I suppose there’s some virtue in showing revolting acts as revolting, and if nothing else, Eli Roth nails that segment of his tragically overreaching statement on globalization, the HOSTEL diptych. As Roth depicts it, torture is dehumanizing and sadistic, as well it should be. What’s more, his crassness keeps him from taking the easy way out, really challenging—insofar as such a film can—notions of deserved violence. Because the entitled hero-victims of HOSTEL are the ugliest Americans (and one Icelander) imaginable, laughing off any cultural experience and even throwing their weight around at a club—“I’m an American, I have rights!”—Roth gives us decidedly unsympathetic protagonists and then tortures them. The position is clear. Even these guys don’t deserve what’s coming (not that they’re warlords or something, either). There’s a parallel in HOSTEL: PART II where the torturer is trying to extract information from her victim. It shouldn’t work, as studies show, but it does, and not out of irresponsibility. It works to show the extreme: even if torture were efficacious, is it worth it?

There’s been some discussion lately about challenging yourself to sit through certain films like SALO or IRREVERSIBLE. It seems to me that lately the horror supergenre has been held rapt not by terror of what’s to come or horror of what just happened but revulsion. Torture-porn, a term that fits the subgenre like an overly starched hand-me-down suit jacket it wouldn’t be caught dead wearing, isn’t about scaring you but revolting you, which is its own kind of endurance test but one that, for me, lacks the fun of anticipating a good scare. Like the B-movies I rail against, it’s mired in self-seriousness with nothing to counterbalance. It’s 100-proof melancholy. HOSTEL always struck me as something that would mostly have my stomach in knots for a couple hours, so when I say I finally watched them, I mean I rented the DVD for HOSTEL in the full sunlight of noon and watched HOSTEL: PART II sanitized for my protection on Syfy. It’s not much different from covering your eyes through the grossest parts and having your parents cover your eyes during the full frontal. Personally, I’ll take it. When are they airing WOLF CREEK?

The grand guignol style weakens whatever topicality Roth is going for, because the obvious response is “CIA torture would look nothing like that.” But as horror, the HOSTEL films cleverly refute the afterschool morality of HALLOWEEN or the ‘80s slasher flicks. Innocence is no shield; only street smarts and a lot of luck can save you here, in—forgive me—a post-9/11 world. But there is hope, if only barely, and that’s a crucial distinction from the films of Michael Haneke or THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT. The problem is what that hope represents. Because as near as I can tell, the primary point of HOSTEL isn’t to let a bunch of gorehounds dream up creative ways to autopsy living humans. The HOSTEL films are revenge fantasies. Whatever nonsense Roth says about blowback for America’s foreign misadventures, HOSTEL gives our protagonist every comical opportunity to get even with his tormentors, and by that point, who isn’t cheering him on? Run over those prostitutes or they’ll just lure more unsuspecting kids into the torture factory! Slit that guy’s throat or he’ll strike again! Catharsis doesn’t come from surviving. It comes from killing the bad guys. Are we still talking about geopolitics, Eli?

DEMONLOVER has a few years and tons of style on the HOSTEL films, successfully navigating this labyrinthine (how long until I can use Assayasesque?) multinational corporate infrastructure that treats human beings like toys all through the haze of a good drug trip. Perhaps unsurprisingly, I found HOSTEL: PART II much stronger than its predecessor, even with Derek Richardson’s wrenching performance, though both are tonally flat, blunt exaggerations whose cinematic style seems to rely entirely on drawing parallels, for instance, between an Amsterdam brothel and the torture factory (and a train, so . . . who knows what Eli Roth was trying to say with that). PART II follows in DEMONLOVER’s footsteps, fleshing out the inhumanity of its capitalist enterprise and illustrating the impossibility of toppling such a powerful organization. A bunch of rich white guys bid on victims, a scene with all the rhythm and release of masturbation, not really caring that all this money they’re spending eviscerates—literally—actual human lives. The message is that everything is a game to the superwealthy, not least the running of the world, because they will always be insulated from real life as the rest of us experience it. Both DEMONLOVER and HOSTEL: PART II are vertically integrated, but Assayas intellectualizes while Roth physicalizes. There’s a bold image at the end of the first HOSTEL of blood splattering across a crowd of bystanders. Provocation is HOSTEL’s greatest success, but the series’ impact is achieved with concision in a single frame: the grisly photo of Libyan dictator Muammar Gadhafi that greeted so many of us when we woke up Thursday morning.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for  the AV Club, the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Because no shocked and giddy souls on Youtube have documentation of the decades-long abandonment of this segment of western civilization but plenty are shooting the eruption, selection bias utterly obliterates our sympathies. Which is a persuasive argument for the first hour of APES, a nonstop subway ride of boredom as we fly mechanically from Oscar nominee James Franco’s tired cardboard performance art to Best Picture star Freida Pinto’s pretty prettiness to John Lithgow’s best attempts to transcend Hollywood Illnessland. We don’t need any of that, most of which is origin story exposition required to bridge every gap from 2011 Tottenham to whenever Charlton established an NRA chapter in PLANET OF THE APES because we couldn’t possibly leave a little mystery or wonder in there. What we absolutely need—what is vital to this film’s faith in a mass demographic to demand its rights and win—is the systematic oppression of an animal much smarter than its society realizes. Maybe it’s cheap to give our hero fur, consolidating our sympathies with that sad, little creature, but Andy Serkis’ performance is the most nuanced characterization in the film, and what’s really sad—and sly—about Rupert Wyatt’s democratic B-flick is that our compassion isn’t as strong for the abused furless primates among us.

It’s frustrating that even a movie called RISE OF THE PLANET OF THE APES about apes who, through sheer force of superintelligent will, sprout enough of an alveolar ridge to speak English is struggling somewhat to please its respectable financiers instead of going all-out campy B-movie, but at least we get that gorgeous, fluid final sequence capping a film riddled with plot holes. Wyatt loves giving us (and his gymnastic heroes) aerial views of gorgeous San Francisco, so we have a firm understanding of the geography of the bay area just in time for the finale, and the rest delivers exactly what the trailer promised by way of showing us all of the major beats. You can’t entirely blame the marketing, since the film delivers as much uprising as HARRY POTTER features the Deathly Hallows, but Wyatt’s restraint does his action no favors, and his politics are too simple and idealistic to resonate much beyond a basic grating against suppression. What he does have is a promising visual clarity. That shot where Caesar draws the chalk outline of his attic window on his cell is one of the most moving images of the year, respectful and compassionate, in a film that cheers its apes on to violent revolution as long as it isn’t too violent for the comfortably done-up guardians of the status quo. It could have used more rising, frankly, but then how would they make sequels?

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

There are three instances of life-saving compassion in this overextended mess, which according to Strunk and White qualifies as a theme. Too bad the only one that penetrated my black heart was Hermione saving the poor, abused dragon (presumably put down by authorities for approaching humans for food in Hyde Park shortly thereafter), though, to be fair, I could not understand what was going on when Narcissa Malfoy asked Harry about Draco’s well-being, so maybe that would have hit me, too. Either way, it seems the essential act of the film, Harry’s maturation, and this whole Jesus thing is Harry risking his life to save Draco, but as soon as he does, we’re off to the next scene like there’s a war going on or something. No gravity, no weight. Dumbledore’s not-just-fallibility-but-literally-insane-arrogance is also glossed over. Instead Yates emphasizes, well, nothing, if all those offscreen deaths of wasted-for-the-last-time British actors are any indication. Everything in the film is equally rushed, including Dumbledore in Wizard Heaven and Snape’s Memories of Inelegant Exposition, however hard those pieces struggle to earn our emotions. When plot is the entire point, pacing this fast not only elides theme but prevents us from marveling at the spectacular architecture of Rowling’s story, the better to disguise its perfunctory capstones. It also brings us to murky/idiotic plot points chained to Rowling’s skeleton: Voldemort makes such a big deal of Elder Wand protocol, determining that Snape killed Dumbledore for the wand and so he needs to kill Snape, and then he leaves it to his snake? Clearly someone’s having trouble landing this thing.

What Yates does well is direct action, which is a relief since this whole thing is action, despite inexplicable pauses in battle (readers will remember that the reason the Death Eaters let the good guys recoup overnight is that there was a fleeting half-off groupon to the Tim Burton exhibit at LACMA). The fortification sequence, as our heroes man every corner of the wall surrounding Helm’s Deep, is one memorable visual after another, each an illustration of how powerfully united yet overextended they are. Yates’ fluid camerawork establishes geography throughout the melee, which alone makes this the most coherent blockbuster of the year—pull quote!—and his chess board climax where all the pieces must get into place at the same moment approaches symphony. Ron and Hermione shrink to make room for all the returning faces so that even our second leads end up with as little to do as Robbie “Oh Yeah” Coltrane, but Maggie Smith finally gets a scene worthy of her casting. Neville also gets an awfully big moment (or two) for someone whose relevance to the films so far is putting Alan Rickman in an old lady suit, but at least fans grok his significance, and Matthew Lewis makes a dashing young hero. Besides, it’s not Yates’ fault that Neville hasn’t been properly established. This isn’t even a whole film.

P.S. After ten years of dorky Brits ejaculating at each other through their sticks, bad age makeup is what provokes the laughter of the self-conscious masses? Nice to know where we’re drawing that line. The Albus Severus sentimentality deserves an eye-roll and nobody seems too concerned that prejudice has swung the other way, but what has this decade been about if not little kids pretending to be grown-ups?

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

ERIC WHEELER: Hello! And welcome to the first installment of what we hope will become a long-lasting and beloved niche in the bowels of The Film Talk website: Contributor Crosstalk. The obvious idea here is that we ‘below the line’ talent (to use an industry phrase) clang our heads together and see what movies have been giving us pleasure, pain or ‘other.’ Ever the deadline daredevils, we hatched a plan many weeks ago to do a Quarterly Review of the first three months of this film-going year. Needless to say, we blew it. But perhaps waiting until mid-May* to reflect on the diamonds and detritus of January, February and March 2011 will pay unexpected dividends. We’ll be dividing the films we’ve seen into the Good, the Bad and the Weird**. And since the bulk of the year lies before us like a cruel, shimmering mirage we’ll also tackle our Most Anticipated and Most Dreaded of Two Oceans Eleven (to quote noted movie lover, Doug Benson). So let me throw it over to you, Brandon. What’s been good, bad or weird for you so far?

BRANDON NOWALK: I’m not sure we’re on the same page: There were good films in the first quarter of 2011? I kid—sort of. But the best films of 2011 for me are the 2010 releases I’m finally getting to see here in muggy, surprisingly out-of-the-way Houston (fourth biggest city in America, seventy-second quickest to get new releases). By far the highlight is Abbas Kiarostami’s CERTIFIED COPY, for me the best film of 2010 and the season’s saving grace. It helps that in preparation I spent a fair amount of January catching up with Kiarostami’s work since 1987’s WHERE IS THE FRIEND’S HOME and spent at least as much time kicking myself for not getting to him sooner as his particular way with postmodernism eerily coincides with my interests. The other great film was by another international auteur I studied up on for the first time this year, Manoel de Oliveira’s ECCENTRICITIES OF A BLONDE-HAIRED GIRL. Because apparently I can’t be satisfied without homework.

But I’ve reviewed those already. What I haven’t mentioned is Kyle Smith’s TURKEY BOWL, an OLD JOY-style reunion between friends drifting apart post-college, pre-marriage that’s currently playing the festival circuit, and is the best film of 2011 proper (so far). It’s only 64 minutes long, and I had no idea how its hooks had stuck in me with its effortless feel and sidestepping of indie cliche until the credits rolled. Beyond that, there’s Mike Leigh’s ANOTHER YEAR, most of RANGO, the last three-quarters of Aaron Katz’s COLD WEATHER, and the final scene of I AM LOVE, but now the well’s dry. Have you seen CERTIFIED COPY yet, Eric? What are your favorites from the first quarter?

ERIC: You raise an interesting ontological question, Brandon. If I see a film for the first time in 2011, does the film belong to the year in which I see it in an American theater or the year in which in was made? There are tremendous films that either sit on the shelf or struggle to find distribution for years – such as the absolutely extraordinary LOVE EXPOSURE, but that’s for another discussion. There are also films that we hear about and read about for months as they play the festival circuit, but only catch up to many months, or possibly years, later. Living in Los Angeles, I’m fortunate enough to catch a number of works at either the height of the hype machine (such as the heinously underrated I’M STILL HERE) or, somewhat bizarrely, months before their proper release, in a tiny independent theater like the Laemmle 5 (such as CAVE OF FORGOTTEN DREAMS).

BRANDON: First off, I’m dying to see NOSTALGIA FOR THE LIGHT! Glad to hear you hold it in such esteem. Personally I consider a film’s year to be when it opens to the public anywhere. So neither my 2010 foreign films nor my 2011 festival flick technically qualify, but otherwise my cinematic pleasures of early 2011 were limited to hacked off pieces of films, like the surrealism of RANGO or the pecs of THE EAGLE.

As for The Bad, I’ve got a doozy: I’m convinced BATTLE: LOS ANGELES is the worst film I’ve ever seen, since most of its competitors for that crown have the unfair advantage of nostalgic childhood viewing. Like Jett and Gareth I see why this threadbare quilt of cliches is such a touchstone: America attacked, unified in a time of petty divisions. Unlike them, I don’t see how that absolves its breathtaking boredom and weepy nationalism of sin. I’d rather watch a friend play Call of Duty for several days or workshop my one-man play DOG TAGS AND CAMO: THE STAR-SPANGLED FETISH than revisit that anti-spectacle.

Early 2011 has seen a lot of bad films, most of which (COUNTRY STRONG, THE MECHANIC, and especially THE EAGLE) have something to recommend them, and some of which (ANIMAL KINGDOM) have gotten strong reviews anyway, presumably by virtue of intoxicating accents. It’s a nice reminder that even bad films have some good in them, and some good doesn’t mean a film’s not bad.

ERIC: While I am professionally obligated to take offense at some of your ‘worst’ selections (THE MECHANIC?! How could you???), I can empathize. I was spared COUNTRY STRONG, though it’s interesting to see you slagging off ANIMAL KINGDOM. I haven’t seen it yet. Maybe I shouldn’t bother?

BRANDON: ANIMAL KINGDOM was a cheap shot, but suffice it to say it’s another of these deathly serious crime flicks that pretends to profundity through sheer force of gravitas. I firmly believe self-seriousness is the greatest threat to cinema today; lifeless pretension is killing our B-movies. THE MECHANIC might not have made my list if it were a bit less brooding and a bit more fun.

As for what I’m looking forward to, you can count out all the comic movies except X-MEN, and even that I’ll be watching through my fingers. What I’m really dying for are last year’s Cannes superstar UNCLE BOONMEE, this year’s Cannes superstar THE TREE OF LIFE, and Kelly Reichardt’s MEEK’S CUTOFF. I’m seeing MEEK’S next week, and TREE the week after, but Thor only knows when BOONMEE will get a DVD release.

I don’t know that I’m actively dreading anything because I don’t have to see anything I don’t want to over summer, but I can say I’m decidedly not on the JJ Abrams bandwagon. I’m sure SUPER 8 will be fine, but the Internet is so in the bag my mildness might as well be dread. After all, you either think a film is the greatest thing ever or you hate it. There is no such thing as middle ground.

Now before we go, you’ve got to tell me your pick for The Weird! I’m on tenterhooks over here.

ERIC: Well, I can’t imagine I’ll see a more compellingly weird movie in theaters this year than DRIVE ANGRY SHOT IN 3D. It’s not a great, or even a particularly well-made, film but it’s something I won’t be forgetting anytime soon. Brandon, what freaked you out in the best way possible?

BRANDON: By far my weirdest filmgoing experience of early 2011 was being the only person in a pitch-black theater (no house-lights, no slideshow, nothing) until the trailers started for JUSTIN BIEBER: NEVER SAY NEVER. When those finally ended, we got a bizarre, inexplicable short film climaxing with the notice (warning?) that our 3-D glasses have now been Bieberized. And then I spent two hours with more provocative material, accidental or not, than any other mainstream flick all year. But maybe that’s just because I never saw DRIVE ANGRY 3-D.

It was never my favorite season for cinephilia, but it was certainly an interesting few months, and all those terrible films taught me a valuable lesson: No amount of rote studio pictures or indulgence indies can kill The Movies. Not as long as genuine visionaries are hard at work on their next exhibition, the strangest films are being harvested from the organs of Little Red Riding Hood and Justin Bieber, and Nicolas Cage is making his fortune back with whatever straight-faced lunacy will have him. Come what may, I believe in Nicolas Cage.

ERIC: I, too, believe in Nicolas Cage.

*Although published in mid-June, this conversation took place (through the miracle of Google-Mail) in the dead heat of May.

** This is of course referencing the recent, Sergio Leone-inspired Korean western-action-comedy, THE GOOD, THE BAD AND THE WEIRD.

I guess X-MEN: FIRST CLASS was set in the ‘60s to better reflect Matthew Vaughn’s thoughtless patriarchal identification, because it damn sure wasn’t about civil rights, the Cold War, liberation, or the Holocaust, weighty abstracts whittled into icons, the better for Vaughn to pretend his film has some deep, world-historical meaning instead of actually doing the work of investing his social commentary, or his doomsday scenario, or his gay allegory, or his coming of age with genuine depth. The story thrills—Magneto hunting Nazis, Xavier assembling a team, our heroes saving the world—but the screenplay is a bag of bones, going from civilian to superhero with the whoosh of a montage, racing from scene to scene so we don’t think about it too hard, and pivoting on several sudden betrayals by those sneaky racial minorities, a black wasp hooker and a blue-skinned, naked chameleon (which I think is taking pride a little too far). What’s more, the reversals are prompted by dialogue that couldn’t convince you January Jones has boobs, not that you could possibly miss the twin subjects of this adolescent fantasy, protesting its feminism while objectifying every curve in sight.

Professor X himself could not determine why Matthew Vaughn made a film about the X-Men set in the ‘60s, outside of the all-too-rare bits of reimagining, like casting the Hellfire Club as a Sinatra-style Vegas powerhouse and dropping Moira MacTaggert into the CIA. Sure we get Charles’ groovy come-ons, such frenetic globe-trotting that even Olivier Assayas was like, “Wait, where are we?” and enough cleavage to keep the world from nuclear war for a little while longer, but otherwise, like with everything else, there is no motivation. January Jones is famous for playing dress-up in the ‘60s, but her Emma Frost looks like she’s about to present an MTV Movie Award; how did that bare rack get through the ‘50s without some serious HUAC investigation? The kids are left auditioning for THE SECRET LIFE OF THE AMERICAN TEENAGER, especially our hopelessly modern rebel without a cause Lucas Till, who has the shoulders of a life-sentence and the macho posturing of a gay bar. Since you brought it up, the gay allegory is everywhere—young Beast wants a cure, don’t ask don’t tell, gay people should out themselves, they fight for a country that hates them, mutants can’t resist a good techno beat—but only because it’s inescapable, X-Men and the 1960s overlapping at this lovely B&B called Civil Rights. Too bad it’s just referenced over and over rather than explicated, because this is the whitest, straightest, malest cast of superheroes since the last Congressional Halloween party. Instead of exploring the allegory, we get a whole lot of well-meaning reminders that we should all be ourselves, which is pretty good for a last-minute cake made with moldy ingredients the film forgot to use. Even the Cuban Missile Crisis is just an excuse for our characters to collide, the backdrop to the real drama, which has nothing to do with faceless hegemons fighting for global domination. The period is more than just pointless. It’s the biggest waste of potential since Havok put on a shirt.

Instead, Vaughn creatively develops this fantastical comicky universe, a brave embrace of the ridiculous that yields deep-roster mutants, colorful costumes, cartoonish photographs, goofy superpower-speak (“I’ll use my sonic scream as SONAR!”), a propulsive score, HARRY POTTER-style effects, BUFFY/TEEN WOLF character designs, a SCOTT PILGRIM villain reject, Kevin Bacon as the world’s foremost expert in mustache-twirling, and a Raimi-by-way-of-Leone shot from the inside of someone’s mouth. You’d think the setting would have demanded some comic-inflected, early Godard color-blocking, but there’s usually enough splashy pulpitude to keep from gagging on the angsty DAWSON’S CREEK interludes. But the airy fantasy only goes so far, and the cheese turns to camp when Vaughn’s going for goosebumps, as in the final shot with a midsentence pause so long I watched THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO trailer on my iPhone and still had some time left. Meanwhile the pseudoscience grounding stumbles into questions it can’t answer, like why the Mohs hardenss scale fails Emma Frost, how mutants can defy the laws of physics above and beyond their superpowers, and why Mystique is almost 30 and dating a teenager. Worst of all, the cheapo effects distract the one time they really need to resonate, a surprise, wannabe heart-rending death sequence that’s just too hokey to land. Like so many grasps at gravitas—mercifully outnumbered by all the whiz-bang fun—Vaughn falls short; even the effects are undeveloped.

The kids are perfunctory, the gay allegory directionless, the danger neutered by history, but X-MEN: FIRST CLASS isn’t about the first class, though I admire how believably scared and useless they are in their first fight scene, and it’s not about all the topical red herrings trotted out by a script that’s at once on the nose and empty (“Darwin’s dead, Charles!”). Brimming with winky continuity references that would be fun—the first 5,000, anyway—if they didn’t condemn this reboot to the dead-end of “I’m the Juggernaut, bitch,” X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is about being a prequel. If I were turned into a blue, furry beast, I would unleash some unprintables on the woman who tells me that’s who I am inside, but because he was destined for that anyway, Nicholas Hoult’s Beast doesn’t need much convincing. Betrayals are inevitable in this film because certain villains have to end up on the other side in order to show up on cue for Bryan Singer’s films.

For all the film’s jiggling parts, the crux lies in the struggle between Charles’ good, MLK Samaritanism and Erik’s Malcolm X mutant supremacy, which for all the actors’ charisma—and I’m speaking as much of the perennially overshadowed James McAvoy as I am of everyone’s favorite actor Michael Fassbender—is just slightly more developed than the rest. The give-and-take consists of the heroes repeating their philosophies, not arguing for them, so we nonviolent resistance types see nothing more than a stacked deck in Magneto’s favor: first he gets this extended mercenary plot that for all the bloodshed treats him like he’s just some charming bad boy, then the film goes out of its way to validate Magneto by entering conspiracyland and altering history, and when we finally get an action beat that tests the Charles/Erik dynamic, the best my hero can do is put up the loaded Good German defense. This is what the fifty-year franchise is all about, being the better man at the end of all things, forgiving your oppressors, compassion proving your worth, and Professor X can but shrug? Of course. Because one way or another, Magneto has to end up on the other side. X-MEN: FIRST CLASS is not an ULTIMATE-style reboot with the freedom to discover the characters for themselves. It’s an origin story nobody asked for, Rube Goldberg fatalism delivering each of its pieces into place as they yammer on about how liberated they are.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

It isn’t simply that I like DEAD MAN’S CHEST better than CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL, that my sui generis brain chemistry arbitrarily prefers squid-pirates to skeletal specters and sexy rogues to straight-laced do-gooders, thought that’s certainly true. But, despite a few extra pounds that should have been a warning sign, DEAD MAN’S CHEST is also the stronger film, a classical, swashbuckling tragedy across the Disney fantasyland where wood looks plasticky and water chlorinated. CURSE OF THE BLACK PEARL is a terrific children’s entertainment, the best film adaptation of you and your friends playing pirate that ever existed, but DEAD MAN’S CHEST boasts fewer “Try wearing a corset” clunkers, more boundary-pushing action thrills, and CGI that would make James Cameron drool if he were biologically human.

We should have known by 2006 what a dextrous director Gore Verbinski is, sidestepping the trenches that sink so many sequels: he’s happy with just one villain—and no wonder, as Bill Nighy’s depressive Davy Jones reveals how flat Ian McShane’s Blackbeard would be in EPISODE IV: A NEW FILM—he expands the universe without overextending—in fact, the film’s major movements isolate the six or eight main characters in sharp opposition to the Peter Jackson formula—Orlando Bloom is exactly as sleepy as he was in the original, and best of all, Verbinski keeps things light no matter how dark the subject matter. And rest assured, where its predecessor saw landlubbers Will and Elizabeth dipping a toe in the moral gray, DEAD MAN’S CHEST is positively Machiavellian. No wonder, considering it’s a Dungeons/Dragons, Tolkienesque game of actors chasing relics across a map played out by Ahab obsessives with nothing to lose. Our heroes are wanted by the British government and confused about the bonds between them, Norrington’s a drunken mercenary, Bootstrap Bill is condemned to eternal slavery, and Davy Jones is a man enduring the hell of outliving his beloved. The stakes aren’t mere profit and plunder, a slice of a hand, a temporary marooning. They’re life and death, and it feels like it, as when the Kraken retreats for a moment and the survivors wander in a haze around the ship turned graveyard. What comes next is even more chilling, as Elizabeth chases The Prince way past the point of no return—with a half-hearted Spockian “needs of the many” rationalization—and Verbinski slows to a crawl to force us to confront the consequences.

Of course, none of this classical tragedy stuffing would have a whit of resonance if DEAD MAN’S CHEST didn’t hold up as a summer action blockbuster inspired by adventure pulp for kids. Though we spend way too long getting the band back together, the first act (featuring Jack’s escape from natives and Elizabeth’s TWELFTH NIGHT phase) is fairly inextricable from the meat in ways that Captain Jack’s London adventures that open ON STRANGER TIDES are not, and at least DEAD MAN’S CHEST knows how to end once the action’s over. The climax is awesomely silly and surprisingly coherent, with Jack, Will, and Norrington swordfighting on a giant hamster wheel rolling across a gorgeous jungle as Elizabeth, Rosencrantz, and Guildenstern hold off the sea creature-pirates with one sword between them. Speaking of Davy Jones’ army, where the original cops out by only revealing its magic under moonlight, not that we don’t notice some pixely moments anyway, DEAD MAN’S CHEST climaxes in full sunlight on the Island of Dr. Moreau, and the oceanic monsters mostly live up to the promise of Davy Jones’ hypnotic tentacles. The Kraken even looks passable, and Verbinski breaks out the bullet-time to illustrate how close the franchise was to being devoured by the Caribbean Sarlacc pit. Thank Johnny Depp’s Agent, it survived.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

While the PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN franchise started with a fun, fresh take on a notoriously stale brand of box office poison, eight years and two directors later, the plastic surgery is finally catching up to it. Like the unintended consequences of a genie’s wish, the children’s adventure serial has achieved immortality at the cost of its integrity, which I don’t mean spiritually—this whole shebang is based on a roller coaster, after all—so much as physically: ON STRANGER TIDES is an unnaturally sagging, surgically distended mess. But beneath the aging collagen flab and melting silicone balloons is a fun next episode, and unlike most of today’s unfocused blockbusters, at least ON STRANGER TIDES tries to have a point beyond keeping its studio in the black.

You have to dig for the treasure, of course, which means somehow managing to stay awake throughout the endless reintroduction—something like five hours of catch-up while we politely wait for someone to remember this film is about the Fountain of Youth, not whatever Jack Sparrow and trusty sidekick Mr. Gibbs were up to since we saw them last—and the epilogue—yet another sequence that lets us know Jack is always climbing out of one hole and into another—and all the boring backstory between Jack and Penelope Cruz as his doppelganger. Memo to the writers of PIRATES V: NOBODY GIVES A SHIP ABOUT JACK SPARROW’S CHARACTER GROWTH! We come entirely for the kitsch: the campy take on pirate as swishy swashbuckler and accidental hero, the lush colonial tropics, the incorporation of seafaring iconography (here fulfilled by mermaids, peg-legs, voodoo, a ship in a bottle, Blackbeard, and the Fountain of Youth), the detailed art design that breaks free of pixel restraints and feels like a stroll through Adventureland, and preposterous action setpieces to rival the best adventure pulp. And, if there’s time, maybe some honest-to-goodness artistic influences, like Melville or Haggard. Say what you will about his point-and-click shooting and his sloppy action and his boring name (Team Gore!), Rob Marshall knows his way around kitsch. Cut off the fat, about a third of the film (and another third is people stabbing daggers into wood for emphasis), and ON STRANGER TIDES delivers a pretty fun little pirate tale.

The traces of Melville I spotted seem now like a sun-stroke mirage, but ON STRANGER TIDES unmistakably spins its quest for immortality into a classic take on redemption that extends naturally from the ongoing saga of a criminal and umbrellas nicely over every character in the film, from Ian McShane’s sadistic Blackbeard to Sam Claflin’s principled missionary, who keeps up a lively debate about selflessness throughout the picture. What’s more, the climax settles the plot and the theme with a classic bit of wisdom from Jack Sparrow, and, along with a fair amount of environmentalism and small-l libertarianism, ON STRANGER TIDES delivers this durable, if not new, belief in the capacity of everyone to renounce selfishness. It’s not Vaclav Havel’s oratory on global transcendentalism, but it’s something, and a beautiful, evergreen something, a current that works with the pulp elements to buoy this unwieldy ship from the black depths of the sea to somewhere closer to the middle.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said and recently joined Twitter @bnowalk. His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.

Episode 175 – Review of  the brilliantly light and lovely MIDNIGHT IN PARIS; how THE HANGOVER 2 could have been saved and brief thoughts on KUNG-FU PANDA 2 and PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN 4: ON STRANGER TIDES.

Running time: 42 minutes and 26 seconds – 40.8mb

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Most of the time, I’m quite content with my indie and foreign film diet. But every now again, I crave the high-calorie, high-fat content of an EVENT film. These are the films for which you soak up the production diaries; buy tickets for in advance; stay up late for the midnight premiere; pack yourself into the crowded theater; and let the collective laughter, screams, oohs and ahs wash over you like a leaf on a wave. As such, I don’t expect a great deal from the film itself. It doesn’t have to be brilliant, thought-provoking, well-acted, or well-written. All the film really needs to do is to be fun, entertaining and not overly-long.

Does TRON: LEGACY pass these three simple criteria? Read on to find out.

Disney’s TRON: LEGACY is a direct sequel to the 1982 cult film TRON. In the original, a hacker named Flynn (played by Jeff Bridges in both films) gets trapped in a video game and must fight to survive. In LEGACY, Flynn has been missing for 20 years, and his son (the heir to his father’s billion-dollar company) twiddles his thumbs while the board of directors run the company with proprietary greed. The company heavies guffaw about such evil concepts as free software, open source, and creative commons. This is especially ironic considering Disney’s long history of copyright-extension lobbying, aggressive intellectual property lawsuits, and vice-like grip on media. I can’t wait for the inevitable mashups followed by Disney cease-and-desist letters followed by more mashups.

As you can probably guess, Flynn’s son also gets sucked into the game world. There, he finds his long-lost father and a perfect likeness of the young Flynn in master controller program Clu. You have to give the writers a little credit for the imaginative idea of a young Jeff Bridges. But the effect is achieved by computer animation, and sadly, it’s just unrealistic enough to be distracting.

Son of Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) is thrown into the thick of it via obligatory disc-throwing and light-motorcycle games. He is rescued by the beautiful-and-mysterious Quorra (Olivia Wilde) who takes him to his father. We learn that each person’s disc is their personal-stats, code, soul, everything and that elder Flynn’s disc is highly desired by Clu. Why? I can’t remember. But trust me, something bad will happen. (Cough, MacGuffin, cough.)

So, is it fun, entertaining, and not overly-long? I am sad to report: sort-of, mildly, and no. The film IS fun and entertaining in parts; but it’s also drab, boring, self-important, impenetrable, and WAY too long. Near the end, my expectations coalesced into the single hope that it would end soon so I could go home and sleep.

TRON: LEGACY is loyal to the original in many ways. For instance, the original TRON suffered from a headache-inducing color-palate-squashing that was hard to watch for long periods of time. Not to be outdone, TRON: LEGACY pays headache-inducing homage by way of an unnecessary 3D process that was hard to watch for long periods of time. A money grubbing exec was asked in the film what was different in version 11 and 12 of their flagship software. “We put a 12 on it,” was his reply. What’s the difference between the 2D and 3D version of TRON: LEGACY? They put a 3D on it (and also reduced the brightness and sharpness and tacked on a $6 surcharge). If you can see the 2D version, by all means do.

Aside from the length, my main beef with TRON: LEGACY is the utter unoriginality of the story. Yes, the “young Jeff Bridges” was an original idea that failed in execution; but that’s the only original idea in the whole movie. I get the sense that the writers read too much Joseph Campbell and promptly stole every sci-fi trope in the book, using the justification of the generic nature of the mono-myth. To me, it’s just sloppy writing full of fist-shaking villains, predictable double-crossings, sacred item searchings, and more cliched lines than you can throw a disc at.

The writers also mined for pop-culture material outside the world of Tron, most notably by exploiting Jeff Bridges’ “The Dude” drug persona. Flynn is very much a “Space-Dude,” and I wonder if Jeff Bridges kept a laminated copy of his check close at hand every time he was forced to spout some corny hippie catchphrase. Each of these self-referential pieces of wit took me completely out of the story.

The real highlight for me was the stunning Olivia Wilde, perhaps the most beautiful person I have ever laid eyes on. I had a hard time telling if her stiff delivery was part of her character’s persona or her acting limitations. She hasn’t been given much of a chance to shine in this or her other major film, YEAR ONE — yet still, she was the most engaging part of either film. Time will tell if she has what it takes to be one of the greats. I’m certainly gunning for her.

If you’re a die-hard fan of the original, you’ll probably enjoy LEGACY enough to see it in the theater. Otherwise, I recommend you wait for home video and role-play the master-controller by using the all-powerful fast forward button.

Tony Youngblood is the current Foursquare Mayor of the Belcourt Theatre in Nashville, TN, a film and music snob, and producer of the experimental improv music blog and podcast Theatre Intangible. His favorite films include Eric Rohmer’s The Green Ray, Abbass Kiarostami’s The Wind Will Carry Us, Ingmar Bergman’s The Magician, Lee Chang Dong’s Oasis, and Rob Reiner’s This Is Spinal Tap.

I’m not going to inspire any fainting spells by saying HARRY POTTER AND THE PRISONER OF AZKABAN is the best film in the franchise. I might when I say that the other six are barely watchable. Why is the Alfonso Cuarón entry so much better? Glad you asked.

It starts with the source material. JK Rowling’s artistic command peaks in the lean, mean PRISONER OF AZKABAN (the third book, in which an escaped murderer is after Harry), before entropy drives the series to senility and beyond: GOBLET OF FIRE is equally elegant but infinitely longer, ORDER OF THE PHOENIX is an ambitious mess, HALF-BLOOD PRINCE is bipolar, and DEATHLY HALLOWS ties together all the loose ends into one obnoxious friendship bracelet.

But narrative isn’t everything. What Cuarón does with it is. In AZKABAN he builds a fantastical universe of colorful characters (Aunt Marge, Stan Shunpike), comical details (the ravenous textbook, the seasonal changes), and an overarching spell of doom (complete with overcast weather). With his playful eye and expressionistic style, Cuarón has made not just a great Harry Potter adaptation but a genuinely unified film.

It’s all about Harry’s haunting—the Halloween iconography, the Macbeth song, the motifs of time and prophecy, the gliding shots, the dark mystery. Everyone is a threat to us, or so it seems, not least the good guys, and something about being an escaped murderer whose victims left behind body parts makes Sirius Black a more palpable danger than the ethereal zap-master Voldemort. AZKABAN demands several new characters, but for the first and last time in the series, everyone has a substantial part to play, from Emma Thompson’s batty prophecy prof to David Thewlis’ ragged, suspicious defense teacher, which is to say AZKABAN has exactly as many characters as it needs. This is not a film where they pay Michael Gambon to play dead or shoot Miranda Richardson strictly for B-roll footage, and Cuarón certainly doesn’t waste the series’ most interesting character and greatest performance in the hilarious Alan Rickman, who can’t even sit in the background without stealing the scene.

Similarly, every element of the mystery is introduced in the first act, often in innocuous ways. By the same token, what we learn in class actually helps us crack the case for the last time in the series, which would be less odd if the series weren’t set at a school, revolving around the school year. This is also Harry’s last unadulterated victory—is there a more exhilarating moment in the series than when he rushes out of the grove shouting, “Expecto Patronum!”—since, for the last time, the good guys win, the bad guys lose, and nobody dies. And still AZKABAN is more morally complicated than the later films which swarm with villains, all of whom are black-to-the-core, autocratic racial purists who couldn’t even spell “nuance” if it were a brand of eyeliner at Hot Topic.

I’ve heard the complaints.  The show-don’t-tell camp wanted something more like the DEATHLY HALLOWS animation than the Chamber of Exposition we get, and the three-act anal-retents started dry-heaving as soon as they could make out the double-climax.  Sorry, but the only rule in art is to be true to yourself, and this ghostly film clearly befits a snake-eating-its-tail structure.

The Harry Potter franchise is not without its cinematic joys.  David Yates mesmerizes with his bleeding of the wizarding world into muggle Britain, Christopher Columbus successfully constructed a kid-friendly fairy tale, and Mike Newell fearlessly plunged the series into the black. It’s just that Cuarón did all these things and better, and in just over two hours.

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Brandon Nowalk writes about film and television for the Maroon Weekly in College Station, TX and at his blog But What She Said.  His favorite films beyond the usual suspects include Henry King’s The Gunfighter, Alain Resnais’ Last Year at Marienbad, Orson Welles’ The Trial, Jan Nemec’s Diamonds of the Night, and David Lynch’s Inland Empire.