Movie Day at the Court

Descendants, The

By shimes,

Yes, I can make myself look like this and still date Stacey Keibler, ok?!

Reviewed by Stephen Himes

At the beginning of Act III, Scene I In Henry IV, Part II, the prematurely aging king lies awake in his “perfum’d chambers of the great,” burdened by the impending collapse of his kingdom from rebellion and the weakness of his playboy son Hal, the crown prince. “Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown,” he muses, dying exhausted soon after, a frail shell of patriarchy.

The classics dramatized royalty, in part, to glorify the patriarchy to the common man. Usually, this meant idealizing fidelity to the kingdom over the personal. Centuries of democratization, however, has bent literature towards using the Everyman to convey the universality of the human condition. What binds the two is a sense of responsibility, that eventually a man must put aside personal desires to serve something larger than himself.

In between the classical and the modern sits Matt King, an eighth generation descendant of the House of Kamehameha and trustee of 25,000 acres of virgin Hawaiian wilderness that must be dispensed because of the law against perpetuities. King (George Clooney) opens the film by dispelling the myth of the Hawaiian paradise, touring us through the trash-strewn, tourist-dependent isolation where tropical sunshine doesn’t prevent businesses from failing or loved ones from getting cancer. Rather than the perfum’d chambers of Hawaii’s resorts, natives like King live in cheap-build suburban McHouses like the rest of us. And like us mainlanders, they have soulless jobs; King is an undistinguished real estate attorney, his life time-sucked at the office pouring over documents in minor land squabbles. Despite having the closest thing to royal blood possible in America, he’s a bit of a cheap-ass: He never bought his wife a boat; she was tossed out of a rental, ending up in a coma.

Most amazing about “The Descendants” is that, from this complex set up, it wraps plot strands from high and low, from the societal to the personal, from the classical to the modern, around a single theme. “The Descendants” is about being an adult: putting aside personal desires to act in the best interest of others. In the legal sense, this is the trustee’s responsibility. It’s also the responsibility of the king, the husband, the father, the executor of the will, and the patriarch of an important family. These are all Matt King.

King was never Henry IV—more like a Prince Charles type, the emasculated constitutional monarch whose only real power is caretaker of ancient land. Apparently, he burrowed into the minutia of small-time lawyering to escape his family. His wife’s accident brings back problem-child teenage daughter (Shailene Woodley) from a boarding school on the big island, where only her heritage makes the schoolmarm put up with her drinking. She tells him her mother was having an affair, which introduces complications about couple-friends, the ethics of dealing with the other man, making decisions in the face of hostile in-laws, and there’s the matter of caring for a twelve year old. And that’s before he must decide how to dispense with the trust’s land. The relatives, aging hippies anxious to reap the family largesse, think this is simply of matter of choosing the least-offensive developer, while native Hawaiians want to see it preserved.

Clooney’s genius is to convey how a man of modest charisma can grow into a serviceable patriarch. Or, as Huey Long said, “Every man a king.”

The Pitch:

2 About Schmidt

Plus

2 Yi Yi

Equals

4 The Descendants

50/50

By shimes, November 7, 2011 8:08 am

"Doc, I cannot get French Stewart's insufferable mugging out of my head."

Reviewed by James Owen

About once a year, Hollywood puts out a Death Film in which a Bad Person—corporate lawyer, heartless doctor, inattentive father—confronts death and learns to be a Better Person. Usually, the lesson is money isn’t everything and/or the roses should be smelled—think Adam Sandler in the last Seth Rogen Death Film, Judd Apatow’s “Funny People.” A variation is the Death as Noble Conclusion in which a saintly character faces death with dignity and grace, ultimately teaching lessons to lesser people characters. Usually, a gorgeous actress—Debra Winger, Julia Roberts—is stricken with a terminal disease to show us that even movie stars can die, and that should make life worth living?

Can’t we just have a film about death being, per Mrs. Gump, “just a part of life”? A film about the general routine of ordinary people who are dying? That’s the goal of Jonathan Levine’s “50/50”, a film that tackles terminal cancer in such a sublime way that you can…almost forgive its soulless ending. While based on the experience of comedy writer and Seth Rogan pal Will Reiser, “50-50” wisely translates the story into that of average late-twenties Seattlite Adam (Jospeh Gordon-Levitt) who finds out he has a rare form of cancer that can only be tackled with surgery after chemo. He goes from being a journalist for Seattle’ NPR with his artsy girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard, cornering the market in the “be-otch” role) to someone with a death warrant.

Rather than go the Rob Reiner route and take up skydiving and safaris, Adam keeps working on his story about some volcano because, hey, he needs the health care coverage. He gives the girlfriend a chance to bail, but even this bitchy girl cannot honestly turn him away. His friend Kyle (Rogan) wants to take advantage of the situation by scoring sympathy on the dating scene. His mother (Angelica Huston) just becomes more overbearing and intrusive than before. His therapist (Anna Kendrick) is in residency working on her second patient. Pretty much, everyone around Adam is a bit of a mess about this. He’s terrified and worried about them, mostly, because he doesn’t have to become a better person—as he says in the trailer, he’s already pretty okay. There’s no way he could get cancer because “doesn’t drink, doesn’t smoke, and recycles.” But, hey, cancer happens.

Adam confronts all this with his weapon of choice: talking it out. He does not avoid it, his friends do not avoid it, the older guys at chemo (Phillip Baker Hall and Matt Frewer) do not avoid it. Thankfully, instead of offering teeth-gnashing and melodramatic dialogue, are characters are clever and funny. I won’t retell the best jokes, but Reiser clearly models his screenplay on Apatow’s “Knocked Up,” which specialized in coating serious themes banter about sex and drugs to help them go down a little smoother. Shoot, Judd Apatow’s Death Film—the above-mentioned “Funny People”—tackled death in similar ways. If he had not used it as a self-indulgent home video to show off his marginally-talented wife and kids, and run it on forty minutes longer than necessary, it might have looked like “50/50”.

What makes this film exceptional, rather than simply being better than an Adam Sandler “serious” movie from two years ago, is how the film uses gallows humor to examine death. For example, Adam shares some pot brownies with his fellow chemo patients. We’ve never seen that before, especially in a Seth Rogen movie! But then, Adam walks through the ward, meditating on different patients at different stages of their disease. Adam—still high—walks by someone flat-lining, and all he can do is laugh.

In the movie theater, we laugh at otherwise objectively grotesque and cruel deaths in action and horror movies because it’s a release of our surprise and uncertainty. But we also laugh to mask our fear of the horrible and unknown—which is exactly why Adam laughs at his fellow patient. Levine turns two cinematic clichés into a poignant moment of a character whistling past his graveyard. We don’t see Adam as cruel or simply high because we understand exactly why he’s laughing—it’s the same reason we’ve laughed with a movie about terminal cancer.

The film is full of moments like this, enough to forgive the film for a completely unbelievable and formulaic ending that does everything humanly possible to wreck everything that happened before it. Forget about its implausibility, it’s just disingenuously contrary to the tone of the rest of the film. If you can get past it, “50/50” offers enough complex emotion to be one of the best films of the year. Levitt and Huston deserve nominations. Everyone else in the cast deserves accolades. It would be tough to tackle a comedy about cancer, and certainly the film’s box-office results show the challenges in selling it. Next time out, perhaps if the cancer gave him super powers. That might have been a hit.

The Pitch:

2 Terms of Endearment

Plus

2 Knocked Up

Equals

4 50/50

Real Steel

By shimes, October 25, 2011 8:50 pm

"Well, it was either refinance my mortgage or do this movie. This movie required less paperwork."

Reviewed by James Owen

If you’re going to make a sci-fi flick about fightin’ robots, then have the decency to make a crazily stupid film if you aren’t going to swing for allegory or social relevance. That is, unless you are hack extraordinaire Shawn Levy, and Richard Matheson’s short story easily translates into a vanilla paste-bland October filler movie. “Real Steel” and takes what could be an interesting story (really!) and makes it into series of sports movie cliches that lack any genuine…wait for it…punch.

It’s 2020 and technology has evolved to where robots have replaced humans in the sport of boxing. Did the sport have to do that for health or liability concerns? We never find out. Does our society also use this technology to wage wars or supplement law enforcement—I mean, we’re sending Predator drones into sovereign airspace to shoot at whomever’s on our terror list! Unfortunately, the director of the Night at the Museum films isn’t much interested in anything other than…hey…fightin’ robots!

Former boxer Charlie Denton (Hugh Jackman) is supposed to be this unscrupulous, down-and-out robot shill that takes heaps of scrap to state fairs to fight bulls. (Yes, you heard me. Even this is treated with earnestness.) However, that’s hard to convey to an audience when you look like Hugh Jackman with a close-shaved head.

But we’ve got a family sub-plot brewing. Through ridiculous legal wrangling, Charlie gets stuck with his son Max (Dakota Goya), whom he now takes him on the robot-battling circuit. Undeterred, we watch Charlie buy other junky robots and watch them get eviscerated comically. His robots get a particular thrashing from super-robot Zeus (yes, Zeus). Then, Max finds Atom, who somehow saves young Max’s life. Atom is some kind of practice robot who can take hits but not really dole any out.

Wow…he sounds like Charlie: life is always pummeling and he can’t seem to do anything about it. While Dad is not sold on Atom, Max really does believe in him. Or it. And, even though he’s never had much of a relationship with dear old pop, the film strives to convince us this confidence will help Max believe in Charlie as well. They work on Atom, the audience is treated to training montages, and we watch as the story crescendos towards Atom taking on Zeus (yes, Zeus) in the climatic battle.

Think about, for a moment, where the screenwriters are trying to take this movie. It could be the ultimate conflict between man-made technology. You have this minuscule unit (with a namesake acknowledging its place in science) battling “the father of the gods.” The simple vs. the complex. The accessible vs. the powerful. The great thing about science fiction is its ability to play out contemporaneous concerns to extreme boundaries in order to challenge the audience. While the notion of fighting robots is kind of silly, there’s real potential. What would happen if artificial intelligence could challenge each other? Would it be better for humanity? Worse?

But Shawn Levy, whether he cares anything about sci-fi or not, knows what makes a studio executive happy. He knows how to craft a film into a good marketing campaign. Or is that the other way around? Either way, he would rather not challenge when he can placate. This is a film about a father redeeming his image in the eyes of his son. This is about an underdog training for the Big Fight. Both are tried and true formulas. Even with all the potential for provocative material, “Real Steel” fails because Charlie isn’t the one going into the ring. The robot is. So all the tension about whether Charlie will be redeemed as a father or an ex-boxer is pointless because HE’S NOT FIGHTING ANYONE! There’s a disconnect between his character’s arc and the outcome of the story because they are parallel, not convergent. Perhaps better filmmakers could cross these two paths. What we know is the guy who made “Date Night” sure can’t.

Compare this to the episode of The Twilight Zone that adapted the Matheson story. Lee Marvin plays the lead, which centers more on how man interacts with machine and how society has become sold on machine’s superiority. It’s a little dated, but you can see the potential. The film could have evoked some ethical questions, like a low-rent “A.I.” Or it could have just been crazy fun. I hoped for misplaced ambition or something that would show Jackman thought this was as goofy as the rest of us. Nope, just a dull film geared for families with nothing memorable left for the kids or their parents. It’s about as offensive as what Warner Brothers did to the end of “I am Legend.”

Could they not have even called it “Reel Steel”? The extra “e” makes it fun in a stupid way. But no, the dude who gave us “Cheaper by the Dozen” couldn’t even have done us that favor.

The Pitch:

1 Battlebots

Plus

1 Michael Bay

Equals

2 Real Steel

Moneyball

By shimes, October 22, 2011 9:51 am

A rejected "before and after" shot for the new Weight Watchers campaign

Reviewed by James Owen

Bennett Miller’s “Moneyball” looks like the ultimate “inside baseball” movie. As such, I shouldn’t like it. I was raised with a disdain for sports and haven’t developed patience for it as an adult (Except for you, fellas). But this Steven Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin (!) adaptation of the Michael Lewis novel isn’t so much about baseball as it’s about the Grand Idea—something so crazy that merely putting it into motion is legendary.

Usually, these films center on eccentric and/or obsessive characters who kick all life’s other responsibilities, including their loved ones, right in front of the bus of the Grand Idea. This is easier to see in films about business, like Martin Scorcese’s Howard Hughes biopic “The Aviator” or the Sorkin-written Zuckerberg opus “The Social Network”. But this is also the root of underdog sports movies like “Slap Shot” or “A League of their Own.” How else do you beat the odds without a Grand Idea? I may not like sports, but “Moneyball” shows what’s possible in sports movies.

Billy Beane (Brad Pitt) was a phenom as a recruit, meh as a player, and now floundering as the general manager of the Oakland A’s. Despite (or because of) a successful 2001 season, all of the good players are bolting for the big money of the Red Sox and the Royals. Ha ha. Just kidding, Kansas City. I meant the Yankees. Beane has no money and, despite his pleas, will not get any money. His scouts are from bygone days, dispensing the same type of thinking they’ve done for decades. Beane rages against it without really knowing why. He tries to cut a deal with GM Mark Shaprio of the Cleveland Indians, who tries to yank good prospects from him based on the advice of his minion, the Yale-educated Peter Brand (Jonah Hill). Like any smart business man, Beane identifies Brand as a threat and offers him a job.

What makes Brand so good? His approach to prospect evaluation is different than the conventional wisdom. The scouts that so irritate Beane look at RBIs, stolen bases, and batting averages (and idiosyncratic details like basing a player’s confidence on the hotness of his girlfriend), where Brand looks at on-base percentages and other obscure-but-revealing statistics. This is too wonkish, too dorky, too new for a traditionalist sport like baseball.

Enter Moneyball! Having spent time in Lawrence, Kansas the home of Bill James, I had actually heard of this. James rose from obscurity in the early 1980s with tomes looking at baseball through a frame he coined “sabermetrics,” which focused on data-driven game analysis. Now, the film informs me James is a weirdo (a fair point) as well as, in the early part of the zero decade anyways, outside the conventional thinking.

After some fast-paced Sorkin-style whiteboarding, Beane puts together a team that causes a revolt with the scouts and consternation with the manager Art Howe (Phillip Seymour Hoffman, so brilliant with so little). Howe resists this new system because he must manage in a way “he can explain in job interviews after the season.” This classic Sorkin line creates a sympathetic Howe because, well, you can’t really blame him. Lesser films would make him the bad guy, but “Moneyball” knows the Grand Idea doesn’t really have villains. It just has people who haven’t come around yet.

Where the tension lies in “Moneyball” is not in a protagonist-antagonist formula. It’s about time and pressure. It’s about watching the Grand Idea as it flounders and flops, is criticized and mocked. The opening of the 2002 season is a slow-burning agony; Bennet’ pacing is slow and lingering, contrary to the David Fincher approach of squeezing two pages of Sorkin’s script per minute in “The Social Network.” This goes to the purpose of this film: not to show the breakneck speed of an overnight success, but to make the audience question the outcome of something they should already know is true. Miller pulls it off with real style and skill.

Pitt wears the agony of losing like a tailor-made suit. He embodies the inherent contradiction of the film: his Grand Idea is predicated on rethinking a system so that it wouldn’t have picked him as a player out of high school. That failure drives this success—moneyball would weed out players like him. Some critics have complained Beane’s failure is not well-explained, but to my mind, it’s almost over-explained. If not for Pitt’s longing stares and defeated posture, it would be over-the-top. It’s not his just his rugged handsomeness without an expiration date that evokes Newman and Redford. He wears the emotional distress of his characters without beating us over the head. That’s an effortless movie star worthy of such comparisons.

Of course, things come around. This is perhaps a “spoiler,” but moneyball leads to the A’s to the longest regular season winning streak in America League history. Of course, critical sports historians will say the film omits the strength of the team’s pitchers. (Yes, I quoted NPR. I DON’T GET SPORTS!) But, folks, Grand Idea movies cannot cram in every fact. This is not a movie about a competent pitching staff, and you probably couldn’t sell that at $9 a ticket. The most gratifying part of “Moneyball” to watch Beane and Brand scheme and scrap their way toward realizing their vision from nearly two-and-half hours. They fire staff and trade players. They finesse the egos of some and blow off others. We know Pitt can do this, but the revelation is Jonah Hill, who proves to be just as good in a sober, not exactly offbeat drama as he is in the angst-ridden Apatow comedies.

“Moneyball” is not flawless. After the climax, the film dwells on for another twenty minutes about post-season decision-making that requires less dramatization than it’s given. Plus, the actual story has a female drought, so the film creates a daughter and ex-wife to occupy the audience’s interest. Ex-wife Sharon barely registers, despite being played by the great Robin Wright. Beane’s daughter Casey (Kerris Dorsey) fares better simply because she’s in the film more, but her presence exists only to give “Moneyball” an emotional hook it doesn’t really need.

In the end, this isn’t what drives Billy Beane—he’s animated by the obsession to prove others wrong, to keep going until you win or go crazy in the process. You don’t need to understand sports to get that. I can stop everything I am doing to watch “Apollo 13” and not have to know anything about astrophysics. Same way with sabermetrics. “Moneyball” is a smart, well-acted film about the mechanics of obsession. That’s the real American pastime.

The Pitch:

2 Manager Joe Riggins

Plus

2 Deputy White House Communications Director Will Bailey

Equals

4 Moneyball

Ides of March, The

By shimes, October 11, 2011 8:03 pm

One can only imagine what handsome, dashing men find funny.

Reviewed by James Owen

No filmmaker is better qualified to examine the guts of political campaigning than George Clooney, who worked on his father Nick’s unsuccessful 2004 congressional run in his native Kentucky. In this way, “The Ides of March” is refreshing: Many celebrities pledge “support” and raise money, but this Auteur actually talks about politics in an informed manner. Unfortunately, Clooney’s film isn’t a policy argument in narrative form or a polemic about How Things Really Are, but a morality play about how cynicism is ruining politics and the country. Clooney, who adapted the film from former Charles Schumer and Howard Dean staffer Beau Willimon’s play Farragut North, tries so hard to make this rather obvious point that he misses the real point of the story.

“Ides” opens with junior campaign manager Stephen Myers (Ryan Gosling) alone on stage in an empty auditorium checking the sound by blandly mouthing his boss’ stump speech. Later, we hear Pennsylvania Governor and Democratic presidential candidate Mike Morris (Clooney) hitting every applause line in the speech—in fact, until the third act, Clooney seems to be filming a test run of a his own future campaign. These contrasting scenes embody the film’s theme: a puppeteer of political theater and his pull-string doll whose voice fills the echo chamber. Then we learn through handy exposition the primary is now down to two candidates: Morris and a conservative Arkansas senator (Michael Mantell), in the final battleground of Ohio.

Still, Clooney shrewdly boils down the action to the fight for one state’s delegates, where less assured filmmakers would have made everything BIG and blown the whole budget and pages of exposition on the entire campaign. Rather, Clooney captures the claustrophobia of campaign life through Myers’ cramped offices and hotel rooms of Cincinnati. He puts up with this unglamorous life because, despite working on a gazillion campaigns, he just knows there’s something different about Morris.

Based on the speeches given to him by the screenwriters (Clooney, Willimon, and Grant Heslov) as well as the art-deco posters, let’s assume “something different” means “Obama-esque.” Here lies the problem. A young guy like Myers probably wouldn’t be the deputy campaign manager on a presidential race, and if he were, he’d have the experience to eschew this kind of wide-eyed optimism. Otherwise, he’d have burned out on other political saviors. The professional campaigner can be dazzled by his boss (who probably got into politics precisely because he’s so dazzling), but you can’t make it from job to job without a healthy dose of skepticism. You have to be cool without being cold, but Myers comes across more like a starry-eyed activist than a steady hand.

From this cracked foundation, the film crumbles in the second act. Details will not be revealed here, but Hollywood’s political scandals are rather predictable: Republicans get in trouble for money; Democrats get in trouble with women. Though reality isn’t quite so neat, “Ides” doesn’t deviate from this basic set-up. Besides, the scandals are merely a fact of political life—what’s important is how they’re “handled.” This is the true litmus test of professional politicos: Do they see the “handling” of scandal as an evil in itself, or is “handling” simply a by-product of the natural composition of politics?

While this debate is worthwhile for political neophytes at all levels of our democracy, Clooney doesn’t really follow through on the idea. Rather, he has said his film is about betrayal: between people, between a person and her morals, between the politician and the voter. The film’s title gives that away, Brute. Clooney’s conclusion is that the origin of political cynicism is in the disappointment with “saviors”; thus, because the nature of politics is compromise and politicians are human, “true belief” begets cynicism. In Clooney’s view, this is the logical conclusion of a political process with real people at their center: anyone seeking power is going to do something bad to get it. If you thought power came from doing good, shelve your principles and get over it.

I didn’t need George Clooney to tell me that—and, in fact, his conclusion doesn’t really jibe with the facts on the ground. Perhaps, having worked as and around political professionals over the past eleven years in a variety of different races, I have a rosier view. Sure, many are jaded, and the higher on the food chain you go, the more cynical they can be. But that dances around the complex reality of politics.

People make a living running campaigns, and like most professional people, they gravitate toward working for like-minded people they genuinely like. As with all of us, sometimes they work for people just to pay the bills. But sometimes they work for people they believe can make a difference. That’s not special to politics—that’s just business. Ultimately, the job of the Stephen Myerses of the world is to make sure the person they work for gets the chance to make a difference. And when the right opportunities come along, Stephen Myers works for people he wants to get that chance. And as long as candidates have to solicit donations en-masse to mass-market themselves, that’s the system.

There’s nothing cynical about working within a flawed system to affect the greater good—but it can often feel that way, which is what breeds political nihilism. This is what “The Ides of March” should have been about, rather than theme-checking the Shakespeare play most common to junior highs. In fact, Farragut North is a much better title. This is the mystical stop on D.C.’s Red Line, where the political consultants on K-Street meet to, as the film puts it, “pimp out ex-Senators to Saudi sheiks.” Why are people so attracted to the chain-smoking, casual alcoholism, crammed inadequacy of the office space (even in presidential campaigns), and lousy pay this life offers? This is no glamour in creating call lists, and many politicos end up looking exactly like Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Paul Giamatti: shrewd, but horribly unhealthy and terribly worn out. These two claw at every bit of dialogue with the need to win and, more importantly, be right. Why do so many talented people give themselves to this life?

Clooney may be qualified to make a very good movie about politics, but he may not be the right guy to answer that question. Sure, he’s developed into a great filmmaker: his dark minimalism captures not only the realism of political life, but also his themes about the work that happens in the shadows between a members of a closed society. But, his approach is all wrong. He is the starry-eyed Obama supporter in the age of debt ceiling hostage taking. He is the son who had to watch his dad lose his Congressional race. His ambition is “The Candidate.” But to paraphrase another classic from the 1970’s: “Jake, it’s just campaign management.”

The Pitch:

2 Good Night, and Good Luck

Plus

1 Bob Roberts

Equals

3 The Ides of March

Friends With Benefits

By shimes, August 1, 2011 8:12 am

"Look, if JC Chavez and the Lacheys *really* needed the money in 20 years, I would consider being a bro and doing a 'NSYNC98D tour."

Reviewed by Stephen Himes

Two very attractive people have very enjoyable looking sex and hang out in very picturesque locations in New York and Los Angeles. They say things very confidently, as you would if you were sexy, successful, and living in an oversized New York apartment. And that, pretty much, is the movie.

But here’s the thing: Hollywood used to be really good at this kind of thing. Too many romantic comedies try to make you feel by dragging out the ending and/or force-feeding important emotions. They have something to say about modern divorce and the difficulties of single parenthood, or the ennui of realizing you’re not who you thought you were going to be.

Don’t get me wrong—I want my romantic comedies to be about these things. But too often, romantic comedies think they’re about things when they’re really not. They’re just simplistic clichés dressed up like real movies, substituting acting! for nuanced scripts. The great romantic comedies of old, when directors cut their teeth on Shakespeare, were both enjoyable and had great scripts. Now, romantic comedies think they have great scripts that require acting! when they really aren’t and don’t.

Why does “Friends With Benefits” succeed? Mila Kunis and Justin Timberlake are not Hepburn and Tracy. But they’re a heckuva lot of fun without pretentiously trying to convince the audience that their movie is about anything. In short, it’s what Hollywood should do at a minimum, which Hollywood doesn’t often do anymore. Very often, words emerge from Mila and Justin (we should call them that because they feel so familiar in the movie) that don’t make a lot of sense, and I’m not sure why they do the things they do. But Mila and Justin say them so effortlessly, they make them their own. If you were that cool, you’d sound like that too.

And this is where “Friends With Benefits” takes on an interesting subtext that elevates the movie. How do I know what a blogger-turned-editor at GQ sounds like? For all any of us know, he could act, look, and sound just like Justin Timberlake—actually, that makes sense. And if you were a corporate headhunter agency landing big clients in New York, you’d probably put someone as sexy, confident, intelligent, and relentless as Mila Kunis on your team.

Before we go too far down this rabbit hole, let’s back up a bit. If “Friends With Benefits” is about anything, it’s about taking time away from stressful jobs to enjoy yourself. It’s about having the confidence to do fun things! Why not stage an elaborate 90’s song-themed flash mob for the girl you love? Why not get that beachfront property and walk the sandy beach barefoot? Why not take the job you’re scared of and just go for it? Why not take afternoon walks through the park and ad lib dialogue between strangers?

Director Will Gluck doesn’t believe that romantic comedies should make you believe a fantasy. Rather, he seems to think that romantic comedies should blur the difference between fantasy and reality. What is romance, anyway, if not abandoning pretention and just doing something fun because you feel like it? Look, Mila and Justin take long midday walks through the park hitting on strangers. Got too much work to do? Maybe you do, but is that extra hour really going to make that stress go away? Or will you get more done after a nooner? Do you think that in real life, you can’t just go out and find the perfect piece of abstract-advertising art for your sweetheart? That’s your problem, not “Friends With Benefits”’s problem.

There’s two specific scenes that capture the paradoxical synthetic reality, sincere vanity truth of Gluck’s worldview. First, Mila makes Justin swear on her iPad Bible app that they won’t get emotional after having premarital sex. Second, a helicopter has to rescue Justin literally off the Hollywood sign because he’s too afraid to jump. Go ahead, Justin, jump into Hollywood summertime movies! Gluck’s sense of humor and subtle irony emboldens these two stars to create something random and enjoyable out of nothing but an idea, a lack of pretention, and a sense of fun. It’s totally planned and constructed, calculated to mildly surprise you with how amusing it is, even if its just kinda random and doesn’t make any sense. “Friends With Benefits” is a Central Station flashmob of a movie.

The Pitch:

2 How I Met Your Mother

Plus

1 No Strings Attached

Equals

3 Friends With Benefits

Jerry Meals Got Too Close to the Play

By shimes, July 28, 2011 10:20 am

Two Steps Back and to Your Right, Jerry!

All umpires have nights like this. It happened to me the first season I umpired full time. Sure, it was Little League, but it was still a big game. Extra innings, after 10:00. I had the plate. Tie game, runner on third, one out. Ground ball to the pitcher. The pitcher almost airmails it over the catcher. The catcher jumps to catch the ball, and the runner crosses the plate before he comes down. Safe, game over.

Except I was bearing down so hard on the play that I looked at it too hard. My brain saw two separate things happen, one after the other. I wanted to make absolutely sure the catcher caught the ball, so I looked up at the glove and watched the ball disappear. Then I looked down and saw the runner cross the plate. Catch before runner, he’s out.

Because I switched perspectives and had to briefly search for the plate and the runner’s foot, I didn’t think to look for the catcher’s foot. I had no idea if the catcher pulled his foot off the plate to make the catch because I was focused on the glove, then the runner. After I reacted to the two separate events and called him out, I realized I missed it. Really badly.

I blew the call and blew the game. I let it get to me, and the zone started floating. It was late, kids were tired, and the pitchers were all over the place. Ball over the head, next one in the dirt, and then the third one two inches off the outside corner waist high. Relatively speaking, it looked like a strike, but in reality it wasn’t. The result is that it looked like I was squeezing 12 year old kids in an extra innings Little League game. So the next shoulder high pitch was a strike. At that point, you’re not umpiring—you’re meta-umpiring: calling the game based on how your calls will be perceived rather than what they should be.

The game ended on a play at the plate where the catcher might have dropped the ball, I’m not sure. The ball beat the runner to the plate, so he was probably out, but the catcher might have dropped it, I’m not sure, so I made the call based on what I think other people might have seen, not what I saw—at that point, I’m filtering everything through perception, so I’m not really seeing anything.

That game was nearly eighteen years ago, and I still think about it when I see a big league umpire blow a call. I was a pretty good amateur umpire who worked my way up rather quickly at a young age. That experience really helped me in law school when I worked for a prosecutor. Not only did I learn that rules are not always directly applicable to the facts, but that perspective matters. Which witnesses were in the right position to see what really happened? Sure, the policeman filled out his report, but where was he when the thing he says he saw happened? Besides, a manager who rides you about that outside corner is just defending his client on the mound, just like a defense attorney objecting to your line of questioning. It’s not personal—he’s just doing his job and wants to make sure you’re doing yours.

So what happened on that Little League play? Like a lawyer who takes her cases home from the office, I got too close to the play. When the batter hit the ball, I should have stepped back to be able to see the catch and the runner at the same time. Now, this is not the normal rhythm of a force play. You’re trained on 95% of force plays to focus on the base and listen for the ball to hit the glove. But on this particular play, you’re not going to hear the glove because of the distance. And, because of the situation, I beared down on it and tried to see the catch and the runner too perfectly, which meant that I saw them separately when I needed to see them together.

Which, of course, brings us to Jerry Meals’ instant classic of a blown call in Tuesday’s Braves v. Pirates game. The throw beat runner Julio Lugo to the plate by ten feet. Catcher Mike McKendry appears to applied the tag well in front of the plate. So how the heck did Meals come to the conclusion that Lugo was safe?

I think there’s two parts to this, one psychological and the other mechanical. First, the psychological. In this situation, you really want to get it right, so, of course, you really bear down on the play. You want to make darn sure you see the tag! Meals didn’t see a tag. He saw the catcher swipe his glove in the vicinity of Lugo’s jersey. And, as Rob Neyer commented, McKendry may not have tagged him. The replays don’t definitely show glove/body contact. But even if we employ the criminal “beyond a reasonable doubt” standard of evidence, it sure looks like he’s out.

The problem is that Meals wasn’t in position to see the play the cleanly, so he fooled himself into making the perfect call instead of the right one. This is where umpiring mechanics comes into play. MLB.com forbids embedded videos, so click on this link and watch it until the five second mark, then pause it.

Meals is behind the right-handed batters box. He’s almost perpendicular to the play, so there’s little chance he could see that tag if it happened. The ball was hit, and he made the classic umpiring mistake: He got too close to the play. He bore down on it, stepping at the play and letting the defender shield his view.

The correct mechanic on most tag plays at the plate is to step toward the left handed batters box. This way, when the catcher sweeps the tag, you have an angle to see if there’s daylight between the glove and the body. Also, this puts home plate in your line of view, so you can see the tag and the plate touch in the same frame of vision. Otherwise, you’ll have to look at the tag, then the plate—considering the two things separately when they need to be considered together.

Jerry Meals didn’t just want to go home, nor did he get tired or lazy. He tried too hard to get it right and made a mechanical error on a play that is counterintuitive to the normal rhythms of umpiring. In this way, Jim Joyce made the same mistake last year: Because of the play’s importance, he got too close to it and lost the larger perspective. Yes, Meals’ is a historically bad call that might cost the Pirates their first playoff spot since 1992. But as Armando Gallaraga told Jim Joyce last year, “Nobody’s perfect.” I just hope the 1994 Rotary Club team can still forgive me.

Sports

Bad Teacher

By shimes, July 26, 2011 2:07 pm

"No, tell me Justin, what happens after I open that box?"

Reviewed by Stephen Himes

The only way to understand the genius of Jake Kasden’s (the underrated, ambitious “Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story”) “Bad Teacher” is to imagine Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker watching this movie. If you’re Governor Walker, you have to revoke teachers’ right to collectively bargain because, though most teachers are good hearted people, they’re overpaid, have too many benefits, and have too much time off—all at the expense of the taxpayer. And then there’s the teachers unions, who entrench teachers who don’t care about their jobs because tenure means they don’t have to care about their jobs. Look at those test scores, people—all proof that teachers are lazy and incompetent!

If that’s your worldview, then you immediately recognize the flask-sipping, movie-showing, meeting-skipping Elizabeth Halsey as WHAT’S WRONG WITH EDUCATION. Film critics have called Cameron Diaz’s performance “gratuitously nasty,” which, as John Stewart captured, is just barely beyond the rhetoric deployed by Fox News during the collective bargaining crisis in Wisconsin. Miss Halsey, like everybody else in the world, is motivated solely by money, so she seeks a sugar daddy who’ll take her away from this awful job. Halsey, unlike her frumpier and fatter colleagues, doesn’t have the patience to just show up and count down the retirement clock. Or, as Halsey tells us, “When I started teaching, I thought it was for the right reasons: shorter hours, summers off, and no accountability.”

So, if you’re Governor Walker, and you’re willing to chalk up the Daisy Dukes car wash and the boob job sideplot to “Hollywood,” then this movie is in your wheelhouse. I mean, this is hilarious because it’s not that far from the truth! Then Kasden’s masterstroke: Halsey can earn her boob job through a performance bonus based on student test scores! Awesome! Because teachers will teach better if you threaten them! Seriously, they just need to be motivated by money to turn themselves into hard-ass drill sergeant super teachers! Finally, a Hollywood movie about teachers conservatives can really get behind! Michelle Rhee, Governor Walker is on Line One!

But this is where Kasden gets them. Suddenly, Miss Halsey passes out To Kill a Mockingbird and starts drilling them with questions about the effectiveness of Scout Finch as a narrator. She hurls dodge balls at boys’ nards without spilling her coffee. If Dewey Cox walked hard, Elizabeth Halsey teaches hard. Really hard. She disintegrates pencils in her hands, she’s teaching so damn hard.

Then it hits you: This isn’t teaching. Yelling questions at kids doesn’t cultivate the critical thinking skills they need to evaluate Scout Finch’s narration. “Bad Teacher” is so obviously Hollywood that it exposes the most essential truth about the teaching labor market: “Motivating” teachers isn’t going to suddenly make them good at their jobs. The Hollywood improbability of (Spoiler Alert!) Miss Halsey winning the performance pay award for test scores underscores this very point. Bad teachers are going to be bad whether you “motivate” them or not.

The problem with the teaching labor market—if we are brutally honest—is that we do not value teaching as a profession, so the best college students don’t choose teaching as a profession. Please do not misread this—I myself chose to go back into education after law school, and there are lots of great minds and great talents in education. But the numbers don’t lie: teacher education schools are populated by lower caliber students. They’re far less selective than other countries’ programs. We don’t even bother to measure whether these programs develop good teachers. Besides, college students know that teaching is long hours for low pay, and you take the blame for “society’s” problems. Teaching has an extraordinary burnout rate—nearly half in the first five years. There’s little chance for advancement. Everybody says teachers are underpaid, but when it comes right down to it, we don’t pay them what they’re worth, and Governor Walker’s benefits cuts aren’t going to cause the nation’s best and brightest to knock down the schoolhouse door.

Kasden captures this perfectly in his random assortment of short-sleeve dress shirted administrators, overweight gym teachers, and other socially awkward teachers in John Adams Middle School. He overdoes it by half—more than half, actually. Most teachers are professional people—and bless the middle school teachers of the world, who do God’s work everyday. But we need more—many more—and to start siphoning off charismatic, talented people from professions (I’m looking at you, lawyers and financial services) where their talents aren’t leveraged for the larger good.

And that, Governor Walker and Chancellor Rhee, is the argument for tenure reform and performance pay—it’s actually professional pay. From the Scott Walker and Michelle Rhee perspective, tenure reform and performance pay is a punitive measure to punish the Elizabeth Halseys of the world. Fair enough, but if you don’t ensure that you’re going to replace Elizabeth Halsey with a better teacher than Elizabeth Halsey, you’re just wasting valuable human resources by firing Elizabeth Halsey.

Thus, the point of tenure reform and professional pay is to reward teachers for exceptional outcomes—as we do in the private sector. It’s a recruitment and retention strategy designed to bring the Scott Delacorte’s (Justin Timberlake’s good hearted nerd in the movie) into the profession (if he’s talented enough), and move the Russell Gettis’s (Jason Segel’s gym teacher) out if they’re not. If education reform is just about firing BAD TEACHERS, reform will never happen because replacing BAD TEACHERS with BAD TEACHERS still leaves you with BAD TEACHERS.

The performance bonus proffered by “Bad Teacher” has no point except as a plot device to allow us to watch Cameron Diaz throw dodgeballs at twelve year olds. As a policy matter, it opens the door to the next step, as Kasden brings up when the principal complains about not being able to fire Halsey, which is tenure reform. You can imagine “Bad Teacher” sparking Governor Walker’s imagination to run wild with visions of tearing apart the teachers union so he can just start firing people! Like Michelle Rhee did! It’s fun! She’ll let you watch!

I would, however, argue with Kasden’s plot point that Amy Squirrel (Lucy Punch) won the top test scores award three years in a row. Squirrel is a horrifying vision of perkiness who thinks “enthusiasm” is “caring” about her students, which makes them want to learn. She rolls out practiced cornball puns nobody thinks is cute, and her “dynamic” style involves hand clapping and making kids stand up and say things. She is the worst kind of busybody teacher because she has “energy,” but her kids don’t learn anything because she’s impossible to respect. There’s no way she is able to command a middle school classroom to teach kids anything.

But I digress. Sure, “Bad Teacher” sells out at the end, and most of it is Cameron Diaz’s take on Billy Bob Thornton-style offensiveness. Still, at its heart, “Bad Teacher” offers the only real argument the Scott Walkers of the world have for punitive tenure reform and benefit reductions: that if you can’t get rid of Elizabeth Halsey, then who can you get rid of? And if you can’t get rid of her, then you have to “motivate” her. Which is a dumb strategy because BAD TEACHERS aren’t bad because they’re lazy; they’re bad because they lack the talent and skills to teach well. Just as kids won’t learn if you yell at them, teachers won’t teach better if you threaten them. Governor Walker, put down the dodgeball before you end up looking like an ineffectual bully—the state capitol’s version of Elizabeth Halsey.

The Pitch:

2 Mr. Woodcock

Plus

1 Governor Scott Walker

Equals

3 Bad Teacher

Harry Potter and the Deathy Hallows, Part 2

By shimes, July 15, 2011 1:00 pm

"You hand over that flask right now, young man!"

Reviewed by Stephen Himes

Chris Columbus directed the first two “Harry Potter” films as if afflicted with Lucas Syndrome: The false impression that the success of a pop culture phenomenon transforms the work into mythology, requiring reverence from the moviemaker. Lucas solemnized the “Star Wars” prequels until they were, in the words of Homer Simpson, boring as church, with its immaculate conceptory midichlorines, marriage vows conflicting with duties to a priestly order, and long talks about the Empire’s repression of the Chosen One. Ron Howard caught the disease on the set of “The Da Vinci Code,” where he treated Dan Brown’s pseudo-religious insanity as a reverent tome. For too many adapters of fiction, fidelity to the “source” is the director’s charge, and must be treated with the respect of a bloody Christ reenactor carrying His cross through the Seven Stations.

Thus, Columbus’ interpretation of Rowling’s world was of meticulous CGI imaginings, each pixel matched perfectly to a syllable. The problem, as is the symptom of all directors affected with Lucas Syndrome, is that “The Sorcerer’s Stone” and “The Chamber of Secrets” lacked adventure! Not just with movies—but adventure stories, even BIG IMPORTANT MYTHS, are supposed to be fun, which absolutely does not mean that adventure stories can’t be fun and about something at the same time.

Adapters of fiction tend to forget this, I think, because of the inherent bias that books are always better than the movies. If that’s true, then why make the movies at all, except as two hour trailers for the book? And no, the movies-get-kids-interested-in-reading argument is not a justification for adapting written stories into movies. The movies must stand alone as their own works of art, which is why Columbus’ “Potter” movies fail. Mostly, Harry and company spend most of those movies gawking at all the floating staircases and talking flying hats and whatnot. In myth, the hero’s story becomes our own, but Columbus takes this too literally: Harry looks on in wide-eyed wonderment at all the magical things happening around him, as if Hogwarts were a multiplex. In fact, he flattened the intricate gothic design of Oxford’s Duke Humfrey’s Library into a kind of green screen for his special effects wizards. Thus, the movies are emotionally flat because Columbus does the cinematic equivalent of powerpointing the novels.

The trend over the last half century in both pop and literary fiction is towards wordiness. Your typical Pen Faulkner winner tends towards pseudo-profound vagueness. As B.R. Myers famously wrote for The Atlantic, authors like E. Annie Proulx, Don Delillo, and Cormac McCarthy, et al rely on “accumulation,” “barrages of hit-and-miss verbiage [rather] than on careful use of just the right words.” They obscure meaning rather than elucidate it, which is mistaken for intellectual depth. Similarly, the pop novel is less pretentious, but lacks the discipline to use five words when fifteen are available. Stephanie Meyer, ask yourself, does Twlight really need 500 pages?

J.K. Rowling’s books got better with practice, and her work deserves special praise for having the accessibility of “genre” fiction with the emotional depth of “Literature.” Still, Rowling tends toward wordiness, especially as the material got more mature. Roughly a fourth of her words are indulgent detail and plot recapitulation, bloating the pages like Harry’s aunt in the opening of Alfonso Cuaron’s “The Prisoner of Azkaban.” At worst, her prose is self-indulgent—some copyediting could cut 800 pages to 600. An unwitting metaphor might be Hogwarts’ spell books that literally try to eat the students.

But, Rowling’s greatest achievement is transitioning the series, like a tween to teen to adulthood, from “children’s fiction” to mature adult literature. By the end, we’re left with the remnants of awkward, kid-ish names: “Slitherin,” “Dumbledore,” even “Hogwarts” doesn’t sound quite right in the darkness of the “Deathly Hallows.” Still, Rowling has assembled a grand, coherent myth in the Campbellian tradition. The opportunity for the filmmaker is best expressed by Professor Sybill Trelawney: “The truth lies like a sentence deep in a book.” Sometimes, Rowling’s truths lie deep within the chambers of her prose.

Thus, the best “Potter” movies find a theme to center the plot, which gives the filmmakers criteria to make coherent cuts. Where Columbus-style “fidelity” demands throwing everything in at the expense of depth, centering the films strips away Rowling’s excessive detail and plot, allowing for depth.

Alfonso Cuaron’s “The Prisoner of Azkaban” emphasizes Harry’s Dickensian roots with a gothic motif, opening the film with a hand-held sequence (“Harry Potter”…the arthouse film?) and an action sequence that zooms a triple-decker bus through London right into what looks like a Tim Burton movie. Cuaron’s non-magical gothic touches (lonely trains whistling through a misty dusk, a snowstorm blurring Hogwarts, candles dripping onto tables in the main hall) build the mood, culminating in Harry climbing the gears of a rusty clock, as in the timelessness of his orphan’s struggle. Cuaron slows the pace for the most touching moment of the film: when Hermoine approaches Harry, sobbing under his invisibility cloak that hides him from the world. She lifts the veil, starkly exposing the wounded boy, reaching out to comfort him while they sit among a gaggle of dioramas of the solar system, slowing spinning as the camera pulls back slowly to reveal the scene.

David Yates’ first “Potter” film, “The Order of the Phoenix,” focuses on what many precocious fifteen year olds sense: school enforces conformity at the expense of creativity, which is why gifted children have some of highest drop-out rates. Yates turns one of the great villains of the series, Ministry bureaucrat turned Defence Against the Dark Arts professor Delores Umbridge, into a horrifying vision of state-run education. When Umbridge stands before the academy in her pink blazer and firmly sprayed hair (not in the book) and tells the students that they will have to reach certain ministry-approved benchmarks, behind the centuries of candle drips from the tarnished eagle of the Great Hall’s lectern—the point is clear: No government “standards” will teach what centuries of academy tradition can. Yates argues that schools like Hogwarts challenge students to achieve greatness by developing their gifts, and the modern bureaucracy celebrates mediocrity by teaching to the middle. That’s not teaching and learning; it’s manufacturing an obedient citizenry. Or, as Umbridge tells Harry before he writes “I Will Not Tell Lies” during detention, “The one thing I will not stand for is disloyalty!”

The wizards learn only enough theory to pass the ministry’s test, “which is what school is about,” Umbridge tells the kids with a matter-of-fact smile. Staunton developed a forced giggle and a perma-pursed expression reminiscent of the kind of evil perpetrated by Joseph Conrad’s Hollow Men: She’s not trying to turn Hogwarts into a fanatical Wahabbist madrassa; she’s bullying the students into obedience through sheer blandness. The students can’t use magic; their textbook’s spells have been bowdlerized into meaninglessness. She tacks so many “Educational Decrees” to the wall that you need a ladder to read them, all of which tell you what they can’t do. The wizards are simply bricks in Hogwarts’ wall.

Of the scenes film omitted from the film, there’s nothing essential to the main plot or theme. Which is not to say these scenes are without color or purpose, but again, Rowling does get bogged down in excessive, extraneous detail. The post-Columbus directors have done an excellent job lifting the story up from the prose to give it immediacy without sacrificing the “mythic” proportions. This explains the decision to divide “The Deathly Hallows” into two parts: Rather than shove it all in, Columbus-style, Yates lets the story unfold at a pace that allows for the big action set pieces, but also the smaller moments between characters who’ve grown up together.

So, the question is: What’s the theme of Part 2? The tag lines seems to be “The wand chooses the wizard,” but what does that mean, exactly? Part 2 focuses on Harry’s quest for the Elder Wand, which is basically Tolkien’s “precious” all powerful ring. Because there’s already been seven novels of plot, the film is a series of set pieces unraveling the secrets of the wand. Aside from the conspicuously Sith-ian way the wand passes to a new owner, I was a little unsure of what it means for the wand to choose the wizard.

On one hand, a key element of myth is the hero is born the chosen one, then he grows into the man capable of the responsibility bestowed on him—thus, the wand chooses the wizard, but the wizard must also choose the wand. He accepts responsibility and suffers the trials that build him into a hero. The most unsatisfying part of myths, to my mind, is the idea that some higher power pre-ordained the outcome, which necessarily devalues the courage of the hero: Divine blessing means he can’t lose. “Star Wars” did this to Anakin Skywalker: The secularized “Force” and his midichlorines (or whatever they were) bestowed him with pseudo-divine powers that pre-ordained his fate.

To Rowling’s credit, there is no divine power that guarantees Harry Potter’s victory. Sure, there’s supernatural powers, but that’s not the same thing: there’s no Zeus that tips the scales toward Achilles, no Athena that steers Odysseus home. Essentially, the final showdown between Harry and Voldemort tests which of them solved the riddle (“Riddle” is also Voldemort’s given name) of the wand. So, when Harry puts his life at risk to prove he’s right, there’s no guarantee he’ll survive—thus, the drama. The brilliance of Rowling’s ending is that Harry’s resurrection is a direct consequence of the plot, without supernatural interference to make things right. Voldemort only kills the piece of him that lives in Harry’s soul, thus killing himself with his own curse.

This, I think, is really at the heart of fundamentalist Christian’s objection to the books. The teaching of “black magic” is really beside the point: The Harry Potter universe has no higher powers to choose the “chosen” and administer justice to evil. Yes, Harry Potter is orphaned and brought to Hogwarts, but not by random chance or divine intervention. For the most part, Harry makes his own choices (though he does, admittedly, keep ending up in opportune situations). This, not the “occult,” is what stands between fundamentalism and Potter-mentalism. If there is a god in the Harry Potter universe, you earn your way into heaven, like a prep school without tuition.

Yates’ film revolves around this theme, emphasizing that the fragile nature of the world (even the august Hogwarts crumbles) is as much about the things we can control as the things we can’t. I might object to the miserly hook-nosed dwarf accountants, but more than that, I think the “wand chooses the wizard” doesn’t quite capture what Harry Potter is about. Harry Potter is about transforming dreams into reality.

Rowling captured our imaginations with wizards and magic and spells and all the rest, and over the course of seven novels, we came to accept these fictions as true. We all wished we went to Hogwarts because, yes, it cultivated creativity, but also enforced the kind of discipline that transforms fantasies into realities. In fairy tales, dreams come true because fairy godmothers waive magic wands; in Harry Potter, dreams come true because you learn spells, practice until its perfect, and then you make the wand your own.This is how the fictions of our imaginations are realized in the real world. Thus, the real theme of “The Deathly Hallows,” as spoken, of course, by Professor Dumbledore: “Of course it’s happening inside your head, Harry. But that doesn’t mean it’s not real.”

The Pitch:

2 The Revenge of the Sith

Plus

1 1/2 Fat Peter Jackson

Equals

3 1/2 Deathly Hallows Part 2