Two legs bad, four legs good, eight legs odd

Enemy

Crit

I have little to say about the film itself except that if I'd gone to the theater to see 2 films and knew that one was a Darren Aronofsky film but didn't know which one, I'd have left this one pretty confident that I'd already seen it. Which is meant as praise; just see it.

But what annoys me is that when my daughter was here last week, she was talking about wanting to do something dark next, and she has long been nagging me to write something, and dammit, if I were to write something dark for her to direct, this would have been perfect: we could have shot it in Champaign-Urbana (not quite as ugly as Ontario, but we could make do) for maybe 2 or 3 times what Scary Normal cost, depending on whether we actually wrecked a car. No, we wouldn't have been able to get Jake Gyllenhaal or that familiar voice we hear as his mother for that kind of money, and maybe we couldn't have cleared a Jonathan Richman song, and, oh, right, maybe we couldn't even have optioned a novel by a Nobel Prize winner, but dammit, I was reading and loving José Saramago before he was a Nobel laureate, and I'm really pissed at myself for not having read The Double and recognized it as Jen's next project. But to be fair, Denis Villeneuve did a pretty good job with it.

Noah

Crit

Appropriately, it was raining when I walked to the theater, and raining harder when I walked home, and it's raining harder still now. But God hasn't instructed me to do anything about it. Because let's face it, I'm not Russell Crowe. 'Cause let's also face this: that's not a biblical icon up there on the big screen; it's a movie star playing a superhero. Like many of his ilk, Noah gets his first push toward superheroism by seeing his father killed, and his next by confronting bullies and kicking way more ass than he has any right to kick.

Unlike most superheroes, he gets his decisive push from an extremely wet dream, after which he joins Greenpeace and Peta. Well, no, but his impulses do take the form of ecological and animal-rights extremism, to the point that he's certain that God's will is that his family is on the ark only to complete that extremist agenda and then grow old and die without breeding. It's hard to see his lumbering fallen-angel allies, the Watchers, helping him to oppose the Earth-raping industrialists led by Tubal-cain (Ray Winstone) without thinking of the ents vs. Saruman and Sauron and the orcs. Later Noah takes turns as noted biblical figures Abraham and Ethan Edwards.

Bottom line: the animals are more interesting than the people here. But that's not the criticism it might seem, because the animals--100% cgi--are pretty damned interesting, at least until they're all sedated.

Trailers

• Transformers: Age of Extinction--One can only hope the subtitle is not a tease.
• Earth to Echo--I don't know: maybe it was a good idea to mash up ET and The Blair Witch Project.