just when I start to think I'm giving that kid a proper education.

Here's a movie with offputting animation, a dull story, and precisely zero funny lines. OK, there's one, but it was a lawyer joke that I couldn't even laugh at for fear my wife would slap an injunction on my butt. It's about a bee who gets a tryout with his hive's elite pollen gatherers, then goes on to become something of an insectoid César Chávez. Oh, and he also falls in love with a human woman, played by Renée Zellweger. Now, if there's one actress on Earth who can sell a woman falling in love with a bee, it's Zellweger. But I still couldn't buy it.

BEE MOVIE does have one thing going for it, and that's Ray Liotta. But not even he can smear enough honey on this picture to make it sweet. Pass this one by.

Talk to Me

Don Cheadle is one of the great actors of our time.

In DEVIL IN A BLUE DRESS, he did the impossible: he stole a movie from Denzel Washington. His character, Mouse Alexander, was so smart, so evil, so good, that I couldn't see the man's face for years without wondering whether he had murder on his mind. That film, made in 1995, brought Cheadle to my attention. But this has been his decade. From the cockney safecracker Bashar Tarr in the OCEAN'S movies to the one of the few things about CRASH to the understated, brave, and noble Paul Rusesabagina in HOTEL RWANDA, here's a guy who showed he can do almost anything. But nothing prepared me for Petey Greene.

If I hadn't known that was Don Cheadle under that costume, I never would have guessed it. Cheadle disappears into the role, thinking and talking faster than anyone else in the film or the audience, a man using his raw intelligence and amazing audacity to overcome nearly every obstacle put in his way. Cheadle as Greene is a force of nature, his performance nothing short of brilliant.

I came to this film through an interview with Chiwetel Ejiofor that I read on CHUD. Ejiofor was promoting RED BELT at the time, but he mentioned this as one film of which he was particularly proud. I can see why. Ejiofor plays the audience surrogate, real-life WOR program director Dewey Hughes, the man who gave the real-life Petey his job. I've already said that Ejiofor is an absolutely outstanding performer himself, and here he has the judgement and confidence to get out of Cheadle's way. Director Kasi Lemmons (who made the wonderful EVE'S BAYOU) knows what she's doing here, and she builds a film around this performance that puts us in its time and in its people's hearts in a way that few pictures manage to do.

I don't care if you don't like soul music. I don't care if you don't care about the black experience in the '60s. I don't even care if you aren't a fan of Cheadle, Ejiofor, or Lemmons. You're here because you like movies. And if you like movies, you have got to see Cheadle on fire in TALK TO ME. Queue this one up today.

Seven Men from Now

My understanding of narrative goes something like this: a protagonist changes and grows over the course of a story. By riding along with this protagonist, we change and grow, as well.

The protagonist doesn't change and grow over the course of SEVEN MEN FROM NOW. In fact, one could argue that nobody changes and grows over the course of Bud Boetticher's SEVEN MEN FROM NOW, although a total of twelve men do stop growing altogether. But it's still one hell of a story.

Seven men walked in to the Wells Fargo office in Silver Spring. They walked out with one box of gold in their hands and one dead woman on the floor. Randolph Scott was married to that woman, and Randolph Scott saddled up and went hunting. The movie begins with the hunter finding his first prey, and it's full-bore revenge fantasy from there on out. It's got a stoic and unstoppable hero, villains both noble and ignoble, Indians, cavalry, settlers in a stagecoach, and some of the finest practical stuntwork you're likely to see in a film of its or any other generation.

This is a tight, lean narrative that knows exactly what it's about and exactly how it's going to get there. Scott and Lee Marvin (as the noble villain) are near-perfect adversaries, and the settler family caught between them like pieces on a chessboard provide a humanizing "in" to their conflict. This film is 78 minutes of flat-out adventure, and I don't care if Scott winds up the same man he was when he set out. I was just happy to ride with him for a while.

PS One of my childhood influences was a retired stuntman. Watching this film's professionally exact horse falls, horse charges, cliff falls, fights, and gunfights made me nostalgic for the days he'd tell stories of working on these kinds of pictures. I love my job, but if I had to pick another, I'd have loved to be a stuntman during the golden age of westerns. In fact, one of my fondest memories is of the time I directed an entry in Calico Ghost Town's stunt show competition. We won that year. So maybe SEVEN MEN FROM NOW really stinks, and I just loved it because it granted me 78 minutes of golden reverie. It doesn't matter. As far as I'm concerned, this is a great movie.

Ride the High Country

RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY is one of the best movies I've seen all year. I'm having trouble figuring out where to begin writing about it.

Let's start with the location. California's Inyo National Forest is one of the most beautiful places in the world, particularly in the fall, when the aspen groves turn luminous yellow. This is the high country for which the film is named, and director Sam Peckinpah and DP Lucien Ballard shoot it so vividly, so marvelously, that I could
practically smell the sagebrush and feel the bite in the air.

Next, we'll roll into the story. The brief summary, "Old friends ride into the mountains to bring back a shipment of gold, but greed threatens to tear them apart," sounds so TREASURE OF THE SIERRA MADRE that it led me to pass this film by. But there's so much more to this film than that summary, so much more unexpected grace and brutality, so much more humor and truth, that a summary does it scant justice. This is a film about who we are and who we want to be; it's the stuff of great drama, and it's realized greatly.

That realization can't happen without performances to give it life, and Randolph Scott and Joel McCrea anchor this movie by giving us men who've been heroes and scoundrels and who may have one or more switches still inside them. Their lives play out in a world that's moving on, and these men need to learn to move on with it, if they can. Mariette Hartley and Ron Starr represent the new generation, people with lots of mistakes still to make, and it's a pleasure to watch their characters get their feet under them.

This is a beautiful, exciting film. I didn't know what was going to happen next, but I came to care about these people and invest in their choices. I made time to see RIDE THE HIGH COUNTRY, and it was time well spent.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch

I'm having a hard time wrapping my head around HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH. I can't decide whether I even liked it.

HEDWIG is, in the words of co-writer, producer, director, and star John Cameron Mitchell, a "post-punk, neo-glam opera." It's about the eponymous Hedwig, who tours the country with her band, The Angry Inch. They play in the most depressing venues imaginable, behind salad bars and near checkout machines in a nationwide seafood chain that seems about two rungs down from Red Lobster. And they appear to be stalking one Tommy Gnosis, whom Hedwig accuses of stealing her best stuff. Over the course of the film, Hedwig tells her life story and, between this and the performances, there are plenty of opportunities for musical numbers.

But here's the problem: Hedwig's life story is boring, while the numbers are fabulous. Whenever someone in this movie was talking, I was bored out of my mind. Whenever someone was singing, however, I was utterly in the moment. Now that I think about it, in fact, I think that the film HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH is superfluous. The soundtrack tells us everything we might want to know about these characters, and it does it more succinctly and compellingly than the picture.

After viewing HEDWIG AND THE ANGRY INCH, I don't think I'd recommend it to my friends. But I would drag them to see the band in concert.

The Phantom of the Opera

Snitz Edwards had a great couple of years there in '24 and '25. First, his name was Snitz, which is just plain awesome no matter what year it is. Second, '24 was the year he played Fagin to Fairbanks' Twist in THE THIEF OF BAGDAD and '25 was the year he got the comic relief duties in THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA. This guy had one hell of a great agent.

THE PHANTOM OF THE OPERA needed Snitz's touch; otherwise, it'd be too dire, too bleak to make for a very good time at the movies. Its damsel, Christine Daae, welcomes the murdering phantom when he's propelling her career, but spurns him for some fop as soon as soon as she gets a look at poor Phant's ugly mug. The Phantom is a psychotic stalker for whom we're supposed to feel some pity, but it's hard to feel pity for a psychotic stalker. About the only guy other than Snitz for whom we can even root is a French secret policeman, but how does one work up much gusto for the secret police?

What THE PHANTOM does have going for it is some great costume, set, and (especially) makeup work, and a deliciously slow tease and reveal of the Phantom himself. But I couldn't hook into it because I didn't care about the fate of either Daae or her foppish boyfriend. They should've given Snitz a bigger part.

In Bruges

IN BRUGES works because it's so remarkably well written. It has the arresting dialogue of a play, the quality of performance one expects from people who need to entrance their audience on the strength of their words alone. The fact that it also features beautiful photography of a beautiful location adds value and dimension to the proceedings, making this an altogether satisfying movie.

Further, IN BRUGES leads me to reevaluate Colin Farrell. This is the first time he's ever interested me, and I was both surprised and delighted to find him assaying such an interesting, perplexing character, at once childlike and possessed of great depth.

I liked this film's story; I liked its performances; I loved its dialogue. I'd gladly spend more time IN BRUGES.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL was a great surprise. I was busy with other things when it came out, so I missed Ebert's very favorable review and the positive word of mouth it generated. It took a coworker's raves to get me to sit down for the movie, and I must remember to thank that guy.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL has an uninspiring setup, one that could work for any number of comedies with varying success. A guy's girlfriend dumps him. He goes to Hawaii to forget her with a change of scenery. She turns up at the same resort with her new boyfriend. But other comedies don't have the guy writing a rock opera of Dracula with a soul-baring tune that makes you want to both laugh and cry (and laugh). Other comedies don't have supposed villains who turn out to be among the funniest and most noble characters in the picture. Other comedies don't have that perfect combination of raunchy humor and gentle understanding that are the hallmark's of producer Judd Apatow's ouvre.

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL does make the common mistake of forgetting the "comedy" part of "romantic comedy" in most of the third act, but it makes up for it with a stitch of an ending. This is a charming, funny, marvelous film, one well worth seeing.

I've been raving about it to my coworkers.

The Thief of Bagdad (1924)

I blame J.R.R. Tolkien for the wasteland that is the fantasy genre.

Tolkien was a jealous guy. He looked at the mythologies of the world and thought, "Why don't the English have a compelling, fun mythology like the Norse and the Romans?" Then he thought he'd create one and, thus, _The Lord of the Rings_ was born. But _The Lord of the Rings_ was so good, so influential, that it bent the Western approach to fantasy and locked it into a thralldom to Late Medieval milieus.

So it is that the modern viewer may come to THE THIEF OF BAGDAD unfamiliar with the rich and delightful world of Arabic mythology. This is a world of crystal balls, flying carpets, invisibility cloaks, and winged horses. It's a world of scoundrels and shamans, thieves and kings, djinn and devils. It's a world of Indian princes, Mongol raiders, and Chinese slave girls. It's rich, exciting, entertaining stuff, and it's brought to life wonderfully by Raoul Walsh in 1924's THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, starring Douglas Fairbanks. As the thief, Fairbanks is all muscle tone, mischievous grins, and cheesy '20s moustache. He's also a great deal of fun as the lying, scheming, wholly redeemable man who learns that happiness must be earned. But how does he learn this lesson? By journeying through some of the most exciting and visually impressive set pieces I've seen in any film of any era.

How can silent era, low-tech sets compete with the wonders dreamed up by the Lucases of today? Because when we see them, we know that they're real. People actually made that magnificent papier mache Buddha, that wonderful Caliphate-era palace, those dazzling underground and underwater environments. We don't care that the ship on the storm-tossed sea is actually a cardboard boat among fan-blown sheets, because THE THIEF OF BAGDAD sells that ship, it sells that sea, it sells everything it shows us because such obvious care and craft went into its design and execution.

I love THE THIEF OF BAGDAD, and I love that it reintroduced me to the world of Arabic mythology, a world I'd largely forgotten. This movie is thrilling, it's exciting, it's a flat-out great time at the pictures. Queue it up.

I betcha Tolkien loved it, too.

PS Yes, I know that caliphate-era Baghdad isn't Arabia, but the stories in the film do come from _The Arabian Nights_, so I'm lumping 'em into Arabian mythology anyway.
--

Water

Deepa Mehta's WATER is beautiful, touching, and topical . It pulled me into its world and made me want to stay.

WATER centers on Chuyia, and eight-year-old in '30s India. Chuyia's parents married her to some guy at an age so young she doesn't even remember the ceremony, which (I suppose) was standard practice. But then the guy dies, and Chuyia's an eight-year-old widow in a country in which a widow's options are (a) throw herself on her husband's funeral pyre, (b) marry her husband's younger brother, or (c) join an ashram and spend the rest of her life in servitude, foregoing her wants and needs and being seen as a cursed woman. Chuyia's parents go with (c), dumping the poor girl at an ashram from which, she's sure, her mother will come to get her any day now.

That's about the first ten minutes. As we follow Chuyia's life and the lives of those she meets, we get a glimpse into another world, one from which we're separated by distance and time, and Mehta and her collaborators make that world come alive with rich colors, lush cinematography, and fine performances. The film, made in Sri Lanka after its Indian sets burned down, boasts images which deserve framing and hanging, the kind of stuff you rewind just to bask in, all while hewing to the requirements of Hindi film: WATER works in two musical numbers, but they're so subtle and so carefully done that they don't serve as holidays from the movie; rather, they enhance it. Further, WATER makes its holy city of Varansi look inviting and intimidating and exotic, like a dream of India. It creates a full world beyond the frame, one in which Ghandi's coming and people feel compelled to reevaluate their politics, their faiths, their very lives in anticipation of great changes on the horizon.

But for all that, the movie wouldn't work if we didn't believe in the people we found there. And I believed in the people in WATER. From Chuyia, played by the extraordinary child actress Sarala with an earthly reality that's rare in the film of any nation, to Seema Biswas as Shakuntala, an older widow beginning to question her faith and her lifelong devotion to millenia-old proscriptions. The film takes a slight misstep with the two characters involved in its love story, Kalyani (Lisa Ray) and Narayan (John Abraham), who appear to be in love merely because they're the two best looking people in India, but I accepted their relationship anyway because, hey, they're the two best looking people in India. As these people, and the people near them, live on the screen, I grew to care about them, to invest in them, and to continue to wish them well after the end credits rolled.

And though the film is set in the '30s, it's still topical. As an end title informs us, thousands of Indian widows are forced to live in ashrams today, unaware that they're legally able to lead any lives they choose, even to remarry. WATER challenges this injustice not through haranguing, but through humanizing. As such, it gives life to the issue and motivates us to consider those aspects of our own lives that are dead fossils of the past. This is a film that works on every level. I'm glad my wife put it in my hands.

American Gangster

AMERICAN GANGSTER is smart, carefully made, and vastly entertaining. With Denzel Washington and Russel Crowe toplining, and Ridley Scott directing, I wouldn't expect anything else.

In the film, Denzel Washington plays Frank Lucas, the guy whose idea it was to ship heroin to the U.S. in the coffins of KIAs returning from Vietnam. Crowe plays Richie Roberts, the detective who finally figures it all out. Interesting enough, but, as is so often the case, it's all in the execution.

And the execution is first rate. Washington and Crowe are two of the best actors working today, and it's always a pleasure to watch them do their thing. Scott took the time to put together a marvelous simulacrum of Vietnam - era New York, populate it with believable people, and make it come alive. I bought into the world of this film, I bought into the people living in this world, and I lost track of time as I grew engrossed in their world.

This is good stuff, team.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

The very worst thing about INDIANA JONES AND THE KINGDOM OF THE CRYSTAL SKULL is John Hurt. Hurt plays an old friend and colleague of the Joneser, one who has lost his wits after peering too deeply into the eponymous Crystal Skull. The problem with this is that Hurt's performance recalls his Fool in the 1982 BBC production of KING LEAR. Attention filmmakers: if you want to drive a stake through the heart of your movie, cast a great character actor in a pale shadow of one of his career-high performances. It's a sure-fire way to get your audience thinking about how much better that other picture was than the one it's currently watching.

That may be the worst thing about Indy IV, but it has competition. The opening sequence, a car chase between people we don't care about and whom we'll never see again (punctuated with supposedly amusing animal reaction shots), starts the film on an offputting, wtf note. When the picture finally gets around to giving us Ford and Ray Winstone (clearly wishing he was in Ibiza), we've already nearly lost interest. Then Cate Blanchett shows up as the villain, she gets a boner joke, and the whole thing just runs off the rails.

Ok, I admit it. I wrote that whole paragraph just to find an excuse to work in a SEXY BEAST joke.

INDY IV is just plain boring. Dull. Flaccid. A yawner. And I like Spielberg. I like Ford. I like Allen, Winstone, LaBeouf, Blanchett, and Hurt. But my pulse never quickened. I never believed in what was happening. And at the climax, when I was supposed to be going, "Wow," I was only thinking, "Huh. Spielberg and Lucas didn't trust me enough to have the Blanchett speak Russian."

I may have seen this one for free, but I still want $10 back. For my time.

21

Recently, I flew a long trip with a copilot who knew one of the people involved in the MIT card counting scheme upon which the film _21_ is based. He hated the movie because it so distorted and sexed up the facts of the case that it barely deserved the label, "Based on a true story." I countered that _21_ had no obligation to be a faithful retelling of the actual events. Its only obligation, I asserted, was to be a good movie. He didn't buy it, but I stand by it. Narrative film's first duty is to entertain. If your picture can't do that, don't bother.

So, does _21_ entertain? Yes, it does, though not particularly well. The film tells a (sexed up) version of the MIT card counting story, in which a team of MIT math wizards mastered the only way to beat the house at blackjack. It throws in some sex, some violence, some cool, and generally keeps things rocking along for an hour and a half. It doesn't blow you away; it doesn't stay with you; but it eats the time on a transatlantic flight well enough.

Not exactly a ringing endorsement, is it? Perhaps if it were more true to life.

Speed Racer

SPEED RACER is the most audaciously brilliant film I've seen this year. It takes the adjectives "bright, loud, and colorful" and turns them into peaks to be scaled, climbing ever higher to some brighter, louder, more colorful future. The story itself can fit on the back of a cocktail napkin: "S.R. saves family. Drives real fast." But the Wachowskis' execution of that story is so joyfully over the top that it won me over. The images flash by so quickly that the brain barely has time to process them beyond "Bang! Zoom! Pretty Colors!" However, when your movie's racing by at these speeds, flashing images and a cocktail napkin plot is all you need.

Is this a film for the ADD crowd? Perhaps so - the cuts are so quick, the action so frenetic, that I'm not sure I want to show it to my kids. But it's beautiful, in its way, and it's daring. In crafting SPEED RACER, the Wachowskis made something unlike any film that has gone before it. Even if you're not easily distracted by bright, shiny objects, you've got to respect the filmmakers' vision and daring.

SPEED RACER is easily my biggest surprise of the year.

Charlie Wilson's War

Cinescene's Les Phillips hit the nail on the head with his review of CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR. Well, except for his impression of Julia Roberts's performance. I thought she was fine. With his permission, here's Les's review:

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR (2007, directed by Mike Nichols). This is slight, but expert, and very entertaining. A playboy Texas congressman suddenly gets serious about the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and works to channel a billion dollars into military aid to the mujaheedin. Nichols and the screenwriter Aaron Sorkin scrupulously avoid political content here; CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR is a fluffy slice of American political life in the eighties. Wilson's staff is all-female -- one of them is nicknamed "Jailbait" -- he parties with lobbyists in Vegas. He tells a newspaper that he's never been to rehab because "they don't serve liquor there." Nichols makes high comedy out of Wilson's lovable roguishness. There's one French-farce sequence set in Wilson's office, with entrances and exits and fast dialogue, that approaches comic genius.

CHARLIE WILSON'S WAR is rich in excellent small performances, and it also has Philip Seymour Hoffman as the crude, irascible, hardass CIA man who tutors Wilson in the works and ways of covert geopolitics. He's excellent, but the part isn't a challenge; Jack Black could have done it nearly as well. Tom Hanks captures Wilson's easy charm and humanity, but he doesn't signify Texas. Julia Roberts plays a savvy, steel magnolia millionairess and political operator. It's a terrific role, and Roberts isn't up to it. She doesn't have the self-possessed energy that the character needs, and she doesn't sound like she's ever been anywhere near Houston.

A bit of a one-off, but Nichols hasn't lost his touch.

Lars and the Real Girl

I recently spent several paragraphs elaborating on the word "charming" as it related to ONCE. While there's nothing effortless about filmmaking, ONCE feels effortlessly charming, like it just happened. LARS AND THE REAL GIRL, however, works so hard at being charming that we can practically hear the servos hiss, gears turn, and ropes creak in the background.

Lars (Ryan Gosling) is socially handicapped. He is so painfully shy that human touches feel like burns, and he can barely speak even with his own brother. Margo works with Lars, and something about him seems to capture her imagination. But Lars can't see it, can't see anything, for he's too busy hiding behind his walls. Lars is drowning; he needs something to latch on to. He latches on to a doll. Not an action figure or a teddy bear, like his marginally better adjusted officemates, but a life sized Real Doll, a sex toy he names Bianca and invests with a past, a personality, even an attitude.

The charming part comes in when we see how his family, his friends, his town respond to Bianca. For Lars, you see, lives in the kindest, most forgiving, most loving town in the world. In fact, I'd say it's downright charming. In Lars's town, the citizens see Bianca for what she is: training wheels for Lars as he relearns socialization. In Lars's town, an ambulance will respond to a 911 call for a doll, and doctors and nurses are happy to get involved (Lars also benefits from a charming insurance company, I presume.). In Lars's town, the guys from the hardware store even bowl with Lars, Bianca, and (you saw it coming) Margo. Charming.

But there can be a fine line between charming and precious, and LARS AND THE REAL GIRL crosses right over it. The music is too precious. Lars himself is somewhat precious. And the conceit that an entire town, and not just a few core supporters, would be willing to play along with Lars is just too precious.

And yet, I'm a sucker for charming. So I liked this movie, even if I can't wholeheartedly recommend it. See it with something inanimate.

The Jazz Singer

I enjoyed THE JAZZ SINGER.

The film, which ushered in the era of talkies for a broad audience (Yes, I know there were earlier talkies, but this is the one that really hit.), has one foot in the silent era and one in the sound. How so? Well, while much of THE JAZZ SINGER plays just like any silent film, with broad acting and intertitles, the musical numbers and some of the accompanying dialogue is in sound as we understand it today.

This raises an interesting question: why not sound all the way? Was it a technical issue, a financial issue, or something else? Anyone? Bueller?

Anyway, all I really knew about THE JAZZ SINGER boiled down to two words: talkie and blackface. Turns out, the film is about more than that, with a compelling story about competing duties and the realities of growing up and growing old. While Jolson´s style of musical performance doesn´t work for me (I´m more of a Crosby guy), I enjoyed the production numbers and found myself appreciating THE JAZZ SINGER as a film, and not just as a homework assignment.

So, THE JAZZ SINGER. Who knew it´d actually turn out to be a fine motion picture?