So why did I enjoy it at all? Three reasons. First, Owen Wilson (an actor I really don’t care for) actually turns in a rather charming “performance” – he’s really not acting very much, he’s just doing his weird-voiced, hippy-dippy thing. But in this movie, his hippy-dippy schtick really takes the edge off Allen’s terrible dialog, making it almost work, much the way the Spanish actors in Vicky Christina Barcelona were able to transform his crap dialog into something really memorable. Secondly, Allen, to his credit, succeeded in getting fairly understated performances out of all the actors playing the artists of the 1920′s and the 1890′s, which makes those sequence work pretty well. Third, Paris is a fun city to look at.

Oh yes, and one other thing. Alison Pill is outstanding in the supporting role of Zelda Fitzgerald. She lights up the screen in her brief appearances. Talk about an under-appreciated and under-utilized actress. Can’t someone write this gal a fabulous lead role for her to shine in? Please?!

Here’s the question: does Midnight in Paris deserve the Academy Award nomination it’s sure to get? Well, probably, but only because movies are so incredibly bad this year, and now of course they insist on nominating 10 of them! If pressed, I would have to admit that Midnight in Paris probably is one of the 10 best mainstream movies I saw this year, but that’s not saying very much.

I’d Netflix it if you are in the mood for a diverting little urban fairytale. It goes down reasonably well, despite its flaws, and you don’t burp it too much afterwards.

This is exactly how I see Stephen Spielberg. Whatever you think of his product, it cannot be denied that he is an artist with a very definite artistic vision. I personally think the product of his vision is comparable in quality to the old Holiday Inn burlap painters, and I find his technique to be so distracting and heavy-handed that for me each and every insufferable scene of his bears a garish SPIELBERG signature scrawled across it in bold, dark letters. But there are people (many people) who disagree with this assessment of his work – among these are the members of the Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences, who will probably give him multiple Oscars for this clumsy, overwrought homage to the worst in tacky schmaltz.

If you are a fan of Stephen Spielberg’s artistic vision, you will probably like War Horse. If you are not, you will probably hate it.

One thing you have to say about Cameron Crowe: the guy knows how to make a movie, and I don’t say this lightly. Whatever you think of his films (I can’t think of one I actually disliked, and I consider Elizebethtown a modern masterpiece) there is a quality of craftsmanship there that cannot be denied. All his talents are on display in We Bought a Zoo. His ability to make GREAT use of a good soundtrack is probably as good as any director I’ve ever seen, and he always gets wonderful performances out of all his actors. He kind of redefined Scarlett Johansson for me – she actually managed to break out of that spaced-out teenager role she’s been playing her whole life, and turned in a very winning, adult performance as the zoo keeper. Matt Damon is his usual wonderful, charismatic self, but Crowe deserves some credit for turning him into a middle-aged dad so convincingly. And the zoo staff all achieve distinct identities without any one of them distracting from the main story and characters – not an easy thing to pull off. The only one he had trouble with (and that’s an understatement) was Thomas Haden Church – I don’t know what happened there, as his performance was a like a ridiculous parody of his usual schtick. He is so bad that he even drags Damon down in their scenes together. But in the end, T.H. Church is not featured enough to do any lasting damage to the film.

But what really struck me about this Crowe / Spielberg comparison was the manifest difference in their camera work. Crowe has this marvelous ability to make even the simplest shots absolutely thrilling – it has to do with the angle of the shot, the motion in the shot, the smallest details of the performance, it’s placement in a sequence of shots, and the emotional tenor of the soundtrack at the moment of the shot, all of which are obviously carefully orchestrated. One example (perhaps not the best) that is popping into my head right now: toward the end of the film, when the father wakes up and sees the sun shining after weeks of rain, and he runs to tell his son, as he moves quickly into the hall and the camera pans with him but then stops on the wall calendar revealing July 7, opening day for the zoo. It seems like such a small thing, done a million times, but that’s my point: it’s been done a million times BADLY. When Crowe does it here, it is for some reason thrilling, more thrilling than it has any right to be, frankly. I’m not really sure exactly how he does it. The guy is just masterful.

Consider also the way the animals are dealt with in this film. Spielberg would have rubbed our noses in cheese-ball animal crap until we wanted to take a flame-thrower to the whole damn zoo. But Crowe somehow manages to keep the animals in the background, while simultaneously having them indirectly define much of the plot and shooting them memorably enough so that their brief segments have the quality of a first-rate animal documentary. I’m not sure I’ve ever seen a “multi-animal movie” of this sort where the treatment of the animals was so perfectly gauged and regulated by the director. The scene with Damon and the Grizzly was incredible – has horror and humor ever been mixed so well?

I’m not saying We Bought a Zoo is a great film. But it is a high quality film that is very enjoyable, and among the crappy, disappointing 2011 holiday blockbuster movies, it stands tall as the best of the bunch by far, indeed the only one I’ve seen that is actually worth watching. Highly recommended!

So what’s the problem? Well, the problem is that the film is not very good. It’s entertaining enough, and I felt only mildly sorry that I went to see it, but in the end it’s the same old story. They just didn’t write enough interesting dialog, and the screenplay is very obviously a poorly re-envisioned stage-play. They didn’t do justice to Jung’s ideas or Freud’s ideas, and they didn’t portray the split between Jung and Freud convincingly at all. Basically the film boils down to some guy who can’t stop horse-whipping Keira Knightley (or thinking about it,) and who weakness in this regard destroys him in the end – clearly something went amiss when they put this movie together.

It’s a funny film. It’s strangely superficial. It seems better than it really is as you are watching it, and then afterward you are left thinking about how little you actually took away from the film. See it if you can enjoy good performances in a crappy film (it never works for me.)

The only thing I took away from this film is a strong sense of wonder that Judy Greer never gets any lead roles. She is such a talented actress, and she completely steals this entire movie with just a few scenes. Her technique is incredible, she is versatile, she is warm and attractive on screen, she has a good voice: Why can’t somebody write this woman a film to star in?!

Still, compared to the mountains of depressing, tasteless and offensive trash that we are bombarded with in theaters, The Muppet Movie looks pretty good. It has a cute story, a good message, has fun cameos from a variety of great actors, and the Muppets themselves are adorable. I recommend it.

I’ve never been a huge fan of Bruce Springsteen. I didn’t overly care for the Born in the USA album, of anything that came after. I did like certain tracks off The River, Darkness on the Edge of Town, and Born to Run. But until I watched The Promise, I had no idea Springsteen was such an interesting guy and such a deep and driven artist. Listening to him talk about what he was trying to accomplish on this album is the perfect antidote to today’s robots-with-diarrhea pop music. I mean, we are talking about a guy who, if he wrote song he thought was going to be a hit and which would therefore distract the listener from the other songs on the album and from the album’s message as a whole, he would leave it off the album! And this was not an isolated incident, it happened over and over. Can you imaging music mattering enough to any big artist today that they would exert that kind of artistic discipline? As Springsteen mentions in the documentary, more that being famous, or being wealthy, or even being happy, he wanted to be “great.” This sounds strange to our modern ears and is probably incomprehensible to the pop stars that record companies pump money into nowadays, and yet we wonder why there is no more good music out there anymore.

The other thing that struck me was Springsteen’s artistic devotion to his internal values shaped by his experience in life and the community he grew up in and was shaped by. He wrote honest music about real things in life – this isn’t “stop telephoning me, I’m busy,” this guy is singing about how his dad lost his hearing in the factory he spent his life working in but how it’s all a natural part of life. When do you ever hear anyone singing about this kind of thing now?! Think for a moment about the spectrum of pop music we have to choose from now. We have Lady Gag singing about how cool she is getting blind drunk in clubs and blowing off her boyfriend. We have the androgynous child Justin Beaver doing music videos where he is picking up grow women in laundromats. We have ten million identical indie bands singing about miscellaneous existential topics in the voice of a lobotomized 13 year old. We have ten million identical sounding chick singers doing robot-soul anthems to the positive-thinking movement and how there’s nothing they can’t do in life if they just dump their loser boyfriends who they are too good for. We have ten million identical country dweebs singing about Happy Meals and sub-moronic adolescent girl crushes. We have ten million identical rapper-dudes singing about bling, and how big their cocks are, and what their astonishing sexual technique does to the women who experience it, and how much fucking money they have. Good God! And record companies wonder why sales are down and no one listens to music anymore except as a half-ass backing track to their boring, mundane lives?

Then you come to something like Darkness on the Edge of Town. This guy is wondering about things like how you honor you parents, how to carry your sins even in a good life, how you honor your community, how you deal with the the need for compromise and the inevitable disappointment in your life while at the same time resisting complete surrender. Springsteen is exploring our creative natures at their very core, not as a manifestation of our egos and our insane avarice but rather as a humble, natural facet of life itself, equal to the need to earn a living and take care of your loved-ones. The guy is a freaking hero-philosopher compared to today’s bilge. And the music, I might add, is fabulous sounding – a real band, talented and soulful musicians, together for years, knit together like a family, a captured in all their sonic glory on beautiful analog tape. I never really appreciated what a composer Springsteen was in his early days. It is clear from the documentary that the guy had an amazing amount of raw musical talent, probably more than the top one hundred pop artists of today combined (and that includes Adele, in case you’re wondering.) And thanks to the incredible amount of archival footage from the actual 1978 recording sessions that is incorporated generously into the documentary, we get to see all this talent and passion in action. It’s fascinating and very inspiring.

Netflix The Promise and prepare to be blown away by what pop music used to be, and what it used to mean to the people who created it. You won’t regret it.

Ben Stiller is the most unfunny comedian of all time (tied for first with Adam Sandler) and on top of that he is a horrifically bad actor. Eddie Murphy has not been funny since the 1980′s. I’m not sure he was ever funny, now that I think of it. Matthew Broderick ranks in the the top ten of completely unfunny comedians. Put the three together and it’s like having your toenails pulled out. The Precious girl should have just retired if this is all she can get – I guess for her it’s either shit like this or “fat porn,” and I couldn’t tell you which has less dignity. Casey Affleck must be thinking to himself “did Gone Baby Gone ever really happen? How could everything go so wrong?” And WTF are Alan Alda and Judd Hirsch doing in this film? All this people must be desperate for money, there’s no other explanation.

It doesn’t matter that this film purports to have a populist message because the film is so shamefully idiotic and offensive that it negates anything the story might think it’s trying to do. In fact, I liked Alan Alda’s character (the prick they are robbing) more than any of the rest of them – every time he was in a scene with any of these dorks I found myself rooting for him. Talk about a script backfiring! Even when he is being completely evil you still like him more than them because he’s the only one who can act. My wife confessed that during the dangling car scene she was wishing the line would snap and all the robbers would all plunge to their deaths (and thus ending the movie, hopefully.) Oh yeah, and I hated that fucking doorman guy. He should have jumped in front of the train.

But you know what the worst part is? The packed audience of the Union Square 14 theater was LAUGHING! My wife and I were like “what the fuck are these people laughing at?” Not only is film comedy completely dead, but no one even has the vaguest memory what film comedy is supposed to be. So, in one scene the fat girl bursts in wielding a gun while she is cramming a piece of cake into her mouth – everybody laughed. Is this what watching current-day television and playing video games has done to people’s brains?

Instead of watching this movie, I recommend the following: watch the trailer, and then  close your eyes and make up what happens in the movie out of your imagination. Trust me, it will be a much more enjoyable and rewarding experience

Martha Marcy did confirm for me my suspicion that films making use of parallel narratives (past / present) are inherently limited in quality. The problem is this structural approach takes away too much dialog. Consider this film: the parallel narrative means that Martha never has to actually tell her sister anything, but this makes the parts with her sister kind of dull, as you just sit around waiting for her to do another outrageous thing in front of her sister’s husband. The parallel narrative also eliminates any kind of set-up for the film – because everything has to evolve out of this dual structure, you are necessarily just plunked down in the middle of the story, much like The Debt (another film limited by the use of past / present parallel narratives.) Some people might really like this approach to films, but I don’t.

The main part of the story, her time in the commune, is done pretty well on the surface, but none of the characters are developed very deeply, or rather at all, including Martha. Basically, what the film has going for it is that it captures very effectively the creepy atmosphere of the camp and the nighttime excursions, and the general affect of the camp’s population. But that’s it. You never really bond, or develop any kind of substantive feeling toward any of these people. As a result, you take away very little from this film besides the surface creepiness (which doesn’t go very far.)

I thought Elizabeth Olsen was pretty good as Martha, despite the relative lack of things for her to say (that’s not her fault, after all.) Hugh Dancy is a personal favorite of mine, and he is really good in this supporting role, although I wish he would get more role where he gets to play someone nice. The chick playing the sister is just okay. Then there is “Teardrop,” the guy from Winter’s Bone, John Hawkes. He seems to be making a good little career out of playing these filthy, crazy wackjobs in gritty, depressing indie films. He’s good in this movie, although I must say I was not totally sold on the aspect of the cult where women surrendered to him so eagerly and dramatically – I think they needed to write more dialog to pull that off.

Martha Marcy May Marlene: at the end of the day, it is unfortunately pretty mediocre.

Limitless has a good story idea (what are the ramifications of a drug that gives people access to 100% of their brain’s power), that they managed to translate into fun, interesting story that hangs together quite well. To compare it to similar movies, I enjoyed it more way more than The Adjustment Bureau, and it is light-years better than Inception. Bradley Cooper (an actor that I really never thought much about) turns in a really solid and engaging performance. I even liked De Niro’s performance (I normally can’t stand him.) I really like Abby Cornish, but she has very little to do in this film.

However, this film does involve a gangster, and as anyone who reads this blog will know, there is little I despise more in movies than gangsters. They are so boring and so ugly and so foul and above all so predictable. Maybe if someone somewhere took the time to create a gangster that didn’t look and act just like a gangster is supposed to look and act, then maybe, but that day will probably never come. When the gangster appears in this film, I cringed. The first words out of his mouth: “If you don’t pay me back, I slit you at the waste (he’s Russian, of course), peal your skin up over your head, and tie it in a knot.” Jesus Christ, OF COURSE he had to say that!

But I will say that this gangster is not featured all that much in the film, and by the end of the movie the gangster almost became interesting … almost. He winds up having a bit more style than your typical movie gangster, and actually managed to surprise me a bit at the end. Don’t get me wrong, he was still foul, spouting off hateful, supremely violent lines directed at Bradley Cooper, but he was , let’s say, tolerably interesting by the end of the movie. I don’t say this lightly. He may be the only movie gangster that I was not instantly and permanently revulsed by.

My wife and I Netflixed this because it appeared in the highbrow/lowbrow grid at the back of New York magazine as an under-rated movie. I would agree with their assessment, and their placement of the film on the grid. I recommend it!