(500) Days of Summer

Grade: B+

I’ve discovered when I find myself sitting in a movie theater with my legs crossed, slumped in my seat, cheek resting on fist, watching the film on a slight slant, it usually means one of two things: either I’m bored out of my mind, or I’m having the pants charmed off of me. I can usually tell the difference by whether or not I’m smiling.

This one had me positively beaming.

500 days in a relationship as told from the perspective of a heartsick romantic. I really like her does she really like me? Friends, she wants to be friends? We like the same band, is there anything more cosmic? Oh my God, oh my God, oh my God, we just had sex! Casual, what the fuck does that mean? I am so happy, I am in so much pain, I am so confused, I am in love, this is the worst, this is the best thing ever. Told completely out of order, a relationship fades, blooms, ends, sparks and fizzles with such accurate and perceptive heart, humor, insecurity and heartache one can’t help but be utterly charmed and thoroughly touched.

Joseph Gordon-Levitt is so adorable it hurts. Yes, he’s cute as all hell with puppy dog eyes and a smile to die for, but the full measure of his adorableness flows from a quirky, easy manner and soulful, affable sincerity – few have portrayed smitten with such unaffected and tender charisma. So dark, brooding and foreboding in an equally fine performance as a sexually abused and sexually compulsive gay man in 2004’s “Mysterious Skin,” Gordon-Levitt displays a bravura jolt of versatility. Even when the film veers into occasional shmultz, just try not to empathize – I dare you. This is an up-and-comer to watch.

Zooey Deschanel is eccentrically likeable if not completely ingratiating as the other romantic half who doesn’t believe in either love or relationships – until she does. Told entirely from his perspective, she has the difficult task of being somewhat one dimensional yet genuinely appealing and marginally sympathetic. It’s hard to like someone commitment phobic and emotionally unavailable, yet we can see why he rolls the dice, lays himself bare and vulnerable, and takes a chance on love despite all the blaring warning signals. Geoffrey Arend and Matthew Gray Gubler are fine sidekicks (although Arend goes off the diving board when playing drunk) Chloe Moretz genuinely funny as the younger sister with a foul mouth and advice well beyond her years.

The film is delightfully fresh and creative – our Romeo’s response to his “first time” with Zooey is “I’m a Pepper” hysterical, a split screen comparing his “expectations” vs. the “reality” at a party is downright torturous – we’ve all so been there it’s impossible not to cringe and commiserate.

People can really be unintentionally cruel. Heartbreak can be mindbendingly painful. And still we keep trying. Back to Day (1).

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1022603/

FAME

Grade: C

As re-envisioned for the CW.

Remember how we all thought the TV series was a little tepid compared with the film? Here we’re talking milquetoast.

Updated around the fringes to include rap music, hand held video cameras and the occasional texting during class, it’s the same basic story as the original film sans any grit or personality. Harmless but bland, if the kids from "High School Musical" had kids with the kids from "90210," they would end up something like the kids from "Fame 2009." The white kids are all really, really white, the black kids sing hip hop but still seem even whiter than the white kids. The teachers are either prototypically hardass or trying to get their students in touch with their feelings, the parents all reduced to ranting on a theme (either pissed because their kid is going to the school and will never get a real job, or pissed because their kid wants to sing rather than play classical piano, or pissed because their kid started dating the boy from the wrong side of the tracks).

“Auditions,” “Freshman Year,” “Sophomore Year,” “Junior Year” and “Senior Year” still flash on the screen, but this time around are mostly differentiated by changing haircuts.

The young thespians range from serviceable to interchangeable, only Naturi Naughton distinguishes herself for a beautiful rendition of “Out Here on My Own” and “Fame,” which plays only during the closing credits. The only songs retained from the original film, they are also far and away the best. Inserted songs range from unmemorable rap or House music to a closing graduation number reminiscent of those annually penned and always drippy season finale numbers on “American Idol.” Teachers Bebe Neuwirth, Kelsey Grammer, Charles S. Dutton, Megan Mullaly and Principal Debbie Allen (promotion!) all dutifully raise their hands as present but add nothing, and Mullaly proves she can lip-synch as terribly – even worse in fact – as the newcomers.

The seedier aspects of the 1980 film have all been sharply dulled – instead of a topless Irene Cara crying her way through a videotaping pornographer questioning her professionalism, here a former student questions the professionalism of a female student for refusing to perform a make-out “scene” on video with him. CW. The romances have all been hormone deprived – instead of the heat and passion ignited in a painfully shy and awkward teenager by a tortured, angry nonconformist, here she ‘aint nearly as shy and he’s as happy as a clam and as cute as a button. CW. A student filmmaker gets involved in a scam so obvious there’s no way he could have maintained the C average required to stay in school, a docile wife finally stands up to her overbearing husband once she hears her daughter sing, and the fact that anyone is gay doesn’t even rate a mention much less a plotline. CW.

And yes, Debbie Allen is indeed heard saying, “You want fame? Well fame costs. And right here’s where you start paying – in sweat.”

Excuse me while I go watch “Gossip Girl.”

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1016075/

District 9

Grade: A-

Science Fiction, Action Thriller, Political Allegory, this gruesome, dank, violent, bleak, gory, horrifying film is a near masterpiece from Director/Screenwriter Neill Blompkamp.

I have never seen anything like it.

Told in CNN investigation and interview style, a spacecraft hovers frozen and immobile over Johannesburg, South Africa, until humans venture inside to discover the 1.8 million malnourished and bedraggled extraterrestrials trapped inside. Welcoming as we are to all immigrants, refugee camps soon become crime-ridden, war-lord infested slums until the cries of “not in my own backyard” (from the black community in Johannesburg no less) force a mass exodus hundreds of miles away from civilization.

And then the real fun begins.

Sharlto Copley is the antihero of all antiheros – a pumped-up doofus bureaucrat at a Halliburton-style company given the task of alien oversight and transfer. Pompous and driven by general incompetence, self-aggrandizement and ultimately his own desperate self-interest, he would not initially seem out of place in “Guffman” or “Spinal Tap.” Comical if not also so completely absent of a moral compass, his surprise plight manages to be goofily entertaining while never failing to remain grotesquely terrifying.

The “others” in the film, aliens derogatorily called “prawns” for their gill-like countenances and scalish features are brilliantly shot and slowly revealed. You will believe. The action is brisk, the humor is macabre, the tension soars, nails will be bitten. Not for the faint of heart, the movie is jarringly authentic, so much so that one initially might be fooled into suspecting a low budget forced such bravura creativity. But don’t be fooled – the film is both visionary and visually stunning, capturing an oppressive doom usually reserved for film versions of the apocalypse. One must presume the same fatalistic gloom hangs over the refugee camps at Darfur, or anywhere else our inhumanity casts such a massive gray shadow over a corner of the world. Yet the film makes no such sweeping political statements – it doesn’t need to. Cat food is a treasured commodity, as we are seen stuffing our faces at fast food lines mere moments later. Extraterrestrials fight to keep their homes, shacks made with tin, cardboard and bits of manmade and alien rubbish. Locals make great profit through the misery and degradation of the “less-thans.”

Only the occasional formulaic moments (the cell phone that never dies and inevitably gets traced sort of thing) and characters (villains straight out of a bad James Bond flick) intrude on an otherwise completely original and awe inspiring work. The film fairly begs for a sequel. Produced by Peter Jackson, who has previously demonstrated a penchant for the trilogy, one can only hope.

Final moments reveal the others take better care of their own than we do, blurry lines and all. Not since Kafka’s Metamorphosis has our species’ unique barbarism toward “differentness” been cast in such bold and blinding light. Deserving of classic status.

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1136608/

Taking Woodstock

Grade: C

Like the rolling meadows that embody this now legendary concert happening, there are flashes of serenity and beauty to be found in Director Ang Lee’s latest, but that doesn’t prevent both the field and the film from becoming a muddy, garbage-strewn mess in the end.

Less about the actual event than an unfocused coming of age story, a closeted young man finds his independence and sexual freedom while trying to save his parent’s dilapidated motel from certain foreclosure. When a helicopter lands in his front yard and out pops concert promoter Michael Lang (an adorably twinkling and appropriately mellow Jonathan Groff – the only actor in the film who can say “far out” and make it sound genuine) there is little doubt parental objections will transition into financial glee, angry townspeople with break out nasty signage, and hippie quirkiness will abound in prototypical abundance.

It is more surprisingly hallucinogenic than dropping acid (so I’ve been told) to watch the usually adept Ang Lee so misdirect his actors – rarely has a cast of such exceptional talent been so poorly/oddly utilized. Imelda Staunton (who gave the finest performance of 2004 in the magnificent “Vera Drake”) chews everything in her path as a raving, mouth-foaming Jewish mother with a heart of pure stone and a secret in her own closet, and Henry Goodman (much maligned for his egregious firing by chickenshit producers from Broadway’s “The Producers” and one of the finest actors of his or any generation) is mostly reduced to muttering and shrugging as the beleaguered, stoop-shouldered husband who has put up with such an ungodly terror for 40 years. It is Tevye and Golde transported to upstate New York, and the characterizations are at best stereotypically uncomfortable. Emile Hirsch fares no better as the standardly agonized Vietnam Vet (replete with dirty long hair, foul mouth, flack jacket and flashbacks) who comes home to a world that doesn’t understand him, and poor Liev Schreiber is almost unendurable as a transgendered veteran who provides gun-toting security and transcendental wisdom impossible to decipher. In the lead role of the son treated like such neverending crap by his mother it’s impossible to understand his familial devotion, Demetri Martin does no harm. A lot of extraordinary talent must have signed on the dotted line on Ang Lee’s reputation without actually reading James Schamus’ ineptly plodding screenplay first, this much is clear.

Will the young innocent show up at a press conference stoned out of his mind? Will the angry townspeople refuse his patronage at the local diner? Will his parents eat the pot-laced brownies? Will the hippie performance artists who live in the barn decide to disrobe at the least possibly appropriate opportunity? Filled to overflowing with cliché-ridden plot contrivances, Lee has an awkward inability to capture the essence of the time or generation. Neither the personal story nor its backdrop have a great deal of passion or conviction behind them, which leaves the film to meander much like the throngs trying to find their way through blocked roads and drug-induced hazes to the damn concert. There is an earnest quality of love, peace and harmony flowing, but it feels piped in through tinny loudspeakers rather than enveloping us in its music. We’re sitting in the cheap seats. Only several quiet moments between father and son transcend and elevate the material to something with genuine heart. Lee’s overuse of splitscreens so quintessential in the award-winning documentary “Woodstock,” only remind us we are watching an off-key simulation.

Like, so not groovin to the beat, dude. I mean, it tries to be all trippin and far out, but it so just brought me down, man.

More Movie Info: http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1127896/