The new Brad Bird flick from Pixar/Disney is as fine a film as Toy Story, Monsters, Inc., or The Incredibles, though with one difference: I doubt that little children will like it as much. This is, really, an adult film. Or, perhaps, an adult film for the whole family, one in which the children might enjoy but only at the expense of not understanding huge chunks of it. After all, it's about gourmet cooking, which is not exactly a kiddie fixation, like toys, monsters, or super-heroes.

Call me romantic, but what could be better? Paris! Cooking! Rats! A youngster realizing his individuality at work!

Besides, this has the best onscreen kiss since . . . Hot Shots, Part Deux.

The answer may be Yes. Reasons for this are ably given by Henry Jenkins in his appreciation for/explanation of the critics' near-unanimous thumbs-down to the third Pirates of the Carribean film. Actually, Jenkins trots out several interesting ideas. Here's one off the main thesis:

Watch a film with a group of critics and it is a rather chilly experience, each trying to suppress signs of their emotional response for fear of tipping their hands to their competition. They don't laugh at comedy; they don't cry at melodrama; and they don't know how to engage in fannish conversation around film franchises, which means that their professional conduct cuts them off from the shared emotional pleasures that are so much a part of how popular culture works its magic on us. For that reason, I trust film critics far more when they are writing about art films which demand distanced contemplation than popular films which desire an immediate emotional reaction.

Hat tip to Jesse Walker, who (in his post to Film Flam) calls attention to Jenkins's well-crafted first sentence:

As a rule, one should never trust the opinion of an established film critic about a movie with a number after its title — and one should multiply the level of distrust for each number over 2.

Dead now about a week, Charles Nelson Reilly was in life important on TV if not in cinema. From Wikipedia:

In the 1990s Reilly made guest appearances on The Drew Carey Show, The Larry Sanders Show, and most notably, as eccentric writer Jose Chung in the television series The X-Files ("Jose Chung's "From Outer Space"") and Millennium ("Jose Chung's Doomsday Defense"). Reilly was nominated for Emmy Awards in 1998 and 1999 for his performances in The Drew Carey Show and Millennium, respectively.

Because I so admire the above-cited work, I can't really agree with the title thesis of this article:

Charles Nelson Reilly played himself better than anyone
by Charles McNulty

Mr. Brooks was given a fairly positive review by Richard Roeper. So I went to see it. I had been feeling sick all day, and needed a distraction.

Mr. Brooks was not the right distraction.

It's not that I don't enjoy seeing the occasional splatter of blood.

It's just that I want my thrillers to feel a little more aesthetically challenging and centered than that classic soft-core late-night Showtime spectacle Body of Influence, and, if at all possible, a little less lurid.

But the new film does have an A-list cast: Costner, Hurt, Demi Moore. The fact that Demi Moore has trouble making a convincing character brings it back to Body of Influence level.

Really, there's nothing here to see, folks; move along. Next movie.

Oh, sure, Costner and Hurt have fun. But that fun barely passes to the viewers. The kitchen sink gets passed, along with nearly every other plot element you can think of, but not the proverbiel good time.

I saw two very well-made films this weekend, Fracture and Disturbia. Both are stylish big studio productions, and show Hollywood polish to good advantage. Both films could be categorized as suspense, the former being a courtroom drama, the latter being a thriller. Both treat of crime: cold-blooded spousal murder and serial killers, respectively. Fracture features old hand (hack? master?) Anthony Hopkins chewing up the screen as the bad guy, as only he can, set against comparative newcomer Ryan Gosling as his prosecutor; Disturbia features a young actor, Shia LaBeouf, playing an 18-year-old under house arrest, suspecting neighbor David Morse of murder. Each film adds a love interest, and each has moments of white-knuckle suspense. Both did very well this weekend at the box office. And yet only one of them strikes me as worth recommending. It is not the one I expected.

What I expected was that Disturbia would be a somewhat vexing remake of Rear Window. Yes, the set-up is similar to the Hitchcock classic, and the nature of the suspense is similar. But there's enough originality here that I wasn't quite sure what was going to happen. Though, yes, I knew that the David Morse character was going to turn out to be a truly bad guy.

The Anthony Hopkins character is convicted in the viewers' eyes from the get-go. And he does indeed murder his wife. The crime in question is not a whodunnit, but a willhegetawaywithit. Or perhaps a howwillhegetawaywithit. The trouble with the movie is very easy to state: the key plot device of the character's own plotting, though kept from view, was obvious to me. I figured it out as the crime scene unfolded. So it was somewhat vexing to watch the Ryan Gosling character not figure it out.

Of course, the subplot regarding the prosecutor's new cushy private-sector position, and the consequent romance with his new boss (this, I tell you, seemed not wholly realistic), was there to both explain how this ace lawyer could miss the truth and add a red herring for audience pleasure.

Still, it was fun watching the case unravel, and it was fun watching the beleaguered prosecutor put it back together again, after all seemed lost.

The love interest in the film, played by Rosamund Pike, might be one of most strikingly beautiful white women working in film today. She is fun to watch, and it is satisfying, in its own way, to see her relationship to the hero go through an arc, not merely up the predictable staircase to happily-ever romance.

In Disturbia the love interest is played by Sarah Roemer, whom I'd never seen before. Cute and sexy, there are a number of lingering sequences where the camera lingers over her bikini-clad body. More cute than beautiful, in some ways, and not used as exploitatively in the plot climax as I would have suspect . . . a refreshing element in the film, really, almost a classy pull-back of the opening gambit, featuring (as it does) lust and danger in equal mixture.

It may be that this late-teen thriller, this rear-front-and-side window voyeurism exercise bares less than thought than Fractured, but the thought that it elicits does not hurt the film, whereas that's precisely the problem in Fractured.

Indeed, the only reason Fractured works at all is Hopkins. He so fills up the screen that he helps distract the viewer (or, I suspect, most viewers) from the problems in the plot. Ryan Gosling's acting, on the other hand, is itself distracting in the opposite way. I've never seen an actor touch his face so often onscreen . . . that is, other than the zombies in Grindhouse, who pop their pustules for the sake of mass infection.

Both Fracture and Disturbia prove variants on the classic romance, as defined by Jack Woodford: boy meets girl, girl gets boy into pickle, boy gets pickle into girl. In each case, in these modern storylines, it is the boy who gets himself into the pickle. And in each case, the other pickle finds its natural end. To show that Fractured is the more adult of the two, the latter pickle action takes place in the development of the main-pickle plot. To show a more standard storyline, the final pickle placement in Disturbia takes place offscreen as the credits roll, in the traditional happily-ever-after realm.

I haven't followed the cartoon strip B.C. in years. But I have many fond memories. Now, the author of those excellent three- and four-panel strips is dead:

Cartoonist Johnny Hart, who won awards and acclaim for creating the BC comic strip, has died at the age of 76.

I'm afraid my favorite Hart jokes were his epigrams, the poems attributed to Wiley, the peg-legged, misogynistic, aquaphobic curmudgeon. Here are two, from memory:

Feature the cone
And its function thereof.
It stands on its orifice
And points straight above.

Inverted and filled
It will tumble at once.
No wonder the cone
Symbolizes the dunce.

And this self-refential one:

Most of my poems
Are written in haste.
And therefore, resultingly,
Lacking in taste.

Yet people who read them
And think they are fine
Must surely have taste
Just as rotten as mine.

I have not read the bulk of his work in recent times, though I've seen a few of his controversial Christian cartoons. Much of the humor of the strip (which means, as my third grade teacher informed me, Before Christ) were all the anachronisms. There is nothing more anachronistic than a turtle and a bird and a clam in the age of dinosaurs and humans preaching about the separation of Church and State. Alas, most of these efforts seem more funny peculiar than funny ha-ha.

My sister just saw Music and Lyrics (which I saw weeks and weeks ago), and mentioned how old Hugh Grant now looks. I find that the actor is less than a year younger than me. I also discover that his birth name was Hugh John Mungo Grant.

Mungo?

I see also that his favorite of his own films is About a Boy. That shows good taste on his part; it is undoubtedly his best film.

Favorite Musicals (my friend Monteith and I agree):

• Singing in the Rain
• Once More With Feeling (Buffy the Vampire Slayer, Season Six, Episode Six)
• Top Hat
• Victor/Victoria
• Scrooge

I like but Monteith Wouldn't:

• Dancing in the Dark

Monteith likes but I don't:

• A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Forum

I did something very odd today: I drove to the city and watched the Academy Awards on the Big Screen. The Kelso Theater and Pub brightened up the silver screen with all the stars of the "firmament."

Maybe it was illusion, the illusion of seeing the big spectacle in a theater, not on a small TV screen, that has me judge the 79th Anniversary Academy Awards as one of the most professional I've witnessed yet. Or maybe it's simply that Ellen DeGeneris is the perfect host. Hostess.

I saw so few of the nominated films that it was hardly worth bothering, in its way. Oh, well. This is part of our culture, and to not watch the Oscars is to blind oneself to an integral part of the world's aesthetic life.

Like everybody else, I was pleased by the "international" and "diverse" flavor of this batch of nominees. Unlike everybody else, I'm getting tired of being preached at about global warming.

Leo and Al and Melissa all reiterated this theme, on stage. With some good jokes, I admit, but . . .

Here's my complaint: This "moral issue, not political" rap is ready-made for sanctimonious Hollywooders. And it's simply not true. If climate change is truly a worldwide problem (and I suspect it is) then it must be a political issue, too.

The "moral issue, not political" slogan is a way to sugar-coat the issue for people who can't think. And since most people can't think, when it comes to science or politics (or religion, or even art, for that matter), this kind of sloganeering seems necessary.

And yet it's the wrong way for environmental prophets of doom to convince skeptics of their doomsaying. At least, it certainly turns me off. (But then, I'm not normal, so maybe this whole rant of mine is pointless.)

The right way might be to not trot out patent nonsense (which is very hard for people in Hollywood, or politics . . . and that includes Al Gore), not make too much of current trends, always pretending that the shape of every curve is always even, or increasing. Admit when they are wrong. Confront the obvious truth, like "sure, environmentalists have been wrong about the ice caps before (Ehrlich saying that increased pollution would cause global cooling and therefore an increase in ice at the poles, causing the Arctic cap to SINK and THEREFORE the oceans to rise!), but telling us why THIS scenario they NOW tout is RIGHT.

Tough to do. I guess that's why they stick with the simplest of models and the simplest of mottos. Anything more, and people might think too much. Brains would explode.

And the planet would heat up even more, with all the emissions from exploding brains.

Oh, well. At least Jerry Seinfeld made sense about morality at the movies. In theaters, the theaters sell us junk food at horrendous markup, and we leave the trash on the floor. That's the deal.

Yes, Jerry, that is the deal.

And when we view the Oscars, we get preached at with absurd messages in exchange for seeing a few of our favorite moviemakers get honored, and a few of our favorite actresses parade on stage in stunning (and, most importantly, revealing) dresses.

That's the deal.

• Out of Africa
  
• Titanic
• The Deer Hunter
• The Lost Weekend
• Gone With the Wind
• On the Waterfront
• Sin City
• Jaws

I asked my friend Jim Monteith for his selection, and he put up some of my favorite films (the last two on his list I've never seen, so I've no opinion):

• Fargo
• Unforgiven
• Annie Hall
• Eraserhead
• Pulp Fiction
• Close Encounters of the Third Kind
• The Color Purple
• Vertigo
• The Blue Angel
• The Wizard of Oz
• A Clockwork Orange
• 2001: A Space Odyssey
• The Third Man
• Rebecca
• Forrest Gump
• The Sting
• Donnie Darko
• Magnolia
• Mr. Smith Goes to Washington (Everything by Capra is over-rated, Monteith says, except Arsenic and Old Lace and It's a Wonderful Life.
• Ace Ventura: Pet Detective (Monteith says Most critics consider it a piece of absolute dreck; I don't rate it that high.)
• The Bandwagon

In a few cases, Monteith and I agree:

• The Searchers
• An American in Paris
• Raging Bull
• The Great Dictator
• Some Like It Hot

Back to just my opinions:

• Most Over-rated Hitchcock: Psycho
• Most Under-rated Hitchcock: Young and Innocent
• Most Over-rated Kubrick: The Shining
• Most Under-rated Kubrick: Barry Lyndon
• Most Over-rated Orson Welles: Touch of Evil
• Most Under-rated Orson Welles: F for Fake

• Most Over-rated SF:

  1. Star Wars
  
  
  
  
  2. Blade Runner
  
  
  
  3. Metropolis
  
  
  
• Most Under-rated SF:
  1. Altered States
  
  
  
  
  2. Gattaca
  
  
  
  3. Brother from Another Planet
  
  
  

The film Music & Lyrics is what Because I Said So tried to be: a clever, amiable romantic comedy. While the latter failed on almost every level, the former shines. Not as great art. But as popular comedy. And it has the sense to laugh at the industry and artform it is about: the simple pop song.

The opening sequence is hysterical, and all through the movie, it is possible for a jaded culture snob like me to laugh at the silly culture of popular music even while rooting for the people involved.

On an imagined permanent value scale of romantic comedies, this film is far below When Harry Met Sally or Four Weddings and a Funeral, but far above unfortunate trash like You've Got Mail and the second (or, for that matter, even the first) Bridget Jones flick.

Not a masterwork. But fun light comedy not trying to be much more than competent entertainment.

And watching people sing pop songs is funny.

Best film recently seen: Children of Men.

Worst film recently seen: Because I Said So.

Current film I most wish to view: Pan's Labyrinth.

Film I definitely will avoid like the plague: Norbit.