CleverDonkey.com …Musings, Commentary, Opinions, and Drivel

So I went into this movie with elevated expectations. It was a martial arts comedy, a combination that I am predisposed to enjoy. I’m not a huge fan of martial arts movies, but I like them well enough, and I have enjoyed kung fu comedies in the past (Rumble in the Bronx, for example). I don’t really care for kung fu films (or other films, like The Matrix) that have characters participate in physics-defying fantasy fighting. I’m all for over-the-top choreography, but I prefer my martial arts to be possible under the laws of physics, even if highly improbable.

But Kung Fu Hustle has fantasy fighting in abundance, with different characters possessing different magical “styles” of fighting. In the context of this film I was okay with that conceit, but found the actual execution to be a bit cartoonish, with no attempt to hide the CGI-ness of it all. In fact, the film seems to revel in the digitality of it all.

The story follows the conflict between The Axe Gang and the residents and landlords of Pig Sty Alley. The Axe Gang members all dress like the Blues Brothers with top hats and hatchets, and Pig Sty alley is a decrepit little almost-slum that is the feifdom of the curler-haired, constantly-cigarette-ed, housecoat-wearing landlady and her limp dishrag of a husband. Our protagonist, Sing, and his partner try a penny-ante scam on one of the Sty-gians, only to find him being protected by the quite imposing landlady.

Sing’s charade draws the attention of the actual Axe Gang, and they come out in force to seek revenge on the Pig Sty. However, it turns out that three of the Stygians are actual kung fu masters with magical powers who end up fighting off the huge Axe-ian contingent. The residents of Pig Sty Alley are surprised and grateful to the three masters, but this is only the beginning of the troubles as the Axe Gang keeps raising the stakes.

The rest of the story is pretty classic kung fu movie stuff, where our protagonist must rise up to defeat his foes and fears, and face his past. Parts of it are cute, and there are some laugh-out-loud funny moments, but overall the parts didn’t gel for me.

Also, the everpresent trailers for the film use the song “Ballroom Blitz” to great effect, but it does not appear in the actual film. What a rip-off.

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So, this movie could have been fairly good, if:

• One of the characters didn’t just simply announce the upcoming key plot twist well before it actually happens.
• Sean Penn didn’t spend the whole movie trying to act like a taciturn Clint Eastwood.
• Nicole Kidman’s character (Silvia Broome) had managed to find a barette to keep her damn hair out of her face.
• Sean Penn and Nicole Kidman had had any actual chemistry.
• The level of incompetence of the Secret Service wasn’t so unbelievable (e.g. Kidman’s character eludes them when she doesn’t even know she’s being followed!)
• The writers/directors/producers hadn’t chickened out and added a token white guy to the bad guy’s team.
• The ending and denouement hadn’t been so trite and hackneyed.

Thankfully, thankfully, thankfully we don’t have to see the two leads lock lips or fall into bed with each other. They exchange some glances that I think are supposed to be smoldering, but looked more to me like two people glaring at each other at a traffic light thinking each was cut off by the other. There is one almost-tender moment where Penn’s character comforts Kidman’s character, but she ends up taking a nap on him (but they don’t sleep together).

But overall this movie is just the same old Hollywood crap. A typical waste of three Oscar winners (Kidman, Penn, and director Sydney Pollack) who are in a story that I bet started out as an interesting script, but was morphed by the Hollywood Frankensteins into “entertainment” instead of leaving it as an actual story. Shame on Sydney Pollack for ending his eight year directorial hiatus and choosing this dreck as his comeback vehicle. Has it gotten so bad in Hollywood that the combined stick of Kidman, Penn, and Pollack can’t save a film from being homogenized, partially hydrogenated, and made shelf-stable? Or did those three simply cash in without worrying about artistic integrity? It’s sad that in today’s Hollywood it’s hard to know the answer to that question.

Anyway, I wasn’t bored by the film, but I was ready for it to be done, and I began forgetting it before I even left the theater. ‘Nuff said.

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When I saw the trailers for Sin City I knew that I would hate it. The trailers showed that the film contained all of my least favorite film elements, to wit:

• Film noir, which I hate with very few exceptions
• Gratuitous use of black-and-white, including my least favorite subcategory of “certain things are still weirdly colorful”
• Random characters (not superheroes) who casually break the laws of physics
• Reverse-anachronisms, such as skyscrapers being modern-day glass and steel towers, but everybody still drives an old gangster car and wears snap-brim hats
• Incessant smoking
• Growling voice-overs
• Every female character is young, beautiful, armed, tough, and dressed like a slut
• Mickey Rourke
• Nerds romanticizing their arrested adolescence by using the term “graphic novels” when referring to comic books

The only thing that would have made this film seem like a worse fit for me is if the characters were prone to breaking out into spontaneous song. But the above list still meant that I immediately dismissed this film and made no plans to see it, and made a mental note to not only not seek it out, but to actively avoid it for the rest of my life.

But I kept hearing good things. Good reviews. Good word of mouth. Consistently good. So last night when we were heading out for an evening of a movie followed by dancing, we went ahead and decided to see Sin City.

And I have to say that it was much better than I expected (and it would have been nearly impossible for it to be worse). The movie is very gritty and violent (an understatement), and has a very comic-book feel even though it is live action. Well, it’s live actors, but virtually the entire film was shot with them acting against a green-screen, and then the sets and backdrops were added digitally. The film is a series of interconnected vignettes set in the same city, involving some of the same characters.

The strongest vignette is the one with Mickey Rourke, where his character, Marv, is a Terminator-like psycho killer with a heart of gold (really) and Jay Leno’s chin. His character teeters between sainthood and insanity (depending on if he’s taking his medication), but while his methods are sometimes extreme, his intentions are always good, even if sometimes misinterpreted. Marv has a whirlwind infatuation with a high-class call girl (off the clock) who ends up dead with Marv framed for her murder. Marv goes on a merciless, relentless mission of vengeance that is simply hypnotic. Mickey Rourke may deserve a Supporting Actor nod for this one, and I say that begrudgingly but with the highest respect for his performance here.

The second strongest vignette is the one with Bruce Willis as Hartigan, a cop being forced into early retirement by a bum ticker. But, as the cliche goes, he still has one piece of unfinished business before he goes — the kidnapping of a little girl by a sadistic child rapist/serial killer. All the cops know who the killer is, but since he’s the son of an all-powerful senator there’s nothing that can be done other than trying to rescue the victims before he harms them. But he always goes free to try again. Hartigan acts gallantly and bravely in rescuing the young victim, and for that he is rewarded with false accusations, years in solitary confinement, public disgrace, and finally…well, I’ll leave that for you to find out if/when you watch the film.

The weakest segment involves Clive Owen struggling mightily over every word in his attempts to hide his accent and try to sound noir-tough as Dwight, a wanted murderer with a new face who rides to the rescue of the local ladies of the evening. The ladies end up doing most of the dirty work as the bad guys keep getting the drop on Dwight, and he ends up being the one needing rescuing. There is one funny segment where Dwight swaps some banter with the semi-decapitated, talking corpse of Jackie Boy (a bravura turn by Benecio Del Toro).

Overall the film has moments of excitement, drama, sadness, and humor. All of the elements mesh well into a cohesive vision, and this film gave me some insight into what it is that people like about film-noir and comic books…er…graphic novels. I’ll never be a fan of either, but I very much enjoyed Sin City.

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Beyond the Gates of Splendor tells an incredible, nearly unbelievable true story that spans 50 years in the lives of five families and a violent and isolated Ecuadorian tribe. If you think you might see it but don’t know the whole story, I urge you to stop reading and go, then come back here.

Really, I mean it. This is the kind of movie that is best experienced with no prior knowledge. I know, I know, you’re wondering how you’ll know it’s your kind of movie if you don’t what the hell it’s about. I’ll have to ask you to trust me here and just go. Go on, go.

Last warning, the next paragraph tells the tale, and as interesting as the story is to tell I sincerely hope you get to experience it on the big screen. Final warning. Here we go.

The Story

Back in the mid-50’s a group of five young, newly married, husband-and-wife couples moved to the jungles of Ecuador to do missionary work. Now, I personally have a problem with missionaries who go to other cultures with the express purpose of telling them that their belief system is wrong and the missionary’s is right, and the natives need to change to be “saved”. I find the implied cultural superiority to be distasteful, presumptuous, and disrespectful.

However, I do have a grudging respect for people who are so sincere in their beliefs that they will uproot their families and travel to remote, unsafe parts of the world and live spartan lives in order to do (what they think is) good. Also, even though their primary motivation is soul-saving, missionaries do *actual* good by bringing things like medical care, nutritional education, etc, that does bring real benefits.

Parking my high horse.

Now, these five families were spread out among different stations in the remote jungles of Ecuador, connected to each other by the radio and airplane. They talked frequently, got together when they could, and had a sense of community with each other. Several of the couples married while in Ecuador, and several of the couples either brought their children, or had children while there.

The Ecuadorians they dealt with on a daily basis told tales of the fierce Waodani tribe that lived in the deepest, darkest parts of the surrounding jungle, and killed with murderous efficiency at the slightest perceived affront. The Waodani had fought the burgeoning oil company presence to a standstill with their vicious “spearing raids”, where they would swoop into oil company stations and slaughter everyone there. With their crude wooden spears and a few pilfered machetes, the fierce and fearsome Waodani halted, however temporarily, the march of “civilized” progress in the Ecuadorian jungle.

The Waodani were not just a fearsome foe to outsiders, but were also prone to settling their interpersonal conflicts with spearings and machete murders. Anthropologists who later studied the tribe were able to trace back five generations of the Waodani, and determined that 60% of all adult deaths over that time were caused by homicide perpetrated by other members of the tribe.

The filmmakers are able to communicate the brutal nature of the Waodani existence because surviving tribe members agreed to be interviewed. They tell mesmerizing tales of a seemingly endless string of spearings, and each tale is punctuated by specific descriptions of how many times the deceased was speared, where the spears entered and/or exited, if entrails were exposed, how long the spear-ee lived after the spearing, and most stories end with the natives gesturing and saying (in their own unique language) that “it happened right over there under that tree”…or “they speared my father in his hammock while I was sleeping on his chest”…or “so-and-so was acting crazy, so we had to kill him and when he was dead we were happy”. These killings are related with what seems like about the same amount of angst a typical American would have when relating the story of a non-fatal car accident…shaken, but not stirred.

The five missionary men hatch a plan to try to establish peaceful contact with the Waodani. The pilot of the group figures out that if he hangs a bucket from a rope from the plane, then circles the plan tightly, he can use the harmonics of the twirling rope to gently lower the bucket down and have it stay mostly in one spot for a while. The men use this method to give gifts to the Waodani. After a few sessions, the Waodani begin putting their own gifts back into the bucket.

After a few sessions of this the men then head out and land the plane on a sandbar near the Waodani village, and bring as a gift a small scale model of the plane. Frankly, I was awed by the simple ingeniousness of this method of building trust with the Waodani. A delegation of Waodani, a man and two women, approach them and over the course of several days a rapport is established. The missionaries nickname the Waodani man “George”, and even go so far as to take him for a plane ride over his village. George shows no apparent fear, and even shouts down to his tribesman “hey, it’s me up here!” (or words to that effect).

But, through a series of unfortunate events, the tribe comes to see these five missionaries as a threat, and a spearing party heads down to the river and kills all of them.

In Hollywood, this would be the end of an interesting, but often told, tale. But in this case, the reality is that these killings were just the beginning of the story.

After the killings, the wives decide to stay in Ecuador to continue their missionary work. Then, some time later a group of Waodani women emerge from the jungle, saying that they have fled the tribe out of fear for their lives. One of the surviving tribeswomen relates the harrowing tale of fleeing the jungle and heading for the area of the foreigners, and having them raise their rifles as she approached, but she simply shut her eyes and ran at them even though she thought they would kill her. When they didn’t shoot her she signaled for the other, younger women to come out.

The missionary widows hear about these tribeswomen and end up meeting and befriending them, and beginning to learn about the language and culture (and horrors) of tribal life. It turns out that several years earlier another Waodani tribeswoman had done the same thing, and was now living the life of an Ecuadorian peasant rather than a jungle tribeswoman. The widows and the expat tribeswomen bond, and soon another delegation, made up of men and women, exit the jungle and approach the missionaries. They express remorse for the killings, as they found they were triggered by stories that they later learned were untrue. They invite the widows to come and visit them, and one of them does, taking along her five year old daughter.

Incredibly, they end up living with the Waodani for years, and they are also joined by some of the other missionary widows. Through their interactions with the Waodani, they express the horror with which most of the rest of the world views murders, and actually begin to convince the tribe that the vendettas and revenge murders have to stop, or it will spell the end of the Waodani. Astonishingly, village by village, the Waodani agree to stop the killings.

The anthropologists who later studied the Waodani express that this was an amazing cultural transformation. The Waodani way of life was unchanged except for this facet, no new tools were introduced, no technology, no farming techniques, none of the hallmarks of cultural dilution. Just the stopping of the killings, with the transformation going from the first village to the last in the course of a few months. And the change has been permanent, at least to date.

One of the women ended up living out her life with the Waodani, leaving only for cancer treatments, but returning to the tribe to die when she learned she was terminal. The five year old daughter lived there for years, and later returned when she was baptized because she wanted to be baptized in the river by the village, and she wanted her adopted Waodani family there. In an astonishing case of irony or joyfulness, the two Waodani who held her arms and leaned her back for her baptism were two of the men from the party that killed her father.

As a grown man, the son of one of the murdered missionaries returned to the Waodani with his two sons, and lived with them for years, as well. When his son returned to the States and was graduating from high school, he asked that one of the Waodani elders come to his graduation. He called this Waodani “grandfather” in the Waodani language. In another ironic/joyful instance, this man he called grandfather had also been in the party that killed his grandfather.

The Film

The film is mesmerizing from the beginning to the end. The film starts by telling a bit about the Waodani and their ways, but then immediately jumps to modern-day interviews with the surviving widows and children. The widows begin by telling how they met their husbands, what they were like, how they ended up in Ecuador, what life was like as a missionary, what it was like to raise kids in the environment, etc. All of this is very quaint and might even be boring except for the fact that you can’t help but notice they aren’t talking to any of the husbands, plus for some reason you’ve been told about a tribe of murderous Ecuadorian tribespeople, and your mind starts making connections.

As the story progresses, you don’t have to imagine much, because there are photographs and films of their missionary life. Some of these films and photos are so clear and relevant that you begin to suspect that perhaps they were “dramatic recreations”, but as they switch from the widows today back to the films of yesterday, they are unmistakably the same women at a younger age.

There are even films and photos taken by the husbands at Palm Beach, which was their name for the strip of riverbank where they landed their plane to visit the Waodani. We see film of George and the two women, photos of the men and George, film of one of the Waodani women performing a detailed inspection of the plane.

We also see film and photos of the search parties that searched for and found the men. We see non-gory photos of their bodies.

The current-day interviews are also riveting. They interview one of the other missionary pilots, who led the expedition to find his friends. His breakdown on camera while relating the tale is heart-wrenching. The wives also alternate from glowing happiness when relating the good times, to soul-anguishing tears when relating the dark times. The interviews with the kids and grandkids are less painful, because as children they didn’t quite experience the full horror of what happened, and they also were instrumental in the peaceful reconciliation with the Waodani.

There is also a funny and heartwarming denouement, where the Waodani grandfather comes to the United States for the grandchild’s graduation. They show Grandfather going through grocery stores, riding the walkways of airports, and doggedly attempting to understand the myriad of different faucet configurations in American bathrooms.

This footage is interspersed with an interview with his wife back in the Ecuadorian jungles, where she expresses her disbelief in his description of airport walkways (“they stand on the trail, and the trail moves”), and his assertion that they have no gardens, but instead get food from giant “food houses” (grocery stores). She laments how fat he was upon his return. He sticks by his assertion that the way food is taken from the food house is by getting the attention of the check out girl and getting her to smile at him (after first being ignored). The narrator tries to explain that he had to give her something (his credit card), but the slyly logical old Waodani says, “yes, but you didn’t fool me because she gave it right back to you!”.

In an amazing footnote to the story, it seems that initially the Waodani refused to participate in the documentary, ostensibly because of their shame over their prior way of life and the murders of the missionaries. However, during their travels in the US and interactions with missionary family members, the Waodani became aware of the Columbine school shootings. The shootings struck a chord with the tribe, and they hoped that by telling their story they could help others learn by their example of turning away from violence.

So, the story is amazing. The film is amazing. Do yourself a favor and go find this film. Here in Houston it was showing on one screen of one google-plex theater, not at the art houses, and I fear it will not be long in release.

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Tony Jaa is the next great martial arts star. That fact is very clear after seeing Ong Bak: The Thai Warrior. He has the charisma of Bruce Lee, the charm of Jackie Chan, and the grace and menace of the bastard love child of Jet Li and Mikhail Baryshnikov. In this film he does all his own stunts, a la Jackie Chan, and they are wild, eye-popping moves. And just in case you miss them, the director films them from several angles, and plays them back repeatedly, sometimes in super-slo-mo, so you can see that it was all done with physics, not with wires, pixels, or mirrors. At first this replay action took me out of the flow of the film, but after a couple of times I got used to it and grew to expect it because some of the moves were so unbelievable they just have to be re-experienced immediately in order to grok the fullness.

Just to give you an idea of where I’m coming from, I’m no fanboy of martial arts films. I’ve never seen a Bruce Lee film all the way through, just bits and pieces, and my favorite part of Jackie Chan’s films is always the outtakes at the end. But I have seen enough of these kinds of films to get the basic storyline, where the reluctantly violent hero tries in vain to achieve his task with a minimal of bloodshed, but his vile opposition won’t let him hang up his guns.

That same storyline applies here. Tony Jaa plays Ting, a young and naive country boy who goes to the big city to retrieve a macguffin that has deep sacred meaning to his village. Along the way he runs into a former village-mate, now a bottom-rung hustler in the big city, who reluctantly (and comedically) “helps” our hero. Pretty standard stuff, really.

But what sets this movie apart is the fighting and stunt work. Mind boggling is the only way to describe it. This movie is worth seeing just for these facets. However, the script is actually engaging and the story is intriguing, and they (thankfully) subtitle the movie instead of overdub the voices, so the true personality of the characters comes through.

So, even if you’re not a fan of martial arts movies, I think this one is worth a look. And try not to groan and yowl out loud with the action on the screen, I dare you. I also dare you to try and get the tune “Mmm-bop” out of your head once you replace “Mmm-bop” with “Ong-bak”. Go on, I double dare you.

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In The Machinist, Christian Bale plays an emaciated machine shop worker who never sleeps and apparently also never eats. Bale is scary-thin here, and it’s not camera trickery. Throughout the movie he becomes thinner and more haggard, and near the end there are flashbacks to previous points in his character’s life when he had a more normal weight. These were filmed sometime before or after Bale’s dramatic weight loss, and the contrast on screen between the thin and normal Bale is almost incomprehensible.

Unfortunately, that dramatic weight change by the lead actor was the most interesting part of this film for me. The picture doesn’t suck, or anything, but it’s really just a trumped-up, big-budget Twilight Zone episode which would have fit nicely in a 60 minute running time. Unfortunately the picture is stretched out longer (and thinner, pun intended) than is necessary, which left me antsy for the damn thing to finish.

The story follows Bale’s character through his life as he doesn’t sleep and finds that stranger and stranger things keep happening to him. Are they hallucinations? Is he dreaming? Is he the victim of conspiracy? What is real and what isn’t? Who is real and who isn’t? The movie flirts with making all of these questions very interesting, but unfortunately settles for making them mildly engaging.

The plot is interesting, however, so I won’t spoil it by talking about it in any more detail. Bale does a good acting job in his role, as does the rest of the cast. The film has a suitably washed-out, foreboding look to it, and the ending was pretty strong when compared to the rest of the film. However, as a package, the whole thing is just slightly above average.

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When I first heard about this film I almost couldn’t believe what I was hearing. Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the duo behind South Park: Bigger, Longer, Uncut, were making a movie about America’s role as police force to a world terrorized by, well, terror…and they would make it using not animation, not actors, but…marionettes? I figured it had to be a joke, and they were just punking us all. Believe me, they weren’t.

Team America: World Police may be the most subversively intelligent political satire that I have seen since…well…Dr. Strangelove. Part of me is almost embarrassed to make that comparison, but it is nonetheless valid. Strangelove is an undisputed masterpiece, and when viewed today it is very easy to marvel in a clinical way at how groundbreaking, offensive, daring, and dangerous it would have been to the politically naive Ward Cleavers of that day. However, it is not the least bit controversial, offensive, or groundbreaking to the jaded audiences of today, who have seen it all. But we haven’t seen it all, and Team America proves it.

Just as Strangelove shocked the sensibilities of the America of its day, Team America will shock you, if you go see it. And I highly recommend that you do, but leave the kiddies at home (but take the later teens, who might actually learn something amid all the cursing, stereotypes, violence, and puppet sex). In today’s political era where every supposed “news” outlet proudly wears its affiliations on its sleeve (FOX is conservative/Republican, CNN is liberal/Democrat, etc), it’s nice to experience balanced political commentary, which is exactly what Team America is, if you have an open mind.

Parker and Stone attack the hegemonic hubris of America-as-latter-day-Roman-Empire, with our government’s proclivity of presuming to tell the rest of the world how to run its business (to our advantage, of course). But they also attack the rise of celebrity/activists, who presume to tell world leaders how to run the world, presumably using the insight they gleaned from scripts someone else wrote but that they nobly memorized (or read from cue cards).

In both cases, Team America hits the bull’s-eye with laserlike accuracy. One might think that if Parker and Stone are smart enough to see North Korea as a greater threat to world security than Middle-Eastern terrorism that the US government would be, too, but one would be wrong. One might think that celebrities would understand that the even though people listen to and report what they say, their opinions are no more valid or informed than anybody else’s, but one would, again, be wrong. One might think that there are no great truths to be learned by watching a drunken marionette collapse in a pool of his own vomit, but one would, again, be wrong.

The film itself is painfully funny, in that I laughed so hard that it hurt. It’s almost impossible to offend me with creative works, but Team America had me covering my eyes (but peeking through my fingers) more than once. I wasn’t offended in the “morally outraged” sense, but in the “I don’t think I’m old enough to see this” sense (I’m 43).

And the songs…my god, the songs. If you couldn’t understand how Trey Parker’s song Blame Canada from the South Park movie got nominated for an Academy Award (look it up), then prepare for more surprises. I doubt any of the songs from Team America will be nominated, but that’s only because they all contain curse words (and bad ones). Well, and the film skewers Hollywood so deftly that I doubt Hollywood would choose to reward them for it. But the songs may be the best part of the film.

Kim Jong Il’s (singing and spoken voice by Trey Parker) rendition of “I’m So Lonely” is a Cole Porter-esque ballad about the loneliness and misunderstanding that only a ruthless dictator can understand (which is why he’s so lonely). The patriotic, country twang of “Freedom Isn’t Free” probably makes Tobey Keith wish it were his song, because it’s played so straight that it could be a New Country hit, which make its ridiculousness even funnier. And the Team America theme song is pretty funny itself, but that’s really all I can say about it because I can’t even mention the title in this column. And do yourself a favor and stay through the end credits.

Oh, and to top it all off the film is also a dead-on spoof of testosterone-charged, Bruckheimer-esque, mindless action films. And if you thought it would be impossible to have marionettes perform complicated martial arts moves, well, you’d be right. But the aimless flailing and twitching that is used instead is HILARIOUS.

Speaking of the marionettes, intentionally lame puppet-fu notwithstanding, the puppets actually do some great acting. Their surprisingly flexible faces are able to emote, and the masterful string pulling allows them to demonstrate surprisingly convincing body language. Also, I didn’t notice any cheats, and all puppet movement seemed to actually be traditional puppet string pulling. They even left in some mistakes and awkward movements, perhaps because of the tight editing schedule, perhaps just to prove that it was all pure puppetry. The sets are also quite ornate, and the level of detail is overwhelming, if you can manage to tear your eyes away from the main action and peruse the background.

All in all this is an amazing and funny film. I think that Parker and Stone are making it clear that they actually have cogent points to make, but that they are smart enough to know that the first step in being heard is to put butts in the seats. They do this with humor and prurience, but those are not the points of their work. However, many, many (many, many, many, many, many) people are unable to see past the surface of their works and see the actual messages.

My suggestion is to treat their films like you would a piece of sausage. If you were to go through the bits and pieces of sausage and actually identify all the parts that make up the whole, I’m sure you would be disgusted (lips, hooves, and assholes, anyone?). However, if you take a good piece of sausage as a whole, and just savor the flavor of ALL the ingredients, it usually tastes pretty good. Even the disgusting parts add to the delicious flavor. Just like in Team America: World Police.

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We went into The Forgotten knowing almost nothing about it other than what we saw on the few, brief trailers we had seen on television. We had a day off, headed to the theater, and decided to let fate play a hand by picking the next available, acceptable movie, which turned out to be The Forgotten. The film stars Julianne Moore, Gary Sinise, Anthony Edwards, and Dominic West, and follows the travails of Telly Paretta (Julianne Moore’s character) as she attempts to deal with the grief of losing her son in a plane crash.

One of the other parents at her local park, named Ash Correll (played by Dominic West), also lost his daughter in the same crash, which was of a plane headed to a summer camp that both kids were going to attend. They do a little reserved commiserating, but really only know each other distantly as parents of one of their kids acquaintances.

Telly is undergoing psychotherapy to help with her grief. Her doctor is played by Gary Sinise. She has been fixated on her son’s death for the nearly two years since it happened, spending several hours a day in his room, pulling his belongings out to look at, watching videotapes of him, and generally not getting on with life on the schedule that those around her would consider normal.

But then, one day, she has either a breakthrough or a breakdown, where her husband and doctor tell her that she never had a son, and that all of her memories of him are delusional and were brought about by a miscarriage that caused her to snap. Based on the film up until this point, it seems obvious that they are trying to pull one over on her, and I started to get quite annoyed that she didn’t just go down to her son’s school and ask any of the 200 kids there if they remembered him.

But she doesn’t do anything like that, at least not at first. But over time she does. She eventaully talks to her neighbor, a fairly anonymous lady who we saw interacting with Telly’s son in flashback, but the neighbor appears not to know who she’s talking about. At this point I couldn’t quite figure out what was going on, as this neighbor did not appear to be anyone that the husband/doctor could get to and convince her to play along with their charade.

Telly finally heads over to Ash’s apartment, which she had been to once before when her son and his daughter had a play date. At least, that’s what Telly remembers, but the guy has no recollection of her, her son, or his (alleged) daughter. When Telly vigorously attempts to convince him that he had a daughter, Ash surreptitiously calls the cops to come get this crazy lady out of his apartment and into some kind of help.

At this point I was confused enough to be very interested in just where the hell this story was going. The story wasn’t confusing in a sloppy way, but in a very deliberate way, that engaged me in the way that a well-done mystery does. As Telly is being escorted out of Ash’s place by the cops, some official looking feds show up, say they’re from the NSA, and take Telly into custody. That was a real head-spinner, and very unexpected. While this is going on, Ash has realized that Telly lit a slow fuse of recognition in him about his daughter, and suddenly all of his memories of her come flooding back. He races downstairs and manages to wrest Telly from the custody of the feds, and the chase is on.

At this point you may be thinking that I’m giving the whole story away. Believe me, I’m not. In fact, right up until this point in the film I was on the verge of walking out because the story seemed to be so implausible (even given the suspension of disbelief granted to films). But from this point on the movie starts moving in some very unexpected directions that make the story make a whole lot more sense.

These new directions also make this a much better film that it first appears to be. But overall it is ultimately disappointing because while the film is slightly above average, it could have easily been very good, or even great, if the creative forces behind it had just stuck to the artistic principals of the first 2/3 of the film. But the ending falls into the trite, simple, overblown, ridiculous ruts that seem to please studio execs and not scare middle-America, and so the very interesting first parts of the film are wasted. What a shame.

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I had pretty much written this movie off my possibility radar — I really like Paul Bettany (those of you who don’t recognize him might remember him from A Beautiful Mind or Master and Commander, playing second violin in both to Russell Crowe) but I can be hot and cold on Kirsten Dunst. Normally she’s okay, but the ads for this movie looked a little too sappy chick-flick, and it looked like her character was just a little too simpering for me.

However, in looking for a good post-dinner-and-coffee film with a girlfriend the other night (we even went jewelry shopping, so I guess we were looking for a chick flick), Wimbledon lined up correctly in the genre/theatre/timing category and there we were. Boy, was I pleasantly surprised! I was expecting at best a guilty pleasure and at worst a cringe-worthy moosh-fest with all the worst that Hollywood can serve up (so to speak) in a romantic comedy. Although I guess maybe it isn’t “Hollywood” crafting this movie, since it came from the team that put together Four Weddings and a Funeral and Notting Hill, both clever and decidedly British comedies. I should’ve had more faith in that pedigree!

First of all, Wimbledon was much more of a Tennis Movie than I was expecting. Bettany’s character is Peter Colt, whom the announcers (great cameos by John McEnroe and Chris Evert Lloyd, by the way) constantly refer to as a ‘journeyman tennis player’: a relatively unknown Brit who’s been to Wimbledon 13 times, currently ranked 127th at 31 years of age, although in his younger days he was once ranked as high as 11th. He’s decided this is his last hurrah at tennis; he’s old (for a tennis player) and ready to retire to reluctantly become pro of a local club where he can be ogled by the rich old ladies in their tennis whites. His status in the tennis world is so marginalized that even his announcement of retirement is lost as the reporters turn to interview another younger, hotter player who enters the room during the press conference.

To make this in part a Tennis Movie, the filmmakers actually make excellent use of something I normally dislike — the athlete-psyching-himself-up-while-performing voice-over. Because they introduce it right from the beginning and it’s used consistently throughout, it actually adds to the movie rather than being a pesky fly buzzing at me during an otherwise enjoyable scene. And it makes the movie very much about the character of Colt and his tennis odyssey.

Well, not entirely. Enter Lizzy Bradbury, the young (but hopefully not too young, since Bettany’s character is 31) hot American tennis star. A mixup in hotel keys upon arrival at the Wimbledon’s primary hotel leads to Peter seeing Lizzy in her shower, and she seeks him out for flirting on the practice courts and private dates in her hotel suite after that. Cue standard pleas to keep their dates private from her overly-focused father, played by Sam Neill and said father inevitably finding out and menacing Peter to not distract his daughter from her game.

Peter and Lizzie’s little affairs, of course, end up rejuvenating Peter’s tennis game, and the journeyman player ends up being an unexpected hope for Britain in Wimbledon. Peter’s agent (a marvelously funny turn by Jon Favreau) begins speaking to him again after two years as Peter is hot property at the old age of 31. None of the major arcs in the story are exceptionally groundbreaking, but the minor details often go in unexpected directions and keep you interested: Peter Colt’s family is an interesting cast of characters, and a verbal conflict between Colt and a tennis rival doesn’t resolve in the stereotypical way you might expect.

All in all, it’s just a touch more than a lighthearted piece of fluff. It still has all the romantic comedy elements if that’s what you’re looking for, but the writing was just a shade above standard Hollywood schlock, and I really enjoyed it. I think even the guys might dig it. Jewelry shopping ahead of time not required.

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Shaun and Ed are flatmates in London. They have been best friends since primary school. Shaun has a brain-numbing job as a salesman in an electronics store, and Ed pretty much just sits around the house playing video games and not taking phone messages. They have a third flatmate, Peter, who is an officious prig who harangues Shaun about the fact that his friendship with Ed is holding him back in the world.

Shaun and Ed spend most evenings down at the Winchester pub, which is a sort of long-standing, dingy neighborhood watering hole. Shaun drags his upwardly mobile girlfriend there each evening, too, much to her dismay. Shaun and Ed spend each day in a semi-drunken, stuporous torpor, going about their soul-sapping, lower-middle-class lives as numbly as possible.

However, one effect of their self-induced sensory deprivation is that they fail to notice that their neighborhood (and all of London, based on the snippets of news shows we see as they channel-surf past them without absorbing content) is slowly transforming from one filled with zombie-like worker bees to one filled with zombies. The zombies move slowly, and so don’t really catch their attention, such as during Shaun’s daily walk down to the local convenience store for beverages. During his first trip we see his route, and the people along it, all going about their dull, pointless lives in a trancelike haze. During subsequent trips, the camera clearly shows that more and more of his neighbors have stopped being zombie-like and started being zombies, but Shaun is too self-medicated, self-absorbed, and closed off from reality to take any notice.

That sets the stage for Shaun of the Dead, which is being (accurately) characterized as a zom/rom/com (zombie romantic comedy). Shaun and Ed end up leading a plucky band of survivors against the ever-growing zombie population, and as with all zombie flicks, some survive and some die. But, unlike most its zombie-film predecessors, Shaun of the Dead is first and foremost a comedy, and a very funny one at that.

To set expectations, this isn’t an Airplane-like spoof, but a comedy that happens to be set in London during an outbreak of zombie-ism. As played by Simon Pegg, Shaun is a loveable loser with surprising resourcefulness when the chips are down. Ed, played by Nick Frost, sails serenely through their fight for survival with equanimity, courage, and a bit of wind. The rest of the cast plays their parts well, with most of the characters balanced on the precipice of caricature, but just real enough to keep the movie enjoyable.

The movie is laugh-out-loud funny, and the zombie portions are sufficiently scary and gory, although this is not a gore-fest. It is a zom/rom/com, and doles out all three with equal measures of screen time and skill. Well worth the price of admission.

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