missmediajunkie

After my little rant about the omission of director Robert Stevenson from "Saving Mr. Banks," I figured I had better go and actually watch the film to make sure I wasn't making a mountain out of a molehill. I think my point still stands, with a couple of caveats. Yes, the movie is limited to examining the two weeks of pre-production on "Mary Poppins" in 1961 that Stevenson had nothing to do with. And yes, plenty of other creatives who were vital to the film ended up on the cutting room floor, including writer Bill Walsh. Yet the events of "Saving Mr. Banks" as they played out were largely invented and very skewed. Walt Disney did greet P.L. Travers upon her arrival to California, and then promptly left town, so it still rankles that his presence looms so large in the film and he's been handed such an outsized share of the credit for the success of "Mary Poppins."

If you put all that aside and buy into the fictionalized version of events, though, how was the movie? Not bad. It's an entertaining watch, particularly if you're a fan of the 1964 "Mary Poppins" film, which I am. Emma Thompson plays the uptight, combatative P.L. Travers, author of the "Mary Poppins" books, who has been cajoled by Walt Disney (Tom Hanks) for over two decades to sell him the rights to make a "Poppins" film. Financial necessity forces her to board a plane to sunny Southern California, to work on a film treatment with writer Don DaGradi (Bradley Whitford) and songwriters Richard and Robert Sherman (B.J. Novak, Jason Schwartzman). As Travers battles for creative control, we also learn the origins of "Mary Poppins" through flashbacks to her troubled childhood in Australia, when she was a little girl named Ginty (Annie Rose Buckley) with a loving, but unstable alcoholic father (Colin Farrell).

The film starts out well enough, with Emma Thompson's performance a major highlight. P.L. Travers is a career curmudgeon, who hates cartoons and musicals, rolls her eyes at whimsy and sentiment, and makes impossible demands that change from one day to the next. Nobody likes her, with the exception of her cheerful driver, Ralph (Paul Giamatti), and she doesn't care. However, thanks to Thompson she isn't unlikeable. The scenes that take place at the studio, where we get to see some of the painful adaptation process for "Mary Poppins," is easily the best stuff in the film. This is also the material that is truest to history, since there are audio recordings of many of the initial story meetings with Travers and the "Mr. Banks" crew had one of the people who was actually in the room, Richard Sherman, to consult with.

Things get iffier with the portrayal of Walt Disney. Tom Hanks turns in a nice performance, but he's not playing Walt Disney as he was, but very much the corporate image of Walt Disney that he projected to the world, with a couple of minor faults like enjoying alcohol and the occasional cigarette. We get a few glimpses of the shrewd businessman who built the Disney empire, but you have to look pretty hard beneath the charming veneer of Uncle Walt. What's worse is the totally invented notion that the "Mary Poppins" film somehow purged Travers of some of her childhood demons, that Disney magic and Walt's insight into her psyche, rather than money, triumphed over her cynicism. This is the kind of sugarcoating that Disney detractors have always despised, and I couldn't help feeling pretty frustrated on Travers' behalf.

The film is well-made and well-executed, a feel-good bit of corporate self-gilding that most audiences should eat right up. If I had known less about the production history of "Mary Poppins" and Walt Disney, I'm sure I would have enjoyed it more. The only really problematic stuff is the flashback sequences, which are commendably darker and tackle heavier subject matter than the usual Disney film, but they take up too much time and are rarely well connected to the events taking place in 1961. I wasn't surprised to learn that "Saving Mr. Banks" originally devoted far more attention to Travers' personal life and history, and the dealings with Disney were only added much later.

So all in all, I have very mixed feelings about the film. Thompson's performance is definitely worth the watch, and Disney fans should be happy to get a chance to see "Mary Poppins" concept sketches from the archives and the Sherman brothers working out the compositions for those iconic songs. But making-of films about famous films rarely manage to impress me, because there's too much of a tendency to glamorize real-life events, and this is just the latest example. The filmmaking process is fascinating enough without having to graft these tired old redemption plots into the works. I'm glad I saw "Saving Mr. Banks," but I wouldn't watch it again.

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People have been complaining about the state of romantic comedies for years, me included, so it's nice to see one come along that happily subverts the status quo while still being, unarguably, a romantic comedy. Written, directed, and starring Joseph Gordon-Levitt as the titular ladies man, this film has been billed in some circles as a more realistic story about relationships from the point of view of a typical guy. The main character, Jon Martello, is a modernized version of the famous lover, a nightclub-hopping ladies' man who never gets emotionally involved with his conquests and admits that pornography is better at sexually gratifying him than his flings with actual women. There's a "Jersey Shore" vibe too, since Jon is Italian-American and from what appears to be the New York area. In short, this isn't your typical rom-com hero.

But then into his life comes the girl, the "dime," as Jon refers to her, a rare winner of the top score on the 1-10 scale that he and his buddies use to rate potential hookups. This is Barbara (Scarlett Johanssen), whose sex appeal is so high that she gets Jon to break many of his rules in order to win her over. He finds himself getting into a real relationship with her, and willing to meet her demands, including going back to school. The only real sticking point is Jon's consumption of internet porn, which Barbara has no tolerance for, and Jon finds difficult to give up. Does the real girl win out over the digital ones? Well, it's not as simple as that, and Jon discovers that he's got a few other issues that he needs to work out regarding his love life.

I'm not surprised that this film has gotten some mixed reactions, especially from audiences who traditionally enjoy romantic-comedies. "Don Jon" is so much raunchier and testosterone driven than your typical romance, initially it comes as something of a shock. We see R-rated, but still fairly graphic examples of the porn Jon prefers, and he describes his masturbation practices for us without a hint of shame. He uses pick-up-artist techniques and discusses women as disposable objects without hesitation. Jon is charming enough to get away with it, of course, but it's also clear that he is not bad person. He does nothing out of line with any of the women we see him with, but he's got certain notions about relations with the opposite gender that are troubling.

"Don Jon" offers some interesting commentary on the differing versions of ideal love connections that modern day men and women often subscribe to. Jon may have bought into the player culture to a potentially damaging degree, but Barbara has been similarly conditioned to expect the fairy-tale romance. Of course, she's a fan of more typical romantic comedies. Where did Jon's ideas about gender relations come from? Well, there's his family, headed by his hyper-masculine father, played with delightful brashness by Tony Danza. And then there are Jon's weekly trips to the church confessional, where all his myriad transgressions are easily confessed and absolved.

Jon doesn't interact with women who aren't family or don't score high on his rating scale, so the most important relationship he develops in the film isn't with Barbara, but with an older woman he happens to meet and become friends with at college, Esther (Julianne Moore). Most of the discussions of "Don Jon" I've read don't talk about her much, probably because her role involves a lot of spoilers. That's a shame, because she is a big reason why the film works as well as it does. Joseph Gordon-Levitt's performance is the one driving the film, of course, but many of his better scenes are with Moore. I'm sorry to say that Scarlett Johanssen feels a little wasted. She looks great, but there's really not much to her character.

As for Gordon-Levitt as a director, this is certainly a promising first film, nice and light without feeling flippant, stylized without feeling overworked. Moreover, I find it encouraging that this is the kind of material he chose to tackle for his debut, a friendly tweak on a masculine ideal that fits right in with Michael Bay's "Pain & Gain" and Scorsese's "Wolf of Wall Street." And he got to play a role that I don't think anybody would have thought to cast him as - mind you, I hope this isn't indicative of the role that Gordon-Levitt wants to play from now on. One movie with him as The Situation's stand-in was fun, but it could get old real quick.

"Don Jon" skews more guy-friendly, but I certainly enjoyed it and appreciated its aims. It should be an entertaining watch for anyone that doesn't mind a little smut and knows what they're getting themselves into. And for those of us tired of the usual rom-com formulas, it's a welcome change of pace.

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I've never found museums particularly inviting places, probably because I've never had enough time to really enjoy them as intended. I've always had to rush through them, getting only a few minutes with each individual piece of artwork. I learned to appreciate museums, but only managed to connect with the art itself very rarely, and then never for very long. I think that's why I got so wrapped up in "Museum Hours" which presents that ideal museum experience that I never managed to have. It follows the lives of two people, an elderly guard named Johann (Bobby Sommer) at the Kunsthistorisches Art Museum in Vienna, and a traveler from Montreal, Anne (Mary Margaret O'Hara) who has come to see a comatose relative in the local hospital, and needs something to fill the lonely hours of her vigil.

"Museum Hours" is not an especially long film, but its pace is slow and deliberate. There are long scenes of people simply talking about art and art history for several minutes at a time, including a lengthy digression where a lecturer (Ela Piplits) delivers a talk to a group of visitors on Bruegel's work that segues into a spirited debate. We learn Johann's views on his job, the various museum patrons, his co-workers, and his own favorite pieces through occasional, thoughtful narration that appears throughout the film, paired with cinematography that lingers on paintings, statues, architecture, and the silent winter landscapes outside the museum. The story of Johann and Anne's developing friendship feels incidental to the simple experience of seeing and observing the world that they inhabit. It's a lovely, rare film that is sure to be an infuriating bore to some viewers, but an entrancing, absorbing watch for others.

The subject matter may seem intimidating, but you absolutely don't need to know a thing about art to enjoy "Museum Hours." The movie is not about the art or the museum, but the ways in which two characters who are in the best position to benefit from them, perceive and are shaped by the museum visits. It's almost as fun to hear about Johann describing a series of humorous Arcimboldo paintings, and give his opinions on them, as it is to actually look at the paintings themselves. He's awkward talking about himself, but becomes far more comfortable when talking about paintings or music. Slowly, over the course of the film, art becomes not just a convenient topic to help fill in the empty spaces and long gaps of time, but something that the characters seek out and enjoy together. We see how it helps to define who they are and facilitates the growing connection between them.

Jem Cohen is not a name I was familiar with, and it's not a surprise that the director is known mostly for experimental and documentary films, video art installations, and multidisciplinary collaborations with other artists, particularly musicians. In this case one of his leads, Mary Margaret O'Hara, is better known as a musician than an actress, and contributed the few pieces on the film's minimal soundtrack. Cohen's background also has parallels to Johann's, who we learn managed rock bands in his younger days, and then became a teacher before taking up his position as a guard. This is an artist well versed in the culture and the atmosphere of museums, who can comment on them intelligently, and does a better job of sharing his enjoyment of them with the audience than I've ever seen anyone else manage.

The scenes that take place outside the museum tend to be the ones that move the plot along, mostly casual scenes that show Anne and Johann getting to know each other, visiting the hospital, and a few sightseeing trips. We hear snippets of their conversations, learn details of their lives, and watch them enjoy each other's company. These scenes feel intensely private, moreso even than the ones where we're hearing Johann's train of thought directly through his narration. There's a lovely, sad moment where Anne quietly sings to her cousin in the hospital that says more about their relationship than any of the dialogue does.

"Museum Hours" is one of those films that I nearly let slip between the cracks. It had a very small release over the summer that barely attracted any attention, but fortunately it came up on a couple of critics' top ten lists at the end of the year, and it's been readily available on all the usual streaming services for some time. Hardly anyone but the most highbrow film fans saw it, but I don't see why it couldn't appeal to a much wider audience. Anyone who has ever enjoyed a museum visit, or like me wishes that they could have gotten a little more out of their museum visits, should look into "Museum Hours."
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2013 may go down as the year of the survival film, with many of the biggest prestige films of the fall featuring individuals placed in extreme situations. "Captain Phillips" is based on the true life hijacking of the Maersk Alabama cargo ship by Somali pirates in 2009. This is easily the kind of film that could have been turned into a gung-ho, bombastic action fantasy with slick set pieces and black and white morality. Fortunately, the movie was put into the capable hands of Paul Greengrass, former documentary filmmaker, and the director of such films as "United 93" and "Bloody Sunday," as well as the latter two Matt Damon "Bourne" films.

"Captain Phillips" takes us step by step through the hijacking, from the ship and the pirates departing from their respective ports, to the attack on the ship, to the hostage situation that results, and finally to the inevitable resolution. It certainly doesn't lack for intensity and thrills, and the central performance by Tom Hanks as Phillips is a good one. However, what really gives the film its power is the decision to give equal attention and character development to the four hijackers. We first meet Muse (Barkhad Abdi), Bilal (Barkhad Abdirahman), Najee (Faysal Ahmed), and teenager Elmi (Mahat M. Ali) at their village, and get glimpses of their lives. This provides vital context for everything that follows, and much of the film is told from their point of view.

The commitment to a high level of realism is noticeable all throughout the film, and elevates it. Some incidents and much of the dialogue were clearly invented, but the script by Billy Ray is full of technical and military terminology that no one stops to explain. The Somalis all speak English to some degree, but among themselves they converse in Somali, and they do so at length. In your typical action spectacular, the threat of four armed men in a speedboat would seem to be too small, but in "Captain Phillips," it is carefully established that no one on the ship is armed, the shipping company has failed to provide adequate security, the safeguards and procedures to thwart such an attack are limited, and though military aid is eventually dispatched, it takes a long time to get to there. By the time the pirates manage to board the ship, the seriousness of the threat is clear.

The Somali characters were played by actual Somali actors, a key detail that really helps to sell the story. No one is saying that Samuel L. Jackson is not a great actor and wonderfully intimidating, but he could never play the leader of the pirates, Muse, the way that Barkhad Abdi does. We would never be able to experience the same, gradual humanization of the character the way that we do with him. As good as Hanks is, it's Abdi who gives the most memorable performance here, a wonderful mixture of naive optimist, who keeps trying to reassure us that everything will be all right, and world-weary cynic who has been lied to too many times.

The fly-on-the-wall approach puts the viewer in the thick of the action, which makes the tension all the more terrific. However, the director at the helm make a lot of difference. I've seen an awful lot of films with bad shakeycam recently, but Greengrass all but started the trend with the "Bourne" films, and he knows how to use it better than anyone. The camera bobs up and down with the speedboats and the life rafts, peeks through gratings and binoculars, and when the characters are plunged into darkness, so are we. More importantly, it's all very restrained, controlled, and the action remains perfectly coherent. No motion sickness warnings this time.

The Maersk Alabama story was all over the news when it happened, but I suspect that few in the American public knew the details of what went on during the hijacking, aside from the fact that Phillips survived. And surely there can't have been many who knew the fates of the four Somalis, which the film gives equal narrative weight. Cynics might wonder what the point of dramatizing the event in a film would be, and "Captain Phillips" provides a very good answer. It shows you parts of the story in a way that the news reports never could. It demystifies the Captain even as it celebrates him. And it reminds us that the pirates were human beings too.

I'm not particularly inclined to call "Captain Phillips" one of the best films of the year, though I think it's tremendously entertaining, a technically impressive pieces of cinema, and successfully addresses some tricky issues surrounding Somali piracy head on. It's about the best dramatization of the hijacking that we could have hoped for, but at the same time I don't feel I understand what was so compelling about this story to warrant the film being made. The characters are all a little too idealized, and the plotting is often terribly thin. There are a lot of true life stories that I'd have rather seen Paul Greengrass's talents applied to.

I was a little confused by the early trailers for "The World's End." Wan't this supposed to be Edgar Wright and company's spoof of an apocalypse film? Or were we looking at something closer to "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," which though technically under the aegis of the sci-fi genre, is much closer to horror, and they'd already covered very similar thematic ground in "Sean of the Dead," right? Anyway, the prior collaborations of Wright with actors Simon Pegg and Nick Frost was strong enough that I was willing to give them some benefit of the doubt.

"World's End" caps off what is now popularly known as the "Cornetto Trilogy," begun with zombie parody "Sean of the Dead," and continued with action movie lampoon, "Hot Fuzz." If you didn't know anything about "World's End," you might initially mistake it for a pleasant little comedy about a group of old college friends who reunite after a few decades to go bar-hopping together. Simon Pegg plays Gary King, once the coolest guy in town, but now a washed-up, middle-aged nobody who never really did anything with his life. Trying to recapture some of his former glory, he manipulates his old friends Andy (Nick Frost), Steven (Paddy Considine), Oliver (Martin Freeman), and Peter (Eddie Marsan) to come help him finish the Golden Mile, which requires twelve pints downed from twelve different pubs around their hometown of Newton Haven. Twenty years ago, they didn't manage to finish, but this time Gary is determined to succeed.

There's absolutely nothing genre-related going on in the first thirty to forty minutes of the film, but it's still a pretty entertaining look at a group of old friends taking stock of where they've ended up after twenty years. Gary is extremely likeable, in spite of being a mess of a human being and willing to resort to all kinds of lies and tricks in order to get his way. Pegg gives him a lot of rough-edged charm and vulnerability. Frost, meanwhile, is playing against type as the most world-weary and most successful of the bunch, who has the least amount of patience for Gary's antics. Their relationship, as is tradition, is the heart of the film. The other three members of their group are less well defined, but get their own little subplots and moments to shine. I'd have been perfectly happy to see a straight comedy with these guys, just dealing with typical middle-aged problems.

So when the supernatural action business does get underway, initially I was a little put off. Were we really going to have to drop all this good character-building for an hour of fights and chases and CGI explosions? But this wasn't "Transformers," but an Edgar Wright film, and he's always very adept at weaving all the themes and the story threads into the action. The guys do quite a bit of soul-searching and personal demon slaying as they try to survive the night. I won't give away the nature of the threat, in case you haven't been spoiled by the trailers and the commercials yet, but rest assured that Wright and the rest also do right by the science-fiction genre, the way they did with the zombies and the action heroes.

Edgar Wright's movie universes are always a lot of fun because they're so well constructed. "The World's End" has loads of little details you won't pick up until a rewatch, all of them subtly and not-so-subtly reinforcing the story's themes and ideas. The science-fiction story parallels the guys' own gradual slide into complacency and suburban stagnation over the years. Each new bar brings new surprises, the situation escalating to a wonderfully weird finale. I liked that there were real consequences to people's actions, and the story goes to some surprisingly deep, dark, and serious places. On the other hand, the action is a blast to watch, the humor delivers, and the movie is an awful lot of fun.

As with the previous Cornetto films, keep an eye out for cameos, in-jokes, references, and visual puns. I expect that opinions are going to be very mixed as to how this compares to the previous installments in the trilogy. It's probably the least action-oriented, and the least concerned with dissecting genre tropes, but it also has some of the most well-rounded characters with the most touching stories. The epilogue has been downright controversial in the discussions I've seen around the internet. Personally, I like "The World's End" a little less than "Shaun of the Dead" and a little more than "Hot Fuzz." And it is by far the best of it's own particular little sub-genre of similar films that we've seen this year.

And does this have to be the last Cornetto film? There are so many more movie genres that could use this trio's attention.
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The recent French romantic comedy "Populaire" depends heavily on the fact that it takes place at the end of the 1950s, when a bright young woman named Rose Pamphyle (Déborah François) considers a secretarial job for an insurance firm to be something to aspire to. Her new boss, Louis Échard (Romain Duris) quickly dubs her a terrible secretary, but is intrigued by her ability to type at incredible speeds. He maneuvers her into competing in speed typing competitions, becoming her coach and biggest supporter. Is there any doubt that his prickly exterior will eventually soften, and the two will end up together, just as Rose faces her greatest challenge on the world stage? But as always, it's the execution that makes all the difference.

Romances and competition films have similar structures, and it's a mystery to me why they're not paired up more often to such good effect. My guess is that the filmmakers have trouble balancing the two sides of the story, and tend to lose the character drama as the sports cliches take hold. "Populaire" manages the trick by throwing its full weight behind the love story, which is very much a new spin on the old "Pygmalion" plot. The leads have wonderful chemistry and they have plenty of room to build up good characters and establish their onscreen relationship. Déborah François is charming and fresh, while Romain Duris comes off as a jerk at first, but slowly metamophoses into someone worth rooting for.

What I really appreciated about "Populaire" was that it's fairly straightforward, with few of the maddening little arbitrary complications that tend to plague most modern romantic comedies. When the roadblocks do come up - Échard still having feelings for an old flame Marie (Bérénice Bejo), and Rose rising to greater fame, they come up organically and they're earned. The end of the second act, when sports movies generally toss in some new group of rivals, or romances have an old boyfriend return out of the blue, avoids the common pitfalls by digging deeper into its characters. Rose has had all the growth and development so far, so now we turn to Échard and figure out his motivations, and see how he's been changed by the experience.

One of my favorite segments of the film is a brief series of scenes where Rose is left with nowhere to go on Christmas, so Marie takes her to Échard's house and introduces her to his assembled family as Échard's fianceé. A different film would have dragged out the deception, or inflated its importance. "Populaire" does not, simply using the evening to get the pair used to the notion that they make a good romantic pair, and Échard's family are neither seen nor mentioned again. Or then there's the running series of bets that Échard makes with his friend Bob (Shaun Benson) on the typing competitions. This is not a plot point at all, but a gimmick used to illustrate Échard's character. It's revealed to Rose very early on, and it barely seems to matter to her. How many other romantic films have blown similar bets all out of proportion?

As a result, "Populaire" is a breeze to watch, very familiar and predictable and pleasant. The typing competitions are a lot of fun, exciting and agreeably silly at the same time. A lot of humor comes from the subtle satire of the time period, with lots of visual caricatures of businessmen and typists, particularly the period fashions. The production design is very bright and colorful, heavy on the pastels and graphic patterns. Homages to older films are everywhere and brief appearances are made by older stars. You get the feeling that if you just walked a few blocks away from the clattering typists, you might run across a Jacques Demy musical taking place at the same time.

I think I reacted so well to "Populaire," because there have been far too many romantic-comedies that have gotten it so wrong in recent years, too goofy, too melodramatic, too complicated, too subversive, too retro, or too modern. Or more often, they get all the right components lined up, but end up with all the wrong proportions. "Populaire" is perfectly balanced, between the sport and the romance, between Rose and Échard, and between the giddy effervescence of the '60s trappings and the decidedly more forward-thinking attitudes of our heroes toward being in love.
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I'm glad I went into "Man of Steel" with fairly low expectations. The Richard Donner "Superman" is so deeply embedded into my psyche, I've pretty much accepted that there's never going to be another take on the character that will live up to it for me. The new version certainly didn't, but it didn't try to. Rather, it is exactly what Christopher Nolan and Zack Snyder kept threatening it would be, a much darker, moodier, serious version that shows no trace of Superman's origin in comic books for wide-eyed young children. I found the movie mostly well made, very uneven, and overwhelmingly joyless, humorless, and honestly a little depressing.

Still, I understand perfectly why many moviegoers enjoyed "Man of Steel." Not everyone wants the larger than life superhero figure that I always think of Superman as being. This version is far more human, full of doubts about his place in the world and his responsibilities toward Earth and Krypton. Henry Cavill does a great job filling out the suit and giving Kal-El/Clark Kent some psychological depth. Much of the running time is devoted to his growing pains, charting encounters with bullies, struggles to hide his burgeoning powers, and his relationship with his adopted father, played by Kevin Costner in one of his best performances in years.

Less successful are the parts of the movie that deal with the Kryptonians. Superman's father Jor-El (Russell Crowe) gets a much expanded role, setting up the conflict with the film's villains and sending his infant son to Earth in the opening sequence. These scenes are too exposition-heavy, designed to deliver mind-numbing action sequence after action sequence, and take away from the more personal exploration of the Superman character that the rest of the film tries to give us. The villains, banished Kryptonians General Zod (Michael Shannon) and Faora (Antje Traue), are a bust. They're intimidating, sure, but they're not developed well at all, and because "Man of Steel" plays everything so straight, Michael Shannon isn't in a position to really let his inner ham loose the way we all know that Michael Shannon can.

Somewhere in the middle, and often getting a bit lost amid all the other plot threads, is the romance with Lois Lane (Amy Adams). She provides a lot of early momentum to the plot, chasing after an elusive proto-Superman in order to report on his story, but becomes caught up in his plight and the threat from the Kryptonians. Adams gets a lot to do, and I like this more grounded conception of the character, but Lois Lane remains fairly blank, barely making an more of an impression than her disapproving boss, Perry White (Laurence Fishburne). When she falls in love with Superman, it's so matter-of-fact, you wonder if any of the writers had ever been in a romantic relationship before.

"Man of Steel" tries to do too much and be too many different movies. The parts that worked - the character pieces about the young Superman, the examination of two different father-son relationships, and the journey of self-discovery, would have been more than enough on their own to fill out a whole feature film. However, this is a summer superhero spectacular, and Zack Snyder was hired to direct, so of course it also had to be an epic scale action movie too. The trouble is that action movie is an unrelenting smash-fest, completely missing the nuance and the atmosphere of the rest of the movie. The final climactic battle seems to go on forever, an orgy of destruction that completely loses human dimensions in yet another attempt this year to best "The Avengers."

"Man of Steel" did some things right, and established the new Superman well enough that I think he has the potential to carry a full franchise. However, the way the movie was constructed, so that it's all the fights and CGI that are pushed front and center, ironically all the character development got backgrounded. Cavill gets tossed around, but he rarely gets to do much acting. The bulk of the development is really with the kids in the flashbacks. Consequently, I don't think I got nearly as good a sense of what this Superman is all about as I should have. And that's a shame.

Will I give him another shot? Sure, I guess. Pairing him with the new Batman in the next outing is a good idea, and should help to better distinguish his character. "Man of Steel" took a few too many cues from "The Dark Knight," delivering another brooding hero in a grim universe. It'll be good to see him face off with Batman directly so the filmmakers will have to address what really makes Superman, well, Superman. On the other hand, assuming it's the same creative team, there's a strong likelihood that we're in for more brainless carnage overload.

I'm really not happy with where the DC movie universe is going right now.
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I've soured somewhat on coming of age films over the years, having seen too many bad ones that either tried to make themselves grand statements that they were never going to be, or by dipping too often into salacious material related to mental illness, drugs, abuse, or sexual dysfunction. I've found that these films work best when they're more grounded and more personal, films that take care to limit themselves to a certain size and scope. This year there were two fairly successful examples that came out quite close together, "The Kings of Summer," and "The Way, Way Back." I suspect "The Spectacular Now" may be a third, but I missed my chance to see it in theaters, and it's still three months to the home media releases. And I want to talk about the other two now.

"The Kings of Summer" follows two teenage boys, Joe (Nick Robinson) and Patrick (Gabriel Basso), who are both chafing at the restrictions that their parents have placed on their lives. Joe's recently widowed father, Frank (Nick Offerman), is overly critical and unsympathetic, trying to move on with a new romantic relationship that Joe isn't ready for. Patrick's parents (Megan Mullally, Marc Evan Jackson) are cloying and overprotective. One day, Joe finally has enough and convinces Patrick to run away together. They construct their own ramshackle house out of spare parts in the woods , with the help of an oddball kid named Biaggio (Moisés Arias), and declare that they're ready to live by their own rules. However, the newfound freedom and the complications of teenage love prove challenging for the boys to navigate.

This is by far the best performance I've seen out of Nick Offerman, better known for his work on "Parks & Rec." He plays Frank as a reflexively sarcastic, bitter jerk who has to face the fact that his prickly personality is doing real harm to his relationship with his son. Watching him work through his baggage and reconnect with Joe is the best part of the film. Nick Robinson is likewise playing a very imperfect kid, smart but too cocky for his own good, and manages to make him far more memorable than the similar teenage boys that are always at the center of these stories. Between the two of them, a movie that is built on a big heap of contrivances actually works to a surprising degree. Joe's relationships with his father and his friends feel genuine, and the way they develop and change over the course of the film likewise feel genuine.

The material is still on the slight side, and it has a sense of humor that I think it's fair to describe as a little peculiar. Biaggio and the ineffectual local cops seem to exist in a film universe closer to "Napoleon Dynamite" than the fairly realistic environs that the rest of the characters are inhabiting. Also, at times it feels like the director, newcomer Jordan Vogt-Roberts, wants to say something about nature and the appeal of a more rustic way of life, but it doesn't quite come across. However, he does a great job with the boys and their interactions, and interpersonal dynamics. I think the reason this story works is that Joe and Patrick have real, recognizable problems. They may seem common, and not very serious in the long run, but we can see how they are terribly important at this particular point in thier lives.

The same can be said for the protagonist of "The Way, Way Back," a fourteen year old boy named Duncan (Liam James), who is dragged along on a long summer trip to Cape Cod with his mother Pam (Toni Colette), her bullying boyfriend Trent (Steve Carrell), and his hostile daughter Steph (Zoe Levin). Duncan is emotionally withdrawn and miserable until he meets a local girl, Susanna (AnnaSophia Robb), and has a run-in with a free-spirited guy named Owen (Sam Rockwell), who turns out to be the manager of a local water park. Owen gives him a job, which affords Duncan a much-needed escape from his increasingly uncomfortable home life.

"The Way, Way Back" was written and directed by Nat Faxon and Jim Rash, who shared scripting duties with Alexander Payne on "The Descendants." Here they prove to be equally as good with a new set of more familiar, but still complicated emotional dynamics, and tackling lot of uncomfortable subject matter without banging the audience over the head with it. By the time we realize just how miserable all the kids are, not just Owen, we've gotten a pretty good picture of how this little vacationers' community operates. Steve Carrell and Toni Colette are especially good as two characters who could have so easily been cyphers from the teenage hero's point of view.

Still, I can't help wishing that the whole film had been about the crew at the water park. Sam Rockwell steals the film so completely, you feel like sitting up straighter every time he shows up on screen. He gets all the best lines, delivered with the kind of unselfconscious cool that not too many actors can pull off. Maya Rudolph, along with Faxon and Rash, play other water park employees, and there's the potential for so much more than we get to see of them. The ending feels very rushed and some of the climactic scenes feel unearned, and I think it's largely because we don't get to spend enough time seeing Joe really connect with this weird little community of water park denizens.

Still, I liked both films. They're warm and nostalgic and bittersweet and offer a glimpse of adolescence the way I remember it. And they tell stories that only work with teenagers as the heroes, which I wish more filmmakers would keep in mind when making these films.
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The cinematic journey of Jesse (Ethan Hawke) and Celine (Julie Delpy) now spans three films, eighteen years, and multiple countries. You don't have to have seen the two preceding films chronicling their love story, "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset," but "Before Midnight" is much more effective if you're already familiar with the characters' histories and the series' format.

The couple are now in their forties, enjoying the waning days of a summer in the Peloponnesian region of Greece. A lot has happened since we saw them last. Jesse divorced, married Celine, and they have a pair of twin daughters. However, thanks to a severe falling-out with his ex-wife, he doesn't get to see his son Hank (Seamus Davey-Fitzpatrick) very often, and feels like he's neglecting him. The opening scenes follow Jesse dropping Hank off at the airport, before being driven home by Celine, sparking the beginning of another long, rambling, revealing conversation that will carry us through the film. We learn their lives have become busy and complicated. We learn that significant tensions and conflicts have resulted.

The earlier installments of the "Before" series impressed me for being so well written and so good at capturing the nuances of a very specific, but fascinating relationship between two people who only met by chance. The movies are deceptively simple, just following the pair around a picturesque locale as they converse, and intensely personal. Hawke and Delpy have screenplay credits alongside Richard Linklater, the series' chief architect and director. I think "Before Midnight" may be my favorite of the set, though, because it departs from the formula in several ways, and because it tackles a stage of life that is very rare to see handled on screen so well and so honestly. This is the movie where the relationship itself finally becomes as important a force as the two personalities who share it.

Encroaching middle age and the diminishment of romantic passion aren't all that uncommon to see in films, but rarely do you get to know the people involved the way longtime viewers know Jesse and Celine. We've seen them as bright-eyed twenty-somethings and more tempered thirty-somethings. We know about Celine's passionate ambitions and her strong convictions. We know about Jesse's more laid-back approach to life, his occasional carelessness, and the course that his writing career has taken. "Before Midnight" also picks up many threads from "Before Sunset," so we learn the consequences of Jesse's terribly romantic decision at the end of the previous movie, which have had nine years to play out. As the pair wend their way through the day together, the details are filled in gradually.

The nine year gap didn't hit me quite so hard the last time, as I watched "Before Sunrise" and "Before Sunset" fairly close together, a few years after the second movie. This time it did, possibly because I experienced the interval closer to real time, or because my own relationships had progressed to the point where I could make some comparisons. Jesse and Celine felt slightly removed from time prior to this, two picture-perfect lovebirds rambling around Vienna and Paris, having these erudite conversations. But with so much of this outing involving their children, and encounters with other people, bits of the modern world inevitably intrude here. Little things like the references to Skype and old cartoons made me acutely aware of the existence and passage of time in the "Before" universe.

Also, touching lightly on some spoiler territory here, "Before Midnight" also sees a momentous event in the couple's relationship that is different from the past ones, though handled just as well. This makes the film an unexpectedly gripping watch, because Linklater and his actors are treading in very different territory. We're not looking at two people contemplating the potential for a relationship anymore, but a long-estaplished pair trying to figure out how to deal with a very solid and weighty reality that they live with every day. The romance isn't over, but reality has sunk in. We find they've made sacrifices for thier marriage, expended great effort to keep it going, and perhaps both aren't quite so happy with how it all turned out.

I'm not in the camp that would like to see the "Before" movies go on indefinitely the way the famous "Up" documentary series has, following its subjects into old age. However, I think there's definitely room for another movie or two, to follow up with Jesse and Celine at another stage in their lives, further down the road. Even if we don't get a "Before Noon" in 2021, this has been an extraordinary run of movies, up there with the best of all time. You have to go back to Bergman and Truffaut and Satyajit Ray to really find anything comparable.

And it's my favorite film of the year to date.
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It's easy to get caught up in all the hype about how Alfonso Cuarón made "Gravity," his new space adventure thriller. The film's impressive visuals required the invention of new technology, and a radically different production timeline than most studio features. After all, the major selling point of "Gravity" is its spectacle, the ninety minutes of visceral thrills and awe-inspiring special effects work that distinguish a very simple survival story.

Dr. Ryan Stone (Sandra Bullock), a medical engineer, is on her first mission as a newly trained astronaut, with the space shuttle Explorer. Disaster strikes when a destroyed Soviet satellite causes a debris cloud that wreaks catastrophic damage on everything in its path. Caught out during a space walk, with all communications with Earth severed, Stone and fellow astronaut Lt. Matt Kowalski (George Clooney) are separated from the shuttle and at risk of drifting away beyond anyone's reach. They have to find their way back with limited resources and limited time, in order to return to Earth safely.

I heard some complaints when the trailers were first released for "Gravity," that casting two major A-listers like Bullock and Clooney was distracting. However, I think having actors of this caliber in the film was a necessity. The script by Alfonso Cuarón and his son Jonás is very simple, and the characters are fairly generic. Nearly everything depends on the performances of the two leads, and they don't have much to work with. We have to relate to and root for the astronauts to overcome each obstacle in their path on the way home, and the film wouldn't have nearly as much impact if the emotional journey wasn't as engaging as the physical one. "Gravity" wouldn't work without Sandra Bullock, and after all the drama about casting the film in the early going, I'm glad she's the one who ultimately got the part.

However, the bulk of the kudos have to go to Cuarón. As we saw last year with Ang Lee and "Life of Pi," it's one thing to have access to sophisticated special effects, but quite another to be able to use them to tell a story in an engaging way. The reason "Gravity" required so much innovation was because of how Cuarón wanted to tell the story. Cuarón insisted on opening the film with a complicated, endless shot that starts with the Explorer as a speck on the horizon and then zooms around it to introduce and follow the characters as they work on the maintenance of the Hubble telescope. Existing methods of simulating weightlessness simply wouldn't cut it, so new methods had to be invented.

One of my favorite shots in the film is the "womb" shot, where we see Sandra Bullock briefly curled up in a fetal position, floating in isolation. It looks so simple at first, but when you consider the logistics of what was necessary to achieve that image, suddenly it becomes exponentially more impressive. Scientific accuracy isn't always paramount in this film, as multiple scientists have already pointed out, but there was clearly a high awareness of the necessity of getting the little details right. Sound doesn't carry in space, so all we hear are the astronauts and the score by Stephen Price. Fire behaves differently. The actors have to move in specific ways to convey the lack of weight and friction. I especially like how all the space shuttles and space stations in the film are ones that actually exist or are planned for the near future.

The technical achievements are without question. The viscerality and the immersiveness of the experience play a major part in its effectiveness, and I think it's to Cuarón's credit that so many critics are calling for the film to be seen in a 3D IMAX format. But at the end of the day, were all these thrills put to use in the best way to tell a good story? Spectacle for its own sake can make for a decent movie, but I expect more from a director like Alphonso Cuarón. By and large I think he managed it. I don't think this is his best film. The dialogue is too simplistic and the metaphors are too blunt, but I was on board with the story the whole way through, and there were times when the human drama did make me briefly forget about the spectacle.

That said, I can't help hoping that Cuarón's next film is a smaller one. "Gravity" is a wonderful film, but I'm not so sure it was worth seven years out of the career of one of the best directors currently working. I don't like the idea of Cuarón turning into another James Cameron, because we already have James Cameron. In any case, I want to see what Alphonso Cuarón wants to do next.