La Vie En Rose (2007)

Here’s how much I knew about French singer Edith Piaf before watching La Vie En Rose, the 2007 movie about her life: doodly-squat. And here’s how much I know after watching it: almost doodly-squat. This is one of the least factually informative “bio-pics” I’ve seen. I’m not being mean here: that’s a description of style, not quality. La Vie En Rose does a remarkable thing: it doesn’t so much look at a “life story” as simply at a life. If you want story, hit the library for books about Piaf. This is a movie of impressions.

Piaf’s father was a soldier who, before the first World War broke out, was a circus acrobat. Her mother was…a woman who thought she could sing. She couldn’t. She goes broke, and the father returns from war to pluck young Edith out of poverty to live with his own mother, a brothel-owner. Later, she lives with her father in the circus. Turns out, unlike her mom, Edith can sing, and can make money at it. So she does, first for her father, then for a pimp, then for managers. Some, she keeps for herself. She is famous. She has lovers. Her health fails and she grows addicted to various drugs to stop crippling arthritis pain. Eventually, as we all must do, she dies.

Such, I gather, is the outline of her life. But it is almost secondary in this movie. The movie instead lingers over moments and aspects: the doting care of the whores in her grandmother’s brothel; Edith’s confusion when an early benefactor is murdered by criminals; Edith’s vision, as a young girl, of Saint Therese, who says she watches over her. And, of course, the music. Piaf had quite a voice in her tiny, often bent body, and the film lets us hear it. Physically, she is embodied for the majority of the film by Marion Cotillard, who won an Oscar for her efforts. Her Piaf is by turns feisty, afraid, stupid, savvy, endearing, and annoying. The performance is seamless. Had I seen this movie on its release, I might have dismissed it. But having first seen Cotillard as herself, and as a tough gangster’s moll in Public Enemies, it becomes clear how much artistry was needed to turn graceful, willowy Cotillard into fragile, arthritic Piaf (Cotillard does not, however, do the singing: you hear Piaf’s own voice). Supporting players are a mixed bag. Emmanuelle Seigner is heartbreaking as the whore who largely “adopts” young Edith, only to lose her, and Sylvie Testud is memorable as Edith’s long-time, tough-as-nails best friend Momone. Gerard Depardieu, for all his physical presence, hardly registers as an ill-fated nightclub owner.

The movie flashes back and forward somewhat, which tends toward confusion. Characters come and go without clear identification, or even sometimes resolution. And yet, by the end, it makes a kind of sense. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button used as its tagline Kierkegaard’s maxim that life must be lived forward, but can only be understood backward. That movie didn’t deserve that tagline (not least because the whole premise is that Button does live backward). This one does. The final 15 minutes or so masterfully weave together one of Edith’s last public performances, her death and deathbed recollections, and a slightly earlier event where a young woman interviews Piaf with something like a version of “the Proust Questionnaire.” No coincidence, that: Proust was also French, and also knew something about looking backward at life. The movie lets these events comment on each other: things Piaf says in the interview recall events the dying Piaf remembers, which in turn fit with the notes of her singing. Some scenes recap what we have seen, others introduce new information. We learn, for example, that as a young woman, Piaf had a child, which died. Other movies would have made Freudian hay of this from the start. But the real Piaf did not reveal this to many people, and so the film withholds it as well.

And this is exactly right. We do not understand life forward. People do not walk into our lives with handy labels like “future spouse” or “career-changing expert.” Labels like that happen, and we apply them later, as needed. Nor do we know the ends of all the paths that cross ours. All biographies are constructs, and this movie understands that. It does a better job of any biography film I’ve seen, with the possible exception of A Beautiful Mind, of getting inside its subject’s head—both for good and ill. Piaf’s head was not, it seems, always a pleasant place to be. But it is where we must go to understand her life.

I’m supposed to be writing about a movie here, but I keep wanting to write about time and memory instead. That’s what La Vie En Rose made me think of, more than of Edith Piaf herself. While the movie contains its share of beautiful and wry moments (When, at the height of her career, her manager chides Piaf for holding up an appointment to let an amateur composer play her a new song, she replies, “What is the point of being ‘Edith Piaf’ if I can’t do this??”), I admired it in the end more for its artistry than its entertainment value, and some early parts are indeed tough going. It is an odd film, to be sure, but its differences are just as much virtues as flaws. American-made bio-pics, in any case, seem to be slumping of late (the recent Amelia was lamented as competent but soulless), and this offering from a couple of years ago and across an ocean provides a refreshing alternative to formula.

Even fewer words about Patrick Swayze...

This being a movie-themed blog, I suppose I should say something about the recent death of actor Patrick Swayze. Swayze was never really a big star in my Hollywood galaxy, and I only saw Dirty Dancing at most twice. This is probably a gender thing. Still, the guy managed to be in a few films of near-classic (Ghost and the aforementioned Dancing) or cult-classic (Roadhouse) status. Swayze tended to make the sort of films that, as NPR blogger Linda Holmes notes, you count yourself lucky if you find on TV on a sleepless night. This means he found his way into projects that managed to be both popular and entertaining--two traits that, strangely enough, don't always keep much company these days.

More to the point, however, is the fact that the media coverage of Swayze's death has largely focused on his character: his work ethic, his strong marriage, his devotion to various kinds of activism. Partly this is a backhanded way of pointing out his not-quite-A-lister status, which is fair: Swayze wasn't exactly Marlon Brando or Johnny Depp. But patterns are hard to fake, and if his colleagues all recall him as a stand-up guy, there's probably something to it. And that's refreshing. Swayze's death came at the tail of a week wherein we saw tennis champs and hip-hop stars behaving in some of the worst ways possible. The way Swayze is being remembered lets us also remember that, even in these times, fame need not come at the price of one's dignity or soul. And that, if nothing else, is worth a mention here.

Enchanted (2007)

Enchanted is a pleasant, silly, and occasionally subversive fractured fairy tale for those who like a little parody with their romance. A Disney product, it takes a if-you-can’t-beat-em-join-em approach to the endless send-ups of “Disney movies” and turns the usual someday-her-prince-will-come genre upside down. Along the way, it takes shots at a number of familiar mouse-eared clichés, as well as at some live-action romantic comedy standards.

The movie begins like countless other Disney animated films. A voiced-over storybook narrator (Julie Andrews) introduces us to Giselle (voiced by Amy Adams), a sweet, plucky young woman who lives in the fairy tale kingdom of Andalasia. Giselle is the sort who lives in a Tudor-inspired treehouse in the woods surrounded by friendly singing animals (including a wiseguy-sounding chipmunk named Pip), and who just knows a charming prince will show up to be her One True Love. Sure enough, he does, in the form of the dashing (if a little dim) Prince Edward (voice of James Marsden). After Edward rescues Giselle from becoming troll food, the two decide to be married the next day. Unfortunately, the match runs afoul of Edward’s jealous stepmother (of course), the witchy Queen Narissa (voiced by Susan Sarandon). Narissa conspires to push Giselle down an enchanted well, banishing her to a place “where there are no happily ever afters.” That place? Times Square. Our Times Square.

And here the lunacy truly begins. The movie switches to live-action, with Adams now playing and not just voicing Giselle—who, though flesh and blood, still behaves exactly like an animated movie princess. Needless to say, she is utterly lost in rude, rainy NYC. Fortunately for her, she is discovered by divorce lawyer Robert Philip (Patrick Dempsey), a single dad bringing his daughter home from karate practice. Of course the little girl, Morgan (Rachel Covey) is immediately smitten with the “real, live princess.” Robert isn’t so sure—-especially when he realizes it means explaining to his fiancée Nancy (Idina Menzel) why he has taken in an additional cute girl. The love-minded princess also plays a bit of havoc with Robert’s divorce law practice. Meanwhile, Edward (still Marsden) comes through the well to rescue Giselle with double-agent manservant Nathaniel (Timothy Spall) and Pip the chipmunk in tow.

As it moves along, the plot mixes fairy tale rescue with real-world romantic comedy, all played largely for laughs. Giselle retains her woodland-princess aura in the “real world,” and can still bond with animals. There’s a priceless scene where she enlists—-with a jaunty song—-standard New York vermin (think rats and roaches) to clean Robert’s apartment. The sight of a bona fide Disney princess chirping merrily about “scrubbing down the toilet” to a crowd of helpful house pests is pretty much worth the price of a DVD rental on this one. There’s also a huge song-and-dance number in Central Park that’s as infectious as anything from The Little Mermaid (Disney musical veterans Alan Menken and Steven Schwartz penned the songs, for added authenticity, and they seem to be having great fun spoofing themselves). Robert and Giselle also begin to affect each other, with him questioning her too-easy version of romance (“You never even went on a date??”) and her pointing out his too-dreary skepticism (“Every word out of your mouth is ‘no’!”) and giving him hints on how to romance Nancy. But they may be learning something else about themselves as well…

For all the dancing, singing, and winky jokes, however, this movie belongs lock, stock, and barrel to Amy Adams. With her soul in her eyes and her heart on her sleeve, Adams is note-perfect as a fairy-tale princess brought to life, down to every twitter, tremble, and twinkle. I particularly enjoyed the way that, when upset, she basically sighs “Oh, NO” with her entire body. But of course, Giselle is hardly ever upset. The role could easily slide into insufferable caricature, but Adams (to whom appeal seems to come effortlessly) finds just the right balance of silly and sincere to make Giselle’s transformation to physical (and eventually emotional) three-dimensionality enjoyable and actually, in its own way, believable. Giselle is a classic lovable eccentric, and the role gave Adams well-earned exposure and a Golden Globe nod.

The other “fantasy” characters are also well-drawn (if you will), and well-acted. Marsden gets his share of laughs as the relentlessly heroic though slow on the uptake Edward (he’s allowed to be much more amusing here than in his thankless, second-banana X-men role). Spall, as the shifty manservant, is in territory familiar from his Harry Potter appearances. But Nathaniel dons various daffy disguises on his search for Giselle, which allows Spall to play some silliness along with the sneak. We remember that he’s actually a rather pleasant chap under all that weasely typecasting. Sarandon also gets her live-action time in, gleefully munching scenery as selfish, nasty witch-queen Narissa. The movie pulls off a neat bit of reverse engineering: we’re used to animated characters being drawn to suggest the famous names who voice them. Here, real actors were cast who actually make credible cartoons, whether it’s Sarandon with her big eyes and queenly cheekbones, or Spall with his round, variously expressive face. Pip becomes a CGI chipmunk in the “real world” sections, and, while he no longer talks, I’d swear he squeaks in an appropriate New York accent.

The New York characters fare slightly worse. Morgan is a standard-issue cute kid. Poor Nancy is essentially around only to provide plot complications for Robert (and, ironically, accomplished Broadway star Menzel gets no songs). She doesn’t register, and it tips the story’s romantic hand too far too early. If there’s a weak link, unfortunately, it’s Dempsey, who looks the cute-lawyer-cum-nice-guy-dad part just fine, but can’t seem to make Robert a real New York Prince Charming. It’s hard to say exactly what goes wrong. Part of the blame has to go to the screenplay—-Robert is a bit underwritten—-though Dempsey’s approach to the role is also a little too laid back. He should have a repressed sparkle, but he too often seems to be only a nice but bland guy. Really, though, Dempsey is simply overmatched; Adams just plain steamrolls him in their scenes together.

The movie itself stumbles a bit by resorting to a conventional ending (although, depending on your movie viewing history, it may not be the convention you expect), but by that time I’d grown to have enough affection for the characters (especially Giselle) to pull me through. And if some of the visual effects toward the end look a little cheesy, it’s best to pause and reflect that, well, this is a film that started with singing bunnies. Overall, this is a fun bit of filmmaking: a genre parody that is also a quality example of the genres it spoofs, and a family film that doesn’t insult the intelligence of any age groups concerned. After all, what are romantic comedies but fairy tales for adults? As an attempt to get the best of both those worlds, Enchanted manages to be (you guessed it) rather enchanting.

Inglourious Basterds (2009)

Just when you thought this summer’s movies couldn’t get much weirder, here comes Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds, a rip-roaring, fast-talking mash-up of war movie, western, film noir, movie criticism, and God-only-knows-what-else. It’s bizarre, violent, and eccentric, and to say it plays fast and loose with history is the understatement of the summer. It’s also incredibly well-made and vastly entertaining. Tarantino is admittedly an acquired taste – some love him, some don’t. Those in the first camp will find the filmmaker in “glourious” form with this film.

The movie begins “once upon a time in Nazi-occupied France.” A French farmer gets a visit from Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), a Nazi officer recently assigned to hunt down Jews remaining in the area. He smiles and asks for a glass of milk. He is just here to tie up loose ends, he says. But Landa is not the clumsy bureaucrat he seems. He slyly deduces that the farmer is hiding Jews. He finds them, and orders his soldiers to open fire. Only the teenage daughter of the Jewish family, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent), escapes alive, fleeing across the fields.

Next we are introduced to the “inglourious basterds” of the title: a crew of American soldiers (mostly Jews) handpicked by Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt) to secretly parachute into France and, as Raine bluntly puts it, kill Nazis. Raine is from Tennessee, and claims to be descended from American Indian warriors. He orders his men to collect Nazi scalps. He’s not kidding. Soon, even Adolf Hitler has heard of “Aldo the Apache” and his brutal Basterds. One of them, Donny Donowitz (Eli Roth) has a special talent for dispatching Nazis with a baseball bat to the head. He’s not kidding, either.

A few years into the Basterds’ reign of terror, we meet Shosanna again, living in Paris under an alias and running a cinema. She meets a young Nazi (Daniel Bruhl) who has a keen interest in film (and in her). Turns out he’s a decorated war hero, and the star of a propaganda film made by Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s right-hand man. He thinks Goebbels should be interested in this young woman, too—but not for the reason you think. Meanwhile, the Basterds are assigned to hook up with British and German secret agents as part of a plot to kill Goebbels at the propaganda film’s premiere. Only it seems the premiere is being moved to a new, smaller venue. Guess who owns it.

All these plots and people (plus a few more) come together in ways only Tarantino could devise. Along the way, the movie dips into many and varied wells of cinematic and cultural inspiration. Consider the opening, where the officer hassles the poor farmer. Tarantino overlays it with Beethoven played on Spanish guitar, and we realize that this is a riff on all those “spaghetti western” scenes where some bad dude harasses the local peasantry. Or consider the later scene in a tavern where at least two double agents are drinking, which is as tense as anything Ian Fleming or Graham Greene ever served up. Tension is a key ingredient in Inglourious Basterds. Alfred Hitchcock is said to have explained that when a bomb under a table goes off, that’s surprise—but when we are told there’s a bomb under the table but don’t know when it will go off, that’s suspense. A number of bombs—real and metaphorical—take their time going off in this film. Being a Tarantino film, there is violence aplenty, but this time the director saves it for controlled bursts. We know it’s coming, but not always when or to whom. This underlying tension helps keep the film from dragging over its 2-½-hour length. The movie asks for enagement; there are treats for the brain as well as the eyes here.

The acting is also a treat. Pitt is the “name” actor here, of course, and he tears into Aldo Raine with gusto, affecting a Tennessee twang and a mouthful of backwoods trash-talk. Raine literally takes no prisoners. With a never-explained scar on his neck and a mean, sneaky moustache framing his upper lip, the lieutenant leads his Basterds on their Nazi-killing sprees with what can best be described as delight. Raine is the distillation of every movie cowboy-soldier from Patton on down, and he really does want them Nazi scalps. It’s a performance that’s funny and fearless, and it confirms my belief that Pitt does his best work in quirky, comedic roles. On the Reich side, the find is Waltz. Movie Nazis are always cruel (as real ones tended to be), but Landa is actually smart. He affects a smarmy, slightly effacing manner and looks uncomfortable in his uniforms. But this is an act. The charm masks a ruthless intellect, and his lopsided smile never quite reaches his eyes. This is a man who can create menace by ordering food. He is a worthy antagonist not because of his firepower, but because he’s a brilliant detective. Waltz makes Landa a memorable villain; his presence lingers. Of course he and Raine are opposite numbers—skilled and dedicated hunters who tend to season their actual orders with their own agendas. You think you’ve seen these characters in movies before. Not these guys, you haven’t. Naturally they end up face-to-face. Think you know what will happen when they do? Guess again.

Surrounding these two are the usual treasure trove of odd Tarantino characters. Laurent, equal innocence and hatred shining in her big pale eyes, brings to Shosanna some of what Uma Thurman brought to the heroine of Kill Bill. Diane Kruger does a nice femme fatale turn as a German actress-cum-Allied-agent, and Michael Fassbinder strikes all the right plummy notes as her British contact. And if it looks like Eli Roth knows his way around a deadly bat, well, of course he does—he’s the guy behind the gruesome Hostel movies.

Oh yeah—the “revisionist” history. It’s no secret that Inglourious Basterds “basterdizes” (if you will) actual events quite a bit. Big deal. If this movie is about World War II, then Jaws was about sport fishing. WWII is just the backdrop. Somebody’s tails had to be kicked, and it may as well be Nazis (against almost any other enemy, actually, the actions of Raine’s men would be beyond appalling). There is real history on Tarantino’s mind here, but it’s the history of cinema. Above all, this is a film about movies. Almost every character knows or loves movies. Film as a genre and as a physical medium figures prominently in several key plans. The British agent is also a film critic. Goebbels preens and fumes like a Hollywood studio head. Raine’s troops view the execution of Nazi officers as “the closest we get to going to the movies.” I can’t recall a more self-consciously cinematic picture.

The self-attention is worth it, though. In his early efforts, Tarantino sometimes seemed to be trying too hard to be cool. This time, he seems to be trying harder to make a good movie, and he has. If the word can ever be applied to his kid-in-a-candy-store approach, this is the most mature film Tarantino has made to date. All the usual quirks are there—the whip-crack dialogue (even in subtitles), the obscure cultural references (G. W. Pabst will be getting his share of Googling), the preposterous characters and, yes, the bursts of over-the-top violence. But it all hangs together better than some of his other efforts, and the technique never overwhelms the story. Yes, District 9 was more thought-provoking, and Star Trek was more of a flat-out romp, but from a variety of purely artistic standpoints, this is the best movie I’ve seen this year. It may not make converts of anyone who’s not a Tarantino fan, but it proves once again that he’s a force to reckon with on the big screen. I can’t think of anyone else who could have made this film work. Actually, I can’t think of anyone else who even could have thought of this film, and I mean that in the best possible way.

District 9 (2009)

Neill Blomkamp’s engrossing (and sometimes plain gross) District 9 works the very un-funny flipside of all those noble “first contact” stories: what if, instead of treating the first aliens we encountered with reverence or tact, we humans treated them in the same rotten, self-centered way we’ve been treating each other for centuries?

The situation, cleverly filled in for us by talking-head “interviews” and “news footage” in the early minutes of the film, is this: a massive spaceship glides to a stop over Johannesburg, South Africa (why not?). Alien creatures are found inside, scared, lost, and malnourished. Apparently they cannot operate their own ship. Initial humanitarian (alienitarian?) outcry from around the world demands that the creatures (nicknamed “Prawns” due to their spindly, crustacean-like appearance) be helped, and so they are loaded down into a holding camp near Johannesburg. But, as so often happens, good will starts to run out. Once it appears that the Prawns are here to stay, no one wants the tall, ugly, clicking, trash-eating creatures in their backyards. Anti-Prawn riots break out, anti-Prawn signage goes up (my favorite: “No non-human loitering!”), and the refugee camp swells grossly into “District 9,” the slum that gives the film its title. Because the Prawns come with the requisite nifty not-of-this-world technology, of course weapons manufacturers are very interested. When it turns out that only Prawns can work Prawn weapons, though (something about DNA compatibility), even big business loses interest, and, with public opinion on the slide, the Prawns have to go.

Governments in South Africa and elsewhere have long since washed their hands of the refugee creatures, so the job of “relocating” the Prawns falls to a contractor: a security corporation with the ominously banal name of Multi-National United (MNU for short). Working with hired soldiers, MNU workers are supposed to canvass District 9 and get (force) Prawn recognition of trumped up “eviction notices” so that the Prawns can be shipped to an even rattier tent city (“District 10,” of course) farther away from the Johannesburg suburbs. There is nothing respectable about this operation. Oversight of it rests upon a weasely MNU middle manager named Wikus Van De Merwe (Sharlto Copely), whose most remarkable achievement thus far has been marrying the daughter of the corporation president. Wikus is, of course, flattered, and heads for District 9 looking to pad his resume and full of chipper condescension. Prawns leave; Wikus gets his picture on TV—everyone (but the Prawns, of course) wins. But while on assignment, Wikus has a close encounter with some alien biotechnology that forces him to start taking a much more personal interest in the fate of the Prawns, especially when he learns what MNU really has in mind for them.

District 9 is the second science-fiction film this summer (along with Moon) to remember that sci-fi can be based on speculation as well as spectacle. This is that rare summer film that grabs you first with its premise, and only then with its visual effects (somewhat uneven here, though the all-CGI Prawns look great). Because the action takes place in writer-director Blomkamp’s native South Africa, much has been made of the film as an allegory for that country’s former Apartheid policies. That’s there, of course, but the xenophobia and corporate cruelty on display in the film represent a pretty general face of the evil that humans do. That South Africa was once the poster nation for this sort of unpleasantness is to the film’s benefit, but I don’t think it’s the whole point. Nigerian gangsters are also on hand to victimize the Prawns, and the mock newsreels show people of many accents wishing the Prawns would just go home. This is a film about human nature, and Blomkamp’s use of a quasi-documentary feel for the first half of the film helps lend realism to its sci-fi premise. We could be watching reality TV here, or a CNN special report.

And then there’s the lead character. I learn from a little internet reading that “Van Der Merwe” is a common South African name for characters in jokes, like Sven and Olle are for Garrison Keillor’s Minnesotans. And indeed, Wikus has much more in common with Steve Carell’s character from “The Office” than with the type of guy usually played by, say, Hugh Jackman. He cracks painfully lame jokes with underlings, calls everyone his mate, and chews out the hired soldiers for having more bullets than “the rules allow.” Wikus is, in short, a jerk. At first we follow him because he is the apparent focus of a documentary on the “relocation” effort. Sometimes we wish he wasn’t, especially when he merrily “aborts” a shack-full of incubating Prawn eggs (this involves a flamethrower). And yet, the screenplay doesn’t make him an utter monster. He likes his job. He really loves his wife, and she (rare for a boss’s daughter in movies) really loves him back. Wikus is not evil; he’s just selfish—but the movie shows how easily the one can slide into the other, and how close the most “normal” of us is to either at any given time. Copely’s acting is not the stuff stardom is made of, but he accomplishes the feat of letting us root for Wikus without necessarily liking him.

District 9 is also savvy in the way it portrays the Prawns. At first, we only see them as others do—they’re subjects of news reports and punditry, as well as some wretchedly inept running commentary from Wikus. Slowly, however, the story reveals them on their own terms, and we realize that some characteristics (like trash-eating) are the result of circumstances and are not innate to the Prawns themselves. Like all disparaged ethnic groups, they’re not nearly as backward as outsiders think they are, and like all refugees, they’d like themselves to “just go home,” too. It’s to the film’s credit that it allows this change in perspective to sink in slowly, and that it never goes so far as to rob the Prawns of their potential danger. After all, we gun-and-knife-toting humans are no cupcakes, either.

This is not to say that District 9 is a masterpiece of subtlety. This is a film with a summer release date, after all, and by the end we’re firmly in action-movie territory. The themes remain, but they’re buried under gun-centric camera angles and splattery casualties that owe more to shoot-‘em-up online video games than to Orson Scott Card novels. Still, it’s admirable when a movie merely puts its brain to one side by its end, instead of abandoning thought altogether. And the ending, if not completely "happy," is satisfactory, with pretty much all the major players receiving what they deserve, including, I would argue, Wikus. After all, the guy has a lot to learn.

This is Neill Blomkamp’s first major directing effort, and it is a good one. It may well merit a sequel (and there are enough openings in the story to allow one). I more appreciate that its premise and story merit reflection. I don’t know that District 9 is the best movie of the year, or even of the summer. I do know that I saw it two days ago, and I’m still thinking about it. To me, that alone is worth the ticket price.

Coraline (2009)

Admit it: you love your family, but sometimes you wish they were just a little…better. Nicer. Not so selfish. More attentive. More creative. Not so mean and not so, well…boring.

If this sounds familiar, you just might identify with Coraline Jones, heroine of the animated movie which shares her first name. Coraline, the movie, tells the story of Coraline, the girl (voiced by Dakota Fanning), who has just moved with her nature-writer parents (Teri Hatcher and John Hodgman)--they’re hard at work on a seed catalog--to into an apartment house somewhere in remote Oregon. Coraline isn’t very happy with this. She misses her friends. Her parents ignore her in favor of their laptops. The only other kid around is an overeager boy called Wybie (short for Wyborn, a name the annoyed Coraline is pretty sure she understands). Wybie (Robert Bailey, Jr.), along with his scruffy black cat, seems to be stalking Coraline—turning up around every corner. She wishes he wouldn’t. Her apartment house neighbors are no better. The basement rooms are taken by a pair of retired burlesque “actresses,” Miss Spink and Miss Forcible (Jennifer Saunders and Dawn French), and their small pack of yappy dogs. The attic room belongs to the amazingly limber Russian acrobat Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane), who claims to be training a circus of super-talented mice. Uh-huh. Coraline wants a way out.

Strangely enough, she finds one. One very boring rainy day, Coraline discovers a small, papered-over door in the living room of her family’s apartment. She opens it to find…bricks. It’s closed over. Or is it? That night, the bricks seem to open, revealing a tunnel leading to another apartment house, where a duplicate world awaits. Here, in a warm, friendly environment overseen by Coraline’s “Other Mother” (“Oh, everyone has one!”), everything is the same but better. Meals are feasts. Her Other Parents dote on her. The neighbors are every bit the fabulous performers they claim to be. There’s only one weird thing: everyone in this other world has buttons sewn over their eyes. But that’s not too much to put up with in exchange for the family of Coraline’s dreams. Or is it? Isn’t there a saying about things that look too good to be true?

This may all sound charming and cute. Charming, possibly, but not really cute. Coraline is directed by Henry Selick, who is perhaps best known for directing The Nightmare before Christmas, and this movie is several steps into nightmare territory itself. Based on a book by master of creepy fables Neil Gaiman, Coraline is a story about a child, but probably not for viewing by the younger demographic. Between Selick’s gothic design and Gaiman’s eerie story, the film earns its PG rating. For older kids and adults who like this sort of thing, however, there’s a lot to enjoy.

The best thing about Coraline is its look. “Animated film” these days usually means CGI, but Coraline’s well-rounded characters were animated the old fashioned way, with stop-motion. They’re puppets, not drawings, and they exist on sets, not backgrounds. This gives the film a richer, deeper look even than most computer work. These characters have real curves and edges, and Selick’s character designs exploit these features to their fullest. Selick favors a certain amount of grotesquerie for his characters. Bobinsky, for example, has a round torso but impossibly spindly, bendable limbs; Wybie is rather hunchbacked and seems to be able to swivel his head a bit too much; and the Misses Spink and Forcible more than amply demonstrate the requisite “T & A” for their onetime line of work. The settings are likewise impressive, especially in the “Other World,” where an entire garden seems to take on Coraline’s face, paper dragonflies really fly, small dogs run a complex theatre show, and one room is apparently furnished entirely with huge, glowing insects that double as furniture. Refreshingly for animated fare these days, this is not a musical, but the score, by Bruno Coulais, adds nicely to both the warmer and scarier moments.

Fanning does fine work as Coraline, who is not the usual kind and plucky heroine, but is allowed to be a real girl with sulky moods and bad habits. She whines. She’s rude to Wybie. She pesters her mother for fancy gloves. Nonetheless, we sympathize with her—after all, who hasn’t felt unloved? Most of the rest of the cast are known primarily for offbeat roles, and this suits the general eccentricity—and eventual creepiness—of Coraline’s world. Hatcher has perhaps the strangest role, having to be a normal mother in one world and a housewife that “desperate” doesn’t quite describe in another world. Saunders and French twitter and bicker exactly like a seasoned performing duo (which of course in real life they are), McShane gives Bobinsky a nicely odd burbling baritone, and Hodgman gets to voice something that’s not a personified PC for a change. Veteran voice actor Keith David also adds his trademark deep intonation as Wybie’s cat. That’s right, the cat. Just wait and see.

Appropriately enough, Coraline represents an “other world” of animation—one that happily gives up cuteness for storytelling. This is a film, not a marketing endeavor (trust me, the Bobinsky lunch box will not sell), and represents a merger of two fine talents. Gaiman clearly remembers that the original Grimm’s Fairy Tales were pretty, well, grim. And Selick knows how to find the beautiful in the bizarre better than anyone. Those who find such talents admirable, or who simply enjoy inventive filmmaking, would do well to follow Coraline through that secret door.

Note: As a theatrical release, Coraline was also available in 3-D, and it appears some DVDs will offer that somehow as well. I saw the 2-D version. Given that stop-motion animation already lends extra depth to the sets and characters, I cannot for the life of me imagine what 3-D would add.

A Few Words about John Hughes

First Michael Jackson, now John Hughes. The icons of my early years are dropping like flies. Eep. I feel old. Cue more rampant nostalgia and retrospective montages.

Honestly, after the Month of MJ, I’m a little celebrity-mortality-ed out. But all the retrospectives have this going for them: they sure do show off what people did. To see a full list of films John Hughes was involved in as writer, director, or what have you (and not just the “big” ones like The Breakfast Club, Ferris Bueller’s Day Off, and Home Alone) is to realize that this guy had his hand in a lot of successful stuff.

Though for people of my generation and thereabouts, he is best remembered for his 1980s teenager comedies. Titles like “the Bard of Adolescent Angst” kept cropping up in Hughes-related headlines this week, and no one really complained. Ask anyone who was any age of teenager in the ‘80s, and they have a favorite Hughes teen film. Not just one they like—one they have watched over and over again. My wife suggested we should watch Ferris Bueller’s Day Off this week in tribute to the late Mr. Hughes. I told her that back in high school, I could have recited the thing for her. It’s just a good movie, we agreed. A good movie.

That, I think, is the secret to Hughes’s success. His movies were good movies first, that just happened to have teen protagonists. The fact that his heroes were teens was not the joke; the jokes occurred because the heroes had real adventures, real foibles, and real interior lives. Hughes seemed to like teenagers. Roger Ebert quotes Hughes as saying in an interview, “People forget that when you’re 16, you’re probably more serious than you’ll ever be again. You think seriously about the big questions.” Teens in Hughes movies actually thought. He didn’t fetishize them or talk down to them. He wrote teen characters as people, which is why his films appealed not only to the teenage demographic but also beyond it. When you see smart, complicated teens onscreen these days—from Kevin Smith’s raunchy clerks to Joss Whedon’s snappy Buffy to Diablo Cody’s pop-poetic Juno—it’s a safe bet you have John Hughes to thank (Smith, actually, happily owns up to the influence in interviews).

It’s not all snappy words, though. Above all, Hughes knew a good story when he saw one. I’ve read that he saw his high school stereotypes as archetypes. Maybe. But I think it was story archetypes, not people archetypes, he went after. Home Alone is Robinson Crusoe in the suburbs: the resourceful castaway fending off loneliness and some mean interlopers. And how about the one where a cross-section of social classes are all exiled to a neutral space where they question each other and learn some lessons? Yeah, that’s the plot of The Breakfast Club. It’s also essentially the plot of As You Like It. And Ferris Bueller, who subverts authority and asks you to look around at life, because time is short? He’d fit right into the carnival-before-it’s-too-late atmosphere of Twelfth Night. Surely, as comic humiliations go, Bueller and company’s treatment of pompous principal Ed Rooney is right up there with the going-over pompous Puritan Malvolio gets from Toby Belch and his crew in that play.

None of this, of course, is meant to suggest that Hughes was in anything like Shakespeare’s league—just that the Bard of Avon and the Bard of Adolescent Angst sipped from the same inspirational coffee cup now and again. After all, Romeo and Juliet, the lovers from A Midsummer Night’s Dream and As You Like It, Twelfth Night’s Viola—we’re so used to BBC stars playing these folks that we forget they were probably supposed to be teenagers, or not much older. Hughes didn’t discover that idea that we’re our most serious in our youth, or that that’s when we ask the big questions—he just reminded us of it. And that’s why people will keep watching, re-watching, and endlessly quoting his movies: exactly to keep from forgetting what it was like to be so serious so young, and to realize how laughable it is as we look back. And we have to look back because that time only comes around once. I’m pretty sure Ferris Bueller would have grown into an insufferable adult. But then, we wouldn’t want to see Romeo and Juliet as an old married couple, either. “Youth’s a stuff will not endure,” says a line from Twelfth Night. Of course. But thanks to Hughes, stories about it will.

Moon (2009)

Who’d have thought a breath of fresh air would come from outer space, of all places? Duncan Jones’s film Moon hearkens back to the sort of classic science fiction written by Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, and Isaac Asimov—the kind where the science is there to help the fiction along, and isn’t the whole point. Oh, stuff happens in Moon, and some of it is very odd indeed. But this is a film about ideas, not actions—a refreshing throwback to when the main sci-fi question was “what if?” rather than “wouldn’t this look cool?”

The story, set in a nearish future, concerns Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), who lives on a special base on the far side of the moon. The base is the center of operation for a program which harvests a special form of helium from the moon’s surface and ships it back to Earth to be used in making clean energy. All of this is done by automation: huge harvesters roam the moon, radioing the base when they have a full load, which Sam goes out in a lunar rover to collect. Nominally, Sam is an astronaut. In reality, he’s a maintenance man. He is there to keep things running, collect the cargo, and fix any problems. He’s also alone. Sam’s only friend is the base computer, GERTY, which roams the base using tracks in the ceiling, has emoticons for a face, and speaks in the soothingly reasonable tones of Kevin Spacey. There is no live feed home. Occasionally, Sam gets recorded messages from his wife back on Earth. She sends pictures of their young daughter and taped football games.

Sam has been at this for years. He signed on for a three-year hitch, which, as the story opens, is almost up. Not a moment too soon, either – Sam isn’t feeling too well. He’s starting to see strange things around the base, causing him to lose focus. This leads to a nasty moon rover accident. Sam wakes up back at the base infirmary, rescued by GERTY, and woozy but otherwise OK. Returning to the scene of the accident, Sam makes a very strange discovery: there’s another injured man out there. A man who looks an awful lot like…well, like Sam. Is something going on, or is Sam just cracking up from too long alone? And why does GERTY seem to know a little more than he’s telling? How can a man who can’t talk to anyone live back home find out the truth?

The answers to these riddles unspool slowly, and, it turns out, with a certain logic. Along the way, the movie gently touches on questions of identity (who are you when you’re alone?), loyalty (what kind of guy signs up to leave his family for three years on the moon?), and corporate ethics (what kind of company lets a guy do that, and how should they treat him when he does?). This sort of stuff could become preachy, but Moon avoids that pitfall. It doesn’t hit us with issues, but lets them drift to the surface (a few ethical issues remain entirely in the background).

Rockwell has been slowly establishing a reputation as one of our better character actors (he’s pulled off supporting roles in everything from Shakespeare to Stephen King to Douglas Adams). Given a movie to carry more or less on his own (and indeed mostly more), he rises to the occasion in fine style. Rockwell makes Sam Bell a real individual: he has a sense of humor, but also a bit of a temper. He loves his wife, but was willing to leave for three years. He’s alarmed by his new strange circumstances, but doesn’t go over-the-top crazy. He’s a smart, reasonable man confronted with odd developments. It’s solid work, and it helps ground the film.

Spacey is an asset to the film as well. Spacey can do bland inscrutability with the best of them, and that serves him well as GERTY. GERTY is as implacable as any computer in these sorts of movies, but he never seems to be a HAL-style hobgoblin. He’s also not omniscient, which is a key factor at several points in the story. His primary directive is to help Sam—but help, of course, comes in many forms…

Duncan Jones directs the film in a straightforward style, letting circumstance, not effects, provide the thrills and chills. It’s not surprising that Jones knows his way around sci-fi, given that his father likes it, too (his dad is named David Jones, though you know him better as David Bowie). But Jones also shows a sure hand for plain human drama. He knows how to generate tension even when a man is alone, by letting a shot linger on the sharp point of a modeling knife or a jet of scalding-hot water. The story is a Jones original, and if there’s a fault to the film it’s that there’s not quite enough story for the movie’s length. Even at just a little over 90 minutes, Moon seems to spin its wheels a little in some middle sections, revisiting points that have already been made.

The look of the film is better than perhaps its budget deserves, and its design pays homage to classic films like 2001 and Alien. Sam’s moonbase home really looks lived in, and is a trove of nice, unobtrusive touches, especially about Sam’s sense of humor. He tapes a “kick me” sign to GERTY, and, having nicknamed the four harvesting machines for the four evangelists, renames “Luke” “Judas” because it never works properly. There is also ping-pong table lying around, with two paddles. Think about it.

At a time when space operas and space junk seem to rule the sci-fi roost, it’s a real pleasure to see a competently-made piece of science fiction that aims for the brain rather than the gut. If you like classic science fiction and/or good acting, this one is worth looking for.

Appaloosa (2008)

For those who prefer their Westerns more like historical novels than games of “Cowboys and Indians,” there’s Ed Harris’s Appaloosa. This only seems to be a movie about lawmen and criminals. It’s really a movie about people—two men and a woman—and about how the rules of love and friendship are even harder to follow than the “no guns” rule posted at the saloon.

The two men are Virgil Cole (Ed Harris) and Everett Hitch (Viggo Mortensen), who are more or less lawmen for hire (I suppose this makes them the 1800s version of “security consultants”). Along with possessing names that apparently destined them to be heroes of a Western, these two possess a deep and long-standing friendship. Like the two heroes of Lonesome Dove, Virgil and Everett joined up for work, but have long since moved from partnership to a form of brotherhood. They know each other so well that they hardly need to talk to each other. When they do, they pull each other’s chains or finish each other’s sentences (a running gag has Virgil repeatedly turning to the West Point-educated Everett for big words he can’t come up with on his own). Together, they are hired by the elders of the New Mexico town of Appaloosa to break the hold of unscrupulous rancher Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), who has a nasty habit of shooting the town’s marshals.

But a complication enters the picture. Also new in town is the fetching Allison French (Renee Zellweger), a young widow. We expect single women in Westerns to be tough mother types or whores with hearts of gold. So do Virgil and Everett. But Allison is neither. She’s a professional musician who wants a job at the local hotel, playing the piano. Virgil tells her she can have one. Funny how he doesn’t ask the owner. Virgil is clearly smitten with Allison. She seems to return the favor. Everett watches from the sidelines, wearing a look like the one he uses when the two scout out a potential gunfight. He has doubts—about what, we’re not sure. Maybe he’s not either.

The plot moves as it must, with the lawmen and the evil rancher collecting supporting players and heading, we assume, for a showdown or two. What makes this movie interesting is how that plot is treated as a sidelight to the interactions between Virgil and Everett and Allison. The film (which is, in fact, based on a novel) allows its characters to be real people, not just action roles. The riding and shooting are simply work. Each morning, the hotel maid brings coffee to Virgil and Everett in their marshals’ office. They greet her like a friendly secretary. Harris and Mortensen get some nice tough talk with Irons and with Lance Henriksen (as a rival hired gunfighter), but the real showdowns are between Harris, Mortensen, and Zellweger as they negotiate the limits of love and loyalty.

Unsurprisingly, this is an actor’s movie. Harris brings gravity to Virgil, a man of definite passions, even if he doesn’t know the words for them. Mortensen plays Everett with more nuance than we usually expect from “the friend” in a Western—he shows intelligence through more than his vocabulary. Zellweger in some ways has the most complex part. Allison is alternately adorable and fickle. She seems too flighty, too unprincipled to be a match for practical Virgil. Of course, in the Old West, “practical” was often very different for men and women. The movie respects that, as do Harris and Zellweger’s performances. Jeremy Irons is in full velvet-voiced bad guy mode here. His character comes the closest to cliché, but Irons is too good to let that completely happen. Timothy Spall shows up to lend a little well-intentioned bluster as the leading townsman—a somewhat meatier role than the Harry Potter franchise has been giving him lately.

There’s some nice dialogue here and there (and of course some cursing to show that the filmmakers watched “Deadwood,” too), but the writing overall flags in about the last quarter of the film. I had the impression that I was seeing things that succeeded on the page not succeed as well on film. The ending solves at least one problem, but may or may not introduce others. In a movie where motivations have been a key factor, this final ambiguity is unsatisfying. Still, I liked the way the story undermined a number of Western clichés (the bad guys here can aim, for one thing), and the way in which the characters were given space to think, evolve, and react. It’s nice to spend a couple of cinematic hours with real people, even if you can’t always be sure what they’re up to. It’s also nice to be reminded that the real wild country isn’t out West, but in the human heart.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (2009)

I’ll just come out and say it: the books are always better. I don’t go to the Potter movies looking for the richness and complexity of the books. To me, the films have been best approached as moving illustrations for the books (rather, actually, like the moving newspapers in the Potter universe), a perspective which allowed me to tolerate the first two outings, which were slavishly faithful to J. K. Rowling’s originals, almost to a fault. As entities of their own, the movies tend to work best when they can depart somewhat from the print source and balance fidelity with inventiveness (this is why the third film, Alfonso Cuaron’s idiosyncratic Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban, is probably still the best stand-alone movie of the bunch).

Interesting, then, to arrive at the film of Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, which, as the next-to-last book in the Potter series, is itself an unusual balance of fidelity to and departure from the usual Potter-book formulas. This is not at heart an adventure story, as most of the others are. The mysteries to be solved and the obstacles to be overcome are almost all in some way psychological. The adventures are mostly romantic. The stakes of the story, while involving magic, spill over into the real world. Say what you will about the increasing darkness of the series up to now—this installment is where the Potter franchise grows up. And it’s about time. This is the best Potter flick in a long time.

The story wastes no time with recaps. We leap in with the direct aftermath of Harry’s encounter with evil Lord Voldemort in the last film, and then are shown the effects of Voldemort’s wrath on the wider world as his “Death Eater” minions ransack wizard landmark Diagon Alley and muggle (non-wizard) landmark London’s Millennium Bridge. The latter is particularly effective at establishing both the raised stakes of the plot and the dangerousness of magic, which is no longer a child’s game at this point (as a U.S. citizen, I was also happy to see someone else’s landmarks get trashed in a blockbuster for a change). To show the stars aren’t kids anymore either, we meet Harry (Daniel Radcliffe, as always) this time on his own, in an ordinary train station café, flirting with a cute waitress. Alas for Harry’s social life, he is soon whisked off by mentor/Headmaster Albus Dumbledore (Michael Gambon) on a special mission. That mission? To recruit Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) a reclusive, tweedy friend of Dumbledore’s to come out of retirement and teach at Hogwarts school. Slughorn, as captivated in his way by Harry as the café waitress was, agrees. But it turns out that Dumbledore doesn’t just want his old pal around for nostalgia’s sake: Slughorn has something to hide, and Harry’s task is to learn what it is. Harry is not the only one with a secret mission, either. Perennial Potter nemesis Draco Malfoy (Tom Felton) is also up to something in a hidden room of Hogwarts—and he appears to have the backing of slippery professor Severus Snape (Alan Rickman), who has made a sinister vow to protect him. And all the while, the Death Eaters are spreading their reign of terror, trying harder to get inside the sanctuary of Hogwarts and strike at Voldemort’s enemies.

Inside Hogwarts, however, there’s also a lot of school business as usual, and Harry and his longtime pals brainy Hermione Granger (Emma Watson) and wry Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint) simply have a lot of late-teenage baggage to sort through. This particularly means romance. No magic potion is as potent as human hormones, and our heroes find themselves in triangles and other love polygons, more or less willingly. The puppy-love stage is over, and we can begin to see pairs forming that will carry through the end of the series…though the course of true love never runs smooth, even for wizards. There are classes still to take, too, and an additional mystery centers around an unnervingly helpful used textbook Harry acquires—a book heavily annotated by its brilliant past owner, “The Half-Blood Prince.” In its pages, Harry learns shortcuts to brilliance in Potions (his weakest subject) and spells that can mortally wound an enemy. This is not a book you sell back. But is it too dangerous to keep?

It’s a credit to screenwriter Steve Kloves (who adapted all but the fifth books) that the film crams in this much information despite the cuts needed to get an almost 700-page book under onscreen control. That said, however, fans of the books will notice much that is missing, those who only know the films would probably benefit from a DVD refresher beforehand, and newcomers to the series will probably be lost. This is a series film, not a starter one, and is in many ways a set-up for the next installment (or installments, since the last book is becoming two films).

All the child actors have grown up, and, while they’re still playing a bit below their real ages, finally get to play young adults. This means that we’re treated to real emotional arcs this time around, and the three leads are beginning to make the most of having literally grown up together. We sense that these are actual friends who care about each other, which pays dividends by the end of this film and looks good for the next two. They’re also just better actors by now, and director David Yates trusts them to be off the leash a bit more. Grint gets some priceless comedy in as Ron is victimized alternately by an overeager girlfriend and a misdirected love spell. Radcliffe has relaxed a bit, internalizing Harry’s anger and instead leading with his sense of purpose. A sequence where Harry is emboldened by a luck potion gives us a glimpse of what Radcliffe might do when allowed to play above school age. Of the three, Emma Watson is the least sure-footed. She still nails Hermione’s intelligence and wit, but somehow doesn’t rise to all the newer, more complex notes the character gets here. All the usual classmates are in good form as well, with Felton getting to show some layers to bad-boy Draco, and Evanna Lynch stealing a few more moments as lovably daffy Luna Lovegood. There’s also some nice, low-key chemistry on display as Harry begins to realize his interest in Ron’s younger sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright). Their naturalistic flirting is a welcome counterpoint to Ron’s zany romantic misadventures.

And here, at last, is the payoff for the supporting cast. The roster of high-profile British actors wrangled into the Potter films has seemed like a stunt in the past (look! Emma Thompson in a wig! Michael Gambon in a beard!), but now that the movies move into more adult territory the wisdom of the choices becomes clear. Before, these players were telling fairy tales. Now they get to act. Gambon does especially good work as Dumbledore here, balancing wit and seriousness, power and vulnerability better than ever. Alan Rickman, who does simmering repression better than anyone, once again proves invaluable to the series as the hard-to-figure Snape. Broadbent is a welcome addition this time, endowing Slughorn with just the right mix of old-school professorial eccentricity and deep, honest guilt. Voldemort is absent for this round, except in two creepy childhood flashbacks, but Helena Bonham Carter returns to have a nice snack on the scenery as gleefully destructive Death Eater Bellatrix Lestrange (“Bellatrix Lestrange?” only Dickens has better character names than Rowling). David Thewlis, Timothy Spall, Robbie Coltrane, Maggie Smith, and many of the other usual suspects are also back, albeit in limited amounts, hitting their cues from the books and marking time, I suspect, for the final two outings.

This is the second Potter effort for director Yates, who also gets the gift/burden of the two-part finale. The consistency is welcome. Yates has found a good tone for these later books, both in mood and actual hue (Hogwarts is still colorful, but many of the other scenes are almost monochromatic). The sillier elements are funny without being fatuous, the dramatic scenes are quietly effective, and some of the menacing elements are downright disturbing (despite this movie’s reversion to a plain PG rating). On Yates’s resume is British original miniseries of State of Play (lately a Russell Crowe movie here stateside), a political conspiracy thriller, and I don’t wonder if such background suits him to the Potter films that move beyond the school walls and into real-world dangers and, yes, conspiracies.

Is this as good as the book? No. Is it a “middle movie” setting up the end? You bet. But I’m not going to complain, this of all summers, when a “big” movie takes the time to explore characters and relationships rather than just blow stuff up (though, in fairness, Half-Blood Prince has its share of pyrotechnics by the time it’s done). There’s talent, not just money, on display here. It’s great to see Harry all grown up, and, in many ways, all the more magical for it.

Public Enemies (2009)

Michael Mann is the working man’s crime-movie maker. That’s not an insult. Or a compliment, really. It’s just how he comes across. Mann is a highly accomplished filmmaker, and has had his hands in things like Heat, The Insider, Collateral, and both the small- and big-screen versions of “Miami Vice.” He knows how to do crime and punishment, and how to do it well. And yet beneath the polished veneers of his films is the idea that for those whose line is either crime or punishment, those are just jobs. Cops and robbers ain’t a game; it’s work. That sensibility is on full display in Public Enemies, a gorgeously-shot, well-acted, and masterfully put together movie that, for all its glories, really feels like nothing so much as the story of some guys having very good and very bad days on the job.

The two main guys are bank robber John Dillinger (Johnny Depp) and FBI agent Melvin Purvis (Christian Bale). It’s the 1930s, and men like Dillinger and his gang are giving lawmen a black eye with their robberies and dashing prison breaks. To fight this, J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup, with more neck than usual) is angling for additional funding for his national crime investigation agency. When politicians turn him down, he ramps up the effort by putting Purvis (a noted gangster-killer) on the job with some publicity fanfare (making Dillinger and Purvis publicly enemies, in one of many possible meanings the film tweaks from its title). Purvis’s job is to get Dillinger by any means necessary. Dillinger’s job? Well, as he casually tells his new girlfriend Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, all big eyes and 1930s moxie), he robs banks.

That Dillinger says that in the way another man might say “I sell shoes” is a key to how Mann treats his material. The director is known for his crime set-pieces (Christopher Nolan claims the elaborate heist that opens The Dark Knight is Mann-inspired), but Dillinger’s robberies are shown quickly, with some nice flourishes but that’s about all. When Dillinger claims he can go through a bank in under two minutes, "flat," he may as well be talking about total screen time. The robberies aren’t the point for Dillinger; the life he can live because of them is. Why does he rob banks? Same reason any man get a particular job--because he’s good at it. It pays for the freewheeling lifestyle he wants to lead, preferably with Billie (or so the film would have us believe). The celebrity of being “Public Enemy Number One” is only a by-product—sometimes a helpful one, sometimes a problematic one.

Purvis is also good at what he does, but early on, is surrounded by underexperienced Hoover men who don’t know which end is up. When the newbies blow an entrapment job in a tragic manner, Purvis complains to Hoover until he can get some hard-hitting (and shooting) Western lawmen in on the case. Dillinger’s men know how to follow orders and use their guns. So, Purvis reasons, should the guys on the side of law. And so it goes: two guys on the job, with Dillinger’s job getting harder as the lawmen on one side and organized crime on the other crack down on a brand of outlaw both see as a serious threat to their nationwide enterprises. You just know that this won’t end well.

Of course you know it. John Dillinger is a legend in our country (Melvin Purvis probably a little less so). He was a legend in his own time. The movie has a great scene where Dillinger dons a hat and dark glasses and wanders into a police station. He goes into the special designated “Dillinger Unit,” looks at the pictures of his gang and himself on the wall, and then pauses to ask the gathered cops the score in the Cubs game. They’re all clustered around the radio. They tell him the score. Did the real Dillinger do this? I don’t know. The point is that the real Dillinger could have done it. Of course he could have, because the Cub-fan cops were all hunting the legendary Dillinger, and he wasn’t going to just show up on their doorstep. Legends don’t do that. This movie doesn’t give us the legend.

What it gives us is Johnny Depp, immersed (as usual) in a man who’s very good at what he does until conditions just won’t let him do it anymore. Depp once again proves that he can inhabit pretty much anyone at any level. A known celebrity like Dillinger could have been pitched as a swashbuckler (we know Depp can do that) or a Robin Hood, but Depp instead plays him as a restless man with a wolf smile and haunted eyes. The dialogue suggests that Dillinger doesn’t plan for the future because he’s so cavalier. The look in Depp’s eyes says differently. Dillinger knows what his future is, and he’s just holding it at bay. Opposite Depp is another acting heavyweight, Christian Bale. Bale is known for flying off the handle onscreen and, alas, off. But here he plays Purvis with a slow drawl and such tight lips that he may as well have “contents under pressure” stamped on his face. Purvis is a bulldog, not a showboat. As stars of a film go, such casting is a win-win, and it allows Mann to put some character set pieces alongside the robbery and jailbreak set pieces. Notice the scene where Purvis reacts to how thoroughly his green G-men have botched an apartment sting: the camera lingers on Bale’s face longer than it might in some films, but it lets us see what’s going on behind the lawman’s expression. Likewise, the scene where Dillinger learns his girl has been apprehended while he waited in the car. Depp is given the time to let Dillinger’s entire persona crumble onscreen. Both of these takes, by the way, are wordless. Here again, two crack guys on the job. Strangely and sadly, the two men are given only one scene where they are actually physically together.

The film is beautifully made. The cinematography (by Dante Spinotti) is amazing, and handles prison yards, nightclubs, big city banks, cramped hotels and rambling forests with equal aplomb. Details are allowed to stand out: the fabric of a coat, the flash of a gun, the shine on tile floors, the blue sky above a colorless prison, the final plume of a dying man’s breath on a cold night. Equal care has gone into set design and costuming, so that the period is evoked without obvious artifice. It feels real. In fact, a lot of realism went into this movie: real locations, a non-fiction book as a source—Depp reportedly even researched Dillinger’s accent, and the “lady in red” of legend is reduced to the much less catchy but more true-to-life lady in orange and white.

For all this, the end result is strangely unaffecting. The movie is superb on a technical level, but I wasn’t grabbed emotionally. There’s emotional potential in the Dillinger-Frechette love story, and there are hints of social themes aplenty, but the film isn’t interested in pushing any of those things very far. When Purvis calls his goons off beating up Frechette for questioning, it feels like chivalry, not commentary. The same goes for when Dillinger tells a robbery witness “We’re here for the bank’s money, not yours” (though it’s funny how that distinction depends only on the guy’s place in the line for the tellers). Still, it’s nice, when so many movies rely on vulgarity and overdone flash-bang, to be able to celebrate onscreen some gentlemen who know how to do their jobs thoroughly and right. By which I mean Mann and his fellow filmmakers. Did you think I meant Purvis and Dillinger and their men? I could mean both, and that’s what makes the movie work as well as it does.

Valkyrie (2008)

Bryan Singer's Valkyrie is an almost successful movie about an almost successful plot to kill Adolf Hitler. The story is a fascinating one, the cast is superb, and the look of the film is spectacular. What it gains in those areas, though, it loses in strange storytelling and choppy editing. In these days of blockbuster bloat, here is a rare movie that should be about half an hour longer.

In the spring and summer of 1944, with the Allies invading at Normandy and tides turning on other fronts, a group of disaffected German army officers and anti-Nazi civilians conceived a plot to remove Hitler from power and redirect the course of the war. They believed a truce with the Allies could save Germany, but Hitler, of course, was single-minded and implacable. So he had to go. But how? Their plan was ingenious. A detailed plan already existed whereby the military could seize power, lock down Berlin and maintain order in the event of Hitler's death. This plan was called "Operation Valkyrie," after the goddesses, made famous by Wagner's operas, who decided the fate of Nordic heroes. The conspirators, many of whom were military men themselves, meant to rewrite Valkyrie to give their commands more power, and then trigger the plan by blowing up Hitler and pinning it on the SS. In theory, this was brilliant: accomplish their own aim of killing the dictator, let the hated secret police take the blame, and use Hitler's own armies to cover their tracks and remove Hitler's remaining friends. The government would, if all went well, essentially overthrow itself. If all went well.

The movie gets us into this plot by following Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Tom Cruise), an officer already disenchanted with the Third Reich even before he loses a hand and an eye in an Allied ambush. We meet him scribbling anti-government notes in his diary, shortly before being blown up. Why, exactly, he is so unhappy is never explained, but his injuries seal the deal, and when he is approached by anti-Hitler generals Henning von Treskow (Kenneth Branagh) and Friedrich Olbricht (Bill Nighy) to join the attempted coup, he accepts. It is Stauffenberg who suggests altering Valkyrie. He is a master planner, and, wearing his wounded-hero credentials on his empty sleeve, is well-placed to gain government sympathy and a position close to Hitler. This he does, and it is Stauffenberg who must get Hitler to sign off on the altered plans (his own death warrant, as it were), and who also ends up being best-placed to plant the bomb meant to kill the dictator.

Despite its war-movie trappings, Valkyrie is really a caper film, more Ocean's 11 than Saving Private Ryan. We meet the principal players, and they explain their plan. Then the caper is wound up, and we watch it go, or, in this case, not go. If you've cracked a history book, or watched the endless WWII programming on the History Channel, you know that the Nazi regime did not end this way. That means that the fascination of the movie has to lie in the details, and it's here that the movie goes astray. There aren't enough details. The early sections of the movie jump from person to person and place to place (using the inevitable typewriter-font onscreen locale and time updates) much too quickly. To get to the lines of the conspirators' plot, the film elides their identities and motives. Who are/were these men, that they disliked Hitler so? Did they object to all his policies, or just his war strategies? Of course Hitler is generally unsympathetic, but universal ill-will is not enough to drive a movie. Even the Ocean's gang were given specialties and unique quirks. These conspirators are a bunch of well-known faces in suits and uniforms. Yes, we root for Stauffenberg, but that's because we spend the most time with him and, well, because he's Tom Cruise. I'm sorry, but that's a cheat. The endless locale jumps give the whole affair a claustrophobic, piecemeal feeling. It's like the Cliff's Notes of a coup, and that doesn't do justice to the enormity of the plan, the frustrating arbitrariness of the circumstances that wrecked it, or the brave men who carried it out. It's an odd experience to watch a "thriller" film and find myself wondering what Ken Burns might have done with this material.

And it is good material. The movie, like the plot itself, generates a frustrating sense of "if only." Singer shows that he can manage real tension. The scene where Stauffenberg brings the rewritten Valkyrie plan before Hitler, pushing the man's own downfall under his nose, and a few scenes involving the fate of an explosive-laden briefcase are real spine-tinglers. Too bad the pacing of the rest of the film doesn't match up.

There's also no faulting the acting. Valkyrie boasts the finest collection of British character actors I've seen in a movie without the words "Harry Potter" in the title. Among the conspirators, in addition to Branagh and Nighy, we have Terence Stamp, Kevin McNally, and Eddie Izzard. On the Reich side, David Bamber plays Hitler and is ably supported by Tom Wilkinson, Tom Hollander, and fellow "Rome" alum Kenneth Cranham. Every one of them is underused, although Nighy, Wilkinson, and Bamber make the most of what they're given. Cruise is the marquee name, of course, but he brings in a remarkably restrained performance. This low-key approach is the right one, because it sells Stauffenberg through his convictions, and not through histrionics or trumped-up heroism.

Overall, though, the result is strangely unsatisfying, and all the more so for the amount of talent on hand. "This is an odd movie," my wife and I kept saying to each other as we watched, and therein lies a key to the problem. With a premise this good, we should notice the story, not the movie itself. The film gets in its own way. "This is a military operation," says one of the conspirators about "Operation Valkyrie," "nothing ever goes 'according to plan.'" How true that is in life, and, unfortunately for the movie Valkyrie, sometimes art imitates life a little too well.

Up (2009)

For a stretch of time in the early 1990s, Disney's feature animation studio could do no wrong. They released a famous series of films, beginning with 1989's The Little Mermaid, with broad appeal and consistently high production values. Of course it couldn't last. Later-90s outings suffered in popularity and, some would say, creativity. But it seems that now there's a new animation king in town: Disney's partner Pixar. Beginning with 1995's Toy Story, Pixar has slowly climbed to the top of the heap, producing well-made, likable, intelligent animation. Like Disney of the early '90s, they can't seem to make a bad movie. And so it is that much expectation and good-will greeted their most recent product, Up. It's the tale of an adventurous old man who lifts his house from the ground with helium balloons. Up is not the most spectacular animated film Pixar has turned out, but it has the company's trademark wit, a generous amount of beauty, and a surprising amount of heart and soul. Like the house tied to all those balloons, this film flies.

The film begins with a young child in a movie house, watching black-and-white newsreels. The subject is the adventurer Charles Muntz (voiced by Christopher Plummer), a sort of cross between Howard Hughes and Indiana Jones. Muntz travels the world in his massive dirigible, the "Sprit of Adventure," collecting specimens of the odd with the help of a pack of highly trained dogs. When scientists scoff at some of Muntz's "finds," the explorer retreats to South America in a huff, vowing to vindicate his discoveries. Muntz is not heard of again, but he lives on in the mind of his young fan, Carl. Carl roams the neighborhood with his own "dirigible" (a balloon on a string) and pretends to be off on adventures. One day, he meets a gap-toothed chatterbox of a girl named Ellie. She, too idolizes Muntz, and dreams of taking her ramshackle clubhouse to the famed site of Muntz's discoveries: Paradise Falls, in South America. From the moment they meet, Ellie does not stop talking about her adventures and plans. Carl just stares wide-eyed, and can't even introduce himself. "You don't talk much, kid," she tells him with a smile. "I like you."

Indeed she does. We flash forward through a series of wordless vignettes showing Carl and Ellie as adults: they marry, they take jobs at the local zoo (she a birdkeeper, he a balloon vendor), they fix up the clubhouse and move into it, and they begin saving to make the trip to Paradise Falls. But circumstances, accidents, and family tragedies intervene and soak up the savings. They stay put, growing old together until Ellie departs on her final adventure, leaving Carl (now voiced by Ed Asner) a widower in the dear old clubhouse/home they built together. There he sits, going through his daily routine while corporate sprawl engulfs his once-quiet house, talking to his absent Ellie. The suits want to buy his home. Carl says no. Russell, an eager Boy Scout type, shows up and asks if he can assist Carl in any way (he needs a merit badge). Carl says no. Offers arrive from a local posh retirement home. Carl says no.

But after a particularly nasty run-in with the developers, something has to give, and Carl decides to leave. Drawing on his lifetime of inflatable-object experience, he ties a mighty host of helium balloons to his house, and, with a compass and Ellie's old adventuring scrapbook in hand, means to fly to Paradise Falls. Along for the ride, it turns out, is young Russell (voiced by Jordan Nagai), who hasn't yet given up on assisting Carl. Of course they make it to Paradise Falls, if not exactly smoothly, and there they meet the long-lost Muntz. He lives alone with his dogs and has gone more than a little obsessively crazy from decades of searching for an elusive brightly colored exotic bird. Any guesses who the bird finds and befriends first?

This is without a doubt one of the more beautiful films in recent memory. It is alive with color, most notably in the form of Carl's balloons (notice the way they refract light) and the giant exotic bird. Up is offered in 3-D in some markets, but I fail to see what that would add. Simply as rendered and colored, the images all but jump off the screen. Equally noteworthy is the attention to detail: from clothing textures to dog fur to tennis ball fuzz. Look closely, and you'll see that Carl develops beard stubble over the course of his journey. Then remember that in animation, all these details have to be drawn. Unlike live-action, there are no "happy accident" shots. On the other hand, animators can design any sort of location they like, and in Up we are treated to many finely realized ones. The movie has neither Finding Nemo's undersea wonders nor WALL-E's spacescape grandeur, but Ellie's clubhouse, Muntz's improbably roomy Jules-Verne-style dirigible, and the towering cliffs of Paradise Falls all linger in the memory.

For all that, though, I found myself concerned with the movie's look only secondarily. Up proves that one key to Pixar's success is that they still focus on story rather than spectacle. The wordless story of Carl and Ellie's younger life is a case in point. Much of the film's genius is on display in this section. It's as sweet and graceful a bit of storytelling as I've seen onscreen in some time, and it establishes these characters as people we know and care about. It's worth noting that there is no voice credit for the adult Ellie, but she is one of the most important, and memorable, characters in the film. Carl, who is made up almost entirely of squares (from his face to his eyeglasses to his fingernails), also emerges as a personality, not just a type. He has feelings and motivations and is not just a common grump or a crusty meanie. Notice how he tries to get rid of Russell: not just with a "get off the porch," but with a clever (fake) story about bothersome snipe in his yard. Of course Ed Asner, our reigning specialist in likable curmudgeonry, is perfect as Carl's voice. The rest of the cast is dependable as well. Plummer is both suitably august and suitably unhinged as the obsessed Muntz, Nagai lets us see how Russell annoys Carl without actually annoying us, and Bob Peterson provides many laughs as the "voice" of one of Muntz's dogs who befriends our heroes. All Muntz's dogs are fitted with high-tech collars that translate their thoughts into human speech. One of the many pleasures of the movie is that they say exactly the sorts of things you'd expect dogs would say, if they could.

The best word I can find for this film (appropriately for the summer season) is "refreshing." It's refreshing to see a summer film that has both heart and smarts. It's refreshing to see an animated film where not just jokes but real story elements are aimed at adults (kids will not understand, unless they know a great deal about their own or siblings' origins, why Ellie cries in a doctor's office, nor will they get the not-always-funny symbolism of a man literally roped to his house). It's refreshing to see in Carl a non-standard hero (and the film has easily the coolest old-guy fight in a movie since Ian McKellan and Christopher Lee duked it out as dueling wizards in Lord of the Rings). And it's even refreshing to see "talking" dogs in a movie allowed to act like dogs rather than four-legged humans. Mostly, though, it's refreshing to find, in a time when even many "live-action" movies aim only to wow us with computer effects, that an entirely computer-made film aims primarily to entertain us with that most old-fashioned movie technology: good visual storytelling. For now, Pixar's reputation is secure. There's real uplift here, and not just from the balloons.

Frost/Nixon (2008)

In 1974, Richard Nixon, mired in scandal and disrepute after Watergate, resigned the Presidency of the United States-the only chief executive to do so. He suffered no legal penalty, he did not explicitly apologize, and after his successor Gerald Ford pardoned him (only months later, no doubt just to be done with the whole mess), the American people were left feeling betrayed an deprived of real closure. Nixon, after a brief stay in the hospital (can you blame him?) retreated to California to contemplate writing his memoirs and to duck jokes and angry journalists. Until Nixon's book, it seemed, there would be no "last word" from the ex-president on Watergate and his behavior in office.

Enter David Frost, a low-wattage international celebrity, best known for hosting talk shows in Britain and Australia, and for romancing pretty women. He is not a heavy-hitter. He tells opening jokes and guest-hosts adventure specials. But Frost sees something in the person of Richard Nixon: ratings. An interview with the most controversial politician of the day is sure to capture public attention, and Frost craves that attention. The trouble is, networks and advertisers do not. The American public largely hates Nixon (whom it sees as an unrepentant scoundrel), and the broadcasting establishment largely distrusts Frost (whom it views as a European outsider with no real credentials). And yet, largely through favors, loans, and his own money, Frost scores the interview and the airtime. For four days in 1977, the smiling British talk show host and the grumbly American ex-president sit together to discuss Nixon's time at the head of the U. S. government. For most of the time, Frost soft-pedals and Nixon bloviates. But then, on the last day, something remarkable happens. David Frost gets from Richard Nixon what no one had seen before: real contrition, in close-up. It was incredible, it was totally unexpected, and it made Frost's career.

It also forms the central story of Ron Howard's film Frost/Nixon, based on Peter Morgan's play of the same name, a movie that proves yet again that truth is often stranger and more compelling than fiction. The interviews themselves--long sit-downs between Frost (Michael Sheen) and Nixon (Frank Langella)--are the centerpiece of the film, but we also get let in on the steps leading up to the talks, as well as a coda about their aftermath. Along the way, Frost and Nixon both argue with their staffs about how to best conduct the interviews and share a tipsy late-night phone call, off the record (or so the screenplay, also penned by Morgan, would have us believe). There is no flash or bang here. Howard directs smoothly and efficiently, keeping visual trickery and silly edits to a minimum, and wisely letting the strange story unfold and draw us in all on its own. There are enough stylistic flourishes to remind us that this is not a documentary (close-ups of particular actions, for example, or the slyly ubiquitous presence of monitors and other TV equipment), but nothing too distracting. Given that his current on-screen offering is basically a big-budget episode of "Scooby-Doo" starring Tom Hanks, it's nice to be reminded that Howard can really make movies when he wants to.

The acting is top-notch. Both Sheen and Langella originated their parts onstage, and the experience and expertise shows. Sheen plays Frost as a man smart enough to embrace his public image without always believing it (he lets fans misquote him to his face). Journalists helping him prepare are aghast when Frost's producer describes him as "a performer," but this is exactly right. Frost is not a journalist, but an entertainer, with a savvy eye for what makes good television. Sheen, who has perhaps the most charming wolfish grin in movies, plays Frost with just enough fluff to be disarming and just enough depth to be a believable businessman without tipping his hand too far either way. Langella has the harder task. Richard Nixon is widely and easily caricatured (almost everyone has a head-shaking, V-sign-waving, "Iamnotacrook" to pull out at parties), and Langella rightly decides to sidestep the impression. He looks nothing like the real Nixon, anyway. But what he gives us is the essence of Nixon in presence and mannerism. Nixon, too, was a performer, and Langella, rather than performing "a Nixon," performs the way Nixon performed. It's a shrewd bit of acting-a version of Nixon we haven't usually seen-and it got Langella an Oscar nod.

Sheen and Langella have a fine supporting cast, with Kevin Bacon in Nixon's corner as his no-nonsense top aide, and Oliver Platt and Sam Rockwell in Frost's corner as, respectively, a radio journalist and a political historian who help the host prepare his questions. Platt and Rockwell also provide most of the comic relief (it's Platt who gets to do the inevitable jowly Nixon riff as a pre-show stand-in).

Still, the real fascination is the story, which Morgan's script compresses but leaves largely intact (I haven't researched it, but I suspect the late-night call is more an excuse for a Langella monologue than a bit of history). The writing does set up the interviews as a "contest" between the two men (my wife pointed out that it's structured very like a boxing movie, where the opponents meet, bout, and return to their corners for critique and pep-talks), but the confrontation aspect isn't overdone. Frost is not a "good guy" and Nixon a "bad guy" here. Instead, the movie leaves room to ponder the nature of things like guilt and reputation, and also the role of media in government and society. The film shows how Frost and Nixon operate on a different level than their respective "handlers." Frost's team wants an expose; he simply wants a good interview. Nixon's aides want a political affirmation; Nixon wants a personal one. Frost's people think he's "losing" and doesn't understand politics (they're so single-minded that when Frost invites everyone to a "celebratory" dinner, the Platt character immediately sneers, "What is there to celebrate?" Frost's reply: "My birthday."). What Frost does understand, however, is the intimacy of television, and the celebrity ego. He really did want to interview Nixon, the man, and perhaps beneath his bluster, Nixon, lonely and tired of the banquet-hall lecture circuit, sensed that. The film does not let us believe that Frost somehow "plays" or "outsmarts" Nixon. Instead, he gives Nixon the room to outsmart himself. It's not a trap, just an opening that the beleaguered ex-president can't pass up. For a man who loves to talk, a good listener may in fact be more dangerous than a good questioner. Frost's journalist consultants didn't get that. Frost did, and so he got Nixon.

It's worth noting that the story is strangely prescient. Today, when politicians line up to talk to the likes of David Letterman and Jon Stewart, and when texting and twittering make slips of the virtual tongue an everyday occurrence, what Frost accomplished sadly seems rather ordinary. We cringe these days as the lines between politics and performance blur and cross, but Frost/Nixon chronicles a moment when that blurriness worked, and, ironically, helped clear the air. At the time, a breakthrough like Frost got, in the forum he got it, was extraordinary--especially with a veteran evader like Nixon. It was unusually good TV because it was an unusually compelling story. The same goes for the movie.

The Diving Bell and the Butterfly (2007)

The book behind The Diving Bell and the Butterfly is one that both begs for and resists filming. The book is the self-told story of a French magazine editor, Jean-Dominique Bauby, who suffers a devastating stroke and learns to communicate despite his limitations. This, in outline, is not a remarkable story. But the particular circumstances say differently: Bauby was left by the stroke with "locked-in syndrome." His mind was fully functional, but his body was completely paralyzed except for his left eye. He could only communicate by blinking. And yet he wrote a book. See the appeal? See the problems?

To attempt to film this, you'd have to be very creative, and maybe slightly mad. A good thing, perhaps, then, that the director who did attempt it is Julian Schnabel, a visual artist as well as a filmmaker, who is possessed of both unique vision and strong temperament. I've read interviews with Schnabel. He can come off as a mass of quirks and pretensions. My fear going in was that his movie would as well. Fortunately, it doesn't.

Schnabel's film works because he remembers two things: that this is Jean-Dominique Bauby's story, and that that story is plenty remarkable all on its own. He makes the choice to start the movie with Bauby's situation. Literally. We begin inside his head, as he slowly emerges from his post-stroke coma. We see what he sees, and since Bauby (played by Mathieu Amalric) is paralyzed, this means what we see is limited. We hear Bauby's thoughts as voiceover, trying to make sense of what has happened. Almost all of the first third of the movie is filmed this way (including the sewing shut of Bauby's useless right eye), and the effect is startling and uncomfortable. But notice that it does two things: it establishes that the film is Bauby's subjective experience, and it establishes that the emphasis will be on the consciousness inside rather than on the damaged body. It is many minutes, in fact, before we plainly see an "outside" shot of Bauby at all. This is a film about a man, not a condition.

The man's story emerges thanks to his speech therapist (Marie-Josee Croze), who devises a system of dictation: she recites the alphabet in order of most frequent use, and Bauby blinks to choose a letter. In this way he spells out words. And in this way, he decides to take advantage of an existing book contract and write a sort of memoir (the "conversation" with his incredulous publisher is one of many priceless moments). The movie is true to the dictation method, although those around Bauby become adept at "guessing" his words, no doubt thanks to time constraints in the screenplay. In some scenes, the method is eventually abandoned, and just Amalric's voiceover kicks in, but the device is used enough that we do not forget it. In this way, we learn things about Bauby before his stroke: he edited "Elle" magazine. He has three children, a wife, and a mistress. He has a father (Max Von Sydow), who keeps tabs on his son's social situation with wry European wisdom ("Having a mistress is no excuse for leaving the mother of your children; the world has lost its values," he says. Try that line in Iowa.). He lives fast; he likes sports cars. The movie wisely does not judge Bauby. Before the stroke, he was what he was: a successful, high-spirited Frenchman who loved both his children and his mistress. What praise he deserves after his stroke is for his strength of spirit, not his morality. His memoir chronicles his finding a way beyond his situation (hence the title images), not a reform of his character. It is enough that this man, in his state, became an author without his also becoming a saint. In flashback and fantasy, Amalric (more recently James Bond's nemesis in Quantum of Solace) plays the mobile Bauby with enough low-key charm that we can root for the man without approving of all his behavior, and his voice-over as the paralyzed Bauby is serious and humorous as is appropriate without overselling either.

That a remarkable situation is presented so matter-of-factly is the film's strength. Yes, it has its obviously artful moments, and yes, it has some wonderful cinematography once it is allowed to. But what sticks with me are the "real" moments: the way few of Bauby's early visitors really look him in the eye, the way Bauby's limited vision takes in whatever it can (from his therapist's breasts to billowing curtains to a distant lighthouse) whenever it can, the way he finds uncomfortable situations funnier than his caretakers do. It is also refreshing to see a movie where a father-son relationship is poignant without being overwrought or overlaid with pop-Freudian baggage. There are no false crises here, nor are there any miracles beyond the basic existence of Bauby's story.

There are countless ways to have gone wrong with this material, all of which Schnabel and his collaborators avoid. In doing so, they have made a remarkable film about a remarkable man. Perhaps it took an artist to make this film. After all, a good artist is said to have "a good eye," and Jean-Dominique Bauby's story shows what can be done with only one good eye. Those of us who fancy we have two should take notice.

Star Trek (2009)

The questions surrounding the new “Star Trek” film directed by J. J. Abrams are legion: Can it revive a beloved-but-musty franchise? Will it keep old fans and bring in new ones? Can it succeed with only one original crew member involved? Can other actors inhabit arguably the most well-known science-fiction roles of all time? Most of all, is it entertaining? I’ll leave it to those more attuned to “Trek” lore and box office receipts to answer most of these, but the last one is easy: yes, it is.

“Reboot” movies seem to be the hot commodity of the day. It worked for Bond and Batman, and so it’s only fair for Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, and their intrepid crew to get a chance at a new lease—or, perhaps, a new reel—on life as well. The marriage of the popular “origin story” and the (until recently) highly successful Trek universe is, from a box-office standpoint, logical (as Spock might say). But it’s also full of dangers. Star Trek is a cultural icon. People who don’t know a black hole from a Black Russian still know who Kirk and Spock are, and our slang is rife with Trek nods (“Beam me up, Scotty,” “I’m a doctor, not a [some other occupation],” just to name two). How much change in these iconic characters will people accept? Star Trek’s screenwriters thus make the wise decision to tell us less about how these familiar people came to be who they are than about how they came to all be together as the iconic Enterprise crew.

The two we follow in are James T. Kirk and Spock, who are, we both learn, more or less outsiders. Kirk (Chris Pine) is a cocky farmboy trying to live down (or drink down, the film would have us believe) his starship-captain father’s self-sacrificing legacy. Spock (Zachary Quinto) is an uptight space nerd trying to deal with his mixed-species background on Vulcan, where his emotional human side makes him an object of prejudice. Both determine, for different reasons, to work out their ancestral grudges by joining Starfleet. At the Starfleet Academy, they study starship stuff alongside other familiar space cadets, such as sexy language expert Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and cranky medical man Leonard “Bones” McCoy (Karl Urban). Of course we know that Kirk and Spock will be standouts at opposite ends of the logical spectrum. And of course we know that this will lead to a confrontation. But before this can fully play out, the cadets are rushed into action to save the planet Vulcan from an attack. The culprit is a vengeful Romulan named Nero (Eric Bana, in a return to onscreen villainy), who has a planet-sized axe to grind with Starfleet in general and the Vulcans in particular. Soon Spock (by orders) and Kirk (by trickery) find themselves, along with Uhura, McCoy, and guys named Sulu and Chekov, onboard the USS Enterprise, a brand-new ship commanded by Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood). When Nero captures Pike, it’s up to the junior officers to save their captain and stop the Romulan rampage…if only they can learn to work together. Fortunately, they get a big assist from a certain pointy-eared officer of the future (or, in cinematic terms, the past) who has traveled back in time in order to…

Never mind. The technical aspects of “Star Trek” plots have always bordered on the ridiculous, and never more so than when they deal with timeline shenanigans. I’ve given up trying to figure out time-travel in the “Trek” universe(s). I just accept it, like the endless flimsy gender-swap disguises in Shakespeare, and move on. Its inclusion here does three things: it gives a big goofy nod to the temporal hijinks of the original TV series, it allows for an uncertainty element lacking (for example) in the recent “Wolverine” prequel, and it allows Abrams and his writers to rewrite Trek history as they see fit. And they do so well. The key part of the story—the genesis of the Enterprise crew as we know it—is solidly handled, and the pacing is kept brisk enough that the sillier aspects of the story aren’t obvious while the movie is running. Character, not realistic science, has always been the heart of Trek’s appeal, and the movie spends the right amount of time developing its cast. The movie makes us care enough about Kirk, Spock, Bones, and the rest to have a stake in what happens to them. They’re likable on their own, not just because they are familiar names. It’s in the movie’s favor that it makes memorable characters out of so many people in such short time. Our cultural memory helps, of course, but some thought went into the writing here and it shows.

The main acting ensemble has big shoes to fill. Fortunately, like the young crew they play, they’re up to a challenge. Again, someone made some wise choices here: all the actors bear a decent physical resemblance to their “classic selves,” and no one is allowed to get away with straight-up imitation. Pine captures the swagger and charm the young William Shatner brought to Kirk while still being his own man, and Quinto has the right mannerisms for Spock, even if his take on the character is softer in certain ways than Leonard Nimoy’s (that he survives onscreen comparison with Nimoy here is achievement enough). Most of the film’s comic relief comes from Urban (allowed to play a real character and not an action figure for once) as the cranky McCoy and from Simon Pegg as dependable-but-beleaguered engineer Montgomery Scott (yes, he gets to beam people up). Saldana’s Uhura has more to do than she used to on TV, though not much more once things get going, and John Cho and Anton Yelchin settle nicely into the bridge swivel chairs as, respectively, pilot-cum-swordsman Sulu and heavily-accented math whiz/navigator Chekov. Leonard Nimoy, who has been doing this forever, adds a nice graceful touch, as well as an implicit seal of approval, as the future Spock. Eric Bana’s Nero will not go down in the Star Trek villain hall of fame, but that’s not really the fault of his performance. The character is underwritten and is mostly a personified threat—he has motive and some wicked tattoos, but not much depth.

Best of all, the movie captures the original Trek spirit whereby the human (or Vulcan or whatever) element trumps the whiz-bang element. At their best, the assorted Trek TV series used their sci-fi trappings to engage real issues, from race relations to politics to environmental concerns and so on. This movie doesn’t go quite that deep, but the beginnings are there, and themes of responsibility and identity bubble along beneath the surface along with the much-discussed-in-the-present-moment Trek hopefulness about people and species working well together. Yes, this is a big shiny franchise machine, but there’s a soul in it. Shatner and the rest have been icons (and objects of occasional fun) for so long that we forget that people love and relate to the Trek characters for a reason. There is something about having new faces in the old roles that reminds us of that. Of course, humor always was a key part of the Trek formula, too (tribbles, anyone?), and the movie has its fair share. It’s sprinkled through with sly references to the original series for those who can spot them. Just as “Shakespeare in Love” was funny, but funnier the more you knew about the Bard of Avon, “Star Trek” is fun, but more fun the more you know about its TV source.

The movie is not perfect. Some action sequences are oddly edited in that now-popular way that really should have been brought to heel after the first “Bourne” movie, I’m not sure the ice-planet beastie needed to chase Kirk for so long, and the Romulans do get a raw deal (in several ways) from the screenplay. But like Kirk and his crew of ace cadets, the film ultimately does many more things right than wrong. This is the first really good big-ticket film of the summer (that I’ve seen, anyway), and it’s worth boldly going to see.