Miscellaneous Debris, August 2010 Edition

Our monthly roundup of news that caught our eye and what we have to say about it. 

We’ve complained about it for months, so here’s our last word on the subject: this was the Summer of Disappointment, with little in the way of surprise but plenty in the way of letdown. Even the surprises were themselves born of relief, with films like Despicable Me and The A-Team offering more than we expected; when the best you can say is that some films weren’t as terrible as you feared,  it’s a bad time for film and a bad time to be a movie fan. This month there’s been precious little to lure us into multiplexes, aside from the occasional goofy pleasure like The Expendables and The Other Guys, and even those weren’t quite alluring enough. 

All of this is to apologize for the comparative dearth of reviews posted over the last several weeks. We’re working on it. Anyway, once a month or so we get together all the news items of the previous four weeks and offer commentary on what they mean for the entertainment industry and the audience alike. The opinions are purely those of SBR. Thanks for sticking with us. 

1. The Emmy awards ceremony this past Sunday night was virtually surprise free, with Mad Men getting Best Drama and show creator Matt Weiner also winning for best writing. Bryan Cranston won best dramatic actor for Breaking Bad and Kyra Sedgewick won best actress for The Closer. On the other hand, Modern Family was something of a welcome surprise to win in the Best Comedy category; we’d guessed voters would just hand it to 30 Rock (I show whose appeal is lost to us) once again. 

Kudos to Mad Men, but we’re curious to see how this year’s kick-’em-when-they’re-down fourth season will fare at next year’s awards. Don Draper and company are in some murky waters just now, and it wouldn’t surprise us if the show’s winter of discontent translated into a chilling factor among Emmy voters. 

2. A couple of weeks ago we posted how The Sorcerer’s Apprentice represents something of a dying breed among films – the star-driven, big budget summer vehicle. Add to the pile of flops mentioned in that review the Jennifer Aniston tanker The Switch, which debuted in seventh place at the box office a couple of weeks ago and has since grossed only about sixteen million dollars. 

There are lots of reasons for the film’s failure and why it won’t derail Anniston’s career, as indieWire’s excellent analysis provides, but we think it’s unfair to blame Jason Bateman’s unproven leading man bankability. The simultaneously cloying yet distasteful television ads, omnipresent for weeks leading up to the premiere, surely had something to do with the public’s indifference. The public may also (finally) be growing tired of Aniston playing yet another variation of Rachel Green. 

3. TV Guide’s assertion that the Hawaii Five-O reboot is “fall’s hottest new show” despite its premiere remaining three weeks away would normally make us wonder if the fix was in. In this case, however, they’re probably right. Stars Alex O’Loughlin and Scott Caan are overdue to break through with the right vehicle (this is O’Loughlin’s third show on CBS) and co-stars Grace Park and Daniel Dae Kim will likely draw curious fans from, respectively, Battlestar Galactica and Lost. 

It gets a plum timeslot, too, inheriting the Monday at 10/9 Central berth that CSI: Miami has enjoyed since its premiere eight years ago. (That show moves to the same time on Sundays.) 

4. Joel and Ethan Coen are probably few people’s idea of theological teachers, but religion journalist Catherine Falsani makes an oft-compelling case for the brothers as  spiritual guides in her breezy 2009 book The Dude Abides. Examining each of their fourteen films, from Blood Simple to A Serious Man, Falsani illuminates the moral and philosophical issues the brothers subtly raise (if not always address) in each film, analyzing plots and themes as well as characters from an allegorical perspective. She reaches a bit in molding her thesis to the films of their middle career – Intolerable Cruelty lacks text, let alone subtext – but her readings of major works including Raising Arizona and of course The Big Lebowski are articulate and convincing. A fun read for the brothers’ fans or anyone looking for a spiritual treat. 

Kramer's 1959 melodrama about nuclear fallout

 5. On the subject of reading material, Saul Austerlitz’s online essay calling for a re-thinking of the career of director Stanley Kramer (Judgment At Nuremberg, Guess Who’s Coming To Dinner) is both fearless and illuminating, bucking a lot of conventional wisdom of the last forty years while extending the maligned director some fresh respect. 

Without meaning to sound disparaging, Kramer made films that if produced today would be released in December and considered unabashed Oscar-bait. All the same, as Austerlitz contends there’s plenty of rewarding material both in Kramer’s pragmatic camera eye and in his approach to his subject matter, and his body of work remains laudably diverse. In fact, you’ve probably seen one of his films without realizing it. 

6. Ever see a preview for something and think it’s going to either be spectacular or go spectacularly wrong? The trailer for Martin Scorsese’s pilot to the HBO series Boardwalk Empire gives us that sense of optimistic dread. On the plus side, there’s a fantastic cast in a sprawling and lavish retelling of the early days of prohibition. On the other hand, it’s been a long time since Scorsese really impressed us, especially when dealing with organized crime (The Departed, Casino, and Gangs of New York were all variously near and wide misses), and this level of ambition rarely pans out when produced for television. At any rate the cast is intriguing: we’ll watch Steve Buscemi, Kelly MacDonald and Gretchen Mol in anything. 

 

7. The comic book movie genre has reached its tipping point, and it’s likely that 2010 will likely be remembered as the year everything started to fall apart. Following the box office disappointments of The Losers, Jonah Hex, Kick Ass, and Scott Pilgrim vs. The World, it’s likely that studios will become increasingly cagey about which comic-inspired projects are greenlit. Meanwhile the Green Lantern and The Avengers projects seem increasingly problematic: Green Lantern for its inauthentic-looking CGI costume, and The Avengers for its slowly deflating scope and scale. 

Time Out magazine recently posted its list of 50 essential comic book movies. That there are fifty at all boggles the mind.

8. Finally, the handsome previews for Ben Affleck’s upcoming The Town made us realize it’s about time again to re-watch Heat, Michael Mann’s 1995 similar exploration of conscience-plagued thieves and the relentless cops who pursue them.

Besides the three stars in the poster, Heat features Ashley Judd,  Jon Voight, Diane Venora, Dennis Haysbert, Amy Brenneman, Nathalie Portman, and William Fichtner. Not an entirely perfect movie, but for its kind it comes as close as any film ever did. The trailer below basically implies that if you don’t see it, you don’t deserve to go to the movies.

We’ll be back later this week. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Girl Who Played With Fire

Sequel to The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo is a brutish, dull melange of genre clichés.

There’s a long-standing pretension among American audiences, largely unsaid, that films imported from Europe possess an innate superiority to their homemade counterparts. Maybe that’s true, and The Girl Who Played With Fire is the exception that proves the rule. Far from art or even good crime cinema (the two aren’t necessarily mutually exclusive), it’s instead a particularly pungent rehashing of some pretty familiar genre clichés, piled high with unmitigated sexism and a cruel streak a mile wide. Densely plotted and manacled by leaden acting from its two blandly cryptic leads, it’s an only sometimes interesting stack of plot twists and turns, each one circling a story idea that’s never quite addressed in the time or space it deserves. It’s also seldom entertaining to watch, thanks to almost artless directing and strictly utilitarian production design that feels not quite real enough to carry off a realistic tone.

Picking up where The Girl With Dragon Tattoo left off, emotionally battered computer hacker Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is living in the Caribbean, still attempting to come to grips with the horrific sexual abuse inflicted on her by her guardian Bjurman (Peter Andersson) as well as traumatic childhood events. Returning to Sweden, she learns that a freelance journalist and his researcher girlfriend have been murdered, shortly after the journalist sold a series of articles exposing a sex trafficking ring with ties to the Swedish government.

Providing plot complications with only a minimum of contrivance, the journalist was working for Millennium, the magazine operated by Salander’s former confederate and lover Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist). Salander’s fingerprints are on the murder weapon, thanks to a visit she paid Bjurman upon her return. Of course the police suspect her, pursuing her with narrow-minded if myopic determination after Bjurman too is discovered dead. Meanwhile Salander’s kickboxing girlfriend (Yasmine Garbi) is kidnapped by towering white-haired brute Neidermann (Micke Spreitz), whom Salander has previously surveiled in Bjurman’s company. An attempted rescue by Salander’s boxing coach gets them both thrown into a barn that the brute lights on fire, though they escape.

There’s an additional storyline regarding Salander’s search for the accurate progress reports Bjurman compiled on her mental condition, not the doctored statements she’d coerced him into sending to the Swedish government. Niedermann dispatches two bikers (themselves straight out of central casting) to intercept her. The meeting allows Salander the opportunity to fire a gun and apply a taser to one of the rape-happy biker’s testicles. As in many other scenes, Salander applies the violence without emotion other than a vague snarl, dispassionate in her vengeance to a degree that’s almost lifeless. It’s typical of the film’s attitudes that no one onscreen seems surprised or excited by anyone’s malevolence.

Ultimately, Salander follows the assorted crimes and sex trafficking ring to aged Soviet defector Zalachenko (Georgi Staykov) with whom she has a deep and troubled past; Zalachenko is her father, and the same man she set on fire after he sexually assaulted her mother. Now scarred and almost cartoonishly evil, after belittling her rape at Bjurman’s hands Zalachenko orders Niedermann to kill her. She’s shot several times and then buried alive, leading to a plot twist so incredible it snaps suspended disbelief: a small-framed girl, shot several times and bleeding, digs herself out of a grave after apparently spending several minutes underground, without suffocating. Such is the herculean strength of the film’s surly anti-heroine.

Swedish television director Daniel Alfredson adapts Larsson’s densely plotted novel with little sense of rising tension or mounting suspense, so that each scene plays out more or less at the same leaden pitch. Salander or Blomkvist brood about something, or get pissed off, with little growing feeling. With a 129 minute runtime, that flatline stretches on forever. Screenwriter Jonas Frykberg’s adaptation of Larsson’s novel is so baldly episodic that at times the events possess a curious detachment from one another, with the third-act dovetailing that should propel the film towards its climax instead feeling only random, and breathless. At its center stands Rapace, all wide eyes and focused yet shallow intensity, but she can’t manage to imbue complexity to Salander’s personality: because the script (and presumably its source novel) only defines her by her trauma, there’s little to work with by way of character building except rage and pain. Few real people are so uncomplicated, and rarer still are successful fictional characters so simplistic.

What the film lacks in structure and staging it wants to make up for with violence and spectacle; if only its misanthropic worldview allowed for anything other than shock and spectacle. Heterosexual sex involves rape or bondage, or carries such superficial emotion as to be meaningless; Salander’s night with her girlfriend is a casual fling on the living room floor, presented not much differently than similar episodes  encountered in porn. In building a better bad guy, Niedermann suffers from a condition called congenital analgesia: he literally cannot feel pain, while Zalachenko’s scalp is a hideous swirl of contracture scars. They are fierce antagonists for Salander’s wounded determination, but their scenes together are shrill and void of emotion, especially towards the film’s climax, which collapses under its too-numerous similarities to a stock-grade slasher flick.

There’s a worthwhile, if not exactly refined, story buried under the bile and misanthropy that clutters The Girl Who Played With Fire. But the long atrocity exhibition presented within keeps that story tangled up in its fascination not with the causes or aftermath of inhumanity but rather by the spectacle of such acts taking place; the film positively wallows in violence, particularly sexual violence. Whatever failures and laziness debilitate American films, Hollywood at least doesn’t have a monopoly on the exploitation of barbarity or on the leering, voyeuristic depiction of the same.

- Michael Kabel

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Night Flights, August 2010 Edition

These films have maybe only one thing in common: we watched them this month.

One a month or so we corral all the movies we watched on late night television into this feature, hopefully casting new light on older or overlooked films that still have something to offer audiences. They only thing they really have in common, possibly, is that we watched them this month. 

Probably no one enjoys only one kind of movie anyway, so hopefully more than one of these will strike your interest. Most are available on DVD, except where noted otherwise. Many are also available online and streaming on demand.

1. Danika (2006) – Suburban housewife Danika (Marisa Tomei) begins hallucinating all the evils that could befall her three children coming true over the course of a few days: abductions, morally corrupt teachers, girlfriends with diseases, irate neighbors, household accidents. Though her husband (Craig Bierko) and therapist (Regina Hall) are at first supportive, there’s more to Danika’s reality than is readily apparent.

By and large the film does well under Ariel Vroman’s (Rx) journeyman direction, but Tomei holds the film together through her acting and presence, especially the seemingly requisite twist ending that spins the whole 75 minutes before it into what some viewers might regard as a big – and familiar – cheat. As a rental though, or on cable on a slow night, it’s perfectly entertaining viewing.

2. The Legend of the Lone Ranger (1981) – This notorious flop probably deserves an entry all on its own just by virtue of its weirdness. Still, it has its moments: when secessionist warlord Butch Cavendish (Christopher Lloyd) kidnaps President Ulysses S. Grant (Jason Robards) and holds him hostage inside an elaborate Western fortress, the Lone Ranger and Tonto (Klinton Spilsbury and Michael Horse) ride to his rescue, partially to avenge the death of the Ranger’s brother and comrades.

Accomplished cinematographer William A. Fraker (Bullitt, Tombstone) gets the sweeping Western vistas right but falls short on directing the actors and pacing the narrative, with a story that’s jumbled and awkwardly-paced when it’s not just odd: seeing President Grant plant dynamite and gun down outlaws would be strange under the best of circumstances; Merle Haggard’s balladeering of the already-simplistic storyline is intrusive and clumsy. Making matters worse, Spilsbury’s voice was dubbed over with Keith Carradine’s, giving his speech a strange disjointed quality throughout. On the plus side: Lloyd is excellent, and seeing actual cowboy Richard Farnsworth (The Natural) play Wild Bill Hickok is a treat.

3. Eight Million Ways To Die (1985) – An attempt to bring mystery author Lawrence Block’s detective Matt Scudder to the screen (though changing his locale from New York to Los Angeles), this undercooked, overwritten neo-noir remains an oddity in the resumes of all involved. It marked Hal Ashby’s (Shampoo) final screen credit, while Andy Garcia made his leading role debut. Oliver Stone and David Lee Henry adapted the Block novel, though Robert Towne (Chinatown) also contributed material.

As the poster suggests, the final film too closely resembles a sleazed-up episode of Miami Vice while enjoying all the artistic freedom (in this case, nudity and profanity) an R rating can provide. When alcoholic cop Scudder (Jeff Bridges, doing his best) fails to keep a high-priced call girl (Alexandra Paul) from getting killed, he teams with her friend and madam (Rosanna Arquette) and a reformed crook (Randy Brooks) to get revenge on the drug dealer  responsible (Garcia.) The ensuing drama never reaches its boiling point, even if the warehouse shoot out scene (in the NSFW clip below) is riveting from its first fame. Those cartons are chock full o’ cocaine, by the way.

Despite the talent involved, the film has so far eluded a DVD release.

4. Slayground (1983) – Another attempt to bring the work of a celebrated crime writer to the screen – this time Donald E. Westlake, author of the books that inspired Point Blank and The Grifters – this low-budget neo-noir tries, somewhat unsuccessfully, to merge noir and slasher film tropes, getting neither one exactly right while neglecting plot clarity and depth of characterization. The ending borrows liberally from Blade Runner, The Lady From Shanghai and The Man With the Golden Gun, actually becoming the film’s best segment.

Westlake wrote the script himself, but director Terry Bedford focuses on style and atmosphere instead. The two never completely meet, despite capable performances by Peter Coyote and British actors Mel Smith and Billie Whitelaw, playing criminals and lost souls whose mistakes catch up with them in the form of a psychotic hitman trailing Coyote’s noble thief. A minor entry, ultimately, in the neo-noir resurgence of the early- and mid-80s, even if frequent showings on late night cable television back then elevated it into a humble cult status.

5. Not Another Teen Movie (2006) – Perverse curiosity led to a viewing of this 2001 “spoof,” and anyway when you’re on vacation it’s okay to lower your standards. Though there are several laugh worthy moments, it’s sometimes difficult to understand its target audience, as the level of humor suggests modern high school students while the constant stream of references and meta-jokes pander mostly to the sensibilities of Generation X, with the then-current “Young Hollywood” romcoms She’s All That and Never Been Kissed also the target of biting (if gummy) jabs.

As with so many films of its type, the script throws one joke on top of another figuring you’ll only remember the ones that connect, and when that gets hard it provides something to gross you out or shock you instead. Not as lazy as some of its successors but not exactly inspired, either. And remember, star Chris Evans is your Captain America.

6. The House Bunny (2008) – Scary Movie franchise regular Anna Faris stars in this mildly underrated light comedy about a Playboy Bunny kicked out of the Mansion on her 27th birthday – she’s too old, it seems, to remain of interest to Hef and his followers. After getting snubbed by the wealthy, pretty members of an elitist college sorority, she joins the “misfit” sorority of book worms and wall flowers instead. You can imagine what happens next.

The subject matter is familiar, comfortable territory for Legally Blonde screenwriters Kirsten Smith and Karen McCullah Lutz, while Faris is actually, surprisingly charming and multi-layered in her turn as the dumb blonde getting smart for lack of a better idea. Rising stars Emma Stone and Kat Dennings are sweet in their sidekick roles, and perpetual up-and-comer Colin Hanks is charming as the heroine’s everyman love interest. Hefner, probably figuring there’s no such thing as bad press, makes a guest appearance accompanied by some recent real-life Playmates and concubines. So frothy it almost evaporates, but harmless fun all the same.

We’ll be back next week with reviews of some current movies. Thanks for reading.

- Michael Kabel

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Review: The Sorcerer’s Apprentice

Is one of this summer’s biggest flops among the last of a dying breed?

There’s nothing wrong, necessarily, with the Jerry Bruckheimer-produced Nicolas Cage vehicle The Sorcerer’s Apprentice. Seen as an exercise taken strictly from the summer blockbuster playbook, it’s serviceable in about every possible way. The special effects are pleasing, the storyline is easy to follow, and the requisite romantic subplots are handled capably and without proving themselves dull or distracting from the extravaganza filling the screen. The film’s only real ambition is to make money by entertaining audiences. So what happened?

As Parade‘s list implies, the age of the personality-fueled blockbuster may be over. John Travolta’s From Paris With Love underperformed last winter, and the Tom Cruise-Cameron Diaz adventure Knight and Day has proven itself a banquet of schadenfreude for the press, with reports of its box office demise actually preceding its release. Yet with only a little hindsight, along with The Sorcerer’s Apprentice the three films seem almost quaint, relics from a time when blockbusters didn’t need the pedigree of a comic book or bestselling tween novel to herd audiences towards theatres. (Obviously, Avatar is the 800-pound exception, but its cast of non-stars also exempts it from this dubious company.) It’s not as if the stars themselves are slacking; none of the three films are worse, by and large, from the kind of brain-light flicks that they’ve cranked out for years, to much greater returns.

Travolta and Cruise as spies aren’t so much of a stretch for audience expectations, but The Sorcerer’s Apprentice continues the increasingly weird choices Cage has made for himself since his notorious remake of The Wicker Man five years ago. Cage plays Balthazar, one of three disciples of the wizard Merlin (the one from Camelot) who once led a war against the evil sorceress Morgana le Fay (Alice Krige). Betrayed by the errant student Horvath (Alfred Molina), Merlin and his forces narrowly defeated le Fay by imprisoning her spirit within the body of Balthazar’s love  Veronica (Monica Bellucci). Merlin was killed in the confrontation, but for centuries Balthazar has roamed the Earth, searching for the “prime Merlinian” adept who could end the threat of le Fay and her disciples once and for all.

The chosen one turns out to be (only somewhat incredibly) nebbishy Manhattan physics student Dave Stutler (Jay Bauchel). A childhood meeting with Balthazar and Horvath left Dave traumatized and reduced to years of social incompetence and depression, so when Balthazar reappears in his life, following an attack by Horvath, he’s less than enthused about undertaking the training Balthazar insists is critical for the safety of the world. Horvath meanwhile has recruited a Criss Angel pastiche (Toby Kebbell) to act as his own apprentice. Eventually, the good guys triumph over Horvath and le Fay using a combination of Balthazar’s magic and Dave’s superconducting Tesla coils.

Director Jon Turteltaub (National Treasure: Book of Secrets) keeps the story moving most of the time, and the special effects are flashy and exciting without seeming egregious or too intense for younger audiences. There used to be an idea that films could be safe for kids but still entertaining for grown-ups. Hollywood rarely attempts such alchemy of content anymore, which sometimes seems a shame; to its credit, The Sorcerer’s Apprentice usually has such an idea in its largely unoccupied head. But that same open-door policy also makes the film’s tone and mood squirm; in trying to please everyone it might not offer the right level of intensity to anyone. Not a high crime, really, but not an advantage, either.

Whether or not you agree with his loopy film choices, there’s no denying Cage’s commitment to his roles. Here he gives Balthazar the right amount of noble earnestness, and approaches the script’s odder moments with a smirk and a wave of his shaggy hair. Molina does a lot of mustache-twirling as Horvath, finding his character inside its Victorian costuming. We’ve accused Molina before of habitually stealing scenes from his younger co-stars; though that’s not quite the case here, he often comes close. Bellucci wanders into the frame in several scenes; seldom asked to do anything more than look good in her American film appearances, her appearance here is no different. (To be fair, she does look really, really good.)

Less effective are Jay Baruchel as Dave and Reese Witherspoon look-alike Teresa Palmer as the object of his unrequited love. Baruchel’s half-Woody Allen, half-Matthew Broderick nerdishness lacks the inner warmth and charm that made either of those influences appealing despite their tics and hesitations, though his vague air of self-satisfaction recalls Broderick’s less endearing moments. Palmer’s role is stock and under-written besides, and she has little chance to interact with Baruchel in a scene that isn’t about Dave. The script suggests Dave has nursed a crush through middle and high school for the same girl, which hardly seems realistic to say nothing of obsessive.

All of which amounts to a slightly diverting, mildly pleasing summer crate of popcorn that’s pleasing enough, in its own possibly antiquated way. Cage has several more projects lined up, of course, and films like this one and the other major flops mentioned above have for several years now become fodder for the discount DVD bins anyway. They are seldom anyone’s favorite movie, liked but not well-liked, enjoyed and then put away in favor of the next big film bauble coming in the fall or summer. If The Sorcerer’s Apprentice et al. are the last of a dying breed, bemoaning their passing will nevertheless seem hypocritical, since they’re exactly the kinds of films whose proliferation audiences have both supported and bitched about for decades. But their replacements might not be much better: this summer both Iron Man 2 and Jonah Hex disappointed and Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight-follow up Inception couldn’t quite get out from under its own weight. Once the old-fashioned summer blockbusters are gone, will audiences be any better off?

-Michael Kabel

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Review: Despicable Me

Steve Carell-starring animated adventure is slightly better than you might expect.

For better or worse, Steve Carell is the face of American comedy right now, so an animated feature starring his voice was probably inevitable. Despicable Me, in which The Office star plays a somewhat bumbling, somewhat self-sabotaguing administrator with a heart of butterscotch, doesn’t ask Carell to step too far out of his Michael Scott safe zone. Nevertheless, it’s often a warmer and more affecting drama than you might expect, thanks to the earnestness of its supporting characters and – yes – the undeniable comic charm of those bumbling, busybody minions.

Carell voices Gru, a middle-ranks supervillain whose best days of evil may be behind him. Lethargic and slow to motivate his assistant Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) and army of minions towards a grand evil project, he’s nevertheless resentful when a younger, more aggressive villain named Vector (Jason Segel) steals one of the Great Pyramids of Giza – a crime for which he sometimes gets the credit/blame. But when Gru and the minions steal a shrink ray Gru needs for his big project, Vector steals it from them, crippling the project. Gru is already in trouble with his creditors at the Bank of Evil and, desperate to get the shrink ray back, adopts three orphan girls to help him infiltrate Vector’s suburban fortress.

Of course, the girls’ affection and innocence help to warm Gru’s heart, giving him the self-confidence he needs to begin his long-dreamt of plan to capture the moon. But work on that project conflicts with giving the girls the attention they need, resulting in some predictable family dynamics and misunderstandings that can seem, at times, sitcommish in their simplicity. It’s sort of unfair to expect any originality from the premise, or to chastise the filmmakers for not deviating from the plotline almost all of us have seen before. To its credit, the film never indulges in schlock value for the sake of moving Gru’s character towards accepting the girls. Quite the opposite. A gag involving an Iron Maiden torture device skirts the borders of good taste, as does a couple of dangling plot threads involving the orphanage and its mean-spirited director (Kristen Wiig.) The ending, showcasing yet another group dance scene, comes close to leaving a saccharine aftertaste but thankfully doesn’t last long enough to cause such damage.

The film works best in small moments that gather momentum into running gags or else dare you to notice them once: one of the ostensibly male minions dons a wig and dress and then, for reasons unexplained, continues to wear them for the rest of the plot; the doorway placard to the Bank of Evil carries the subtitle “formerly Lehman Brothers;” a weightless minion’s growing bliss as he floats out of Earth’s atmosphere. The moments are small, and don’t completely compensate for the scenes elsewhere that putter along or outright stall – and there are too many of those for the film to really be very good – but while they’re onscreen they’re potently effective.

Regarding the voice talent, many of the characters often seem to be trying to sound like someone else. Carell’s Gru voice, all slurred words and blocky diction, recalls Christopher Walken’s Saturday Night Live character The Continental. The minions, cute as they are visually, sometimes sound like the Jawas of Star Wars and at other times like Gremlins; sometimes they just sound like toy robots. Wiig gives the evil matron Miss Hattie all of Paula Dean’s exaggerated Southern drawl – a weird choice, yet somehow an effective one. The three child actors voicing the girls do their job well, even if the bulk of their dialogue is strictly unchallenging stock.

The film is, like so many aspiring blockbusters of the moment, also available in 3-D, and the many shots that pander to this new technology are not always as egregious as they could be. Sometimes they are, however, which for 2-D audiences might prove distracting. In fact, the story is just as entertaining in 2-D, as the comic potential exists without the gimmick and by and large realizes its promise. A sequel is already announced, but in the meantime this first adventure is a pleasant way to spend a couple of hours, either in the emptying late summer theatres or definitely on home video. Far from despicable, in this summer of disappointments it’s a welcome and endearing surprise.

- Michael Kabel

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Patricia Neal: 1926 – 2010

Academy Award, Tony, and Golden Globe-winning actress passes away at age 84.

Actress Patricia Neal, who won an academy award for her role as the aging housekeeper Alma Brown in the 1963 drama Hud, died Sunday of lung cancer at her home in Martha’s Vineyard. She was 84.

A versatile and accomplished stage and screen actress, Neal appeared in several film classics including The Day The Earth Stood Still (1951), A Face In The Crowd (1957), and Breakfast At Tiffany’s (1961). Born in Kentucky but raised in Knoxville, Tennessee, Neal studied acting at Northwestern University before moving to New York. A 1946 Tony Award win for her turn in Lillian Hellman’s Another Part of the Forest launched her film career, with a breakthrough performance opposite Gary Cooper in The Fountainhead arriving in 1949.

In 1971 Neal won a Golden Globe for her performance as Olivia Walton in the television movie The Homecoming: A Christmas Story. A critical and ratings success, the telefilm served as a pilot for the television series The Waltons, though she did not reprise her role for the series.

Neal’s personal life was tempestuous and often wracked by tragedy: following a doomed, adulterous romance with Cooper, she wed British author Roald Dahl in 1953, though their 30-year marriage was marked by the death of one child and the severe injury of another. A series of strokes sustained while pregnant in 1965 left her comatose for three weeks, though she ultimately delivered a healthy baby girl.

In 1978 Ford Sanders Regional Medical Center in Knoxville dedicated the Patricia Neal Rehabilitation Center in recognition of her advocacy for stroke victims. Neal published her autobiography, As I Am, in 1988. Her final film appearance, in the drama Flying By, was released last year. Our sincerest condolences to her family and friends.