1) It involves a name I am not officially permitted to drop in public.
2) It does not pass my test of real in Hollywood, which we remember involves a signature on a piece of paper and a check that clears.

It must sound awfully joyless of me that I am so resistant when these things happen for which a lot of would-be screenwriters would trade three toes. But I’m not denying it, just saving it and letting it accrue interest. If this development behaves the way it potentially can – as a hard-to-resist chunk of movie bait that movie-making elements will be drawn out to sniff at – then trust me; you will see joy. Snoopy dancing with his little black nose in the air-type joy.

Until then, keep the faith, brothers and sisters.

-I publish a 10 Best/10 Worst list from the movies I saw that were released in the previous year; thus closing the book on them so I can exclusively review releases from this year.
-I publish my predictions of who will win this year’s Academy Awards.
-I have seen all the Best Picture nominees.

None of those traditions hold this year. The reasons are many and interrelated. You may have noticed that I am months behind on the movie reviews I publish, and I still have about 10 I intend to write. Organizing my writing time and goals is an ongoing struggle, with the way my life is structured right now.

I could give myself the excuse that, with 10 Best Picture nominees for the first time in my life, it’s understandable that I missed one (An Education) in the run-up. I know I will catch it soon, but I always had a certain OCD pride in seeing all the nominees in advance, so I could feel extra opinionated.

But now I will see that habits can be broken and the world does not come to an end. And I’ll get to do the important thing, which is to enjoy the ceremony with friends, and appreciate the passing of another excellent year of cinema.

And by the way? This isn’t a full round of predictions, but all that talk of this being the year of Avatar versus The Hurt Locker? In the last two weeks, I have come around to thinking there is a different possibility for one of the two top prizes – Inglourious Basterds.

My reasons why?:

-Harvey Weinstein distributed Inglourious Basterds; and no one knows how to run a better single-minded, no-bullet-un-fired campaign of ratfuckery for Oscars than Harvey. The well-timed news articles complaining about Hurt Locker’s originality and accuracy in the final hours before the ballot deadline, the leak of that producer’s e-mail breaking Academy rules by bad-mouthing Avatar; someone has done a very good job provoking a hot war between those two pictures. With the new vote-counting procedure for Best Picture, the movie with the most first-place votes won’t necessarily win, if everyone outside its camp ranks it much lower. In religion, business, and politics, always ask: “Who benefits?”

-James Cameron got his big sweep with Titanic, and Oscar has a resistance to repeating history this exactly. Titanic may have been criticized as hokey, but it was providing romantic sweep and melodrama that gave a patina of classicism to its scope. Avatar doesn’t score as high for its all-ages dramatic appeal, and is probably a little too weirdly-spectacular for the older voters (and boy are there a LOT of them).

-The Hurt Locker’s box office was small. REALLY small. Look at the most recent Best Picture winners – Slumdog Millionaire, No Country For Old Men, The Departed, Crash, Million Dollar Baby. The lowest grossing of them, No Country, had over five times Hurt Locker’s box office when it won. Locker finished its run in theatres many months ago, and while it ran an amazing awards campaign, it doesn’t change the fact that just not a lot of people have seen it. And being on DVD doesn’t provide the same cultural currency payoff. That said, because of the strength of its campaign, and the historic possibilities for director Kathryn Bigelow, I still think it is well-positioned to win Best Picture or Best Director, or possibly both. But I now think that, if it splits, the movie it splits with will be Inglourious.

-The Academy’s favorite prize to give is the make-up prize. Quentin Tarantino had to be satisfied with the Best Original Screenplay Oscar for Pulp Fiction, one of the greatest and most influential films of its generation. He’s a slow-burning savant who doesn’t put out movies as often as other filmmakers, and eccentric enough that he doesn’t always put out movies that can attract the approval of the respectables. Inglourious is roundly admired, financially successful, and shows him working at the peak of his craft. The Academy has a chance to give him one of its top prizes, and can’t be assured it will have another any time soon.

-Did I mention Harvey Weinstein?

I recognize what they’re doing – the broad humor and the good heart, the way colorful ink is made to imitate life, the fairy tale story that proudly wins its happy ending. It is familiar but shocking, because it makes you realize just how long it has been since you saw it. It’s Disney Animation.

This is not to say that the Walt Disney Transglobal Entertainment Conglompire has failed to put out cartoons in recent years. But it felt so distressingly like they hated their own legacy and character, like they had no confidence that children still worked the way they did even 15 years ago when The Lion King was enrapturing them. When the budgets and staffs were slashed, when spreadsheet-inspired sequels to classics were outsourced to quickie TV animators, and finally, when they announced that they were through with 2D hand-drawn animation, and would be switching entirely to digital like their competitors at Pixar and Dreamworks, I wondered why all these suited bigwigs could have such poor taste as to grin at a funeral.

But with Pixar heads John Lasseter and Ed Catmull brought in to take the reins of the animation studio that inspired them and so many other artists in its heydays, we have the privilege of watching this one corner of Disney re-discover, and re-embrace, its true nature. The Princess and the Frog might not rank in the masterpiece class of Disney’s long roll call of animated features – the format they essentially invented with 1937’s Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs – but it brings with it a palpable breath of joy. You get to see them remembering what they do, and that it feels good.

The story takes that classic fable about the frog looking for a kiss to restore him to Princehood, and transports it to Jazz Age New Orleans. This provides a rich well of music from which to draw, and a nearby swamp where frogs might feel at home. It’s a world of haves and have-nots, and Tiana (Anika Noni Rose) grows up on the have-not end of the streetcar line, where she learns to believe in hard work, community, and secret family recipes. She grows up fiercely determined to honor the sacrifices of her father (Terrence Howard) by opening her own restaurant – a modest dream, but the way she fights for it, and sings about it, makes it sound more enriching than “Someday My Prince Will Come”.

There is a Prince in town, the charming (and disowned) wastrel Naveen (Bruno Campos), who is searching for an heiress who might trade some cash flow in order to be a bona fide Princess. But a run-in with a Voodoo trickster known as The Shadow Man (Keith David) leaves him trapped in amphibian form.

Tiana knows this fairy tale well and tries to help, but her kiss actually makes her a frog as well. And the story expands beyond the set-up to become something much more like a romantic comedy version of another famous fantasy – The Wizard of Oz. Working adversarially at first (before…well, you know) they quest deep into the swamp in search of the ancient Voodoo queen Mama Odie (Jenifer Lewis), and along the way pick up a few misfit companions with dreams of their own. Fairy tales are built on the notion of borrowing and re-interpreting, so it’s no knock to identify such influences. It’s encouraging to see that Disney is once again choosing such classy tales from which to draw inspiration; after all, they took at more than a little bit of Hamlet for The Lion King.

You want the environment of an animated film to provide cues that excite the artists, and sometimes you can see The Princess and the Frog in such a hurry that it shortchanges some of its own best visuals. There’s such a rich grace to their foggy riverbanks, and I love the just-spooky-enough garishness of The Shadow Man’s sinister “Friends on the Other Side”. You need to be a mixture of festive and haunted to tell a story in New Orleans, and the animators, under the direction of Little Mermaid and Aladdin maestros Ron Clements and John Musker, well deliver their share of the magic. I was left wanting more.

The songs, timed with Broadway precision, are by Randy Newman. They are neat, but without the transcendence of the best works of the duo of Menken and Ashman who gave Mermaid and Beauty and the Beast their unforgettable melodies. In the realization of the setting they play a pleasing and authentic role, but they have a habit of just plunking along then stopping, without a sense that you actually went anywhere.

Watching The Princess and the Frog is like enjoying an imperfect step taken in the right direction. It’s jury-rigged expansion doesn’t feel bloated at feature length, and helps it arrive at a family-friendly theme. Tiana is non-traditional in an excellent way, and I don’t mean in her skin color but in the way that strength, ambition, and belief in herself are not her fundamental problem. Disney Animation didn’t lack for confidence when it set off so boldly in the wrong direction in recent years. What it lacked was perspective on what’s important. Here’s a movie about just what re-discovering that can do for you.

Ray
Director: Taylor Hackford
Writers: Screen story by Taylor Hackford and James L. White, screenplay by James L. White
Producers: Taylor Hackford, Stuart Benjamin, Howard Baldwin, Karen Elise Baldwin
Stars: Jamie Foxx, Kerry Washington, Regina King, Sharon Warren, Clifton Powell, Bokeem Woodbine, Harry J. Lennix, Aunjanue Ellis, Curtis Armstrong, Richard Schiff, Larenz Tate

A movie and a life always make strange bedfellows; my gut call would be that there’s a lower ratio of excellent biopics than nearly any other genre in filmmaking. Sure, you have the attraction of a famous name, and the opportunity for award-friendly acting. But it’s hard finding defining emotional and dramatic shape in messy real lives. It’s even harder when the life in question is one so many people are invested in that there’s immense pressure to fit in all those highlights.

Ask yourself what a challenge it would be making one mix album to summarize Ray Charles, whose genius crossed so many genres and embraced so many stories and moods. The cumbersome weight of expectations throws Ray seriously off-balance. You are left learning a great deal about the life of the artist – in fact, most of what a good timeline would tell you. But after trying to jam in so much data, we leave strangely unenthralled despite the extraordinary efforts of Jamie Foxx in the title role.

Make no mistake, Foxx’s work is as good as that of any lead actor this year – from his first moments on screen he not only embodies the physicality so familiar to us, but the music and mischief in the soul of Ray Charles Robinson. He may be lip-synching, but trying to replace the real thing would be hubristic folly. The point is not to replicate what Ray did (though Foxx shows ample piano chops), but to depict the person he was. And the person he was – playful and stubborn, mistrusting and desperate for love, gregarious and distant, compassionate and cruel – is not papered over.

The movie starts in the early years of his traveling young adulthood, playing and singing for his supper. His ability to mimic any musical style that enters his ear keeps him working, his blindness invites people to exploit him, so regularly that he starts insisting he be paid entirely in $1 bills, so he can count them.

But he was raised to expect this, and we skip off and on into flashback, where we see the ferocity with which his mother Aretha (a stunning Sharon Warren) carved out a living for herself and her sons, even as a disease slowly took his vision.

Aretha saw life as a fight you could never shrink from, and drilled into Ray that he may be blind, but that was no excuse to be a cripple. In one scene that blessedly plays out long enough to really reach our heartstrings (instead of the bullet point approach taken in much of the rest of the movie), we watch the young Ray trip over a chair in their one-room house and cry for his mother to help him off the floor. But she just stands and watches, silent and tearful and defiant, as he cries himself out, then gradually uses his hands, his memory, and most importantly, his ears, to orient himself.

And while he learned to live without his eyes, the sights they did see haunt him – most particularly that day he stood paralyzed on the ground and watched his brother (Terrell Jones) drown in a washtub. What’s most important about the funeral is not the expected emotional breakdown of the mother, but the crowd – they sing. They sing loud and soulful, and the people walking Aretha to the coffin sing loudest of all. They sing that they may raise themselves above the pain.

Ray sings, and plays, but by the time he finds his wife-to-be Della Bea (Kerry Washington), who encourages him to break out of mimicry and find his own voice, he has already spent years submerging the pain of his life with addictions – to heroin and to women. Neither will he give up easily.

But the music was, and still is, so so special. From early hits like Mess Around (a tune I always connect with Planes, Trains and Automobiles, where John Candy did a joyful pantomime to it as Steve Martin snored next to him) through groundbreaking gospel/R&B fusions like I’ve Got a Woman, right up through his plaintive orchestral and country records like Georgia on my Mind and I Can’t Stop Loving You, this movie takes full advantage of the vast and powerful catalog of its subject.

But what was most astonishing about Ray Charles was not that he was blind, or that he survived so many years of addiction, or that he took stands against racism and closed-mindedness, but that in one song after another, across one style after another, he was able to channel his feelings and awaken us to them. Sadly, about halfway through the sense settles in that there are simply too many hits to address, even at 2½ hours the movie feels hurried (especially a jarring and abrupt ending), and you end up experiencing little more powerful than the blurp of satisfied curiosity.

Oh, I think, so that’s why the female vocalist sounds so authentically angry in “Hit the Road, Jack”. And that’s how the seminal hit “What’d I Say?” evolved to be so long that it was split into two parts for release. I wanted to be taken on the journey, instead I saw the map and the highlight photos.

Ray Charles’ music, along with Foxx’s performance (another giant leap forward in a year where he already triumphed in Collateral) is enough to recommend this movie in spite of its ultimate shortcomings. But those songs weren’t about telling you how he felt, it was about bringing you inside it through the power of his voice and the spirit of his piano. Taylor Hackford is never less then competent in his handling of the material, and he achieves a great deal on what was clearly an unforgivably tight budget. The cast he assembles is top-to-bottom excellent (and yes, that’s Curtis Armstrong, Revenge of the Nerds’ Booger, all but unrecognizable as Charles’ early producer Ahmet Ertegun). But in his attempt to do full credit to an extraordinary life, it’s his form of completeness that ends up shortchanging it.

Sideways
Director: Alexander Payne
Writers: Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, based on the novel by Rex Pickett
Producer: Michael London
Stars: Paul Giamatti, Thomas Haden Church, Virginia Madsen, Sandra Oh

Screenwriting gurus use a term called “petting the dog”, which is meant to remind writers to give their characters some action that humanizes them, so we in the audience will like them.

Sideways shows us a different application of this principle, we might call it “chugging the spit bucket.” Which means there’s got to be a lot to this warm, rambling charmer of a movie for us to like these characters. After all, how hard is it to like a guy who pets a dog?

Miles (Paul Giamatti) chugs the spit bucket. He wants a drink, after all, and the tasting steward at the phoney-baloney winery at which he’s stranded refuses to top off his glass. So he does what any alcoholic, self-loathing, middle-aged author would do after hearing his third novel has been, yet again, rejected.

I read somewhere recently that demographers in the advertising business are hoping to expand people’s perception of what is “young”, so those in their late 30’s/early 40’s can feel comfortable buying the same stuff as people in their 20’s. This places the mid-life crisis in a time while you’re still, technically, celebrating your shallow youth. Simultaneously, the AARP is reaching out to people in their fifties, and have dropped the designation “American Association of Retired Persons”, in order to widen their political clout. Their acronym now stands for nothing.

So in the world of Coke or Pepsi, red state or blue state, smoking or non, the forces of marketing are attempting a new polarization. You are either young and irresponsible or old and settled, with nothing in between. This tends to make the transition rather crashingly traumatic, and Sideways is about two friends facing similar life-changing issues in radically divergent ways, at an age where, in previous generations, they might easily be grandparents already.

Jack (Thomas Haden Church) is getting married in a week. Once a semi-recognizable face on a soap opera, these days he does voice-overs informing us about low, low APR’s, and describes his recent commercial resume as “mostly nationals” in that way that shows he thinks it means something to anyone outside of Los Angeles. His future father-in-law is showing him the ins-and-outs of his business, and Jack is trying to tell himself it’s simply a source of steady income in between auditions.

Miles, his college roommate and longtime friend, is taking him on a week-long tour of wine country in preparation for the wedding. For him, it’s about getting snockered in a very sophisticated way – he’s a well-informed and opinionated oenophile who truly does relish a good quaff, but he looks like any other drunk when he stumbles back to his motel room at the end of the night, or when he makes meandering, pitiful calls to his ex-wife from a restaurant pay phone while he’s supposed to be in the bathroom (“did you drink and dial?” Jack asks scoldingly.)

For Jack, this week is about sex – both for himself (he’s not married yet, after all), and for Miles, who he reasons could use cheering up. Each finds a woman to woo in their own way, Jack with the sexually-ravenous single mom Stephanie (Sandra Oh, exuding allure in a way mainstream Hollywood hasn’t allowed her to demonstrate), Miles with the cautious but intrigued waitress Maya (Virginia Madsen, all but glowing with a real three-dimensional character to play for once).

None of it goes easily, naturally. Sideways is about the way our feelings and desires are often helpless in the tide of events, and how this is all like wine – the movie makes the point that the primary reason different years at the same wineries offer subtle changes in flavor is because of the weather. Literally every unpredictable day of sun or rain, heat or cold, shapes what ends up in your glass.

Payne embraces the “life is about the messy stuff” motif – from casting very non-Hollywood faces in all the roles (what a shock to see people who look like people) to the lived-in production design of the restaurants and living rooms they occupy.

In spite of his incisiveness, brilliance as a writer, and sensitivity to actors, there’s frequently been an unpleasant vein of contempt running underneath Payne’s movies, almost as if he couldn’t help tipping the characters of About Schmidt and Election into the pitiable and ugly column in order to get more of a laugh. Here, he’s more assured, more trusting in our willingness to love our four leads, and it represents his best work as a filmmaker to date.

The cast helps enormously. As Jack, Church (most recognizable from the sitcoms Wings and Ned and Stacey) wears a look like a golden Labrador – eager and a bit dumb. After every verbose Miles rhapsody or condemnation of the current vintage; he sips, furrows his brow, and decides – “tastes pretty good to me.”. And we can see he has the power so many emotionally stunted men have to convince, really convince themselves, that their genitals are giving them hints about their heart, and that he can lie his way out of most anything if he can just prevail upon his loyal buddy to help out.

Finally, there’s never enough praise for Giamatti, who has in the past brought humanity and dimension to roles as disparate as an underground comic artist and cult misanthrope (American Splendor), a noxious and hot-tempered radio executive named Pig Vomit (Private Parts), and even an ape slave trader (Planet of the Apes). There is literally no movie he cannot make more watchable by his presence, and as the emotional center of this movie, he can do everything from steal money from his mother to chug that spit bucket and, because we also get to see him wax admiringly about the tender care needed to cultivate the touchy pinot noir grape, we like him.

It often seems like not a whole lot is happening, or that it doesn’t seem to be going anywhere extraordinary. But Sideways sneaks up on you, and you suddenly notice that around the charm and detail that has you smiling in your seat, you’ve suddenly ended up in some very surprising places (like the deeply weird mission Miles must undertake to retrieve a lost wallet, or an absurd conversation about whether a crashed car looks crashed enough), and that they have had everything to do with the flavor of this thing.

Here’s the original – six lads singing a good little tune about young love:

You might recognize it from the soundtrack to Rushmore. I heard it on the radio the other night and realized I had never known its right title. I also realized that I wanted to sing it at karaoke some night. So I went hunting for it on YouTube to study it, and was surprised to see the strange life this song has led since it came into being 45 years ago.

I think about that moment in That Thing You Do! when Tom Hanks tries to explain what he likes about the song, and just snaps his fingers and says: “’That Thing You Do’, you know, it’s catchy.” This is a catchy song, and sweet, and you can see why many artists along the way have thought it could do them some good.

Here’s now-prolific film composer Randy Edelman giving it some ballad-y touches and good 70’s over-instrumentation, scoring a hit in the era when singers could be fugly:

And here’s Australian rocker Martin Plaza, complete with mullet and “I’m Dead Sexy!” facial confidence, who adds some perfectly-deployed horrible synthesizers in a video with so many bits of cutting-edge 80’s low budget trickery that you’ll be wondering where the star wipe is:

Once again, a hit for him. And it was also a hit for late 80’s German pop trio Hong Kong Syndikat, whose video teaches us that with a bit of good music coming out of the boom box, hobos, baby-snatchers, rockabilly rejects, naughty nuns, and overweight people can all smile and share pastries together on the sidewalk:

But you want to know someone for whom this song wasn’t a hit? This guy:

Believe it or not, that’s Kevin Rowland, former lead singer of Dexy’s Midnight Runners, another One-Hit Wonder Hall of Famer with 1982’s unforgettable Come on Eileen. Seeing this video, I remember that this was how I first heard a snippet of this song, on a VH1 Where Are They Now? special, where Kevin announced that with this new album of his, he was going to be unveiling his line of men’s dresses; and how it wasn’t at all a gay thing, he just thought it should be okay for men to wear dresses. And stockings. And combination phallus-hammocks/thongs. And schoolgirl shoes.

I cannot decide what is my favorite part of this video – is it the conga drummer who is barely playing the drums, but is just there for Kevin to rub up against in an extremely non-gay manner? The widely-varying but still-very-generally-low enthusiasm of the backup singer/angels? The way this was obviously shot in a couple of hours on a tiny soundstage for next to no money? Or is it just the whole conceit that this middle-aged pansexual really wants everyone to pay more attention to his shaved ass?

According to the never-ever-wrong Wikipedia, the album – which was supposed to have something to do with his recovery from drug addiction – sold less than 500 copies, and when he tried to perform live in the dress, he was driven off the stage by a hail of bottles.

Understand, I do not mean by this light mockery to discourage. I think more weird people need to do more weird things, because it enriches life for the squares. I think all the people in these videos felt the same impulse I felt when I heard that song. Snap snap, you know, it’s catchy.

I have always loved this philosophy because it incorporates the idea that mistakes will happen no matter how much you prepare. The imperfections are as much a part of the music as Jackson Pollock’s cigarette ashes are part of his paintings. Every night, the audience gets a version of the show that will never be done again, because of the hundred little accidents, deviations, and discoveries.

This spontaneity is part of the reason I moved away from acting – I have a hard time with trust and letting go in the moment, and my best idea usually only comes after rumination and calculation. It’s why I’m better as a writer than a performer – I get a chance to think rather than just react.

But even though since college I have rarely sought out opportunities to perform on stage, I have developed this strange pattern over the years of ending up on a stage anyway. It started in high school. A community children’s theatre group I had performed with in the past needed someone to fill in on tech – and on our budget, by “tech” I mean flipping a light switch and operating a CD changer in the back of a cafeteria. So I showed up for one rehearsal, watched the show, and noted all my tasks.

On opening day, at one o’clock, the director called and said: “Hey, I’ve got a crazy idea. Want to act in the play?” One of the cast (and strangely enough, he might be reading this post right now) had twisted his ankle after the last rehearsal and couldn’t perform. The director needed someone who could memorize the part in six hours.

Now this part I do well. I’ve done Shakespeare and Tom Stoppard and I adore words, so I have the skill for recording language in my brain on short-notice. I will freely say I am not all that good an actor, and I’m tricky to cast – I can’t dance, my singing is so-so, I’m too odd-looking for the leading man roles, too tall and soft for the energetic character roles, too cerebral for the boisterous roles, too rubber-faced for serious roles, too unthreatening for the macho roles, and too young for the old crafty roles. But I understand stagecraft and discipline enough that people I work with can trust that they don’t have to start from square one. I can be plugged in on an emergency basis and they won’t have to worry I’m going to crash the show.

It happened again when my sister was helping produce her fiancée’s musical. They needed an extra set of backstage hands and someone who could walk on to do two lines at the end. And with one rehearsal, that’s exactly what I did. Auntie Mame happened a few years later because of my brother. He had kept doing community theatre as an occasional hobby, and when a production needed to fill a supporting role eleven days from opening, a friend of his in the cast dropped his name. He wasn’t available for the whole run, so I got brought along as part of the family package for half of the performances.

After that, when I was directing my 10-minute play for Sacred Fools in LA, and my lead dropped out three days before the show, my good friend Mishka the Hairy Russian, who I had also cast and have known since college, was the one who convinced me that searching for a new actor on such short notice was foolish when we already had a perfectly capable one who knew the script available – by which he meant me.

I auditioned for one play a year or so ago, but didn’t prepare, mumbled my way through it and didn’t have a serious chance at a part. I have never been that good at auditioning and it wasn’t a show for which I was actually appropriate, in hindsight.

But Norma Jean, one of my castmates from Auntie Mame, remembered my ability to swing in at the last minute (and actually has a far higher opinion of my abilities than I do), and on Saturday night she dropped me a Facebook message which is the reason why I haven’t been able to post, or really even think much, since then.

She was working on a murder mystery – basically an EZ-bake farce in the vein of the movie version of Clue that gets booked for corporate events and parties. They are high-energy, super-broad, lowest-common-denominator, usually with ample fourth-wall-breaking and audience interaction, and you end up performing in some strange locations. But the very, very, very, very important thing about these shows is – they pay.

She told me that someone in the cast had fallen very ill, and that they were booked to perform on Wednesday, and while the director had played the part before and could do it again if there were absolutely no alternatives, she was wondering if I wanted to give it a go. The pay part did seal it for me, I admit. I thought it was going to be a small role – a butler or something. You couldn’t expect much more on such short notice.

On Sunday morning she e-mailed me the script for Mobster in the Men’s Room, and then told me which role I was playing. It was the lead – the character who acts as the detective once the murder happens. In the second act, the longest one, I had half the dialogue, as I questioned the other characters. The script was only 45-60 minutes long, but to memorize it by Wednesday? With three different endings which rotated depending on which character committed the murder any given show? Without ever meeting the director or the rest of the cast? With only the van ride to the venue to rehearse together? With never seeing the performance space or having any pre-set blocking?

I knew I couldn’t be sure I was saying yes until I cleared it with work, but the director re-assured me by phone that the ending had already been picked, so I could ignore the other two; that I wouldn’t be involved in the biggest improvisational bit, and that, since I was conducting an interrogation, having a little notepad in my hands during Act Two was totally justified. I proceeded to transcribe all of Act Two into a little notepad.

We convened this morning at 9:30 at the Costa Mesa Playhouse – me with my new haircut, my repaired glasses and my borrowed tie. One of the other co-stars had been in Auntie Mame as well – that made three out of five of us; and we all knew we worked well together. After a little bit of gabble and gossip, we hit the freeway and started running lines, and finished 1½ recitals of the script on the way. I knew I was going to have blank spots; what amazed me (and set me at ease), was that I was not the only one. Apparently this company, which refers to itself as the largest murder mystery company in the country, is well used to the last minute, throw-it-against-the-wall approach.

The venue was a Dave & Buster’s in San Diego, and it was a corporate party for some bank executives. We think they were loan profilers. Everyone wore nametags, and certain ones had stars on them – for some reason, we were instructed to pay these people extra attention. Minutes before curtain, the director pulled me aside to ask if I could locate one particular guest and give him an improvised mock interrogation during act two. Since we were already altering/eliminating lines, and remembering all the pronoun changes caused by one of the male roles being played by a female, I had really been swept by the circumstances into a “bring it on!” mindset; so I said sure.

At that point I had studied all I could study, I had a full night’s sleep and a good breakfast. I had already exercised whatever tiny power over the quality of the show I had, and the rest was up to the Gods. In Ancient Greece, theatre was so revered that two Gods were considered to have it in their province: Apollo and Dionysus. Respectively: The God of Perfection, Light, and Truth; and the God of Liberation, Drink, and Ecstasy. That dichotomy has always been so important to my attitude about theater, because we must strive all we can, and yet give ourselves jubilantly to the moment.

Our “dressing room” was a training room near the kitchen, where prospective employees learn to identify all the glassware. Norma Jean said that it reminded her of her stand-up comedy gigs; being shoved into whatever space was handy before the show. Everyone else got free coffee and sodas – I knew that one thing I didn’t need at all was caffeine.

I don’t think what I felt was actual fear – not in the fight-or-flight school. I felt the delirium of the challenge, as I had been ever since Sunday morning. And I felt a surrender to the fact that this could only be so good in the final analysis. If we got some laughs from the room, and made them feel like we’d given them a novel experience that was worth leaving home, that’s an epic win around here; and for me, just to be doing SOMETHING with my day that isn’t pushing paper is so fulfilling.

That’s not to say my heart wasn’t thudding.

The stage was – well, not much of a stage. Half of it was covered in balloons and a podium, and our instructions were to perform throughout the room; walk around the space, make sure every corner got at least a couple of minutes where they could hear us.

Oh yes – the acoustics. This was like a small banquet room, with a bar setup in the corner, which makes a lot of humming and squirting noises that you don’t notice until you are trying to recite plot information over them. And just on the other side of a pair of swinging doors was the main gaming area, with all the attendant noisy music, cracking of billiards balls, and gunfire from the very latest zombie-shooting arcade machines. And the only microphones were a couple of fixed ones on stage. If we weren’t on stage, we were BELLOWING our lines. No choice but to go big.

Not everyone in the room had exactly signed up to take in some theatre. Most, I’m sure, would have been happy with the free meal. The ones who couldn’t hear us quickly made their own conversations. There was so much clinking of glasses and silverware. Some never stopped texting/talking. Not an ideal room – but, if you know the traditions of live theatre in Western Civilization, there is something very true about it.

Oh, it was chaos, Jimmy. I lost count of the number of dead spaces we had to improvise through. We kept getting trapped in corners by chairs or food servers. Amazingly, I remembered most of my lines, although I did need to go to my notepad twice, and accidentally dumped a page of the show by skipping ahead twice. I even broke the pen I was using to “take notes” during the interrogation.

Before the final scene, the crowd got to vote on who they thought was the killer before I came back out to explain whodunit. And once I did, I noticed that the actor playing the killer had worked his way to the opposite side of the room, so I was sprinting and shouting my re-enactment of the fatal stabbing as I got closer. And only while running at full speed did I realize that a) he was at the bottom of a set of three steps separating the upper and lower dining areas, b) I was running towards him awfully fast, and c) there was no way to stay in character and just stop to walk down them.

Which is how I ended up taking a full-speed, highly-dramatic flying leap, landed in an unbalanced position, and tumbled to the ground – frightening my cast-mates and, I’m sure, thrilling any lawyer in the room.

I sort of rolled into a chair leg, banging my shin and hip and giving my bad knee some major stress. But I hopped right back up and finished the damn play, and it was only a half-hour later, as we ate Subway sandwiches in the van, and with the adrenaline wearing down, that I even noticed I was not totally unscathed. It’s not bad by any means; but I am normally so cautious. I didn’t realize I was capable of such a goofy, risky stunt.

But that is the moment you work your way into. That’s when you are a theatre actor.

This company apparently gets about 50-70 bookings a year. One of the actresses has been doing these shows for twelve years – and said on the way back that this was the best cast she had ever worked with. Maybe she says that every time. Maybe she feels it every time. The rush makes you think and feel a lot of things. What I know is that this was the toughest test I had ever had of my compressed-rehearsal abilities; and while I didn’t do as well performance-wise as I would have liked, I never half-assed the stuff that I did badly.

They’re talking about the idea of me doing more. I still maintain at the top of my lungs that I am not an actor.

But they do pay.

Viggo Mortensen’s performance in The Road is great because of all that the movie denies him. Withered and hoarse, he has such small spaces within which to suggest the human he used to be, covered as it is by what he has to be now. He says to his son: “I’ll shoot anyone who touches you; ‘cause it’s my job.” And under his absolute conviction he is able to show us his grief that life has become that simple, that the nearness of death has made his parental tunnel vision, in his mind, necessary. We believe he is not a ruthless man, but his love is now a ruthless love, and the way it has altered him provides the tension in this post-apocalyptic journey filmed from the pages of Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel.

As movie apocalypses go this is one of the most thorough I have seen – even the innocent plants and animals were not spared. It’s a planet-wide cemetery; everything is decay and despair, and the only sound on the horizon is the sighing crash of another dead tree. Even their roots have given up. Director John Hillcoat used the primitive Australian Outback to mesmerizing effect in 2006’s The Proposition, and he realizes this bleak future just as capably.

We do not learn what happened, we only see the briefest glimpse of the night that the power went out, and Father (Mortensen) saw an orange glow on the horizon, and somehow knew the gravity of what was happening. There was a Mother (Charlize Theron) in this family – and for the first few years after they all huddled in the old house. But now it is just Father and Son, and they are working their way south through a ruined America; hoping to find warmth, water, or just hope itself.

Father remembers the world that was; but his son (Kodi Smit-McPhee) was born after, and as they scavenge the ruins, you can see in his eyes his curiosity about the relics left behind, watch him still looking for room to be a child when there are such terrifying adult dangers everywhere. Not just any child actor can look alive in a somber mode, but Smit-McPhee succeeds in creating a sense of quiet dedication to Father; there is so much silent give-and-take between them, so much emotional negotiation. One of the movie’s best scenes involves the discovery of an old can of soda, and the unforced truths we get to watch.

It is a rare variation in tone. By intent the movie does not have much brightness to share. Far more prevalent are its horrors. Most of the humans alive are either cannibals or captive meals, and even the other wanderers are only as noble as their desperation allows them to be. Father carries an old gun that has only two bullets; not enough to fight it out with one of the roving gangs, but they are the closest thing left in this world to mercy. It makes it a dear choice for Father to pull that trigger, knowing that to shoot someone else is to give up the chance to shoot himself.

If you are wondering why you might subject yourself to this, you have the crux of the problem. We are dealing with the ebbing breath of hope, with the value Father has invested in what is, to him, the very last new life in the world, and about how he is trying to impress both survival skills and a moral code on his son while he can. He tells his Boy that they are “carrying the fire”, and the Boy tries his best to understand why that means there are things they will never do.

The movie is at its best here because it has found a truth that reverberates back into our world. If a flawed Father can make his son a better man than himself, then he has spent his life well by improving the world. That’s faith, and it’s moving. Parents who know that agony will feel it instantly in the way Father dotes on his son, and may even recall the reverse of the feeling, in those moments where Boy barely starts to understand what it all means.

But the movies have been in the game of ending civilization for a long time now – they do it on practically a monthly basis down at the multiplex. When the flavor of McCarthy’s language is not available to enrich the sights, and Mortensen’s virtuosity as a performer cannot alter the momentum of the story (or truly, the world) around him, the filmmakers’ skill at rendering their uber-blight in believable gray can have the opposite of its intended effect. I fear most will disconnect from The Road emotionally after seeing one too many examples of gruesome cruelty, one more respite stolen away. When the ending does come, quiet and neat, their hearts may have already closed to it. Hillcoat has made a film which is easy to admire but challenging to like. It does not leave the memory easily though, and it grows in reflection, and both those qualities can be ascribed to Mortensen’s performance. Watching him is seeing that there is at least one heart still beating.

Team America: World Police
Director: Trey Parker
Writers: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Pam Brady
Producers: Scott Rudin, Matt Stone, Trey Parker
Starring the voices of: Trey Parker, Matt Stone, Kristen Miller, Masasa, Daran Norris, Phil Hendrie, Maurice LaMarche

-PERSONS attempting to find a motive in this narrative will be prosecuted; persons attempting to find a moral in it will be banished; persons attempting to find a plot in it will be shot.

-Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

It’s a dangerous, dangerous thing to assume that Trey Parker and Matt Stone, the creators of South Park and the brains/voices behind Team America: World Police, have any agenda beyond making you laugh.

Dumber and more hostile people than them have suggested that celebrities who speak out against war are giving aid to the enemy, which is exactly what happens in the movie. The catch is, the people who’ve suggested this have never been funny at it. And I doubt Parker and Stone really believe it. But I do think they consider it funny. And maybe it is inherently funny that famous actors believe they can change the world, but it can’t be discounted that the climax of the movie involves, well, good acting changing the world. And thus a clear message beyond universal mockery eludes us again.

I will not attempt to even guess at Parker and Stone’s politics, much less criticize them. My criticism is reserved solely for their humor.

Case in point – showing a Michael Moore marionette shoving hot dogs in his mouth – not funny. Having a computer damaged by Moore, in an incongruously lackadaisical voice (provided by radio personality Phil Hendrie), report “we were attacked by a fat socialist weasel” – funny. And I say this as someone who’s glad we have Michael Moore in this world.

The story feels familiar because it’s a bald-faced rip from any number of Hollywood summer testosterone fests, most of them produced by Jerry Bruckheimer. “Team America” travels the world in high-tech vehicles a la fellow puppet travelers the Thunderbirds, protecting us from terrorists and WMD’s and causing plenty of damage in the process. We meet them battling turban-clad brutes in France, where between their one-liners and kung-fu they manage to demolish most of Paris on behalf of “freedom”.

Their newest recruit is Gary (Parker), a Broadway actor fresh off of a starring role in the hit musical Lease. Spottswoode (Daran Norris), Team America’s commander, thinks Gary is one of America’s most talented actors, and because he can speak foreign languages, is ideal for missions impersonating terrorists.

He does not fit in at first with Team America’s commandos, who are still mourning the loss one of their own in Paris. One of them, Chris (Stone), has a particular grudge against actors whose roots are too painful to reveal.

But, with a glue-on beard and a little gibberish, Gary manages to pass himself off as a terrorist and a Team America mission (typically, exploding just about everything around it) is a rousing success. And suddenly he’s got the eye of beautiful Teammate Lisa (Kristen Miller), and the two are consummating their romance in a scene which defies summary, description and belief. And you thought that John Cusack’s marionette shows in Being John Malkovich pushed the boundaries of taste…

Actually, it is legitimately amazing just how versatile, and emotive, these marionettes are. It’s hard to believe at least a little computer gimmickry isn’t at work here and there, but that aside it’s clear that Parker & Stone have found yet another medium with which to practice their calculated balance of tackiness and hidden sophistication.

In this day and age they could certainly make the wires invisible if they wanted to, but seeing them there becomes part of the humor (much like the swearing in South Park often ends up funnier because it’s bleeped.) Big laughs come from seeing just how self-serious these marionettes are, and how expansively elaborate the world they inhabit is (every foreign land they visit has a large, bustling marketplace that is in ruins by the end of the scene).

Indeed the crisis for Team America eventually becomes global, when the real supervillain we should have been paying attention to, North Korean dictator Kim Jong Il (Parker again, sounding like Cartman but replacing his “l”’s with “r”’s.), reveals his plans to rule the world. And that Il has allied himself with the “greatest actor in the world”, Alec Baldwin (Maurice LaMarche) in order to provide a distracting smokescreen of handwringing and peacenikitude. Baldwin leads a literal army of liberal celebrities, all of whom are too busy spouting invective against rich corporations and arrogant over-aggressive American troops to notice WMD’s being smuggled around the world right under their nose. For this, they get a most bloody comeuppance.

Parker and Stone’s humor works best when keeping you off-balance, when the jokes come fast enough to leave you gobsmacked at how willing they are to zag in shocking or simply absurd directions. We have seen in any number of movies the scene where the hero abandons his comrades, feeling guilty and responsible for some sort of disaster. And we have seen the scene where he drinks himself into a self-loathing stupor (most movies spare us the resultant projectile vomiting. This one doesn’t.)

But just try to believe the loyalty test Spottswoode demands of Gary when the actor comes back with a sense of renewed determination. Then enjoy the moment when you realize Gary is actually going to do it.

As with the South Park movie there are biting showtunes, from the guitar-wailing anthem “America, F*** Yeah!” to a wistful love song which compares how much someone misses a girl to how incredibly bad one particular Jerry Bruckheimer movie is (it sounds weird, I know, but it works). And there are any number of opportunities to upend movie clichés – like all blockbuster heroes, Gary has a tragedy in his past which haunts him, and Lisa tries to console him by declaring “Gary, you can’t blame yourself for what gorillas did.” Plenty of flesh-and-blood actresses in Jerry Bruckheimer movies have had to say equally ridiculous words with a straight face. This is, ultimately, the core of the movie’s humor.

And so it comes down to the final arbitration – is the thing funny? It is – laugh-out-loud ridiculous, even the way a marionette cocks his head can get a chuckle, so satirically on target is the movie’s choice of medium. It’s not quite at the level of the South Park movie, from which it recycles more than a few jokes and plot elements, but it’s still well worth your time and money. And in a season where everything, and I mean everything, has been hauled onto the political battlefield, you can be safe in the knowledge that anyone who cites Team America in a serious ideological discussion is as much a victim of this movie as any of the puppets on-screen.

Shaun of the Dead
Director: Edgar Wright
Writers: Simon Pegg, Edgar Wright
Producer: Nira Park
Stars: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy

The Scream movies were labeled “post-modern” because the characters in them had seen horror movies and used them as a template for survival. Shaun of the Dead is a different kind of post-modern, because its success depends heavily on the audience having seen horror movies, particularly zombie movies. The characters have not seen zombie movies, and know nothing about survival except how much their preferred post-hangover victuals cost at the corner market.

This almost appallingly-amusing movie’s central joke is that there’s no thing too weird, say, for example, an apocalypse of the walking dead, that we as people couldn’t eventually filter into a background irritant. The inertia of the average low-watt slacker, we see, will always bring him back to his couch, television and beer.

Shaun (Simon Pegg), a 29-year old appliance salesman who’s yet to advance beyond the pay grade of his 17-year old co-workers, knows that his girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) wants to see him grow up some. And we can tell he’s genuinely sweet on her – notice how he’s paid enough attention to remember the definition of the word “exacerbate” at an important moment, and how he can’t bring himself to follow through with a lie to her no matter how damning the truth.

But somehow, he always comes up short at a key moment, and despite his repeated insistence that they’re going to do something romantic as a couple, they invariably find themselves back in the Winchester Pub for the evening, sucking down beer and peanuts with Shaun’s best friend Ed (Nick Frost). Ed is a part time pot-dealer and genial overweight hanger-on – he’s decided it’s his function in life to make Shaun laugh, and lacks the self-awareness to know he’s a walking rut for Shaun to keep falling in. Liz can barely tolerate his existence and despises the Winchester.

The behavior between these three is so detailed, so full of frustrated history and habit, but with such unquestionable underlying affection, that the complications their relationship is about to undergo tempts me to label this British import a relationship comedy.

Except that it happens to have zombies in it.

Those people who know the zombie formula will be laughing at odd times, and not just because of the movie’s throwaway references to its forebearers (“We’re coming to get you, Barbara!” shouts one character reassuringly). They’ll also laugh because, while our heroes are slow to catch on – they never linger on enough of a news broadcast to hear important information, and most of the folks in their neighborhood don’t seem all that engaged on the best of days anyway – we know exactly what’s happening.

Some force has turned the recently deceased into zombies, and they’re going to do what zombies do, which is to lurch around, moan, eat people, and make more zombies. But these characters are held back by their hangovers, the emotional bruising from their arguments with each other, and the mental dulling brought upon by their directionless lives – so after a day or two it’s finally up to Ed to point out “There’s a girl in the back yard!”

And from there Shaun must grow a spine, pick up a cricket bat, and lead his loved ones to safety through the growing zombie horde. Of course, with hilarious but unassailable logic, he and Ed conclude that the best place to hole up with their loved ones is at the Winchester, which is no small bone of contention with Liz and her best friends (Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran)

The filmmakers tread a very fine line, in that most of the time they want us to react with sincere emotion to the characters they’ve taken the trouble to detail with such care. And every so often they flub – like a scene where a character pauses in a stressful moment to answer his cell and becomes incongruously nonchalant; it’s not the knee-slapper it’s meant to be. And it takes us just that little bit out of the movie.

It’s almost as if they realized the very high bar they set for themselves, and couldn’t resist including a few cheap throwaways just in case they didn’t clear it. Which is an overall let-down, when you see how gleefully they manage to pivot from a dying character’s loving confession to a bit of demented slapstick involving a car with too many people (and one suddenly non-person) in it, you realize they had the talent not to have to resort to some of these gags.

There are so many sights and moments in Shaun that you’re unlikely to see anywhere else. The humor is at its best when the filmmakers hold faith with their material and find just the right gag, or song (brilliant use of two cuts by Queen), or squelchy sound effect to play on the knowledge we have that the characters don’t. And the scares are best when we’re reminded, at just the right and cruel times, how lethal a zombie plague can be.

While 28 Days Later and this year’s Dawn of the Dead re-make gave us sprinting zombies, these are old-school, might as well dub them “Romero-style” slow zombies, and director/co-writer Edgar Wright and his co-writer/star Simon Pegg clearly know what’s both funny and scary about them. What’s funny is that, taken one at a time, or viewed from a distance, they’re pathetic, aimless. You can outrun, outmaneuver, even knock a few aside without much trouble, as long as you’re paying attention. It’s when their numbers keep growing, and you get tired, that you start to get scared.

So alchemy in this case has produced not pure gold, but certainly something unique and valuable. Shaun is an honest and earnest soul and a swell guy to hang out with. And we see, when the crisis hits, he manages not like a movie hero, but probably about as well as any of us would under the circumstances. Which is exactly what makes it so funny.