Warm Bodies

A young man in a hoodie shambles aimlessly through an airport. He can’t remember his name, but he thinks it begins with an R. The R may as well stand for Romeo, because he soon finds his Juliet, though he has to eat her boyfriend’s brains first. Warm Bodies is a “zomromcom,” a term inaugurated by 2004’s witty modern classic Shaun of the Dead, and while this film isn’t as funny, it’s more romantic and has some intriguing twists on the zombie theme. R (Nicholas Hoult) is a relatively thoughtful and sensitive zombie — he provides self-deprecating narration, and he collects things that remind him of when he was alive. He stumbles across Julie (Teresa Palmer) when she’s on a run for medicine in the city. He seems taken with her even before he consumes her boyfriend Perry’s gray matter and experiences Perry’s memories of — and feelings for — Julie.

In 1985’s Return of the Living Dead, we were told that zombies eat brains because it alleviates “the pain of being dead.” Warm Bodies pushes that notion further towards an emotional anodyne: eating brains takes a zombie out of his listless existence for a while, like a drug. R and a few other zombies of his acquaintance (including Rob Corddry) may be zombies, and they may kill and eat humans because they have to, but they’re not as far gone yet as another kind of zombie. “Bonies,” these others are called — skeletal ghouls who “gave up” and have become true anti-life monsters. Compared to them, R looks pretty decent, and Julie (who doesn’t know R ate her sweetie’s skull meat) allows R to look after her after he rescues her. Eventually she develops feelings for him, which is unfortunate, because her father (John Malkovich) is the gung-ho leader of a militaristic band of zombie-killing survivalists.

Warm Bodies isn’t a romantic twist on the zombie movie so much as a zombie twist on the romance movie. There’s a nicely fragile rapport between Hoult (who’s delivered on the promise he showed in About a Boy a decade ago) and Palmer (who resembles Kristen Stewart but has more verve and humor). R and Julie look good and feel good together. We’re asked to believe that their love not only slowly heals R but inspires his fellow zombies to do likewise. Mostly we do. We can take or leave the implied message that we must embrace life to avoid being dead — literally, in this case — but R and Julie are a strange enough couple to make the bromide go down easy. The movie also appealingly suggests that if you were a bit of an outcast in life, you’ll manage to resist becoming one of the Bonies — you’ll try to find ways to make death interesting, like piling up snow globes or listening to Guns ‘n Roses.

This is director Jonathan Levine’s second horror-themed film, after his debut, the slasher flick All the Boys Love Mandy Lane; some might also count 50/50, with cancer as the remorseless serial killer. Levine’s work here is amiably rumpled, relaxing into the scenes of R playing his old ’80s vinyl records for Julie or haltingly trying to converse with her. The movie doesn’t stand out much in memory — nothing in it really pops — but it’s enjoyable while it lasts. It provides a surprisingly nuanced showcase for Rob Corddry, who is often pretty funny but too often lapses into a cartoon of himself. Here he gives us an amusingly polite zombie, and his first non-conversation with R strikes the tone the movie needs. They could be just two regular guys mumbling at each other at an airport.

Warm Bodies is not anything like the Twilight of zombie movies — for one thing, it doesn’t take itself stupidly seriously enough for that — though some horror fans offended by the softening (and sparkle-fication) of vampires in that series may likewise bristle at this film’s apparent thesis that even if you’re a zombie, all you need is love. Zombies, such people may say, eat people; that’s all. (The villain of the piece, the gun-happy Malkovich character, agrees with them.) Some of us horror fans, though, get tired of the binary us-vs.-them formula and welcome some shading, especially in a subgenre as exhausted lately as the zombie film. When World War Z opens this summer, it’s possible I’ll be looking at some of the zombies slaughtered by the heroes and thinking “Wait, one of them could be R.”

This Is 40

Who thought it was a good idea to take the two most irritating characters in Knocked Up and devote a two-hour-and-thirteen-minute movie to them? This Is 40, the new dramedy written and directed by Judd Apatow (opening on December 21), follows the squabbling and problems of Pete (Paul Rudd) and Debbie (Leslie Mann), miserably married with two daughters (played by the real-life daughters of Apatow and Mann). Pete’s small record label is tanking, and Debbie’s clothes shop isn’t doing much better. If you think the movie is going to be about the reality of financial hardship in a shaky economy, though, you’re wrong: The couple apparently can still afford iPads, iPhones, and miscellaneous other iProducts for themselves and their kids. I’m a Mac user, but there are times when the film seems like an Apple commercial.

They can also presumably afford to go out to clubs, take a vacation at a fancy hotel, plan a catered 40th birthday party for Pete, and snipe at each other in the comfort of their too-spacious home — all while they’re in the hole for $80,000. But none of this is the point of the movie, which hammers the point that this technology-addicted family can’t communicate. The older daughter spends too much time on Facebook. Pete hides in the bathroom playing Bejeweled on his iPad. The couple also have problems with their fathers: Pete keeps lending money he can ill afford to lend to his dad (Albert Brooks), while Debbie hardly knows her father (John Lithgow), who left when she was eight. Also, Debbie’s sister Alison, one of the leads in Knocked Up, is absent here and never mentioned (however, Ben, Seth Rogen’s character, is referenced); maybe they had a falling out.

Judd Apatow enjoys a reputation for smart, closely observed comedy, a rep I think he earned with The 40 Year Old Virgin and Funny People (I wasn’t as taken with Knocked Up as many). Here, though, he draws out tiresome arguments, with everyone in the house screaming — the movie is shrill. There’s no surprise in any of the conflicts, no shock of recognition, and the occasional reconciliations feel unearned because the rancor that precedes them is so bilious. At many points we feel we’re seeing the end of a marriage, but Apatow keeps shoving the couple away from divorce, perhaps because a Christmastime release with a bummer ending would get fatal word of mouth. Realistically, we don’t see much reason for these two to be together, even for the sake of the kids, who are also irritating to us and to their parents.

Apatow’s films are generally well-cast, and this is no exception; Melissa McCarthy steals the movie as the mother of one of the daughters’ classmates (stick around during the end credits for some primo McCarthy outtakes), and Megan Fox comes through with a warm and human performance as a staffer at Debbie’s shop. I did think it was weird that the only two non-white characters with speaking parts are scam artists of various natures — Apatow’s universe is as white as Woody Allen’s. And the way poor old Graham Parker is used in this movie — a past-it rocker who can barely sell 600-something downloads of his new album, and who finds himself playing to a sparse club crowd and at a birthday party — struck me as insensitive, though maybe Parker enjoyed poking fun at himself, or enjoyed the paycheck.

This Is 40 is about pretty people with pretty problems; this used to be the province of James L. Brooks, who seems to have passed the torch to Apatow. It remains to be seen, though, whether Apatow can write women as compassionately as he can write men — Debbie comes off as a shrew much of the time, and the only halfway likable female character in the movie works part-time as an escort. Pete is no prize himself, nor are any of the other men, so I guess it’s equal-opportunity misanthropy, but 133 minutes is a long time to sit with people you don’t like. In the final reel, the revelations and reconciliations arrive like clockwork, and the couple prepare for a considerable additional financial burden without, apparently, worrying about how they’ll be able to swing it; indeed, the movie ends with them going to see Ryan Adams at a club, which, unless I miss my guess, is not a free event. To quote Selina Kyle in The Dark Knight Rises: “The rich don’t even go broke like the rest of us.”

Frankenweenie (2012)

Imagine this: You’re working for a huge family-friendly conglomerate. You direct a half-hour film to be shown before a re-release of one of the conglomerate’s classic movies. The conglomerate hates your film — too scary for kids, they say — and fires you. Twenty-eight years later, the same conglomerate hands you $39 million to remake the same film they hated, in 3D stop-motion. They even let you make it in black and white. This, of course, is the story of Tim Burton, who made a short called Frankenweenie in 1984 for Disney, which has now thrown its full marketing weight behind the new remake. The lesson here is that if you make enough money (all told, Burton’s films have earned $1.7 billion for various studios, including Disney), your failures will be forgiven eventually. (Disney did acknowledge its short-sightedness earlier, releasing the first Frankenweenie on videotape in 1994 and then putting it on the Nightmare Before Christmas DVD as an extra.)

The 1984 Frankenweenie wasn’t a failure, though; it was a charming tribute to the monster movies Burton grew up on (and this was before his career grew a little too long on charming tributes to the monster movies he grew up on). The new one — call it Frankenweenie 2.0 — pretty much tells the whole story of the earlier version, with some padding that gets a little tiresome but does produce more monsters. Young Victor Frankenstein (voice of Charlie Tahan) obsesses over monster movies to the point of making his own, starring his beloved dog Sparky. One day, Sparky chases the wrong ball at the wrong time, and Victor loses his movie star and best friend. But not for long: Inspired by his science teacher (Martin Landau), Victor brings Sparky back to life on a dark and stormy night.

There are a couple of sad moments for dog lovers, especially those who have dug their share of tiny graves. But overall this is a comedy; Sparky doesn’t come back as a monster — he comes back as the same Sparky, except that his tail or his ear occasionally falls off (“I can fix that” is Victor’s refrain), and he needs to be “topped up” with a jolt of electricity every so often. I have to say I prefer the original version, not only because it felt fresher at the start of Burton’s career, but because it was shorter and didn’t succumb to subplots. Here, we get complications when other kids in Victor’s class find out about Sparky, and they want to learn Victor’s secret so they can win the school’s science fair. We don’t really care if they succeed or fail; it’s just a distraction from what should be the main event, in which the townspeople, horrified, corner Sparky at a windmill, just like old times.

The windmill in the original short was a small windmill at a mini-golf course. Here it’s a real windmill, and Victor has to run up endless stairs to save his neighbor Elsa (Winona Ryder) from a hybrid cat/bat as the windmill burns down around them. It reminded me of the entirely unnecessary fight at the end of Burton’s Edward Scissorhands, which felt as if Burton had internalized all the studio notes he got on Batman. You gotta have a bang-up finish, kiddo! But the tiny windmill in the original had so much more charm; you knew Burton didn’t have the budget to build and burn down a big windmill, so he improvised. In stop motion, you can do anything (and let’s have a round of applause for Trey Thomas, the animation director here), and some of the additions are inspired — I enjoyed the re-animated turtle who becomes a sort of non-flying Gamera — but some of it nudges our ribs a little too hard. Hey, remember Gremlins? How about Jurassic Park?

I suppose we should be thankful there isn’t a dancing number (no numbers at all, actually, except for some simpy end-credits song sung by Karen O). As long as it stays with the friendship of Victor and Sparky, Frankenweenie is fine. The look and tone are — say it with me now — a Charming Tribute to the Monster Movies Tim Burton Grew Up On, same as Nightmare Before Christmas and Corpse Bride and Sleepy Hollow and many others. The thing is, Disney should’ve had more faith in this premise back in 1984, when it mattered, instead of shocking it back to a bigger life now, after we’ve seen Burton return to this cobwebbed well again and again and again. It’s been said before, but Burton is almost ready for his own amusement park — Burtonworld, home of dozens of lovable misfits, land of sportively macabre imagery. Frankenweenie passes 87 minutes nicely, but apparently the 54-year-old Burton doesn’t have much more to say with this story than the 26-year-old Burton did. That’s a little dispiriting.

Moonrise Kingdom

Since at least Rushmore, Wes Anderson has not made movies so much as storybooks in motion, and Moonrise Kingdom may be his purest storybook yet. The movie teems with characters yet is modestly scaled; like Anderson’s previous film, Fantastic Mr. Fox, it doesn’t employ the super-wide compositions that had been Anderson’s trademark. It looks boxier, homier, warmer. Everything is at a slight, sly remove, indicating that this isn’t serious business — it’s storytime, nobody’s in real danger, and things will end as they should. Anderson and co-writer Roman Coppola construct a story about true love, and because that love is between two 12-year-olds, it’s not complicated, which it usually is in Anderson’s films — it’s innocent, optimistic, almost anarchic. These kids aren’t tragic lovers, though; we feel that they’re in benevolent hands.

Sam Shakusky (Jared Gilman) ditches his Khaki Scout troop to be with Suzy Bishop (Kara Hayward), who likewise runs away from home. They meet in a field and take off for the woods, pursued by various worried adults: policeman Captain Sharp (Bruce Willis), who keeps the order on the island of New Penzance; Scout Master Ward (Edward Norton); and Suzy’s parents, Walt and Linda (Bill Murray and Frances McDormand). There is some complicated love here: Captain Sharp and Linda are uneasily ending an affair. But they don’t see themselves in Sam and Suzy, which is a relief — Anderson isn’t that obvious. The adults just want the kids to be safe back home — although Sam, an orphan whose most recent foster family has decided not to invite him back, doesn’t really have a home.

Sam and Suzy are described as “disturbed children,” though they may simply be responding to their environments. Suzy’s parents are troubled (and she has three brothers to contend with); Sam’s parents are dead. Moonrise Kingdom is set in 1965, when the generation impacted by Dr. Spock had kids of their own and sought to understand them via pop psychology. As the movie presents it, though, it’s simple: Sam and Suzy are unhappy alone and happy with each other. They sit in a tent while Suzy reads aloud from various storybooks; they dance on a beach and have their first kiss. Their journey is quietly idyllic, and the young actors play the kids deadpan enough that they’re never insufferable. Anderson never oversells the beauty; his regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman provides his usual immaculate symmetrical compositions, with characters always framed dead center, surrounded by the retro tackiness of the mid-’60s.

Moonrise Kingdom works up to an apocalypse of sorts — a hurricane approaching New Penzance. Its arrival coincides with that of a lady from Social Services (Tilda Swinton), amusingly named only Social Services, who wants to put Sam in an orphanage. Social Services is this storybook’s villain, worshiping rules and bureaucracy, ready to ruin Sam’s life without even having met him. Swinton is in let’s-have-fun mode here, and the others in the cast — especially Willis and Norton — seem relieved to be a part of something with some substance, something childlike but not childish. Like Spike Jonze’ Where the Wild Things Are, the film is about kids but is not really a kids’ movie.

In the summer of big, expensive superhero flicks, Moonrise Kingdom evokes awe, wonder and the magic of escapism in a much smaller and more precious way. It does Wes Anderson good to get outside: filming around Narragansett Bay, he inhales some fresh air and gets out of the rectangular confines of his past work. If Anderson’s films have been about anything, it’s the importance of breaking out of damaging routines: unhappy adults come to a crossroads and decide a change is needed. Here, in the first scenes, we see what it might be like to grow up inside a Wes Anderson film. Like their earlier adult counterparts, the kids grow to embrace mess, feeling, life outside the manicured interiors. They also have their whole lives ahead of them, which makes this Anderson’s most honestly hopeful work yet.

Ted

Ted is a filthy-mouthed and fairly amusing farce about a little boy who wishes his talking teddy bear were really alive. Thanks to the magic of movies, the bear comes alive, and after a few minutes (thanks to the magic of movie editing) we pick up the boy, John (Mark Wahlberg), at age 35, still hanging out with Ted (voice of Seth MacFarlane). Over the years, Ted has matured, or immatured, into a fuzzy libertine who smokes copious amounts of weed and chases after various buxom, brainless women. John and Ted are inseparable, but John also has a girlfriend of four years, Lori (Mila Kunis), who’s beginning to get a little sick of Ted. She feels, probably rightly, that Ted is holding John back.

MacFarlane, whose Ted sounds a lot like Peter Griffin on his show Family Guy, also co-wrote and directed Ted, so expect a lot of pop-culture references and random gags. Some of them hit, some don’t. Fans of 1980’s Flash Gordon will appreciate that it’s John and Ted’s favorite film, and that its star, Sam J. Jones, puts in an extended cameo as a party-dude version of himself. Any movie that worships Flash Gordon (“It’s so bad,” John accurately sums up, “but so good”) can’t be all bad, though Observe and Report used the film’s “Football Theme” to far better effect. Anyway, other randomness is in store, such as a riff on Airplane’s riff on Saturday Night Fever, an appearance by Norah Jones (who must be a really good sport), and a character submitting happily to “gay beatings” at the hands of a recent superhero-film star (who must also be a good sport, or a Family Guy fan — indeed, he’s done a cameo on the show, too).

Political correctness is not in store, with a Chinese caricature as the noxious stand-out. Most of the laughs derive from Ted’s crude, blinkered viewpoint, which is fine up to the point where the film itself seems to share that viewpoint. Still, I laughed more than a few times; the script, which MacFarlane wrote with Family Guy cohorts Alec Sulkin and Wellesley Wild, keeps things moving and keeps the foul language coming. Ted is rightly rated R, and I was relieved not to see any little kids in the audience, brought by clueless parents who saw a talking teddy bear in the ads and thought they were in for a Teddy Ruxpin reboot. They would have much to explain to their kids, such as why Ted at one point uses hand lotion for purposes best not discussed in a family publication.

There’s a creepy subplot involving a weird dad (Giovanni Ribisi) who wants to take Ted home for his bratty son. The movie doesn’t really need this thread, and it leads to a car chase that reminded me of Pauline Kael’s almost visceral rejection of the car chase in Splash, which she otherwise loved. Said it before, say it again: Car chases (and gunfights) belong in action movies, not comedies, where they just stop the comic momentum dead. Ribisi is effective enough as a kind of anti-John, a case of arrested development that led to madness instead of John’s amiable loafing. But the plot thread still leads the third act into a sour place and an unconvincing change of heart from Lori. (Mila Kunis does hold her own in an otherwise blithely sexist movie, creating something relatable out of what could’ve been the Katherine-Heigl-in-Knocked Up killjoy who pulls the man-child away from childish things — and childish friends.)

Ted is painless, and not as smarmy as it seems, though I would have liked to see more of Joel McHale as Lori’s goatish boss, Matt Walsh as John’s Tom Skerritt-obsessed boss, and Bill Smitrovich as Ted’s amusingly lax boss — you have enough material with these three for Horrible Bosses 2. One impressive feat is that we never question Ted’s reality; Wahlberg plays off him naturally, and the special effects used to create him are seamless. Ted is just taken as a given, briefly a media superstar, trading quips with Johnny Carson, until, as Patrick Stewart’s narration puts it far less politely, nobody cares any more and Ted is more or less treated by everyone as nothing all that special. This is how fantasy should be done more often: not much awe or terror, just “Oh, okay, that’s sort of cool” until a shinier media fixation comes along. Ted gets that much right, at least: Ted would be hot stuff for a season, then dwindle to a curiosity, then be forgotten. Sam J. Jones might know the feeling.

Men in Black 3

Josh Brolin does a pretty damn good Tommy Lee Jones in Men in Black 3. Good thing, because the actual Tommy Lee Jones is barely in the movie, and when he is, it seems he’d rather not be. By now, Jones can do the stoic, perpetually unfazed Agent K in his sleep, and that’s more or less what he does. Brolin is a different story. Playing a younger Agent K — in July 1969, where Agent J (Will Smith) has time-jumped to prevent an alien marauder from killing K — Brolin not only brings some Jonesian dry wit to the role but suggests a fresher, more optimistic K. He alone makes MIB3 a worthier sit than the previous sequel.

Beyond that, there’s Smith doing his usual shtick as J, who you’d think would be used to extraterrestrial shenanigans after fifteen years, but who reacts to everything the same way he did in 2002 and 1997. J has somehow kept his humanity in his job, but how? How do you deal with surreal threats to Earth every day for a decade and a half and not turn into a jaded cold cod like K? The movie isn’t interested in that; it’s more concerned with its Moebius-shaped timeline, in which the alien villain (Jemaine Clement) seeks to kill K before K can implement a shield to keep the villain’s cohorts from invading Earth. J isn’t even supposed to interact with the younger K, but he’s forced to, and the movie doesn’t get into any possible catastrophic consequences that may result from J being in 1969 — or any benefits, either.

There’s an intriguing character named Griffin (Michael Stuhlbarg), who sees all possible futures. I almost wanted MIB3 to break off and become a mockumentary about him — his butterfly-effect way of seeing life as infinite branches that can point to glory or doom based on whether someone leaves a tip at a diner. That’s the problem with the MIB movies — they serve up fascinating concepts, but they all take a back seat to the same chase scenes, the same shoot-outs with space-age weapons. Make-up wizard Rick Baker reportedly built a bunch of retro-looking aliens for the 1969 scenes, not that we get to see much of them. Mostly we’re stuck with Jemaine Clement’s Boris the Animal, who growls and shoots people with spines launched from his palms. There are two of him, too — the one from 2012 and the one in 1969 — so he gets tiresome fast.

MIB3 reportedly cost $250 million, though it doesn’t look much more expensive than the earlier films. The 3D, as usual ladled onto the film after shooting ended, doesn’t help. At this point, I think I’d rather skip such post-converted 3D movies — generally you miss nothing by opting for the 2D screenings — and hold out for the ones designed for 3D and actually filmed in 3D, like the upcoming Prometheus. The script, by Etan Cohen and the uncredited David Koepp and Jeff Nathanson, tries for some emotional depth with the fatherless J looking fruitlessly to K for some caring and sharing, but once J gets together with the younger K that aspect gets lost, only to be rediscovered in a last-act twist.

By that point we want to see J and the older K reunited, and we do, briefly, but there’s no weight to it. I suppose the point — and, for some, the appeal — of these movies is that they’re weightless romps. In theory, and with the cast of eccentrics the MIB series have attracted with a big paycheck, the movies should be nutball classics. But most often what they boil down to is Will Smith getting flung around by some giant beast, or Tommy Lee Jones smacking someone repeatedly with an alien fish. If that’s what hits your funny bone, bon appetit. The hip, knowing backdrop of the films — their winking acknowledgment that what you suspect about aliens is true — is more interesting than the run-of-the-mill plots scampering around in front of it.

The Dictator

Most movie stars would die without a script; Sacha Baron Cohen may be the rare actor who works best without one. In Borat and Bruno, Baron Cohen disappeared inside offensive foreign characters and then let them loose on America, interacting with actual people and recording his findings. The Dictator is different in that it’s a scripted narrative (by Baron Cohen and three other writers) about Admiral General Hafez Aladeen (Baron Cohen), the capricious and preening ruler of the fictitious Wadiya. Through circumstances too contrived to bear repeating, Aladeen comes to America, is stripped of his signature beard, and finds himself powerless and anonymous on the streets of New York. How will this dictator, accustomed since childhood to having his every whim satisfied, adjust to life as just another immigrant shlub?

One problem is that he doesn’t really have to. The script could have gone one of two ways: either he goes the Henry Hill route and lives the rest of his life like a shnook, or he somehow bends his surroundings to his will even without the support of the state. The Dictator opts for the second way, and though it seems fresher at first glance, it allows for very little shading for the character, comic or otherwise. Aladeen is pretty much one-note throughout; so were Borat and Bruno, though the structure of their films mitigated the characters’ lack of growth — indeed, part of the fun was in watching the unpredictable reactions of real people to these unchanging, predictable characters. Baron Cohen and his writers give Aladeen some quirks but don’t do much for the supporting characters. The result is a lack of any real comic tension between Aladeen and anyone else.

Needing a way into the United Nations to switch places with his double before the double can declare Wadiya a democracy (I told you it didn’t bear repeating), Aladeen goes to work in an earthy-crunchy organic food store managed by the super-p.c. Zoey, played by a nearly unrecognizable Anna Faris with short black hair. Aladeen falls in love with her, and while the reasons for that are cleverly worked out, we mostly have to intuit that he’s pleasantly shocked by the very notion of a woman who speaks her mind (or, indeed, has one and is allowed to prove it in front of men). As for what Zoey sees in him, your guess is better than mine; she seems to bond with him while helping him deliver a baby, a script decision considerably less sexist than what Aladeen takes for granted, but still pretty sexist. Ah, gals will always go mooshy around a baby.

The Dictator cribs a lot from Borat in that both are about blinkered males who can’t help being sexist and racist — there’s no malice in it, it’s just the way they are reflexively. Borat, however, was used partly as an instrument to draw out American sexism and racism: he would say something offensive, and Americans would genuinely agree with him. There’s nothing like that here, so there’s no satirical bite to Aladeen’s worldview. He just behaves predictably indefensibly in scene after scene. The same point is made over and over. Baron Cohen performs with his usual gusto, but he’s acting in a self-made vacuum. If it were anyone else in the role, and if The Dictator weren’t riding on the audience good will left over from Borat and (to a lesser extent) Bruno, it’d be a complete flop.

Some oddball touches lift the satire a bit: the movie seems both amused and obsessed by the notion of powerful political figures renting the sexual favors of celebrities. (We know from the ads that Aladeen buys Megan Fox’s attentions, but the real joke is his wall covered with Polaroids of other stars, including a hilariously shamefaced former politician. There’s also a cameo by a fairly random star who must be a good sport, or a fan of Baron Cohen.) But by now, what looked like good dirty fun, a funhouse mirror pointed at America, has calcified into easy shtick. Baron Cohen can’t do his covert-op comedy any more — he’s too easily recognized — but he’s got to come up with something other than “guy with funny accent comes to America” if he doesn’t want Borat to be his peak. He reportedly has other things on deck, including a movie about Queen frontman Freddie Mercury, and that might be a fine vehicle for Baron Cohen’s fearlessness and high energy level. But the next time he and his coterie come up with a one-joke premise like The Dictator, they’d do well to confine it to a short film on Funny or Die — indeed, that’s how Borat, Bruno and Ali G started, in short segments on Baron Cohen’s TV show — instead of stretching it to 83 minutes.

Dark Shadows

If there’s anything remotely goth-flavored in our culture untouched by Tim Burton and Johnny Depp, just wait a while; they’ll get around to it. Their latest collaboration, Dark Shadows, checks off “vampire” on the Burton/Depp wish list, a mild disappointment for those of us who’d hoped to see them remaking London After Midnight someday. (People remake well-loved films all the time; why not remake one few living souls have ever seen?) Following the lead of its forebear, the 1966-1971 supernatural soap opera, Dark Shadows doesn’t stop at bloodsuckers; it also throws in a witch and — rather randomly, I thought, and with little explanation — a werewolf. It is not the loosey-goosey fish-out-of-water farce the ads lead you to expect, though it’s far from serious — this may be the only live-action film I can recall in which a climactic explosion is a perky magenta.

Indeed, the look of Dark Shadows is intriguing; it’s the strangest-toned mainstream film out there right now. The stock appears slightly faded, as if it were aping both the left-out-in-the-sun graininess of ’70s cinema and the wretched video quality of the old show. It all coalesces into a uniquely anti-goth palette (and the opening credits, too, are bland enough to be part of the joke). Into the tackiness of 1972 comes Barnabas Collins (Depp), cursed to vampirehood by scorned witch Angelique (Eva Green) two hundred years ago. Freed from his coffin/prison, Barnabas shows up at Collinwood Manor, now occupied by a dysfunctional family headed by disdainful matriarch Elizabeth (Michelle Pfeiffer).

Burton and screenwriter Seth Grahame-Smith (Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter) shoehorn as much melodrama and as many subplots into Dark Shadows as an hour and fifty-three minutes can hold. I suppose they’re trying to get as much of the original show into the movie as they can. Too young to have been one of the fabled kids running home from school to catch Dark Shadows on ABC, I prepared by popping in a DVD of nine “fan-favorite” episodes. After the first one, which introduced Jonathan Frid as Barnabas a year into the show’s run, my attention wandered elsewhere. You had to be there at the time, I guess. Frid played Barnabas as a melancholy romantic anti-hero, and Depp — looking like a cross between Count Orlok in Nosferatu and Conrad Veidt in The Cabinet of Dr. Caligari — follows suit; though the script makes the new Barnabas boggle his eyes at the trappings of 1972, Depp mostly stays away from easy laughs (he gets them anyway, largely with his sly inflections). He brings out the tragedy and anger of Barnabas’ situation.

Barnabas’ main antagonist is Angelique, who’s stayed around all these years to put the Collins fishing cannery out of business. I can’t quite decide if Eva Green’s scenery-gnashing performance is great or terrible or both, but whatever it is, it’s memorable. Aside from Green, this is one of the more eclectic casts in a Burton film in a while, the standout for me being Helena Bonham Carter as the live-in shrink for the troubled little David Collins. She seems to be channeling an unholy combo of Jacqueline Susann and Fran Lebowitz, with a pre-punk orange wig topping everything off. Burton certainly has found his muse.

Dark Shadows isn’t top-tier Burton, but he remains a classical director who trusts the image (some would say to the exclusion of anything else). It’s a pleasure to watch a film that isn’t over-edited, that basks in elegance. The blood, as in Burton’s Sleepy Hollow and Sweeney Todd, is bright Hammer red. The movie is more or less what you’d expect a Burton Dark Shadows to be, only with less emphasis on the purple-on-black color scheme and a lot of Super Sounds of the ’70s — including Alice Cooper as himself, performing two songs at a Collins mirrorball party — fighting Danny Elfman for dominance on the soundtrack. It turns into a bit of a mess towards the finish line, but at least it’s a fun mess, and if you’re looking to Tim Burton for narrative tidiness you must be thinking of another Tim Burton.

God Bless America

In his new black comedy God Bless America, writer-director Bobcat Goldthwait vents about some of the cultural detritus that annoys him — or, given the typical lead time for low-budget indie cinema, the stuff that annoyed him a few years ago. American Idol! Spoiled reality-show princesses! People who chat on their cell phones during a movie! People who take up two parking spaces! Fuck those people, amirite? At the risk of sounding like one of the trendoids Goldthwait despises, this is all so 2004 (at the very latest). The movie does gesture at more recent irritants like the Tea Party, but even that reaches back a few years, and the bit about the Fred Phelps-style protesters might’ve felt fresher if Kevin Smith’s Red State hadn’t scooped it. God Bless America isn’t a bad movie, but it’s a step back from the more daring material Goldthwait’s been doing, like 2009’s World’s Greatest Dad, or even his directing debut, 1992’s criminally underrated Shakes the Clown.

Joel Murray, Bill’s younger brother, is Frank, a sad sack who gets fired and learns that he may have a brain tumor. Even before that, though, Frank is fantasizing about storming into his cretinous neighbors’ apartment and blowing away their incessantly crying baby with a shotgun. He’s obviously unstable and ready to pop, and a night of channel-surfing through the various outrages on TV squeezes his mental pimple. Frank seems to fixate on a Will Hung-type contestant on an American Idol-like show as proof that America has become a nation of cruel, vapid bullies. While stalking an insufferable reality-show brat, Frank meets a teenager, Roxy (Tara Lynne Barr), who’s as disaffected as he is. For a while, Roxy might be Frank’s imaginary friend, spurring him on to a killing spree, though that possibility ends when a cop sees her in Frank’s stolen car. Too bad, because that might’ve been an interesting touch.

We spend most of our time watching Frank and Roxy platonically hanging out in between killing annoying people. The killings are presented in such a deadpan, facile manner — these two don’t murder in the heat of rage, they just coolly execute the rude — that I kept thinking it was all in Frank’s head, especially since the pair go so long without getting caught despite carrying out most of their crimes in broad daylight in a bright yellow car. How literally are we meant to take the killing spree? Sometimes Goldthwait seems to intend Frank and Roxy as avatars of his and our own disgust, particularly when he gives Frank lengthy, vituperative speeches that sound like Goldthwait talking. It’s probably cathartic as hell for Goldthwait, but a lot of the targets, as I said, are made of very stale straw.

Here’s the problem: Aside from the fact that many of Goldthwait’s pet peeves aren’t exactly up-to-the-minute — which means God Bless America is dated now and will only get more so — only someone in the foulest mood would define an entire country by passing fads and fringe idiots. I kept waiting for Frank to exhibit some icky, troubling behavior (other than killing folks, of course) that would discomfit us for enjoying his crimes. Joel Murray occasionally lets his face go dangerously slack, looking like the stone psychos we see on TV after a mass murder, but mostly Frank’s presented as a regular schmoe who goes rogue. I hate to say it, but Observe and Report was a lot more disturbing — yes, a major-studio film starring Seth Rogen was edgier than a Bobcat Goldthwait film that begins with a man daydreaming about killing an infant. That’s partly because that film was subverting what the audience expected from a Seth Rogen flick and partly because Rogen’s rage was both organic and non-specific. And I guess it isn’t Goldthwait’s fault that the unbalanced-dude-with-grrl-sidekick thing was done so recently, and better, in Kick-Ass and Super.

I don’t hold Goldthwait’s past as a funny-voiced stand-up comedian and Police Academy regular against him. I think he’s one of the most original comedy directors we’ve got. He’s done bold stuff before, and I hope he gets a chance to do it again, but God Bless America feels like a project he got the money to make from some like-minded financiers — yeah, man, stick it to those American Idol judges! (The shot at a Simon Cowell-style judge seems kind of forlorn now that the actual Cowell’s been off the show for, what, two years now?) And by the time he got behind the camera, the anger had dissipated — that’s the problem with directing your own rage-fueled script you started writing years ago; it’s hard to sustain that level of bile for so long. So we don’t feel Frank’s fury, nor are we horrified by his actions. We don’t feel much of anything, and that’s not something I ever expected to say about a Goldthwait film.

21 Jump Street

What was the appeal of the cop show 21 Jump Street to young audiences? It seemed preachy, and its subtext was that the cool, mysterious new kid in your high-school class could be an undercover cop. (The obvious answer is not to trust any new kids.) I remember the show being somewhat ironically enjoyed, much like its near-contemporary Beverly Hills 90210. Like The Mod Squad, it tried to tackle tough issues relevant to Today’s Youth, but a network television series could only tackle so hard back in the ’80s. The new 21 Jump Street movie lampoons the typical 21 Jump Street episode, with added fish-out-of-water jokes involving how much high-school culture changes in only seven years. It’s no longer considered cool to be aggressive and dismissive of passion; now everyone is sensitive and socially committed.

The movie sends inept twentysomething cops Schmidt (Jonah Hill) and Jenko (Channing Tatum) back to high school to bust up a drug ring. The narcotic all the kids are taking is some new synthetic mind-blaster that works in hilariously specific stages. This 21 Jump Street is neither pro- nor anti-drug, but mines a lot of humor from its effects, especially when Schmidt and Jenko are obliged to try the drug to prove to the school’s dealer that they’re not narcs. If there was ever an episode where Johnny Depp and Peter DeLuise had to shove their fingers down each other’s throats so they’d vomit up a drug, then failed and had to contend with a track coach whose head kept changing into animals and ice cream cones, I must’ve missed it.

The young directors Phil Lord and Chris Miller (Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs) hedge their bets entertainingly by filling the movie’s margins with ironclad comedy professionals; Rob Riggle, for instance, turns up as the aforementioned track coach, Ellie Kemper and Chris Parnell are also on the faculty, the formidable Nick Offerman appears too briefly as the cops’ deputy chief, and none other than Ice Cube is the captain of the Jump Street program. (The movie goes excessively meta for a minute or so when NWA’s “Straight Outta Compton” invades the soundtrack, ending on a shot of Ice Cube, looking as angry as he sounded on that song.) For nostalgic fans of the show, no fewer than three of its actors walk on here; sorry, but that sort of thing is what the too-serious Miami Vice film needed.

Hill and Tatum make a natural Mutt and Jeff team, and when I laughed, which was fairly often, Hill was responsible — though I became an instant fan of Tatum’s chemistry-class ode to the wonders of potassium nitrate, and Brie Larson as Hill’s romantic interest has some terrific dry line readings. The movie is perfectly pleasant, a smidgen too aware of itself (though the “why didn’t that explode?” running gag during a car chase pays off nicely) but consistently sharp; the party scene midway through is wilder and funnier than the entirety of the recent party movie Project X (which, like this film, was written by Michael Bacall — small world). It’s been getting a tad overpraised, perhaps because everyone’s surprised it isn’t completely foul; the randomness and genre-tweaking of The Other Guys hit my particular humor spot more solidly. It’s not a classic, but it’ll look just fine on cable in a couple of years, and at least it doesn’t end with a painfully earnest PSA, as some episodes of the show did. Then again, that might’ve put it over the top to genuine greatness — leave something for the DVD extras, I guess.