Cute, or despicable?

I was immediately taken in by the first teaser I saw for Despicable Me, way back in 2009.

I'm sure many of you saw it, or if you didn't, I could link to it. But because I'm a man of words, let me describe it.

It takes place in Egypt, and features a rotund family of American tourists, each more disagreeable than the next, visiting the Pyramids. The precocious little boy climbs up on rickety scaffolding next to one pyramid, eluding the notice of the guards. As he nears the top, the guards finally do notice him, but it's too late -- he's losing his balance, falling a hundred feet toward the unforgiving edges of the pyramid below. It's certain death. But right as he hits the surface of the pyramid, it gives -- and it turns out this is an optical illusion, some kind of billowy tent with a pyramid painted on it, taking the place of the actual structure, which has been stolen right out from under everyone's noses. The boy sinks into it like someone would sink into a trampoline, then is ejected hundreds of feet into the air, landing on his family. In real life, this would also have killed him, and probably them. But not in a cartoon.

At the end of the teaser, there's a sinister laugh and the silhouette of a man with a very large nose. He's the despicable man of the title. And we immediately imagine him as some kind of evil (but probably loveable) genius with an evil fortress and unlimited amounts of money, who goes around stealing landmarks and generally making mayhem, just for mayhem's sake. Maybe he'd be across between the Grinch and Ebenezer Scrooge.

At least, that's what I thought the movie would be about. Now, I'm pretty sure it's just about a bunch of oblong yellow dudes in overalls.

Yes indeed, the ad campaign for Despicable Me has officially been hijacked by a bunch of preciously cute android worker bees, or whatever these things are. That's all you see of Despicable Me, anywhere you go. Having once rested its laurels on the naughty charm of some kind of dastardly supervillain, Universal has since gone a thousand percent kiddie in one of the most stunning market corrections you will ever see in film advertising.

These stupid little yellow guys -- whose character design I hate, by the way -- are everywhere. On bus stops. On the sides of buses. In poster kiosks in malls. On billboards. On TV. They even star in their own intro bit for Real 3D that has been playing before movies like Toy Story 3 and The Last Airbender. They are simply inescapable.

Oh, and never mind the series of strategically timed posters designed to steadily whet our appetite throughout the spring, which have instead done the exact opposite. In addition to the Mother's Day-themed poster seen above, there was one for Father's Day and one for Easter.

But how much more excited for the movie were you when the poster below was symbolic of how they wanted to advertise it?


For the record, I hear Despicable Me is quite good. Which just makes it all the more unfortunate that the advertising campaign has turned off people like me -- people who were fine with seeing it for free on Wednesday (had my free screening transpired correctly), but are pretty wary about spending money on it, if only because I am so damn sick of those walking grapefruits with googly eyes.

Granted, Despicable Me doesn't make its money on me. It makes its money on the little kids who love those walking grapefruits.

If I wanted to give Universal a break, here's what I'd say: In choosing a movie title that contains a word children don't understand, they had to re-double their efforts to connect with them in another way. Hence the current blitz of grapefruit minions. The more kids see the grapefruit minions, the harder they'll try to pronounce the word "despicable" -- at least well enough for their parents to buy tickets to the correct movie.

Ultimately, wishing that Universal could go with a despicable approach rather than a cute approach is akin to the many other complaints we film buffs have about the film industry, in which we wish it could only be such-and-such a way, and if so, everything would be awesome. But the need to make tons and tons of money almost always prevents it from being such-and-such a way.

In other words, accepting the grapefruit minions brings us one step closer to accepting reality.

Multiplex blues

A lot of bloggers have written about how this has been a bad summer for movies. My aim today is to explore a phenomenon that's related to that notion only superficially.

Yesterday my wife and I drove down from our house in Los Angeles to a multiplex in Torrance -- the AMC Theatres Del Amo 18 -- to see Despicable Me. I know it doesn't come out until tomorrow, but I clicked on a link in an email sent to me by Entertainment Weekly, and was selected on a first-come, first-served basis to attend a free advanced screening last night at 6:30. Feeling a little thrill of "victory," I got excited to go, even though I had my doubts about the movie. We rearranged our day yesterday, my wife even taking a conference call in the car on the 30-minute drive there, in order to be there in plenty of time. But when we walked up a full hour before showtime, the guy at the front basically told us that the line was hopelessly long, and we shouldn't even bother. This is a topic for a full rant at some other time, but a "free" movie feels a lot less free if you need to camp out all day to get in.

The good news was, we were there at a theater with 17 other screens, and there was surely something else we'd want to see, right?

Nope.

Here's what was playing:

Get Him to the Greek
Grown Ups
Knight & Day
Knight & Day
The A-Team
The Karate Kid
The Karate Kid
The Last Airbender
The Last Airbender - 3D
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse - The IMAX Experience
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 - 3D
Toy Story 3 - 3D

That doesn't quite add up to 18, so I don't know what happened.

We had already seen Get Him to the Greek, Toy Story 3 and The Last Airbender (my wife hadn't seen Airbender, but I wasn't going to sit through it a second time). We had no interest in the movie playing on a full five of the 18 screens, Twilight: Eclipse. Grown Ups was definitely out. I would have grudgingly seen Knight & Day, The A-Team or The Karate Kid, and my wife might have acquiesced. But none of them had a starting time closer than an hour and ten minutes away, even with two of those movies playing on two screens.

I was determined to see a movie, so I suggested we stop at another multiplex on the way home, to see if we might luck out on the times. This was advertised as a 16-screen theater, AMC Theatres Galleria at South Bay 16. But here's what was playing:

The Last Airbender
The Last Airbender - 3D
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Twilight: Eclipse
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 - 3D
Splice

Only one different title from the previous theater, and it was one I'd already seen.

In case you're counting, that's only eight different movies playing at a theater with 18 screens, and only four different movies playing at a theater with 16 screens.

I understand that these results are skewed slightly by the Twilight phenomenon, and by the summer season, but it still points to a very disappointing trend: Today's multiplexes are offering less than half of the movies they could be offering. And gone are the days when, if you missed one movie, you could be sure there was something else at the multiplex you'd be willing to subject yourself to.

I'm not saying all the movies listed are bad -- that's definitely not the case when one of the movies you're talking about is Toy Story 3. But I used to appreciate a time when there were still movies you could see, beyond those you diligently prioritized seeing (like Toy Story 3), if you were in a jam. I love random exposure to movies I hadn't planned to see, and I thought I might get an occasion like that last night. I was even willing to see something I didn't particularly want to see, but the start times weren't staggered in a convenient way for me to even have that option, either. So you take the combination of bad movies, bad start times, and too few options to choose from, and my wife and I had to slink back home last night, having seen nothing.

Oh don't get me wrong, I understand it's a business. I understand it only makes sense to play movies that are still ringing up ticket sales. If you're going to make more money on five Twilights than you are on three Twilights and two other movies, I guess you have to play the five Twilights. And speaking of all the Twilights, there was something weird going on at the second theater, I see as I look at the movie times online today. Twilight is playing 13 times today, which means four times each on three screens, then one other time on one other screen. Yet I can't see which other title is standing down to allow a fourth Twilight screening in the 7 to 9 p.m. primetime slot. This suggests that there's one empty theater whose only purpose all day is to screen one primetime showing of Twilight.

And I guess this sheds a little more light on the whole business thing I'm talking about. That second theater advertises itself as a 16-screen theater. But by my calculations, even with that one theater showing only one Twilight, only nine screens are currently being used. This means they're better off, financially, simply showing less than their full capacity, than to play movies that aren't selling any tickets in order to utilize their full complement of screens. By this model, one has to assume that in this particular slice of the geographical landscape, Splice happens to still be selling enough tickets, more than a month after it opened, to be worth playing for another week. I'm inclined to cheer them for showing continued faith in a pretty cool movie, but I know it's only business. If Splice isn't selling tickets, it's gone.

I'm not really blaming anyone for all this. Audiences see what they want to see, and theaters screen what audiences want to see. It just causes me to arrive at a rather obvious conclusion: The average multiplex out there sucks, and is no longer going to cater to a film fan like me, if it ever did.

Fortunately, I live in Los Angeles, where we have a couple truly great theaters that adhere to my definition of what a multiplex should be. Of course there are the three branches of the famous Arclight concept, in Hollywood, Pasadena and Sherman Oaks. But none of those is within 15 minutes of me. I do, however, have the Landmark on Pico, about four miles from where I live, which is currently showing the following:

Cyrus
I Am Love
Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work
Knight & Day
Love Ranch
Restrepo
The Secret in Their Eyes
Twilight: Eclipse
Toy Story 3
Toy Story 3 - 3D
Winter's Bone

The Landmark has found that perfect balance between needing to make money (Twilight, Toy Story 3) and showcasing films you won't see anywhere else (Love Ranch, Restrepo). When they shifted from all-indie to a few hits, a few years back, I initially bemoaned the change. Now -- and especially after last night -- I think that if the Landmark can just be the shining example of what I wish most multiplexes could be, that's fine with me. At least they're only playing Twilight on a mere single screen.

I guess the real lesson of this whole experience is: Don't get roped into the false promises of vastly overbooked free screenings.

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).

The Goodgerman wasn't really that scary

After years of anticipation, I finally saw The Goodgerman today.

What? That's not the correct title? It's actually called The Good German?

Ah, that explains why it was about Allied-occupied Germany in the summer of 1945, not about a horrifying creature who goes bump in the night.

What the hell are you talking about, Vance?

When Steven Soderbergh's The Good German came out in 2006, the ads included the film's website. The website was (and still is) http://thegoodgerman.warnerbros.com/. However, it was easy to just omit the space between "good" and "german," and think of it as The Goodgerman. Which is how I've referred to it ever since.

Can't you just hear the announcer?

"Close your doors. Shut your windows. And most of all ... don't go to sleep. Because if you do, you'll be visited by ... The Goodgerman."

Who knows what the Goodgerman does. I don't think we want to know. It's that bad. He's like the Boogeyman, but much, much worse. What does it mean to "goodger" someone? You don't want to know.

Okay, so I actually saw The Good German. And it was only alright. At the end, I couldn't decide whether it was a marginal thumbs up or a marginal thumbs down, though I certainly appreciate the effort that went into making it look like an actual black & white film from the 1940s.

One major complaint that has little to do with the movie -- this was the second video I've gotten from the library in the last two weeks (the first being The Terminal) that contained only the standard viewing format, no widescreen. Each time I get stuck with a DVD like this, I always wonder why it's even worth it for them to press a version of the DVD that has only the standard option available. Haven't we, as a film-watching society, graduated to the point yet where we no longer think "the DVD is broken" if there's a black bar at the top and bottom of the screen?

Unwieldy titles duke it out

So, you thought The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader would win, hands down, for Most Unwieldy Title, Fall 2010?

Well, maybe you have not been properly aware of Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'hoole.

Yes, you read that correctly -- the word "Ga'hoole" is in the title of a movie. A movie that thinks it has a shot at hundreds of millions of dollars, at that.

I was peripherally aware of this movie, but it wasn't until I saw a trailer for it yesterday that I realized what its full title was. I believe I may have actually laughed out loud there in the theater (though the movie itself looks like it could be cool, this wussy poster notwithstanding).

The main reason I originally laughed so hard at The Voyage of the Dawn Treader was that I didn't know it was actually the title of a Chronicles of Narnia book. It's by far the most eccentric title in the series. You start with The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe, which everybody knows. Then, Prince Caspian is fairly short, simple and easy to grasp. It's The Voyage of the Dawn Treader that becomes a bit goofy. What's a Dawn Treader? Is it a boat? And where's it going? That title's got almost as much going on as The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull or Tomb of the Dragon Emperor. If they keep making Narnia movies, three of the next four are pretty easy to grasp: The Silver Chair, The Magician's Nephew and The Last Battle. But if they call the fifth movie in the series The Chronicles of Narnia: The Horse and His Boy, I'm warning you, I'm going to laugh again.

Okay, so Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole is also based on a series of books. But they've significantly lengthened the name of the book series for the movie. The book series is called Guardians of Ga'Hoole, which still has the problematic word "Ga'Hoole," with its problematic apostrophe, in the title. But if kids recognize the movie based on that word, well, I guess I'm fine with it.

So couldn't they have called the movie either Legend of the Guardians or Guardians of Ga'Hoole? I understand that all the books in the series are not being covered here -- only the first three. But if you get to make another movie, you can figure out how to do the title for the second one at that point. So says me.

Maybe they've already decided it's a non-starter, since they're dumping it in September.

An expert on the years 2005-2009

Do you ever feel like you're only watching movies from the 21st century?

I sure do. I've seen just over 3,000 movies, and nearly half of them were released in the last ten years. That's 1,433 movies released between 2000 and 2010, and 1,603 movies released between 1900 and 1999. (Let the arguments begin now about whether the year 2000 is actually part of the 21st century.)

This shouldn't be such a huge surprise. The 2000's were my first decade in which I didn't go to school for any part of the decade. (I finished grad school in 1999.) Logically, then, I had a lot more free time on my hands, disposable time to spend however I wanted, without the looming threat of homework. We film buffs fill that time with movies, and it's only logical that we would be drawn to the brightest, shiniest objects on the new release wall of the video store.

But this doesn't mean we shouldn't go back and fill in the neglected decades whenever possible.

I've probably seen more older movies than most people I know, but I still feel disappointed in how I've done. Let's take a look at the movies I've seen by decade:

1990s: 879
1980s: 418
1970s: 134
1960s: 66
1950s: 43
1940s: 29
1930s: 23
1920s: 8
1910s: 2
1900s: 1

Hey, at least I'm consistent in my apparent aversion to old movies. I drop off at a pretty predictable rate as the decades go back, with each older decade having fewer movies than the one that came after it.

The problem is, even if you're a film buff, who appreciates difficult and demanding films, you still often see films as a way of escaping, a way of engaging in a pastime that doesn't feel like work. And, like it or not, older films, by their very lack of explosions and CGI monsters, can feel a bit more like work than their newer counterparts. If you're looking to zone out on a Friday night, a 21st century comedy with boobs and dick jokes seems a little softer on your noodle than the wittier but dated banter of a screwball comedy.

The thing is, my wife and I do make a concerted effort to see old movies. We'll go through little periods where we'll try to fill in the gaps in our viewing of the best picture winners of the 1940s, for example. But despite what we think of as our hearty resolve, these periods don't last very long. And pretty soon, the endeavor is forgotten.

So I was thinking recently: The best way to get back to this is to build it in as a recurring feature on my blog. If I force myself to seek out older movies according to a firm schedule that I can't delay, because I've set up the expectation publicly on my blog (not that you'd hold me to it), it will prevent me from procrastinating on my goal of having a well-rounded understanding of cinema, throughout its long and glorious history.

Here's what I'm going to do: I am hereby announcing (yet another) new feature on my blog called Decades. I will put the names of the decades from the 1920s to the 1970s in a hat, and each month, I will pick out a new one. It will then be my goal to watch three movies that month from that decade, and write a post recapping what I saw at the end of each month. July will be the first month. Once I get through all six decades, I'll start over again. (Or not, depending on whether I've gotten tired of doing it.)

I figure, four movies is too many (don't know if I can manage one per week), but two is too few (I want to make more than a cursory commitment to this project). One movie from the decade in question every ten days seems about right. Oh, and I decided that the 1980s and 1990s didn't really need my help, though maybe I'll include them down the road. As for the 1900s and 1910s ... well, I'll be getting enough silent movies in the 1920s, thank you very much.

So what will I be starting with? I thought you might ask that. Here, let me write the decades on paper and get started ...

(rummages through hat for pick)

Okay, it's the 1970s. That's a bit of an easy one. I was hoping to get thrown a curve ball out of the gate. But the fates have spoken.

I guess it can't hurt to ease into it, given my demonstrated preference for movies from the last 20-30 years. Maybe it would be too much of a shock to throw myself right into the 1920s.

See you back here on the other side of July, to let you know how I did.

Shyamalan's Last chance - really

I can't believe I've had a blog for 18 months (almost to the day), and I have yet to write a post about M. Night Shyamalan.

His latest movie, The Last Airbender, comes out today. (I thought it was supposed to be tomorrow, but it appears to be today, so I'm moving this post up a day.) I actually think it looks like it will be, or at least could be, good. I have such faith in it, in fact, that I'm planning to see it tomorrow afternoon, assuming I get the traditional early release on the day before a three-day weekend.

But if it's not good, like the overwhelming evidence of the last six years' worth of Shyamalan movies would suggest, can we finally put this guy out to pasture?

Some people would even extend Shyamalan's streak of crapitude back further, but I happen to like Signs. I didn't much care for Unbreakable, though I did respect it. But let's say you take a person who didn't like Signs, and also didn't much care for Unbreakable -- like my wife. That person sees a writer-director who's made a career's worth of god-awful movies, on the strength of just one great one.

Because really, does anybody like The Village, Lady in the Water or The Happening?

I'm suggesting we need to pry the clapboard out of Shyamalan's hands, but if we did, we'd be deprived future instances of the sublime hilarity of these three films, each of which has contained at least one extended section that left me aghast at its ridiculousness.

In fact, so sure was I that Shyamalan was done after Lady in the Water, I was amazed to hear that someone had greenlit The Happening. Then, so sure was I that Shyamalan was done after The Happening, I was amazed to hear that someone had not only entrusted him with yet another movie, but had doubled or tripled his budget as well.

Now, one clear thing The Last Airbender has going for it is that it is based on material that did not originate in Shyamalan's head. By needing to adhere to the basic structure of a popular children's series, Avatar: The Last Airbender, the man is less likely to botch a basically good idea with bursts of his trademark flaws: the overuse of twists being one, his developing God complex being another. (He cast himself as a writer who would be the savior of mankind in Lady in the Water.) What I'm hoping is that the brilliant direction that has made an appearance, however brief, in each of his films, will get a chance to shine here, and the writing won't get as much of a chance to torpedo the movie.

But if Shyamalan is being allowed to branch off in a new direction, and this also turns out to be professionally disastrous for him, how, I ask you, can Hollywood keep giving him work? The fact that he's doing something different, and still fucking it up, would certainly seem to be the Last straw, wouldn't it?

And it's not like Hollywood doesn't understand that he sucks. He's been dropped by studios and worn out his welcome on projects, and he was even the recipient of two Golden Raspberries for Lady in the Water: worst director and worst supporting actor (for the aforementioned writer-savior role). But -- at least for Shyamalan -- a hit shines more than a dud stinks, and The Sixth Sense has still been shining strong for Shyamalan some 11 years later.

IMDB does not currently have another directing project listed for Shyamalan, but I've been fooled by that one before. It does mention the first of three movies that Shyamalan is going to be writing and producing (but not directing) called The Night Chronicles. (For another sign of the man's ego, I invite you to look no further than here.) The first one, subtitled Devil, is about a group of people trapped in an elevator with the devil. Like most of his movies, it sounds interesting. But like most of his movies, it comes with a cloud over its head, symbolizing the high likelihood of its suckiness.

And even though the footage from The Last Airbender looks good, the guy just can't seem to escape controversy. The movie was criticized for using a predominantly white cast in an Asian-themed film. To be fair to Shyamalan, I'll have to reserve comment here until seeing the movie. At a glance, I don't necessarily see what the fuss is about, as the film features Indian actors Shaun Toub, Aasif Mandvi and Dev Patel (from Slumdog Millionaire), and Maori actor Cliff Curtis. And while those may not be Asian Asians, at least they are not white, per se. Then again, if all the heroes are white and all the villains are non-white, I guess the critics have a point. Besides, you can't really call it "branching out" for an Indian-born director to cast Indian actors in his films.

At least we can say one thing for sure about The Last Airbender -- if it's incompetent, it won't be incompetent in the same ways his other recent films have been incompetent. I think we all need a break from that particular brand of incompetence.

Because as much as I've laughed at Shyamalan's recent work, it's not like I've stopped watching. I too continue to be drawn in by the long-ago promise of The Sixth Sense, and to a lesser extent, Signs. As much as I blame Hollywood for forever giving M. Night Shyamalan one last chance, I've been doing the exact same thing myself.

Then again, I'll see anything, so I don't really count.

The documentary ceiling

As it turns out, I've seen exactly 100 documentaries in my life.

You'd think it would be more. I certainly thought it would be more. But when I counted through my list last week upon getting the idea for this post (after seeing Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work), I found myself at exactly 99 -- which includes stand-up comedy movies, for the purposes of this exercise. So I decided I'd just delay the post until I watched my 100th (Protocols of Zion) last night.

I watch as many documentaries as anyone I know (with one exception), yet they account for just 3% of all the 3,035 movies I've seen. I guess that shows you the prevalence and general name recognition of documentaries relative to fiction films, when even a buff who consumes films like a hoover has only just gotten into triple digits in his 37th year of life.

Of those 100 documentaries, you know how many I gave a thumbs up?

Ninety-four.

To put it another way, I've only ever disliked six documentaries, and two of those were the aforementioned stand-up comedy films (I'm looking at you, Martin Lawrence Live: Runteldat). I won't even mention by name the four conventional documentaries at which I turned up my nose, so I don't have to start any arguments, but let's just say at least one was an utter waste of time, and a fairly loose interpretation of the term "documentary" (I'm looking at you, The Real Cancun).

If there's going to be a 94% chance of enjoyment each time I pop in a nonfiction film, you'd think I'd be clambering to get my hands on as many as possible. But here's why I don't: While I find almost all of them to be good, and a few of them to be great, I find almost none of them to be transporting. And here's where we hit what I'm calling "the documentary ceiling."

I've seen documentaries about everything you can imagine: the preparation of food, the mistreatment of animals, the use of the word fuck, the use of the n-word, the abuse of steroids, wrongful imprisonment, Anti-Semitism (just last night), insects, a French tightrope walker, video game geeks, penguins, global warming, electric cars, Trekkies, fundamentalist Christians, a crazy bear enthusiast and every Michael Moore documentary except his last one. What they all have in common is that they can't touch me the way the best fiction films out there can.

The reason for this seems relatively simple: I seek emotional truth in fiction, not in reality.

If you tear it down to its basics, anyone can put a camera in front of a grieving mother or a burning building or a protesting crowd, and produce an emotional reaction in the viewer. All you have to be is at the right place at the right time. But when you create those emotions "artificially," so to speak, it's a more impressive feat to me. When a line of dialogue identifies something universal and powerful in our world, even though it's the fabrication of a screenwriter, it's more true, in a way, than actual "truth."

Of course, I'm oversimplifying the purpose and value of a documentary. In fact, I'm worried I'm coming dangerously close to being anti-documentary, by identifying this tendency in the way I read films. The last thing I want to be is anti-documentary, because that's the same position held by the conservative hawks I detest, who seek to keep hidden the corruption that documentaries tend to expose.

But I can't escape the unfortunate reality that whenever I start to watch a documentary, I have slightly muted expectations. It was that feeling, before sitting down to Joan Rivers: A Piece of Work, that inspired me to write about documentaries today. (In fact, I would have used that poster art with this post, except that I didn't really want Rivers' large botoxed-face up at the top of my blog for 24 hours, and the image from the Protocols of Zion poster kind of went with the title of the post.) When I'm seeing a documentary, I never think that I might be seeing the best movie of the year. It feels like there's a certain ceiling for how good it could possibly be.

Maybe part of what's tripping me up is that the purpose of most documentaries is not the same as the purpose of most fiction films. Again oversimplifying, the purpose of most fiction films is probably to entertain first and foremost, and then sometimes to educate, depending on the film. With documentaries, it's often the other way around. Which is why you will meet documentary enthusiasts from time to time who don't particularly care for fiction films. They're in it for the education only, the same way they read only nonfiction, and watch only the History Channel. I don't necessarily call these people film fans -- I call them fans of learning. The documentary is just one of many media available to allow them to learn, and they may view those media somewhat interchangeably.

It's perhaps no surprise, then, that some of the documentaries I've found most effective have been about frivolous things. In those cases, there's more of a balance between entertaining and educating. These films also tend to allow themselves to be slightly more "cinematic," in that they might have fewer talking-head interviews and follow more of a readily identifiable story. I basically want the documentaries I love to resemble the fiction films I love as much as they can, without crossing over into the realm of actual fabrication. Which ultimately is a failure to appreciate documentaries for what they actually are.

This is a very rich topic and I'm sure I could go on for hundreds if not thousands more words. But instead I wanted to close by telling you my ten favorite documentaries of all time, and seeing if I can figure out why they managed to transport me almost as much as a quality fiction film. (And good news already -- I tried to pick just five, but couldn't whittle it down, so I chose ten. And even that was hard.)

10. Madonna: Truth or Dare (1991, Alek Keshishian). I loved the way this film brought me into the world of one of the most fascinating people in the world, at least at that time. Keshishian used different film stocks and expertly combined concert footage with behind-the-scenes footage, and with other Madonna-related hoopla.

9. Religulous (2008, Larry Charles). Bill Maher is quite the agent provocateur in this screed against religion, but I really connected it with it because I was the choir and it preached to me. Maher underscores why I find organized religion so scary in the wrong hands, in a very powerful way at times -- and a very funny way at others.

8. Super Size Me (2004, Morgan Spurlock). Morgan Spurlock would eventually wear out his welcome by trying too many other social experiments, and becoming somewhat egocentric. But the first social experiment I saw, where he ate nothing but McDonald's for 30 days, was a funny and convincing indictment of the American fast food industry, and earned points for outside-the-box thinking.

7. Man on Wire (2008, James Marsh). One of the most thrilling documentaries I've ever seen, where the attempt to cross between the buildings of the World Trade Center on a tightrope is staged like a spy thriller. Loved the eccentric French acrobat at the center of the action, and was particularly impressed that the movie never indulged in any post-9/11 sentimentality -- or even mentioned 9/11 at all.

6. American Movie (1999, Chris Smith). Rarely has the new American dream -- to make a movie -- been expressed so poignantly through the plight and lives of such ordinary Americans. Mark Borschardt, Mike Schank and the metaphorical inertia of a Wisconsin winter are absolutely riveting topics, eccentric to no end.

5. Sicko (2006, Michael Moore). I debated about whether this list really deserved more than one Michael Moore movie, as Bowling for Columbine is also great. But this movie's climax may be the most affected, emotionally, I've ever been by a documentary -- and whether that was Michael Moore manipulating me or not, it still reminded me of what I sometimes take away from moving fiction films. So Sicko takes the spot.

4. Microcosmos (1996, Claude Nuridsany & Marie Perennou). Still the most mind-blowing nature movie I've ever seen, though to be fair, I categorize this as a true documentary, whereas some impressive nature documentaries have actually been a part of a larger television series. The vignettes are constructed as many little conflict-filled narratives, causing you to become fully invested in a scarab beetle struggling with a ball of dung.

3. Anvil! The Story of Anvil (2008, Sacha Gervasi). The best of the many music documentaries I've seen, probably because it resembles one of my favorite mockumentaries of all time: This Is Spinal Tap. With a little distance from it, I've decided that this movie probably contains one of the biggest no-no's in the making of documentary films: A scene or two that was at least somewhat staged. But I loved these goofball Canadian rockers so much, and they seemed so earnest, that I just didn't care.

2. The King of Kong: A Fistful of Quarters (2007, Seth Gordon). I don't know why, exactly, but this showdown of two Donkey Kong experts was one of the most thrilling documentary experiences I've ever had, an epic battle between two personalities who were probably not hugely different from each other, but were constructed in such a way where you were eager to cheer one and boo the other.

1. Looking for Richard (1996, Al Pacino). Al Pacino's love letter to Shakespeare, his role in our world and the challenges of performing his work takes the number 1 spot because it's the only documentary that I've ever ranked as my favorite film in a given calendar year. That year, 1996, was actually the first year I formally ranked my movies. And though I haven't seen it a second time -- I definitely should -- I remember being so blown away by the craft and care that went into this film, which contained parts of a performance of Richard III within the confines of the documentary structure. A brilliant way to address Shakespeare from all his many-splendored angles.

Honorable mentions: Bigger Stronger Faster*, Bowling for Columbine, The Cruise, Dig!, Dogtown and Z-Boys, Jesus Camp

Agree? Disagree? Well, you don't know which documentaries I've seen and which I haven't, so there. :-)

But I'd love to hear some of the ones you were impressed by for their potential fiction film qualities -- or otherwise -- if you'd like to talk about them in the comments section.

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.

Underachievers: The Terminal

Since I just introduced the idea for posts highlighting over- and underachievers on Saturday, it seems only fitting that I should now be inspired to write my first Underachievers post, to go hand-in-hand with the first Overachievers post.

Before watching The Terminal last night, I would have thought that anything with Steven Spielberg's name on it would rise to a certain minimum level of quality. But The Terminal reminded me that Spielberg has his Hooks, his Lost Worlds and his Crystal Skulls, just like anyone else out there.

Simply put, The Terminal was ridiculous. Almost everything that happened in it was unbelievable, even if it was based on something that really happened, as my wife told me halfway through. I looked it up just now, and apparently, an Iranian refugee lived in Terminal 1 of Charles de Gaulle Airport in Paris for a whopping 18 years -- my wife had thought it was half that -- from 1988 until 2006, and it was only a hospitalization that eventually forced him out. It goes to show you just how poorly The Terminal was made, that a story of a Krakozhian refugee living in JFK for less than a year seems like a completely unfathomable prospect.

(Spoilers to follow.)

Let's start with the worst part of the film: Its villain. Stanley Tucci plays an airport security bureaucrat who is in line to become a bigger airport security bureaucrat, who basically comes to think of Victor Navorsky (Tom Hanks) as his biggest nemesis. Everything Tucci's Frank Dixon does in the entire movie is mean and unmotivated. He's cornered by a loophole in Navorsky's legal status, in which he can't be deported to his home country (whose government was overthrown in a coup) but he also can't be allowed into the United States, because the U.S. is no longer recognizing passports issued by the fictitious Krakozhia. By all measures, the nice bumbling man has a very even-tempered adjustment to being forced to live in an airport, without any long-term means of sustaining himself. Yet Dixon views his very attempts to survive and thrive as a defiant act of needling him. This is a blatantly false attempt to create a straw man villain for the audience to root against, and it relies on a bunch of bullshit contrivances to escalate the supposed rivalry between the two men. For example, at one point, Navorsky is hired by a construction crew to work on a new wing of the airport, and Dixon learns that Navorsky is being paid $19/hour under the table -- "Which is more than I make," says Dixon. So this guy is one of the top officials at JFK International Airport, and he makes less than $39,520 per year? We're talking 2004 dollars, but still -- total B.S. The rest of the artificial conflict between Dixon and Navorsky is so artificial, I won't even get into it.

Then let's go to some of the stuff Navorksy spends this year doing at JFK. One subplot is that he's helping a Latino guy involved in making the meals given out on the planes, played by Diego Luna. Luna's Enrique Cruz is in love with Dolores Torres, played by future hot commodity Zoe Saldana. Torres is a lower-level bureaucrat who sits at a desk with a big red stamp, denying Navorsky's various attempts to submit paperwork for a visa. But Dolores doesn't even know who Enrique is. So Enrique enlists Navorsky to ask her questions about herself, in his highly broken English, each time he tries anew to submit paperwork. And Enrique feeds him much-needed airline dinners each night, to find out what Dolores has said about herself each day. Not only is this an extremely roundabout way for Enrique to find out information -- don't they have some other mutual acquaintance at the airport? -- but it culminates in the most ridiculous way you could imagine. One day, Navorsky presents a diamond engagement ring to Dolores, on behalf of Enrique. But here's the thing -- they've never even spoken to each other. Because this is a bogus Hollywood contraption, Dolores accepts the proposal, and the next scene is them leaving the airport chapel, a married couple. Huh?

I could go on. Navorsky's love interest is a pathetic airline stewardess played by Catherine Zeta-Jones, who is constantly waiting for pages from the married man she's having an affair with. To give her character supposed depth, she's always reciting details about historical figures she's read about in books. Then there's the ridiculous janitor character, played by Kumar Pallana, who I loved so much in Wes Anderson's Bottle Rocket. He starts out as another unmotivated rival of Navorsky -- he hates Navorsky for apparently one reason, which is that Navorsky tried to get his meal vouchers out of the trash after the janitor had already collected it up. But of course, he ends up becoming a close friend, one of the many blue collar airport workers who put Navorsky on a pedestal as some kind of champion of the little guy. His character arc resolves in a ridiculous scene in which he runs out on the tarmac with his mop, in front of the wheels of an arriving airplane, in order to delay its eventual departure. Yes, it's as unintentionally absurd as it sounds.

All this nonsense might be worth it if Navorksy had a good reason for wanting to get into New York. But for the longest time, we aren't given a clue what the reason is. We know Navorsky has a container of Planters peanuts that he cherishes, and once plants a kiss on -- we assume his reason for coming to New York has something to do with that. My wife and I were predicting that maybe the ashes of his father, or wife, or someone like that, were in the can, and he needed to dump them in New York as part of a promise. When Navorsky's purpose is finally revealed, it can't help but seem pretty arbitrary -- he's trying to get the signature of a jazz great to complete a collection for his deceased father. His father loved jazz and had written numerous jazz greats who appeared in a newspaper photo, asking them all for their autographs. Navorsky has come to America to get the signature of the last person who never responded to his father's request. Really? Really?

The one thing I will say is that Tom Hanks is by far the best part of this movie -- and perhaps the only tolerable part. He's as likable as usual, and gives a performance that is far more interesting than the film deserves. However, Hanks is totally failed by the script, which doesn't give his character much to do -- he's a protagonist whose goals are not fully articulated, and who is the passive recipient of most of the things that end up happening to him. The movie conveniently allows his character to learn English, when he knows next to nothing in the first scene -- so that makes his apparent disconnect from the audience and from the events around him a little smaller. But it shouldn't be a surprise that in a movie where almost everything is unbelievable, even an Oscar winner and a generally beloved performer can't help more than just a little bit.

The Terminal is terminally flawed.

Overachievers: Walk Hard

It's not often that I'm prompted to run straight to the computer after watching a movie. But with no post up yet today -- I never exceed one per day -- I have a clean slate to do that tonight.

The movie that prompted this was Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story. Not only did it prompt me to go straight to my computer, but it also prompted me to create a new recurring-as-needed series on my blog: Overachievers.

Overachievers -- and its inverse, Underachievers -- will be series that allow me to spotlight films based on how they compared to my expectations for them/what I had heard about them. If a movie is much better than I thought it would be, Overachievers makes a nice way to spread the word. However, if it's been unjustly hyped, Underachievers can save my readers from it. (To the extent that people allow themselves to be biased one way or another by what I write.)

And tonight's overachiever is Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story.

I guess I only really discussed this movie with one other person who saw it, but that discussion left such an overwhelmingly negative impression of it that I'd kept a wide berth from it since then. I did form negative impressions of it myself -- a trailer that looked too broad by half; too much infantile dick humor in the title. But without that conversation, I probably would have seen it two years ago. After all, I consider myself a patron of Judd Apatow's many-splendored buffet. If Apatow's name is on it, I'll see it sooner rather than later.

Apatow has minor misses -- but my conversation with this friend led me to expect a major whiff. So I passed up a couple decent chances to see it. Until just recently, when my wife decided that she wants to watch basically nothing but simple -- preferably funny -- cinematic fare until she gives birth in two months. I lap up dumb comedies with the best of them, and now I didn't need to feel guilty anymore. So Walk Hard was one of three movies that came home with me from the library on Friday. It had to be good for at least a laugh or two.

Was it ever.

I think it's fair to say that I was laughing from the very first minute of the movie, and did not stop for more than a minute the rest of the way.

Quite simply, this is one of the funniest parodies I've ever seen. It takes all the well-known cliches of rock n' roll biopics and drives them just 10% into the absurd. Okay, maybe 20%. But with a few obvious exceptions, almost everything that happens in Dewey Cox could happen to a real music icon. It's not the Airplane! school of parody, where everything is a sight gag and few of them are logical. It's not the _____ Movie school of parody, where everything is just a really obvious parody of a really popular person or movie, regardless of whether it actually relates to movie's theme. No, Dewey Cox is the blessed result of a director and star pulling back on the reins -- and being all the more uproarious for how seriously they're devoted to being just plain funny.

I am in such a dizzy post-Dewey state right now that I can't even give you a laundry list of specifics, though believe me, I want to. I will say that not only is John C. Reilly brilliant in the lead role -- playing himself from, hilariously, age 14 onward -- but he's supported by a terrific and frankly huge cast of funny people, most notably his two leading ladies (Kristen Wiig playing Wife #1, Jenna Fischer playing Wife #2, in following the Johnny Cash template). Special props to Tim Meadows as his lifelong friend and the guy who gets him into every new kind of increasingly serious drug. The scene where Meadows tells him "you don't want this shit!" regarding marijuana, then proceeds to explain all the ways it's great as if they're negatives ("It's not habit-forming!"), is absolutely brilliant.

What's even better is that the music is totally legit. There had to be 15 new songs written specifically for this movie -- sung by Reilly, I'm pretty sure -- and they all sound like they could have been played by a real musician of the era in question. Only the lyrics are slightly goofier, but even the goofiness is underplayed -- most songs are more absurd than the most obvious interpretation of their lyrics, because of things a 21st century post-ironic audience would recognize, but they wouldn't have recognized at the time.

One final proof of how unexpectedly pleased I am with Walk Hard: During the entire time I've been writing this post, the DVD title menu has been replaying the title theme on permanent repeat. I believe this is the 32nd iteration. Or is the 34th?

Anyway, way to overachieve, Dewey.

The Comedians Who Wouldn't Go Away

If you're like me, you thought June 25th would never arrive.

But here it finally is. Which means they can finally stop promoting the fuck out of Grown Ups.

It's not the number of television commercials, billboards, or advertisements plastered on the sides of buses that have been excessive. That's been about in line with industry standards.

No, it's that you can't go anywhere without seeing Kevin James, Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, Rob Schneider and David Spade, in some combination, but most often all five together.

They've been at baby christenings. They've been smashing bottles of champagne against the hulls of ships. They've been cutting the ribbons outside of malls. They've been offering their expertise on how to solve the BP crisis in the Gulf of Mexico.

It's enough to drive a person crazy.

They say the more something is relentlessly promoted, the less good it probably is, so watch out for this one. In light of recent discussions we've had on this blog, I'm trying to withhold judgment on films I haven't seen yet. But it doesn't mean I can't talk about some bad indicators, and the indicators are all bad for Grown Ups right now.

The fivesome you see here literally started promoting this movie back in February. I didn't witness it myself, but I heard on sports talk radio a few weeks back that they were hanging around the Super Bowl in their inseparable group of five funnymen, at various stages of career decay, getting out the word about their big summer movie in the dead of winter. You usually start seeing ads for summer movies around then -- in fact, the Super Bowl is renowned for being a showcase for such ads. But it's usually still months before the distributor sends its stars out on a publicity campaign. In the case of Grown Ups, the media blitz started then and hasn't let up.

I suppose NBA fans, like myself, were subjected to an extra large dose of the Grown Ups. Not only was the movie one of the sponsors for the TV coverage of the basketball playoffs, but almost all of these guys seem to have been Lakers fans with courtside seats, independent of any promotional tie-in. Of course, in the actual tie-ins -- there was one they played constantly, where the five guys sat around talking about great championship teams -- Sandler wore his Knicks jersey, and they didn't betray any specific biases for any current playoff teams. But whether they were biased toward any particular team or not, they were still ubiquitous.

Another reason why it seems so sad, that they've been working so hard for this movie, is that it really does seem like a lazy project in which three successful comic actors are trying to lift up two unsuccessful ones. It's no secret that Rock, Sandler, Schneider and Spade were all friends from their Saturday Night Live days -- in fact, I've read that Kevin James felt like quite the fifth wheel, with no SNL war stories to tell. But two of those guys seem to be slumming in order to help out the other two. It shouldn't be too hard to figure out who's who in this scenario. As for James, well, I guess this is about in line with the other movies he's been making. But he definitely has more going on in general than Schneider and Spade (oops, I mentioned their names).

Anyway, hopefully, today it all ends. Or at least tones down a bit. You often continue to see ads for movies for a week or two after they've hit theaters. But at least these five will probably no longer be weighing in on Stanley McChrystal or discussing their picks for the World Cup.

And just so I don't have to leave Grown Ups on a totally destitute note, I will say that I absolutely love the poster for this movie. Not only is it perfectly composed, showing all five stars with their varying levels of importance (though I might argue that Rock and James should change places based on their current career fortunes), but it also tells you what the movie's about in one perfect image: Five guys who haven't grown up. I also like it for its originality, as it may just be the first movie poster ever to feature guys on a waterslide.