The Twilight Saga: New Moon (an andPOP review)

I am not the audience for this movie.

I did not see the original Twilight. I read the novel and was horrified; how many teenage girls truly believe that men like Edward Cullen exist? (Fewer, probably, than the number of boys men who expect to meet a gorgeous independent woman who caters to their every whim and is miraculously attracted to slovenly underachievers, but that’s a rant for another film.) In real life a man who stalks protects a woman the way Edward does will continue to do so whether her life’s in danger or not. Perhaps the majority of Twilight fans recognize this, and treat the stories as wish fulfillment, much as this reviewer does with good romantic comedies (though not, it must be said, The Ugly Truth, which peddled a similar adolescent fantasy).

On that level, New Moon delivers. It reproduces the central appeal of the books: a man who’s faster, stronger, more romantic, better at playing baseball and musical instruments alike and more beautiful than anyone you could possibly imagine falls for Bella Swan, an ordinary, unremarkable-looking girl, and continually professes not only that he loves her, but that he cannot live without her. So protective is he that when his otherworldly urges place her in danger he actually abandons her to protect her.

This is the basest sort of adolescent fantasy, the kind any writer who’s attended university could dream up, and yet it would be undone by a sense of cynical manufacturing if author Stephenie Meyer didn’t wholeheartedly believe in it. She does, and it would appear a wide cross-section of the western world does too.

The audience I saw New Moon with cheered when Robert Pattinson and Taylor Lautner entered, gasped when Bella was attacked by a vampire and cheered when a pack of werewolves defended her. Director Chris Weitz (The Golden Compass) provides female viewers with plenty of eye candy, and even throws in a flourish or two (I enjoyed the way he depicted three months passing). With two exceptions – one of the worst-looking CG werewolves I’ve ever seen (only one, thankfully, not the entire pack, and only for one shot) and a flash-forward near the end that I doubt was intended to elicit hearty laughter from the audience but did – he gets the job done.

My problem with the movie lies completely with the source material. I hate Bella; she’s a wallflower, reacting to (instead of acting upon) events around her by screaming, moping and becoming recklessly suicidal when Edward leaves, yet suddenly protective of (and willing to die for) him if he’s in the room and in danger. Fans of Edward will be less than pleased he’s off-screen for more than half the movie, appearing sporadically in a series of visions. And we all know the central conflict in Twilight is a metaphor for sex, with vampirism standing in for the horrid corruption that awaits Bella should she (gasp!) consummate her relationship with Edward without tying the knot first. To phrase it diplomatically, I do not share Meyer’s Mormon beliefs.

On the other hand, how is an adolescent girl’s desire to meet someone as protective as Edward any different from the hope that your True Love is out there, somewhere, and you could meet them at any time, which forms the backbone of all romantic comedies?

I was completely and utterly indifferent to New Moon. Its fans will lap it up.

Michael Jackson: This Is It (an andPOP review)

Dunno if you heard, but a concert documentary, starring a little-known performer who died recently, opened across the country at 12:01 this morning.

This performer, Michael Jackson, would likely have been plagued by scandal through much of his adult life had anyone actually heard of him, so perhaps it’s just as well.

To Sony’s credit, This Is It does not feel like a quickie cash-in on Jackson’s death. A bit over-adulatory perhaps, but that’s to be expected. It must be said, however, that Jackson’s death casts a pall over the movie’s early proceedings; to me, his fake cleft chin and overly manufactured nose make his face look like melted wax, his voice occasionally lilts – not in a good way – and some of his dance moves look robotic.

But as time passes, the rehearsals have an obvious effect on him; his dancing becomes smoother, his singing becomes stronger, and the younger he seems. Performing came as naturally to Jackson as breathing, and while his voice occasionally disappears, he’s never off-key (and explains more than once that he’s trying to save his vocal cords), and every number yields enthusiastic applause from the gathered technicians and back-up dancers.

If there’s an aspect of This Is It worth complaining about, it’s that a series of early interviews with Jackson’s back-up dancers never mentions their names, nor does the movie return to them, making their initial praise of him and nervousness when auditioning both creepily voyeuristic and shamelessly sentimental. It’s also worth noting that we never learn anything about Jackson himself; whenever he’s talking it’s all business, though it’s enlightening to learn just how clearly he knew his music inside and out. As you might expect, Jackson is very affectionate with the people he works with, and the choreographers, musicians, back-up singers and dancers all speak highly of him.

And what of the performance itself? Jackson and High School Musical director Kenny Ortega created a very cinematic production – show-stopping sequences were filmed for at least five of the songs – and after a clumsy introduction, the movie soon feels like a private concert.

Most of the expected hits are here – half of Thriller (the title track; “Wanna Be Startin’ Somethin’”; “Billie Jean”; “Human Nature”; “Beat It”), some of Michael’s early stuff with the Jackson 5 (“I’ll Be There,” “Dance and Shout”), half the singles from Bad (“Smooth Criminal”; “Man In The Mirror”; “The Way You Make Me Feel”) and some of his most popular later work (“Black or White”; “Heal the World”; “They Don’t Care About Us”).

Watching This Is It, I couldn’t help but think about what Jackson’s detractors would have thought of the final product. Would they have seen his show and enjoyed it, or dismissed it as overproduced fanservice mounted by a fallen icon? Hard to say, but for his fans, those who haven’t seen it already can expect a fond farewell. Whatever his faults, Jackson wrote some great music and remained a terrific performer until the end, and my impression is that anyone lucky enough to get a ticket would have seen a hell of a show.

Zombieland (an andPOP review)

Here’s an old-fashioned crowd-pleaser; albeit, a crowd-pleaser with lots of blood spewing, limb-chewing, and bone breaking – but really, why would you see a movie called Zombieland if you didn’t want to see that?

Zombieland’s a horror film that acknowledges how ridiculous it is by depicting a group of eight-year-old zombie girls before the opening credits; and a comedy that, by casting Jesse Eisenberg in the lead role, quickly establishes an enjoyably quirky tone, and maintains it by adding Abigail Breslin as a shotgun-toting 12-year-old and Woody Harrelson (in a terrific performance) as the movie’s resident badass.

It’s also a genre movie with a coherent plot – Breslin and Emma Stone, playing nervy sisters, push the thin but logical story along – and which pays attention to its characters, giving each of them solid backstories and respectable screentime. (My biggest complaint with Zombieland is that while the sisters are much stronger than typical damsels in distress, they nonetheless wind up being damsels in distress.)

And it’s an action movie with an extended, glorious climax at an amusement park, with all the standbys (roller coaster, tilt-a-whirl, drop mechanism) used in exactly the way you’d expect; plus characters using really big guns, and firing them with a generous helping of one-liners.

Zombieland is that rare film which knowingly (rather that ignorantly) prefers to play into its conventions rather than create new ones, parading its influences on both the front and back of its blood-splattered t-shirt (in one scene a pair of characters actually sit down to watch Ghostbusters). What is wrong with that? When it’s done this well, nothing.

Horror comedy is a tough sell with audiences, and even the gold standard of this decade, Shaun of the Dead, barely raked in $13 million at the North American box office. However, I must confess I did not particularly like Shaun of the Dead. It was a great movie, but the “happy” (of sorts) ending was so dark I had forgotten what I was laughing at by the end.

I had no such problems with Zombieland. While it has few genuine scares, and much of it coasts on warm-hearted good humour rather than laugh-out-loud laughter, I can’t remember the last time I consistently heard an audience gasp, laugh, or clap at the same moments during a film.

What a wonderful year we’re having when I can say Zombieland is the best pop entertainment to hit theatres since District 9.

District 9 (an andPOP review)

Note: If you’re already interested in seeing District 9 - you know the setup, you’ve seen the posters – go see it. Like all good stories, the best way to experience it is to know nothing about it going in. A word to the squeamish, however – this is a Peter Jackson production by the man who directed The Frighteners and the icky spider-pit sequence in King Kong, not the man who directed Heavenly Creatures or Lord of the Rings.

When we first meet Wikus Van der Merwe, we don’t really notice him; he’s one of many talking heads in the faux documentary that opens District 9, and he isn’t important. Others explain that in the 1980s an alien mothership appeared suddenly over Johannesburg, and that, after nothing happened (by all appearances, there was nothing to keep this ship from torching South Africa like the aliens in Independence Day) humans broke in and discovered a sickly race of alien refugees whose ship had literally run out of gas. Wikus (newcomer Sharlto Copley) is a cubicle drone tasked by MNU, the corporation that has kept the refugees under (debatable) control, to lead a team that will hand the aliens eviction notices, lending a sense of legitimacy to their forced extraction from District 9, the slums in which they currently reside, to District 10, which is more of a concentration camp. In his opening scenes, Wikus comes across as an officious bureaucrat who in any other movie would be the first to go, in a spectacular and probably funny manner. That appearance is crucial, because it means his ultimate role in the story is as much a surprise to the audience as it is to him. I can’t say that if Hitchcock made an alien invasion film Wikus would have been his protagonist, but I do think he would have been proud.

This is science fiction. This uses allegory to cast a light on one of the most shameful aspects of humanity. First-time writer/director Neill Blomkamp, who lived in South Africa until he moved to Canada at 18, never bludgeons us with the parallels, but his film has a clear thesis in mind, and he states it well.

With their clawed hands and hardened carapaces, the aliens almost resemble bipedal lobsters (they’re derisively referred to as “prawns”), and with their tentacled mouths and garbled speech they appear half a step removed from the Aliens/Predator mold of goopy hunters. Yet with their bulbous eyes and thin waists, they’re just as easily injured as humans, and with their weapons confiscated (you didn’t think humans would free them and allow them to live with their own technology, did you?) they can’t easily hurt us – nor is there any indication they’d want to, since they rarely fight unless being attacked.

And here is the sole element of District 9′s plot that I’ll spoil (it’s not much of a spoiler, since it’s revealed in the opening mockumentary, but it’s not underlined): MNU is funded by corporate interests who, as you might expect, are interested in the aliens’ weaponry. Problem is, no human can work them, since they’re attuned to the aliens’ DNA. Both “legitimate” MNU forces and the Nigerian black market that has appeared in District 9 have a cache of alien weaponry, but after 20 years neither has figured out how to operate them – until our plot comes along.

For those who desire nothing else, District 9 is a thrilling action yarn. The mercenaries hired by MNU to police the increasingly volatile district are capable villains, and while their bald leader, Koobus (David James), isn’t the most memorable antagonist in screen history – think Gary Busey in Lethal Weapon rather than Alan Rickman in Die Hard – he gets the job done. The Nigerians, whose wheelchair-bound leader is obsessed with eating the aliens’ flesh, hoping it will let him utilize that robotic exoskeleton taking up space in his warehouse, won’t win the filmmakers any points for racial sensitivity, but they actually come off as slightly more sympathetic than the (mostly white) corporate villains. At least they’re open about what they’re doing.

If there’s a problem with District 9 it’s that the documentary format can’t sustain the story. It’s impossible for a human being holding a camera to capture the aliens’ perspective, and unlike The Blair Witch Project and Cloverfield, the cinematographer is never identified. Long stretches of movie trade the format for straight narrative, albeit narrative with the same handheld cinema verite style, before abruptly becoming a documentary again. It’s jarring, but I’m not sure Blomkamp could have handled it differently. For whatever reason, the film almost reaches perfection, but not quite.

It is, however, an instant classic that will be fondly remembered for years to come.

Julie & Julia (an andPOP review)

It’s a funny thing about life; even though we’re all (obstensibly) unique, certain experiences fall into distinct patterns. Most middle-class children in the western world, for instance, go through a period in their childhood where the world revolves around them, followed by a period in their teenage years where they’re convinced it should and are surprised when it doesn’t. This leads to a period of intense self-reflection, during which they discover their place in the world and are shocked again some years later when that place doesn’t welcome them with open arms either.

In Julie & Julia, Amy Adams’ character, Julie Powell, is in that directionless place between shock and reaction when she decides to give herself one year to cook all 524 recipes in Mastering the Art of French Cooking, and if you’re in the same place, or recently past it, you’ll probably identify with her.

Another stage many adults find themselves in, and which people of Julie’s age hope to avoid, is that of the middle-aged, middle-class (or upper-middle-class) person who suddenly realizes they haven’t accomplished anything. Sure they’ve survived, but they still don’t recognize their place in the world, nor have they experienced anything they could call a “dream.”

Julia Child (Meryl Streep) has reached this stage when we meet her. A virgin until 40, lucky enough to marry a U.S. diplomat while working as a secretary, she found herself living in France unsure of the direction she wanted her life to go. In the movie, she tries her hand at bridge and hatmaking, but ultimately settles on cooking, as we all know. And what a cook she became!

It must be said: this is a delicious-looking movie. Recipes for crunchy bruschetta, sauteed mushrooms, raspberry cream, breaded duck, stuffed chicken breast, and braised fish, among others, are lovingly depicted, most of them perfectly caramelized and nearly all of them fried in butter. You might expect the sort of Crisco and shellack-based tricks used by the advertising industry, but no: it’s all real food, something writer/director Nora Ephron, apparently an accomplished cook, insisted on. (And this is a director who, when she couldn’t find a rustic enough 18th-century British cottage in The Holiday, ordered one built from scratch – so you know she got her way.)

The problem with Julie & Julia is that while Julia’s story is engaging no matter what your age, if, like many older viewers, you passed Julie’s stage a decade or more ago there’s a good chance you’ll be turned off by her. Streep plays Julia Child as a genuine character, a gregarious Amazon with a warm smile, an easy laugh, and an accent that never quite sounds like it came from anywhere, while Adams’ Powell frequently burns her food, screams at her husband, alienates her friends, yells at her cat and cries in her kitchen until you expect her husband to come in, burp her, kiss her hand, and make it all better – and that’s more or less what happens (minus the burping).

This isn’t Adams’ fault, exactly – Child was a genuine character with a warm smile, easy laugh, etc. who got past the directionless stage, recognizing that after discovering her place in the world she would have to fight for it, whereas Powell occasionally comes off as a self-indulgent narcissist who, in the primitive blogging world of 2002, simply whined loudly enough for her voice to be heard.

It may not sound like I enjoyed the movie, but I did – I was engaged by Adams’ side of the story, despite the fact that she and her husband (Chris Messina)’s arguments came off as obligatory beats in a bad romantic comedy. Streep and Stanley Tucci, who plays Julia’s husband, Paul, on the other hand, have what would have been the sweetest onscreen relationship I’d seen in ages had I not seen Away We Go two months ago.

Basically, unless you’re a foodie, or passing through one of Julie or Julia’s life stages, or a fan of Meryl Streep and/or Amy Adams, there isn’t much here that will interest you.

But that’s okay. Just because certain life stages fall into patterns doesn’t mean everyone experiences – or gets past – them.

The Ugly Truth (an andPOP review)

I was shocked to discover that three women wrote this screenplay. (Or that, more accurately, two women wrote and a third re-wrote it.)  I do not harbour any illusions of women being the “fairer” sex. I recognize that women are just as likely (or unlikely) to enjoy dick, fart and sex jokes as men. However, some idealistic part of me still believed a woman was above writing something like The Ugly Truth.

I more or less saw this movie three months ago, under the title Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. Like that Matthew McConaughey vehicle, The Ugly Truth revels in juvenile stereotypes about men and women, with Gerard Butler’s Howard Stern-like cretin more or less encouraging control freak Katherine Heigl to pick up a man the same way McConaughey’s cad kept picking up women: by playing to their baser instincts.

Romantic comedies live or die based on two things: their central gimmick, and the viewer’s willingness to buy into said gimmick, which is often affected by their own experience with romance. My experience has left me angry at anything which frames the difference between the sexes as a battle between Martians and Venusians, since by my observation both men and women are essentially attracted to the same things (confidence, a sense of mystery and, if they’re popular, someone they like who apparently doesn’t care about them) and would like a partner who will essentially act as a parent, protecting them (women) or feeding them (men). Both like sex, but since most men will sleep with almost anyone who approaches them, women usually hold the power.

Anyway. Follow the rules like Katherine Heigl does in The Ugly Truth, and you may eventually land your dream man. Of course, once he discovers you’re not his dream woman but have only been acting like her, he’ll walk away. The Ugly Truth knows this – but fear not, ladies, because that Howard Stern type will, like the real Howard Stern, ultimately reveal that his shtick is all an act and in fact he’s a kind, caring human being whose heart was simply hardened by too many nasty women.

Come to think of it, maybe it isn’t hard to believe this film was written by women after all.

I realize that romantic comedies are all about wish fulfillment, that a large percentage of the audience agrees with the movie’s take on men and women, and that said audience likes it that way. I will not be shocked if The Ugly Truth is a hit; at the screening I attended, there was plenty of laughter, including my own, but (for me, at least) it was soon followed by uncomfortable squirming. Not because the movie was depicting the ugly truth, but because it was perpetuating ugly stereotypes. To its credit, I bought almost every decision the characters made until the 80-minute mark (the movie is 97 minutes long). The exception is a When Harry Met Sally sequence involving a pair of vibrating panties; it’s not immediately clear why Heigl decides to wear them (though it sort of makes sense in retrospect), nor is it clear why she leaves them on.

Reader, I did not want to see this movie. For Katherine Heigl to appear in this sexist garbage after publicly berating Judd Apatow for Knocked Up’s depiction of women (nevermind that Knocked Up’s message was to grow the fuck up, and that the main women were depicted as grown up already) struck me as a definition of hypocrisy. Not to mention it rips off one of the genre’s few genuine modern classics.

You, like the audience I saw it with, may feel differently about the subject, and if so you are welcome to it.

Year One (an andPOP review)

I hadn’t seen the trailers for Year One. I wasn’t expecting a “Jack Black” movie; for me the most important name in the credits was director/co-writer Harold Ramis (Ghostbusters, Groundhog Day).

Year One begins with a boar hunt; not as convincing as the one in Apocalypto perhaps, but credible nonetheless. For two brief, shining minutes I thought here was a movie that understood that most important and least followed rule of comedy: the more seriously the participants take it, the funnier it is.

Then a hunter played by Horatio Sanz is hit with a spear, the type that if thrown properly would have gored him. It barely scratches his shoulder, and after discovering Sanz isn’t a boar Black apologizes for throwing it. He sounds exactly like the Jack Black we’ve seen in countless other films (King Kong excepted), and if the movie began here I would have wondered what he was doing dressed as a caveman.

Michael Cera sounds exactly like the character we’ve seen in countless other films too – which, as a coworker pointed out, is odd, because he played a completely different character in his breakthrough, Arrested Development.

Soon Black is thrown out of his village for eating the fruit of knowledge. He accidentally burns the village as he’s leaving, so everyone else has to leave too. Rejected by the girl of his dreams (Juno Temple), Cera’s character soon follows.

At first, Black and Cera continue to stumble across some bible stories: they witness Cain (David Cross) accidentally murder his brother Abel (Paul Rudd); they prevent Abraham (Hank Azaria) from sacrificing Isaac (Christopher Mintz-Plasse); and they journey to Sodom, which you might think they end up burning to the ground (at least, I did). But no; 40 minutes in, the bible angle finishes. Black and Cera wind up in Sodom (along with, coincidentally, the rest of their tribe), and stay there.

Like all viewers, critics are biased; I have a soft spot for dumb comedies, am critical of religion, and appreciated seeing a movie whose central thesis (if it has one) was, “what if there is no God?” I like Cera, and Black in the right material, and accepted their pseudo-stoner dialogue without difficulty. Year One is more genial than funny, but its lightweight story is enough to string us along, and you can tell the actors were having a good time. I’ll admit I laughed occasionally, and when I wasn’t laughing or closing my eyes I smiled much of the way through.

Unfortunately, biases run both ways, and I have a big one when it comes to comedy:

I hate toilet humour.

Despise it.

To this day I’ve never seen “classic” scenes such as Leslie Mann vomiting shrimp all over Steve Carell in The 40-Year-Old Virgin, or the “pale ale” in American Pie. I accept that on a conceptual level it serves its purpose (it makes the characters painfully human) and a segment of the audience finds it funny. In an otherwise wonderful movie, I’m happy to close my eyes for a moment and move on.

In Year One, however, something disgusting happens every 20 minutes: Jack Black examines (and eats) a pile of shit; Michael Cera, while hanging upside down, pees on his own face (judging from Black’s lines, some of it lands in his mouth and nose); a man sharing a bed with Cera proudly farts repeatedly. In a major supporting role, Oliver Platt plays a high priest who’s extremely hairy, and the camera lingers while Cera is forced to slowly rub oil all over his chest.

Does a majority of the audience actually find this funny? I thought nothing could top the running gag involving gum thrown up at Penn Station in last year’s Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist. Once again Hollywood proved me wrong.

There are other problems – Mintz-Plasse’s Isaac is wasted, while Cross’s Cain remains onscreen long past his sell-by date; Black’s love interest (June Diane Raphael) falls for him even though he repeatedly forgets about her, jokes about her parents’ deaths, and would happily dump her for Sodom’s princess (House’s Olivia Wilde) – but they pale in comparison to the film’s desire to shock.

I enjoyed parts of Year One because I kept hoping it wouldn’t disgust me again (the shit-eating scene comes at the beginning; the Michael-Cera-pissing-on-his-face scene near the end). You’d have to pay me to see it a second time, and during that repeat viewing I would get up ten minutes into the movie and never come back.

Away We Go (an andPOP review)

“There are times when a critic truly risks something, and that is in the discovery and defense of the new.”
- Anton Ego, Ratatouille

Here is the pitch for Away We Go that arrived in my inbox, and which put me to sleep before the second paragraph:

Longtime (and now thirtysomething) couple Burt (John Krasinski) and Verona (Maya Rudolph) are going to have a baby. The pregnancy progresses smoothly, but six months in, the pair is put off and put out by the news from Burt’s parents Jerry and Gloria (Jeff Daniels and Catherine O’Hara), that the eccentric elder Farlanders are moving away from Colorado – thereby eliminating the expectant couple’s main reason for living there.

So, where, and among whom of those closest to them, might Burt and Verona best put down roots to raise their impending bundle of joy? The couple embarks on an ambitious itinerary to visit friends and family, and to evaluate cities, eventually realizing that they must define home on their own terms.

If that sounds riveting, skip my review and see the movie – the less you know walking in, the better.

If, like me, you’d rather see a film about watching paint dry (an idea my friends and I once came up with a surprisingly credible pitch for), continue reading as I put on my critic’s hat and attempt to dissuade you from skipping it.

Away We Go was directed by Sam Mendes (American Beauty, Road to Perdition, Revolutionary Road), and while it doesn’t sound like a Mendes production – neither lead has a lousy job or is chronically depressed – it contains the same world-weary eye for exact, offbeat detail, not to mention it was written by McSweeney’s cofounder Dave Eggers and his wife, Vendela Vida, which alone would have made me excited had I known in advance.

What the pitch doesn’t tell you is that unlike every other couple in every other “romance” the studios have cranked out over the years, Krasinski and Rudolph never fight. They don’t argue. That isn’t to say they never disagree about anything, but it never turns into shouting. They’re not drunk on each other either, making out every chance they get and having wild, passionate sex every night. Their relationship is as credible as Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet’s in Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, a movie which hammered home just how fantastic (literally) most Hollywood romances are. Away We Go shows the reality, and it’s a lot more pleasant-looking than other movies would have you think.

Krasinski and Rudolph do indeed embark on a road trip, visiting a range of  quirky characters such as her former boss (Alison Janney) in Tuscon, Arizona; his childhood friend (Maggie Gyllenhaal) in Minnesota; and their old university friends in Montreal. Some, such as Rudolph’s sister (Carmen Ejogo) are fully rounded; others (especially Gyllenhaal’s neo-hippie, who still breastfeeds her seven-year-old and claims to have sex in front of her children) are two-dimensional caricatures, but still embody traits you’ve probably seen.

The ending, of course, is disappointing: how could it not be? There is no destination in North America that could live up to Krasinski and Rudolph’s expectations, and the place where they settle seems as good as any. They certainly stay for the right reasons, and while they may not know what’s coming next, during the credits I was left with a feeling I’ve rarely experienced watching a romantic comedy: that whatever happened, they were going to be okay.

Star Trek (an andPOP review)

A few months ago I caught a 20-minute non-screening of J.J. Abrams’ Star Trek, where the most memorable thing that happened was me falling down a third of a long flight of stairs, injuring my shoulders in a way that still hasn’t fully healed.

The scenes were disconnected, 12-year-old Kirk announcing himself as “James Tiberious Kirk!” was still stupid, and the time travel device driving the plot looked sketchy. The film was written by Alex Kurtzman and Roberto Orchi, who typically favour setpieces over plot and quirks over character development. But the actors were effective and during the rapid-fire action sequences I could actually tell what was going on. I’m glad I saw it; when the lights came down on the full-length movie, I knew what to expect.

Make no mistake: this is not science fiction. It does not utilize a technology-driven society to explore an issue in the present. It is not Star Trek as defined by the multiple series; there are no Important Ideas, no debates over man’s place in the universe. It is, in short, no Battlestar Galactica.

But I underestimated Abrams and company; this is an exhilirating, slam-bang space opera, one of the best I’ve seen, that happens to star the characters from the original Star Trek. That also means it has one of the most memorable casts ever to grace a screen, and while most of them are drawn in broad strokes, that’s long been the fate of supporting characters: Kirk (Chris Pine) and Spock (Zachary Quinto) do have actual character arcs.

This must be what watching Star Wars was like thirty-two years ago. It didn’t present anything new, but came across with a credibility and vitality audiences had never seen before. Abrams understands, like few modern directors seem to, that it’s not just about the budget. Granted, Star Trek’s $150 million investment was considerable, but it could have easily gone to waste (as it did in the excreable Wolverine) without a properly fleshed-out setting, plot and characters.

This version of Star Trek looks lived in. The future Earth that gave rise to the Federation looks tangible and welcoming. The planet Vulcan feels like it has its own history. Suddenly it isn’t surprising that monitoring stations of the type manned by Scotty (Simon Pegg), which appeared to be there simply so Kirk could stumble across it in the preview, would be set up in the middle of nowhere, staffed by a mechanic who was sent there as punishment. As in the various series, aliens of the Deep Space Nine variety are all over the place like intergalactic immigrants, in all levels of society, their otherness never commented on.

As in the preview, Kirk, Spock, Scotty, McCoy (Karl Urban), Sulu (John Cho), Uhura (Zoe Saldana) and Chekov (Anton Yelchin) feel like the characters of pop-culture lore, and the players inhabit them wonderfully. The screenplay is peppered with welcome beats (such as the “red shirt”) from the original series, and while Urban perhaps overdoes his character a bit, it’s hard to argue with the way he says “dammit.”

More than anything, Star Trek reminds me of the animated epics Titan A.E. and Treasure Planet, in that every 20 minutes something spectacular happens, but it actually has a solid plot, unlike Titan A.E., and doesn’t feel neutered, unlike Treasure Planet.

Incidentally, that time travel device is still ludicrous. But it lets the future Spock (Leonard Nimoy) come onto the scene, and gives the nasty Romulan villain (Eric Bana, of all people) some real depth. Also, the plot is internally consistent: once it establishes the rules, it doesn’t break them, unlike every other science fiction epic from the past ten or so years.

After the debacle that was the Star Wars prequel trilogy and the Matrix sequels (not to mention Titan A.E. and Treasure Planet), I’d forgotten what a good space opera was like. Movies like Abrams’ Star Trek remind us why they’re still bankrolled however – when they work, they’re amazing.

Ghosts of Girlfriends Past (an andPOP review)

Is there any formula more credible than A Christmas Carol? Done correctly, the story plays on two primal aspects of human nature: that when it comes to remembering how we hurt others, our memories are fuzzy; and that we hate feeling guilt. Forced to confront every nasty thing committed against someone else over the course of three hours, even the most unrepetant jerk would undergo some kind of change (unless they’re a clinical psychopath – which would make for an entertaining, though less marketable, movie).

And yet it results in trash like Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, a pandering, obvious slice of counterprogramming shuffled into theatres against the likely blockbuster Wolverine, starring an especially off-putting Matthew McConaughey.

This is a terrible movie. You don’t need me to tell you that. Just watch the trailer.

As you’ve no doubt seen, McConaughey plays a successful photographer with a reputation for bedding women and dumping them as soon as they fall in love with him. After breaking up with three “girlfriends” in front of another woman, he beds the other woman. He’s had a mentor – his late Uncle Wayne (Michael Douglas) taught him everything he knows, including that whomever has the least invested in a relationship holds the power.

Of course these kinds of men exist. Worse, their techniques often work. Women in McConaughey’s position are often called sluts. Men in his position are often called players – and indeed he’s glorified as such. The film tries to have it both ways – eventually McConaughey realizes he’s pathetic, and a bridesmaid jokingly refers to him as a man-whore – but it comes across as shameless hypocrisy. After all, it’s much easier to condemn a habit once you’ve come out the other side.

The film’s blatant misogyny wouldn’t hurt so much if its featured example of monogamous bliss – McConaughey’s brother, played by Breckin Meyer, and his shrewish bride, played by Lacey Chabert – wasn’t so clearly headed in the wrong direction. Jennifer Garner plays McConaughey’s love interest, a woman too smart to put up with him for two minutes, let alone twenty years.

Eventually, of course, McConaughey’s visited by ghosts. Poorly conceived ghosts. In A Christmas Carol, Jacob Marley was at least seen lugging around chains; he wanted to keep Scrooge from meeting the same fate. Here, Uncle Wayne appears relatively normal. Still an asshole, but hey, if sex was more important than having friends or building a family…

Perhaps if Douglas had simply warned McConaughey the ghosts were coming – and even better, warned him not to listen to them – his prescence here would have been credible, but he tells McConaughey to stop emulating him, then continues hitting on the other (female) ghosts until the end of the film. Not to mention he and the other ghosts randomly touch and pass through solid objects without any consistency.

The worst part about Ghosts of Girlfriends Past, however, is that it makes McConaughey’s transformation almost believable. Every minute of the film is immaculately telegraphed, and better paced than many romantic comedies I’ve seen. It’s only once you pause to think about it for any length of time that its wrongheadedness becomes clear.

Men are not automatically from Mars and women not automatically from Venus. There are far more differences among the sexes than between them, and anyone who’s progressed beyond a high school relationship, on some level, knows this.

It’s a shame nobody at the studios seems to.