I went to see John Carter with some trepidation, having heard bad press and not having gotten a very good vibe from the previews. I went nonetheless in part because when I was 12 or 13 I went through a very serious Edgar Rice Burroughs phase. I read all 25 Tarzan books, all 10 Mars (John Carter) books, the Pellucidar series and a handful of others. These books were red meat for a 12-year-old boy, especially when adorned with cover art by fantasy artist Frank Frazetta. At any rate, I have a nostalgic fondness for those books and was excited to see the first installment brought to the big screen. My attitude toward the movie may be colored by those boyhood memories. While there is a healthy dose of silliness, John Carter is quite entertaining popcorn fare. Given its hefty budget (rumored to be north of $200 million) a sequel may not be forthcoming, but I hope I’m wrong.

The movie throws in some extra plot elements to help explain how John Carter, a former member of the Confederate Cavalry, ends up on Mars, but the screenplay by Andrew Stanton (who directed), Mark Andrews, and Michael Chabon cleverly handles what was essentially a mystical transport in Burroughs’ book, particularly at the end of the movie. (Stanton and Chabon, by the way, are my age. I cannot help but suspect they had a similar experience with the books as I did thanks to their re-release (Frazetta-ized) in the mid-seventies.) The movie is less clever in explaining what interest the apparently malevolent (but professedly indifferent) Therns (immortals meddling in the affairs of Mars and men) have in John Carter and his involvement in a Martian civil war.

The situation on Mars is not made entirely clear by the movie either. The planet is populated by “red men” who inhabit (apparently) only two cities: Helium and Zodanga. There is also a civilization of Tharks: 10-foot-tall green people with four arms and large tusks whose young hatch from eggs. (In the books, so do the children of the buxom, naked, and beautiful women of Helium, but the movie spares us this oddity of Martian reproduction.) Aside from this handful of densely populated cities, Mars (or “Barsoom” in Barsoomian) looks remarkably like the real Mars, which is to say a barren wasteland. One wonders what the Martians eat, where they get their power, how they build their elaborate and fragile airships, and why there aren’t any living things smaller than a lion. But, for the most part, one doesn’t wonder these things until after one has left the movie theater. That is, while both Burroughs’ original story and Stanton’s adaptation have lots of nonsense, it’s harmless nonsense and the fast-paced fantasy action keeps us happily distracted for the duration of the movie.

Carter is able to be a successful fighter on Mars due to muscles and bones grown in Earth’s stronger gravitational field. Here as throughout the movie, things are a tad exaggerated. While Mars’s gravitational acceleration is about 1/3 that of the Earth, Carter is able to leap hundreds of feet. Had I been a science consultant I would not have complained about that particular liberty (this is, after all, a fantasy movie, not a science fiction movie), but I would have given them a nifty idea to get another dramatic element out of Mars’s two moons and add a bit of orbital realism as a bonus.

Taylor Kitsch gives Carter a rather sullen demeanor, but the movie has fun with his stubbornness. Stanton manages to infuse some much-needed humor here and there, including a self-deprecating nod at the ironic similarities of the story to so many Disney animated movies about princesses. Lynn Collins plays the Princess of Helium, Dejah Thoris, though, in an update from the book for 21st century norms, she is first introduced to us in the movie as a scientist who is on the verge of a major breakthrough in magical Martian technology. Collins gives what Burroughs described as “the incomparable Dejah Thoris” reasonable heft: she is not merely a damsel in distress. She is a smart, strong and brave damsel in distress.

Most reviews I’ve read cannot resist mentioning its rumored price tag. But I paid a normal ticket price and got my money’s worth.

The Guard puts an Irish twist on the fish-out-of-water trope of a sophisticate adrift in the surprisingly complex boonies. Think of the many movies in which a big-city doctor (lawyer or policeman) finds himself in some backwards backwater where all his clever techniques are useless and he must learn the down-home local way of doing things to save the patient (exonerate the accused or catch the bad guy) with a heavy Irish accent and an occasional dose of Gaelic.

In this case, Don Cheadle plays the sophisticated FBI investigator Wendell Everett, dispatched to a small town in Ireland on the trail of international drug dealers who may be making a delivery on the coast there. He is forced by circumstance to partner with the town’s policeman or “guard” Sergeant Gerry Boyle (Brendan Gleason). Boyle is unimpressed with Everett’s work ethic and proceeds with his weekend getaway with two lovely prostitutes from the city, leaving Everett to canvas the town on his own with predictably unproductive results. The two stars provide enough charm and chemistry to carry the relatively lightweight movie on their shoulders.

Based on the story of screenwriter Will Reiser‘s own struggle with cancer, 50/50 combines humor and pathos without being overly sentimental or maudlin. Joseph Gordon-Levitt plays Adam, a 27-year-old reporter for a public radio station in Seattle, whose back pains turn out to be due to a rare form of cancer.

The movie’s title gives his odds of recovery as well as reflects the uncertainties of life in general. Adam’s illness becomes a catalyst for change in his relationships and his approach to life. It does not take long, for example, for him to realize that his girlfriend is a fair-weather friend. His best friend Kyle, played by Seth Rogan, on the other hand, is a true friend, even if sometimes his efforts to help miss the mark. Kyle determines that some casual sex would be excellent medicine for Adam, and it’s a sweetly perverse (a phrase that characterizes most Rogan roles) outing that ends up with the two of them heading home with two women to try some of Adam’s medicinal marijuana. But the reality of a painful back tumor did not factor into Kyle’s planning. The movie has just the right amount of Kyle: in leading man doses I’ve found Rogan to become grating. Here he provides good comic moments without dominating the story of Adam’s journey from a well-ordered life into one characterized by uncertainty.

Anna Kendrick plays Adam’s hospital-assigned therapist Katherine, a student in training who tries the techniques she learned in class out on Adam, her first patient. As she tries to help him deal with the misery of chemotherapy and his mortality, Adam helps her learn her future trade. Adam’s parents, a protective mother (Anjelica Huston, compelling, but not an obvious choice to play Levitt’s mom) whom he has kept at a distance, and a father with the first stages of dementia, provide the third leg of support, with Kyle and Katherine, for Adam. His journey is, in large part, learning to recognize and accept this support. Even without a diagnosis of cancer, it is an uncertain world. Adam discovers the joy in that uncertainty. What comes next may be wonderful. And when it isn’t, he has people to lean on.

Who would have thought in the post-Avatar era, where movies are sold based on the enormity of their effects and explosions, that a true silent black-and-white movie could be made? The Artist is a playful throwback to the silent era about a silent film star’s struggles at the dawn of the talking picture age. Jean Dujardin plays George Valentin, a classic screen hero openly modeled on Rudolph Valentino. When the talkie era begins, Valentin, with his winsome grin, pencil moustache and loyal sidekick (a Jack Russell terrier), refuses to accept the end of the era he dominated. At the same time, the plucky Peppy Miller (Bérénice Bejo) whom Valentin inadvertently discovered, is a rising star in the new talking pictures. Valentin has an understandably difficult time accepting this change in fortunes. But it’s only understandable to a point. Valentin still has the adoration of not only his dog, but a faithful driver and servant (James Cromwell) and Peppy herself, who admires Valentin’s work and apparently the man himself.

The style of the movie, the brainchild of writer and director Michel Hazanavicius, is true to the golden age of silent movies. He filmed it at 22 frames per second while movies are projected at 24 frames per second now, resulting in all the action running roughly 10% faster than normal. This replicates the jerky feel of the older movies which were shot at the stuttering rate of 16 frames per second. He keeps the old 4 to 3 aspect ratio and even grays out the corners of the image to replicate the imperfect projectors of the time. The actors also ham it up a bit, conveying meaning without words but instead with big grins and exaggerated gestures. John Goodman is particularly fun as the movie producer, initially of Valentin’s hits and later of Peppy Miller’s talkies. It has a nostalgic charm and is fun to watch. However, spoken dialogue is able to convey far more nuance of emotion as well as more information about plot as well as the inner life of characters. Absent this, the characters’ motivations remain only superficially portrayed. Valentin’s insistence on spiraling down the drain of despair ultimately becomes frustrating and, for me at least, unbelievable. It is my only complaint and thanks to the film’s accelerated pace, short-lived, as the action (and style) ultimately saves the day and the movie.

Ben Stiller is refreshingly likable as the straight man in band of misfit thieves in Tower Heist. Alan Alda plays Arthur Shaw, a Bernie Madoff-inspired corrupt investment banker and resident of the penthouse suite at the “Tower” luxury residence in Manhattan. Stiller plays Josh Kovacs, the manager of the staff at the Tower, and it was his initiative that got Shaw to invest (and hence lose) the pension fund for everyone on the staff. When the veteran doorman who was planning on a sunny retirement attempts suicide, Kovacs cracks and decides to steal Shaw’s presumed safety stash of 20 million dollars. On his side is encyclopedic knowledge of the building and the habits of its inhabitants. He also recruits small-time thief “Slide” (Eddie Murphy), an evicted tenant of the Tower, Mr. Fitzhugh (Matthew Broderick) – a victim of the investment firm bankruptcies, his brother-in-law Charlie (Casey Affleck), and Enrique Dev’reaux (Michael Pena) – an exuberant newly hired and fired elevator operator. When Slide admits that he cannot crack Shaw’s high-end safe, Jamaican maid Odessa (Gabourey Sidibe) whose father was a locksmith is brought on board. Each member of the gang in principle brings some necessary skill to the table. Dev’reaux is the electrician, for example, until we learn that his online degree has given him little more knowledge than what is an on-off switch.

The movie takes its time establishing the characters and the situation with Shaw and only hits its full comic stride about midway through when Kovacs and company start planning the heist. Shaw, for his part, is under penthouse arrest, the target of an FBI prosecution led by Special Agent Clair Denham (Téa Leoni, my co-star), complicating for obvious reasons plans to break in to said penthouse and steal $20 million. There are a number of funny throwaway moments, such as when Dev’reaux, the least stressed and most clueless of the bunch, buys ski caps instead of ski masks because they are made of a warmer fabric and when Slide insists that they all steal $50 of merchandise from the mall to prove they are capable of theft at all. The group manages to capture some of the current angst and anger about the fleecing of society by unscrupulous bankers without being self-pitying or preachy. As Kovacs, Stiller is calmly determined to do right by his colleagues. The hapless Fitzhugh joins in because it beats, after all, living in a cardboard box on the street, and Charlie reluctantly participates because he is (a) easily persuadable, and (b) is facing serious financial troubles with the loss of his job and the impending birth of a child (with Kovacs’ sister whose narrow vagina Charlie fears will crush the infant‘s head). The group has good chemistry and the script brings them to life. The climax is both funny and tense, and the movie’s conclusion is both satisfying and unconventional.

Like the global pandemic it portrays, the cast and plot of Contagion spreads quickly and is difficult to pin down. At times it almost feels like a documentary. That’s a blessing and a curse. The unfolding medical drama feels real, but because the movie covers so many story-lines it failed to connect me emotionally with any of them. (That is doubly surprising in my case given that among the film’s sprawling A-list cast are two of my favorite actors: Kate Winslet and Marion Cotillard.)

We follow the spread of the infection beginning with a business traveller (played by Gwyneth Paltrow) returning from Hong Kong. Her husband (Matt Damon) and his daughter represent the general population: the movie concentrates on the efforts of the Centers for Disease Control (CDC) and the World Health Organization. But we flit between doctors both at CDC (Laurence Fishburne, Jennifer Ehle, Demetri Martin (!), Winslet) and at a private company (Elliot Gould – always fun to watch, but in a role that is superfluous in an overly crowded movie). Jude Law plays a trouble-making blogger sowing fear and distrust over the internet. No doubt rumors and fear-mongering would run rampant through the internet in the event of a serious epidemic, but Law’s character also takes time away from the, oh, I don’t know, 109 parts listed for this movie at imdb.com. Cotillard is banished to Hong Kong as WHO’s investigative officer, disconnected from everyone else in the movie except for security camera footage of Paltrow. What I’m saying is: too many characters spread the movie too thin. I would have liked to have spent twice the time with half the characters.

This is perhaps overly severe. The movie is interesting on an intellectual level. It is well acted and well written. Although it tracks a plethora of characters, the movie moves forward at a brisk clip and is never confusing or muddled. Kudos to screenwriter Scott Z. Burns and director Steven Soderbergh for crafting a well-researched medical drama that doesn’t condescend to the audience. The dialogue between the doctors at the CDC feels authentic, and I was surprised not to find a medical consultant in the credits. The final statistics we here on this particular viral outbreak from Dr. Cheever (Fishburne) are that 1 in 12 people on the planet will get infected, and the mortality rate is 25%. That puts the total mortality at roughly the same level of the spanish flu of 1918-1920. Think about that when you leave the theater.

One Day should perhaps have been called “Two Decades” as that is the actual duration of the time we spend with its out-of-sync protagonists Emma (Anne Hathaway) and Dexter (Jim Sturgess). We join them after graduation from university (University of Edinburgh, perhaps?) where nerdy Emma who has had a crush on Dexter stumbles into a nice day with him. That day, July 15 (or Saint Swithin’s day, as Dexter superfluously tells us) becomes their anniversary of sorts and the movie skims across the years, pausing for various durations on different Saint Swithin’s Days to see how Emma and Dexter are doing. For reasons not entirely clear, they decide at the onset (primarily on Emma’s insistence, perhaps wary of Dex’s wandering eye) to have a close but platonic relationship. They become best friends, but frequently separated by circumstance. Dex goes abroad while Emma moves to London and flounders as a waitress for a while. Both have big aspirations and, apparently, big talent, but have a hard time finding their way. Dex finds early success in TV, he spirals into alcoholism, drugs, and floozies, while Emma eventually starts to find her way as a teacher and then a writer.

It is easier to believe Dex’s seduction by the glitz and easy fame of trash TV than it is Emma’s struggles in life and love. She is played, after all, by Anne Hathaway. Dorky glasses and clompy boots are the movie’s only effort to explain why her only suitor through the years is Ian, an even dorkier and desperate aspiring stand-up comic. Adding insult to injury, he sits around all day watching “Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan” (a conflating of Star Trek with loserdom that I found personally affronting) while she does all the work and pays all the bills.

Movies with this sort of gimmick have the problem that while it is still just two hours in the theater, seeing the couple spend two decades in fitful romance feels as frustrating for us in the audience as it must have been for Emma through all those years, loving Dexter and hoping for him to get his act together. But she doesn’t do much to help him get his act together, and neither does she ever really move on. Sturgess and Hathaway are both immensely appealing actors, and their performances here are no exception, but One Day is a romance where frustration and heartache frequently win out over happiness and fulfillment. It’s not that that is unfair or unrealistic, but it can be frustrating, even if it is only vicarious.

Crazy, Stupid, Love takes the time to develop more than just the central two characters, Steve Carrell as Cal and Julianne Moore as Emily who start the movie by splitting up on Emily’s announcement that she has had an affair and wants a divorce. It’s easier to understand her desire for a divorce (Cal has settled into a boring state of existence) than it is to understand Cal’s despondency over the prospect of it. Happily, the movie spends most of its time on the romantic aspirations of several other characters as well as Cal’s self-reinvention under the tutelage of Jake (Ryan Gosling), a handsome, wealthy ladies man who takes Cal under his wing as some sort of challenge to himself. Having found himself to be the king of the singles scene, transforming Cal is perhaps the only challenge left. That, and the enigmatic Hannah (Emma Stone) who is the only woman we see rebuff Jake’s seduction.

For her part, Hannah, a young lawyer, wrestles with whether she should settle for the smarmy and decidedly unromantic colleague (a delightfully repugnant Josh Groban). Meanwhile Cal’s 14-year-old son Robbie pines for his 18-year-old babysitter who in turn pines for Cal. But Cal is off scoring at the bars thanks to his newfound Jake-inspired coolness. If it sounds a bit messy, it is, but the movie takes the time needed to develop most of these characters beyond the routine or the caricature. Of everyone in the movie, Robbie is the one with the purest ideas of love. Everyone else is jaded in one way or another. Emily is bored and has allowed herself to be lured into an affair, Cal has decided that superficial physical relationships are what he needs, Hannah mulls whether or not to settle, the babysitter has set her sights on the unattainable older man, and superficial physical relationships are all Jake has ever known. It is up to Robbie to educate the crazy, stupid adults.

(I can’t help commenting on the peculiar punctuation of the title that suggests that it is not love that is both crazy and stupid, but that the movie is about three separate things: crazy, stupid, and love. My comment is that it is peculiar that it is not called “Crazy, Stupid Love”.)

This neat prequel of the Planet of the Apes universe of movies has promises (or threatens, depending on your preferences) to restart the franchise from the beginning with a nice premise for how the world gets taken over by intelligent apes. James Franco plays a scientist who has developed a drug that repairs damaged brain cells and, as it turns out, improves functioning in healthy brains. The drug is a virus, so it spreads readily, and it genetically modifies the chimps on whom they test the drug, so that the traits get passed along to the young. The young, specifically, is Caesar, an adorable baby chimp created by performance capture of (from? by?) Andy Serkis who is cornering the market on that work. Caesar is taken home by Will (Franco) when the drug testing program is abandoned and raises him secretly at home.

Voiceovers tell us that Caesar’s intellect outperforms same-aged people, but the movie does not show much of this. Instead he mainly seems very clever and curious, at least initially. The portrayal of Caesar plays into the fantasy of every person who has ever anthropomorphized his or her pet. He understands everything that is said to him, though his responses are limited to brief bits of sign language. As a youngster, he keeps watch on the action in the yard and the street from his attic window with the human curiosity we imagine our dogs and cats have.

Things take a turn for the worse as Caesar reaches adult strength and full chimp temper (though research indicates that humans have a worse violent streak than our ape cousins), resulting in him ending up in a primate sanctuary where he and an improbably large population of chimps (and one very large and angry gorilla and one very large and sweet orangutan) are badly mistreated. The movie would have been far more interesting had this sanctuary been realistically portrayed as a humane facility as modern American primate facilities are. Instead, it takes the easy way out by making the chimps miserable prisoners so that their violent uprising is unequivocally justified. Not to say that animals are not mistreated today, but Rise has Tom Felton playing a caricature of the sadistic animal-keeper just to really rub our faces in it. (Felton’s character is virtually indistinguishable from his Draco Malfoy; I hope this is the last role in this mold he takes for, say, a decade or two, doesn’t let himself get typecast.)

Still, even with superhuman strength, it’s hard to imagine how this band of perhaps a couple hundred apes can take over the world. Except the movie has a nice answer for that as well, while laying a few seeds for a sequel. One might imagine that a movie about the end of human dominion over the Earth would be depressing, but we’ve messed things up enough that the idea of giving our cousins a shot at running things doesn’t seem like such a bad idea. There are also a few amusing tips of the hat to the original Planet of the Apes with Charlton Heston. Don’t leave at the start of the end credits.

Here’s a movie idea that is not new at all, but gets a bit of new life by being told with a different target audience. The Change-Up uses the tried and true (but rarely, if ever, terrific) gimmick of having two people swap bodies. Shakespeare did it just with disguises and funny voices and the suspension of disbelief that comes along with watching a play. Modern movies usually use some magical ruse that puts the minds of two polar opposites in each others’ bodies. The change-up from the usual version of this gimmick (which frequently aims for the cute, such as the many versions of Freaky Friday) is that it is told in a (very) R-rated world.

Otherwise there is not much new: straight-laced workaholic lawyer (and family man) Dave (Jason Bateman) swaps with stoner, loser and Lothario Mitch (Ryan Reynolds). By living the other’s life, they learn invaluable lessons about their own self-destructive behavior (Mitch is a quitter, among other things, while Dave’s single-minded pursuit of success risks his marriage). Sweet and corny, well corny anyway, which is par for the course. But in the middle we get treated to a lot of good ol’ fashioned raunchy comedy, some of which is just gross, but in true shotgun fashion, some gags hit the mark. The set up actually works quite well. Dave and Mitch immediately figure out what has happened, which is a relief because nothing is more tiring in these movies than watching the protagonists figure out what the audience already knows. And they wisely immediately try to tell Dave’s wife Jamie (the excellent Leslie Mann) what is going on. Naturally she does not believe them, and for the sake of comic expedience, the movie lets it slide so it can try to wring jokes from the foul-mouthed Mitch living Dave’s clean and proper life. Mitch is almost impossibly dense, though, to the point where he drops non-stop F-bombs at a high-powered legal meeting. It’s not funny because there’s no way Mitch would be that dumb and careless. More laughs come from Ryan Reynolds portrayal of Dave within his body, trying to live down to Mitch’s lifestyle. The gold-standard for the body swap gimmick, though remains Steve Martin‘s portrayal of Lily Tomlin‘s hermit millionaire co-inhabiting his body in All of Me. Nevertheless, The Change-Up has some original and funny moments, and the trio of lead actors are a pleasure to watch in this raunchy retread.