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A “trippy” local debut.

In The Way I See Things, the feature film debut by Memphian Brian Pera, memory, identity, interpersonal connectivity, and grief are commingled to form a work that is literate and artistic. Filmed digitally in Memphis, West Memphis, and Hardy, Arkansas, The Way I See Things invokes William Faulkner, Eastern philosophy, and the psychology of loss.

As the story begins, a group of guys stage a kind of intervention for a bedraggled man, Otto (Pera), stuck in bed for two months surrounded by prescription sleeping pills. What precipitated his spinout remains, for the time, unclear, though it can be assumed, by his friends’ concern, that he hasn’t always been this way. Otto is taken on the road by a friend (Jonathan Ashford) who thinks he needs a geographic cure. Otto ditches and winds up in an ashram where, he’s told, “There are no rules, just agreements.”

Otto’s story is told both forward and backward as the film progresses, punctuated by sequences of trippy images and words that build on, and eventually reveal the truth of, the mystery at the center of Otto’s life. These freak-out sequences are expertly — and beautifully — done.

The film is made in both black and white and color. Pera has an attentive eye to faces and shapes, and, in color, the film is gorgeous; the color and quality look as good as anything you’ll see at the multiplex.

The score by Memphis musician Harlan T. Bobo provides expansive music that often has a calming influence on the proceedings. Sometimes juxtaposed with the score, however, are images and actions that are unsettling or, at the least, not calming.

Pera had no formal filmmaking education prior to shooting The Way I See Things and had never acted before, for that matter. “It was a very unrealistic thing for me to think that I could make a movie,” he says. “I think if I had had training, I wouldn’t have done it. Training would have told me that I needed a litany of things that I didn’t have, and that would have kept me from doing it.”

The Way I See Things has been re-edited and improved upon from the version that screened in Memphis in April 2007 under the title Other Way Around. The film’s beginning and ending have been updated, but the surreal aspects of the film have lost none of their power. “It does have some challenging aspects to it,” Pera says. “If you do that, you have to be really precise and economical about editing.”

Pera begins shooting his follow-up film this week. He says it’s a much quieter story, with only himself and two other actors in the cast.

The Way I See Things screens at 12:45 p.m., Sunday, October 12th, and at 7 p.m., Monday, October 13th.

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Evolution

Morgan Jon Fox is no stranger to the Indie Memphis Film Festival. Fox’s debut, Blue Citrus Hearts, is a past winner of the festival’s Hometowner Award. He tries to repeat that success this week with his third completed feature, OMG/HaHaHa, which debuted this summer at the Newfest festival in New York.

Fox’s latest is a collaboration with John Tom Roemer, a young Memphis filmmaker who graduated from White Station High School and is now finishing film school in New York. Fox and Roemer co-wrote the film’s script via e-mail, planned and cast the film when Roemer was home for Christmas break, and shot it the following summer.

Visually and tonally, OMG/HaHaHa is inspired, in part, by films such as Harmony Korine’s Gummo and Gus Van Sant’s Elephant. (The Gummo connection comes through strongly. If you can’t stomach Korine’s film, you might struggle here. If you think Gummo is beautiful, as I do, the best parts of OMG/HaHaHa are likely to be quite moving.)

Where Blue Citrus Hearts was relatively conventional in following two teen protagonists through a coming-out drama and the uneven, overambitious follow-up Away (A)wake tried to blend its experimental tendencies around a narrative structure, OMG/HaHaHa dispenses with standard narrative. It’s a series of often acutely observed moments from the often messy lives of a group of interlocking characters. The arc of the film is more emotional than narrative, though the film is given a web-culture framing device — one character “telling” these stories via his online diary — to pull its various strands together. The tender, compassionate tone is familiar from Fox’s other work.

OMG/HaHaHa, within the context of Fox’s previous films, is probably most notable as a dramatic step forward visually, resulting in a film that works as well shot for shot as any local low-budget film in memory.

“We spent a lot of time on art direction on this movie,” Fox says. “We spent a lot of time thinking about how color and composition can really set a mood. We spent more time than I ever had before scouting locations and setting up shots.”

Though the film weaves through the lives of a couple of dozen characters, some strands stand out. Few local actors have been shot with as much love as that shown here to Suzi Crashcourse, Fox’s longtime collaborator.

“Suzi is transgender, and that’s something I’ve had the honor of experiencing with her,” Fox says. “I approached her and said I want to have a transgender character in this movie and I want you to let me know how this character should be portrayed. Because I’m not transgender, I don’t understand that struggle. I haven’t lived it. But her attitude was, ‘No, just write it and I’ll let you know if it’s wrong.’ We didn’t want to make it that big an issue.”

For example, Crashcourse is shown reading to a group of kids at a bookstore. Afterward, one boy asks, matter-of-factly, whether she’s a boy or a girl, an interaction that leads to some hide-and-seek amid the shelves. Later, Crashcourse’s character is seen at home, taking a hormone shot while arguing with her mother on the phone.

“She has to take a hormone shot once a month, and I had seen her do it. I thought it would be interesting in the scene to see her doing this without [explaining it]. Suzi said she thinks that’s the first time there’s been a transgender person taking a hormone shot on film.”

Visually, the most memorable moment might be the afternoon coupling of a couple of post-high-school guys who fell in love in geometry class and are taking their relationship into adulthood.

“I’ve been criticized for ‘playing the gay card,’ but to me when I put these so-called issues in my films, they aren’t issues. They’re just what me and my friends are going through,” Fox says.

Following Indie Memphis, OMG/HaHaHa will screen at Chicago’s Reeling festival in November and has been purchased by Water Bearer Films for a DVD release, probably next year.

OMG/HaHaHa screens at noon Saturday, October 11th, and at 7 p.m. Tuesday, October 14th.

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Battle fatigue settles in on Spike Lee’s WWII epic.

Like Douglas MacArthur’s old soldiers, World War II movies will never die. Unlike those old soldiers, however, WWII movies won’t ever fade away as long as audiences express anxiety about current global conflicts. From They Were Expendable to The Thin Red Line, the classic American war films elucidate moments of courage and bravery that remain moving and important even though the idea of fighting such a clear-cut good-versus-evil fight now seems impossible to imagine.

Within the last year, though, a more complex treatment of World War II has yielded remarkable results. With last year’s Black Book, Dutch filmmaker Paul Verhoeven critiqued traditional notions of wartime heroism within the context of a survival story that also emphasized the roles of women during wartime. And Jean-Pierre Melville’s 1967 Army Of Shadows, which was re-released last year, looked into the high cost of doing the right thing for a left-wing cause. Miracle at St. Anna, Spike Lee’s new attempt to tell a true war story, should have been a welcome addition to those remarkable works, since the conventions of the genre play to Lee’s strengths at dramatizing larger-than-life figures grappling with thorny, unwieldy social and historical issues. So why is his new film such an interminable, unfocused, ridiculous mess?

For starters, Lee’s plot and characterization scarcely qualify as archetypal, much less original. The film follows a quartet of black Army soldiers (a Cynic, an Uncle Tom, an Assman, and a Simpleton, of course) who rescue a young Italian boy and eventually hide out in an Italian village. This story is told with none of the visual daring Lee brought to previous fiction films such as 25th Hour and Inside Man. Speaking of visuals, the gruesome battle sequences owe everything to Steven Spielberg’s flawed but potent Saving Private Ryan. But not even Spielberg would batter the audience with music the way Lee brandishes Terence Blanchard’s overblown score while the bullets and bodies fly.

Miracle at St. Anna’s most memorable, audacious scene is more befuddling than breathtaking. It occurs when one of the soldiers flashes back to a Louisiana diner where he and his fellow grunts were refused service by the redneck proprietor. They later return to the diner and force the man to serve them by baring their rifles and essentially holding up the place.

What the hell’s going on in this scene? Why does Lee hold the image of the crestfallen soldiers and link it to the racial stereotypes displayed on Axis propaganda posters? Is he condemning the violent reprisals of this group, or is he praising them for wresting their dignity back from the wicked oppressor behind the counter? Such confusion is momentarily diverting, but its vagueness is nothing like the rich ambiguity of Lee’s best work. And it’s symptomatic of the film’s incapacity to show or tell us anything new about combat, race, history, or spirituality. War films are hell. When will they end?

Miracle at St. Anna

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Run Shia Run

If you leave your brains with the ticket-taker, then there’s a good chance you might enjoy Eagle Eye, the stripped-down, hyperactive new chase film executive-produced by Steven Spielberg. If you think about its muffled politics or its general plausibility for more than a few seconds, though, you won’t be able to appreciate some of its mildly diverting close calls and narrow escapes.

Shia LeBeouf plays Jerry Shaw, a feisty, recalcitrant minimum-wage ant estranged from his wealthy father and his recently deceased military-hero twin brother. Stopping off to cash a check after his brother’s funeral, Shaw discovers that his once-empty bank account is now literally bursting with cash. And when he returns to his tiny apartment, he finds that it is now bursting as well, with explosives and terrorist weaponry. Soon he’s on the run from a pair of all-business government agents (Billy Bob Thornton and Rosario Dawson) and following orders from a demented GPS system that can manipulate anything plugged into an outlet. Shaw’s only chance for survival depends on plucky single mom Rachel Holloman (Michelle Monaghan) and a series of outlandish, belabored mini-missions. What is the ultimate goal of this convoluted cross-country cannonball run? Who — or what — is the mastermind in charge of everything from stop lights to cell phones? And why does every evil supercomputer look sort of like HAL 9000?

Even more importantly, which Shia LeBeouf will show up for this uninspiring gig? (And was he paid cash?) Will we see the small-shouldered, sensitive guy whose palpable emotional turmoil energizes great movies like Bobby and A Guide To Recognizing Your Saints? Or must we gape at the flighty young stud peeking out from within the CGI landscapes of Transformers and Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull? Actually, since LeBeouf spends most of his screen time either running or flinging cell phones into the street, you can probably guess the answer to that one.

At best, director D.J. Caruso (Disturbia) is a moron’s Hitchcock whose most effective suspense sequences are shameless ripoffs from Hitchcock’s later career. There’s a concert with a deadly crescendo like The Man Who Knew Too Much, and the spyplane/freeway tunnel showdown is a neat inversion of the crop-duster sequence in North By Northwest. But even Hitchcock’s zaniest sequences followed a mordant logic. Eagle Eye is often too ridiculous in its embrace of one-in-a-million chances; once the frail Monaghan out-toughs a pair of trained security guards with a well-timed shotgun blast, all bets are off. Ironically, if Eagle Eye had a surer sense of humor about itself, its themes could be taken more seriously.

Plus, Caruso needs to slow down if he wants to put anything memorable on screen. He’s got a nice feel for urban architectural landscapes, but he won’t let the camera sit still for an instant. Shot variation and shot length can and do increase tension. The long, still shots of Cary Grant in the middle of nowhere make North By Northwest’s crop-duster sequence linger in memory. Eagle Eye, on the other hand, disappears as it’s happening. Honestly, I can feel my memory of it fading as I type.

Eagle Eye

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Multiple locations

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Amorphous Southern soup

Even before its premiere at the 2007 Sundance Film Festival, Hounddog was known as “the Dakota Fanning rape movie.” The film got a lot of notoriety but for more than a year, until this spring, couldn’t get a distributor. It’s a revealing fact. Hounddog may be Dakota Fanning’s grown folks’ movie, but it’s not a good one.

Fanning is Lewellen, a grubby, barefoot Southerner who obsesses over Elvis. The film seems to be set in 1956 or so, though there are some musical anachronisms. But no mind: Hounddog exists in an ooey-gooey, amorphous Southern soup that never did exist anyway.

Lewellen can’t get enough of “Hound Dog,” and she bursts into song and a sashaying dance to the tune every few scenes, always reminding her audience that she’s “gonna be a singer someday.” The closing credits list each of these outbursts, and “Hound Dog” is performed eight times in all: five times by Fanning, twice by Elvis, and once by R&B singer Jill Scott, who plays Big Mama Thornton (the original, pre-Elvis “Hound Dog” singer).

Lewellen’s daddy (David Morse) approves of his daughter’s fixation, though he up and R-U-N-N-O-F-T, leaving her behind with his girlfriend (Robin Wright Penn). Lewellen’s Grammie (Piper Laurie) is not a fan of Elvis, occasionally shouting at Lewellen to “stop playin’ that devil music.” From the pulpit, the local preacher decries the harmful effects of rock-and-roll.

Afemo Omilami plays the Magical Negro. I mean the little-white-girl whisperer. I mean the snake-medicine-man. I mean Charles the stableman. He’s the only one who really understands what Lewellen’s going through, though, after another blue-eyed-soul rendition of “Hound Dog” atop a tree limb, he asks her, “When you gonna sing real blues?,” emphasizing that “Elvis is a white boy singin’ black music.”

True enough. But throw in a slew of biblical references, too. Lewellen and her pal Buddy (Germantown native Cody Hanford) are, sometimes, stand-ins for Eve and Adam. Their Southern swamp is downright Edenic in its primal nature, and the movie opens with an I’ll-show-you-mine-if-you-show-me-yours Genesis genital allegory.

There’s no shortage of snakes slithering around to drive the point home (snake-o-phobes beware this film), and if you take the metaphor all the way — which you’re intended to do — then it’s music that is the forbidden fruit of the Tree of Knowledge.

No doubt there’s an interesting story in here, a Fall of Man coming-of-age tied to the advent of rock-and-roll, but Hounddog is not it. It doesn’t help that Lewellen is also a Christ figure, that the acting is something to be missed, that the whole production (Deborah Kampmeier writes and directs) is uncooked, and that the Southern accents and period details are as authentic as a Beale Street Monday Night.

God help me, I even think Black Snake Moan (which premiered at the same Sundance with Hounddog) got more mileage out of some of the same ideas than this one does.

Hounddog

Opening Friday, September 19th

Ridgeway Four

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Up in the Sky

On the morning of August 7, 1974, Philippe Petit spent 45 minutes walking, standing, sitting, and lying down on a tightrope that spanned the top of the World Trade Center towers in New York City. Man on Wire, James Marsh’s gripping documentary about Petit’s high-wire exploits, may be one of the best films of the year.

Man on Wire is not a typical art-house documentary. It’s almost entirely apolitical, refusing to define Petit’s act as a statement about capitalism, industrialization, or performance art. It’s neither a muddled, abstract, rhetorical exercise like Standard Operating Procedure nor an insulting travelogue like Where in the World Is Osama Bin Laden?. If anything, Marsh’s work resembles last year’s NASA documentary In the Shadow of the Moon, which evoked a similar sense of wonder at the power of human ambition. Yet Man on Wire contains more cinematic excitement than those films and more storytelling chops than the current fictional releases.

Man on Wire is most successful as a straightforward caper picture. But as Petit and his ragtag gang of French and American collaborators recount the extensive preparation and hair-raising actualities of their stunt, Man on Wire changes into a physics problem. As Petit delves into the details of his plan, you start to think along with this mad-eyed, garrulous elf in the banana-yellow Bottle Rocket jumpsuit. How is it possible to stretch the wire across the 200 feet separating the towers? How much will the wind shake the wire at that altitude? How does a guide wire work on a tightrope when there’s nothing but air for 1,350 feet?

As the inspired solutions to these problems emerge, Petit’s charm and drive seduce the viewer in the same way it clearly seduced his handful of co-conspirators. The rush he felt then still invigorates Petit three decades later: When he re-creates the long night he spent in the World Trade Center avoiding guards and setting up the tightrope, he can’t help jabbering wildly and discursively (“A human being with crutches? The universe is his!”), bounding around maniacally, or shrouding himself in some curtains when acting out those tense hours on the night of August 6th when he and a friend hid under a tarp to avoid a security guard.

Although the years of planning and meetings were meticulously filmed, no motion-picture footage of Petit’s time atop the Twin Towers exists. Instead, Marsh assembles a series of still photographs set to Erik Satie’s “Gymnopedie,” which, thanks to its cryptic playing instructions and poetic disregard for tempo and time signatures, is another kind of high-wire act. This fabulous sequence is an elegy to a lost era and a plea for closer, more deliberate observation of the world.

And of course the film is weirdly sad because of the fate of the World Trade Center. In one stunning photograph that unites the past and present, Petit balances in the middle of the wire as an airplane floats by in space, seemingly grazing the top of one of the towers.

So many films portray the destruction of large buildings in pornographic detail. Man on Wire does something different. It re-creates the mystery and majesty of a fallen monument.

Man on Wire

Opening Friday, September 19th

Ridgeway Four

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River of Return

The Sundance-winning Frozen River is a singular film. It takes place at one spot and time in the world: in the present day on the St. Regis Mohawk tribal land in upstate New York — a reservation that encompasses territory on both sides of the St. Lawrence River, in the U.S. and Canada.

Every winter, when the river freezes over, a brisk smuggling trade comes out of hibernation. Illegal immigrants, cigarettes, drugs, you name it: It all comes over the river, transported in cars driven across the ice by Mohawk women. American and Canadian police officials can’t do much to stop it either, because the Mohawk nation is autonomous and free from federal control.

Frozen River is based on this crossroads between three countries, with their imaginary borders and very real disputes, the river that runs through it, and the women who try to keep from drowning under it all.

Ray Eddy (Melissa Leo) is a white woman on the New York side. She asks for just a little slice of the American Dream: a new doublewide trailer. But her husband has stolen the payment on it the morning it’s being delivered, and he runs out on Ray and her two sons, 15-year-old T.J. (Charlie McDermott) and 5-year-old Ricky (James Reilly). To make matters worse, it’s Christmastime, and Ray doesn’t have anything to put under the tree. She’s not getting enough hours at Yankee Dollar Store.

While trying to track down her husband, Ray encounters Lila (Misty Upham), a Mohawk woman who’s not doing so well herself. Lila lives in a tiny trailer on the rez, and, though she makes a little money smuggling, she’s saving it all for her 1-year-old son, who was kidnapped by her mother-in-law.

Their backs against the wall, Ray and Lila begin an uneasy partnership. Ray helps bring a carload of foreigners over the river. It’s nerve-wracking, but it seems easy enough the first time. And it pays.

Frozen River is full of observations of those who are living less than paycheck to paycheck: digging through the couch for lunch money for the kids; buying exactly as much gas as you have change in your pocket; popcorn and Tang for dinner. The American Dream is sought after by the dispossessed, the repossessed, and the pissed off. It makes you wonder if it’s worth chasing at all. And yet, the film doesn’t descend into the depressing. Though times are tough, these characters are strong, engaging, and willing to fight.

Leo and Upham’s chemistry is magnetic but not overplayed — the two will get nominations and more come award season if there’s any justice. The film is full of indelible images and moments of surprise and humor, and the culture clashes are intensely realistic.

Melissa Leo and Misty Upham

Frozen River is a noirish, western, indie-drama character study. Like I said, it’s singular.

It also premieres in Memphis this week, marking a bit of a homecoming for writer-director Courtney Hunt, who was born in Memphis and lived here until age 13.

The film is the debut feature from Hunt, who has a law degree from Northeastern University and an MFA from Columbia University, where she studied under filmmaker, critic, and Taxi Driver screenwriter Paul Schrader. Frozen River won the Grand Jury Prize at this year’s Sundance Film Festival.

Hunt recently took a few questions from the Flyer in advance of the film’s Memphis premiere:

Flyer: Was filmmaking something you’ve always wanted to do?

Hunt: Yes. My very first art-house movie was at the Memphian theater [the current location of Playhouse on the Square]. My mother would take me to see everything. I remember when I saw The Way We Were — arguably inappropriate for an 8-year-old. She thought I should be able to see good films. That’s how my love of movies got started, which is why I’m so excited to come to Memphis.

Was the genesis of Frozen River hearing about the smuggling trade?

Yes. My husband is from a town about 10 miles from the Canadian border. I met some women who were smugglers. They were running cigarettes, and they just ran it as a business. They didn’t think anything of it. I heard that they had switched over to illegal immigrants after 9/11, and that to me became very interesting.

Did you ever go on one of those runs yourself?

No, because every time I’d be up there, my husband would say, “Don’t you go on a smuggling run!” But I did drive across the river with a Mohawk, just to drive across. It’s exhilarating.

So much of what defines Frozen River is its atmosphere.

The way it looks up there — that open, desolate landscape in blues and grays — is what it looks like in the winter. We just turned on the camera. Coming from West Tennessee, I always loved that flat landscape with a big wide river. It’s a powerful image for me. You add on to this the sight of that river frozen and a car driving across it, and that was the central visual image for the movie.

First-time filmmakers often make work that is in some way autobiographical. Are you anywhere in these characters that you created?

I would say that I am probably in all of the characters, but most of all I am probably in T.J. I think he feels burdened beyond his years — which I did.

Even though my mother was working her heart out and my dad was in the picture as somebody I saw regularly, it was still that feeling of, Is my mother going to be able to pull this off? I think kids of single mothers often ask that question.

What’s next on the slate?

I have a period piece that I just finished and I’m beginning to shop. It takes place in 1904 on the Lower East Side of New York City, about the melting pot before it melted.

Any chance you’ll make a movie in Memphis called Muddy River? Part of a trilogy?

[Laughs] It’s funny you should ask. I do have a third film I’ve outlined but not written, which does take place in West Tennessee and it does involve my family, but I can’t really say anything else about it.

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Location Shooting

“I thought about that movie, asked if it was that way.

He just shook his head and smiled at me in such a loving way.

As he thought about some friends he will never see again,

He said, ‘I never saw John Wayne on the sands of Iwo Jima.'”

— “Sands of Iwo Jima,” The Drive-By Truckers

Tropic Thunder is an extremely funny disappointment. Directed and co-written by and starring Ben Stiller, this tale of a group of actors on location shooting a Vietnam War film who find themselves in the middle of real combat is an enjoyable, often uproarious farce, but it’s not a particularly brave film.

Perhaps predictably, Stiller & Co. take the easy road in skewering Hollywood arrogance and duplicity while only mildly questioning the legitimacy of make-believe war, particularly its appeal to and impact on audiences. For that reason, the film’s alleged satiric savagery too often feels more like a self-congratulatory pose.

Tropic Thunder opens with a comedic bang in the form of a series of fake advertisements and film trailers that introduce most of the central characters and establish the gonzo tone of the comedy: Rapper Alpa Chino (Brandon T. Jackson) is shown hawking products — namely, Booty Sweat energy drink and Bust a Nut candy bars. Aging action hero Tugg Speedman (Stiller) promotes the latest installment of a flagging action series (Scorcher VI: Global Meltdown). Hard-living comedian Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) is back with a “family” comedy sequel, The Fatties: Fart 2. And Aussie master thespian Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey Jr.) is a monk in love opposite Tobey Maguire in a bit of Oscar bait.

As the film proper opens, these actors are in the jungle of Southeast Asia, filming a Hollywood epic based on a memoir of a 1969 military mission and led by an overwhelmed director (Steve Coogan) and a hard-bitten author (Nick Nolte). With the production in trouble, the author convinces the director to try to salvage the film by taking his actors “off the fuckin’ grid” and putting them “in the shit,” with handheld cameras to document the gritty reality — resulting in a howlingly abrupt and thorough mockery of directorial hubris that is the film’s finest moment.

The Hollywood targets here are specific — the fake-gore extremity of Saving Private Ryan, Russell Crowe, Eddie Murphy, an overly familiar but still funny riff on how playing characters with mental or physical handicaps is the road to the Oscar. (“You went full retard, man. You never go full retard,” Lazarus explains to Speedman about his failed lead performance in the would-be career-changer Simple Jack.) And the actors — especially Downey and Tom Cruise — chomp into flashy parts with admirable gusto.

Cruise’s inherent maniacal intensity serves him well in his grotesque caricature as a hairy, belligerent studio chief, just as it did when he played a self-help guru in Magnolia. (Perhaps he just needs an excuse to let that inner asshole out.) But it’s Downey — whose Lazarus takes the next step in Method acting, undergoing a “pigmentation alteration procedure” to play a black soldier — who owns the film.

Wearing brown makeup and wig and spouting “jive talk” even after the reality of the situation is clear (“I don’t drop character until I do the DVD commentary,” he explains), Downey’s character skirts offensiveness, which is good. The film balances him out with Jackson’s Alpa Chino, an actual African-American character (though one who certainly engages in his own racialized role-playing) who takes considerable umbrage at the act. (At one point, Alpa Chino realizes that the inspirational speech Lazarus is giving is actually the lyrics to the theme song from The Jeffersons.) The humor here isn’t in Downey’s character as an emblem of black speech and behavior but as a commentary on what white people think of as black speech and behavior. After his lascivious Tony Stark in Iron Man, Downey surely deserves some kind of special Oscar for enjoyable performances in summer popcorn movies.

As with recent comedies such as Pineapple Express and, especially, Hot Fuzz, the protagonists here ultimately bumble into success in action sequences that mock Hollywood convention while ultimately trying to match it. An honest comedy about pretend warriors in real combat would result in a far harsher comeuppance and would be considerably more challenging for the audience.

For a glimpse at what Tropic Thunder might have been in bolder hands, make a video-store search for Small Soldiers, Joe Dante’s bravura 1998 war-move satire that was disguised — far too well, it turns out — as a summer kid movie. Now there’s a satire that goes places Stiller isn’t willing to.

Tropic Thunder

Now playing

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Star Wars: The Clone Wars

A long time ago, in a Greg that seems far, far away, I camped outside a Lexington, Kentucky, theater for three days to buy tickets to a Star Wars movie. Yeah, I used to be excited by the prospect of a new Star Wars movie. But, then again, I also used to vote Republican. Time makes fools of us all.

Which is why I viewed the release of the new Star Wars film, The Clone Wars, with minor apathetic annoyance. Haven’t we all agreed that George Lucas shouldn’t play with his Star Wars toys anymore? So color me a little surprised and mildly entertained with the actual movie, which fits in nicely with the series from the last decade: stilted dialogue and broad-brush characterization, but generally satisfying action.

The Clone Wars is animated, which distinguishes it from the other Star Wars prequels in that, now, even the human characters are conjured on a laptop. The Clone Wars will go on to be a TV series on Cartoon Network. The animation is very good by television standards but a little weak to carry the silver screen. Of note: Anakin Skywalker, played by Hayden Christensen in the live-action movies, is no less wooden as a cartoon.

Two things, in particular, threaten to derail the whole train. One is Jabba’s son, a little baby Hutt that’s, at least, no worse than the Ewoks or Jar Jar. The other is Jabba’s uncle, Ziro the Hutt, a jazz-club proprietor whose voice is, I swear, the most screamingly funny thing I’ve experienced at a theater in years: Imagine Strother Martin from Cool Hand Luke, maybe a twist more effeminate, crossed with Cartman from South Park. Add the character visual to the voice: a big fat slug with purple makeup and a feather on its head. Once the idea was in my head, I couldn’t stop laughing. I’m laughing right now.

Star Wars: The Clone Wars opens Friday, August 15th, at multiple locations

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Buzz kill: Stoner comedy goes bad

The release of Pineapple Express portends a new way to mark off the American movie calendar. Certain dreary patterns already exist. After many good movies hit town in January and February, several weeks are filled with occasional glimpses of life and art and the most misshapen, leprous studio debris. The apex of the summer-movie brain-freeze is celebrated over the Fourth of July weekend, when Will Smith descends from the heavens. Thanksgiving means stuffed turkeys and James Bond films. The Ghosts of Oscar Seasons Past and Present haunt Christmas. And now it looks like those back-to-school days of mid-August will be eternally ushered in by the latest tiresome male fantasy from the minds of Seth Rogen, Evan Goldberg, and Judd Apatow.

The fantastical boundaries of Pineapple Express’ all-male Neverland are immediately established with Rogen’s character, process server Dale Denton. He’s a 25 year old whose job allows him to remain stoned most of the day. Preposterously, he dates a cute teen-age girl, and while he’s talking to her in the hallway of her high school, he tells off an officious teacher. (Hooray for taboo-busting anti-authoritarianism, I guess.) Dale soon finds himself on the run from some bad guys with his drug dealer Saul (James Franco). Many bullets, car chases, and explosions later, the phallocratic order dusts itself off and stands up straight (kind of) once more. Holy predictability, Batman! I mean, Dark Knight!

What could director David Gordon Green, whose George Washington is one of the great American films of the decade, possibly add to these proceedings? Well, Saul and Dale’s actions express a certain level of pathetic desperation that’s frequently excluded from action movies. They’re terrified at what might happen to them next, and they fight blindly and awkwardly whenever they’re in jeopardy. Green and cinematographer Tim Orr also reveal social class and status through décor. The cluttered, run-down rooms where Saul and his philosophical, indestructible supplier Red (Danny McBride) live are covered in bad wallpaper or curtains, littered with stacks of media, and kissed by some defining oddity, like an astrology chart or a mannequin head. The Dude from The Big Lebowski could roll off of a couch, white Russian still in hand, and look perfectly natural.

Did Green halt or curtail Rogen and Goldberg’s Neanderthal stance toward women, too? There’s little of the misogyny and chauvinism that mark the dreadful Superbad. However, that may be a function of the script: There aren’t any three-dimensional women anywhere in the movie. But the homoerotic dynamic between Saul and Dale is curiously tender, culminating with a fairly funny rescue attempt/bump-and-grind sequence in an underground marijuana farm.

Other laughs are sparse, because Pineapple Express is not a comedy for stoners as much as it is a movie depicting stoned people’s struggles with the world. Fans of genuinely unpredictable, stoner-inspired comedy should try renting the just-released three-DVD set of the BBC TV series Spaced, directed by Edgar Wright and co-written by Simon Pegg. Spaced provides scores of energetic, non-sequitur belly laughs that, like Wright’s visionary films Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz, are filled with the heartfelt good vibrations that Apatow and his protegés can no longer find.

Pineapple Express

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