2013 Catch Up: SHORT TERM 12 and YOU AIN'T SEEN NOTHIN' YET

Destin Cretton’s Short Term 12 has an earnest verisimilitude that’s nearly undercut by plotting neatly organized with hidden-in-plain-sight exposition, dramatic payoffs, and impeccable structure, each moment building expertly on the last with character arcs dovetailing oh-so-neatly. Set in a group home for at-risk kids, the film follows the routine of Grace (Brie Larson, in a remarkable performance of considerable poise and easy charm), a young woman who is helping these troubled teens out of an honest desire to help, and as a way to work through memories of her own troubled upbringing. The place itself is achingly convincing with a charming collection of struggling teens suffering from a variety of circumstances and emotional afflictions. The employees, mostly nice twentysomethings portrayed appealingly by John Gallagher, Jr., Rami Malek, and Stephanie Beatriz, are tough but compassionate, eager to be friendly with their wards, but quick to get serious and severe if necessary.

The main trouble kid is a new inmate, an abused teen girl (Kaitlyn Dever, a strong performance in a film of great young actors) who becomes Grace’s special case. She feels like she understands her more than anyone because - wouldn’t you know it? – she has been in her shoes. Cretton’s screenplay is so deft and polished that I wished it would step back and breathe, letting the great setting and hugely talented ensemble relax and settle into the film without being pulled along by plotting with obvious signposts and predictable symbolism. It easily generates such a strong, emotional impact through the cast and setting that I only wish that power arrived with as much unforced ease in the plotting. I realize it may seem a minor complaint that the film is too transparently well written for its own good, but it’s a frustration of mine in this case nonetheless.

In You Ain’t Seen Nothin’ Yet, a French playwright’s assistant calls the man’s closest actor friends – real French stars like Mathieu Amalric, Anne Consigny, Lambert Wilson, and Michel Piccoli playing themselves – to inform them that their old pal has died. They’re called to one of the man’s mansions, gathered in a darkened screening room, and shown footage from a rehearsal in an empty warehouse of a humble new production of his Eurydice. Those gathered have performed this play before at one time or another, and as the evening stretches out, memory and screen merge. They act out their old parts, doubling dialogue, inserting themselves into the conversation, moving into an imagined dreamscape of remembered or present-tense performance with dramatically lit sets and deliberately phony CGI backdrops, twisting back into their seats, smiling warmly at one another. The formality of the words and loose playfulness of the imagery creates a fun tension, as does the richly appointed home stretching across the wide screen and the smaller frame-within-the-frame play-within-the-play-within-the-movie’s humbler, scrappy production. It’s mischievously esoteric.

Cinema has the ability to reflect our lives back at us, provoking warm memories, deeply held feelings and truths. These artists are called back into their Eurydice characters, and into the memory of their dead friend by nothing more than the dramatic circumstances of sitting together in the dark, watching a flickering image projected before them. Humans may be mortal, but if we’re lucky we live on forever in the emotions sitting ripe for the feeling within art. That this spellbindingly experimental and intimately heartfelt film is a product of an old master, 91-year-old Alain Resnais, who brings together his mesmerizing hypnotic symbolic abstraction (a la 1961’s Last Year at Marienbad), sharply observed acting, and giddy, playfully dreamy imagery (like his 2009 film Wild Grass), is once more a welcome sign that great artists can retain their sense of vitality. Here is a man, like the playwright in his film, who will live on in his art, forever calling forth an audience to see if anyone still cares.

Ain't Nothing Like the Real Thing: HER

Her is a film on parallel tracks. It’s a gentle and quietly chilling sci-fi film; it’s a fuzzy and empathetic romance. It’s interested in abstract philosophical ruminations on the implications of ever increasing entanglement with ever-smarter technology; it’s a sopping sentimental look into mankind’s yearning for a life of truly meaningful connection and beauty. That these tracks come together with something approaching coherence and cohesion, meeting sometimes convincingly in a sweet and whimsical middle ground between these concerns, is due to writer-director Spike Jonze’s ability to find and present the beating heart and core universal insights that sit inside what appear on the surface to be unwieldy and peculiar concepts. He makes prickly unpredictable, but deeply sympathetic and singularly strange stories – about a portal into the mind of a real actor playing himself, Being John Malkovich; about a case of writer’s block that rewrites before our eyes the very movie we’re watching, Adaptation; about a boy who imagines a storybook world in which his emotions are literal monsters to be ruled over, an adaptation of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are – so full of personal and evocative feeling.

With his newest film, he uses science fiction in what has become an increasingly rare use of the genre in its big screen outings. I mean, I love sci-fi about monsters, robots, superheroes, and space opera plenty, but that’s not all the genre is capable of, even if that’s increasingly the only kind that makes it into wide release. With Her, Jonze takes a real concept concerning How We Live Now – the nature of human intimacy in lives increasingly tangled up in smart phones and wearable tech – and layers on some metaphoric complications by imagining a world that’s much like our own, with current trends extrapolated outward. He takes a question one could ask about present day interactions – is cybersex any less an intimate act for being mediated by technology? – and adds a futurist complication. What if the person on the other end isn’t even human? This is no Catfishing parable. In Her, a man depressed in the wake of his divorce upgrades his network – a synced cloud between his computers, phone, and gaming device – to a new operating system and immediately falls in love. He’s not just happy with his purchase. He falls in love with the smart, funny, inquisitive, lively computer voice representing the cutting edge learning and evolving artificial intelligence of his OS.

The man is played by Joaquin Phoenix, often sitting alone in the frame as he talks to the voice of his computer, his eyes lighting up with unexpected energy. He has flesh and blood people to interact with, his neighbor (Amy Adams), his boss (Chris Pratt), and even his ex-wife (Rooney Mara), but still he’s lonely. Speaking to his new digital companion, he’s cautious at first, but the technology soon seems to win him over. It’s just so alive, speaking with the breathy, excited voice of Scarlett Johansson. You might wonder why a computer function would need to breathe at all, but it’s clear that the software is built to grow and learn and speak in a way that’s comfortingly human. No stiff Siri stiltedness here. There are long passages of the film in which the two of them talk, Phoenix and Johansson bantering or exposing their innermost thoughts, which could be lifted out of any film romance barely altered, and it’s startlingly easy to forget for a split second the nature of what is happening. That’s the chilly but humane point bubbling under their interactions. It’s sweet and scary, but tips so hard to the sweet side for so long, it’s all the scarier.

It’s a haunting form of intimacy. He throws himself into the relationship. It is a technological escape from depression and through the process he rediscovers his ability to feel. It’s productive in that way, and he’s increasingly happy with his situation, even shyly admitting to his neighbor that he’s “seeing someone” and “just having lots of fun.” But it was hard for me to shake the awareness that his love is a voice programmed to have all the signifiers of human interaction without anything signified. This is no long-distance relationship with a human. It’s all just bits of code zipping around, learning, evolving, behaving human. (The tantalizing question of how human must a program be before we say it has developed humanity remains hinted at, largely unexplored.) Jonze’s wonderfully humane tone, whimsical and twee without ever becoming too silly, seems to bury this central fact for quite some time, swooning with a twinkly (too twinkly) Arcade Fire score at the romance just as much as Phoenix does. How real is this output really? He rather geekily says research shows OS/human romances are rare, but maybe he’s in one because the input data of his life suggests to the computer that that is exactly what he needs.

Jonze paints the complications simply, subdued under the rosy romantic picture he paints, a soft and warm comfortable environment underneath which sits its colder questioning. It’s an oddity, at once hopeful and pessimistic, saying that even when we become too reliant on technology, it may in the end grow past us to the extent that it’ll know when to leave us. The cinematography suggests this funny futurist optimism, Hoyte Van Hoytema creating imagery that has a pale glow off of the soft pastel colors of shirts – the high-waisted pants are all earth tones that are even softer – and glistening city lights of a world cautiously and convincingly just a few leaps beyond our own. We live in a world of sleek, smooth, curved devices, much like the ones in this film. Everything from the iPhone to the Wii seems soft and appealing with light colors, dulcet tones, soothing beeps, intuitive functionality (some of the time). You can walk into any restaurant and are likely to find a couple sitting across a table from each other, staring deeply into their screens. Her takes infatuation with technology and design to the next level, reveals that, even with some strange and awkward new complications, it can be deeply satisfying and even beneficial for this character. And that’s exactly why it’s so creepy, too.

Paranormal Selfie: PARANORMAL ACTIVITY: THE MARKED ONES

I like the Paranormal Activity franchise’s crafty mix of repetition and experimentation in their found-footage haunted house stories that are all connected in one way or another. That audiences have so far rewarded the creative team with highly profitable box office grosses have allowed the filmmakers to have a little qualitative resurgence with every other sequel. Paranormal Activity 2 was a prematurely tired retread of the first film, but with a bigger cast and more camera angles. Then 3 came along with the best scares the series has yet seen, including a fantastic use of a video camera fastened to the top of a rotating fan. These movies are never better than when teasing scares by teaching an audience how to watch them, scrutinizing still or locked patterns of shots for the slightest tremble of variation. That the fourth film was a dull repetition of earlier scares without the satisfying crescendo while bobbling its few new ideas was a disappointment. But, hey, they’re trying.

Now here’s Paranormal Activity: The Marked Ones, which takes a step sideways from the events we’ve been moving backwards and forwards through in the previous four films, circling the original haunting of Katie (Katie Featherston) and Micah (Micah Sloat). This time we’ve moved away from suburbia and into a poor, predominantly Latino neighborhood. The setting is drawn in a way that’s full of convincing, mildly stereotypical, local color with plenty of Catholic symbols, gangbangers, and untranslated Spanish. It’s a nice break from what we’ve seen so far from the series. Instead of worried suburbanites wondering about things that go bump in the night, we’ve got an 18-year-old kid (Andrew Jacobs) and his friends (Jorge Diaz and Gabrielle Walsh) messing around with a video camera, having fun, partying, playing games and goofing around. Then a secretive woman in their thin-walled apartment complex gets murdered and, poking around the crime scene, they discover her connection to, what else, Paranormal Activities.

Soon one of the kids starts finding strange events everywhere he goes and decides to capture them with his camera. He has a mysterious bite on his arm. The dog runs from him. He can do the Michael Jackson “Smooth Criminal” lean like a pro. He pulls a loose eyelash at the corner of his eye and a long, thin trail of wiry slime comes sliding out. A Simon electronic memory game seems to be trying to communicate with them. The symptoms ride a fine line between funny and creepy, but all point to all the obvious signs of having suddenly become a character in a horror movie. Thankfully, he keeps the camera pointed at his plight. Unlike the four previous hauntings, this Paranormal Activity is a straight-up possession movie, with an underlying need to solve the mystery and exorcise the evil spirits. At one point the teenage girl from the family in Paranormal Activity 2 (Molly Ephraim, nowadays pretty funny on ABC’s Last Man Standing) shows up to explain the grave stakes and make cross-sequel franchise connections, moving the overarching mystery forward ever so slightly.

The Marked Ones wouldn’t work as a stand-alone horror film, but as an entry in a franchise it’s a nice attempt to branch out. Writer-director Christopher Landon has had a hand in the screenplays for all of the sequels and here on his own finds some minor fun in the makeshift mythos. The camera work – shaky and mobile all the way through – tugs at the why-are-they-still-filming-this? question more forcefully, robbing the film of the locked-down creeping dread through total stillness that’s always been my favorite aspect of these films. It doesn’t follow the pattern of escalating thumps, choosing instead to inject creepiness more overtly, like in a dark hidden basement draped in layers of plastic sheets hanging from the ceiling, a couple visually bendy effects, and in quick pans that find mildly creepy surprises. It’s lively enough and the kids at the center have likable joking chemistry that slowly curdles into fright. In the conclusion, the film turns a tight bit of narrative surprise mixed with closure that the series perhaps didn’t need, but feels right. In finding new types of characters and new locales to spin these stories with, it proves there are still some signs of life in this franchise yet.

Smell of Success: THE WOLF OF WALL STREET

His first day working on Wall Street, young stockbroker Jordan Belfort (Leonardo DiCaprio) accepts an offer to go to lunch with his boss (Matthew McConaughey). Over a martini meal, the older, richer man imparts his basic rule of business: move your clients’ money to your pocket. Not long after that, the firm goes bust in the stock market dip of 1987. Out of work, Belfort doesn’t doubt that core ethos of finance his boss told him. Instead he gets right back in the game, building his own firm bundling penny stocks with blue chips and getting wealthy clients to buy. There are huge commissions off these risky bets. Belfort explains this to us in the narration that runs through The Wolf of Wall Street, but often stops and sneers that it’s all too complicated for us to understand. He has utter contempt for anyone with a paystub south of his. For him, complaining about his yearly salary consists of annoyance that it was just shy of a million a week. To celebrate an earnings milestone, his firm orders a marching band and strippers to march around the offices. As the bacchanal erupts, a secretary is held down and her head is shaved. She’s paid $10,000 for it, told to use the money to buy breast implants. Though Belfort announces before hand that she’s in on the joke, the camera hangs back and watches her clutching the stack of bills, her face awash with turbulent mixed emotions.

Martin Scorsese’s film is a raucous look at Belfort’s rise and the atmosphere of carousing frat boy cruelty that followed his addiction to greed and the enabling economy that allowed him to funnel ever more money after his other addictions: booze, cocaine, sex, pills, power. What Belfort and his crew did to accrue their massive fortunes was legal, at least for a while, and they felt entitled to it, pumping up stock prices artificially before selling them for a huge profit. They worked hard at all this quasi-legal money moving and partied harder. Belfort tells us “money makes you a better person” and really believes it. To him, wealth is proof he’s doing something good. The film sets up some opposition to his suffocating solipsism: his father (Rob Reiner), a blustering guy who tries to pull him back, at least when he’s not too tickled by the unrestrained behavior; and an FBI agent (Kyle Chandler) who is sure something is up with the brash new firm and steadfastly investigates. But the humanity etched on these paternal faces doesn’t sink into our narrator. Only Scorsese, with juxtapositions and cutaways, like to a quickly glimpsed crime scene photo of an employee’s future suicide, can cut through Belfort’s cheery smugness. His mindset, the aspirational affluenza of the gospel of prosperity, of monetary might making right, is not just his. It is a poisonous boil on the American psyche and Scorsese is working on a satirical lance.

It hardly feels like taking your medicine. This is probably the most entertaining way of making a movie about insufferably smug, endlessly hungry fattening cats, as a wild, boisterous comedy in which the joke is on them. Stretching out over two hours and fifty-nine minutes, this epic tragicomedy follows Belfort, his business partner (Jonah Hill, with frightening grin of gleaming white oversized chompers), and his hometown buddies (P.J. Byrne, Kenneth Choi, Brian Sacca, Henry Zebrowski, Ethan Suplee), recruits into the ground floor of his new brokerage firm. As the business quickly grows, they find more ways to funnel money out of their clients’ pockets and into theirs, treating everyone else as property. Belfort trades in one wife (Cristin Milioti) for another (Margot Robbie) and though he tells us he feels bad about it, it’s only for a moment. He and his colleagues abuse and bully their employees, sneak money into tax shelters and down ratholes, pop pills, slam back beers, and call in prostitutes. The screenplay by Terence Winter who, between work as a writer on The Sopranos and the showrunner of Boardwalk Empire, knows a thing or two about criminal entrepreneurism, constructs a screenplay that hurtles forward with digressions and debaucheries and still manages to make sense of how the firm got off the ground in the first place and how it worked its way towards insane profits and a legal implosion. It's all about business as an outlet for unchecked id and how that takes morality and responsibility completely off the table.

The film is loose and freewheeling, growing bigger and overwhelming in its implications. It’s about an entire system that allows such an operation to thrive, a system with a massive disincentive for the greedy and selfish to behave responsibly. They squirrel away large amounts of money in whatever way they want in order to fuel whatever drunken high they’re chasing this week. There is no stopping people who have no guilt, no shame. Even when Belfort has a setback, his confidence carries him through. Once you are filthy rich, you can unapologetically monetize even your most shameful wrongdoings. A key sequence finds Belfort fuming about a magazine hatchet job that labeled him “the Wolf of Wall Street,” writing in no uncertain terms about his firm’s grey-area ethics and frat house atmosphere. He’s angry right up until he arrives at work and finds the lobby stuffed with résumé waving young jobseekers, phones ringing off the hook with prospective clients. His buddies start calling him “Wolfie” affectionately as they generate an ever more powerful cult of personality around their fearless immoral leader.

Full of irredeemable, unapologetic, and unstoppable characters, Scorsese’s masterful command of cinema keeps the whole thing slamming forward with energetic momentum. In his typical style, the film is painted with big bold strokes, a mix of rattling soundtrack cues, varied film stocks, speeds, and aspect ratios, finding rich nuances within. His collaborators bring welcome touches, from Thelma Schoonmaker’s swaggering edits – sloppy without feeling careless – to Rodrigo Prieto’s sleek, sunlit cinematography. This is a film that is taking place in the bright light of day, barely legal acts crossing over the line easily and with little negative consequence in the immediate future. The first time crack is smoked in the film takes place in shadow, Hill and DiCaprio huddled in the dark corner of the frame. But once the high hits they leap away, the camera tracking them into the harsh midday sun outside. They can get away with anything, anytime. The film is vulgar, dripping with sex and drugs and yet little pleasure. It’s a monotonous mechanical need for them and the film circles endlessly overconsumption of one kind or another that sends them spiraling down until the next high.

The Wolf of Wall Street is loose and rattling in its structure. Some scenes as assembled seem to stretch too long and others clip along too quickly, but there’s such an elemental cinematic pleasure seeing Scorsese operating on such a huge scale, developing his theme strongly and confidently and then noodling around, finding dozens upon dozens of variations over the runtime. He watches DiCaprio’s unhinged performance as it wriggles around in all manner of debauched positions, squirming out from under scrutiny to do bad all over again. He clashes with his second wife as Robbie’s strong performance reveals welcome unexpected depths. The trophy wife is not as shiny and shallow as she first appears, forming a key element of the time-release poison pill bitterly dissolving under each scene in the final stretch. Their final scenes together are utterly devastating, one of the few times the film brings his steamroller of desire to a dead stop. The sweep of the film threatens to feel unformed at times, and yet it all comes together in such a clear statement of purpose.

Belfort’s ego is too big to fail. The movie (the events, not the point of view) is based on his autobiography. The final shot finds a group of people eagerly awaiting his insight, desperate to learn his tricks, wanting to become his kind of success. Whatever catharsis I found when some level of legal comeuppance is at long last dealt out in the final minutes of the third hour, is squashed under his unapologetic opportunism, his ability to turn any misfortune into shameless profit. And then there’s the sense that, though this wolf may no longer stalk on Wall Street, the rest of his pack is still out there, as insufferably untouchable as ever. It can’t be a coincidence that a scene of jaw-dropping dehumanizing negotiation – the guys agree that, when it comes to the entertainers hired for an office party, “If we don’t recognize them as people, just the act, then we’re not liable” – devolves into the guys goofily reciting the famous “one of us” chant from Tod Browning’s Freaks. They’re joking about the people they’ve hired, literally scoffing at the plight of the little guy. But it’s clear that Wall Street can be more freakish than any sideshow horror. 

Dream On: THE SECRET LIFE OF WALTER MITTY

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty is an ode to manufactured uplift and insta-insight. Loosely extrapolated from James Thurber’s short story of the same name by screenwriter Steve Conrad of The Weather Man and The Pursuit of Happyness, this is another of his stories about an everyman who finds his employment or lack thereof not providing enough fulfillments. It’s something of a parable about getting the courage to live your dreams, travelling the world to find you had what you needed inside you all along. Directed by and starring Ben Stiller, the film follows him as Walter, the man of the title. He’s dedicated to helping his elderly mother (Shirley MacLaine) and to his job keeping track of the original negatives of every photo for Life magazine. Unfortunately, a mixture of personality and circumstance has found his dream of travelling the world and having experiences beyond the cubicle long forgotten. He’s like George Bailey without all those wonderful life moments an angel could show him. Walter Mitty wants more, retreating into his mind for daydreams of grandeur, of saying the right thing or saving the day. Alas, they aren’t to be. Yet.

For the swooping sentimental arc of Conrad’s screenplay to fully take off, events conspire to push Walter out of his comfort zone. The magazine is in the process of shutting down, led by a jerk manager (Adam Scott) who sneers at the employees with contempt as he pushes them out the door, managing their livelihood’s transition to a web-only all-digital format that needs only a skeleton crew to manage. Their best field photographer (Sean Penn) sends a roll of film, designating a particular shot as the perfect one to grace the final print cover. When Walter looks through the photos, the one he needs is missing. Getting up the courage to ask the co-worker he has a crush on (Kristen Wiig) to help him track down the photographer's next dangerous photo shoot, Walter decides to throw himself into solving this particular mystery of the missing cover photo. Why? He just does. It’s a prefab situation ripe with symbolic import that pushes him out the door, following clues to their globetrotting destinations.

Stiller’s direction – fussily composed with impressive formal control – has faint echoes of Wes Anderson and, fainter still, Jacques Tati, as he builds a world of modern architecture and office spaces that are totally ordered and closing in. Walter’s daydreams, on the other hand, are glossy Hollywood dreams in which he becomes a quipping comedy star ready with a comeback, a rugged lover clambering down a mountain to the woman he wants to woo, or a superhero smashing down the city streets after his nemesis. More than once he’s told he has great imagination. Maybe so, but he could also just watch a lot of movies. By the time he’s out in the real world, the picture takes on a shiny widescreen postcard look, soaring over mountain ranges and ocean waves, finding Walter as a small piece of big world, small in big frames and vast vistas.

It’s all so gently sentimental as the self-help mysticism of living his dreams of adventuring helps him to become his best self. And yet it all feels so artificial and contrived, a perfect closed system of a film studded with obvious turns of the gears and pulls of the strings. I could see every payoff clearly with each setup, no matter how lovingly photographed by cinematographer Stuart Dryburgh. It’s a gorgeously composed film that’s suffocating in its surface beauty. Each step of his journey feels preordained and carefully composed in a way that doesn’t match the gathering of courage necessary to take such a journey. Here, obstacles –sharks, volcanoes, warlords, drunken helicopter pilots – aren’t so much something to overcome as Hollywood spectacle to experience.

Perhaps there isn’t enough differentiation between his daydreams and his real world, after all. Sure, he’s not really leaping out of a skyscraper with newfound super-strength, as he imagines at one point. But I’m not sure how the Walter we meet becomes a guy who can climb enormous mountains all on his own. Maybe the filmmakers sympathized so greatly they couldn’t help but want to push Walter along and see his character arc through. I can hardly blame them. Stiller brings a sympathetic nuance to the man’s personality, a kind of hunched tentativeness that’s easy enough to relate with. The perfection of his self-improvement narrative is almost how he’d dream it. But the film dare not suggest such a possibility. Where the film goes wrong is erring on the side of too much earnestness, a fuzzy and warm belief in the power of sentimental uplift to do good to the soul. It’s a comfortable erring, but one that feels a little empty all the same.

All for One: LONE SURVIVOR

The true story Lone Survivor tells is inherently mournful, but the film is too slickly pumped up and narrowly focused to communicate much of it. The story follows a SEAL Team on a mission to kill a Taliban leader in the mountains of Afghanistan that went wrong, trapping the men in a firefight that ended with all but one dead. This sad story of sacrifice is presented simply as an extended action sequence that envelops at least half of the runtime. Focused on one moment of pain and death, the film traps its characters, boxed in by the inevitability of their story. We don’t get to see them as living people so much as we sit around waiting to see how they die. It’s a film happy to play with broad types, sparsely characterized, quickly sketching in their specifics in cheap and easy ways. One’s a rookie. Another’s getting married. We should care about them as people – the better to make the lengthy bit of action filmmaking impactful – but instead we’re to care about them as the same standard crew war movies have had since they’ve been an identifiable subgenre. It’s not fair to them, and it’s not fair to the audience.

Writer-director Peter Berg (Friday Night Lights, Battleship) easily creates a sense of what it might be like to be in the middle of a gun battle in Afghanistan if Hollywood filmmakers staged them. It is loud, repetitive, chaotic, and a chance to show off squibs and pyrotechnics as the SEALs are slowly picked off one by one by a largely faceless enemy force. Before we get there, though, we sit with these men through their briefing and then as they set up a stakeout of a mountain village, spying their Taliban target below. Because the actors are likable – Mark Wahlberg, Taylor Kitsch, Emile Hirsch, and Ben Foster – it’s easy enough to sit through their macho militarism. Because Berg and cinematographer Tobias A. Schliessler have a fine sense of thriller-y procedural nervous energy, the scenes in the command bunkers with Eric Bana – as their commanding officer – and Alexander Ludwig – as an overeager rookie – play out with some surface sleekness. It’s all so very professionally done.

In these early moments the film is full of gleaming glamour shots of hardware and camaraderie right out of a recruitment ad. The SEALs are buddies who jog around the base and haze each other (gently, of course) and listen intently as they’re told their target is a “bad guy” in an info dump briefing that has more in common with a video game cut scene than anything more convincing. We don’t know who these characters are, but they sure look the part. They seem to know what they’re doing. The movie doesn’t have time to slow down otherwise. By the time they’re sitting in the mountains, staring down at their target, it’s been a pretty successfully rosy picture of war that’s about to be shot down. But it’s not like the movie has much of a point of view. It’s bad luck that gets them into their doomed mission and good luck (and a kind deed returning unexpected dividends) that gets one out.

Two kids and an old man herding their goats back to their home accidentally infiltrate the stakeout. Here the film finds an interesting moral dilemma briefly entertained. Let them go and risk being found by the Taliban in the village? Or kill them and be sure of completing the mission without exposure? They do the right thing after brief debate, which leads the Taliban fighters right up the hill to find them. (It’s unclear if their decision directly led to this, but that’s certainly the implication.) What follows is the hour of tense bloody conflict up and down the mountainside, crouching behind branches and rocks as the dead pile up on both sides of the conflict.

I’m reminded of the famous quote from Francois Truffaut about the impossibility of making an anti-war film because of the action’s inherent exciting qualities. That’s certainly a problem for Lone Survivor, with its endlessly exchanged rounds of gunfire, overeager effects work – look at that exploding helicopter and its lovingly CGI carnage – and gunsight crosshairs killshots right out of a first person shooter. Or rather, it’d be a problem if it seemed to be a film interested in being anti-war or anything at all.  (Or if it didn’t grow less exciting the more attempts are made to thrill.) It’s a film that’s not thinking about any sort of big picture. It doesn’t see any further than the barrels of its guns. It tries to sell heroism, but seems perversely uninterested in the characters it’s selling as representative of some larger ideal of patriotic machismo or something. The final moments, which shows photos of the actual SEALs killed in this mission, is more moving and respectful than the two hours that came before. It’s a serious subject tackled in a self-defeating manner, utterly lacking the weight it deserves.

Dino Bores: WALKING WITH DINOSAURS

The instantly, blessedly forgettable Walking with Dinosaurs is an 87 minute film based loosely on the concept of the 1999 BBC documentary series that featured CGI dinosaurs in nature photography of our present-day world standing in for their prehistoric one. It was a nature documentary that tried to imagine the past, and was popular enough to spawn an “Arena Spectacular” full of animatronic creatures that toured the world. The new film has more in common with Disney’s Dinosaur, a 2000 feature that did the same trick – real footage with animated dinosaurs – but added a narrative, avoided narration, and let the dinosaurs talk to each other. Neither one of those projects were in any way perfect, but this new Walking with Dinosaurs is the worst of both smashed together in one nearly unbearable experience. It features nonstop babbling of grating docu-style narration, annoying modern colloquialisms, heaps of lame attempts at humor, and a story that features nothing worth thinking about or getting invested in.

After a brief live action frame story about a paleontologist (Karl Urban) taking his niece and nephew with him looking for fossils, a time traveling bird (John Leguizamo) guides us through the story of a baby Pachyrhinosaurus named Patchi (Justin Long) who bumbles around the wilderness with his herd. One day, they all migrate south. After much literal plodding and a few moments of predator and prey jostling, Patchi gets separated from the herd, along with his bully older brother (Skyler Stone) and a girl Pachyrhinosaurus (Tiya Sircar) who is along to be in a love triangle that’s more like being traded between them as if property. After much more plodding around, their not so incredible journey leads them back. Then, just when I thought that was the end of the story, it cruelly continues for another twenty minutes or so. It’s not just that the plotting is simple and painfully predictable. It’s done without an ounce of imagination in sight, a clash of intentions, perhaps.

It’s obvious the movie is trying to serve two competing ideas of what it should be. It tries to be both something like an educational opportunity and a generic children’s movie and fails on both counts. It’s two kinds of terrible mixed together such that I could never get comfortable with what kind of mediocrity I was watching. Whenever we meet a new creature, the frame freezes, the name of the dinosaur pops up on the screen, and a child’s voice reads it to us, along with some accompanying facts. As if the story didn’t feel endless already. Then there’s the dinosaurs, who are something approaching photoreal in their animation. They stomp around, grunting and growling at each other through unexpressive snouts and beady little eyes. No big attempt is made to make these creatures into anything like actors in the movie. They just root around being big, blank animals. When they talk, their mouths don’t move. We hear the voices booming on the soundtrack but they’re just standing around blinking at each other.

Most of the dinosaurs remain silent, but for our three leads and the bird. I suppose that’s a blessing, but it makes for a confusingly silent soundscape. Combine that with the inscrutability of the scaly mugs, and it feels like someone dubbed in the voices at the last minute. Not that it would play any better without them, but it would’ve lessened my desire to be given a mute button. The storytelling proceeds in a terrible clash of insufferable narrators. Leguizamo’s bird is always distracting with off-hand self-aware comments like, upon looking at a nice forest, “Don’t get too attached. It’s going to be an oil field.” Long’s dino is a whiny simpleton with an obvious character arc, but he chimes in from time to time as well, talking back to Leguizamo’s narration.

Many moments revolve around the dumb little dino getting pooped on or talking about poop. Other moments involve him falling over or something and when he first meets the girl of his species of his dreams, Barry White enters the soundtrack. All that’s the comedy, I guess. Still other times, dinosaurs are stalked by bigger, scarier dinosaurs, sometimes escaping, many times not. The predators tear into their limp prey viciously. The movie features both poop jokes and teeth gnashing at greater than required levels. At one point, the awful humor and bloody circle of life collide, when Leguizamo says one kind of dinosaur has no natural predators right before it’s eaten before our eyes. “I think I jinxed him,” he says.

The co-directors are Barry Cook, who also co-directed Mulan, and Neil Nightingale, who has produced nature documentaries for the BBC and PBS. The screenplay, such as it is, was written by John Collee, who wrote Master and Commander: The Far Side of the World and Happy Feet. I don’t know what went wrong here, but they all clearly should know better. Walking with Dinosaurs is interminably irritating, trying desperately to be all things to all people – educators, small children, and dinosaur fans alike. And in the end, it’s much closer to nothing for nobody. The biggest joke of all is when we return to the frame story to find Urban’s aloof tween nephew has been so inspired by the story we just heard that he has a newfound love of paleontology. He stares off into the middle distance, smiling with wonder. Sheesh, if this dumb story is all it took, wait’ll he hears a good story.