I was 8 years old when my parents took me to see Toy Story in a tiny theater in suburban Atlanta and it completely blew my mind. Since then, I’ve pretty much grown up with Pixar. When I was younger, “A Bug’s Life” and “Toy Story 2” fed my love of movies. As a teenager, “Finding Nemo” and “The Incredibles” aligned with my growing, more sophisticated sensibilities. And now, as a full-blown and fully grown cinephile, “WALL-E” and “Up” have served as the sole shining beacons of ambition, reflecting exactly what I want big budget Hollywood film to be. Do I love Pixar movies because I’m a movie buff, or am I a movie buff because I love Pixar?

Still, I understand why there’s a comparative dearth of enthusiasm for “Toy Story 3.” The run from “Ratatouille” through “WALL-E” to “Up” has easily been Pixar’s best, infusing their work with a scope that can claim a kindred spirit with everyone from Arthur C. Clarke to Werner Herzog. Those weren’t just “kids films” they were films that literally everyone could relate to in some way. They were also insanely risky for a studio that has never produced a flop and it is not just a coincidence that, with the long lead time on animated films, “Toy Story 3” was probably put into production right around the time the advertising cycle on “Ratatouille” started. Can Pixar retain their high creative standards while releasing a movie that, at least superficially, appears to be a “Shrek” style cash grab. The answer is mostly yes. If not a home run, “Toy Story 3” is at least a solid double that extends Pixar’s streak of good movies to 11.

Set well after the first two films, “Toy Story 3” finds our favorite group of toys collecting dust in a chest in their owner Andy’s room. Andy has outgrown playing with his toys and is getting ready to head off to college. While most of the toys see the writing on the wall, Woody (voiced again by Tom Hanks) still feels the connection between them and their owner and wants the toys to be there for their rapidly aging owner. Through a couple of mix-ups, the gang ends up in a day care, on the promise that they will always be played with and spared the heartbreak of being abandoned again. However, the day care is more Shawshank  than Shangri-La and the toys quickly realize that they need to get out of there and get back home as soon as possible.

Anyone who wants to know how far Pixar has come in the 15 years since their debut feature needs to only compare the first five minutes of “Toy Story” to the opener in this film. Both depict the same action (a boy playing with his toys) but this film actually takes you inside his imagination, making for an eye-popping reintroduction to the world. From there, however, the film drags for a little while as it gets stuck in the threequel rut, running through renditions of story beats that feel a little too familiar. The toys turn on Woody, Buzz thinks he’s a real space ranger, and so on. One  character even gets a tragic backstory, but one that feels too rushed to provide the same emotional gut-punch that the tragic history of Jessie, Woody’s cowgirl friend voiced by Joan Cusack, did in “Toy Story 2.”

Like that film, “Toy Story 3’” big theme is abandonment, but unlike there, abandonment is no longer some distant abstraction. It is very real and it has already happened, which breathes new immediacy into the film. That immediacy really starts to pick up during the manic escape plan (even The A-Team would be jealous) and subsequent action sequences. It’s a theme that may have some immediacy for Pixar as well. Keeping in mind that this movie started production before their recent run, it is hard not to read some of Pixar’s real-life predicament into the story. They find themselves in an odd position. On the one hand, they have to please a generation of fans who have grown up and are now outside the traditional wheelhouse of animation. At the same time, a child who was born when “Toy Story” was released is now 15 years old, so Pixar has to reintroduce itself to a completely new generation of children (rereleasing “Toy Story” and “Toy Story 2” to theaters last October was as much about familiarizing a younger audience with these characters as it was about showing off the new 3-D hotness). Pixar has become its characters, worried about being forgotten by the older generation and ignored by the younger one.

That said, the audience I saw it with was made up mostly of 20-somethings, not young children, who had also grown up watching these movies. They laughed along with inside jokes, cried at the story beats and, most of all, reacted with fear to any signs of peril for these characters. The woman next to me reacted with such visceral fear to one particularly dire circumstance – a scene that seemed so committed to torturing its audience of devoted fans that I wondered if Lars Von Trier didn’t happen to stop by and guest direct it. Personally, I had forgotten how invested I was in these characters and how much I flat-out liked them.

I saw “Toy Story 3” in IMAX 3-D, which was a little troublesome for me since I cannot really see 3-D too well. About 75% of the time its visible, but the other 25% the movie looks blurry and out of focus to me, presumably because of my prescription glasses. Still, aside from the visually stunning opener, I didn’t feel the 3-D was particularly necessary. I also didn’t hate it though, which I guess is an improvement (and while the 3-D process still problematically dulls a lot of the color, it was less of a problem than it was with “Up”). That said, the short that played before the film – “Night and Day” – was incredible in 3-D and suggested the kinds of things that would be possible for 3-D cartoons. To call it the best 3-D to date is a little backhanded, but “Night and Day” was certainly very impressive.

Ultimately, “Toy Story 3” is neither a disappointment or a step back, even if it’s also not the revelatory step forward that Pixar’s recent work has been. It is, like those early movies, a zippy, funny, moving, and engaging family film that can be enjoyed by all. All that stress is for nothing, as long as Pixar continues making movies this good, there will always be an audience for them.

Jonah’s Score: 69

TUIW Grade: B

I’m not sure at what point in the superhero movie craze we’ve reached, but “Kick-Ass” at least indicates that its started to eat itself. Based on Mark Millar’s comic book (from the second phase of his career, known as “chasing sweet Hollywood money with weak comic books), “Kick-Ass” comes with an appropriately high concept premise – what if some random kid in the real world put a mask on and decided to be a superhero – and plenty of the old ultraviolence to keep the kids entertained (this is a gleefully unrestrained hard R). But a little scope or ambition might have been nice.

Aaron Johnson plays an average 17 year old kid (we know this because of the number of times he tells us he’s just an average 17 year old kid. Thanks voiceover!) who is invisible to girls, all too visible to bullies, and obsessed with comic books. One day he decides to put on a mask and fight crime, under the name Kick-Ass. He has no abilities to speak off, and ends up just taking a lot of beatings. But a mix of the Internet and circumstance turn him into a minor celebrity (like keyboard cat, but with way more merchandise) and also raise the attention of a local crimelord. He also spawns a series of other caped crusaders, including Big Daddy (played by my favorite go-to loony toon: Nicolas Cage) and Hit Girl (newbie Chloe Moritz), who are far more effective and violent.

The problems with “Kick-Ass” begin with its main character, a sniveling, whiny, kind of annoying teenager who is essentially the male equivalent of Kristen Stewart’s character in “Twilight.” He’s pretty uninteresting and the film doesn’t seem to understand that, so we waste 2/3 of the movie focused on his boring, boring life, the boring, boring girl he like, and his boring, boring friends. There’s also the realism issue. For a film that keeps telling us it wants to be about a superhero in the real world, “Kick-Ass” doesn’t take place in anything remotely resembling the real world. The bright, comic book pastel color palette and set designs evoke Sam Raimi’s Spider-Man movies, but also the clearly fictional comic book world they take place in. The movie never stops too long to think about the logic of its plot developments and it has no problem sacrificing realism in the name of a joke. It also gets the little things wrong, like the idea that everybody still uses MySpace in 2010.

Things get a little more interesting around the peripheries, especially with Big Daddy and Hit Girl. At times both of them, but especially Hit Girl, seem like they’re just around to court attention and controversy, but at least Hit Girl is more recognizably human than she was in the book. Its also interesting that Nicolas Cage basically brainwashes his daughter and devotes both of their lives to brutal (and unlawful) violence, even if the film doesn’t seem particularly interested in exploring that particular ambiguity. In many ways, they seem much closer to the film’s stated vision of somebody putting on a mask and fighting crime in the real world. But the film doesn’t take the road, nor does it really question how creepy and wacked-out they actually are.

So what are we left with? Yet another mediocre superhero movie with an above-average helping of blood, guts, and swearing. I’m a person who kept reading comic books long after it was acceptable for a person of my age to do so, and even I’m getting really bored with all of this. The problem here, I think, may be that the source material was weak to begin with, but an uninspired script and generic action direction (from Matthew Vaughn) don’t help matters much. If you’re 17 and a boy, then this might be a good movie for you to see. Otherwise, just wait for Tony Stark to come back.

Time travel is hot again within science fiction circles, most notably with last year’s mindbending season of a certain show we already write about too much around here (although I think its 2000s renaissance can all be traced back to Primer, one of my favorite movies ever). But so far, no film has had the guts to go the Back to the Future route and play time travel for laughs. And, more importantly, no one has realized the sure fire comic goldmine that is a time-travelling hot tub. But what would you call a film with such a premise? Surely it would need to be an attention-grabbing title with some immediacy. One that hinted at the numerous possibilities of such a film, without giving the whole game away.

Hot Tub Time Machine is the story of three friends (and a nephew who tags along) who travel to 1986 in their ski resort’s hot tub. They inhabit their 1986 bodies and must decide whether to protect the space-time continuum by doing exactly what they did or risk destroying the future in the name of having way more fun than they did the first time through (although, as Daniel Faraday tells us, it doesn’t matter because whatever happened, happened) (I promise this will be the last Lost reference). In keeping with our need for a deal in the current economy, Hot Tube Time Machine is really three films in one. In the first, John Cusack starts in a mash-up of High Fidelity (yay!) and Serendipity (boo!) as a guy who is scared of commitment or something and meets this flighty girl who he likes (and there’s music or something?). In the second, Craig Robinson is married to a shrewish woman who cheats on him (and wants him to take her name! Just like the ol’ ball and chain…am I right fellas???). Finally, well there’s not much of a plot for Rob Corddry’s storyline, he just acts like he dropped in from one of the weaker Apatow movies.

When Hot Tube Time Machine works, it does so in one of two ways. The first is the goofy fun it has with the conventions of time travel narratives, like the running joke with Crispin Glover’s bellhop, who has one arm in 2010, but two arms in 1986. It also head-fakes towards being an homage to 1980s comedies, like John Cusack’s Better Off Dead. But, unfortunately, the film spends waaaaay too much time on the bland trappings of modern comedy, with all the unfunny raunchiness of something like last year’s The Hangover (but none of the inspired, Galifianakis schenanigans).

It doesn’t help that Corddry, Cusack, and Robinson make for a completely unbelievable group of friends. No single member of that gang seems like he would hang out with any other one, which makes the movie’s dumb FRIENDSHIP IS AWESOME theme that much hollower. Individually, they each have some nice elements that they bring to the table, but together it is all too much. As an unabashed Cusack fan, it is disappointing to see him given the least to play, with the script sticking him in the bland good guy role. His storyline feels like someone summarizing a John Cusack movie (and not a terrible compelling one) and is just a total waste of time. Robinson is kind of funny (although his plot is even more grating than Cusack’s) and Corddry is Corddry, but the unlikely standout is Clark Duke, who gets to run around and make sarcastic comments the whole time as Cusack’s dorky nephew.

No human could rightfully expect Hot Tub Time Machine to be a comedy version of Primer or Timecrimes, but an 1980s soaked Wet Hot American Summer wasn’t out of the question for a film that clearly has such affection for the time period it’s mocking. But, unfortunately, Hot Tub Time Machine isn’t that movie. Its best moments simply made me want to go watch Back to the Future or Grosse Point Blank and, despite getting funnier towards the end, those moments were few and far between.

Jonah’s Score: 41

TUIW Grade: C-

Macgruber

MacGruber is not The Ladies Man, but its also not Wayne’s World. As a film, it works a lot better than I was expecting, and director Jorma Taccone (one of The Lonely Island guys) brings a very 1980s action film feel to the whole thing. He talked about Lethal Weapon and Die Hard as being influences, but the movie reminded more more of the ridiculous Schwarzennagger film Commando. Either way it definitely treads the line between homage and parody (not unlike Hot Fuzz), although, as you might expect from an SNL movie, the whole thing felt a little thin. More a long string of bits than a film, MacGruber expands one of SNL’s shortest sketches to feature length and its not hard to feel the strain of trying to turn a 30 second joke into a 90 minute film (especially given the relatively limited timeframe they had to make this movie). When the jokes work (like the two hilarious sex scenes or a small moment of subtitle fun), they tend to be playful nods and swipes at the storytelling conventions of those ridiculous action movies. But there’s too much filler, and long stretches where there’s just not very much going on. The cast is all strong, especially Will Forte, who shows that he has the charisma to carry a film like this. Kristen Wiig is very funny and subtle, and Val Kilmer is Val Kilmer (though not as gloriously so as in Kiss Kiss Bang Bang). In the end, MacGruber is a relatively entertaining timewaster, but its a too uneven and disposable to have legs as a comedy classic (although it did play very well at the Paramount, so maybe I’m just being harsh).

Grade: C+

I wanted to go to the Mohawk to see Califone last night too, but it started raining pretty hard (its not a music festival in Austin without a little rain) and MacGruber got out later than it was supposed to, so I decided to bail. That’s going to just about do it for our coverage of the film festival. I may try to see No Crossover or Parking Lot Movie, but from here on out I’m switching my focus to the music and party side of things.

So, despite my efforts at doing so here, I was not prepared for SXSW. The mass of people. The lines at everything. I’ve gone to places I’ve been to a bunch before, like the Drafthouse and the Paramount Theater, but they were unrecognizable. Nonetheless, here’s my summary of what I’ve done so far:

FRIDAY:

Friday was like an education for me in how to do SXSW. I showed up to Kick-Ass an hour before it started and didn’t get in. Then I didn’t get into Trash Humpers (which I’m kind of okay with) and the Predators preview event. So it was basically a wash.

SATURDAY:

Film: Dogtooth
So, I started my festival with the dark, dark Greek film Dogtooth, which won the Un Certain Regard prize at Cannes last year. Dogtooth is about a husband and wife who, for reasons that are left frighteningly vague, keep their three children locked up in their country estate. They teach the kids different meanings for words, so they can’t communicate with anyone except each other, and feed them with lies about the dangers of the outside world (cats are the most dangerous animals; stepping outside of the gate will cause you to die). Into this sheltered world comes an outsider who the parents are paying to sleep with their son, and things only get more messed up from there. Dogtooth swings from darkly funny to genuinely disturbing in a whiplash inducing way. The movie stays with you after its over, and some of the weirder setpieces are still eating at me a little. I wish the film was a little more stylistically polished (the colors are a little washed out and the camera work is, at times, kind of flat), but for a Lynchian contrast between a bourgey, rustic setting and the terrible things that the people who live there do, you can’t do much better than Dogtooth.

Grade: B+

Micmacs

Jean-Pierre Jeunet’s follow-up to Amelie is going to be a film you either love or hate. If your tolerance for unironic whimsy, childlike magic, and absurdity are low then you will likely check-out somewhere around the first five minutes. But, if you are locked in on Jeunet’s particular brand of playful filmmaking then you’re in for a delightful and fun night out. Micmacs is the story of a band of misfits who team up to take down a couple of arms dealers, but its strength is much more in the high number of comic setpieces and the thrill of watching things play out. The movie draws from a number of inspirations – ranging from Pixar to Tex Avery to Ocean’s 11 – but the main touchstone is Buster Keaton. Jeunet uses as few words as possible, making for a visual (and visceral) experience that is able to mine laughs in a truly cinematic way. Some of its jokes are as old as Keaton films, but the flair and pizzazz that Jeunet uses to tell them makes them funny nonetheless. While its ending draws the film’s politics to the fore a little too much, Micmacs is still a delightful piece of filmmaking.

Grade: A-

Cyrus
The Duplass Brothers’ greatest strength – their emotional honesty and verisimillitude – is also their greatest weakness. Their films are so rough and unpolished that its easy to sit at the end and wonder what, exactly, was the point of it all. But that’s a feature, not a bug, and, with Cyrus, they’re poised to break out in a big, big way. Their first movie with stars, Cyrus is about a guy, played by John C. Reilly, whose life is in a lonely tailspin, until he meets and falls in love with Marisa Tomei. Things are going great, but there’s a big obstacle to their love, in the form of her emotionally stunted, 21-year-old son Cyrus (Jonah Hill) who still lives at home and is in a weird, somewhat creepy co-dependent relationship with her. The movie doesn’t strain for laughs but lets them flow naturally, drawing from a loose, naturalistic style (helped by the actors’ improvisation and the Duplass Brothers’ trademark, documentary-style camerawork) and feeling very real. Its helped on by some great performances. John C. Reilly is his typically great self, but I was surprised by Jonah Hill (best known for Superbad and Forgetting Sarah Marshall) who gave a very natural and poignant performance that was miles away from his Apatow persona. It feels a tad slight – treading the line between loose and lazy – but its a very funny film with the potential to be a huge smash at the box office.

Grade: B

SUNDAY

Winter’s Bone
The only film I managed to see on Sunday was Winter’s Bone, a smash at Sundance that should be getting released later on in the year. The movie is set in the Ozarks, focusing on a young girl who, with her mother struck with mental illness and father in and out of jail, has to take care of her family and household (including her two younger siblings) on her own. Things get complicated when the cops show up and say that, if her Dad doesn’t show up for his court date, the family will lose their house, which he put up for his bond. The movie looks absolutely gorgeous – getting full effect out of the rustic, mountaneous backdrop – but is also an intricately realized and very full story. While the Coen Brothers are an obvious influence, this movie never mocks or satirizes its characters. The movie is all about the innate, deeply held mistrust of others and pervasive sense of “minding one’s own business” that is held by residents of the area and only exacerbated when Jennifer Lawrence’s character starts asking questions that make some very scary people bristle. The movie boasts some fantastic performances – especially Lawrence’s weighty work in the lead and John Hawkes (who was just killed off on Lost) as her tough, tempremental uncle – and the last 15 minutes are absolutely wrenching. It takes some time to get going, and a few scenes are too on-point (especially one with the only army recruiter in America who actually turns away potential recruits), but Winter’s Bone is a richly detailed mystery that forgoes the typical hyperbole and conventions of the average noir/thriller in favor of a more subtle and human story.

Grade: A-

TONIGHT: Macgruuuuuuuuber

Over the weekend I saw three movies, two 2009 releases and one 2010, and I thought I’d post some smaller reviews here:

The House of the Devil:

Ti West’s House of the Devil is at once an homage to 1980s horror and something more. Set in Anywhere, USA, the film tells the story of a young girl who agrees to take a very shady babysitting job from a highly suspicious Tom Noonan because she needs the cash for a deposit on her new place. The real joy of the film, at least for me, was in the waiting as West shows a tremendous amount of patience and confidence by structuring the film in such a way that, for over an hour of the film’s 90 minute running time, nothing really happens. Instead, the sense of dread grows and grows until it becomes unbearable. We’ve all spent nights alone in creepy places where every creak and clatter raises a sense of doom, and the genius of House of the Devil is how effectively it evokes that feeling. Well, that and the stylistic flourishes. Everything from the grainy, 16MM film stock to the chintzy score and goofy opening titles evokes early 1980s horror in such a detailed, precise way. I’m sure I’m in the minority, but the part I found the least satisfying was the last 20 minutes or so, when the danger actually presents itself (although the very end is pretty awesome). Its not that what happens isn’t awesome, but that I found the atmospheric horror of the first two thirds to be more interesting, and terrifying, than what followed.

Grade: B+

Cop Out:

Oh, Kevin Smith. After a series of films with diminshing returns (a look at his 2000s filmography on IMDB is like a harrowing trip through the depths of humanity’s worst) Smith decided to change things up by directing a script he didn’t write. This is hilarious because, as a director, Smith is so generic that he provides the best evidence to date against auteur theory. Still, Cop Out had potential, since I am a fan of 1980s cop movies (I thought it might make for a good 1980s themed double feature with House of the Devil) and Tracy Morgan. However, not only is the script not funny and the movie kind of a slog, but Tracy Morgan kind of sucked. The thing about Tracy is that he is mindblowingly good…as long as he can play himself (or a slightly scrambled version of himself) in a role with lots of room to just say whatever he’s thinking of. Here he’s hamstrung by a character who is expected to behave like a normal human being for 80% of the movie. The moments of improv feel forced, and Morgan is jammed into a role that he is ill-suited for, leaving aside his utter lack of chemistry with Bruce Willis. I don’t mean to harp on this one point because Cop Out is inadequate in every single way that a film can be inadequate (including not being so outrageously bad to actually be entertaining), but Morgan’s performance is the only even remotely interesting fail in a film full of it.

Grade: D

Police, Adjective:

A police procedural, with the emphasis heavily on the procedure, Police, Adjective is paced like a Low record, spending most of its two hour running time following its main character through a couple mundane days in his life. Dragos Bucur plays Cristi, a cop who has been following a young kid suspected of drug charges, but doesn’t have proof that he’s up to anything more than smoking some reefer. Still its enough for the police to arrest him and ruin his life, so Bucur does everything he can to stall this from happening. Simultaneously an exploration of the implications of language, an examination of law and order in post-Soviet Romania, and a surprisingly tense police procedural, Police, Adjective is a movie where, literally, nothing happens for minutes at a time. The camera lingers on him for minutes as he eats dinner, spies on the target, or asks his coworkers for favors. But the result is hypnotic, putting the viewer in the same position as the film’s main character and questioning the obtrusiveness of surveillence. It all pays off with a bang-up climax – easily the most tense scene to involve reading definitions from a dictionary ever – and a totally killer last line. Police, Adjective is not easy to get through, but it rewards your patience with a rich character portrait and a subversive glance at government restrictiveness.

Grade: A-

Sometimes we can’t get to see a movie in theatres, so it goes completely unreviewed by our site. That’s where Netflix comes in handy, giving us a chance to review a film as it comes out on DVD.

The film career of Mike Judge has largely relied on word of mouth, DVD sales, and afternoon airings on Comedy Central, and the thought was that Extract would be his commercial break through. Well, it wasn’t, but that doesn’t make it any lesser than his previous films, Office Space and Idiocracy. The other two are satires, taking on the banal work environment and the devolution of society. Extract breaks this mold, and instead is a straightforward comedy depicting the continually muddled world of Joel (Jason Bateman), an owner of an extract plant.

Joel genuinely has an interest in the rather mundane product that he makes, but he seems disinterested in his life as a whole at the start of the film. He’s trying to sell the company to General Mills and his wife Suzie (Kristen Wiig) ties her sweatpants so tight that sex is simply out of the question. Nothing for him at home or at work, he spends his nights at the sports bar of a hotel with his bartender friend Dean (a surprisingly funny Ben Affleck). He also has an annoying neighbor, Nathan (David Koechner), who stops him on his way home to endlessly invite him to things, including a charity event that he thinks Joel and Suzie will attend, despite their firm no. Needless to say, he’s stuck in a major rut .

Then disaster strikes when one of his employees, Step (Clifton Collins, Jr.) looses a testicle in an on the job accident. Joel and his partner Brian (the reliable J.K. Simmons) figure they’re settle with insurance money with Step and move on with their cut and run deal with General Mills. Enter Cindy (Mila Kunis), a gorgeous con-woman who learns of Step’s predicament and swoops in as a temp at the plant as a way to get to Step and convince him to instead sue Joel and Brian, leaving her with millions to steal.

Her flirting with Joel and an accidental dose of horse tranquilizer lead Joel to follow Dean’s idea of hiring a really stupid gigolo, Brad (Dustin Milligan), to sleep with Suzie so that he can then sleep guilt free with Cindy. On horse tranquilizers, it seems like a brilliant plan, but in the clear light of day, Joel becomes enraged that Suzie sleeps with Brad and not her. That’s where things begin to spiral out of control, when Step hires a lawyer (played by a perfectly tacky Gene Simmons), the workers threaten a strike, and Joel gets beat up physically and emotionally constantly, as if on cue. The ending of the film is sweet in only a way Mike Judge could do a sweet ending, with things moving towards the previous status quo for Joel.

Compared to Office Space and Idiocracy, I think you could say that Extract is Judge’s more sophisticated comedy, but that would probably be a misuse of the term. Extract is a bit more restrained than the first two, but it still has testicle jokes, drug jokes, and a guy that is pretty similar to Bill Lumbergh in Nathan. I think the biggest issue with Extract though is that it feels like its missing an end goal. Sure, Joel wants to have a guilt free affair and sell his company, but he regrets the decision to have the affair when he realizes what he’s done and it’s unclear why he wants to sell the company in the first place. Narratively, the film is just a bit choppy, but everyone in it is very good. Ben Affleck manages not to play Ben Affleck, and gets big time laughs for it, and Kristen Wiig does really well in a more normal character than she usually plays on SNL and movies. In the end, I think Extract will get the same second life that the previous Mike Judge films did, but it will rate third behind them.

Michael’s Score: 66

Tangled Up in Wires Grade: B

Over the last few days, I’ve been getting out to the theater to catch up on some 09 releases I missed. Rather than writing full reviews, I figured I’d give you a few capsulized thoughts:

A Single Man

Directed by fashion designer Tom Ford, A Single Man looks and feels a lot like a fashion spread, filled to the brim with gorgeous, luscious period style (it looks like Mad Men with a larger budget, which is unsurprising since I believe it had the same design team as Mad Men). Colin Firth also absolutely tears it up in his role as a gay professor still in mourning over the death of his partner. You’re probably used to seeing him as Colin Firth in any number of romantic comedy, but he’s pretty devastating in this. But there are a couple problems here. The first is that Tom Ford, as Tom Ford is wont to do, goes WAY over the top. Every other shot is in slow-motion, or is an extreme close-up of some item. Some of these shots are absolutely stunning but for every moment that works, there’s at least three that felt tedious and overblown. But, on a larger scale, there’s just no reason for it. The movie oscillates wildly between being an intimate portrait of grief and loss and a bombasically epic take on the American condition (complete with a massive collection of literary references ranging from Huxley to Fitzgerald and a storyline that intersects a person’s inner turmoil with the Cuban Missile Crisis) (and, on that latter point, as if the last 40 years haven’t driven that story point home, Mad Men did that a little more than a year ago, to much more chilling effect). Its tempting to watch this whole film and keep yelling “Mad Men did it” like General Disarray (the Don Draper cameo doesn’t help), but on a larger level, I just left the film not entirely sure why that story needed to be told. There’s a lot here that’s tragic and a lot here that’s beautiful, but Ford never merges it all into a whole.

Score: 55
Grade: C

My Son, My Son, What Have Ye Done

Werner Herzog is a crazy motherfucker. David Lynch doubly so. In theory, a Lynch-produced, Herzog-directed film should simply cause the world to explode, but My Son has been generally greeted with shrugs. It’s easy to see why, since the film wants to drive at so many points that it kind of loses itself along the way. Why did Michael Shannon lose it and kill his mother with a sword? It could be because God told him to, or he witnessed all his friends die in a rafting accident, or any number of the other things hinted at in the numerous flashbacks that form the spine of the film. My Son has an oddly theatrical structure, almost like Citizen Kane where characters sit around and talk about Michael Shannon in flashbacks, which foreshadowed the appearance of a play. The movie is certainly unsettling – no more so than in the scenes where Shannon oscillates between eerily calm mumbling and sudden violent explosions, which Herzog (perhaps feeling the Lynch assist) sets against a backdrop of sunny, prefab suburban sprawl – but also feels a little tired. Herzog doesn’t even pretend he’s interesting in answering the question Willem Dafoe is ostensibly investigating – how can someone do something so terrible – which, of course, can’t be answered, but this is not an entirely new notion. My Son feels like minor Herzog, lacking in either the clairity and vision of his finest works or the satisfyingly gonzo immediacy of TUIW favorite Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, but it also feels like a film that could be potentially rewarding on a rewatch.

Score: 59
Grade: C+

A Town Called Panic

Gleefully mixing the droll anthropomorphisizing of Wallace and Gromit with the manic energy of Action League Now!, A Town Called Panic is more about the experience than the movie, but what an experience it is. The film has a charming lack of cynicism and winning freneticism that makes it fly across the screen at an almost uncontrollable pace. The plot is more a series of amusing twists, each ratcheting up the insanity to break-neck speed so that, suddenly you find yourself inside a giant, robotic penguin who builds and tosses giant snowballs. The deadpan absurdity and enjoyably shoddy action figure-like stop motion figures add up to a film that doesn’t just feel like you are watching someone have a great time playing with his toys, but is visceral enough to almost be like you are playing with them. Its understandable to be fatigued after a little while, but if you just go with it, A Town Called Panic will take you to some wonderful places.

Score: 79
Grade: B+

Um…hi everyone. How are you doing? I mean, uh, are you doing okay? No? Me neither, hahahahaha that’s so funny. I, uh, know what you mean. Anyway, I was…I mean…uh…I uh…if its not too big of an inconvience for you and…uh…if you don’t have anything else to do I…uh…I was just wondering if it might be all right if we…uh…talk about the new Michael Cera movie? Maybe? Or not, because I can do whatever you want to do.

Okay, let’s talk about it then. Youth in Revolt is an adaptation of the sprawling, darkly comic novel by C.D. Payne about a shy, verbose young virgin who falls for a girl and has to embrace his dark side by literally inventing a second persona to do bad things in an attempt to woo her. Hijinks ensue (most of which get left out of the film version); hearts are filled and broken; age is come-of (I really need to work on my phrasing).

Cera does double duty, playing both the put-upon lead and his dangerous alter-ego (outfit with a moustache and cigarette) but, except for a few amusing moments where the two sides of his personality have direct conflict, he doesn’t give a very dynamic lead performance, settling too much into his all-too-familar awkward wallflower act, and not really engaging with the rest of the cast (including Zach Galifianakis and Steve Buscemi). His female counterpart, newbie Portia Doubleday, handles Payne’s hyper-literate dialogue but there’s not a whole lot of chemistry between her and Cera.

The other film’s other problem is one common to literary adaptations, especially ones based on books as long and jam-paced as Payne’s. There’s simply too many ideas going off in different directions and not quite enough focus. The film feels to overstuff and never ends up getting control of all the disparate concepts and ideas contained inside. Director Miguel Artera throws just about everything he can at the wall, including a number of animated sequences, but can’t really bring everything together in a satisfying way, especially towards the end where the film mostly drops the darkness and becomes a relatively bland, somewhat sappy love story.

Which isn’t to say the whole thing is a complete wash. There are a few funny moments, just not enough to keep up any sort of momentum for the film’s entire duration. The screenplay sands off too many of the edges, so Cera’s revolt feels too bland and, while the movie features a number of supporting character with the potential to be interesting, there’s far too many of them for any to actually become interesting.

Youth in Revolt has some promise, thanks mainly to the source material, but the filmmakers weren’t quite able to wrap their heads around it and find a way to synthesize that into a movie. Add in yet another milquetoast Michael Cera performance with him doing mostly the same stuff we’ve seen and you’ve got…uh…I mean…it was okay, but I…uh…what did you think?

Jonah’s Score: 48

Tangled Up in Wires Grade: C

If nothing else, 2009 has been a stellar year for animation. Sure there was Up but Coraline and Ponyo showed that Pixar aren’t the only people doing extraordinary things with cartoons. We can now add Wes Anderson’s Fantastic Mr. Fox to the list. Bearing Anderson’s distinctive directoral stamp, which meshes perfectly with Roald Dahl’s authorial sensibilities, Fantastic Mr. Fox is a joyful movie of meticulous, fully realized detail, a triumph of style and heart.

The film’s larky plot concerns Mr. Fox, who has the distinctive voice of George Clooney. Mr. Fox was a successful chicken thief who hung it all up to settle down with a wife and child. However, when he moves to a new tree, in the same neighborhood as the three most successful and dangerous farmers in the world, he can’t resist the temptation of one last big score. When he gets into more trouble than he bargained for, Mr. Fox has to use all his cunning and wiles to get his community out of a big jam.

Here’s the part where I have to admit that, despite my trepidation going in, I may not be the best person to evaluate this movie with a detached eye, since it happens to fall directly in my happy zone. Based on a Roald Dahl novel? He was and still is one of my favorite authors. Directed by Wes Anderson? Check. With a soundtrack that includes classic, but not overplayed songs from the 1950s and 1960s? You betcha. If only this film could include Bill Murray, playing a lawyer/badger…which it totally does.

The blending of Wes Anderson’s trademark style with Roald Dahl’s source material works even better that it sounds on paper. Anderson’s choice to make the film in stop-motion animation was perfect. Unlike “Coraline,” whose stop-motion was seamless and state-of-the-art, Fantastic Mr. Fox is affectionately rendered in jittery, hand-crafted stop-motion, reminiscent of the old Rankin-Bass holiday cartoons like Rudolph, the Red-Nosed Raindeer. In an interview, Anderson said he shot the film at 12 frames-per-second, instead of the traditional 24, which adds to the charm, especially when the characters dance (which is more often than you may think). Anderson’s eye and command really come through too. For anyone who doubts the impact a director can have in animation, I point you to this film, which looks and feels exactly like a Wes Anderson movie. All the trademarks are there, from his square, dead-center framing to crafted, exacting mise-en-scene.

And, like any Wes Anderson movie, there’s a dollup of melancholy to go with all the whimsy. But, that said, he’s working from a slightly different angle than usual. Mr. Fox isn’t the typical Anderson protagonist, instead suffering from angst that more closely approximates general male anxiety. He has settled down with a job (writing a column for the newspaper that nobody reads) and a family, but has trouble squaring his bourgeois, middle-class lifestyle with the literal animal lurking inside him. Anderson balances the two elements, bringing out the characters’ wild sides in a few delightful moments, while also mining a lot of humor from a group of animals who go to elementary school and see the pediatrician.

For me, the movie is most purely encapsulated by its best scene, one that rivals the prank war from “Rushmore;” in it the camera remains stationary, fixed on a bank of security monitors each with a different angle. Mr. Fox starts on the monitor on the left and works his way across each one, as he moves through each step of his elaborate heist. It’s a moment representative of the meticulousness and the total command of filmmaking that makes this movie such a joy to watch. Each frame is packed with detail, made more tactile thanks to excellent work by the animators. The entire film has the feel of an elementary school diorama in a shoebox and, if it’s a little slight, then so what. My friends and I left the film wondering if we could immediately turn around and go see it again. Mr Fox inhabits a world that you want to live in, and the only problem is that you have to leave it after an all-too-brief 87 minutes.

Jonah’s Score: 88

Tangled Up in Wires Grade: A