It Was a Tangled Web That They Wove But It Was Woven in a Good Way

The first time I saw the 2010 movie Tangled, I was surprised how much actress Donna Murphy's "Mother Knows Best" number seemed to describe the dysfunctional love-hate relationship that one of my female friends had with her own mother. Like the main character of Tangled, the woman in question seemed to have a loving mother but only as long as she did what she was told. The minute the woman in question stopped obeying her mother's wishes, the woman's mother proved to be not so loving -- so much so that the woman spent most of her time in mortal fear of her mother's disapproval. (And bear in mind that this friend was a woman who was old enough to work at a local hospital.) While the woman's mother made a great show of showing people outside her family how friendly she could be, it seemed obvious by my friend's statements to me in private that her mother was not quite as friendly behind closed doors. If that was not bad enough, every time she and her mother had an argument, the friend would often be threatened with the possibility being thrown out of her mother's home -- a threat which usually made her back down really fast.

Fortunately, this movie's main character -- Rapunzel -- was not as intimidated as my friend but then she had the luxury of being a fictional character. Granted, we should be wary of reading our own issues into movies lest we see stuff that is not really there. But I never really expected to identify with Rapunzel as much as I did after I came across that number on YouTube -- and of course after that, I had to sample other songs from the same movie and then rent the video.

Mind you, I don't consider this flick to be a perfect movie. I could have done without the anachronistic chameleon that Rapunzel had for a pet or for that matter, Maximus the world's most dedicated guard horse. For that matter, I am not the world's biggest fan of singer Mandy Moore -- the person who voiced the character of Rapunzel -- though I must admit that I liked her very much in this movie. And yet when I consider how much I expected to hate this movie judging from an early description of it that I had read online... Well, suffice it to say that I rather be surprised by how good a movie is than by how bad it is.

Anyway, Tangled is a retelling of the classic story of Rapunzel, the long-haired princess who was trapped in a tower due to an old curse. Since this is a modern retelling, this Rapunzel was not content to sit around and wait to be rescued. Instead she chose to leave her tower voluntarily even though the woman she considered to be her mother firmly warned her against doing so. Along the way, she met up with a would-be thief who wished to hide out in her tower until his pursuers lost interest, only to end up interested in Rapunzel instead. This being a Disney film, there were countless misunderstandings for Rapunzel and her would-be boyfriend to wade through but there was also an inevitable happy ending.

Rapunzel eventually learned that yes, the world can be a scary place but despite what her would-be mother said, it could be beautiful as well. It was all a question of where you chose to look. And that is hardly the worst lesson one can receive nowadays.

Veronica Mars: Heroine Addict

Critics have written so much about all the fan service in the 2014 Veronica Mars movie that it will undoubtedly come to a shock to those few Veronica Mars fans who have yet to see the movie that it has absolutely no scenes like this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or this:

Or even this:

Of course, those who have complained about the fan service in the Veronica Mars movie usually don't mean this kind of fan service. What they really mean is that the movie is mainly aimed at fans of the Veronica Mars TV series. And being such a fan, it would be dishonest of me to pretend that the movie was not aimed at people like me.

Then again so what? James Bond films are usually aimed at fans of James Bond, Harry Potter movies are usually aimed at fans of Harry Potter and of course, the last three Star Wars movies were aimed at fans of the first three Star Wars movies. Such aim does not necessarily mean that the cinematic result will make for a bad movie. Then again it does not necessarily make for a good movie, either. As always, you have to judge by the final result.

As for the matter of fan bias, well, I have seen quite enough bad movies aimed at various fan groups that I can readily understand why people might be hesitant to see yet another movie that indulges in "fan service." Then again it is not unusual for the same people who object to one type of fan service to have little or no problems with other types of fan service. For example, a lot of critics of the Veronica Mars movie had no trouble with the last Star Wars trilogy -- which had their share of fan service -- and vice versa. And as much as I would like to think the best of such critics, I would be a lot more comfortable with doing so if such critics were honest enough to admit if their real problem with the Veronica Mars movie was that it was not made primarily with them in mind. Then again I see many movies that are not necessarily made for me in mind so I may be a tad biased on this subject. Indeed, as a Hispanic Catholic half-breed living in a predominantly White non-Hispanic Protestant society, I would be very surprised if most of the movies available for viewing in the U.S. were made for the likes of me. But that is a subject for another day.

Anyway, it is not as if the movie is likely to be that hard to understand if you have never seen the TV series upon which it is based. I must admit that it has been quite a few years since I saw the last episode of the series and since then, I have not bothered to memorize every minor character just in case I had the opportunity to see a new episode. Then again, it did not seem very hard for me to imagine any non-fan seeing the scene in which a snobbish woman acts mean to Ms. Mars at her high school reunion and not concluding that the snob in question was a former nemesis of Ms. Mars during the original series. (After all, I did not remember that particular character's name and yet I was able to figure out who she was.) Indeed, most complaints about the movie's fan service seemed to have little if any confidence in the intelligence of would-be moviegoers. (Though I guess director Rob Thomas should be flattered by the implication that his movie was just too smart to be understood by non-fans.) And it didn't help the case of the movie's detractors that their complaints seemed to echo similar complaints that were made about the 2005 movie Serenity -- a movie that was quite popular with many people who had never seen Firefly (the TV series upon which it was based).

In any event, if I had to pick the most bothersome aspect of the Veronica Mars movie, it would not be the "fan service" or the limited screen time enjoyed by actress Jamie Lee Curtis but rather the way the movie finds it necessary to give a reason why Veronica Mars does the things that she does. Apparently, it is not enough for her to want to do the right thing or help her friends; she has to have a "problem" which makes her do all her heroic deeds. Indeed, Hollywood has gotten so used to presenting its audiences with dysfunctional characters that it seems difficult to present a genuine heroine on the big screen nowadays; instead, it is more fashionable to present a dysfunctional character who just happens to do heroic things. Perhaps this is the inevitable result of a society that has been given many reasons to become cynical due to the Iraqi War and the recent economic crisis. Then again you can find reasons to be cynical in almost any period of history so it seems odd to witness this recent cultural war against heroism. And especially odd to see it take its toll on a character as likable as Veronica Mars.

Then again a part of me is glad that the Veronica Mars movie proved to be as good as it was. After all, I used to be a big fan of the Harry Potter movies -- but I gave up on the series after I found myself hating the movies more and more -- so much so that I did not even bother to see the last film in the series. For that matter, I also used to love the Star Wars movies -- but I found myself rolling my eyes more and more at some of the excuses film critics would make for the second trilogy and if it were not for the fact that my late sister's children like those three movies so much, I would be a lot more vocal on this site about my dislike for them.

Anyway, like most moviegoers, I don't go to the movies hoping to have a bad time. But I don't like the idea of pretending I did not see a bad movie just because other people than me seem to like it. So while I am not likely to be the most objective critic of the 2014 Veronica Mars movie, I would like to think that I am among the most honest. At least I hope so.

Be Still, My Once-Beating Heart!

Perhaps we should consider the 2013 movie Warm Bodies the official #NotAllZombies movie -- a long-needed cinematic reminder that not all zombies are necessarily evil flesh-eaters out to destroy the human race. Just some of them.

And how do you tell the difference between the good zombies and the bad zombies? Not screenwriter Jonathan Levine's problem. After all, just because a few zombies devour your relatives doesn't give you the right to wax all judgmental. Next thing you know, you'll be passing judgment on serial killers and arsonists and all sorts of evil-doers who are just victims of the human condition. Shame on you!

Anyway, this movie in particular was all about a teen-aged zombie who devoured a girl's boyfriend. After said zombie ate the boyfriend's brain, he absorbed his memories and decided that he (the zombie) was really in love with her. Granted, there were quite a few obstacles to overcome before he could convince her that he was really a nice guy. After all, people tend to be so prejudiced against people who devour their loved ones. But in the end, the power of true love -- and a few lucky breaks -- won out. Which was a good thing for the zombie's would-be love interest. Just imagine if something had gone wrong and the teen-aged zombie had not been able to overcome his tendency towards anthropophagy. Wouldn't that have made for an awkward time at the wedding reception?

I Saw Yo Soy Boricua, Pa'que Tu Lo Sepas!, Just So You Know!

I thought I knew everything there was to know about Puerto Rican history before I saw the 2006 documentary Yo Soy Boricua, Pa'que Tu Lo Sepas! (aka I'm Puerto Rican, Just So You Know!). Then halfway through this documentary, my jaw dropped open when I came upon its revelation of a historical event so awful that I was surprised that there was not still a major scandal about it. And if said event had happened in the continental U.S. to white middle-class women, I suspect it would have inspired a major scandal. But since it took place in Puerto Rico and involved poor Puerto Rican women, it joined the ranks of so many historical events that ended up being "forgotten" by most American history books.

When this documentary was first released, it was written off by most critics as just another celebrity home movie. And given the amount of film its co-director Rosie Perez devoted to herself and her various friends and relatives, I could see why some critics reacted like that. Yet it seemed equally obvious that there was a lot more to the documentary than that. After all, Perez also devoted a lot of film to portions of Puerto Rican history that are rarely mentioned in conventional history books (for example, the Vieques protests, forced sterilization, the struggle for Puerto Rican independence, etc.). Granted, it would be nice if she had the time and resources to devote even more film to those subjects but as it was, she had so much ground to cover in regard to those subjects that there was no way she could have done them justice with just one movie. Anyway, it hardly seems fair to blame Rosie Perez for not doing more about these topics when mainstream film directors like Michael Moore have been ignoring these same topics for years.

In any event, you don't necessarily have to be Puerto Rican to find something of interest in this documentary. Nor do you have to be Puerto Rican to find something in the historical events Ms. Perez covers that will make you depressed or angry. And you certainly don't need to be Puerto Rican to hope that all the bad things Ms. Perez mentions in this film eventually prove to be stuff of the past. Because the alternative would be even more depressing than anything you see in this film.

Jane Austen for Dummies: Austenland

There is undoubtably a good movie to be made out of the idea of a theme park inspired by the novels of Jane Austen but the 2013 movie Austenland is not it. In fact, I felt a little embarrassed for the cast of this movie. Most of them have done better work in other movies and while it might be true -- as some critics have claimed -- that the actors were at least having fun in this movie, said fun was rarely on display for the audience.

The plot revolved around a single woman named Jane Hayes -- played by actress Keri Russell -- who blew her life savings on a trip to a British resort inspired by the novels of Jane Austen. No sooner than she got there than she was immediately disappointed. Apparently her savings were not quite enough to get her decent accomodations so she had to put up with second-best all throughout the trip. Moreover, since the resort owner -- played by Jane Seymour, who deserved better -- frowned on modern technology, Ms. Hayes was constantly trying to hide her cell phone only to eventually have it confiscated. Even worse than that, Ms. Hayes was constantly being snubbed by the resort owner who displayed a distinct preference for her richer guests. And yet in spite of all that...

Anyone who has ever seen a romantic comedy can probably predict the rest and indeed, the movie's writer and director Jerusha Hess (working from a novel written by Shannon Hale) makes little effort to keep things from being predictable. I suppose the movie has a few laughs but unfortunately, they were so few and far between that when I first watched this movie on DVD, it was all I could do to keep my finger off the fast-forward button. If you must satisfy your Jane Austen addiction, you would probably be better off with the Lost in Austen mini-series or the Jane Austen Book Club movie. In fact, I suspect you would probably be better off with almost any other movie inspired by Jane Austen since I have a hard time believing that there could exist a worse Austen-inspired movie than this.

Then again, the movie was a library rental so at least I did not have to pay $8.50 or more to see this movie. Thank heaven for small favors.

The Jane Austen Book Club Deserves More Than a Quick Glance

One of the film critics who reviewed the 2007 movie The Jane Austen Book Club expressed concern that it might be dumbing down the books of Jane Austen. Granted, I am not really sure what dumbing down means in a world where director Paul Verhoeven's not-exactly-as-highbrow-as-the-original versions of Hitchcock and Heinlein regularly receive critical praise and the most commonly read author by most literate English-speaking adults on the Net seems to be not Charles Dickens, Ernest Hemingway, Leo Tolstoy or even John Steinbeck but rather J. K. Rowling. I will, however, admit that I liked this movie despite my not being a big fan of Jane Austen and that it actually made me more interested in reading her books than the usual sermons about my duty to read great books.

Then again, I have found that the surest way to kill one's interest in reading a particular book is to treat the act of reading it like a holy act of obligation. After all, no one particularly likes reading a book because he or she has to read it; instead, even the most intellectual among us tend to gravitate toward books that we want to read. No doubt this is a habit that drives literary critics up the wall but then most writers whose work is worth reading don't necessarily write for literary critics; they read for people.

Anyway, I was not happy about every plot twist in this movie. Moreover, when I read the original novel soon after seeing the movie, I found more than a few of the movie's embellishments on the original plot to be a bit disappointing. Even some of the "improvements" left a bit to be desired. As nice as it was to see actor Jimmy Smits on the big screen again, I could have done without another version of the old "unfaithful Latino husband" stereotype. Indeed, I found it a bit ironic that the movie not only switched the ethnic backgrounds of two main characters but also played down the bilingualism of those two characters and their daughter. Even the movie's attempts to show the universal appeal of Ms. Austen's books by including in the storyline the type of people (for example, gays, Asians, Hispanics) who are not normally associated with Jane Austen left me feeling more than a little sorry for members of the one minority group associated with Southern California that was consciously left out of the movie.

Then again I did like the way literary science fiction got treated in a respectful way for once and how the movie avoided the usual jokes about Star Trek fans and Star Wars aficionados. Given some of the recent developments in actress Maria Bello's personal life, I found the movie's focus on her character's failure to marry to be a bit ironic if not unintentionally humorous but at least that character received a more respectful treatment from the script than most middle-aged female movie characters normally receive nowadays. I even liked the way the movie depicted the act of reading as a pleasurable activity -- though given my status as a hardcore reader, I am understandably biased.

The Jane Austen Book Club is not exactly a movie I would recommend for everyone but it was not a movie that made me sorry to have seen it. Since I can't say that about every movie I have seen as of late, I would like to think that constitutes a bit of a compliment right there.

Please Don't Put Seeing This Movie on Your To Do List

Aubrey Plaza is a very likeable actress but unfortunately, not every movie she is in is all that likeable. A classic example is the 2013 film The To Do List, an allegedly sex-positive comedy which asks Ms. Plaza to go above and beyond the duty of your typical actress yet can't resist delivering a very questionable message which almost makes me yearn for the good old days of the Hays Code.

The film started out with Ms. Plaza's character Brandy Klark giving a speech at her high school graduation only to be heckled by her own friends for being a virgin. What being a virgin had to do with her graduation speech, the film never really said. Like so many things in this movie, it was treated as just another item that your average movie-goer should just lie back and enjoy. (Apparently being sex-positive is the cinematic equivalent of being brain-dead.)

In any event, Ms. Klark was convinced by her friends -- and please note that it was her friends who did this and not her enemies --- that she had somehow missed out on something by not having sex in high school and thus Ms. Klark set out to remedy that by making a list of all the sexual things that others have done that she never got around to doing. The idea that she was not naturally curious about this stuff before she talked with her friends seemed odd but the movie chose not to explore that path. Nor did it bother with the many obvious reasons -- for example, fear of STDs or an unplanned pregnancy -- an otherwise healthy young woman would have for putting off sex. (After all, if it did bother with such reasons, Ms. Klark's position might seem sympathetic and writer-director Maggie Carey seemed uninterested in sympathizing with that position -- especially since it was so noncommercial.)

Movies like this are not usually meant to be taken seriously and indeed, I would probably drive myself crazy if I took seriously every such movie. But there was something about the cruel way this movie's script treated the main character that was hard to ignore. After all, Ms. Carey was not content to just put more than a few obstacles in Ms. Klark's path; she went out of her way to outright humiliate her. And she did not just humiliate her once but on multiple occasions. While I respect the commitment to her craft that allowed Ms. Plaza to get away with on-screen actions that would normally be considered above and beyond the call of duty by most actresses -- I do not believe, for example, that she really did put a certain disgusting object in her mouth but she did a great job of pretending that she did so -- I do not think it was nice of Ms. Carey to have Ms. Plaza perform actions that even the most misogynistic of directors rarely ask of their leading ladies. Indeed, the stunt I mentioned above involving a certain disgusting object seemed more stomach-turning than funny -- and yet we the audience were asked to go with it because to the director, it was funny. At least supposedly.

Even the sex-positive part of the movie seemed dubious. After all, Ms. Klark eventually got dissed as much for being sexually active as she did for being sexually inactive. Even Connie Britton -- who played Ms. Klark's mother -- had to perform some rather dubious sexual actions -- though thankfully, Ms. Britton was generally treated more respectfully than Ms. Plaza. (For example, Ms. Britton's character just didn't have sex with her husband, she had sex in the most outlandish fashion possible. Because nothing says "sex-positive" like making a married couple having sex with each other look weird.)

Granted, I am not exactly part of this movie's target audience. Indeed, if you still wax nostalgic over 2 Live Crew's "Me So Horny" and you thought that Caddyshack would have been a lot better with more gross-out humor, you will probably like this film far better than me.

But I would not recommend this film to anyone if I had a choice.

A Plum Role Is Not So Peachy in One for the Money

The good news about the 2012 movie One for the Money? It is about as accurate an adaptation of Janet Evanovich's novel of the same name as one can expect.

The bad news? Janet Evanovich's novel is kinda meh for a mystery novel.

Granted, my taste in mystery novels is a bit eclectic, if not eccentric. I have read only one Agatha Christie novel in all my life, never finished the various Sherlock Holmes novels and stories until just last year and yet found time to read every mystery novel written by Charlaine Harris prior to completing the Arthur Conan Doyle stories. (I know. Shocking.)

That said, the original novel One for the Money was still kinda meh, even accounting for the fact that it was written at a time when lady bounty hunters were still considered a novelty and that not every mystery reader necessarily identifies with female protagonists who are near perfect. Granted, I don't expect every mystery novel to be my cup of tea but I have run across books in the mystery genre that I have liked better.

Anyway, the movie itself was okay once I got over the fact that Stephanie Plum -- the main character -- was a throwback to the days when women were generally expected to know little about guns or self-defense or well, anything. It did not help that Jennifer Morrison had played a more convincing bounty hunter in the first episode of the TV series Once Upon a Time. However, actress Katherine Heigl -- who played Ms. Plum -- was likeable enough to at least play a convincing amateur bounty hunter though her allegedly "lovable" clumsiness got old fast. I did not mind the constant examples of her lousy marksmanship; after all, I know from experience that it is not always as easy to shoot a gun as it looks on television. But the fact that she never gained the common sense to put her gun somewhere other than her purse just did not seem very realistic to me.

Indeed, in the age of Veronica Mars and Rizzoli & Isles, Ms. Plum's amateurishness seemed especially exasperating. And apparently the box office agreed since there appears to be no sign of a sequel.

It is probably just as well. As nice as it was to see the likes of Debbie Reynolds and John Leguizamo earning a paycheck in supporting roles, I must admit that there are better movies out there. Fortunately for me, this was just a library rental. And some might argue that this movie was worth about as much as I paid for it...

Trying to Stink and Something Happens

If Robert Altman's Popeye proved that you don't necessarily need to be a hardcore fan of a particular character in order to create a good movie about said character, the 2012 Farrelly Brothers version of the Three Stooges proved the exact opposite: that you can be as big a fan of a particular character -- even three particular characters -- and still bomb out if you don't have the cleverness to back it up. Of course, one might argue that you don't exactly expect cleverness from a Three Stooges movie, and that is true. But even the most lowbrow comedy has to have some standards; otherwise, all lowbrow comedies would share the exact same level of popularity.

In any event, the Stooges have always been at their best in their short subjects -- especially the early shorts with Jerome "Curly" Howard -- so the idea of a modern-day Three Stooges movie kinda misses the point. Unfortunately, modern-day Hollywood doesn't go in for short subjects anymore; indeed, modern-day Hollywood often doesn't seem to give a damn whether you actually enjoy the movie or not as long as they can make enough money off of product placements, DVDs, movie soundtracks and other movie tie-ins. Thus, it seems a wonder that the Farrellys found money for a Three Stooges project at all. That said...

It would be nice to say that The Three Stooges was every bit as awesome as the original short subjects or that all it lacked was a pie fight or two but I would be lying if I said any of that. In fact, I found The Three Stooges to be quite mediocre at best when it wasn't quite awful.

On the bright side, actors Chris Diamantopoulos, Sean Hayes and Will Sasso do a good job of imitating the original Stooges and bringing off some of their more familiar slapstick routines. On the not so bright side, the Farrelly Brothers' decision to add toilet humor to the Stooges' comic routines -- at one point substituting a duel with urinating infants for the classic pie fight -- does not exactly improve matters. Poor Sofía Vergara gets stuck in the classic femme fatale role usually reserved in the original shorts for classic Stooge hand Christine McIntyre and Larry David plays a nun in drag for seemingly little reason apart from the fact that he could.

Craig Bierko plays a bad guy named Mac who allegedly loves Vergara's character Lydia but wishes to kill her wealthy husband first because he is far more in love with the idea of helping her inherit her husband's estate. He tries to hire the Stooges to help him pull off this dirty deed but unfortunately, the Stooges are so dumb they can't even be corrupted in the right manner.

I must confess that when I first found out about this subplot, I was surprised that the Farrelly Brothers bothered to include it. After all, the classic Stooges were basically at heart good guys and while they were hardly the most dedicated of workers and were usually in little danger of being mistaken for Boy Scouts, they were still a long way from being the type of characters who would seriously considering murder for hire, no matter how badly they needed the money. In fact, it was usually the Stooges who ended up bringing real crooks to justice in some of their better shorts.

So while it seemed obvious that the Farrelly Brothers would find a way to keep the Stooges from going through with Mac's scheme, they could not resist teasing the audience with the idea the Stooges might be would-be killers, after all -- which only goes to show that the Farrelly Brothers did not understand the appeal of the original Stooges as well as they thought they did.

Anyway, it would be nice to pretend that one subplot was the only thing wrong with this movie but it was not. Indeed, while some attempts to drag the Stooges into the 21th century were pretty funny (for example, the I-phone joke displayed in the trailer), yet others -- like the dueling infant scene mentioned above -- were not. In any event, the original shorts are still available on DVD for anyone who is still genuinely nostalgic for the Stooges and I suspect all but the most desperate fans would be more satisfied with said shorts anyway.

As for the movie, the most charitable thing that could be said about it was that it could have been worse. But then I could say that about a lot of bad movies.

At least now I will be no longer curious to see what a Three Stooges movie would look like if it were made with 21st century technology. So I have to thank the Farrelly Brothers for at least that much.

I Not Only Survived Surviving Christmas -- I Also Lived to Laugh About It

I'll admit it. I did not have very high hopes for the 2004 film Surviving Christmas the first time that I watched it and I watched it with low -- very low -- expectations. Ben Affleck was not exactly my favorite actor, Christina Applegate did not exactly have a good record when it came to picking movie scripts and the very idea of a Christmas movie being released in October just seemed weird.

Yet for some reason I found myself chuckling during this movie far more than I had expected to. I am not saying that this movie is in any danger of replacing Miracle on 34th Street as my favorite Christmas movie or even nudging its way onto my list of all-time favorite holiday movies. Yet I found Ben Affleck a lot easier to take as an obnoxious rich guy (the role he was born to play?) than he was as a superhero in Daredevil and the film did a good job as long as it attempted to be an outright farce. Some elements like the cyber-porn subplot were in questionable taste and the fashion shoot sequence -- obviously meant to be a sendup of Glamour Shots -- needlessly humiliated one of the main characters in a way that was not at all funny. But the film did not really get into trouble until it tried to take its own plot seriously.

Let's face it. Some plots are not meant to be taken seriously, and the plot of this movie -- which involves a young rich executive attempting to create his own Christmas from elements of other people's lives and literally paying people to pose as his own relatives -- was definitely one such plot.

I doubt I will be remembering this film any more fondly than I do similar mediocre holiday fare like Jingle All the Way. But for a Christmas flick that was released out of season, it was not that bad. Besides, I can't help thinking that the most obvious pitch for this movie involved the success of the movie Scream. After all, if a Halloween movie like Scream can hit it big at the box office despite being released in December, then why can't a Christmas movie being released in October achieve similar results?

Why Bother Watching the Watchmen?

The 2009 film Watchmen was not as bad as I feared but not as memorable as the original graphic novel that inspired it. Some have described this as perhaps the best possible adaptation we could hope for on the big screen and sadly I think they are right. I suspected that the film would be in trouble when the pre-credit sequence showed a masked figure with a distinctive costume killing a key character and then the opening credits showed yet another key character wearing almost the same type of costume that the killer wore (only without a mask), thus blowing any suspense the movie might have had about whom the mystery killer was. It did manage to pull off some memorable scenes despite all that but I suspect the scenes that will be best remembered all took place in those opening credits I just mentioned.

The biggest problem with the movie was that director Zack Snyder seemed all too eager to depict the world that Watchmen creator Alan Moore made -- a world in which superheroes really existed and changed human history -- yet he seemed not quite capable of convincingly portraying the negative side of such a world. As a result, his movie's characters never came across as believable as their graphic novel equivalents and many scenes that should have been quite dramatic -- such as the one in which the superheroes (aka the Watchmen) break up a riot -- seemed more than a bit static. Here and there the movie showed promise -- thus the memorable scenes mentioned above -- but as a whole, it was a big disappointment.

Oh, well. At least the original source material has not changed.

Beware the Angel Atop John Constantine's Tree

I will always have a fond feeling for the 2005 thriller Constantine if for no other reason that it was the movie that introduced me to Tilda Swinton and made me realize what a great actress she could be, even in a potentially silly role. Her triumph seems even greater when you consider the fact that the character she plays in this movie -- that of the angel Gabriel (or at least an angel called Gabriel) -- was originally created as a male character -- and yet Ms. Swinton does not balk at playing the character as if it were a man even though she is, of course, a woman. And, as a result, she is very easily the most watchable thing in this movie.



Alas, the rest of the film is not that perfect, and poor Keanu Reeves seems especially miscast as the cynical title character. Granted, it's not all Reeves' fault that his performance is less than satisfying. After all, the character that he plays -- freelance detective John Constantine -- was originally created by English comic book writer Alan Moore to be a mysterious Englishman who investigated the supernatural and looked like the English singer Sting. He originally made guest appearances in the DC/Vertigo comic book series Swamp Thing but eventually became popular enough to earn his own title called Hellblazer. Basically, the character is about as English as John Steed or Doctor Who so it always seemed silly to "re-imagine" him as an American character. But that is what Hollywood did. (And judging from the recent Elementary series, Americans are still reinventing British pop culture icons as Yanks. ¡Qué lástima!)

Anyway, Moore himself was supposed to be quite disappointed in the movie version and I can not blame him. A lot of silly stuff occurs in this movie and the filmmaker makes little attempt to apply the logic one would expect from a mere comic book. Actress Rachel Weisz is wasted playing two twins who get caught up in a supernatural conspiracy that only Constantine -- natch -- can uncover. There is even a guest appearance by the Devil -- not just a devil but the Devil -- though to be fair, that proves to be one of the more interesting subplots in the movie.

All in all, one can see why the Hollywood powers that be never felt compelled to make a sequel to this flick. And yet of all the comic book movies based on Alan Moore's work, this is the one to which I most often return. Perhaps because Ms. Swinton makes such a divine villain (no pun intended) that she alone is almost worth the price of a video rental.

All the New Movies That I Have Seen

1. Batman Begins (2005).

Basically a Batman movie for people who don't like Batman, or to put it in a more charitable sense, a Batman movie for people who don't like comic books. It tries very hard to be more realistic than most comic book movies and it is certainly more realistic than the Tim Burton movies that dealt with the same subject but in the end, it just was not my cup of tea.

2. The Chronicles of Narnia: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe (2005).

A film that proves that Tilda Swinton is an acting goddess. And the rest of the cast isn't bad either. I do kinda wish that I didn't keep confusing the older girl with Violet Baudelaire but that's a failing on my part, not the filmmakers'.

3. The Dark Knight (2008).

I actually liked this better than Batman Begins though I found attempts to interpret it as a pro-Bush parable to be pretty laughable. Of course, it helps that I have a weakness for the work of comic book writer/artist Frank Miller who was responsible for the comic book novel that inspired this movie.

Fangs for Nothing

After not just one but two Dark Shadows movies plus an attempt at a syndicated television reboot, one could argue that the old Dan Curtis Gothic soap opera Dark Shadows was long overdue for a less serious approach if for no other reason that yet another serious attempt did not seem likely to succeed. And yet there was something so pathetic about the humor in the recent Tim Burton movie version of the classic program that I can not help but wonder why he bothered.

Part of the problem is that both Burton and his humble scribe Seth Grahame-Smith seemed to think that no one other than them had ever tried to find any humor in the vampire movie genre. As far as they were concerned, movies like The Fearless Vampire Killers and Love at First Bite never existed. Neither did Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. And, of course, TV shows like Buffy and Angel were unthinkable as far as Burton and Grahame-Smith were concerned.

Nor were Burton and Grahame-Smith especially prone to raising the bar in regard to said humor. For example, Grahame-Smith's idea of wittily satirizing the 1970s -- the decade in which the movie's vampiric protagonist Barnabas Collins awoke -- seemed to consist of heroically ridiculing the same things comedy shows in the 1970s poked fun at way back then -- the only difference between then and now being that, instead of giving us the wit of a M.A.S.H. or an All in the Family, the screenwriter gave us repetitive bad jokes about Love Story and the Carpenters. The movie even managed to make the same hippie culture that inspired Taxi's Reverend Jim character and Doonesbury's Zonker Harris seem unfunny -- though admittedly there have been a lot of bad hippie jokes since 1979.

If the movie had any point to make with such humor, such gags could easily be forgiven but it did not. Indeed, the whole film seemed to be rather purposeless. Was it about family? Not really. The contrast between the 1970s and the 2010s? Not really. Burton and Grahame-Smith had a chance to go that route early in the movie but instead they chose to include more jokes about bad songs and fast food restaurants. There was one nifty visual sequence in which Burton used a series of portraits to show the various incarnations of an exceptionally long-lived character but that alone was not enough to save this movie. And please don't get me started on the movie's various plot twists.

Even the romantic triangle that was at the heart of the original Dark Shadows (the one that involved Barnabas, his bride-to-be Josette, and his would-be lover/servant/witch Angelique) proved less than satisfying. On one hand, Burton and Grahame-Smith did a good job of summing up the back story of Barnabas Collins in an efficient manner. On the other hand, they seemed at a loss as to what to do with it when the scene switched to the modern day. And Grahame-Smith's decision to play Angelique's side of the triangle for laughes did not help matters.

In short, Dark Shadows tried to be a comedy, a romance and a horror movie all at once, only to fail at all three. I guess it was a good thing that Burton was less ambitious or the movie would have been even more terrible. Or at least longer.

Trying to Find a Better Life at the Movies

I am always tempted to recuse myself from reviewing movies like the 2011 release A Better Life because it is hard to pretend I can be unbiased about the subject manner. But then it is very hard for me to be very unbiased about many subjects. Besides, it is not like diehard Anglophiles recuse themselves from reviewing English movies. Nor do Francophiles recuse themselves from critiquing the latest Gallic film. If anything, I tend to be a little harder on movies about Mexican-Americans and their immigrant parents because my expectations are higher. I find it ridiculous to pretend that movies about Mexicans should be novelties when there are already so many of us in the American movie-watching population. Moreover, I find it equally ridiculous to pretend that we are incapable of inspiring the same great stories that we take for granted in other segments of the American population.

In any event, A Better Life is not the best movie about Mexican-Americans and immigrants that I have ever seen -- but it is not a bad movie either. After having seen Mexican actor Demián Bichir play a wealthy drug-dealer-turned-politician in the American cable TV series Weeds, I was pleasantly surprised to see how well he played a character on the other end of the class spectrum -- though I am not quite happy to note that his two biggest parts in America thus far involve variations on decades-old stereotypes.

Some parts of the movie were a bit too good to be true. Bichir's character Carlos Galindo, a humble illegal immigrant working as a landscape worker in southern California, seemed at times to be a bit too mellow for a guy who has had so many setbacks in his life. The conflict between him and his American-born son seemed to get resolved almost a tad too easily to be believable. But some areas -- like the relationship between him and his sister -- were all too believable, and even the rather silly event that landed him in trouble was more believable than most illegal immigrant apologists would have you believe. (I am not an expert on illegal immigration but I have met enough such people to know that while some such are more law-abiding than one would expect from their circumstances, still others are not quite as law-abiding as they could be.)

For what it is worth, my own father was never an illegal immigrant but he did have the same air of being wiser than his years that Bichir brings off so well in this movie. Indeed, much of this film's merits lies in the way it focuses on aspects of Mexican and Mexican-American culture that are still invisible to most American movie-goers.

If there is one such drawback to such a movie, it is that we are fast approaching the point where most Anglo-American movie-goers are not likely to welcome future work in this area. Already there is a tendency to see such movies as propaganda more than art, which I find ironic since it can be argued that movies that show the opposite view of illegal immigration are also more propaganda than art. Besides, propaganda tends to be in the eye of the beholder, and while I must admit that my views of illegal immigration are a bit more mixed than those of most Hispanic liberals, I must confess that I grow increasingly wary of those who only cry "Bias!" whenever a particular story is not in their favor.

But then most people rarely go to a movie theatre to have their political opinions challenged. And even more rarely to have them changed.

The Invention of Lying and the Myth of America

I once rented the 2009 movie The Invention of Lying from the local library, and one of the first things that came to my mind while I was watching it was the notion that this imaginary world where the movie is set -- a locale where no one can say anything but the harshest and bluntest of truths -- was supposed to be a fictional version of America. Or at least a fictional version of America as it must have seemed to English actor/writer Ricky Gervais when he first came over to this country from his homeland.

After all, Americans tend to take pride in being more honest than the English, more direct than the English and less likely to shade the truth with diplomatic white lies than the English.

So while the latter half of the film can be seen as a religious satire, the original inspiration might have been the temptation to poke fun at us "straight-talking" Yanks in such a way that most of us wouldn't catch on.

Of course, if you don't like that theory, I have others... but I like this one best.

As for the religious aspect of the movie, I found the premise of the movie to be a lot kinder and sympathetic toward religious people than I expected even though I found its idea of religion being just another form of lying to be more than a bit questionable.

Then again, the most questionable part of the movie was the part that expected me to believe that a woman who looked like Jennifer Garner could ever fall in love with a guy who looked like Ricky Gervais. After all, Gervais is not exactly famous for playing likable characters in his native England, let alone romantic heartthrobs. And though his character in this movie is a lot more sympathetic than, say, the character he played in the UK version of The Office, the romance between his character and Garner's still seemed less than convincing.

Then again, when I look upon some of the more unlikely real-life relationships I have witnessed since this movie was first released, it seems more and more believable. Or at least as believable as one might expect from a movie about lying.

All the Christmas Movies That I Have Seen

1. Arthur Christmas (2011).

Before I saw this movie, I was beginning to think they stopped making good Christmas movies. I mean, sure, Nothing Like the Holidays was not a bad effort, but it was hardly a classic. And most other Christmas films I've seen within the last decade -- with one obvious exception -- did not even try to approach the same level as NLtH.

Then came this flick and my faith was restored. Granted, when you have the reliable vocal talents of Jim Broadbent and Hugh Laurie, it is kinda hard to make a bad Christmas movie. But writers Sarah Smith and Peter Baynham give it their best shot anyway. And although only time will tell if this film is as fondly remembered in 2052 as It's a Wonderful Life and the original Miracle on 34th Street are today, I would like to think that the odds are in this film's favor. If nothing else, Arthur Christmas' humorous but good-hearted quest to do the right thing on Christmas Eve is a pleasant alternative to the usual "dysfunctional-and-proud-of-it" Christmas movie that has so recently become the rage.

2. Rise of the Guardians (2012).

This year's Arthur Christmas. Granted, it is a bit darker than AC and less traditional than your average holiday movie. But in its own way, it works.

When I first saw the trailer for this movie, I feared that Alec Baldwin's very untraditional take on Santa Claus -- among other things, his version speaks with a Russian accent, carries two swords and proudly displays two arm tattoos that say "Naughty" and "Nice" -- would end up ruining the movie. But I was wrong to think so.

Not only was Mr. Baldwin's Slavic Santa surprisingly charming, but so were Hugh Jackman's Australian Easter bunny, Chris Pine's Impish-American Jack Frost and the oh so silent (and definitely not Neil Gaimanish) Sandman. For that matter, I also liked Isla Fisher's Tooth Fairy character though it was a bit surprising for me to see Ms. Fisher in a role that was so Earth Motherly after seeing her play so many ingenues on the silver screen.

If there is one flaw in the movie, it is the way that it veers away from any of the traditional religious elements associated with Christmas. But then the same thing could be said of many classic Christmas movies including Arthur Christmas. And quite frankly, I would prefer that Hollywood stay away from such religious works as The Little Drummer Boy and The Night the Animals Talked lest they receive the same dismal treatment that Dr Seuss's How the Grinch Stole Christmas received from director Ron Howard. After all, there are worse things a good Christian could watch than a shamelessly pagan Santa Claus.

Robbing Michael to Play Paul

About ten minutes into the movie Paul, Simon Pegg and Nick Frost meet a Hispanic bellboy who proves to be one of the few people in the entire picture who knows nothing about ufos. By some odd coincidence, he always happens to be the film's only Hispanic character as well -- though to be fair, I was kinda surprised to see Pegg and Frost include such a character in the first place, given the fact that they do not exactly hail from a country with a large Hispanic population. Anyway, the scene with the bellboy struck me as puzzling because on one hand, Pegg and Frost were savvy enough to avoid the inevitable joke about illegal aliens. On the other hand, the scene seemed to come mighty close to including such a joke and indeed, the scene ends on such an awkward note that I could not help wondering why Pegg and Frost included it.

If that was the film's only flaw, I could have happily ignored it. After all, I have always liked Simon Pegg and it does not hurt that Frost and he both starred in Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead, two of my favorite films of the last decade.

Yet this latest film they made together just did not work for me. Perhaps it was because the humorous side of aliens have been explored in the movies far more than Frost and Pegg's previous subject matter. Or perhaps it was because Pegg and Frost really did not have a lot to say about this subject that was all that imaginative. Occasionally, they came up with a nice sight gag and some witty dialogue but all too often they depended on the same rude humor that almost every other recent movie comedy has used.

Moreover, the main gimmick of their movie seemed to echo the gimmick of the atrocious Nora Ephron movie Michael: a traditionally asexual being comes down to earth and starts acting contrary to asexual tradition. The main difference, of course, being that instead of the being being an angel as in Michael, the being in this case is an extraterrestrial. Occasionally, Frost and Pegg tried to add a bit of social commentary by making the alien visitor -- an extraterrestrial nicknamed Paul -- an enlightened being who mentally and emotionally liberates almost everyone he comes in contact with -- a subplot the audience is undoubtedly supposed to find funny since the alien's chief form of liberation seems to involve encouraging people to cuss a lot, have sex and partake of illicit drugs. In short, Paul encourages the humans to do the kind of things they normally would have wanted to do anyway.

Even that would not have been so bad if so much of the movie's humor did not seem directed at a more sophomoric audience than the people who watched Hot Fuzz and Shaun of the Dead. Thus, in place of the witty dialogue we have come to expect from Pegg and Frost, we get endless shots of Paul mooning the humans and doing various other off-color stunts. Plus we get the umpteenth ripoff of X-Files and Men in Black in the form of a subplot involving mysterious agents -- feds, natch -- who are attempting to stop Paul and his human companions when they are not acting as childish as the movie's intended audience.

Nevertheless, Paul has enough laughes that I can readily see why many people might enjoy it. I just wish I could honestly say that I was one of them.

In Rio, Romance Is for the Birds

I liked this movie well enough for the first ten minutes when it seemed like it would be the story of the sweetest relationship between woman and bird since Lesbia and her sparrow. But then they had go bringing another bird into the plot and then a guy.

They couldn't just leave female bookstore owner Linda Gunderson and her pet macaw Blu alone to find their own path; no, they had to go ahead and imply that both of them were missing something. Well, the two of them seemed just happy together. Happy, I say. And sure it's nice that Linda and Blu finally found happiness with others but jeez, all that trouble that they went through to find it. Frankly, Blu would have been better off had he stayed home in Alab -- er, Minnesota. Run, Blu, run. And for heaven's sake, ignore that Anita girl and don't stick to your own kind.

Learn, Larry, Learn

There are many things I could say about the 2011 movie Larry Crowne but the one idea that keeps coming to mind is that it was meant to be sort of an anti-Crash. Instead of giving the movie-going public yet another scenario a la the 2005 movie Crash in which people of varying races and ethnicities spent most of their time symbolically tearing each other apart, Larry Crowne gave us a scenario in which the same variety of people came together to accomplish a common goal. In this case, the goal was the intellectual enabling of recently unemployed store clerk Larry Crowne.

What made Larry Crowne so special? The movie never really said though I imagine it has something to do with the fact that he was both a nice guy and a character played by Tom Hanks. A more sophisticated analysis was downplayed by a screenplay that found more pleasure in a running gag involving confiscated cell phones than in any serious social commentary.

For the record, the movie deserved some credit for inspiring my little sister to think seriously about going back to school like the title character did. However apart from that, the best thing I could say about the film is that it never promised to be more than a pleasant way to spend two hours enjoying the local movie theatre's air conditioning and on that one point, it most definitely delivered.