Summer Movies: The First Wave

I'll take a momentary break from shoving Hot Fuzz down your throats to talk about some of the other movies I saw this week. I initially wanted to see five movies in five days, but the wife and I lost steam after three. Here are some impressions:

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End: This movie cashes in the last little bit of goodwill the first movie bought merely by not sucking. I'm not sure why I like the director, Gore Verbinski. He, after all, dumbed down one of my favorite J-horror flicks. But he's got a talent for cartoony nonsense. The set pieces in his debut Mousehunt had a Rube Goldberg quality to them. There are few moments of senseless anarchy in At Worlds End, but most of the movie is just senseless. Plot threads dangle, peter out and fizzle left and right. And I'd personally like to keelhaul the genius who thought that multiple Jack Sparrows would somehow exponentially magnify the character's charm.

Knocked Up: My nerd friends in Northern California were also reluctant to see this movie. I reassured them, as I do you, that the trailers do not do it justice. If anything the movie is vulgar. But more importantly it's smart, cutting and surprisingly honest. Paul Rudd and Leslie Mann (director Apatow's wife) play a married couple with kids whose fights ring as true as any I've seen in ages. They're all simmering passive aggression punctuated by blink and you miss 'em barbs. Rudd's character is suffering the death of a thousand cuts -- a fate all the more tragic in that all he and his wife need do is actually talk. Don't get me wrong, this is all B-story I'm talking about. The main plot is all about stupid kids making stupid decisions. And, like most paths we walk, they still tend to come out okay. And Mike, the director of your favorite comedy of all time, Harold Ramis, makes a solid cameo. That movie, at its heart, was a movie about love, youth and reproduction as well, wasn't it?

Triad Election: Johnny To is at the forefront of the current Chinese gangster film revival. He's eschewing the operatic gunplay and complicated man-on-man relationships of John Woo for a more languid approach. This, actually the second in a series, continues on the theme of mob leadership with heads of crews lobbying to be the unifying capo of Hong Kong's diverse and colorful crime groups. One reluctant wise guy, Jimmy Lee, wants to go straight and make a mint developing land in mainland China. Wouldn't you know it? They keep pulling him back in. Triad Election hits all the notes already played by the likes of The Godfather or Scarface, but sometimes all you need is a little change of scenery to make an old story worth re-telling.

Black Book: I've come to terms with the fact that people just don't get Starship Troopers. There's nothing confusing about Black Book. It's a sharply made World War II thriller about a Jewish woman who joins the Dutch resistance after her family is gunned down by Nazis. Verhoven comes down against tyranny of all kinds (his own countrymen get their due) and he does so in his trademark way. He challenges the audience at every turn to rethink their morality. He paints an SS commander as human. He pushes violence, sensuality and cruelty in the audience's face with an unflinching honesty that I can't help but admire. He's also got a soot-black sense of humor. The wife and I were the only two people laughing in a scene when a pacifist member of the resistance, a devout Christan rightfully reluctant to take lives, finally snaps and unloads his gun in the back of a sympathizing scumbag. Murder is never funny, but when he uses his victim's last words -- blasphemy against God -- as rationalization for vengeance the moment felt too cathartic to respond in any other way. Life is just fucked up that way. If you're sick of movies with happy endings this one is for you. The heroine's ordeal under German occupation eventually gives way to a depressing kind of victory -- a life behind Israeli barbed wire and battlements.