Daybreakers

The vampire science is ridiculous and the guts and gore are pornographic but I love ghoulish feeding frenzies that end with decapitations? Yum.

It's Complicated

It's Complicated is not complicated at all. It's a pristinely crafted storythat's set in some of the most impeccably appointed interiors this side of House Beautiful. (www.housebeautiful.com) Meryl Streep and Alec Baldwin are an inspired pairing as two exes who haven't completely embraced their ex-ness.

Invictus

Clint Eastwood's Invictus is from start to finish a paean to human decency. The film exploits (in the positive sense of that term) every visual and musical cue to rouse the audience as it tells its tale of a heretofore pitiful South African rugby team's battle for world domination, and respectability, in 1995. The team's struggle was emblematic of the nation's own quest under the leadership of Nelson Mandela.

Brothers

Brothers is a perfectly decent movie with credible, spot on performances from beginning to end. Everyone hits the marks, each scene is crafted for optimal believability and the ending is satisfying. It is a good but unremarkable film. The child actress Bailee Madison holds her own when on the screen with Gyllenhaal, Portman and Maguire.

The Road

Yes, The Road is as bleak, maybe bleaker, than you had pictured it in your head while reading the book. But, as McCarthy had intended, those redeeming moments of transcendent humanity are to be found in the boy, played by the young Aussie actor Kodi Smith-McPhee. What a face.

A Serious Man

The Coen Brothers' "A Serious Man" left me sad and blue as I thought about the Jobian troubles that had befallen the mild-mannered physics professor Larry Gopnik (Michael Stuhlbarg). Were he not so blasted mild-mannered half of the crap that he had to deal with wouldn't have happened. Therein lies the beauty of this "morality" tale.

Sherlock Holmes

Sherlock Holmes really packs a wallop, and that's a good thing. The Holmes / Watson interplay put me in mind of a more amped-up House / Wilson pairing from the TV series House, all bromance and codependency.

Colors

Jay Smooth and the Yankee Victory

Jay Smooth through the uprights

Jay Smooth's Polanski Commentary

Pandorum

This poster for Pandorum is so off-the-mark it's easy to imagine the designer had not seen the film or read the script. Or maybe the film was once a very different movie. Many reviews have commented on the dozen or so previous sci-fi movies being referenced here ~ Alien, The Matrix, THX 1138 ~ but it reminded me most of the Wizard of Oz set on a enormous colonizing vehicle somewhere in space in the 22nd century. Ben Foster is hunky Dorothy and Dennis Quaid the wizard. The acting is "incredible" and the edits are synaptic but it's a tantric experience. No release.

Gamer

Gamer tapped the same nerve as Inglourious Basterds but with less subtlety. I was actually surprised by quality of actors -- Gerard Butler, Michael C. Hall (Dexter), Krya Sedgwick -- in this film about a future world where cyberga...mers pay big buck...s to "puppetmaster" death row inmates through blood sports and sexcapades. The story is nonsense, blood flows freely but the cinematography is exceptional.

Inglourious Basterds

Inglourious Basterds is a masterpiece of cathartic brutality and exquisite, old Hollywood tension and menace. It's riveting and exhausting and Tarantino. Wonderful. Christoph Waltz is the star of the film, not Brad Pitt. As SS Col. Hans Landa, Waltz is chillingly unforgettable. It is his face, not Hitler's or Goebbels', that is seared in mind as the face of Nazism, albeit an opportunistic kind of Nazism. The set piece that opens the film could serve as a master class in studied control. His performance throughout the film is outstanding.

Taking Woodstock

Ang Lee's Taking Woodstock is strangely inert and uninvolving, mainly because the film's lead, Demitri Martin, is so wooden. The wonderful British character actor Imelda Staunton is the lone standout in this movie, as Martin's disappro...ving and controlling Jewish mother. It's beautifully filmed but it's not art. The psychedelic LSD trip is fun.

District 9

District 9 is a wildly ambitious sci-fi movie with a virtuoso performance by Sharlto Copley as an inept South African bureaucrat who is given the task of relocating about 2 million alien (as in space) refugees from a squalid containment camp to another.... After being exposed to some alien DNA, Copley becomes a whole other character and heads roll (literally). It's fierce and bloody and fun.

The Hurt Locker

Kathryn Bigelow's "The Hurt Locker" takes the unique "battlefield" horrors of the war in Iraq and their effect on service men and turns the resulting madness both inward and outward with an intensity I've not felt in a film for quite a while. The film follows a trio of short-timers in a bomb squad as they move from one impossibly tense encounter with IEDs or suicide bombers to the next.

Orphan

The Orphan was disappointing, not just because the waif-from-hell storyline features the dumbest family in the history of demon children movies but also because a boom mike can be spotted in every other interior scene. How did this shite get released? Good lord! The kid, Isabelle Fuhrman, who's like 12 years old and a native of my hometown, is pretty creepy though. Her Russian accent is a little spotty. Don't ask.

Sunbeam Bread Commercial '50s

This commercial features shapeless though faceless female characters and a lumpy, buffoon of a father character that appears to be aping Jackie Gleason and Red Skelton, popular comedic actors of the day.

Moon

Duncan Jones's "Moon" borrows from "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Solaris" and "Silent Running" but does manage to offer up a unique vision of alienation and disconnectedness. Sam Rockwell gives a wonderful performance in this film about Sam Bell, a man counting down the days until he's relieved from duty on a desolate lunar mining station. Kevin Spacey voices Bell's computer companion, Gerty. It's captivating.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

I'm not a Potterite.I have not read the whole of a single volume in the series. I engage the films as cultural phenomena even though they have been, consistently, quite magical.

To me, this story of a boy wizard is not only the tale of messianic identity and good v. evil, it also appears to be about connectedness in a fractured and threatening world. The orphaned Harry, the reputed Chosen One to lead the final battle against the dark forces, is a figure rooted in other British literary creations like David Copperfield and Tom Brown, but he is such an interesting figure to me. Harry is marked and detached, loved and cared for by a host of people, but essentially disconnected and alone, and lonely, in his quest to defeat "he whose name must not be spoken," a task he seems at once driven by and ambivalent toward. The emotional and psychological dimensions of his life take on richer dimensions in the latest, highly enjoyable film.

We're All in This Together PSA

I've seen this spot dozens of times now, in movie theaters, and am still torn. I understand the message, I think ~ Working together is better for everyone ~ but why stage it with the Down syndrome kids? It seems to be saying "the least among us will lead us." But what if we don't see Down syndrome children in that way? Doesn't this become patronizing? A similar spot that features a young Down syndrome woman as prom queen, see below, is even more problematic for me. I think it's based on a true story but it strikes me as cloying and condescending and treats the woman like a mascot or maybe an object of pity.

Bruno

I'm fairly sure that at some point most of the millions of people who will see Bruno will stop for a second and ask "Why am I laughing?" I laughed more to keep myself from leaving the theater than to share in whatever hilarity was transpiring on the screen. Norman Cousins promoted the therapeutic qualities of laughter. I actually felt depleted by this film, spiritually. Sacha Baron Cohen's heart might be in the right place in getting audiences to confront their issues with homosexuality but the gags seem inappropriate -- not just because of their crudeness -- but because they obscure the message. Maybe other folks will be delighted and enlightened by this film, I wasn't.

Jay Smooth's Reflection about Michael Jackson

Man's Best Friend

The tone of this commercials is less acerbic than other Folgers spots until the end. The mention of man's best friend at the end seems odd because the puppy bit at the top was so brief the context was lost and it seems a bit of slight against the wife.