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.