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.