The Way, Way Back

The Way Way Back feels like a missed opportunity at times. It tries to be a profound comedy-drama, but its simple story works against those ambitions, for the better. (Simplicity is so underrated that even the simple movie is trying to complicate itself.) This is an enjoyable comedy-drama that's full of interesting characters, but they never develop beyond the predictable. There's pouty teenager Duncan (Liam James), stuck at a New England beach town with his mother (Toni Collette) and her asinine boyfriend (Steve Carell). Then there's Susanna, a chronically annoyed teenager who lives next door with her mom (played by Allison Janney, who's funny but tries too hard to be endearingly obnoxious) and her little brother, whose lazy eye is a point of amusement for his mother.

The film is about Duncan's finding acceptance. He takes to wandering the town and eventually wanders into a water park run by Sam Rockwell and Maya Rudolph. Rockwell's Owen is a man-child who doesn't take anything seriously. But he tries too hard to be funny, and you feel the effort in every line. (He still manages to be likable much of the time.) Rudolph's part feels under-written. She has what amounts to a glorified cameo, and when she gets annoyed with Owen for being so immature, it's never addressed. She just gets over it and that's that.

I found much of The Way Way Back to be charming and refreshing. The film represents for me a conundrum. It's mostly well-acted, and the cast is appealing, as is the story. (That ending was wonderfully understated and really made up for the stupid water-slide-passing moment.) But I kept wondering why on earth Toni Collete was dating Carell's character--who's such an obvious jerk-- in the first place. She provides some shoddy reasoning: "he said it was too late, we were already in this together." It's the kind of dumb movie-writing that is all to easily relied upon when a writer is running out of credible ideas. With AnnaSophia Robb, Amanda Peet, Rob Corddry, Jim Rash, Nat Faxon, Robert Capron, and River Alexander. Directed and written by Fason and Rash. ★★★

Galaxy Quest

Galaxy Quest (1999) is pure stupidity, but in a good way. It's a tribute/send-up of Star Trek, but it sticks to its own story with surprising self-confidence. The plot is thus: the cast of an old TV show (called Galaxy Quest) hasn't moved on since their show was canceled: they're squeezing every drop of milk from the petrified teets of their show, which maintains a cultish popularity with the geek culture. But, there's one group of "fans" at the latest geek convention who take them completely seriously: aliens (who have taken on human form to blend in) who think Galaxy Quest was for real, and who seek the cast members of the show--whose characters are believed to be real people on their faraway planet--to help them defeat an insidious enemy named Sarris (I couldn't help but wonder if the name was a reference to the famous film critic). Thus begins an adventure which finally validates the has-been TV stars, all of whom finally taste the glory their characters experienced every episode.

It's like Spaceballs and Star Trek had a one-night-stand and ushered forth some kind of unholy comic sci-fi offspring.

As a non-scifi/fantasy fan, I probably didn't get as much gleeful amusement out of Galaxy Quest as was available to me had I had been one of the devoted. But it's still a fun movie. And "fun" is the ingredient that seems to be missing from so many movies of late, even in this genre. Last year's Prometheus is a prime example: it was a beautiful-looking film that feigned a sense of wonder and lacked any of the enjoyment of its genre. But Galaxy Quest, which stars Tim Allen as the show's commander--their very own Captain Kirk--and Sigourney Weaver, as the blonde technician whose character on the show needlessly mimicked the spaceship's computer whenever it diagnosed a problem, careens through the cliches of science fiction with breathless enthusiasm and an ardent, head-over-heels mission of comic self-indulgence. The supporting cast--including Alan Rickman, Sam Rockwell, Tony Shalhoub, Daryl Mitchell, Justin Long, and Missi Pyle--tries their damnedest to show us a good time, and they succeed most of the time.

Directed by Dean Parisot. Written by Mark Johnson and Charles Newirth. ★★½

Seven Psychopaths

Seven Psychopaths is equal parts clever and insipid, from writer-director Martin McDonagh, whose 2008 film In Bruges turned death into something poetically transcendent and darkly funny. Lightning doesn't exactly strike twice. This is one of those movies that wants desperately to be more clever than it is. It's not as blatantly philosophical as Cronenberg's recent disappointment, Cosmopolis. But it reaches for things outside of its grasp. Deep, cosmic ironies perhaps. This overreaching tends to derail the movie, which is actually quite good when it isn't being hopelessly opaque. Thankfully, McDonagh can't resist pushing our buttons. So there are a lot of wonderfully funny moments involving a handful of truly astonishingly bad people and a few others who aren't all that bad, just mixed up with the wrong crowd.

Colin Farrell plays an alcoholic writer who's struggling to start a script. His buddy, played by Sam Rockwell, works with an aging crook (played by Christopher Walken) who snatches rich people's dogs and then returns them for the reward money. Meanwhile, a serial killer is picking off mafiosos with shrewd efficiency. The dognappers steal the poodle of one of the mob bosses (Woody Harrelson), thus turning themselves into targets of his rage.

This is really Sam Rockwell's movie. He's Farrell's unassuming chum, good-naturedly picking on him for being a drunk and busting his chops for not finishing the screenplay (he's trying to motivate him to make something of himself). But he's hiding a dark secret. We soon realize that Rockwell's character is manipulating events so that they will unwind in a cinematic fashion, with the aim of giving his buddy some poetic inspiration. I haven't seen Rockwell play this kind of a part before, and he does it marvelously. He exists in some kind cinematic limbo: part real, part fictional. Rockwell looks like he's having fun with his part. He exudes a certain casual perverseness, and as an actor, Rockwell continually reconstructs what we think is fixed about his character. He's not exactly a blank slate, but he's certainly a layered one, and he continues to surprise.

All the same, Psychopaths is considerably uneven. McDonagh was apparently trying to fashion a sort of living-nightmare vision of Hollywood, in which the all-too-typical weirdness of the golden-tinged Los Angeles neighborhoods constructs the psychotic within: the result is either lived or imagined violence. The flippancy with which McDonagh approaches his subject matter saves it from being heavy-handed. But when he shoots for ironic profundity he misses (unlike In Bruges). Happily, about two-thirds of the movie (intermittently) is still quite good.

The performances certainly bolster the movie's weakness. Farrell, who utilizes the things which made his performance stand out in In Bruges, plays a whining pacifist who's content with his ineptitude. Rockwell's high-functioning psychotic personality makes him a sort of madman-therapist to Farrell's law abiding screw-up. Walken is his usual mock-charismatic self, always providing substance to his scenes. But nothing gels as cohesively as you'd like it to. Beware: It has some incredibly violent scenes, so take that into consideration if you're horrified by horrible things. With Olga Kurylenko, Abbie Cornish, Gabourney Sidibe, Kevin Corrigan, Harry Dean Stanton, and Linda Bright Clay as Walken's hospitalized wife. 110 mins.

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford

An elegiac Western, brooding with grim death, about the life and death of Jesse James, played by Brad Pitt. Director Andrew Dominik and cinematographer Richard Deakins capture the vastness of the Midwestern terrain which serves as the stage for the countless train robberies and stand-offs and meandering conversations in breezy meadows. It's vacuous like a Terrence Malick film, and while its subject has a certain dramatic pull, watching it lumber along for nearly three hours reminded me why Westerns are so utterly unappealing, with a few exceptions. They're either gratuitously unrealistic to the point of being macho right-wing fantasies or they're so grimly realistic that you can't get an inkling of enjoyment out of them (much like Meek's Cutoff). It's quiet and ponderous like There Will Be Blood, which is a better movie. It had a poetic energy to it while Jesse James feels torpid and unimaginative.

Brad Pitt tries to layer a philosophical undercurrent into his performance as Jesse James, and Casey Affleck, as the calculating Robert Ford in the title, turns squeaky-voiced weaselly-ness into an art form--an undignified, desperately unappealing one. Pitt registers. He's an actor who hasn't really gotten his due. But the movie is unsustained--parts are better than the whole--and so his performance and his staying power are rendered somewhat less effective. The supporting cast is populated with good actors who are bogged down by a boring script and the shackles of self-important filmmaking: Sam Rockwell, Jeremy Renner, Paul Schneider, Mary-Louise Parker, Sam Shepard, and Zooey Deschanel.

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. ★★★