Sex, talk, and relationships on view

   I already knew that Penelope Cruz can be a terrific comic actress, but The Invite, a movie about sex and relationships, reminded me how good she can be. I can’t say I’m a huge Seth Rogen fan, but he gives what might be his best performance in this Olivia Wilde-directed movie. Wilde also has a starring role.

   Essentially, The Invite is a four-hander with Edward Norton joining the group as a firefighter who has formed a relationship with a psychotherapist (Cruz), who describes herself as a sexologist. 

   Putting two couples (Wilde, Rogen, and Cruz and Norton) into a San Francisco apartment sounds claustrophobic, but working from a screenplay by Will McCormack and Rashida Jones, Wilde makes her movie both provocative and entertaining. 

   The movie opens with Rogen’s Joe riding his folding bicycle home from his job as a music teacher at a minor San Francisco conservatory. Everything about Joe suggests defeat — from his slouch to his saturnine countenance. In hilly San Francisco, riding a bike can be punishing. Joe shows no signs of being able to escape his fate.

   When he arrives home with a bad back, Joe quickly gets into a tiff with his wife Angela (Wilde). She tells him the upstairs neighbors are coming to dinner. Joe claims that he’s been ambushed by the news. Angela’s upset that he didn’t buy wine for the occasion. We're primed for an evening of familiar bickering.

    But Joe has a specific complaint about the neighbors — Cruz’s Pina and Norton’s Hawk — make wild, noisy love that disrupts Joe’s sleep. Pina’s orgasms evidently have an epic quality. Joe insists he plans to complain. Angela slides into don’t-you-dare mode.

     It’s clear from the start that these two couples aren’t destined to be best friends forever. Norton’s Hawk has a self-possessed arrogance about him, and Pina has a pushy personality, an openness that borders on aggression. She presents herself as a free spirit.

    So where is all this going? The Invite soon turns into a movie about contemporary sexual mores and styles. Hawk and Pina, we learn, are into group sex. The noise Joe has been hearing comes from some of their orgy mates. Hawk upends Joe by bringing the subject up before Joe has a chance to complain. He feels he owes Joe an explanation.

     Wilde’s jittery uneasiness and Rogen’s inbred cynicism play well against two people who pride themselves on their maturity. I won’t describe the results, but the dialogue becomes sharply funny, and the actors are in peak form. 

     Wilde keeps things humming as we learn more about each character. Pina goes beyond her obvious eroticism. Hawk reveals a sobering part of his past, and Angela and Joe begin to see the truth that underlies their constant arguing: Their increasingly stale relationship may be teetering on the edge of extinction

     No fair telling more. The movie can’t quite decide how to end, but Wilde avoids a sentimental resolution and by the time the movie concludes, each character stands more revealed. Emotions, vulnerabilities, and personal truths have been bared. 

     Look, The Invite isn’t Chekov or Albee, but it’s engaging and deftly realized. That’s more than can be said about lots of current movies.

Rolling into Bob Dylan's early days

 Timothee Chalamet does his own singing in A Complete Unknown, director James Mangold's lively look at the years Bob Dylan transformed from a folk music prophet into an electrified and electrifying musician who defied classification.

  Although his voice isn't quite as gritty as Dylan's, Chalamet comes close enough to keep the movie credible, and Mangold, who told Johnny Cash's story in Walk the Line (2005), adds enough rising-star power to make for a captivating entertainment.

  Chalamet and Mangold meet Dylan on his terms or their idea of Dylan's terms. A Complete Unknown isn't an interpretation of Dylan's work or life. It's a cultural chronology that begins in 1961 when Dylan -- formerly Bobby Zimmerman -- arrives in New York City. He was 19.

   Dylan has a mission: He wants to visit folk legend Woody Guthrie (Scoot McNairy) who by then was hospitalized in New Jersey with Huntington's disease. He also catches the eye (and ear) of Pete Seeger, played by Edward Norton in a smartly shaded performance. 

    Seeger recognizes Dylan as more than a wannabe trying to worm his way into an already established milieu. That may have been partly true, but Dylan had the chops and imagination to pay his own way.

    Tagged as an original, Dylan also came to the attention of Joan Baez (Monica Barbaro), an established folks star. Their musical and personal relationship seemed to mean more to her than to him.

     The movie also depicts Dylan's relationship with Sylvia Russo (Elle Fanning), an artist based on Suze Rotolo, a former Dylan girlfriend who passed way in 2011, long after the movie concludes at the fabled Newport Folk Festival in 1965.

    Dylan's shift from folk to rock causes a stir at Newport. Seeger struggles to persuade Dylan to use his star status to keep folk music in the forefront. Johnny Cash (Boyd Holbrook) upholds the opposite view, urging Dylan to follow his gut.

   Norbert Leo Butz plays Alan Lomax, the staunchest of Dylan's opponents, a folk purist who tries to keep Dylan's band off the Newport stage.

   The movie includes 40 songs, many of them Dylan favorites that are fun to revisit, even if they're not sung by Dylan. Whatever you think of Chalamet's singing, it never sounds like he's serving up cheap covers of classic Dylan tunes.

   I suppose it's arguable that Chalamet is impersonating Dylan, but that insults his effort. It's quite a feat, playing an enigmatic genius, imp, poet, and artist.

  The screenplay for A Complete Unknown was written by Mangold and Jay Cocks based on the book Dylan Goes Electric! by Elijah Wald; Dylan fans may know where fact leaves off and fiction begins. In interviews, Wald has called the movie "poetically accurate."

   As it happens, I witnessed Dylan's moment of transition. As a young reporter, I covered a concert Dylan gave at a Syracuse, NY arena then known as the Onondaga War Memorial. During the first half of the concert, Dylan appeared alone on stage and sang the songs that had breathed new life into folk music.

    In the concert's second half, Dylan was joined on stage by the Paul Butterfield Blues Band. Half the crowd cheered; the other half screamed its disapproval, "Bring back the real Bob Dylan," I remember hearing someone yell.

   Dylan pressed on, like, say, a rolling stone.

   I don't know if Bob Dylan, who's now 83, ever has been knowable. Mangold suggests he was ambitious, difficult, and creative, cruel at times, and caring, at other times. If Dylan's career is about anything, it's about resisting definition. 

   Maybe that's why Mangold can't and probably didn't want to offer a definitive portrait. Instead, he highlights touchstones in a career that produced the only songwriter ever to win a Nobel Prize for literature. 

  Mangold, Chalamet, and the rest of the cast bring what could have been a dusty time capsule of a movie to life. That was more than enough for me.

   

Wes Anderson visits the ‘50s in ‘Astroid City’

 

  In Astroid City, director Wes Anderson returns to the 1950s to create a self-consciously expressed artificial environment in which he can ... well ... I'm not sure exactly what. 

  Astroid City overloads on the dry visual wit that has distinguished Anderson's style. Anderson's movies (The French Dispatch and The Grand Budapest Hotel) are so strenuously stylized that one can only assume that we're meant to revel in the cleverness.

   In this case,  Anderson creates a phony desert landscape in which he locates the town of the movie's title. The story and its characters feel like miniatures encased in high-quality plastic, Bakelite perhaps. 

   I guess the question arising from all this is whether Anderson's approach transcends playful amusement? The dialogue and some of the issues (the rise of atomic weapons) suggest he has more in mind than chuckles.

   Whether you can make that leap with him seems to turn audiences into supporters or detractors or, just as likely, those who are simply confused. Watching Astroid City, I alternately found myself in all of those categories. 

     One of Andreson's best sight gags involves a highway constructed in the middle of Astroid City. The road ramps upward and then ends abruptly, suggesting that the town's early optimism ran out of gas. Make what you will of that. I laughed.

   Anderson populates Astroid City with a large and notable cast.

   Jason Schwartzman plays Augie Steinbeck, a war photographer who's traveling with his four kids and the ashes of his late wife, a once loved woman whose remains have been stored in a Tupperware bowl. 

   To add to the story, the little town plays host to a mini-convention of Junior Stargazers. A funny Jake Ryan portrays Augie's son Woodrow,  a nerdy Stargazer with a serious scientific bent. 

    If all this weren't enough, Anderson adds another meta layer. We know from the start that everything that unfolds in Astroid City is part of a television play that's introduced in black-and-white sequences by a character called The Host (Bryan Cranston).

   Later Adrien Brody will turn up as Schubert Green, the man who seems to be directing the play which was written by Conrad Earp (Edward Norton).

   Of all the movie’s many actors, Brody alone seems entirely comfortable in this world. He retains a sense of fluidity that other actors can’t always achieve when visiting AndersonWorld. 

   As you probably can tell, Astroid City can be regarded as a scorecard movie. You'll need one to keep track of the many actors who pop up. Jeffrey Wright plays General Grif Gibson, a military man who addresses the Stargazers. 

    You'll also find appearances by Matt Dillon, Steve Carell, Hope Davis, and Liev Schreiber.

   More notable is the work of Scarlett Johansson who plays movie star Midge Campbell and who -- during the course the play we're watching -- converses with Augie. Both characters speak from their motel rooms, observing each other through windows.

   Midge pops back and forth from the play to black-and-white behind-the-scenes sequences that show us what's happening backstage at the production.

    Other characters also appear in both realities.

   The performances are molded into the movie's deadpan style that's enjoyable if you pick out highlights, notably a dance sequence led by Montana, a cowboy played by Robert Friend. 

    A scene in which an alien lands in Astroid City is as funny and beautifully executed as it is cheesy -- in the manner of third-rate 50s sci-fi.

    And, oh yes, Tom Hanks.

    Hanks pays the grandfather of the Steenbeck brood; he shows up for the burial of his daughter's ashes and connects the movie to the grief that drives Augie and his kids.

    For the most part, the appearances of the movie's many actors lack the joy of  recognition that sometimes can be derived from a large, recognizable cast. Here, they come and go without fanfare.

    Astroid City looks like one of those towns that were constructed for atom bomb tests and, at various points, we see mushroom clouds in the background. The town is named for an astroid that long ago smashed into earth, leaving a portion of itself as a valued memento.

     Anderson divides the movie into acts, which heightens the sense of remove that he creates; for me, at least, this is both Anderson’s strength and weakness. His characters can be more like objects than people and they operate in the coded way that fits the rest of the film. 

     At times, Astroid City has a piercing brilliance that I found captivating. Overall, though, the movie proves fitfully enjoyable, something we observe as if looking through a microscope meant to satirize and dissect cliched images of lonely Western landscapes. If they were paintings, they might be admired for their cartoon-like clarity.

    My advice: Grab what you will from the passing tray of oddities, ignore what baffles you. Sometimes Astroid City feels like a collectors show of mid-Century bric-a-brac; best to take it booth by booth.

A private detective with Tourette syndrome

Edward Norton directs and stars in Motherless Brooklyn, a movie that never attains the impact that seems to have been intended.

There’s nothing inherently wrong with long movies. Problems arise, though, when the content and momentum of a particular movie don't match its length. And that’s what happens with Edward Norton’s two-hour and 20-minute adaptation of Jonathan Lethem’s 1999 novel, Motherless Brooklyn.

In adapting Letham’s novel for the screen, Norton (who wrote the screenplay, directed and stars in the movie) uses Lethem’s story about a detective with Tourette syndrome as a launchpad for a conspiratorial tale about the ways in which a powerful figure built the bridges and highways that shaped New York City, destroying neighborhoods in the bargain.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to understand that the movie, set during the 1950s, can be taken as a riff on the career of New York power broker Robert Moses -- and perhaps on all wheeler/dealers who accumulate power without applying any ethical constraints.

A complicated story weaves through the various scenes that push Norton’s character deeper into the dens of power. He’s trying to negotiate his way through a labyrinth he doesn’t fully understand and which, frankly, may baffle audiences, as well — at least in the early going.

Moviegoers with memories probably won’t be able to resist comparisons to Chinatown (1974). But that movie became a classic of contemporary noir. Motherless Brooklyn, I’m afraid, is a wannabe by comparison. I’m talking about the movie's characters, its mood and the lack of chemistry between Norton and the movie’s female lead, portrayed by Gu Gu Mbatha Raw.

No point dwelling on the plot, but a word or two about the secondary characters. Bruce Willis appears briefly as the mentor and employer of Norton's Lionel Essrog. Willis' Frank Minna, a private eye with his own agency, rescued Lionel from an orphanage and schooled him in the ways of the street.

Bobby Cannavale portrays the slickest member of Frank's detective agency. Alec Baldwin appears as Moses Randolph, the movie's power broker, a man who doesn't care how many lives he wrecks. Baldwin is fine, although, in crucial moments, his dialogue is too on-the-nose. Willem Dafoe delivers an angry, agonized performance as a compromised idealist.

Safe to say that none of these characters is all that memorable. The same goes for a community organizer (Cherry Jones), a woman who’s fighting for New York’s neighborhoods. Raw’s character is part of that team, an activist lawyer intent on fighting the powers-that-be.

Michael Kenneth Williams portrays a jazz trumpet player who plies his trade at a Harlem nightclub that figures in the movie’s plot. Always commanding, Williams appears at a moment when Norton allows the narrative to stall; it almost seems as if he values listening to the music on the soundtrack more than moving the plot.

Norton gives Lionel the tics and outbursts that define his brand of Tourette syndrome. In displays of uncontrollable agitation, Lionel tries to put sometimes unrelated things together, which may be a metaphor for how he's trying to deal with a broken society. But Motherless Brooklyn isn't really about a man living with Tourette syndrome; it's a plunge into a corrupted world and the movie eventually staggers under the weight of what appear to be ultra-serious aspirations.

A fine cast keeps Motherless Brooklyn watchable, but something odd happened when Norton changed the time period of Lethem's novel from the 1990s to the 1950s. It lost much of its urgency. Motherless Brooklyn ca be so retro, it feels as tired as some of the clothes you might find in a thrift store, almost worn out -- and maybe a trifle passe.

Wes Anderson's distinctive 'Isle of Dogs'

Stop-action animation, a great voice cast, and strangely insular atmospherics make the director's latest appealing.

I’m not a total fan of Wes Anderson, the director whose work includes The Fantastic Mr. Fox, The Grand Budapest Hotel, Moonrise Kingdom and The Darjeeling Express). But there’s no arguing that Anderson is one of the few directors working today who follows his imagination wherever it leads him. To enjoy his movies, you must accept his apparent unwillingness to curb his idiosyncrasies or to tailor his work to popular expectation. You must accept -- and perhaps even welcome -- what feels like the willed insularity of Anderson's world.

In Isle of Dogs — Anderson’s latest — the director employs stop-action animation to create a story in which a Japanese mayor banishes all the dogs in his city to an island where the city dumps its trash.

Every dog lover will recognize this as a horrible situation and Anderson doesn’t shrink from the inherent sadness of a society so cruel that it condemns a species that has done nothing to deserve being ostracized.

The city's authoritarian Mayor Kobayashi (voice by Kunichi Nomura) -- a lover of cats -- takes a sadistic approach to an epidemic of dog flu that turns once faithful companions into health hazards. Totally committed to his own power, Kobayashi refuses to change his mind even when a researcher develops a serum that will cure every flu-carrying pooch.

Although it feels all of a piece, Isle of Dogs is a linguistic mash-up. The abandoned dogs speak English and the Japanese characters speak Japanese (no subtitles). There's also an American exchange student who, of course, speaks English. A reporter for a high school newspaper, she crusades to topple Kobayashi's rule.

The animation is impeccable and creative — from doggie expressions to cityscapes to the forlorn trash heaps where the abandoned dogs roam. You'll also find outstanding voice work from Edward Norton, Bryan Cranston, Scarlett Johansson, Bill Murray, Greta Gerwig and more.

Cranston’s mangy Chief may be the most distinctive of the dogs. A stray who doesn’t believe in trying to please humans, Chief warns others that he's not afraid to bite.

Sometimes when I watch an animated movie I can’t help trying to visualize the human actor behind the animated character.
Cranston’s voice is unmistakable, but — for the most part — I forgot about who might be doing the voice work and immersed myself in the visual environment Anderson and his team so ably create.

Anderson bows to Japanese film culture — often in humorous ways. At one point, for example, he employs a bit of the score from Akira Kurosawa's Seven Samurai as a wry commentary on the action.

I wouldn't call Isle of Dogs a kids' movie, although it centers on 12-year-old Atari (Koyu Rankin), a boy who steals a small plane, crashes on Trash Island and winds up helping to rebuild a bridge between dogs and humans.

One question seems unavoidable: Does Anderson’s movie have a seriously deep meaning? Is it an allegory or simply another display of Anderson's eccentricity?

I’m not sure where I stand on the question, an uncertainty about Anderson's work that has bothered me before. But I also find his artistic expressions personal and intriguing, full of small touches that can be as pleasing as the film’s overall design.

Toward the end of the movie, a dog and his new family are served heaping bowls of red meat, something of an apology from the previously abusive humans. Each puppy gets the same food -- only in tiny bowls. I’m not entirely sure why this detail made me smile. Perhaps because it’s emblematic of Anderson's approach, placing irresistible bits of minutiae against backdrops that seem to have been created with something that might be called "cockeyed control."

Death, love -- and a waste of time

A strong cast can't make anything credible out of weepy Collateral Beauty.

Burdened by a whopping contrivance, Collateral Beauty -- a movie that wants to talk about unbearable grief and the need for human connection -- resembles a luxury passenger liner that sinks soon after leaving the dock.

The luxury reference has to do with the presence of an A-list cast featuring Will Smith, Kate Winslet, Edward Norton, Helen Mirren and Keira Knightley. They're all fine actors, but Collateral Beauty blows the opportunity for great ensemble work by putting the cast into one credibility-challenging or maudlin scene after another.

The story might be viewed as a fable grounded in what may have been intended as a plausible reality, the world of New York advertising.

Smith plays Howard, a hot-shot advertising executive who loses his six-year-old daughter to a rare form of cancer. Mired in grief, Howard completely shuts down. Not surprisingly, his near-catatonic state threatens the life of the agency he founded with his partner (Norton).

The plot's big twist arrives when Norton and two of his colleagues (Winslet and Michael Pena) decide to hire a trio of actors (Mirren, Knightley and Jacob Latimore) to visit the dejected Howard as the embodiment of three abstractions: Death, Love and Time.

Why Death, Love and Time? In the movie's prologue, Howard tells his staff that these are the vital ingredients in selling products. Moreover, since the death of his daughter, Howard has been writing and mailing letters addressed to Death, Love and Time. The letters give voice to Howard's anger at the way all three have betrayed him.

Howard's colleagues have two objectives: They want to save Howard from his depression, and they also want to have him declared incompetent. They'll then be able to sell the company, of which Howard is the majority owner, to an eager buyer.

To achieve their goal, this trio of ad execs also hires a private investigator (Ann Dowd) to photograph Howard talking to Death, Love and Time; the execs then will have these figures digitally removed so that it looks as if Howard is ranting to himself.

When it's not focusing on Howard, the movie doles out other forms of pain. Winslet's character wonders whether she hasn't sacrificed the chance to have a family by spending too much time at the office. Pena's character deals with a recurrence of a long-dormant cancer, and Norton's Whit worries about fixing the screwed-up relationship he has with his young daughter. She won't talk to him because he cheated on her mom.

Putting all of these fine actors into one movie must have seemed like a casting bonanza to director David Frankel (Hope Springs and The Devil Wears Prada). Too bad Allan Loeb's screenplay doesn't play to the cast's strengths: It falls to young Latimore to give the movie's most (and perhaps only) compelling performance.

If all of these actors weren't enough, the movie adds Naomi Harris as a woman who leads a group of parents who've lost children.

The drama comes to a head on Christmas Eve making Collateral Beauty an offering for the season that's intended to mix laughs, tears and greeting card wisdom. Who knows? It might have worked had Frank Capra tried it during the 1930s.

Today, Collateral Damage looks precisely like what it is: a concept that never develops into a real or convincing movie.

One raunchy 'Sausage Party'

This hunk of adult animation earns its R rating.

When I tell you that the animated movie, Sausage Party, involves walking, talking hot dogs and buns, you don't have to work too hard to surmise that the humor will be sexual and that it won't be subtle.

That's not to say that the splashy, adults-only animation in Sausage Party is not without trace elements of wit or that some of the jokes aren't funny, providing you're not put off by a slew of "F" and "MF" bombs that are thrown around so casually, they seem like accepted parts of speech.

And when I tell you that the villain in this ribald piece is a character named Douche (Nick Kroll), you should have all the information you need to know that Sausage Party is brash, impolite and damn proud of it.

Brimming with ethnic stereotyping and building toward an orgiastic finale that would be rated NC-17 if it didn't involve grocery store perishables, Sausage Party tells the story of hot dog Frank (voice by Seth Rogen). Frank falls for a bun named Brenda (Kristin Wiig). Frank and Brenda lust for one another, but can't do anything about their desires until they're liberated from their respective packaging.

The movie's characters give you some idea of what directors Greg Tiernan and Conrad Vernon have in mind.

In addition to Frank and Brenda, we meet Sammy (Ed Norton), a bagel who sounds very much like Woody Allen, and Lavas (David Krumholtz), an Arab hunk of pita who believes that eventually he'll be rewarded with 77 drips of extra virgin olive oil. I didn't even mention Teresa (Salma Hayek), a taco shell and Latin bombshell with lesbian leanings.

Sexual preferences aside, Sausage Party also immerses us in a story about the way faith functions to keep folks under control. The perishables at Shopwell, the supermarket where the story takes place, believe that when they're purchased they'll find eternal bliss in what they call "The Great Beyond." After being wheeled out of the store in shopping carts they'll be eternally happy.

Not so fast, says Honey Mustard (Danny McBride), a return item who has seen The Great Beyond, and knows that his perishable brothers and sisters will be sliced, diced, boiled, fried and otherwise "murdered" by hungry humans.

We follow some of the characters into The Great Beyond, notably little Barry (Michael Cera), a hot dog who hasn't grow to full size and who learns the horrible truth: The faith on which Shopwell runs is hokum.

Perhaps in a spirit of fairness, the screenplay also includes some non-perishable items, most prominently Firewater (Bill Hader), a native American bottle of liquor whose wisdom seems to derive from massive inhalations of marijuana.

Come on, you thought you'd make it through this kind of movie without a pot joke?

I don't know what it says about me, but I laughed at the wad of gum (Scott Underwood) that rides around in a wheel chair and talks in a voice that resembles the electronically produced voice of physicist Steven Hawking. Gum, we learn, became smart because he spent years stuck under the desk of a brilliant scientist.

Too much? Probably, but Sausage Party thrives on tossing out too much of everything.

In the right crowd, Sausage Party might be fun. It may not run out of energy, but it does sometimes run out of comic gas, and it's not always fall down funny.

By the time, the big orgy arrives, I'd had enough, which made me wonder whether Sausage Party's hour and 29 minutes might have been better had it been served as a snack rather than a full-course meal.

'Birdman' tries to ruffle lots of feathers

A vibrantly presented world, but what's there to care about?.

If you've been following this year's film festival news, you know that director Alejandro Gonzalez Inarritu's Birdman -- or more pretentiously Birdman: The Unexpected Virtue of Ignorance -- has taken flight in critical circles.

Michael Keaton, who hasn't occupied center stage in a movie for a while, has received raves for portraying a washed-up movie star trying to make a comeback on Broadway.

And even those who've objected to Inarritu's cacophonous, multi-story approach in 21 Grams and Babel seem to regard Birdman as a striking improvement.

I begin this way because Birdman arrives with a cache that proclaims the film a brilliant riff on celebrity, movies, stardom and heaven knows what else.

Obviously, I wouldn't have mentioned any of this unless I intended to take a different -- and less effusive -- tack.

Creative, willing to plunge into fantasy without apology or explanation and sharply acted, Birdman resembles, as someone has pointed out, a high-wire act -- except (and here's the rub) the wire might be located no more than two feet off the ground.

Put another way, Birdman has its virtues, but revovles around a less-than-riveting question: Can a movie star we don't particuarly like and with whom we may not identify earn a reputation as a credible actor?

Keaton portrays Riggan Thomas an actor who made his mark playing a superhero called Birdman. Thomas ditched the franchise, but eventually fell into hard times. Now, his money and self-respect are running out.

To redeem his reputation, Riggan has written a play, an adpation of a Raymond Carver story called What We Talk About When We Talk abokut Love. What rides on the play's success? For Riggan: Everything. For us? Much less.

Keaton does a fine job playing a man who's plummeting even as he's trying to take flight. Riggan is tormented by the blatant commericalism of his past success; his box-office triumphs drag on him like an anchor.

But even in a comedy this caustic, it would be nice to give a damn about whether Riggan saved himself or not. I can't say that I did.

Riggan fights an internal battle, even as he faces various obstacles that threaten his play. He often hears the voice of his Birdman character, either berating him for his failures or reminding him that he could (and should) reclaim his place as a bona fide movie star who doesn't need the pipsqueak acclaim of the New York theater crowd.

Working with the gifted cinematographer Emmanuel Lubezki (Gravity and The Tree of Life), Inarritu employs a ferociously mobile camera as he attempts to make it seem as if the entire story is unfolding in a single take, an approach that's augmented by Antonio Sanchez's solo drum score. It's a feat of sorts, but put to what end?

OK, so Keaton played Batman, and stopped playing Batman. For some, this shard of show-business reality adds resonance to Inarritu's movie, but I can't imagine anyone confusing Keaton with the character he's playing.

Most of the story takes place in the tumultuous days before the play's opening: Among Riggan's problems: A cast member has been struck on the head by a stage light that detached from its moorings.

Riggan, who's both starring in and directing the play, hires a replacement, an apparently well-regarded theatrical actor (Edward Norton), a performer whose attempts to find realism in everything he plays reaches ludicrous levels.

Norton finds comedy in the self-inflation of a talented actor who believes that he's fighting a lonely battle to save the culture.

Also along for what's mostly a backstage ride is Riggan's daughter (Emma Stone). She's fresh from rehab and almost always in couldn't-care-less mode.

Stone has a power moment when her character tells her father that nothing about him matters, and he'd best get used to it. Stone then shows us -- as anger drains from her face -- that she realizes she may have gone too far.

We also meet an actress who's finally realizing her dream of appearing on Broadway (Naomi Watts).Zach Galifianakis plays Riggan's attorney and principal advisor, a mostly exasperated fellow who's constantly trying to save Riggan from himself.

Low-grade contempt runs through the entire movie -- for Hollywood and its blockbuster lust, for actors who either are portrayed as deeply insecure or phenomenal twits and for the audience, which is left to ponder the meaning of realistically presented images in which Riggan moves objects with his mind. Power fantasies from a man who seems to control nothing?

The screenplay tosses in some additional characters, notably Thomas' former wife (Amy Ryan) and his actress girlfriend (Andrea Riseborough). Early on, she tells Riggan that she's pregnant, the last bit of news someone in his precarious position needs to hear.

Much of the movie is marked by scorn, but Inarritu really forces his point when we meet the drama critic for The New York Times (Lindsay Duncan). She insists that she's going to destroy the play, even though she hasn't seen it.

Why? Because she detests everything that Riggan stands for; i.e., Hollywood commercialism. Even in a movie with satirical aspirations, it's just another cheap shot.

Look, Inarritu's clearly trying to push his movie out of the usual big-screen comfort zones. But I found Birdman to be marching to a drumbeat of self-absorption, and for all of its agitated craft, it's not without dull spots.

Birdman is about the ways in which artists risk everything and bystanders (and critics) risk nothing. With all humility, I'd say that real risk takers don't feel the need to point out that they're laying everything on the line. They just do it.

You can spend a lot of time deconstructing Birdman, but you may find that once you've done with the exercise, you haven't arrived anywhere that deeply matters.

Wes Anderson checks into a grand hotel

Evoking a bygone era -- or a director's carefully realized vision of it.

Watching Wes Anderson's The Grand Budapest Hotel, I wondered whether the Marx Brothers wouldn't have fit right into the visual intricacies and loopy grandeur of Anderson's impressive production.

It's not that Anderson's nostalgic comedy has an antic spirit or that it's full of rapid-fire word play, it's more that Anderson has concocted a fantasy that embodies the feeling of European culture at a certain moment, perhaps the interval between two world wars.

Anderson creates a time full of aristocratic pretension, ornate elegance and formal manners. The Marx brothers probably would have trashed this world, created by Anderson in the fictional Eastern European country of Zubrowka.

Anderson may not embrace everything about this bygone environment, but he establishes it with astonishing precision. At times, it almost seems as if the entire production belongs inside a snow globe.

Anderson's great strengths center on production design, color and visual wit. Even a young woman's face can't be presented without adornment. Saoirse Ronan's Agatha, for example, has a swooping red birthmark on the right side of her face. A young lobby boy at the once stately Budapest Hotel draws a pencil thin mustache under his nose.

Considerable pleasures can be found in Anderson's mixture of artifice and art: Anderson creates a charmed atmosphere in which the principal characters are introduced along with the main story line, a tale told by Zero Mustafa (F. Murray Abraham ) to a writer (Jude Law) who's visiting the Grand Budapest.

Mustafa explains how he came to own the Grand Budapest, which -- at this point in the tale -- is in a near-fatal state of decline.

Thus begins a flashback. As a young lobby boy, Mustafa found a mentor in Gustave H. (Ralph Fiennes). Gustave becomes the movie's most memorable character, a concierge so well-schooled in the arts of service that he has sexual liaisons with many of the hotel's elderly women guests. They adore him, even though Gustave may have been a homosexual.

What ever his sexual preference, Gustave embodies all the surface qualities necessary to create the illusion of taste and distinction so vital to a certain segment of European civilization.

By the time, the movie is over, Anderson deepens his definition of what it means to be civilized, particularly when one realizes that life is short, brutish and subject to violent intrusions by war and other catastrophes.

Anderson's complicated, story-within-stories plot eventually comes to revolve around a supposedly priceless painting called "A Boy with Apple." The painting is left to Gustave by Madame D. (an unrecognizable Tilda Swinton), one of his aging fans.

Madame D's son Dimitri (Adrien Brody) wants the painting back. A tangle of betrayals and murders ensue. At times, the plot -- which includes a prison break -- has the over-stuffed feel of excess baggage.

That bothered me a bit, but with this kind of movie, the icing tends to be far more important than the cake, a fitting comparison because elaborately decorated pastries play a key role in advancing the plot.

Although Grand Budapest Hotel is small and highly polished, it boasts a large cast that includes Jeff Goldblum, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Willem Dafoe, Mathieu Amalric, Tom Wilkinson, Edward Norton and, in passing, Owen Wilson.

The heart of the story belongs to Fiennes and newcomer Rivolori. The two create a relationship in which Gustave -- a man known for his "liberal" use of perfume -- develops a genuine fondness for his young charge. If there's a love story here, it's between Gustave and Mustafa.

The movie ends with a title card that pays homage to Stefan Zweig, an Austrian writer credited with inspiring the script and who seems connected to some of the sensibilities that seem to interest Anderson. Overwhelmed by a rising barbarity in the world, Zweig committed suicide in 1942.

In a way, The Grand Budapest Hotel is a movie about sensibility. Gustave's refinements of speech (broken by the occasional epithet) contrast with Demitri's bluntness: Brody sounds as if he arrived in Zubrowka after a stop in one of New York's outer boroughs.

I can't say that Grand Budapest proceeds without sometimes losing steam. But there are enough rare sights to make the journey worthwhile: An elevator with a shocking red interior, the pink grandeur of the hotel's facade, and the changing aspect ratios that Anderson uses to evoke times past.

Moreover, the overplayed gentility of the characters remains quietly amusing throughout.

But there's a problem in all this: Anderson's sensibilities are so refined that he sometimes seems to lose sight of the audience. I enjoyed The Grand Budapest Hotel enough, but also sometimes saw it as a kind of art object, something too far removed from recognizable experience to encourage connection.

By now, though, most audiences have come to regard Anderson (Moonrise Kingdom, The Darjeeling Limited, The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou and Rushmore) as an acquired taste.

The taste here? Call it bittersweet.

Running in Bourne's footsteps

Revamped with a new hero, the The Bourne Legacy is only semi-successful.

Goodbye Jason Bourne. Hello Aaron Cross.

Right there, you can see part of the problem with The Bourne Legacy, a semi-successful attempt to perpetuate a franchise with Jeremy Renner taking over for Matt Damon. Renner plays Cross, one of nine chemically enhanced Treadstone operatives. He's like Bourne, but he's not Bourne.

Damon's absence can't help but be felt because we've come to identify the Bourne movies with (here's a shocker) a character named Bourne.

In the hands of director Tony Gilroy, who co-wrote the screenplay with his brother Dan, The Bourne Legacy proceeds in fits and starts, possibly because it's forced to establish its Bourne bona fides with lots of references to its predecessors. (The movie takes place at roughly the same time as the end of The Bourne Ultimatum.)

Familiar from The Hurt Locker and more recently from Mission Impossible - Ghost Protocol, Renner is an explosive actor. He looks and acts tough enough for a globe-hopping thriller, and in this outing he has a snub-nosed intensity that makes him a credible action hero -- if not a franchise figure.

We meet Cross while he's conducting a solo training exercise in Alaska. We quickly learn that he's a super-operative who can go one-on-one with a snarling wolf. We also discover that he's being hunted by his own super-secret agency, which -- thanks to threat of exposure and possible public outrage -- is being closed.

That means that Cross must be killed, a project that's being led by a retired Air Force Colonel played by Edward Norton, who -- like every other actor in the movie -- spends most of his time looking seriously grim. Norton's character is a proponent of the notion that some things are morally reprehensible but essential to U.S. security. In a dirty world, survival depends on playing dirty. That's where guys like Bourne and Cross come in.

The plot eventually contrives to bring a fleeing Cross into contact with a scientist (Rachel Weisz) who has been working on the project that develops the chemicals that give Treadstone agents their heightened powers. Cross and Weisz's Dr. Marta Shearing spend the rest of the movie trying not to be killed.

Blame recent events -- shootings in Colorado and Wisconsin -- but for me, the most disturbing scene in the movie involves a shooting in a lab. It's staged for maximum impact by Gilroy, who directed and wrote Michael Clayton and Duplicity. What makes the lab scene so horrific is that there's no hail of bullets: A gunman picks off his victims one by one, each shot ringing with chilling clarity.

Gilroy does a decent job with the rest of the action, but a lengthy motorcycle chase in Manilla -- the film's climax -- leans toward the outrageous and makes it clear that Gilroy and company are making a summer movie with a capital "S." The longer the chase went on, the more it smelled of pandering to me.

The movie's ending isn't especially satisfying, leaving one with the impression that the filmmakers have huffed, puffed and blown down a lot of houses without getting much of anywhere. The series, we suppose, is meant to continue.

Audiences should find enough action and exoticism in Bourne Legacy to give it box-office life, but I wonder whether future movies will continue to put the Bourne name into the title, will let Cross move forward under his own banner or will switch to one of the other agents that are running around the dangerous world that novelist Robert Ludlum imagined when he created the Bourne series.

The Cross Ultimatum? Doesn't sound right, does it?

Welcome to Wes Anderson's dollhouse

Moonrise Kingdom is intermittently amusing, distinctive and not always easy to digest.



I loved director Wes Anderson's last movie, an animated adaptation of Fantastic Mr. Fox, a children's story by Roald Dahl. For me, over-the-top admiration for an Anderson movie isn't the norm. Watching Anderson's latest -- Moonrise Kingdom -- reminded me that my responses to Anderson's work usually are more complicated and far more mixed than with most directors.

Typically, I find myself admiring Anderson's skills and impressed by what seems to be his unwavering commitment to the peculiarity of his own sensibilities. Inevitably, there will be places in an Anderson film where I chuckle, perhaps ruefully. These amusing moments often involve Bill Murray, who has appeared in such Anderson films as Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou, The Royal Tenenbaums and, of course, Rushmore.

But if Anderson's audience divides into fans and non-fans, I lean away from fandom.

You probably can see where I'm headed in writing about Moonrise Kingdom, perhaps the most Andersonian of Anderson's films, a tiny story built around artful set decoration, distinctive imagery and a story that seems to be taking place in a universe composed of elements that have been tweaked just enough to throw them out of whack. The look of a Scout camp in Moonrise Kingdom, for example, suggests a Norman Rockwell painting -- only drained of nostalgic exultation.

For me, watching an Anderson movie is like marching at attention rather than walking. There's not much room for meandering. Anderson's works seem made to be appreciated in a certain way, and even when I think I see what Anderson is getting at, I have trouble totally connecting to his movies.

This time, Anderson tells the story of Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) and Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward). What's different about Sam and Suzy's love-at-first-sight tale? Sam and Suzy are 12-year-olds making their way through the summer of 1965. They fall in love before either their bodies or their minds are prepared for romance.

Sam, we learn, is an orphaned member of the Khaki Scouts, a stand-in for the Boy Scouts. He's attending scout camp on the fictional island of New Penzance, off the Massachusetts coast. Suzy Bishop lives on the island with her family -- mom, dad and three brothers. Suzy and her siblings listen to Benjamin Britten recordings on her portable phonograph. She often has her nose buried in a book. On the surface, things look normal enough, but the rooms of the Bishop house can seem like isolation chambers.

It's hardly surprising that Suzy's parents (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand) object when their daughter runs off with Sam. Suzy's parents enlist the help of the local sheriff (Bruce Willis), who also happens to be having an affair with McDormand's character. Sam's scoutmaster (Edward Norton) frets about the situation, and a social worker (Tilda Swinton) threatens to return Sam to foster care or maybe place him in an orphanage.

The adults in the movie are not quite ogres nor are they exemplary. Both Murray and McDormand are playing attorneys, characters who have acquired material success, and who want to expose their children to culture, but who also seem miserable -- at least in the non-emotive way of most Anderson-created characters. The trick for Anderson's actors seems to involve presenting outlines that can be colored in by the audience's crayons -- assisted, of course, by the occasional sharp line of dialog in Anderson and Roman Coppola's screenplay.

Toward the end of the movie, one adult -- a scoutmaster played by Anderson vet Jason Schwartzman -- offers to marry Sam and Suzy, cautioning them to think seriously about what they're doing. This bit of silliness provides an instance in which Anderson's approach works well. Schwartzman's offer makes no sense. but it connects Sam and Suzy with a co-conspirator who's willing to accept their view of things.

At one point, I wondered whether Suzy -- with her affectless delivery -- and Sam -- with his goggle-eyed glasses -- might not be more at home in an artfully drawn comic strip than in a movie. During their lovers' flight, Suzy invites Sam to French kiss and touch her breast. Sam complies, but in the typically inexpressive fashion that Anderson favors. Suzy and Sam don't seem like kids discovering their sexuality; they're puppets in Anderson's playhouse.

All of this builds toward a major flood of the island, which makes sense because Sam and Suzy met while Suzy was preparing for an appearance in an amateur production of Britten's opera Noye's Fludde (Noah's Flood). I guess if Sam and Suzy had their way, the Earth would be flooded, the rest of humanity would be wiped out and they would walk hand-in-hand onto a waiting ark, sole survivors of a necessary conflagration.

Sam, in particular, is a kind of outcast. Until a heroic turnaround by one of his fellow Scouts, he's scorned by boys his own age. Even the foster parents who had been caring for Sam don't want him back.

Those who enjoy visiting these Anderson-created worlds seem to like them very much. I appreciated Moonrise Kingdom in a whacky sort of way that did not always equate with either enjoyment or illumination. My feelings about Anderson's work remain unresolved.

If you're looking for a different take on the '60s -- or more precisely -- if you're interested in the continuing ramifications of life in the '60s, you may want to check out Peace, Love and Misunderstanding, director Bruce Beresford's seriocomic look at the present-day conflict between a mother (Jane Fonda) and the adult daughter (Catherine Keener) she raised during the free-and-easy, pot-smoking '60s. Faced with divorce, Keener's Diane -- a successful New York attorney -- leaves Manhattan with her two children (Elisabeth Olsen and Nate Wolf) to visit her mother in Woodstock, N.Y., an iconic locale for peace, love, protest and marijuana. The resentment of children with "hippie" parents is a legitimate and under-explored subject, but Peace, Love and Misunderstanding mostly blows it. Fonda's character comes off as a shrill parody of '60s values, a woman stuck in a time warp -- but confident that it's the right place to be. Meanwhile, Diane's son Jake (Wolf) runs around Woodstock with a video camera, exercising his wannabe filmmaker muscles and introducing the dreaded film-within-a-film conceit. Peace, Love and Misunderstanding stands as an example of what happens when a lot of talented people are shackled to second-rate material. Much pot is smoked, but this one doesn't inhale deeply when it comes to working through its characters' very real issues.

'Stone' sinks under weight of its pretensions

Say this: Stone showed me something I haven’t seen before, a movie that's gritty and labored at the same time. With Christian radio frequently droning in the background, Edward Norton and Robert De Niro play a film noir duet as convict and prison case worker. Sporting cornrows, Norton looks and sounds like a wannabe rapper who thinks he has a shot at toppling Eminem from his perch. De Niro – all impacted rage and middle-age bulk – portrays the caseworker who must decide whether Norton’s character – he calls himself Stone – will be paroled from the Michigan prison where he’s spent the last 9 years. Trips to mass don’t seem to have helped DeNiro’s Jack find his spiritual bearings. His downtrodden wife (Frances Conroy) reads the bible and drinks heavily, a coping strategy composed of equal parts alcohol and Catholicism. True to noir demands, Jack is ripe for a fall. Along comes Stone’s sexy wife Lucetta (Mila Jovovich) to provide all the temptation any man (God-fearing or otherwise) needs. For a while, it looks as if director John Curran may pull something powerful together, but the longer Stone goes on, the less credible it becomes. And for all their obvious skills, DeNiro and Norton are bested by the women. Both Jovovich (impossibly sultry) and Conroy (weathered by years of emotional deprivation) are more intriguing than their men, a convict and a prison worker who may be headed in opposite directions. It’s nice to see De Niro try something heavy, but his choice of material leaves something to be desired. Stone ultimately sinks under the weight of philosophical pretensions that don't seem to have been thoroughly worked out.