Romance, violence: same old, same old

Channing Tatum and Amanda Seyfried in a borefest.

Jonathan Rhys Meyers, John Travolta try to kick butt.

Without romance and action, we probably could reduce the size of every 25-screen multiplex by at least two thirds. So it's hardly surprising that we move into February with examples from each of these venerable genres leading the way. Sadly, neither Dear John nor From Paris With Love serves as a role models for their respective genres. It's also possible to argue that these two movies - though radically different - teach us virtually nothing about their subjects, assuming you can say that the dizzying, dippy From Paris With Love even has a subject.

Dear John, adapted from a Nicholas Sparks' novel of the same name, tells the story of a soldier who falls for a college student. Their romance is put through a wringer of obstacles - many arriving on screen as if they were little more than afterthoughts. This is especially surprising because we're talking about issues as potentially volatile as wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, terminal cancer and autism.

That's an awfully full plate for a romance that feels drastically undernourished and which offers - near as I could determine - only one pleasure, the balm to the senses that comes from beach settings in South Carolina, where much of the story takes place.

We might as well focus on the movie's main and most crippling liability, the lead actors and the characters they play, Savannah Curtis and John Tyree, portrayed by Amanda Seyfried and Channing Tatum. Seyfried, best known for her work on HBO's Big Love, looks so young that it's difficult to accept her in any romance that doesn't involve a corsage and a prom. Tatum, who plays a Special Forces soldier, seems to have been encouraged toward a stinginess of expression that suggests soul and suffering.

It's not exactly earthshaking to say that big-screen romances depend on the sparks that are ignited by the actors. I'm not sure you could start a campfire with the heat that Seyfried and Tatum generate as their characters are pushed through a variety of circumstances that inspire either yawning indifference or an unfortunate awareness that the screenwriters are straining to find ways to impinge on the romance. Savannah and John meet while John is on leave and living with his father (Richard Jenkins), a reclusive soul whose mental impairments have turned him into an obsessive coin collector. He also cooks a lot of lasagna.

Sparks' sentimental novels make easy targets for critics. So, too, the movie, which has been directed without distinction by Lasse Hallstrom, a Swedish-born director whose Hollywood record is spotty, including audience favorites such as What's Eating Gilbert Grape , Chocolat and The Cider House Rules, as well as missed opportunities such as The Shipping News.

Watching Dear John, I wondered what a master of melodrama such as Douglas Sirk (Imitation of Life) might have done with this material. Sirk would have exaggerated and pushed the emotional pedal to the metal. He would have given the movie operatic amplitude, instead of producing what amounts to romantic easy listening.

But Sirk is long gone, and Dear John stands as a bona fide yawner that probably will serve only one notable purpose; it will provide a place for Sparks' legion of fans to convene for popcorn and group sighs.

Now, onto the action.....

From Paris With Love boasts the kind of pedigree that's bound to tempt action junkies. It did me. The movie stars John Travolta in Pulp Fiction mode - only with a shaved head and goatee. It has been directed by Pierre Morel, who also directed the sneering revenge drama Taken, as well as District 13, an irresistible piece of French martial arts mayhem. If you need more by the way of credentials, know that the movie is based on a story by Luc Besson, the French writer/director with his own action track record and a flare for lavish overstatement. Witness The Fifth Element.

These filmmakers have a flare for preposterous action that's so overindulged in From Paris With Love that the movie threatens to collapse under tons of scattered impulses. Let's face it: The line between preposterous and dumb can be awfully thin, and From Paris With Love crosses it early and often.

The movie teams Travolta with Jonathan Rhys Meyers. Meyers portrays James Reese, an embassy assistant who aspires to become a full-fledged CIA operative. Early on Reese hooks up with Travolta's Charlie Wax, a blustering, high octane CIA nut job with method behind his obvious madness. Perhaps knowing that the movie would be rife with explosions, Travolta tries to compete with bursts of profanity and clownish exaggeration. It should be impossible to go over the top in a movie this wild, but I think Travolta managed to do it.

Morel adopts a cut-and-slash approach to editing that makes the action - everything from Uzi-sprayed ceilings to blurry car chases - frenetic without being entirely comprehensible. The story -- which peels back layers of plot to get at (what else?) a terrorist threat - - is little more than scaffolding on which to hang an extensive but meaningless body count.

Amid the chaos, Travolta and Meyers do their version of an odd-couple routine. At one point, Meyers' character carries a vase full of cocaine through a couple of shootouts, a ploy that's more confounding than funny. Amid the furor, he also tries to stay in touch with his fiance (Kasia Smutniak). He's being tested throughout, building toward the all-important question that every would-be CIA agent must answer: When it really matters, can he pull the trigger?

Here's the thing about movies such as From Paris With Love: They needn't make sense, but they do require that their rampant violence be accompanied by a subversive sense of fun, a delight in the intricacies that the filmmakers weave into their energetic set pieces. You can find an example in Morel's own work. Just rent District 13.

As for From Paris With Love. Lots of bullets fly, but too few hit any truly entertaining targets.

The ugly battle for Tolstoy's legacy

Mr. and Mrs. Tolstoy in a rare happy moment.

If you've ever wondered how George and Martha -- the battling couple from Edward Albee's “Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf” -- might have looked had they lived in 19th Century Russia, you need look no further than director Michael Hoffman's The Last Station. Set in the waning days of Lev Nikolayevich Tolstoy's life, The Last Station revolves around an epic battle between Tolstoy and his wife, Sofya.

The two had plenty of reason to fight. Toward the end of his life, Tolstoy (Christopher Plummer) attracted a large number of Tolstoyans to an expansive form of Christianity that focused on Christ as a beneficent soul who championed the cause of a benighted but essentially noble peasantry.

To underscore his beliefs, Tolstoy wore peasant clothes and expressed withering disdain for his aristocratic heritage. None of this could have been easy for Tolstoy, who was both wealthy and a celebrity. And it was even more difficult for his wife, Sofya (Helen Mirren), who fought to keep her husband's wealth from supporting a movement she grew to detest.

Tolstoy was encouraged in building his prototypical social movement by Vladimir Chertkov (Paul Giamatti), who apparently attempted to appropriate Tolstoy's fame and fortune for the benefit of a movement that had established communes where participants chopped a lot of wood and refrained from sexual relations. (Tolstoy himself evidently hadn't shown such restraint during the lustful days of a wanton youth.) As played by Giamatti, Chertkov comes across as the ultimate anti-party animal, an intractable ideologue capable of little compassion.

Plummer, nominated for an Oscar in the best supporting actor category, portrays Tolstoy as a man of large, embracing spirit, the papa bear of Russian literature and of a social movement that he doesn't seem to take quite as seriously as some of its adherents. Nominated for best actress, Mirren conveys Sofya's desperation as a wife who fears she has been supplanted in her husband's heart by the Tolstoyans who idealize him.

Credit Mirren with also showing that Sofya – though often shrill – could seem a bastion of common sense. Sofya convincingly attacks the Tolstyans as peddlers of hooey, and Mirren makes it clear that Sofya's position is based on a finely honed and skeptical intelligence, as well as on fear of financial ruin.

Unfortunately for the movie, there's more to The Last Station than battles between Tolstoy and Sofya. The story also introduces us to an eager young writer (James McAvoy) who's hired by Chertkov to become Tolstoy's private secretary. McAvoy's Valentin Bulgakov lives on a commune near the Tolstoy estate, and is supposed to serve as a spy for Chertkov.

Instead of falling prey to Chertkov's agenda, Bulgakov begins to be swayed by Tolstoy's generosity and tolerance, so much so that he finds himself lured by the charms of a fellow Tolstoyan (Kerry Condon). Bulgakov also plays middleman between Tolstoy and Sofya, refusing to become a total pawn in Chertkov's game.

McAvoy (The Last King of Scotland) knows how to portray avid young men, but scenes involving Bulgakov's awakening can't hold a candle to those over which the great novelist or the ranting Sofya preside.

Based on a novel by Jay Parini, the movie occasionally sputters, but remains worthwhile for the performances of Plummer and Mirren, which tend toward impressive exaggeration. That makes sense. The movie reminds us that Tolstoy was a carefully watched celebrity. The Russian press took a keen interest in his sputtering marriage and declining health. If he were alive today, Tolstoy probably would have found himself a subject for TMZ, the Internet celebrity gossip hub.

I doubt whether either Plummer or Mirren will win Oscars, but they're the kind of accomplished pros who have the stature to give Tolstoy and Sofyo the vividly memorable screen life they deserve.

Two movies leave us out in the cold

If you need to be any colder this winter, two movies offer an excellent opportunity to feel the chill.

MAN VS. MOUNTAIN IN 'NORTH FACE.'

Climbing doesn't get more difficult than in North Face.

No denying there are thrills (and chills) in North Face, director Philipp Stölzl's movie about two German climbers who try to conquer the treacherous north face of the Eiger, a fabled mountain in Switzerland. Once you know that Eiger means Ogre, you pretty much get the idea. Reaching the top of sheer Eiger cliff walls is no easy task, and when the movie begins -- in 1936 -- no climbers have yet accomplished the task.

Benno Fürmann, as Toni Kurz, and Florian Lukas, as Andreas Hinterstoisser, play members of the Mountain Brigade of the German Army. An aspiring newspaper photographer (Johanna Wokalek) approaches this Bavarian-born duo at the suggestion of a reporter (Ulrich Tukar). Tukar's character is full of Nazi bluster, and thinks that the sight of two Germans conquering the Eiger would have enormous PR value. Germans, he argues, would be encouraged to believe they truly could scale any heights.

Stolzl faced a fairly large problem in making his movie. How could he glorify the heroism of two intrepid climbers if they were also part of the Third Reich propaganda machine? To take the political edge off his main characters, Stolzl uses the movie's reporter as a kind of foil. He also includes scenes in which an Austrian spectator of the climb -- folks watched from a hotel at the base of the mountain -- makes clear that he wants Hitler to stay out of his country.

Stolzl creates additional empathy for Kurz and Hinterstoisser by showing that they were apolitical outdoorsmen capable only of the most lackluster sig heils. An epilogue at the film's end boasts a shot that seems intended to demonstrate that one of the characters escaped the tarnish of Germany's racism.

Still, I couldn't help think that while I was white knuckling at the sight of two climbers engaging some very spectacular hazards, Jews were being persecuted in Germany's cities, and Hitler was cranking up his war machine. You'll have to decide for yourself how much such knowledge influences your viewing experience, how you feel about a movie that pushes history to its periphery.

Judging by the degree of difficulty, though, North Face is a superior example of the particularly German, mountain film genre. I can only imagine how hard it was to film scenes of Kurz and Hinterstoisser on the mountain, and once the action starts, the climbing segments keep us riveted.

Unfortunately, Stolzl waters down their impact by switching from the mountain to the posh hotel where the spectators have gathered. The hardship and heroism of the climbers contrasts with the comfort and safety of those who watch from a distance. The point is made early and often -- too often.

I don't know how much liberty Stolzl has taken with the facts. A love story between Kurz and Wokalek's Louise adds some poignancy, but what happens on the mountain keeps the movie percolating and us frozen with tension in our seats.

ANOTHER TAKE ON WHAT IT MEANS TO BE UP IN THE AIR.

Three skiers have a very bad day.

Bring a sweater to Frozen, a thriller/horror movie that takes place almost entirely on the stalled chair lift of a New England ski resort. Having ridden lifts like the one in the movie – mostly at the end of summer at Telluride Film Festivals – I've felt what it's like to hope that you don't fall off or get stuck in mid-air. (The old Telluride lifts had straps that fit loosely across your lap.) The characters in Frozen, by director Adam Green, don't fair nearly as well as I did. I always arrived at the top. Decently acted by Emma Bell, Parker O'Neil and Joe Lynch , the movie strands three skiers in the middle of their ride. If Frozen, which played as a midnight movie at the recently concluded Sundance Film Festival, is a bit of a director's exercise, I'd give it a solid "B." Expect a few grisly sights and be prepared for a pack of hungry wolves, but know that Green and his cast make you feel both the cold and the sense of helplessness that confronts three skiers who face the prospect (never mind why) of spending a week suspended over a mountain with no help in sight. Of course, it takes a bit of contrivance to set the story in motion, but once he gets going, Green -- unlike his characters -- pretty much avoids getting stuck.

Can a legal system provide justice?

Despite its title, director Hans-Christian Schmid hasn't ginned up Storm for visceral excitement. Instead, Schmid immerses us in a tangle of problems surrounding the prosecution of a Bosnian Serb general for crimes against humanity. Kerry Fox plays a prosecutor who has been asked to try the case in The Hague, and the movie takes a variety of twists that call the motivations of nearly everyone into question. Far from undermining the movie, Schmid's even-handed strategy turns Storm into a fascinating look at morally complex issues that resist easy answers. Although the movie makes clear the kind of atrocities that the general perpetrated -- most notably against Muslim women -- it also shows how justice can be compromised in the name of accepting so-called “adult” solutions. Anamaria Marinca, pictured above with Fox, portrays a woman who – at great personal risk – is asked to testify by those who risk little more than finding themselves on the losing side of a legal battle. Thought-provoking and intelligent, Storm presents a remarkably clear-eyed view of how legal systems work – or don't. The movie leaves us thinking that something's terribly wrong when justice can be bartered away.

(Storm opens in Denver Friday.)

10 pictures, but not many real surprises

Both Avatar and The Hurt Locker are aiming for Oscar gold.

If you care, you already know this year's Oscar nominations in every category. You also may be a little worn out on statues, having endured what seems an endless parade of critics' awards and the always over-hyped Golden Globes. Still, nothing trumps Oscar for prestige, and no matter how little the pompously named Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences surprises us, we're always forced to glance in Oscar's direction.

OK, you know that Avatar and The Hurt Locker tied for the lead in nominations with nine each. You also know that Oscar's expanded 10-picture list includes The Blind Side, a decent enough movie but one that probably would have caused little Oscar stir in years gone by. And without the 10-picture approach it's inconceivable that District 9 would have found its way onto a best-picture list. Oscar has never been partial to sci-fit, but this year's best picture list not only includes District 9 (about aliens stranded on Earth) but also Avatar (about aliens as holy primitives.)

The 10-picture news, of course, isn't all bad. I'd rather see A Serious Man on a best picture list -- which it is -- than wonder why Star Trek, though entertaining and zesty, deserved to be ranked among the year's elite. It wasn't.

For all the hoopla, it already seems clear that Avatar and The Hurt Locker will duke it out for best picture. But with 10 movies, it's just possible that The Blind Side could surprise everyone, even though neither its screenplay nor its director received Oscar attention.

Quick. Who directed The Blind Side? Did you see John Lee Hancock's name on anyone's awards list? Neither did I. The Blind Side has become Bullock's picture. No one else need apply for ownership.

For the record, the 10-picture format strikes me as little more than a PR stunt, a sop to popular taste that gives the category the faint aroma of The People's Choice Awards. Of course, if the people really did have an Oscar choice, The Hangover would have made the best picture list. Even with 10 movies, Oscar remains comedy shy.

And for all its attempts at a new populism -- a.k.a., the search for higher TV ratings -- Oscar still found plenty of room for movies that first made their bones at film festivals: The Hurt Locker, An Education, Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, and Up in the Air.

I was hearted to see Oren Moverman's The Messenger -- and important and deeply moving movie about the impact of war on soldiers who survive it -- earn Oscar nominations in the best supporting actor category (for Woody Harrelson) and for best original screenplay. If you haven't seen it, make an effort.

It was equally heartening to see that In the Loop was nominated in the best adapted screenplay category. It won't win, but the Academy seems to have recognized that the movie was witty, incisive and delicious satirical. And while we're on the subject, I would love to have seen Peter Capaldi (of the same movie) on the list of best supporting actor nominees. He was brilliant as a vicious PR-conscious British government advisor and could have replaced Matt Damon, who played a rugby star in Invictus, a movie that was snubbed for best picture. Damon, by the way, was outstanding as a whistleblower in Steven Soderbergh's The Informant!

Still, it's difficult to carp about the best actor category. Even though Jeff Bridges has become a runaway favorite for his work as an alcoholic singer in Crazy Heart, there's no one on the list I'd want to see knocked off. The Academy did the right thing by including Jeremy Renner, who played the wild man leader of a bomb squad in The Hurt Locker. Colin Firth's nomination in the same category proved that Oscar can recognize quiet work. Firth played a bereaved gay English professor in A Single Man.

Maggie Gyllenhaal as best supporting actress for her portrayal of a single mom in Crazy Heart? Not in my world. I'd rather have seen Julianne Moore honored for her work in A Single Man. Maybe it doesn't matter. Does anyone believe that Mo'Nique can be beaten in this category? She played the world's most abusive mother in Precious.

Like everyone else, I was surprised to see The Secret of Kells on the best animated feature list and a little dismayed that The Princess and the Frog -- lesser Disney -- made the cut. Still, I wouldn't bet the rent against Up, the favorite in this category.

But you know what? This should be your day to applaud your favorites and scream about what you regard as the Academy's sins of omission. Want to know what makes me truly happy? An interminable awards season finally is drawing to a close -- even if we still have to wait until figure skaters collect Olympic gold before we learn who'll win Oscar gold.

The awards will be handed out on March 7.