Pun Salad

We've been inundated with TV-season finales, end-of-semester craziness, and social obligations, so the Netflix DVDs kind of got pushed aside for awhile. But (since we were unwilling to battle the first-weekend crowds for Into Darkness) we cued up this one.

Here's the deal: A skilled sniper kills a bunch of folks in an unnamed Midwestern city. Thanks to a masterful crime scene investigation, the cops immediately corral a suspect, an ex-Army guy named Barr. But the Army guy just says: get Jack Reacher.

Reacher is Tom Cruise, an ex-MP, and a skilled investigator. He shows up on his own. His immediate reaction is: yeah, Barr is as guilty as hell. But little details nag at him. He is importuned by Barr's beautiful defense attorney (Rosamund Pike) to check out the case. And before you know it: fisticuffs, car chases, more murder, gunplay, explosions, …

I should note that this movie is based on the novel One Shot, which I just read back in November, and I still remembered the details. So the movie/book comparisons were inevitable, and (in my case) the movie suffered. A major plot twist is given away right at the beginning. A lot of backstory is left out. Characters are left out. Action sequences are crammed in. I kept wondering: would this make any sense to someone who hasn't read the book? (Mrs. Salad confessed confusion.)

Reacher's creator, Lee Child, blessed Tom Cruise as a credible actor for the role. Fine, but I beg to differ. I've always imagined Kiefer Sutherland in the role while reading the books, and Mr. Cruise's performance did not sway me from that opinion. (Although he did a pretty good job otherwise.)

Finally: I don't know what the deal is with the flag imagery on the DVD box over there. Although I like patriotism as much as the next guy, there's not very much to inspire it in Jack Reacher.

If you've been reading many of these movie blurbs, you've probably noticed that a good 50% of my movie-preference DNA is strictly Teenage Boy. So I went into Iron Man 3 enthusiastically and uncritically, and I was not disappointed.

Tony Stark is still feeling the aftereffects of saving the world in The Avengers; apparently the shawarma didn't get things back to normal for him. So he's neglecting his (now) live-in girlfriend, Pepper, and is spending an inordinate amount of tinkering-time in the basement of his flying-saucer home on the Malibu cliffs. He gets the occasional anxiety attack.

Despite all his tinkering, he's dreadfully unprepared to deal with the threat of The Mandarin, an international terrorist bent on blowing up Americans. There are a number of strangely glowing people wandering around doing nefarious things. Worse, Tony's inconsiderate conduct from a dozen years previous is about to bite him in the ass. He spends most of the movie a couple steps behind his enemies.

What sets the Iron Man series apart from its genre is overall braininess. As a geek, I appreciate that. There is, of course, the normal slam-bang boom-boom action, but Tony's scientific/engineering expertise gets him out of any number of situations where the armor isn't doing the trick. (He's out of his suit for most of this movie.) Tony also shows some pretty mean detective skills here, as he struggles to figure out what's going on.

Robert Downey Jr. is (as before) just about perfect as Tony Stark, hitting all the right notes of arrogance, hubris, and cynical humor covering some inner vulnerabilities. Gwyneth Paltrow, as Pepper, has more to do here than in the previous movies, and she handles her expanded role very well. Mrs. Salad usually bypasses superhero flicks, but she accompanied me to this one, enjoyed it, and I think Gwyneth (plus a cute, smart kid in a key role) contributed.

A decent little musical comedy. It's Maine (heh) attraction is Anna Kendrick, a very good young actress born up in Portland. She got an Oscar nomination a few years back for her role in Up in the Air. I forsee more, albeit not for this.

Ms Kendrick plays Beca, whose life ambition is to go out to LA and get into the music business, specializing in her mad DJ mixes. You can, in theory, make a living doing that, I guess. But her professor dad insists that she get a college education first, and she enrolls unenthusiastically at Barden College.

In addition to DJ skills, Beca is a decent singer, and she gets recruited into an all-female a capella group. Its leader, Aubrey, is a bit of a tyrant, obsessed with winning the a capella competition held yearly at Lincoln Center in NYC. (They were cruelly denied the previous year when Aubrey regurgitated impressively in the midst of their performance.)

So, yeah: it's like every other musical-competition movie you've seen. Or, for that matter, every other sports movie you've seen. Will the underdogs triumph?

But it's PG13-funny along the way, doesn't take itself seriously, and—see above—Ms Kendrick is always worth watching even when she's in a clichéd role in a clichéd movie. Also good is Australian Rebel Wilson playing Tasmanian "Fat Amy". (She calls herself that "so twig bitches like you don't do it behind my back.")

In addition, John Michael Higgins and Elizabeth Banks pop in on occasion as ESPN-style announcers for the televised a-capella competitions; their banter is hilarious. The competitions actually exist, although the finals weren't at Lincoln Center this year, and I can't find any evidence they are televised.

One of those movies where I could see the flaws, but managed to like it anyway.

It's about—guess who?—Alfred Hitchcock, spanning the time between July 1959 (the opening scene is the North by Northwest premiere) and June 1960 (things wind up with the premiere of Psycho). Although insanely popular with audiences worldwide, Hitch is somewhat concerned that he's reached the end of his (heh) Rope, creativity-wise. He wants to do something new and scary, and finds (to the skepticism of nearly everyone) the very thing in the book Psycho, by Robert Bloch, which in turn was inspired by the gory 1950s Wisconsin crimes of Ed Gein.

Hitch has problems, though: He thinks his wife, Alma Reville (played by Helen Mirren) is getting way too chummy with the dashing, womanizing screenwriter Whitfield Cook. (She, in turn, is getting a little put out with her husband's obvious infatuation with the aloof blonde starlets he keeps casting.) Their personal fortune is at risk on the success of Psycho, and the production is mired in problems. The censors are on his (ample) ass. So are the studio execs. Plus, he eats too much, drinks too much, and smokes burrito-sized cigars.

But it all works out.

Anthony Hopkins plays Hitch; they don't get the physical resemblance very close, but the voice and mannerisms are pretty good. And his macabre quips are nearly all funny. ("Oh by the way, try the finger sandwiches. They are real fingers.") Helen Mirren is wonderful as Alma, and Scarlett Johansson is decent as Janet Leigh, around whose performance the movie-within-the-movie depends. And gee that actress playing Vera Miles looks familiar! I had to wait for the credits to find out it was that nice Jessica Biel.

One problem is shared with most biopics: the script uses dialog for exposition. (Movies should should either bring in Basil Exposition for this, or find another way to do it.)

Another Oscar Best Picture nominee. And Christoph Waltz won for his supporting-actor performance. And Quentin Tarantino won for his screenplay. And (as I type), the IMDB raters have placed Django Unchained at position #44 on the Top 250 Movies Of All Time.

In addition, I liked it quite a bit. Mr. Tarantino, who (you may have heard) also directed, is a movie lover, and this is his own unique take on the Western genre. (Although most of it is set in Tennessee and Mississippi.)

It takes place in 1858, and slavery's still going strong. Django, played by Jamie Foxx, is a slave, freed in the opening scene by Dr. King Schultz, Waltz's Oscar-winning role. Schultz is a bounty hunter, and he enlists Django as his sidekick. Dishing out murderous violence to white criminals, it turns out, is something Django has an unusual talent for.

But Django's wife ("Broomhilda") is still in captivity, and Schultz agrees to help track her down and (hopefully) free her by fair means or … well, let's be honest here, the goal is to engage in a lot of violence and hope that the right people are left alive at the end.

Waltz's Oscar is richly deserved; he's a lot of fun to watch. Unlike Inglorious Basterds, he's pretty much a hero here.

It's also a lot of fun playing spot-the-actor. As in his other movies, Tarantino pulls in a lot of semi-forgotten TV and movie stars of yesteryear: Michael Parks, Lee Horsely, Franco Nero (the original Django), Dennis Christopher, Don Johnson, etc.

Sheer coincidence: the soundtrack contains a snippet of Richie Havens' classic song "Freedom", and I watched the movie the same day I heard of Havens' passing.

Life of Pi won four Oscars (including Best Director), and was nominated for seven more (including Best Picture). The IMDB raters have (as I type) pegged it as #190 on the list of the Top 250 Movies Of All Time. I don't know about that, but it's pretty good.

It's the story of a young Indian kid, Pi Patel. His family runs a failing zoo in India, and they decide to pack up and move to Canada, taking the zoo beasts with them. They find themselves on a doomed ship, and pretty darn quickly Pi is drifting alone in a lifeboat with a few zoo animals. Most notably, a full-grown Bengal tiger that they've named "Richard Parker".

Or at least that's the story Pi tells. But it's a very good story, filled with danger and amazement. The moviemakers did an incredibly good job putting the story on screen. Even jaded me is amazed to learn that 86% of the Richard Parker shots are CGI, with no actual tiger content.

I read the best-selling novel back in 2004. Although my memory is kind of dim, I think the movie is rather faithful. And that's important, especially for the plot twist at the end. Spoiler alert coming: both movie and book offer a very different alternative look at Pi's travels. So, in its own way, Life of Pi is as bleak as Killing Them Softly. A gutsy choice to make for a big budget flick.

A very bleak, bloody crime thriller marked by pretentiousness. Maybe it's Brad Pitt's least glamorous role? I'd hate to do the research. It is based on the George V. Higgins novel Cogan's Trade; although that book was written around forty years ago, set in and around Boston, the movie's was filmed in New Orleans and takes place in 2008.

I haven't read the book, but based on the Wikipedia entry, the movie is remarkably plot-faithful. A group of petty crooks conspire to knock over a mafia-protected card game. Their scheme rapidly falls apart, and Brad Pitt, playing hitman Jackie Cogan, is called in to punish the upstarts. He's directed by lawyer "Driver" (Richard Jenkins), whose strings are pulled by shadowy Mob higher-ups.

There's a darkly comic element revolving around Cogan's cynicism and efforts to behave professionally while all around him are relative screwups: Driver's bosses are criminals, fine, but they're also bureacratized and risk-averse, avoiding the decisions Cogan knows have to be made. Cogan hires an assistant, Mickey (James Gandolfini) to deal with one of the targets; Mickey has turned into a worthless drunken lecher.

I mentioned the movie was pretentious. Over many scenes of seedy criminality, we hear speeches given by Obama, Dubya, McCain, et.al., mostly on the topic of the financial crisis of 2008. I assume the point is the theft of billions by Wall Street bigwigs in their corporate jets, while normal criminal lowlife scum bicker, assault, and shoot each other in the gutters over relatively paltry sums. The movie's final scene has Brad Pitt haggling with Richard Jenkins over a $5K difference in his hitman fee, while Obama pontificates on a nearby TV, and Cogan makes a little speech about Thomas Jefferson being a wine-snob slaveholder.

Subtle and insightful? No, pretentious and tedious.

I won't bore you with the details of how we came to watch Chernobyl Diaries. Suffice to say: I would have preferred to get something else from Netflix, but I'm not the only person living in Pun Salad Manor.

Three young Americans (two female, one male) are doing a tour of Europe; they stop off in Kiev to meet with the male's brother, who lives there. They plan to travel on to Moscow, but the brother has a different idea: he's heard of a local guy, Uri, who engages in "extreme tourism", and one of the extreme tours is to Pripyat, the abandoned ghost town that the Soviets once built to house workers for the Chernobyl Nuclear Power Plant. Together with another couple (Norwegian girl, Australian guy), they head off for Pripyat.

But this is a horror film, and other than its unique premise, it's extremely generic. Eventually, things get creepy, then scary, then the troupe starts getting picked off, one by one. The only question is whether there will be a sole survivor (probably the plucky independent girl) or whether they'll get her too.

Filmed mostly in shakycam, giving it that "found video" vibe, although most of the shots show the entire group, so who's holding the video camera? There's a lot of running, screaming, crying, mostly in the dark with flashlights waving around. It is rated R, but (I think) nearly entirely for overuse of the f-word; there's remarkably little gore, and the Disturbing Images aren't that Disturbing.

The IMDB raters have have (as I type) The Intouchables at #61 in the list of the Top 250 Movies Of All Time. Yeah, I don't think so. But it's not bad.

Also (according to IMDB) it is "the most successful French film in German cinema history." And you know how much Germans like French stuff. It is based on a true story.

The plot is what TV Tropes calls the Odd Couple. The "Oscar" is Driss, a young black man living in France, on the edge of a mean-streets life of crime, drugs, and homelessness. In order to get French unemployment benefits, he has to at least pretend to look for a job; this sends him to the house of Philippe (or "Felix"), a rich parapelegic widower who needs a caregiver.

Philippe's world is dry, antiseptic, humorless, and boring. Driss would be totally out of place. Of course, he is hired; Philippe appreciates his total lack of pity. There are all sorts of conflicts, mostly handled humorously: Philippe loves art and classical music. Driss is more into Kool and the Gang, and Earth Wind and Fire. But (you know this is coming) their odd chemistry manages to develop in ways that saves them both.

I have no idea what the title refers to. French intouchables translates to "untouchables" in English, according to Google Translate. But there's no Eliot Ness.

My fellow Americans, I am a bad person. Probably I should move to Cuba or some other Commie hellhole. Because I fell asleep while watching Lincoln. It was boring.

Sorry, Abe.

Now (as always, I shouldn't even have to point this out) your mileage may vary. Lincoln was nominated for 12 Oscars (including Best Picture) and won 2 (including Best Actor for Daniel Day-Lewis, who plays Abe).

But I'm convinced that many of those Oscar folks were just running on autopilot, perhaps just after waking up from a Lincoln nap. To paraphrase an apocryphal quote from the man himself: People who think they are supposed to like this sort of thing will find this the sort of thing they are supposed to like.

It follows the last few months of Lincoln's life in 1865, as the Civil War winds down, and concentrates on the political maneuvering behind the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment in the House of Representatives. It is like watching a filmed version of a history book, where the characters' dialog takes the place of the author's narrative, instead of resembling anything like what people might actually say to each other.

In fact, it would be a pretty good movie to show in high-school history classes. (I briefly thought that the language in the movie might not be appropriate for that (according to IMDB: "Two f-words. Four or five s-words.") but it's probably not a deal breaker for kids these days.

And Daniel Day-Lewis is truly amazing. Just not interesting.