An Education

Carey Mulligan plays a curious young woman growing up in Britain who falls in love with a man some ten years older than her (Peter Sarsgaard). She sees him as sophisticated and lavish and fun. But his carefree lifestyle comes at a high price. The title, An Education, serves as both a candid synopsis of this movie's plot as well as a nod to English novels of old that purported to teach women how to behave, what to think, and how to live. This movie asks the question: why do we teach our young people (particularly women) the things we teach them? What kinds of ideals do we hand down to them and with what expectations? Mulligan's character confronts these questions herself and lives through them in a poignant and intelligent movie with a heart like its heroine: equal parts soft, tough, naive, witty, stubborn, vulnerable, and resilient. With Olivia Williams, Alfred Molina, Cara Seymour, Dominic Cooper, Rosamund Pike, and Emma Thompson. Directed by Lone Scherfig. ★★★

The Informant!

Director Steven Soderbergh has a penchant for movies about crime with a neo-noirish feel. The Informant! isn't exactly film noir, maybe film noir light. It hits on a subject that resonates clearly in the 21st century: corporate crime. Based on the apparently true story of Mark Whitacre, an employee for a company called ADM who decides to blow the whistle on some illegal price-fixing going on in his company, The Informant! is a movie that refuses to let you rest comfortably in your assumption that you've got its main character (played very well by Matt Damon) figured out.

Damon is surrounded by wonderful co-stars: Scott Bakula and Joel McHale (from Talk Soup and Community), Melanie Lynskey, Scott Adsit (Pete from 30 Rock), Thomas F. Wilson (Biff from Back to the Future), Tony Hale (Buster from Arrested Development), and Ann Cusack, among others.

The Informant! is rather interesting when compared to Food, Inc., the documentary I recently reviewed. The company for which Damon's character works is involved in the processing of corn, a food that seems to be almost magical in the variety of its utility.

Perhaps the standout of this movie is Marvin Hamlisch's music score, which is reminiscent of old spy and cop thrillers from the 60s and gives the movie an impressive, ironic feeling, particularly when the music that should be accompanying a chase scene or something else very exciting is layered over a quiet, seemingly blase moment in the film. It's a nice touch, and one that reminds us we're watching a parody.

It's not as laugh-out-loud funny as In the Loop, my favorite comedy of 2009, but it's certainly up to par in smarts, and has such wonderful irony that it demands a second viewing. ★★★

Inglourious Basterds

I finally watched Quentin Tarantino's latest movie, Inglourious Basterds, a film that, unlike most historically-themed productions, is blatantly upfront about its historical revisionism. And indeed that is where all the fun is to be had.

While Brad Pitt and his troupe of American Nazi-killing soldiers (incuding Eli Roth, B.J. Novak, Til Schweiger, and Omar Doom) may be the eponymous "basterds," their screen time seems a bit minimal as Tarantino takes us into Paris, where the basterds, in cahoots with a German actress (Diane Kruger) working for the Allies, are planning a show-stopping Nazi judgment day at the screening of a German propaganda film featuring a Nazi soldier (played by Daniel Bruhl) who single-handedly killed over 300 enemy soldiers. Those in attendance include prominent figureheads of the National Socialist German Workers Party, including Propaganda Minister Joseph Goebbels (Sylvester Groth) and the Fuher himself, played by Martin Wuttke. Meanwhile, the owner of the cinema (Melanie Laurent), has her own plans of "painting the town."

Brad Pitt's performance is funny, but his sporadic screen time makes it difficult to decide who's supposed to be carrying this movie. Laurent's character certainly has the most fictional backstory and motive. Pitt is just there to crack quasi-ironic jokes in a Southern drawl while his men butcher Nazi soldiers. The story shifts back and forth to different storylines, most of which are fascinating to watch even if they render the movie somewhat discombobulated (and they're not without ample bloodshed). As per usual, Tarantino manages lots of engrossing conversation between his characters, something for which he certainly possesses a knack.

Much good talent is on display here, and the Nazis are successfully represented as slimy, calculating and cold. (But what about the "heroes"?) Christopher Waltz is particularly convincing as the primary villain in this film, a detective working for the SS to track down Jews in hiding, known all over Europe as "The Jew Hunter."

Even if a historian might be mortally offended about how Inglourious Basterds laughs in the face of history, its very audaciousness makes it worthwhile. Tarantino made a lot of people notice him with his debut Reservoir Dogs (1992) and exceeded that with the tremendously successful Pulp Fiction (1994). He really had nowhere else to go but to take something on an epic scale such as World War II and manipulate it into his particular style of gory, violent, loquacious insanity.

Whether or not Tarantino reduces Jews to the same level as their torturers is an interesting question to pursue. Or perhaps this movie is more cathartic than that. ★★★

The Hangover

There's been much ado about The Hangover, my review of which is admittedly way late. It's about a Las Vegas bachelor party gone awry: the groom's three buddies awake the morning after to find their friend Doug (Justin Bartha) missing and their memories of the previous night as fuzzy as their knowledge of his whereabouts. They slowly piece together the events that led to their current dilemma, through a series of often chaotic comic vignettes.

The Hangover gives us easy laughs. Too easy, in fact, and yet this is being lauded as kind of a monumental comedic achievement by some. The characters are typically one-dimensional, utterly unlikeable ex-frat-boy types, who don't really even seem to like each other.

Bradley Cooper is especially pompous as Phil, the bronzed, athletic bachelor-type who happens to be a married science teacher. Unbelievable as his character is, he is alternately an irresponsible jerk and the determined leader of the group. Then there's Stu (Ed Helms), the dentist, perhaps the most successful--economically speaking--of the group. He's trapped in a dead-end relationship with a woman who's too much of a tyrannical nag to be sympathetic in her fear that her boyfriend will venture into a strip club during his Vegas exploits. (However, he's lied to her that they're going wine-tasting in Napa Valley instead.) Given the revelation (early in the movie) that she's cheated on him before, it's hard to buy the emasculating choke-hold she has over him, and much easier to accept his drunken Britney Spears-style marriage to a stripper (Heather Graham) with a heart of gold. Last is Alan (Zach Galifianakis), Doug's loopy, unpredictably weird brother-in-law-to-be, whose wacky personality allows for much of the plot--if one can call it plot--to advance.

There are too many plot-holes in The Hangover to forgive, even if the movie gives us a passably entertaining hour and thirty minutes. It's a pastiche of Swingers, Bachelor Party, and the lesser-known comedies Mystery Date and The Night Before. From these four movies we get the main themes of The Hangover: Las Vegas weekend out-of-control, bachelor party out-of-control, Chinese mafia villains complicating the storyline, and missing friend/memory failures. You may want to watch The Hangover to save time, but I think any of those four movies is equally watchable (although all of them are fairly flawed).

Also starring Jeffrey Tambor and Ken Jeong. Written by Jon Lucas and Scott Moore. Directed by Todd Phillips. ★★

In The Loop

There's a scene fairly early on where James Gandolfini, playing a long-time U.S. general, and Mimi Kennedy, as the U.S. Assistant Secretary of State, retreat from a party to an upstairs bedroom of a D.C. house where they're discussing some top secret information about a possible war with the Middle East, using a child's calculator--with pink plastic lining and nursery rhyme sound effects emanating from it--to figure out the number of soldiers they're expecting to lose during the course of battle. That scene exemplifies the satirical current that flows through In the Loop, a movie where the children have taken over the park, and are playing in an enormous sandbox of global proportions and global consequences.

It's a wickedly funny British poli-satire directed by Armando Ianucci and written by Ianucci, Jesse Armstrong, Simon Blackwell, Tony Roche, and Ian Martin, that crosses borders between the UK and the US quite frequently. The political tidal wave is triggered in London, where a bumbling British politician named Simon Foster (Tom Hollander) makes a statement (that war with the Middle East is "unforeseeable") which provides him with enough political rope to hang himself and his career. The Prime Minister's raging, vein-popping, foul-mouthed Director of Communications, named Malcolm Tucker (played by Peter Capaldi) steps in to try and clean up the mess, but Foster keeps putting one foot in his mouth in the effort to get the other one out. It's so hysterically funny that it's nothing but absolutely believable. Watching In the Loop, it's almost as though someone had snuck cameras into every behind-the-scenes meeting in Washington and London for the world to see what it's really like for the underlings trying to make sense of the inner-workings of foreign policy, diplomacy, and the domestic ranglings that go on in our political centers.

The cast also includes Gina McKee, Chris Addison, David Rasche, Anna Chlumsky, and Olivia Poulet. This may be the funniest film of the last year. It's certainly one of the most intelligent--and grim in its own disturbingly satiric accuracy. ★★★½

A Single Man

In A Single Man, Colin Firth is George Falconer, a 50-something English professor living in L.A. (although he's a native of England) in 1962. Since the death of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode), George wakes up, he gets dressed, he goes to work, he comes home, and everything in between is so painfully contrived that he operates more like a machine than a man. Still, there are glimmers of life amidst his cookie cutter existence. 

Living in a Leave it to Beaver-style neighborhood, George chafes against the provincialism of his surroundings and maintains a faux-sophisticated relationship with his old chum Charley (Julianne Moore), also English, the two of them isolated expatriates, unsure of their roots anymore. George is cynical, Charley pretends not to be, and the gin flows freely in their tumultuous meeting that night (this story unfolds in the course of one 24-hour-period, with flashbacks of George's former life with Jim). Charley is George's only friend, and yet there's a distance between them that George maintains. She was the one, however, that he went to the night he received word that Jim had died in Michigan in a car accident (and that he wasn't welcome at Jim's funeral).

George approaches this day with a new-found determination. He's going to kill himself.

Tom Ford, who started out his career as a production designer, makes his directing debut with A Single Man, which spends so much time in close-up that we practically become experts of the actors' pores. It's a glossy affair, one that seems at times like postcards extracted from the early 60s, and at other times recalls the sumptuous intensity of a 1950's soaper, not unlike an earlier film starring Julianne Moore (Far From Heaven). 

Christopher Isherwood's book, though very literate, is also inherently cinematic in the way it unfolds, and so the task of screenwriter David Scearce isn't one of selecting and arranging but of heightening the dramatic appeal. There hasn't been a movie this visually opulent for a long while, and I think we can attest to Ford's prowess as a production designer that the movie looks so good, and not just good, but seamlessly rich in detail; at times it appears pretentious, but there's such a thread of humor about the whole production that it takes the wind out of the deliberately high drama.

The performance by Colin Firth is top notch, somewhat reminiscent of Laurence Olivier, but then this is the kind of part that seems almost too obviously geared toward winning an award. And yet Firth does it justice, maintaining the clinched, formal composure that offsets the visual razzle-dazzle. There's a lot of Vertigo in this movie, particularly in the music score by Abel Korzeniowski, as well as the voyeuristic approach Ford and cinematographer Eduard Grau take to the movie. There are constant close-ups of lips and eyes and legs and backs and bodies floating in the water...it's very European without losing its Hollywood-ness.

A Single Man isn't for every taste, but it deserves much praise for what it does well and what it doesn't do. Its deadly serious subject matter could have been a lot heavier and therefore a lot grimmer if not for the humor and the visual largesse that constantly reminds us we're watching a movie. ★★★

The Hurt Locker

“Going to war is a once in a lifetime experience. It could be fun.”

In The Hurt Locker, written by Mark Boal and directed by Kathryn Bigelow, we see a firsthand account of the Iraq War, perhaps as close as many of us will ever be. Whether or not it’s a completely accurate portrayal of the war matters less because it’s a portrayal of three individual American soldiers’ experience, and one in particular, played by Jeremy Renner, who seems to get off on the gamble his job as a bomb deactivator confronts him with on a daily basis. As Sergeant William James, Renner has a crazed look in his eyes as he approaches each mission. The Hurt Locker plays on some level like a video game, where each day is a new setting in which our players face new threats in unfamiliar locations.

[the following paragraph contains an early spoiler:]

Bigelow keeps it on a cinematic level though, and early on sets a tone of urgency and danger by killing off the first "bomb tech," Sergeant Thompson, played by Guy Pearce. Because Pearce is a recognizable actor, we don’t expect him to die so suddenly (although the build-up in the opening scene renders the outcome inevitable), and when this happens we know that the movie isn’t going to operate by many if any genre rules. As James and his fellow soldiers Sanborn (Anthony Mackie) and Eldridge (Brian Geraghty) approach each mission, we wonder if this is it for any and all of them.

Despite the uneasiness we experience, the movie lets us breathe at times too, and also lets us feel what the characters are feeling. We have time to catch a glimpse of the paranoia that sets in for the soldiers, who never know who they can trust. At certain moments it begins to feel like Bigelow is playing with us, but she’s playing with them too, and it really does feel like the Russian Roulette scene in The Deer Hunter, which is a movie that screams “I am an important film” where The Hurt Locker stays silent.

At the beginning of the movie we are greeted by the following quote by author Chris Hedges: “The rush of battle is often a potent and lethal addiction, for war is a drug.” For more effect, that last part is left lingering by itself before the black screen disappears and we are immersed into the world of our heroes. It’s sort of irritating when movies declare their message at the beginning, even more so when they feel the need to underline it further, but it sets a tone, and follows through on that message very much so. It is unlike the other war movies I have seen; there’s a lack of grandiosity that makes it all the more effective and resonant. ★★★★

Moon

[note: this contains spoilers]

In Moon, Sam Rockwell plays Sam Bell, the lone crewman living on a lunar outpost where energy is harvested for around 70 percent of the earth. Sam seems fairly well adjusted to his solitary environment. His only company is a computer named GERTY (voiced by Kevin Spacey). For a good half hour or so you wonder if we’re supposed to stand up and applaud the filmmakers for having seen 2001: A Space Odyssey enough to reference it in myriad ways. It’s not just the computer reminiscent of HAL, but even some of the shots, such as the scenes of Sam exercising that recall Gary Lockwood maintaining his fitness regiment aboard the spaceship in 2001. Fortunately, Moon changes things up, offering a hypnotic, trippy and perhaps inconvenient, unsettling idea: that since clones are replicated human beings, they must certainly feel pain, grief, loneliness, sorrow, joy, angst, etc.

Sometimes it seems that science fiction is the most difficult genre in which to create original ideas, but maybe the problem is that not enough people who make science fiction movies have read enough and seen enough outside the genre. Time will tell what becomes of the careers of first-timers Nathan Parker (screenwriter) and Duncan Jones (director). They’ve obviously had plenty of exposure to sci-fi, because Moon has a good deal of the paranoid corporate thriller that was perhaps more terrifying than the alien in Alien. However, they aren’t too worried about looking like the movies that have shaped their own, because Moon manages to remain something interesting on its own terms.

As for Sam Rockwell (who resembles Eric McCormack), his acting deepens with every scene, and the fact that he’s a bit obscure serves the movie well. It would have been disastrous to cast Tom Hanks or some other mega-star. Sam Rockwell is much more of an everyman. Kevin Spacey’s vocal performance isn’t too demanding for him as an actor, and I’m curious as to why he took the part. (Perhaps it was simply because he believed in the work). “GERTY” is a fun expansion of the HAL character: it has a computer screen displaying a face with emotions that change constantly to reflect the appropriate response to its human counterpart.

Less pretentious than 2001, Moon is a much more internalized space thriller. Instead of showing us how machines have taken over, Moon shows us the precariousness of manufacturing human beings…they’re not less human, they’re equally as human, but it’s easy for the corporation that made them to sleep at night with clones manning their operations rather than humans. Of course, Sam doesn’t know he’s a clone until this is revealed to him by another clone. (Which begs the question: how did the other clone know?) It’s a perplexing set of questions to consider. ★★★

(500) Days of Summer

The timing of my viewing of (500) Days of Summer worked out nicely following a "screening" of Adam. Both are movies about love, even though the former defiantly states the contrary during its opening minutes. Whether or not that statement was a marketing technique or an attempt to stand out from its genre matters little since (500) does stand out in some ways, particularly because its main character is a male. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, a young man who writes greeting cards for a living in Los Angeles. Tom believes in true love. Then he meets Summer (Zoey Deschanel), who doesn't. A relationship buds, although Summer hesitates to define it beyond friendship--with benefits (great dental plan, long-term sick leave, that sort of thing).

Spoilers Below for Adam and (500) Days:

Roger Ebert argues that Adam wrapped things up too nicely, and after reading his review of that film, I agreed with him. Perhaps the ending came about too easily, but this flaw was mitigated because the ending was unconventional. (500) too is unconventional in some ways, yet it surprisingly left me a bit irritated, and relieved that the movie was over. Despite (or maybe because of) Tom's utter niceness and his pouting face, I wasn't all that interested that the movie seemed to be all about him and his problems, wants, and needs. The lesson he learned was perhaps inevitable, delayed because the filmmakers chose to give us a sort of non-linear linear story. Yay, Tom. Summer realized you were right all along that there is true love, and GO TOM, you can find another girl...

End of Spoilers for Adam, but not for (500) Days:

There were a couple of standout moments: the scene where Tom's diabetes-inducing love-happiness results in a song and dance routine was quite funny (and perhaps those of you familiar with Fletch Lives were reminded of a similar scene in that film involving rosy expectations and the incorporation of music and cartoon bluebirds). Joseph Gordon-Levitt is a good actor, and I think he and his counterpart did a nice job. The film itself leaves me feeling ambivalent. It was such a contradiction of itself (and perhaps rightly so): both whimsical and cynical, modern and old-fashioned, and carried on the new cliche of splicing indie-folk-pop songs intermittently with its own score (which Adam did as well). Watch them both and compare.

Directed by Marc Webb. With Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Zoey Deschanel, Geoffrey Arend, Chloe Moretz, Matthew Gray Gubler. 95 min. ★★½

Adam

At the risk of summoning the adjective police, Adam is a poignant, vibrant and evocative movie. It's the story of a man named Adam (Hugh Dancy) who has Asperger Syndrome and lives a quiet, highly structured life in Manhattan. Not long after his father dies, Adam meets Beth (Rose Byrne), an elementary school teacher/children's book writer, and a truly unique relationship forms. One of the more refreshing movies of late, particularly because its characters aren't caricatures or stereotypes. They have a little more mystery to them and a lot more honesty. Of course I was thrilled to see Amy Irving in the film, even if the part--as Beth's mother--was fairly small.

The entire movie is beautiful--beautifully shot and featuring gorgeous locations of New York (and California, briefly). Likewise, the soundtrack is terrific (both the instrumental score and the lovely folk-pop songs that intermingle with it--I thought I heard Leigh Nash singing in the end credits but it turned out to be someone else). Do check out this little film. It didn't seem to make much noise (although it got some recognition at the Sundance Film Festival), but amidst a lot of noisier, flashier films, this one is worth listening to and looking at.

Directed by Max Mayer. With Hugh Dancy, Rose Byrne, Frankie Faison, Amy Irving, Peter Gallagher. 99 min. ★★★

District 9

Perhaps it was the mind-numbingly awful selection of summer movies--particularly in the blockbuster-thriller category--that afforded District 9 such positive reviews. I found myself rather disinterested in it. The opening thirty minutes, playing a bit like a mockumentary, were a peculiar blend of cleverness and bad exposition, which you often get in the science fiction genre. The following hour and a half was predictable enough in its depiction of aliens being exploited by mankind followed by one man's grotesque journey to enlightenment. I'll avoid giving too much away, as I went into the film with no real knowledge of the plot (but rather high expectations, given the many favorable remarks the film has accumulated). I'll have to join in with the admittedly small band of nay-sayers on this one.

Directed by Neill Blomkamp. Starring Sharlto Copley, Jason Cope, Nathalie Boltt. 112 min. ★½

Up in the Air

At the risk of corroborating all the hype, I have to say that Up in the Air is the best film I've seen all year (so far). This year the offerings have been sparse in terms of solid movies, but the latest from director Jason Reitman (Juno) certainly rises to the top of the list. What distinguishes it from the others I've seen thus far? I think perhaps its bravery. Most of even the good movies ended on a settled note where problems were resolved and there was a clear choice between what to do and what not to do.

Up in the Air, while I will neither confirm or deny its ending as happy or sad, seems resistant to making a judgment either way. The loneliness of a life lived avoiding commitment is honestly explored, but equally examined is the dissatisfaction with "settling" and being "tied down." Amidst subject matter that has been done before are characters that are unique and well-drawn. Performances by George Clooney and company are believable. Clooney's character may be a prick, but he's a likable prick, and proves his heart is not made of stone without lapsing into syrupy sentimentalism. And there are some genuine surprises, a good sense of humor that doesn't seem forced or self-conscious, and enough richness in material (source was the book by Walter Kirn) to warrant a second viewing. I'll drink to that.

Up in the Air is a winner. Go see it. And a Happy new year to you and yours. Directed by Jason Reitman. With George Clooney, Vera Farmiga, Anna Kendrick, Jason Bateman, Amy Morton, Melanie Lynskey, Danny McBride. 109 min. ★★★½

Julie and Julia

Julie and Julia is probably the warmest film of the year, and Amy Adams is quickly becoming one of my favorite actresses. Meryl Streep was terrific as the famous cooking expert Julia Childs, but I found Adams's story much more enthralling while Streep's half of the movie seemed sort of breezy. Indeed, the fun of watching Meryl Streep and Stanley Tucci was enough to propel their portion of a film which is split into into separate stories of women in 1949 and 2002 respectively: one, a burgeoning culinary icon studying the art of French cooking in Paris, the other a devoted follower living with her husband in Queens, who decides to cook her way through Childs's French cookbook in one year--which she documents on her blog--and which soon becomes an obsession.
It went on a bit longer than it should have, but it was definitely a feel-good kind of movie, an ode to food (what's not to like about that, after all?) ★★½

Sherlock Holmes

"'My dear fellow,' said Sherlock Holmes, as we sat on either side of the fire in his lodgings at Baker Street, 'life is infinitely stranger than anything which the mind of man could invent.'"

-from "A Case of Identity," The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle.

As the saying goes: "Don't kill the messenger." The latest incarnation of Doyle's immortal British sleuth (Robert Downey Jr. here, upon whose performance and casting choice I remain undecided) is big and booming and loud...and a bit limp amidst all the frenzy of action, explosions, and the like. Perhaps Guy Ritchie was the wrong choice to direct this film. I found its scale disappointingly large, with all the more room to fall given its self-conceived grandeur. The mystery was less than mesmerizing in its attempt to cash in on the magic motif that has served other blockbusters so well of late. I have read some Sherlock Holmes, including the volume of short stories from which the above citation comes, as well as the classic novel The Hound of the Baskervilles, and I could never have imagined the behemoth that took place on screen coming from the pages of Doyle's work.

That said, the movie isn't terrible, just average. Good performances, particularly a well cast Jude Law as Holmes's amiable chum Dr. Watson and Rachel McAdams as a scheming American with whom Sherlock feels a slight romantic affection, made the film less irritating. However, there are just so many ridiculously unbelievable brawls and chase scenes and explosions one can manage. At just over two hours, the film should have been a lot more fun without trying so hard, and the mystery should have been more spine-tingling and less a pastiche of magical villains, superhero movies, and doses of the occult (which could have been explored with more historical perspective and curiosity given Victorian England's fascination with the subject).

The script was laced with humor, eliciting fairly frequent laughs; unfortunately the film was either too gimmicky and cartoonish or too reminiscent of something from Marvel comics. I was waiting for Dr. Watson to caution Holmes that old adage, "with great power comes great responsibility." Indeed. ★★

State of Play

State of Play didn't seem to get much notice back in April, but it ought to have. It's an absorbing political thriller in the vein of director Alan J. Pakula's films (All the President's Men, Klute, and The Pelican Brief), based on a 2003 British TV mini-series. Russell Crowe heads an impressive cast as a reporter for the Washington Globe whose old buddy, a U.S. Congressman (Ben Affleck) becomes the center of a scandal when his aide and mistress dies suspiciously in a subway station.
The congressman's investigation of a large and insidious corporation which has its financial fingers in the cookie jar of the War on Terror seems unrelated to this apparent accident, at first. Crowe and a newbie reporter (Rachel McAdams) whose job as a blogger for the Globe he resents, must band together in their search for the truth, fighting reticent political figures, creepy mercenaries, and the ticking of the media clock.
Well-timed and appropriately suspenseful fun with more than a few pertinent plot points (such as political scandals, the War, and the current transitory nature of newspaper media and its relationship to the blogosphere). Helen Mirren gives a wonderfully bitchy performance as Crowe's editor, and also starring Robin Wright Penn as Affleck's disgraced wife, also a long-time friend with Crowe.

So far, I would certainly add this to my favorites of the year. ★★★

Away We Go

I had heard much praise of Sam Mendes's little change of pace, Away We Go, and I wasn't disappointed. It is the story of a couple in their early 30's experiencing the fears and joys of becoming parents for the first time, a change that triggers a deep yearning for roots and some sense of belonging. In a culture of seemingly constant mobility, Away We Go captures the scattered sense of community that so many people have. Amidst their voyage from Arizona to Wisconsin to Montreal to Miami and eventually to her childhood home along the Mississippi River, our weary but persistent heroes (John Krasinski, Maya Rudolph) encounter the struggles of their friends and family, seemingly taking mental notes along the way: of what not to do, what to do better, differently, the same, etc. The little vignettes, divided by location, offer some wonderful performances by such fine character actors as Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels (Krasinki's parents), Allison Janney (Rudolph's outspoken, crazy former boss who enjoys the shock value of her demeanor and calls her own daughter a "dyke"), and a particularly amusing performance by Maggie Gyllenhaal as an old family friend of Krasinki, who is the epitome of the trendy modern-day hippy. I found this movie refreshing in its examination of modern values: it doesn't seem to have an axe to grind, and is instead content to simply let its characters find out things for themselves. ★★½

Sunshine Cleaning

I would like to congratulate the movie Sunshine Cleaning for being the best movie I've seen this year so far. (Let me clarify, I have seen very few movies in 2009, ranging from good to awful: The Proposal, pretty good, Zombieland, highly entertaining Star Trek, good, The Blind Side, good, Night at the Museum 2, unbearable, Observe and Report, bad).

Up to now there was nothing I wanted to elevate to a "best of" type list, but I think Sunshine Cleaning qualifies. It has the performances (two great ones by Amy Adams and Emily Blunt as sisters who decide to go into the crime scene/post-decomp cleaning business), the sharp sense of humor, and the truthfulness, of a very good picture. It's very well-rounded, I would say (offering humorous and sad moments--and some icky ones too-- in equal measure).

I was asking myself what the "job" of a good movie is...and I answered (is there medication I can take to avoid these types of conversations?) that the "job" of a good movie is to tell a story well, reflecting with honesty some glimpse of the human experience. In that sense, Sunshine Cleaning works because it's true (or is it true because it works?) ★★★

The Blind Side

Football movies. They have emerged as a genre within themselves. As a non-sports fan, I tend not to express much interest in them, even though I have enjoyed the few I've seen (Remember the Titans and We Are Marshal come to mind). The Blind Side works because it's not the same old story about a team coming together and winning, but a close-up into the story of one individual, a shy, overlooked youth nicknamed Big Mike who is slipping through the cracks in every way imaginable until he finds an unexpected friend in Sandra Bullock, a wealthy, tough and funny Southern woman with a husband (who owns 85 Taco Bells) and two kids. Bullock has never been better, and director John Lee Hancock generally avoids indulging in too much sentiment, preferring to keep things a little more stable and realistic. The film is emotionally charged enough without sacrificing restraint. I was also impressed by Quentin Aaron's performance as "Big Mike" (Michael Oher, a real-life football player, as it turns out), whose performance relies much more on the subtleties of facial expressions and movement than on dialogue as he struggles to come out of his shell. Tim McGraw plays Bullock's husband, and Jae Head steals the show as their rambunctious and intelligent son. Very funny and poignant. ★★★

Couples Retreat

I enjoyed it. Not a laugh a minute or anything, but very entertaining. Four couples are guests at a resort called Eden, where their specialization is in couples therapy. In an effort to get the group rate, Jason and Cynthia (Jason Bateman and Kristen Bell) coerce their friends into joining them for the weeklong pleasure vacation/therapy session. The other couples are content to enjoy themselves while their friends work out their marriage problems, but it becomes clear that no one's "house" is in order. Couples Retreat is funny and enjoyable but never really peaks comically. Perhaps this is not something it even attempts, and that didn't bother me much. I was intrigued enough to want to know what would develop between the various characters. Where the movie did not succeed was in developing real, adult problems that it was apparently unwilling to really solve (this is supposed to be a comedy, after all), so the resolutions were happy but not necessarily believable in that they happened too fast and somewhat unrealistically. The exceptions were Vince Vaughan and Malin Akerman's characters, who realized (I am paraphrasing): "we don't have a problem. We have LOTS of problems. And maybe that's okay." Couples Retreat may pretend to offer profundity without doing so, and this makes it somewhat more subtle (in spite of the often crude humor that may or may not affect one's enjoyment of the movie). ★★½

Zombieland

Fantastic! Not my favorite "looking" zombies, but this is certainly one of the most fun zombie flicks in recent years, sort of America's answer to Shaun of the Dead. Woody Harrelson is a bad-ass. Jesse Eisenberg balances out Woody's redneck Dirty Harry persona with his neurotic, witty and insightful take on his new "world," which is--you guessed it--overrun by flesh-eating zombies. And who would have thought a zombie movie would quote All About Eve's famous line ("Fasten your seatbelts...")? ★★★