A week of judgment comes to a close

This past week I participated in a fun activity organized by Hannah Keefer on her blog Hannah and Her Movies. It was actually more organized on Facebook, with her blog playing a co-sponsorship role.

Hannah decided to do something really ambitious this year: She's watching one movie per day. That in itself is not the part that takes a lot of coordination. She's leaving 71% of the movies she watches (each of the weekday movies) up to her friends. Or in my case, acquaintances she met through the Flickchart discussion group. (You could call us friends, because we have quite a friendly interaction, but I have never met her in person.)

So she put the call out for interested parties to claim a week, and each person would then give her one title for each weeknight of that week. The initial response was overwhelming, so I didn't even have one of the 52 spots at first. However, someone dropped out, so this alternate became a full-fledged curator. I was assigned the week of February 10th to 14th, and had her a list of five within minutes.

(Do I sound like a guy who sits around, just waiting for the opportunity to recommend movies to people? Nah.)

Hannah's been calling this Hannah's Movie Challenge Adventure 2014, and she has a Facebook group set up to join together the people who are participating, and as kind of a home base for the project. That's where we have most of the discussion about the movies she's seeing, but she does also write about each on Hannah and Her Movies. And yes, I do consider it a shame that people seem to be more interested in having lively film discussions through Facebook groups than through the comments sections of blogs. :-)

Here are the movies I chose, and here were her responses to them:

Monday, February 10th: Perfume: The Story of a Murderer (2006, Tom Tykwer)

See what I've written about this movie here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Well, dang. This was a good start to Vance's week. A crazy, almost fantasy-esque serial killer movie with an incredible soundtrack and a great story. I loved it, though I had to think about it for a little while after it ended to decide whether I did or not."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4.5

My comment: I was riding high at this point. Perfume is one of my favorite movies to share with people. No one I've recommended it to hasn't liked it.

Tuesday, February 11th: Agora (2009, Alejandro Amenabar)

See what I've written about this movie here and here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Another movie I knew almost nothing about and ended up really enjoying. It had kind of unusual subject matter, like Perfume did yesterday -- I'm not sure I can think of another movie I've seen about a female philosopher. Nice pick."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4

My comment: Pretty pleased with that, especially since Agora has not been a hit with everyone to whom I recommended it. It does feel a bit more like my movie than Perfume, since it's significantly more obscure. 

Wednesday, February 12th: What Maisie Knew (2013, Scott McGehee & David Siegel)

See what I've written about this movie here and here. 

What Hannah said on Facebook: "The movies this week appear to be losing a half a rating every day... From 4.5 to 4 to 3.5. Hmm. But I still liked this one. The interactions in the movie felt very real, even if it was sometimes difficult to watch because of that."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 3.5

My comment: It didn't occur to me that yeah, not everyone wants to watch warring exes yell at each other about what they want to do -- or not do -- with their daughter. Glad Hannah liked it enough to give it a half-star higher than merely thumbs up.

Thursday, February 13th: Bound (1996, Larry & Andy Wachowski)

See what I've written about this movie here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "Unfortunately, this one broke Vance's streak of movies I really enjoyed. It's tough for me to really care about crime movies, though I did enjoy the characters and watching them interact."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 2

My comment: That's a shame. Bound is another personal favorite to recommend, and no one's ever turned their nose up at it to this extent. However, if she doesn't like the genre, she doesn't like the genre. Not a lot a person can do about that.

Friday, February 14th: Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nick Stoller)

See what I've written about this movie here and here.

What Hannah said on Facebook: "And my final movie of the week, which I found both funny and heartwarming. I'm glad Vance picked this one, as I'd been meaning to get around to it for a really long time. I had a bunch more written here, but then I realized it was pretty much just all the same thing I said in the review, so if you want to know more, you can read that."

Star rating (out of 5) she gave on her blog: 4

My comment: I figured this would end the week on a winning note. For the record, I didn't intentionally pick this for Hannah and her husband to watch on Valentine's Day, but I'm glad it worked out that way.

                                    ************************

Note: You may notice that many of my picks are recent. In fact, four of the five came out in the last eight years. Well, Hannah is in her twenties, and I gambled on her liking new things better. That said, I also know she's a fan of musicals, and those had their heyday decades ago. 

It's funny that I ended up dwelling on her dislike of Bound, because really, four out of five is pretty darn good. The five movies had an average of 3.6 stars for her, which means I certainly didn't waste her time this week. And yet we tend to be so sure that the movies we love are great, that it can be an oddly personal kind of blow when someone doesn't like even one of them.

The competitor in me was a tad disappointed, too, since Hannah is keeping track of who has made the best picks for her by computing the average Flickchart position of the new movies she's ranked. One guy (another from the Flickchart Facebook discussion group) already has me beat with a slightly higher average, and it's only February. Oh well, I'll shoot for finishing in the top ten.

Overall, this was incredibly fun. I really looked forward to Hannah's daily posts (which would arrive in my inbox around 4:15 p.m. my time), with her latest assessment of a movie I'd suggested. I guess it felt kind of like when someone asks you to make them a mix. "What? You want me to show you what I think is awesome? Sure!"

And the truth is, Hannah thought most of the things I thought were awesome, were awesome, too.

Cool.

This Critic Was Wrong: Mistakes from 15 Years of Ranking Movies

This January marks 15 years since I started ranking all the movies I've seen in the previous year, from first to worst. I started the practice in January of 1997, and here it is, January of 2012. (Technically, that's 16 lists, because there are two lists bookending that 15-year period. But it's still 15 years. If you are for some reason coming to my blog for the first time during this very post, my 16th list went up yesterday.)

So to celebrate this milestone -- because you know how I love burdening you with my milestones -- I thought I would take a look back at where I've been and how far I've come.

But I'm not going to do something boring like give you a list of my favorite movies from those 15 years. Especially since there were plenty of great movies I saw during that period that I didn't see within their release year, meaning they never appeared on any year-end list, meaning talking about them here would be a strange way to mark the occasion. (No movie I see after the morning of the Oscar nominations is eligible for ranking.)

Instead, I'm going to look at what I got wrong. Those rankings are and will always be part of the "official record," but clearly my feelings about the movies I ranked have changed over the years. Some, I like a lot more than I did when I first saw them; others, a lot less. And so I thought I'd give you a list of the top ten movies I misranked when they came out, at least, relative to how I feel about them today. And in some cases, as you'll see, I even wonder what the hell I could have been thinking at the time.

But before we get into that, I want to lay the groundwork, to give you some idea about my tastes over the years. For each year from 1996 to 2010 (see yesterday's post for 2011), I want to tell you three things: 1) how many movies I ranked by my deadline, 2) the movie I ranked #1, and 3) the movie I ranked last.

Here they are:

1996 - 43 movies. #1 - Looking for Richard (Al Pacino), #43 - Before and After (Barbet Schroeder)
1997 - 39 movies. #1 - Titanic (James Cameron), #39 - Speed 2: Cruise Control (Jan de Bont)
1998 - 58 movies. #1 - Happiness (Todd Solondz), #58 - Almost Heroes (Christopher Guest)
1999 - 57 movies. #1 - Run Lola Run (Tom Tykwer), #57 - Wild Wild West (Barry Sonnenfeld)
2000 - 58 movies. #1 - Hamlet (Michael Almereyda), #58 - The 6th Day (Roger Spotiswoode)
2001 - 73 movies. #1 - Gosford Park (Robert Altman), #73 - The Musketeer (Peter Hyams)
2002 - 80 movies. #1 - Adaptation (Spike Jonze), #80 - Bad Company (Joel Schumacher)
2003 - 58 movies. #1 - Lost in Translation (Sofia Coppola), #58 - Dreamcatcher (Lawrence Kasdan)
2004 - 59 movies. #1 - Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (Michel Gondry), #59 - Troy (Wolfgang Petersen)
2005 - 73 movies. #1 - Hustle & Flow (Craig Brewer), #73 - Saw II (Darren Lynn Bousman)
2006 - 77 movies. #1 - Children of Men (Alfonso Cuaron), #77 - Lady in the Water (M. Night Shyamalan)
2007 - 82 movies. #1 - There Will Be Blood (Paul Thomas Anderson), #82 - Captivity (Roland Joffe)
2008 - 87 movies. #1 - The Wrestler (Darren Aronofsky), #87 - An American Carol (David Zucker)
2009 - 113 movies. #1 - Moon (Duncan Jones), #113 - The Final Destination (David R. Ellis)
2010 - 109 movies. #1 - 127 Hours (Danny Boyle), #109 - Furry Vengeance (Roger Kumble)

Come to think of it, I don't know what this actually tells you. One thing of interest to me, though, is that never have I awarded the same director top honors twice, nor have I hung the dunce cap on any director more than once. (Though I think M. Night Shyamalan came close, and Joel Schumacher came very close yesterday when I ranked Trepass second lowest of 2011.) However, Charlie Kaufman did write two of my #1s, those being Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind.

Okay, enough preamble. I found 25 contenders for my biggest mistakes and pared them down to ten. I've also given you their ranking, and some better films they finished ahead of or worse films they finished behind. In reverse order of their severity ...

10. Napoleon Dynamite (2004, Jared Hess)
Ranked: Too low, 27th out of 59
Below such films as: Fahrenheit 9/11, The Forgotten
Explanation: This must be a case of the film not having achieved its eventual beloved status until well after it was released. (In fact, the movie is apparently so beloved that Fox decided to revive it this year as an animated show.) One of the other contenders for this list was Office Space, which I had ranked fairly low at the time it came out, but has since become a common reference point for numerous film fans by playing regularly on cable. The same could be said for Napoleon. Still, I knew that I liked it at the time and I also knew that Michael Moore's 9/11 polemic annoyed me, so how did I get this wrong?

9. High Fidelity (2000, Stephen Frears)
Ranked: Too low, 37th out of 58
Below such films as: Red Planet, Mission to Mars, The Perfect Storm
Explanation: I wouldn't say I was a huge fan of Frears' movie, prefering Nick Hornby's book (as people who have read the book first are wont to do). But I must have really thought it trod wrong if I ranked both of the Mars movies, neither of which was very good, ahead of it, not to mention The Perfect Storm, which I found even more problematic than the Mars movies. Or perhaps it's just that over the years I have conflated the film with the book, and just see them as a single entity that I love.

8. Star Wars, Episode II: Attack of the Clones (2002, George Lucas)
Ranked: Too high, 14th out of 80
Above such films as: About a Boy (speaking of Nick Horby), Blue Crush, Signs
Explanation: Yes, I loved seeing Yoda bust out that lightsaber. And yes, I saw it twice in the theater. (An honor the inferior Phantom Menace can also claim.) But I think I must have had a case of serious Star Wars blindness, or perhaps just relief to move on from the narrative inertness of Episode I, in order to rank it ahead of the movies listed above. I know Signs has its detractors and Blue Crush may just be a guilty pleasure, but Crush is a guilty pleasure I felt fervently about at the time. Then again, none of us could know the extent to which the prequels would backlash on George Lucas until they had all been released and they were all sub-par.

7. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (2004, Alfonso Cuaron)
Ranked: Too low, 24th out of 59
Below such films as: The Manchurian Candidate, Before Sunset, Million Dollar Baby
Explanation: Although I was enchanted enough by the Harry Potter movies at the time -- I'd legitimately liked two of the three -- it wouldn't yet have been possible to know that this movie would become the crown jewel of the series, looking better and better as each new movie disappointed me (until the final one, that is). It certainly helps my current appreciation of Azkaban that Children of Men would elevate Cuaron to the status of a god in my mind two years later. Still, I knew I really enjoyed this at the time, so I don't know how I would have ranked it behind a serviceable if unspectacular remake, a somewhat frustrating sequel (that's beloved by some) and a best picture winner I didn't find worthy of that honor, even if I couldn't have known it would win best picture at the time.

6. Wag the Dog (1997, Barry Levinson)
Ranked: Too high, 18th out of 39
Above such films as: Air Force One, Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery
Explanation: Even at the time, I'm pretty sure I found this an overly smug satire that didn't make me laugh the way it considered itself so clever for doing. I actually remember resenting the critical praise directed at this movie. Yet as I looked back at my lists, I found it in the top half of the films I saw that year. I blame that decision on the fact that I had not yet honed my current sense of independence from what others think. I must have thought I "should" like this more than I did, and elevated it accordingly. Granted, the original Austin Powers is also a movie that's become significantly more beloved (by me, and in general) as the years have passed.

5. The Matrix (1999, Larry and Andy Wachowski)
Ranked: Too low, 22nd out of 57
Below such films as: Magnolia, Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, Dogma, Sleepy Hollow
Explanation: Oh, the perils of being a movie made in 1999. As I looked back on these lists, I found that 1999 had far and away the greatest concentration of excellent movies. In fact, all the movies I've listed above are movies I either like a little or like a lot. So the inclusion of The Matrix on this list, in this spot on the list, says more about just how much of a cultural institution that film has become in the intervening years -- even though it got plenty of attention as the surprise hit of the year it was released. And the funny thing is, I remember how much of a good time my friend and I had when we first saw it, coming in with no expectations. So it shouldn't have even needed that second viewing to help elevate it toward how I currently think of it, as probably one of my favorite 200 films of all time.

4. Disney's The Kid (2000, Jon Turteltaub)
Ranked: Too high, 12th out of 58
Above such films as: The Cell, American Psycho, Crouching Tiger Hidden Dragon
Explanation: Rule of thumb when it comes to movies: Always watch the ending. I watched The Kid on a plane ride to Los Angeles (I lived in New York at the time), and it charmed the damn pants off me. But it was the second film they showed on the flight, and the pilot had to shut it off before the actual ending in order to land. I thought we were close, so I counted it and ranked it and moved on. I mean, how much can really go wrong in the last 10 or 15 minutes of a movie? (Ha.) Well, I finally watched the end in 2010, and, well ... you can read about it here. (And for the record, it was more like 25 minutes that I missed back in 2000.)

3. War of the Worlds (2005, Steven Spielberg)
Ranked: Too low, 30th out of 73
Below such films as: Diary of a Mad Black Woman, Cache, Aeon Flux
Explanation: Sometimes you just never know which films will take hold and become favorites. I own War of the Worlds and have seen it probably four times now. No other film from that year have I seen more than twice, yet I ranked 29 films ahead of it. I don't know what I saw in my second viewing of War of the Worlds that catapulted it so far forward, but that's where it is, and it certainly should have been ranked higher. Darn, now I kind of want to see it a fifth time. (I know, I know, you don't like the ending. Get over it.) For the record, that doesn't mean it's now my favorite film from 2005 -- just that you never know why you'll want to repeatedly watch certain movies, even if they are not "better" than other movies that you don't care to watch repeatedly.

2. Forgetting Sarah Marshall (2008, Nicholas Stoller)
Ranked: Too low, 18th out of 87
Below such films as: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button, Taxi to the Dark Side
Explanation: Okay now, you might be saying "What?" It's safely in the top 25% of a year in which I saw 87 movies, and besides, both of the movies I listed above are pretty good. No, this one is again to show you how much this movie jumped up after two more viewings. When I ranked my top movies of the decade a mere year after publishing these rankings, I'd become so smitten with this film that I ranked it 18th again -- out of the whole decade. Granted, I may have been under the undue influence of an extremely heightened sense of appreciation for this film, one that probably doesn't translate to reality. (On a movie podcast last year, I actually said I preferred this movie to Jaws. Why those two movies were being compared, I won't get into right now.) But the fact remains that there's no movie I've seen more than this since I first saw it in November of 2008, having just watched it for the fourth time on New Year's Day.

1. Scary Movie 2 (2001, Keenen Ivory Wayans)
Ranked: Too high, 39th out of 73
Above such films as: The Princess Diaries, Jay and Silent Bob Strike Back, Blow, The Fast and the Furious
Explanation: Did I have a brain embolism when I was making out my 2001 rankings? Or have I just completely forgotten the things about this movie I might have once found funny? The reason this movie is my #1 ranking mistake is because I currently think of it as so loathsome, so puerile, and so inept, that I have it ranked #3289 on my Flickchart -- out of only 3329 films total. That means that according to my current understanding of Scary Movie 2, there are only 40 movies that I've ever seen that I hate more. Yet in the year 2001, I thought it was better than nearly half of the movies I saw -- 34 movies in that year alone. What's the real truth? And could I possibly be so intrigued by this odd disconnect that I would actually watch it again? Eh, probably not.

Was this exercise interesting to anyone but me?

Eh, probably not.

Spinoff city

There was a time when spinning off a character to his/her own unique entertainment property was considered a sign of desperation, or the worst kind of creative malaise. Can't quite let go of Friends? Move Joey to Los Angeles and give him his own show. Needless to say, it didn't work out in that case.

But sticking with television, there are also the examples where that kind of decision is genius, and creates television that rivaled the original program in terms of popularity and/or critical acclaim. I don't have the numbers in front of me, but I'd bet Fraser won more Emmys than Cheers.

Movies are similarly strewn with successes and failures. I probably don't need to list them here. You know your Beauty Shops from your Evan Almightys. (In case it's not obvious, Beauty Shop is good -- really! -- and Evan Almighty is bad.)

Today I'd like to talk about two other recent examples of the trend -- one of which is already available for your viewing pleasure, one of which has just been announced. Both are based on two of the funniest movies of 2008.

Needless to say from the poster art above, the first is Get Him to the Greek, which I saw on Saturday night. Get Him to the Greek follows the character of Aldous Snow, played by Russell Brand, from Forgetting Sarah Marshall, one of the funniest and best written comedies in years. Snow's the lanky and stylish British rocker who's sleeping with Sarah Marshall (Kristin Bell), recently broken up from our hero, Peter (Jason Segel). In a lesser film, Aldous would have been a nasty prat who didn't have an ounce of humanity. In this film, he's charming, funny, and basically a good guy, except that he likes to sleep with everything that moves and is a little full of himself. He was the film's breakout character, which is saying a lot, considering how good all four of the main characters are.

Why spinning off his character worked: In Forgetting Sarah Marshall, we only got to see Aldous Snow in the context of a brief Hawaiian resort vacation -- in other words, about the least likely place for an urban partier like him to be. (Okay, reformed partier -- he's sober.) Get Him to the Greek promised not only to show us the more usual environment for Aldous Snow, but also what he's like when he's off the wagon. That gave the spinoff a purely plot-driven reason for existing. But more importantly, Brand's portrayal of the character -- the rocker as a funny and complicated human being, not as merely a symbol of excess and entitlement -- gave the spinoff its potential emotional core. Because we like Aldous Snow, we want to see what makes him human outside of just being a good sport when his girlfriend's ex-boyfriend crashes his vacation. We want to see what he's like with his on-again off-again soulmate (played terrifically in Greek by Rose Byrne as a similarly soulful-vapid pop star) and his seven-year-old son.

The second spinoff I'd like to discuss is a breakout character of similar magnitude to Aldous Snow, and possibly more hilarious. But I don't really expect this one to work.

If you watched the MTV Movie Awards (I didn't), you were treated to the reappearance of Les Grossman, Tom Cruise's despicable studio exec from Tropic Thunder. The fact that Cruise was even in the movie was supposed to be a surprise, especially since he's nearly unrecognizable under all that makeup and wearing that bald cap. But now that it's been almost two years since the movie was released, I'll have to assume it doesn't qualify as a spoiler to talk about him here.

Simply put, Cruise was uproarious in Tropic Thunder. His Les Grossman was a profane, revolting, and possibly only slightly exaggerated example of the type of bottom-line studio exec you could imagine having a closet (or not so closet) affection for the bling-blingy stylings of hip hop. His scenes dancing to Ludacris (he danced to the same song on MTV, with an assist from J-Lo) were perhaps the funniest of the whole movie. Second may have been him screaming spittle and threatening to not only fire, but basically kill, anyone who gets in his way. A couple days after the MTV Movie Awards, Ben Stiller announced that Grossman would be getting his own movie.

However ...

Why spinning off his character probably won't work: It's hard to watch an entire movie where you're supposed to hate the main character, even if you love to hate him. Aldous Snow presented a problem for the protagonist in Forgetting Sarah Marshall, but he was ultimately very likable on his own terms, complicated enough to be human. Grossman, on the other hand, is basically a caricature -- in fact, you could say that his defining characteristic is his inability to have anything resembling a human emotion. Not only that, but unlike with Snow, we've seen him in his primary arena of operation. What surprises could a Les Grossman feature yield, that we haven't already seen in Tropic Thunder? It could be argued that we've already seen exactly as much of Les Grossman as we were ever meant to see.

What could work: Spin off Robert Downey Jr.'s character, Kirk Lazarus, and have Grossman appear as a supporting character in the Lazarus film. That's Grossman's perfect role, as comic relief for a main character who can carry a film.

Not that any of the characters in Tropic Thunder were particularly three-dimensional. That's what separates it from a character-driven comedy like Forgetting Sarah Marshall -- it's more scenario-driven, an absurdist satire. It's really a matter of preference which one you like better, but the character-driven comedy may be a better launching point for a spinoff than the satire.

Or not. I guess we'll find out next year, or whenever Les Grossman: The Movie hits theaters.

How much is the setting?

Before I get into what I really want to discuss today, allow me to briefly indulge in a little Almost Famous flashback. (As well as my fondness for discussing issues of racial politics).

Just look at this poster, and how teeny tiny the black couple is in the background. What, black man don't get to stand in front? I thought Rosa Parks made it so people like Vince Vaughn and Malin Akerman could not force people like Faizon Love and Kali Hawk to stand in the back of the lake. Or inlet. Or cove. Or what have you.

Oh, and the Almost Famous flashback? Remember how there was that t-shirt of Stillwater, but Billy Crudup was the only band member whose face was in focus? Yep, kind of like that.

But I'm here to talk about something much more sunny today. Specifically, tropically sunny. More specifically, movies whose settings make us want to see them for that reason alone.

I want to see Couples Retreat a lot more than I think I should, given the quality of the jokes from the ads. I mean, they're okay, but they're nothing special. Particularly the joke about the Euro yoga instructor wearing the skimpy grape smugglers, who gyrates his ass in Jason Bateman's face. I've lost count ... is this the 723rd movie with a scene like that, or the 724th?

But I do want to see Couples Retreat -- I can't deny it. And I'm pretty sure this has as much to do with the tropical setting as anything else. Jon Favreau's character puts his finger on it perfectly in one of the clips from the ads: "This place looks like a screen saver!" Exactly.

I'm pretty sure, however, that it's not merely the setting, but a reminder of how much I loved that setting in another recent comedy, which I believe is destined to become one of my top 25 comedies of all time. I'm speaking of Forgetting Sarah Marshall, the superlative 2008 comedy starring the dynamite quartet of Jason Segel, Mila Kunis, Russell Brand and Kristen Bell, which happens to have been set in Hawaii. As if making an even more direct appeal for those who loved Sarah Marshall, Couples Retreat also features Bell, playing Bateman's wife.

Forgetting Sarah Marshall would probably have still been a pretty good movie if it hadn't involved a vacation destination as its backdrop, but the Hawaii setting pushes it over the top. In fact, the Hawaii setting is so intrinsically involved with why we love it, maybe it really wouldn't have been that good without it. Escapism begets laughter begets escapism, and so on. If Peter Bretter (Segel) had accidentally followed Sarah Marshall (Bell) to a hotel in Detroit, we wouldn't have been seeing nearly the same movie.

However, a tropical setting alone is not enough to guarantee liking a film, as we may be about to discover with Couples Retreat. A recent example of a film that struck out in that regard: The Heartbreak Kid, starring Ben Stiller, and, like Couples Retreat, also co-starring Malin Akerman. By being dumb and mean-spirited, the Farrelly Brothers' remake of Elaine May's 1972 film starring Charles Grodin made me not particularly want to go to Cabo San Lucas.

It's not tropical settings alone that can have this impact on us, either. For example, part of the charm of Dumb and Dumber is that a good portion of it takes place in Aspen. And needless to say, this isn't limited to comedies. We love Dirty Dancing as much as we do in part because of its Catskills setting.

Okay, brilliant deduction, Vance. If you have the budget to shoot on location in a beautiful setting, more people will want to see your movie.

So this is not an earth-shattering realization. But it's always good to know how you are being subtly manipulated by the people who market movies to you. If, with that knowledge, you still want to see the movie in question, go ahead.

Just don't expect Forgetting Sarah Marshall every time out, because you'll be disappointed.

Step aside, Baron Cohen

I haven't seen Bruno, but I have the sense it could be the beginning of the end for Sacha Baron Cohen.

It seems to be liked by only a small percentage of the people who liked Borat, banking less than half of Borat's $128 million box office and quickly dwindling with only $3 million and change this past weekend. He doesn't have any more guerrilla personas left to play. And let's be honest -- he's a bit too weird-looking to play just "regular roles" in the movies. How many of his characters do you remember that don't have five-letter names starting with B?

Well, who needs Sacha Baron Cohen when you have Russell Brand?

When I first started writing this blog, I envisioned a periodic feature called "In praise of ..." and then the name of some film personality (most likely an actor or actress) who I was feeling particularly jolly about at the moment. The first one was to be "In praise of ... Emma Stone," and was to have hyped the co-star of The House Bunny and Superbad, the spunky young talent who's like an intelligent version of Lindsay Lohan. But that was right at the start, when I had a million other fertile ideas (or ideas I considered to be fertile -- not the same thing). This hypothetical post got pushed too far away from my viewing of House Bunny to seem time sensitive.

Well, even though I'm not calling this "In praise of ... Russell Brand," it's going to function as the de facto first in that series anyway.

Now I should say that I'm not exactly breaking fresh ground by praising Brand. In fact, I have a feeling he's already been through a couple praise cycles -- praised, then hated for awhile, then praised again, and now maybe hated again. I don't really know. I understand he's been a "love him or hate him" host of the MTV Video Music Awards. And that he made some kind of prank phone calls that got him kicked off the BBC.

Whatever. I'm here to praise his movie work. Not only was he the perfect final ingredient to push Forgetting Sarah Marshall over the top, but he just added a much-needed spice to Bedtime Stories. Well, he didn't just add it -- but I just saw the movie tonight, so I thought I'd write a little something about him. (Could that just be because I have two longer features I'd like to write before Friday, and can't summon the energy/organization/research for them now? Perhaps.)

Is he really very similar to Baron Cohen? Probably not. They're both lanky comedic personalities from England who like to push the envelope, especially in terms of staging elaborate stunts. Though Brand is known for marketing his own persona, whereas Baron Cohen is famously a chameleon without a knowable "self."

But I will say I've been enjoying him better at the movies than Baron Cohen.

Let's take his role in Forgetting Sarah Marshall. Given that he plays a foppish, uber-hip rock star from England who steals the hero's girl, nine scripts out of ten would have also made him a total prat. But not this script, and not this performer. Sure, he's got some unendearing qualities, but overall, Brand's Aldous Snow is as likeable as anyone else in the movie -- I'd say more likeable, except that one of the most commendable things about the script by Jason Segel and Judd Apatow is how they give sympathetic dimension to all the film's characters. (Sarah Marshall herself is more insecure than insensitive). Instead of amassing artificial jealousy for his rival, Snow reaches out to Segel's Peter Bretter and befriends him. But not in some gooey way, either -- he's a beguiling mix of glamorous artifice and insightful forthrightness, a space cadet with his head screwed on correctly. And boy does he have style and personality.

Bedtime Stories is a lot more of a standard script -- Brand plays a hotel employee who's the best friend of Adam Sandler's character. And yes, his scenes feel a bit shoehorned in for additional comic relief. But Brand can make a bit about his character having night terrors funnier than that standard material would suggest. A lot funnier. And then there's the part of him -- his Brandness, you might say -- that you can tell has to be an improvisation from what was written for him. In his strangely-not-annoying sing-songy British accent, he weaves intelligently goofy and wry observations about the world, and pushes laughter out of us, just with his turns of phrase. My wife and I needed a pick-me-up tonight, and we both started smiling as soon as he sauntered on screen.

So what if I'm out of synch with the praise cycle for Brand. Maybe I'm supposed to hate him right now. I don't know. These "controversial" figures fall in and out of our good graces at the drop of a hat. Maybe I'm supposed to be "so over his shtick." But I'm not.

This is my blog. I can praise whoever I want.

Theme Night

I recently rediscovered the joys of watching a movie in a themed setting. Except it was quite by accident. Two nights in a row.

Let me explain what I mean by a themed setting. I mean when you watch a movie in a circumstance/environment that enhances its themes/ideas/plot, and ultimately makes the experience more enjoyable. I'm sure you can think of many examples, but one would be a decorated theater. On two very different occasions, for example, I had themed viewings in Disney's El Capitan Theater in downtown Hollywood -- The Princess Diaries, when it was decked out with tween-bait princess furnishings (hey, I went with a guy who was in the movie), and a recent re-release of The Nightmare Before Christmas, when the place was given a ghoulish makeover (and a live organist pounding away on some sort of Tim Burton-ish contraption).

But it doesn't have to be quite as overt as that. There was the time when I saw Talladega Nights: The Ballad of Ricky Bobby at the drive-in theater -- a car movie while sitting in a car. Most bizarrely, there was the time I went with some friends to an artists' loft in downtown LA and watched what can only be described as "puppet pornography." As the 1976 schlockfest Let My Puppets Come, directed by Deep Throat helmer Gerard Damiano, unspooled before my eyes, I happened to look over to my right to notice two stuffed muppets watching along with us. That's right, it was none other than Statler and Waldorf from The Muppet Show -- you know, the grumpy old men who sit in the balcony, naysaying and cracking themselves up. I later found out that those two stuffed dolls sat on that particular ledge for all the screenings that occurred there -- it just so happened I was there when they watched the puppet movie.

Well, on my trip to Bisbee, Arizona last week, I added two more to the collection.

First I think I better tell you why my wife and I chose Bisbee as the destination for our road trip. Several years ago, we'd heard about a vintage trailer park in Bisbee called The Shady Dell, where guests can stay the night in Airstream trailers and other mobile homes from the 1950s. This might not be everyone's idea of an exciting adventure, but it's a testament to our compatibility that we both fell in love with the idea. We finally got the trip on the books last week for my wife's birthday, and started driving east last Wednesday night. By Thursday afternoon we'd passed through Tucson and made our way an hour further south to Bisbee, just minutes from the Mexican border. And not only was the old mining town absolutely adorable, but The Shady Dell was everything we'd hoped for and more.

Wanting to stay a night in each of the 12 trailers on the grounds, but being forced to choose just two, we selected the Spartanette for Thursday night and the Tiki Bus for Friday night. (And just in case you didn't notice the embedded links, I thought I should point them out to you.) As soon as we stepped inside the Spartanette, I began mentally calculating how to fit in all the ways I wanted to appreciate it -- in the sadly finite period of 16 hours, half of which would be spent sleeping.

One of the most charming things about the Spartanette was its antique home electronics. No sooner had we stepped in the door than we were throwing Dean Martin and Harry Belafonte on the record player, and trying to discover if the old TV actually worked. We'd assumed from the shots on the website that it was decorative only, but finding a DVD player connected to it -- hidden discreetly in the closet to preserve period authenticity -- immediately challenged that assumption. Not to mention the dozen classic DVDs that were provided along with the room.

After giddily flipping through all sorts of wonderfully kitschy titles -- like It Came From Outer Space (1953) and The Woman Eater (1957) -- we decided on And Then There Were None, Rene Clair's 1945 adaptation of the Agatha Christie novel. And after a yummy steak birthday dinner and a few glasses of wine, we settled in.

At first, the TV did not seem to work. But we later discovered this was just its inevitable cranky warm-up period, which lasted maybe four minutes. It started with a blank screen whose slight change in hue was the only indication the device was even powered on. This then changed into typical between-station fuzz. When we turned the DVD player on, an image appeared. Of course, it took several more minutes for this image to stabilize -- isn't that what they used to call it, the vertical hold? -- but when it did, there was the title menu for And Then There Were None.

And what followed was an absolutely authentic viewing experience. The sound was terrible, the contrasts were sometimes impossible to make out, and if you stopped the movie for any reason, you had to fight the vertical hold for another couple minutes. (Granted, those first two probably had more to do with the original print of the film than the TV). But I tell you, I wouldn't trade this experience for anything. Sitting in this vintage trailer, watching this old movie, it was easy to imagine that I was actually in the 1950s -- and since this movie would have been ten years old in the mid-50s, it's theoretically something the networks might have actually seen fit to play on a Saturday night. I tickled myself with the unlikely -- though narrowly possible -- notion that someone may have watched And Then There Were None in this very trailer, decades earlier, when "DVD" was just a meaningless acronym.

Just because it would have made for such a jarring anachronism, I had hoped to follow this up with an episode from the Californication DVD I'd brought with me. But we were both too tired.

Fast forward to the next night. We survived a trip into a mine shaft and a day in town, and now we're in the Tiki Bus. This is a giant blue bus that's been tricked out with a kitchen, a breakfast nook, a bathroom, an outside tiki bar, and a double and single bed on either side of the aisle. Plus, it's got a forest of straw hanging down from the ceiling and a couple heads like the kind on Easter Island, to complete the effect of being in Hawaii, or somewhere Polynesian in nature. This lodging also has a record player and a half-dozen vinyl albums, most of them Hawaiian in theme. But no TV.

Never fear. I've brought my portable DVD player with me. In fact, this is only its third usage since I had to replace my old one. It's what I'd been expecting to use the night before if the TV hadn't worked.

But what was really crazy was the movie I'd brought with me, and since I used it as my art with this posting, the title should be no surprise: Forgetting Sarah Marshall. What's crazy about that? Well, for starters, the movie is set in Hawaii.

You planned that, Vance. Actually, I didn't. I've already seen Forgetting Sarah Marshall, and my usual M.O. when at the video store is to find something that neither my wife nor I have seen. You know, always wanting to expand our horizons. In fact, I had a couple such choices in my hand already when I came across Sarah Marshall on the shelves. I saw it last year when she was out of the country, thinking she didn't have much interest in it, which was actually true at the time. But she came around on it and mentioned it recently, so I picked it up as a surprise choice for her birthday trip. See, that's the problem with a movie neither of you has seen -- it might totally suck. I wanted to stack the deck in our favor this time, so I picked it up. There was no consideration to the idea that we might watch it in a giant blue bus wearing a Hawaiian outfit.

But that we did, and so for the second night in a row, I was washed over with a certain surrealism. Yes, it was surreal just to be watching a movie (and sleeping, and making a pasta dinner) in a blue bus with track lights running along the bottom and hula girl bobblehead dolls on the dashboard. But the subject matter made it more so. The image was crisp and clear on my DVD player, and the movie was enjoyed by one and all.

I'd be remiss if I closed this post without singing the praises of the people at The Shady Dell, who were perfectly wonderful in every way you'd want them to be. Jen, Justin and their staff took great care of us, and we wished we could have stayed a week longer. (And kudos to the refurbished Dot's Diner, which just reopened a few weeks ago, a classic diner located just steps from the trailers that was transported from Los Angeles in the mid-1990s). If you are ever traveling through Southern Arizona, you have to put The Shady Dell on your itinerary.

I'd love to hear about any memorable theme movie experiences you had, my dear readers.