A whiter shade of pale

Finally, got a clever title in! And it really does reflect what I felt about this film "Whiteout", which had promise but ultimately turned out to be a little bit 'meh'.
But I have to admit, at this point, that I'd slept through some parts in the beginning, thanks to the Crispy Tadyang ng Baka and Pinakbet we had for lunch at Mangan. Mmmmmmm.
But unlike most films I slept through, I got to watch a huge chunk of this film - I don't think I missed all that much.
And I did read the graphic novel by Greg Rucka on which this film was based on.
But I'd also read "Angels & Demons" before seeing the film and I thought the film version turned out to be a pretty exciting thriller.
And that's my case against watching a film based on material you've read before: Angels & Demons.
I knew whodunnit, but by God I was along for the ride up to the very end.
I did not get that satisfaction with 'Whiteout'.
All the elements were there: the terrifying snowstorm, the paranoia of being left in that isolated Arctic base with 3 people, one of which may be the villain - but this film just wasn't thrilling enough for me.
The paranoia, the uncertainty could have been heightened but it all feels like everything was done by the numbers.
I should have known, after seeing Kate Beckinsale strip down to her undies that that would be the most exciting part of the film. It was also gratuitous, which filled me with a sense of foreboding.
And then I saw the end credits and I was illuminated.
"Directed by Dominic Sena"
This, explained a lot to me.
I normally watch a film based on who directed it, but this time, due to my love and affection for Kate, I didn't bother finding out.
If you didn't know, Dominic Sena is a TV commercial director who's had some films under his belt, but he's no David Fincher, one of his compatriots during the late 80s early 90s.
Next Kate Beckinsale movie, please!

Comic Stylings

The multiplexes were happy places this past weekend as--for the same reasons Mars aligns with Jupiter, and a woman waking up five minutes later than usual leads to a ballerina getting run over and crippled--comedies like Bruno, Year One, Land of the Lost, and Kimmy Dora all got the same release dates. Since all of the Hollywood releases mentioned above were shown at least more than a month ago in the States, I suspect a case of back-end dumping going on here. (Wait...back-end dumping...that didn't come out quite right.) Or maybe the distributors were betting on the fact that people's moods were quite elevated due to the second consecutive three-day weekend we were enjoying. (While death is always a sad thing, Ka Erdy can at least take consolation from the fact that we all pay tribute by being lazy an extra day.)

Whatever the case, we can all use a hilarious pick-me-up during these dreary rainy days and gloomy economic times. I was most excited about Bruno; I had adored Borat, and the prospect of Sacha Baron Cohen's fearless, trenchant satire directed at homophobia was just too delicious an idea to pass up. Now, I don't know if my expectations were too high, or whether the MTRCB undercut all the fun by "recommending" nips and tucks (despite the fact that they had already rated the film an R-18, yet still insist on treating adults like drooling, impressionistic babies), but somehow, this mockumentary felt a bit limp.

It could be that Borat's success practically mandated a formula for his gay brother to follow. This time, Baron Cohen plays the titular fame-hungry Austrian fashionista who, after demolishing a fashion show with his Velcro jumpsuit, gets fired from the talk show he hosts (Funkyzeit), and decides to conquer the world by way of Los Angeles. With his besotted assistant's assistant Lutz (Gustaf Hammersten) in tow, he tries to pitch a show to the networks (and gets a crisp "F--k off!" from Harrison Ford); espouses a cause by flying to the "Middle Earth" and attempting to broker an instant peace between the Israelis and Palestinians; stops off in Africa to adopt a black baby like his gurus Angelina Jolie and Madonna; and finally, tries to be the first successful straight convert ever.

Borat's "plotting" felt more organic; the Kazakh journalist was, after all, trying to glean learnings from the American heartland to make benefit the glorious nation of Kazakhstan. As such, all the hilarity and hypocrisy he uncovered seemed more serendipitous. Of course, part of the fun of Borat was trying to identify which parts were staged and which were authentic. (Borat trying to abduct Pamela Anderson with a sack was staged. It couldn't have been real...could it?) But with Bruno, a lot more feels staged, somehow. Bruno's nominal plot feels like a force-fitted imposition of "structure" on what's meant to be a picaresque journey, and the creators' hands (Baron Cohen reunited with director Larry Charles) look more apparent. That's why the "We Are the World"-like anthem stgaed at the end feels a bit flat; it's as if you were watching celebrities hamming it up at a party yet self-consciously congratulating themselves for being donw-to-earth cut-ups.

Also, I guess I was just expecting more. There are stretches of out-and-out hilarity (such as Baron Cohen miming oral sex with the deceased half of Milli Vanilli in a sequence so breathtakingly coarse you just have to see it to believe it), and Baron Cohen is still so committed to his character that he seems willing to risk life and limb for the sake of a joke (such as the comedian getting chased down a street in Israel by a Hassidic scholar for his offensive style of dress). But when Bruno hits on the idea of ditching his homosexuality, the satire falls by the wayside. The comedian can still coax unintentional laughs from an evangelist who claims to be able to convert gays to straights ("There's nothing quite like building your muscles around other men...who aren't gay"), but the set-up presupposes a dynamite punchline. I was expecting a hidden-camera infiltration into one of those notorious gay-to-straight camps. Instead, the film decides to hit easy marks by bringing Bruno to a macho camping trip (where he asks his three backwoods companions which of the Sex and the City girls they are) and military boot camp (where he schools his superiors on Dolce & Gabbana). Anyone can put a homosexual in camo--I expect more from the prankster who fed cheese made from human milk to politicos!

I also expected more from Harold Ramis, the comic genius who wrote Animal House and Ghostbusters, and directed the seminal existentialism-as-a-form-of-comedy film Groundhog Day. But sitting through Year One, in which Jack Black and Michael Cera play Neanderthals who are ejected from their tribe and land in the Biblical landscape of Cain and Abel, Abraham and Isaac, and Sodom and Gomorrah, I was particularly saddened to witness how tone-deaf the Old Master had become.

I think it's a case of Ramis' classic comic instincts bumping up against the very of-the-moment persona of Jack Black, who wears his clueless horndog persona like a badge of honor. (Michael Cera tries his darndest to match Black's manic energy by ratcheting up his nerdy sarcasm, but Black's onscreen presence just won't be denied.) When Black discovers the concept of the wheel and acts as though riding a cart were like doing free-hands on a rollercoaster, you get a sense of unpredictability and unapologetic anything-goes humor. But instead, Ramis must exert the hand of the plot, in which Zed (Black) and Oh (Cera) must rescue their respective lady loves from slavery. The resulting comedy is painfully awkward...a bit like stone-age men adopting the new-millennial stances of slacker and self-reflexive geek.

My most enjoyable trip to the cineplex this past week came from my visit with Eugene Domingo, as she played the dual roles of rich virago Kimmy Go Dong Hae and her half-wit twin sister Dora Go Dong Hae in Kimmy Dora (Kambal sa Kiyeme). Of course, the plot is predictable--sibling rivalry that results in a botched kidnapping that results in enlightenment and a happy ending. But Kimmy Dora is proof positive that predictability is not a detriment to hilarity, as long as it is done smartly. And you really cannot get a much smarter comedienne than Eugene Domingo, who appreciates the fact that it takes a fair amount of brain matter to do dumb the right way.

Eugene is an intelligent enough performer to let you know that she's in on the joke; what makes her so deserving of the stardom that is coming her way is that she lets you know that she knows you're in on the joke too. It takes a special brand of courage to give your audience credit for having a brain, which means that the unfunny trailer for the misbegotten Vic Sotto-Tony Reyes "comedy" Love on Line is the celluloid equivalent of a stand-up comedian dropping flop sweat while delivering flat jokes. The biggest joke of all? I hear from reliable sources that Love on Line has grossed a measly P10 million so far, while Kimmy Dora's rapturous word-of-mouth among the AB crowd will most likely propel it into the status of a surprise hit. Proving that justice may be blind...but its scales can be tipped with a well-executed tickle.

Sci-High

In Karen Joy Fowler's delightful cream puff of a book The Jane Austen Book Club, one of the obstacles preventing the hookup of two characters (who you just know are right for each other...because that's what great romantic literature should reduce you to: a page-turning matchmaker) is the issue of the guy's love of science fiction books. The control-freak woman looks upon science fiction with disdain, implying that her laid-back, potential beau has some growing up to do. It is a sign of Fowler's depth of perception that she identifies this snobbery among mainstream lit freaks of science fiction as the domain of arrested adolescents; it is a credit to her generosity of spirit that she acknowledges science fiction as a genre has much in common with Jane Austen. Both are denigrated for being too specific in realm, too eclectic in milieu to command the attention or respect of serious lit lovers. And yet scratch beneath the surface of jargon and custom, and you discover that science fiction and Jane Austen are really speaking to huge, universal themes of human behavior.

I myself consider Ray Bradbury one of the greatest American writers. I remember reading one of his short stories, "To the Future"--about a man seeking refuge from a war-torn future in the present and the time-traveling police force pursuing him--in a high-school lit textbook, and being instantly hooked. The man writes economically, yet somehow conveys the width and breadth of wonder that only someone who looks through the telescope of extreme possibility can possess. And then comes the heartbreaking ending...and the truth hits home that life is all about ambiguity; that the world offers no convenient platitudes, no black and white. I got turned on to the power of fiction and lost my innocence all at the same time.

No such disturbing loss happens in Robert Schwentke's The Time Traveler's Wife, in which Hnery (Eric Bana) and Clare (Rachel MacAdams) are lovers who are eternally enamored of each other...except the guy has a "genetic anomaly" that causes him to unpredictably pop out of their present existence and appear in another time frame--either the past or the future--without clothing and with very little time to get his bearings. Sometimes the time-skipping Henry will see himself in the past and realize he is powerless to change what is in store for him; sometimes he will see Clare at a time when he doesn't know who she is yet but she is starry-eyed in her knowledge of him. Because as it turns out, Henry first met Clare as a little girl in the field behind her wealthy parents' estate, and she's been waiting for him to appear sporadically in her life eversince. (Then again, what sane member of the female species wouldn't be waiting with bated breath for a naked Eric Bana to pop into their life now and again?)

Confused yet? So was I. But time-travel plotlines tend to do that to me, obsessed as I am with poking holes in their logic. But the film is constructed as a game whose rules you're bound to learn as the story goes along...or maybe you just learn to overlook the obvious lapses (aside from a few streaks of gray in one pivotal scene, Eric Bana never seems to age) and just go with the feeling. And the feeling you get is that this matter of the man disappearing for days and weeks at a time because he can't help it is treated as a weepy inconvenience, a bit like Barbra Streisand being a feisty Jew from the lower classes and Robert Redford being an entitled WASP in The Way We Were. The plot is never milked for its obvious science-fiction richness, and the script by Bruce Joel Rubin (Ghost) never strays from its wistful, diaphanous, gentle mood, even when it deals with the prospect of a violent death foretold.

But if indications are correct, Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 best-seller did not flinch from the creepy overtones of its premise. There is something inherently pervy about a naked guy who compels a little girl to fall in love with him, and there's even a scene in the book where Henry's father mistakenly thought his son was gay because he caught an older version of Henry teaching himself to masturbate. In the end, what's missing from the movie adaptation is that most intriguing of questions: What would you tell yourself if you had the chance to visit yourself when you were younger? The movie, illuminated by Rachel MacAdams' radiance and Eric Bana's charm, only tells us the heart-fluttering platitude we romantic saps long to hear: Given the choice, I wouldn't change a thing.

Maybe this fondness for beating its themes into the heads of its readers with large, honking Allegories is my one beef with most science-fiction literature. Thankfully, that brow-beating is largely absent from the trippy, inventive, running-on-its-own-adrenaline District 9. The political overtones are obvious: a rundown spacecraft stalls over the city of Johannesburg, forcing its crustacean alien life forms--derogatorily called the Prawns--to inhabit a fenced-in settlement, and the country as a whole to confront its history of separation and race-induced violence all over again. But once the action gets going...well, all the glaring politics just fly out the spaceship window!

A hapless bureaucrat named Wikus van de Merwe (Sharlto Copley, in a take-no-prisoners feature debut) is promoted by his weapons conglomerate employer MNU (the Multi-National Unit) to evict the aliens from their squatters' area in the center of Jo'burg and relocate them to another settlement outside city limits. Poking around the shanty of a Prawn who turns out to be a scientist devising a way to get his race back into the mothership and off to their home, he is sprayed by a fluid in a cylinder and suddenly becomes an unwitting pawn (or is that a semi-Prawn...yuk! yuk!) in an arms race between his evil corporation and a criminal warlord who has set up shop within the settlement.

Produced by Lord of the Rings director Peter Jackson, District 9 is co-written and directed by Neill Blomkamp, a director who cut his teeth on shorts and commercials. And what a heady brew of symbolism, narrative, and humor he comes up with! Blomkamp shoots everything in documentary style, imbuing even scenes with high-technology graphics and gadgetry with a gritty, lived-in look that situates them in the immediate present. And just like those creepy, lumbering Prawns, just when you think the story is about to grind to a halt, it picks itself up and careens in another breathtaking direction. I'd call District 9 a cheeky mash-up of Independence Day, The Fly, and Cloverfield...but that wouldn't be doing this giddy, wildly original science-fiction film justice.

I think one reason why I was so enthralled by District 9 is that I always appreciate fiction that is wholly situated in their own complete universe. All of the recent pop-cultural entries that I vociferously follow--from The Simpsons to The X-Files to Mad Men--all live in a world of their own making that is vital, detailed, and beholden to their singular rules. And if there is one filmmaker who is a stickler for following his own rules, it is James Cameron. His obsession with creating his own universe and marching to his own beat is in full flower in his latest sci-fi epic Avatar.

I was fortunate enough to be invited recently to a 20-minute sneak peek at the Titanic director's first new feature film in 12 years, and let me tell you, it is mind-blowing. The story of disabled former Marine Jake Sully (Sam Worthington, easily the best thing about Terminator Salvation) who, through the wonders of consciousness-transferring technology, is able to inhabit the body of a blue, 10-foot-tall humanoid called a Na'vi and fight a Vietnam-style war in the distant planet Pandora, Avatar makes full use of IMAX and 3-D to immerse you in its breathtakingly alien world. But that's only half the picture: it's the obsession and obsessiveness of its creator (who, true to form, refused to commit a single frame of this long-gestating idea to film until the technology had caught up with his vision) that will really take you for a ride.

True, the lead humanoid kinda looks like Robert Pattinson and not Sam Worthington (as a recent website was obsessive enough to point out). And I have a sneaking suspicion that Avatar has fewer layers of subtext than the smart, subversive District 9. But unlike Geroge Lucas, Cameron can actually write and direct, so I'll let highfalutin considerations like that slide. Suffice to say that like a wide-eyed girl in a meadow anticipating the appearance of her naked beau, I will be waiting with bated breath for December 18, when Avatar pops up in our collective Christmas movie stocking.

Off the Beaten Track...or Just Off-Track?

Technically speaking, "independent movies" were first called that because the origin of their financing originated outside the studio system. But of course, if you ask any film scholar, they will proudly hark back to the '60s and refer to the films of John Cassavettes as the first examples of true independent cinema, then trace a throughline that skewers everyone from Francois Truffaut and the French New Wave, to John Sayles and Steven Soderbergh. Which means that the words "independent cinema" have now taken on a romantic connotation--now they mean anything outside the well-trodden mainstream and its ills, anything maverick, anything brave and revolutionary, anything with a "vision".

There's a reverse snobbery to the very concept of independent cinema, something that smacks of the pride a starving artist feels when he thumbs his nose at those who produce landscape paintings for living room walls, while he himself starves because he refuses to sink to the level of painting poker-playing dogs. And so a movie like Porky's will be deemed too pedestrian to be included in the canon of independent cinema, even though it was produced on the cheap by a small Canadian production company. And Miramax will be criticized for "selling out" by allowing itself to be folded into the corporate behemoth that is Disney, when it was responsible for such groundbreaking titles as Sex, Lies...and Videotape and Pulp Fiction. In many ways, the proponents of independent cinema are like brothers in a fraternity: strict about who gets to be called one of them, slightly contemptuous of those who aren't.

Here in the Philippines, independent filmmakers criticize the studios for their paucity of vision, their aversion to risk. I have to admit, when I see the trailer for the Vic Sotto-Paula Taylor comedy Love On Line--with its wealth of unfunny gags--I can't help but agree with them. The problem with many of these filmmakers, really, is that they haven't paid their dues. A filmmaker like Brillante Mendoza, no matter how polarizing his subject matter may be, can at least lay claim to the fact that he's served his time in the trenches, slaving away as production designer for years before taking his shot at directing love-'em-or-hate-'em films like Masahista, Serbis, and Kinatay. I'm more bound to give his films the time of day because he's seen the view from the inside, he knows the realities of making movies locally, and he allowed his talent to ripen with the technique and conviction that only years of experience will give you.

Nowadays, it seems that anyone with a laptop, a cellphone, and a "vision" can make a movie, which makes for an interesting phenomenon: Never before has a stringent fraternity been so open to admission. Bang out a story you feel strongly about, scrounge up some money from a favorite aunt, and--voila!--you're a director. And while I don't subscribe to the notion of "us versus them" when it comes to filmmaking, maybe for the sake of independent cinema in the Philippines, we should. Cases in point: Monty Parungao's Bayaw and Seymour Barros Sanchez's Handumanan.

Bayaw was a participant in the Network for the Promotion of Asian Cinema (NETPAC) category of this year's Cinemalaya, a satellite competition that involves independent film producers. Sorry if I sound ill-informed; even the producer I asked NETPAC about had these words for me: "I really don't know." Given that the producer I talked to put up the money for Bayaw, his mind must have still been reeling at what hath been wrought in the small CCP theatre we had just walked out of. The film is about a disgraced police officer (Paolo Rivero) who kills his wife in a fit of temper, goes on the lam with his hapless brother-in-law (Janvier Daily), proceeds to molest him when he feels the urge, hooks up with a petty thief (Andrew Miguel)...I can't even find the energy to continue with the synopsis, given how incoherent the whole thing is. All I can tell you is that, for reasons I can't completely explain (and I was watching!), the brother-in-law voluntarily incarcerates himself with the homicidal police officer because there seems to be some sort of poignant poetry to it.

Parungao, a veteran of softcore beefcake Viva home videos, has a vision (there's that word again!) of Manila that's a bit like John Carpenter's vision of Gotham in Escape from New York: claustrophobic, characterized by a lot of lighting by fire, wearing its grunginess like an ingenious badge of honor. But that's really all that I can commend of the movie. The pickpocket played by Miguel steals from the two fugitives but is strangely admitted into their confidence...with oral rape by way of a pointed gun as hazing ritual, of course. All the homosexuals in the movie are either raped or ridiculed, for no other reason than that they're supposed to serve some larger theme or be convenient gewgaws in the film's mise en scene. There's supposed to be a late-movie twist about the wife really being a bitch (either an implication that she deserved her fate or a clumsy machination to allow for said poingnant ending), but given that it comes completely out of the blue after so many mystifying plot points, you wouldn't be blamed for being beyond caring.

On the other end of the stylistic spectrum is Seymour Barros-Sanchez's Handumanan (Remembrance), which was financed in part via a grant from the National Commission on Culture and the Arts (!) for the NETPAC competition (!!). The film follows the story of three damaged souls: a lonely pocketbook romance writer named Sol Miranda (Chin Chin Gutierrez) who is being edged out of her rose-colored view of the world by an employer who feels that erotica is the wave of the future; a disillusioned government employee named Lean (Jason Abalos) who has some nebulous issues with his Chinese mother and who really wants to be a novelist; and a Brazilian model named Carlos (Brapanese model Akihiro Sato) who is trying to find his Filipino mother.


Barros-Sanchez wears his literary aspirations on his sleeve--setting the movie in the academic atmosphere of Silliman University, the Southern haven for writers and various literary types; sprinkling his dialogue with literati inside jokes; peppering his script with wordsmithed nuggets on life, love, and loss. But just because you're literary, doesn't mean you can write a script. The problem begins when he has the lives of his three characters intersect. Sol takes in Lean after she finds him shivering with fever in a tent on the beach outside her villa; then Carlos comes upon his face on the cover of a pocketbook Sol wrote, whereupon he strikes up a cyberchat friendship with her. Sol forges a connection with these two men on the flimsiest of motivations--what's supposed to be an affecting portrait of loneliness just comes across as spinsterly desperation.

Handumanan is the kind of incompetently staged movie where Sol's obligatory gay pal acts all sentimental and weepy that his friend is leaving, then cuts to an exterior shot of the NAIA, and then we discover that Sol has actually gone all the way to...Dumaguete. It is so laughably amateur that in all the scenes that show Chin Chin or Akihiro typing on their laptops, the preprogrammed words appearing on the screen appear out of sync with the actors' slower typing fingers. And the acting is a case of Goldilocks faced with three choices of porridge: Chin Chin (too overheated), Akihiro (too underdone), and Jason (just right...although in a movie like this, that's not saying much). To Akihiro's credit, you can tell his heart is in the right place...as well as most of his other body parts. (The hunk appears barechested in his first three scenes.)

I was planning to catch the new Jay Altarejos film Big Boy, Little Boy...I was ready to give independent cinema another try, I really was! The last film I saw of Jay Altarejos' was the borderline-passable Ang Lihim ni Antonio, which at least portrayed some of the recognizable awkwardness of growing up gay (even if it insisted on faux-profound voice-overs in which the pubescent protagonist contemplated his name and how it defined his place in the world...because all gay teenagers are burgeoning philosophers). But one look at the poster and its credit line "A Film by Altarejos"--just as Talk to Her is "A Film by Almodovar"--and I was suddenly stricken by a migraine.

Remember what I said in the beginning about paying your dues? If these filmmakes had actually done that, maybe they would have subjected their characters to recognizable motivations, strapped their plots on the crucible of considered structure...maybe they would have realized that if they followed the discipline of narrative logic, then their movies wouldn't be such an excruciating viewing exercise. But really, this kind of insight and conscientiousness you can only gain from years of experience. Based on my experience of writing for film and TV, the lack of narrative discipline in the mainstream is usually a matter of laziness or a scarcity of faith in the mass audience. For local independent cinema--which often touts itself as the great hope of Filipino film--there is no excuse.

Bro Cinema

Apparently, sometime between the Lethal Weapon movies bowing on screens in the '80s and Paul Rudd looking for a best man in the recent comedy I Love You, Man, the Golden Age of Bro Cinema happened. As GQ Magazine so helpfully points out, the term "bro" "originally evolved from the Middle English ("I knowe ynogh, on even and a-browe"--G. CHAUCER); evolved during the '60s as "brother," used by African-Americans to indicate a shared history of struggle. Now used a lot by white guys to indicate a shared history of that time you puked at White Castle."

This week, two specimens of testosterone-driven cinema debut on local screens. One shows manly men piloting sleek aircraft and blowing things up. The other involves three best men looking for a lost friend in the wilds of Las Vegas a day before said friend's wedding. Two likely entries in the emerging subgenre of Bro Cinema. But really, only one of them is a Bro Movie.

Let's start with the one that isn't: G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra. Remember that distant time when the toys existed as merchandising for the movie? Now, thanks to Hasbro (a perfectly named corporation for the Golden Age of the Bro, if there ever was one), it's the other way around. If the other Hasbro movie of the season is any indication, then G.I. Joe is everything you'd expect it to be: just as loud, just as emptily bombastic, just as devoid of "acting" as Transformers 2: Revenge of the Fallen.


What makes G.I. Joe marginally better than that other movie about robots that can hide themselves as monster trucks is what it is by default: an exposition movie. In laying out its plot about an evil corporate magnate named McCullen(Christopher Eccleston, emoting enough for a whole village of loud, abrasive Scotsmen) who intends to enslave the world via nanotechnology--that branch of theoretical physics which postulates that subatomic particles can be manipulated into doing anything from killing cancer cells to devouring toxic waste--the filmmakers clumsily toggle from the present to the past in order to explain their characters' motivations. Which is how you come to know that the Joes' newest recruit Duke (Channing Tatum), has a past with the requisite slinky villainess, the Baroness (the generically beautiful Sienna Miller who, in brunette coloring, looks like a straight-haired Evangeline Lilly); or that the silent operative Snake Eyes (masked and wordless throughout, so I didn't even bother looking him up in the credits) has a shared childhood with the requisite martial-arts villain Storm Shadow (Byung-hun Lee, who is inexplicably always dressed in white despite his crepuscular name).

So anyway, through his terribly deformed scientific genius The Doctor (whose actor I won't reveal as it will spoil an already spoiled movie), McCullen has created the first successful nanotech weapon and sold it to the US military. But the truth is, he only needed the sale to fund his research and development, and so he's commissioned The Baroness, Storm Shadow, and their ilk to steal the weapon back from the military. And it is up to G.I. Joe, the elite branch of the armed forces with super-advanced fighting skills and weaponry of their own, to stop this evil plan from coming to fruition.

If you can overlook the glaring holes in the plot, (According to theoretical physics, nanotechnology is self-replicating, so why would McMullen need to steal back something that is theoretically limitless? For an elite fighting force, G.I. Joe's headquarters are ridiculously easy to infiltrate. And maybe you can explain this away via political correctness, but it's a little jarring to have an outfit named G.I. Joe be populated by British and French-Moroccan operatives.) then sit back and enjoy the mind-numbing ride. But make no mistake: this is no bro movie. Yes, there are neat explosions, women in tight catsuits, and that high-five brand of machismo, but G.I. Joe is too sleek and too corporate an entertainment to be called a Bro Movie. At its heart, the Bro Movement is defined by that love a guy feels for another guy who will always have his back--the less succinct, sappier definition of "Bros before 'hos." At its heart...well, I'm not sure G.I. Joe: The Rise of Cobra even has a heart. Calling G.I. Joe a Bro Movie would be like calling Top Gun a Bro Movie, only that would be an insult to Top Gun.

Now, The Hangover...ah, where to begin? Do I begin with that scene where Justin Bartha, playing Doug, the groom about to embark on his last night of debauchery in Las Vegas before getting hitched, gets hugged by his nutzoid-bordering-on-insane brother-in-law Alan (Zach Galifianakis), who is wearing only a tee shirt and a jockstrap? Or how about that scene where The Office's Ed Helms, playing Stu, a desperately buttoned-down dentist who is in desperate need of rescue from his slave-driving lady (Rachel Harris), is fetched by his good-looking friend Phil (Bradley Cooper) with a hale and hearty "Paging Doctor Faggot!" Or how about the nifty character twist that has Phil, the most eager to be debauched and the most open to highjinks, be not just a high school teacher...but also the only one among this crew of four friends to be happily married?



The Hangover is directed by Todd Phillips, the director and sometime-screenwriter who also helmed Road Trip and Old School, which makes him the putative Martin Scorsese of Bro Cinema. Both the director and his characters look upon this trip--in fact, the very concept of Las Vegas--as the Promised Land of Debauchery. At their essences, a road trip to Las Vegas and a pilgrimage to Lourdes are the same: You've heard of their reputations, you go expecting something to happen, and then upon arriving at the fabled land, you realize that everything has been so organized and touristy that the promise of debauchery or miracles--something raw and authentic--has been bleached out of the place.

Of course, the twist in The Hangover is that something does, indeed, happen: After settling in at their beyond-their-means suite in Caesar's Palace, the band of four toast each other at the roof...and then they wake up the next morning with a tiger in the bathroom, a baby in the cabinet, Stu missing his right incisor, and Doug the groom just...missing. The whole movie is structured in revelatory Oh my God, I did that?! detective fashion, and while I can't spoil what is a truly hilarious, laugh-a-minute movie, all I will say is that the unearthed memories involve a stripper (Heather Graham), an Asian gangster (Ken Jeong, who played a grumpy doctor in the Judd Apatow comedy Knocked Up), and a debate over why the date-rape drug Roofies are called Roofies and not Floories (because that's where you end up after taking them).

The Hangover is a Bro Movie not just because the lowest of the low in masculine behavior--that part of a guy who refuses to go gently into the good night of adulthood--serves to undermine everything that is so organized and touristy about the Vegas experience, but because the central mystery--Where is Doug?--is treated with a touching urgency. Not since Saving Private Ryan has the story of a missing comrade been laid out more engrossingly.

I have to admit, the plot necessity of bringing together disparate "types" is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, I understand that opposing character types make for more interesting interactions--characters who are too similar to each other are redundant, and when they talk, they have "conversations" not "dialogue". On the other, you wonder how the Dweeb (Stu), the Nut (Alan), and the Jock (Phil) could have become friends in real life. Among this band of Bros, it is Ed Helms who rises above the rest, reacting to every improbable twist the plot throws at him with an accessible mix of horror and giddy liberation. But really, even the clunky parts work in The Hangover, which, at its heart, is an unapologetic, chest-bumping, warm-Budweiser-guzzling ode to the "Bros before 'hos" philosophy.

Up, Up and Away

Is it possible that living, breathing actors could become obsolete? If you spent the last week watching Public Enemies and Up like I did, you would see why this is becoming a distinct possibility.

Not that Johnny Depp and Christian Bale act with all the vitality of cardboard, mind you. In fact, they make for a truly intriguing pair: Depp, one of the most unpredictable, iconoclastic actors of this generation; Bale, one of its most intense and volatile. I'm just not sure if this Michael Mann biopic--about the exploits of Depression-era bank robber John Dillinger and the FBI agent who pursued and eventually shot him outside a moviehouse in Chicago--was the best vehicle to showcase their strengths.

Public Enemies opens with trademark Mann machismo. Shooting in HD with frequent collaborator Dante Spinotti, Mann shows Dillinger orchestrate a clever jail breakout so he can repopulate his bank-robbing gang. The colors are cool and bleached, the panorama is expansive (suggesting both freedom and the lack of places to hide), and the action is staged with macho melodrama...and in a way, the film approaches its subject matter in much the same way: Full of bluster and coolness, but never really getting into the skin of its notorious subject.

Soon, Dillinger is romancing Billie Frechette (Marion Cotillard, laboring in newly learned English for very little acting payoff), the half-Native American, half-French coat-check girl who suspiciously tells Dillinger: "I don't know anything about you." Dillinger responds that his father beat him up, that he likes movies, cool clothes, fast cars, whisky, and her. And that's as much character exposition we're going to get about Dillinger. Oh, and that he has a Prince Albert piercing in his you-know-where. I never thought it was possible to have too little character illumination also be too much information, but there you have it.

On the other side of the law, J. Edgar Hoover (played with beady-eyed brilliance by Billy Crudup) is busy jockeying for more power for his bureau of detectives, and he thinks his golden boy Melvin Purvis, fresh off his sensational arrest/killing of Pretty Boy Floyd (Channing Tatum), is just the guy to do it. He assigns Purvis to the Chicago field office and tasks him with taking down Public Enemy # 1 Dillinger. But Purvis has a problem: His unwavering sense of ethics is often at odds with his boss' sense of politics and showmanship.

In the end, Depp and Bale aren't playing living, breathing characters so much as Symbols: According to the screenplay by Mann, Ronan Bennett, and Ann Biderman, Dillinger was the last of the honorable rogues--the kind who cared about public opinion enough to return the money of the customers whose banks he robbed, and looked upon such rackets as kidnap-for-ransom with disdain; and Purvis was the last of the honorable G-Men--the kind who cared not an iota about public opinion, budgets, or manpower allocations, only about getting the job done right. They're the remnants of a bygone, glamorous era--an era where big-time scores didn't involve conning retirees out of their pensions in pyramid schemes and crusading lawmen didn't try to impeach Presidents over their adulterous dalliances for media exposure. In their own ways, Dillinger and Purvis were Good Men, if not three-dimensional men.

3-D as moviemaking technology is not necessary in any Pixar movie, because the 3-D unfailing exists in its screenplays. That Up makes use of 3-D technology is just a fitting, metaphorical bonus--Pixar's 10th film is a touching, inventive, uplifting story about a crotchety old man, an enthusiastic boy scout, and a house that sails away on balloons. And it made me tear up in the first ten minutes...a new record for my encounters with Pixar's movies!

Up follows the life of Carl Fredricksen (voiced by Ed Asner with an authority he displayed as Lou Grant), whose block of a head and square glasses already communicate to us that he isn't an adventurer in the conventional sense of the word. The adventurer is his wife Ellie, whom he first meets as a boy walking past a dilapidated house that she has sequestered as her own adventurers' headquarters. The film then lays out their love story--their happiness, their heartbreak, their shared dream of someday traveling to a fabled waterfall in South America--with such deftness and economy of narration, it could be the subject of much dissection by filmmaking classes for years to come...if it weren't also such an emotional, engrossing ode to all that makes us wonderfully, beautifully human. (Just remembering that montage now is choking me up.)

But Up is just beginning. In the twilight of his years, Carl finds himself hemmed in by the soulless developments rising up around his quaint, little home and badgered by the energetic boy scout Russell (expressive newcomer Jordan Nagai), who is only missing a badge for assisting the elderly to become a full-fledged Wilderness Scout. And then something terrible happens: An unintentional assault threatens to uproot Carl from his life. And so he does what any sane balloon salesman does: He attaches his house--a nod to how the elderly cannot travel anywhere without a memento from home--to a thousand brightly colored balloons, and finally makes true on his lifelong promise to seek out that fabled waterfall.

With Russell as an accidental stowaway, Carl touches down in South America, and this is where the screenplay goes into full inventive, unpredictable mode. Through the alcehmy of Pete Docter (Monsters, Inc.) and Bob Peterson's script, Up manages to weave an exotic bird, a gang of talking dogs (with the good-hearted nerd of the pack, Dug, voiced by co-screenwriter and co-director Peterson), and an obsessed explorer (Christopher Plummer) into a story brimming with laugh-out-loud comedy, breathtaking scenery, and a sincere, unselfconscious joy that tells us, Hey, the biggest adventures happen in your own life...with the people you love! And through it all, the creators never lose sight of their biggest strength: their unerring ability to paint characters with understandable motives, contradictory impulses, recognizable emotion.

In a press conference after Up's screening as the opening film at Cannes this past May, Pixar creative bigwig John Lasseter characterized 3-D as a "fun toy," but that he had no use for it as a marketing gimmick: "3-D should supply depth that furthers the emotion of the scene." It's so simple a moviemaking tenet, so applicable to everything that raises movies to beloved classics, you wonder why Hollywood doesn't always get things right. I say John Lasseter and co. have accomplished their mission with Up. Can't wait for Toy Story 3.

Everything Old is New Again

Film snobs and cinema eggheads say "formula" as though it were a dirty word. For the record, it's not. As Julia Roberts squirmily explained to Cameron Diaz, our mouths may water for créme brulée, but there are times when Jell-O really hits the spot. To bludgeon all the wit out of the metaphor by taking it to its extreme, there is nothing quite so disappointing as créme brulée that is badly done (which, in my opinion, is the problem with most local "indie" films...but more on that in a future entry.) Having said that, the question then becomes: What flavor would you like your Jell-O to be?

Perhaps you'd like it to be vanilla with a subtle hint of something-something. Like The Proposal, which casts Sandra Bullock as Margaret, a high-powered Manhattan book editor who will get deported back to Canada on an expired visa unless she pulls off a green-card wedding to put-upon assistant Andrew (Ryan Reynolds), who tolerates Margaret's abuse as standard industry fraternity-hazing but finagles a possible promotion out of the set-up. But first, they must survive a weekend visit back to Andrew's home state of Alaska for his grandmother's (Betty White) 80th birthday. Amusing complications, as to be expected, ensue.

The romantic comedy conceit of "man and woman who hate each other before they realize they love each other" goes back beyond Jane Austen, all the way back to Shakespeare, and it is used with square pride in The Proposal. Proving that Hollywood relegates its middle-aged actresses at its own peril, Sandra Bullock shows that she's polished and burnished her comic chops to a sharp, pearly sleekness, so that even when you know her character is headed for the inevitable softening/humbling that you know is due, her intelligence never makes it seem like a diminishment of her character. The real pleasures here are Ryan Reynolds, whose dry sense of timing is given more screen time here than it did in Wolverine (Was I the only one who was sorely disappointed that they didn't give Deadpool a mouth so Ryan could spout some more smart-aleck putdowns?), and Betty White as the hot grandma, who steals every scene she's in by masking her shrewd worldliness with her trademark Rose Nyland naiveté.

Only one problem: the lopsided nature of Peter Chiarelli's script. Maybe it's because Sandra Bullock is the producer, but I got the sense that her character's journey is more mapped out than Ryan Reynolds'. Sure, sure, we get a subplot about Andrew butting heads with his entrepreneur father (Craig T. Nelson) because the son has no interest in inheriting the family business...but see, that really has nothing to do with why he should suddenly realize that he's in love with his termagant of a boss. Meanwhile, on Sandra's part, we get a retread of her "I never had a family growing up so I never learned how to love" shtick from While You Were Sleeping (although lovelorn Lucy from that movie was certainly more pleasant than multitasking Margaret), and a realization that wielding your power over people like a blunt axe isn't really all that fun.

And so what should have been a shiveringly pleasurable reunion is rendered a bit unconvincing. On a scale of 1 to 10 with 10 being a truly satisfying Sandra Bullock rom-com romp, The Proposal ranks somewhere much higher than Forces of Nature (the 1999 torture device in which Sandra does edgy with liberal doses of eyeliner as she escorts Ben Affleck through natural calamites and a misguided striptease so he can marry Maura Tierney anyway) and two notches below Two Weeks' Notice (the 2000 soufflé that had Sandra Bullock sparring with Hugh Grant on equal footing when it came to smarts, sexiness, and ability to do a chuckle-worthy pratfall). In other words, I'm still waiting for the romantic comedy that will make full use of Sandra's middle-aged intelligence and womanliness. (Judging by its trailer, I'm not sure her next outing with Bradley Cooper, All About Steve, is it.)

Or perhaps you'd like your Jell-O to be darkest blueberry with the piquat zing of chili. That's the flavor you'll get from Jaume Collet-Serra's Orphan, which somehow takes the tried-and-tested horror trope of the "evil child" and squeezes something new out of it. Vera Farmiga (The Departed) and Peter Sarsgaard (The Skeleton Key, Kinsey) play a comfortable, middle-class couple who adopt a preternaturally gifted and "mature for her age" orphan named Esther (Isabelle Fuhrman) so they can get over the tragedy of a recent miscarriage. It's not long before Esther is smashing a pigeon's head in with a rock and pushing a bratty classmate out of a treehouse...and she's only getting started.

Collet-Serra, whose most memorable directing job in Hollywood has been fulfilling audiences' death fantasies for Paris Hilton in the 2005 reboot of House of Wax, has a directorial style that can be called purple: If you're looking for Damien Thorn-subtlety, it's safe to say that Orphan is no The Omen. Esther dresses like an antique doll, and speaks in a heavy Russian accent that should send jitters up even the most clueless parent's spine. But the way Collet-Serra repeatedly plays on our jaded perception of standard horror movie devices--the medicine cabinet mirror trick, the subjective camera as it approaches a character from behind, the welling music--and then subverts it, leavens the proceedings with much needed doses of humor. In this respect, he is more subtle than Sam Raimi--hey, at least Collet-Serra didn't send anvils crashing down on his villain's head!

But the real ingredient to a sumptuous piece of cinematic Jell-O? Character, character, character. The main conflict in Orphan is obviously between the mother-warrior and the cunning interloper. Vera Farmiga lends an empathetic neurosis to her grieving, borderline-alcoholic mother, just to make Isabelle Fuhrman's evil Esther appear all that much bigger and make the showdown more evenly matched. And Isabelle Fuhrman...lordy! Where on earth did they find this 12-year-old actress--a back issue of Mini-Psychotics Weekly? (I sound catty, but I say this as a compliment.) My hats off to the casting directors who found this chilling, wise-beyond-her-years actress (who I hope will not be typecast into playing creepy misfits for the rest of her career).

And when the tagline says "You'll never guess Esther's secret," I am happy to report that you really won't...even if the cynical cinephile in you will insist that you saw the twist coming from a mile away. That dirty-trick-of-a-twist is simply whipped cream on top of a sick, satisfying slab of cinematic jelly.