Everybody works ... sometimes

You hear the phrase "working actor" thrown around in Hollywood, but it's almost never used in a strictly complimentary sense.

Oh, if you were a nobody and had forged your way to the point that you could pay all your bills on acting gigs alone, the term "working actor" would certainly be a badge of honor. But if you're already famous and someone calls you that, it means that you probably can't afford to be selective, maybe because you've made bad financial choices that have left you working paycheck to paycheck, or you can be selective but simply choose not to be. It means that you're an actor for hire, either out of necessity (that guy in the first sentence of this paragraph) or indifference to how you're perceived (Nicolas Cage). You'll appear in anything, regardless of whether it dovetails with your sensibilities or represents you in a way consistent with the persona you're cultivating.

"I just like to work" is the phrase you imagine being put forth by people like Nicolas Cage, Samuel L. Jackson and Eugene Levy, to name three guys whose choices have always told me that they aren't too snooty about which jobs they'll accept. And while the first two are genuine stars, someone like Levy probably would be a much poorer man today if he weren't gleefully appearing in every straight-to-video American Pie sequel ever made, of which there are currently 37.

Either way, it's still "work" -- the thing you have to do, rather than the thing you want to do. At least that's the connotation of the word "work" in most contexts.

But the ones that always seem the most puzzling are not the movie stars, who you might think are addicted to the spotlight, or the character actors, who need to eat. The puzzling ones are the ones you might think of as "thespians," as actors who are always making good choices and clearly always thinking about whether their choices reflect who they see themselves to be. Sometimes even they appear just to be taking work because it's their job and they need to keep on doing it.

The reason I'm writing about this is I saw two movies on Friday night that featured actors I would describe in that way -- conveniently enough, one of them in a Nicolas Cage movie. The first movie I saw in the double feature was James McTeigue's The Raven, which featured acclaimed Irish actor Brendan Gleeson as the prospective father-in-law to John Cusack's Edgar Allan Poe. The second was the aforementioned Cage movie, Stolen, directed by eternal hack Simon West. The cast includes none other than John Huston's son, Danny, an actor who always seems so damn regal that you might confuse him for a Brit.

Both movies were terrible, immediately sinking to the lower depths of my 2012 rankings. And both films certainly seemed beneath those two actors. Gleeson can probably be forgiven a little more readily than Huston, because at least The Raven seemed like a possible prestige movie. Huston couldn't have had any illusions about the quality of Stolen. Nicolas Cage's name alone should have tipped him off to the likelihood that it was a soulless enterprise.

But actors like to act, and Brendan Gleeson and Danny Huston are both actors.

Which got me thinking about other very good actors who have appeared in very bad films -- and not just films that should have been good, but went bad in the execution. Of course, when just looking at the script, it can be hard to tell the difference.

So I decided to go through the lower third of my Flickchart and see the great actors who stick out of those bad movies like sore thumbs. Which produced the following, in no particular order:

Anthony Hopkins in Bad Company (2002, Joel Schumacher). The same way that Cage's involvement in Stolen should have been a tipoff to Huston, whipping boy Shumacher's involvement in this film should have steered Hopkins far away from it. There's a strange incongruity between Hopkins and Chris Rock as well, but it was fair to hope that Rock's success on stage and TV would finally translate to film for once. Didn't happen.

Helen Mirren in Shadowboxer (2005, Lee Daniels). Speaking of incongruous casts, how about Mirren starring alongside Cuba Cooding Jr., Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Mo'Nique? This was of course well after Gooding was somebody, but well before the other two were. It's also before Daniels proved he was somebody with Precious. You'd think Mirren would have done a double-take if someone asked her to appear as a hitwoman involved in an interracial, intergenerational romance with Gooding, but she apparently didn't.

Kenneth Branagh in Wild Wild West (1999, Barry Sonnenfeld). Branagh hasn't always made Shakespeare, and he's definitely shown some impulses toward crossing over at different times in his career (as a director as well, if you consider last year's Thor). But this was as little like the Bard in quality and subject matter as you can possibly imagine. Of course, the quality problem wouldn't have been known when Branagh was cast.

Martin Landau in B.A.P.S. (1997, Robert Townsend). Considering that he was only three years removed from winning an Oscar for Ed Wood, there seems to be no explanation why Landau would lower himself to appear in this "comedy" (it's not funny at all) about two vulgar black women whose every aspect of their personal appearance is ghetto fabulous-outrageous. I do like the open-mindedness Landau's choice displays -- a sense of fairness that the movie does not remotely mirror in its portrayal of these two awful stereotypes.

Malcolm McDowell, Peter O'Toole and John Gielgud in Caligula (1979, Tinto Brass). The fact that this epic disaster was co-financed by Penthouse magazine should have given some indication what its pretensions toward artistry truly were. Yet all three of these esteemed thespians came on board for one of the most pornographic (not to mention shockingly violent) mainstream movies ever made. I could have chosen to give Mirren her second whammy of this list by including her name with the others above, but I don't think she was established enough yet for us to have expected selectivity from her.

Ben Kingsley in Bloodrayne (2006, Uwe Boll). A rather famous example, at least in the sense that every single negative review of the movie (and almost all of them were negative, many extremely negative) finds space enough to mention Kingsley's inexplicable involvement. Boll is considered just about the least reputable hack making legitimate movies today, so Kingsley's involvement indeed makes one wonder. If he were going to take this, he really should have taken Christopher's slasher movie on The Sopranos.

Nicole Kidman in Just Go With It (2011, Dennis Dugan). I don't know if this really works, because Kidman has made plenty of bad career choices. But at least many of her bad choices have been in genres that at least made sense for her. Her appearance in an Adam Sandler movie simply left me gobsmacked. (Also, I don't know that I think of her as really a "thespian." The terms "great actor" and "thespian" are not quite interchangeable, the latter term indicating more of a tendency to gravitate toward classical subject matter.)

Gary Oldman in The Unborn (2009, David S. Goyer). All of these interchangeable supernatural horror flicks have some kind of legit actor in the role of the priest. I just never expected it to be Gary Oldman in any of them.

Frances McDormand in Transformers: Dark of the Moon (2011, Michael Bay). Oh Frances. Frances Frances Frances Frances Frances. (Again, maybe not a "thespian," but FOR SURE someone who should have known better. I wonder if the Coen brothers have some kind of relationship with Micheal Bay, because Coen regular John Turturro also appears in these movies and might reasonably have been listed alongside Frances, except that she should know better more than he should. John Malkovich is also in it, so maybe these three made a pact to collectively surrender their souls.)

William H. Macy in Cellular (2004, David R. Ellis). And another Fargo cast member shows up in a decidedly odd place. I actually thought Cellular was approaching halfway decent, one of those films that manages to get slightly better as it goes along. In fact, it may have just been the arrival of Macy later in the story that gave it its halfway legitimacy.

Since that's exactly ten movies and since I am now starting to approach "halfway decent," that's probably a good place to stop.

I'm sure there are plenty of other examples, though. Keep in mind that I limited myself to movies I've actually seen, as well as movies that I thought were definitely failures. I'd love to hear some of the other examples you have to add.

The next Casey Affleck

When I saw the name Scoot McNairy in the closing credits for Killing Them Softly on Saturday, I thought "Okay, maybe I did know that actor who played Frankie." Except just because I could identify the name (it's a pretty unforgettable one) didn't mean I could identify the face. I still didn't remember how I knew him, only that I remembered reading his name recently.

It was only on the drive home that I realized that Scoot McNairy was also in Argo, in quite a different role. No wonder I wouldn't have recognized him, beyond a vague sense that he looked familiar.

In Softly, McNairy plays a lowest-guy-on-the-totem-pole hood who is hired to rob an illegal card game. The Dallas-born actor gives us one of those Boston accents that's authentic enough that only people from Boston (see: Affleck family) can usually produce them. In Argo, however, he's one of the state department employees stranded in the Canadian ambassador's Tehran home, a bit of a pipsqueak actually, though he ultimately asserts his will more than any of the other characters in his position. Still, it's a huge difference in overall physicality between the two roles.

But it's not just his physical appearance and range that cause me to compare him to Casey Affleck. In fact, these two roles suggest McNairy may exceed Affleck in terms of range.

What causes me to compare him to Affleck is that it's kind of a surprise Affleck himself was not cast in these two roles.

Killing Them Softly was directed by Australian director Andrew Dominik (hence the casting of the terrific Australian actor Ben Mendelsohn, whom you may remember from his unforgettable role in Animal Kingdom). Dominik also directed The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford, which starred his Softly leading man Brad Pitt ... and Casey Affleck.

Argo was directed by Ben Affleck ... Casey's brother.

The fact that McNairy was cast in films directed by two people who have a history with Casey seems to suggest that both directors were going for "a Casey Affleck type" in those roles, since for one reason or another they were not able to hire the genuine article. Or perhaps both directors didn't want to be so predictable or on-the-nose, Dominik feeling like he didn't want to return both leads from his previous film, and Affleck feeling he'd already made too many movies featuring his brother (though older brother only directed younger in Gone Baby Gone).

And though I once thought otherwise, being "a Casey Affleck type" is most certainly a good thing.

When Casey first emerged as a person I was aware of, a couple years after Ben became famous, I thought he seemed like a bit of a piss ant, a smirking, substance-free beneficiary of all that nepotism has to offer.

This was not based on any of his film work, mind you. It was an impression born almost entirely of my limited perception of his public persona, and I must assume it was based on something very irrational. I still didn't particularly like him in the small roles in which I saw him, but that's probably because they didn't provide him enough screen time to overcome my petty impression of what he brought to the table. Sometimes you just have an instinctive negative response to someone, you know?

But by the time he commanded the screen in the aforementioned (Affleckmentioned?) Gone Baby Gone, I decided that Ben's little brother had some serious chops. And I decided that maybe the thing I hadn't liked about him was what made him so different from his brother, whom I did initially like and like again now (let's forget about those intervening "dark years"). While Ben had classic leading man good looks and was on the path toward becoming a genuine movie star, Casey had the squirrelly appearance you usually associate with a character actor.

Traditionally, which of these two archetypes is the better actor? You guessed it -- the character actor, who isn't handsome enough to skate by on his looks, and therefore has to bring it every time. Which Casey basically does.

There's a place in this world for both Bens and Caseys, but if you appreciate the craft of acting, you are usually better off with the Caseys. To take it out of the Affleck family -- George Clooney is incredibly fun to watch, but if you want an award-worthy performance, you're probably better off seeing a Paul Giamatti movie. (I say this, of course, knowing that the current Oscar tally for these two actors is Clooney 1, Giamatti 0. Clooney also has more nominations and has also been nominated as a director and screenwriter. Okay, maybe I picked bad examples here.)

If McNairy's 2012 work is any indication, he could easily become the next type of actor producers would die to have in their movie.

"Get me the next Scoot McNairy!"

The movie that never goes on sale

We all know that the price of movies in physical form has plummeted in the past couple years. Even movies that are indisputably great can sometimes be found on BluRay for around $5. (That's how much my Terminator 2 BluRay cost, as I keep mentioning every time I invariably return to the subject of the cost of owning movies.)

But there are certain movies that remain pretty much as expensive as they were when they were first released. The one I'm thinking of today is Cars, which is now over six years old, but priced like it was brand new.

As Toy Story made it into our BluRay player for the second weekend in a row this weekend, I'm all the more eager to step up my plan that's been gestating for awhile, to diversify our collection of movies that are appropriate for kids. Specifically, to buy Cars for my son for Christmas. He'll turn 2 years and 4 months on Christmas day.

Cars seemed like a logical choice, because not only is it an absolute slam dunk choice for my son (we already own a Cars storybook that he loves), but it's a movie that I also really like. In fact, I ranked it 13th out of the 77 films I saw before my ranking deadline in 2006. Not only that, but the Cars franchise has room to grow. Neither my son nor myself (nor my wife, but that's a little less surprising) has seen Cars 2, so after we just can't stand Cars anymore but my son still requests it, Cars 2 will be waiting to provide us a change of scenery.

The thing is, Cars is probably one of the most profitable movies in the history of the medium, in terms of the demand to own it. I don't have any numbers to back that up, but there's a reason Pixar made Cars 2 when the original Cars didn't receive the usual praise directed at one of the studio's films (or win the Oscar for best animated feature, the only Pixar film not to do so since Monsters, Inc. -- except for the sequel, which wasn't even nominated). The reason is that kids frigging LOVE Cars, and the merchandise sells through the roof.

Why, then, would you discount something that sells so well?

Answer: You wouldn't.

So I can't just waltz into a store and pick up a DVD of Cars for $10. When I was at Target yesterday, the DVD was still $19.99, the BluRay still $29.99.

And I'm sorry, I'm not going to spend that much money on a movie for a 2-year-old.

Because it's different buying a present for a 2-year-old than for an adult, isn't it? The goal behind getting a present for your child is not to demonstrate how much money you spent on them, which, regrettably, is sometimes the goal with adults. (It's one of the reasons I don't mind paying full price for presents for adults -- I feel that on some level, the amount of money I spend on them is a measure of how much I care about them.) The goal with a kid is simply to deliver the present. You wouldn't care if you got it for free, as long as the kid received it and was happy with it.

I could never give an adult a gift I'd gotten for free -- I'd feel too guilty. Maybe as an additional throw-in gift, but not their only gift. I'd feel like it was some kind of a deception, a violation of the unspoken rules of gift giving. But kids don't think like that. They just care about the material results.

Which actually leads me to a potential solution to my problem, something I would never do with an adult but could easily do here: buy it used. Again, with a child, there isn't that moment when they remove the wrapping paper and make an immediate judgment about the condition of the present and what it might have cost. My son will just see a DVD with Lighting McQueen on the cover, and his eyes will light up.

I should pause here to note that Cars is by no means the only example of movies that retain their full value, even years after they've driven off the lot. I'd bet the whole Pixar catalogue rarely goes on sale, and there are probably other perennially successful children's titles (The Lion King, Shrek) that are always going to be near peak demand. But by being the most kid-oriented of its kind, Cars is probably a lot more in demand than, say, Wall-E. I wouldn't be surprised if I could waltz into certain stores and pick up a $10 Wall-E.

So yeah, maybe I need to pick up that $6.89 used Cars DVD on Amazon, because even on Amazon, I can't find a new one for any lower than $14.99.

What's the essential difference between Amazon's $14.99 and the $10 I was willing to spend if I found it at Target?

Well, to take it back to the beginning of this post, I could buy a BluRay of Terminator 2 for that difference. 

And then you'd still have to add in shipping.

So while my son is still young and hasn't yet developed an adult understanding of the do's and don'ts of exchanging presents, I'll give him hand-me-down movies just as I give him hand-me-down clothes.

And in the process, maybe I'll also hand down to him my love of movies.

The perks of knowing a WGA member

Hello everyone, and welcome to my annual "What screener did Vance get from his WGA friend this year?" post. (For past installations in this "series," see here, here and here.)

As you know if you followed those links, every December I enter into an awkward phase of my existence in which I try to figure out a natural way to borrow a screener from my friend who's part of the Writers Guild of America, without seeming like I care too much about whether it happens. I don't want it to be viewed as one of those things where I'm just in it for the screener, even though Phil and I see each other regularly throughout the year, and even though Phil would never view it that way or care even if he did. (I've called him Phil in past posts, though I abandoned that tradition last year. Might as well resume this year.)

Usually my borrowing scenario arises when I'm over at his house for some other reason, but this year it was a little different. Phil messaged me on Facebook the other day to tease me, and ended up giving me an opening for the screener topic to come up organically.

But I need to give you the history, since this goes back to a poker game in October.

At this particular poker game at Phil's house, I put forward the argument that Maya Rudoph is sexy. I didn't even think I was saying anything particularly controversial, but everyone else present, including one woman, shouted me down and thought I was crazy. Well, I think they're the crazy ones. Rudolph is sexy -- for a good example, check her out in Idiocracy. It's not nearly the only example, and Paul Thomas Anderson certainly agrees with me.

So this week Phil sends me a Facebook message, joking that he should loan me his screener of Friends With Kids in order to feed my Maya Rudolph obsession.

Opening.

Even though his suggestion wasn't serious, I answered it seriously enough, telling him I'd already seen Friends, but asking what else he had. He listed them off, and the only one I hadn't seen was The Perks of Being a Wallflower. Which he quickly declared was his favorite of the bunch. He said I could borrow it as long as I came by one of the next two nights and returned it the next day, because he was sending a shipment of screeners off to his parents on Friday. This was Tuesday.

I was happy to oblige, but I did feel that little twinge of guilt about making trips to his house on consecutive days just so I could watch a movie that wasn't available on DVD yet. (Since you are reading a film blog right now, you know how intoxicating it is to watch a movie on your TV that isn't yet available on DVD, but the average person probably thinks it's much ado about nothing.) I initially told him to never mind, feeling that the transaction made me seem a little icky, but he insisted so I accepted the offer and told him I'd come by that afternoon after work.

I'm glad I've gotten the chance to see it, because I had only recently checked on the expected release date of the DVD on Netflix, which was accompanied only by the lonely word "Unknown." I figured that ruled out all of January, which meant I definitely wouldn't be able to rank it with my 2012 films.

I'd actually come close to seeing it in the theater -- as close as a person can come, really. After I watched Argo back in October, I knew I was taking in a second (free) movie and had hoped to make it Perks. But when I reached the door of the theater where it was playing, the opening credits were already rolling. Not knowing whether I'd missed an important nugget of action/dialogue before the credits, I opted for the masterpiece known as Alex Cross (please note the sarcasm), which had the benefit of starting five minutes later. As I discovered this week when watching it, I wouldn't have missed any action, but better safe than sorry.

I'd heard a number of praises of Perks that went from the low end to the high end of good: guarded praise from one friend who had been looking forward to it for months, and a woman on a Facebook discussion group who immediately crowned it her favorite film of the year. So I decided I definitely needed to see it to judge where my own opinion would fall.

And judge I have.

Wow.

Rarely have I seen a film involving teenagers -- ever -- that was so sensitive and humanistic in its approach to their lives, without ever becoming precious or maudlin. In fact, the sheer earnest optimism with which it presented them, while also acknowledging their numerous faults and bits of baggage, gave me chills on maybe a dozen occasions. Sometimes I felt like I was just tingling for whole ten-minute periods at a time.

One of the first things that struck me was that it took my wife and me 20 minutes to realize that the movie wasn't set in the present. That's a good thing. Many period pieces hit you over the head with exactly when they take place, wanting to establish that context so you can appreciate the movie exactly how it was intended. But The Perks of Being a Wallflower is not "about" taking place in 1991 (the exact year is never mentioned, but I saw that date listed in a synopsis). It's about the characters, and only after we'd heard enough songs from before 1990 did we realize that it was not just an aesthetic choice by the director that these older songs were playing. "I don't think this movie takes place in the present" I told my wife, somewhat absurdly, and it was clear she also thought it might have been a modern-day movie. It seems absurd in retrospect, because no one was carrying cell phones or ipads or laptops -- in fact, several characters make each other mix tapes. But a period production design can be undertaken for purely aesthetic reasons -- think Wes Anderson -- so we thought that might have been the case here. This is an embarrassingly protracted way of saying I'm glad the movie didn't confront me with its era so overtly.

Plot-wise, what you're seeing here is nothing new, and in fact, the title probably tells you a lot of what you might expect to see. There are teenage archetypes aplenty, but Perks doesn't get bogged down in them. Even the arty misfits you're supposed to identify with display extraordinary dimension within the realm of the character traits you're expecting. Again, it's nothing new for a movie to make its wallflower characters the viewer's surrogates, but by spending more time with these characters rather than having them in constant direct opposition to the jocks and other popular kids, it amply demonstrates their weaknesses and fickle ways, instead of simplistically rendering them as outsider saints.

It's probably worth saying a thing or two about the performances. The primary actor of note is of course Emma Watson, finally getting out from under the Harry Potter series that so wearied her. Those eight films may have exhausted her and changed her life forever in ways that are not all positive, but they also give us a 22-year-old actress who has the skills and emotional range of a veteran, which is precisely what she is. She is sheer magnetism in this movie.

However, even her performance is not nearly the strongest. The lead character is played by Logan Lerman, an actor two years Watson's junior who has actually been making movies a year longer than she has. You may know him from such films as (Troy McLure voice) Percy Jackson & the Olympians: The Lighting Thief and The Three Musketeers. But after this film, you will know him from this. He has the more difficult role and is simply astounding in the range of things he is asked to do. Last but not least among the performers worth singling out is Ezra Miller, also 20, whom you may not know from anything (unless you saw We Need to Talk About Kevin, which I did not). His role as Watson's gay stepbrother is very necessary comic relief that has a deceptive emotional depth all its own. It's hard to gauge exactly how important it is that these high school kids are played by actors who are under 22 -- these three actors, at least. But I'm betting it added significantly to the film's verisimilitude.

I also think it's worth devoting a word or two to Stephen Chbosky, who wrote the much-loved novel on which this movie was based. But that isn't all Chbosky did -- he also adapted his own book, and directed the film. I'm sure that's happened before, but no examples come to mind. And if it has happened, it seems an unlikely undertaking for a first-time director. There's no doubting that the decision to place executive, legislative and judicial power all in the hands of the same guy has worked out for this one. No external interpretation of his vision was necessary, since he controlled it from book page to script page to screen. That could be disastrous in some situations; here, it was wondrous.

Look, Perks isn't always entirely subtle (though it usually is), and sometimes you feel like every character is afflicted with some kind of problem from an after school special. And it does include two separate scenes where characters stand out of the sunroofs of cars going at high speeds, taking in the wind, Rose DeWitt Bukater style, while listening to David Bowie's "Heroes."

But the movies we love aren't always movies with crazy narrative structures or high-concept ideas we've never considered. The Perks of Being a Wallflower is one of those films that reminds us that familiar genres infused with a distinctive touch of originality and grace can tingle our spines just as much.

As it did mine for sometimes ten minutes at a time.

Is this really what Gerard Butler wanted?

Gerard Butler was a person of substance at one point. I'm sure of it.

In fact, the way I first learned his name was watching Joel Schumacher's 2004 adaptation of Phantom of the Opera. Back then I guess they didn't understand the potential appeal of Butler's face, because it spent the whole movie concealed under the phantom's mask. And there may be no character in cinema who takes himself more seriously and has less of a sense of humor than that titular phantom.

But since then? It seems like Butler is trying to emulate the career of Matthew McConaughey more than the career of Hugh Jackman, which should seem the model for a tough, handsome, charming guy who can also sing.

Then again, maybe not even that, as McConaughey has tried to remake himself in the past year with a number of daring roles, while Butler is still stuck in that Playing for Keeps phase that McConaughey has been trying to shrug off.

Playing for Keeps may be a fine movie, but just one look at this poster tells me it it's what I have referred to in the past as "this year's Nancy Meyers movie." (See here for a fuller discussion of this phenomenon.) That poster is not a poster, really. It's a poster template. If you have a romantic comedy with heart that you're releasing during the holiday season, just swap out the title and the head shots of your cast, and blammo, you're ready to go with the next one. In fact, note how similar this poster is to the one for How Do You Know?, which was the inspiration for the linked post about Nancy Meyers. Even down to the stars appearing in squares with different-colored backgrounds.

Also, that title? It's quintessentially bland, and interchangeable with any number of other titles in this genre.

It seems all too easy these days for Butler to take a role like this.

Most people first became aware of Butler from 300, when his iconic shouting and sculpted pecs seemed to destine him for a career comprised of logical offshoots of this film. So I suppose it's to his credit that he hasn't been quite that predictable. I only wish it was good unpredictable rather than bad unpredictable.

Butler's next prominent film was the one that I believe set him off on the wrong track. He made the truly bizarre romantic drama P.S. I Love You, which went back and forth between sickeningly sweet and oddly depressing, as it features a grieving woman (Hilary Swank) going on this intricate gauntlet of self-actualization tasks set up by her dead husband (Butler) while he was dying of cancer. The tone of this movie is all over the place, including a ten-minute argument at the beginning of the movie that's the only scene we actually see between Butler and Swank while he's still alive. Then the rest of this movie is this syrupy succession of cheesy life lessons punctuated by strangely misplaced jokes. I hated it.

In 2008 Butler made at least one good decision, Nim's Island, a kids movie with a ton of heart. I don't know whether RocknRolla was a good decision or not, because I didn't see it. But at least it wasn't a squishy romantic movie.

But 2009 saw him come out with The Ugly Truth, which is the very worst kind of romantic comedy -- a Katherine Heigl romantic comedy. I will grudgingly admit that I liked the first half of the movie, before it went into a tailspin in the second. He finished off 2009 with two truly abysmal movies that both featured the physical Butler, Gamer and Law Abiding Citizen.

In 2010 he was back to a light and fluffy romantic comedy in the form of The Bounty Hunter, which I will also admit had its share of enjoyable moments (while being mediocre at best overall). That year he also provided a voice for How to Train Your Dragon (his voice being one of his most distinctive assets). The following year brought Machine Gun Preacher and Coriolanus (neither of which I've seen, but at least Coriolanus is Shakespeare), and his only other film since then was October's Chasing Mavericks.

Now that I've performed a career recap that you could have easily gotten on IMDB (which is, in fact, where I did get it), I realize that I'm really only talking about four movies when I complain about Butler's tendency toward undemanding romantic dramas/comedies: P.S. I Love You, The Ugly Truth, The Bounty Hunter and now Playing for Keeps. But that's three more than Jackman has made (Kate & Leopold), though still fewer than McConaughey.

Okay okay, Jackman also made Someone Like You in the same year as Kate & Leopold. But this was only one year after Jackman made his splash in X-Men, and it's fair to say he was just taking the opportunities that came to him, glad to be a Hollywood commodity. Butler should be past that phase now.

But maybe the person I should be blaming is Butler's agent. Butler's agent hasn't gotten him a hit in any of the movies Butler has selected since 300, except for How To Train Your Dragon, though the success of that film can hardly be attributed to Butler in any meaningful way. 

But maybe I really just shouldn't be comparing Butler to someone like Hugh Jackman. Yeah, both men can sing, but Butler hasn't done it since Phantom, so it hardly seems like that was the way he intended his career to go. And it's hard to compare anyone to one of the breakout stars of the past decade, which I think we can say Jackman is.

I suppose if Butler just ends up as a Scottish McConaughey, there are worse careers he could have.

And that means that sometime in 2017 or 2018, we should expect to see him start playing the roles that McConaughey has been playing in 2012.

Turn me on, Norway

I'm always interested in examining how the foreign films I see have made it onto my radar.

Most American film fans really have to seek out foreign films, since few of them are marketed or distributed heavily in the United States. In fact, only the five that get nominated for Oscars each year have a great chance of making it down to the casual film fans, and even then, only one or two of those seem accessible enough to secure a place on their Netflix queues.

I, however, am not a casual film fan, so I see a lot more foreign language films than most people. Which still results in only a pathetic fraction of those that get made.

My method of learning about them is usually some combination of randomly reading about them, hearing them touted on a film podcast, or perhaps seeing a trailer for them at an arthouse theater.

Because of the random nature of this exposure, it seems like you should watch an equal number of movies from all pockets of the world, assuming you aren't carrying in a bias in favor of any particular region, and assuming you have an open-minded desire to expose yourself to as wide a cross-section of world cinema as you can.

Within this, though, you notice certain patterns emerging, certain parts of the world that seem to be really bringing it in terms of quality during the same period of time. Sometimes you even notice thematic and stylistic similarities that may have a cultural origin.

In the past couple years, South Korean films and Romanian films have each had distinct periods where they've asserted themselves into my consciousness. This year, though, it's films from Norway that are having a moment.

As I write this, I'm a bit surprised to note that three of my top 20 films from 2012 (out of 77 that I've seen) hail from Norway. Which means that 2011 was a damn good year for the Norwegian film industry. (Because of my ranking rules, I rank the films in the year they became available for me to watch for the first time, which was 2012, even though the three films all hit Norwegian theaters in 2011.)

No night better symbolized Norway's sudden ascendency than Monday, when I watched two of these three films in the same evening. (Watched the entirety of one, and finished another I'd started on Sunday.)

It was a total coincidence that I happened to do this, utterly unpremeditated. I'd had Turn Me On, Dammit! (whose trailer I saw at an arthouse theater) as a disc from Netflix since the second week of November, and I prioritized Oslo, August 31st (available on Netflix streaming) because of hearing it touted for a second time on the previous week's episode of  Filmspotting. I'm just thankful I didn't ruin the latter film by watching ten minutes of it during a bout of insomnia on Saturday night, then squeezing in another half-hour Sunday night before finishing it on Monday. And the only reason we watched Dammit on Monday night was because our DirecTV is out, as discussed on Monday.

Both of these films are full of wonderful and sometimes heartbreaking surprises, so I won't tell you too much about them. But just to get your curiosity piqued, Turn Me On, Dammit! is a coming-of-age story told (refreshingly) from the perspective of a 15-year-old girl, confronting her budding sexuality and its unintended consequences within the setting of a small-town Norwegian high school. Oslo, August 31st is a pensive look at a day in the life of a recovering drug addict, who must confront people from his past as he contemplates his future. As is the case with many good films, the plots are deceptively simple. It's the attention to storytelling detail that makes these two films sing.

But my favorite of the three Norwegian films in my top 20 is a gas of a thriller called Headhunters, which I watched back at the end of September (and learned about by hearing Joe Morgenstern's glowing review of it). This one contains more unexpected moments than the two previous films combined. Rarely have I seen a film straddle this many genres and have such a deft touch at each of them. It reminded me of the best work of Joel and Ethan Coen, except with more humanism. To say any more about it would spoil a terrific rollercoaster ride worse than riding a rollercoaster after a long night of drinking.

As if we needed further proof that there's Norway in the air, a Japanese film called Norwegian Wood, based on Haruki Murakami's novel, would qualify for my 2012 list as well. This one originated in Japan all the way back in 2010, but its U.S. release wasn't until January 6th of this year. I do plan to watch it before I finalize my rankings next month, though I don't expect it to have anything to do with Norway.

Of course, the problem with watching all these foreign films that originated in other calendar years is that each one presents a potential problem to me in terms of this year-end list. What if one of these films ends up being my favorite of the year? I have a philosophical problem with that, because when I look back on these lists in years to come, I don't really want to see that my #1 movie is something that only belongs with that ranking year based on the technicality of it U.S. release date. I narrowly avoided that fate in 2008, when I ranked 4 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days my #2 film of the year, just behind The Wrestler -- even though many critics ranked it in 2007, having seen it at film festivals. Since then it has definitely surpassed The Wrestler in my estimation. I caught a break with last year's #1, A Separation, which was the rare foreign film to debut in its country of origin in the same year that it debuted in the United States.

I guess I should just be glad that I'm seeing movies that are this good at all, and hand-wringing about year-end lists is not that important. It's the experience of watching the movie that matters, and it's nice to be reminded that you sometimes (frequently?) have to go abroad to find the most original stories being told in cinema.

And in 2012, the way to those stories is Norway.

Getting acquainted with ... Elvis Presley

This is the second-to-last in my Getting Acquainted series, where I have been watching three movies per month by a director or actor or writer whose work was previously unfamiliar to me. I've got one final installment in December.

November's subject has probably got to make almost anyone laugh. Who doesn't know Elvis Presley?

But the Elvis I know is not Elvis the actor. In fact, I had seen none of his movies. Not that they were supposed to be great cinematic masterpieces, but you'd think I would have caught one at one point, just by accident. Never happened.

I had a very specific idea of what to expect from Elvis' movies, but got off to a bad start when the first one didn't conform to my preconceived notions ...

Jailhouse Rock (1957, Richard Thorpe)
Watched: Monday, November 5th
One-sentence plot synopsis: A man convicted of manslaughter tries to forge a music career after getting released from jail.
My thoughts on the film: It may sound crazy to compare an Elvis Presley movie to Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay, but yep, I'm about to do that. One of the many things that annoyed me about that film is that they spent almost no time in Guantanamo Bay -- literally less than five minutes of screen time. In Jailhouse Rock, Elvis might spend twice that amount of time in jail --15 minutes at the absolute maximum. Then the plot turns to the not-that-interesting machinations of how his character becomes a music star. Although it's always a good idea to judge a movie on what it is rather than on what you thought it would be, I couldn't overcome the disappointment of being shortchanged on the type of movie I thought Jailhouse Rock would be. Even the titular song doesn't take place in the titular location; instead, it appears as a musical number on some kind of Ed Sullivan-type show later on in the narrative. But what really turned me off about this movie was Elvis himself. I was expecting a fun-loving scamp who was up to all kinds of skirt-chasing and mischief, but ultimately had a good head on his shoulders. This Elvis, however, is a surly, me-first guy who seems to disrespect women and gets off on being "cool." I have a kneejerk negative reaction to this personality type. So the thing that makes many people consider Jailhouse Rock to be Elvis' best movie -- its sense of substance and realism -- was the very thing that ultimately turned me off. Bring on the bubblegum Elvis!

Blue Hawaii (1961, Norman Taurog)
Watched: Tuesday, November 20th
One-sentence plot synopsis: A solider returning from the army to his Hawaiian home resumes his slacker island ways with his friends, despite his parents' insistence that he go to work in the family business.
My thoughts on the film: Ahhh ... that's more like it. I chose Blue Hawaii, the least iconic of the three titles, precisely because I expected it to be light and charming, and to remind me of my love affair with Hawaii (which I share with pretty much everyone). I've been there once (in 2005), but have also loved a lot of movies set in Hawaii (Forgetting Sarah Marshall for one), and specifically have an affection for Elvis-era Hawaiian music -- when we were staying in an Airstream trailer on our trip to Bisbee, Arizona (see here for a fuller discussion), we played a couple Hawaiian albums on the vintage record player, at least one by Dean Martin. I'm glad to say that Blue Hawaii did not disappoint in any of these respects -- which only means that it is an enjoyably frivolous confection, well short of a "great" film. This is the smilin' rather than sneerin' Elvis, and since this is the Elvis I understand we saw in most of his movies, his career sure was a strange sort of repudiation of Jailhouse Rock, even though that movie was a pretty big hit. It's fun to see the carefree King dancing at luaus and singing with his native Hawaiian friends as they paddle around in various skiffs and another local forms of aquatic transport. He has a playful relationship with his leading lady, too, even though he seems determined to keep her off balance (one song about his time in the army talks about how he was "almost always true" to her). One thing I noticed is that the campaign is now in full swing to almost subliminally sexualize Elvis, where more overt displays of sexuality may not have been feasible. His exchanges with various women are almost dripping with a winking sexual innuendo. The movie also has a breezy comedic subplot about Elvis' role as a tour guide for a group of mainland schoolgirls, one of whom becomes fixated on him, causing many Three's Company-style misunderstandings and hijinx to ensue. I was impressed to note Elvis' fitness for this type of comedy. One thing I found interesting is that poor Angela Lansbury must have always been thought of as some kind of dowdy old woman. Even at the young age of 36 -- making her only ten years older than Elvis -- she's cast as Elvis' mother, a stick in the mud who comes closest to being the film's antagonist. And in this role I noticed a bit of the movie's latent (or blatant) misogyny: Elvis' father is quite the opposite, an easygoing soul who seems to genuinely hate his wife and all she stands for.

Viva Las Vegas (1964, George Sidney)
Watched: Friday, November 30th
One-sentence plot synopsis: A Las Vegas race car driver crosses paths with the girl of his dreams while trying to win/earn the money necessary to replace his engine and race in The Big Race.
My thoughts on the film: More of the Blue Hawaii vibe here, except there's one big difference from Blue Hawaii that's important to note: Instead of hogging the spotlight for himself, Elvis shares it with his leading lady, making for a far more balanced love story and a much more progressive film in terms of its gender politics. That leading lady is Ann-Margret, and I must say, my qualms with her odd hyphenated stage name aside, she is charming (and talented) as all get-out. I don't think I'd seen Ann-Margret in anything in which she wasn't already middle-aged, and I must say, I was astonished at the radiance of her beauty. But if she were just a beautiful face, she'd be no different from a series of unknown pretty faces who played opposite Elvis in his other films. She can (and does) sing, including at least one solo, and she dances like there's no one watching -- which is to say that she gives her all to a number of 60s-style jigs that we might confuse for convulsions if we didn't know they were popular back then. In fact, I was particularly impressed with her solo "My Rival," which was shot in one long take without edits -- a feat that was made more complicated when the choreography required her to catch several slices of toast ejected from a toaster oven at precisely the right moment. Little details like this made the movie seem more than just a color-by-numbers Elvis movie, shot as quickly as possible according to the path of least resistance. Oh, I suppose I should say something about Elvis, but you already know I think he has a good talent for comedy, more of which is on display here. My one complaint about the movie is that it has an almost comically hasty conclusion, as though at that point they really did just decide to close up shop, cut and print. A couple other quick things to mention: 1) The famous scene of Elvis water-skiing alongside what I now know to be Ann-Margret, which I always assumed was probably in Blue Hawaii, materializes here, and it's actually on Lake Mead near the Hoover Dam; 2) The movie made me wish I'd ever bothered to visit Vegas' old downtown, which was bustling back in the 1960s long before the strip surpassed it in popularity; 3) The sexuality in this movie becomes considerably more blatant, as Elvis and Ann-Margret actually simulate sex sounds briefly during one of their songs; 4) For reasons I'm not sure I entirely understand, several different characters in this movie know how to fly a helicopter.

Conclusion: I would like to watch more of Elvis' comedies, having been particularly intrigued by a screwball-looking affair called Live a Little, Love a Little, whose trailer appeared before Viva Las Vegas.

My favorite of the three films: Viva Las Vegas by a hair over Blue Hawaii, mostly because of Ann-Margret

Okay! It's finally here, the last month of Getting Acquainted. And as I told you last month, I plan to go out with another icon, a little somebody you may have heard of named John Wayne. (Marion to his parents.)  I have seen probably only about three of the 142 features he appeared in, and I need a good excuse to finally watch several of his most famous titles: Stagecoach and Rio Bravo. (Stagecoach is really young Wayne and is probably more associated with John Ford than John Wayne, but it's supposed to be a masterpiece in its own right and I finally need to see it.) Mostly because I know it's available on streaming, I'm going to finish the whole shebang with McClintock! I always love titles with random exclamation points.

I'll see you back here on the other side of December.

Little Timmy Bekmambetov makes good

Even after he's made four movies that have been seen widely in the United States, Timur Bekmambetov is still not a name that rolls off the tongue, and not just because it's Russian. We've learned far harder names of foreign-born directors. (Apichatpong Weerasethakul, anyone?)

But at least it's finally a name worth saying again.

After I was disappointed in, well, almost everything he's been involved in since he made a splash with Night Watch (which hit Russian theaters in 2004 and which I saw in 2006), little Timmy Bekmambetov is finally back in my good graces with Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.

Little Timmy?

It's something I started to call him a couple years back. I have no idea why except that it made me laugh. It seemed like a guy named Timur might go by Tim as a nickname, and Timmy is a funny nickname for Tim. What's funny about it is that unlike Jimmy, Johnny, Joey or any number of nicknames that end in a Y sound, no one goes by Timmy as an adult. In fact, probably no one goes by Timmy much later than third grade.

It wasn't really meant as a diss to Bekmambetov, and it doesn't have an overt meaning. It's not that I think his filmmaking is childish, or that I think he wears a bib while he eats. It was just a little slice of randomness that made me giggle.

But after watching Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter, I think I owe the guy a lot more respect, perhaps enough that I need to ditch the nickname for awhile.

Let's go back and explore his career to this point to get a better idea what we're talking about.

Little Timmy made two films few have heard of -- the Russian film Peshavar Waltz and the American straight-to-video movie The Arena, produced by Roger Corman -- before taking the cinematic universe by the lapels with his 2004 vampire movie Night Watch. The movie pulsed with style and innovation, whipping up some terrific action set pieces and all manner of blood and viscera in its eye-popping production design. But perhaps its most original aspect was something its Russian audience didn't even get to see. The film turns its English subtitles into living pictorial elements, typing out in bursts, dripping off the screen like blood, that kind of thing. This little touch only served to make the experience of watching it all the more immersive and exciting.

Where to go but down? So down Little Timmy went. The follow-up in an expected trilogy was 2006's Day Watch, which returned the same world and many of the same characters, but little of the wonder. For reasons I won't get into at length now, the film is narratively static and dull, doing little better than treading water in terms of both its story and technical innovation. To use a (probably cliched) pun, this vampire movie is surprisingly toothless -- in part because vampires actually take a back seat to witches, shapeshifters and other mythological creatures in this installment, to the movie's great detriment. And all the sudden I kind of didn't care if I saw the series' third film, which has not yet transpired and probably never will.

I can't comment on Bekmambetov's next Russian language project, which came along the next year, because I have yet to see (and probably never will) The Irony of Fate 2, a sequel to a popular Russian movie from 1971. Although the movie did incredibly well in Russia, second only to Avatar for the highest box office in Russian history, it never made it here.

And so it was Bekmambetov's Hollywood debut that made his downward slide all the more precipitous. That was a little 2008 movie called Wanted, starring Angelina Jolie, James McAvoy and Morgan Freeman. You may remember it. Here's hoping you don't. Although I'm sure Wanted has some ardent fans, I found it to be non-stop ridiculous -- and not the good kind of ridiculousness Bekmambetov had peddled in Night Watch and to a lesser extent Day Watch. Although it is an adaptation of previously existing material, the movie plays like its only reason for existence is so Bekmambetov can indulge his desire to see things that he (and no one else) had ever seen before on screen. Namely, absurd stunts involving jumping cars and the physics-defying flight paths of bullets, each more absurd than the one before it. What takes the movie from silly to actively bad is that it has a number of big problems in its moral world view, which I also won't get into here. Oh yeah, and the fact that much of the plot revolves around a giant loom. You know, for sewing.

Bekmambetov took (or was forced to take) four years before his next Hollywood directing project surfaced, but he was busy producing other people's movies in the meantime. None of the movies that have his name in a producer capacity have really done it for me (the ones I've seen, anyway). I wanted to like 9, but just didn't like it that much. The same was true for Apollo 18, though I liked that one even less. Then there was last year's flop The Darkest Hour, which I never caught up with, but which received awful reviews. He did go against type a bit by directing a Russian comedy in 2010, Six Degrees of Celebration.

When I sat down to watch Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter on Friday night, I didn't even remember (if I ever knew) that it was Little Timmy in the director's chair. Maybe that's a good thing. By carrying in no preconceived notions, I just took it all in as a fresh new experience with the potential to excite me. And that it did. In fact, only when the credits rolled, and I saw who was responsible for this gloriously kooky movie, did I smack my forehead and realize that I'd felt an excitement akin to the excitement of watching Night Watch for the first time.

Here the audacious and outrageous set pieces really work, and the mixture of over-the-top action with a loving and detailed production design did indeed remind me of Bekmambetov's debut. There's something joyously nutty about watching a young Abraham Lincoln twirl a silver-tipped axe like a baton twirler would twirl a baton. But where Bekmambetov et al really succeed is by telling their story with a straight face. As much attention as possible is paid to developing a reasonably plausible interrelationship between his political career/personal ideals and his role as a man who hunts vampires. You could easily (obviously) go campy with a movie like this, but playing it straight delivered the best possible realization of what was, nonetheless, clearly envisioned as something of a joke by writer Seth Grahame-Smith. Then again, Grahame-Smith adapts his own work here, and keeps the respectful tone toward Lincoln, so maybe the joke never went beyond the title to begin with.

But let's talk about Bekmambetov's contributions, or one in particular that seems to be worth singling out (so as not to ruin the others). It scores a ten in both absurdity and creativity, and on this particular night, that's what I was looking for. Picture this: Lincoln hunts down one particularly reprehensible bloodsucker and chases him into the middle of a field full of stampeding horses. (Best not to think too much about how the stampede started, and why it includes no less than 500 horses.) Now imagine Honest Abe and this demon chasing each other across the backs of the horses in full sprint, occasionally falling down in between them, and sometimes even using the horses as weapons against each other. All shot with enough verisimilitude to make you wonder exactly how they did it.

I thought I should also take a moment to praise Little Timmy as a director of actors -- a side of directing that's oft-forgotten when it comes to directors of grand spectacles like this one. Benjamin Walker makes a highly credible Lincoln, and let me just say that I applaud the balls it took to cast an unknown in this role. (I thought I was making an original observation when I noted that he looked like a young Liam Neeson, and then I learned that he had actually played a young Liam Neeson -- Walker was cast in the role of a younger version of Neeson's title character in Kinsey.) However, the smart casting and the good performances don't end there. Mary Elizabeth Winstead puts her all into Mary Todd Lincoln, Jimmi Simpson, Dominic Cooper and Anthony Mackie are all solid as Lincoln's various cohorts, and Rufus Sewell sinks his teeth deliciously into the villainous role of a vampire who has roamed the earth for millennia, who unsurprisingly passes this particular decade as a plantation owner.

Of course, numerous liberties taken with the life of Abraham Lincoln and fight scenes conducted across the backs of stampeding horses may just not be your thing.

Then again, you may not have liked Night Watch either.

Welcome back, LTB. 

Adapting to a DirecTV outage

Our DirecTV started acting funny last Wednesday night. Our first indication was when I was stopped, mid-program, from watching a show on our DVR in our bedroom, which is the secondary receiver we have in our house. I tried to call the Playlist back up, but it couldn't find it anymore. I shrugged and went to sleep, finishing it the next day with no problem on our main TV DVR.

Then Friday night, as we were trying to watch this week's 30 Rock with our dinner, it wouldn't load. We also discovered that we couldn't change the channel, either on the remote or the front of the receiver itself (which ruled out battery problems with the remote), nor could we call up various other menus. Eventually, it did try to pull up 30 Rock, but it went straight to the "Do you want to delete this recording?" screen.

We did not want to delete that recording, but in effect, that's what's going to happen.

After another 12 or so hours of trying various resets and getting various ominous messages ("1456 errors found on the disk; 0 repaired"), we called DirecTV and discovered that our receiver has gone kaput. We're going to have to get it replaced. This means we'll lose about 20 hours of saved programming. (And pretty much makes up my mind to stop watching Fringe, of which there were six episodes stockpiled with no plan to watch them in the foreseeable future.)

Darn it.

But as much as I bemoan the loss of those shows, I know we'll be able to cobble them together from other places, eventually. (We were able to see the list of saved shows, so at least we copied that down.) And in fact, it's possible our TV being down for a few days will have fringe (no pun intended) benefits for me.

Namely, now we have no choice but to watch movies.

Saturday night I babysat, so my wife and I weren't pursuing a communal viewing option that night anyway. But last night, we likely would have wound down the weekend with a couple shows on our DVR. Instead, we watched one of my favorite movies of the 2000s, Spike Jonze's Adaptation. (Though I think it would be more accurate to refer to it as Charlie Kaufman's Adaptation, or perhaps Charlie and Donald Kaufman's Adaptation.)  It was my favorite movie of 2002, and I ranked it 11th for the whole decade. And yes, I know the title is probably properly written as Adaptation. with the period at the end. But I find that problematic for the purposes of writing fluidity, so I'm excising the period here.

I'm not up to the mental calisthenics of giving this movie a review for you -- besides, you know that reviews aren't what I do in this space. (He says somewhat disingenuously, as more and more of his posts contain some form of a review of the movie being written about.) But even if I were completely clear-headed and hadn't spent half the night asleep on the couch while trying to make my way through a second movie, this is a difficult one to review in general because it's just so damn rich. Rarely have so many aspects of a script worked on as many thematic levels as they do in this impossibly meta (but never in an annoying way) piece of filmmaking.

So instead of touching on the movie's particulars as I do indeed believe is warranted, I'll just reprint my own review of it from allmovie.com, written nearly ten years ago, coinciding with the film's release. I was rather proud of accomplishing in those approximately 300 words the very thing that Kaufman struggles with in the movie: being able to say all the things you want to say in the limited time/space allotted to you. (For further consideration of this career-long struggle for Kaufman, see Synecdoche, New York.)

Anyway, here it is:

Critics charged with the divine headache of describing Adaptation, in all its twisted magnificence, should find it appropriate that the story concentrates on the paralysis of writer's block, brought on by the impossible urge to say everything. The sophomore collaboration between screenwriter Charlie Kaufman and director Spike Jonze is so drenched with unorthodox ideas, yet so fundamentally accessible, that it actually outdoes the groundbreaking Being John Malkovich in existential pretzel logic, while remaining digestible to a middle-brow audience. Kaufman's real-life struggles adapting Susan Orlean's The Orchid Thief get brilliantly expanded into a self-reflexive narrative of sublime originality, in which screenwriter, author and muse become intertwined, and such rich topics as artistic integrity, social awkwardness and sibling rivalry get teased and prodded. Not only has Kaufman written himself into the proceedings, but in Nicolas Cage, he's found an exquisite choice to interpret himself and his twin brother -- an imaginary character given "real" life by receiving a screenwriting credit. Sweating, stammering, lowering his eyes, and imploding in a crisis of relevance -- then doing just the opposite as Donald -- Cage kicks his own career out of neutral, at least briefly exchanging the hunt for ever-bigger paychecks with work that truly matters. Although the stories of Orlean (Meryl Streep) and John Laroche (Chris Cooper) both carry a vital urgency, this is Kaufman's film, full of the anxieties of a kinky-haired shlub whose overactive imagination is both his meal ticket and his curse. Inasmuch as it eventually imitates the very story structure it abhors, Adaptation is the rare film that both attacks and revels in the humbling, soul-crushing yet exhilarating mechanics of Hollywood moviemaking. 

I did have a few new observations on this, my third viewing and first in about three years, but I don't have the time to get into them now -- nor, as described previously, quite the mental acuity. Let's just say that it still fills me with a sense of awe over its narrative audacity, and how well its many ideas cohere into something truly sublime.

Now it just remains to be seen how many more movies we can squeeze in between now and when our new DirecTV receiver arrives, which they tell me will be in three business days.

You know, I wouldn't mind if it were four.

Guardian fatigue

And speaking of Rise of the Guardians (as I was yesterday), one of my first experiences with it, a few years back, was thinking the title sounded awfully similar to Legend of the Guardians: The Owls of Ga'Hoole. The fact that both were animated movies aimed at children made the possibility of mixing them up even greater.

Thank goodness for Legend's hilarious subtitle, which helped keep things straight.

But it makes me wonder if they won't want to change the title Guardians of the Galaxy by the time James Gunn's movie comes out in August of 2014.

Guardians of the Galaxy is the latest in-production Marvel movie whipping geeks into orgasmic levels of excitement. It was announced at Comic-Con this summer, an adaptation of the interstellar comic books that Marvel first started publishing in 1969. It gives off an instant and probably not coincidental Avengers vibe.

But depending on how kind two years and four years of existence, respectively, are to Rise of and Legend of the Guardians, fans may be getting unfortunate vibes from those two films when Guardians of the Galaxy tries to stake its claim to tentpole status two summers from now.

And even if history is kind to them, who wants to be the third in any trend?

The problem with each of these properties is that they were all based on previously existing material, all of which used the word "Guardians" in the title. The owl books were called Guardians of Ga'Hoole, but I guess they wanted the movie's title to introduce the concept of owls to the consciousness of selective viewers. Rise of the Guardians was based on books called The Guardians of Childhood, and I guess having the word "childhood" in the title would have made that one sound too wimpy. But even if either movie had kept the series' original title, that title would have including the word "Guardians" regardless.

I can see why Guardians of the Galaxy would be loath to change its title, considering that this is the entirety of the title, and it existed as a brand nearly 35 years before Guardians of Ga'Hoole (which came into existence in 2003) and over 40 before The Guardians of Childhood (a newbie, having debuted in novel form only last year). Besides, how many adaptations of well-loved comic books have had to back off from using their original titles?

So I guess they're probably stuck with it, for better or worse.

Something that's kind of funny about this word "guardian" popping up so frequently: Isn't a "guardian" someone who's kind of lame? In fact, to a child, isn't it often seen as a synonym for "parent"? As in "No one under 13 permitted without parent or guardian." To kids, a guardian isn't necessarily someone who keeps you safe. It's someone who rules strictly and arbitrarily, and prevents you from having any fun.

I mean, the galaxy would probably have a blast with all those black holes and supernovas if it weren't for those pesky guardians.

(And I'll thank you not to debate me on scale and scope when it comes to my astronomy-related claims in the previous sentence.)

It's all in the writing

There are others in the game, but it's safe to say that the two current titans in animation are Disney/Pixar and Dreamworks. We can lump Disney and Pixar together because a) Disney owns Pixar, and b) when combined, their output about equals that of Dreamworks.

(Sorry, Universal/Illumination Entertainment -- I'm not inviting you to this party for the disappointing Despicable Me and Dr. Seuss' The Lorax. I'll also now make a dutiful mention of Fox' Ice Age movies.)

Although I certainly prefer the animation styles of Disney/Pixar, I'm not going to credit them with having a significant technical advantage over Dreamworks in that department.

And so, when/if Dreamworks does poach employees from Disney/Pixar, they shouldn't be poaching the animators. They should be poaching the writers.

The writing is why Dreamworks is Pepsi to Disney/Pixar's Coke.

The latest example is Rise of the Guardians, the movie I accidentally saw on Thursday night. I had gone to the Sherman Oaks Arclight for an 8:00 showing of Lincoln, but was denied as the result of an apparent sell-out. Although the "big board" did not list the movie as sold out, neither could I purchase a ticket to it at one of the kiosks. And I was close enough to start time not be able to wait behind over 20 dodos who didn't realize you can also buy tickets from the machines. Even if I did, the wait might only confirm what I already suspected about the paucity of available tickets.

Since it started only five minutes later, Rise of the Guardians was an obvious Plan B. (Though I first made sure that Anna Karenina wasn't playing anytime soon.)

My response to this movie was sluggish from the start. That's not to say I thought it was poorly made. As I said before, I prefer the character designs in Disney and Pixar, but I could easily recognize the virtuoso work on display here. I just wish it weren't so manically dizzying, is all. So frantic with color and action and general zaniness. "You can tell they worked really hard on this" was the backhanded compliment that kept occurring to me.

It was really the writing that let me down. The inability to make me care about the characters. The inability to give them depth. The inability to fill me with wonder. The inability to make me laugh.

That was the thing that surprised me most about Wreck-It Ralph, which I saw a couple weeks ago. Not surprised that I cared about the characters or was infected with the contagious sense of wonder, but that I was laughing hysterically. I'm sure it has something to do with the fact that the movie was perfectly tailored for a child of the 1980s to get its references, but Wreck-It Ralph may have been the hardest I've laughed at a movie this year. (I'll also note that I saw it with two friends who are the same age and have the same references, which certainly helped.)

I didn't laugh once during Rise of the Guardians. Not once.

I might consider Wreck-It Ralph an anomaly if not for the fact that Disney's previous non-Pixar animated release, Tangled, gave me the hardest single laugh I can remember having in the theater. That's a bold statement, but it may be true. I distinguish this hard laugh from other hard laughs because I kept giggling about this particular line of dialogue for minutes afterward. If you've seen the movie, it's when the thief turned hero, Flynn (voice of Zachary Levi), finds himself in an improbable sword fight with a horse, backing up toward the edge of a long dropoff. Yelling above the ruckus, Flynn tells the horse (who, true to nature, can't speak), "Just so you know, this is the strangest thing I've ever done." I'm almost starting to laugh now, just typing this out.

As a comparison, let's look at the other recent Dreamworks movies that didn't make me laugh: How to Train Your Dragon, Kung Fu Panda ... well, maybe once or twice each. I did laugh at Monsters vs. Aliens, but that stands out as an exception that I attribute more to the vocal actors than the writing. I'd say its third act gives a good idea of its structural failures from a script perspective.

Why are there so many recent Dreamworks Animation movies I'm not even mentioning here? Because I didn't even deem them worth seeing. That list includes the last two Madagascar movies, the second Kung Fu Panda, the last three Shrek movies, Puss in Boots and Megamind. I did really enjoy Bee Movie back in 2007, but had a much more negative impression of it on second viewing. (That also probably speaks to the writing, as that script is all over the place.)

Pure Pepsi, I tell you.

Now, I haven't seen Pixar's last two movies, either. But I do expect to catch Brave in the coming weeks. I'm probably saving Cars 2 for when my son inevitably goes crazy over the Cars movies, which will happen just as soon as we expose him to the first one.

I do realize that the claims I'm making here are rather broad. In fact, if I looked up these movies, I'm sure I'd find their scripts credited to dozens of different writers, multiple per movie in most cases. Naturally, a group of dozens of different writers have varying strengths that should seem to operate independently of whatever studio is employing them.

Except Pixar and the last two Disney films do have a certain unifying force that gives them a consistent quality: John Lasseter. You know, the guy who basically founded Pixar and directed the first two Toy Story movies. (We won't mentioned that he also directed what many people considered three of the lesser Pixar movies, A Bug's Life and the two Cars movies. For the record, I do really like the original Cars.)

I can't be sure to what extent Lasseter meddles in the day-to-day operations of these movies, but I have to think that his fingerprints are all over Tangled and Wreck-It Ralph, which certainly qualifies as a good thing. In fact, it seems as though he's putting more of himself into making really good Disney movies than really good Pixar movies, as Brave seems likely to be the second straight Pixar movie not to win the Oscar for best animated feature. (If you were asking me today, I'd bet on Wreck-It Ralph to win this year.)

Assuming that he does meddle (and that this is a good thing), it's probably not standing over the shoulder of an animator, grabbing his mouse arm and operating the animator like a puppet, showing him the right way to give texture to individual hairs on a character's head. Nope, I'm thinking he's in the writer's room, figuring out just the right way to give the characters texture, dimension and heart.

The results speak for themselves. Disney/Pixar movies feature characters and scenarios you care about, which lead to exciting and poignant narrative climaxes.

Dreamworks?

With Rise of the Guardians being a particularly valid example, Dreamworks movies are just a big light show. 

Some pretty crap pairings

I like me a good puzzle.

Not necessarily those brain teasers that threaten to drive a person crazy. I'll try those from time to time, but I'm usually driven crazy before I solve them.

No, more than anything I mean I like fitting things together so they just plain work. And one "recent" (almost five years ago) example of that was the seating arrangements for our wedding.

That was my responsibility, and I attacked it with gusto. I loved the challenge of taking a group of disparate guests (nearly 100) and dividing them up so that each table included the perfect blend of similar personalities, and at least one really gregarious person who could help get everyone talking. The key was working out the whole table, not just eight of the ten seats. The final results of my mixing and matching left me with a much greater sense of accomplishment and satisfaction than such a task probably should have.

The Mission Tiki Drive-In needs someone like me.

With many fewer variables to consider, they've done an absolute shit job figuring out which movies should fit with which this week.

As I may have told you before, I get a weekly email from Mission Tiki telling me which movies are paired for double features on which screens. They've probably made some bad pairings before, but this week's pairings are particularly egregious.

The only prominent new movie opening today is Killing Them Softly, which joins a slate of seven returning movies: Skyfall, Wreck-It Ralph, Flight, Twilight: BDP2, Taken 2, Rise of the Guardians and Red Dawn.

Now, if you want a little challenge of your own, take a minute to pair off these eight movies in the ways you think would be smartest.

When you do so, keep in mind that this drive-in theater does not let you switch screens between the two features. I should know, as discussed here.

Therefore, also keep in mind that both movies should be appropriate for the same audiences to watch. I'm sure there are some people who come to watch only a single movie and then leave, but you're paying for two movies, so they should arrange it so you can see both of them. (Actually, you're paying only $7 for adults and $1 for kids from 5-9, with those under 5 free, so the price is justified for only watching a single movie. Still, that's no fun, and it's not how the movies are advertised.)

Have you made your selections?

I'll show you mine in a minute, but let me first show you theirs. The first movie listed below plays twice, both before and after the second movie, to accommodate the late-arriving crowd.

Killing Them Softly with Skyfall
Wreck-It Ralph with Twilight
Rise of the Guardians with Flight
Red Dawn with Taken 2

If the problem with this arrangement doesn't immediately jump out at you, let me give you a little assist.

Three of these pairings are basically fine. Not ideal, but fine.

The fourth is an outrage.

I'm talking about Rise of the Guardians and Flight.

(And very minor spoilers about Flight are about to follow.)

Guardians is rated PG. But since it's an animated movie, you wouldn't be surprised if some parents assumed it was rated G. Meaning it would be suitable for their youngest possible tots. And believe me, there are always plenty of young tots at this drive-in.

Flight? R. R for Restricted.

R for full frontal nudity and cocaine use in the first five minutes.

That's right, all you lovers of the female flesh -- in the first five minutes of Flight, you see Nadine Velazquez, erstwhile cast member on My Name is Earl and The League, boobs and bush front. (You see her butt, too, but that's comparatively quaint.)

Actually, forget what I said about five minutes. You see this in the first one minute of the movie.

Not long after that, major movie star Denzel Washington leans over a glass table and snorts a couple lines of cocaine.

So even if parents were savvy about the rating and prospective content of Flight, and even if they were hurrying to pack up their kids and leave before the next movie started, there's a decent chance those kids would be exposed to pubic hair and drugs before their parents even had a chance to do anything about it.

And any parents know that you can't pack up your kids to leave somewhere in only a minute or two. Especially if you've got coolers out and a half-dozen kids running around like maniacs, you're looking at ten or 15 minutes.

What's more, it's one thing to know that an R-rated movie is coming on, and what it may contain. It's another thing to be assaulted by the movie's kid-unfriendly elements while the opening credits are still rolling.

And then of course there are all those parents who don't know what Flight's about, and will be just sitting there, blissfully watching the second movie, until all the sudden, a 40-foot vagina is staring them in the face.

Someone needs to put a stop to this before the first show tonight, methinks. At least it's raining in Los Angeles, so perhaps Mother Nature will step in where stupid human beings either can't or won't.

The thing is, this should be easy enough to fix.

And now we've come to the part of our program where you and I compare notes on our own pairings for these eight movies. This is what I came up with:

Flight of the Guardians with Wreck-It Ralph
Red Dawn with Twilight
Killing Them Softly with Flight
Skyfall with Taken 2

The first pairing is so obvious, it should have hit them over the head with something heavy. You have two animated movies with very little scandalous content. Put them together on the same bill.

The second seems pretty obvious as well. These are the two movies featuring primarily casts of late teenagers/early twentysomethings. I'm sure there's a fair amount of angst in both. Not to mention that both of the damn movies have the word "dawn" in their titles. (A little on-the-nose? I don't care, I like it.)

The remaining four movies could probably be divided up in almost any fashion. In fact, I was tempted to pair Skyfall and Flight, just because of their similar titles.

But when you look a little closer, a more logical configuration does present itself. There are two PG-13 movies here, and two R movies. Just match up the two R movies, you idiots.

Last week they weren't smoking this much crack. Killing Them Softly replaced Hotel Transylvania, which finally finished an improbably long run that would have started in late September. Transylvania had been matched up with Guardians. Ralph was with Twilight -- not perfect, but at least the younger audiences probably aren't going to be scarred for life by anything that happens in Twilight. Flight was with Taken 2 (that's fine) and Red Dawn was with Skyfall (that's also fine). There are some Rs mixed in with some PG-13s, but I don't really think that line of demarcation means what it used to mean.

Who knows why they got soft in the head this week.

Now, I don't want to rule out the possibility that there's some kind of profit algorithm they use to determine what goes with what. Maybe strong performers only go with strong performers, or maybe just the opposite -- maybe strong performers need to prop up weak performers. (Though I don't know how you can accurately determine which movie is responsible for a double feature performing well.) Or maybe there's a newness variable, or maybe there's some kind of variable to determine which movie needs to be shown first. After all, if you match the two animated movies, you are pushing the start time of Wreck-It Ralph back to 9:30. Maybe they've witnessed the exodus of cars from the lot after the first movie ends, and they know that most of the tykes clear out after the first movie anyway.

But even just the risk of incurring the anger of dozens of parents, for whom Nadine's "special area" was never part of their evening plans, seems like a good reason to throw that algorithm out the window. At least for one week.

At this point I should admit that protecting kids at the drive-in from things they shouldn't see is an imperfect science to begin with. All you have to do is rotate your head to watch any one of the other three movies. You can see all four screens from almost any vantage point (though the other three would be farther away and therefore harder to make out clearly). The drive-in logistics department just assumes you're going to want to keep your eyes trained on the screen of the movie whose sound is also playing on your FM dial. But if you're talking about a young kid, that's not a safe assumption. If you're a young kid whose attention easily wanders, his/her eyes might easily and unwittingly wander to Nadine Velazquez' crotch. 

At least in that case it would be a random occurrence, not part of our regularly scheduled program.

Of course, they could solve some of these problems by just allowing people to switch theaters between movies. I've never quite understood why they're so strict about that. Except that it probably does have something to do with judging which movies are performing and which are starting to stink like old fish.

Besides, power-hungry assholes get off on being power-hungry assholes, and no, I'm not talking about those guys who drove up to us in their golf cart to prevent us from switching screens to see Hall Pass after we'd finished Battle: Los Angeles in March of last year.

And no, I'm not still bitter.

Though they could go a long way toward mending fences with me if they hired me as a "pairings consultant." I would do it for a very modest fee: $25 a week.

If they're looking for referrals, I offer for their consideration the hundred happy guests at my wedding.