Justifying my shitty taste

When blogger Mike Lippert of You Talking to Me? announced an interactive event on his blog this week called "Justify Your Shitty Taste," I knew I was in. One of my favorite things as a film lover is to defend movies I think people got wrong.

A film immediately jumped to mind: Repo! The Genetic Opera. Despite having some passionate cult fans, the film was generally lambasted, in part I'm sure because it features Paris Hilton. But my wife and I truly liked it -- a lot, actually -- and I thought it made a great candidate for Mike's project.

But then I decided I should really watch it again in preparation for writing the piece. As luck would have it, I own the movie on BluRay -- a friend gave it to me as what he thought was a joke. But the way my week's shaking out, I wouldn't have an opportunity to watch it until Saturday night, then write the post hurriedly on Sunday morning. Chances are Mike would like to be posting his results by then.

Then I remembered: I did a whole series on my blog last summer called Double Jeopardy, in which I re-watched films that I'd liked, but most other people didn't, to see if I still felt the same about them upon second viewing. I figured, Mike's probably not going to cry in his beer if the shitty tastes I choose to justify were first written on a previous occasion.

I had about ten movies to choose from in my series, but I chose Ivan Reitman's Fathers' Day because it was about the most universally reviled on the list. I figure, if I'm going to participate in Mike's project, I want to go all in.

So without any further blah blah blah, my first-ever re-post on The Audient. Enjoy. Or don't. It's up to you, really.

"It's no Ishtar"

I've never seen the infamous flop Ishtar, but I have a very specific memory of reading a review when it first came out, back in 1987. I was 13 years old and probably just getting into reading film reviews, so this one stuck with me, as such formative experiences often do. I can't remember if it was the Boston Globe critic or someone like Roger Ebert, but it was a two-star capsule review which read, and I may be paraphrasing slightly:

"One star for Dustin Hoffman. One star for Warren Beatty. No stars for anything else."

So when I heard Ivan Reitman's Fathers' Day, which came out a decade later, described as Robin Williams' and Billy Crystal's Ishtar, I was as wary as everyone else who steered clear on the basis of that dour prognosis.

But when I actually did see it, sometime in probably 2001 or 2002, in order to provide the review for the website that employs me, I thought it wasn't half bad. In fact, better than that. I thought it was good.

In the years since then, I've been operating on the assumption that I must have been crazy. Like Bedazzled, which I wrote about in my first Double Jeopardy post, I've owned this movie for over five years, but had yet to re-watch it until yesterday. And like Bedazzled, I didn't actively seek out this movie as part of my collection. In fact, I came into possession of it at a theme party at a friend's house. Her idea was that you brought over crap that you wanted to get rid of, put it on a table, and walked away with someone else's unwanted crap. I can't remember what I purged at this party, but I came home with Fathers' Day. I'd liked it, after all. But I haven't watched it again, and this was so long ago, now, that I'm not even friends with that woman anymore -- haven't been for three or four years.

Well, I'm not crazy. And now I think I probably ought to go watch Ishtar, because if it's anything like this, Ishtar is probably not half bad, either.

The plot basically revolves around a 16-year-old boy who goes missing for two weeks after running away from his heartbroken parents (Nastassja Kinski and Bruce Greenwood). Desperate, Kinski's character visits two of her former lovers, Jack Lawrence (Crystal) and Dale Putley (Williams), who both bedded the woman right around the time her son was conceived. Either could be the father, and she uses this possibility to separately enlist their help in finding young Scott. (In retrospect, it seems like a precursor to Mamma Mia!, as there's actually a third possibility for the boy's male parentage -- Greenwood, who has thought he was the actual father the boy's whole life, and is involved in his own separate search for the boy.) As might be expected, Jack and Dale cross paths and discover each has been told he's the father of the boy. Hijinx ensue.

It's the nature of those hijinx that probably left some viewers and critics displeased. Williams is skittish and eccentric, and when we meet him, he actually has a gun barrel in his mouth, ready to off himself -- in a scene that's played for laughs. Crystal is, well, Crystal -- he's businesslike and sarcastic. Both could do these roles in their sleep, I'm sure, and they're meant to be a zany odd couple.

Well, it works. I'm not a huge Williams fan, and Dale Putley is normally the kind of role in which I like him least. But for some reason, I found him lovable and actually sort of believable here. I like the dynamic that builds up between he and Crystal, whom I've always enjoyed on screen. (And why did he quit acting, anyway?) It's not just a buddy comedy-type situation -- it's almost a bickering lovers-type situation, since Jack so clearly wears the pants in the relationship, and Dale plays the sensitive role that's traditionally ascribed to a woman. As they say in the movie, they really do make a good team in seeking out the wayward boy, and their attempts to navigate the rock 'n roll underground (Scott is following the band Sugar Ray, before they became sellouts) contain some funny fish-out-of-water stuff. (And if you know Sugar Ray only from that song "Fly" that was ubiquitous back in the late 1990s, see this movie -- it reminds you that they were once inaccessible punks, musically speaking.)

And it shouldn't be a huge surprise to us that it works. After all, the film is directed by the reliable Ivan Reitman, he of Ghostbusters and Dave fame. And it was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who also wrote Splash, City Slickers, A League of Their Own and Parenthood. Throw in producer Joel Silver, and you've got a dream team working on this film.

So why didn't people like it? Eh, who knows. Dale and Jack are likable, Scott gets swept up in a relatable predicament with his feelings for a girl (even if it involves a sort-of unrelatable theft from drug dealers), and even the notably serious actor Bruce Greenwood moonlights successfully into comedy, notably a scene where he gets pushed down a hill in a port-o-potty. If that just sounds silly, listen to Greenwood's hilarious line readings while he's trapped inside the overturned john: "Oh, it's horrible! Get me out of here!" Playing against type in the other direction is Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Jack's wife -- she's probably the most straight-faced person in the whole movie, and apparently, it didn't go over well, as she was nominated for a Razzie as worst supporting actress.

A couple other things to look for: an uncredited cameo by Mel Gibson as a guy with a face full of piercings, and the director's son, Jason, a future director himself, as "wrong kid in alley."

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Fathers' Day: It's not going to revolutionize the comedy world, but this is a nice little movie that didn't deserve to be bashed like it was. Fans of Williams and Crystal in particular should give it a shot. These two comedy icons give the fans what they came for, and isn't that one of the primary reasons people make movies?

Tuesday features are on baby break!

Programming note!

Even in the face of life events like having a newborn, I still consider my commitment to you sacred. So I thought I'd formally let you know that I'm taking a break from my Tuesday features for awhile, to welcome my son into the world, and all the lack of free time that implies.

Back in April, I began doing Second Chances, a feature where I reexamined movies that I hadn't liked as well as most people. That ran for 10 weeks. In June, I took a summer break from that in order to do Double Jeopardy, which was just the opposite -- I wanted to see if I'd liked certain movies too much. That also ran for 10 weeks, and then last Wednesday, my son was born. Perfect timing in terms of symmetry with the first series.

At one point I talked about returning Second Chances in the fall, but I think I'm going to give it a break until 2011. I'll have enough to keep up with, without having to figure out what movie I'm going to re-watch each week, and how to budget my available rentals in order to get those movies to me. Besides, all we can reliably pay attention to right now seems to be undemanding comedies.

I'll continue to write my Decades series, in which I watch three movies from a particular decade (1920s-1970s) each month. Expect the next in that series tomorrow.

Thank you. You may now return to your regularly scheduled program.

Life as a montage

This is the tenth in my Double Jeopardy series, in which I'm revisiting films that got high grades from me, but not from most other people. I want to see who's right and who's wrong. The series runs on Tuesdays.

I have so many entry points for discussing Rob Reiner's The Story of Us that I don't really know where to begin. So, apologies in advance if this becomes a bit disorganized.

Let's start by addressing something obvious, for those of you who read my sidebar features closely. That's not a formatting error you see there -- The Story of Us is, in fact, the last two movies I've most recently revisited. I watched it Sunday afternoon by myself while my wife was taking a nap, and then when she awoke -- perfectly timed to the end credits -- I felt really disappointed that I hadn't made a stronger case to have her watch it with me. So I told her I would watch it again, if she was interested. She was, so we did, about four hours later. She probably figured, if I'm willing to see a movie twice in one day, it's probably worth her seeing it once.

That should take away some of the suspense about whether I still like Reiner's film, a decade after I first saw it. Or was it more like nine years after I second saw it? Only after finishing what turned out to be my third viewing did I realize I had inadvertently broken the rules of my own Double Jeopardy series. This series was supposed to be comprised of films I've seen only once before, but I had forgotten until Sunday afternoon that I had already submitted The Story of Us to a form of double jeopardy, all the way back in 2001. (Which made this a triple jeopardy, and the eventual fourth viewing the first time the movie was being watched purely for pleasure since my first viewing.) The movie came out in 1999, and I probably caught it on video in 2000. I really liked it, but I also knew I was in the minority. So when I got the chance to review The Story of Us in 2001, I made myself watch it again, just to see if I might have been overcome by a temporary inability to judge the quality of films.

Nope. Still liked it. But then I did something I now very much regret -- I wrote a review that was positive, but hedged its bets by being lukewarm and out-and-out critical in a couple spots as well. See, the site I write for had given the film a star rating before anyone wrote a review -- a common practice based on the general critical consensus about a film. That star rating was two out of five. It's always acceptable to diverge from the star rating -- especially if you are writing something that's more positive, since the reviews are syndicated on sites that sell DVDs. But at that time, I was fairly new at this, and thought that I had to make my positive review reflect the critical consensus evident in those two stars. So instead of writing the 3.5-star review I wanted to write, I wrote one that was probably closer to 2.5 stars.

If I wrote a review of The Story of Us today, I might actually give it four stars. And I almost wish I could take back that re-ranking of the movie I did on Flickchart, which I wrote about here. (If you are keeping track, this is my third entry point to discussing the film.) To sum up what I wrote ten days ago, I temporarily lost control of a sequence of duels on Flickchart, and the eventual end result was that The Story of Us jumped all the way up to my 25th favorite film of all time. Wanting to correct the error, I removed it from my seen movies and started re-ranking it from scratch. Needless to say, #25 is still too high for it, but after my two screenings on Sunday, I feel like I would be very comfortable having it in my top several hundred movies.

So why do I like this movie so much more than anyone else? Well, I'll tell you.

The movie was referred to sarcastically at the time as When Harry Broke Up With Sally. It stars Bruce Willis and Michelle Pfeiffer as a couple married for 15 years, who are taking advantage of having their son and daughter away at camp for the summer, to try out a separation that may ultimately lead to divorce. The movie begins a few days before the kids leave for camp, and ends when they return. In between, Ben and Katie Jordan do their best to live their lives apart, with the inevitable moments together -- some of which are positive, some of which remind them why they're no longer suited to be together. The movie progresses along during their present tense of that summer, but it also flashes back to the memories they're cataloguing of 15 years of marriage. These memories are triggered by conversations they have with their friends (a well-cast group of Reiner, Rita Wilson, Paul Reiser and Julie Hagerty), as well as mundane things that happen in everyday life.

And here's where the movie impresses me immensely on a technical level. I am a person who applauds when someone really "commits" -- when an artist or a performer gives it his/her all, beyond the call of duty, to produce the desired artistic outcome. And the filmmaking team behind The Story of Us really commit to showing us Ben and Katie's marriage. I wish I had gone back and counted, but to give us as many snippets of their life together as possible, the costume and makeup departments give Willis and Pfeiffer dozens of different hairstyles and wardrobes, and Reiner shoots them in dozens of different locations (including an on-location shoot in Venice, Italy -- something he notably did not do when he hopped continents on green screens for The Bucket List). What I find so impressive about this is that these hairstyles and wardrobes do not usually appear in entire scenes -- they are often quick flashes in montages, seen by the viewer for only a second or two. Most films cannot afford such complicated setups for such little overt narrative payoff. Like, a whole wedding between Ben and Katie, in which Reiner (as the best man) somehow really looks 20 years younger, just for five seconds of screen time? The budgetary math doesn't add up.

Which is why I'm trying to give this film the ink it deserves now, that it never got then. I appreciate every hair on Pfeiffer's head that you crimped with a crimping iron, every time you applied that long-haired toupee on the bald Willis. And I'm sorry more people didn't. The most affecting montage comes near the climax of the movie, with Mason Williams' "Classical Gas" playing as you see each child born, each child's pet die, each time Ben or Katie says I love you, each time Ben or Katie says I hate you. And everything else in between.

What's great also is how the memories are balanced within the overall plot. I'd almost call this a structurally perfect script. It steps away from the present tense for the perfect amount of time, every time, and supplies the memories we need at just the right moment to contextualize future events in the plot. It's downright masterful -- special props to Jessie Nelson and Alan Zweibel, who share the screenwriting credit.

And speaking of the writing ... one of the most common misconceptions about this film, I assume, is that it's depressing. Yes, there's a lot of squabbling, and yes, it's about a couple considering divorce. But what I was really amazed at was the number of times I laughed at the clever writing. The supporting characters get a lot of the funniest lines, and thank God they're there. Wilson is in fine form, Reiner seems comfortable and affable, and Reiser is wickedly funny. Reiner knows that this movie can't be glum, or else it won't fit into the marketing category of a romantic comedy. The Story of Us gives romantic comedies a good name by being about something a lot more than most of them are about.

Remember when I said things might get disorganized here? That's what happens when you are writing about something you feel really passionate about.

And I think there's an additional reason I felt so passionate about this film this time around. Unlike the first two times I saw it, I am now married with a partner I love, on the precipice of having children. (Literally -- the baby will probably come next week.) What I appreciated in the abstract before was something that I can now appreciate more concretely -- that marriage is a marathon with peaks and valleys, times when you will love the other person and times when you (only temporarily, you hope) will hate them. I am fortunate to say that I've spent 2.5 years of marriage in 95% bliss. But we haven't nearly gotten to the hard part, and movies like The Story of Us make you appreciate what can happen to make otherwise blissful marriages hard. The movie expertly documents Ben and Katie as they grow from feckless twentysomethings to burdened fortysomethings, yet their character traits continue on a throughline that never makes you doubt that these are the same people, just aged 15 years. Willis and Pfeiffer deserve incredible credit for this in terms of their acting -- Pfeiffer has an amazing monologue near the end of this movie that's just heartbreaking -- but it's the whole experience that's been created for us that really makes this movie the complete package. We know the performances are strong, but what these characters are saying is what makes them sing -- topics that are unobtrusively and humorously discussed are as diverse as mortality, fidelity, the influence of in-laws on a marriage, the tension between the need to be responsible and the need to have fun, and whether an ass is really an ass, or just the fatty tops of your legs.

The Story of Us could be the story of anybody, and it's incredibly enriching, whether you're a parent, a child, a husband, a wife, or none of the above. You'll laugh and you might cry ... I don't mind tell you I did.

During both of Sunday's viewings.

And that's really saying something.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, The Story of Us: An unjustly panned film that just gets more observant and more nuanced the older you get and the more life experiences you have.

Fast and loose with the quickie divorces

This is the latest in my Double Jeopardy series, in which I reconsider movies that I may have supported too strongly on my first viewing. This is their "second trial" of sorts. The series runs on Tuesdays.

A couple weeks ago, I hoped to spark a debate by singing the praises of what's widely considered the worst movie (The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou) by a very popular director (Wes Anderson). Having failed in that regard, I'm going to try the same approach again with Intolerable Cruelty and the Coen brothers -- although this time, my supportive adjectives are far more muted.

But I didn't know that before watching it again last Friday night. Then again, that's exactly why I'm doing this exercise.

When I first watched Intolerable Cruelty, I didn't get what all the negative fuss was about. Yeah, a couple of the courtroom scenes were a little broad, with defendants choking witnesses and judges saying "I'm going to allow it." But some of our favorite Coen films have been filled with such quirky broadness. To name one example I loved, Raising Arizona; to name another example I didn't love but liked okay, O Brother Where Art Thou?

What I saw in Intolerable Cruelty was the modernization of a classic screwball comedy, starring two of the most beautiful people in Hollywood -- timeless movie stars, as such a movie would have starred back in the 1930s and 1940s. The best screwball comedies -- your Bringing Up Babys, your Adam's Ribs -- involved a great battle between the sexes, and you certainly have one here between elegant gold digger Marilyn Rexroth (Catherine Zeta-Jones) and debonair divorce attorney Miles Massey (George Clooney). (I now see Adam's Rib is classified as a "sophisticated comedy" rather than a screwball comedy on the website I write for, but its battle-of-the-sexes courtroom themes make it a relevant film to discuss here, so "I'm going to allow it.")

And all the quirky Coen touches are there. In one great example of this, you see Clooney's brilliantly white teeth two different times -- at a dentist's office, exposed by implements that have drawn back his lips, and shining through the windshield of his car -- before you ever see the rest of his face. It's a great introduction to a character who obsesses over manipulating appearances (and juries) for the benefit of his clients, and by extension, himself. The film also has a really funny opening scene in which Donovan Donnelly (Geoffrey Rush) walks in on his wife having sex with the pool guy, even though they don't have a pool. It's got that delightful Coen zip, and features both a handgun and a daytime emmy award used as weapons, with the latter's pointy tip getting stabbed in Donovan's buttock.

(Donovan Donnelly is also the name my friends gave their son who was born two weeks ago -- when I heard the name, which I already considered memorably alliterative, appear in this movie, I immediately notified them via email and Facebook. Their failure to respond suggests that they didn't find this as funny/interesting as I did -- maybe they are already taking flak for the name.)

What follows is a pretty clever story that involves an escalating game of legal one-upsmanship between Marilyn and Miles -- who can bend this letter of the law to circumvent that prenuptial agreement, and so forth. On the most basic level, it's a clever story with clever players moving their chess pieces, thinking several moves ahead and surprising us with their ability to manipulate each other. This is what I took from the movie the first time.

The second time, I decided that the delectable details of the story were convenient from a narrative perspective but extremely suspect from a legal perspective. When you break it down to its basics, the world of Intolerable Cruelty is one in which the primary factor in divorce settlements is how cleverly one party tricked the other into marrying him/her.

It doesn't start out that way. Miles and Marilyn cross paths because Marilyn has caught (on video) her husband of five years, Rex Rexroth (Edward Hermann -- and my how the Coens love their funny names), cheating on her. She "nailed his ass," as she likes to say -- and as the private eye who videos her philandering husband (Cedric the Entertainer) repeats as he's filming. We find out it's a premeditated ploy to take half of his assets, and it certainly sounds legitimately earned in terms of appearances -- Marilyn invested five years in the marriage just for this payday.

But then the movie shifts gears in the interest of having its plot points play out (mostly) in the present tense. See, you lose momentum in a film if you have to have everything occur at five-year intervals.

(Spoilers ahead, for the rest of the piece!)

So before the ink is even dry on her first divorce -- which Miles spoils for her through good legal detective work -- she's introducing Miles to a Texas oil tycoon she's going to marry, Howard Doyle (Billy Bob Thornton), and insisting on a prenuptial agreement as a way of showing him how much she's marrying for love. This is, of course, a ploy designed to make Doyle think it's his own idea to tear up the prenup. Barely a week later, it seems, their own wedding is getting thrown, followed promptly by Marilyn filing for another divorce.

This turns out not to be exactly what it seems, either, but the problematic idea here is that Marilyn only needs Howard to sign on the dotted line, then she immediately has him over a barrel. Clearly, if a woman married a Texas oil tycoon, then filed for divorce only a couple months later, nearly any jury out there would recognize this as a transparent case of gold digging, and would not find in her favor. Yet the movie treats these realistic obstacles as though they did not exist. Merely entering into the contract of marriage means she can exit it at her leisure, with as much of her ex-husband's assets as she pleases.

We later find out that Billy Bob's character was just a soap opera actor hired to play an oil tycoon, and that Marilyn was never actually married to him. (Or if so, it was just a business relationship and was immediately annulled.) It turns out the entire wedding was a sham to make Miles think that Marilyn has become rich -- so when Miles, who has fallen for Marilyn, gets the idea to marry her, it's again she who is being magnanimous when she tears up the prenup. See, she's the richer party -- or so he thinks. But since she actually isn't rich, she can take half of Miles' money when they divorce. Not only is this an attempt to fulfill her original gold-digging aspirations that Miles foiled, but it's also revenge against Miles for foiling those aspirations. Two birds with one stone.

Again, though, this is highly problematic. Even if a jury wouldn't have sided for Marilyn in her theoretical case against the oil tycoon, the movie tells us that Miles believes the jury would have. And that, just six months later, she could already be swimming in Doyle's wealth. The movie is founded on the idea that Miles is extremely smart and legally savvy, so how could he think both a) that Marilyn already won a huge settlement from Doyle, and b) that she would enter into a hasty Vegas marriage with him, without having other tricks up her sleeve? You're supposed to believe that she's so beautiful and entrancing that Miles has lost his legal bearings, but I'm not really buying it.

But then, even this shouldn't matter, because Marilyn shouldn't have any right to half of Miles' fortunes just a single day after marrying him. No matter what her attorney might tell a jury to paint Miles in a negative light, a single day of marriage wouldn't warrant that kind of settlement, especially in light of the previous revelations about Marilyn's motivations for marrying her first husband -- i.e. gold-digging, pure and simple.

Yet the marriage contract is considered such an iron-clad agreement that it leads to the movie's most misguided passage, in which Miles hires someone to kill Marilyn, who then tries to turn the assassin back on Miles. This is dark quirky Coens rather than light quirky Coens. But this movie should be light quirky Coens all the way through.

I get that you aren't supposed to take a screwball comedy very literally -- there's a winking understanding, I'm sure, that a lot of this stuff exists for the purposes of plot mechanics, and doesn't hold up to the slightest scrutiny, legal or otherwise. And you probably aren't even supposed to take Miles' and Marilyn's attempts to kill each other very seriously.

But let's just say that I saw other people's concerns about Intolerable Cruelty a lot better the second time around.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Intolerable Cruelty: Still tolerable, but a lot more narrative cruelty than I'd remembered. Appropriate that the initial verdict should have been at least partially overturned in a movie about legal wranglings, eh?

The merits of a "minor" film

This is the latest in my Double Jeopardy series, which runs on Tuesdays. I'm revisiting certain underdog films -- films that I liked a lot, but other people did not -- and giving them a "second trial," to see if they deserve my support.

With accomplished directors who boast large bodies of work, there's a tendency to refer to their lesser films as "minor." There are a couple ways to interpret this word "minor" -- either the film had big ambitions, but wasn't hugely successful at achieving them, making it only good instead of great, or the film had small ambitions to begin with.

A good recent example of this seems to be Shutter Island, which was referred to by many as "minor Scorsese." I would argue, actually, that Shutter Island is a combination of both definitions of "minor" I've given above, which makes it kind of the perfect example of a "minor" film. On the one hand, it's a genre film, so that sort of makes it "minor" by default, considering the way Martin Scorsese has busted genres in the past. However, on the other hand, it had a largeness of scope to it -- just think of the grandiose helicopter shots of that island -- so it's also kind of a "big" movie that only halfway succeeded in its ambitions. "Minor Scorsese" to be sure.

I think you would agree that "minor" is not an insult -- in fact, sometimes it's not even a backhanded compliment. It just means you aren't necessarily going to discuss this film when surveying the major works in this artist's career. And sometimes, that's a good thing.

Take U-Turn. It is very definitely "minor Stone." And to me, that's very definitely a good thing.

See, Oliver Stone is a director whose every film is "major." The man almost always has some grand sociopolitical agenda. He's made a movie about the Kennedy assassination. He's made a movie about Richard Nixon. He's made a movie about George W. Bush. He's made a movie about Alexander the Great. He's made a movie about 9/11. And he's made not one, not two, but three movies about Vietnam. And those are just his films based on real events. This is to say nothing of the various messages and intentions in his films about fictitious subject matter.

So when he makes a little film noir set in the desert, like U-Turn, it feels like something of a relief from all this bombastic seriousness of purpose. We still get to see the filmmaking style that's so captivating -- kind of like a restrained version of Tony Scott -- without all the thematic baggage.

Yet U-Turn was widely dissed by critics. The site I write for gave it a 1 1/2 star review. Metacritic gave it a 54, which is not terrible, but is not up to the usual Oliver Stone standards. Could it be that people want seriousness and bombast from an Oliver Stone movie, or else they won't be happy with it?

So as I watched U-Turn for the second time last night, I was trying to pick up on what people didn't like about it. And couldn't.

I think part of the reason I liked U-Turn so much, when I saw it in the theater back in 1997, was that I thought it contained residuals from Natural Born Killers three years earlier -- one of Stone's most controversial films, which I consider a masterpiece, difficult to watch at times though it may be. Some of the most memorable passages of that film are set in the deserts along Route 66, the route Mickey and Mallory Knox take on their killing spree. Simply put, Stone's filmmaking style is a perfect match for the American desert. You can see the gritty grains of sand in his lens, the dueling stillness and violence of the American southwest, with its unrelenting heat and unforgiving lawlessness. The place is symbolized by its broken, dangerous characters and the kitsch of its roadside Americana, influenced by Mexican and Native American cultures. Simply put, it's as cinematic a setting as there is.

So Stone returns to that world through a low-level hood in a Mustang convertible, played by Sean Penn, on his way from Somewhere to Somewhere, having to stop in between at Nowhere (Superior, Arizona) for a blown radiator hose. Penn's Bobby Cooper owes a $30,000 debt to gangsters, who have recently taken two of his fingers as a warning. The payment is in his trunk, but it's not that easy. First, in an extremely long and unforgiving 24 hours, Bobby must get jerked around by a shady mechanic (Billy Bob Thornton at his scuzziest, in scummy coke bottle glasses), seduced by a local Latina (Jennifer Lopez, looking sultry during her pre-2000 run of very good film choices), punched and then propositioned by her husband (Nick Nolte, looking as grizzly as ever), eyeballed by a local sheriff (Powers Boothe), not-eyeballed by a blind Vietnam war vet (a nearly unrecognizable Jon Voight), held up for his duffel bag full of money in a grocery store (where his money ultimately gets destroyed by buck shot), flirted at by a local teenager (Claire Danes) and threatened by her sometimes-boyfriend (Joaquin Phoenix, all hot air).

The film is not only a noir, but it's a black comedy that is downright hilarious at times. (Especially funny are the scenes involving Danes and Phoenix -- when Bobby finally tires of Phoenix' posturing and starts pummeling him, Danes rushes to his side as he's crying like a little baby, and yells out at Bobby, "Yew killed him!") Like a prototypical noir character, Bobby is constantly getting beaten up in one way or another -- he collects all manner of scrapes, scars and bandages as the day goes on, and one recurring joke has him constantly unable to quench his thirst, as the old-fashioned soda bottles he's always popping open (purchased with his last few dimes and quarters) are forever getting knocked out of his hand for one reason or another. Stone's love for noir conventions are all over this film, as Lopez makes a perfect femme fatale who may be involved in a handful of double or triple crosses, as her various allegiances are revealed throughout the course of the film. And in what appears to be a direct nod to Chinatown, there's even some possible "She's my daughter! She's my sister!" incest here, and Nolte's character even looks a bit like John Huston. (And Penn's bandages remind us of the one Jack Nicholson wears for the second half of Chinatown.)

I like the filmmaking, too. The cinematography (by Robert Richardson) has a grainy, throwback look, and its used in perfect tandem with Stone's editing style, which often shows small pieces of the action -- close-ups, throwaway shots -- in quick succession, but not to excess. The film's style has its personification in the character of Darryl, the mechanic played by Billy Bob Thornton, who is one giant greasy tribute to poor hygiene and bad teeth. He's superficially harmless, but this hick has malevolence running through his veins.

So why didn't people like it? Not sure, exactly. I guess it might be 20 minutes too long, as it cracks the two hour mark. I guess it might not be exactly what you would call a feminist film, as the film's two main female characters are portrayed as slutty and devious, and are each on the receiving end of violence from men. But I would argue that this is a film where there's no one to cheer for, man and woman alike. For some people, that could be the ultimate reason they didn't dig U-Turn. For me, when done right, that can be the makings of the best black comedies out there -- maybe "noir comedy" is the appropriate term in this case.

And maybe by making this comment on the irredeemability of mankind, Stone is sending one of his usual "big" messages after all.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, U-Turn: Stone should find his way into "minor" territory more often -- as long as it's truly "minor," and not just a major film disguised as a minor film, like the disagreeable Any Given Sunday.

Ten years and 25 minutes

This is the seventh in my Double Jeopardy series, which runs on Tuesdays. I'm trying to figure out if I was crazy for liking movies most people didn't like, by watching them a second time.

It took me nearly ten years to watch the final 25 minutes of Disney's The Kid. Therefore, I spent nearly ten years thinking it's a much better movie than it actually is.

I didn't think I'd missed that many minutes back in the fall of 2000, when I watched the movie on the plane from New York to Los Angeles. I can't remember which trip it was, though I think it was the October one -- the first of two trips (the second coming at New Year's) that convinced me it was time to move to Los Angeles, which I did the following spring. My airline made the strange choice of playing two movies for the five-hour trip, something I had never experienced before and haven't experienced since. However, they started the second movie -- Disney's The Kid -- too late in the trip to be able to finish it.

From the pacing of the narrative, it looked like there were 10, 15 minutes at most remaining in the movie when they shut it off. It had already reached the crisis at the end of the second act, and I had a pretty good idea how the remainder of the third act was going to unfold.

At least, I thought I did. Fast forward ten years.

But before I get to that, let me tell you just how much I liked the 80 minutes of The Kid I did see. Quite simply, I was tickled pink by it. The story follows Russ Duritz (Bruce Willis), a Scrooge-like image consultant living in Los Angeles, who's about to turn 40. He's handsome and successful, and has a pretty almost-girlfriend (Emily Mortimer) whom he keeps disappointing. His world gets shaken up when he is suddenly confronted by the eight-year-old manifestation of himself (Spencer Breslin), who doesn't know how he's gotten there, but is definitely flesh and blood, as everyone else can see him and interact with him. Young Rusty is dumpy and has a lisp, and older Russ can only see bad memories of the child he was. However, it's soon clear that Rusty is there to teach him to be a better person, to remind him of the good parts of himself that he walked away from when he became this allegedly more successful human being.

Sounds Capra-esque if you're being generous, cheesy if you're not, right? Actually, not really. Director Jon Turteltaub gives the proceedings a lot of heart, but it's Breslin who steals this show. The child actor -- who was also great in the second Santa Clause movie -- has impeccable comic timing for being so young. Almost everything he says or does inspires giggles, and he gets the most out of Willis, who has always been good when acting harried. Their odd couple pairing is highly watchable, and Mortimer has great chemistry with both of them, most notably young Breslin. Add in a funny turn from the great Lily Tomlin as Russ' assistant and a nice cameo from Jean Smart as a local anchorwoman, and you've got a warm family movie that actually reminds adults of a time when they didn't feel so cynical toward movies with simple and heartfelt messages.

Okay, so that was the part I saw.

(Spoilers, as if you care ...)

Right around the time the airline shut off the video for landing, what would have happened is that Russ and Rusty would have driven through a tunnel somewhere in Los Angeles, and come out the other side wearing 1968 clothing and driving a 1968 Porsche convertible (as opposed to Russ' 2000 Porsche convertible). Then they would have driven to a schoolyard to witness young Rusty fight a bully -- a bully who knocked him over with one punch the first time these events played out, directly resulting in years of loserdom. Of course, since old Rusty has taught young Rusty to fight in the few days they've been hanging out, now young Rusty beats up the bully -- which doesn't seem to be the exact right message, but this isn't the worst part. Then it turns out that this is not the crucial moment that made Russ such a self-loather -- it turns out that Rusty got in trouble for winning this fight (but did he actually win the first time? I'm confused) and that his cancer-stricken mother had to report to the school to pick him up. Then later on, his father shakes him and says "Are you trying to kill her more quickly?" or something similarly scarring. Apparently, the adult realization that he wasn't responsible for his mother's death (mind you, none of this had been discussed in the film until this point) is the trigger to starting to approach his life differently. Russ and Rusty end up at Santa Monica Airport at a diner called the Skyway Diner, where they see an alternate version of Russ as a mustachioed pilot, with the dog that young Rusty always said he wanted, and Mortimer's Amy in tow as his wife. Call me crazy, but this mustachioed Bruce Willis does not really seem like an improvement on the one we've known throughout the movie -- he just looks cheesier.

The whole movie is based on a fantastical premise, of course -- we're supposed to believe that Russ is being visited by an eight-year-old version of himself, and that several other people accept this on face value. However, as far as suspension of disbelief goes, it's a lot easier to accept this one basic premise than to have to accept the second one, that Russ kind of time travels back to his own childhood, and this creates an alternate timeline for Russ that may just be imaginary. We never quite understand in what reality pilot Russ with the mustache exists, and where that Russ goes. But young Rusty does finally disappear, and old Russ makes amends with Amy. The end.

So yeah, I really didn't like the ending. And so for the last ten years, I've been praising this movie a lot, when I should have been praising it only a little. How much did I praise it? Well, I ranked the first 80 minutes of Disney's The Kid as my 12th favorite movie of 2000. Out of the 58 I saw in time to qualify. Want to know what titles finished behind it in the rankings? How about Requiem for a Dream at #13? How about The Cell at #17? (Both of those would be top 10 if I re-did the rankings today.) How about Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon at #20? Yeah, I'll call myself out when it's justified.

So thank goodness for Double Jeopardy, as I can finally finish watching Disney's The Kid, and finally set the record straight -- in my own head, at least.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Disney's The Kid: If the movie had wound down in the present tense with merely the conventional "Look what we can learn from the innocence of a child" message, it would have been a real winner, rather than just okay.

It's no Ishtar

This is the latest in my Double Jeopardy series, in which I give a second look at movies I liked that other people didn't, to see who didn't know what they were talking about. It runs on Tuesdays.

I've never seen the infamous flop Ishtar, but I have a very specific memory of reading a review when it first came out, back in 1987. I was 13 years old and probably just getting into reading film reviews, so this one stuck with me, as such formative experiences often do. I can't remember if it was the Boston Globe critic or someone like Roger Ebert, but it was a two-star capsule review which read, and I may be paraphrasing slightly:

"One star for Dustin Hoffman. One star for Warren Beatty. No stars for anything else."

So when I heard Ivan Reitman's Fathers' Day, which came out a decade later, described as Robin Williams' and Billy Crystal's Ishtar, I was as wary as everyone else who steered clear on the basis of that dour prognosis.

But when I actually did see it, sometime in probably 2001 or 2002, in order to provide the review for the website that employs me, I thought it wasn't half bad. In fact, better than that. I thought it was good.

In the years since then, I've been operating on the assumption that I must have been crazy. Like Bedazzled, which I wrote about in my first Double Jeopardy post, I've owned this movie for over five years, but had yet to re-watch it until yesterday. And like Bedazzled, I didn't actively seek out this movie as part of my collection. In fact, I came into possession of it at a theme party at a friend's house. Her idea was that you brought over crap that you wanted to get rid of, put it on a table, and walked away with someone else's unwanted crap. I can't remember what I purged at this party, but I came home with Fathers' Day. I'd liked it, after all. But I haven't watched it again, and this was so long ago, now, that I'm not even friends with that woman anymore -- haven't been for three or four years.

Well, I'm not crazy. And now I think I probably ought to go watch Ishtar, because if it's anything like this, Ishtar is probably not half bad, either.

The plot basically revolves around a 16-year-old boy who goes missing for two weeks after running away from his heartbroken parents (Nastassja Kinski and Bruce Greenwood). Desperate, Kinski's character visits two of her former lovers, Jack Lawrence (Crystal) and Dale Putley (Williams), who both bedded the woman right around the time her son was conceived. Either could be the father, and she uses this possibility to separately enlist their help in finding young Scott. (In retrospect, it seems like a precursor to Mamma Mia!, as there's actually a third possibility for the boy's male parentage -- Greenwood, who has thought he was the actual father the boy's whole life, and is involved in his own separate search for the boy.) As might be expected, Jack and Dale cross paths and discover each has been told he's the father of the boy. Hijinx ensue.

It's the nature of those hijinx that probably left some viewers and critics displeased. Williams is skittish and eccentric, and when we meet him, he actually has a gun barrel in his mouth, ready to off himself -- in a scene that's played for laughs. Crystal is, well, Crystal -- he's businesslike and sarcastic. Both could do these roles in their sleep, I'm sure, and they're meant to be a zany odd couple.

Well, it works. I'm not a huge Williams fan, and Dale Putley is normally the kind of role in which I like him least. But for some reason, I found him lovable and actually sort of believable here. I like the dynamic that builds up between he and Crystal, whom I've always enjoyed on screen. (And why did he quit acting, anyway?) It's not just a buddy comedy-type situation -- it's almost a bickering lovers-type situation, since Jack so clearly wears the pants in the relationship, and Dale plays the sensitive role that's traditionally ascribed to a woman. As they say in the movie, they really do make a good team in seeking out the wayward boy, and their attempts to navigate the rock 'n roll underground (Scott is following the band Sugar Ray, before they became sellouts) contain some funny fish-out-of-water stuff. (And if you know Sugar Ray only from that song "Fly" that was ubiquitous back in the late 1990s, see this movie -- it reminds you that they were once inaccessible punks, musically speaking.)

And it shouldn't be a huge surprise to us that it works. After all, the film is directed by the reliable Ivan Reitman, he of Ghostbusters and Dave fame. And it was written by Lowell Ganz and Babaloo Mandel, who also wrote Splash, City Slickers, A League of Their Own and Parenthood. Throw in producer Joel Silver, and you've got a dream team working on this film.

So why didn't people like it? Ah, who knows. Dale and Jack are likable, Scott gets swept up in a relatable predicament with his feelings for a girl (even if it involves a sort-of unrelatable theft from drug dealers), and even the notably serious actor Bruce Greenwood moonlights successfully into comedy, notably a scene where he gets pushed down a hill in a port-o-potty. If that just sounds silly, listen to Greenwood's hilarious line readings while he's trapped inside the overturned john: "Oh, it's horrible! Get me out of here!" Playing against type in the other direction is Julia Louis-Dreyfus as Jack's wife -- she's probably the most straight-faced person in the whole movie, and apparently, it didn't go over well, as she was nominated for a Razzie as worst supporting actress.

A couple other things to look for: an uncredited cameo by Mel Gibson as a guy with a face full of piercings, and the director's son, Jason, a future director himself, as "wrong kid in alley."

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Fathers' Day: It's not going to revolutionize the comedy world, but this is a nice little movie that didn't deserve to be bashed like it was. Fans of Williams and Crystal in particular should give it a shot. These two comedy icons give the fans what they came for, and isn't that one of the primary reasons people make movies?

The right kind of quirkiness

This is the latest in my Double Jeopardy series, which runs on Tuesdays. I'm watching movies I've seen exactly once, which other people seemed to enjoy a lot less than I did, to see if it was me who was wrong, or them.

I am not your typical Wes Anderson fan.

For starters, my favorite movie is his first, Bottle Rocket, which many Anderson fans haven't even seen. It's sweet and simple and doesn't try to do too much.

At the time I saw it, I thought I loved Rushmore, but have downgraded that to "liked a lot" over the years -- I've yet to actually watch it a second time, which I guess tells you something. I loved Bill Murray in it, but in retropsect, probably did not love Jason Schwartzmann, who I've since decided is one of Hollywood's greatest beneficiaries of nepotism. And I think the warning signs were there that Anderson could be too quirky for his own good.

Like in The Royal Tenenbaums. I'm sure I owe this movie another viewing, because it has just gotten worse and worse in my mind over the years as I've offered various people my take on it. Which is: It left me feeling offbeaten to death. (I'm sure I'm not the first person to come up with that line, but I'd never heard it before and felt kind of proud of it.) It was a thumbs up for me, but just barely.

Let's skip The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou for the moment, because it looked to me like The Royal Tenenbaums times ten. I didn't see it until after seeing ...

... The Darjeeling Limited. I probably owe this movie another viewing as well, because I started it at nearly midnight in a hotel room, and may have snoozed through as much as five to ten minutes of it, even though at the time I thought I saw the whole thing. Anyway, I hated this movie. What I disliked about it was summarized in a scene involving the aforementioned Mr. Schwartzmann, as he maces his brothers (Adrien Brody and Owen Wilson) while they're wrestling on a train. Ridiculous. Also thumbs way down to the scene at the end where they throw away all their luggage (baggage). It's as bad a metaphor as the rat running along the railing in The Departed.

I liked The Fantastic Mr. Fox about the same as most people, if not slightly more.

It was my thoughts on Tenenbaums and Darjeeling that I thought brought me out of sync with other Anderson fans ... and threatened to make me not an Anderson fan at all. They seemed to love the quirks of those movies, while I hated them. But I wanted to be an Anderson completist, so I finally circled back to The Life Aquatic, about eight months after seeing Darjeeling.

And was blown away by how much I loved it.

This was troubling. In any discussion I'd had with people about Wes Anderson, The Life Aquatic was their choice for the chink in his armor. They were willing to accept the spirit of my criticisms of Tenenbaums and Darjeeling, but always applied them to a different film -- "That's how I felt about The Life Aquatic," they said.

Not me. I didn't feel that way, not a bit. Let me give you some of the reasons I didn't:

1) The music. Here's a good sign of how effective I found the music: Nearly two years after first seeing it, I remembered the exact song that plays over the DVD menu. It's part of the goofy synthesizer score, with its throwback parallel-dimension 1980s sound -- and now that I look it up, the composer, Sven Libaek, originally wrote the music for a 1974 underwater television series called Inner Space. Then there's the consistently enjoyable decision to have Seu Jorge, playing one of Zissou's crew, sing David Bowie songs in Portuguese throughout the movie, while strumming his guitar. But what really blew me away was the use of the spine-tingling Sigur Ros song "Staralfur" during the film's emotional climax. It got me.

2) The marine life, CGI and otherwise. I loved the moment, after Zissou's disastrous opening for the first part of his most recent film, when Klaus' son presents Zissou with a colorful seahorse in a bag of water. (When the bag springs a leak during a brouhaha, Zissou transfers the creature to an empty champagne flute.) It's the film's first digital effect, and it prepares you for the way modern technology will inform this story, with its antiquated gadgets and out-of-time production design. The CGI creatures, of which there are maybe a half-dozen throughout the film, never call special attention to themselves -- they function as a throwaway detail, and are all the more pleasant for that fact. Also loved the live tracker dolphins who swim alongside the boat. And speaking of the boat ...

3) The boat. The Belafonte, Zissou's boat, is a masterpiece of old-school set design. Anderson built a massive boat set that's open on one side, as though it had been sliced in half lengthwise from bow to stern, so he could film the characters from the side as they walk between rooms, sometimes climbing between levels on ladders. It's an effect we saw in an ad campaign for (I believe) a cell phone company that Anderson shot around that same time, and it really works. Not only is it excellent to see the craftsmanship that went into this, and enables some great uninterrupted takes in which the characters move between rooms that are full of ongoing activity as they do the scene, but the rooms themselves are a triumph of understated quirkiness.

4) The antiquated equipment. As mentioned briefly earlier, I dig all the old computers, rotary phones, and other ancient gadgets that fill the Belafonte.

5) The locations. I love where Anderson chose to shoot. There's the Zissou complex on a tiny island, and the Hennessey complex on a huge island. One of the reasons I love the section where they visit the Ping Islands, torn apart and left uninhabited by a hurricane, is that they serve as a great metaphor for the Zissou we know now. As a young newlywed, Zissou visited this island on his honeymoon, its five-star hotel resplendent and shimmering. The moldering grandeur of that hotel is like Zissou in his current state of disrepair.

6) Bill Murray as Steve Zissou. I was expecting a super-ironic, eyeball-rolling, detached performance from Murray. But what I got was emotional engagement in a way that creeps up on you. Sure, there are some absurd set pieces here, most notably the one where Zissou grabs a gun and single-handedly saves most of his crew from pirates, killing several of them. But his character's emotions are always honest. I felt Zissou becoming a real person as he grapples with the reality that his best days are behind him, and that he had a son he didn't meet until the boy was in his mid- to late-20s. Anderson creates a goofy tone so that all this emotional processing can be light and funny, but that doesn't make it any less true, nor make the moments of real introspection feel any less introspective.

7) The tone. As hinted at in the previous paragraph, Anderson creates a tone that I like to think of as "melancholic jauntiness." Certainly, there is a sadness that permeates this film -- Steve Zissou is close to being washed up, he's already lost a friend to the possibly mythological jaguar shark, and his current mission is a flimsy contraption ready to take on water at any minute. But never once is The Life Aquatic depressing. It tells the story of a man who was once truly great -- he wasn't just a laughingstock, as some films would have had him be. A lesser film would have just made him a self-involved boob with no redeeming qualities, but there's a basic goodness to Steve Zissou, at his core, and he eventually displays a perceptive understanding of every situation, just when you think he might be wandering dangerously close to self-involved boobdom. He's clearly sailing into the sunset, but enough of the things he's done right in his life prevent him from being a total shambles -- and this little bit of lightness and optimism, along with some truly screwball set pieces, keeps the film humming along quite nicely.

8) The cast. There are plenty of familiar players from other Anderson movies -- Owen Wilson, Anjelica Huston, and of course Murray himself. But they are assembled here in a way that makes good, quirky sense. I can imagine an international oceanographic film crew being made up of all types -- an Indian cameraman, a German second-in-command, a pilot bastard son from Kentucky, an aloof ex-wife, a pregnant reporter, a half-dozen green interns, a bond company stooge who in his younger years was Harold in Harold & Maude. (The sight of Bud Cort was quite welcome.) The Belafonte is the perfect location for this motley crew to come together as some kind of oddball family unit ... one that's a lot less over-the-top than you'd think.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou: I'm happy not being your typical Wes Anderson fan, if it means getting to have a special place in my heart for this film.

Its own worst enemy

This is the fourth in my series called Double Jeopardy, in which I reexamine movies that I liked more than other people, to see if they hold up. It runs on Tuesdays.

In my first three weeks of the Double Jeopardy series, I ended up feeling about as positively toward the movie in question as I had after my first viewing. That made me wonder if I'd seen them too recently to have had much of a change of heart.

So this week I decided to dig way, way back -- something I hadn't seen since the 1980s. But I may have had to stretch the definition of this series to do it.

See, I thought most people felt kind of positively about Wolfgang Petersen's Enemy Mine, as I did. The website I write for told me otherwise. On the website, I noticed that the movie was assigned only two stars out of a possible five. Later, I discovered that it was one of those instances where the reviewer wrote a review that was out of synch with the star rating -- a consequence of the star rating having been assigned at a different time from when the review was written, and by someone other than the person who ultimately reviewed it. But I didn't read the positive review until later, and added Enemy Mine to my hit list based on that two-star assessment.

As it turns out, it was a good choice for this series. Enemy Mine is a lot cheesier than I remembered it. And it starts out on a very wrong foot.

Now, 1985 was no period of great achievement in special effects. But it was a full two years after Return of the Jedi, so I was expecting a modicum of sophistication in the opening spaceship battle between the humans and the Dracs. Uh uh. Super-imposed two-dimensional cardboard cutouts of spaceships swoop across the screen in perfect arcs, fixed at an equal distance from each other, in a way only possible if they are all part of a single graphic. They shoot light brite laser blasts at each other and erupt in the kind of flames you see grafted onto episodes of South Park (because that type of animation doesn't work for explosions). What's more, you're given only the flimsiest back story to comprehend these events, which can be summarized as "Humans hate Dracs and Dracs hate humans." The hammy yelling of Dennis Quaid makes the scene complete.

I like Dennis Quaid as an actor -- actually, I guess it's more that I think he would be a fun guy to hang out with, so therefore, I like him as an actor as well. But his hammy acting is a constant throughout the movie. When both he and the Drac, whom he calls Jerry, crash land on the planet, most of the story elements start to improve. But Quaid's acting isn't one of them. Quaid's Davidge sneaks up on the Drac crash site, where Jerry is enjoying some food by the fire. When Jerry plunges into the water for a swim, Quaid literally cackles like a maniacal villain, as Davidge gains the upper hand on his enemy. Wouldn't he be a lot more nervous, especially never having seen a Drac in person before, and not knowing what he/she (the Dracs are multi-gendered) might be capable of?

Enemy Mine proceeds as you would expect -- enemies become grudging allies, and then genuine friends, with a couple episodes of lingering mistrust thrown in to spice up the narrative. The developing friendship was what really got me when I was a kid. I was just the right age, with just the right brief history of seeing science fiction movies, to find it revolutionary that a human being would be able to forge a loving bond with an alien so grotesque as a Drac. That idea was certainly seen in numerous previous movies, if not actually, then at least metaphorically. But it was new to me, and I found it profound.

And how grotesque is that Drac? That's the thing I find interesting about Enemy Mine -- as bad as those toy spaceships at the beginning are, the makeup that turns Lou Gossett Jr. into a full-blown alien is that good. Just check out this picture of Jerry. Not only is the reptilian outer skin attached seamlessly, but just for effect, it has moving parts as well. Those small circular patches next to the sides of his mouth, and the veiny oblong shapes where his ears should be, both ebb in and out. Slightly easier, though still effective, is that when Jerry is seen from behind, he's got a partially exposed skull that is similar in appearance to the oblong ear-things. If Jerry had been just a Star Trek villain from the 1960s, basically a humanoid with green or blue skin, we wouldn't feel the sense of repulsion necessary to underscore the difference between humans and Dracs -- nor the sense of revelatory joy when we realize that these surface-level differences can be overcome. It should come as no surprise that Enemy Mine functions as an allegory for race relations on Earth, and an effective one, at that. It's probably no coincidence that Quaid is white and Gossett Jr. is black.

Adding to the effect is the Drac language, which involves a weird guttural trilling of the R sounds, making the species of alien all the more exotic and frightening. Gossett Jr.'s performance is soulful and understated, and it's clearly the best thing about the movie. How touched I was by Jerry was the clearest feeling that lingered with me from Enemy Mine.

Spoilers ahead ...

Once Jerry leaves the movie, the air goes back out of it again. Jerry's offspring, the little Drac named Zammis, is cute and all, but the third act goes to extremely obvious places. Zammis is captured by a bunch of marauding human pirates and made to work as a slave with other Dracs in their mining business. These reprehensible humans are led by Brion James, who played the replicant in the opening scene of Blade Runner, whose real battle with Quaid is to see who can chew the most scenery. The final 15 minutes of this movie contain some of the most perfunctory and poorly staged fight scenes you have ever seen, and involve Quaid running around screaming "Zammis!" repeatedly, looking for his surrogate son. You're still glad for the happy ending, but a little embarrassed about what it took to get there.

Even if it proceeds along somewhat predictable lines, and features certain conflicts that are there purely for the purposes of narrative structure, Enemy Mine has a good enough story that it should be better than it is overall. Unfortunately, the great makeup and the great performance by Lou Gossett Jr. are barely enough to overcome Quaid's acting and the terrible special effects.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Enemy Mine: I said "barely," which means the movie does overcome its shortcomings. It's still valuable as an allegory, but it may have been better off, to me personally, as a fond memory, rather than something to be held under the microscope a second time.

Top dog

This is the third in my Double Jeopardy series, which runs on Tuesdays. I'm revisiting films that I liked a lot more than the average person, to see if my affection was justified.

I watched Alpha Dog during a very emotionally charged weekend for me.

I had flown home -- as in, Los Angeles to Boston -- for less than 48 hours. A red-eye Friday night to Sunday afternoon, so I didn't even miss a day of work. My task was to bid farewell to my childhood house, which my dad was selling to allow him to move up to Maine, to live with his soon-to-be new wife. I needed to box up as much of my crap as I possibly could, most to ship out to me in Los Angeles, some to store at my mom's house, one town over. Of course, there was also the implication that I would throw out a ton of crap, but that's hard for a hoarder like me. I ended up spending way too much time poring over individual pieces of writing from high school, etc. -- the job required all the subtlety of a bulldozer, but I was acting like I could do it slowly over the course of a whole week. When really, I didn't even have the whole weekend, since I also saw a few friends and went to my sister's voice recital Saturday night.

Anyway, after a truly panicked last couple hours, and then waving goodbye to my house for the last time, I headed to the airport, where I began watching Alpha Dog. I immediately realized that I liked it more than I thought I would. But it wasn't until I was able to finish it on the plane that I really got choked up. I was totally blown away by the acting of Justin Timberlake and Anton Yelchin in the last scene, and was left with the impression that it was a powerhouse movie.

Because the film received only middling praise at best -- a 53 rating on Metacritic, smack dab in the middle of the "Mixed or Average Reviews" classification -- I've wondered since then whether it was really a good film, or if I was just an emotional wreck that weekend.

Well, I didn't get choked up last night, but I think that makes sense -- like laughing really hard at the movies, producing tears is most likely to happen the first time you watch something, and not necessarily on repeat viewings. But I do still think it's an extremely solid film, and I'll do my best to explain why.

Also, let me give a standard spoiler warning, although the facts of the real-world case portrayed in the movie are known to most people already.

For starters, this is a collection of some of the best young actors going right now -- or, going three years ago, at least. And I'm glad to say I can include Mr. Dick in a Box, Justin Timberlake, in that group. He's always entertained us on Saturday Night Live, but Alpha Dog showed he had real chops -- that he could play even deeply emotional scenes with conviction. His partner in that final scene, Anton Yelchin, first came on my radar in that film, and has since been popping up everywhere, including two of last year's biggest summer releases (Star Trek and Terminator Salvation). He gives a performance of understated brilliance as the kidnapping victim, Zack, who becomes a willing participant in his own kidnapping, in a sense, because it's also serving as his coming-of-age party.

As he's passed around between low-level hoods, most often in the possession of Timberlake's Frankie, Zack also hits one party after another, smoking from a bong here, kissing two girls in a swimming pool there. He's having such a good time, in fact, that he turns down at least one opportunity to just walk away to safety. This is what makes his unwitting final car ride to his execution spot so touching. Zack feels like he's been awakened to all the world has to offer; he talks about learning an instrument and being nicer to his mother. He feels like this is just the start, when we and everyone else in the car know it's the end. And when the realization finally sets in what's happening to him, it's devastating. Even as Frankie is wrapping duct tape around his mouth, and both boys are crying, Zack still trusts Frankie that everything is going to turn out alright, as Frankie promises. Yelchin's little hitching cries and attempts at bravery are absolutely heartbreaking as the scene progresses down its path toward inevitability.

We shouldn't leave the topic of acting before we talk about Ben Foster. This is one insane motherf**ker. He gives a raw, crazy performance of head-butting fury as Zack's older brother, whose debt to Johnny Truelove (Emile Hirsch) is what creates the kidnapping scenario in the first place. Foster's performance is somewhere between virtuoso intensity and just plain scenery chewing, but he's always a joy to watch, especially when he tears up a party full of people he doesn't know in order to get a message to Truelove. With his shaved head he's a bit reminiscent of Derek Vineyard in American History X.

The rest of the cast is more than capable, though most of them have less screen time. What I like so much about this film is that there are so many characters, but they are all kept track of well, sometimes with on-screen title cards identifying them as witnesses in the eventual trials of the principle characters. It gives the film the ensemble feeling that real life has.

And what an interesting portrayal of real life we see in Alpha Dog. The film identifies this subculture of teenage gangsters who come from privilege in the San Gabriel Valley of Southern California. Most of the characters are probably in their early 20s, but they might as well be teenagers, rather than the seasoned gangsters they think they are. There's this priceless dichotomy between their tatooed, hardened street images and the palatial homes they bounce between, most owned by absentee parents who are off fueling their own drug or alcohol habits. At the same time, director Nick Cassavetes is not hitting us between the eyes with the idea that bad parenting = criminal kids. Foster's character, a depraved drug addict and violent criminal (though also loving brother and son, in his own way), is the product of a completely functional household -- well, a completely functional father, anyway. We never meet his mother, who's supposed to be awful, but his father is married to Zack's mother, and has been for at least the 15 years of Zack's life. They eat dinner as a family in the dining room and everything. (And it's worth mentioning the performance of Sharon Stone as Zack's mother. In a final harrowing interview with the camera, several years after her son's death, she has gained 40 pounds and is a mascara-streaked mess. While I think this is a strong performance, some viewers probably found it laughable. It's one of those divisive moments that you interpret differently based on your feelings about the film overall.)

But back to these kids being basically just teenagers. What I love is that they don't have real protocols in place for what to do when they have to enforce repayments of debts, etc. The whole situation escalates out of control when Foster's Jake Mazursky comes by to visit Johnny Truelove, to tell him that a deal went south and he doesn't have any money to uphold his end of the deal with Johnny. Johnny impulsive wraps a belt around Jake's neck and throws him through a glass table -- not something you want to do to a guy with Jake's hair-trigger temper. But it's clear that Johnny thought, in that moment, "Okay, I can't let people walk over me. So I have to do something to show them I'm tough, that I mean business. Here, I'll smash this guy's head through a table." The same thing essentially happens when he impulsively kidnaps Zack -- a crime of opportunity that arose merely from randomly driving by the kid when he's walking along the side of the road. They throw him in the back of a truck, not really knowing what they're planning to do with him -- and soon realize that they've already gotten in way too deep, and could be facing life sentences for what they've already done. Almost everyone in Alpha Dog is sympathetic in one way or another, because it's clear that none of them are purely malevolent -- they just don't properly understand the consequences of their actions, and make bad decisions in trying to correct the course of the ship.

Before I finish, let's talk for a minute about the writer-director, Nick Cassavetes. He's the son of the 1970s iconoclast director John Cassavetes, who made such films grungy crime-ridden films as Gloria and The Killing of a Chinese Bookie. I wasn't a fan of the first two films of the younger Cassavetes, She's So Lovely and Unhook the Stars, which I thought were rather too obvious attempts to parrot his father's signature style. Cassavetes caught my attention as a director to watch when he went the opposite direction for his 2004 feature The Notebook, an adaptation of a Nicholas Sparks novel. Not only did I think the movie was good, but I am always impressed when a director can switch up styles so successfully -- particularly when I didn't like the direction he was going previously. Alpha Dog represented Cassavetes going back to basics in a sense -- it's a movie about violent thugs trying to navigate the criminal world. But here I didn't think Cassavetes was stealing from his father -- I thought he was making the material his own, giving it a modern update, and setting it not in grungy New York, but beautiful Palm Springs. It's a world of big-screen TVs and video games, moveable feasts of young partying, and self-stylized criminals who chose this lifestyle rather than falling into it by necessity.

Okay, so clearly I still like Alpha Dog, and I feel like there's a lot more I could write about it. But in the interest of not driving you away with sheer word length, I'll stop praising it now.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Alpha Dog: A smart, interesting and emotionally charged recreation of a tragic crime that should never have happened. Deserved better than to be dumped in January of the year it came out (2007).

Capra Madison

This is the second in my Double Jeopardy series, in which I revisit films I may have liked too much, to see if they hold up. It runs on Tuesdays.

I know what you're thinking -- Was this whole Double Jeopardy series just so Vance could write about high-concept comedies, in which a fantastical plot device allows the protagonist to change his life in ways that at first seem desirable, but are ultimately undesirable? Last week Bedazzled, this week Click?

I promise, it's just a coincidence -- I won't make a habit of it.

Adam Sandler's production company is called Happy Madison. The name is a hybrid of Sandler's first two big-screen successes: Billy Madison and Happy Gilmore. It seems a bit infantile to be so openly proud of those two movies, but then again, they're probably his two funniest movies, so have at it, Adam.

Every "Adam Sandler movie" that has been made since 1999 is a Happy Madison movie -- Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds, 50 First Dates, Anger Management, etc. Adam Sandler doesn't necessarily have to be in the movie for it to be an "Adam Sandler movie," as movies like The Hot Chick, Dickie Roberts: Former Child Star and Paul Blart: Mall Cop also fall under the Happy Madison label. Similarly, Sandler appears in movies that are not "Adam Sandler movies," and not produced by Happy Madison, such as Punch-Drunk Love and Funny People. The movie I crapped on (sight unseen) last Friday, Grown Ups, is the consummate Happy Madison movie, as it features not only Sandler, but the stars of The Hot Chick, Dickie Roberts and Paul Blart as well.

If Happy Madison is a hybrid of Sandler's two formative successes, then Click is a different kind of hybrid. It's a mixture of a Happy Madison movie and, surprisingly, a Frank Capra movie. Hence, Capra Madison.

And like Little Nicky, Mr. Deeds and 50 First Dates, none of which I've seen, I probably would not have seen Click if I hadn't made it the second half of a "sneak into the second" double feature. Around the time the movie came out, four years ago, I was working in the IT department of a restaurant company, and was sent out to a site about an hour east of Los Angeles, to fix a cash register or something. The site is right next to a multiplex, so I decided to extend my workday by four hours, since I always love seeing movies in unfamiliar locations. First I saw the Keanu Reeves-Sandra Bullock weepie The Lake House, then I stayed for Click.

I don't know which one I was expecting to like more, but Click was the clear winner.

In the review I wrote at the time, I commented that the idea of a remote control that controls real life had taken a particularly long time to come to the screen -- and that Click was a thoroughly satisfying realization of the concept. But it doesn't start out that way. In fact, the first 20-30 minutes represent some of the worst instincts of the worst Happy Madison movies. Rob Schneider, disguised under heavy makeup, plays a wet t-shirt-loving Middle Eastern prince named Habeeboo, whose name everyone constantly mispronounces. Sandler's Michael Newman screams at a bunch of teenagers playing with fireworks and jumps a fence to try to beat them up. And a recurring joke is that the family dog loves humping a duck stuffed animal that's the same size as he is.

During this interminable lead-in to the good stuff, I could feel the uncertainty mounting in my wife, on the couch next to me. I wondered if the film's second and third acts could possibly redeem the first.

Once again, they did.

At a certain point in the movie, the remote control starts following Michael's past preferences. Michael once told the remote to fast forward to his next promotion, which he expected to be just a couple months off. Now, the remote wants to fast forward to his subsequent promotion -- however far off that may be. Ditto for the times Michael wanted to fast forward through sex and through being sick -- just that one time in both instances, but the remote programs it as a preference that supersedes all else.

So it's at this point that the movie moves away from boob jokes and fart jokes -- Sandler hitting slow-mo to watch the bouncing boobs of a jogger, and hitting pause to fart in his boss' face -- and becomes a sublime examination of the risk of sleeping through our lives, and missing the details that make it worth living. This is where the Frank Capra part kicks in -- most literally, It's a Wonderful Life. With assistance from a guardian angel figure, played by Christopher Walken (more on him in a minute), Michael gets to see his future life if he continues on his current trajectory. But he's not just witnessing it -- he's living it. And it's moving forward at a speed he can't control.

Sure, there's some shtick here too -- at one point, Michael's weight doubles, the end result of his steady junk food diet. To director Frank Coraci's credit, though, this scene does not get milked for laughs and is relatively short. This scene also highlights the technical reasons for seeing the film -- it was nominated for an Oscar for its makeup effects, which are sometimes quite astonishing.

Maybe I'm just a sucker for movies where characters age into imperfect futures that are passing through their fingers like running water, because the second half of Click really gets me. Fast-forwarding into Michael's future surprised me, because the ads had just shown the bouncing jogger boobs, and Michael slapping the paused face of his boss (a hammy David Hasselhoff). This should be no surprise, because the ads were trying to win the Happy Madison crowd only. But Click has so much more to offer than mere Happy Madison shtick. Some of the events of Michael's future are as touching and as delicately handled as anything you would want to see in a sensitive drama. And if I wasn't sure I was right about this the first time, I knew it the second -- especially when I heard my wife sniffling back some tears. I did her the courtesy of not embarrassing her by drawing attention to an emotional moment that surely caught her by surprise.

The reason more people probably did not like Click was that there was too much Capra for the Happy Madison crowd, and too much Happy Madison for the Capra crowd. As hybrids go, Click is probably more diametrically divided than most you will see -- but its good parts really do elevate the bad ones, rather than the bad parts dragging the good ones down to their level.

I said I'd get back to Christopher Walken. Walken is a full-on comedic performer at this point in his career, and Click is one of the funniest performances he's given. As the inventor of the remote control, who guides Michael through his journey -- an employee of the "Beyond" department at Bed, Bath & Beyond -- Walken's Morty is simply hilarious, his line deliveries always worthy of a good chuckle, no matter what he's saying. He may be what pushes Click over the top, saving it from its weaker comic instincts with a gonzo performance that's in a category all its own. But to continue the hybrid metaphor, Morty also has a dark side, which serves that part of the story well -- to chilling effect, at certain points.

Double Jeopardy Verdict, Click: If only half of a movie is going to be good, you're always better off with it being the second half -- and because it's usually the other way around, the movie leaves a better impression than many of the scores of films that have strong beginnings and weak finishes. The second and third acts elevate this film into a recommended high-concept escapist dramedy, one that's actually touching, and not as funny as you might think it's trying to be.

Whether that last comment qualifies as a selling point or a detractor depends on what side of the Capra/Madison divide you find yourself.