Refined former literature professor or rednecky old coot—is it really that tough a choice? Apparently it is for John Travolta, who plays the title character in A Love Song for Bobby Long as someone whose outsized Southern lilt is put to use both quoting the great authors and delivering an extended monologue on his boyhood quest for “puh-say.”

Travolta’s white-haired Bobby, all ratty T-shirts and decrepitude, is just one of the false notes in Bobby Long. Scarlett Johansson is another. She may be the most likable presence in this hackneyed story of family, redemption, and whatnot, but she’s never quite convincing as Pursy, an 18-year-old who, estranged from her momma and never having known her daddy, has ended up living in a Florida trailer with a guy who tries to comfort her with “Why don’t you just make us some dinner, and I’ll go rent us a porno!” Writer-director Shainee Gabel, making her feature-film debut, doesn’t even try to dirty up the typically lovely Johansson, instead outfitting Pursy in pristine tank tops and denim and keeping her skin healthily glowing despite the character’s hard living and diet of peanut butter, M&Ms, and potato chips.

Trailer-trash princess and loutish lit lover meet when Pursy’s singer-songwriter mother, Lorraine, dies unexpectedly. Pursy travels to New Orleans to claim the house that Lorraine said would be hers, but when she gets there she finds it already occupied by Bobby and a younger but equally disheveled roommate, Lawson (Gabriel Macht). Bobby and Lawson, who shared the filthy, plastic-lounge-chair-and-liquor-bottle-furnished place with Lorraine, tell Pursy that she left the property to all three of them.

Naturally, Pursy moves in anyway, with the hope of eventually forcing her roommates to leave. But as time goes on, she discovers that Bobby has a Secret. And that both Bobby and Lawson are keeping another Secret. And that Lorraine was keeping a Secret from all of them. One of these surprises is guessable, one’s obvious, and the third is a completely convoluted explanation of why Lawson, a good-looking and educated guy, is drinking his life away with Bobby, his dissipated former mentor.

Based on Ronald Everett Capps’ novel Off Magazine Street, Bobby Long is full of humid Southern atmosphere—y’know, bright, broken-down houses surrounded by prickly thickets and neighborhood gatherings full of men singing folk songs with their shirts off. Purple narration, voiced by Lawson from the book he’s writing about Bobby’s life, lays it on even thicker, with unnecessary descriptions such as “Autumn comes slowly in New Orleans” and, later, “Winter never really feels truly at home in New Orleans.” Gabel’s dialogue veers from syrupy (“She was hard to understand, but she kept the door to her heart open”) to childishly antagonistic (Pursy amends Bobby’s description of his liquid “breakfast of champions” to “champion of fuckups, maybe!”). None of it sounds terribly realistic.

Appropriately, the movie’s pace is as slow as a summer afternoon, with the pile-on of drama saved for the very end. But the most unforgivable of Gabel’s sins is Bobby himself. The character is ostensibly a broken academic, but he just seems schizophrenic: Spouting Molière, Thomas Jefferson, and George Sand all the while, Bobby is alternately gruff, wacky, soulful, and cheesy. He strikes up a conversation with a couple of kids on the bus like a mental patient, asking, “Are you having sexual intercourse with each other? Sex is nice!” and later asks Lawson, “Think we’ll still be living together in heaven?” Most incongruous of all is his big my-girl-gone-done-me-proud speech, which is more gee-whiz than great-books, hardly the eloquent finale Gabel intended.

Like that bit of dialogue, A Love Song for Bobby Long simply meanders along, wrong note after wrong note, toward a melodramatic but welcome conclusion. After two hours of trying to figure out what kind of person its main character is supposed to be, you may find that Lawson’s voice-over says it best: “Time was never a friend to Bobby Long.”

The characters in Brother to Brother also quote literature, but in this case, the experience feels truly academic. “There are thoughts that have the power to trap me,” the lead character drones in the opening scene, and for the next 90 minutes, you’ll be trapped, too—in the kind of world where it’s perfectly normal for two kids, fresh from a heated class debate on race and homophobia, to recite poems to each other on a stoop, only to be interrupted by a passing elderly gentleman who then awes them with a few verses of his own.

At this point, you’re already hoping for someone to come along and call bullshit on these poseurs, but throughout Brother to Brother you can almost hear writer-director Rodney Evans nagging, “This stuff is serious, people!” And the many, many topics that Evans’ sprawling debut tries to be about—most significantly, the unjust double bind of being a black homosexual—surely are. Problem is, Evans attacks them with all the earnestness of a college student who’s just discovered poetry slams and raging against the Man. It doesn’t help that his cast generally sinks to the level of the material: Most of the inhabitants of this insulated universe wear only two expressions: man-I’m-angry and wow-that’s-deep—though in the case of Roger Robinson’s Bruce, the elder poet, at times you also get the blanker God-I’m-old.

The angry young man at the center of it all is Perry (Anthony Mackie), a New York student and artist who likes to defend his gayness before anyone even gives him shit about it. Perry’s been disowned by his father, who caught him in bed with another boy. He spends his time painting, listening to the rhymes of his friend Marcus (Larry Gilliard Jr.), and fooling around with Jim (Alex Burns), a white classmate who fuels Perry’s ire when he comments that he loves “sweet black ass.” In school, where these kids apparently take only one class, Perry starts getting rather vocal in an ongoing discussion about civil-rights leaders, yelling at no one about how openly gay author James Baldwin was discriminated against by his own people—which kicks off a leave-your-sexuality-at-home backlash from the other students.

Jim remarks afterward that it’s weird that Perry got so aggressive, given that he’s never spoken in class before, to which Perry responds, “It’s probably because I feel like if I open my mouth, I’ll just start screaming!” You’ll understand how he feels, especially once the sage Negro poet turns up again. Perry not only happens to find the lines that Bruce recited in a library book one day, he also confirms that he’s gay Harlem Renaissance writer Richard Bruce Nugent. As the two become buds, the film jumps to black-and-white flashbacks of Bruce’s heyday, when his friendships with the likes of Wallace Thurman (Ray Ford), Langston Hughes (Daniel Sunjata), and Zora Neale Hurston (Aunjanue Ellis) resulted in the formation of the Algonquin Round Table–esque Niggeratti Manor and the publication of the groundbreaking literary magazine Fire!!

Though the episodes from the past make Brother to Brother feel even more unwieldy, they’re ultimately the most compelling parts of the film, filled with a liveliness and passion that deflate whenever Perry returns to the screen. Of course, Perry’s friendship with Bruce eventually renews them both, culminating in an oh-please development that officially brands the film as cheese. By then, you’ll wish everyone involved had just listened to Langston Hughes: “When we started this,” he says in one flashback, “we wanted to say something important. What happened to that?”

Directed by Jean-François Richet

The introduction of the about-to-retire cop in Assault on Precinct
13 is a bad sign. Actually, back up: The mid-January release of an
action flick starring Ethan Hawke and Drea de Matteo is a terrible sign.

Thing is, director Jean-François Richet doesn’t let you get your
scoff on for even a second: In an opening so abrupt you’ll likely think
it’s another trailer, Hawke—is that Hawke?—appears greasy and gaunt,
his face filling the screen as his character tweaks his way through a
historically inaccurate sales pitch about how his product is “the Niña,
Pinta, and Santa María” of drugs and that its buyers will be, um,
“Magellan.” Richet’s handheld camera then pans around a trashed living
room, showing a young woman passed out on the couch and a couple of
lowlifes beginning to look suspicious. Soon the narc’s jig is up,
resulting in a furious exchange of expletives and gunfire. A bullet
blows out the back of someone’s head. The young woman is again lying
down, this time in a pool of blood.

But then the movie flashes forward, and that AARPer shows up.

Surprisingly, it actually takes a whole lot longer for Assault on
Precinct 13 to go downhill. Until then—and perhaps even after
then—action fans sick of Oscar-baiting biopics and post-holiday dreck
should be pleased. Even if they didn’t know that this is a remake of a
1976 John Carpenter film, they’d probably have guessed that any movie
with the word “assault” in its title isn’t going to be a lighthearted
romp. (Possible exception: Assault of the Party Nerds.) Richet’s film
is funny, yes, but more important, it’s unapologetically violent.
Storywise, he and screenwriter James DeMonaco may not have borrowed a
whole lot from Carpenter—but the grisly bloodshed and slasher-worthy
body count? Check.

Whereas Carpenter’s film told of a gang seeking retaliation against
the police (and was itself a sorta-remake of Howard Hawks’ 1959 John
Wayne vehicle, Rio Bravo), DeMonaco recasts the under-siege plot to
involve cop-on-cop action. Hawke plays Jake Roenick, a Detroit sergeant
who took a desk job after his leg and sanity got screwed up in the
opening scene’s botched drug bust months earlier. Now drinking on duty,
popping pills, and apparently making no therapeutic progress with his
foxy psychiatrist, Dr. Alex Sabian (Maria Bello), Jake doesn’t care
that he’s stuck at his crappy precinct on New Year’s Eve, the last
night the station’s to be open. Stuck with him are curmudgeonly
Irishman Jasper O’Shea (Brian Dennehy), who tells the others that this
is his last night, too, and miniskirted secretary Iris (de Matteo),
whose first scene shows her on a ladder, hanging decorations and
finishing an anecdote with, “Impulsive sex is in our genes, boys!”

Jake, Jasper, and Iris, essentially babysitting the nearly
nonfunctional station, just want to get drunk. But then a busload of
prisoners, unable to travel farther in an increasingly nasty winter
storm, is instructed to crash at Precinct 13 for the night. Among
small-time felons including a dealer (John Leguizamo) and an
all-purpose hustler (Ja Rule) is notorious cop-killer Marion Bishop
(Laurence Fishburne). When a couple of masked gunmen sneak in and start
shootin’ the place up, Jake guesses that they’re there for Bishop. And,
whether perked up by the pills or spurred by Alex’s earlier taunt of
“You will never be the cop you used to be!” Jake decides to prove her
wrong.

Assault on Precinct 13 whizzes by in its first hour, fueled by
one-liners (a prisoner on the slip-slidin’ bus tells the driver, “Hey,
Ray Charles, slow this motherfucker down!”), tough-guy speeches (“We
have to put them all down. Without pause. Without regard!”), and the
tension that builds when the good guys realize that their crumbling
station is basically surrounded by people with giant guns. The holiday setting gives de Matteo and Bello an
excuse to look appealingly slutty (though why Dr. Alex changes from
boots to heels to wait for a tow truck is anybody’s guess), Fishburne’s
oily evilness makes up for his lameness in the Matrix sequels, and
Hawke is Reality Bites–grungy, even after getting a sudden case of the
morals. Jokes, hot chicks, and badasses—so far, so good.

Soon, though, the plot contrivances that seemed excusable at the
start—no cell service?—get a little harder to buy. That police stations
keep a large supply of gasoline on hand, for instance, will probably be
a revelation even to the scanner-listening set, and a last-minute
whoops-I-forgot-about-this-way-out development is
ludicrous. Worse, the violence that initially made the movie feel
gritty and shocking starts getting repetitive: Richet is awfully fond
of point-blank shootings, exit-hole spurts, and solitary trickles of
blood oozing from forehead bullet holes, and the ol’ gun-packing
Mexican standoff has been done so many times in the past decade it’s
laughable. (As is Iris’ response to stress: “I can’t stop thinking
about sex!”) More galling, however, is the illogical morality behind
the remake’s Big Twist, which hinges on one too many shifting
alliances. In the end, Assault on Precinct 13 earns its January
placement after all: It shows early promise but then falls apart like a
New Year’s resolution.

Directed by Rob Bowman

Early in Elektra, a mentor tells the
pouty kung-fu fighter, “You understand violence and pain.” Soon,
anyone who shelled out 10 bucks for this Daredevil spinoff will
understand, too. To be fair, Elektra is not as snort-inducingly
terrible as Hollywood’s last attempt at a vixenish superheroine. (Oh,
Catwoman — was it Halle Berry? The Evil Cold Cream plot? A director
named Pitof?) Instead of laughing at its badness, in fact, you’ll
more likely  follow Jennifer Garner’s lead and, well, snooze through
this most staid of comic-book adaptations. Anyone who’s seen
Daredevil (you poor, poor souls) will expect that Elektra has some
’splaining to do, considering that Garner’s character died in that
movie and is, obviously, resurrected in this one. For those of us who
remain blissfully ignorant of the Ben bomb, however, that’s one fewer
flaw to notice — but wait, there’s more. Elektra, a killing machine
with a Bambi-esque past, allegedly has a cold granite pebble for a
heart, haunted by the loss she suffered the last time she dared to
love. Yet it doesn’t take more than a thievin’ neighbor girl (Kirsten
Prout) and dinner with her hot-as-hell dad (Goran Visnjic) to
turn this assassin into an assassin with…feelings. Even after
Elektra goes girl on us, however, Garner’s demeanor remains the same:
Not taunting, not badass, definitely not ever pleased with herself –
just there. OK, so she looks good in the slinky red silks she’s
tightly wrapped in most of the time, but c’mon, even supermodels
manage to convey a little personality in their come-hither glares.
The film’s villains are dull and ridiculously named (actual line:
“Typhoid! Stone! Tattoo! Get Kinkou!”), and just like Elektra’s
whoops-she’s-alive-again encore, very few of the plot
developments are explained. I found, however, that a couple lines
of dialogue between Thievin’ Neighbor Girl and Elektra succinctly sum
things up: “I thought you were cool.” “I’m not.”

Bad Education

Directed by Pedro Almodóvar

In Good Company

Directed by Paul Weitz

Love, anger, joy, sorrow—none of these emotions can be found in Bad
Education. In this chilly film noir, the usual Pedro Almodóvar trifecta
of passion-grief-hysteria — rendered, of course, with Benjamin Moore
brightness—is nowhere to be found. Yes, there’s frequent talk of love
in this story of priestly pedophilia and prepubescent gay crushes, but
none of it is ever brought to life.

Also missing are Almodóvar’s women, though given that the Spanish
auteur’s last masterpiece, Talk to Her, was also driven by male
characters, this probably isn’t the source of the problem. More likely,
Almodóvar just got so caught up orchestrating his refracted plot that
he forgot to make the people involved in it all that human. Or maybe he
was too busy trying to fit in one more reference to a certain
cameo-loving American auteur.

In any case, thank God his star is so magnetic: Gael García Bernal,
last seen portraying the sunnier side of Che Guevara in The Motorcycle
Diaries, again proves he’s not just a pretty face by deftly handling
three roles—or, more accurately, three variations on the same
character—as the story moves back and forth between times and
realities. Though it’s impossible to describe all three personas
without giving too much away, suffice it to say that any actor who can
convincingly bring Jake Gyllenhaal to mind one minute and Juliette
Lewis the next will hold your interest even when the rest of the cast
can’t.

Bad Education begins in 1980, when Bernal is introduced as Angel, an
actor formerly known as Ignacio who 16 years ago was best buds (and a
little more) with Enrique (Fele Martínez), now a filmmaker. Angel, an
aspiring writer, brings Enrique a script titled The Visit that tells of
their experiences at a Catholic boarding school—and then jumps ahead to
imagine Enrique unhappily married and Ignacio now a tranny entertainer
called Zahara. After the fictionalized grown-ups meet again, Zahara
decides to blackmail their grade-school principal, Father Manolo
(Daniel Giménez-Cacho), who repeatedly molested Ignacio and, after once
finding the 10-year-old boys together in a bathroom stall after
bedtime, expelled Enrique to keep him from molesting Ignacio, too.

Almodóvar weaves the interactions between Enrique and Angel with the
imagined parts of Angel’s story, flashbacks to the late ’60s, and a
segment set in the late ’70s that fills in a few blanks pertaining to
the movie’s Vertigo-esque twist. This complex (though tidy) telling
manages to engage, but only because of its difficulty: The characters
are too superficial to be sympathetic in the present, and their story
isn’t convincing enough to make you care about what happened to them in
the past.

The young protagonists’ boy-boy love, for instance, is portrayed by
longing stares, a walk to the cinema, and some pretty confident (and public) mutual
masturbation. Priest-boy love—and the word “love” is actually used—is
also demonstrated by longing stares. But in this case, we also get a
shot of bushes that Ignacio runs out of following an unplugged
principal-student performance of “Moon River,” as well as a scene in
which Ignacio helps Father Manolo remove his vestments and then offers
to “do anything” to keep Enrique from being expelled. None of it is
very believable. And Zahara’s expressed desire to make Father Manolo
“pay” notwithstanding, none of it seems to have been particularly
traumatizing, either.

Though Almodóvar has exchanged his usual emotional gut-punch for
Hitchcockian intricacy, Bad Education does boast his usual visual
flair, from Zahara’s sherbet-colored outfits to Enrique’s
sunshine-bright house in the hills. Best of all, though, are the
opening credits, whose black, white, and red Saul Bass–Êlike graphics
are accompanied by Alberto Iglesias’ perfectly Bernard Herrmann–esque
score. It’s a brashly old-Hollywood touch—the type of thing that
thrillingly seems to signal that you’re about to behold not a movie,
but an event.

If only the rest of the film were the happening we’re
promised. Bad Education’s bold style and puzzle-piece story certainly
grab your attention, but they can’t conceal the movie’s fundamental
problem: If they aren’t made with a little love, even Almodóvar’s most
stylish pieces just don’t wear well.

There’s plenty of love in writer-director Paul Weitz’s In Good
Company—specifically, the back-slapping kind between a senior ad-sales
manager and the young whippersnapper who ends up taking his place.
Sure, there’s also a traditional romance here, but once the unlikely
work partners exchange heartfelt “Listen, [Blank], you’ve really helped
me [blank]” speeches after half a film’s worth of resistance, it’s
clear where the real connection has occurred.

Weitz’s two main characters initially seem dangerously close to
cliché: Dan (Dennis Quaid) is a 51-year-old glad-handing ad salesman at
Sports America magazine, which has just been taken over by Globecom, a
gigundous media conglomerate. Carter (Topher Grace) is the 26-year-old
whiz kid from Globecom who, on the basis of his shameless campaign to
market cell phones to children, is promoted into Dan’s position and
charged with increasing sales and slashing payroll. Though Dan’s
longtime colleagues end up fired, Carter, whether out of guilt or
common sense, decides to keep Dan on to serve as his “awesome wing
man.” Further complicating matters is Carter’s eventual relationship
with Alex (Scarlett Johansson), Dan’s college-age eldest daughter.

Perhaps not all that surprisingly, however, Weitz—who succeeded in
making Hugh Grant’s Peter Pan character sympathetic in About a Boy—so
thoroughly rounds out the potential caricatures that you soon forgive
his contrived setup. Both men are portrayed as simultaneously enviable
and sad: Dan’s career shakeup is made more manageable by a solid home
life, and the thrill Carter feels when he’s promoted is dampened by
loneliness when his new wife (Selma Blair) unexpectedly leaves him.
Weitz also takes care to avoid any schadenfreude inherent in the latter
situation by keeping the younger man’s cockiness in check; his terror
at entering a situation he suspects is over his head is palpable (a
deep breath and some hesitation before stepping into Sports America’s
office for the first time), if not spoken outright (“I’m scared
shitless. I have no idea what I’m doing”).

The two actors are right at home in Weitz’s well-written characters,
with Quaid lending a slight dorfiness to Dan—a man not above making a
terrible 50 Cent joke in front of his younger colleagues—and Grace
easing back on his usually snarky tone to inject genuine sincerity into
Carter’s many “awesome!”s. Side-by-side in business suits, the pair
look entirely ridiculous together until the story gently shifts their
dynamic to where, Weitz seems to argue, it should rightly be: Dan
teaching the youngster some old tricks while opening his own mind to
change.

Thematically, In Good Company is all over the place, with the
dominant ideas of the inhumanity of bottom-line thinking and the joys
of career vs. home life at times giving way to myriad father
issues—Carter never really had one, and Dan not only struggles with
letting his two teenage daughters become adults, but also learns that
there’s another baby on the way. Aside from a too-happily-ever-after
ending, though, Weitz is such a subtle juggler that all of this seems
less like overload than, well, the messiness of real life. The film’s
depiction of office politics—the murmured gossip, the building-wide
chill of a shouted closed-door meeting—is dead-on. And so, it turns
out, are its relationships, especially the ones that Carter so
desperately seeks out. You’ve gotta love that.

The Woodsman

Directed by Nicole Kassell

The Woodsman takes place in a world where few children go
unmolested. If the kids running around the schoolyard aren’t in danger
from the freshly paroled pedophile who conveniently lives across the
street, they’ll certainly be lured by the yet-to-be-caught pervert who
lurks near the playground at recess. When the aforementioned felon
falls in love, it happens to be with a woman who got “poked around” by
her brothers while growing up. And when he finally gives up on the idea
of a having a normal relationship and follows an adolescent girl into
the woods…well, turns out her daddy sometimes asks her to sit on his
lap, too.

With this pile-on of contrivances, writer-director Nicole Kassell
turns her Sundance Grand Jury Prize–nominated debut from the lean,
powerful drama it promises to be into something that could have been
brought to us by Disney Educational Productions. And dammit, Kevin
Bacon deserves better. The actor, whose last major role was as
conflicted cop Sean Devine in the similarly toned (and, to some degree,
themed) Mystic River, brings the same low-key intensity to The
Woodsman’s Walter, a convict who has spent the past 12 years in jail
for molesting girls. His boyish Footloose face now roughly lined, Bacon
again deftly hovers between bad and good, managing to make sympathetic
a character whose predilections are universally reviled.

Initially, Kassell’s rather spare storytelling helps. We don’t
actually learn any details of Walter’s crime until about a quarter of
the way into the 87-minute drama. The film opens with scenes of
Walter’s fingerprinting and mug shots; some paperwork later informs
that the prisoner is being released on supervised parole. Walter is
then shown taking steps to rebuild his life as he rents an apartment
and starts a job at a lumber yard.

Walter is quiet, polite, and slightly hesitant as he tries to start
fresh: Clearly burdened by the fact that, in many of his everyday
interactions, his history precedes him, Walter acts so gun-shy it seems
possible that he was wrongly accused. Whether listening to his new boss
(David Alan Grier) lecture that he doesn’t want any trouble or
accepting the pity visits of Carlos (Benjamin Bratt), the
brother-in-law who tries to soft-pedal his wife’s refusal to see her
brother, Walter carries himself as a melancholy outcast who wishes
desperately to just belong again. His most frequent question to
himself—as well as to his court-appointed therapist (Michael
Shannon)—is “When will I be normal?”

Despite the felonies we eventually learn Walter is indeed guilty of,
The Woodsman’s main character turns out to be the film’s only aspect
that doesn’t seem overdone. Its slight running time and
information-withholding narrative, for example, don’t result in
elegance but in too many developments that seem serendipitous and
stagy. (Walter is rarely shown in his apartment without someone
knocking at his door, for example—or, as on two occasions, without
visitors somehow waiting for him inside when he comes home.) In an
embarrassing bit of miscasting, Walter’s love interest, tough-as-nails
lumber handler Vickie, is played by Bacon’s wife, the cute-as-a-button
Kyra Sedgwick, who needs more than a bandanna and a potty mouth to seem
appropriately butched up. And a convicted sex offender managing to set
up home right across the street from a school post–ÊMegan’s Law? Please.

Kassell and co-scripter Steven Fechter, on whose play the film is
based, do attempt to explain away some of these unrealities. Walter
tells Carlos that his apartment building is the only place that would
rent to him, and a conversation that Vickie has with her new beau about
how “weird” it is that he takes the bus leads him to comment, “Not as
weird as a sharp, young, good-looking woman working in a lumber yard.”
But such ham-fisted acknowledgments don’t make it any easier to buy the
details—or, for that matter, The Woodsman’s histrionic implication that
every street corner harbors a child molester (or two).

Kassell also missteps with her directorial flourishes, including
melodramatic freezes (a child’s cartwheel, a suspicious secretary’s
glower) and odd perspectives (a couple of shots of seemingly
upside-down bus steps). The most cringe-inducing touch, however, is a
scene in which Candy (Kevin Rice), the man whom Walter has watched
hanging around the school, finally talks a boy into his car: Kassell
gives Walter a sportscasterish play-by-play to recite as the incident
takes place, imposing an inadvertently comedic tone on a scene that’s
obviously meant to be disturbing.

The Woodsman does have a couple of worthy moments, however, as
Walter faces harassment from his co-workers once they find out about
his crime (“People have a right to know,” one determined spreader of
the gossip says) and gets closer to Vickie, who tries to find out his
“deep, dark secret” and then laughs when he tells her, apparently
thinking it’s a joke. Most compelling, though, is Walter’s visible
struggle with himself: He knows that what he did is shameful, but when
he confesses his crime to Vickie and says, “It’s not what you think. I
never hurt them,” it’s apparent that he doesn’t believe his actions
were actually wrong. He seems to express disgust as he watches Candy
scope out a victim, yet he still checks out girls’ asses at the mall
and, in a chilling scene, eventually propositions a young bird-watcher
(Hannah Pilkes) in the woods. (Though the line “Are you a bird-watcher,
too?” gets another unintended laugh.)

Bacon makes Walter forever skittish as he tries to blend in wherever
he goes. On the bus, Walter’s eyes dart back and forth to potential
prey; at the mall, he follows a girl into a store but jumps and hurries
out when a clerk asks if he needs help; at work, a glance from his boss
and a finger-point from a co-worker have Walter holding his breath,
though he’s done nothing wrong and it’s actually someone else they’re
looking at. Among the rest of the cast, only Mos Def as Walter’s
keeper, Sgt. Lucas, can match the quality of Bacon’s performance.
Though his scenes are few, Def’s detective is captivating, from the
perfectly pitched disgust he shows for Walter on his visits to his
quietly delivered yet emotional monologue employing the Little Red
Riding Hood metaphor that gives the film its title.

Neither actor can save The Woodsman’s rapid and precipitous decline,
however, which bottoms out in a last chapter that is supposed to be
open-ended but is actually just abrupt. In this case, that’s merely
more evidence that difficult subject matter is no guarantee against
facile filmmaking.

Directed by Geoffrey Sax

Ouija boards are so last-century—to contact the dead these days, you
need an assload of equipment from your local Best Buy. Or so says White
Noise, the debut thriller by BBC director Geoffrey Sax, which turns on
the modern ghost hunter’s favorite “evidence”: electronic-voice
phenomena. Talkative spirits now require multiple TVs, VCRs, and
computers. One of each, apparently, just won’t do—which is handy for
White Noise’s hero, Jonathan Rivers (Michael Keaton), a successful
architect with plenty of disposable income who’s told by some weird
dude that his recently deceased wife, Anna (Chandra West), is trying to
communicate from beyond via the static in radios and televisions.
Initially skeptical, Jonathan is soon—and a little too easily—won over
when he hears a tape of Anna’s voice, after which he goes out and gets
himself, basically, a new home-theater system. Just like the
technically savvy little ghost girl responsible for the haunted
videotape in The Ring, Anna ends up not only whispering, “Jonathan, my
love!” over the airwaves, but also broadcasting some rather disturbing
visions, which—without giving too much away—prompt Jonathan to become,
well, Batman. With a script by no-name Niall Johnson and a star who is,
sadly, now as outdated as a séance, White Noise is, unsurprisingly, yet
another disappointment in the recent string of horror busts. Though Sax
shows admirable restraint in the cheap-scare department, his wan
attempts at more understated, Sixth Sense spookiness make much of the
movie a big bore. (And really, the ghostie-zipping-past-the-door thing
can be done only so often.) There are a couple of cool shots of a trio
of bad-guy wraiths who try to strong-arm Jonathan into tuning his radio
back to smooth jazz, and it is rather chilling to see Anna’s name pop
up occasionally on Jonathan’s caller ID. But when the story goes
superhero, any sense of eeriness vanishes as completely as Keaton’s
career.

Zombies, superheroes, and sex, drugs, and R&B: 2004 was a fun year
at the movies, if nowhere else. Typical Hollywood escapism? Not
exactly. The big screen was often a very serious place, too, overrun by
the furious filmic politicking that kicked off with June’s Fahrenheit
9/11—and continued all the way through this month’s too-little-too-late
WMD: Weapons of Mass Deception—and dotted with sobering fare from
Important Directors such as Mike Leigh (Vera Drake), Mike Nichols
(Closer), and Jean-Luc Godard (Notre Musique). Hell, even Kevin Smith
got reflective—if not quite fully lucid—with the daddy-daughter
meditation Jersey Girl.

But this year, the best-made films were
also the most lighthearted. And the most winning of those proved that breeziness doesn’t preclude thoughtfulness—or, for that matter, thinkiness. In fact, geeks
of all persuasions were especially rewarded: Whether your jones is
horror, comics, music, or even science, 2004 provided viewing that was
entertainingly brainy, slyly silly, or, in the case of a few
documentaries and biopics, thrillingly persuasive in the portrayal of
folks with passions just as focused as yours.

And, oh yeah, the ’70s came back, too.

For those who love being entertained but hate being pandered to,
here are the 10 best movies that showed me a good time in 2004, in
alphabetical order:

Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy Bad suits and worse hair may
be requisite when making a movie about a sexist ’70s news team, but to
leave it at that would be too easy. Will Ferrell and co-writer and
director Adam McKay loaded their movie with inspired cameos (Tim
Robbins as an Afro’d public-broadcasting anchor), bizarre one-liners
(“I want to be on you”), and the pop-cultural dregs of the decade
(“Afternoon Delight”) to ensure that this seemingly one-joke comedy
didn’t go the way of so many supersized SNL skits.

Hellboy Hellboy will grudgingly leave his nachos and TV to help out
mankind, but with worries about overtaxed muscles and a mantra of “Aw,
crap,” this slow-aging superhero has the attitude of the senior citizen
he actually is. Writer-director Guillermo del Toro and co-scripter
Peter Briggs—not to mention a surprisingly non-Beastly Ron
Perlman—bring to cantankerous life a comic-book character who’s more
depressed about his girlfriend than the sorry state of the world.

Kinsey Bill Condon’s biopic of Alfred Kinsey, author of 1948’s
Sexual Behavior in the Human Male, neither dumbs down nor sexes up the
bedroom revolutionary’s unflagging nerdiness as he interrogated
Americans about what they do to whom and how often. But that doesn’t
mean Kinsey doesn’t practice what its subject preached: Rarely has such
a high-minded script been such filthy fun.

Primer Attractive, funny, and smarter than you or I, the nerds in
Primer could easily score as often as Kinsey but are too busy
time-traveling to think about girls. First-time writer-director Shane
Carruth makes a scientific Memento whose curious garage projects and
flurries of smart talk will make you want to go back to school—or at
least see the movie again.

Ray Released just months after Ray Charles’ death, Taylor Hackford’s
biopic of the “blind ’Bama boy” who helped invent soul music is a
triumph for both its warts-and-all story line and the jaw-dropping
performance of its star, Jamie Foxx. Between Foxx’s transformation and
Charles’ rump-shakin’ repertoire, Ray could turn casual fans of the man
or his music into lifelong devotees.

Shaun of the Dead Hungover Brits fight the undead with dull cutlery
and bad records as they slowly realize that their own lives are nearly
as zombielike. Writer-director Edgar Wright and co-scripter Simon Pegg
pay homage to the Romero trilogy with a dry English spin and a fresh
social moral—neither of which rules out realistic corpses, genuine
frights, or a character’s getting his guts ripped out in graphic
old-school style.

Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow First-time writer-director
Kerry Conran’s set-free marvel may be based on ’30s movie serials, but
it resembles nothing more than a comic book come to life. Using only
computers and his imagination, Conran offers a sepia-toned and
soft-edged art-deco cityscape where both pitching zeppelins and giant
droids seem right at home. The story may not always crackle in step
with the noirish look, but you’ll be too dazzled to care.

Spider-Man 2 Another case of the superhero blues: Peter Parker
realizes that a dual life can mean double the disappointment as his
moonlighting responsibilities get the always-late Peter labeled a
screw-up and have Spidey losing his web-slinging touch. By turns
elegant, insightful, and Evil Dead–wicked, Sam Raimi’s sequel was one
of the most well-rounded movies to munch summer popcorn to.

Starsky & Hutch Ben Stiller and Owen Wilson are shaggy,
sweatered, and fuzz-fabulous as they play ’70s cops who are best
buddies—albeit the kind who serenade each other with “Don’t Give Up on
Us.” This being a more manly era, however, the duo has to remain
delightfully conflicted. Even when making up after a fight, Starsky
denies the tears that Hutch assures him are healthy: “It’s great, but
I’m not crying. I’m not a crier. I don’t cry. I work out.”

Super Size Me Director Morgan Spurlock turns his liver into “pâté”
as he eats nothing but McDonald’s for 30 days in this informative and
often funny crusade against the fast-food industry. As he considers the
roles of both personal and corporate responsibility in the country’s
obesity epidemic, Spurlock offers loads of statistics, expert opinions,
and updates on his own worsening health. Even better, while discussing
why most children equate fast food with playgrounds and treats, he
says, “That’s why, when I have kids, every time I drive by a fast-food
restaurant I’m gonna punch them in the face.”

Honorable mentions go to Baadasssss!, Dawn of the Dead, Dodgeball: A
True Underdog Story, Fade to Black, The Incredibles, Ocean’s Twelve,
Metallica: Some Kind of Monster, The SpongeBob SquarePants Movie, and
13 Going on 30, all of which also added some cinematic fun to the
year—and weren’t nearly as dumb as Catwoman.

Directed by John Moore

If you don’t want to know the outcome of Flight of the Phoenix, you
of course should avoid the 1965 will-they-make-it-out-of-the-desert?
drama starring Jimmy Stewart. And you should also, er, avoid reading
the title. John Moore’s remake of The Flight of the Phoenix may not
measure up to its predecessor with all that movie’s fancy “acting,” and
really, the virtually point-by-point reimagining by scripters Scott
Frank and—Ed Burns?!—didn’t take much imagination at all. But anyone
going into this action-adventure with fresh eyes—and low
expectations—could do a lot worse. Yes, there are bad lines (“I think a
bee stung your big dumbass head!”), highly convenient plot turns (evil
nomads who wait until the most dramatic moment to attack), and one
cheesy musical interlude (to “Hey Ya!”—hiphop that even the white
people can enjoy). We know that the majority of the passengers took
that doomed flight out of Mongolia because their oil rig was shut down,
but the movie seems less concerned about who they are than the fact
that each adds diversity: The modern cast now includes a woman (Lord of
the Rings’ Miranda Otto), two black men (Tyrese Gibson and Kirk Jones,
aka Sticky Fingaz), a Mexican (Jacob Vargas), a vaguely Middle Eastern
man (Kevork Malikyan), and a handful of white dudes (most notably
Dennis Quaid as the cocky pilot and a bleach-blond Giovanni Ribisi as
the flight’s Poindexter/Nazi). But the scene that takes the plane
bouncing through a black-orange sandstorm before it crashes is
spectacular, and the continued setbacks the gang faces while stranded
in the middle of nowhere are Saturday-matinee suspenseful. And though
Ribisi may be the only actor here who doesn’t phone it in, no worries:
His adenoidal, Hannibal-on-helium performance as the creepily needy
brains behind the group’s Hail Mary shot at survival would make the
1965 Flight crew proud.

The Life Aquatic With Steve Zissou

Directed by Wes Anderson

Vodka Lemon

Directed by Hiner Saleem

Steve Zissou is a man who’s not easy to love. The renowned
oceanographer and hack filmmaker at the center of The Life Aquatic With
Steve Zissou may have the grizzled look of an old salt, but his
attitude is more reminiscent of a sulky teenager who can dish it out
better than he can take it. Consistently gruff with his family, crew,
and strangers alike, Zissou nevertheless expects kid-glove treatment in
return, whether it’s requesting that his wife not be so matter-of-fact
when telling him how his cat just died or whining that a reporter whom
he prodded into a rage subsequently hurt his feelings.

As the journalist says later: “That’s so…effed up.”

Fans of Wes Anderson may feel the same way about the director’s
strange new flick, his fourth after the widely celebrated Bottle
Rocket, Rushmore, and The Royal Tenenbaums. Promoted as being in the
same quirky spirit as its predecessors, The Life Aquatic is a
surprise—though not exactly a pleasant one. Whereas each of Anderson’s
first three projects had a streak or two of melancholy, his latest aims
for a much deeper black. Or you at least think it does. Sometimes.

The crux of The Life Aquatic is a Moby Dick story: After Zissou
(Bill Murray) loses one of his men to a so-called jaguar shark, he sets
out to hunt down and kill the animal. (“What would be the scientific
purpose of killing it?” Zissou is asked. “Revenge,” he replies, after a
pause and a shrug.) Because his last few documentaries—projects as
laughably stilted as grade-school film strips—were failures, Zissou’s
current expedition is launched with precarious funding and diminishing
faith from his benefactors, fans, and crew. When even his wife and
business partner, Eleanor (Anjelica Huston), decides that his quest is
too crazy and returns to land, Zissou’s impending breakdown is staved
off only by his budding relationship with Ned (Owen Wilson), whom
Zissou invited to join his crew after learning that the Kentucky-bred
pilot might be his son.

If only Wilson had traded in his onscreen appearance for his usual
writing credit. After having Wilson help out with the scripts of his
first three films, Anderson co-wrote The Life Aquatic with Mr. Jealousy
screenwriter Noah Baumbach. The result is a tone that’s as uneven as
Wilson’s Southern accent, with characters whose oddness—perhaps to
offset Zissou’s cantankerousness—is forced to the point of
preciousness. Willem Dafoe plays Klaus, a thick-accented and
thin-skinned German crew member who feels hurt whenever Zissou doesn’t
pay him enough attention. Robyn Cohen’s intern, Anne-Marie Sakowitz,
walks around topless, while Cate Blanchett is a pregnant,
squeaky-voiced reporter who refuses to swear. And Brazilian musician
Seu Jorge is Pelé, the expedition’s alleged safety expert, who doesn’t
do much more than perform acoustic, Portuguese interpretations of David
Bowie songs. It’s all fitfully amusing, but the cues to laugh will
usually seem stronger than your desire to.

The look of the movie is also unrelentingly whimsical, from the red
balled beanies and matching Speedos (the full-body suits, not the teeny
blush-inducers) the crew wears to a dollhouse pan of the ship’s
unexpectedly posh rooms, which include a giant gourmet kitchen, a
library, and a spa with whirlpool and masseuse. Again, most of it
smacks of trying too hard, but to be fair, Anderson’s bits of magic
realism are lovely: Animatronic, Crayola-colored sea creatures make
regular appearances, and a nighttime scene of a beach awash with
electric jellyfish is a sight nearly intoxicating enough to explain why
these people are so devoted to the life aquatic to begin with.

But Zissou’s desperate unhappiness keeps crashing against the
movie’s orchestrated fancies. Murray’s deadpan-crank schtick initially
elicits a few chuckles, as Zissou rolls his eyes at overenthusiastic
autograph-seekers or introduces Ned with “This is probably my son.” But
his character’s bitterness and insecurity soon outweigh his sarcasm,
and Anderson and Baumbach don’t exactly have the tragicomic touch: “I
hate fathers and I never wanted to be one!” Zissou says at one point.
Later, he asks his weary crew, “Do you all not like me anymore?” In
between, pirates attack his ship, in a sequence that’s sometimes
violent, sometimes slapsticky, and completely puzzling.

The Royal Tenenbaums–ish gist of The Life Aquatic—that even a
crushing midlife crisis can be overcome by sharing your life with
others—does become more deeply felt toward the movie’s end. And for a
few moving scenes, Anderson even forgets about cramming in
idiosyncracies and lets relatable emotion take over as a poetically
directed tragedy is followed by a bittersweet success that’s witnessed
by the entire crew, elbow to elbow in a tiny pod. But it’s not nearly
enough to conjure the wistfulness of the director’s previous films—or
to overcome the quirkiness that has become less a trademark of
Anderson’s than a crutch. These days, it seems, Steve Zissou isn’t the
only man who’s not easy to love.

Vodka Lemon’s absurdities, by contrast, are so slight that they
barely register. Paris-based Kurdish director Hiner Saleem cuts his
delicate film about a post-Soviet Armenian village with lightly comic
sight gags, but more noticeable is the almost oppressive quietude.

The film’s laconic, ironic first line is “Darling, everything is
fine.” It’s spoken by widower Hamo (Romen Avinian), kneeling in the
snow at his wife’s grave and updating her on the events of the day. Of
course, everything isn’t really fine, as we soon discover. A
frantically awaited phone call—witnessed, it seems, by the entire
village—informs Hamo that his son has sent him a package from Paris.
When he treks out to the post office on a broken-down motorbike to find
only a letter, some pictures, and no money, the apparent slight breaks
the struggling Hamo’s heart—as well as those of the neighbors who have
lined up for a handout.

When Hamo goes back to the grave the next day, he shows his wife—or,
rather, her creepily etched portrait—the pictures and notes that prove
their son “is not very nice.” He wishes for a return to Communism, when
everyone seemed to be prospering. Nowadays, Hamo is forced to sell off
his possessions to survive, always taking a price much lower than he
initially fights for. And he’s not the only one in financial straits:
On Hamo’s daily trips to the cemetery, he notices Nina (Lala
Sarkissian), a widow who racks up IOUs with the bus driver and is about
to lose her job at the liquor shack that carries the movie’s titular
libation.

Christophe Pollock’s white-on-gray cinematography alone is enough to
justify the town’s love of drink. It’s hard to believe that this
unnamed village is inhabitable: There are barely any buildings to cut
the no man’s land of snow and sky, and the one local road is so
infrequently driven that travelers carry along mats to sit on should
their transportation break down or the bus not come. The Vodka Lemon,
the only retail that’s shown, is a fragile oddity, a fruit stand in the
middle of the middle of nowhere. Paying a visit is likely a more
economical way to stay warm than paying the gas bill—and much easier
than another village pastime: dragging large pieces of furniture
through the snow.

A little romance never hurts in the warmth department, either, and a
hesitant one slooowly develops between Hamo and Nina as they ride the
bus together. At first, their furtive glances seem coy; eventually,
their refusal to even say even hello to each other becomes maddeningly
inexplicable. As written by Saleem and co-scripters Lei Dinety and
Pauline Gouzenne, Nina is practically a mute, both with Hamo as well as
with her pianist-turned-hooker daughter. Though some interactions go
poetically unspoken, others—such as when Nina’s sitting with her
daughter after learning she’s about to be fired and they both start
laughing—seem too prosaic even for this setting.

Toward the end of its leisurely 90 minutes, the movie begins
bouncing randomly between its little dramas, including Hamo’s
granddaughter’s getting married off for her family’s financial gain, an
attempted murder, and Hamo’s constant attempts to sell his belongings.
Despite a magical end note and its sporadic humor, Vodka Lemon leaves
you briefly forlorn—but with none of its stories developed very deeply,
not even the melancholy will stay with you after the credits roll.