There's something to be said for Commercial Cinema

Let me say a word here for commercial cinema: though I've obviously been a huge fan of indie movies and of world cinema, most of which is state- or grant-supported, there's something to be said, too, for the need to earn your keep by attracting an audience that wants to watch your movie. Obviously, commercial cinema produces some amazing bombs and you wonder who would ever have been dumb enough to invest money in such films as Somewhere? or I Love You Philip Morris? And commercial cinema also leads to an incredible dumbing down of most movies, as too many reach for the widest possible audience, as do radio stations, rather than finding a right audience, and too many depend on cartoons and special effects, which can show worldwide without any need for translation or dubbing. OK - but what do you make of a movie like the multinational art film "A Talking Picture" but the legendary, 90+ year old Portuguese director, di Oliverias (I know I have his name wrong - I'll look it up)? A mother takes her daughter on a cruise from Lisbon to Bombay, they stop at many sights - the Parthenon, Pompeii - and the mother explains the history to the daughter, and on and on! I could literally not bear to watch more than 30 minutes. This looked like a really bad episode of Globetrekker. Turned it off; read a brief synopsis that tells me this turns into some kind of thriller, with a bomb aboard the ship. OK, great - do you think, Mr. writer-director, you might have wanted to do something to captivate or entertain or pique the interest of your audience sometime during the first 30 minute?! This is a great, or terrible if you will, example of too many people allowing a legendary director to have his way because nobody really cares if anyone ever watches this film. Maybe it ends up being a good movie, but I'll never know.

Does The King's Speech deserve all this praise?

I don't usually go for the Masterpiece Theater-ish highly stylized British period productions, especially about royalty, about whom I have little interest and no empathy, but "The King's Speech" rises above the type and above my expectations - it's a truly fine movie and deserving of its many laudits and Oscar nominations, and it will probably win most of them (though I'm kind of hoping to see Social Network win best picture - we tend to forget about films we saw earlier in the year, as do Oscar voters). The main strength is the the film builds a strong, friendly relationship between its two main characters, who are so different - Duke of York later George VI (Colin Firth) and his speech therapist, Lionel Logue (Geoffrey Rush). There are a million male-bonding buddy movies and dozens of patient-therapist movies (e.g., Good Will Hunting, Ordinary People, Prince of Tides), too, but this one, adding the elements of a social class and British history as Hitler rises to power (the only hinted-at undercurrent is that the Duke's older brother, Edward who abdicates, would have embraced Hitler - the therapy for George VI played an unstated role in altering the fate of the world), rises above the type. First time, ever other than in Shakespeare, I've felt great sympathy for a king - because this movie makes him completely human, fallible, and knowable. Firth is extraordinary in a really difficult part; Rush excellent, too; and who doesn't like to watch Helena Bonham Carter? Highest praise of all to the screenwriter, who should definitely win for original screenplay - the scenes of the speech therapy are terrific, some great family moments, both the royal family and the Logue family in their run-down flat, lots of witticisms that had the whole audience in laughter. Everything about the movie, from its clever title to the beautiful use of period detail, works to perfection.

What's the worst movie ever made?

Was recently talking with friend Frank about Kurosawa's The Lower Depths, which we agree is probably the worst movie we've ever seen - not the worst movie ever made, because that would be something we'd never see - but a great movie that is actually horrible, unwatchable (maybe my first judgment was wrong - I saw it about 35 years ago - but I don't want to see it again to find out). A movie with great ambitions that fails miserably is far worse than a movie with no pretensions that at least hits its mark. The Israeli film "Lebanon" falls into the great (or at least greatly ambitious) movie that's almost watchable. It's far from the torture of The Lower Depths in that it's only 90 minutes, but it's 90 minutes of misery. And yes I get it - that's the director's (Maoz?) aim: he puts us right into a tank in the Israeli army, invading Lebanon, and almost the whole movie takes place inside the tank - replete with a rotting corpse, a terrified Syrian prisoner, leaking oil, fumes, heat, debris, sweat - we see it all, and almost everything we see outside is through the gun sights. There's a lot of tension among the 4 men in the tank, and the story hinges on the failure of one to pull the trigger at a crucial moment - we see the difficulty and futility of war, the danger at every moment, the clash of the personalities, the breakdowns. It really sounds great as I describe it, but it's so hard to watch that I can't recommend this movie. The obvious comparison is with Generation Kill, which is much more character-driven and broader in scope. Lebanon is a powerful indictment of - something - but what exactly it indites I can't be sure: war? Israel? human nature? cinema?

A (partial) list of the great scenes in The Godfather

Watched "The Godfather" last night in the terrific new Blu-ray version, and lest there be any doubt about it the movie stands up to whatever standard you set for it and more - it is clearly one of the great films of all time - from its ambitious and rich story line, the excitement of some of its most dramatic and violent scene, the sharply sketched personalities of the conflicting family members, the evolution of character across the arc of the story, the portrait of a society and a culture and a way of life, one amazing scene after another - the wedding (25 minutes) that opens the movie, the business meetings on the morning of the wedding as supplicants as Godfather for favors, the death of Luka, the ambush of Sonny, the meeting of the 5 families, the assassination in the restaurant, the dinner with the studio exec and the aftermath, the takeover of Las Vegas, the mobsters in the kitchen, the Sicilian interlude and the 2nd wedding, the death and funeral, the startling montage of the baptism and murders - on and on. The color so richly infused that, as M noted, it's like renaissance painting. A film that in its day may have seemed terribly violent is much less so b today's standard, but the violence seems very credible and essential to the story line - and it set the standard, now a trope of all mobster movies, or counterbalancing the violence against domestic tenderness and family loyalty. Like most great art, it's a movie built on conflicts, internal and external, none greater than in the minds of the two Godfathers, Brando and Pacino, as they try to reconcile business with brutality and loyalty with family. A film totally deserving of its place in the pantheon.

In search of Planet Earth: Battlestar Galactica

"Battlestar Galactica" first season apparently opened as a miniseries, with two 90-minute segments; at conclusion of 2nd segment we're very well set up for what obviously became a long and successful series. The characters aren't deep by any means - each one is just a comic-book sketch, a type, and moreover their personalities seem to shift as needed by the plot - but they do serve the purpose of establishing the broad oulines of the plot and the people who will drive it: the dedicated captain of the Gallactica, the gruff Colonel at his side, the brilliant but troubled and guilty scientist, the macho fighter pilots,, the new president judiciously using her authority, and so forth. There's a great twist at the end of the 2nd episode (spoiler, kinda, but if you've seen any later episodes you know this already): the "humans," now fleeing their destroyed 12 colonies, are in search of the legendary 13th colony, Earth, circling an unknown star - that can be their refuge. There is debate about whether Earth is just a legend or if it's real. Well, that's a great twist! I will make here a prediction as to what happens at the end of the series: they discover Earth and do a "jump" through time, backwards, and land on Earth as great apes - the beginning of our civilization, these are our ancestors. We also get some key info at end of 2nd episode about the enemy Cylons: there are 12 "models" lactica is a Cylon. How will this play out.

The end of the world and what happens afterwards : Battlestar Gallactica

"Battlestar Galactica" is often called a space-opera, and, judging from the pilot episode, that's a great description - for better or worse, that's what you get, a soaper aboard a soaring spaceship, with half the characters in ridiculous military uniforms that look to be a cross between Nehru jackets and costumes from Rent. The plot setup is terrific: a "race" of robots, the Cylons, have turned against humanity, leading to an intergalactic war; following 40 years of peace, the Cylons have infiltrated the human galaxy (now twelve planets, the main one called Caprica) and destroyed all or most of human life; one set of survivors is the Battlestar Galactica, a vast war machine in space, about to be decommissioned and turned into a tourist site, like Mystic Seaport or Battleship Cove; Education Secretary is visiting for the decommission, and it appears she is highest ranking surviving cabinet member and becomes president. Battlestar put back into commission, but it's aging, as is her commander. We get bits of back story on the commander and his deputy, some of the fighter pilots, the flight crews, as well as some of the survivors from Caprica - a lot of story lines spun out there in the first episode, so it's no surprise this series lasted for several seasons. All in all, a lot of fun, if you have a taste for basically comic-book plot and lots of video-game laser battles among model spacecraft. Not the kind of thing I usually go for, but clearly this seems a high-water mark for this often-cheesy genre, and I'll give it a few more episodes at least.

An over-the-top performance in an over-the-top movie: Black Swan

That poor Nina Sayers (Natalie Portman) in "Black Swan" doesn't stand a chance: horrific stage mother (Barbara Hershey), predatory director, extreme jealousy from all the other girl dancers in her ballet company - is it any wonder that over the course of the movie she goes insane? Yes, it is a wonder - most movies would show her valiantly fighting, proving that she deserves to dance the lead in Swan Lake, triumphant. Black Swan isn't about ballet as much as it's about insanity: Portman doesn't triumph over the pressure but succumbs to it. I've read some on-line criticism of Black Swan, angry at its implication that a successful woman artist/dancer has to either prostitute herself or go mad in order to succeed. I don't think the implication is that all have to do so - but it's a pretty powerful look at one dancer in a horrible situation who succumbs to enormous pressure. Whether it's something you'd want to see or ought to see, I don't know - it's very painful to watch, brutal even, and I had to close my eyes several times during horror-film like, loathesome episodes of gore. It also strains belief that a ballet dancer at her level (the lead in a Lincoln Center production) would be so naive about life and insecure about her abilities, or that a director at that level would cast an obviously unsuited and unprepared dancer in the lead. It's also ludicrous to hear the director speak to the company as if they're a high-school troupe (more visceral! more passion!) - puh-leeze. All that said, great over-the-top performance by Portman in a totally over-the-top film that probably ought to be an opera.

A great film in some ways - but it's slow, slow, slow...

The recent Japanese movie "Still Walking" is the latest in a long and wonderful Japanese tradition of family drama, very much a direct descendant of the work of the great Ozu. Like Ozu's films, still walking is narrow and tight, almost claustrophobic, in its scope: almost all of it takes place during one day, in a small setting (seacoast town), in fact most of it in a small house in traditional Japanese style, tatami mats, floor-level dining table, sliding doors. The family gathers annual to mourn the death of the oldest son, died (in his 20s or so) in a drowning accident while rescuing a young boy - and film is about how this tragic death has affected everyone in the family, especially the younger son who can never live up to the image and expectations of his brother. Family members range from obsessively and meticulously nice and polite to gruff and cold beyond the point of rudeness - but even the "nice" ones (the mother in particular) show a flash of meanness and cruelty - especially during the great scene when the rescued boy comes to pay his annual respects. This is a totally honest film, unflinching, seems absolutely credible and understated - the famous Ozu "tatami" perspective, film shot almost in stills from floor level (not quite but almost) - and yet despite all these words of praise I have to add that Still Walking is soporific in its pace and seems by the end to slow to a crawl or even a dead stop. God know I don't need action or melodrama, but this is a film that, despite its strengths, is more to admire than to love.

Ben Stiller proves he can act - but can he save this film?

Noah Baumbach's "Greenberg" is, once you get past the unlikelihood of the premise (family goes on "vacation" for apparently 6 weeks! and leave their Hollywood Hills mansion in the care of the brother just out of a mental hospital) an incredibly realistic and astute portrait of two troubled, needy characters - 40ish exmusician and mental patient Ben Stiller and 25ish personal assistant played by the little-known (to me) Greta Gerwig (?). I've not been a huge Stiller fan, but in this straight-drama role he's excellent, and Gerwig is if anything even better, vulnerable, needy, insecure without being cloying or annoying or supercute. I could believe every second of their interaction, as they fall in and out of each other's lives, and every word of their dialog, which is quirky and quick but feels as if spoken by real people not by screenwriters in a seminar. All that said: I also felt that 90 minutes with these needy people was about 80 minutes too much. Baumbach is a really talented director and writer, but it's no wonder that his movies since Squid & Whale have been commercial disasters - there's nothing about these people or their world that we like or even want to like. They're people whom we might know and recognize - but would probably avoid or ignore. Greenberg is far better than the earlier Margot at the Wedding, perhaps in part because Jack Black proved he can't play straight drama and Stiller proves he can, but it's not a movie in which any character grows, matures, changes, or surprises. We may feel sorry for the characters, but the sorrow doesn't rise to the level of pity or of empathy. We're glad to see them go.

Director, don't direct thyself : Ben Affleck and The Town

"The Town" gets off the a great start with a very exciting bank-vault robbery well-paced and almost choreographed. Thought the rest of Ben Affleck's movie doesn't live up to the opening scene, it's a pretty entertaining film on the very familiar ground of the heist movie. The gang of four guys from Charlestown (Boston neighborhood of course - Affleck remains committed to doing interesting movies in Boston, and I admire him for that) pulls off three heists during the film, the last being the most imaginative, a robbery of the day's cash till at Fenway Park. Every fan has yearned to see the park from the inside, behind the scoreboard, etc., and Affleck got full access apparently - I'm amazed that John Henry agreed, but have to believe their security isn't as antiquated as the film would lead us to think. The strength of the film is a strong performance from rising star Rebecca Hall, who is great but is in danger of settling into a narrow range of type (intelligent young woman with weak self-image, q.v. Please Give) and a clever plot setup: Affleck is monitoring Hall as she is a robbery witness (actually they held her hostage then let her go, totally improbably), and he falls for her. She doesn't know he's in the gang that held up her bank. If you can believe this for two seconds, good for you, but you're better off completely suspending disbelief and letting the story unfold. Would have been stronger had Hall actually made the discovery on her own instead of being told by FBI agent John (Mad Man) Hamm. Affleck is wildly unsuited for the part of Charlestown thug and should never have agreed to direct himself - probably nobody should do that except in a comedy - as he allows himself to indulge in extensive monologues that cry out to be cut. Did the gang of four remind anyone else of the foursome in Entourage? If so, which group was more fearsome? Overall, The Town is a movie that breaks no new ground but is pretty entertaining for 2 hours.

Another movie about boxing? But The Fighter adds something to the fray

Honestly, how many movies do we need about boxing? It seems we get one every year. Maybe it's an absurd question, like asking how many movies we need about war, or about love, but it does seem that boxing is over-exposed - that there's some kind of innate synergy between film and the ring: immediate and dramatic conflict, easy to film and capture in a tight space, the obvious dramatic arc of a rising (and falling) champion, the alluring overtones of big-money glitz and back-alley street toughness, mob and business pressures, family dynamics, sometimes also racism - you can go through all the movies, from Requiem, to Waterfront, to Rocky, to Million-Dollar, maybe throw in The Wrestler, and dozens in between - so with all that I wondered what "The Fighter" could possibly add to the fray - and found the movie surprisingly good and original. Of course it touches on every one of the tropes I listed above: story of a tough kid from Lowell (Micky Ward, played well by Mark Wahlberg - who would have guessed when he was a Backstreet Markie-Mark that he'd develop into such a talented actor?), coached by his half-crazy half brother into a long-shot march toward the welterweight crown. The movie adds some great elements: first of all, it's based on a true life story (we see the actual family members in a credits clip); second, it's mostly about the difficult and complex relation between Ward and his brother, Dick (played very well by Christian Bale); third, Ward's tough mother who's like the worst of a stage mom, plays a key role. Movie seems to be filmed on the streets of Lowell with a real documentary style, and very much captures what feels like the daily life of the struggling fighter. It's not the most original movie ever made about boxing but it's one of the most credible.

Possibly the best Coen Brothers movie

I haven't read the book and I never saw the original version of the movie, so the Coen Brothers' "True Grit" is my only point of comparison here, but I found the movie very compelling and entertaining. I'm up and down on the Coens, but this seems to me their best movie yet - it plays well to their strengths, which tend to be strong narrative, a good sense of place, and a feeling for the Gothic and grotesque. Sometimes they let their taste for the grotesque run away with their movies, as in the awful A Serious Man, but they use it perfectly in True Grit, as we find the main characters wandering through the Choctaw Nation in the late 19th century in pursuit of a killer - so when they come across a strange, almost alien figure (a roving doctor living inside a bearskin) or a hideous scene (a corpse hanging high in tree) it builds of the strangeness and danger of the land and lines they're transgressing. Most of the reaction to the movie is inevitably about the young Hailee Steinfeld who plays the absurdly, comically precocious 14-year-old lead - she may win an Oscar, and she does play the part really well: speaking somehow in a very archaic and highly sophisticated diction, like a 19th-century novel come to life on the American frontier. You can't really believe her, or in fact this entire adventure, if you think about it for five minutes, but I found myself very captivated by the characters and hanging on the dialogue, as unlikely as it was. Jeff Bridges in the lead is excellent, though he sure does mumble, and he's in danger of being typecast as a near-ruined alcoholic with a good heart and with principles (cf. Crazy Heart). Matt Damon his usual wooden self. Only significant flaw in the movie, however (Spoiler alert!) is the conclusion: The whole mission is to kill or take fugitive, and as it turns out he's shot and killed without much of a fuss, and then the movie becomes a kind of aimless adventure yarn as Hailee falls in a pit, gets bit by a snake - is this in the original, or a Coen contrivance? Concluding scene - Hailee as an adult - not really a satisfactory coda to the mood of this otherwise very strong movie.

A completley unpretentious movie that's surprisingly good: City Island

"City Island" is a small, low-key, below-the-radar movie that breaks no new ground and will not be studied in classes on world cinema but is quite entertaining and completely unpretentious, much better than I thought it would be. Story centers on a family of four in the eponymous neighborhood in the Bronx, dad works as a prison guard but secretly wants to be an actor, taking classes at night while his wife (Julianne Marguiles) believes he's at a poker game. Family is full of secrets, most notably dad (Andy Garcia) has a son out of wedlock whom he spots in prison and brings home to live with the family, daughter has been kicked out of college and works as a stripper, son has an obsession with overweight women, and so on. Sounds a little kooky, or kinky, and it is, but the script is very well engineered - film teachers take note, it's a very "teachable" screenplay I think - and many of the scenes are very funny - family dinner, Garcia's film audition, the grand denouement when secrets are revealed. Other aspects don't work quite as well, especially the flirtatious relationship between Garcia and acting classmate, Emily Mortimer - film can't decide the sexual-emotional content of their relationship exactly. Alan Arkin is a good bit player as the acting instructor. The film owes a huge debt to The Sopranos, in the family dynamics (the daughter especially), and in the motif of the tough guy who wants to act. It's not a believable film on a literary level, but it's not meant to be - just a good entertainment that set forth modest goals and achieved them.

After all these years, Antonioni's Blow-up holds up well

After all these years and countless pop-culture references, Antonioni's "Blow-up" holds up very well, and not just as a cultural artifact, though it is that - in fact it was a a cultural artifact even in its own time, as people watched it to get a glimpse of the swinging, artistic London scene of the 60s, seems a million years ago, Pleistocene, you could drive around London in an open Rolls Royce and find parking on the street, anywhere (at least in this movie) - but as a beautiful and well-crafted story of alienation and mystery. I encourage anyone to compare this story about a commercial artist (photographer) so alienated from life and emotions and feelings and sexual drive that he is callous to everyone and experiences life, to the extent that he does at all, only through his lens, with the recent and entirely drab and unimaginative Somewhere - well, there's no comparison. Not that this film is truly about personality - we learn and know nothing about the background or back story of any character and I believe, I may be wrong, that only one character, the photographer's agent, even has a name - but it's about a certain style and mood that Antonioni captures perfectly, with his many unusual shot compositions, the strange pastoral scenes in the London park where a crime may or may not have been committed, the studio and apartment seemingly built of oddly juxtaposed angles and facets, the streets of London, what appears to be an industrial SE district, not yet populated by artists but ready for discovery - and most of all the central mystery, never truly resolved as to what the photog sees in his blown-up prints - with the ultimate meaning that it doesn't matter, it's not about a crime but about his life - and then of course the famous closing sequences of the mimes on the tennis court - what a beautiful film!

Low IQ?: Why Intelligence doesn't quite measure up

We'll probably stop watching Intelligence after episode 3 of season 1, not that it's a bad series - it's definitely not bad - but it's just not that good, and there's so much good stuff out there, especially in the well-tended field where Intelligence has staked its claim. Face it, you can't help but compare it with The Sopranos and The Wire, and it just doesn't measure up against that level of excellence. It's a suitably complex plot - underworld figure in Vancouver, much like a Tony Soprano but younger, slicker, not part of an ethnic clan, Jim Reardon, who runs an enterprise involving drugs, strip clubs, money laundering - turns informant for the Vancouver ICU, the head of which is under great pressure because of interagency jealousy. Both she (Mary) and Reardon have complex family situations going on: a fuck-up brother, a nasty divorce, a custody battle. All that said, the family and personl aspects are barely developed and barely rise above the level of cliche. What made the Sopranos great was that it was primarily about people and families, and as it happened they were involved in this criminal line of work - a total surprise and twist. What made The Wire great was the terrific scenes of police work in action, with lots of down time, which is very true to life. Intelligence is built on a thousand very short scenes, all business - there's so much plot to spin out that nothing unfolds - Reardon rushes from one brief meeting to another, and all I'm thinking about the whole time is how to hold the plot elements together. It's kind of a different take - mob boss as CEO - but for me far less interesting than many other series out there right now.

An evil mountain man turns out to be a lovable eccentric: Welcome to Hollywood!

When a gruff mountain hermit threatens intruders by blasting at them with his shotgun, chases terrorized children off his land, posts a "no damn trespassers" sign, speaks in monosyllables, and beats a bystander over the head with a wooden pole, and then turns out to be a soft-hearted eccentric well versed in Indian lore and natural homeopathy who keeps an image of his long-lost beloved taped above his headboard, speaks in wise parables, and is so generally good-natured and benevolent that he built an entire church by hand for a nearby black congregation just as a favor to the folksy preacher, we can be in only one place: Welcome to Hollywood. "Get Low," a Robert Duvall-Bill Murray-Sissy Spacek vehicle is set in the 20s/30s in what looks to be the Ozarks, and is just as believable as any Ozark yarn - but less compelling. To the extent that there are any surprises in the movie, you will figure them out in minutes - way, way ahead of any of the characters. The very basic plot outline is that eccentric hermit Duvall comes to Murray's funeral parlor and asks for a "living funeral" at which people will come to tell stories about him (presumably, about his evil ways). Oddly, this never happens - but at the big funeral that wraps the movie Duvall confesses to the great sin (he loved a marrried woman! she died in a fire and he couldn't save her!) that has driven him to 40 years of hermetic existence. This movie - aided and abetted by its soundtrack - is about as heavy-handed as they come, but there are a few strengths: the acting of the principals is very strong, especially Murray, who has become a better and nuanced actor with nearly every serious role. I wish the movie had been about him, an itinerant confidence man trying to make a buck. Or I wish it had been written by Stephen King, who would've made the Duvall character much more frightening, complex, and credible.

The best film ever made about nomadic Kazakhi shepherds

Tempting to say that "Tulpan" is the greatest Kazakhastani (sp?) movie ever made and leave it at that. However: part of what we love in movies is that they can take us to places we've never been, real and imagined (Avatar), and show us lives that we've never seen or even imagined. Much of the great world cinema of today does this, and any serious viewer of world movies has gotten to know and understand the lives the wealthy and the impoverished from Europe, Asia, Africa, the Americas, Australia, everywhere - and Tulpan brings us with what looks to be documentary realism, and probably a cast of amateur actors, into the lives of nomadic shepherds on the Kazakh steppe. Who knew there's a story to be seen and told here, and a flat and desolate landscape, amid camels and sheep and a few goats, people living in yurts and getting about in a jeep of some sort that looks to be cobbled together from spare machinery parts. Some of the scenes are strikingly graphic: we get to see one of the character assist in the birth of a lamb, definitely not faked or digitized. This is a world few of us will ever visit or see again in any other form. If you want to see what it's like to live inside a smoky, cramped yurt where mom spends the day churning buttermilk, here's your chance. The plot - a failed attempt to forge a marriage contract - is thin as paper, but it's just enough to keep a little forward movement in this film. All that said: the film at times is so slow I thought the image was freezing onto my flatscreen, and it's not the easiest thing in the world to convey isolate, insular lives, in which the characters endlessly sing the (seemingly) same chanting song over and over and over. It's a film I appreciated more than enjoyed.

Can I have the 90 minutes back?: Movies I wish I hadn't watched in 2010

Not to be too curmudgeonly on New Year's Day, but to complete my thoughts on the Best Movies of 2010, let me round it out with - not the worst movies of 2010 because who would even go to see the absolute worst, but the worst movies that I watched or tried to watch. Can I please get back the 90 minutes I spent watching:

Bright Star. Thought it would be great. Was and am really interested in Keats and the Romantic poets. Has there ever been a less romantic movie, though? Or a more ludicrous depiction of the art of creating poetry? It did get me to re-read some odes and sonnets, though.

An Education. A movie without a shred of honesty about how a criminally exploitative older man takes advantage of a troubled teenage girl. Amazingly, it did get many good rerviews.

Inglourious Bastards. Couldn't finish it. Nazis were horrible? Gee, I never knew! So let's watch some Jewish thugs take them on with baseball bats.

It's Complicated. Rich people suffer just as much as we do. They struggle as they work with the architects to plan the latest addition to their mansions. Sometimes, they have to settle for a modest hotel suite in New York while their thoughtless ex takes an executive suite. It's not complicated, it's ludicrous.

The Lovely Bones. If it makes you feel good to believe that murder victims live a life after death in which they roam through an unpopulated landscape designed by Peter Jackson, maybe you'll go for this movie.

Where the Wild Things Are. The book was a short classic. The movie: bloated, pointless, chaotic. Who exactly is supposed to like this film? Not kids, not adults, not me.

You Kill Me. Another one I couldn't finish. The first 30 minutes were not credible in any possible way - a screenwriter's attempt to create yet another zany mob comedy movie, with no wit, knowledge, experience, or original insight.

And two other movies, not in wide release yet, but worth avoiding in 2011: I Love You, Philip Morris, and Somewhere.

With these behind us, let's hope for great movies in 2011!