Pushing Our Buttons (Drag Me to Hell, Coraline and The Brothers Bloom)

(Spoilers within.)

Say this for Sam Raimi: he knows his way around a corpse. The best bits in Drag Me to Hell, his half-successful attempt to recapture the low-rent magic of his loosey-goosey horror comedies of yore, come in a pair of scenes where poor sweet bank officer Christine Brown (Alison Lohman) encounters the dead body of an elderly gypsy woman who put a curse on Christine after getting turned down for an extension on a loan. In the first of these scenes, Christine, having deep misgivings even before a demon starts wreaking havoc on her life (she rejects the woman's request in order to shed her reputation of being too nice to make the tough decisions for an open assistant manager position), arrives to make amends only to find herself in the middle of a wake. She accidentally knocks over the coffin, and suffice to say hijinks ensue. In the second, late in the movie, Christine digs up the body in a raging thunderstorm in order to reverse the curse, only to find the old crone even more resilient in death than she was alive.

I laughed out loud at moments like these, but Drag Me to Hell ended with my wishing it were more satisfying as a whole. Part of the problem is Christine's journey from passive cutie-pie to badass grave-digger: Lohman's performance is effective in individual scenes ("Choke on it, bitch!"); what's missing are the transitions, the gradations in her personality shift. The larger problem, I think, is Raimi himself, who earned heaps of praise for returning to his roots following the increasingly bloated Spiderman franchise, but to me he looked more like a wizard struggling to remember how simple spells are cast.

Although I'm no great fan of animation, one of its advantages is rendering more tolerable performers who might otherwise be anathema onscreen. Take Dakota Fanning (please!): an intolerable, overstudied young actress, yet completely serviceable at providing the voice to the titular character in Coraline. Or Teri Hatcher, smashingly good as both Coraline's mom in the "real" world and as the malevolently seductive button-eyed Other Mother in a parallel universe adjacent through the wall of Coraline's new apartment. I read Neil Gaiman's original book yet recall almost nothing about it, so I can't vouch for the authenticity of this screen adaptation. But it's an effectively creepy movie, well-directed by Henry Selick who also made (ahem) Tim Burton's The Nightmare Before Christmas. Freed from his overlord's easily distracted, overly labored whimsy (inevitably to return like a bad penny in the form of Alice in Wonderland), Selick taps deeply into the loneliness and resilience of his heroine and makes as evocative a recreation of childhood as I've encountered in recent memory. Bonus points: almost no songs.  

Without benefit of animation, Adrien Brody and Rachel Weisz, two of my least favorite actors, managed to charm the pants off me in the maligned heist comedy The Brothers Bloom. I knew from the previews that Weisz was playing the naive mark of a pair of con-men siblings, but to my delight Brody and Mark Ruffalo were cast against expectations as, respectively, the sensitive younger brother who wants out and the cynically manipulative older operator who talks him into (wait for it) one last score. Picking up an Oscar early in her career seems to have liberated Weisz, who plays her cloistered heiress with a hitherto genuine spontaneity. She lacks the overcalculated innocence of Glenne Headly in Dirty Rotten Scoundrels, and develops a sweet rapport with Brody, who has never been more appealing than when he's mooning over her. Reliable pro Ruffalo has the unenviable task of conjuring Paul Newman's Henry Gondorff from The Sting, and damned if he doesn't nearly pull it off. Rian Johnson nearly pulls off the entire movie too -- a type of farce that's difficult to appear effortless and rarely attempted anymore -- but stumbles in a homestretch that's at least twenty minutes too long.

Still, the many comparisons in the press to Wes Anderson seem off the mark (one unfortunate similarity, reducing the few ethnically diverse characters to non-speaking caricatures -- in this case Bang-Bang, the Japanese explosives expert for the Bloom bros. -- is redeemed by Rinko Kikuchi's richly amusing performance). If anything, Johnson's effort is closer in spirit to the other Anderson, one PT, of Magnolia (both prologues narrated by Ricky Jay) and Punch-Drunk Love (dogged hopefulness in the face of despair). As with Brick, Johnson's gift is weaving a veil of irony that pulls us closer to his characters rather than distancing us from them. The Brothers Bloom takes some missteps, but is better than its reputation suggests.

Everything, and So Much of It (Mad Men, Season 3)

(Warning: Spoilers.)

"I suspect (Matthew Weiner) is after something darker and more mysterious, something tied into the intersection of personal psychology and social change....a show which explores the systematic dismantling of and destruction of the authentic self, and its replacement by manufactured images and feelings, the very images and feelings Don Draper is so adept at creating."

-- Matt Zoller Seitz, commenting at The House Next Door

"They need a game-changer," I told a colleague shortly before the season finale of Mad Men, and well before Mo Ryan effectively dismissed the notion of game-changers on TV shows. "We hear that all the time (and) yet games remain unchanged," she tweeted, before later clarifying her point: "Many shows DO them well. It's when (Executive Producers) SAY game-changer is coming -- then 'meh' happens." It's always a delicate balance on television between shaking things up and keeping them the same. We viewers are a fickle bunch, bored by the status quo yet easily alienated by change. There are a limited number of options, all of which have spelled disaster for a large number of successful shows: add new characters; move to a new location; devise a major plot twist; or make a feint to change only to revert back to the comfortable and familiar.

Nevertheless, it seemed clear as we entered the homestretch of this year's Mad Men that something had to give. As a big fan of the first two seasons, I was pretty dismissive of the snarky naysaying by James Wolcott, the now defunct Newcritics, and others going against the grain; but this year I had to admit that the miniscule flaws they had pointed out from the start were beginning to magnify and multiply. While Season 3 still featured the usual share of stellar performances -- with January Jones a surprise standout -- too often Mad Men had been getting bogged down in its own self-seriousness, pregnant pauses, and ennui. Don and Betty's extramarital dalliances, a source of rich comic and dramatic fodder in the past, took a sharp turn into dullsville; and the crack supporting cast often seemed adrift, underused. How many times can Sal be spontaneously groped by closeted gay men before the social commentary takes a turn for the ridiculous? (Answer: twice.) Even the intriguing addition of Conrad Hilton as Don's daffy new billionaire client ("When I ask for the moon, I want the moon") had the effect of taking over the series the way George Hearst did Deadwood, putting its main characters in a ceaselessly reactive mode.

Yet Matthew Weiner has a knack for pulling off what Keith Uhlich has called the "Tarantino longueurs," when interminable stretches of inertia are suddenly energized by startling developments. This season's macabre comic classic, "Guy Walks into an Advertising Agency," climaxed with an upstart British exec's grisly rendezvous with a drunken secretary on a riding mower. (His superiors' solemn epitaph:"The doctors say he'll never play golf again.") And this Sunday's giddily dynamic finale, "Shut the Door. Have a Seat," was turbo-powered by Don Draper's refusal to be absorbed in a monolithic ad agency's plot to buy out Sterling Cooper and its colonizing overlords. At the heart of Mad Men has always been Don's sales-pitch, his ability to "find the emotion" behind a product and give people what they need; and the fun of the finale was watching Don pitch to people who know his machinations, to see Roger, Pete and Peggy tell him what they need -- the validation that Don has denied them.

Jon Hamm, Vincent Kartheiser, Elisabeth Moss, and John Slattery continued to shine in their scenes at the workplace. But it was back at the Draper residence that January Jones was a revelation. Betty's transformation from in-denial housewife to calling her husband on his elaborate pack of lies came in convincing gradations -- repression, role-playing (e.g., her stunning makeover in Italy), revelation -- to where, at the close of this season, she no longer bought his sales-pitch anymore. And yet, stuck with Henry Francis on the wrong plane to Reno, as it were, Betty seems right back where she started. That so many viewers find Betty loathsome (and side with Don under the "charming cad" clause) is, I think, a testament to the authenticity of Jones's performance, that she's gotten under people's skins deeply enough to provoke their defenses.

After three years of cultural Zeitgeisting, critical hosannas and innumerable Emmys, there has been the temptation to see Weiner the way Peggy sums up Don: "You have everything, and so much of it." So it's admirable to see that he hasn't grown complacent, or that he's not above lying to the press corps about whether or not the show would address the Kennedy assassination, which it did quite effectively in the penultimate episode. (I do hope the dramatic shake-up in "Shut the Door. Have a Seat" ends the lazy comparisons of Mad Men to the plot trajectory of each season of The Sopranos. By now it's clearly a false analogy.) Season 3, while less consistent in quality than the previous two, took some interesting risks that paid dividends with a core of key characters, led by Don, leaving behind a familiar world and staking out an uncertain future. In so doing, Weiner & Co. left their viewers with more than what they wanted: they gave us what we didn't know we needed.

Lucky Man (25th Hour)

25th Hour (2002) is one of those movies that shoehorns a real-life tragedy onto a work of fiction, only with a fundamental difference: It works beautifully. Hurricane Katrina blows into Benjamin Button for no purpose other than to give the picture an unearned patina of awards-season relevance. Even though the aftermath of 9/11 has, on the surface, nothing to do with a pulpy tale about a drug dealer's last day of freedom before a prison sentence, it renders 25th Hour a movie haunted by squandered opportunities and the fragility of life.

Spike Lee is a filmmaker accustomed to cramming square pegs into round holes. With varying success -- ranging from masterpieces to stinkers -- he has made heavy-handed dramas that contain elements of slapstick farce, and whimsical musical comedies that explore socially conscious themes. He also has made documentaries like When the Levees Broke, a far most honest and artistic depiction of Katrina and its ramifications. His blowhard public persona continues to capture more attention than his films, which have become increasingly inconsequential and ignored. (Inside Man 2 -- really?) 25th Hour came and went fairly quickly from screens seven years ago, and I only caught up with it recently; but I think it's one of the defining films of the decade, warts and all.

Based on the novel by David Benioff (who adapted his own screenplay), 25th Hour stars Edward Norton, in one of his few performances in recent years where he gives a shit, as Monty Brogan, the aforementioned heroin dealer who chooses prison rather than rat out his Russian mafia employers. His two pals, Jacob (Philip Seymour Hoffman) and Frank (Barry Pepper), are grinding their way through more reputable professions. Jacob is a nebbishy high school English teacher who finds himself tempted by a flirty-skanky student (the fearless Anna Paquin); Frank is a cocky Wall Street trader blithely unaware that the Gordon Gekko era is long gone. Monty's younger girlfriend, Naturelle (Rosario Dawson, charmingly awkward), he suspects may have turned him over to the cops. His bar-owning father (Brian Cox, proving he can do straight and understated) fumbles at a belated attempt to reconnect.

These people, who all care for Monty, nevertheless hover around him like constellations -- solitary while he's in perpetual orbit. Monty's only constant companion is his beloved dog, Doyle, whom he rescues in a prologue that conveys the tenderness beneath his bravado. (In a burst of typically colorful dialogue, Monty's Russkie sidekick inadvertently gives the dog his name when he confuses "Doyle's Law" with Murphy's.) 25th Hour is deceptively aimless for much of its running time: at times it plays like an inverted Last Detail with Meadows hauling Buddusky to the brig. Jacob and Frank take Monty (or does he take them?) to a strained nightclub party that spills into the dawn. Norton very effectively shows time closing in on Monty -- how, despite his deceptively cavalier attitude, he will never have enough of it. 

All of this would add up to a moderately entertaining B-movie, like Before the Devil Knows You're Dead with Hoffman unwisely hitting on Anna Paquin rather than Marissa Tomei. What takes 25th Hour to another level is how it captures the mood of New York City in the days following the fall of the towers rather than pretending the horror didn't happen. 2002 was a year when Hollywood digitally removed the World Trade Center from some of its movies. Spike Lee evokes the memory head on, in a stunning opening credits sequence that features the Tribute In Light, and conjures it again later in a scene played above Ground Zero from Frank's high-rise apartment.

These are moments where Lee communicates visually everything that needs to be said, moments that earned him praise from a few critics who normally can't stand him. Charles Taylor's laser-precision review hits all of its marks except the implication that the director has a newfound maturity here. Lee has always been sensitive and observational beneath the off-camera bluster. In Do the Right Thing, Mookie's racial harangue is just one of many tirades from the movie's representative ethnic groups, no more enlightened than the rest. (Also, Charley, John Savage's character isn't new to the neighborhood; he's lived there for years.) Monty has a superficially similar monologue in 25th Hour that starts by singling out everything he hates about New York before boiling down that loathing to his family, his friends, and finally himself. Like Quentin Tarantino, Spike Lee often invites being misunderstood from moviegoers who take his words and images at face value. In truth, he's a filmmaker with a gift for attaining perspective outside of his characters even as he's deep inside them.

I could trot out a list of plenty of things wrong with 25th Hour, scenes where the tone is off, the tempo falters, or the performances fail. (I've seen Barry Pepper in about ten movies now, and I still have no idea if he's a good actor or not.) I couldn't care less. What matters for me about the movie is what matters for Lee -- how the little details add up to the big picture following September 11, another time the levees broke. In Unweaving the Rainbow, his tribute to Carl Sagan's ability to find the poetic in the scientific, Richard Dawkins wrote, "We're all going to die, and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are never going to die because they are never going to be born." You get a sense of what Dawkins means in the astonishing conclusion of 25th Hour -- which Mike D'Angelo brilliantly described as the climactic dream-vision of The Last Temptation of Christ "compressed to 10 minutes" -- where Lee sifts out hope from horror, poetry from rubble, culminating in a line of stirring force: "This life came so close to not happening."

'We are Lucifer': A Halloween Tribute (Sorta) to William Peter Blatty

"... two novels of the Humorless, Thudding Tract School of horror writing are Damon, by C. Terry Cline, and The Exorcist, by William Peter Blatty - Cline has since improved as a writer, and Blatty has fallen silent... forever, if we are lucky."

-Stephen King, Dance Macabre

"It's a shame that people perceive Catholicism as Mel Gibson and not more often as Will Pete Blatty....He's the smartest Catholic in the media. When he goes who are we going to have?"

-Commenter on the Internet Movie Database

Say what you will about The Exorcist - book or film - for King to single out William Peter Blatty as humorless is like claiming Julia Child wasn't into cooking. A black Roman Catholic theologian-vaudevillian-playwright-author-filmmaker, Blatty's first moment of fame was as a contestant who won ten grand while impersonating a polygamous Arab sheik on You Bet Your Life, hosted by Groucho Marx. (So the story goes: "When Blatty revealed it was a hoax....he told Groucho he did it because [announcer/straight man] George Fenneman had said that Groucho was an expert at spotting phonies. Groucho replied, 'That is incorrect, because I've had Fenneman in my employ now for 14 years.'") Later, Blatty co-wrote the screenplay to Blake Edwards' A Shot in the Dark, the best and funniest of the Inspector Clouseau movies, featuring a memorable sequence where Clouseau goes undercover at a nudist colony. He wrote the novel that became one of two films he directed, The Ninth Configuration, an odd amalgam of long stretches of broad slapstick mixed with deep theological ruminations. His literary sequel to The Exorcist, titled Legion, offers more of the same blend of humor and profound insight. (Blatty also directed the screen adaptation, known as Exorcist III.) William Peter Blatty has often brought the funny. And, as the IMDb commenter noted, he is, at nearly 82 years old, one of the few remaining American Catholic hardcore thinkers to have received his formal education before Vatican II. Stephen King finds Blatty drearily serious. I'd counter that he's just serious enough to know when to laugh.

But, yes, he is less known for this - 

- than he is for this:

It is also true that the latter isn't exactly choc-a-bloc with laughs. (Those would be reserved, largely unintentionally, for John Boorman's loopy Exorcist II: The Heretic.) But my mother, who introduced me to Blatty, adored the novel's prose style, namely the opening prologue where Father Merrin encounters some ominous foreshadowing in the Middle East. Blatty wrote the script for the movie directed by William Friedkin, and the collision between Blatty's grace and reflection with Friedkin's feverish technique is what makes the film compelling. Friedkin bashing is a popular sport these days (and was originally with Pauline Kael, who mocked both him and Blatty in her review), but I'm with Harlan Ellison that "there is a subterranean river of dark passion running wildly in the subtext of all his films - both successful and disastrous - that clearly marks him as an artist almost manic to rearrange the received universe in a personal, newly-folded way." I had a sense of this the first time I saw The Exorcist; and I felt it again even at a rowdy midnight Halloween showing during my freshman year at a Jesuit university. (The movie played in the cavernous theater where many of us attended the loathed and feared Father Donnelly's core Western Civilization course, and when the exorcism sequence began the audience started chanting, "Donnelly! Donnelly! Donnelly!") By the time Father Karras (a riveting performance by Jason Miller) makes the ultimate sacrifice, the theater had gone eerily silent. Later that night, drifting off in our bunk bed, my roommate interrupted the silence by muttering, "I don't want to think about that movie."

Despite Kael's claim that Blatty's work is "Shallowness that demands to be taken seriously," William Peter Blatty is a heady thinker, at least by cinematic standards. I would also argue, based on the only two movies he has directed, that he is a rare writer who understands the visual medium. His rhythms are odd and original; his eye attentive, at times ravishing. Both films, The Ninth Configuration and Exorcist III, are incredibly uneven, but the best passages in them are breathtaking to watch.

The Ninth Configuration tells the story of an army psychiatrist (Stacy Keach) who arrives at a mental institution (a foreboding castle in the Pacific northwest) and engages in an escalating series of debates with an astronaut (Scott Wilson) who cracked up prior to launch. Leonard Maltin, a huge fan of the film, has marveled at its "eminently quotable dialogue," which recalls the nutball logic of Catch-22. ("I know my rights! I demand to see my urologist.") I recently saw The Ninth Configuration again for the first time in years, and the bizarreness of the enterprise came rushing back. What can be said about a movie that begins with a montage of the lush Oregon wilderness set to the country ballad "San-An-tone," or that stages its climax with a deadly brawl in what appears to be a gay biker bar, other than David Lynch owes an obvious debt?

Exorcist III pretends the first sequel never existed and makes a supporting character in the original movie and novel the central protagonist. Lt. Kinderman (George C. Scott) hunts a serial killer in Washington, D.C., an investigation that starts as a standard police procedural and concludes with elements of the supernatural. (Jason Miller's now-deceased Father Karras makes a demonic reappearance.) Blatty's movie ultimately bottoms out: Scott, who would have been ideal for the part about a decade earlier, has a sluggish, distracted air. But he achieves a couple of jolting shocks (watch out for one in a hospital) and astonishing images like a police helicopter flying over a church. As a filmmaker, Blatty is fascinated by conflicting imagery that intersects the spiritual with the secular.

What the movie lacks is the novel's collusion of ideas. Legion ends with Kinderman linking the theory of evolution with the Biblical Fall: "We are Lucifer," he posits - the shattered dark matter of the universe struggling to become whole again. I don't share the bulk of Blatty's beliefs. At his worst, his work is awkward and more than a little nutty. But he's an artist who has spent his career exploring, indulging and challenging his own obsessions, and that's no joke.

Culminating Experiences (A Serious Man, The Class, and Shotgun Stories)

(Spoilers for all.)

I fell hard early on for Joel and Ethan Coen's A Serious Man. It may have been the thrilling transition from a Yiddish folktale to 1960s America via Jefferson Airplane that hooked me; or when Professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg) has to deal with an indignant student who won't take an "F" for an answer; or the time his encroaching, gun-toting neighbors return from hunting with a large bloody deer strapped to the top of their station wagon. While not Jewish, I have been accused of a persecution complex (they're always saying that!), have experienced emotional blackmail from undergrads (though, regrettably, not outright monetary bribery), and I once lived next to encroaching, gun-toting neighbors who tied a large bloody deer to a tree outside our door (in all fairness, it was Thanksgiving). A Serious Man proves the adage that by being as specific as possible art can become universal.

Lord knows the Coens are nothing if not specific. After fourteen films in twenty-five years, they have established themselves as enthusiasts of screwball comedy and film noir, masters of regional dialects, impeccable re-creators of cultural eras, traffickers of pitch-black humor in an uncaring universe. This last quality has earned them the frequent accusation that they have contempt for their characters. I don't think this is true, but A Serious Man is unquestionably their most personal film, as warm as it is merciless. Throughout, Larry is besieged by personal calamities (possible health problems and gathering storms), not insignificant injuries (infidelity from his spouse, anonymous hostile letters to his tenure review board) and petty insults (moving to a fleabag hotel, paying for his wife's lover's funeral). What's gone unnoticed in many reviews is that everyone else (his son, his brother) is enduring troubles as well. This gives Larry's determination to solider on a hint of backbone that compensates for his at-times infuriating meekness.

A Serious Man is, along with No Country for Old Men, the second Coen picture in three years to leave out their familiar stable of actors (Clooney, Goodman, Turturro, Buscemi, et al.), and the cast of mostly unknowns acquit themselves ably. Stuhlbarg is a winning, affecting presence as the tormented Larry; Fred Melamed is memorable as Sy Ableman, the unctuous lover of Larry's wife; Aaron Wolff, as Larry's son Danny, has a terrific sequence where he shows up stoned for his own bar mitzvah.

Perhaps it's the lack of stars that make the Coens seem more empathic this time around. Whatever the case, they've moved past their creative funk from earlier this decade (Intolerable Cruelty, The Ladykillers), have honed their craft to the point where their effects -- occasionally strained in the past -- now feel effortless. A Serious Man is a great comedy, a model of elegant structure, with "Somebody to Love" the most original use of an overly familiar pop song since Wong Kar-Wai employed "California Dreamin'" in Chungking Express. This song, its lyrics lined with lingering questions, underlines the recurring theme of the film -- the "uncertainty principle" at the basis of Larry's convoluted mathematical theorems, or the hilarious suggestion by one character that Larry stop trying to decipher a circular argument and simply "accept the mystery." I've been off and on about the Coen brothers for their entire career and frequently don't trust my initial reactions to their movies, but with A Serious Man I feel no such ambiguity: It's a masterpiece.

Laurent Cantet's The Class, winner of the 2008 Palme d'Or at Cannes and a Best Foreign Film nominee this past year, is fabulous in a completely different way. The teacher here, a Parisian high school French instructor Francois Marin (played by real-life version Francois Begaudeau, and as I write his name I can almost hear that old man from Amelie emphasize, "Begaudeau, not Bedaugeau"), is no mild mannered Larry Gopnik. Faced daily by an unruly melting pot of middle-school students, Mr. Marin creates an atmosphere of civil disobedience: by making them follow certain rules (no wearing hats, hands must always be raised to ask a question), he lets them argue their points with more freedom and vocality than you would expect. He's a gifted, challenging teacher, but also one who employs the kind of withering mockery that (he is told more than once) sometimes crosses the line.

As a fictional year in the life of actual teachers and students, it's only natural that The Class take a documentary approach to its subject, with hand-held cameras that blessedly don't draw attention to their jitteriness. Cantet's focus is entirely on the classroom dynamics, with intimations but no concrete revelations of the characters' personal lives. A question of Mr. Marin's sexual preference is deftly volleyed back to the student with a reply that may or may not be true. A once engaged student turns sullen and disrespectful and back again without explanation. A troublemaker in the back row enjoys a brief artistic triumph only to revert back to hostility.

The final act of The Class gets a little creaky with the plot mechanics, narrowing its expansive themes down to an expulsion hearing, but it manages to subvert expectations anyway. The anticipated Rousing Speech, followed by Slow Clap, never materializes. And the incident that leads to the hearing is ugly and ambiguous, with Mr. Marin sharing the blame. It's a fitting irony that an uncompromising language instructor would misunderstand a word he himself fatally uses. At the same time, when you're under siege as constantly as he is, it's remarkable that he didn't slip up sooner. The Class is a probing, troubling study of the high price of small mistakes.

The makers of Bubble and Old Joy must have watched Jeff Nichols's Shotgun Stories (2007) resembling the kind of slack-jawed yokels they depict onscreen. A movie about economically despairing Americans with enthusiasms, hobbies, interests! The central narrative -- a deadly blood feud between two sets of brothers following the death of their mutual father -- holds your attention the way an effective plot device should. Yet the lovely passages in between, where characters go to work, coach basketball, count cards, play movie trivia, and cultivate relationships form the film's real subject.

The main trio of siblings (played without a trace of condescension by Michael Shannon, Douglas Ligon, and Barlow Jacobs) is developed far more than the other group (from their father's second marriage), and I think Shotgun Stories would have been even better had we been given more reasons of why they loved their father as much as the former brothers hated him. It's still a terrific movie, though, reminiscent in tone to Carl Franklin's One False Move -- a "masculine" story that doesn't neglect its female characters, a depiction of squalor that still acknowledges the ravishing beauty of its rural Arkansas setting. Most movingly, Shotgun Stories depicts the tragic consequences of violence while also radically suggesting, in the end, that familial devotion needn't make one trapped by fate.

Strange Journeys (Where the Wild Things Are and Away We Go)

Somehow I doubt a child's imagination includes a shaky hand-held camera. That's my main beef with Spike Jonze's adaptation of Where the Wild Things Are, a movie with reviews that are all over the place, but even the naysayers have found much to admire in Jonze's visual aesthetic while reserving the bulk of their ire for co-screenwriter Dave Eggers, whose contribution is reportedly as smug and twee as his literary body of work. Never having read anything by Eggers, I'll have to take his critics' word for it, but the script that he and Jonze fleshed out from Maurice Sendak's children's favorite (and one of mine as a kid) is elegantly structured with resonant thematic echoes. Nine-year-old Max (played by the natural young actor Max Records) is a creator of worlds -- of igloos and forts -- in order to compensate for feelings of powerlessness in the one he lives in. A child of a broken home, he loves his mother (Catherine Keener) to the point of overpossessiveness when she brings a new boyfriend home. A school teacher brings him worry with news about the sun dying out. Following a family squabble, Max flees by boat to an island populated by monsters whom he tricks into making him their king. Representations of people he knows -- and of his untamed id -- the creatures have been compared by more than one review to Dorothy's encounters in the Land of Oz.

The difference, however, is that The Wizard of Oz placed a striking visual demarcation between fantasy and reality, while Where the Wild Things Are is drab on both levels. Doesn't Jonze realize that Max's fantasy life should be more interesting, exciting, and easier on the eyes than his reality? The monsters are awfully downcast too. It's refreshing to see a movie where characters like these are played by giant puppets rather than consisting entirely of special effects, but between their unremarkable adventures and the undistinguished voicework (by James Gandolfini, Paul Dano, Forest Whitaker, Catherine O'Hara, Chris Cooper, and Lauren Ambrose), these supposedly badassed beasties are disappointingly tepid. In Oz, even the G-rated supporting characters had basic needs and desires. It's unclear what these Wild Things want besides sustenance; and even then they seem far too depressed to eat.

Eggers, along with his wife Vendela Vida, co-wrote the original screenplay for Away We Go, an amiable if ultimately forgettable road comedy directed by Sam Mendes in a rare non-Oscar-baiting mood. The premise contains a dash of autobiography mixed with screwball farce: An unmarried thirtyish couple (Maya Rudolph and John Krasinski) find themselves with an unexpected pregnancy, and travel the country to find the right place to start a family. Like many road movies, Away We Go is episodic and filled with a gallery of eccentric characters. I liked best Maggie Gyllenhaal's nightmare of a New Age mom, probably because she's the most vivid creation (more monstrous than anything in Where the Wild Things Are) and she brings the only major sparks out of Rudolph and Krasinski's performances. Not that they're bad by any means. The unconventional casting is a nice change of pace, yet while the two have a quiet chemistry I still found myself wishing for actors with a little more star power. Away We Go passes by harmlessly enough; too bad it doesn't get very far.

Lives of the Dead (Zombieland and The Girlfriend Experience)

It's appropriate that Zombieland, the surprise hit horror-comedy, climaxes at an amusement park. The movie is a "ride" in the best possible sense: fun, frightening, and moves like a breeze. Also fittingly, it stars Jesse Eisenberg in what is essentially a reprise of his sensitive intellectual virgin from Adventureland, and it's a welcome return. His character, named Columbus, is just as ungainly and abashed yet surprisingly resourceful. Throughout the film, Columbus explains the rules for survival in this post-apocalyptic zombiefied world, and by the end is forced to consider revising the most important one: Don't Be A Hero. Eisenberg is very funny, in a Woody Allen-in-Bananas kind of way, and he nicely sets the movie's tone: that struggling to survive shouldn't keep one from trying to get laid.

One reason why I hate the horror genre -- its grinding humorlessness -- isn't an issue in Zombieland. Like Shaun of the Dead, this movie is an example of "happy horror," and if it lacks the former film's satirical edge (i.e., Brits keeping a stiff upper lip in the face of being devoured), Zombieland's steady stream of gags moves it far away from torture-porn. Director Ruben Fleischer and screenwriters Rhett Reese & Paul Wernick give you just enough to care about the characters without making them a drag. And their central quartet of actors are game: in addition to Eisenberg, Emma Stone and Abigail Breslin appear as a savvy pair of grifters named Wichita and Little Rock, while Woody Harrelson makes the most of Tallahassee, the gung-ho redneck who enjoys killing zombies a little too much. I find Harrelson hard to predict between two extremes. He's either terrific or terrible and he's wonderful here, one of the defining roles of his career.

I like how the characters are named after their hometowns, as if they are their sole surviving representatives. And, like Hokahey, I loved the vividness of images like the one of Breslin running in an Indian headdress, feathers flying in slow-motion. I wasn't too crazy about the big meta in-jokey cameo from a famous movie star about halfway into the picture, but it caps with a killer punchline. Zombieland is a silly, goosey trifle, but it has energy, humor and verve, rare qualities in our post-apocalyptic comedy wasteland.

The rampaging flesh-eaters of Zombieland have more of a pulse than anyone in Steven Soderbergh's recent HD movies about the living dead. His first, the atrocious Bubble (2005), hewed closely to the Kelly Reichardt/indie-arthouse view of small-town America as a hopeless vortex where nonsentient beings grunt and stagger in a dazed stupor and respond to news of a murder in their midst with a "Bummer, man!" shrug. (There are examples of this in areas where I have lived, but there has also been the occasional joke now and then.) The erotic cosmos of The Girlfriend Experience would seem to offer a better opportunity for this egghead auteur to show signs of life, yet it too is where joy and laughter go to die. Sasha Grey's high-priced prostitute wears a perpetually jaded expression, but her edges are dull; and the character's one quirk -- an interest in "personology" -- is for Grey as an actress one quirk too many. Similarly, her gallery of clients, including the man she falls for, are indistinct and ill-defined. One scene featuring real-life film critic Glenn Kenny's "Erotic Connoisseur," a sleazy reviewer of escort services, gives the dismal proceedings a triple-jolt of energy, appetite and malice, but Soderbergh disposes of him lest he threaten to make things interesting.

Set in New York around the time of last year's economic meltdown, The Girlfriend Experience makes a half-assed feint at topicality, its corollaries between prostitution and capitalism mapped out with more wit and insight 25 years ago in Risky Business. Soderbergh's flair for experimentation used to produce sensational amalgams of art and entertainment like The Limey and Out of Sight. Lately, though, his goal seems to be making films that are as off-putting as possible -- non-movies with non-stars resulting in non-experiences.