The Coens sing a weird ballad

Six short films make for a mixed bag in the Ballad of Buster Scruggs

The Coen brothers (Joel and Ethan) tackle the West in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a six-part anthology of short films in which breathtaking visual acuity couples with a morbid sense of humor and western mythology gives way to chilly existential horror. The six films -- united because they're presented as part of a book in which they're bound -- suggest crossbreeding between lurid western pulp and tales told around a campfire.

Not all of the episodes are successful and, sorry to say, stretches of the movie are duller than you might expect from the Coens. But this is a Coen brothers film and, as such, demands some attention from those who've been following the Coens since the days of Blood Simple, some 24 years ago.

In the first episode, Tim Blake Nelson plays the title character, a singing cowboy with an aggressively cheerful manner. Nelson's Buster Scruggs is also a killer who guns people down between songs. One of the movie's best episodes, this one also serves as an announcement that the Coens are hell-bent on replacing the Wild, Wild West with the Weird, Weird West.

Other chapters in the Ceon's rueful book include a story about hanging starring James Franco and a bizarre riff on wagon-train movies that focuses on a woman (Zoe Kazan) traveling west to start a new life but meeting with a sorry fate.

Then there's Meal Ticket, the story of a traveling showman (Liam Neeson) who goes from town to town with a legless, armless man called Hamilton, the Wingless Thrush (Harry Melling). Neeson's character sets Hamilton on the stage where he recites Shelley, Shakespeare and Lincoln's Gettysburg Address to increasingly sparse audiences. Hamilton's career soon will be undermined by an unlikely new entertainer.

Tom Waits portrays a lone prospector who strikes gold but must fend off trouble.

The final chapter of this blood-stained book takes place on a stagecoach where Saul Rubinek (as a Frenchman), Tyne Daly (as a rigidly upright woman), Chelcie Ross (as the always-necessary bearded old trapper), and Brendan Gleeson (as a passenger who sings a sad song) take their weird ride toward ... well ... you'll have to see the movie to discover where they all wind up.

The Coens have fun with the movie's language, which is florid and overdone, the formal-sounding speech of characters aspiring to -- but not always attaining -- eloquence.

For all the Coens wit and wiliness, The Ballad of Buster Scruggs sometimes feels caught in the pages of the book that serves as its framing device, a dusty volume that may be a sorrowful lament for a world that has been mortally wounded and has nothing left to do but stagger toward the grave.

Creative as The Ballad of Buster Scruggs can be, I'm looking forward to seeing the Coens turn the page.

It's not relative: 'Kin' is a misfire

I don't know who thought it would be a good idea to make a movie about a 14-year-old kid who acquires a super-charged weapon and then takes a road trip with his ex-con brother and a stripper. I guess the ignominy rests on the shoulders of the Baker Brothers (Jonathan and Josh), siblings who have expanded their short film Bag Man into a feature that's tainted by bad judgment. Likable young Myles Truitt may have a future as an actor, but even if he were an emerging Olivier, he couldn't turn this cinematic folly into something worthwhile. Truitt plays Eli, the adopted son of a gruff Detroit widower (Dennis Quaid). When Eli's ex-convict stepbrother (Jack Reyner) shows up, the family is sucked into the orbit of a vicious low-life criminal (James Franco in full over-drive mode). Zoe Kravitz's character enters the movie when Rayner's Jimmy takes his younger brother to a strip club as part of their road adventures. The brothers are trying to get away from Franco's character, a vengeful thug who killed their father during a robbery Jimmy arranged in order to pay off a $60,000 debt. Now about that super-weapon: Early on, Eli is scavenging in an abandoned factory when he discovers a weapon that's about the size of an AR-15. The "ray gun" (as Jimmy eventually refers to it) was left by armor-clad figures who fight a battle during the movie's prologue. Are these strange combatants aliens from another world? The movie, which flirts with sci-fi, answers this question during its finale by hammering an explanation onto the already overamped action. Carrie Coon shows up in the latter going as an FBI agent, adding to a viewer's sense of disorientation. (By viewer, I mean me.) What's a fine actress doing in this misbegotten misfire? Sometimes a movie goes wrong here and there, but you pretty much understand what the filmmakers were after. Kin goes wrong almost from the start. Trying to treat a 14-year-old's visit to a strip club as a fun adventure (at least for a while) and then allowing the same kid to blast away at various foes shatters any sense of propriety the movie might have had. Shameful.

He made the world's worst film

James Franco directs a comedy about the making of The Room, an awful movie about a comedy that has developed a cult following.

All through the preview screening of The Disaster Artist, I found myself looking for James Franco's face, a strange preoccupation because Franco's in nearly every frame of the movie. We catch glimpses of what we know as Franco's face but he's mostly unrecognizable as Tommy Wiseau, a wannabe film director who made The Room, a movie so awful it has acquired cult status among those who enjoy unadulterated badness.

Often shown at midnight, The Room probably is best appreciated in the company of audiences who feel liberated to hoot and holler at the screen. In real life, Wiseau frequently attends screenings of his movie, which has been called the worst movie ever made.

I don't know if The Disaster Artist will rock your world, but I do know that I laughed at the comic touches that Franco, who also directed, brings to the subject of dismal failure.

As is the case with most good comedies, Franco and his fellow actors play things straight. Wiseau had no idea that he was making a bad movie; in fact, he seems to have had a wholehearted belief in the quality and importance of his effort.

In dead-on fashion, Franco replicates scenes from The Room as the production is being filmed. He also replicates Wiseau's shoulder-length hair and odd manner of speaking; his accent has a marble-mouthed, eastern European flavor. Wiseau says he's from New Orleans.

Given the outrageousness of the subject, there's no need for Franco to veer from straightforward narration in a screenplay that has been adapted from a book written by Greg Sestero, another wannabe actor who traveled to Hollywood with Wiseau to pursue fame, fortune and a career in movies.

Sestero (Dave Franco) met Wiseau in 1968 when both were attending a San Francisco acting class. Sestero saw Tommy do a balls-to-the-wall, completely insane version of a Stanley Kowalski speech from A Streetcar Named Desire. He was impressed by Tommy's willingness to go "raw."

No one knows where Wiseau got the money to support himself and Sestero in LA or how he financed a movie that he believed would put him on the map. A deluded Wiseau also says that his work has a Shakespearean quality, a comparison that, to say the least, represents a stretch.

The Room, the picture Wiseau's making, centers on Johnny (played by Wiseau) and includes some ridiculous sex scenes which Franco shows us as he chronicles the shooting of the movie with an actress (Ari Gaynor), a script supervisor (Seth Rogen) and a small crew.

Jacki Weaver appears as one of the film's actresses, a woman who claims that even a day on the set of the world's worst movie beats a day of longing to act.

It's impossible to make a movie like The Disaster Artist without a bit of condescension toward the movie's woeful cast of characters. We laugh at them precisely because it's so obvious that Wiseau's project is doomed from the start. Nothing would (or could) redeem it.

Franco fully immerses in Tommy's life, presenting it with the same cockeyed seriousness with which Wiseau seems to have lived it. Wiseau released The Room in 2003 and claimed that he always intended it to be funny.

I'm not sure what Wiseau really had in mind, but unlike a lot of other would-be comedies, Franco's rendition of this real-life story actually is funny.

Watching Wiseau try to throw a football, for example, presents a moment so void of athleticism, it's close to astonishing. And that's the whole joke in a nutshell. From the outset, it's clear that nothing about The Room will succeed, yet -- to the amazement of everyone involved -- Wiseau persists.

And, no, you don't have to have seen The Room to go along for this enjoyably nutty ride.

Kidman of Arabia (really)

Werner Herzog directs Nicole Kidman in Queen of the Desert, a sparkless historical epic.

Werner Herzog isn't David Lean, and Nicole Kidman is no Peter O'Toole. I don't mean that as a slam on either Herzog or Kidman, the talented director and fine actress who have teamed for Queen of the Desert, an historical epic about Gertrude Lowthian Bell. Bell, a woman who probably will be unknown to most audiences, was a writer and adventurer who helped Winston Churchill draw the lines that carved up the Ottoman Empire after World War I.

Herzog fans immediately will be struck by the movie's surprisingly conventional style, which (alas) relies heavily on images of Kidman riding camels, on two somewhat listless romances and on the less-than-exciting intricacies of tribal politics among the Arab populations of the empire once controlled by the Turks.

A miscast James Franco portrays Henry Cadogan, Bell's first love. As he whispers his way through a British accent, it's difficult to take Franco seriously. Robert Pattinson, who shows up as T.E. Lawrence at least uses his crooked half-smile to suggest Lawrence's mischievousness.

Damian Lewis plays the third man in Belle's life, Maj. Charles Doughty-Wylie; Bell writes to Doughty-Wylie as she wanders across the desert. Periodically, we hear Kidman reading these letters in hushed tones.

Kidman captures Bell's courage, her confusion when it comes to romance and her determination not to be limited by gender. But Herzog relies on far too many glamor shots of Kidman, who manages to look beautiful even in extreme circumstances of desert heat and dust, not to mention the threat of hostile Arabs, most of whom ultimately are charmed by Bell's tenacity.

Herzog can't be accused of skimping on scenery; many of the desert images are steeped in grandeur, but the movie's swelling musical score feels like something lifted from another era.

Bell supposedly drew up the boundaries of modern Iraq, a skill that may have inspired Herzog to use on-screen maps to follow Bell's progress around the region, an old-fashioned technique that he presents without any trace of irony. Same goes for some of the cornball dialogue in which Bell talks about giving her heart to the desert.

Aside from telling us that Bell -- one of the first women to attend Oxford -- was an early example of feminine assertion, it's not exactly clear what Herzog hoped to say. Such is the price of reigning in idiosyncrasy: Herzog seldom has made a movie this sparkless and generic in its feel.

The vicious side of college life

 Fraternity hazing may be an easy target, but that doesn't mean it shouldn't become the subject of a cautionary tale about uncontrolled cruelty on college campuses. Director Andrew Neel's Goat is just such a movie. Neel begins his story when local thugs attack a high school senior (Ben Schnetzer), beating him almost senseless. Time passes and Schnetzer's Brad heals, but he heads for his first year in college with a lingering case of post-traumatic stress. Neel contrasts the random cruelty Brad suffered in his hometown with the organized humiliations orchestrated by the fraternity Brad pledges. Brad's older brother (Nick Jonas) -- a senior at the same school -- urges his brother to join the frat. The promise, of course, is that friendship and social acceptance will follow the demeaning rigors of Hell Week. Increasingly, Neel focuses the drama on Jonas's Brett, a young man who begins to understand that his fraternity brothers are crossing the line between acceptable rites of initiation and behavior that -- in other contexts -- might qualify as criminal. Goat doesn't take us any place we haven't been before, but its message bears repeating. Neel and his young cast skillfully handle events that are intended to repulse -- and do. Consider Goat an antidote to recent hard-partying, frat-boy comedies such as 2014's Neighbors. Goat's not about college fun; it's about the torture some will endure in order not to feel socially ostracized.

Seeking the truth behind a murder

James Franco and Jonah Hill get serious in True Story.

In True Story, Jonah Hill and James Franco put on serious faces to tell a story about journalistic ethics and murder. But before we get to how well they do, some background may be helpful.

True Story is the big-screen adaptation of Michael Finkel's 2005 book, True Story: Murder, Memoir, Mea Culpa. Let's begin with the "Mea Culpa" of Finkel's title.

Finkel's journalistic career hit a major snag when he was fired for fudging facts in a New York times magazine cover story about the use of slave labor on African cocoa plantations.

In search of a more compelling read, Finkel created a composite character without telling readers that he was combining the stories of a variety of young men who'd been terribly exploited.

Months after his New York Times debacle, Finkel learned that an Oregon man who had been arrested for murdering his wife and three children had been posing as Finkel while hiding from the law in Mexico.

Seeing a path to possible journalistic redemption and a book contract, Finkel visited Longo in jail, wondering why the accused murderer had tried to steal his identity.

Simple, Longo told him, he very much admired Finkel's writing. He was an ardent fan.

Finkel developed a relationship with Longo, who proceeded to tell him his story, claiming that he was innocent. But he also refused to tell Finkel what really happened, asking instead that Finkel teach him how to write.

For his part, Finkel thought he was a good enough reporter to induce Longo to spill whatever beans need spilling.

Although not without interest, the resultant movie never fully realizes the mind-bending possibilities that result when a journalist (Hill) whose work has come under question meets a prisoner (Franco) whose account of events immediately qualifies as suspect. Facing the death penalty if convicted, Longo had plenty of reason to lie.

British theater director Rupert Goold directs in competent but conventional fashion as he presents the story of a writer (with an agenda, of course) who collaborated with a prisoner (with an agenda of his own).

Hill and Franco worked together in the comedy This is the End, but are paired here in a dramatic effort that's sprinkled with brief flashbacks to the crime.

Franco brings low-key calm to the role of an accused murderer, as well as a bit of rumpled charm.

We know that Hill can act (see Moneyball and The Wolf of Wall Street), but I couldn't quite buy him as an avid, ambitious and ultimately desperate reporter, perhaps because the script makes Finkel too much of a one-note character. Having screwed up, he now wants to restart his career.

Almost everything that transpires between Finkel and Longo in the pivotal jail scenes clings to the surface; their one-on-one exchanges lack the kind of subtext that would have given the movie's ethical issues more dimension.

The screenplay by Goold and David Kajganich tells us that Longo's a horrible narcissist, but doesn't really dig into his personality. Half the time, the movie doesn't even seem interested in whether Longo actually committed the crime.

Felicity Jones appears as Finkel's wife, but doesn't have much to do other than pop up for a jail house visit with Longo, delivered with more conviction than anything else in the movie.

And that's the rub here. Goold's movie says many of the right things, but doesn't always dramatize them in compelling ways. The fact that both men are acting out roles should have resulted in a dizzying look at how men in high-pressure situations are called upon to create themselves. Besides, we needed to know more about both these guys.

True Story is a decent enough movie, but it should (and could) have been brilliant.

Yes, Virginia, it's really not good

The Interview now can be seen -- but should it be?

For a few minutes, I thought some of the critics I respect might have been wrong about The Interview, which I watched as soon as it became available on-line Wednesday. Sure, it's ridiculous, but for 15 or so minutes, it's also rudely funny. But silliness soon gives way to a plot that sends an annoyingly hammy James Franco and straight man Seth Rogen to North Korea for an assassination attempt arranged by the CIA. Once the plot kicks in, the movie gets progressively worse, building toward an action-oriented finale that goes way over the top, leaving a long trail of anus jokes in its foul wake. Seeing The Interview makes you realize that the absurd story that has surrounded it -- a purported North Korean hack of SONY, withdrawal of the movie and its reappearance in independent theaters and on-line -- has more satiric potential than the movie itself. Yes, Franco's Dave Skylark and Rogen's Aaron Rapaport -- a couple of tabloid TV types -- succeed in killing Kim Jung-un (Randall Park). But Rogen and co-director Evan Goldberg, who find ways to spray lots of blood around, also manage to murder any good will we might have felt toward this comedy in its very early going. I'm glad SONY released the movie and allowed the mystery surrounding it to evaporate, but if this is the best we can do for a free-speech issue, I'd say we're in trouble.

An exercise in diminishing returns

Pieces of puzzle don't fit together well in Paul Haggis's latest.

Director Paul Haggis's new movie, Third Person falters, but boasts an unusually watchable cast led by Liam Neeson, Olivia Wilde, Adrien Brody and Israeli actress Moran Atias.

Perhaps best known for the over-rated Oscar-winner Crash (2004), Haggis tells three related stories that don't cohere until the movie's unsatisfying conclusion.

Third Person has not been particularly well reviewed, but as flawed as I believe the movie to be, I was happy to see a film that, at least, attempted to deal with adult concerns.

In the film's best performance, Neeson plays a stalled novelist who's living in a Paris hotel, where he's trying to finish a book. He's left his wife (Kim Basinger) at home in the U.S., perhaps so that he can carry on an affair with his mistress (Wilde), a journalist who's also trying her hand at fiction.

Brody plays a businessman who steals other people's fashion designs and sells them to manufacturers of knock-offs. On a trip to Rome, where it's practically impossible to eat badly, he becomes an ugly American in search of a hamburger.

Dubious taste aside, Brody's character finds himself involved with a Romanian immigrant (Atias) who pulls him into a web of possible deceit.

In the third story, Mila Kunis plays a New York actress who's working as a maid while trying to win visiting rights with her young son, who lives with his artist father (James Franco). Kunis's character has been accused of abusing the child.

The actors give the enterprise their best shot. I especially enjoyed seeing Neeson in a role which didn't require him to wield a gun. Wilde's performance as a woman of mercurial moods proves alternately alluring and alarming, and Kunis pushes her character far out on an emotional ledge.

Third Person -- which deals with issues of trust and betrayal and also with the loss of children -- is too transparently tricky and, at times, too willing to push matters toward strained extremes. As a result, many of its twists tend to take us out of the picture's flow.

By trying so hard to describe a world of unrecognized connections, Haggis -- who also wrote the screenplay -- loses the battle between life's real complexities and those dreamed up by a writer who's capable of intriguing us one minute and making our eyes roll with disbelief, the next.

An icy hit man stalks his prey

New Jersey-based hit man Richard Kuklinski reportedly killed more than 100 people during his career as an assassin so cold-blooded, he was called The Iceman. We've seen a lot of movies that glamorize criminal life and plenty that go for hard-core grit. The Iceman -- which tells Kuklinski's story -- falls squarely into the latter category, and were it not for the work of Michael Shannon, the movie might have been another bit of cinematic slumming, one more foray into society's lower depths.

But Shannon, who's carving out a career playing men of intensity and weirdness, brings frightening credibility to the role of a killer who murdered as part of his routine and then went home to his wife (Winona Ryder) and two daughters. Let's just say Richie -- as his cronies referred to him -- must have been good at compartmentalizing.

Director Ariel Vroment surely knew that he had struck gold with Shannon because he works hard to support a performance that creates its own tension and dread. If you're looking fully to understand a Polish-American killer who plied his trade for Italian mobsters, you'll probably have to look elsewhere. A half-hearted reference to abuse Kuklinski suffered at the hands of his father neither justifies nor explains a man who seems to feel that he needs neither justification nor explanation.

That's just what makes Richie so terrifying. Aside from a professed love for his family, he doesn't seem to feel much of anything.

Although the movie clearly belongs to Shannon, the rest of the cast keeps pace. Ryder has her best outing in some time as Richie's wife, Deborah. She sees Richie as a protector, the man who loves her and takes care of her. She doesn't push him too hard about his cover story. Kuklinski accounts for his suburban lifestyle by claiming to be a savvy currency trader.

We've seen Ray Liotta as a tough guy so many times, it's a little disappointing to find him playing that role again, although he's obviously good at it. Here, he's mobster Roy DeMeo, the man who elevates -- if that's the right word -- Kuklinski from his job in a lab that processes pirated porn films to the job of hit man. Roy asks Kuklilnski to audition for his new role by killing a bum, a task Richie carries out without much fuss.

James Franco is convincing in a small role as Marty Freeman, a man who has the misfortune of crossing paths with Kuklinski, and David Schwimmer has a nice turn as Josh Rosenthal, a long-standing friend of Ray's with a talent for getting his mobbed-up boss in trouble.

In a movie such as The Iceman , the look and feel of things can be every bit as important as plot. Cinematographer Bobby Bukowski sees New Jersey at its depressing worst, creating a downcast mood the movie seldom breaks.

Even turns of plot that might have been played for cheap ironies and chuckles pass without much winking humor.
Chris Evans, for example, plays killer Robert Pronge, a hit man with whom Kuklinski forms a seedy partnership when his boss no longer needs his services. Pronge's day job: He drives an ice cream truck. His nickname: Mister Softee.

The plot unfolds pretty much as you'd expect: Vroment laces the screen with double-crosses and betrayals that eventually tighten a noose around Kuklinski's increasingly vulnerable neck. He's desperate to find a way out of the box he's constructed for himself. At a certain point, his occupation and his private life seem destined to collide.

Shannon's chilling performance keeps the movie's wheels spinning. He presents Richie in all of his icy, terrifying stature. But Richie's different than a lot of movie gangsters: He's one cold-blooded devil who never begs for sympathy.

On trying to turn exploitation into art

Spring Breakers is full of energy -- and maybe full of something else as well.
I finally caught up with Harmony Korine's Spring Breakers, a propulsive hunk of cinematic energy that has been hailed in more than a few quarters for its willingness to go wickedly against its genre grain.

It's difficult not to see the movie as a kind of perverse trick. The title seems to have been calibrated to lure unsuspecting teens into an entertainment that they think will serve up screenfuls of scantily clad women, wild gross-out humor and outrageously dopey behavior. For better (and sometimes for worse) that's not the film that Korine has made, which is precisely what you'd expect from the director who wrote the screenplay for Kids (1995) and who has directed movies such as Gummo (1997), Julien Donkey-Boy (1999) and Trash Humpers (2009). If you've seen any of those movies, you know that Korine's work tends to polarize even the most tolerant of viewers.

Werner Herzog praised Gummo at a long-ago Telluride Film Festival. I didn't see Gummo at that festival, but I knew people who had and who were appalled by it. That's understandable. The movie opened with a scene of a boy drowning a cat in a garbage can.

Spring Breakers isn't quite in that mode, and it might be Korine's most accessible movie yet. Glutted with bare-breasted women, the movie begins by indulging itself in collegiate excess, a beach bacchanal that serves as a prologue to a story about four college girls from Kentucky (Selena Gomez, Ashley Benson, Vanessa Hudgens and Rachel Korine) who head to Florida for spring break.

Korine turns the girls' Florida romp into an orgiastic riot of shoulder-to-shoulder partying that leaves you feeling woozy, sort of in the same way that an amusement park ride that initially looks like fun can leave you feeling slightly nauseous. The movie more than earns its "R" rating with nudity, cocaine snorting and scenes of sexual abandon.

Just about everyone will notice that two of Korine's actresses are associated with shows that are the antithesis of what he's after here: Gomez (Disney's Wizards of Waverly Place and Hudgens (Disney's High School Musical).

In case we had any doubts about his intentions, Korine quickly injects a shot of malignancy into the party-hardy swells that break over St. Petersburg's packed beaches. To finance their spring break, the girls stage a robbery at a roadside diner.

Their new-found criminality provokes giddy excitement, although Gomez's Faith (a young woman with religious impulses) has reservations about all the bad-girl high jinx.

As Spring Breakers unfolds, it becomes clear that Korine wants to turn his sybaritic romp into a form of contemporary horror. He suggests that a flirtation with danger can turn into a full-scale love affair; it's as if he's presenting his characters with a series of twisted challenges, pushing them to see just how far they're willing to transgress.

As a result, it's difficult to watch Spring Breakers without experiencing a burgeoning sense of unease.

The introduction of hard-core danger starts when the girls hook up with wannabe gangsta (James Franco in a strangely effective turn.) Cornrows and a metallic grill make Franco almost unrecognizable; he's playing a character named Alien, a figure who's both ludicrous and menacing. Alien says he grew up among blacks, and learned a black gangsta style. Alien shrieks with pride at the stuff he's been able to acquire as the result of his drug dealing. He's part menace and part clown, a character who teeters on the edge of self-parody.

Franco's Alien becomes involved with the girls when he bails them out of jail after a drug bust, presumably one of many conducted by the St. Petersburg police during spring break.

As the story develops, Korine allows two of the girls to fall by the wayside. Faith realizes she's out of her depth and heads for home. She starts talking about how uncomfortable she is in the gangsta milieu, giving the movie an infusion of jitters that would be right at home in an after-school-special. Later, another girl is forced into inaction when she's wounded in a drive-by shooting.

Perhaps to keep Spring Breakers from turning into a finger-wagging cautionary tale about the dangers of consorting with thugs, Korine adds a tables-turning finale that's as excessive in gunplay as the early picture scenes are excessive in skin.

I suppose we shouldn't be surprised that a movie in which the female characters spend most of their time in bikinis begins to feel as if it's less interested in saying something than in standing a variety of archetypes on their ear, and, in the process, doling out punishment to the gangsta world.

Spring Breakers is not without interest, but Korine is able to carry his colossal goof of a movie only so far before he stretches credibility way beyond the breaking point.

Spring Breakers practically bursts with end-of-picture violence. Korine's bloodbath of a finale takes Godard's famous axiom -- all that's needed for a movie is a girl and a gun -- and restates it as, "All you need for a movie is a couple of girls and many guns."

To take pleasure in any of this, you probably have to enjoy watching Korine trample the archetypes of a thousand vapid beach movies. But by the end, I wasn't sure that Korine knew what to do once he and his characters had transgressed. In the end, it's the same old story. When in doubt, break out the heavy artillery and open fire.

Korine hits some wild notes in what amounts to a bona fide oddball of a movie, but for all its willingness to subvert expectation, Spring Breakers, ultimately, is not to be believed -- or, I think, taken as a coherent look at anything.

No, it's not the usual teen tripe, but it's not necessarily anything else, either.

This journey to Oz misses greatness

A prequel to the Wizard of Oz has its enchantments -- but flaws, as well..
It takes more than a little moxie to revisit the big-screen world that was so beautifully created by director Victor Fleming in The Wizard of Oz. To go "all-in" with a big-budget, 3-D extravaganza takes even more guts. So no faulting Disney or director Sam Raimi for an lack of daring.

Raimi -- perhaps best known for his contributions to the Spider Man series -- attempts to serve up a visually ambitious prequel to the 1939 classic, a movie that still attracts viewers when its shown on TV and which still scares adults and kids some 76 years after its 1939 release, thanks mostly to those hideous flying monkeys.

Moxie aside, Oz the Great and Powerful turns out to be a hit-and-miss affair with some serious drawbacks, not the least of which revolves around James Franco, the likable actor who begins the movie as a two-bit carnival magician named Oscar Diggs.

Franco flashes a toothy grin to convey the phony sincerity of a small-time con man, but doesn't do much more with his character. Early on, Diggs is swept by a tornado from Kansas to the magical world of Oz. There, he's greeted as the living fulfillment of a prophecy that calls for a wizard to save Oz from tyranny.

But Franco's performance isn't the only issue. There's also a notable lack of characters to provide the level of entertainment associated with The Tin Man (Jack Haley), the Scarecrow (Ray Bolger) and the Cowardly Lion (Burt Lahr).

I know. That's an awfully high bar, but what's the point of flying off to Oz without trying to match or jump over it? On top of that, Dorothy (Judy Garland) was a more interesting and involving character than a crackpot magician who must kill a wicked witch in order to save Oz and, not incidentally, gain access to its piles of golden treasure.

Having said all that, I don't want to leave you with the impression that Oz the Great and Powerful is a total disaster. It's a medium-grade helping of fantasy enhanced by some skillful animation, a few spectacular sets, some decent set pieces and dollops of humor.

Raimi wisely begins by following in the footsteps of the original with a black-and-white prologue that's presented in the old-fashioned 1:33 aspect ratio. When the story reaches Oz, Raimi expands to wide-screen and color.

Look, it's clear that Raimi (and a vast special effects team) was trying for a feeling of sustained enchantment, and when Franco's character discovers the land of Oz or gets his first glimpse of the Emerald City, Raimi seems to be on the right track.

The new movie gives the emerging wizard some new companions, a flying monkey named Finley (voiced by Zach Braff) and a China Doll -- she's called China Girl -- voiced by Joey King. Finley, who's dressed as a bellhop, becomes a beast of burden, carting the faux wizard's bag all over Oz. Although he manages some cuteness and humor, Finley simply doesn't have either the weight or memorability of any character from the original.

And China Girl might have been more affecting had the character been played a real girl instead of a CGI stand-in.

All of those flaws might have receded into obscurity had the witches (there are three in this edition) provided more kick. Mila Kunis portrays Theodora, a young woman who begins as a good and trusting witch but transforms into the Wicked Witch of the West. Michelle Williams appears as Glinda, the irrevocably good witch, and Rachel Weisz plays Evanora, the witch responsible for handling much of the movie's villainy.

None of them are as frightening or as commanding as the great Margaret Hamilton, the original (and in reality the "only") credible Wicked Witch of the West. Raimi and screenwriters David Lindsay-Abaire and Mitchell Kapner pay brief homage to Hamilton and try to create a variety of other (mostly minor) connections to the best-known big-screen adaptation of L. Frank Baum's classic story.

Now, about those flying monkeys. This version offers a more obviously fearsome version of the airborne simians, but employs them to lesser effect. These razor-toothed creatures fly at the audience, generating more by way of jolts than creepiness. The monkeys may be emblematic of the way Raimi employs 3-D throughout, more for thrill-ride impact than for the subtlety and depth that has marked the best recent 3-D, notably Life of Pi.

The mix of live-action and effects isn't always convincing, either. Too often, we're aware that animation is being employed, although some of it is beautifully colored and alluring.

I appreciated the gargantuan effort that went into Oz the Great and Powerful, and the movie may please younger audience while giving them a few scary kicks in the pants.

But "not bad" is not what we expect from a movie of this magnitude and with this lineage.

Oh, and by the way, Oz the Great and Powerful makes room for Munchkins, but not for Toto or any other dog. Pity.

How our beleaguered planet went ape

Rise of the Planet of the Apes has plenty of B-movie kick. That's a good thing.

I don't know many pop-culture lovers who aren't fans of the original Planet of the Apes.

The success of the much-revered 1968 original prompted four sequels, none of which had the entertaining kick of the first installment. And as much as I admire director Tim Burton, I have to admit that his 2001 trip to the Planet of the Apes was a bit of a disappointment.

Now comes Rise of the Planet of the Apes, an origins movie that reflects a deep understanding of B-movie pleasures. This installment functions as a worthy prequel to the 1968 edition, which starred Charlton Heston and some very fine actors in ape makeup.

This time, a mixture of CGI and motion-capture photography allows the filmmakers to go ape, filling the screen with primates that are misused and abused by humans who don't respect their integrity as living creatures.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes connects to the original in ways that can be both smart and amusing, and Andy Serkis, who did such brilliant motion-capture work as Gollum in The Lord of the Rings, gives Caesar -- the movie's principal ape -- a sense of gravitas and well-earned indignation.

No question about it: This time, our sympathies lie with the apes.

As the story unfolds, Caesar -- who's raised in the home of research scientist Will Rodman (James Franco) -- makes the transition from rambunctious chimp to the leader of every primate in the San Francisco area: those used in cruel lab experiments and those housed in zoos.

Thematically, Rise of the Planet of the Apes can't be viewed as a groundbreaker. It cautions against the ways in which hubris undermines science, and peddles the familiar notion that some things are beyond our control -- and should remain that way.

I say forget the themes: The movie doesn't fuss over them anyway. Enjoy this skillful mixture of story and action for what it is, recognizing that everything that happens in the realm of the apes will be more compelling than whatever transpires in the human world.

When we meet Franco's Will, he's working on a serum called ALZ-112. The drug has great commercial potential because it's supposed to reverse the debilitating effects of Alzheimer's, a disease that has stricken Will's father (John Lithgow).

It doesn't take long for Will to go a little rogue: After a violent outbreak by Caesar's mother, Will's company orders the destruction of all of Will's research chimps. That's how baby Caesar winds up at Will's house: Will smuggles the tiny chimp out the lab.

The rest of the movie involves the ways in which Will continues his research, and Caesar continues to develop. The chimp learns to communicate using sign language and observes the world around him with more than animal-like curiosity. of course, Caesar has a leg up on every other chimp in the world: He was born with developmental potential his genetically altered mother passed on to him.

But like his mother, Caesar still has plenty of animal impulses. A violent episode triggered by a challenge to Caesar's protective instincts results in Caesar's confinement in an animal shelter. In this dank animal prison, Caesar emerges as the freedom-loving leader of the ape world.

All of this builds toward an action-packed finale on the Golden Gate Bridge during which director Rupert Wyatt finds the right mix of violence, dread and primate-administered retribution. Let's just say that prospects for humanity become bleak.

Rise of the Planet of the Apes can't be called an actors' movie, but Franco does a decent job as a scientist whose work forces him to confront serious moral questions. Frieda Pinto offers support in the mostly thankless role of a veterinarian who becomes Will's love interest. David Oyelowo appears as the drug company's profit-crazy boss.

Sometimes, the human action lags, but Wyatt delivers when it counts, and Rise of the Planet of the Apes turns out to be entertaining, ominous and amusingly over-amped. Credit Wyatt with playing the movie's signature moments for all they're worth.

Honesty compels me to tell you that the chimps sometimes look like they belong in a computer-generated zoo; i.e., they don't always look real. But I admired the fact that Wyatt has made one of the best kinds of genre movies, one that knows its place.

And just in case you have difficulty rooting for the apes, a word of advice: Think back to the recent Congressional debate about raising the debt ceiling. Keep Congress in mind, and the apes will start looking a whole lot better.

'Your Highness' is a royal flop

This Medieval comedy is vulgar, but not funny..

Once a darling of critics, David Gordon Green (George Washington and All the Real Girls) lately has been dabbling in low-brow comedy, first in 2008's Pineapple Express and now with Your Highness. * Green manages to take two of last year's prominent Oscar names -- James Franco (nominee) and Natalie Portman (winner) on a downward spiraling ride. * Tasteless and often downright ugly, Your Highness attempts to spoof the cliches of the sword-and-sorcery genre. * Danny McBride, who along with Franco appeared in Pineapple Express, plays a prince immersed in a sibling rivalry with his older brother Fabious (Franco). The brothers embark on a quest to save Fabious' finacee (Zooey Deschanel). * Deschanel's Belladonna has fallen into the clutches of the evil wizard Leezar (Justin Theroux). The brothers ultimately find Belladonna, but discover few laughs as the script pours on the F-word, something you can do at home without having to purchase a ticket. * Is it me or is there some kind of rule that after winning an Oscar, an actor must always appear in a bad movie? Oh well, at least Portman looks good. * The movie's comic high point involves a severed penis. Does that tell you enough? No? Well, the presence of special effects makes the movie seem as overproduced as it is witless.* By the end, I was hoping that Your Highness wouldn't raise its sword in in triumph, but would fall on it instead.

A intense, harrowing '127 Hours'

Director Danny Boyle turns a young man's ordeal into high-energy cinema, but the experience isn't without artistic pretension.

127 Hours seems headed for a bright, awards-laden future. It’s possible that this highly praised movie will win an Oscar nomination for best picture. It’s an equally good bet that the movie’s director, Danny Boyle, will be nominated for best director.

And while we're on the subject of awards: It’s reasonable to speculate that James Franco, the movie’s star, will find himself on Oscar’s short list for best performance by an actor in a lead role, and it wouldn't be shocking if cinematographers Enrique Chediak and Anthony Dod Mantle receive Oscar nominations, as well.

You get the idea. 127 Hours already has struck gold with critics and industry insiders.

All of this is fairly amazing considering that Boyle’s tense and involving movie is a bit of stunt, a celebration of the will to survive and of the stunning, high-definition clarity of its own imagery.

For those who don’t know. a recap is in order: 127 Hours tells the real-life story of Aron Ralston (Franco), a brash young Coloradan who got his arm pinned by a boulder while taking a solo hike in Utah. Isolated in a narrow canyon and facing death, Ralston -- who wrote a 2004 autobiography called Between A Rock and Hard Place -- struggled to find ways to free himself.

Ralston’s story owes its prominence – then and now – to the radical way in which he saved his life. When all else failed, Ralston freed himself by cutting off his lower right arm with a dull knife.

No question a movie such as 127 Hours poses extreme technical challenges for a filmmaker. How do you dramatize a story involving only one location, a spot from which the main character can’t move?

Boyle (Slumdog Millionaire) solves the problem with a facile camera, bravura editing, fast-paced depictions of Ralston’s delirious fantasies, split-screen images, occasional flashbacks and dizzying shots of the canyon in which Ralston is trapped. Boyle also provides just enough backstory to establish Ralston as a young man whose journey involves an arc of sorts: Ralston makes the transition from arrogant self-assurance to humbled acknowledgement of his need for others.

Ralston underwent an awful ordeal. He tried to drink water that trickled down to him from a thunderstorm. In desperation, he drank his own urine. He talked to a video camera, sometimes addressing his mother in an attempt to assuage the guilt he felt about not having bothered to return her call before leaving on his ill-fated excursion.

Of course, Boyle makes you squirm when the BIG MOMENT arrives. At some festival screenings a few people reportedly passed out. That strikes me as a bit of an over-reaction, but it is difficult to watch someone cut off an arm. I never approached loss of consciousness, but I did wince.

After some heady opening sequences, Ralston leaves the rest of humanity behind. Before striking out by himself, though, he meets two young women who also are hiking. Ralston takes them to a place where they can suspend themselves between two high rock walls before dropping into a pool of blue water.

It’s a key sequence because it tells us that Aron, played by Franco with giddy but eroding confidence, regards the natural world as a kind of personal playground; it's this view that ultimately betrays him.

Boyle takes us through what feels like the quickest 127 hours in movie history. He’s never boring, but he also never lets us forget that there’s a creative talent working (and sometime overworking) this material. That's why 127 Hours represents an intriguing but strange sort of achievement: Although it's set in the middle of nowhere, Boyle's movie can seem like one of the busiest, most charged-up dramas of the year.

Jula Roberts eats, prays and learns to love

It's hardly news that Julia Roberts can carry a movie. So you won't be shocked that she puts Eat, Pray, Love on her back, pretty much keeping this episodic adaptation of Elizabeth Gilbert's best-selling memoir from falling apart. Appealing as she is, Roberts can't elevate this travelogue into something meaningful and deep. I don't blame her, but director Ryan Murphy of Nip/Tuck fame seems to have forgotten that a long-standing internal conflict about life's meaning only can carry a movie so far. As was the case with Gilbert's book, the movie follows Gilbert as she leaves two failed relationships and tries to find herself during a yearlong trip that begins in Italy, continues in India and culminates in Bali. On her various stops, Gilbert learns life lessons, and eventually arrives at a point at which she can take a chance on love. The men in Gilbert's life are played by Billy Crudup (first husband); James Franco (Gilbert's next love); and Javier Bardem (the man who just might be able to persuade Gilbert to risk her heart.) Richard Jenkins portrays a Texan Gilbert meets in an Indian ashram; Jenkins is good, but the movie doesn't really allow any of these characters to flourish. They're like people we meet on a trip, feel a little close to and then forget. Roberts and supporting players do their best to give the movie some easy charm. I enjoyed looking at Rome, and reveled the airy openness of Gilbert's home in Bali, but Eat, Pray, Love offers a cliched view of the world and of its colorful characters, a smiling, toothless medicine man included. I couldn't watch Eat, Pray, Love without thinking how much more I wanted from these characters and from the movie itself. Director Murphy, one of the screenplay's co-writers, attempts to replicate the author's voice by having Roberts supply a narration. But if there's any authentic yearning in the movie, I didn't feel it. I also couldn't help thinking that if Arthur Frommer wrote self-help books instead of travel guides, this is how they'd look.