Against the backdrop of a low-rent amusement park and set during the halcyon days of 1987, Adventureland is a sweet and endearing, if slight, comedy that makes the most of its familiar plot. In particular, Jesse Eisenberg (Zombieland) is wonderful as the nebbish James, making up for the usual pouty-faced, lip-biting acting by Kristen Stewart. A cavalcade of quirky characters makes this all seem true to life, lending a sort of easygoing charm and appeal.

James is set to go to an Ivy League school, but his dad’s transfer (and subsequent alcoholism) means the family can’t afford the tuition. Eventually, James happens upon Adventureland, which is every bit as ritzy as its name implies, and is quickly put to work manning one of the games on the park’s midway. It’s here that he meets the alluring Em (Stewart), along with Joel (Martin Starr) and owners Bobby (Bill Hader) and Paulette (Kristen Wiig). Also entering the picture is the mysterious handyman Mike Connell (Ryan Reynolds), who’s said to have jammed with Lou Reed, and the sexotic – new word! – Lisa P (Margarita Levieva).

James’ problem? Many, as it turns out. He’s a virgin (I know!), and Em is almost an unattainable ideal for him – she’s cute (no, she’s not), she’s smart, she’s worldly, and so on. Plus he’s trying desperately to save up enough money to head to New York and start a life there. It helps, though, that he’s the major weed supplier for the park’s employees. Neat trick.

Essentially, what you’re left with is a slice of life, a look at a summer spent working in a hellhole (albeit with a cool boss like Bill Hader), accompanied by the usual teen/young adult angst and overactive hormones. I liked Jesse Eisenberg, and I think that his casting is essential to the movie’s appeal. Didn’t care for Stewart at all, and I wonder how she possibly gets these cute-indie-chick roles when she’s neither cute nor indie. Where’s this generation’s Parker Posey or Janeane Garofalo? Ryan Reynolds was also appropriately douchey. It’s sort of his character, his mien, his idiom, if you will.

There is now a long, grand history of disaster films in Hollywood. The best of the lot have combined suspense with cutting-edge effects to keep your adrenaline pumping. The worst combine cheesy CGI with shallow characters whose deaths won’t affect you much.


Here’s 2012, summed up: Look, some recognizable landmark! Kablam! Look, a giant wave! Wooo! Do our intrepid Good Guys have enough time to outrun the imploding planet and foil a plot to save only the pretty, rich people? Probably!

It’s pretty clear what happened to bring us to this point. Roland Emmerich, who’s made such cinematic classics as Independence Day, The Patriot, Godzilla, and The Day after Tomorrow, was asked if he wanted a quintillion billion bazillion dollars to make a movie about the end of the world, and he said sure. Then he took parts of each movie’s script, filmed them mostly with CGI, and pocketed the rest. Viola! Greatest movie!



See, there are two ways Emmerich could have gone with this movie. He could have given us characters to follow whom we cared a little about, thus involving us in their plights, and mixed in some convincing special effects. Or he could have said, “The heck with the characters, give me blowy-uppy thingys.” This sometimes works: See Independence Day, a movie that made me feel pretty good when I left the theater after seeing it but that ultimately, frankly, was pretty bad.

Emmerich chose the latter. Which would have been fine, but the effects themselves are wildly unrealistic and often take so long to set up that you completely notice how godawful they really are. For example – and if you’ve seen the trailer, this is in there – there’s a scene in which the Sistine Chapel falls, crushing thousands of spectators. Because the toppling is so slow to complete, it becomes painfully obvious that it’s just a film running on a screen behind people running away. Sad and unintentionally hilarious.

And you can forget about the plot, really, because most of it makes no sense anyway and would happen only in a Big Movie like this. Of COURSE John Cusack is divorced from his hot, bitchy wife (Amanda Peet) and of COURSE she’s hooking up with a plastic surgeon who of COURSE winds up having had some flying lessons that of COURSE will save them all and of COURSE Cusack’s young son will somehow save the day as well and of COURSE there is a Russian businessman who used to be a boxing legend and of COURSE he punches someone out. And of COURSE people say “My God!” a lot, because that’s what people do in crappy disaster films. And of COURSE the president is black, because in Hollywood black people get to be president only if disaster is a-coming.

At least the acting isn’t horrible. Because everyone just runs from place to place in an effort to escape the horror, there aren’t any subtle, low-key scenes that would allow good actors to flourish. Cusack is good in general, but what the heck is he doing in here? He’s usually so good at picking projects, and he chose this? Willingly? Oliver Platt plays the kind of role that Bruce McGill typically gets, the hamhanded, I’m-in-charge, Al-Haig-like politician. I can’t even remember his title. Danny Glover gets to be president and does get the best dialog in the film, even if his role isn’t a big one. Woody Harrelson, as a crazed DJ deep in Yellowstone is also a lot of fun, although he’s not the kind of guy you’d want to sit next to on a transatlantic flight.

Final verdict: Yikes. Yikes, yikes, and yikes. If you dare watch this travesty, you might find yourself laughing hysterically at things – and this is important – that were not meant to be funny. If that’s your thing, this is your movie. I managed to see this as a matinee, so I’m not out the $10-$15 that some people are right now, so at least I got that going for me. Best advice: Watch it for free at home on a big-screen TV to fully appreciate the magnitude of suck.

A lot of people didn’t like Rob Zombie’s Halloween, but I’m not one of them. I found his vision of John Carpenter’s classic to be stylish without drifting from the core issues of the original. Sure, it’s gorier, but you knew that going in. Zombie’s followup isn’t a direct sequel to the first Halloween II but rather to his own film, and personally I thought it (and the blood) flowed rather nicely. It’s clear the man is passionate about his horror.

You know how I know a horror movie works for me? When the killer leaps out unexpectedly. Time was, that was basically every time, but we’re a little more jaded now and really expect him continuously. You know what else works? When the characters are more than just victims, cardboard standups there for the killin’. When something happens to these people, you feel it. Example, Sheriff Brackett rushes back to his house, realizing that Michael Myers – not dead! – is probably in the middle of hacking his daughter to pieces. At that moment, we feel what Brackett feels – not just that an innocent, but the man’s daughter is being killed. Done right, this kind of scene can pack an emotional wallop, something you don’t often see in slasher movies.

Here’s the story. It’s a year later, and Laurie Strode (Scout Taylor-Compton) is trying to get on with her life after Michael Myers escaped from a mental institution, returned to Haddonfield, Illinois, and tried to kill her. Laurie bears the considerable mental and physical scars of her encounter with Michael, as does her friend Annie Brackett, and she now lives with Annie and her father, Sheriff Brackett (Brad Dourif). Michael’s supposedly dead, but we wouldn’t have a sequel if that were truly the case, so he finds his way back to Haddonfield as well, cutting a swath of bloody corpses (or leaving a path of bloody corpses).

Zombie’s great talent is style. You see it in his old White Zombie videos, you see it in his animated sequence in Beavis and Butt-head Do America, and you see it in his earlier films. The man has verve and panache. People don’t just get smacked around, they get pummeled, and not just men, either. People don’t just get stabbed in the leg, they get sliced up. Dogs, too. It’s not a movie for the weak of heart.

What also works here is that Zombie never loses sight of the story. (Yes, there is one.) Sometimes, with crappier horror movies, the director will simply go all-in and make everything as goopily gory as possible. There’s a plot here, and there are victims and good guys, too. There are other things in the movie, is what I’m saying, and Zombie makes sure we remember they’re there, too. Keep the story moving – Michael must have some reason to butcher someone, even if that reason is “they were in the way.”

One problem I had with the movie, though, was the character of Dr. Loomis. In the first-series films Loomis (played by Donald Pleasance) is a kindly doctor, terribly upset that he’s inadvertently unleashed Michael onto the world by letting him escape. In this movie, Loomis (played by Malcolm McDowell) is a greedy, self-indulgent jerk who’s pushing a tell-all memoir about the events of a year ago. Loomis seemed a lot more concerned with everyone’s well being in Zombie’s first film, but here he simply doesn’t care about anyone – even going so far as to reveal a potentially deadly secret to sell books. I’m not sure if it was just McDowell hamming it up or an oversight on the writer (also Zombie), but the character seemed way over the top, sort of like Gale Whatshername from the Scream movies, which were parodying the way newsie types profit from misery and woe.

But overall, I liked this sequel quite a bit. I was literally the only person in the entire theater this morning, which is always quite nice. I particularly liked Brad Dourif as the strong but vulnerable police chief; a great performance from an underlooked character actor.

Note: Zombie (and the studio) has said he won’t be back for Halloween III, should it come to fruition.

Unlike Crash, another recent disparate-people-dealing-with-a-sociological-issue movie, Crossing Over is poignant, stirring, and rousing, capturing what must be the wrenching experience of being an immigrant, legal or otherwise, in the United States. Led by Harrison Ford, the ensemble cast touches all the bases. Although the movie can be very difficult to watch at times, owing to its subject matter, it’s a tough-minded look at the often-tragic issue of immigration.

Ford plays Max Brogan, an INS agent stationed in Los Angeles, who decides to help an illegal textile worker (Alice Braga) by making sure that the woman’s son is taken to his grandmother (the woman’s mother) in Mexico when the woman is detained. Meanwhile, Max’s partner Hamid Baraheri (Cliff Curtis), struggles to reconcile his job with the culture of his family (Iranian) and the reckless behavior of his younger sister. Ray Liotta plays Cole Frankel, an adjudicator who determines the status of immigrants and their green cards; Alice Eve is an aspiring Australian actress who has to degrade herself to lengthen her stay in the country; Ashley Judd plays Liotta’s wife, who defends immigrants in status cases. In a parallel storyline, a young Korean youth, days before his family’s naturalization ceremony, makes a decision that could have terrible consequences.

All of these storylines are intricately intertwined, but here’s where the movie differs from Crash: the interactions of the various characters never feel forced or insincere, and the characters themselves are not simple good people doing bad things or bad people doing good things.

The acting is uniformly grand. Ford, who rarely plays nonhero roles let alone supporting roles, is excellent as the crusty, world-weary agent, trying desperately to solve a serious crime that may hit close to home while also doing the right thing by the young textile-worker mother. Also shining is Judd (and, to a lesser extent, Liotta, although he plays the same character in many of his movies now – a slimeball), but really sealing the deal is Curtis (10,000 BC, Sunshine) as the conflicted agent of Iranian descent.

Like the issue of immigration itself, the movie is complicated, almost detrimentally so, but the conflict should certainly resonate with its audience, even if one is not an immigrant or part of a family that has recently immigrated. Certain scenes are almost deadly with their pathos, figuratively rending your heart as they play out. Emotionally gripping scenes such as these (particularly near the end of the film) exemplify precisely the kind of psychological gymnastics that a director must undertake for a film like this to have any sort of positive effecet on its audience. That is, the entire issue of immigration is fraught with anger, deceit, terror, and sadness, and it can be tricky to walk the line between one feeling or another, lest one be accused of bias.

Crossing Over falls into none of the traps that Crash fell into. Its character-driven storyline is brimming with plausible conflict that eclipses the usual cops-and-illegals pastiche, choosing instead to deal with problems on a more individual level. The result is an honest, illuminating look at a sometimes-vexing subject, although it is clearly not for all tastes.

In Steven Soderbergh’s The Informant!, Matt Damon is a guileless agriculture exec who decides to rat out on his superiors for their price-fixing schemes. Or maybe he’s not as innocent as he looks and is simply trying to take over the embattled company. Or maybe he’s just mentally unstable. But the result is lamebrained and uninvolving; as the movie progresses, it’s clear there’s more to things than meets the eye but little reason to care. With a protagonist who isn’t convincing as either a victim or a perpetrator, The Informant! ultimately tries way too hard to please. Damon’s characterizations are difficult to pin down, making it impossible to root for him or against him at any point, even at the very end.

The Informant! is an absurdist piece, but it just doesn’t work. You get the feeling that if this had been a straightforward industrial-wrongdoing bit, it could have been a strong, acerbic eyebrow raiser about Big Bad Companies. It could have been The Insider, an investigative movie that was just as much about the behind-the-scenes machinations of the good guys and the bad guys as it was about the evils of the smoking industry. But you get little of that in The Informant!, which apparently sees itself as a comedy of errors. As the lies of Mark Whitacre (Damon) – to the FBI, to his bosses, to his lawyers – pile up, all semblance of reality and logic go flying out the window.

Damon plays Whitacre with almost unhinged glee, but it’s as if he’s in on the joke, and you’re not. At times, he reminds you of Andy from The 40 Year Old Virgin, so innocent in the ways of the world, and the next thing you know he’s lying his butt off to anyone who will listen. Is it all part of an elaborate scheme, or is he just a chronic liar? It might not be evident even by the end of the movie, which sort of puts the protagonist’s role in a bit of stasis.

For me, there are people for whom you root, people against whom you root, and people whose intentions are nebulous. I don’t even mind it when there are unexplained actions by the characters; it’s okay if there are loose plot threads. So it’s not that I don’t agree with Mark Whitacre being this playing-all-sides sort of fellow, it’s just that all of the actions he undertakes, whether he’s working with the feds, interacting with his smarter wife, or narrating himself, are a colossal bore. That’s the crux of it right there – the movie is boring; the plot is so straightforward and vanilla that the audience isn’t likely to be emotionally invested in Whitacre or his family (we hardly ever see the kids anyway) and therefore isn’t likely to give a hoot what happens to them.

Zombieland is a gleefully twisted mockumentary about a world full of you-know-whats, wherein only five living people remain in the entire world. It’s gory and disgusting, but most of all, it’s terrific fun, with just the right mix of violence and off-kilter comedy.

Jesse Eisenberg plays a young man named Columbus (because that’s where he’s heading, across the wasteland that is the middle US). Columbus is scared of just about everything: clowns, the cloths people use to wipe down tables, bathrooms, you name it. A hot apartment neighbor comes down with this hot new disease that all the cool kids don’t want to have, and before you know it he’s killed her (well, rekilled) and is on the run, fleeing zombies and making up a long list of rules of how to survive in the eponymous new land. Near the beginning of our story, he meets up with a man he calls Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson), who’s, uh, on his way to Tallahassee, and they in turn meet with a couple of con girls (Abagail Breslin and Emma Stone).

Comparisons to Shaun of the Dead are somewhat apt, as both movies are comedic takes on a horror subgenre, and director Ruben Fleischer was influenced by the Simon Pegg-Nick Frost movie. But. Zombieland is both funnier and more sincere; it’s not a slapstick comedy, and it’s not really a horror film, as Shaun of the Dead was. In fact, it’s sort of quirky and genreless.

There were a LOT of laugh-out-loud moments for me in this movie, and I think a chief reason it all gels is that the leads are so perfectly cast. Eisenberg is awesome as the protagonist, the vulnerable hero, and Harrelson is a real hoot as the Mad-Max-like (or maybe Ash from Evil Dead) gentle psycho who desires nothing more than to waste zombies and find one, just one, Twinkie. Yes, I said Twinkie!

I also really liked Abagail Breslin as the moppet Little Rock. It’s always tough for child actors to make the transition into more-adult roles, but she’s up to the task here. Emma Stone is tough and sweet as her sisterly counterpart.

There’s a cameo that’ll surely surprise you – and what’s more, it really works. The actor – no spoilers here! – really sells the role. Let’s just say that he plays himself. Did I mention that the main characters are headed to California and that basically everyone else in the world is either dead or a zombie? Everyone?

You don’t often hear people applaud during a movie, but applaud we did at a couple key moments. The final scene in an amusement park is witty and lighthearted, at least as lighthearted as mowing down zombies with machine guns can be.

Now, granted, there’s plenty of blood splattering, plenty of gore, plenty of cursing, and even some nudity. And yes, it’s even gratuitous. But not for a zombie movie. For a zombie movie, those things are sort of underplayed a little bit, at least in the true horror sense – they’re played much more for chuckles than anything else. If anything, Zombieland is a movie that dares you to take it seriously, just so it can pull the rug out from under you and we can all laugh. It’s an offbeat look at an overused genre that cranks out the guts and guffaws in equal, lethal doses.

Echoing such luminous sci-fi classics as 2001 and Alien, Pandorum is a terrific psychological thriller, although it does struggle at times to be coherent and original. But it’s a true mindbender, and it’s packed with action that moves so quickly neither the actors nor the audience can really catch a breath, which is a good move if your plot is shaky to begin with.

As with the best deep-space movies, the context is mental illness, what the Professor on Gilligan’s Island called, oddly enough, “island madness.” Only in space. In the distant, distant future, a ship has been sent from the Earth carrying a lot of people, headed to the only Earth-like planet ever found. Sometime during the journey, things go awry. We pick up the story as an astronaut named Bower (Ben Foster) awakens from hypersleep, abruptly; he’s soon followed by his commanding officer, Payton (Dennis Quaid). The rest of the crew is gone, and the only door is locked from the outside. What’s happened here?

Making matters more difficult is the amnesia that each man suffers from, owing to their having been in hypersleep way longer than intended. Somehow, they must piece together what has happened and find out what lies behind that door – and throughout the rest of the gigantic ship.

Not only does the movie recall Aliens and 2001, you can also see similarities to The Descent and The Abyss; really, any movie in which people are trapped in claustrophobic environs. And although the pacing is frenetic at times, the movie is really chillingly shot (by Wedigo von Schultzendorff). On the one hand, the plot flows linearly – Bower needs to get to the ship’s reactor so he can reboot it and save everyone – meaning that the actors race from scene to scene, running out of time. On the other hand, they don’t piece together what’s happened as quickly as they might in other, lesser films; they seem to figure things out gradually, as if assembling a puzzle in their heads. Bowers and others – and there are others – discover right away, though, that they’re not really alone on the ship and that their enemies are extremely strong and fast and vicious.

Injected into this oh-my-goodness-what’s-out-there madness is, well, madness. The movie’s title is explained as being a sort of mental illness that affects astronauts from time to time, when they just plain go bonkers for seemingly no reason and kill everyone on board. Is that’s what’s happening here? Is Bower the crazy one? Or is it Payton? Are they, in fact, alone on the ship?

Foster is excellent as the hero who remembers a little bit more of their mission as time elapses; Quaid, in turn, shows a few more layers than we’re accustomed to seeing from him (he’s usually more of a poor man’s Harrison Ford). Both actors turn in convincing, full-throated performances that complement, rather than succumb to, the special effects and cinematic wizardry. Often, the effects are the entire show. Now, it’s true that you won’t see a lot of character development here, as you might in the most cerebral of sci-fi, but what works best here is the paucity of knowledge about the situation and the characters. By spinning the tale gradually, feeding the audience only a snippet at a time, director Christian Alvart dangles the mystery in front of his viewers without allowing them to settle back and solve the mystery on their own. When you’re constantly kept on your toes with sudden lurches of unseen shapes and reverberating noises, you – like the befuddled characters – are concurrently kept off balance. The result is an unsettling, entertaining delight.

The Harry Potter franchise, like its youthful cast, continues to get darker, seriouser, and more mature. In this sixth entry, Harry has to deal not only with Death Eaters and He Who Shall Not Be Named (coughVoldemortcough) but also teenage hormones, which seem banal to us old folks but rather consume the entirety of the demographic audience’s existence.

But it’s a testament to director Peter Yates and writer Steve Kloves that the so-called down-time scenes aren’t dull; in fact, they’re invigorating, sweet, sincere looks at teenage life, which is sort of difficult to do when you’re middle aged.

One aspect of Harry Potter that’s always held a tremendous amount of appeal for me is in how the whole kids-growing-up experience is so detailed and authentic. The portrayal of teen angst on film is no easy task, particularly by grownups, who presumably haven’t been angsty in a decade or two.

To be sure, the movie is darker than any of its predecessors, just as with the books. As the stories have progressed, the issues Harry faces increase in intensity and maturity – as his beloved Professor Dumbledore says, he must once again ask too much of his young charge. But for a change, the adults in Harry’s world are beginning to treat him more like an adult and less like a pestering child. They share secrets with him, seek his counsel, and trust him to do heavy lifting – that is, they don’t shunt him off to the corner while they fight bad guys themselves. (Of course, this is partly out of necessity, as so many of the good guys are being picked off.) But the frivolity and child-like wonder of the earlier films is now long gone, as the filmmakers (correctly, really) assume that the audience is well familiar with the characters and the storylines. Less time is spent on exposition and introducing us to strange new creatures (mermaids, dragons, etc.).

The plot: Voldemort, freed at the end of the fifth film, is assembling his Death Eaters, who attack London. Meanwhile, Dumbledore has asked Horace Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) to return to the school as the Potions teacher. Dumbledore wants to gain access to an old memory of Slughorn that may hold the key to Voldemort’s plans, and Harry (naturally) is asked to get that memory from the reluctant teacher. Meanwhile, Hermione likes Ron but doesn’t want to admit it. Ron falls for a clingy Lavender Brown, and Harry has eyes for Ron’s sister, Ginny. The kids are at that age – in the fifth film, we saw hormonal hints, but more from the girls’ side of things, and here the score is evened up a tad. The thing is, though, as much as those of us far removed from our teen years are not interested in teen issues, Yates and Kloves make the relationships and interactions so spot-on honest that we can’t help but get swept away in the sentiments.

On an individual level, your heart really goes out to all three young leads. We’ve all been down their paths, but there’s something about the performances – throughout the series – of Daniel Radcliffe, Rupert Grint, and Emma Watson that compels you to see things on their terms, to feel their hearts soar and sink with each emotional twist. You can see the connection between Hermione and Ron, which has been developing for five years now, beginning to blossom before the characters are even aware. You just know that Harry likes Ginny and can see the conflict in his mind – on the one hand, Ron’s his best friend, and on the other, Ginny is Ron’s sister. These battles these conflicts foment aren’t fought in clear view; they’re done with quite a bit of subtlety in a movie franchise that’s also known for wild special effects. And that’s a huge compliment.


The entire cast is outstanding, giving us a sort of old-shoe comfortability with their work here, but I wanted to point out the crazed, perfectly over-the-top work of Helena Bonham Carter as Bellatrix Lestrange, the most insane of all the Death Eaters, the witch who killed Harry’s godfather, Sirius. Bonham Carter is devilish, part Bride of Frankenstein and part, I dunno, Aileen Wuornos. She’s hissably evil, as they say, but she’s never hammy. Broadbent is also a welcome addition as Slughorn, vulnerable, pompous, a bit grandstanding, a gadfly of students (he likes to “collect” portraits of the best ones). A students’ groupie, really. Slughorn is pivotal in unlocking Voldemort’s secret. Alan Rickman, again back as the nebulously moral Severus Snape, offers a delicious, multilayered performance that keeps you guessing throughout the entire movie.

The movie features some of the best cinematography and sets in the series, too. Hogwarts is shown at times, as is The Three Broomsticks at Hogsmeade, but Harry and Dumbledore also travel to a distant cave, and there’s a Quidditch match (hooray!), and the Weasley twins have now – having left Hogwarts in a blaze of glory at the end of the fifth film – opened their own shop at the now-dilapitaded Diagon Alley.

You cannot be bored with this film. Yates’ pacing is top notch, as he slows the movie down only when necessary – i.e., to build drama or inject humor. Things move at a breakneck speed, just as in the book, and everything is so perfectly laid out that you don’t even realize they’ve slowed down. If you’re a guy you’ll assume the romance will be pointless and dumb and just filler, but I assure you it’s none of those. Despite all your efforts, your heart will break a couple of times in this movie, once for those in and out of love, and once for the big secret near the end of the movie.

A final word about the adaptation itself. It has been a little while since I read the book, but I don’t think they took out too much that should have remained, if any. The movie is two and a half hours long, after all, and the books got progressively longer. There are a couple of extended scenes that are missing from the movie, but there’s good reason: One is a battle scene from the end of the book; this was cut because the next book also contains a huge battle scene, and the producers wanted to avoid having the two films look too similar. The other scene, rumor has it, will appear at the beginning of the next film.

All in all, Harry Potter’s sixth adventure is possibly the best of them all. Stunning sets are complemented by achingly real acting by not only Britain’s most decorated but also by the youthful main cast. I saw this in a theater full of teenagers whom, I had feared, wouldn’t keep quiet for the movie. They did keep quiet except when the script told them to cheer and gasp and jump in fright. (This is an intense PG-rated film.) The movie was so well received that people cheered when the credits came up, which is not something you see often nowadays. The ending – not in the book – is sweet, portentous, bittersweet, and elegant.

An ex-superhero is thrown through a plate glass window, many stories above the city. Was his murder somehow connected to the feared imminent nuclear holocaust between the United States and Russia? Someone seems to want the former do-gooders out of the way in this thrilling, one-of-a-kind, jaded look at superheroes that turns conventional comic-book wisdom on its head.

It’s an alternate 1985. Richard Nixon has been elected to a fifth presidential term. But the USSR is encroaching on Afghanistan, and the US isn’t taking too kindly to it. Enter the smartest man in the world, Adrian Veidt (Matthew Goode), formerly known as superhero Ozymandias, who is working with the ethereal Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), a physicist who has achieved immortality and near-omniscience owing to a long-ago lab mishap. With Dr. Manhattan’s help, Adrian hopes to dissolve the tension between the two superpowers.

But that’s not the only conflict, not by a long shot. Since the characters here are unfamiliar to most audiences, there’s plenty of backstory, seamlessly edited into the main story as important details that inform the characters. (For one thing, we get to see the rather graphic - more on that later - origin of Dr. Manhattan.) The superheroes have conflict within their own group, which has gone its separate ways - with different goals and outlooks. Not only that, but the world at large isn’t entirely on the side of masked avengers, labeling them as vigilantes. By the present, most of them have ditched their costumes for traditional lives; some tinker with their gadgets in their basements, in hiding, and some merely blend into society.

Here’s who’s left in 1985, in addition to Ozymandias (who’s revealed his true identity to the world) and Dr. Manhattan: Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), Silk Spectre II (Malin Akerman), and The Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan). Others have gone insane or been murdered themselves in years past; all suffer as everyday humans now.

So how does Watchmen skewer comic-book tropes? Well, they’re not always good, you see. Some are, but some maliciously kill, albeit for the greater good. Some take delight in the suffering of man if that man is, say, a child killer. That sort of thing. The truth is, no one here is perfect, not even the superheroes. Another difference is the high level of violence in the movie. This isn’t a comic-book movie where the bad guys fall down when they get slapped, no sir. No, the heroes beat the stuffing out of them, with blood, entrails, and the like splattering all over the place. Limbs are dislodged, brains are exposed. It’s wildly violent, much like director Zack Snyder’s last film, 300, but without the detached, this-can’t-be-real tone. This isn’t a movie in which the bad guys are brought in for questioning or sent to prison to think about what they’ve done. This is a movie in which the bad guys are annihilated, period.

In case you’re still contemplating taking the kiddies to see this superhero fare, here’s another caveat: there’s nudity. No, it’s not Malin Akerman (although you do get a glimpse), it’s the blue-hued Dr. Manhattan himself. Sometimes he’s in a thong, but often he’s just letting it all dangle there. Funny thing is, it’s not really all that shocking. If it’d been one of the humans, perhaps, but Dr. Manhattan is more humanoid than human at this point.

At 160 minutes, the action really doesn’t let up. But that’s nothing - most movies are fast paced now. This one has a plot that can keep up with the action. In fact, the intricacies of the plot are delicious to unwrap; this was not a movie - superhero or not - where you can predict the end without just taking a wild stab.

I can’t understate how tremendous an achievement this movie is. If we’re all lucky, this will open the door for more adult comic-book films. The good guys don’t always have to be about justice and truth and all that junk, and the bad guys can sometimes get what’s really coming to them. I do want to point out that among the outstanding cast, Jackie Earle Haley as the haunted, masked Rorschach is tremendous. Wilson, who appeared with Haley in Little Children a few years back, is also dweebishly strong as the aging Nite Owl II.

I Love You Man, despite a fine premise and sincere comedic overtones, falls flat, a victim of a scattershot script that’s never sure when it wants us to take everyone seriously and as a result never quite finds its way. Paul Rudd stars as a schlub who proposes to his fiance (Rashida Jones) and then spends half the movie trying to find some guy, any guy, to be his best man, since he’s lacking in buds.

Along the way, he finds his new best friend ever in the person of Sydney Fife (Jason Segal), a wacky truth-telling soulmate who slowly begins to pry the hapless Pete away from his betrothed. Hilarity doesn’t quite ensue as much wander around aimlessly and flop down on a beanbag chair.

Pete’s a nice guy who has no guy friends at all. (I can sort of relate.) He’s always had girl friends, as opposed to girlfriends. Oh, let’s just call them gal pals. When Zooey asks him who he’s going to have as his best man, though, he’s at a loss. His dad? Nah, his dad’s best friends with Pete’s younger brother (Andy Samberg). Guys at work? Nah, they’re a bunch of go-getting, artificially tanned prima donnas. What about his fencing club? Nah, he doesn’t hang with them. So instead, on the advice of his brother, Pete goes on a series of “man dates” to find his special bro. One of these in particular, played by Thomas Lennon, has a surprise of his own.

But sort of by accident, he runs into Sydney, a dude who’s all that. Sydney listens and likes to hang with Pete. It’s sort of like courting a new girlfriend, really. And all of a sudden, Pete’s doing less wedding planning and more gallivanting, which is a word I picked up reading Hardy Boys mysteries. Now he’s going to Rush concerts and jamming on the bass.

For the most part, Rudd nails the part of the guy who’s just too awkward to fit in with the other guys. But he’s a little too awkward. One of the running jokes in the film is that Pete just can’t get the hang of new-fangled slang. Like when Syd calls him “Pistol” after Pete Maravich, and Pete can’t come up with anything that’s not completely unfunny. Not even funny in the amusingly cute and dorky way. He’s a classic dweeb, and yet here he is a realtor. (One of his clients, in another amusing gag, is Lou Ferrigno.) Because Pete’s so incredibly awkward, he’s a little hard to root for. If you’re the popular kind (or were back in the day), you feel a little guilty, laughing at Pete’s inadequacies. And if you’re the unpopular kind, you cringe a little, knowing perhaps it’s a bit too dead-on of a portrayal.

I also found it a bit difficult to tell where Sydney was coming from. Was he a good guy after all? Could this be a movie where the good guy turns out to be bad but it’s just a woeful misunderstanding? His motives were unclear until the end, when it was too late for me to care. He’s also a little annoying (he has some jumbly logic for not cleaning up after his dog, for instance) and creepy.

There are jokes here, mostly at Pete’s expense, and I understand that the movie wanted to be sensitive and meaningful while still being crude and raunchy, but it never found a middle ground to enjoy the best of both worlds. The laughs were good when they were there, but they were so scattershot that they felt like shooting icicles from a handgun. Ok, bad simile, but you get the drift.