Hayward and Gilman in Moonrise Kingdom.

Preceded by bewildering blogs and Tweets (and even a few genuine reviews) from Cannes (“A Tender Triumph!” “Glows in the Darkness!” “Ode to Arrested Development!”), Wes Anderson’s Moonrise Kingdom is juvenile gibberish about two 12-year-olds who get married in a Boy Scout camp that is too sexually outrageous for the preteen age group it portrays and too tween for grown-ups. Like all Wes Anderson movies, it is naïve, mannered, pretentious and incomprehensible. He co-wrote it with Roman Coppola (yikes! another Coppola!). Together they were responsible for The Darjeeling Limited, one of the worst movies of all time. This one is neither as contrived as The Royal Tenenbaums nor as moronic as The Darjeeling Limited, but its boredom quotient is still stuck in the same unbroken wave of dubious tedium Mr. Anderson is famous for. (It also features another Coppola, the creepy Jason Schwartzman.) What is it with this guy and his awful movies masquerading as “original ideas” that turns otherwise sensible critics into slobbering groupies?  

Set in 1965 at the dawn of the alleged sexual revolution, this frivolous, wafer-thin fable takes place on an island called Penzance with Gilbert and Sullivan overtones off the coast of New England, populated by troops of misfits called “Khaki Scouts” (fearing, I presume, that after one look at the script, the actual Boy Scouts of America might sue) run by idiotic scoutmasters (Edward Norton in his most embarrassing role since the ghastly Incredible Hulk and Harvey Keitel, for whom overacting is a way of life). The lovers are Sam Shakusky and Suzy Bishop (newcomers Jared Gilman and Kara Hayward), two kids who run away into the wilderness in a stolen canoe to eat jerky and play Francoise Hardy records. Well, it’s the 1960s. I guess anything is possible. Anyway, Sam is an unpopular, bespectacled, nearsighted orphan who is hated by the rest of the scouts, so nobody is looking for him. But Suzy’s parents are lawyers who, as played by Frances McDormand and Bill Murray, talk to each other on megaphones and demonstrate immediately and at all times the root cause of their child’s endless problems. Suzy drags along her little brother’s portable phonograph, two heavy suitcases filled with books and cat food, spies on everyone and everything with a pair of binoculars hanging from her neck and invites Sam to feel her breasts after skinny dipping. Together they pitch a tent on the Old Chickshaw Harvest Migration Trail. Soon they are set upon by the gnat-brained island sheriff (Bruce Willis) and the entire nine-member Khaki Scout Troop 55 from Camp Ivanhoe, all of whom fire deadly arrows and kill their pet doggie mascot by mistake. There is also a demented hag in a flaming orange wig from social services (Tilda Swinton, naturally) who wants to ship Sam off to a foster home (or worse). Before it all ends—not a moment too soon, if you ask me—prissy scoutmaster Ed Norton loses his pest control spray, his latrine-inspection detail and his short pants, while the runaway children land in another camp where the mentally challenged Jason Schwartzman enters. But wait. It’s not over yet. The insanity culminates in yet another outrageous visual.

The only thing worth mentioning about Moonrise Kingdom is the sound and art design. The sets and camerawork resemble colorful illustrations from children’s books and crayola drawings from a kindergarten art class. A red gingerbread house with ocean views abates a lighthouse that would be proud to appear in a Bette Davis movie. A field of Indian grass wafts its way in the breeze all the way to the sea. The soundtrack blares Benjamin Britten’s “Young Person’s Guide to the Orchestra, Op. 34: Fugue: Allegro Motto,” Mozart’s “Cosi Fan Tutti,” Saint-Saens’ “Carnival of the Animals” and “Honky Tonkin’” by Hank Williams. What any of this overdose of whimsy actually means is anybody’s guess. Pity the kid who wanders in by mistake, thinking this is a movie for children.

In all of his eccentric films, instead of structuring his adolescent fantasies into one coherent narrative, Mr. Anderson throws together lunatic fragments of surrealism that consist mainly of actors making fools of themselves. The result, in the case of Moonrise Kingdom, is what I call transcendentally brainless—an after school special aimed at asinine adolescents over the age of 40.

rreed@observer.com

MOONRISE KINGDOM

Running Time 94 minutes

Written by Wes Anderson and Roman Coppola

Directed by Wes Anderson

Starring Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward and Bruce Willis

1/4

Sy and Cluzet in The Intouchables.

Already a huge hit in Europe, France’s crowd-pleasing The Intouchables seems destined to repeat its success here. Written and directed by Eric Toledano and Olivier Nakache, it’s the factual story of an unconventional relationship between a millionaire quadriplegic from the ritziest neighborhood in Paris and his Senegalese caregiver from the ghetto—a bond that begins as a working one but builds, through trust and care and shared experiences, into a lasting friendship that changes two unhappy lives forever. It has warmth, humor and an understated sweetness that is not to be taken for granted.

The daily manifestations of washing, changing, massaging, shaving, cleaning, spoon-feeding and lifting a paralyzed patient are so daunting that Philippe Pozzo di Borgo (played with heartbreaking patience and moment-to-moment honesty by the great French actor Francois Cluzet) is always interviewing new job applicants. Many over-qualified nurse-companions apply, but there is something intriguing, irritating and challenging about Driss (Omar Sy) that rouses Philippe’s curiosity. The man’s rebellious spirit, irreverent attitude and lack of pity are refreshing. And he more than lives up to his promise. Driss hates the job at first, refusing to change Philippe’s diapers, insulting his taste in music and generally marking time until he can go back on welfare. But the film derives its emotional impact from the surprising ways the two men overcome their differences and learn to help each other to a better level in life.

Driss is a homeless man with a criminal record for robbery and no focus or direction. He’s rude and arrogant, with his own blunt brand of pragmatism and logic. The first thing he does is steal a priceless Fabergé egg that belonged to Philippe’s beloved late wife. Philippe is a rich invalid with nothing to live for who is warned by his staff and his business advisors to be careful about granting a man of unsavory character access to his home and unlimited power over his deteriorating physical condition. Gradually, their horizons expand. So aghast at the price of a painting Philippe buys in an art gallery that he decides he can do it better himself, laughing hysterically at his first visit to the Paris Opera, acting as a makeshift therapist to Philippe’s neurotic teenage daughter, teaching his boss how to smoke a joint while making him listen to Earth, Wind and Fire, Driss exerts an influence that heals some of his boss’s emotional pain. Philippe, in turn, teaches his uneducated caregiver to appreciate Vivaldi and passes him off to the pretentious art world as an important new painter whose work is worthy of a pricey investment. Since Philippe was paralyzed from the neck down from a paragliding accident, you can’t help but feel the terror and the ultimate thrill of their bond when they share the risk of paragliding to Nina Simone’s “Feeling Good.”

Eventually Driss learns compassion and responsibility while Philippe gains courage to take control of his own life and even seek romance. It’s all a bit too neatly resolved and, although it is a true story, some of the incidents are hard to swallow. For laughs, Driss stages an elaborate, life-threatening high-speed chase through the streets of Paris while Philippe fakes having an epileptic seizure to get a police escort to the hospital emergency entrance. Then when the cops leave, they drive away, pleased with their mischief. I had a rough time joining in the fun myself. Issues of class and racial tension pop up only in the underprivileged world Driss comes from. Philippe’s upper-class milieu seems to take everything in stride—suspicious at first because a black man from the streets given full reign in a mansion filled with treasures is a worrisome thing. But Driss wins over every white man in sight, especially when he shows off his hip-hop skills, and before it ends, he has total control of the house and everyone in it. A bit of a credulity stretch there, not to mention the fact that when Driss buys his first suit, Philippe’s secretary says he looks like Barack Obama. Sometimes the writing dispenses a condescension the filmmakers might not even be aware of. Still, the film has a life-affirming resistance to sloppy sentimentality that is bracing. And the acting is dynamic. For obvious reasons, Mr. Sy has all of the movement and action, and he’s a lively, colorful counterpart, but the wheelchair-bound Mr. Cluzet is the revelation. His expressions reveal myriad emotions from a motionless face that tell volumes about what he is thinking, feeling and sharing from within.

The Intouchables serves up a tasty abundance of charm, warmth and humanity that makes its popularity in Europe understandable. It’s the kind of feel-good movie that turns up as rarely as a winning lottery ticket.

rreed@observer.com

THE INTOUCHABLEs

Running Time 112 minutes

Written and Directed by Olivier Nakache and Eric Toledano

Starring François Cluzet, Omar Sy and Anne Le Ny

3/4

Harner, Quaid and Smith in Cock. (Joan Marcus)

Despite the fact that we’re 12 years into the 21st century, some publications are too squeamish to print the word Cock, which happens to be the correct title of the extraordinary new play by Mike Bartlett at the Duke on 42nd Street. They’re erroneously mislabeling it The Cockfight Play in a ridiculously misguided attempt to deter the easily offended from a four-letter word used hourly by every child of 5. It’s not about an illegal sporting event involving cruelty to animals. But it is very much about what the title suggests. It was such a smash when I tried to see it three years ago at the Royal Court in London that I couldn’t get in. Judging from the raves across the pond, the title is the only thing that has been diluted for American audiences. The play is still a dazzler, brilliant and hilarious, and one that rests (no pun intended) on the penis.

There’s no nudity, but Cock is still about sexual identity and the lack of it. John (Cory Michael Smith) is a young man with an older stockbroker boyfriend called M (Jason Butler Harner) who walks out on a long and seemingly happy relationship after an argument, leaving his lover confused and emotionally devastated. When John decides he wants to come back home, he brings a peace offering of a teddy bear, a symbol of his errant youthfulness. Then comes the reluctant confession: during his absence John discovered a latent heterosexuality he never thought possible. John becomes the center of attention in an emotional and physical tug of war for his lust, love and you-know-what below the belt. He is the only one of the play’s four characters with a name, but ironically he’s the one with no definite identity. Torn between M, the male stockbroker, and W, the divorced female teaching assistant (Amanda Quaid) he’s just been to bed with, John is an irritating conundrum nobody can solve. The play is about how M and W thrust and parry for a commitment from John, who actually digs them both. “You’re lucky to have me,” says John, with the arrogance of a virile beauty who thinks he’s pretty special. It’s absolutely O.K. to love them both equally, John insists. “But not at the same time,” says M.

In James Macdonald’s economical but intense staging, everything is insinuated and suggested, but not actually shown or even simulated. The sex scenes are spoken, conveying intimacy with only words. The sexual initiation of the boy by the woman and the first meeting of their sex organs is suggested by a movement in circles. When John undresses M, the older man is pursued in right turns, like two soldiers in a formation drill. The actors are strong, forceful and sensitive enough to hold attention for 90 minutes without intermission. Finally, it all ignites at a dinner party where John is forced to make a choice. John is the one who pulls the strings, yet he’s also the only one allowed the luxury of vulnerability. It’s an awkward meeting, as expected, joined by M’s father, F (Cotter Smith), who tries to reduce the triangular confusion to reason. Making a strained effort to be polite, civilized, honest, careful and fair while the dinner courses are cooked and served (but never used as props), everyone maps out their verbal strategy for holding onto the object of their passion. “Him and me, we must both be stupid,” says W in a moment of exasperation—“What is it about you?” Clueless and vexing to the point of inciting violence, John replies, “I think it’s my eyes.”

Navigating the turbulence in their changing values brings out painful truths in each character until the writing reaches a force that is shattering. Every issue is explored, first with wit, then rationale, and eventually desperation. As it unfolds, the play also makes you shift uneasily in your own judgments, values and analysis. While the writing often surprises and entertains (“Some people might think you’re scrawny, but I think you’re like a drawing—with a pencil”), audience frustration builds. It is ultimately up to John to make a decision, but he’s surrounded by so much psychological baggage, drifting around him like molecules, that neither lover can leave him for good or shake him loose. He’s a wimp. You want to slap him. He’s also enormously appealing. You want to take him home and feed him. The script recognizes the humor and humanity in each of the characters. Whether you find the title a turn-on or a run-in-the-opposite-direction invite, Cock is far from a sensationalistic shocker. Some people are calling it the first important play about bisexuality, but I think it’s a sharp and penetrating bit of insight into the paralyzing indecision that can result from not knowing your true identity in life and love.

Cock is staged on circular bleachers of raw pine that look down on a tiny space the size of a round Pilates mat. Be forewarned: it’s a drag to sit for 90 minutes on open wooden rafters with no back support. For a play without scenery, sets, furniture, costumes or props, you can feel the tension at the dining table, taste the red wine lapped up with angst, close your eyes and visualize the sex. This is a wonderful British export and a vibrant addition to the New York season, but as much as I like it, Cock is definitely a production that needs a chiropractor on duty.

rreed@observer.com

Tim Burton, the director who never grew up, and his favorite star Johnny Depp, who is both fearless and overrated, follow the Gothic nightmare pranks of Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood, Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd with more gross and dross in this cinematic aberration that gives things from the grave a dullness they don’t deserve. Good actors do find themselves drawn to this kind of fiddle-faddle. And why not? It must be fun to bare fangs dripping with boysenberry pancake syrup and fly into crystal chandeliers that wreak havoc on haunted house sets that look like Hollywood even though they’re shot in London. The plot scarcely survives another rehash, but there might be somebody who had too much taste in the 1960s to watch Jonathan Frid creep his way through the spiderwebs of Collinwood Manor in makeup of Chinese rice powder. (As a Tim Burton in-joke, he makes a guest appearance as a party guest here, shortly before he bit the dust for good in real life.) He was Barnabas Collins, whose family moved from Liverpool to Collinsport, Maine in 1752 and established a fishing empire. Unfortunately, he spurned the romantic advances of an evil witch named Angelique, who cast a spell that turned Barnabas into a vampire, drove his lover Josette to her death from the top of a cliff, and then buried him alive for 200 years. So much for background.

Cut to 1970. Construction workers dig up the casket of the mildewed Barnabas, who appears in the body of Johnny Depp, whose ancient Dracula cloak starts a fashion trend. Times have changed, and most of the fun comes from watching Barnabas trying to adjust to pop tunes, Iggy Pop posters, lava lamps and Erich Segal’s Love Story. He thinks the McDonald’s logo is a sign from Mephistopheles. In the role played on the old TV show by Joan Bennett, Michelle Pfeiffer is now the dowager of the family that has seen its fortune depleted and Collinwood Manor fall into ruins. She does the best she can to control her useless brother, Roger (Jonny Lee Miller), his neurotic 10-year-old son, David (Gully McGrath), and her gruesome daughter Carolyn (Chloe Moretz), who may or may not be a werewolf. There is also David’s chain-smoking, pill-popping psychiatrist, Dr. Hoffman (Helena Bonham Carter in a flaming red wig), a cretinous caretaker (Jackie Earle Haley) and little David’s lovely nanny (Bella Heathcote), the reincarnation of Barnabas’ dead Josette. Lurking in the shadows is the 200-year-old Angelique (sexy Eva Green, who steals every scene). Barnabas takes one look at his old nemesis and screeches things like “Succubus of Satan!” and “Harlot of the Devil!” It’s supposed to be a Halloween party with comic overtones, but the script by Seth Grahame-Smith is stupider than The Addams Family. He’s got two more dorky creep shows on the way: Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and the soon-to-be-released Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter. Gosh, we’re lucky.

It doesn’t get any sillier than this, but I’m sure the Burton-Depp team will think of something. This time around the cemetery, the writing is stale, the jokes are corny, the blood as watery as recycled communion wine. To be charitable, I did laugh a few times. Especially when the decadent, dysfunctional Collins family drives through the town in a classic Chevy station wagon to the music from A Summer Place. There are also guest appearances by Christopher Lee, who has played plenty of bloodsuckers himself back in the day, and by aging wacko rocker Alice Cooper, who looks more like a vampire than Barnabas and is much too old for this kind of kid stuff. Overacting like a road company Bela Lugosi in Barbra Streisand glue-on nails and more mascara than Cher, Johnny Depp is about as scary as Abbott and Costello Meet Frankenstein. Talk about cinema as self-delusion. Dark Shadows is dead on arrival, in more ways than one, and stays that way.

rreed@observer.com

DARK SHADOWS
Running Time 113 minutes
Written by Seth Grahame-Smith (screenplay) and John August (story)
Directed by Tim Burton
Starring Johnny Depp, Michelle Pfeiffer and Eva Green

Skipping through a mass of sci-fi prologue mumbo-jumbo, NASA’s transmission device, which is more powerful than anything known to science, has discovered another planet with the same water, air and climate as Earth. It’s called Planet G and suddenly, faster than a rocket launch, it has declared war, wiping out Hong Kong and heading for Hawaii. In Oahu, where 20,000 Navy men have assembled for the biggest game competition since the invention of the pinball machine, the spaceship strikes, attacking Pearl Harbor, recalling the Japanese air strike that once stun-gunned Franklin D. Roosevelt into military history. This time, the harbor where the U.S.S. Missouri stands as a World War II museum becomes the launch pad for war at sea with … aliens?

Taylor Kitsch, the camera-ready hunk from the Nautilus School of Dramatic Art who just survived the billion-dollar bomb John Carter, plays Lieutenant Alex Hopper, a screw-up of a weapons officer with no experience who takes over the state-of-the-art battleship John Paul Jones when the state-of-the-art U.S.S. Sampson, commanded by his veteran big brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard), is blown to scrap metal by the vastly superior vessels from outer space. Alex is in love with a beautiful physical therapist for disabled combat veterans named Sam (Brooklyn Decker), who is also the daughter of the Commander of the Pacific Fleet (played by Liam Neeson in a cameo of sorts). The admiral thinks Alex has a weak character and poor leadership and even worse decision-making skills, and is on the verge of kicking him out of the Navy. To make matters worse, Alex faces a powerful adversary in Captain Yugi Nagata (Tadanobu Asano), commanding officer of the Japanese destroyer Myoko. Poor Alex has got a lot to prove, with the help of an Army battalion leader and double amputee, played by Col. Gregory D. Gadson, a real-life veteran who lost both legs in Iraq in 2007, various boatswains, engine-room experts and pop star Rihanna, making her screen debut as a sarcastic crewmate and weapons specialist who changes her tune in battle (but, fortunately, does not sing). If you got all that straight, you’re a better man than I, Gunga Din.

But back to the aliens. Destroying Marine bases, helicopters, jet planes, warships on the sea and radar transmitters in the sky, they must wonder as much as I do, in the middle of an ozone-destroying nuclear war, how Alex’s girlfriend reaches him from a mountain top on her cell phone. It makes no sense why the John Paul Jones is the only destroyer in the Pacific Ocean to battle the alien invasion. “Let’s see if we can buy the world one more day,” says one sailor. “Who talks like that?” is the reply. And then, when they’re blown into ocean foam, the only humans left to come to their rescue, are the old World War II survivors on the 70-year-old floating museum, the U.S.S. Missouri. Even NASA is rendered helpless, but when it comes to Pearl Harbor, this movie asks you to save the patriotic applause for the old tugs. Never mind. It’s not the wooden acting, asinine plot or feebleminded dialogue that keep you awake. It’s the attacking UFOs sending out grinding wheels of fire that look like Good Year tire rims equipped with atomic bombs. Will the old salts called into action one last time to fire on the alien missiles with torpedoes from the 1940s raise Earth’s flag in triumph?

Battleship is dopey, preposterous and unintentionally hilarious in all the wrong places, but as directed by Peter Berg, it is also energetic, fast-moving and bracing. Summer audiences with a high tolerance for stupidity and low expectations will jerk and shake and wince in perfect unison with the cacophonous soundtrack. For artistry look elsewhere, but for inescapable time-wasting entertainment value, search no further than Battleship.

rreed@observer.com

BATTLESHIP
Running Time 131 minutes
Written by Erich Hoeber
and Jon Hoeber
Directed by Peter Berg
Starring Alexander Skarsgård, Brooklyn Decker and Liam Neeson

At the pinnacle of Victorian prudishness, when ignorance and disease were the order of the day, rusty surgical tools were prevalent and bleeding with leeches was a popular treatment for everything from gout to gonorrhea. Hysteria was the term used to diagnose nervous conditions in women suffering every sexual disorder from frigidity to an overstimulated uterus. This is the true story of Dr. Mortimer Granville (played by the charming Hugh Dancy), a progressive doctor devoted to advancing the suppressed sexual pleasure of women, enriched with witty dialogue, elegant production values and an intelligent screenplay that expands the historical canvas of life in London to include class prejudices as well as social hypocrisy. Disillusioned with the medieval practice of medicine in an England of chaos (this is also the year of Jack the Ripper and the Elephant Man), Dr. Granville was ready to denounce his Hippocratic Oath when he found employment as an assistant to Dr. Robert Dalrymple (Jonathan Pryce), an elderly “specialist” experimenting with the treatment of housewives with sex problems and a foremost expert on the subject of “hysteria.” Eschewing warm baths and horseback riding in favor of vaginal massages, his business was already booming. But when the younger, more appealing Dr. Granville develops his own brand of manual finger manipulation, eager patients filled the waiting room with renewed reason to come out of their corsets. What nobody ever thought possible was the mysterious fact that all of these stressed-out women were experiencing something nobody had considered: They were just plain horny!

The result was heaven for the patients, but hell on the doctor’s hand. Suffering from severe cramps and nerve spasms that required the use of a cast, the good doctor turned to a goofy prissy-pot friend with a passion for gadgets named Edmund St. John-Smythe (a hilarious Rupert Everett) to invent a motor-driven stimulus that could be applied to a woman’s lower anatomy without overtaxing the wrist and fingers. The result was nothing short of a revolution. In the plot trajectory, Dr. Granville also attracted the attention of the elderly Dr. Dalrymple’s two daughters: placid, proper, obedient and favorite daughter Emily (Felicity Jones) and headstrong, outspoken Charlotte (a marvelous Maggie Gyllenhaal), a suffragette who disgraces her father by running a settlement house for the impoverished prostitutes of the East End slums. There is evidence galore that the vibrator contributed to the sexual independence of enlightened free-thinkers in the future of liberated women everywhere. Muffled praise of the vibrator eventually gave way to cries of “Heigh-ho, the dildo!”

Instead of provocative prurience, Hysteria brims over with humor and sweetness. Far from dogmatic, it is agreeable, lyrical, carefully scripted and acted with great feeling by an exemplary cast. The film is also an eye-opening footnote to history as it depicts a time so backward that women with libido challenges were declared insane and sent to asylums or punished by court-ordered hysterectomies. Don’t miss the closing credits, displaying a wonderful collection of museum-quality illustrations of changing styles and designs from the mid-19th century to the ugly plastic drug store models of today. The liberating vibrator may have started out in Victorian England, but eventually made it to the Sears Roebuck catalogue and, in the final and funniest scene in the picture, even Buckingham Palace. A clever, quick-witted, informed and terrific movie!

rreed@observer.com

HYSTERIA
Running time 100 minutes
Written by Stephen Dyer and Jonah Lisa Dyer
Directed by Tanya Wexler
Starring Maggie Gyllenhaal, Hugh Dancy and Jonathan Pryce

Somehow, in yet another inexplicable narrative turn, they’ve managed to invest in two bungalows. They live together in one and rent out the other to a traumatized, unemployed single mother named Lynette (Carrie Preston) and her precocious but desperately lonely 12-year-old son, Kelsey (newcomer Chandler Canterbury), who pretend to be Louisiana refugees from Hurricane Katrina. The landlords’ singular conscience is Alan’s sister, Mel (Rebecca Hall), who works as a waitress in a waffle house. When Mel peeks through the window to check out her brother’s new tenants, she is appalled to find the kid alone, neglected, living in squalor and existing on canned soda and microwavable TV dinners. Suspicions that their new neighbor is a prostitute are already aroused by Lynette’s long absences from home at night, but when her rent check bounces and she offers to pay them off with free two-for-one bargain specials, the guys, who can barely take care of each other, suddenly take on the responsibility of becoming the kid’s surrogate family. To eliminate the embarrassing red tape of trying to explain why two 30-somethings who live together want to adopt an adolescent with raging hormones, the writers send Lynette to the garage to turn on the carbon monoxide. Homeless, terrified of a future in foster homes and desperate for love, Kelsey welcomes his two new fathers with nonjudgmental acceptance and joy. A “bag of hammers,” explains Ben in his awkward way, is the bad stuff that life dishes out to nice people—cancer, divorce, bankruptcy, death, stealing cars. The important thing, he reminds Kelsey, is what you do with those hammers. But what these scam artists do is live like Peter Pan. They’ve never known the meaning of family or grown into mature adults themselves, so the role of the “nontraditional” family is something they’re eager to take on, hiding the kid from the cops, the school, the Department of Family and Child Services—everything legal. It works for a while, but then Mel picks up the phone to call in the proper authorities and all hell breaks loose. Heartbreak ensues.

The actors are fine in universally underwritten roles, and there are some fresh, amusing lines. When the deceased at one funeral turns out to be the father of an ex-girlfriend of Ben’s (a guest appearance by Amanda Seyfried), she delivers an understandably insulting tirade after they steal her car, to which Alan responds laughing. “What’s so funny?” she shrieks. “You speak in Michael Bolton lyrics,” he answers. (Well, anyway, it amused me.) Sadly, though, the film is more ambiguous than humorous. Everyone in it looks as if they had a different film in mind. Clichés abound. The valet parking grift is different, but it wears thin fast. Mr. Ritter (who looks like his father, the late sitcom star John Ritter, and also currently appears as Kathleen Turner’s dysfunctional son in The Perfect Family) and Mr. Sandvig are both too good looking and wholesome to ever be believable as purse-snatching, car-thieving slackers. Worse still, the film is not true to its own convictions.

The word “gay” is never mentioned, but it is obvious from start to finish that these guys love only each other and are capable of committing to nobody else. When they show up as prospective parents to adopt Kelsey, there is no doubt in anyone’s mind that they are, indeed, a “couple.” Once he introduces us to all the issues, writer-director Crano clearly hasn’t the foggiest notion how to resolve them. A Bag of Hammers falls apart badly as it ends in a series of fragments that form a confusing montage that prompts the question: Are these vignettes supposed to be flashbacks, alternate endings or deluded fantasies? Some of it looks like it was tacked on after the fact in the editing lab. Most of it seems baffled and unclear. Some nice ideas floating around in here, but A Bag of Hammers is one of the few movies I can remember that appears to be composed mainly of outtakes.
rreed@observer.com

A BAG OF HAMMERS
Running time 87 minutes
Written by Jake Sandvig and Brian Crano
Directed by Brian Crano
Starring Jason Ritter, Jake Sandvig and Chandler Canterbury

Cierra Ramierez and Eva Mendes

Directed at the pace of a mollusk on drugs by Patricia Riggen, the nonstory concerns an immigrant single mom named Grace (the usually sexy, vivacious Eva Mendes, turned miraculously dowdy) who juggles bills, stress, the challenge of raising a teenage daughter, a going-nowhere job as a waitress in a Seattle seafood dump called Emilio’s Crab Shack and an affair with a married gynecologist (another wasted role for poor Matthew Modine, who deserves better assignments). Grace’s teenage daughter (Cierra Ramirez), for reasons known only to screenwriter Hiram Martinez, is named Ansiedad, which I think translates to “anxiety.” (Latin linguists more fluent than I will undoubtedly correct me.) Fueled by the coming-of-age books she’s reading in school, the imaginative teen hops on a bus to adultsville, promising to hang out with bad girls, lose her virginity with bad boys and possibly, if time allows, get into narcotics. Looking for candidates who might recognize her potential, she seeks out the hottest stud with the worst reputation in school, who turns out to be a secret wimp with secret old-fashioned values. The problem is, the only potential she demonstrates is the potential for being the subject of a corny, overwritten movie made by a director with nothing to say. Grace left home to get away from her mother at an early age. Now her daughter wants to do the same thing. The movie’s naive resolve is for both of them to learn, through trial and error, to act their own age.

The monotony is stupefying.

rreed@observer.com

A GIRL IN PROGRESS
Running time 90 minutes
Written by Hiram Martinez
Directed by Patricia Riggen
Starring Eva Mendes, Cierra Ramirez and Patricia Arquette

Chloe Grace Moretz and Blake Lively

Derick Martini is stuck in a rut of coming-of-age movies. His first feature, the 2008 artistic failure Lymelife, was a coming-of-age opus about dysfunctional young people struggling to get out of Long Island and survive miserable marriages, a real estate crisis, the doomed economy and Lyme disease. His new one, a deadly dud of a horror called Hick, is a hopped-up coming-of-age road movie about a dysfunctional, filthy-mouthed 13-year-old runaway named Luli (Chloë Grace Moretz) who is trying to hitchhike her way from a hick town in Nebraska all the way to Vegas. I can’t say I blame her for getting the hell out of Nebraska, but the way she does it is the stuff autopsies are made of.

Based on a smarmy novel by Andrea Portes (who adapted the screenplay), the movie opens on Luli’s 13th birthday, when she gets a Smith and Wesson .45 for a present and decides to make the most of it. What’s she got to lose by hitting the road? Her skanky mother (another cliché-riddled performance by Juliette Lewis) and alcoholic stepfather are both dead-end nightmares who spend their nights getting obnoxiously tanked, then rutting like farm pigs. So Luli packs up her gun—it will come in handy later—dressed like Shirley Temple in heat (ghastly thought, but no worse than anything in this picture) and gets picked up by a broken cowboy named Eddie with a Stetson hat and a permanent limp from his days as a failed rodeo rider. Eddie seems charming because he’s played by the wonderful, charismatic Eddie Redmayne, but he’s a bona fide psychopath whose sole aim is to work out his sadistic S&M fantasies on Luli as a nubile sex object. She also meets a grifter named Glenda (the aptly named Blake Lively), who becomes Luli’s cocaine-snorting fairy godmother. From here on, the movie careers downhill with the speed of an unhinged kangaroo with one foot. People are beaten senseless and shot to death in filthy motel bathrooms. There’s a near-rape by a pool shark. Someone urinates in a drink.

Instead of trying to bring some troubling insight to the tragedy of boring, small-town adolescence, director Martini concentrates on painting a pretty lurid picture of the American countryside—bowling alleys, Dairy Queens, brothels, Motel 6’s. Eddie shoots Glenda. Luli kills Eddie. Alec Baldwin, who owns a camp in the woods, makes scrambled eggs, growls, “Eat your goddam fluffy eggs,” and drives Luli to the bus station. Following the ho-hum you-can’t-go-home-again theme, Luli goes home defeated to find her former home turned into a Walmart. The pace is funereal, the dialogue consists of brilliant lines like “Rise and shine, sugar tits!” and the result is pointless even as a coming-of-age fable since Luli never develops as anyone with the brain of a cockroach. The acting is feisty but forced, and after the sensitive and dynamic Mr. Redmayne won the Tony award for Red, followed by a riveting centerpiece performance in My Week with Marilyn, it’s anybody’s guess just who talked him into lending his name to this trash. Nothing he does can be ignored, hence this one-star review. The rest of Hick adds up to nothing more than a tax write-off.

I guess the only real theme of Hick is: Life is crap, and then you write about it.

rreed@observer.com

HICK
Running time 97 minutes
Written by Andrea Portes (novel) and Andrea Portes (screenplay)
Directed by Derick Martini
Starring Chloë Grace Moretz, Blake Lively and Rory Culkin

Enticed by the lure of colorful travel-magazine adverts promising a life of tranquility and luxury in the newly restored Marigold Hotel, seven senior citizens searching for a place to spend their golden years travel from the U.K. to India to enjoy their retirement. Bravely soldiering into the camel dung and curry of a country that is an open invitation to acid reflux, they find a resort in Jaipur that is nothing like what they were promised. The broken-down Marigold is not only misrepresented in the brochures, but is scarcely more than a ruin, where everything is badly in need of repair and nothing works, including cell-phone signals and plumbing. In this godforsaken place, a series of comic misadventures ensue that teach a diverse group of rough and randy retirees that no man is an island while they are transformed by shared experiences both sad and uplifting. The audience has the best time of anybody.

This is no pathetic gang of helpless elderly victims discarded by a society hooked on youth. Sure, they face the daunting problems of trying to figure out the new technology their grandchildren already understand, and they talk about buying panic buttons in case of sudden falls. But they’re crafty and brave and not yet ready for Ovaltine, rocking chairs and Metamucil. After newly widowed Evelyn Greenslade (Judi Dench) spends her late husband’s savings paying estate taxes, she finds herself financially bereft and in need of a new beginning. Cantankerous old dragon Mrs. Muriel Donnelly (Maggie Smith) needs a hip replacement, refuses to eat anything she can’t pronounce and is so cognizant of what little time she has left that she won’t even buy green bananas. Graham Dashwood (Tom Wilkinson) is a gay judge who has left the bench and returned to India to look up a long-lost lover he abandoned years earlier in an act of cowardice for fear of disgracing his family. Douglas Ainslie (Bill Nighy) is ready to jump-start his life, but his wife Jean (Penelope Wilton) is a quarrelsome pickle who hates India on sight—especially the heat, the squalor and the food that attacks her colon, leaving her husband to explore his new surroundings alone and form a warm friendship with Evelyn that sends Jean into jealous rages. Rounding out this motley crew of septuagenarian pioneers are Norman (Ronald Pickup), a horny bachelor looking for sexual fulfillment before he dies, and Madge (Celia Imrie, one of the stars of Downtown Abbey), a lonely multiple divorcee who has rebelled against her role as baby sitter and left her daughter’s home forever to look for her next husband. Some of them have sold out and walked away from the burdens of old age, announcing their own personal declaration of independence. Others, like Evelyn, have gone through their savings and must learn to make ends meet. All of them find themselves at the mercy of the naïve, clueless but cheerful manager (Slumdog Millionaire star Dev Patel) and all of them face the “assault on the senses” that is modern India, a land of so many dialects that even the people cannot communicate from one village to the next. The joy and passion of the movie is how they survive in the endless collision of colors, noise, car horns, traffic jams, smells, beggars, textiles, spicy foods and cultural challenges in order to cope and hopefully thrive. Some of their experiences are touching, others are hilarious. You haven’t lived until you see Maggie Smith, her face narrowed as a dried fig, surveying the chaos of India and saying, “I’m in hell.”

So many movies depict the elderly as gravely ignored, overlooked and forgotten that it’s a veritable thrill to see them treated with so much respect, humor and dignity. If nothing else, the rapture, pride and honest emotion in Judi Dench’s shifting expressions make the price of admission a privilege. The ensemble acting is of a monumental caliber seldom encountered in motion pictures, the wonderful screenplay by Ol Parker (adapted from Deborah Moggach’s best-selling novel These Foolish Things) captures the diverse characters with detailed reverie, and John Madden’s direction juxtaposes the manifold escapades with unerring vigilance. The theme is that it is never too late to find love, trust and a fresh beginning at any age. Some may find The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel too slow for its own good, and not because the cast is too old to move any faster. But I found it paced with the charm, heartbeat and optimism that make a true classic. There are many words to describe how I feel about it. Let’s start with gratitude.

rreed@observer.com

THE BEST EXOTIC MARIGOLD HOTEL
Running Time 124 minutes
Written by Ol Parker (screenplay) and
Deborah Moggach (novel)
Directed by John Madden
Starring Judi Dench, Bill Nighy and Maggie Smith