Minnesota 2nd Run Movie House King

The Conspirator was a Civil-War era film about the trial to find guilty the men who they believed had conspired to murder Abraham Lincoln.

The men, and one woman. What evolves is a sense of the national sentiment following the murder of President Lincoln, and how the American people needed to hold someone accountable for what happened. The JFK assassination, the Oklahoma City Bombing and the September 11th terrorist attacks serve as evidence of how this dynamic manifested itself in the 20th Century and 21st. Have we developed a less knee-jerk, wild-west system of justice now than we had in place circa 1865? 

The Conspirator merely lays out how the country reacted, and examines how the evidence was used to come to a verdict in the trial against Mary Surratt. It is up to us to interpret whatever lesson or moral that might be drawn from it. But make no mistake, this film is aware of the values both of the prosecution and the defense. That is what makes the story so riveting. 



As mentioned, the story centers around the legal defense of Mary Surratt (Robin Wright), a boarding house operator who had moved to Washington, D.C. after her father's death to operate a boarding house. Mary and her family had come from the south, and as such had confederate allegiance. However, as we see from flashbacks, Mary is ready to move forward from the conflict and tries to convince her son, John, to do likewise.


John, however, hates the union, and is closely tied with the band of men who have a plan to murder President Lincoln, Vice President Johnson, and Secretary of State William Seward.


It is the unhappy task of young attorney Frederick Aiken (James McAvoy) to serve as counsel in her defense. Aiken was a union soldier, and the last thing he would want is for his friends, fellow soldiers and society to think that he shows sympathy for the confederates, and will effectively try to get a woman who was in some capacity responsible for Lincoln's murder off the hook. The American people mourned the death of Lincoln, and cried for anyone even suspected to have contributed to the plot ought to be sentenced to death by hanging.  

Aiken pleads Senator Reverdy Johnson (Tom Wilkinson) to find a different defense attorney than him. But Johnson knows that Mary Surratt does not have a chance of innocence if a southern lawyer is appointed to the case. So Aiken visits Mary Surratt in prison. It is prickly at first, to be sure. He flat out tells her she's got to help him by providing an account of her involvement with the men she was boarding, and why her son was affilliated with them. He needs not only for her to convince the tribunal of Judge Advocate Generals that she was not an insider in the plot, but she has to convince Frederick. We see him wounded on the battlefield as the film opens, and he of course is looking down his nose at her as a southerner who favored the secession. Having said that, he grows to appreciate how torn she was between her duty to protect her son, John (Johnny Simmons), who had strong Confederate loyalty, and wanted to help Wilkes-Booth take some measure of revenge against the White House, and is in hiding following the assassination; and her desire to just move on with the reconstruction of the United States. She did resent the Union, which, after all, decimated the South and their well-being in order to get the concession they needed, and yet, as an exhausted women who was raising two children alone in the U.S. capitol, she was only too ready to prevent her children from hanging on to the vendetta that so many Confederates maintained against the North. When Aiken goes to check on her daughter (Evan Rachel Wood), we sense a very delicate mutual respect developing between the client and counsel. 

Aiken learns not to judge her as a Confederate mother whose ill-will toward Lincoln must be evidence in and of itself that she contributed to the plot to assassinate Lincoln, but as a woman who did not play an active role in the proceedings of the Wilkes-Booth and his associates during their time as guests in her household, and whose intuitions as a matriarch would have prompted her to do anything in her power to have prevented her children from going out and inciting further rebel violence following the South's official surrender.  

It's really fascinating to see McAvoy as Aiken, grow from an initial apathy towards Surratt, and the near-certainty that she would be hung; to being a lawyer who was fighting for a fair trial, such that she would not receive a death sentence unless the prosecution provided unequivocal evidence that she was involved first-hand in the logistics of the Lincoln assassination, as well as the attempts on Johnson and Seward.

Aiken's biggest thorn in the side here is Secretary of War Edwin Stanton (Kevin Kline) who was appointed by Lincoln, and by his side shortly after the murder. We at first understand Stanton's desire for justice, but then we see how blinded he is by the need for revenge, such that he's willing to influence the outcome of the trial to the extent that Mary Surratt is found guilty, and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.

It's easier to be impartial today to the Surratt proceedings. Back then, I can appreciate the moral ethical debacle that Frederick Aiken was in, as well as the internal conflict that Surratt had over her citizenship as an American and her history as a Confederate. She accepted the treatment so well, and yet the bitterness and heartache is palpable on her face. 

The film becomes very suspenseful as we realize that Surratt is facing down a public hanging, much like the one we saw in 2010's True Grit, and is very much at the mercy of the wrangling between the prosecution and the defense. It comes down to whether or not Aiken can get a Writ of Habeas Corpus from a judge, and gain Mary Surratt a retrial with a jury of her peers, and perhaps a reduced sentence given the lack of substantiation of her involvement in the plot. Over the course of the film we learn that she wasn't entirely in the dark about her son and Wilkes Booth's plans to overthrow the president, how could she have been, but we learn to internalize that her being under the same roof as these men did not make it fair to judge that she was a key player in the coordinated attack that played out. And we get a great sense of her humanity as we see the flashbacks of her as a first and foremost devoted mother. 

Captain America: The First Avenger, you've had a nice run at the top of the list. But you have ably been moved to runner up status. The Conspirator was the best movie of 2011. 

Four stars. 

A newspaper article recently made the point that there hadn't been a wide-released baseball movie since Fever Pitch in 2005. They spoke contemptuously of Jimmy Fallon being cast as a Boston Red Sox fan. I liked Fever Pitch, and would further like to mention that it hasn't been six years since a baseball movie came out. The Perfect Game, starring the kid from Wizards of Waverly Place, came out in 2010. Sugar, filmed in part in Davenport, Iowa, near where my friend Greg O'Neill lives, and featuring a player not unlike the ones he taught over the summer. And as for 2008, while it was not marketed as a baseball movie per se, Twilight actually prominently featured the pasttime as the favored sport of vampires. 

But getting back to the point of the article, it claimed that Moneyball represented the comeback of the baseball movie after a long absence.

I think actually Sugar was ahead of the curb in shifting the nature of the baseball movie, by mixing up the order of finding success, defeat, and redemption. The story starts at the end of the 2001 major league season. Improbably, the Oakland A's had made it to the post-season in the wild card race, and pushed the New York Yankees to seven games. The team's general manager, Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) makes his way across the bay to San Francisco to meet with the team's owner. He wants to change things up for 2002. He wants to get some real talent into the line-up. If they could make strides against a team with a nine figure payroll with the talent they had, think of what they might be capable of if they could use some logistics to stretch their 39,000,000 dollar budget.

On a trip to the Cleveland Indians organization, Billy Beane notices that the team's general manager will not authorize a trade of a particular player after consulting with a young 25 year old man in glasses with a paunch who stands non-descriptly in the corner. This man is Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), and he has quietly leveled with his general manager that the on-base percentage of the player they stood to receive would not guarantee the premium amount of bases for the season. 

In perhaps one of the most enticing scenes of the film, Billy Beane confronts Peter head-on at his cubicle, demanding to know why he discouraged his general manager from accepting the trade for an A's player. In this scene, Peter sort of gets lost in Beane's gaze. I thought of the line in Superbad where Seth told Evan about how he'd looked in the eyes of one of Jules' boyfriends and "it was like hearing the Beatles for the first time." Same went here. I think you could say an instant mancrush was formed.

It's not a stretch to call Moneyball a bromance between Billy Beane and Peter Brand, and yes, Brad Pitt and Jonah Hill are not the first choice for a match-up I would imagine. 

Billy Beane returns to Oakland with Peter Brand signed to his staff as assistant General Manager. The board of the A's are not pleased that this young economics major from Yale might be granted access to the very closed meetings of their board of directors. But Brand's presence is integral to Beane's success as a general manager.

Much as the United States turned to Navajo Indians to use code language to transmit radio signals during World War II to stymie the Germans, Billy Beane wants to use sabremetrics to compile a roster of Oakland A's players who would be formidable enough talentwise and discretionwise to accumulate an on-base percentage as a ball club that could legitimately compete with the Yankees and the other American League baseball outfits.

At first, Beane, along with Brand, are scoffed at by the long-standing members of the board, and the scouts who pride themselves in finding players with good batting averages to recruit to the organization. Happily, Beane is stubborn enough to face such men down, and uses his authority as general manager with bluster to hire and trade accordingly. Over Christmas, he makes a trip with first base coach Ron Washington (Brent Jennings) to the home of Scott Hatteberg (Chris Pratt) a catcher who has a decent on-base percentage but no contract for the upcoming season. While his wife crunches numbers at the dining room table and their daughter sleeps, Chris entertains the offer of Beane to have him play for the Oakland A's as a first baseman.

"Is it hard to learn to play first base?" asks Hatteberg. 

"No, it's not that hard," Beane reassures, then gestures to Washington. "Tell him."

"It's incredibly hard," the first base coach deadpans, not missing a beat.

In the moment, this was high-stakes, high-tension for the third-base coach, the general manager, and the prospective first baseman. They were making an incredible financial gamble on a player who would be experienced in one position but was very green in the outfield spot they needed him for. However, watching it transpire from the seats of a movie theater, it is not hard to laugh hysterically at the conflicting agendas of Beane and Washington in their effort to settle upon a suitable first-base candidate.

Do the sabremetrics work right away? Of course not. The team falls into a rut, well below .500 through May and June, and Beane is questioned by everyone from the fans to the sportscasters to the board. Then there's Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), the team's manager, who relentlessly disagrees with Beane's suggestions for players in the game's line-up. As general manager, technically Beane has the authority to call the shots. But Howe, who's contract has not yet been renewed for the upcoming year, starts to feel he has less and less to lose by going with his gut and putting in the players he feels are more rested, reliable and capable of getting hits.

Some interesting moments in the film include Beane asking Brand to deliver the news to a player that he has been traded to the Tigers. Brand is just a young guy who crunches numbers, and the last thing he wants to do is tell a player that he has to uproot from his residence and move to another city to play for their team. His entire social life he has to leave behind, and if he has a family, hopefully they're not too settled yet. Peter hates having to do this, and I was reminded of the scene in Up in the Air when Anna Kendrick had to deal the news via videoconferencing to an older man that his position was no longer available. The fact that Peter labors over the nicest way possible to say this conflicts with Billy Beane's personality completely.

"Would you rather get one shot in the head or five in the chest and bleed to death?" Beane asks Brand in a meeting before he is scheduled to deliver the news of the trade to the player.

"Are those my only options?" Peter asks.

After weeks of lopsided losses over wins, suddenly the A's get on track, and manage to win over twenty straight games in the regular season, and find themselves primed to enter the post-season. It all comes down to an eleven-eleven tie game, which had been an 11-0 lead the A's had let slip away. Scott Hatteberg steps up to the plate. It is his discipline, and his keen eye for the pitch, that will give him the advantage of getting on base over the bat-cracking A-Rods and Jeters of the Yankees outfit. While the film tries very hard to stay existentialist, whereby baseball is a business and a franchise that has to crunch numbers for productivity of its employees in order to decide who to retain, trade, put in for a series, or who to rest, the success of the A's, against all odds, causes the film to finally embrace the element of prevailing over adversity that has become the staple of so many great baseball movies in the past. And it does so beautifully, with a quiet score by Michael Danna, a screenplay by Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin, with the story by Stan Chervin, and based off of the book by Michael Lewis, the film is left with no choice but to dispense with its rational convictions in pursuit of depicting the game as a labor of love, as the circumstances it is portraying dictate such a mood.

When a young man named Adam discovers that he has a malignant tumor growing on his spinal cord, and that he has only a fifty-fifty chance of survival, he reaches out for help...and finds that no one in his inner circle knows exactly how to receive him and respond to him with his new condition...except for the people who are suffering from cancer along with him.




50/50, a fine film from director Jonathan Levine and screenwriter Will Reiser (based upon his own experiences) stars Joseph Gordon-Levitt as Adam, a young man who works for an NPR affiliate in Seattle, Washington. Episodic back pain sends him to the doctor, and an MRI reveals the surprisingly bad news.He learns that the tumor is already too large to operate on, and that he will begin receiving chemotherapy. He struggles to maintain a routine life while everyone around him heaps on awkward sympathy. When his girlfriend (Bryce Dallas-Howard) learns, she shows support with cautious distance. His best friend, Kyle (Seth Rogen) seems to be in a form of denial, and tackles it with a sense of humor, realizing thst his loyalty to his friend may in fact be an inroad to portray his masculine sensitivity for females he's interested in hooking up with.

Kyle throws Adam a manner of a goodbye party at his place of work, where he receives the well-wishes of co-workers who so badly want to paint a sanitized portrait of cancer for him. One co-worker (played by Will Reiser himself) is quick to point out he had an uncle who beat cancer. Others ask somewhat timidly about what the treatment options are, their sense of imminent dread hard to ignore. No example of this is clearer than his boss, who flat-out tells Adam he's going to miss him. What? Really? I had to laugh out loud at that moment. Even if I had Stage 4 Terminal Cancer, I had completed a living will and was taking chemo as a last-ditch effort to buy time, I would still avoid making an outright goodbye with anyone, or at least until I was on my deathbed. I thought Adam was remarkably well-adjusted in the early stages of his diagnosis, and perhaps felt more of a need to offer consolation to his friends than a need to accept it from them, poorly articulated as it had come at him.

Adam has a girlfriend (Bryce Dallas-Howard) who already seemed very emotionally reticent towards Adam to begin with. Upon learning of his cancer diagnosis, she makes the concerted effort to be supportive and grow closer to him. But it's obvious that she is not ready to make the emotional commitment of helping a boyfriend cope with a serious illness. In fact, after some well-intentioned but middling gestures of support (thrusting a therapy greyhound on him and guilt-tripping him into keeping it, helping host an awkward dinner with him when he tells his parents about the illness where she somewhat haltingly accepts the task of taking care of him to appease Adam's mom), the girlfriend kind of checks out of the relationship completely. 

It is here that Kyle pulls through for Adam. Everyone else around him is handling him with kid gloves. It's awkward when you can't do or say anything to make things better for Adam! Kyle reasons that, so he just sticks by Adam even if he can't really adequately help absorb the blow of the cancer diagnosis. But Kyle is there for his friend. One night, after Kyle takes advantage of his friendship with Adam to score a date to an art gallery exhibit with a lady he met in the bookstore, Kyle catches Rachael on a date with another man. 

When Kyle takes a picture of them with his smart phone, he goes right to Adam and reports it. Why does he not keep it from his friend? Wouldn't he spare his friend's feelings by keeping her man on the side a secret? On the other hand, what happiness was he protecting? Adam knew that deep down Rachael was not doing enough to make him happy. She drops him off for chemo but doesn't stay with him. She's late by hours picking him up. So Kyle's sense of satisfaction in breaking the news to Adam is not that of a man who enjoys being the bearer of bad news to bring his friends down to size...it is a satisfaction of having the opportunity to prove his loyalty to Adam, and actively work to make his friend's life better by revealing to his friend what an insufficient support system he had with Rachael.

Inevitably, a showdown ensues between Kyle and Rachael over which one is the more devoted. 

It's not a huge spoiler that Adam realizes Kyle is the truer friend. 

And Kyle is there for many scenes, cracking wise, helping Adam pick up women, getting coffee, helping him walk his dog...Kyle does not at all hold back for fear of weirdness about landing upon the right thing to say; he just fumbles towards the least damaging encouragement like everyone else, but feels less inhibition about doing so. So he stands by Adam without shame. 

Alan and Mitch (Matt Frewer and Philip Baker Hall) are two other cancer patients that Adam meets while getting chemotherapy. The scenes together alternate radically between introspective reflection on mortality and very comical interchange. Adam doesn't have to worry about people stepping lightly around his condition when he's with Alan and Mitch. They're cancer patients alongside him, and give him some of the best insight into living a meaningful life while their health is in a precarious state. Adam sees what a force of love and support Mitch's wife is, and this suggests to him what he should be looking for in a woman. 

Alan and Mitch offer Adam some marijuana on his first visit to chemotherapy. Unbelievably, they're allowed to eat macaroons laced with pot right there in the hospital. This leads to the film's funniest scene, where Adam walks through the hospital with a goofy grin, still stoned from the cookies, unfettered by the scenes of ill cancer patients, and even a body underneath a sheet pushed by orderlies, that pass him while the song "To Love Somebody" plays in the background. He is in remarkably good shape for having come out of chemo...

...until later that night, when he has come down from the high, and the nausea kicks in. He leaps out of bed and barely makes it to the bathroom in time, looking every bit the wreck that I was when I had stomach flu a year ago.

I should say that Kyle is not the only person in Adam's life who does not let the awkwardness of the cancer diagnosis get in the way of their determination to help him. There's his therapist, Katherine (Anna Kendrick) who does her damndest to try to help him come to grips with his condition. She's only 24, and we're meant to assume that Adam is one of her first patients. She always keeps a textbook or folder nearby, and clumsily clings to the knowledge from her classroom about the stages of grieving. I thought of the episode of The Office when Dwight won a regional sales award, and had to give a speech at the hotel, and wound up clumsily adapting a Mussolini propaganda speech to salespeople. The more times I see this movie, the funnier the Anna Kendrick scenes are going to become. (Same goes for Jessica in Twilight.) Adam adamantly defies her attempts at therapy, but has the innate understanding that she wants to help him, and perhaps the support she can offer is not the kind one can go and do clinical hours and get a degree to offer.

When the chemotherapy proves ineffective, surgery proves to be the last option. The doctor dispassionatly tells Adam about the risks of the surgery, and how if they cannot extract the tumor through the incision in the allotted time, his life will very much be on the line. 

Adam spends the last night before the surgery with Kyle. They have beers in the park. Adam asks to drive Kyle's SUV. For Adam, it's not unlike Will Ferrell's Harold Crick in Stranger Than Fiction. He is going under the knife, which anyone this day in age fears (I remember having trepidation about having my wisdom teeth taken out). In his case, though, the doctor told him point blank it was the last option and the size of the tumor could cause complications. So he has a meltdown that perhaps he's been building towards the whole film. he has incrementally been losing control over his well-being, and he stands to lose everything in one fell swoop if the surgery goes wrong, though his other option is a slow and painful death.

The value of human life becomes a prevalent theme in this gem of a film; though it may sound cliched, not taking your health for granted, living life to the fullest, the film sort of earns the right to make these points by stubbornly upholding the backdrop of being a comedy. On his last night (or we'll treat it as his last night, since he was not in a place where he wanted to look beyond the day ahead), he finally takes a call from his mom, he takes a long walk alone in the rain, and he calls Katherine. Not really having anything to lose, he perforates the membrane between therapist and patient and as much as tells her he has strong feelings for her. In his case, I say go for it. Katherine didn't really know what to say, but we're willing to wager that she is not without strong feelings for him.


Instead of insisting on being an intrepid family drama where no easy reconciliation is made between the ill son and the mother he's pushed to the margins, we get to see Adam better grasp why his mom worries the way she does (her son has cancer, her husband has alzheimers), and he manages to make great strides with her before being wheeled away to the operating room.  You know, just in case he makes it out okay, it'd be nice to know he hadn't burned any bridges.

I loved 50/50. Joseph Gordon-Levitt responded to Seth Rogen's plea to take the role within days of the beginning of shooting. While Rogen was his perfunctory self, Joseph Gordon-Levitt really expanded his range both as a comic actor and as a dramatic one, the latter comprising a majority of his film roles. Yeah, Kyle seemed kind of reprehensible at times, using his friend to score dates and expecting him to have the energy to hit the clubs til all hours when he was, you know, undergoing chemo. But while he was kind of opportunistic about his friend's illness, he was never single-mindedly exploitative, and he never left his friend behind.

50/50 is one of the best movies of 2011.


Three and 3/4 stars.  
  

I really liked Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2.



While I did have to refresh my memory as to what had taken place in Deathly Hallows Part 1 (and where it had left off) after a long winter and spring, I was soon in the throes of Harry, Ron and Hermoine's race against time to confiscate and destroy the seven Horcruxes that are key in the return of Voldemoort to power.

I think this Horcrux theme has caught on a lot in recent movies. Case in point: Transformers: Dark of the Moon, wherein the autobots had to retrieve the five pillars so that the Decepticons wouldn't use them to bring Cybertron to earth and enslave humanity. Sucker Punch had the five items needed for the girls to take down Blue Jones and the High Rolller; the map, fire, the knife, a key, and the fifth item.

These two hit movies (we'll pretend Sucker Punch was a hit, because it was great), came sandwiched inbetween Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 and 2. Hallows 2 begins rather quietly. Harry has just buried the house-elf Dobby, who bravely fought for him by unscrewing the chandelier in Deathly Hallows Part 1. Harry goes to the house of Griphook, and learns that he will need to go to Gringotts bank to retrieve the Horcrux that is stored in the account of Bellatrix LeStrange. This will, of course, require that Harry, Ron, and Hermoine transfigure into Bellatrix and her allies to withdraw the item.

Then we see Hogwarts, where Snape, menacing as always, warns against any wizards who might have been communicating with the Boy Who Lived, or may defy Voldemoort.

After months on the road searching for Horcruxes, Harry learns that he will in fact need to return to Hogwarts to find one of the seven mystical objects hidden there. He returns by means of a secret passageway, all the while staying one thin step ahead of the Death Eater's.
He emerges with Ron and Hermoine in a basement chamber of one of the houses...to the great surprise of the Hogwarts' students, who expected yet another confrontation with the Death Eaters or one of the Dark Lord's deputies when they heard the bricks in the wall move.

Harry enlists everyone's help to find the missing Horcrux, not knowing exactly what he's even looking for. He knows he has to get Draco Malfoy's wand, as it is the instrument that Voldemort intends to use for Potter's demise.

We see Harry in an epic aerial chase with Draco Malfoy, who gets knocked off his own broomstick in an attempt to stop Harry from destroying a Horcrux and to save his wand. Harry has Malfoy in a position where he easily could have ended him by letting him fall into the flames; but we all knew Harry is far too big of a person to do that. (by that I mean of course his heart, ethics and dignity). He rescues Malfoy, much to the chagrin of Ron, and the fight over the wand ensues.

At Hogwarts, an epic battle ensues between the Dark Lord with his army against the good wizards, led by Professor McGonagal, the would-be successor to Dumbledore. Harry, Ron, Hermoine, Neville Longbottom, Luna Lovegood, Fred and George, Ginny, and the Weasley's all take up arrms, or rather, wands.

And then there's the issue of Severus Snape.

Here's the thing; we've known across the whole book series that Severus Snape is a profound gray area. Everytime we think we've got the goods on him and know that he's behind some atrocity, he turns around and does something remarkable to save Harry. He reversed Professor Quirrel's curse on Harry during the Quiddich game in Sorceror's Stone; he called together the Order of the Phoenix to come to Harry's rescue when Harry goes to the Department of Mysteries in the Ministry of Magic to retrieve the memory that Voldemoort baited him to come find through giving visions of Sirius Black's torture.

But as I was reading Half-Blood Prince, when Snape took points away from Harry for his late entry to Hogwarts after a being left on the train beaten to a bloody pulp by Malfoy, or watching Snape kill Dumbledore after seemingly assuring Harry he had come to save the day in the movie, I wasn't ready to make nice with the Slytherin head.

Just as quickly as I think I know everything, however, everything changes. We learn over the course of Deathly Hallows, Part 2, that Harry's mom, Lily, was one of the only friends that Snape had while he attended Hogwarts, and Harry's father, James, which we learned from the Pensieve visit in Order of the Phoenix, was one of the worst bullies Snape encountered. Snape has a love hate relationship with Harry for good reason; he absolutely despised his father, and yet he saw traces of Lily in him.

Which is why, when Snape is on his death's bed, Harry rushes to find a capsule to catch Snape's teardrops, so they can be used to enter the Pensieve and learn the truth that he has guarded; (warning, spoilers) Snape so grieved over the death of Lily Potter that he risked everything his whole life so that Harry Potter could live; he did what Leonardo Di Caprio's Billy Costigan did in The Departed; he worked as a faithful deputy to Voldemoort, all the while a mole planted to serve as informant to Dumbledore.

The film approaches its climax as Harry goes to face Voldemoort mano-a-mano in the woods. Hermoine and Ron plead to go with him, but Harry's finally at the point where he wants to end this, whether he lives through it or dies. It's a decision he doesn't struggle long with, not nearly as much as Ron and Hermoine do.

In the woods, Harry and Voldemoort draw wands, and Harry is knocked out instantly. Voldemoort believes he has found his prize. Harry ascends to a sort of other world, an afterlife that is seemingly constructed from his own memories. He speaks to Dumbledore, and he visits a train station.

Voldemort, meanwhile, brings the body of Harry back to Hogwarts, where a crying Ginny assumes the worst, as do the rest of them. But what Voldemort does not know is that the wand he had used to defeat Harry had a different user than Dumbledore, and he comes to realize what he thought was the wand of Hogwarts' former headmaster was in fact switched around, as such perhaps not capable of dealing a fatal blow.

What follows is an all-out firefight between the Death Eaters and the Hogwarts wizards. Yes, there is bloodshed. There are casualties including characters we love. We see a makeshift morgue area where members of the Order of the Phoenix are lied down, and sadly, a classmate of Harry's.

What does make the film satisfying, as was the case with the Order of the Phoenix book and film, is the surprising agility and strength of Neville Longbottom. Long the feckless, accident prone wizard, we see he has something to fight for, and really leads a charge against the Death Eaters who approach from the bridge. Before the fight, he confides in Harry that he's going to tell Luna Lovegood how he actually feels about her.

In other romantic news that comes to fruition, Ron and Hermoine have to join forces to destroy a Horcrux, and in doing so we finally get the make-out scene between the two of them I had been waiting for since Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.

And of course, there's Harry and Ginny....the erstwhile girlfriend who readily sacrifices her own safety to fight beside him. We see her valiantly draw wands against Luna Lovegood, and amidst this matchup which may have found Ginny overmatched, Mrs. Weasley comes through in a refreshingly brazen act of wizardry to save her only daughter.

The gripping moments of the film, where family and close friends are lost, are brief, and as such hang with us by their brevity. Harry never wanted a single life to go to waste to protect him; but really, the people who died fighting alongside Harry were doing more than just protecting the Boy Who Lived; they were defending a way of life, and preserving the future of all Wizardkind. Really, that fight was much bigger than just Harry Potter all along. He's the necessary piece to win the fight against evil on behalf of everyone. They stake their dreams in him.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2  was a worthy finish to the franchise, upholding the momentum of the first half of the book for an exemplary finish. It is likely to stay in the top 3 for much of 2011, maybe all the way to Oscar night.

Four Stars.

Now summer's getting somewhere!

Captain America is a wholesome, patriotic story about Steve Rogers, the all-American boy who has twice the heart of your average person, but only half of the body mass.

I was worried that the CGI digital shrinking of Chris Evans would distract me from the performance. Not so. Like with Benjamin Button, my trepidation was in vein.

Steve Rogers watches his friends enlist to fight against the German forces in World War II, but every time he tries to sign up himself, he can never pass the physical. In addition to being stick thin, he has asthma and a number of other medical maladies. So the closest he can get himself to the warfront is watching the newsreels at the cinema. When a couple of dumb, loud teenagers shout that they want the movie to begin, Steve Rogers can't stand not to get lip with them. As a result, he gets himself attacked in an alley.

Steve Rogers one chance to get into the army is through the Army's Special Scientific Reserve recuriting office, which he comes across at the 1942 World Exhibition of Tomorrow. After watching weapons baron Howard Stark (Dominic Cooper) strut out his latest technology, which includes an early-model hover car, Rogers slips in to get a physical for enlistment. He wouldn't have passed, if he were not noticed by Dr. Abraham Erskine (Stanley Tucci), who decides to use him for a special experiment. Erskine has developed a syrum that expedites bone and muscle growth to transform a man into a superhuman soldier. This is the only way Rogers can get past Colonel Chester Phillips, who isn't even totally convinced by Rogers' bravery when he throws himself onto a grenade he believes is live during a training routine.

It is a risky procedure for Rogers to go through with this medical procedure. It takes up thousands of watts of energy, such that the power grid falters. We hear him scream from inside the chamber as his muscles and bones expand at an accellerated rate. But an out of control Hulk the result of this experiment is not. Rogers emerges as a super-soldier, ripped, tall, and with improved senses...but with the very same heart and mind with which he entered into it. This is what makes him the ideal specimen to represent America in the fight against the Third Reich. 

Immediately Rogers smells a rat within the entourage of witnesses to the procedure. A NAZI agent in disguise named Kruger is among the congressmen, military brass and Stark Industries personnel who witnesses the transformation of Steve Rogers. Kruger, as it turns out, works for the enigmatic Johann Schmidt, and somehow managed to gain clearance to the highly classified Brooklyn laboratory where the procedure was taking place. Upon gaining the information on Dr. Erskine's formula, he makes his true identity known by firing off rounds, intent on using the medical technology to develop performance-enhanced fighters for the NAZIs. Rogers takes off on foot, clearly in instant control of his new-found strength. One moment where the NAZI makes off with a kid at gunpoint was sobering for me, since I remember losing my nephew momentarily in Chicago last Spring, and all sorts of horrible thoughts popped into my mind. "Don't hurt him!" the mother screamed helplessly as the NAZI used the 9 year old for escape leverage. Rogers, happily, has just as much horsepower as this NAZI, and with sound moral judgment to boot. The NAZI tries to get away in his water craft, but Captain America thwarts that plan right quick. The only problem is the NAZI doesn't give out a great deal of information about who he works for before deploying his exit strategy.

Steve Rogers wants badly to start fighting the NAZIs on the front lines, but he's used instead to raise war bonds, sent on a nationwide tour to raise money in costume as Captain America. He visits different cities, dutifully reading his pitch, while feeling secretly demoralised at not putting his power to real use.... that is, until, he hatches a plan to find and rescue his best friend, Joe "Bucky" Barnes, kidnapped and held deep behind enemy lines. His plan to get to him? A little help from maverick military industrialist and ace pilot Howard Stark, a reminder to us that everything is relative in the Marvel universe. Well, not only the help of Stark, but also Agent Peggy Carter (Hayley Atwell), a woman who had some involvement in the performance enhancement project. It's no secret that Agent Carter and Steve Rogers have strong feelings for each other, stretching back to even before he made his radical transition. So when Howard Stark asks her if she wants to stop in Paris for fondue after they make their drop of Captain America behind enemy lines, Rogers naturally assumes it's some kind of innuendo for sex. He makes some block-headed accusations, which only served to endear me to Rogers as a poor naive sot who still scrambled to find social skills to suit the pristine, chiseled masculine body he had acquired.

Never mind his novice social swagger. On the ground, with shield and pistol in hand, Captain America is one of the most formidable weapons the U.S. Armed Forces has. He penetrates the HYDRA Base, which is where he comes across not only Bucky Barnes, but five other POWs who were leverage for the maniacal Red Skull, who has gone around under the face mask of Johann Schmidt (Hugo Weaving). Captain America discovers that the NAZIs have far more up their sleeve than toppling and overtaking every country in Europe. Nope, they have a nefarious plan to take over the entire world, with bombs labeled with American and world cities.

Captain America sets out, with Agent Carter's help, to pinpoint the exact coordinates of all of HYDRA's munitions facilities on a map of Europe. With that information, he sets out with his vibra

Captain America now has not only his country, but his planet to think about in thwarting the plans of Red Skull. The POWs he rescues become the Howling Commandos. This consists of Rogers' best friend, Bucky Barnes, Timothy "Dum Dum" Dugan, Montgomery Falsworth, Gabe Jones, Jim Morita, and Jacques Dernier.

Captain America knows that the HYDRA mastermind Red Skull is on a train passing through the French Alps. As the U.S. Army had Dr. Erskine working on genetic engineering on their end, the evil NAZI terrorist faction leader has his own assistant in biomedical advancement, Dr. Arnim Zola (Toby Jones), who is on the train as well. Captain America decides the best way to get information is not merely to have planes flying over the enemy bases, but actually plans to zip line down to the train and find the plans they have for their world domination, then hand-deliver them to U.S. Army intelligence. If they can get the classified information from this reconnaissance mission, the Captain will have a huge advantage in thwarting this super-secret, super dangerous subsidiary movement of the NAZIs. If there is an Achille's heel to Captain America, it is his enormous ability to feel and empathize. This, of course, drives his heroic actions. But when a man from the Howling Commandos doesn't make it out of the train infiltration, Steve Rogers is left in a bad state of regret and remorse. And as he points out to Peggy Carter in a bombed out bar, his attempt to drown his sorrows in whiskey is in vein. His new-found metabolism with his body strength prevents him from getting drunk. It is understandable that he could feel this sense of responsibility, since the fallen soldier was among the ranks he led back to safety from the clutches of HYDRA. Peggy is good of a friend for Steve as a potential romantic interest, which makes their dynamic in Captain America unique among comic book movies. She provides emotional support for him above all, and tells him what he needed to hear; those soldiers weren't on the mission strictly for him; they were in it to do what they knew was right.

But this does make it personal for Captain America, as Colonel Chester Phillips points out to Dr. Arnim Zola during interrogation. Phillips, at first skeptical of Steve Rogers' purpose in the fight against the NAZIs, is sort of won over by the last third of the movie, and he knows that the NAZIs are sweating with Captain America leading the charge in blowing up their weapons facilities. It is with this sense of desperation to act quickly that Red Skull loads up a glider with explosives that he intends to drop on every major American city, as well as points abroad.

It is Captain America's brave to the point of delusional mission to board this HYDRA aircraft, fight hand to hand combat with Red Skull personally, and redirect the aircraft to a safe detonation locale far off of the U.S. coastline. Delusion may be a strong word. He knew exactly what he was doing, he was just making a very big sacrifice within his right mind.

Of course Captain America has to say goodbye to Agent Carter, but not without a shared moment beforehand...a great shared moment. (Between this film, Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2, and Thor, it's been a great summer for kissing scenes.)

Before diverting the plane to its remote resting place, Captain America gets on the horn with Peggy, making a promise to take her on a dancing date, though the two of them have an unspoken understanding that this is just an affectionate way for them to make a farewell to each other.

If Captain America survives the descent of this ship, he will not wake up in his own time.

Captain America: The First Avenger, you relieve Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows of its brief tenure at the spot; this is the best film I have seen so far from 2011. In fact, this sets the bar pretty high for the year. It may be deep in to the fall before I see a film that impresses me more than this elegant mesh of action, romance, drama, art direction, period musical score, and visual effects under the keen, knowledgeable eye of Joe Johnston. I await The Avengers eagerly.

Four Stars.

This is a very good point. My former roommate, Blake, and I have encountered bullying on a regular basis. Whenever we go to movie critic conferences, for example, I find myself scoffed at and berated for some of the choices on my top ten lists for the year. What if I did think Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows pt. 1 was the 2nd best film of 2010? And who cares if Blake thought Serenity was one of the top 5 movies of 2005? We like what we like.

And one thing we can do to stop bullying is to show bullies we just aren't fazed. We like what we like. Leave Blake alone if he goes on the record saying Glee is the best comedy series on television, never mind the fact its plotlines are maudelin, overextended and archetypical. It is admittedly above average for Fox.

And what if I didn't go along with the rest of the nation buying the ketchup popsicle while wearing white gloves (to borrow an anecdote from Tommy Boy) that the rest of the critics did in believing The Social Network was a groundbreaking, historic piece of work? At the end of the day, friend sues friend over money and they become enemies. It was a perfunctory piece of work on a topic that's already been explored! 3 and 1/3 stars. I don't need a bunch of critics from the Denver Post, the Chicago Tribune, and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch laughing at my face over drinks at the hotel bar that I stacked it behind Shrek Forever After, Scott Pilgrim vs. the World and Tron: Legacy on my year end list. It made the Top 20 for heaven's sake.....at #20.

Bullying stops when everyone looks inside and realizes there's something other people could laugh at about them. We all have interests we have no reason to be proud of when presenting them to the general public. I happened to really enjoy Judy Moody and the Not Bummer Summer. I cry every time I watch Big Fish. I think Tommy Lee Jones was just as good in U.S. Marshalls as he was in The Fugitive, and he handily matched both performances with his role as Mike Roark in Volcano!

If we all loved arthouse films and no one had a guilty pleasure in the blockbuster action season, what would the point of debate be?

But the debate does not need to resort to bullying. If we let the pot-shots roll off of our representative shoulders, the bullies will realize they aren't having much effect and just quit. Or if they do persist, confront them and call them what they are. Most people this day in age are embarrassed at being accused of being a bully, what with the negativity of its connotations. And if you're outnumbered by bullies who think your opinions are ridiculous, enlist the help of whatever critics you can find to back you up!  

Wow, was X-Men: First Class a good movie! It was brave enough to prescribe to the summer blockbuster period of openings, with the plump June 3rd weekend, while also insisting on a period production design that gave the whole piece a sense of great detail.



Directed by Matthew Vaughn (Kick-Ass, 2010's 6th best movie), X-Men: The First Class largely is set in 1962, when a young Professor Charles Xavier (James McAvoy) came across a gentleman named Erik Lehnsherr (Michael Fassbender), and found their commonality that they had strange mutant superhuman powers. They forged ahead with a common goal of finding as many people as possible on the planet who had special abilities.

The film has its beginning in 1944, when a teenage Lehnsherr was forced to attempt to use his mutant superpower of telekinesis in order to prevent NAZI Sebastian Shaw (Kevin Bacon) from killing his mom. Lehnsherr writhes with effort, but does not yet have the control of accessing his ability on command or out of free will. This makes Shaw resort to desperate measures to set Lescher off, and it is a moment that will shape Lescher as he continues on in life. He can't call upon telekinesis to move a coin for Shaw, so the NAZI makes Lescher's mom pay for it. As Erik demolishes the office with his powers unleashed, a frightening Shaw shouts accolades in German.

It goes without saying that Kevin Bacon crafts Sebastian Shaw into one frightening villain, the likes of which comes around only a few times a year if we're lucky. His sinister gaze lets us know he will stop at absolutely nothing to make Mutants the master race. The fact that he starts out as a NAZI is in fact a metaphor, since aryan white Germans thought similar of themselves over Jews and Gypsie, and as such resorted to genocide to do away with who they thought to be inferior ethnicity. Shaw has targeted the human race as a whole. They can't understand mutant powers, and in his mind aren't worthy of breathing the same air as mutants.

Around the same time, in Westchester County, New York, a child-age Charles Xavier meets and takes in a young shapeshifing mutant, a girl named Raven, who entered his estate pretending to be his mother.

In 1962, we find Lehnsherr in a Swiss bank, full control of his telekinesis powers, and removing the fillings from a Swiss banker's teeth to get the address of Sebastian Shaw in Argentina.

We also find Xavier and Raven full-grown. It was tough for me to tell whether they were going to be romantic, or if it was more of a brother-sister relationship. The way Raven would collapse and lay on Charles on the couch seemed to me to be Matthew Vaughn's subtle hint that yeah, they're an item. I didn't read the comic book, though, so I guess I missed the memo that Charles and the future Mystique had no romantic history, it was brother-sister. Blake brought that point home to me that Charles and her were raised as brother and sister when we saw the film while meeting up in Minneapolis recently. That explained why he was honeytalking every dame in that bar except for her, and he accused her of harshing his style when she came to him. The fact that she didn't get jealous when he was trying to convince a woman to come home with him also cemented that Raven and Charles were totally platonic.

We learn, through the undercover spying work of CIA agent Moira MacTaggart (Rose Byrne, so great in Bridesmaids), that Shaw has some sway over the U.S. armed forces. At a gentleman's club in Las Vegas, we see Shaw encounter Colonel Hendry, whom he tries to blackmail into planting nuclear missiles in Turkey. Like Iron Man's Obediah Stane, Shaw works both sides so as to pit them against each other. Whereas Stane was interested in making a dollar as his bottom line, Shaw's was the supremacy of the mutant race. Not only would they rule the earth, by Shaw's logic, true victory could only be achieved by wiping out all of mankind in the process.

Shaw then goes on a bloody rampage, cooly taking out Russian guards, American diplomats on his yacht, CIA agents at Langley, and even a young fellow mutant, who decides not to go with him when he shows up trying to solicit them to leave their safehaven with the . The young mutants Charles Xavier and Erik Lehnsherr manage to find on their international mission to recruit mutants includes Beast (Nicolas Hoult), also known as Hank McCoy, and a brilliant student;  Angel Salvatore (Zoe Kravitz), who works at the Hellfire Club, and has learned to resort to her powers when she senses she has been made the prey; Banshee, or Sean Cassidy (Caleb Landry-Jones), who is able to coast off of the sonic waves of his screams; Darwin/Armando Muñoz (Edi Gathegi), a young cab driver who can develop gills in water, thick skin for cold, and in general adapt to just about any new environment, climate or ecosystem; and of course Raven (Jennifer Lawrence) who will one day become Mystique. 

Raven is quite taken with Hank McCoy. It is interesting to observe how their philosophies differ with regards to their abilities. Hank sees it as a deformity, and seeks to develop a serum that will make him appear to be more like other people. Raven, however, takes the opposing view, and feels prompted to always appear in her blue form, and at one point dispenses with clothing alltogether, leaving all of her lady-like curves and contours for the world to see. I loved the scene where she walked into the kitchen and Charles Xavier did a double take, forcing himself to look away. I love a good bashful moment for James McAvoy. The scene in Atonement when Cecilia stripped to her undies and jumped into the pond to retrieve the water basin and emerged with much visible to Robbie came to mind. So who's right? Hank or Raven? Should they try to conform and show humans they're working together? Or should they wear their mutations on their sleeves and demand that humans conform to accepting them?  

It is nice to see that at least for a time, the majority of mutants could all work together towards a common goal; developing their respective powers in an environment of mutual advocacy while coexisting peacefully with humans. It's a recurring theme you see across many movies; wizards living among muggles in Harry Potter; the autobots not only living alongside humans but provideing security deetail in Transformers: Dark of the Moon are two examples that come to mind. It is fair to say that Shaw is the Voldemort or Megatron, as he has special powers, but believes that humans cannot peacefully accept the "other" into their lives; as such, humans are the ones who should be conquested. 

I sat back and watched in horror as Shaw carried out double-dealings, slaughtered innocent humans who were in fact allies to the mutants, and then took down a mutant like himself just for not being willing to go with him. Kevin Bacon really is working on a different level here. I know him best for playing the lady's man (Picture Perfect), the good-hearted new guy (Footloose), or a combination of the two (Apollo 13). But he scared me on a level of Gary Sinise, Peter Sarsgaard, John Lithgow, Javier Bardem, and Jeff Bridges. I really sensed death waited around the corner whenever he walked into a room.

Lehnsherr has justifiable rage at Shaw for his mother's demise at the deranged mutant's hands. He  travels the globe trying to catch up with him, speaking numerous languages along the way. Meanwhile, Charles believes that terminating Shaw only continues the cycle of violence. With his pained eyes and searing twitch, he does his damndest to reason Lehnsherr out of outright killing the supervillain. I think Charles knew that even if Lenscherr were to avenge his mother's death by bringing about Shaw's demise, it wouldn't bring Lenscherr the closure he needed, and he would further subsume into his anger, having fewer inhibitions about exacting such vengeance using his super powers in the future.

Watching X-Men: First Class, however, it is very easy to look through from the lens of Lehnsherr.... Shaw killed his mother in front of his face, and Lehnsherr genuinely tried hard to do the telekinesis for that NAZI/mutant bastard. If any of us had been in Erik's shoes, we'd certainly want to know that there would be a day of reckoning for Shaw. It is worthwhile to add that Shaw was seeking to bring about the end of humanity as we know it by bringing the United States and the U.S.S.R. to the brink of nuclear war, in which missiles sent from each side would obliterate the other hemisphere, and blast the human race, what's left of it, back to the stone age. With that thought in mind, shouldn't Xavier acknowledge that any and all means must be taken to stop Shaw?

I preface this next statement by saying James McAvoy was great, he was in top form as Charles Xavier, portraying him as a professor and mutant with a sound moral compass who also had a penchant for honey-talking ladies. With all respect for his watchability, though, Michael Fassbender ran away with the movie. It was fitting that both actors got billing in the same frame during the credits. It was a two man job. Erik Lehnsher's transition into Magneto is utterly absorbing, and Fassbender's performance knowingly leads us inside the character's heart and  brain (I know, lame pun, since Magneto uses the cerebro to find mutants and target humans in the original X-Men trilogy). Even if we know the consequences of letting his anger get the better of him will be, (ultimately utilizing his powers for the dominance of mutant over man, even trying to exact man's downfall), we fully understand him. We also understand Xavier's helplessness as he determinately persists in trying to talk reason into Lehnsher.

The big climax boils down to Shaw trying to manipulate Russian and American naval commanders into unleashing their arsenal of missile. Xavier, Lehnsher, and the good mutants try to dismantle his plans, and the future of mankind lies in the balance of Lehnsher's ability to access his telekinetic abilities. Can he marshall enough power to reroute all of those missiles? And upon doing so, is there any future possibility of compromise between him and Charles Xavier? Or will it come down to a showdown between Magneto and Professor X, with half of the mutants in their tutelage choosing between one mentor or the other? The line that divides the route of peace before war and the route of unconditional defeat of their adversaries to protect their own kind runs right down the beach of the sandy island where Xavier and Lehnsher joined forces to save the world. Which side will each of the youth mutants in their tutelage go to? 

With great supporting work by the actors mentioned, as well as Oliver Platt as the CIA agent, January Jones and Lucas Till as baddies Emma Frost and  Alex Summers/Havok; and Jason Flemyng and Álex González rounding out the Xavier/Lehnsherr mutants as Azazel and Riptide/James Quested; X-Men: First Class is one of the best films to come out of the summer of 2011; maybe one of 2011's best films period.

Three and 3/4 stars.

Now we're talking! Bridesmaids was the much needed answer to my question of when were we going to get a good breakout summer comedy again? 2010 was anemic. Maybe people were just too depressed by the recession to laugh. Bridesmaids provides laughs while not casting a blind eye to the recession.

Kristen Wiig, who for years has stolen scenes in cameos and supporting roles in comedies, finally gets herself a lead role. And even as movies have a hard time seeming current with the one year delay between shooting and release, this film did a pretty darn good job of feeling up to the moment. Wiig plays Annie, a jewelry store clerk. She had owned and operated a bakery in downtown Milwaukee. But it became a casualty of the economy, as revenue could not keep up with the overhead costs, even as she is fantastic at what she does, as is evidenced by a scene where she goes to great ornate detail to bake and decorate a single cupcake at her apartment. Nevertheless, all of her investments tied up in her business went down with the foreclosure, so she's terrified of trying again to make a living out of the baked goods industry, and she's extremely reluctant even to bake for fun.

Annie's love life is an exploration in self-destruction. She engages in one-night stands with the superficial Ted (Jon Hamm), who really has no emotional need for her, and it is, to him, the quintessential no-strings-attached friendship with benefits. Annie likes him, though, and is quietly crestfallen when he indicates, in prime comic jerk fashion, that she has reached the limit of the time he has budgeted to spend with her.

Annie's relationship history stands in direct contrast to her best friend, Lillian (Maya Rudolph), who is about to get married, and by all accounts appears to be in love with her fiancé, Dougie. Annie and Lillian are clearly peas in a pod, a female version of Blake and me. Their friendship spans years and years, to the point where they communicate readily with each other, and it's obvious through their impulses, gestures and projected moods that they're able to respond to each other's thoughts and feelings by means that transcend the dialogue itself. This is accomplished because Rudolph and Wiig have worked together so long, and having seen them act on SNL together from 2005-2009, I can sense that they brought their sense of implied history right into these characters; and that's fine! Anne and Lillian speak in inside jokes, and just watching them bantor we know they can see into each others' minds. Tom Hanks and Gary Sinise had a similar dynamic when I saw Apollo 13, because you really believed, based in their performances, that Jim Lovell and Ken Mattingly went way back, as carry-over from them playing Forrest Gump and Lieutenant Dan.

Lillian and Dougie's engagement party sets the movie on its course. While Annie is not jealous of Lillian's good fortune, it does make her feel more sorry for herself. This does not mean, however, that the engagement party is devoid of a jealous stand-off.

The engagement party is hosted by Lillian's boss' wife, Helen, who as it turns out has become pretty good friends with Lillian herself. When Helen makes the toast, she thanks Lillian for being such a good friend, and expresses that she's able to tell her things she's never told anyone else. Helen clearly is eager to please Lillian, and Annie's immediate feelings of inferiority manifest themselves through her compulsive addendum to add to the toast. A hilarious battle of wills ensues, but it's so funny because it's true. When your best friend gets another friend, and they seem to go and develop an emotional bond that exceeds that which they share with you, you suddenly feel threatened. This set the tone for the film, written by Wiig and Annie Mumolo, and directed by Paul Feig (I see his name on The Office regularly); Annie is a fish out of water as the wedding planning proceeds in layers of decadence like a metaphorical cake that gets only more ornate with each tier.

Anne, frustrated with Helen and her instant bond with her best friend, does impressions of Helen while driving home from the engagement party. This causes some erratic driving, which gets her pulled over by a state trooper Nathan (Chris O'Dowd), who is ready to write hre up for a traffic violation. However, she manages to sort of charm him with her walking the straight line, and with her history as a baker. 

Anne is at a moment in her life where she feels reticent to do what her true passion is, which is to bake, and yet she resents that her friends have so many more options than she does. Anne rents a room with a British brother and sister, and has her present job at the jeweler only because her mom is her boss' AA sponsor. Annie's mom (Jill Claybourgh) constantly dotes on her about her love life, and it's really funny to see how a woman in her mid thirties is still subject to the same helicopter parenting as a teenager or child. 

Anne becomes increasingly desperate throughout the film to assert herself as a presence in her friend Lillian's life, because she is clearly not having as significant of sway in the wedding planning as Helen.  Annie, who we have to remind ourselves is the maid of honor, makes a suggestion for a shorter skirt, which is admittedly the tacker of the options, while Helen opts for a more elegant model, which is of course the far more expensive option. Annie can't afford the more expensive dress, at least without asking for help, nor can she afford first-class for a posh destination bachelorette party without, as mentioned, asking for help. She starts to feel less and less relevant in Lillian's life, and we really start to connect to her sense of futility as Lillian is reasonably bound to show gratitude for Helen's seemingly endless hospitality.

When it comes to selecting a place for the bridesmaids to eat, Annie feels compelled to choose the lunch destination, the Churra Chi, an obscure Brazilian restaurant in a working-class Milwaukee neighborhood. Lillian vouches for her friend's choice, even as Helen clearly would prefer a more elegant option. What happens as a result of this food decision? Well, the symptoms of gastroenteritis start to become all too clear in Annie, Lillian, as well as fellow bridesmaids Becca (Ellie Kemper), Rita (Wendi McLendon-Covey), and Megan (Melissa McCarthy). It becomes a mad dash for the bathroom as they all need to either throw up or have diahrreah. Yes, the scene is as funny as it sounds on paper. This scene is stolen by the bride, though, who...(pausing to laugh out loud)....has the problem of making a bowel movement in a frilly wedding dress!

Annie is a disaster on two legs, and yet she's a good person. A complement of sorts is provided to her through state trooper Nathan, who she proceeds to run into on the highway and at the gas station. Nathan gets her, and a very nice friendship evolves, leaving the audience positively begging for it to transcend to something a little more serious. Nathan isn't as devastatingly handsome as Ted, but that's fine, that prevents him from being a total douchebag. In fact, he not only doesn't indicate that he wants her to leave after their first night of no-strings-attached lovemaking, he actually sets up ingredients for a cake in his kitchen and invites her to bake!

Annie doesn't feel quite confident enough in herself, though, and maybe her terse attitude towards Nathan is an external terseness towards herself; she doesn't feel like she's deserving of the positive lifestyle change he provides, or at least represents.

Annie will, in her ambivalence towards romance and her dogged ambition towards friendship, bring herself to the brink of total failure. And even as she continues to do damage to herself and everyone around her, we can't help but look through things from her side and ache for her. Her slow motion trainwreck includes a drunken tirade on a flight to Las Vegas, a spectacular meltdown at a wedding shower, hosted by (who else) Helen, an eviction, employment termination, and as if she wasn't landing far enough off her feet already, car trouble, where when in need of a lift, instead of calling Nathan, she calls Ted.

While this may seem like too much personal trauma for one movie, Kristen Wiig sells it to us. Mike Myers did it in Wayne's World, Chris Farley did it in Tommy Boy. With the aforementioned movies in mind, Bridesmaids evokes the very best SNL-cast movies of the past three and a half decades. And it matches its lunacy with sincerity without coming across as too cloying, though it dares to come close.

Is there a future for Annie and Lillian now that Helen has not only similar interests to her, but the money to go out and do the great things that they've always wanted to? Can Annie pull herself together enough to know that a history of being there for someone speaks for itself? If only Annie can swallow her pride, she just might grasp that there's space for her in Lillian's new life of opportunities if she can just accommodate for the perhaps over-the-top, overcompensating presence of Helen. While her lifestyle and her invitation of posh adventure may seem materialistic and fundamentally unnecessary to Annie and Lillian, given their humble origins, it is borne of a woman who is eager to please, and may just care as much about making people happy as showing off.

While Melissa McCarthy provided some hilarious comic relief as Megan, and Rose Byrne certainly stole some scenes as Helen, the towering performance of the movie was Kristen Wiig, who was fearlessly funny and painfully human.

Bridesmaids more than made up for Hangover 2. It's perhaps the best comedies of the summer, and perhaps one of the best films of the year. It's made a handsome amount of money; now if only the Golden Globes can serve to catch it some fire come awards season.

Three and 3/4 stars.

Here are my favorite Saturday Night Live cast movies so far.

1. Wayne's World
2. Bridesmaids
3. Groundhog Day
4. Big Daddy
5. The Wedding Singer
6. Mean Girls
7. Coneheads!
8. Caddyshack
9. Anchorman
10. Tommy Boy

Also enjoyed:
Daddy Day Care
Austin Powers
National Lampoon's Vacation
Ghostbusters
Ghostbusters 2
Stripes
Wayne's World 2


Need to finish: 
Animal House 
Blues Brothers
   

And I thought there were no event movies slated for 2011.

The Dark Knight Returns, The Avengers, the reboot of Superman, the reboot of Spiderman, The Hunger Games, the Summer Olympics, the Presidental election, Spielberg's Abraham Lincoln movie, the return of Mad Men, the Star Trek sequel, and the first of the Hobbit movies are all on the docket for 2012. As a consequence, 2011 was starting to seem kind of like just a non-event year to sit through while we waited for the new year to arrive.

Then Thor hit theatres.



I was so engrossed in the story of the war between the Asgardians and the Frost Giants of Jotunheim, and the king's son who is exiled to present-day Earth and must return to his home to restore order and peace between the warring realms, which has dissolved amidst the outbreak of battle between the principalities.

Our story begins in the reign of Odin in Asgard, one of the nine realms. Odin (Anthony Hopkins) intends to crown his son Thor as the next king of Asgard. Thor is a cocky, insolent young daredevil who has know-how and courage but no respect for authority. I found myself thinking of Chris Pine's Captain Kirk in 2009's Star Trek, which is appropriate, because Chris Hemsworth, who plays Thor, was also in Star Trek, as Kirk's father, George. (Thanks to Blake for bringing that to my attention.)

Hemsworth's Thor reminds me a little of Simba from The Lion King. Simba thought being king was all about going around scaring the Hyenas out of the pride land, but had yet to learn about how authority meant settling differences and honoring agreed-upon boundaries. It's not helpful, as such, that on the day Thor is to be crowned, the Frost Giants invade and stage an attack. Thor, in fury, crosses over to the realm of the Frost Giants, and decides to retaliate personally. Accompanying him are his younger brother, Loki (Tom Hiddleston), childhood friend Sif (Jaimie Alexander), and the Warriors Three; Volstagg (Ray Stevenson), Fandral (Joshua Dallas), and Hogun (Tadanobu Asano).

The Frost Giants orchestrated the covert attack during his coronation out of the interest of reclaiming the Casket of Ancient Winters, which was taken from them by Odin around the year 965 A.D. in an effort to prevent them from usurping control of all nine realms, starting with earth. The Frost Giants froze many innocent men, women, and children to death in their initial attack on our planet. It was justified for Odin to have staged his attack as he did on Jotunheim, but losing their source of power through Asgard's acquisition of their coffin does not sit well with the Frost Giants.

This is why, while the whole palace was watching Thor's coronation ceremony years later, several Frost Giants leave Jotunheim and infiltrate the Asgard kingdom to claim their lost object. Loki does such a sinister job of pretending to want to stop Thor from crossing the bridge to Yotunheim to face down Frost Giant leader Laufey (Colm Feore). He has the "younger brother good child" act down to a science, and the fact he claims to accompany his brother to Jotunheim merely to provide back-up in case of friction is so delightfully misleading, as Loki's motives involve anything BUT assurance that the two sides cease and desist from deploying forces to each other's realm.

Thor manages to do a good deal of damage in his, shall we say, heated diplomatic encounter with Laufey over the disputed casket, and the infliction of carnage upon the Frost Giants results in the immediate return to a state of full-scale war between the realms.

Odin is of course not pleased with this, as brokerage of peace was his life's work. So he banishes Thor to earth. Watching Hemsworth and Hopkins chew up dialogue while sharing screen time was positively delightful. Rarely do we get summer popcorn movies that place so much emphasis on articulating the plot through scripted argument.

Thor is hit broadside by a jeep upon his landing in the New Mexico desert. The jeep is driven by a scientist by the name of Jane Foster (Natalie Portman). Foster's years of compilation of data on strange force fields in the desert has directly entwined her fate with that of Thor. She witnessed the beam of light that brought him down to earth, and was the first to discover him in his Norse God get-up. Along with research assistant Darcy Lewis (Kat Dennings) and mentor Dr. Erik Selvig (Stellan Skarsgård), Jane helps Thor adapt to life on earth, first taking him to the emergency room, then to a diner for breakfast.

With Thor absent, the throne falls upon his younger brother Loki, who may have about as distorted of morality as Obadiah Stane in Iron Man, in that he not only betrays his family and crown, but he betrays his betrayers as well.

Thor's main goal on the planet is to pull his beloved hammer, Mjolnir, which was teleported down from the heavens alongside him and embedded firmly in the desert rock. Thor's inability to remove the hammer is evidence that he in fact has been stripped of his superhuman strength through his banishment. Without Mjolnir, there is no way he can wage war against the Frost Giants or ever show his face in Jotunheim. Although, first, of course, he would need to figure out a way to even get back to Asgard.

Thor is most certainly a stranger in a strange land. He smashes dishes when he likes food. He shows up at a pet store hoping to buy a horse to ride the fifty mile trip to the spot in the desert where his hammer is buried. I have to admit, there was easily an equal amount of laughs in Thor by way of comic relief as there are to certain comedies this summer. *cough, Hangover 2, cough.*

It turns out Loki was the architect of the Frost Giant attack on the Asgard realm, convincing them to do so as a double agent. His agenda was to get Thor ousted for retaliating, and then upon his older brother's exile, he would then kill Laufey and destroy the Bifröst Bridge, which connects Jotunheim and Asgard. It would also require killing the Bifröst Bridge's gatekeeper, Heimdall (Idris Elba, Charles from Season 5 of The Office). It was a plan carried out in true blue "Are you proud of me, Dad?" fashion, emblematic of the non-crown younger prince with the inferiority complex in so many movies and books.

Loki is a wild card in that he actually was born a Frost Giant. His father rescued him as an orphaned infant following his attack on Jotunheim in 965 AD, and raised him as an Asgardian. Loki was able to exploit this friendship to make the under the table deal with Frost Giants to attack them in the first place. (It's very Da Vinci code in the sense that a seemingly virtuous character has a hidden agenda and plays both sides).

When Loki finds out that the Warriors Three and Sif are planning to use the Bifröst Bridge to travel to earth, he sends a Destroyer, an automated killing machine, to take down Thor and his friends. Without the Mjolnir hammer, of course, Thor is not much more powerful than a really ripped human being, which he is (the shirtless abs and pectoral shots were amusing in their gratuity amidst such an otherwise self-serious adaptation). So when the Destroyer comes for Thor, it knocks the wind out of him. This is troubling to Jane, whom Thor had helped by recovering a good deal of her research on celestial paranormal activity from the clutches of SHIELD during his raid on their compound, built up around the entrenched Mjolnir.

SHIELD arrived on the scene in New Mexico when the Mjolnir was found, and per order of Agent Coulson (the one guy from 500 Days of Summer and The New Adventures of Old Christine; just kidding, he has a name, Clark Gregg), Jane's data and research were seized.

Not only did Thor help Jane keep her wits about her in the wake of watching years upon years of work go to waste, he seemed kind of emotionally bound to her. Jane, likewise, wanted to help see Thor safely through battle with the Destroyer, and when it rampaged the town shelling on the debilitated Thor, it's clear that he's in over his head.

I hadn't read the comic books, so I was genuinely on the edge of my seat wondering how Thor was ever going to come out of his comatose/death state. Because of that, Thor's collapse was both suspenseful and achingly romantic. He had so much left to accomplish at that juncture, and had finally met a woman whom he cared about enough to go to battle to protect, even as he was without his superhuman strength. Could his sacrifice for the people of that town, be at once a final act for redemption and a gesture worthy of releasing the Mjolnir?

I can't praise Thor highly enough. Chris Hemsworth was roundly entertaining, and well-matched by an entertaining ensemble cast. Natalie Portman and him just lit up the screen while he was acting. Their goodbye kiss, even though it was his intention for it to be a see-you-later-I-have-to-do-battle-with-an-old-foe kiss, was simmering. I'm glad I got to experience this on the big screen. While yes, moments were convoluted and I had to read about the movie on Wikipedia to remember character names, objects and places with their Scandanavian spelling, doing so only reminded me what a truly entertaining piece of work this was. You know what? Nothing wrong with applying an aesthetic design theme to the setpiece, requiring stage presence from the acting, and granting substance to the storyline. Director Kenneth Branaugh had a very self-assured artistic vision when he took the helm of Thor, borne out of his orientation working on Shakespearean projects. He makes the courtly mannerisms that define his resume. His style is not wasted on this popcorn flick.

Four stars.

Thor takes over as the best movie of 2011 so far, and my fourth favorite comic book movie ever made.

Blake and I were talking about our favorite comic book movies of all time as we left the theatre after our screening of Thor. Here is my list of my top favorite comic book/graphic novel film adaptations:

1. Watchmen (2009)
2. Kick Ass (2010)
3. Spiderman 3 (2007)
4. Thor (2011)
5. The Dark Knight (2008)
6. X-Men (2000)
7. Spiderman 2 (2004)
8. Batman (1989)
9. Superman (1978)
10. Spiderman (2002)

Honorable mentions:

Batman Returns
X-Men 2: X-Men United
Batman Forever
X-Men 3: The Last Stand
The Green Hornet
Daredevil
Batman Begins
Fantastic Four
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
300
Iron Man
Iron Man 2
The Mask

Need to finish:

Hellboy
Sin City
Wanted
The Hulk (the Ang Lee one- watched most of it at work- I liked it!)

True Grit achieved the paradoxical distinction when I saw it in 2010; it at once became the funniest movie of 2010, and the most compelling drama.



True to form with every other Coen Brothers film I've seen, the film had a gripping moment in the opening ten minutes. We have the voiceover of Mattie Ross, who quotes a bible verse as the camera pans in on her father's body lying limp in the snow. He was murdered by a member of the Ned Pepper gang. It is a rural Arkansas town in the 1870's.

Mattie Ross takes it upon herself to get a full refund on the ponies that her father had invested in, and the horse that was stolen by Tom Chaney. So she leaves her mom and two younger siblings behind and sets out to Fort Smith to retrieve her father's body, and find the man responsible. A public hanging takes place at the outset of the film, where three convicts are given the opportunity to make their last words. The Coen Brothers are always very thorough about putting us into a time and place, and their precision in depicting the setpieces and cultural signatures of a time period are evidence of extensive research. We are thrown instantly back to about 1879 in the treatment of Indians and western-style justice that the film seeks to demonstrate.

Mattie (Hailee Steinfeld) is a no-nonsense fourteen year old girl who is all too aware of how low the town's expectations are for her of seeking justice for her fater. After all, she is barely more than a kid. Mattie has the horse sense, though, to first talk to a Rooster Cogburn (Jeff Bridges), a livewire who she opts to have go after Tom Chaney simply because he is the type who is not afraid to shoot the ciminals who he pursues.

Of course, Rooster Cogburn isn't the only person in town with an invested interest in bringing Chaney to justice. Mattie Ross finds in her inn a gentleman by the name of LaBoeuf (Matt Damon), who is a Texas Ranger on Chaney's trail for a murder he committed in Texas.

Ross has such moxie and pride she actually rejects LaBoeuf's terms, insisting on accepting his assistence on the grounds that Chaney is brought to her home town in Arkansas to stand trial for her father's murder. It is actually Rooster Cogburn who solicits LaBouef, and strange bedfellows though they are; Cogburn being a husky, world-weary one-eyed law man whose diminished speed is compensated for by his intuition, and LaBoeuf a young, spry sharpshooter who has comparatively lower experience is made up for by his agility, determination and marksmanship; the two realize that they need to combine their strengths to bring about the demise of Tom Chaney.

Oh, but there's that girl. Mattie Ross is incensed when Rooster takes her money and departs into Arkansas territory with LaBoeuf and without her. She takes the horse, Blackie, which she bought back from the livestock dealer, and fords the river to catch up with them.

The film evolves into sort of a battle of wills between Cogburn, LaBeouf, and Ross as they descend ever deeper into Indian territory on the trail of Ned Pepper's gang. And it is this friction between them and their method for securing Chaney's capture that elevates this film to vintage Coen brothers. No Country For Old Men was almost too muted for me, as it was about a one man justice system in the personage of Anton Chigurgh. No one ever got close enough to him to contest his actions. What made Fargo crackling great was the constant arguments between Jerry and Marge, Jerry and Carl, Carl and the Father in Law, Carl and his silent partner....and this same palpable tension keeps True Grit moving forward at a clip.

The film absolutely comes ALIVE when Cogburn and LaBoeuf stare eachother down incredulous to the insults they have just received from the other, with further verbal ammunition at the ready. In a non-Social Network/King's Speech year, this would have been a screenplay shoo-in at the Oscars. The actors just devour the dialogue.

Allies of Ned Pepper's gang are stowed out in a cabin, which Cogburn and Ross happen upon late one night. LaBoeuf, having gone his separate way in the wake of a spate with Cogburn, happens upon the cabin of his own volition, and a two-front assault seems to be waiting Tom Chaney upon his anticipated arrival later that night.

Oh, but damn it, LaBoeuf doesn't see the lasso coming for him!

A classic Coen Brothers shoot out ensues, the likes of which kept me on the end of my seat in Fargo and No Country for Old Men. Yes, there's blood, yes, there's mutilating injury, and yes, death is not merciful enough to come upon some of the wounded soon enough.

The botched attempt to catch a killer (the job gone awry being another Coen Brother staple) leaves Cogburn in a drunken, despondent stupor, Mattie in a belligerent stand-off with Cogburn, and LaBoeuf on the verge of defecting from their search party yet again.

It is when the group of three is at their greatest odds with each other that Mattie just HAPPENS to run directly into Tom Chaney.

Will a young fourteen year old with lots of street-smart and an iron will meet her match when she comes across the desperate but dim-witted thief and murderer? A dumb man with a gun may still be more dangerous than a smart teenage girl. A lesson we learned in Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events was that nothing is more ironic than when you have a child protagonist who is more intelligent than their adult adversary, but their scheme to outwit the said adult antagonist is actually thwarted by the authority invested in likewise dimwitted adults, whom they should otherwise have handily and capably outsmarted.

We see Mattie grow up fast, learning she has to put aside her desire for justice if she is to survive her period in the captivity of Tom Chaney. We also see that adults can't necessarily sweep in and be the hero on the spot if a child is in hostile custody. The survival of Mattie happens to fall upon whatever sense of humanity and principle remains with the vicious gang of robbers who have kidnapped her. In large part that sense of order is governed by Ned Pepper himself (Barry Pepper) whose character interpretation is right at the intersection of the classic Coen Brothers anti-hero, who makes bad decisions trying to do the right thing; and the classic Coen Brothers villain, who doesn't care who he takes down on collateral damage to carry out his job, women, children, and pets included. He swerves back and forth across that fine line beautifully. But hey, he's Barry Pepper. If you saw Saving Private Ryan or 61*, you need no convincing the man knows how to do justice to a script.

I can't possibly praise True Grit highly enough. My year long search for 2010's best movie ended at a locally operated 2nd run movie house in Marion, Iowa, with Blake Gothenberg on a blustery afternoon in March of this year. Watching Mattie have to wait out for her chance to strike back while the wills of both the robbers and the bounty-hunters ironed out terms of their confrontation made this a tenuous, pulse-pounding third act. That's a compliment. It was no fairy tale, for sure, and yet you do have the extraordinarily satisfying awakening on all parts involved that no matter how secure their plans of action are, they can always come unraveled, and whether wits or braun will win out in a battle of wills is not necessarily clear, as both parties are forced to improvise their respective approaches on the spot.

True Grit should have swept the Oscars in 2010. But it did do one thing; it forced Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1 to relinquish its crown, and forced me to acknowledge I had not enjoyed a film in 2010 as thorougly as I did True Grit.

Four Stars.

True Grit helped make 2010 the first year in history where I had an entire top ten list of four star movies. Here is my best of 2010:

1. True Grit
2. Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 1
3. 127 Hours
4. Toy Story 3
5. Black Swan
6. Kick-Ass
7. Alice in Wonderland
8. The Last Play at Shea
9. Letters to Juliet
10. Valentine's Day

Honorable Mentions:

Inception
Tangled
Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time
The King's Speech
Secretariat
The Chronicles of Narnia: The Voyage of the Dawn Treader
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
Tron: Legacy
Shrek Forever After
The Social Network

mixed feelings:

Iron Man 2
Despicable Me
The Karate Kid
Get Him to the Greek
The Last Airbender

Forgettable:

Step Up 3D

Need to finish:

Our Family Wedding
Marmaduke