Before there was Uggie, there was Mike The Dog, who delivered, per Janet Maslin and others in 1986, “Oscar-caliber work.” (Gone now, but still (somewhat) fondly remembered.)

Films seen and reviewed: Act Of Valor

An action film starring real-life Navy SEALs. Is that a good thing? Not really, I argue in my review.

I have two film reviews in The A.V. Club this week, one for Red Tails, the other for Coriolanus. The first is a long-in-the-works George Lucas production about the Tuskegee Airmen. It’s not very good. The other is Ralph Fiennes’ directorial debut and the first, best I can tell, feature film adaptation of one of Shakespeare’s least-loved major plays. It’s quite good. The former’s a fact-inspired WWII story seemingly created to show off some CGI effects. The latter’s set in a contemporary “Rome” of the imagination abut feel much more immediate, and aware of the toll war takes on the soul.

Recent films I have reviewed: War Horse and We Bought A Zoo

I’ve been on the all creatures great and small beat lately, which worked out well half the time. As for the other half. Well…

The Steven Spielberg-directed adaptation of War Horse is one of my favorite movies of the year, paying homage to classic Hollywood and old-fashioned humanism without being self-conscious about it while still being unmistakably the work of Spielberg. And it’s moving as hell. I love it so much I feel kind of protective about it, and have been a little disheartened by some of the more muted responses. See it. It’s great. 

I can’t say the same for Cameron Crowe’s We Bought A Zoo. I say that as a pretty big fan Crowe’s past work, which even at their most sentimental never strained this hard for effect. If you do go, consider making a drinking game of obviously paid-for references to Target and Home Depot. You will be drunk. Better yet, have another look at Vanilla Sky, Crowe’s most underrated film. Or reconsider Elizabethtown. It’s not as bad as they say! Really!

Finally, I didn’t review Extremely Loud And Incredibly Close but take on it lines up pretty well with Scott Tobias ”F” review. “Cloying” doesn’t begin to describe what director Steven Daldry is up to with this one. Please keep him away from national tragedies.

Polish poster of Mulholland Dr. (2001)

Just because it’s there.

“It only means these youngsters are enjoying themselves”

My latest Secret Cinema column—which I should mention was at special request of Nathan Rabin—covers the Robert Zemeckis-directed I Wanna Hold Your Hand. It’s a fun, nostalgic look at Beatlemania and, I argue, one of several Zemeckis films that takes a fairly complex view of our relationship with the past. (Polar Express is not another one of them.)

Recent review: Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol and Sherlock Holmes: Game Of Shadows

Two sequels make this week’s top punctuation mark the colon, followed by the emdash. One’s terrific one’s grating. But which is which? Actually, let’s go ahead and spoil that. Mission: Impossible - Ghost Protocol is one of the best action films I’ve seen in a long time, and the best of a series that’s been pretty good all along. (Except for the disappointing second entry, which failed to deliver on the promise of letting John Woo loose with Hollywood’s most expensive toys.) One of the best animators around, Brad Bird, makes his live-action debut with this one. It’s animation’s loss, but I doubt anyone will be complaining after seeing this.

MI:4 features explosions galore. So does Sherlock Holmes: A Game Of Shadows but beyond that they have little in common. Bird directs action scenes with classical discipline. Holmes director Guy Ritchie just uses them as an excuse to try some cool-looking shit. I was surprised by how much I liked Ritchie’s first Holmes film, having not cared for his work in the past. But the charms of the first one, including Robert Downey Jr.’s eccentric performance, get lost here as the sensation-above-all Ritchie of old returns. So do the flat characterizations that made me check out on him after Snatch. “Oi! You think you’ve got a bad attitude?” every character seems on the verging of saying. “Wait until you see mine!”

Movies I reviewed the past two weeks (Featuring birds, Texas killers, ska-punk pioneers, and human centipedes)

What do The Big Year, Texas Killing Fields, Everyday Sunshine: The Story Of Fishone, and Human Centipede II (Full Sequence) have in common? Not much, but let’s try to make some connections anyway!

At least two of them are films about obsession. In The Big Year, Owen Wilson, Steve Martin, and Jack Black play obsessive birders. In Human Centipede II, some actor I hope never to see again plays a man obsessed with the first Human Centipede movie and determined to do some ass-to-mouth stitching of his own.

I guess Texas Killing Fields, which felt more like a promising TV pilot than a finished film to me, is sort of about obsession, too, albeit of the garden variety cops-and-killers-doggedly-pursue-their-professions variety. Or maybe that’s compulsion. Compulsion certainly figures prominently in Everyday Sunshine: The Story Of Fishbone at first it’s about the compulsion to make music that gripped a bunch of black L.A. kids in the ’80s who wanted to erase the lines between punk, funk, ska and whatever music floated their boat. Then it’s about what happens when a pair of them keep the band going after turmoil and commercial disappointment shakes it up.

Talking with Stephen Tobolowsky

Today’s A.V. Club includes my Random Roles feature with Stephen Tobolowsky, a terrific character actor and the man behind the great podcast The Tobolowsky Files. I really enjoyed talking to him and I hope you enjoy reading it. (Thanks to /Film’s Dave Chen for setting it up.)

Late to the movies: X-Men: First Class and Cars 2

With Hannah here it’s been hard to get out to the movies this summer. Essentially, if I’m not reviewing it, I probably won’t be watching it until it hits DVD in the fall. Which is a new experience for me. I’m using to spending a good portion of any given summer inside a movie theater. I’m not complaining. Really. The sleeping baby on my chest as I write this is more compelling than just about any movie right now. And, besides, Stevie and I are discovering ways to get to the movies anyway. Last week we drove out to the Cascade Drive-In in West Chicago and this morning we hit a 10:30-ish screening of X-Men: First Class, figuring it was late enough in the run and early enough in the morning that we could drag the baby along without bothering too much people.

I’d rate both ventures as largely successful on the baby-toting front, with the drive-in having the edge. (Plus, you know, it’s the drive-in.) Cars 2, on the other hand, was kind of baffling. I’d had my expectations lowered enough that it was more entertaining than I’d expected, but did Pixar really need to make what felt like an Our Man Flint-style spy spoof? (Someone on Twitter pointed out its similarity to the 1966 Flintsones feature The Man Called Flintstone. I can’t speak to that, but the plot does bear some resemblance to For The Love Of Benji, if I recall correctly.) Technically it’s a wonder, although at this point that’s no surprise, and the designs of the Cars-verse cities around the globe are quite clever, as is the notion of casting notorious clunkers as the villains. But thematically it aims awfully low. It’s the first Pixar movie that felt like it could be the work of a Pixar imitator. The scene where the characters visit the memorial to the Paul Newman-voiced Doc Hudson served as a reminder of how good Pixar can be at stirring emotions. The rest of the film, on the other hand, seemed to forget that.

I liked the first Bryan Singer-directed X-Men films. But after X-Men: The Last Stand and X-Men Origins: Wolverine, I didn’t really care if I saw another mutant on the big screen again. But I heard good things about X-Men: First Class and the movie lived up to them. The script has some groaners and sometimes goes about the business introducing all those characters, powers, back stories, and motivations a bit awkwardly. But the cast—pretty terrific from top to bottom with the notable exception of January Jones—sells it and Matthew Vaughn’s direction doesn’t overreach, mostly getting out of the way of the action rather than chopping it up. The period setting worked too. Maybe it’ll work in for Captain America, too. Maybe I’ll even get to find out while it’s still in the theaters.