Movie Nation

Daft, dazzling in design but straining ever so hard to be hip, “Mirror Mirror” isn’t your Uncle Walt’s “Snow White.”

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Josh Brolin impersonating the young Tommy Lee Jones is worth the price of admission to “Men in Black 3.”  Dry, drawling, deadpan — he nails the flinty Texan in this sentimental sequel to the sci-fi comedies about secret agents in black suits who save the world from aliens.

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 Watch any surfing documentary, from “Whipped!” to “Riding Giants,” and you’ll hear the dudes speak — in hushed tones — about the treacherous and epic waves that show up, off the coast of Santa Cruz, when the conditions are just right. The “Mavericks” break is legendary, and for years, was considering some sort of myth by those who surfed and had never seen it.

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Bob Marley remains, as his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame biography attests, “reggae’s foremost practitioner and emissary.” Thirty years after his death, at 36, his estate still earns millions from sales of his music — his “Legend” greatest hits disc has sold over 20 million copies, and counting — and the omnipresent T-shirt that bears his image.”People love to listen to him at the beach, to hear ‘Three Little Birds’ or ‘One Love’ in parties,” says filmmaker Kevin Macdonald (“The Last King of Scotland,” “State of Play”). “‘Stir It Up’ plays in elevators, supermarkets. He’s become background music, background noise actually.”

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Bob Marley packed a lot of living into his 36 years. Hit records, international concert success, eleven kids by seven different women, a face stenciled on more t-shirts than Che Guevara, it was as if he knew he didn’t have much time so he got an early start and lived at a sprint, despite the laid back image his music and lifestyle portrayed.

He’s been dead over 30 years, but the founding father of reggae music remains an icon whose fame transcended music just as Marley transcended the odd confluence of geography, religion, patois and poverty that created him.

The who, where and how of Bob Marley shines through in Kevin MacDonald’s thorough (almost overly so) documentary about Marley, a Jamaican who introduced reggae and his religion, Rastafarianism, to the world, a guy for whom the phrase “world music” was pretty much invented.

(My interview with KevinMacdonald is here.)

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“Do not go gently into that good night,” the poet urged us. And that goes for actors as well as anybody else.

A cast of great Brits of old age pensioner vintage light up John “Shakespeare in Love” Madden’s film of “The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel,” an adorable comedy about elderly pioneers tackling life’s last great adventure.

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The great thing about social observer-documentarian Morgan Spurlock is that he works — a lot. He’s constantly got films or TV shows in pre-production, post-production or in theaters, films that have a take on this or that corner of the American zeitgeist. He’s done “Super Size Me” and “The Greatest Movie Ever Sold” and “Where in the World is Osama Bin Laden.” So it doesn’t mater when he misses the mark. There’s always something else coming right after it that could connect.

Spurlock follows his amusing and perceptive “Comic Con Episode IV: A Fan’s Hope,” with “Mansome,” a weak , myopic and generally unamusing look at a legitimate social phenomenon — the rise of the metrosexuals, aka men “who think too much about their appearance.”

It’s a mockumentary, of sorts, about American manhood and the growing obsession with grooming and preening male self-image. Assorted guys — and Spurlock samples a tiny pool of “experts,” and comic actors who have either worked with Judd Apatow, or should work with him — talk about facial hair, narcissism and the changing image of manliness.

Not so much about the last one, which may be where this film should live. Spurlock, who started his career making a movie about himself and his health after taking on an all-
McDonald’s diet, hijacks his own movie in the first ten minutes. A balding fortysomething who has sported a Fu Manchu moustache for years, he wanders into the land of facial hair and wonders whether or not he should shave it. Since he opens the film with over ten indulgent minutes of this, with John Waters discussing his pencil-thin moustache and others identifying the various shapes, from the “chevron” to the “toothbrush” to everybody’s favorite, the “porn-stache,” “Mansome” struggles to finds its tone, its voice and its message.

Funnymen Jason Bateman and Will Arnett provide the connecting tissue, followed as they have a day-long chat about manliness and being “mansome” as they get every spa treatment under the sun. The Old Spice Guy (actor Isaiah Mustafa) weighs in on the broader subjects, and the bearded Zach Galifianakis declares “Real men don’t hang out with models, and don’t tweet.”

You get a feeling of haste from this film, as if Spurlock, as usual, is onto something, but maybe doesn’t have the time or patience to stick with it to widen his approach and find sharper people to sharpen his material. Yes, it’s ironic that Galifianakis, who has built his career or lumpy, fey characters, should be lecturing American men on manliness. Not that funny, though. And posing comic Adam Carolla in a garage in front of a couple of vintage Ford Mustangs while he makes his points about the narrowing differences between men and women in career terms (bartenders, pilots, plumbers) seemed like a better idea than it turns out to be.

When one expert suggests that “women today want men to man up,” we’ve gotten to the heart of the argument. Showing us another 45 minutes of men getting fitted for wigs (“systems”) and kvetching over removing four stray hairs in their eyebrows doesn’t settle it.

MPAA Rating: PG-13 for language and some crude material

Cast: Jason Bateman, Will Arnett, Paul Rudd, Judd Apatow, Morgan Spurlock

Credits: Directed by Morgan Spurlock. A Paladin release.

Running time: 1:24

Disney-Pixar realized they’d hit on a can’t-miss formula for animated blockbusters about the time “Monsters, Inc.” came out in 2001.

Find some fantastical corner of pop culture you can peek in on – after hours. From the lives of toys when the kids aren’t around to where scary monsters go when they’re not hiding in kids’ closets or the private lives of clownfish, comic book superheroes or video game characters (Disney’s new “Wreck-It Ralph”), these familiar but imaginary worlds have proven to be fertile ground for animation.

Whatever chances they take with the riskier “Up,” “Brave,” “Cars” or “Ratatouille,” taking children inside a world they have only imagined has been box office gold.

“Monsters, Inc.” may have lost the best animated film Oscar to “Shrek.” But ask any parent which film is aging better, and which DVD their children wear out, and the real winner emerges. Reason enough for a prequel, “Monsters, University,” to go into production. It comes out next June.

And that’s a good excuse for converting the computer-animated “Monsters, Inc.” to 3D for a special holiday release.

Whatever his other accomplishments (He’s in theaters Christmas Day with “Parental Guidance”), generations of kids know Billy Crystal only for the comic-stylings of Mike Waznowski, the one-eyed working stiff (monster) he plays in “Monsters, Inc.”

“I don’t know, but it’s been said, I love scaring kids in bed!”

The perfect comic foil to Sulley (John Goodman), beau of the long-suffering and equally one-eyed Celia (Jennifer Tilly), nemesis of the slithery Randall (Steve Buscemi), Mike is the guy who keeps his pal Sulley in tip top scaring shape – ordering up the closet doors that the monsters go through to frighten children, whose screams are bottled and converted to the energy that keeps the monsters’ world, and Monsters, Inc., going.

Until that fateful day that a teeny tot nicknamed “Boo” isn’t scared, and follows them back through the door. Kids, out of their element, scare the dickens out of monsters. Call out the haz-mat team and bar the door – all the closet doors, stored in a vast kids’ closet-door repository – until Boo is rounded up and order is restored to the universe.

That ingenious set-up is detailed to a staggering degree, from the décor each child has on his or her closet door, to the vast variations of monsters on the job on the Monsters, Inc., “scare floor” – blobs and yeti and giant spiders and all manner of lizards, snakes and goblins.

The jokes benefit from perfect timing and the best running sight gag ever – big, hairy monsters, all scared to death by a burbling, giggling, “KITTY” shrieking tyke (voiced by Mary Gibbs).

This didn’t need 3D to work. And the big question, on seeing it anew, is “How WILL they top this by taking us back to see these guys in college?”

But any time Disney and/or Pixar goes astray in an animated way, they have only to look back at this, one of their best, to remember that magical recipe that works as well now as it did then.

MPAA Rating: G

Cast: The voices of Billy Crystal, John Goodman, Steve Buscemi, Jennifer Tilly
James Coburn

Credits: Directed by Pete Docter, David Silverman and Lee Unkrich, scripted by Andrew Stanton and Daniel Gerson. A Disney/Pixar release.  

Running time: 1:32

 It’s no great stretch to imagine the chiseled, hot-footed hottie Channing Tatum as a stripper. It’s how he got his start in show business, after all.

And even though he never danced for his dollars, Matthew McConaughey has never been shy about shedding a shirt on the big screen.

But that’s the simple genius of Steven Soderbergh’s “Magic Mike,” a fictionalized spin on Tatum’s pre-Hollywood years, his Florida years, taking it off for ladies who stuffed tips into his thong. The casting does most of the work in this very entertaining dramedy set in a sexy/seedy world of male exotic dancers.

From the moment McConaughey, as the veteran owner of the Xquisite Dance Revue, struts onstage to introduce his ensemble and tell the ladies “what you can…and canNOT touch,” we know we’re in good, um, hands. Soderbergh’s direction here is like stripping itself — the selling of a fantasy, a tease. It’s only as the film progresses that the sobering reality of living in this sordid world is stripped bare.

Tatum has the title role. By day, he’s a hustler — working as an off-the-books roofer, running a mobile car-detailing business, living in a beachfront split-level where he’s as likely to wake up with two naked women as one.

That’s because by night he is “Magic” Mike — the break-dancing star of the Xquisite Dance Revue. He’s living the good life. It’s a pity that all his businesses are cash-only. At 30, he’s got no credit, no prayer of getting a loan to run the business that is his first love — hand-crafted design.

Right.

Enter Adam, aka “The Kid” (Alex Pettyfer), a hunky college drop-out that Mike takes under his wing. The Kid doesn’t realize what Mike means when he says “You OWE me” as he gets him into a club. Next thing Adam knows, he’s helping Mike hustle birthday girls into the strip club. After that, David’s up on stage, a virgin doing his first awkward striptease. The money rolls in and the lazy Adam realizes the REAL American Dream — he’s getting paid just for being pretty.

So what if his nurse’s aide sister (Cody Horn) doesn’t approve? Not that she’s a prude. She just senses danger.

Soderbergh, working from Reid Carolin’s script, revels in the backstage “making of a stripper” scenes, as The Kid is trained to do the Ken Doll routine, the GI Joe strip, “An Officer and a Gentleman,” the trench-coat and umbrella “It’s Raining Men” number.

And in his face, taunting the shy out of him, is Dallas, given a searing swagger by McConaughey.

“What are you, a 12 year-old in the locker room?” he teases. Put some salesmanship into that bump and grind. “You are fulfilling every woman’s wildest fantasies!”

The film showcases the dancers — the funny-beefsteak Joe Manganiello stands out in the supporting crew. And it sells the fantasy. For a while. The club patrons are young and gorgeous and beddable. The hours allow for enjoying the sun and fun as “The Kings of Tampa.”

And then the dark side shows up — the easy access to drugs, the “real” women who frequent such clubs (Plain Janes, over 40, not super model skinny) turn up –one dancer throws his back out lifting one onstage. There’s the fleeting nature of the career, the sleazy way employees are treated by the “entrepreneurs” who run such revues. Soderberg doesn’t pretty up Tampa, either, sending everybody out for a “sand-bar party” on the dull-brown waters of Tampa Bay, suggesting how easy it would be to leave all that behind.

Tatum is spot-on, conflicted and perfect in the part. Mike is smart enough to know he can’t get by on his looks and his stripping forever. He’s ready to leave behind his “friend with benefits” (Olivia Munn) for the plainer and testier Brooke. Horn, the daughter of the head of Warner Brothers studio, acquits herself well in the role of the grounded girl, protective of her brother and suspicious of Mike.

But McConaughey is the spark here, preening, amusing, but suggesting the dark side of the business and the only possible future for those who stay in it — alone, with lots of ready cash but no self-respect, a guy who has to take advantage of the next generation the way he was probably taken advantage of. McConaughey takes his hipster-revival preacher, butt-slapping jock persona to the next level here, hinting that maybe all this dirty talk, getting up in his dancers’ business in the dressing room is a closet door he’s hiding behind.

“Magic Mike” drifts into melodrama, and Pettyfer (“I Am Number Four”), though adequate, struggles to make an impression with a character that is little more than a cliche.  

But Soderbergh, Tatum and McConaughey strip this world of glitter and body oils. They let us know that for all the supposed fringe benefits,  these guys work hard for the money, and that creating every woman’s fantasy takes a lot of fantasizing on the part of the toy boys, too.

MPAA Rating:R for pervasive sexual content, brief graphic nudity, language and some drug use

Cast: Channing Tatum, Alex Pettyfer, Matthew McConaughey, Olivia Munn

Credits: Directed by Steven Soderbergh, written by Reid Carolin. A Warner Brothers release.

Running time: 1:49

“Madagascar 3: Europe’s Most Wanted” is a riot of splashy colors, silly 3D gimmicks, big, broad kid-friendly gags — and those professionally pesky penguins.

And for adults, there’s the charming spectacle of Oscar winner Frances McDormand giving voice to her inner Edith Piaf as she belts out “Non, je ne Regrette Rien” — as a French-accented animal control officer.

The third film in this unlikely animated franchise takes those New York refugees from remote Africa, where they’ve been stranded, to Monte Carlo and other points in the Eurozone as they try to get back to the friendly and confining Central Park Zoo.

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