Alfred Hitchcock made some classic movies that were essentially expensive foreplay. They were movies that floated over their plots, and used the tools of Hollywood cinema to work the audience into states of laughter, excitement, and arousal, to “play them like an organ” as Hitchcock himself said. We all know what the last shot of North by Northwest meant.

The majority of modern movies have no interest in foreplay. Pornographers show more patience. But Knight and Day’s director James Mangold (Walk the Line, 3:10 to Yuma) has frequently demonstrated an affinity for the classical approach – his movies look totally contemporary, but they feel richer and savvier. Here, in a globe-trotting spectacle starring Tom Cruise, Cameron Diaz, and a McGuffin that’s literally heating up by the minute, he puts some lessons from Hitchcock to use in making a movie that is not as great, but far better than its plot.

Cruise is – his interstellar flights of public behavior notwithstanding – a real movie star, and has also been nominated for three Academy Awards. Neither of these achievements is an accident. As an action hero we have watched him do (forgive the pun) the impossible; his performance in this film is a high-wire act that capitalizes on that history, riffing on his mad self-confidence in the face of ridiculous perils, but also bringing with it a wistful quality that wasn’t there in his Top Gun days. Watch him in a conversation with the pretty misfit June Havens (Cameron Diaz) that goes on longer than most movies would allow, longer and more intimate than a character of his expediency normally deems necessary. He has more urgent things that ought to be on his mind, but (forgive the pun), there’s something about this girl.

His character, Roy Miller, is a lethally-skilled super-agent who has gone rogue. His former partner (Peter Sarsgaard), his former boss (Viola Davis), and a bushel and a peck of soldiers and assassins and arms dealers, are all after him and an item he has stolen called “The Zephyr”, which was invented by a misfit genius barely out of puberty (Paul Dano) who really likes trains.

Miller takes advantage of lonely singleton June, using his charms and her luggage to smuggle The Zephyr past airport security. She’s not aware she’s doing him this favor, but responds to him like she’d gladly do much more. Sadly for her, Miller’s pursuers see their conversation, and with their extra-legal impunity and ticking-clock panic, decide that they may not know who this June is, but arresting and interrogating her would be a safe, clean course of action, and killing her possibly safer.

Miller saves her from an airplane filled with assassins using mostly his bare hands and the items available on normal commercials flights. This is a complicated fight. But we are always aware of the geography, the active participants, and the weaponry. Most fight scenes can’t get any of that right, but Mangold manages more, the sequence has rhythm and surprise and a sense of humor. I feel such gratitude for a filmmaker who has both the skill to do something correctly, and the desire to go beyond that in order to truly entertain.

Maybe that’s why the advertisements for this film have been so uninspiring – it is Mangold’s scenes and sequences that add up so effectively, and that can be harder to convey at the blinding editing pace of a commercial. There’s a splendidly tongue-in-cheek gag that involves a bullwhip and the frame lines of the camera itself – it plays out in a way that’s so swift and funny you don’t get to consider how complicated it must have been for the cameraman; or for that matter, the guy who is supposedly using the bullwhip. And see again his accomplished sense of action geography in a climactic chase scene involving motorcycles, cars, and running bulls.

Diaz has a more difficult time than Cruise – early on her June is an object of the filmmakers’ whims, neurotic and haplessly panicky, swept stupidly along by the tide of events. It’s a crucible of indignity, as Miller has a running habit of drugging her and changing her clothes while she’s unconscious (college campus police have a term for that). But as she crosses continents by boat and plane and train – Miller blows through exotic locations faster than James Bond – she transforms, acclimating herself to life in his world. And then we get to see the ignition of a mad glow of her own; and that’s when the movie truly becomes a delight.

Even when characters talk about what The Zephyr is and does, there’s a casually ludicrous quality to the conversation. For all the bullets and blood spent over it, what really matters about it is it brought Miller and June together. And that it is hot. In one scene it melts the ice in a champagne bucket, and I have to believe the sound team spent a long time figuring out just how suggestive they could make that little hiss of steam. What you feel at the end of Knight and Day is that it really is well past time these two had sex. Don’t be embarrassed – that’s how you’re supposed to feel.

I really do hope this is the last one. Toy Story 3 has a scene where young Andy (voiced by John Morris) is emptying his childhood bedroom, preparing to leave for college, and his mother sees the bare floor and walls and is overcome with emotion. And we remember right in that instant that this very bedroom, back in 1995, is where we as moviegoers first met Woody the cowboy (Tom Hanks), Space Ranger Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen), and all their joyfully neurotic toy friends; but also where we first met the animation company Pixar, and the whole concept of a fully-digital animated film.

For a long time, Toy Story was the only world Pixar re-visited, the only movie in its acclaimed roster to get a sequel. That is about to change, with the likes of Cars and Monsters, Inc. now set for the franchise treatment. Andy’s departure as a grown-up young man could truly mark the end of the first generation of Pixar – no longer a rambunctious start-up but the industry’s dominant creative and financial institution.

Their latest film finds them re-trenching on safe ground after more daring spectacles like WALL*E and Up. For much of its running time it is charming, it is imaginative, and it is beautifully rendered by the artists, who take full advantage of the resources purchased by 15 years’ success without violating the aesthetics established by the episodes made in more primitive times. We meet new toys, and enjoy some fast-paced laughs and thrills. But it feels mostly like a succession of gags and adventures featuring characters we already love rather than anything urgent or fresh. It’s only in its ending that Toy Story 3 becomes a very good story, and I will talk more about that in a moment.

As it opens, Andy’s mother (Laurie Metcalf) is insistently broaching the uncomfortable topic of what to do with his toys. Few of them remain, and they have lain unused in his toybox for many years. Woody, devoted Woody, believes that, as Andy’s toys, their mission is to always be there for him should he ever want to play with them again, and if that means a life in the attic with the Christmas decorations, so be it.

But a series of mishaps both drives a wedge between Woody and the other toys, and sees them inadvertently donated to the Sunny Side Day Care Center. To Buzz, Jessie (Joan Cusack), Bullseye, Mr. and Mrs. Potato Head (Don Rickles and Estelle Harris), Rex (Wallace Shawn), Hamm (John Ratzenberger), and Slinky Dog (veteran character actor Blake Clark, subbing for his late friend Jim Varney), it has the look of a toy’s paradise – endless play with an eternally-renewing supply of children. A Barbie Doll belonging to Andy’s little sister Molly (and voiced by The Little Mermaid herself, Jodi Benson) has arrived with them, and at last meets a Ken (Michael Keaton). Sparks fly at Ken’s Dream House.

Of course there is much more to Sunny Side and its folksy alpha toy, the plush Lotso Huggin’ Bear (Ned Beatty), and soon pleasures give way to toy-scaled terrors. I am not sure which Sunny Side denizen is creepier – the baby doll enforcer with the droopy eye, or that cymbal-clanging monkey in the security room. And so our heroes, with Woody’s help, scheme an escape that involves such inspirations as exploiting Ken’s wardrobe fetish and (you must see to understand) bringing a tortilla to life. Buzz, as he often does, finds himself in personality conflict.

Things turn far more perilous than you might guess – by the end these toys are facing real literal death, and doing it with an amazing kind of courage. The makers of Toy Story 3 have not forgotten that we bond with these characters through their suffering. Even its villain is seen as not born bad, but as someone who was wounded deeply by a misfortune that could befall any toy, and nursed his anger about it until it changed him.

Toy Story 3 is enjoying incredible success right now in a disappointing summer at the multiplex, and I am sure there will be immense pressure to capitalize on the possibilities for future sequels inherent in its emotional ending. I believe that the ending is rather extraordinary, but only if you see it as the true conclusion of the story.

Here is why: this has always been the story of Woody, and his attempt to pierce the mystery of the life of a toy – like so many he strives to understand how best to fulfill the purpose of his existence. First he helped to teach Buzz, as they went from rivals to best friends and Buzz discovered he was not a real Space Ranger, about the virtue in inspiring the imaginations of children, and starring in their play. Then, in the even more provocative and moving second film, he was essentially forced to acknowledge his own mortality – and chose the finite joy of being Andy’s plaything, knowing at any time he could be abandoned or forgotten or destroyed, over immortality as an ever-preserved but never-touched exhibit in a toy museum.

This third film shows the bill from that choice coming due, and the screenplay, by Oscar-winner Michael Arndt (writer of Little Miss Sunshine), achieves poignant release because it once again finds Woody making a devastating choice, one only he can make. How could you produce a Toy Story 4 after this? Toy Story 3 shows Woody achieving true enlightenment within the toy philosophy – and with no lessons left that need learning, we should respect his maturity by letting him go. We’ll always have that bedroom.

P.S.: While the feature Toy Story 3 might not represent a risk on the part of Pixar, it is preceded by an animated short, Day & Night (directed by Teddy Newton), which is ecstatically radical. It is more of an experience than a plot, personifying and contrasting the sounds and rhythms and activities of light and dark on Earth in a way that is so conceptually tricky yet dumbfoundingly simple that I will leave you to be astounded by it for yourself. I saw it in an audience of children who were captivated into silence – they understood immediately. It carries a beautiful message of understanding and embracing that which is not like us, and as a final means of underlying its point, does so by marrying Pixar’s trademark 3D brilliance with…old-fashioned 2-D hand-drawn art. An absolute triumph.

If you ask the masters of the greenlight, who must be smarter than I am since they make so much more money – the problem is…sunspots. Or the Internet. Or mean critics. They themselves are blameless, having only made the movies we asked for.

But did we ask for this? I know that the summer is our dessert season, when we get our action and our fantasies and our cartoons. But did we really ask for ALL dessert for four consecutive months? And did we really ever promise that we would eat any moose turd pie a studio put whipped cream on between the months of May and August?

I know we have given an awful lot of our money to superheroes and explosions over the years, and I am fine with them responding to that. I show up for it like anybody. But there has to be such a thing as variety. As of now, July’s Christopher Nolan dream spectacle Inception looks like the only large-budget summer movie that wasn’t spawned from a Satanic ritual and a brand-awareness survey.

The problem is not the audience; I honestly believe that our movie screens are being held hostage to the insular egos of the studios green-lighting these movies and blasting them onto 4,000 screens apiece, bullying smaller movies out of the multiplex to make room for a weekly game of Kill-or-Be-Killed among the alphas.

Take, for example, Prince of Persia, which is based on a damn good series of video games that have inherent cinematic potential. It is currently nose-diving its way to a domestic gross of around $85M. For an action-fantasy movie that would be a fabulous result – if the movie cost $70M. However, Walt Disney Studios – whose employees, it cannot be emphasized enough, must by nature of their salaries be far, far smarter than me – spent $200M.

Now, the argument goes that this is an attempt to launch a new film franchise a la Pirates of the Caribbean, and you’ve got the hit-maker Jerry Bruckheimer producing, and those last Pirates movies had budgets of over $200M; so what’s the problem?

Well, the problem is that the FIRST Pirates movie in 2003 “only” cost $140M, and at the time was considered a terrifying gamble at that price. One would think that Persia, which has fewer recognizable stars and is based on a brand only known to video game junkies, should cost less – if one is going about this rationally.

But I think that budget was actually dictated by the release date. Simply by virtue of it being assigned the Memorial Day tentpole slot, the studio felt it was REQUIRED they spend that kind of money. That’s not because assuming you can create a hit of that magnitude is any kind of business plan; it is driven by insecurity about size.

Are there filmmakers out there with enough imagination, technical savvy and discipline to have made an $80M Prince of Persia adaptation that would have satisfied audiences? Absolutely. And that would have freed up $120M to make a few other movies to broaden the palate of offerings and off-set Disney’s risk.

Studios, however, with Disney leading the way, are pursuing a strategy of making fewer and fewer and bigger and bigger movies. One reason is that the investment and effort, not in producing the movies, but in ADVERTISING them – staking out a brand identity within the din – is simply becoming too much for the slates of yesteryear. But the dirty secret is, it’s only too much because the majority of studio employees know only one way to sell a movie (the opening day playing-at-every-theatre blowout) and only want to make movies that can be effectively sold that way. And so the cycle perpetuates.

When I saw Spider-Man 3 in 2007 I wrote that “we’ve finally breached the threshold of diminishing returns when it comes to PG-13 fantasy violence spectacles. These movies have simply become so expensive, so over-marketed, and so sustained by their own momentum as cross-demographic brand name juggernauts, that Hollywood’s geek talent pool may finally be overtaxed by the assignment of spinning them into turnstile gold.”

There have been fabulous high points since then, like the Iron Man franchise, Star Trek, the landmark Dark Knight and the ongoing wizardry of Pixar, but maybe what is happening right now is that 2010 is when all those looming signs of danger behind the successes have finally given way to the threatened disaster. Tell me this doesn’t resemble a broken dam? Persia is a nightmare for Disney, and it doesn’t look promising for their upcoming The Sorcerer’s Apprentice, or Warner Brothers/DC Comics’ Jonah Hex. Clash of the Titans only qualified as a hit by padding their box-office take with 3-D markups, and the only reason Robin Hood isn’t causing mass layoffs at Universal is that its international box office is doubling its limp US take.

The studios thought that all we wanted were big brand names, and they gave us this. And it’s too late to turn around their slates for the next three years, what with release dates and giant budgets already assigned to the likes of Battleship. There are many available lessons in 2010 – but I think the studios will continue putting bigger budgets behind a shrinking pool of brand names, and thus hasten their obsolescence.

This weekend, the two widest releases were both shameless cash-ins on 80’s nostalgia: The Karate Kid and The A-Team. The Karate Kid (forgive the pun) waxed The A-Team, pulling in an estimated $56.0M compared to $26.0M. Reviews helped, cross-demographic family-friendly appeal helped even more, I’m sure.

But even take all those advantages away, and assume that the numbers had turned out much closer. You want the true measure of Kid’s resounding victory? Its production budget was only $50M, compared to The A-Team’s $110M.

I’m here to say there is room for re-makes and re-launches and sequels – when they work, we like them. I’m sure the producers of The A-Team felt very cocksure about the budget they spent. But a sense of proportion (and, judging by reviews, making a better movie) is about to make The Karate Kid’s producers much, much wealthier.

Box office analysts are thinking of Get Him to the Greek as a dud because it didn’t do the numbers that The Hangover did on the same weekend. But The Hangover is currently the highest-grossing comedy of all time. It’s absurd to use the wildest outlier in existence as a measuring stick – Greek only cost $40M to make and will be handily profitable by that standard. Hell, if you accept the rough ratio that matching your budget in domestic gross is a good sign that you’ll make a profit once foreign and DVD are factored in, The Tooth Fairy is a bigger hit than Prince of Persia will ever be.

Persia opened on over 3,600 screens, and obviously did not sell out many of them. Imagine if they had cut that opening by just 300 screens. They wouldn’t have lost a dime. Playing to fuller houses might have given the audiences a better sense of fun. And maybe some of those 300 screens could have allowed a smaller or independent film to find an audience. The studios would be no poorer, and we as moviegoers would be enriched.

But it was Memorial Day Weekend – and size matters.

When you spend $200M to make a movie, it demands that you come up with, not just a hit, but one of the biggest hits of all-time, just to turn a worthwhile profit. That’s insane; it’s like planning a basketball game around making half-court shots at the buzzer.

Here’s a bit of free wisdom to all my wealthy superiors. You want more hits?

FEWER SCREENS, CHEAPER MOVIES, MORE VARIETY.

Spielberg was really playful with the camera back then – not in the hyper-cut, constantly-moving style you think of today, but with an uncanny knack for finding an impish way to compose a master shot, even out on location. The main characters are a young couple (played by William Atherton and Goldie Hawn) on the run in Texas with a stolen cop car and a policeman hostage – she broke the husband out of prison because child protective services put their baby with a foster couple, and she wants to steal him back.

There’s a shot where the Captain of the Highway Patrol (Oscar-winning Western movie veteran Ben Johnson) first comes up alongside the fleeing vehicle in his own; and they talk to each other over their radios. And it’s a single, unbroken shot, from Hawn’s perspective in the back seat, as his car pulls up on the left, her husband warns him to keep his distance, he speeds up ahead, then drops back around their other side, then finally falls back in line behind them with the other cars in pursuit. The whole time they’re talking through the radio, and you can see Johnson’s lips moving in the other car. This shot wasn’t pieced together with effects or editing, they’re all ACTING, at full speed on the highway.

There’s another shot, originating from Johnson’s car, where the top half of the screen catches his eyes in his rear view mirror, and the bottom half is filled with the rear window of the hostage vehicle. Hawn’s in the back seat, holding a shotgun in one hand, but playfully finger-drawing on the back window with the other. In a single shot we get to see both her, and him studying her. Not only is it a clever trick of framing, it gets across what’s so important in that moment – that he’s realizing these are just a couple of dumb, scared kids in way over their heads, and he really doesn’t want to have to kill them.

That’s what’s finally so startling to me about The Sugarland Express, because I feel like that spirit makes it utterly foreign to today’s America and today’s audience. I don’t know if it’s 30 years of Reaganomics pitting everyone savagely against each other, or our culture’s full-tilt embrace of the Just World fallacy (in which we are only able to cope with the horrors and injustices we see by finding reasons why the victims must have deserved their fate), but most people not only have no more sympathy for the poor and petty, they actively wish to see their harm. I think a contemporary audience would get restless to the point of outright anger that these tragic fools weren’t tased, beaten with clubs, and riddled with bullets ten minutes into the movie. The hostage, too – who, after all, was stupid enough to get caught.

Closer
Director: Mike Nichols
Writer: Patrick Marber, based on his play
Producers: Mike Nichols, John Calley, Cary Brokaw, Robert Fox
Stars: Jude Law, Julia Roberts, Natalie Portman, Clive Owen

I prefer it when movies are About Something over when they Say Something. Closer, based on Patrick Marber’s award-winning play, is a bit of the former and a great deal of the latter, but has the presumption to treat the Something it is Saying – that people lie, screw around, abuse others and don’t really know what they want out of the opposite sex – as news. Yes, I find myself saying, and…? While it’s surprising to hear Julia Roberts, queen of PG-13 platonicism, comparing the flavor of two mens’ emissions, I don’t know that by itself it constitutes a good movie.

It is a long-standing grief of mine that nobody makes movies for grown-ups anymore, so perhaps I should be grateful for Closer’s mere existence, since it is decidedly that. But it comes off as middlebrow satire, witty but mostly quaint when it’s meant to be devastating. I want more.

Danny (Jude Law), who writes obituaries for a living but would rather write novels, makes goggle-eyes across an intersection at a stripper who calls herself Alice (Natalie Portman). She seems equally charmed, then gets hit by a car. He helps her, shows her around London, when we next catch up with them she has moved in and he’s about to get a novel published mostly based on her life – at least, what she has told him of her life.

His book jacket photo is being taken by Anna (Roberts), who is separated and cautious. Danny pursues her casually and callously, not caring that Alice is waiting downstairs. Anna is interested but rebuffs him.

As some sort of vengeful prank Danny poses as Anna in an internet sex chat room, luring a lustful doctor (Clive Owen) to an aquarium at which Anna happens to enjoy spending time. In spite of the awkward misunderstanding of their meeting, they hit it off and get married.

And there our four principles are on the stage and talking. Almost exclusively in successive pairs, they have dialogues about loneliness, and sex, and jealousy, and sex, and whichever of the two presently off-stage characters they have had sex with recently, and how good it was. Then they trade off like partners in a square dance and another dialogue starts. Closer is not a bedroom farce being played at 33rpm, though the characters switch chambers often enough. At one point Larry the doctor confesses he slept with a prostitute while on a business trip, and I think the only reason he did it was to keep pace with the others.

I don’t mind movies about people who are generally nasty with one another, but what is most frustrating about Closer, is that the characters’ screen time seems to be directly related to the opacity of their emotional motives. Jude Law drives most of the action, professing to desperately love each of the female leads in turn, yet treating each with cruel disregard whenever he actually has them.

Which is not the point, though I kind of wish it was; the movie charts his evolution as that of someone who realizes The Truth only after he has made One Too Many Mistakes. But I defy you, examining his behavior in retrospect, to decide conclusively which love is genuine, if either.

The strongest character in the movie by far, and by the rule above then the one least on stage, is Larry the lustful doctor. Although he has as active a sex drive as anyone in the movie and acts out of incisive and chilling malice when his relationship is threatened by Danny, his wants and wounds are never ambiguous. Of everyone in the movie, he is the only one who seems to feel intimacy in its raw form, and the irony is this makes him smartest about inflicting damage on everyone else. You like him because as low and vile as he gets, you at least have a clear sense of how he got there.

You never forget that you are watching a filmed play, the dialogue has that stylized breathing room to it where every conversation feels like just another round of hormonal Ping Pong. And yet Nichols doesn’t film it remotely like a play, giving actors long takes in frame together. He cuts busily and the result is a movie that looks like TV, at once handsome and dull. By staying married to dialogue that is meant to simmer while filming in this style, there’s an unquantifiable loss of energy that may be at the heart of just why this movie fails to get enough of a rise out of me.

The actors are uniformly committed to the material and any spark the movie achieves comes from them. Roberts seems out of her depth trying to play buttoned-up and self-loathing, and generates no real heat with Law. Since her seduction by him underpins the action of the entire movie, that they don’t sell it is troubling. Law displays an interesting blend of impulse control problems but doesn’t seem to grasp Danny firmly.

Natalie Portman gives a solid, sexy grown-up performance as a young woman whose life is a series of calculated revelations and half-truths that she keeps hoping will come to an end. The scene where she strips for Larry while he, at his wit’s end, tries to bribe her real name out of her is the movie’s one perfect moment, where its conceit seems finally to come together and crackle.

And consistently, every time the movie comes even close is when Clive Owen is on the screen. Larry is his best role since his break-through in Croupier and the biggest reason why this movie generates any passion at all in me.

I admire the effort, and certainly the talent assembled, in Closer. Mike Nichols has directed brilliant films and hopefully will do so again. But this movie just misses its bravely-chosen target. Maybe we’re all just out of practice.

Shark Tale
Directors: Vicky Jensen, Bibo Bergeron, Rob Letterman
Writers: Rob Letterman, Michael J. Wilson
Producers: Bill Damaschke, Janet Healy, Allison Lyon Segan
Featuring the voices of: Will Smith, Robert De Niro, Renee Zellweger, Jack Black, Angelina Jolie, Martin Scorsese

So it’s an odd quibble to make in an animated kids’ movie that there is no good reason a fish should need an elevator to get to a top floor apartment. He couldn’t swim up? But I am just picky enough to think that the reason we watch movies set in another world is to bathe our imaginations in the unfamiliar, or something which is familiar but skewed in a unique way.

In Shark Tale, a harmless, diverting, but ultimately less than memorable animated comedy, fish, sharks and other creatures of the deep wear sunglasses, listen to walkmen, make their own TV shows, and dream of owning surround sound systems. Another odd quibble would be how a surround sound system works underwater, but I’m starting to come off as too much the grump.

Maybe what I am asking is, why is this story set underwater at all? Its trappings are the trappings of the human world – the sharks sit in booths at a restaurant and eat off of plates, fish use cell phones to communicate. Most of the characters spend their time upright rather than horizontally. Why did they have to be fish?

I think the answer is that if they weren’t some kind of cute animal, you would never bring kids to this movie – after all, what 6-year-old can relate to a story about mobsters and gambling? Sure, it has bright colors, fart jokes, and the voice of Will Smith at its jiggiest. But can a kid find any way to emotionally plug into his quest to live in a penthouse and have a hot girlfriend? Will they comprehend what it means that he is in debt to a loan shark (technically a loan puffer fish, named Sykes and voiced by Martin Scorsese)?

I cannot really speak for the children, who will find something to enjoy in this all as I did. But my guess is that it doesn’t nestle itself into some special place in their memory, where they store things that swept them away and made them feel something more than just a momentary laugh.

Oscar (Smith) works a menial job as a mouth scrubber at a “whale wash”. He sees himself as destined for bigger things and as such is a sucker for get-rich-quick schemes. Surviving one long enough to whip up another takes up much of his attention, so of course he is blind to the unrequited longings of his loyal friend Angie (Renee Zellweger).

But then a bad bet at the sea horse racing track has him getting worked over by some of Sykes’ jellyfish goons (Ziggy Marley, Doug E. Doug). To make matters worse, a couple of sharks, the sons of the reef’s capo Don Lino (Robert DeNiro), show up. Good son Frankie (Michael Imperioli) is fed up with the eccentricities of his little brother Lenny (Jack Black), who is trying to be a vegetarian, and wants to set him right by enjoying a little fish stalking. And Oscar is the only fish around.

All does not go according to plan, and an accident leaves Frankie dead and the reef thinking that Oscar bested him. Long in fear of the sharks, the fish denizens dub Oscar “The Sharkslayer” and suddenly he’s got everything he ever wanted – fame, money, a hot girlfriend (the ever-changeable Lola, voiced by Angelina Jolie) and the aforementioned rooftop condo. But he’s also got a deadly enemy in the form of Don Lino.

Oscar and Lenny become friends out of mutual self-interest, and of course Angie tags along to provide some voice of conscience as Oscar’s lies form ever higher and more teetering piles beneath him. The story unfolds as you might rather expect, with sitcom-like farcical situations in the climax and sitcom-like “we learned a valuable lesson today” emotional resolution for the characters. There’s nothing particularly broken in the mechanics of the story, but that’s a long way from saying there’s anything inspired to it.

While the other offerings from Dreamworks/PDI – the Shrek movies and Antz – have offered a high level of wit and expression, this is a far more modest effort. The characters just don’t pop to life like we’ve come to expect. There is a growing trend to people animated movies with the voices of big stars; frankly I can’t imagine a six-year-old caring. The no-name David P. Smith scores more laughs than any of them as a scuttling non-sequiter named Crazy Joe.

No six-year-old is going to understand why a mobster character voiced by Robert De Niro is meant to be funny in and of itself. Live action acting and voice-over acting are two distinct arts, and I have yet to be convinced that the average movie star adds anything to an animated film. For vocally gifted performers like Eddie Murphy and Mike Myers I of course make glad exceptions. But Shark Tale is overloaded with “names”, so much so that it seems to be relying on our affection for these stars to provide the razzle-dazzle the animation and story isn’t.

But we’re not looking at the stars. We’re looking at fish. They are who we’re supposed to be relating to and embracing. And at any age, not focusing on that is a let-down.

The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou
Director: Wes Anderson
Writers: Wes Anderson, Noah Baumbach
Producers: Wes Anderson, Barry Mendel, Scott Rudin
Stars: Bill Murray, Owen Wilson, Cate Blanchett, Willem Dafoe, Anjelica Huston, Jeff Goldblum, Noah Taylor, Michael Gambon, Bud Cort, Seu Jorge

It’s fitting that in addition to being an undersea explorer and cataloger of rare and exotic species, Steve Zissou (Bill Murray) is also a filmmaker. We leave The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou feeling great anticipation for Zissou’s next film, though the recent work we have seen has frequently felt meandering, distracted, and missing a certain purpose. But it ended with a bang, suddenly had some guts again, and there is every reason to believe he is back in possession of his mojo.

Which is how I arrive at a most unexpected form of endorsement for this movie. I think it is interesting but imperfect, amusingly detailed but often less than gripping. But it does end very well, and with beauty. And it finds co-writer/director Wes Anderson finishing a great journey in which he has reclaimed his voice. Mostly, it makes me eagerly anticipate his next movie.

While I loved his Rushmore, my reaction to his follow-up The Royal Tenanbaums was more one of admiration and appreciation. I found it too bound up in its precious convolutions to speak to me very emotionally. Aquatic has both the virtues of the former and the vices of the latter in bounteous amount, and I ultimately see it as more of a quest than a conclusive story.

This is reflected in the plot, which is also a search. What it is a search for changes often, sometimes it seems to lose its way entirely. In the beginning Zissou unveils the first half of his latest film, in which a heretofore unseen creature he dubs a “jaguar shark” attacks and eats his dearest friend and comrade Esteban (Seymour Cassel). The audience is less than wowed, and downright appalled when he announces, matter-of-factly, that the 2nd half of the film will chronicle his upcoming efforts to track down and kill the possibly one-of-a-kind shark for revenge.

Zissou smokes a lot of marijuana and lacks aptitude for the day to day details of managing “Team Zissou”. This task usually fell to his estranged wife Eleanor (Anjelica Huston). But she has abandoned him for his grant-hogging braggart rival Hennessey (Jeff Goldblum), and Zissou is slow to come to grips with just how much this portends going wrong in his voyage.

He also has two unexpected visitors. Ned Plympton (Owen Wilson) is a “co-pilot for Air Kentucky” who believes he might be Zissou’s illegitimate son – there’s evidence both for and against this but Zissou is eager to take the young man under his wing and insists he join the expedition. And Jane Winslett-Richardson (Cate Blanchett) is a reporter for an oceanographic journal determined to do a cover story on Zissou which may or may not be a hatchet job; she criticizes his recent documentaries as seeming “kind of fake”.

The same charge has been leveled against Anderson about his own work over the years. And it’s hard not to question the verite of a movie whose protagonist returns home to his island compound and is told coldly by his wife in lieu of a greeting that his favorite cat has died, its throat torn out by a rattlesnake. This sort of thing is always happening in Wes Anderson movies. All of his characters are thick with eccentricities from their clothes on inwards, all of them are sad and lonely in determined, intricate ways, and we watch their experiences with little predicting what’s going to happen to them or how they’re going to react to it.

Which is the beginning of the snake-swallowing-its-tail that is the whole point of this. Zissou cannot help stage his reality ever so-slightly, it’s a natural reaction to a world he sees as too confoundingly, frustratingly designed to actually be random. He’s a fraud; but in a fraudulent world he is an inspiring one who finds a way to show you something you’ve never seen before, even if he does steal equipment, torment his unpaid interns, and beg funding from his in-laws in order to do it.

So the movie is unrealistic, is fake. But it’s so carefully, lovingly fake, like the cutaway full-size model of Zissou’s research vessel “The Belafonte” (which characters walk through and treat as the real thing) or the bouncy themes composed as temp tracks for his documentaries on cheap synthesizers, or the sea creatures themselves, created in stop-motion animation by Henry Selick, director of The Nightmare Before Christmas. Even many of the names are brand names or celebrity surnames.

The performances (save some wobbly and unsure work by Wilson) are constantly surprising and funny – Murray seems to inhabit Zissou with intimate familiarity, Blanchett is a delightful presence, and Willem Dafoe (as insecure short-pants-wearing right-hand man Klaus Daimler) works his face into the most unbelievable contortions of apoplexy, indignation and injury.

I laughed in places no one else in the theatre did, just as they chuckled at moments in which I could not see the joke. It’s that sort of movie, never dull really, though sometimes restless-making as you long for Anderson to get to some point. It is amusing all the while, and suddenly, shockingly heartbreaking when reality makes a brutal intrusion.

Is that jolt of emotion too little, or the more enhanced for coming in such a composed, minute dose? I am hardly one to judge, I can only say again that I left The Life Aquatic feeling good, willing to say I enjoyed the time I spent. I don’t think I saw a great movie, but I saw a great filmmaker figuring out, after facing distractions and temptations and the pitfalls of his rebellious and quirky approach, just how he wanted to proceed with his art.

Beyond the Sea
Director: Kevin Spacey
Writers: Kevin Spacey, Lewis Colick
Producers: Jan Hantl, Arthur E. Friedman, Andy Paterson, Kevin Spacey
Stars: Kevin Spacey, Kate Bosworth, John Goodman, Bob Hoskins, Brenda Blethyn, Caroline Aaron, William Ullrich

This is the second musical biopic this season which features legendary producer/songwriter Ahmet Ertegun as a supporting character. In Ray, he’s a savvy and encouraging mentor in both music and business to Ray Charles, and when he’s not behind the console he’s prodding Ray to find his own sound, or expressing nervousness at his latest groundbreaking escapade; and finally, showing unabashed pride that he negotiated a deal with a rival label so good that Ertegun’s label could never hope to match it. He’s not even the third or fourth lead character in Ray, so to see such well-rounded detail in his depiction is generous and winning.

In Beyond the Sea, Kevin Spacey’s daring, odd, but ultimately off-putting musical/biographical tribute to Bobby Darin, Ertegun has only one scene with any significant dialogue. In it, he’s a record label suit who tries to convince Darin (Spacey) to stick with the teeny-bopper audience that loved his pop hit Splish Splash, and not take a foolish risk by crooning classic standards. Darin wins the argument with an insufferably cute contrived movie moment, then goes on to cut his Sinatra-esque album and prove what a dunce Ertegun was. Ertegun spends the rest of the movie in crowd scenes applauding Darin’s latest triumph.

I think this is a sign of what undermines this interesting failure. The lives, problems, and occupations of everyone around Darin are not really worth his detailed attention except for those inconvenient moments where they get in the way of his big dreams. Then they become opportunities for him to triumph and show what a Legend he is and how small-minded or selfish or shallow They are.

And I could fill this whole review detailing the uncomfortable way clearly awful details of his marriage to Sandra Dee (Kate Bosworth) are skirted – when you find your new bride in screaming, crying hysterics in the closet on your wedding night, maybe it’s about more than just coming up with a cute way to convince her to have sex with you.

I’ve been wondering since I watched this movie if such self-involved tunnel vision is an inevitable result of the format. Spacey tries something admirably risky here which may have worked better on a Broadway stage – he fashions Darin’s life into a kind of celebratory revue, and frequently steps out of the drama to bring the lights up, let the extras take five, and argue with his colleagues (and the actor playing him as a child, William Ullrich) about what should come next. Scenes which start as drama have a habit of breaking into full musical numbers. It’s supposed to be a big fun hullabaloo of a show about Darin, Darin, and Darin, and the hope is we’ll get swept along in the zowie of it all.

We see that Walden Robert Cassotto was born to meager circumstances in the Bronx, that he suffered a crippling bout of rheumatic fever that left his heart heavily damaged and made any birthday past his 15th an unlikely miracle, and that Polly Cassotto (Brenda Blethyn, nailing the vibe of the movie as well as it can be nailed) encouraged his musical gifts and drew on her Vaudeville background to instill showmanship and driving work ethic in little Bobby.

Then, in a whirlwind, he became teen idol and movie star (even nominated for an Academy Award for Captain Newman, M.D.), wooed Sandra Dee away from her domineering mother (Greta Scacchi), crossed over to become a top-drawing club crooner, wrote and recorded hundreds of songs, dropped out of the public eye, learned a shocking and life-changing fact about his parentage, briefly walked out on his family to live in a trailer by the ocean, not-too-successfully reinvented himself as a hippie protest singer, then seemed to fold this new political awareness into a re-embraced lounge star image before succumbing to his health problems at 37. The conclusion the movie ultimately comes to about the fate of “Bobby Darin” is either ghoulish or just vain, but it is not magical in spite of its best intentions.

Spacey gets to show off his hoofery and a fine set of pipes – he’s a good dancer and hits every note and flourish and ad lib Darin did in famous recordings of hits like Mack the Knife, Beyond the Sea and on and on (he unaccountably struggles with Dream Lover). But there’s something missing in the singing, some almost-intangible red-blooded immediacy that might even momentarily help us forget that what we’re watching is just a very, very well-rehearsed act of mimicry. He’s internalized the melody, but left the life external.

Spacey’s best performances draw on that calculation in his eyes – they’re always slightly dull; softly smirking even when his lips aren’t joining in, as if to mask the active mind seeking the next way to get the upper hand on you. For Darin, whose life speaks more of heedless, almost fatalistic forward momentum, the innate reserve of Spacey the actor can’t hide from the camera.

And maybe it sounds like a lowbrow complaint (one he even winkingly attempts to dismiss), but at 45 he’s simply, unavoidably, too old for the part. When he romances Dee in Italy, the camera captures for us exactly what it’s seeing – not a love-struck kid in his early 20’s, but a middle-aged man relentlessly wearing down a teenage girl’s resistance. Even set to the strains of Beyond the Sea I am not charmed.

I consider Spacey a brilliant, but here miscast, actor and a dedicated producer – raising the money to realize his vision, which required shooting this largely-LA-set movie in Berlin and the UK, took some ingenuity – but also a pedestrian director and an imaginative but hackneyed writer. In Beyond the Sea the ideas come across but not the heart.

Once in awhile the music and the clothes and the energy are enough to shake everything to life and make the proceedings enjoyable. But the underlying premise requires that we look at Kevin Spacey and, despite the naked artifice of the movie’s structure, believe that he is Bobby Darin. And to not spare a care or second thought for anyone else on that screen. I don’t know if I’d want that to work even if it could.

The Aviator
Director: Martin Scorsese
Writer: John Logan
Producers: Michael Mann, Graham King, Sandy Climan, Charles Evans, Jr.
Stars: Leonardo DiCaprio, Cate Blanchett, John C. Reilly, Kate Beckinsale, Alec Baldwin, Alan Alda, Adam Scott, Ian Holm, Danny Huston, Kelli Garner

I don’t say this lightly – in the eyes of Howard Hughes, as embodied by Leonardo DiCaprio, I see the same will, the same earth-shifting madness, as T.E. Lawrence, as Charles Foster Kane. The performance is that good, and in The Aviator, it has a film good enough to contain it. One of the best of the year, I’d venture to say.

Martin Scorsese has worn the heavy mantle of Our Greatest Living Filmmaker for many a long year now. And while the wailing power of his filmmaker’s voice has never weakened, his deification has blunted honest critical appraisal of a recent decade of work that has never been less than gripping, but sometimes seemed to escape his storytelling grasp. Even his epic Gangs of New York, an amazing accomplishment, still feels (when we’re able to admit it to ourselves) unresolved, short of a fully-realized vision.

But here, working from a sprawling but always deft and witty script by John Logan (Any Given Sunday, Gladiator), Scorsese the Director roars and soars. It’s his tightest, most confident work since Goodfellas, and as a long-time fan I rejoice – there’s no more uncomfortably ignoring flaws or making apologies for sloppiness. Yes, I think, this is how great he can be.

The movie opens with the young Hughes in Hollywood, pursuing his three obsessions – movies, women and airplanes, with round-the-clock fervor. And, risking the drill-bit fortune left behind by his parents, he combines the three by self-financing and directing an aerial dogfight film, Hell’s Angels, starring the delectable Jean Harlow (Gwen Stefani). At the time he first sends the planes in the air he’s all of 21 years old.

The making of Angels is an early clue into the double-edged sword of his personality – a bedeviling marriage of a dreamer’s imagination and costs-be-damned obsessiveness. Boldly prevailing upon rival studio heads to lend him two cameras (the 24 he has are insufficient to shoot the climax the way it exists in his head), he films the movie but is unsatisfied by the footage – the planes don’t look fast enough with nothing in the background to which to compare them. So he hires a meteorologist (Ian Holm) to find clouds for him, clouds like “big breasts full of milk” (one half-sentence of dialogue neatly combining his favorite beverage with his favorite body part).

In one of the movie’s funniest scenes, the good Doctor, after months of failure, runs out of a tent waving a weather report, shouting “Oakland!” Then Hughes yells “Oakland!” and 100 costumed pilots all run for their planes to fly to Oakland, where the milky-breast clouds are today.

Try to imagine, then, the exasperation of Noah Dietrich (John C. Reilly), hired to keep Hughes’ varied business interests in the black, when Hughes announces he wants to re-shoot the entire movie, again, to capitalize on the new trend of sound pictures.

This is the first time that Scorsese, the lover of classic Hollywood, has had the chance to depict classic Hollywood on-screen, and we sense him reveling. Look at the sumptuous design work, and the color and detail in the parties at the legendary Cocoanut Grove. One aging singer there, through his gyrations and unnatural grin, seems to wholly embody the desperate heedlessness of it all – as if by force of his smile alone the Depression and WWII might be staved off.

Seeing this decadent mayhem through Hughes’ eyes we sympathize with the discomfort and terror it often produces in him, we can also understand why long-time paramour Katharine Hepburn (Cate Blanchett) felt so drawn. As a man he could give you every extreme – exhilarating adventure and passionate appreciation – but also coldness and the most painful immature vulnerability. Blanchett is no dead ringer for Hepburn, but she nails the insouciant rhythms of her speech and every so often her head tilts just so and it’s like seeing a ghost. Some mannered lookalike job would have been sacrilege against the memory of the one-of-a-kind screen legend. In Blanchett’s wonderful performance we see the living vibrancy, the independence and the contradictions; she makes Hepburn breathe rather than show us a waxy and academic recreation.

But she was far from the only woman in his life, and we not only see his ill-fated patronage of underage starlet Faith Domergue (Kelli Garner), but his dalliance with Ava Gardner (Kate Beckinsale), who managed to appreciate and dote on him while keeping him at a certain arms’ length. And who wouldn’t want him at arms’ length when he’s planting electronic bugs under your bed?

A lesser movie would have focused with clinical glee on the details of Hughes’ madness – his germophobia, his paranoia, the way he liked his food prepared just so and the way his brain seemed to sometimes skip the needle, leaving him repeating some phrase over and over and over again. The Aviator will take knocks from rubberneckers who longed to see DiCaprio in a fright wig with fingernail extensions cocooned in a Vegas hotel room.

But while providing enough dementia to keep it honest (a scene in a public restroom demonstrates just how paralyzing a simple doorknob could be), The Aviator allows us to see Hughes’ strength, the way he fought through these eccentricities over and over again to achieve greatness. We watch him shatter the air-speed record, cut Lindbergh’s time for flying around the globe in half, transform the air travel industry through guts and engineering genius, survive (heavily-scarred) the terrifying crash of an experimental spy plane, break Pan-Am’s monopoly on overseas travel by facing down a corrupt Senator (Alan Alda), fly a plane the size of a football stadium that was built out of wood, and yes, make a profit on Hell’s Angels.

In the end his demons defeated him, and we see signs of that inevitable doom sprinkled throughout, as well as a brief flashback which, while not fully explaining his complexities, certainly gives them a kind of understandable context. But this movie celebrates rather than gawks or pities. This all starts and ends with DiCaprio.

A decade ago we saw signs of this potential when he played the mentally-disabled younger brother in What’s Eating Gilbert Grape?, this performance is the next step in that evolution and the fulfillment of that early promise. Lesser actors run up to scenes of madness with arms-waving glee, like Evel Knievel making sure everyone knows how many buses he’s about to jump over. But DiCaprio shows the most incredible care in dribbling out the symptoms of Howard Hughes’ mania; he takes the essence of the motto for great actors playing alcoholics – you don’t play a guy who’s falling down, you play a guy who’s trying to stay standing.

Ocean’s Twelve
Director: Steven Soderbergh
Writer: George Nolfi, based on characters created by George Clayton Johnson and Jack Golden Russell
Producer: Jerry Weintraub
Stars: George Clooney, Brad Pitt, Julia Roberts, Catherine Zeta-Jones, Matt Damon, Andy Garcia, Vincent Cassel, Bernie Mac, Don Cheadle, Scott Caan, Casey Affleck, Elliot Gould, Carl Reiner, Shaobo Qin, Eddie Jemison

There is the heist movie where we root for our heroes to pull it off, then there is the one where we realize with dread that they won’t get away with it. Ocean’s Eleven, the 2001 remake of the 1960 Rat Pack vehicle about knocking over a Vegas casino, was the former, as is this sequel. Watching with faith that our heroes will somehow come out on top, our enjoyment lies in the discovery of details – details about how impossible the job is, and the details of how they overcome those impossibilities.

The details in the first effort from Clooney and the gang were impeccable – every member of the “Eleven” had a clear task to attend to, and the heist they pulled off was paced well and enjoyably ridiculous while keeping that single all-important stretching toe on the line of plausibility. Like good soul music, you could enjoy the style because the groove was locked in tight. But in Ocean’s Twelve, after going through the motions of reassembling the entire crew, the story labors heavily to keep track of them all, and eventually resorts to just throwing increasing numbers of them in jail to lessen confusion.

If it feels as if they’ve been grafted onto a story that cannot hold their weight, it’s because this is exactly what happened – George Nolfi’s script, originally titled Honor Among Thieves, was set up for John Woo to direct. These characters were dropped in after the financial failure of director Steven Soderbergh’s Solaris and Clooney’s directing debut Confessions of a Dangerous Mind (both underrated and worth a look) made this sequel what an agent would call “smart business”. At least they decided to have some fun in fulfilling this obligation, but unfortunately not all of that fun is passed along to the audience.

In the beginning, the object was to take down slimy casino magnate Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia). But there was an emotional quest involved too; it was a way for Danny Ocean (Clooney) to demonstrate his love for ex-wife Tess (Julia Roberts), and in the end you could appreciate the design of both story threads. Now we open with Benedict tracking down the people who robbed him, one by one, and demanding his $160 million back, with interest.

He gives them two weeks to do this, but the deadline is utterly arbitrary, since it never precludes our gang from anything they want to do, be it shuttling across several countries in Europe or finding the right equipment to lift a house from underwater. In the process of finding big-dollar heists to pull off on short notice, they learn not only who gave their identities to Benedict, but why.

And then the story ceases to be about Benedict at all, but about a slimy French cat burglar named the Night Fox (Vincent Cassel), a legendary retired thief named La Marque, and the aborted fling between Ocean right-hand man Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt) and Interpol detective Isabel Lahiri (Catherine Zeta-Jones). These are likely the main players in the movie that would have been Honor Among Thieves, and they look like they don’t realize that they have been demoted to the rank of pretext.

In this day and age it’s an impressive feat just to assemble so much star-wattage in one movie. Clearly the lure was a chance to reunite for the laughs they enjoyed before, and go to beautiful cities and wear smashing clothes and say witty things and just generally celebrate their own amazing-ness.

I have no objection to that on principle, it was part of the charm of the first. Director Soderbergh is still a master of staging and rhythm, and in acting as his own director of photography (as always, under the pseudonym “Peter Andrews”) he uses natural lighting and rich color to stunning effect. The scenery, primarily Amsterdam and Rome, is to die for and everyone does indeed dress well. The collective charms of the cast do manage to carry things along for longer than you might think, although with the number of cameos it does have a clowns-tumbling-out-of-a-Volkswagon effect after awhile.

But eventually your own smile wears off, and you realize that these people you paid to entertain you are now focused entirely on entertaining themselves. Ironically, the most laughs-per-minute of screen time goes to Chinese acrobat and non-actor Shaobo Qin, who re-defines the problem of lost luggage.

The second half of the movie wobbles and lists under a series of surprises and double-crosses, and without giving too much away I must say that in the end the audience is fundamentally cheated. We’re subjected to that tired device where we stop the movie so the actors can grin and tell us what really happened. A good heist movie inspires us to think along with the gang. A bad heist movie prevents us from thinking then condescends to us about what we didn’t know.

And our glamorous movie stars are too preoccupied with kidding each other about how beautiful and rich and successful they are to do anything about it – in an extended cameo, yet another huge movie star comes along and gets to brag about the worldwide box office gross of his biggest hit (really, Bruno, do we care?).

If at this point you are asking what any of this has to do with a heist, you are asking the question that sticks the knife right into this ultimately wearying movie, a reunion party that just drags on too long. The end scenes involve our triumphant gang getting together for a night of poker, and I was disappointed to conclude I would rather have watched two hours of that.