Making a short story long

Some short stories should be allowed to remain on the page.

Raymond Carver's short story -- Why Don't You Dance? -- can be read in five minutes, presuming you drag your feet. In a terse, deadpan style that allows the reader to fill in a variety of blanks, Carver introduces us to a man who has hit bottom.

Here's Carver's first sentence: "In the kitchen, he poured another drink and looked at the bedroom suite in his front yard."

Obviously, the main character in Carver's story is not having a good day. Not only the bedroom suite but just about everything else he owns is sitting on the lawn. The man seems to be alone; his wife may have vacated the premises to avoid her husband's rage and drinking. Or maybe she'd had enough, and simply didn't want to talk about their relationship anymore. Once a guy's stuff hits the lawn, there's not much left to talk about anyway.

Everything Must Go -- the movie derived from Why Don't You Dance? -- allows writer/director Dan Rush to fill in details that Carver purposefully omitted. Try as he may, Rush can't quite stretch Carver's minimal tale into a full-blooded movie.

In the movie, we meet Nick (Will Ferrell) in the midst of the mother of bad days. He's been fired from his job, and his wife has tossed all his stuff onto the front lawn. The neighbors are curious or vexed. Passersby take the scene for a garage sale.

Bolstered by a nonstop stream of beers, Nick settles down to contemplate his fate or maybe to avoid contemplating his fate. Rush does a good job setting up Nick's modest catastrophe, allowing the humor of despair to rise from the narrative like foul vapors from a dump.

I like despair as much as the next guy, but as soon as Nick is awakened from a night's sleep on the lawn by the automatic sprinkler system, an alarm went off my head. Too easy, I thought. Too expected. Too much like a gag you'd see in a very different kind of Will Ferrell movie.

Now in fairness, it should be noted that we're not talking about a movie that spends the next 100 minutes staring at a guy on his lawn. Not exactly. Nick has what are known in the trade as encounters: first with Kenny (Christopher Jordan Wallace), a portly black kid who Nick pays to watch his stuff while he replenishes his beer supply, and then with Samantha (Rebecca Hall), a pregnant woman who just has moved into the neighborhood and is awaiting her husband's arrival. Nick also discusses his situation with a detective (Michael Pena), who also happens to be his AA sponsor.

At a desperate low point, Nick visits a woman (Laura Dern) he hasn't seen in years. Kenny notices Nick's high school yearbook amid the debris on the lawn. Turns out Dern's character wrote something nice about Nick. Maybe she has an encouraging word for him. Clearly, Nick is grasping at straws.

Nick's relationship with Kenny has touching aspects, and Ferrell is quite good as a depressed man who has allowed alcohol to get the better of him. But there's at least one scene that calls for Nick to express his anger at someone. Samantha draws this particular short straw. Ferrell is much more than a comic buffoon, but a drunk with a venomous side? I didn't totally buy it. I didn't see enough mean in him.

Everything Must Go probably should have remained a short story, a writer's take on the kind of strange suburban sight we might see in real life, prompting us to wonder what series of events could have brought a man to the point where he's sitting in a recliner on his front lawn surrounded by all his crap and not having a clue what comes next.

I guess that's where I part company with the movie. I'd rather imagine what might have happened than to know what did: Filling in the blanks in Carver's story may amount to a case of subtraction by addition.

Samurai warriors battle long odds

13 Assassins celebrates Samurai movie tropes without getting self-conscious about it.

Japanese director Takeshi Miike's new movie, Hara-Kiri: Death of a Samurai, is slated to show at the Cannes Film Festival, which kicked off on May 11. If you can't make it to Cannes and you've been seized by a samurai jones, you'll definitely want to spend some time with Miike's 13 Assassins, which opens in Denver this week and is moving slowly around the country. * Miike could have called this one, The Death Of A Whole Lot of Samurais. Miike's body count is high in this story about a samurai warrior who tries to topple a sadistic nobleman in a battle with very long odds. How long? Try 13 against 200. * Of course, Miiki doesn't spare us the sight of some of the evil warlord's work, some of which may upset the squeamish. * The idea of desperate battle between a small group of honorable men and an entire army is both familiar and preposterous, but Miike pushes it to extremes, allowing the climactic battle to extend for 45 action-packed and somewhat exhausting minutes. * Miike's movie is set in the 19th century, a time when once valued warriors are losing their status, a popular moment for many directors who are partial to the genre's apparently endless supply of swords, horses and bloodshed. * 13 Assassins is a large-scale production with an epic look, if not an epic story, but if you like this kind of movie -- and what self-respecting movie fan doesn't -- 13 Assassins should do the trick. * And by the way, Hara-Kiri is in 3-D. I'm no 3-D fan, but I have to admit that I can't wait to see what Miiki does with another dimension.

A look at some of the world's oldest art

It's no gallery, but the art is first rate.

In his 2006 book, The Cave Painters, author Gregory Curtis observes that the first thing everyone seems to notice about the cave paintings of the Paleolithic Era is their beauty. Curtis goes on to point out that cave images focused primarily on animals. For Curtis, this repetitive tendency suggests a brand of art that supported the social order of its time, which happens to have occurred some 32,000 years ago.

If you want to see the beauty (and amazing skill) of these early paintings, you'd do well to check out Werner Herzog's new documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, although you may need to read Curtis' book for a fuller picture of the culture that produced this art. And, yes, I used the word "culture" advisedly.

Granted exclusive access to the Chauvet cave in France, Herzog and a small crew took 3-D cameras into the cave to photograph its paintings. Some of the folks with whom I saw Forgotten Dreams thought the 3-D was well used and that it added to their experience. I have to say that it left me feeling slightly woozy, even though I appreciated the sense of immediacy and presence it provided.

But on to the heart of the matter: The art we see is vibrant, sophisticated and accomplished. Paleolithic artists were able to suggest motion, and to make creative use of undulating cave surfaces. None of the work is marked by the crudeness that might have been ascribed to it by those of us who know little about Paleolithic life.

It's also fascinating to learn that humans did not inhabit the caves, but entered them to draw or to paint and possibly to conduct "religious" rituals. Herzog shows us a rock with a bear skull that has been placed on top of it. We may be looking at an early altar.

Those familiar with Herzog's work in documentaries such as Encounters at the End of the World and Grizzly Man know that he tends to make room for heightened commentary, the kind of observations that allow him to spar with a universe he can find mysterious, indifferent and unyielding. Normally, I go along for almost any journey Herzog takes, but for me Herzog proved the most troublesome feature of Cave of Forgotten Dreams. I'm sure others will have precisely the opposite reaction, but this time I found Herzog's presence distracting.

Still, the fact that Herzog's camera has access to sights that none of us could see on our own makes the movie special. And, of course, the paintings are priceless. If you're intrigued by the idea that some of our earliest ancestors were interested in art, music (they played carved flutes) and spirituality, you can't help but be fascinated by what Herzog shows. When he allows his camera to survey the art in silence -- which happily he does -- the movie couldn't be better.

'Thor' swings a mighty (loud) hammer

Thor's motto: Talk loudly and carry a big hammer. Kenneth Branagh's entry into the world of superheroes provides some fun.

Thor drops the hammer that gets the summer-movie parade rolling, and if it doesn't quite hit the nail on the head, it delivers a pretty loud whack.

A Marvel Comics character since 1962, Thor does his hammer throwing in a grandly scaled entertainment that hits the screen with enough sound and fury to leave little room for doubt: Another comic book hero has left his calling card at the nation's multiplexes, and has done so in bold, emphatic fashion.

In chronicling Thor's transition from arrogant warrior to humble king, director Kenneth Branagh goes big, flooding the screen with everything from epic-sized fights to lightening-like flashes of energy to large men wearing Viking helmets that go heavy on horns.

What can I tell you? Any movie that makes room for Frost Giants and Anthony Hopkins can't be accused of taking itself too seriously. Hopkins plays Odin, Thor's father and king of Asgard, the realm where Thor and his fellow Norse gods cavort in robust fashion.

Thor is played by Chris Hemsworth, an Australian actor who looks like a cross between a Norse warrior and a California surfer. Hemsworth, who slips into the American argot as easily as he tosses off the script's portentous dialog, helps keep the movie from swirling down the cosmic drain. He's strong enough to pull a slightly scattered script together, has a godlike physique and manages to make his character more likable as the movie progresses.

After an hour so, you may feel comfortable enough around Thor to call him, "Dude,'' as in "Dude, where's your hammer?" Or maybe, "Dude, I like your cape." Better known for staging Shakespeare than for throwing spears, Branagh piles on the special effects as he paves the way for next year's Avengers movie, an exercise in comic book crossbreeding in which Thor joins other Marvel superheroes.

In this edition, the action alternates between Asgard and Earth. Thor lands in New Mexico after displeasing daddy. As punishment for leading an unauthorized raid on Jotunheim, the realm where the Frost Giants reside, Thor is banished to Earth.

Had Thor been less arrogant, he would have ascended to the throne in the movie's early going. Evidently ready for retirement, Odin wants to cede his kingdom to Thor. But the old king is put off by his son's epic-sized flaws: arrogance, impetuousness and an eagerness to make war.

Thor and Odin have an argument in which they shout mightily. Get used to it. At key moments, the actors don't talk; they bellow.

Working from a script by a trio of writers, Branagh mostly finds the right balance for a comic-book movie, blending action, humor, stabs at grandeur and thematic issues involving fathers, sons, sibling rivalry and a burgeoning love between a mortal and a god.

Natalie Portman portrays Jane, an astrophysicist who catches Thor's eye, setting up a possible romance between a mortal and a god. During his exile on Earth, Thor also encounters a group of scientists led by Erik Selvig, played by Stellan Skarsgard, whose befuddled expression suggests he may be asking himself exactly he's doing in this movie.

Despite her recently acquired best-actress Oscar, Portman's stuck in a supporting role, and she's not as interesting as another of Selvig's colleagues, portrayed by an acerbic Kat Dennings. On the Asgard side, we're introduced to various Thor loyalists, notably Volstagg, an ebullient Norse warrior played by Ray Stevenson with enough hair and beard to clog a thousand drains. A more carefully groomed Tom Hiddleston plays Thor's younger brother, Loki, a character with a complicated background that steers him toward treachery.

As is the case with most such movies, Earthlings in black suits eventually show up to add a note of bureaucratic menace. S.H.I.E.L.D. agent Coulson (Clark Gregg) leads the contingent of black suits; he's an investigator we've already met in the Iron Man movies.

Many of the Asgard scenes sprawl across spectacular backdrops that can't quite disguise their artificial look, but there's enough going on here to please comic-book fans, as well as those who like movies that leave them feeling as if they've been subjected to sonic boom.

And don't look now, but there's more where Thor came from. Due later this summer, another movie taken from Marvel's superhero storehouse: Captain America.

Two wedding invitations from Hollywood

This weekend, Hollywood has issued invitations to two weddings, but I wouldn't necessarily rush to RSVP. Both movies -- Something Borrowed and Jumping the Broom -- have problems, but given the choice, I'd head for Martha's Vineyard, where the livelier and slightly more realistic Jumping the Broom takes place. Both movies have a sitcom flavor and both are heavily reliant on contrivance, but I prefer Angela Bassett and Paula Patton (as mother and daughter) to Ginnifer Goodwin and Kate Hudson (as best friends). Besides, Jumping the Broom, unlike its competitor, offers some real laughs.

A QUICK LOOK AT SOMETHING BORROWED

In the thoroughly mediocre Something Borrowed, Ginnifer Goodwin plays Rachel, a lawyer who has two best friends: Darcy (Kate Hudson), a woman Rachel has known since childhood, and Dex (Colin Egglesfield), a guy with whom she attended law school. When Rachel fails to acknowledge her romantic interest in Dex, Darcy swoops in for the kill. Dex and Darcy clearly make for an oil-and-water couple, but they're soon engaged. It doesn't take long for the movie to start feeling like junior high school with the principal characters trying to outdo one another. Meanwhile, Rachel's level-headed buddy (John Krasinski) encourages her not to defer to Darcy. The trailer gives away the movie's major twist, so I don't feel bad about including it in this brief review: Rachel and Dex sleep together, which puts Dex in a tough spot. He must decide whether to go through with the wedding or follow his heart. Goodwin (the new Doris Day?) knows how to handle this kind of role; Hudson tends to be shrill and over-the-top; and Egglesfield seems longer on looks than personality. As romcoms go, Something Borrowed feels entirely familiar, less a full-bodied movie than a cardboard cutout.

CLASSES MINGLE AND CLASH AT AN UPSCALE WEDDING

After a variety of unsatisfying one-night stands, Paula Patton's Sabrina pledges not to sleep with another man until she's married. It doesn't take long for Sabrina to become engaged to Jason (Laz Alonso), a New York investment banker who grew up in downscale Brooklyn. Conflicts arise when it becomes clear that Sabrina's well-heeled family is unprepared to accept Jason's mom, a truculent postal worker played by Loretta Devine. Devine squares off against Angela Bassett, who plays Sabrina's take-no-prisoner's mom. The script by Elizabeth Hunter and Arlene Gibb finds comedy in class conflict as families and friends gather at the Martha's Vineyard home where the wedding is to be held. The script also makes room for a couple of stock characters who add humor: the outspoken Shonda (Tasha Smith), best friend of the groom's mother, and Willie Earl (Mike Epps), the groom's equally outspoken uncle. The movie was produced by J.D. Jakes, a Dallas-based preacher who may be responsible for the movie's mild religious tilt. To its credit, though, Jumping the Broom seems more interested in entertaining than in proselytizing. The movie is not without clinkers, not the least of which involves a melodramatic twist the script easily could have done without. But director Salim Akil keeps the movie percolating as it heads toward its predictable conclusion, having only flirted with a few real issues, but at least acknowledging the world in which they exist.

Love in a time of brutal war

There's at least as much passion in the filmmaking as in the various romances in Bertrand Tavernier’s The Princess of Montpensier, a 16th century story set against a backdrop of brutal war between Roman Catholics and Protestant Huguenots.

Philippe Sarde's edgy score and Tavernier's fluid camera infuse this period piece with plenty of urgency. Tavernier also reminds us that few conflicts are more vicious than religious wars, a message that resonates as loudly today as it did in the 1500s.

The Princess of Montpensier is based on a short story by Madame de La Fayette, a 17th century writer who’s credited with having penned the first historical novel, The Princess of Cleves. Tavernier preserves La Fayette’s fascination with courtly intrigue, and also gives us a vivid feel for life in war-torn France during the 1500s.

If the public life of France is torn apart by war, the private lives of the movie’s characters seems equally tumultuous. A series of clashing passions revolve around Marie (Melanie Thierry), a young woman who’s forced into marriage by a father who’s more interested in cementing a land deal than in ensuring his daughter’s happiness.

The dashing Henri de Guise (Gaspard Ulliel) – Marie’s original beau -- continues his pursuit, even after Marie has been married off to Prince de Montpensier (Gregoire Leprince-Ringuet). Later, Marie turns the head of yet another man, the dashing Duc d’Anjou (Raphael Personnaz).

As the story unfolds, Marie’s husband becomes increasingly jealous – and with good cause.

The movie’s most interesting male character arrives in the person of Comte de Chabannes (Lambert Wilson), a warrior who decides to withdraw from battle after he kills a pregnant woman. Comte de Chabannes, who taught the Prince de Montpensier the arts of war, becomes Marie’s tutor, instructing her in everything from the reading to herbal cures. He, too, falls under Marie’s spell.

Each of the men desires Marie for different reasons: the prince because she’s his wife; de Guise because he can’t have her; Duc d’ Anjou because he’s vain; and Comte de Cabannes because Marie revives his sense of youth and innocence. The Comte’s love probably is the purest and least self-serving.

All of this might have been more effective had Thierry been able to endow the princess with a little more mystery. The buxom, blonde Thierry plays a young woman who has yet to learn to conceal her intentions, assuming she even knows them. I suppose that's the way she is, but it makes the story less interesting than it should be.

I’m a great admirer of Tavernier’s work – from A Sunday in the Country to Captain Conan with a stopover at ‘Round Midnight. Some of Tavernier’s recent films (In the Electric Mist and Holy Lola) have not received wide exposure in the U.S., but he remains one of the world’s important filmmakers. A director who refuses to be imprisoned by genre, Tavernier seems to break new personal ground in nearly every movie.

Princess of Montpensier allows Tavernier to pit large-scale historical events against a personal story of less-than-epic proportions, and Tavernier’s deep love of cinema is palpable in nearly every frame, as is his commitment to authenticity.

So even if a Tavernier movie is a little less than hoped for (as is the case here), it's still worth watching a master at work.

'Fast Five's' best when it speeds and bleeds

Fast Five' doesn't make much sense, but its action works and it also reminds us that Hollywood's summer thrill ride is fast approaching.

Fast Five makes no real sense, features some of the year's least interesting acting and revolves around a disappointingly generic heist plot: Regulars from the "Fast and Furious" series angle to steal $100 million from a Brazilian drug lord.

Does any of that matter? Not really. If you're a fan of fast-paced, improbable action, Fast Five delivers the frenzied goods, although you may find yourself twiddling your thumbs between action set pieces.

Thankfully, director Justin Lin stages the action on a grand, pulse-pounding scale, affording us the opportunity to watch a bus do aerial flips, to see high-priced cars being hijacked from a speeding train, and to witness a climactic chase sequence that threatens to destroy half of Rio de Janeiro while maiming nearly every member of the city's police force.
In case you're wondering, all that belongs on the plus side of the movie's ledger.

The series' two franchise players are back: Vin Diesel, who looks like a man constructed entirely from biceps, returns along with Paul Walker, whose all-American looks are marred only by some obligatory stubble. Diesel and Walker play Dominic Toretto and Brian O'Conner, a champion street racer and a former cop who wind up in Brazil after Brian helps spring Dominic from jail.

Jordana Brewster returns as Mia, Dominic's sister and Brian's main squeeze. Brian and Mia don't have much time for squeezing, though. Like everyone else in the movie, they're too busy showing off their muscles, sweating profusely or planning a totally preposterous robbery.

Dwayne Johnson, formerly known as The Rock, constitutes the biggest (as well as bulkiest) addition. Johnson portrays Hobbs, a supercop who's pursuing our heroes. Sporting a goatee, bulging veins and a determined expression, Johnson joins the kick-ass festivities with as much gusto as he can muster.

In typical B-movie fashion, Brian and Dominic assemble a gang to pull off the job, a task that provides the movie with a reason to add a large supporting cast. Chris "Ludacris" Bridges, Tyrese Gibson, Sung Kang, Gal Gadot and Tego Calderon add humor, some of it by way of comic action, notably a bit in which the toilets in a men's room are blown up. Very messy.

If you see the Fast and Furious movies because you love street racing, you may feel short-changed. At one point, Dominic and Paul seek out Rio's street-racing scene, but Lin ignores the race in which they compete.

I won't describe any more of the action because most of the fun involves the surprisingly ingenious ways in which Lin, working from a script by Chris Morgan, piles on the carnage as the movie races through Rio's impoverished favelas and across its sleek downtown.

The roar of the action and the crackle of gunfire tend to drown out the small voice in us that wonders what happened to logic. Oh well, with a movie such as Fast Five, credibility takes a back seat to stunts, grunts, artfully designed mayhem and fake grit.

Fans will want to stay through the end credits for a postscript that Lin has added. The rest of the world should know what it probably already suspects: Fast Five is more product than movie, a pre-summer money machine that probably will rev up the box office before the bigger boys arrive. Think of it as Hollywood stripping down to its T-shirt as it starts to flex its thrill-ride muscles.

A two-continent search for a better world

In A Better World features strong acting and some fine moments, but its ending is too pat and its script is too committed to scoring moral points..

Last February, Danish director Susanne Bier won the best foreign-language film Oscar for In A Better World, a movie that tries -- boy, does it try -- to explore the impulses that lead to violence. To accomplish her task, Bier splits her narrative, following developments in her native Denmark and in a dusty, unnamed African country where villagers receive sporadic medical care.

In the Danish segments, school bullying becomes a springboard for a larger inquiry into the origins of violent behavior. In Africa, the movie explores violence generated by the wanton abuse of power in a lawless society: A local tyrant -- referred to only as Big Man -- brutalizes villagers, sometimes cutting open the bellies of pregnant women to settle trivial bets about the gender of an unborn child.

Anton (Mikael Persbrandt), a physician, provides the link between the Danish and African segments. A man of liberal conscience, Anton travels to Africa to minister to the poor. His wife Marianne (Trine Dyrholm), also a doctor, has assumed most of the responsibility for raising their two sons, one of whom (Markus Rygaard) is being bullied at school.

Anton and Marianne are newly separated, as a result of an affair Anton's had, but they still try to act in concert when it comes to their children. Though sometimes hampered by geographical distance, Anton's relationship with Elias seems tender and loving. And the kid clearly adores his father.

But Elias also responds to the overtures of a friend (William Johnk Nielsen), a new kid who has just lost his mother and who only recently moved to his grandmother's farm with his businessman father (Ulrich Thomsen). Thomsen's Christian responds violently to the bully most responsible for Elias' humiliation. A volatile mixture of anger and grief pushes Christian toward extremes, and Bier generates suspense about how far Elias will go in supporting his unforgiving pal.

After Anton returns from Africa, he attempts to teach Elias and Christian a lesson about the futility of violence. When he breaks up a playground fight, Anton gets crosswise with another father, an adult bully who knows he's in the wrong but insists that only he can tell his child what to do. Despite ample provocation, Anton refuses to fight the man, insisting that there's little to be gained from confronting the bully on his own terms. Christian can't accept such a "pacifist' approach. He thinks violence should be met with greater violence.

Throughout the movie, Bier creates situations that test her characters. At one point, Big Man suffers a severe leg wound, and asks Anton for treatment. Anton must grapple with a troubling ethical problem: Is he obligated to treat a man who has inflicted so much harm on others? Should he ignore the pleas of villagers who would be only too happy to see Big Man die?

The plot often feels as if it has been burdened by a need to illustrate such problems, but Bier does a lot right here, too. Anton's pain, Marianne's anger, Elias' loneliness, and Christian's fury all feel real; these elements may have been enough for any movie to handle without also wandering off to Africa, which (in truth) receives short shrift here.

Sometimes when a movie tries to do too much -- and this may be one of those cases -- it fails to do enough. Put another way: In casting such a wide net, Bier doesn't go deep enough. Full of promise and often absorbing, In A Better World winds up being too pat for a film that has dared so much.

As funny as being hit with a wrench

Geek power carried to a vicious extreme.

Here's another movie about a geek who attempts to transform himself into a superhero. The fact that Kick-Ass already filled that bill makes Super mostly superfluous. The fact that the movie's superhero -- played by Rainn Wilson -- decides to use a pipe wrench to beat evildoers senseless undermines Super's attempts at humor. * If there's any saving grace here -- and it turns out to be a small one -- it arrives in the person of Ellen Page, who plays Wilson's sidekick. He's the Crimson Bolt, and she's Boltie. * Page brings comic exuberance to a movie that desperately needs it. * But the rest? Liv Tyler plays a drug addict who falls under the sway of a rock musician (Kevin Bacon). The trouble: She's engaged to Wilson's character, a short-order cook who becomes a superhero to liberate the love of his life from the clutches of addiction. * Super not only follows in the footsteps of better movies, but can't really convince us that its violence should be taken as an expression of cartoon zest. * A total commitment to the dark side might have made Super more interesting, but in this battle between humor and menace, no one emerges a winner.