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.

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.

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.

Pornography is a sexual aid, and perhaps its value lies in getting sexual release over with quickly.

Is pop music to art music what porn is to interpersonal sexual activity? That is, a quick excitement allowing a quick release, so one needn't bother, any longer, with troublesome complexities. The thing is done and over with in a few minutes. Now, back to work, or gaming, or eating potato chips; something with more inherent interest.

Tila Tequilla's I Love U video is a good example of pop music conjoined with porn in the lowest of unions: the tiny penis of the paltry music is shoved into the stretched, gaping maw of porn. The music is simple, driving, and over with quickly. The sexual antics help make its purpose clear.

Thankfully, it is indeed over quickly.

I purchased the DVD and watched A Scanner Darkly this last week. My sister gave up on it: too many fucks and shits. She hears such language more than enough while teaching at a correctional institution.

As for me, these do not bother me. And I found the film a successful adaptation of Philip K. Dick's great novel, a fine transmutation from prose fiction to rotoscoped film animation. It is the first film of a Dick story that I've watched that keeps Dick's characteristic dark comedy.

But I understand my sister's reluctance to watch the film. I could not read the novel in my '20s; I had to wait until my '30s to down this black comedy. And it was for similar reasons. I have little interest in the lives of addicts. I don't want to be around them in person. And art about them? Well, it took me a while to let the frame of the novel shield me from the distaste of their lives.

The comedy helps. One empathizes with the poor bastards. But still, it helps to be able to laugh at them. For they are risible.

Addicts usually are. When I was young, one of the few reasons I could find to go to bars was to go there to make fun of the drunks.

But it does interest me that people (including me) can watch thousands of deaths in TV and cinematic fiction per year, and not flinch. It is droll when those same people cannot abide by a little swearing.

For me, most of the the time, art's frame takes away the connection to immediate reality that would make me cringe from dealings with the characters and incidents of comedy and drama.

The double standard, allowing murder and death and violence, but not allowing sex and swearing, is interesting, and well worth extensive study. If you understand why this double standard, you will probably understand the real nature of conservativism. Or today's religions.

But there are times when I, too, cannot manage to establish that frame.

As I've mentiond before, TV news shows make it hard for me. There's no artistic frame there, and I actually find it hard not to judge many stories intrusive. My right to know, so to speak (there is no such right, of course), does not entail a right for a cameraman to stick a lens in front of a grieving mother and ask her how she feels. That's just indecent. I don't want to see such grief.

It's too personal.

Just the same, I don't want to see my friends and relatives engaging in sexual acts. Not my business.

But seeing actors go through grief and sex is no problem for me.

And yet . . . I could not watch The Squid and the Whale. The film's characters, particularly of the father and the oldest son, were so disgusting to me that I could not watch the film. I sent it back to NetFlix with only having viewed the first 20 minutes or so. And it took me nearly three weeks to view those 20 minues, in minute-or-so installments. I would view a scene, find something so unbearably contemptible or embarrassing that I had to push Pause, and would then pick up a book.

So it's not violence that sends me away from film. Or profanity. Or sex. It is assholery. I can only take certain kinds of assholery. When people I would normally like as characters and as people engage in assholery, my sensibilities revolt.

In The Squid and the Whale, the characters should be of the kind I'd like: college professionals; smart students.

But they are all, almost to a man, disgusting in the early part of the film, at least. I turned it off.

I'll rewatch the numbskull losers of A Scanner Darkly a second or a third time before I try The Squid and the Whale, again.

This is not a critical review, of course. It is a psychological confession. Everybody has their limits. I've found mine, at least in film.

Other films I've walked out of? Or turned off?

• Romero's Martin
• Fellini's La Strada
• Weitz's American Pie
• Truffaut's Shoot the Piano Player

And literally hundreds of standard Hollywood fodder.