They are precious in His sight

Citizen Ruth

(1996)

Anybody got another nominee for "best abortion comedy ever"?

I've said it before, and I'll say it again: Alexander Payne really doesn't like people much. Which may be why I own all of his features so far--but given that that's just four in a dozen years now, that's not much of an accomplishment.

The beauty of this, his first, is that my team is depicted as just as ugly and conniving as the antichoicers, and yet there's scarcely a moment that strikes me as false--a testament to Payne, writing partner Jim Taylor, and the entire cast, from Laura Dern, in what may be the most courageous role in a career hardly marked by timidity, to how'd-the-first-time-filmmaker-get-'em Burt Reynolds, Tippi Hedren, and Diane Ladd.

But while we're on the subject of choice, did you catch the recent Planned Parenthood poll that showed that in 18 battleground states almost a quarter of pro-choice women voters believe John McCain to be pro-choice? If you think that sucks rocks as much as I do, you might want to make sure people you know know the truth.

Tasty pie, grainy ice cream

My Blueberry Nights

Crit

A mixed bag--the usually Kar Wai Wong gauzy beautiful look; a fine score from Ry Cooder and a soundtrack including, of course, the star, Norah Jones, as well as Cassandra Wilson singling Neil Young and channeling Nina Simone; and uniformly excellent acting, including the newbie Jones.

The story, though, is laboriously literate, like one of those New Yorker stories that's elegantly written but that you can't remember anything about 24 hours later (except that some of this writing is embarrassingly inelegant). It's sort of an offhand picaresque, as if Wong decided (sensibly) that a story so thin couldn't stay in the Bronx but needed some Memphis and Nevada casino locations to make us think something is happening.

Worth seeing, if only for the scene in which Natalie Portman's poker player on a losing streak makes Jones's waitress Elizabeth an offer she can't refuse, and Elizabeth chews on the offer and her sandwich simultaneously. It's the closest the film ever comes to making us believe that these are real people, not just characters.

Mother of Exiles

Drama behind the drama: as of Wednesday I knew this would be opening in Madison, but as you know, I need a car to get there, and it's not car-rental time for a while. It didn't seem likely to open in the burbplexes, and indeed Thursday I was able to confirm that suspicion. But what about the Cine--and why no Cine listings yet as of Thursday? Finally, and happily, the listings showed up yesterday. And so I start the day on the D13 bus . . .

The Visitor

Cine

A gem, another quiet gem from Thomas McCarthy, who gave us The Station Agent in 2004 and who--who knew?--was that familiar face at the start of Baby Mama who flees a first date in a cab when the dinner talk turns to procreation. Turns out I've seen him in more than a half-dozen movies, including some of my favorites from recent years, but I don't remember anything he's done in front of the camera; the stuff he writes and directs, though, sticks.

It figures that a guy who wasn't afraid to give the first lead role to 4-foot-5 Peter Dinklage wouldn't hesitate to do the same for 60-year-old Richard Jenkins, aka the Man with the Craggiest Face in the Biz. "Who the hell is Richard Jenkins?" you ask? Trust me: you'll know him when you see him. Let's see--going back 20+ years, he's the doctor who tells the Woody Allen that he's not dying in Hannah and Her Sisters; fast-forward a decade or so and he's the shrink sick of hearing the Ben Stiller character whine about his lost love in There's Something About Mary; perhaps the closest he's been to famous is as the paterfamilias of a funeral home family who gets killed in the first few minutes of Six Feet Under but still manages to give the series some of its most indelible moment of its five-year run.

Anyway, McCarthy is 2 for 2 in his gambles, and now the follow-up question for Jenkins, as it unfortunately remains with Dinklage, is: Will anyone else ever give him more than 15 worthwhile minutes on screen?

But I digress. This film skates close to the edge of the kneejerk-liberal-proselytizing hole in the America-as-haven-for-immigrants ice, but balance is another gift McCarthy has demonstrated in his two-film writing/directorial career. As with Agent, he does it in part through flawless casting--Haaz Sleiman and newcomer Danai Gurira, both beautiful as the young couple of "illegals," Tariq from Syria and Zainab from Senegal, whom Walter (Jenkins) finds in his apartment, and Hiam Abbass, beyond beautiful as Tariq's protective (and rightly so, it turns out) mother. It is a story that so invests you in the characters that you're constantly rooting for a way to avoid the inevitable end.

Another reason to like the film: Walter is rarely without a glass of red wine at hand, even when eating his breakfast cereal. Another reason to like Tom McCarthy: he thanks seemingly everyone from The Station Agent, including My Future Wife Patty Clarkson and my friend and former upstairs neighbor Stephen Trask. One film every three or four years isn't much output, but if McCarthy can nail it like this every time, I'm happy to wait.

OK, so I'm out of there at about 2:30, with 2 hours before I need to be at Showcase North Haven for my next flick. And it's a beautiful day--about 5 hours of which I've already committed to being in a dark room. So what the hell--it's only a couple of miles--why not walk?

Uh, the answer to that question would be "Because you've never walked it before, you've bused it only once, and you didn't really pay any attention then--in short, because you don't fucking know where you're going! An hour and three quarters--and two against-the-masculine-grain requests for directions--I finally arrive at NoHa, footsore (I figure I probably turned that 2 miles into 5) and sweaty, and declaring myself deserving of a Ben & Jerry's Chocolate Chip and Cookie Dough milkshake. Eh--gotta walk about 6 miles a week from Sunday for the Connecticut Food Bank Walk Against Hunger (including the walks to and from the Walk), so call it training.

Harold and Kumar Escape from Guantanamo Bay

NoHa

Hey, we got a theme: America's treatment of the teeming masses, even when the representatives of those teeming masses have been here for a generation or more. And in its way--its way incorporating lots of drugs, pubic hair, and Neil Patrick Harris--this is just as serious a treatment of the issue as is The Visitor. It is a sweet-spirited grossout movie, often a very funny one, and sometimes an irresistible one. It is also subversively patriotic, and its depiction of our beloved commander in chief is certainly the most sympathetic in any of the several films I've seen that touch on the war or terror. OK, the sympathy is largely a function of his sharing his really dynamite weed w/ our boys, but still.

But seriously: what was the deal with that threesome in the audience who sat in the front row, one guy sitting between the one woman and the other guy in monsignorial drag? They laughed a lot--though not at the "God's vagina" line from the Pineapple Express trailer; I was looking--but the dude's threads looked so real--and remember: I used to serve Mass for a monsignor.

The Forbidden Kingdom

NoHa

Who the hell is Michael Angarano, and why does anybody think he needs to be in a movie with Jackie Chan and Jet Li? I wonder what sorts of transformations this story went through en route to become what it is--a hundred-minute adrenaline rush occasionally slogged down by the obligatory romance between the South Boston kid and the Chinese ingenue-turned-assassin by the massacre of her family and village.

Gorgeous Chinese locations, fantastic fight choreography (including one between the stars, who of course must have a brief initial period of antagonism to justify same). Probably most satisfactorily viewed after spending some time with Harold & Kumar, or maybe scoring some of that Pineapple Express.

Trailers

In addition to the following, also saw a red-screen version of the Hamlet 2 trailer--a mildly amusing bit from Ms. Shue about her casting-couch history, plus Amy Poehler saying "The so-called Supreme Court can suck my balls." Just noticed a disturbing pair of numbers: 129 IMDb raters give this flick an average of 5.3 out of 10. Tom compare current films, that's better than Prom Night but worse than 88 Minutes. I cling to the principle that people are idiots.

• The Dark Knight--Have I already previewed this? Well, all that needs to be said is: 5.
• My Best Friend's Girl--Like the song, skeptical about the film. Isn't Jason Biggs's 15 minutes up? Not to mention the inexplicable Dane Cook.
• Meet Dave--This is probably gonna be awful, but hope springs eternal that Eddie Murphy will rise again.
• Tropic Thunder--Desperately want this to be good, but have to report that the trailer is not promising.

Claws retracted

The Curse of the Cat People

(1944)

Wow!

I wouldn't want to go on record as saying this is a really good film, but it certainly one of the best I've ever seen in at least three categories: (1) genuinely weird sequels to genuinely weird and excellent films (in this case, the 1942 Cat People--and if you've seen only the dreadful 1982 remake, whose chief virtue, aside from Bowie's title song, was to teach us that, against all logic, Nastassja Kinski could look bad naked, forget about that and rent the original, which will give you the sequel as lagniappe); (2) completely mistitled films (though let's face it: The Redemption of the Cat People probably wouldn't have sold many tickets); and (3) pointed exemplars of world-class horrible parenting.

Like the original, this was produced by Val Lewton, and it has his signature creepy tone, but unlike the Jacques Tourneur-directed original, in this one, the creepiness is entirely a misdirection play; you'll never encounter a more benign filmic supernatural creature than Simone Simon here, not even Max von Sydow in The Greatest Story Ever Told. If unique is your thing, you owe it to yourself to see this one.

Difficult labor

Baby Mama

Crit

OK, look, if you really want to know what excited me at the movie theater today, jump straight to the second trailer. As for this, well, it's perfectly inoffensive (OK, they refer a couple of times to a woman's "taint," but come on--we're all adults here, aren't we?), and it tries really, really hard to make you love it, but . . .

I dunno--as pretty much a non-TV watcher, I really wanted to like Tina Fey based on stuff I've read about her, but she just seems undecided about whether she wants us to think she's sexy or hilarious, and thus is neither. Somebody tell her she can be both if she plays it right (cf. early Katharine Hepburn, or even Goldie Hawn, fer chrissakes!).

The woman who really grabs me here, of course, is Maura Tierney, in a microscopic role as the Fey character's sister. Has she had a starring role Scotland, PA? And speaking of things with Shakespeare debts, . . .

Trailers

• Mamma Mia!--No, not this one. Look, I'm hardly homophobic, and I owned Abba's Gold on vinyl, but I can't say I'm much interested, though the cast--Streep, Firth, Brosnan, and Big Love daughter Amanda Seyfried, among others--makes it a possibility. But seriously, how can it stir much emotion compared with . . .
• Hamlet 2--Oh, hell, yes! Darling of Sundance, got its distribution deal there, stars Steve Coogan, the funniest or second-funniest man in the U.K., and Catherine Keener, reintroducing Elisabeth Shue as Elisabeth Shue, plus Melonie Diaz, who is sometimes confused with Rosario Dawson--and it's Hamlet, fer chrissakes! Well, sort of.

Local

The Station Agent

(2003)

This may be the countermetaphor film of the decade: all the central imagery is about trains, which move on a predetermined course and take you exactly where you expect to go--sorta like a lot of movies. But contrary to the insistent shots of narrow, unbending tracks, this film takes its pleasure in the ride, with the occasional side trip and no obvious destination. Which is not to say that it doesn't know where it's going; just to say that the terminal station doesn't show up on your timetable--the film ends in midconversation, on a mildly funny joke. And perfectly, in case my enthusiasm is not clear.

But let's talk about Peter Dinklage. Do we shrug our shoulders and say he (as well as we) is lucky to have gotten one lead role at 4-foot-5, or do we say, look--was it that hard to give him some work where his character's stature was not the only thing that matters about him? Gee, maybe his turn as "Diminutive Private eye Mongo 'The Magnificent'" in the upcoming Affair of Sorcerers will be a breakthrough. Or not.

Hanging out

Forgetting Sarah Marshall

Crit

Judd Apatow is just a producer here, but his fingerprints are all over it: guy humiliation, mostly merited, redeemed by moral and emotional rebirth and a really hot babe (Mila Kunis, not the vanilla Kristen Bell in the title role). It's the cinematic equivalent of eating a whole bag of Cheetos at a sitting: most of the time you're having a ball, occasionally you give some thought to more responsible caloric intakes you might be pursuing, and afterward you think, "OK, well, I did that again." But don't get me wrong: I love Cheetos, and the nutritional information on the back of the bag does, after all, say "Serving size: the whole damn bag." Plus, the movie doesn't leave your fingers all orange, though whether that's a plus or a minus is perhaps debatable.

Trailers

Forgot to do these yesterday, so first, those:

• My Blueberry Nights--Reviews haven't been promising, but hey, Norah Jones, eh? I'll go if it comes downtown--excuse me: if it comes to the nabes.

• Standard Operating Procedure--Oh, hell yes, maybe even if it weren't Errol Morris. See the New Yorker excerpt of Morris's book on Abu Ghraib, cowritten with Philip Gourevitch, for a preview.

• American Teen--Hard to tell from the trailer whether it's a documentary, a parody, or a heartfelt drama. IMDb says the first, but I'm not altogether sure I believe it. Anyway, I'm 3, pending further information.

And then today:

• Pineapple Express--With Freaks & Geeks costar Jason Segel waiting on deck as the star in the feature attraction, we got a rare red-screen, R-rated trailer (yeah, we hear the F-word from Nora Dunn, but I think maybe it was the likening of the bouquet of the titular variety of cannabis to the aroma of God's vagina that tipped the scales) for the reunion of F&G's Seth Rogen and James Franco. Could be as stupid as a heavy-duty consumer of the product, but then again, I laughed as if I were that consumer, so my mind is open.
• Wanted--Way lame title for an actioner in which Angelina Jolie and Morgan Freeman make a reluctant hero out of James McAvoy. Terence Stamp's in it too--anybody wanna bet he plays a good guy?

L'homme erroné (plus ou moins)

Ascenseur pour l'échafaud (Elevator to the gallows)

(1958)

Formula for the perfect noir: love-stupid sap murders girlfriend's wife, manages to be arrested for a murder he didn't commit, but can't employ his alibi because it would implicate him in the one he's guilty of. Add a score by Miles Davis and world-class pouting by Jeanne Moreau, and you're set. Four years ago I'd never heard of this; now it's probably my favorite noir that doesn't star Bogart.

Bats both

Every baseball manager knows the value of alternating lefties and righties in the batting order, and given that my batting order seems always to tilt heavily to the left--especially the documentaries--I thought it would be useful to give a look to Ben Stein's movie. I'd been curious about it since I first heard about it, 'cause my understanding was that, righty though he may be, Stein's not an idiot. So . . .

Oh, but wait: is anyone out there familiar with the word nabe, as in neighborhood theater (usually used in the plural, with the)? It was in Friday's Times crossword puzzle--as 1-Across--and since 1-Down was something like "certain rental arrangements" and was supposed to be "net leases," I didn't know but what maybe the initial was supposed to be s. Well, now I know--so today I made a trip to the multinabes:

Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?

and

Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed

Crit

These films share the strategy of most documentaries since the rise of Michael Moore: the naïf (or buffoon, in the case of Moore and Morgan Spurlock in search of Truth, aided by lots of audiovisual aids that are only tenuously related to that quest. What's different is that Spurlock's a/v aids range from amusing to hilarious (an animated Osama dancing to M. C. Hammer's "Can't Touch This"), while Stein's range from tediously obvious to infinitely tediously obvious. There may be just as much straw in the men Spurlock constructs as in those Stein builds, but at least he makes us smile. Or me, anyway.

Which is a tough thing to unravel: did I hate Expelled because I hate everything it stands for, or did I hate it because it's uncinematic, dishonest, and relentlessly unamusing? And do those adjectives themselves reflect anything more than my political perspective?

Well, I don't know: it seems to me fair to say that Stein oversteps just a tad by blaming Darwin for Hitler, but maybe that's just me. And it seems as if he wants to have his intellectual freedom and eat it too when he excoriates Darwinists for being uniformly atheistic but claims that support for "Intelligent Design" is purely scientific, independent of religious belief. (Never mind that ID's claim not to concern itself with religious belief is absurd on the face of it: design requires a designer, and regardless of whether you call that designer God or the Prime Mover or Murray, positing its existence looks, walks, and quacks like a devout duck.)

Look, I agree with Stein on this point (though he fails ever to articulate it thus): we shouldn't be afraid of any idea, no matter how ill it fits with our own own intellectual frames. The marketplace of ideas is healthy enough to ensure that smart ideas will prevail and goofy ones will die out in a fair fight. So bring on the loonies, I say. But let's be honest about what we're talking about. We're talking about bringing God into the scientific academy; and he (or she!) should have to earn tenure just like everybody else. And frankly, while the existing record of publication includes some fine poetry, it doesn't impress me with its intellectual rigor.

One thing I'll say for the flick: it opens with a damn fine instrumental (like, chamber trio, maybe) version of "All Along the Watchtower" (the watchtower in question being on the metaphorically central Berlin Wall--see, the nasty old scientific community has erected a pernicious wall against unconventional ideas). I managed to miss the name of the group in the end credits, even though I was looking for it, but it's worth sneaking in for the opening if there's something else at the multiplex you actually want to see.

Like the Spurlock flick, e.g. Not a great movie, but great concept (making the world safe for his baby-to-be), and great personality. Spurlock is well on his way to being Michael Moore for people who have gotten to the point where they just can't stand Michael Moore anymore. Musical highlight of this one is one the end credits: to sum up Spurlock's unabashed naïveté, we get Elvis Costello's heartbreaking rendition of Nick Lowe's "What's So Funny ('Bout Peace, Love, and Understanding)?" And come to think of it, what is?

The rose goes in the front, big guy

Bull Durham

(1988)

Funny thing happened when I first saw this. Lots of people had told me how much I'd love it, but I found it merely OK, nothing great. Then not long afterward, I saw Kevin Costner's second baseball film, Field of Dreams, and I found it beautifully poetic, one for the ages.

How to explain this pair of wrongheaded responses? Well, I could blame it on the back pain and rehabilitation that occupied virtually all of 1988 and much of 1989, but I have instead adopted the pair of films as exemplars of a much simpler principle, the Where My Head Was That Day principle. Clearly, when I first saw Field of Dreams--and I'll grant that the back situation had something to do with it, because I can remember, almost two decades later, that this was one of the first times I felt ready to sit through a movie at the theater again (and I remember what theater it was: the long-since-defunct Thunderbird, in Urbana, Ill.)--my mind and heart were wide open to the sort of cliché-ridden, sentimental slop that I was horrified to discover characterized the film when I saw it again a few years later. And for some reason, the first time I saw Bull Durham, there must have been a lockdown somewhere that prevented me for appreciating its nearly perfect portrait of the myth and reality of God's Game--and as unenthusiastic as I was the first time, it's lucky I gave it another chance a few years ago. But since I did, it has become one of my annuals, tied loosely to March or April--spring training or early in the season. And it has never again failed to have its way with me.

So I've tried to keep the WMHWTD principle ever since, particularly when I disagree with the assessment of a film by someone whose opinion I ordinarily respect. Clearly, that person's head was just in a funny place when she or he saw the film.

What style, what class

The American Astronaut

(2001)

First time I saw this I was staying at my wife's apartment in Brooklyn, taking care of her cats while she went to the Austin Film Festival. Now the cats are dead, the wife's an ex, but the film remains one of my favorites of the millennium--or, as my daughter calls it, one of the weirdest films I've ever loved. (I also learned on that trip that I could go to movies and concerts [Jonathan Richman] in Manhattan on my own, and I've made good use of that discovery since. But it's still sad about the cats and the wife.)

As the title suggests, it's science fiction, and the special-effects budget must have approached three figures. It's also a western, and a musical, and a chase movie, and a buddy flick, and a sexual-confusion pic, and there's a very nice kitty in it. Bottom line: if you don't love this, then there's really no point in your trusting anything I say about anything.

Sweet and sour

La dolce vita (1960)

Crit

This is not a film that I would have thought especially needs the big screen, but this is the first time I've seen it big and the first time I've appreciated how magical it is before it turns terrible and then horrible. Coincidènza?

Pitch-perfect performances by Marcello Mastroianni, as an underachieving, bored, depressed, philandering, empty journalist; Yvonne Furneaux as his understandably loony fiancée; Anouk Aimée as his true love, if true love were possible; Anita Ekberg as the pneumatic Swedish (or American--we're told both) movie star whom he loves and loses early on (as does the audience); Alain Cuny as his tragic role model; and Walter Santesso as the freelance photographer whose name, Paparazzo, was soon after applied to the breed.

Also full of indelible images, from the opening helicopter-toted statue of Jesus to the flock of balloons following the clown/trumpeter from the cabaret floor to the staring eye of a manta ray dragged ashore at the hungover conclusion. As near to perfection as a plotless film can be.

Radix malorum

The Italian Job

(2003)

Hey, wait a minute: didn't I just see a heist film w/ Job in the title and Jason Stratham in the cast? And guess what, campers? Coming next year, The Brazilian Job, reuniting Croker's Five. Let's see: sequel to remake of sixties heist film: sounds like three Mini Coopers full of gold bricks to me.

As for this one: fun & forgettable. Kinda makes me think I oughta check out the original. Thanks for the loan, LT. (Yes, it's true: Lawrence Taylor is a close personal friend, and we routinely swap DVDs.)

Take it or leave it

Smart People

Crit

A film almost as tough to like as Dennis Quaid's pompous, misanthropic Carnegie Mellon English professor, and indeed I didn't for the first couple of reels. But after a while, its very refusal to engage in the cheap ingratiation that its poster seems to promise finally won me over. Quaid cashes in on body language that marks him as the world's oldest 50-year-old, and Thomas Haden Church is perfect as the world's oldest slacker. Little is asked of Ellen Page beyond being the anti-Juno, but she makes her 17-year-old Young Republican-National Honor Society robot work.

And kudos too to the editors of the trailer, who give no hint of a couple of key plot points that need to be surprises. Specifically . . . naw, I wouldn't do that.

My supper with Wallace

Vanya on 42nd Street

(1994)

OK, call me a Philistine (last syllable rhymes with "dine" as Wallace Shawn pronounces it here), but this is the way I like theater: on film. And distanced, but just a bit. And adapted by David Mamet. And directed by Louis Malle. With (naturally, in a Malle film) a jazz score (this time by Joshua Redman).

My only objection is that Sonja is apparently supposed to be plain at best (yes, that's right: I've never seen any other production of Uncle Vanya; did you not already get that?), and Brooke Smith completely misses the mark in that respect; in fact, stunning as it may seem, I found her more beautiful even than My Future Wife Julianne Moore. But that's a small price to pay for art.

Footnote: as far as I know, the first film I've ever seen with an appearance by someone who's written a cookbook I own (Madhur Jaffrey). (Actually, I've also seen her in Heat and Dust, Six Degrees of Separation, and Wolf, but I didn't have the cookbook then. Oops, wait a minute: she was also in Prime, and I definitely had the cookbook by then.)

Fear death by water

Tini zabutykh predkiv (Shadows of forgotten ancestors)

(1964)

Boy loves girl, boy loses girl, boy goes mad, boy enters loveless marriage, boy regrets and then regrets some more. Don't recall exactly why I had this in my queue, but it turned out to be a stunning visual poem, set in the Carpathians--a simple story told beautifully (and in Ukrainian).

We'll float down to Peru

Le Peuple migrateur (Winged migration)

(2001)

The first film I've ever shown to my granddaughter, this has a running time of two 20-month-old attention spans. It also has man-on-bird violence I'd forgotten about, but I think she'll remember the amazing shots of flocks in flight more vividly than the duck being gunned out of the air. Obviously, I did. Looking forward to working out to the DVD extras, which I have been told provide at least a partial answer to the key question: How the hell did they do that? Maybe they'll also explain the decision to use really lame music.

Warning to those with anything less than a 42" screen: it's really not big enough. In fact, 42" isn't really big enough.

It will not last the night

Shine a Light

Post

Didn't expect to get to a movie this weekend, but my chiquitas' (daughter & granddaughter) flight to LGA got canceled, and the reroute brings them into HVN--but only after the plane change (in PHL) that we were trying to avoid for the sake of toddler-and-mother stress--and not until hours later (just got a call for the third delay out of Philly, in fact). I'd heard good things about this film, directed by some young turk and documenting a concert by an up-and-coming rock 'n' roll band, so why not?

I'd love to be able to report that this band is going to be around for a long, long time, because, good golly, they give one hell of a show. But fact is, the lead singer, who must weigh about 110 pounds, expends so much energy that it's hard to imagine his still being able to prop up his frail frame, say nothing about catapult it around the stage, once he's past 30.

The family of rock being what it is, the youngsters got one-song support from veterans like Jack White and Christina Aguilera (wearing even more eye shadow than the lead guitarist), but they didn't need any help rocking. On the other hand, an appearance by blues guitarist Buddy Guy--for Muddy Waters's "Champagne and Reefer"--was a highlight. If one were to offer a single constructive criticism, it would be that a drum and two guitars (plus an occasional third when the singer consents to tone down his gymnastics enough to strum) just doesn't make it as a rock ensemble; fortunately, there was competent backup on this occasion from freelancers on keyboards, bass, horns, and vocals, but the band probably should shore up its act instrumentally.

On the other hand, they seem to write most of their own material, and it's A+ sex-and-sweat stuff. They did cover one old Motown hit, but it turns out that the Marianne Faithfull ballad was their own composition. Who knew?

Anyway, if you enjoy discovering new pop talent as much as I do, don't miss this one--if you have an IMAX nearby, you might try to catch it there, though the sight of that lead guitarist 50 feet high might give the children nightmares--unless they've already seen him in Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End. Anyway, check out these tyros--they're bound to burn out quickly, but for now they shine a lovely light.

Trailers

Golly, it was the day of eagerly-anticipated-big-summer-blockbusters-based-on-fond-memories trailers previews. Well, after the first couple.

• 88 Minutes--Pacino's a lawyer, and someone wants him dead. And guess what the running time is? Yes, that's right: according to IMDb it's . . . 108 minutes.

• Deception--Hugh Jackman seems very very naughty, Ewan McGregor a tad out of his depth, and Michelle Williams dangerously innocent. Or not.

• Get Smart--Would you believe Sir Ian McKellan and Dame Judi Dench as Maxwell Smart and Agent 99? Would you believe Patrick Stewart and Helen Mirren? How about Steve Carell and Anne Hathaway? The former perfect, the latter promising, assuming the film doesn't ask more of her than the TV series asked of Barbara Feldon. Also Alan Arkin (yes, good) as the chief, Dwayne Johnson (perfect) as Agent 23, Bill Murray (always good) in a presumptive cameo as Agent 13, and Terence Stamp (yes, yes, yes, omigod yes!) as Siegfried, the leader of KAOS. OK, I'm a 5.

• Iron Man--You've collected the comic books, you've smoked dope to the song, now pay eleven bucks to see whether Jon Favreau can do better with this than Ang Lee did with The Hulk. I don't recall Iron Man being a wise guy in the Marvel tradition of Spidey, Daredevil, and the Thing, but then I didn't even remember that his name was Tony Stark. Anyway, this one's gonna be a wise guy, played by Robert Downey Jr., and Pepper Potts will be a red-headed Gwyneth Paltrow. I'm a skeptical but hopeful 4.

• Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull--Filmed in part right here in the Elm City--I think I may have exchanged greetings with the director while crossing the Green after work one day, but he doesn't have as distinctive a face as, say, Harrison Ford, whom everybody in town saw. Finally, Karen Allen is back--there hasn't been a worthwhile female lead since we saw her last--and Cate Blanchett is an evil emissary of the Evil Empire. Oh, boy!