The Smurfs 2

Now, Papa Smurf...you.must.die.

Grade: D +

Director: Rafa Gosnell

Starring: Hank Azaria, Neil Patrick Harris, Brendan Gleeson, and the voices of Jonathan Winters, Katy Perry, Christina Ricci, John Oliver, J.B. Smoove, and George Lopez

MPAA Rating: PG

Running Time: 1 hr. 45 min.

The fact that there are five screenwriters “credited” with inflicting The Smurfs 2 on a ticket-buying public that really oughta know better resembles a firing squad in which one or more members are issued blanks instead of live rounds. That way, each member of the group can retain the belief that they weren’t among the ones propelling actual pain toward their intended target.

Stuck in live-action Paris since the last movie, Gargamel (Hank Azaria, giving his all in service to nothingness) now stars in a magic stage show that’s made him a worldwide sensation, armed with a wand that can levitate cars, change people into toads and conjure an interdimensional vortex back to his animated home. Yet, all this somehow falls short of the world domination Gargamel seeks, so he teleports Vexy (oh Christina Ricci, where did it all go wrong?), his ashen, naughty Smurf-like creation, to kidnap a genetically needy Smurfette (whined by Katy Perry) so Gargamel can extract the formula for the Smurfs’ all-powerful “Blue Essence.” Or something like that.

Papa Smurf (the late Jonathan Winters, taking the most ignominious bow since Orson Welles voicing 1986’s animated The Transformers: The Movie) and only a handful of his blue crew give chase, find their old friend Patrick (Neil Patrick Harris), and pun-filled silliness ensues. The tedious spectacle was already teetering on the edge of inanity before Patrick calls his stepfather-turned-duck (voiced by Brendan Gleeson) “Martin Luther Wing” after the mallard frees a coop of fellow fowl.

The whole lazy, meaningless mess is Smurf-itively soul-smurfing … uh, -sucking. At least Smurfs don’t rap in The Smurfs 2 like they did in the woeful first film. But, they do manage one fart and blue bum reference. “If you weren’t in such excruciating pain, you’d think that was hysterical,” Gargamel tells some caged Smurfs after another dud pun. I coulda sworn he was breaking the fourth wall.

The Words

Don't sorry, honey. Hangover III comes out next year.

Grade: C –

Director: Brian Klugman and Lee Sternthal

Starring: Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana, Dennis Quaid, Olivia Wilde, Ben Barnes and Jeremy Irons

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 1 hr. 36 min.

I like to envision the developmental scene behind a film self-indulgent enough to call itself The Words. It starts with a couple of fresh-faced, first-time writers/directors, Lee Sternthal and Brian Klugman (nephew of Jack), serving up their romantic-drama about anguished writers to be ground through the Sundance sausage maker. Enter a trio of young actors—Bradley Cooper, Zoe Saldana and Olivia Wilde—looking for the right portal for their entry into “serious moviemaking.” Snare a fading name like Dennis Quaid, looking for one more prestige project en route to a latter-day career of supporting roles in G.I. Joe sequels, ‘80s remakes and TV series. Hire Marcelo Zarvos—a poor producer’s Alexandre Desplat—to wind up the Oscar Trax 2000 and crank out an incessant, string-laden score that practically wails, “This is important!” And finally, imagine the day they all find out that a bona fide Oscar winner had signed onto the project: “We got Irons…We got Irons!”

But, a funny thing happened on the way to the Kodak Theatre. Although blessed with an intriguing premise rife with ethical and morality conundrums, The Words never becomes more three-dimensional than, well, words on a page. The principal storyline dovetails off a book reading by celebrated author Clay Hammond (Quaid) to an adoring audience that includes Daniella (Wilde), a comely, college-age literati groupie.

Hammond’s titular novel is about Rory Jansen (Cooper), an aspiring writer looking for his big break and also in the throes of newlywed bliss with his wife, Dora (Saldana). During their Parisian honeymoon, the couple pays homage to a plaque honoring Ernest Hemingway just before Dora buys her husband a tattered satchel that, unbeknownst to anyone, contains a yellowed, unsigned manuscript that Rory immediately recognizes as transcendent literature. Circumstances contrive to have Rory innocently type the story into his computer and then not-so-innocently present it to a literary agent who leaps at the chance to publish the book to great acclaim.

Rory’s new-found high life is upended when an old man (Jeremy Irons) follows Rory to Central Park and reveals that not only does he know of Rory’s subterfuge, but that the geezer is the actual author of the mysterious tome, the lost chronicle of the old man’s life and star-crossed marriage to a young French girl named Celia (Nora Armezeder) in post-WWII Paris.

It’s emblematic of Sternhal and Klugman’s erratic editing that I went a long time believing Rory’s misappropriated manuscript was actually a long lost Hemingway; maybe that’s also because Hemingway’s first wife, Hadley, once lost a suitcase full of the author’s manuscripts at a Paris rail station, an event duplicated in the film. Instead, we get The Old Man and his Celia, one of three diffuse plot strands held together with muddled melodrama, prosaic narration and some of the least convincing scenes of fake crying seen in cinema (from Bradley and Ben Barnes, as the younger Old Man).

There’s a good story lurking in The Words. Unfortunately, the only words most viewers will use to remember the film are, “Wait, isn’t that the one with the guy from The Hangover?”

Neil Morris

One Day

 Aren't I so Avant-garde?

 

Grade: C –
Director: Lone Scherfig
Starring: Anne Hathaway, Jim Sturgess and Patricia Clarkson
MPAA Rating: PG-13
Running Time: 1 hr. 47 min.

Beginning in 1988, One Day is actually 20 years worth of July 15ths distilled down to a series of schmaltzy, snappy Saint Swithun’s days. Screenwriter David Nicholls wisely eschews including all 23 chapters of his best-selling novel in the film. However, rather than snapshots of a relationship’s evolution, this Same Time Next Year simulacrum drops in periodically on the interwoven lives of middle-class bookworm Emma Morley (Anne Hathaway) and posh Dexter Mayhew (Jim Sturgess), beginning with their graduation from the University of Edinburgh. In the aftermath of an aborted booty call that day, however, begins an ebb and flow friendship that will eventually and inexorably develop into something more.

Unfortunately, books do not always convert effectively to film, and One Day is a story that never lifts off the page. Indeed, Danish director Lone Scherfig (An Education) displays more creativity in the graphics she uses to denote the passage of time than crafting logical, full-realized characters.

Having bought into the serendipity of a storyline in which key moments involving first encounters, breakups, betrayals, reunions and even death all happen fall on one particular calendar date, it is actually stunning that the seminal moment in Emma and Dexter’s relationship – when they finally succumb and have sex – happens midyear and off camera, a fact revealed to the audience during a casual conversation between them in which they express regret over the incident.

Such is the fractured structure of the plot. It’s not inconceivable that Emma would go from college graduate to waitress in a Tex-Mex restaurant to teacher to author, or that Dexter would transition from a graduate school instructor to an inept TV music video host. But, without the context of intervening events, their career and life paths prove jarring and meandering.

However, the most flawed part of One Day is that the main characters lack any palpable chemistry together and are individually unlikable. We don’t care much for Dexter because he is a self-absorbed, drunken jerk ostracized even by his mother (Patricia Clarkson) and father (Ken Stott).

And, we don’t like Emma because she can’t conjure the self-esteem to quit Dexter – one dinner-date during which she swears him off for good is followed immediately by a new year in which they’re chatting amiably again. It doesn’t help that Emma’s poor choice in men also extends to moving in with a part-time comedian, full-time putz named Ian (Rafe Spall). Perhaps Emma’s French boyfriend was a great guy, but we’ll never know because she unceremoniously leaves him sitting at a Parisian café to suddenly chase after and pledge her undying love to Dexter after he starts to cut short a trip to visit her.

Hathaway uses the same ropey British accent she deployed in Becoming Jane as her weak approximation of a Yorkshire brogue. But, it’s Nicholls’ attempt to convert his literary conceit to the silver screen that gets truly lost in translation.

Neil Morris

Inglourious Basterds

I intern your milkshake

Grade: B

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: Brad Pitt, Mélanie Laurent, Christoph Waltz, Eli Roth, Diane Kruger, and Daniel Brühl

MPAA Rating: R

Running Time: 2 hours, 32 minutes

To proclaim Inglourious Basterds is Quentin Tarantino’s fourth-best film (ahead of only the indulgent, indolent Death Proof) is not an insult, as each entry in this top quartet exceeds the finest production most directors will ever generate.

Still, the film’s relatively relegated status is interesting since Tarantino’s long-rumored World War II flick has been a pet project dating back to his immediate post-Pulp Fiction years. Like all Tarantino movies, Basterds is largely homage, principally – says the director – as a “spaghetti western but with World War II iconography.” There are also overt allusions to so-called “macaroni combat” flicks – the Italian exploitation war movies of the 1960s, 70s and 80s – as well as French New Wave cinema.

Of course, there is also Tarantino’s distinctive pulpy, madcap mayhem buttressed by an underlying, underrated maturity. Few filmmakers are afforded the latitude Tarantino enjoys to methodically develop scenes and storylines. This freedom sometimes leads to sequences that are rudderless, drifting on with no discernible payoff. However, it also produces gems like the opening, 20-minute long “Chapter One” of Basterds. Armed only with guile and a glass of milk, SS Col. Hans Landa, played sensationally by Austrian actor Christoph Waltz in an Oscar-caliber performance, interrogates a French dairy farmer suspected of harboring Jews. The scene reinforces Tarantino’s affinity for Sergio Leone, and it also crackles with QT’s trademark visual and dialogue flourishes. Unlike most filmmakers, the excitement and tension in a Tarantino film largely derives from the fact that you never know how any particular scene will end, and Basterds is no exception.

After the opening act, we are then introduced to the key players for the rest of the interwoven storyline. First is Lt. Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), a thickly accented Tennessee hillbilly leading a motley crew of eight Jewish American soldiers nicknamed the “Basterds,” whose mission is to comp the European countryside looking to kill and scalp “Nat-zzies.” Later, we meet a Jewish woman going by the name of Emmanuelle Mimieux (Mélanie Laurent), the proprietress of a Parisian cinema that is forced to play German films by Leni Riefenstahl and G.W. Pabst. (In one of the film’s more memorable lines, Mimieux explains that she displays the names of filmmakers on the theater’s marquee because “In France, we revere our directors.”)

In typical Tarantino fashion, these diffuse plotlines gradually intersect around a blazing, bombastic finale set around the premiere of the latest Nazi propaganda film by Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth), called A Nation’s Pride, which dramatizes on the heroic exploits of a German soldier (Daniel Brühl) who also harbors affections for Mimieux. QT’s love of cinema is the principal sidelight in Bastards, with characters who provide a virtual audio tour through early 20^th century Weimar cinema.

As in his previous works, Tarantino wrings tension out of the clash of characters with varying class and cultural backgrounds. He distills World War II into one giant race war (not without basis) and takes a baseball bat to Hitler’s vision of the “master race” with irony and volume by conjuring a conspicuously multiculti milieu. American soldiers impersonate Italians; a British lieutenant and film buff (Michael Fassbender) plays a German officer; Mimieux is a Jew masquerading as a Frenchwoman whose lover is her African projectionist. Aldo himself claims to be part-Apache Indian, and the Basterds end up adopting guerilla tactics patterned after Native Americans. Even in the epic opening scene, Landa starts out speaking in French until he and the Gallic farmer compromise by communicating in English.

Of course, the vehicle for all this would-be social commentary is a violent, rollicking fever-dream. And, yes, Tarantino’s nearly unchecked filmmaking freedom again manifests itself in occasional self-indulgence, particularly his infatuation with the sound of his scripts – Aldo acts as Tarantino’s mouthpiece during the film’s anticlimactic coda, declaring that his latest bit of sadistic handiwork “just might be my masterpiece.”

Thankfully, the grotesque use of the Holocaust as a justification for stylized revenge and Tarantino’s brand of comic brutality is largely confined to the film’s second chapter and its misleading trailers. Inglourious Basterds is audacious, entertaining, uneven, and imaginary. It is no “masterpiece,” but it’s far from inglorious.

Neil Morris

Julie & Julia

I'm happy to accept this award on Ms. Streep's behalf...

Grade: C +

Director: Nora Ephron

Starring: Meryl Streep, Amy Adams, Stanley Tucci, and Chris Messina

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Times: 2 hours, 3 minutes

As shallow as a soufflé, Julie & Julia is a puff pastry of epicurean ecstasy. It is a testament to the enduring talents of Meryl Streep and the iconic chef she portrays. But, in the vacuous hands of director Nora Ephron, it is an example of subtraction by addition, as two storylines that would barely sustain a feature-length film by themselves are diluted to the point of near irrelevance (in the case of Julie) and paucity (in the case of Julia) for the sake of splicing them together under a single title. Simply put, the ingredients don’t mix.

Streep is a deservedly acclaimed actress, and she is a mistress is two characters traits: accents and the ice queen. Thankfully, it is Julia Child’s Boston Brahmin brogue that Streep emphasizes for her charming, disarming portrayal of the famous chef, author, and television personality. The Julia-half of Ephron’s screenplay is drawn from “My Life in France,” Child’s autobiography that recounts the culinary experiences she and husband Paul Child (Stanley Tucci) indulged while living in post-World War II Paris and Marseilles, along with the infancy of her writing career.

Streep and Tucci – reuniting after costarring together in The Devil Wears Prada – portray these as heady times for the Childs, full of the wonderment of French culture and cuisine juxtaposed against the dismal tide of McCarthyism swamping citizens at home and foreign diplomats working abroad, like Mr. Child.

Against the glare of this iconic spotlight, the marginalized (or not outright marginal) protagonist of Julie & Julia is actually Julie Powell (Amy Adams), a struggling author who cures personal and professional malaise – and jumpstarts her literary career – by starting a Web blog in 2002 chronicling her mission to cook all the recipes in Child’s “Mastering the Art of French Cooking” over a year.

We’re told that the tie binding these two is that they are both strong, resourceful women who find inspiration in the joy of cooking. Thing is that Julie’s domestic travails in her tiny New York City apartment and her post-September 11^th job inside a cubicle working for the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation pale in comparison to Child’s worldly ventures.

The film is satisfied with the morsels of manufactured tension it concocts along the way (particularly during Julie’s timeline). Still, it is telling that its funniest scene is the replaying of a 30-year-old Dan Akroyd skit.

Moreover, Ephron eventually tethers a giant elephant in the kitchen near film’s end. I suppose the director and Powell deserve some measure of credit for including the dim view the actual Julia Child held for Powell’s Internet adventures in cooking. But, by addressing the rift only in passing, it serves to erode the essential connection between the two women suggested by both the screenplay and the film’s title. It also further minimalizes Powell’s standing in this two-headed narrative, making you wonder whether it was more than the rain that caused Child’s longtime publisher, Judith Jones (Erin Dilly), to cancel a dinner date with Powell.

They are both talented actresses, but in Julia & Julia (just as in Doubt), Streep gets to chew the scenery, while Adams gets consumed by it.

Neil Morris

Paris 36

We wear short shorts...

Grade: C +

Director: Christophe Barratier

Starring: Gerard Jugnot, Nora Arnezeder, Clovis Cornillac, and Bernard-Pierre Donnadieu

MPAA Rating: PG-13

Running Time: 2 hours

The social, political, and financial upheaval of 1930s France forms the unlikely and misbegotten backdrop for Paris 36, a schmaltzy slog through the travails of a moribund Parisian music hall. Director Christophe Barratier (The Chorus) attempts to prepare a puff pastry of historical recall and mythical nostalgia. However, his simple-minded pastiche of the rise of socialism and anti-Semitism is Benigni-esque, while the Hallmark rendering of French theater is overly sentimental and, during one keynote production number, oddly anachronistic.

Archetypes pile atop clichés: There’s a kindly old stagehand, a goofy comic, a hunky ladies’ man, a child accordion prodigy, and a villain in the form of a fascist landlord. The lone saving grace is an ingénue-turned-chanteuse named Douce, played by newcomer Nora Arnezeder, who lights up the screen with her voice and comely visage. The film lives and dies by her presence.

Neil Morris