It’s my fault for going in hoping for “The Proposition”-meets-”Starship Troopers.” Instead, generic title begets generic results in the tepid “Cowboys & Aliens,” brisk professionalism of a middling order. Jon Favreau’s first film since the congenially scatty “Iron Man 2,” from a script credited to Roberto Orci & Alex Kurtzman & Damon Lindelof; Mark Fergus & Hawk Ostby; and Steve Oedekerk, demonstrates that craft takes you only so far. (The ampersand in screen credits indicates writers who worked together as teams; the ampersand in “Cowboys & Aliens” is more mysterious.) The opening scene of spirited splatter from our supposed hero, an alien or Starman or Man With No Name or amnesiac (Daniel Craig) is promising. Craig plays terse and rugged well enough, but the sly twinkle of his best acting is absent (“Fateless,” “The Mother,” “Enduring Love,” “Love is the Devil”). Almost like a so-so movie by co-producer Ron Howard, “Cowboys & Aliens” is turgid without messy bits to keep it interesting, slick without the sleekness of high style. (Cinematographer Matthew Libatique has done better work in “Black Swan,” “Iron Man” and “Josie and the Pussycats.”) Read the rest of this entry »

A vanload of pals since fifth grade drive halfway across the country in 1998 to break into the editing room of George Lucas’ Skywalker Ranch so they can sneak a preview of “Star Wars: Episode 1—The Phantom Menace.” One fanboy has cancer. Another is a girl. They battle Star Trek fans along the way. Director Kyle Newman and writers Adam F. Goldberg, Ernest Cline and Dan Pulick are at fault for this inane, inert road movie. In a self-incriminating instance of it-takes-one-to-make-one, these off-screen fans of “Star Wars” can only offer onscreen counterparts as nitwit nerds. In 1916, Hugo Munsterberg warned of moviegoing youth harmed by “the trivializing influence of a steady contact with things which are not worth knowing.” “Fanboys” only shows that distributors build shelves for good reasons. If only bad films like this would molder there longer. Wasting your time and theirs: Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner, Seth Rogen, Kevin Smith and Jason Mewes. With Jay Baruchel, Dan Fogler, Sam Huntington, Chris Marquette and Kristen Bell. 90m. (Bill Stamets)

Executive Producer George Lucas adds nothing to his “Star Wars” cosmos and corpus with this CG-animated kids tale. Director Dave Filoni—and writers Henry Gilroy, Steven Melching and Scott Murphy—stick to the franchise’s fixtures: Galactic Republicans and Separatist scum, Jedi’s and Siths, mentors and apprentices, chancellors and assassins. New on the scene are “rolling death balls” and a 14-year-old Togrutan named Ahsoka Tano. This orange-creamsicle-faced knight-in-training is assigned by Master Yoda to Anakin Skywalker. Together they will free the kidnapped nephew of Jabba the Hut, and thwart intrigue by Count Dooku, Asajj Ventress and a treacherous Hut who purrs like Truman Capote. Victory means Galactic troops can access shipping routes in the Outer Rim to contain the insurgency. Mission Accomplished. The Long War. Following up a 2004-2005 Cartoon Network show about the Clone Wars period, “Star Wars: The Clone Wars” fits into the six-film saga in between Episodes II and III. “A war, by nature, is a patchwork of untold stories,” says Lucas. “We know what happens to the galaxy, but we don’t know exactly how it all came to pass. These are the stories behind the story.” There’s a badly borrowed Buster Keaton bit, and the robo-critters on the sidelines get the best quips and squeaks. “Sky Guy,” as the cheeky “youngling” tags Skywalker, is colorless. With the voices of Matt Lanter, Ashley Eckstein, James Arnold Taylor, Dee Bradley Baker, Tom Kane, Nika Futterman, Corey Burton, Kevin Michael Richardson, Samuel L. Jackson and Christopher Lee. 100m. Anamorphic 2.40 widescreen. (Bill Stamets)

By Ray Pride

Only Timur Bekmambetov could have made “Wanted.” And that’s a grand thing.

Opening with the familiar Universal logo that has sparkling space dust girdling the globe, we’re quickly thrown into a comic-book adaptation written by Scots by a Kazakh director who made his name in Russia, set in a lustrously shot Chicago, with a Scottish male lead and an American female. We’re quickly propelled into a loonily labyrinthine, gratifyingly Byzantine weave of immaculately produced visual filmmaking. “Wanted” is not breathless in the sense of Michael Bay’s accelerated cutting (although the cinematographer, Mitchell Amundsen, shot “Transformers” and knows from gleam).

Bekmambetov’s “Nightwatch” (2004) and “Daywatch” (2006) were reportedly Russia’s biggest hits ever, but didn’t cross over here. Of “Daywatch,” I noted that his “full-tilt willingness to be incomprehensible is his keenest talent,” and of “Nightwatch,” its “convoluted, grimy, gruesome, Gothic, Slavic, giddy humbug.” Ah, but now. “Wanted” is a tonally aggressive, wildly expressionistic, deeply satisfying film, a sleekly machined action powerhouse, words I hardly expected to type this summer.

Wesley Gibson (James McEvoy, sporting a fine American accent) is a lowly office worker who takes anti-anxiety medication and knows that his beautiful-but-shrill girlfriend is having sex with one of his coworkers on their Ikea kitchen table. A voice-over by this cubicle-bound sweet-faced nerd is profane and echoes with hapless exasperation the self-realization gab of “Fight Club.” (A character named Darden may just echo “Tyler Durden.”) But that’s only a component of the many layers offered up by Bekmambetov and screenwriters Michael Brandt, Derek Haas and Chris Morgan (from the comic-book series by Mark Millar and J. G. Jones). Bekmambetov, like George Lucas, James Cameron and Peter Jackson before him, owns his own effects house, and there are generous swirls and dabs of technique throughout this story of a young man who’s enlisted by a secret society of assassins who’ve persisted for a thousand years, led by Morgan Freeman, and whose mostly silent teacher of the arts hardcore is embodied by Angelina Jolie. (She has fun.)

Bekmambetov’s going for baroque at each available instant. Yet on recognizable streets in the Loop and near North, atop El trains always curving or going under low underpasses, he elevates and heightens the city in rare fashion, much like Michael Mann or Andy Davis (“The Fugitive,” “Code of Silence”). Lake and Wabash; Wacker and Wabash; lower Wacker: all stylishly rendered. The multiple uses of and references to the El are integral to the tale, not visual or sonic scene-setting. (An opening shootout that takes place partly atop the Carbide and Carbon Building, home of the Hard Rock Hotel, is immaculately cut and composed for maximum narrative and visceral effect.)

These filmmakers get Chicago. Bekmambetov uses everything at his disposal, adapting more than lifting styles, techniques and gags that have been in movies by David Fincher and the Wachowskis, for instance. But this florid, perfervid visual style delivers. No romcom-style reverse-angle tick-tocks of conversation. Yet the rush of imagery doesn’t suggest videogames as much as a romping pulp infraction.

Credit, too, must go to Chicago names in the credits likely to have something to do with the look, such as location manager Mark Mamalakis, as well as prop work that includes the characteristic Loop newspaper kiosks with headlines about a violent act, all done in the correct style of the newspapers on display. A character back at tough-love assassin HQ drinks from a Bears glass. A restorative bath involving some kind of chemical-wax compound comes to resemble shards of broken ice eddying around Wesley’s face (Alexander Nevsky much, Timur?) The costume design, Varvara Avdyushko, is also typical of the attention to detail: everyone’s garb is slightly heightened; Wesley’s costumes are plain and tend to beige and brown, yet are immaculately refined.

Even the stripped-down, quintessential cod-philosophical twaddle satisfies. “Why are you here?” “I don’t know who I am!” “That’s good enough for now.” And when you can pull off Morgan Freeman intoning, “We call this the loom of fate,” causing you to grin rather than laugh out loud, something’s very right. You come to accept characters slinging armory like a chef with an omelet pan or a tennis player at the top of their game. The El itself becomes one more weapon in their expressive arsenal.

With such impressive filmmaking in every technical respect, and decent respect for the comic-book flummery while acknowledging its essential silliness, you want something to tie it together, a deeper undercurrent other than the obligatory Zennish bromides. Perhaps an undercurrent about terrorist cells? Mmm… No. [AN ALLUSION TO THE ENDING FOLLOWS.] The man who made his name in Russia pulls it off with gleeful aplomb. In the last scene, which is one of a corkscrew-laden movie’s most elaborate twist-and-turn sequences, when the last one standing shows how it’s done and confronts the audience head-on with a profane provocation? It’s the grace note: the winner who takes all, head spinning throughout from Kremlin-style hall of mirrors reversals, now resembles one triumphant figure on the world stage: Vladimir Putin. Za vas, Timur! Za vas! “Wanted” opens Friday.

By Ray Pride

A plush cousin to “Idiocracy,” the latest humbling eyeful from Pixar, “Wall-E,” says that Americans are going to die for their consumption habits, except for a few fat fumblers shot out into space.

While less profane, “Wall-E,” directed by Andrew Stanton (“Finding Nemo”), is more pessimistic than Mike Judge’s dark mess. Its protagonist is the titular rusty robot that no one bothered to turn off 700 years earlier when the survivors of a ruined Earth leave for a luxury cruise ship, the Axiom, deep in outer space. The tableaux of a ruined Manhattan are thrilling, drawing from myriad influences: “Blade Runner” tempered with ideas from artists like Jodorowsky, Mobius and Jacques Tardi, among other hands from the Metal Hurlant era of comics. Wall-E becomes a Sisyphus building and ascending ziggurats of consumer waste that would appeal to Philip K. Dick in this post-human Metropolis, spending each day compacting and constructing step-at-a-time towers of Babel, with the watercolor look of Bruce McCall’s inventive apocrypha atop a Breughel canvas without human figures.

For the first forty minutes or so, there’s no dialogue and the eye wanders through an inventive tapestry of the remnants of a lost civilization. Stanton et al. make the most of silence (along with Ben Burtt’s terrific sound design). No brand names are given pride of placement, only the “Buy N Large” megacorp that seems to have absorbed all before the fall, including the government. Fred Willard makes a cameo as Shelby Forthright, the cheerleader CEO, using the memorable phrase, “Stay the course.”

Wall-E’s daily routine includes collecting things he likes: he’s a dogged packrat assembling a curiosity cabinet of technology and junk. He owns a single videotape (of “Hello Dolly”!), on BetaMax, which he watches through a contraption that includes an early iPod. It’s reminiscent of Los Angeles’ Museum of Jurassic Technology, as if civilization were a long-gone myth, an invented legend collated by a robot from scraps. When Wall-E’s solar panels are filled each morning, it’s signaled by the Mac start-up chime, which in one of its iterations, while rushing through the rings of Saturn, is strangely touching. (What’s he running? Mac OS MMDCCLXXV?)

Where “Cars” erred on the side of trying to make 1950s-style internal combustion engines into a thing of shiny love to dazzle the most prehensile of animation watchers, “Wall-E’”s anthropo-dwarfism goes the opposite direction, toward an eco-fable that’s more than majestic in its detailing while keeping its characters exceedingly small. (Wall-E’s sidekick is a resilient cockroach.) Stanton has said words to the effect that most of the Pixar projects to date were sketched out on a napkin over lunch more than fifteen years ago, and while the napkin has grown many terabytes larger, the idea of “the last robot” remains.

And there’s a lot of “last” to go around. After meeting a sleek female robot, EVA, that’s been dispatched to find vestiges of vegetation in the barren, windblown topsoil, further destruction ensues, including the nuking of a rank of tankers that at once is apocalypse and invokes the image of ship-cutters in India and other countries who take disused ships apart piece by piece. EVA’s intense minimalism suggests a universal remote that Apple design guru Jonathan Ive—listed in the end credits—might well have had a hand in. Cinematographer Roger Deakins (“No Country For Old Men”) was a consultant, too, and the textures of ruined Earth, including a scene between Wall-E and EVA at brick-red sunset seen from a bench on the Brooklyn Heights promenade, looking across an empty river bed to the dead lands of the island of schist and shite that Manhattan became, are haunting in their densely detailed grimness.

When EVA finds a plant that Wall-E had stowed in a Chaplin-style boot, a race to space follows. (A skyful of fallow space trash against a clean, bright star field joshes the opening of “Star Wars.”) The style shifts radically when the pair arrive on Axiom, with its thousands of blubberous passengers, grown lazy from generation upon generation of pampering in the 700 years onboard. They’re like inflatable Incredibles, ponging around on levitating air chairs. (Another keen homage: as the robots emerge into the corridors of Axiom, they’re hit with a crush of people just as the characters in Lucas’ “THX-1138″ are just outside the expanse of white infinity they believe they had been trapped in.)

Just past forty years since the debut of “2001″ and HAL, “Wall-E’”s pastiche of Kubrick’s notions of space stations and cold computers has a few tickles, including Sigourney Weaver’s voicing of the onboard brain. Jeff Garlin’s voice work as the stupefied captain of the ship amuses, too. But nothing trumps a finely detailed apocalypse. And how do you get a happy ending from the end of the world? It is possible, and when you do, you have Peter Gabriel sing atop it, backed by the Soweto Gospel Choir.

By Ray Pride

Goodwill may be the rarest commodity in movies today.

Not buzz from ill- or half-informed rumormongers, not good word-of-mouth after a film opens, when the text “S GOOD!!” rains from the skies. Simple goodwill. Journalists around the world fell upon themselves to repeat a New York Times article that repeated a downbeat report about “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” that had been posted to a spoiler site, written by someone in the industry who claimed to had attended a legally mandated exhibitor’s screening. In other words, a pseudonymous dis by someone who was violating a key tenet of his job had pissed on a product he would be distributing to the public. Or, as the case could be—no one but the Times reporter and his editors know for sure—it might be a repeat of ruckus from last summer involving a projectionist of twenty or so who saw nothing wrong with reviewing movies he was paid to show. (God and Homer did not invent “Doh!” for nothing.)

But “Indy”: all I’d heard for weeks from kids from 15 to 50 was a big, tall case of the warm-’n'-fuzzies. The movie premiered at Cannes, and its North American press screenings were a few hours later, midday Sunday. Insta-reviews cascaded in. New York freelancer Eric Kohn text-messaged dribbles from Cannes, a stunt for which, a commenter at David Poland’s Hot Blog aptly suggested, “The guy should have been dragged out of the theatre and treated like a gambler caught cheating in old Vegas.” Who’s on first? Who fucking cares?

There are good things and indifferent things throughout this enterprise by the two richest directors who ever lived [pictured]—are they really worth several billion dollars each?—but most of the best (and worst) moments work from surprise, which reviews have already splashed across the media consciousness. If you want to be surprised, be warned that the rest of this piece has spoilers.

While a Lucasfilm production, “Indiana Jones and the Title by George Lucas” opens with a slap at DreamWorks’ partner, Paramount, whose mountain logo melts into what resembles a molehill, from which a prairie dog makes the first of many appearances. (The later swarms of flying monkeys bring far more cheer than the lame chimp in “Speed Racer.”) The original “Raiders of the Lost Ark” was supposed to be based on breakneck, nonsensical no-budget serials that Lucas supped upon as a youth, yet in the fourth iteration (with a fifth put forward by Spielberg at a Cannes press conference), the movie seems consumed by self-nostalgia, with wacky setpieces coming in an undifferentiated rush, an expensive crap rapture. (Lucas’ original title was reportedly “Indiana Jones and the Saucer Men from Mars,” and Harrison Ford actually speaks that line.)

An opening that establishes the 1957 setting has Lucas-style road racers drawing us into a military zone (quietly marked “Hangar 51″) and a confrontation with Russian spies, led by Cate Blanchett as the most boldly sexual drawing of Natasha Fatale ever (although Boris Badonov’s consort did not have those astonishing blue eyes). Holding her features in repose, Spielberg elevates her above the “Ilsa: She-Wolf Of The SKG” Blanchett resembled in promotional stills.

The dialogue throughout is painfully expository and mostly lame in a self-aware, declarative fashion, a geezer chic to match leading man Harrison Ford’s 65 years. The stunt men are obvious and his asides are murmured, almost whispered, almost as he didn’t care to be bothered once the fedora was popped on his head. French filmmakers like Truffaut and Godard always made the point of Alfred Hitchcock that his movies were as much about images as about editing and the psychology of point-of-view—not framing or geometry or composition, the basic elements of mise-en-scene, but a bit of action weighted with emotional or cultural undertow. (A man in a business suit chased by a crop-duster across a vast empty field in broad daylight; an extreme close-up of a key; a dying woman’s eye superimposed on the drain where her blood corkscrews away.)

The lack of iconic images was one of the letdowns of “Crystal Skull,” which doesn’t resonate as a Macguffin, either. The action in the last third, filled with CGI, is often as incoherent as a “Mummy” sequel. The most piercing sequence comes early, when Jones blunders into a nuclear test. A perfect, depopulated 1950s suburban tract is peopled by mannequins. The lightly satiric décor takes on a comic yet fearful air in the framing of the figures, like George Segal sculptures, and then in their fiery detonation worthy of the great maker of sardonic sculptural tableaux, Ed Kienholz. Spielberg caps the passage with a low shot from behind Jones, where the “hero” angle from beneath is not granted to our dwarfed protagonist, but by the horror-blooming, dark, rude, dust-filled mushroom, the annihilating terror of the twentieth century dwarfing the man with the hat and the whip.

“Indiana Jones And The Kingdom of the Crystal Skull” is now playing.