Moonrise Kingdom (2012)

MOONRISE KINGDOM  (2012)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Wes Anderson
    Jared Gilman, Kara Hayward, Bruce Willis, Bill Murray,
    Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Tilda Swinton,
    Jason Schwartzman, Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel
On an island off the New England coast, two kids, a boy and a girl, run away together. A local cop, the girl's parents and the boy's scout troop all go out looking for them. I'm not sure why this movie works, but it does. It's transparently artificial and way too cute. The kids are precocious. The grownups are clueless. The kids act more like adults than the adults do, in situations where you're just not used to seeing pre-teen kids, and maybe don't want to. Some viewers will find this precious, or creepy, or both. Others will find themselves laughing out loud at the good-natured absurdity of it all. It's a kids' fantasy, really, a romantic adventure that plays out not the way it would happen, but the way a kid might imagine it. The script's a collection of cliches and non sequiturs, all delivered deadpan straight. It's about family, of course. All of Wes Anderson's movies are. But what made him think he could get away with this, and how he managed to pull it off, I still don't know the answer to that one. 

The Comedians (1967)

THE COMEDIANS  (1967)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Peter Glenville
    Richard Burton, Elizabeth Taylor, Alec Guinness,
    Peter Ustinov, Lillian Gish, Paul Ford,
    Raymond St. Jacques, James Earl Jones
Burton plays a hotel owner stuck with a property he can't unload in the endlessly corrupt and crumbling world of Papa Doc's Haiti. Taylor plays a diplomat's wife. Ustinov plays Taylor's husband. Paul Ford and Lillian Gish are vegetarian activists who have picked an unlikely base for their quixotic cause. Alec Guinness is a World War Two vet, a slippery character who may or may not be telling the truth, but seems to know more than he's telling. They're "the comedians," fish out of water, all out of their depth and more or less clueless in a place they don't belong. Graham Greene wrote the screenplay, based on his novel, and the sense of unease that sets in from the opening minute stays consistent throughout. Unfortunately, the movie plods along for two and a half hours, slowing down especially when Burton and Taylor share the screen. Filmed in the African nation of Dahomey, which was picked because of its striking resemblance to Haiti. Not much of a recommendation for Dahomey, if you ask me.

Best Worst Movie (2009)

BEST WORST MOVIE  (2009)  ¢ ¢ ¢
    D: Michael Stephenson
A documentary in which the cast members of "Troll 2" reconnect 18 years later to celebrate (or cash in on) what some experts consider the worst film of all time. They cover a wide range, from the grandstanding dentist who played the dad, to the delusional recluse who played the mom, to the still-aspiring actress who played their daughter and can't get work now because her resume includes "Troll 2". It's a revealing group portrait, funny, affectionate and a little sad, directed by the guy who as a young boy played the kid who saw the goblins. If you want to find out just how bad a movie can be, see "Troll 2". If you want to know what happened to the people who made it that way, including the guy who played his part in the film on a day pass from a mental institution, see "Best Worst Movie".

Troll 2 (1990)

TROLL 2  (1990)  ¢ 1/2
    D: Claudio Fragasso
    Michael Stephenson, George Hardy, Margo Prey,
    Connie McFarland, Robert Ormsby, Deborah Reed
A young boy moves to a small farming community called Nilbog with his mom, dad and older sister, but his dead grandpa keeps turning up, warning him about goblins. Nobody believes him at first, but the townspeople do act mighty strange, and the neon green icing on all the food they keep pushing toward the newcomers seems a little suspect, too. This apparently has nothing to do with the first "Troll" movie, but it does have a significant cult reputation as the worst film ever made. That could be argued either way - the collected works of Ed Wood and Doris Wishman are still out there, after all - but there's no denying that "Troll 2" is amazingly, laughably bad. Mere words can't do justice to this one. See for yourself. 

I Wish (2011)

I WISH  (2011)  ¢ ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Hirokazu Kore-eda
    Koki Maeda, Ohshirô Maeda, Joe Odagiri,
    Nene Ohtsuka, Kirin Kiki, Isao Hashizume
Three Japanese schoolboys skip out of class and embark on an adventure, believing (or at least hoping) that if they go to the spot where two bullet trains cross paths and make a wish as the trains go by, a miracle will happen. One of them wants to play baseball like Ichiro. One wants to marry the school librarian. One wants to reunite his family. It can take a while to adjust to the pace of this. The storytelling is leisurely, as Kore-eda's camera follows the boys around, showing how they live, what they think and talk about, and what they do. You wonder sometimes if the kids are even acting, or just being themselves. It's a sweet little glimpse at what it's like to be a kid, in that fleeting time you get when you really are a kid, old enough to be doing stuff on your own, but before hormones take over, and it's time to start to grow up, and everything goes to hell.

Welcome Home, Roxy Carmichael (1990)

WELCOME HOME, ROXY CARMICHAEL  (1990) 
    D: Jim Abrahams                                                  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    Winona Ryder, Jeff Daniels, Frances Fisher,
    Laila Robins, Thomas Wilson Brown, Graham Beckel
Clyde, Ohio, is a dot-on-the-map town west of Cleveland, where, according to this movie, everybody's emotional development stalls out at about age 15. There really is a Clyde, Ohio, and whether the people there are all small-minded and shallow, I couldn't say, but that's the way the film portrays them. The story has the good citizens of Clyde making much civic ado over the imminent return of one Roxy Carmichael, a girl who escaped as a teenager 15 years before, vowing not to come back till she was famous. Now she is, mainly because somebody wrote a hit song about her, and her reputation in Clyde has reached the level of myth. Everybody's affected by it. Jeff Daniels plays Roxy's old boyfriend, now married with a couple of kids. Winona Ryder plays the high-school outcast who believes she's Roxy's daughter. Laila Robins plays a sympathetic guidance counselor, and there are a couple of sweet scenes between Ryder and Thomas Wilson Brown as the schoolmate who's not-so-secretly crazy about her. The other actors, with minor variations, are stuck playing all those emotional 15-year-olds. That's deliberate, apparently, like the stereotyping you'd find in a fairy tale, but outside of movies and fairy tales, not everybody's like that. They can't be. Not even in Clyde, Ohio.

Seven Psychopaths (2012)

SEVEN PSYCHOPATHS  (2012)  ¢ ¢ 1/2
    D: Martin McDonagh
    Colin Farrell, Christopher Walken, Woody Harrelson,
    Sam Rockwell, Tom Waits, Abbie Cornish,
    Harry Dean Stanton, Long Nguyen, Olga Kurylenko
This movie made me wonder whether it's a sign of desperation when a screenwriter writes a script about a desperate screenwriter. The screenwriter in "Seven Psychopaths" is a guy named Martin, who's trying to come up with a script to go with the title "Seven Psychopaths". Coincidentally, the real screenwriter who wrote the script for "Seven Psychopaths" is a guy named Martin. Colin Farrell plays the Martin in the movie, and what happens is, he doesn't just write the script he's working on, he lives it. The seven psychopaths include Christopher Walken and Sam Rockwell as a pair of dognappers, Tom Waits as a serial killer who specializes in killing other killers, Harry Dean Stanton as a vengeful Quaker, and Woody Harrelson as a gangster who's much too attached to his defective handgun. McDonagh also wrote and directed "In Bruges", and this movie has the same wise-guy vibe going for it, but the story's not as tight, and some scenes, like the ones where Harrelson threatens to shoot the film's only black characters, just seem pointless and mean. You could watch it for Waits and Walken, if nothing else, but if McDonagh's next project has anything to do with a desperate screenwriter, we'll know he's really desperate.