Swann's ticket stub

• Mr. Magorium's Wonder Emporium (11/18, Post 14)--An earnest effort to be both magical and fatalist, but the magic just isn't there.
• Lions for Lambs (11/10, Crit)--The reviews were universally negative, but I went just to tell Bob I love him, and I do, dammit--but any more like this will put my love to the test. What a dismal waste of talent and good intentions.
• Beowulf (11/18, Post 14)--Tries to be all things to all people, and it succeeds pretty well in each of the attempts: it's a mostly faithful adaptation of the Old English epic; it's a fairly sophisticated psychocultural treatise on truth, motive, and mythmaking; it's a terrific special-effects actioner (I saw the 3D version, of course); it's pretty good softcore porn. But somehow it adds up to less than the sum of its parts. A big chunk of my misgivings, I think, stem from the image- and motion-capture technology: it's neither fish nor fowl, and it lacks the life of either photography or honest animation. For all that, a laudably ambitious effort.
• Dan in Real Life (10/20, NoHa)--Occasionally I'll go to a sneak preview because I'm afraid that the reviews will be so bad that I won't want to go then. The reviews I saw of this later were actually pretty generous; that's 'cause I didn't write 'em. This is cynical by-the-demographics filmmaking at its worst. Ugh.
• Canvas (11/14, Crit)--What does it mean that I have to look up a film I saw barely two months ago? Partly that it's a lame, generic title, I guess. Harden is, as always, great, and Pantoliano finally gets an opportunity to be both sympathetic and complex, and he wears it well. But the writing is ordinary, and the stars are kind of hung out to dry.
• The 11th Hour (8/31, Crit)--A good year for angrymaking documentaries, this one environmental. The problem will all of these, of course, is that no one who needs to see 'em does.
• This Is England (9/1, IFC)--A surprising film about skinhead cultures, plural, in the Falklands War era, with a good old-fashioned but unclichéd battle between good and evil for an innocent soul. Probably not top-ten material, but not far off.
• Quiet City (9/1, IFC)--Note to self: mumblecore may not be the best choice for the end of an M4. Actually, I rather intended following this 8:05 film with a 10-something Hannah Takes the Stairs, but instead I came home and put that mumblecore in the Nf queue. As for QC, perfectly OK, but no Funny Ha Ha by a long shot.
• Sunshine (8/11, Crit)--Talk about your lame generic titles. Owes a lot to 2001: A Space Odyssey and maybe even more to Solaris, but several light years short of either.
• The Darjeeling Limited (10/12, Crit)--God help me, I loves Wes Anderson. Wonderfully logic-defying film about a family so cartoonishly dysfunction you can't help but believe it.
• Harry Potter and Whatever the Rest of the Title Was This Year (7/15, Crit)--Gee, I don't know: I remember liking it. I think something very bad happened, then something very good. Or maybe I have it backward.
• Gypsy Caravan (7/7, Crit)--Of the many music documentaries I saw this year, this may be my favorite: Gypsies from four countries and five cultures brought together to tour as a troupe in the U.S. Moving and musical--the hell else do you need?
• Paprika (7/6, Crit)--Fucking trippy Japanese animation--not sure whether I'd have liked it even more stoned, or whether that would have simply painted the mushroom. Plot? Get outta here w/ your jive-ass narrative requirements!