Midnight In Paris

★★★½/★★★★

Woody Allen's ode to the most beautiful, romantic and elegant city on the planet is a blissful Parisian reverie. In its opening pictorial, establishing cityscapes populated with bikers, baguettes and berets sumptuously fill the frame. The sequence seems to go on too long and then it becomes clear that a day has passed, and morning has turned to night. The Eiffel Tower now stands alone, illuminated with shimmering fluorescents, against the night sky. With the quintessential romantic twang of a guitariste as its score, Midnight In Paris's wordless prologue is a short film all its own.

Gorging himself on French culture, Allen may consider himself an intellectual -- though some might call him a "pseudo-intellectual"-- here he's more of a starry-eyed fantasist than anything else. The film's protagonist is a self-proclaimed hack screenwriter named Gil (Owen Wilson) who's enraptured with Paris's beauty, but he longs for its romantic golden age of the 1920's. He's visiting the City of Lights with his fiancee, Inez (Rachel McAdams), and her parents. When we first meet the couple they're standing on a bridge over a pond -- the very pond Monet painted his impressionist masterpiece, A Bridge Over A Pond Of Water Lilies. The two look as if they were harmoniously painted into the canvass by Allen's careful composition. The superimposition of art and its admirer is the key to Allen's whimsey. On a lonely Paris sidewalk at midnight, a mysterious Model T picks Gil up and drops him off in the roaring twenties. Jazz, flappers, the charleston: Gil is absorbed into a lost milieu. Paris, then a mecca of artists, writers and avant garde filmmakers, has Gil rubbing elbows with lost generation novelists like Hemingway and Fitzgerald. He visits Gertrude Stein (Kathy Bates) and sits in on a studio session with Pablo Picasso. In no time he's having drinks with Dali and Bunuel, inspiring melting clocks and The Exterminating Angel. With the artists come their muse, Adriana (Marion Cotillard), a french delicacy materializing out of an ad for "french cool" with her cigarette holder, flapper slip and curly take on Louise Brooks' mop top. Gil and Adriana connect based on their shared love of the past -- Adriana calls the twenties dull and dreams of the 1890's, Paris's "real golden age".

Midnight In Paris is a refreshing slice of sophisto-com cinema for a few important reasons. First of all, it finds Allen shaking the crotchety nihilism that has marked so much of his recent work. 2005's Match Point had its shocking, murderous pleasures and 2008's Vicky, Christina Barcelona had classy as well as filthy eroticism; but both were rife with grumpy cynicism and arc-less characterizations. Midnight In Paris perfumes romantic fancy and childlike wonder. It has the pristine, ecstatic perspective of a newborn culture-connoisseur discovering art, literature, music and romance for the first time. Yet it also rewards the literate with its intertexuality. (You'll enjoy it more if you can pick Josephine Baker out of a crowd than if you can't). Wilson's expression has both qualities: star-struck disbelief and kid-in-a-candystore elation combined. Like a kid at Disney Land who can't believe he just saw Mickey Mouse ("I've only seen you on TV"), Gil gushes over T.S. Eliot ("The Wasteland is like my mantra!") with the same elan and enthusiasm.

Allen understands that Paris can have that kind of magic -- due to the palpable timelessness of its cobblestone streets and medieval architecture. And because Allen plays so loosely with the "rules" of his time-warp conceit, the whole film becomes a dreamy, grown-up fantasy about meeting the long lost idols of our most ethereal English class day-dreams. Is Gil really in the 1920's? Or is he in his own ideation of its hypothetical awesomeness? -- a time before Zelda Fitzgerald went nuts and Ernest Hemingway drank himself to death. There's a delectable flavor and airiness about Allen's hilariously transportive new comedy. It's a giddy plaisir for the "pseudo-intellectual" in us all. Midnight In Paris has a unique ability, it can make educated adults feel a little like kids at Disney Land.

Bridesmaids

★★★/★★★★

Annie Walker, who's played by SNL headliner Kristen Wiig, wins our sympathy within the first few moments of the new femme-raunch comedy Bridesmaids. After a night of what might be the most strangely awkward and rhythmless onscreen lovemaking since the puppets from Team America, Annie, in a stunt of pitiful desperation, dolls herself up and sneaks back into bed at sunrise so her partner, a carpet-chested, perma-grinning douche named Ted (John Hamm), will think she's a stunner even early in the morning. The sad attempt is fruitless since man-slut Ted promptly and passively gives her the boot. But the message is clear: Annie will go to great lengths to avoid being alone.

Wiig, who's SNL characters have shown great versatility and manic irreverence without being genuinely likable, portrays Annie with many of the same goofy mannerisms, twisted face shapes and quickened speech patterns that can be seen weekly on NBC. But where she departs, and succeeds, here is in gifting Annie with that indispensable pathos that all great comedians (from Chaplin to Murray) must have to infuse the laughter with candid human qualities. As consequence, Annie becomes a goofball worth caring about.

Even as she's clowning her way through all the pre-bridal imperatives pinned on her as her best friend Lillian's (Maya Rudolph) maid of honor, the resulting shenanigans -- like food poisoning at a dress fitting, mile-high drunken escapades and bridal shower full-on meltdowns -- aren't the product of spite or jealousy, but of good intentions gone awry. Yet because Annie is living in fear of being an old maid, her actions, on some level, reflect the anxiety of losing her best friend and being the only single gal left out in the cold, alone.

The quirky jumble of personalities that complete the rest of the bridal party don't make it any easier. Rose Byrne (Jackie Q from Get Him To The Greek) plays Lillian's haughty new friend Helen -- a glamorous, trophy-wife pretty enough to make even attractive Annie look plain and intrusive enough to subjugate her at every turn, constantly outdoing her sentimental gestures with luxurious ones the money-starved Annie can't possibly equal. Ellie Kemper (The Office) and Wendi McLendon-Covey play opposites: the former's a prissy, naive newly-wed and the latter's a tired veteran with three hell raising boys at home. The scene-steeler is Melissa McCarthy as Megan, the rotund Zach Galifianackis-type outcast who, in this case, carries wisdom to go with her weird obsession with air marshals and adorable puppy party favors.

All these characters play their part in making Bridesmaids, easily, the funniest movie of the year so far. But, in the end, it all goes back to Kristen Wiig whose bit parts in MacGruber and Knocked Up gained her deserved recognition. And now, in her first leading role, she is a revelation. The film's one glaring flaw, however, is structural. The low period, the one in which the protagonist has hit rock bottom and must evolve before the climax and resolution, is just too long. The narrative loses steam as it wallows, leaving the viewer impatient as it languorously lurches toward the denouement we know is coming. Other than that... Bridesmaids is a winner -- bent on deconstructing the supposed feminine camaraderie of wedding planning and twisting the trite, passive-aggressive, cattiness and wholesome romanticism of female targeted romantic comedies into a film of more liberating puerility and, paradoxically, complexity. And Wiig leads the way. I've always known she was funny, but she has now grown from an irreverent three-minute-skit virtuoso to a genuinely lovable screen actress.

The Double Hour

★★/★★★★

In movies, as in all storytelling, a mystery is only worth our interest if it involves a juicy question worth answering. That question can be as juvenile as, who killed Mr. Body? Or as metaphysical as, what is the meaning of life? In either case, someone -- maybe Renee Descartes, maybe Scooby Doo -- is eagerly attempting to find the answer and we, the audience, are simply along for the ride. Problems arise when a story devolves into mystery for mystery's sake, and the audience is no longer vicariously following a crusader into the abyss, but kept coldly alone and in the dark, struggling for a reason to care.

This is precisely the problem with the Italian romantic-thriller, The Double Hour. It begins promisingly as a tall, pretty maid named Sonia (Kseniya Rappaport) is ushered into a hotel room by its young female inhabitant. As Sonia cleans the bathroom, the young lady, without warning or reason, falls (or leaps? Or is pushed?) from the window and lies dead on a rooftop below. Why? That's a good question, and one worth answering. But The Double Hour jumps ship in a heartbeat and we find Sonia, now, relaying through sleazy creepos at a speed dating get-together. She meets Guido (Filippo Timmi) -- a gruff, unshaven behemoth of smoldering sexuality. He's the only bearable suitor, she's a melancholic sulker with low standards -- so they hit it off. Guido takes her to his country mansion/sound-studio and a gang of masked, gun-toting burglars shoot Guido and leave Sonia for dead. When she comes to in the hospital, her world has become a haunted, unnatural place.

The subsequent Rubik's Cube of a storyline -- involving hallucinations, criminal histories, leering priests and double crosses -- evoked Sherlock Holmes in its intrigue, The Double Life of Veronique in its Euro-art incoherence, Repulsion in its psychosis and even that 2001, B-movie, teen-ghoster Soul Survivors. But The Double Hour isn't a pop mystery like Holmes or even an abstract piece of European identity-loop impressionism like Veronique; it's an oddball hybrid, bleeding the lines of logic and dream, not in a fun, thrifty way, but in an indecisive kind of way. As director Giuseppe Capotondi second guesses himself again and again, his film loses its structure and its control, climaxing just passed the half-way point and leaving the audience in an insufferable 40 minute denouement. The finished film is disjointed and, when twists designed to shift our sympathies instead leave them stranded, we're left wandering the caverns of confusion alone, with no reason to care.

Incendies

★★/★★★★

Incendies is a film of great many layers -- one of clashing forms, genres, protagonists and hidden messages. The French Canadian, Best Foreign Language Film nominee is actually a smorgasbord of the candid, the mysterious, the horrific, the heartfelt, and the deranged all fighting to take hold of the confounded viewer, pressed back in his seat by the startling nature of what's presented. Although, as fascinating as the film is, I can't say that its heavy stream of disparate elements was held together seamlessly. In fact, the result is a rather untidy package.

It would take a master to blend a mystery, a cross-continental identity search, a Greek tragedy, a war film and a political allegory into a polished, unwavering product of consummate power; but director Denis Villeneuve doesn't quite have the craft to keep up with his ambitions. Based on the novel Scorched by Wajdi Mouawad, Incendies tells two parallel stories in a non-linear narrative. The first is the story of Jeanne and Simon, twins from Quebec, who, in accordance with their mother's dying wishes, must track down their long lost father and brother in Lebanon. The second is the story of their mother, Nawal, and her journey from disgraced Lebanese villager to POW in a religious war to quiet single mother living in Quebec.

For the first half of the movie's run-time, we follow Jeanne in search of her father. As the film cuts between Jeanne's journey and Nawal's forty years before, the same cross, that hangs around both women's necks, is both a clever match-cut tool as well as a meaningful motif linking mother and daughter and marking Jeanne's investigation as something of a religious pilgrimage. The Lebanese civil war that Nawal gets caught up in, circa 1970, is religious, and her christianity is by turns her condemnation and her saving grace depending on which war party she runs across. In its somber, taciturn way, Incendies compels most in its first half as Jeanne retraces her mother's steps, traveling down the same dirt roads, talking to the same people, inhabiting the same houses and rooms. Like a great mystery, the trail runs hot and cold, clues lead to people of interest, some will talk and some won't. The procedural aspect hides a more personal adventure as well: in her odyssey to learn her father's identity, she learns more about her mother than she ever knew, and even more, about herself, her own roots and all the blood, violence and hate that led to her own conception. It's searing the way the film contemplates the possible darkness hiding behind a person's origins.

The rest of the film is a fractured, sometimes feckless, patchwork of different components. Non-sequitors involving child soldiers have purpose, but are placed inharmoniously within the story and without context or proper transition. Nawal's long stint in a tiger-cage of a political prison is wrought with confusing structural fallacies and a discombobulated sense of time lapse. It's not intended, believe me -- when specific actions occur is very important to the film's logic and especially its wallop of a climaxing plot twist. (You might want to read up on your Sophocles). And the underlying political agenda is a sleepy allegory about the suffering incurred on those attempting to overcome regional religious intolerance. All those layers can make for a heady filmic experience when done right, but Incendies isn't as incisive and important as it is busy and crudely fragmented.

Thor

★★/★★★★

Kenneth Branagh, who directs, has been Hollywood's resident Shakespeare afficionado since Larry Olivier got too old to adorn tights and puffy collars or stand waving skulls, spouting the Bard's sing-songy iambic pentameter. With that in mind, it's not difficult to see what attracted Branagh to the story of Thor. It's got many of the playwright's integral tropes: power struggles among the aristocratic elite, sinister familial betrayals and a prodigal son's banishment, and eventual return. Of course Norse mythology predates England's Renaissance theater scene by some distance, Thor included. As the Herculean-type son of Odin and prince of Asgard, Thor is a hammer-wielding, meathead whose name (if you believe it or not) helped derive the term Thursday (Thor's Day). Jump to the Sixties, the golden age of Marvel comics, and that's when Stan Lee, the Shakespeare of mutant vigilantes, first penned the comic book version of this Norse, hammer-happy deity.

Branagh's film is (surprise, surprise) based mostly on Lee's comic book. Thor is played by Chris Hemsworth, a Kiwi, who looks as if he'd be throwing chairs at Stone Cold Steve Austin if it weren't for his rugged, outback-y handsomeness and smoldering, slitty-blue gaze. Thor is a cocksure punk prince first in line to be king, but his bloated ego and childish bravado land him on his father's (Anthony Hopkins) shit-list. Odin wants peace with a red-eyed tribe of Ice Giants and Thor wants war without any comprehension of war's dire consequences. To teach his son a lesson, Odin banishes him to that oh-so-horrible realm called Earth, and more specifically somewhere in sandy New Mexico probably a mile away from Area 51.

The simple joys of Thor, for me, came not from its CGI heavy panoramas of the ornate Asgard or the frenzied melees between cannon-fodder ice giants and Thor's entourage of Norse warriors, but from the absurdist hilarity of watching the Michelangelo sculpted, golden do'd, celestial gladiator order more food at a truck-stop diner by slamming his mug on the linoleum floor. "That was delicious! More, I say!" He cries with splendid brutishness. His human hosts: storm-chasing, physicist Jane (Natalie Portman), her mentor Erik (Stellan Skarsgaard) and grad-student Darcy (Kat Dennings) look in awe at a man never frightened by his fish-out-of-water situation, but innately heedless about it. Like how Enchanted's Giselle never loses her fairy tale princess qualities despite being stuck in New York's urban cesspool, Thor, in heaven or on earth, is still Thor in all his self-promoting glory. These two characters never compromised their identities in their new surroundings but simply adapted to them -- and for the better.

And while Thor's on his journey of self-improvement, his once-meek and jealous brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston) is back in Asgard claiming the throne and wreaking havoc. What ensues is a race against time, a la Little Nicky, to save a deteriorating paternal monarch and the kingdom that goes with him. And, of course, for Thor to get home in time he'll have to become a better guy first. As passion blossoms between the Byron-esque demigod and the girl-next-door Jane -- the combination of Portman's thin, angled, Cleopatra-esque brows with her hazel eyes, petite frame and seductive whine give her a unique ambrosial nobility -- the Danielle Steele cover art begins to take shape and, predictably, love foments change.

It's a sweet message, but Thor ends up a rather untidy film. Its plot points don't run congruent or seamless to one another. The Men In Black show up at Thor's dusty landing sight and declare it a hot zone merely so our hero can break down the walls in a fruitless attempt to recapture his beloved hammer. The same government suits confiscate a truck load of Jane's "very important" scientific junk -- junk that has little significance within the plot's limited boundaries. And Branagh, the great dramatist, never misses a chance for a canted angle, swirling vista, or slow-mo closeup of Hamlet, errr a Thor, covered in sweat and tears. Audiences are sure to love the 3-D visual feast of this Norse extravaganza, but with Branagh's penchant for the stage still in mind, I would've enjoyed more of oafish Bottom slamming goblets than of the Danish Prince holding skulls.

The Lincoln Lawyer

★★★/★★★★

For some reason boxing movies and courtroom dramas never go out of style. The Lincoln Lawyer has its fair share of left-hooks, but one can easily tell from the title that it's a member of the latter genre. Matthew McConaughey is Micky Haller, a morally bankrupt defense attorney with a Lincoln Town Car (hence the title) as an office and a laundry list of reprehensible cliental. His newest, Louis Roulet (Ryan Phillipe), is a rich kid facing 20 years for attempted rape and murder. He plays innocent really, really well, but is he? Or is he just a savage predator with "I'd like to thank the Academy" acting chops? Of course the real question is: would it matter to bottom feeding Micky Haller either way?

It should, right? Director Otto Preminger and star James Stewart tackled that quandary in their excellent 1959 ethical drama, Anatomy of a Murder. The Lincoln Lawyer is a similar moralist tale that never lets that all-important question simmer and soak the way Preminger's film did so effectively. Maybe, the movie's lack of thematic focus derives from its expansive supporting cast diffusing the protagonist's arc. The film is based on a novel by Michael Connelly that I'm sure balanced and sufficiently utilized a plethora of characters that includes: an ex-wife (Marissa Tomei), a PI (William H. Macy), several prosecutors, DA's, old clients, new clients, snitches, judges, police officers and witnesses. Let's just say, The Lincoln Lawyer adaptation bites off a little more than it can chew.

Yet despite itself, the movie works. Probably because Matthew McConaughey is so sly and in control that he makes playing devil's advocate look cool. Rolling up in his Lincoln with his sunglasses on or displaying courtroom pyrotechnics of the most audacious variety, McConaughey's Micky Haller is a legal leech you can get behind. Watch how he plays both sides of the litigating coin simultaneously in the climax. (Such a bravura display of lawyering deserves a standing O). Like I said, there is something about the courtroom that makes it a hotbed for drama: the lives at stake, the chess match between prosecution and defense, the sweating witnesses grilled on the stand, and everything guided by the authoritative hand of civilization. (Guilty or not, everyone has a right to a trial). For all these reasons, The Lincoln Lawyer is proof that as long as there are courts, there will be courtroom movies.

Rango

★★½/★★★★

Rango, director Gore Verbinski and star Johnny Depp's new animated, slithery, sand-and-sun opera, has a lot of things going for it. To be begin with, Depp proves he needs neither Captain Jack's wild extremities nor his buggy, shadowy peepers to play a riotously amusing and curiously screwy underdog hero. The eponymous Rango, voiced by Depp, is an hawaiian shirted chameleon who crashes (quite literally) out of his glass box existence while speeding down a desert highway with his owners. Lost and stranded in a Nevada wasteland, Rango wanders from the "real world" and stumbles very unequivocally into a Spaghetti Western populated by other scaly creatures, vermin and birds. Adorned in the traditional garb of a Leone flick, the citizens of Dirt (the town our hero happens upon) are in a sad state since their water supply was cut. Rango, their reptilian Shane, steps in with tall tales of one-bullet-killing-sprees and rattlesnake half-brothers and quickly gains respectful notoriety -- before long he's Sheriff Rango and it's high noon.

Depp is impressive as Rango for willingly immersing himself. The part seems all but written for him, and he reciprocates with whole-hearted enthusiasm. Early on when a cartoon Raoul Duke and Dr. Gonzo sped passed the green gunslinger in their red convertible I knew immediately which Depp alter-ego Rango reminded me of most. And it's not just the shirt, but the rambling speech and pseudo-sophistication -- the renegade esprit following something unbeknownst even to the men themselves. Duke was chugging forward at light speed trying to go backwards (to the 60's), and Rango, well, he's not trying to recapture his destiny, but simply figure it out.

As it happens, that destiny was to be dropped tail first into an animated landscape so visually arresting it just about dusts the theater seats. Director Verbinski brings an elegant desert poetry to the film: sunflowers cup themselves in the heat, Rango is carried on a rollypolly mattress across the sun-drenched sand. The action scenes are equally impressive as our hero outruns a swarm of bats in a frenzied canyon chase or takes on a scene-stealing serpent named Rattlesnake Jake (with a Lee Von Cleef stash) who's got a gatling-gun rattle.

Though it's nice to see such detail and imagination put in service of adulate homage (name your Western plus a Noah Cross turtle proclaiming, "Whoever has the water controls everything!", and even a dive bombing hawk who may as well have been crop dusting Cary Grant) it's nicer to see them put in service of a great story. Rango gasps for air. Push aside all the gorgeously contrasty saloons and sun-baked dunes and all you've got is a mediocre Western. 2008's Kung Fu Panda was superior for prioritizing itself as a first-class Kung Fu film first and a CGI extravaganza second. Rango can only aspire to the lofty melange of genre and tech that Panda reached rather effortlessly. Despite its qualities and its showcasing, Rango remains slightly under conceived. The thin story felt like an afterthought. Still, I was left amusingly bemused by the ever-zany Johnny Depp whose voice talents brought Rango and his picaresque to life just as he did with another well-known, equally animated lune, Captain Jack Sparrow.