Movie Nation

Anna Nicole Smith was “famous for being famous,” or more to the point, “infamous for being famous.” A volutuous Playboy Playmate and Houston stripper who married an old man for his millions, showcased her vapidity on reality TV and never missed a red carpet or any other chance to shake her money maker for the paparazzi, she never achieved anything and didn’t live long enough to celebrate her 40th birthday. But the public couldn’t get enough of this blonde template for the Kardashians to come.

If you’re a direct-to-video movie maker longing for his shot at the big time, what could be better than landing this attention-magnet for the lead in your new movie? That’s the Devil’s bargain that writer-director David Giancola made when he landed Smith for his 2006 “Charlie’s Angels Meets Earth Girls Are Easy” parody, “Illegal Aliens.” He had publicity, more than he could have dreamed. The Vermont filmmaker, who’d used people like Bruce Campbell and a very young Jesse Eisenberg in earlier movies, had a movie Hollywood had at least had heard of and might be interested in distributing. To theaters, even.

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“Act of Valor” is an amped-up, action-packed adventure about the exploits of the Navy’s “Sea, Air and Land” commando teams — the SEALs. It’s a furiously macho saga scripted by the screenwriter of “300” and starring those always-get-their-man men of mystery — real Navy SEALs.

What the filmmaking duo who bill themselves as “The Bandito Brothers” have concocted is an episodic, reverent round-the-world sprint which follows a team of SEALs as they hunt Islamo-terrorists, narco terrorists, arms smugglers and their fellow travelers from Africa to Central America. They’re trying to stop a team of suicide bombers from making their way across the US border.

In bracing, first-person-shooter video game style photography, we follow a platoon of “operators,” as they’re called — Rorke, Mikey, Dave, et. al — as they rescue a C.I.A. agent (Roselyn Sanchez) before she is tortured to death, hound a smuggler (Alex Veodov) who is aiding terrorists, and pursue the Chechnyan mastermind (Jason Cottle) who wants to strike America and cause a global economic collapse.

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Hollywood has a long, rich tradition of historical abominations, but never has there been a history done more abominably than “Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter.”

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Tales peopled with vast collections of interlocking stories, even the best ones — “Crash,” for instance — often seem more like writing exercises than stories that move us. We barely get involved with one character’s problems when the movie traipses off and involves us with another. The overarching theme often gets lost in in these “Six Degrees of Separation” that separate and connect the various characters.

“360,” the new film based on a classic of that genre, Arthur Schnitlzer’s “La Ronde,” has no deeper message than you can change with every fork in the road your life takes. It has good actors, a couple of compelling characters, and a few nervy scenes. But the director of “The Constant Gardener” and screenwriter of “The Queen” don’t manage more than that in this generally frustrating waltz around lovely locations, from Vienna to Phoenix, London to Colorado.

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Julie Delpy completes her metamorphisis into the French Diane Keaton with “Two Days in New York,” a broad farce that is a funnier and markedly sillier sequel to her “Two Days in Paris.”

Delpy, who gained American fame for her work in Richard Linklater’s “Before Sunrise” and “Before Sunset,” went to school on those films. They inspired her to write, direct and star in these two “Two Days” treatments. Again, we’re treated to a narrow period of time, a relationship to resolve, a lot of funny, sharp banter, and in this case, with a lot of outlandish characters and outrageous situations getting in the way.

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Here it is, “Occupy Movement: The Musical,” the French musical “Les Miserables” preaching economic revolution, the downtrodden rising up against the wealthy few and a police force hellbent on defending the status quo.

Well, that and the virtues of mercy and compassion.

Tom “The King’s Speech” Hooper brings this worldwide phenomenon to the screen with its majestic music and emotional weight intact. He takes the film outdoors and gives us a raw, sometimes wrenching remembrance of how unjust, how hungry and how bloody, dirty and smelly France was in the post-Napoleonic decades that one man spends on the run from his nemesis.

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Jack Kerouac’s stream of consciousness novel “On the Road” comes to the screen more or less intact as a not altogether satisfying road trip into the Beat Era. The “Motorcycle Diaries” team of director Walter Salles and screenwriter Jose Rivera have made an “unfilmmable” book cinematically coherent, capturing the geographical possibilities, the feel and flavor of this blend of biography and Beatnik history.

Sam Riley (“Control”) is Sal Paradise, the “witness,” the teller-of-the-tale – Kerouac by another name.  Sal’s the restless writer struggling to write a book that will make him famous. And with Dean Moriarty (Garrett Heldund of “TRON: Legacy”), Sal’s found his muse. Dean’s “every muscle lives to twitch and go.” Dean was in Denver. Now he’s in New York. He has to go back to Denver. Then San Francisco. Then Algiers, Louisiana.

Dean, whose catch phrase is “Yes, yes yessss,” has to experience it all – high on Benzedrine, racing his Hudson down the two-lane blacktops through rain, sleet and snow – procuring and seducing women, not just his 16 year-old wife (Kristen Stewart, young and kittenish), the woman he wants to leave her for (Kirsten Dunst), and other random pick-ups – devouring books and grooving to jazz.

Dean is magnetic, with an ostentatious literacy about him. He shoplifts and swipes gas to finance his cross-country treks, seduces both women and men and bear hugs one and all. The others follow him to where the action is.

Dean is “a taker,” says Sal’s writer-pal Old Bull Lee, based on William S. Burroughs. Old Bull (Viggo Mortensen) might be a junky, raising a child with his junky wife (Amy Adams, alarmingly “out there”). But he sees Dean for what he is — Falstaff to Sal’s Prince Hal, somebody the writer understands but refuses to judge – for now.

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Ben Affleck is closing in on the perfect thriller. “Argo” shows us how near the mark he has gotten in just three films.

Since stepping behind the camera to direct, Affleck has yet to make a movie that doesn’t pull us to the edge of our seats.

He may have showed his easy way with suspense and pathos, chases and humor with “Gone Baby Gone” and “The Town.” But “Argo” has him operating on a whole new level.

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Watching “Skyfall” again with my wife, I appreciated the clockwork cleverness of the piece, the relish Javier Bardem brings to the eye-rolling/bitchy and sometimes homoerotic touches as the villain.

My favorite moments remain that opening gambit — the chase where Bond trashes a passenger car on a train to keep from losing his quarry, tumbles through the wrecked roof, picks himself up and shoots his cuffs — and the Moneypenny reveal.

I was fine with Albert Finney’s “Lion of the English cinema” cameo as the caretaker of the estate, until he referred to Bond’s father’s “hunting rifle.” When it’s a shotgun. What the hey? Nobody caught that?

And being a British car lover (I spend weekends in, and working on, my ’73 Triumph TR6), I’m perplexed as to why the screenwriters and Sam Mendes didn’t find a more graceful way to bring the “Goldfinger” Aston Martin DB5 back to help commemorate 50 years of Bond, James Bond.

Why would this youngish Bond have that car, with ejector seat and machine guns, etc.?

He wouldn’t. But since he’s transporting “M” into hiding, luring Mr. Silver (Bardem) into a trap, why did it never occur to one and all to have it be HER car, “retired, off the books”?

She could have directed Bond to the storage garage where it is parked, said something like “I got it for my late husband,” or some such, and suggested they drive it so that they cannot be tracked.

And she could have made a joke that would have poked fun at Daniel Craig’s rumored inability to drive such a car when he first got the role of Bond James Bond.

“Can you drive a stick?”

Just a thought.