There are precious few mysteries left in a world scoured by satellites, street-cams, and all other manner of ravening photographer's eye. It's tough to believe in monsters, magic, lost islands, or even private lives in an era of wall-to-wall coverage, where every surveilled surface is space lost to possibility. It's Google's Earth, we're just zooming in on it. But instead of finally nailing down Big Foot or tracking the elusive unicorn, what's most often mined from the previously uncharted corners of our newly comprehensive, woefully literal view of the planet -- as this week's harvest of reputation-charring images, courtesy of Anthony Weiner, reminds us -- are banal reflections of our own persistent vanity, loneliness, and malignance.
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Elephants are magnificent creatures, possessed of great intelligence and sensitivity, so it's little wonder that people who regularly work with or care for them become devoted. That's mostly a good thing, particularly for elephants who've been transplanted far from home: If you're a 10,000-pound African elephant living 8,000 miles away from your native habitat, you need all the help you can get. Still, these marvelous animals are strangers among us, and understanding them isn't easy. How much human love is too much for an elephant? That's the question Lisa Leeman's One Lucky Elephant attempts to answer, without sentimentality but with the right amount of compassion.
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By now, Super 8 has either rekindled your fondness for Steven Spielberg's whimsy or -- well, it hasn't. Either you embrace nostalgia and the comforts of epic, innocent fantasy, or you're purposely done with them until another Toy Story comes out. I sympathize with the latter option, especially if you think the keywords "Steven Spielberg" and "innocence" call to mind Hook, the 1991 kiddie blockbuster that asks, "What if we took the story of Peter Pan, threw it out, and invented an unrelated story about a grumpy man who begrudgingly saves his kidnapped children?" Tah-dah! Yuck. And yet, I found a few reasons to love this troubling movie. Chortle with me as I rank them!
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X-Men: First Class wants to be five movies at once, and it occasionally succeeds at being a few of them: One minute it's a stylish James Bond-style retro pleaser, the next a bitter-edged revenge melodrama, the next your boilerplate "embrace individuality" empowerment brief. It is also, of course, a movie based on a comic-book franchise -- in this case, Marvel's long-running, multi-tentacled X-Men saga -- and for that reason alone, it comes with a million other expectations attached. I don't know what director in his right mind would want to take on such a project, but I admire Matthew Vaughn for trying.
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Storytellers have sought effective ways to engage the fairly recent, unfathomable phenomenon of children committing mass murder of other children. With Elephant, in 2003, Gus Van Sant came closest to a direct narrative address of events based on the 1999 massacre at Columbine high school. Using the dreamlike, slow-motion realism that characterized his so-called "Death Trilogy," Van Sant captured the mind's resistance to cataclysmic horror, particularly in spaces and situations of presumed safety. We Need To Talk About Kevin, Lionel Shriver's 2003 novel recently adapted for the screen by Lynne Ramsey, is a mother's story of disaffection from her bizarre and increasingly unlovable son. The event itself is the novel's purposefully anti-climactic twist -- held off until the end and largely elided.
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No one wants to hear about the sex lives -- or lack thereof -- of their parents. But once you reach adulthood and begin to reckon with the horrific reality that parents are people too, learning all that stuff you don't want to know is sometimes unavoidable. Mike Mills' Beginners squarely addresses the fallout that often comes with that unwanted knowledge. And while the picture sometimes groans under the 200-pound whimsy of Mills' filmmaking, it's also often touchingly direct. Beginners is all about beginnings that begin with endings -- the point, Mills seems to be saying, is that sometimes you need to say good-bye to make room for hello.
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In a pivotal scene of The 400 Blows, sweet-tempered Antoine, forever and unjustly underfoot, discovers Balzac while smoking a rollie on his parents' sofa. Everything in Antoine's home belongs to his parents, and they rarely let him forget it, but Eureka! -- Balzac might be his alone. Inspired by "A Sinister Affair" to write an essay about his grandfather's death for a class assignment, Antoine finds himself accused of plagiarism, and indeed at least one verbatim Balzac passage made it onto the page. He runs up against the limits of influence as definitively as he does those of authority and ultimately the inhabitable earth, bound itself by the sea.
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Self-mythology has a bad name, especially among honest, discreet folk who prefer to downplay their good qualities and undersell their achievements. To hell with that: Mr. Nice is a devilish and entertaining little picture based on the possibly somewhat true story of Howard Marks, who began life in a humble middle-class family in Wales, got into Oxford just by being a really smart kid, and eventually realized he could make a lot more money smuggling drugs from the Middle East into the United Kingdom (and later into the States) than he could by teaching. Marks outfoxed the authorities for years, before finally getting caught in 1988. He served seven years in an American prison before emerging with the 1996 autobiography, full of tall tales and derring-do, on which this movie is based.
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I know there are important movies coming out this week like X-Men: X Marks the Suck, so forgive me for blowing off new releases when choosing today's Bad Movie. Truth is, I've been thinking about the star of next week's huge debut, Super 8's venerable Elle Fanning, and the merits of child actresses as a species. Why do child actresses rule? Or do they? Do we reward them for their raw abilities or for acting like pocket versions of adults (and therefore, ourselves)? I'm steering this train of thought back to the greatest kid thespian of all time, Jodie Foster, and a weird movie she made in 1976 called The Little Girl Who Lives Down the Lane. Have you heard of it? It's about being 13, matching wits with a pedophile played by Martin Sheen, killing some lady, and befriending a teenage magician. Gawk with me.
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Though critics and other film-pundit types often like to lament the death of movies as a communal experience, box-office evidence shows that plenty of people still like to watch comedies with other people. Todd Phillips The Hangover was one of the biggest hits of summer 2009, and anticipation for The Hangover Part II has been pitched as high as a monkey's scream. In theory, these are the types of movies people want to see in groups; that half-going-crazy feeling is a lot more fun when it's shared.
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A quest movie that's too long on destination to make for much of a journey, Kung Fu Panda 2 is nevertheless scenic, inventively playful, and successfully serious when it wants to be. In this sequel to the 2008 DreamWorks hit, goof-off panda and accredited dragon warrior Po (voiced again by Jack Black) learns that the goose/noodle-monger (sweetly voiced by James Hong) he calls Dad may not be his biological father. Po's ensuing search for his true identity has a convenient overlap with his responsibility to save China from an imperial peacock named Shen (Gary Oldman). Both objectives begin and end with the vengeful, feathered fiend.
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Terrence Malick's The Tree of Life is gorgeous to look at. It's also a gargantuan work of pretension and cleverly concealed self-absorption masquerading as spiritual exploration. If God really is in the details, it's true that Malick does care about craftsmanship: He's clearly poured thought and care into the images and the editing, and the sections of the film in which characters are actually allowed to interact -- instead of just issuing forth in ponderous voice-overs as images of cosmic tadpoles and Ansel Adams-style calendar shots fill the screen -- manage some degree of dramatic intensity.
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I tried so hard to find an Oprah-themed Bad Movie We Love this week. Bad news, my darlings: they're all not good enough. Beloved is too boring, Native Son is too serious, and The Color Purple is too funny. (Trust me.) So I rallied and made big choices. This week I'm commemorating Tree of Life star Sean Penn's filthy past and Oprah's biggest finale guest: the ineffable, the insufferable, La Sleaza Bonita herself, Madonna. Read: THIS IS A GREAT DAY. And the movie is a legend among awful, latrine-stink cinema, a rancid little misfortune cookie called Shanghai Surprise. Or as I prefer to call it: Not-So-Fast Times with Frigid Wife.
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Rob Marshall's Pirates of the Caribbean: On Stranger Tides is the most modest picture in the Pirates franchise since the 2003 Curse of the Black Pearl -- which doesn't mean it's necessarily modest. On Stranger Tides, shot in 3-D, offers more muted special effects, more swashbuckling and swordplay and perhaps fewer needless plot twists than either the 2006 Dead Man's Chest or the 2007 At World's End. Both of those movies took everything that was casual and fun about the first picture and shackled it with million-dollar handcuffs. They were expensive-looking and clumsy, out to impress us rather than settle for anything so mundane as to simply entertain us.
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My friend the critic Howard Hampton once lamented that too many young people have no sense of the past as a real place. Anything predating, say, the era of Star Wars seems old and strange and hardly worth bothering with, a waste of the Google finger in an age when the cultural refresh button needs to be hit every minute just to keep up with current stuff. Woody Allen's Midnight in Paris -- for my money, the best Allen movie in 10 years, or maybe even close to 20 -- is all about that idea: Reckoning with the past as a real place, but also worrying about the limits of nostalgia.
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