Action!

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Crit

Zzzzzzzzzzzz . . . huh?! What?!? Oh, right, thrill-a-minute action movie, yeah, got it. All the ingredients, but somebody must've walked heavy in the kitchen, and the cake fell. Flat.

A few giggles, mostly at familiar elements from the first one (like when storage crates in a warehouse are damaged in a Jeep chase [a vehicular chase in a warehouse? yes] and one busted open crate reveals--to us, but to none of the characters in the film--a gleaming corner of the Ark of the Covenant; or when Karen Allen's Marion delivers her first line to Indy, matching exactly, I believe, the line and intonation of her first line to him in Raiders), but mostly rote efforts (oh, they try, they try) at fun fun fun.

Two things we learn about acting limitations:

1. Cate Blanchett does in fact have one: she can't hold onto a Russian accent for an entire sentence. I think she's trying to channel Garbo's orthodox Party animal in Ninotchka, but Garbo had the advantage of having been a Russian a couple of times before (not counting the silent version of Anna Karenina)
2. Shia LaBeouf also has one: an inability to act.

Son of Rambow

Crit

OK, you know how I feel about religion in general; but a religion that forbids nonsacred music and . . . movies? What kind of stick-up-his-ass Jesus do you people envision?

So we have a young boy escaping from christofascism through secret massage of all his senses. The early scenes, before William meets bad boy Lee Carter are some of the most moving I've seen, as he turns the corners of his notebook into flipbook animation, or relishes the sounds of a water cooler or a pinecone dragged across a radiator.

Nothing's as good as that the rest of the way, but nothing's as good as that in majority of films I've ever seen. The boys' conspiracy to make a sequel to the one film William has seen is mostly pitch perfect, until things go all soggy and sentimental and predictable in the final reel. And a bonus: not only a Jonathan Richman and the Modern Lovers song, but an instrumental ("Egyptian Reggae") that you don't get to recognize by Jonathan's voice but actually have to know his oeuvre and thus get to feel really superior to the rest of the audience (except that I think I may have been the entire audience).

Trailers

• Traitor--Don Cheadle, so it's got that going for it, but I see nothing special otherwise.
• Australia--Baz Luhrmann directing Nicole Kidman and Hugh Jackman in something clearly meant to be magical. We'll see.
• Bigger, Stronger, Faster*--Director Chris Bell is clearly trying to be Morgan Spurlock in this documentary about steroids in sports. Maybe.