According to Colwell

Sherlock Holmes is a kick-ass scientist hero! The reinvention of Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson as a Victorian era action hero duo in the new movie Sherlock Holmes may change the character of Holmes’ adventures, but it also celebrates the deductive reasoning of his character.

Robert Downey Jr. plays Holmes with Jude Law as an equally adventurous, and macho, Dr. Watson. The movie begins with what appears to be the culmination of their final joint enterprise in apprehending 19th century bad guys in London. They stop a demonic serial killer, Lord Blackwood, (also a member of parliament, naturally) who has been ritualistically murdering young women to serve some nefarious and mystical scheme. When Blackwood appears to rise from his grave, however, the two reunite to close the case.

Director Guy Ritchie does an excellent job of putting us in the head of Holmes who, it must be said, leads a somewhat tormented existence because of his inability to put the brakes on his runaway brain. It’s great for solving crimes and mysteries (and, in a clever wrinkle, figuring out where the other guy’s fist is going to land), but not so great for light dinner party banter. Holmes engages in bare knuckle boxing matches, apparently for the diversion. Whenever he bothers to pay attention to his opponent, he is able to anticipate and plan the series of blows that will win him the bout. It’s a 19th century version of the Matrix’s “bullet time.” When challenged by Watson’s fiancee to divine her past, however, Holmes’ inability to edit and control his powers of observation and deduction just make for embarrassment and a glass of wine to the face. Downey is characteristically charismatic, but his English-inflected bass mutterings, frequently at a rapid clip and into his collar, were sometimes difficult for me to understand. Jude Law is a fun Dr. Watson, far from the hapless assistant of past Holmes incarnations.

While the resurrected Blackwood continues killing people in ways that appear to be magical, a former flame of Holmes played by Rachel McAdams gets involved in his investigation. But her role seems mostly designed to lay the foundation for a sequel. But Holmes stays focused on solving the conundrum of Blackwood’s cultish murders and plot to - what else - take over the world. While those around him are readily persuaded that supernatural forces are at play, Holmes is steadfastly rational. “Data, data, data!” he demands of the police investigating one of Blackwood’s apparently magical murders. Holmes lives by the basic tenet of science: any theory lives and dies by how well it fits the data. His entire approach is based on collecting data and conducting experiments. Plus some pretty kick-ass hand to hand combat.

Movies with as much hype and expectation as Avatar do not come along every year. The movie has been assigned the duty of revolutionizing cinema and doing for 3D movies what The Wizard of Oz did for color 70 years ago. With such expectations, it is hard not to use superlatives in describing the movie. I made an effort to keep my expectations modest prior to seeing Avatar, a job made more difficult by a daughter who could barely contain her praise after seeing a midnight showing on opening day. Not only did it exceed my expectations on a technical level, it certainly deserves the mantle of a landmark movie as a work of art.

This was the first “RealD” 3D movie I have seen, and it was also the first time I’ve seen a movie in 3D without the annoying ghost double images that have plagued every other 3D technology. The 3D effect is not used to dangle objects over the audience or shoot things toward the camera to make us jump. I did not see a single shot that seemed designed to capitalize on the 3D effect, and for that I thank James Cameron. Instead, for the most part, it worked the way 3D should work and just made the actors and action on the screen look like it was actually there. The effect was subtle, but convincing. Avatar may very well end up being the landmark movie that makes 3D the new standard. While it by no means ruined conventional 2D movies for me, it achieved the technical feat of making 3D really work, without any sacrifices to the quality of the picture or the telling of the story. Maybe soon we will all have our own RealD glasses that are nicer and more comfortable than the loaners from the theater.

Avatar takes place on a moon called Pandora orbiting a gas giant planet around some unidentified star. Our own gas giant Saturn has a moon named Pandora, but it is a puny rubble pile of rock and ice, while Avatar’s Pandora is resplendent with life and color. To the misfortune of its inhabitants, Pandora has a large deposit of - I hesitate to write the name - “unobtainium.” Its whimsical name reveals that what it is and why people need it is irrelevant to the purposes of the movie. It is the classic McGuffin. Humans have invaded Pandora with a sizable military installation and a tiny scientific contingent consisting of Sigourney Weaver’s botanist, Grace, and a handful of assistants. Enter Jake Sully, the identical twin of one of Grace’s crew who died just before he was about to make use of a new avatar - bottle-bred bodies made by mixing the DNA of the native Na’vi people of Pandora with the DNA of the future human user of the body. Jake, a paraplegic Marine, is brought in to take the place of his dead brother.

He, and Grace and another scientist, Norm, enter their avatars by climbing into chambers and having their consciousnesses transported through unspecified means into the minds of the otherwise unconscious avatar bodies. Wisely, Cameron wastes little time on establishing Jake’s past, Earth’s problems, or the mechanics of avatars. He gets us quickly into the avatar and into the discovery of Pandora. Plant and animal life literally glow with a rich palette of blues, greens, and fiery reds that make the paintings of Maxfield Parrish look practically monochrome in comparison. To describe the creatures and the scenery of Pandora in words would be to make them trite, kind of like saying the Mona Lisa is a painting of a woman with an enigmatic smile, or Michelangelo’s David is a sculpture of a muscular man.

The story itself is both simple and familiar, even as the movie’s technology and setting are complex and completely novel and alien. The Na’vi are noble primitives that live in harmony with their ecosystem. They are the embodiment of the most romantic image of Native Americans fighting the noble struggle to keep their peaceful and harmonious existence safe from the invading hordes of Europeans. Jake is granted three months by the military industrial complex, personified by the militarily evil Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang - bulging muscles, scars, and an obvious desire to kick some native ass) and the corporately evil Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi - practicing his putting on the control center floor, twiddling samples of unobtainium, and counting the days until the next quarterly report is due) to earn the trust of the Na’vi and convince them to move off their prime piece of real estate and avoid a bloody relocation.

Jake is first rescued by, and then trained by, none other than the chief’s beautiful daughter, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana). You can imagine the rest if you have not yet seen it. Yes, it is a complete cliche, but I found I didn’t care. Creatures on Pandora have neurological ports as part of their biology - a tangle of nerve endings at the end of a tentacle (concealed by a braid of hair for the Na’vi) - that enables two individuals of different species to communicate telepathically. It is at the heart of why the Na’vi are so connected to their home, and has a lot of interesting story potential on its own that is not really explored in this movie. The idea is a staple of science fiction (think of the ports on the back of the neck in the Matrix movies), but here it is given an entirely new twist. It is just one example of the imagination that is on display on the screen. Not only is the movie a visual work of art, but I found myself totally drawn in, cheering for the overpowered Na’vi, hoping to see Quaritch get his due, and rooting for Jake to succeed in his transformation. I’ll see it again, on the big screen, in 3D.

Set in 1937, when all colors were apparently brown and orange-ish brown, Me and Orson Welles offers a portrait of the future auteur of Citizen Kane as he approaches the peak of his artistic and egotistic expression. Zac Efron plays “Me,” a high school student who talks his way into a small part in Welles’ production of Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar just days before the premiere on Broadway in a refurbished Mercury Theater. Actually, it is John Houseman who is the producer, but it is Welles (Christian McKay, in a strong performance) who maddeningly calls all the shots. Welles plays Brutus in his adaptation of Caesar, and not only does he make last minute changes in the casting, like hiring Richard (Efron) to play Lucius, and show up late for his own rehearsals, he has a hard time committing to an opening date less than a week away.

Welles is full of bluster and bombast, interrupted by the occasional speech to inspire his beleaguered cast. Claire Danes plays Houseman’s assistant, Sonja, who puts up with it all because she views her stint with the great Welles as a stepping stone to a real job. As such, she is willing to put up with a lot, always with a smile. Richard is seduced not only by Sonja, but by the drama and allure of the theater. And there is so much drama, mostly supplied by Welles. In one of the movie’s funnier scenes, he dashes off from rehearsal at the Mercury to record a radio drama where, midway through, he launches into a long and complex improvised aside to the bemusement and confusion of his fellow voice actors. He is good, and boy does he know it.

Efron plays Richard with a youthful charm. He is not afraid to go toe to toe with either Welles or the womanizing actors in the play. Caesar serves to let Richard get a glimpse of his own potential and also of the realities of life in the theater and the personalities behind the personas of famous actors. And the movie gives us a glimpse of a time before World War II had gripped the world and the country was emerging from the Great Depression with a hopeful and infectious optimism.

Ricky Gervais’s The Invention of Lying is a movie based on a brilliant central idea with mixed results. In a world otherwise like our own, no one has the capacity to lie or even to conceive of the concept of lying. Since all fiction is a lie, actors in this world simply narrate historical events. When Mark (Gervais) tells a friend that “he said something that wasn’t” he is met with a blank stare of incomprehension. While Mark tries to seduce the unwilling Anna (Jennifer Garner), he believes that he can use his unique power to make people happier. He tells a depressed man that things will get better for him. The man of course believes him, and so is instantly happier. Or at least hopeful, which is a big improvement. And then his biggest lie gets him into a spot of bother: faced with his dying mother’s terror at an eternity of emptiness, he concocts the ultimate lie. Religion.

Mark tells his mother that she will go to a wonderful place and be reunited with everyone she ever loved. Having been overheard by the doctor, Mark becomes an instant celebrity as the man who “has no information about what happens after you die.” Not having had a lifetime to master the art of deceit, however, Mark is not particularly good at weaving lies. One day he tells Anna a story, meant to impress her, about the time he saved a baby from a burning building and was attacked by a bear after jumping from the second floor into enough jam to break his fall. But the weakness of his lies is irrelevant for a world that has no choice but to believe them.

While the idea of exploring the value of lying to individual happiness and societal well-being is fascinating and clever, the execution of it in this movie had a couple of problems. The most serious, for me, is the struggling romance between Mark and Anna. Anna likes everything about Mark except the likelihood that their children would be overweight with stubby noses. Except for some physical appeal, it is not at all clear what Mark sees in Anna, who is dreadfully shallow. Unless, as the movie indicates, her focus on genetics is somehow a natural part of this lie-free world. But why would it be? And other couples are seen in the movie who are in love, or are fighting, or are otherwise having normal relationships that are not built around their genetic compatibility.

A deeper problem, though one that presumably must be accepted along with the movie’s premise, is that people can “say something that isn’t” without lying. My students do it on their exams, on average, about 30 per cent of the time. They are certainly not lying when they say that the solar system is 4 million years old, or that the Earth is the largest planet, they are simply mistaken. And in making a mistake, they “say something that isn’t.” So the inhabitants of Gervais’s world should be very well acquainted with the idea of people saying things that turn out not to be true. Somebody should have the idea that, perhaps, all that new information about what happens after we die might be an honest mistake.

[I saw this in June, and forgot to finish writing the review. It may be too little, too late, but at least now seeing the movie is chronicled.]

“AWAY TO PHOENIX” appears in bold white letters on a black background 20 minutes into the movie Away We Go as Burt and Verona embark on their cross-country voyage to find a new place to live. While the titles, and the cast of crackpot friends and acquaintances that Burt and Verona visit, are bold, the couple at the center of this movie are generally quiet, polite, and soft-spoken. Burt, the more lively of the two, shouts at his wife’s pregnant belly to check the effect on its heart rate. I had more interest in some of their friends than in Burt and Verona themselves. It was hard to get to know the couple and what they were looking for in life. Until, at the end of the movie, they find it.

Nick Hornby, whose novels (About a Boy, High Fidelity, Fever Pitch (actually a memoir of sorts)) deal with men struggling to reconcile their desire to remain living the life of a teenager with the realities of life as an adult, wrote the screenplay of An Education, about a teenage girl struggling to reconcile her vision of life as an adult with the painful realities. The movie is based on a memoir by Lynn Barber who is 16-year-old Jenny in the movie, played beautifully by Carey Mulligan. Jenny is the star student at her private school in a London suburb in 1960 with her sights set on going to Oxford. Or at least her parents have their sights set on her going to Oxford. When a dashing 30-something named David (Peter Sarsgaard) shows up in a sporty car to offer Jenny a ride home in the rain, her poor geeky teenage suitor stands no chance.

It is hard to decide what aspect of the movie is most creepy: the romantic relationship that develops between Jenny and a man twice her age or the tacit approval of this relationship by society as a whole and Jenny’s parents in particular. Her father, played by Alfred Molina, is so concerned about her future financial stability, that for him the prospect of her dropping out of school is more than compensated for by a connection to a wealthy sophisticate. For her part, Jenny is seduced not just by David’s charms, but by the alternative to grinding away at the books for no obvious reason. The movie fails to articulate a case for Jenny to go to school. Her teacher and the headmistress of her school can only point to their own careers, both portrayed as dismal, as the rewards for a woman going to Oxford University. Her English teacher, a young woman who recognizes Jenny’s potential, is worn down by the apathy of her other students. She is made to seem like a lonely bookworm with her hair tightly pulled back and a pale complexion. It is a bit too simplistic a way to make the glamorous life of jazz clubs and weekends in the countryside offered by David the obvious choice over the more responsible - and more rewarding - educational path. Of course, the education of the title refers not to her book learning, but to Jenny’s education on the ways of greedy and less-than-honest men.

It’s hard to turn on the television or pass by a multiplex these days without seeing an ad for a show or movie featuring vampires. There must be something about vampires that has some fundamental and relatively broad appeal. Although vampires have different personalities and, for lack of a better term, superpowers in their various TV and movie incarnations, while watching them in Cirque du Freak: The Vampire’s Assistant I recognized a trait that all the vamps share. They are all a combination of great power and great vulnerability. They can fly around, have great strength, and climb walls like Spiderman, but spill some garlic sauce or a dash of sunlight on them and they crumble pathetically. Not to mention their famously picky dietary requirements. Perhaps it is this combination that appeals. Like Superman, they have their Kryptonite.

The Vampire’s Assistant is based on the first three novels in the twelve-book Cirque du Freak series by Darren Shan, aimed at teenagers. The movie is also clearly aimed at teens and young adults: a teenager embraces his inner freak and finds a community of fellow freaks. No longer is he a misfit. Who has not felt that painful feeling of differentness and isolation while passing through adolescence? Chris Massoglia plays Darren Shan (yes, it’s a bit odd), an obedient straight-A student with doting and naive parents and a cute younger sister. His best friend, for unknown reasons, is a disobedient, lying psychopath named Steve (Josh Hutcherson). Darren, feeling the oppressive weight of a predestined life of college, work, and family, sneaks out of his house to see the only performance of the mysterious Cirque du Freak with Steve at an old abandoned theater. There, he and Steve become embroiled with the vampire Crepsley (John C. Reilly), and his large, colorful spider.

Disclosure: my brother was the First Assistant Director on this movie. And one can tell that the set was managed brilliantly and efficiently. As for the freaks, they are a combination of mild (Mr. Tall, who is, and Mr. Tiny, who isn’t) and wild (Alexander Ribs, who has none, and Rhamus Twobellies, who has, well, two bellies). They were created by a combination of prosthetics and makeup for the less dramatically afflicted, and CGI (computer generated images) for others, such as Corma Limbs (Jane Krakowski) who can have an arm ripped off and grow it back before your eyes, and Madame Truska (Salma Hayek) who grows a healthy beard in seconds. The movie should be a serious contender for an Oscar nomination for Makeup: so convincing was the enormous Mr. Tiny’s fat suit and fat-face makeup that not only did I assume the actor, Michael Cerveris, was enormous, but the First A.D. didn’t recognize the un-made-up actor after seeing him only as Mr. Tiny for several weeks.

In order to save Steve, Darren makes a pact with Crepsley that makes him a vampire, or half of a vampire. It’s not entirely clear. This entangles him in a brewing battle of vampire clans (the Vampaneze and the Mofreakins?) in which he and Steve are on opposite sides. Destiny figures heavily in Cirque. Mr. Tiny alternately appears to be orchestrating vampire warfare and acting as a fascinated spectator to events he has seen unfold in a magical book. For his part, Darren has trouble accepting his new destiny as an immortal blood-drinker after having escaped his previous fate of middle-class mediocrity. Steve, on the other hand, embraces his bad-guy fate. Like Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, The Vampire’s Assistant feels like the first movie in a series. Its first goal is to establish the antagonists in a clash between good and evil that will span multiple dimensions and, presumably, multiple film installments. The plot here is aimed at getting Darren in the camp of the good vampires and Steve under the wings of the evil ones. Both boys felt like misfits in their normal lives and feel at home in their new freakish lives. For those who dream of a different, more exotic life, (and what teenager hasn’t?), this movie and the Cirque du Freak books hold an obvious appeal.