Movie Nation

It takes little away from the quirky, deadpan comedy “Sleepwalk with Me” to say it worked better as a stand-up monologue. The monologue was exquisitely-timed and drawn out. The film, for a film, is short and droll. It’s slight. And the dead spots, the routine observations about love and the stand-up comic’s life, stand out more.
“Sleepwalk With Me” opens Friday at The Enzian.
Comic Mike Birbiglia’s nightmarish sleepwalking routine gained its greatest fame as a segment on public radio’s “This American Life,” and in adapting it to the screen, he’s merely added recreations of events that were perfectly vivid in our minds’ eye, thanks to the magic of radio.
On the screen, though he manages a few novel touches (he breaks the fourth wall and narrates his story), the mannered “This American Life” style of delivery — intentional stammers and pauses, aka “Ira Glass-itis” — seem even more precious. As charming as the film often is, the laughs in a ten minute “bit” are thin and drawn out in an 80 minute movie.

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“Sound of My Voice,” earlier this summer, reminded us that time travel is one corner of science fiction where you don’t have to break the bank to tell a convincing, thought-provoking tale on screen.
“Safety Not Guaranteed” is a quirkier, funnier and more romantic variation on a time-travel theme. It’s a sci-fi story of regret, and an indie film with Duplass Brothers touches.
No, the “Jeff, Who Lives at Home/Comfy Chair” guys didn’t write or direct it. But they produced it. Mark Duplass co-stars in it. And director Derek Connolly and writer Colin Trevorrow give it that that offbeat, bemused Duplass Brothers no-budget “mumblecore” tone.
Darius (Aubrey Plaza) is a twentysomething cynic, alone, unloved, unhappy and underemployed in her internship at Seattle Magazine. They have her stocking toilet paper in the bathrooms, and that’s got her down.
“I just expect the worst, and try not to get my hopes up.”
Her chance to prove she’s better than that comes when star reporter Jeff (Jake M. Johnson of “No Strings Attached”) spies a classified ad in the local paper. Some anonymous tinkerer is looking for a partner to join in him or her on a trip back in time. “This is not a joke,” the ad declares. You need to provide your own weapons. “Safety not guaranteed.”
Jeff heads off to a sleepy corner of the Washington coast, dragging virginal interns Darius and Arnau (Karan Soni) along. The interns stake out the post office box the ad refers to. And tactless, shallow Jeff sets out to do a little time traveling of his own. This town is where his first great flame ended up. He wants to catch up with an old girlfriend.
Darius spies the time traveler and takes her shot at signing on to be his partner. Kenneth (Mark Duplass) is a genuine eccentric, a grocery store clerk who babbles on about physics to clueless colleagues, the sort of nerd-kook who challenges potential time travelers with “Can you look fear and danger in the eye?”
The most charming scenes here involve Darius clumsily working her feminine wiles on hapless Kenneth, batting her eyes and peppering her speech with his brand of crackpot aphorisms.

“There’s no sense in nonsense.”

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It begins with a disaster, a huge one witnessed not from a distance, not via the safety of a TV news report, but up close and personal.

The horror of the Indian Ocean tsunami of 2004 is made intimate, so awful that you recoil from the screen, ducking as tree limbs and shards of debris are hurled at you and the onscreen victims in “The Impossible.” The effect is akin to being stuffed into a washing machine filled with brown water and about 400 things that can poke, puncture, slice and lacerate you.

While you don’t drown.

Then, stripped, battered, injured and doomed to infection, you try to save yourself and then others. You look for help. You find yourself depending on the kindness of strangers, people who don’t speak your language who are suffering and lost, too, for your very survival. And having children in your care, you try to cling to your humanity as you all cling – barely – to life.

“The Impossible” is a vivid recreation of a disaster made moving by a stellar cast, a gripping, “How will this end?” script and all-too-real special effects and sets. You’ll feel you’re in that oceanic washing machine with Naomi Watts, grieve for her chances of survival and cry over the life lessons she struggles to pass on to her son (Tom Holland).

A Christmas vacation in Khao Lak, Thailand turns terribly wrong for a family of five, headed by Maria (Watts) and Henry (Ewan McGregor), English teachers living in Japan, enjoying the sun and surf until that December morning when the world was turned upside down and washed away within minutes.

Miraculously, they survive the tidal wave. But they’re separated – dad with two small boys of five and seven years, mom with twelve-year-old Lucas. We follow their stories, separately, each looking for and despairing of finding the other, each facing the awful reality that they may be the last members of their family.

For Maria, that takes on extra urgency as the film unfolds. She’s badly hurt, and the struggle to get Lucas and a small boy they rescue along the way to safety becomes the thing that drives her even as we see her pallor change, her own death become imminent.

Lucas, a frightened, confused and rebellious kid, has staggering responsibilities thrust on him. Mom’s “I’m scared too,” is hardly consolation. He might be all alone in the world at any minute, with no way of reaching even distant relations in the aftermath of this cataclysm.

Meanwhile, Henry frantically searches for Maria and Lucas, struggles to keep his boys with him even as evacuations threaten to pull them all out of the area and remove any hope he has of finding his wife and missing son.

The genius of Spanish director Juan Antonio Bayona’s approach is the myopia here. Bayona (“The Orphange”) lets us see only what the victims see. The chaos of the aftermath, First World survivors hurled into the Third World abyss with everybody else there, is stark and alarming. What they don’t know, not being able to get information, to find loved ones, to let relatives know they’re alive, is maddening.

Bayona spares us little in the detail of the injuries, the ocean that victims vomit up days later.

And Watts, in the best performance in an already illustrious career, makes us feel it all. Maria is never so stricken that she cannot see past her own misery, never more heroic than when she distracts her son by charging him to “Go help people, you’re good at it.” Fading in and out of consciousness, fully aware of her own fate, she’s determined to leave Lucas, if she has to leave him, with that one last life lesson.

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It’s something to see, all right — this “Dark Knight Rises.”

An epic finale to the Christopher Nolan/Christian Bale “Dark Knight” trilogy, it has the summer’s best effects, the summer’s highest stakes — Gotham City armageddon — the summer’s sexiest villain and the biggest comic book movie thrills and best comic book movie chills of this cinema season.

It’s a film of awe inspiring set pieces and jaw-dropping stunts — less of this “Avengers/Spider-Man/Transformers” digital effects overkill. It’s topical, morphing the “Occupy” movement into a few choice messages about the few who take from the many, but taking anarchy to its logical extremes.

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“Skyfall” is far and away the best, and the most British of the Daniel Craig-James Bond movies. Director Sam Mendes (“Road to Perdition”) gets Bond back to the basics — bullets, babes, big time bad guys and bawdy humor. And the result is an entertaining romp, an old spy school Bond film that reigns in the more violent and Germanic Bond of Marc Forster’s CHECK films.

In the film’s opening gambit, Bond bites the bullet. He’s accidentally shot while wrestling with a generic villain on the roof of a train speeding through Turkey.

Since he’s chased this guy, by car and motorbike through the crowded bazaars and narrow streets of Istanbul (and “Taken 2”), M (Judi Dench) is willing to risk a trigger-happy fellow agent, played with a sexy pizazz by Naomie Harris, best known as the less sexy witch of the “Pirates of the Caribbean” movies.

What Bond was trying to nab was a compuer hard drive with a “list” on it. Some supervillain with Wikileaks tendencies wants to expose spies. Bond getting “killed” means that he’s failed. And that M has failed, too. The fallout for 007 is an obituary. For M, it’s a political raking-over-the-coals, where she’s called an “old fashioned” relic of a bygone era, “the golden age of espionage.”

“We can’t keep living in the shadows,” her new boss, the intelligence minister (Ralph Fiennes) tells her. “There are no more shadows.”

We, of course, know better. When MI-6 is hacked and bombed, Bond comes back from his babe-and-beers and drinking games (very Indiana Jones) to save the day. Except he’s gotten old. He’s lost a step. And he couldn’t hit the broad side of a barn with a Walther PPK. No matter, M won’t have anybody else.

The biggest problem with the first two Craig Bonds — both films were huge hits — was the villains. This time, Oscar winner Javier Bardem shows up as a murderous hacker with a Julian Assange blond mop top. And he brings the pain — and the homoerotic undertones — OK, OVER-tones.

The writing — three screenwriters pitched in — is jokier, crisper. The “Bond Girl” is played by the ultra-exotic Bérénice Marlohe

And there’s a new quartermaster, “Q” — played by waif-thin Ben Whishaw in a radical re-interpretation of a witty role that has been beloved by fans of the series for nearly 50 years.

Yes, this year marks 50 years of James Bond films, and Mendes & Co. use the film as an excuse to joke about age and trot out old props and older actors (Albert Finney). So much of it works that it’s as if Craig’s been dying to give this guy a lighter touch, and makes the most of it.]

The finale is straight out of John Wayne’s “Rio Bravo,” and the violent set pieces — ranging from Shanghai and Macao to Parliament and the bunkers of London — are blandly predictable.

But that’s kind of the point here. This is action comfort food, from the brand of gun and martini recipe to the quips and coital interluds. It’s all good, clean, British fun. “Skyfall” — the bloody title means little within the context of all this — ensures continuity in that comfort food, that as long as there’s a Britain, there will be a Bond, James Bond, to look after her interests.

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Can a movie be utterly done in by a botched ending? Maybe.
The one Oliver Stone & Co. cooked up for his take on the drug trade, “Savages,” is dishonest and patronizing. But in a film that overtly references “Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid,” it’s only natural for the filmmaker to be thinking of other Newman/Redford pictures and how they conclude.
Stone has always been a cinematic preacher, and in Don Winslow’s novel — sort of a “Blow” set in the west coast marijuana trade — he found a great vehicle to sermonize about the violence and greed that have taken over the once-benign Baby Boomer narcotic of choice.
Ben and Chon (Aaron Johnson and Taylor Kitsch) are mellow Americans who are thriving as medical marijuana “independents,” with a shore side home in Laguna Beach and a shared girlfriend — “O” — played with a certain blitzed bliss by Blake Lively. She loves them both, sleeps with them both, and narrates the tale.
But only one of the lads, Ben (Johnson) the Buddhist with high-ideals, promoting Third World anti-poverty and sustainability projects, is mellow. Chon is an Iraq War vet, a man with physical and emotional scares.
“I have orgasms,” O says of sex with him. “He has wargasms.”
Their happy menage a trois is interrupted when the drug violence of Mexico storms into their lives. The Baja Cartel kills people with chainsaws and posts the video online. Lado (Benicio del Toro) is their enforcer. Alex (Demian Bichir) is their suit. The boss of bosses? Salma Hayek.
And they’ve made the boys an offer they cannot refuse.
Ben is all “Chill” and “Let them have the business.” But Chon takes a darker view.
“You let people think you’re weak, sooner or later you’re going to have to kill them.”
Thus begins the downward spiral from idealism and pot-entrepreneurship to carnage, kidnapping, torture and mayhem.
The characters are neatly sketched in — each with an obvious weakness. Their histories set the scene for heightened violence when the story’s pre-ordained action side takes over. Of course, the war vet has fellow vets who are friends. They’ll come in handy when the Mexican “Savages” take the one thing Ben and Chon won’t surrender — O.
Stone’s film flirts with racism even as it sermonizes that each side regards the other as “Savages.” The film’s sympathies, and ours, lie with the gringos. The Mexicans put on their cowboy boots, eat their all-meat and frijoles diets and treat life cheaply. One chilling ingredient should give every gringo pause — Mexican hit men posing as yard service workers, running their leaf blowers to cover the sounds of gunfire and torture.
The Americans? The worst you can say about them is that they’ve indulged in too much of their product, and are a bit slow on the uptake even as they’re sure they can “outsmart” the savages on the other side.

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