This season’s champ is clearly the feel-good urban horror movie Precious. It leaves no stone unturned to flatten us. A partial checklist of miseries: Poverty. Illiteracy. Morbid obesity. Incest and rape with dad. Two-time teenage pregnancy, the first resulting in a Down’s syndrome child matter-of-factly named “Mongo.” Oh, and it’s 1987, as AIDS did its worst to decimate whole communities. The movie is based, as the subtitle tells us, on the novel Push by Sapphire, and it pushes hard, squashing our tearducts. I smell a musical.

But wait, it gets worse. Poor Precious (Gabourey Sidibe), the punching bag of the title, is stuck in a festering, shades-drawn-tight Harlem apartment with her monster mother, played, in a performance of epic degeneracy, by Mo’Nique. Director Lee Daniels has conceived the film as a kind of fairy tale, with the big-boned actress as an unstoppable seven-headed dragon. From her sweaty couch she smokes incessantly, drinks buckets of Sunkist orange soda, defrauds the welfare authorities, and treats her daughter as her personal slave, hurling everything including the TV at her and poor Mongo—and she uses Precious for sexual gratification, too. Come awards time Mo’Nique should be whisked from the red carpet and transferred to the Hague to stand trial for crimes against humanity.

With only a good right hook at her disposal Precious lumbers on, finding allies in a lesbian schoolteacher (Paula Patton), a no-nonsense welfare worker (Mariah Carey, completely scrubbed of glamour), a male nurse (Lenny Kravitz, ditto), and a gaggle of fellow special ed kids. Daniels films all of this from the perspective of Precious’ limited consciousness, with dream sequences that show her imaginary life as a plus-sized supermodel, or a skinny white girl. The movie is co-presented by Oprah Winfrey and Tyler Perry, and bears their earmarks—abuse stories, echoes of The Color Purple, and the weird shifts in tone that make Perry’s hits so jarring. And it has some of the neon flamboyance of Daniels’ unclassifiable feature debut, Shadowboxer (2006), which cast Helen Mirren and Cuba Gooding, Jr. as mother-and-stepson assassins and lovers. Social realism goes down the stairwell along with that TV as Precious ducks the usual uplift and empowerment treatment.

I’ll give it that, and add that a motley cast acts persuasively. Good intentions, however, are scrambled together with the overripe awfulness of Precious’ degradation; it’s not enough for her to be greasily raped, the act has to be intercut with shots of pigs’ feet boiling nauseatingly on the stove. Precious wounds. But it’s also shameless, and a shambles.

You leave The Road thinking it’s at least ten degrees colder outside the theater than it actually is. Javier Aguirresarobe’s desaturated brown-gray cinematography perfectly captures the feeling you get from Cormac McCarthy’s Pulitzer Prize winner, of a dying, sun-deprived planet where night and day are all but interchangeable, and the only season is a chilly late fall. I was shivering when it ended.

And also mighty sleepy—that aesthetic is hard on the eyes. Director John Hillcoat has made an apocalyptic prison picture, Ghosts…of the Civil Dead (1988), and an apocalyptic Western, The Proposition (2005). Here he takes on the whole enchilada, and he does it very conscientiously, following the story of a father and son trapped in this wasteland practically to the letter. That fidelity, though, is a problem. If you’ve read the book, you really have seen this movie. It doesn’t give you anything more than McCarthy’s scorched earth prose did.

If you haven’t, well, as usual when blockbuster books don’t come across on screen, you’re likely to be left scratching your head. Like last year’s Blindness, the movie is a surface in search of a soul. The novel communicates a great deal by saying very little. The father is tormented by dreams of the world before the catastrophe, one only barely remembered, while the son knows only the world after. The rest is sort of a zombie movie waiting to happen—marauding cannibal gangs roam the roads, looking for two-legged meals, and the few other survivors encountered are suspect. (Like George A. Romero’s living dead movies, most of the film was grimily shot in Pittsburgh, and the association with the end of the world must thrill the town fathers no end.)

McCarthy doesn’t often foreground the horror (save for one terrifying incident early on). The focus is on the transcendent bond, which given the spare use of dialogue, and despite a good but overcompensating score by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis, is tougher to communicate. Caked in mud and filth, a look he seems to prefer, Viggo Mortensen is bedraggled and determined—but The Man, as he’s called, is let down by The Boy (Kodi Smit-McPhee), who gives a whiny, less dimensional performance. The movie perks up a bit when that sly fox, Robert Duvall, turns up as a philosophical Old Man, then it’s back to muttering, and collecting cans, and trying to stay warm. As a film, The Road leads nowhere.

The world ends not with a bang, but with an Adam Lambert power ballad. That’s the takeaway from 2012, the flip side of The Road. Most filmmakers want to stretch, to grow, but Roland Emmerich is happy to kill off multitudes. This is the third time he’s gone after our big blue marble, after Independence Day (1996) and The Day After Tomorrow (2004), and when big arks slosh around the terrestrial bathtub that the Himalayas have become following a rash of Mayan-foretold earthquakes, volcanoes, and “super tsunamis,” I think it’s 99% safe to say he’s finished the job. (Maybe 95%.)

But just because your graphics engine gives you the power to drop the U.S.S. John Kennedy on an ash-covered black president or ravage Los Angeles with Playstation-ish temblors for queasy laughs doesn’t mean you should. Cecil B. DeMille and Irwin Allen showed a modicum of restraint in their spectacles, and peopled them from the top ranks. Emmerich is of the money shot-is-everything school, lavishing $200 million on a B-list cast and a jerry-built C-script that gets an affable John Cusack and his estranged family from one hot spot to another over the eventful if fatiguing course of two-and-a-half hours. (Along for the ride is actor/director Tom McCarthy, of last year’s mortal-sized Oscar nominee The Visitor—I shudder to think what he learned from Emmerich.)

For all the world-splitting antics, however, the only really memorable image is of Rio’s Christ the Redeemer statue crumbling, which we glimpse on a hazy TV screen. Everything else has a been there-done that quality—Emmerich has trouble topping himself, with the spaceship attack on the White House in Independence Day and the tidal wave sluicing through the Manhattan canyons in Tomorrow (a truly arresting sequence in a truly awful movie) setting the bar high for this sort of thing. We’ve seen worlds destroyed plenty of times now. It’s more satisfying to see them built up.

At his best, Nicolas Cage is an A-list special effect, throwing off all kinds of sparks. But outside of the occasional Adaptation his post-Oscar career has pretty much been one big La-Z-Boy, as he goes from one high-salaried, low-impact gig to another. (The name of a recent dud says it all: Next.) There was reason, then, to hope that the no-budget Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans, a collaboration with Werner Herzog, might shake him up—“snap out of it!” as Cher once advised him in Moonstruck. But the film is as clumsy as its title.

Abel Ferrara’s Bad Lieutenant (1992) was a geekshow, and a good excuse for Harvey Keitel to rip into his psyche and, figuratively and literally, expose himself. It’s a stunningly unkempt performance. This in-name-only followup (the sort of thing that usually goes straight to video) isn’t at all harrowing, partly because Cage doesn’t have much to share other than a bunch of tics and drug-addled shtick. His bad lieutenant, a pill-popper investigating the murder of Senegalese immigrants while ripping off dealers, users, and the police department evidence room for their stashes, has three moods: coke (frantic), heroin (slowed-down, hallucinating), and crack (over the top, somewhere near Pluto).

Cage’s performance might have made sense if Herzog had committed to it, and gave it the sort of context that allowed Klaus Kinski to rivet audiences. But the director’s recent documentaries have far outranked his recent features, and the two-hour movie just sort of sits there, inert, neither crime movie nor camp. (Ferrara had the good sense to end his bath of depravity at about 90 minutes.) Seemingly written in a fit of ADD, William M. Finkelstein’s screenplay introduces new characters in every scene, losing track of ones we might be interested in, like Val Kilmer as Cage’s hard-nosed partner or Michael Shannon as the guard unwisely entrusted with the department’s drug seizures. Herzog has never been strong on plot, and he’s clueless as to how to move this one along.

Disappointingly, Herzog’s weak on images, too: New Orleans post-Katrina would appear to be a natural fit for him, yet his typically excellent DP, Peter Zeitlinger, stuck indoors for most of the duration, has contributed shockingly shabby cinematography. The movie could have been set in Scranton or Des Moines for all it matters. (If you were hoping, at the very least, for hambone accents, forget it; no one has one, surely a deliberate, and peculiar, touch. Only Mark Isham’s score has a twang to it.)

From time to time the movie bumbles into something worthwhile—the frowsy comedienne Jennifer Coolidge is surprisingly touching as Cage’s beleaguered stepmother. It’s a mystifying flop, as if Herzog were under the influence of gonzo cop melodramas like Year of the Dragon (1985), 8 Million Ways to Die (1986), and Tough Guys Don’t Dance (1987). But those 80s failures had a ridiculous conviction to them. This one, entirely reliant on Cage’s mannerisms, reeks of contempt.

This little clip is a litmus test for much you might get out of the movie. Imagine 20 minutes more of this and perhaps instead of seeing the film just wait for the most outlandish of it (the hallucinatory iguanas, the “gator cam”) to wash up on YouTube as well:

Magnet Releasing did a good job handling horror fave Let the Right One In last year so I’m confident its two-and-a-half-hour distillation of John Woo’s two-part, five-hour epic Red Cliff is in good hands, and I’m glad to see it getting some sort of theatrical release. Not having seen the U.S. version yet I can’t really comment on it, but I have seen the full-strength epic (which is available on DVD from Asia-based vendors) and can recommend this cut based on what I know will be retained—namely, its titanic battle scenes. The money’s clearly on the screen, and not, as with 2012, in the workstation, with digital effects complementing but not defining the complicated clash of ancient warlords. You sense Woo’s guiding hand throughout.

Hollywood appropriated Woo’s run-and-gun action stylistics, then the filmmaker himself, for about a decade. By the end of the era, and the appropriately titled Paycheck (2003), both were exhausted. With Red Cliff, Woo has joined the trend among Hong Kong and mainland filmmakers (Zhang Yimou, Chen Kaige, etc.) to mount elaborate historical pageants and, given his chops in the field (The Killer, Hard-Boiled, and Face/Off, an astute use of Cage, are favorites), he blows the lid off the genre. That said, it’s impersonal—the whirling dervish gunfights and their noir-ish underpinnings have no place in the Han Dynasty, and the sociopolitical resonance of Yimou’s Hero is absent. But what Woo does with ships, and swords, and masses of armies is hugely impressive. And the excellent Tony Leung (from Hero and In the Mood for Love, among other contemporary Asian classics) holds all the intrigue together by quietly flexing star power. With China absorbing everything else in the U.S., I’m glad the country has imported the grand old traditions of Hollywood, just in time for the dreariest moviegoing Thanksgiving on record.

And this:

And of course this:

A Spike Jonze short film of Maurice Sendak’s pint-sized classic Where the Wild Things Are might have been solid gold. (An animated short was produced in 1973.) But Jonze has attempted a full-length, live-action version, which makes no sense. Then again, on paper, Being John Malkovich (1999) and Adaptation (2002) didn’t make a lot of sense, either, but he and screenwriter Charlie Kaufman conjured movie magic from them. There was hope.

And there is fulfillment. Where the Wild Things Are is by no means a disgrace, like the godawful movies torn anguished and bleeding from the carcasses of How the Grinch Stole Christmas and The Cat in the Hat. It’s respectful. It may grow on me. But I sympathized with the guy sitting across from me at the screening, who woke up when the end credits rolled, joined in the polite, scattered applause, and fled. Truth be told, I was a little droopy too.

I don’t think I have to tell you the story, which, besides the book and the animated version, has also been a ballet and an opera since 1963, and is only 400 words long. But I do have to tell you the backstory, which Jonze and Dave Eggers have supplied. Nine-year-old Max (played by a relative newcomer with the perfect Popdose name, Max Records) is having abandonment issues, first with his older sister, who leaves him to fend for himself in a snowball fight with the neighbors, then with his harassed mom (Catherine Keener). Max gets back at his sister by stomping all over her room in his wet snow boots. When his mother, already simmering over that episode, explodes when he dons a wolf costume and acts out in front of her boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo, severely overqualified for a minute-long part) Max hightails it out of the house, and after a tumultuous sea voyage finds himself … where the wild things are.

These are, however, fairly mild things. Crafted by the Jim Henson Creature Shop, and augmented by digitized facial expressions, they claim to need a king, but a few months on Prozac might do the trick. There’s the sorrowful Carol, voiced by James Gandolfini, who befriends Max, and becomes his consigliere when the boy assumes the throne. (Other actors stuck in the 9’-tall costumes had to tough it out in the wilds of Australia, where the film was mostly shot.) Uneasy lies the crown, though, as the wild things reveal their neuroses. Carol is hung up on KW (Lauren Ambrose), who’d rather split the scene. And no wonder: Cranky Judith (Catherine O’Hara) is always sniping at Max, as he tries to rally the beasts long enough to build the magical fort of his dreams. Her endlessly patient companion, Ira (Forest Whitaker), is no real help, nor is the rooster-ish Douglas (Adaptation Oscar winner Chris Cooper) or goat-horned Alexander (Paul Dano), whose personalities are even less defined.

The creatures rouse themselves long enough to indulge in their “wild rumpus,” then later smack each other with dirt clods, and there are a couple of fleetingly monstrous moments: one character loses a limb (which is replaced with tree branches) and Max is forced to jump down KW’s throat and hide in her stomach when the things get out of hand. The teasing suggestion that KW might actually consume Max provides the film with one of its more offbeat moments, then it’s back to lumbering around the forests, deserts, and seascapes. Cinematographer Lance Acord injects a bit of spectacle into some of the locales, so a stroll through the sands looks like Lawrence of Arabia with Muppets.

Restraint, however, is the guiding principle. Where the Wild Things Are has been analyzed to death, and Jonze and Eggers have done their homework, laying the psychological groundwork for Max’s flight from home (lots of semi-frantic handheld camerawork in the early scenes), splitting Max’s roiling id into the creatures to represent aspects of himself (dutiful, passive, pissed-off), etc. It’s all sort of therapeutic, in an Eggersy sort of way—and it misses the whimsical scariness that drew kids, the presumed target audience, to the material in the first place. Jonze’s personality seems submerged. What would Kaufman have made of this?

Records I liked; the kid’s a natural, and to the extent that the movie works it does because his energy stirs the sleepy wild things. The costumes adhere to the book but have an unenchanted heaviness to them, and everyone except the caustic O’Hara and the purring Ambrose speaks their lines in the same muted, diffident, whatever tones. “We thought of them as people the entire time,” Eggers says in the press notes. People who spend some of their time with their analyst; Carol could be a Tony Soprano who followed Dr. Melfi’s advice to the letter, and still couldn’t hack it. This is the one movie that could have used some of Jack Black’s undisciplined rowdiness. (It might have used less of Karen O’s hipster lullaby music.)

I don’t want to undersell the charms of Where the Wild Things Are. It has some. But you’ll understand why KW wants to be moving along. I’m interested to hear what children make of this sober treatment, which for all its sincerity is as much fun as an anger management class.

While watching, I couldn’t help but be reminded of the classic Bill Murray comedy Groundhog Day. Both stories involve individuals who stumble upon a special ability and proceed to go through the natural stages any omniscient being might: exploitation for personal gain, assisting those in need, and then, ultimately, solving personal romantic struggles.

The Invention of Lying takes place in a world in which lying isn’t just non-existent, but also completely unfathomable. People tell each other exactly what they think, which leads to some very scathing insults at the expense of Gervais’ character, Mark Bellison. Not only do all the characters treat one another with the most brutal form of honesty, but also advertisements and signage follow the same rule (an honest TV commercial for Coke may be the funniest part of the movie).

What makes Lying work is the consistency with which the theme is followed. Most movies such as this would play like nothing more than a series of over-extended sketches. This is not to say that this film doesn’t occasionally do just that, but rather that the film is so earnest that all the vignettes add up to mean something more.

With this film, we have a protagonist that is a bald-faced liar. The very fact that all the other characters, including the antagonists, are honest just makes the audience root for Mark that much more. It is truly a testament to cinema’s ability to set its own rules that a film like this can portray those that are honest as such dastardly people.

From a young age, we are all taught that a lie, even the smallest one, is harmful and wrong. Yet in this movie, Mark’s nemesis Brad Kessler (dryly played by a spectacled Rob Lowe) comes across as such an ass precisely because he doesn’t lie about his feelings. Jennifer Garner’s Anna falls for Brad because she can’t deny both a physical attraction to him and revulsion for Mark.

The film also plays as an allegory for anyone who has ever been frustrated by society’s overall willful ignorance. The film takes a not so subtle swipe at religion while still upholding the general importance that faith can have when used for good. Perhaps blasphemous to some is the idea that society would have no belief in God if it also didn’t have the lie.

Not everything about this movie is perfect. Gervais and co-director Matthew Robinson show a slight stiffness behind the camera at times. The entire concept of the story is predicated on the idea that without the ability to lie, nearly everyone is also superficial and gullible. Obviously, we can’t test the concept, so you’ll just have to go along with it.

This movie is not for everyone. Tonally, it’s very dry — and, at times, sober. Fans of The Office won’t necessarily appreciate the metaphorical approach it takes. Occasionally, the celebrity cameos are a bit distracting and under-utilized. However, certain viewers will find here a clever movie that strives to take advantage of its concept for more than just clever jokes. At its heart, the most important point The Invention of Lying makes is to demonstrate the effectiveness of well-intentioned honesty.

An Education takes place in 1961, just before London started to swing. From the start, the movie is excellent at signifiers: The period production design (Andrew McAlpine), art direction (Ben Smith), set decoration (Anna Lynch-Robinson), and costume design (Odile Dicks-Mireaux) all show a proper, if mildewed, English reserve, and the lighting, by John de Borman, has an uncanny restraint, as if it too is being rationed. Conservatively raised by parents Jack (Alfred Molina) and Marjorie (Cara Seymour), Jenny would seem to be far from the epicenter of the cultural earthquake that would collapse the fifties into the sixties. But she’s a little braver, and more precocious, than her schoolmates, to the occasional dismay of her teacher, Miss Stubbs (Olivia Williams), and the institution’s headmistress (Emma Thompson), who see her as Oxford material.

However, the enigmatic businessman who gives Jenny a ride home one day in his Bristol roadster, David (Peter Sarsgaard), sees her as something else. At least twice her age, and Jewish to boot, David is enchanted by his slightly thorny rose, who is in turn captivated by his stories of Paris and his familiarity with the worlds of art auctions, nightclubs, and racetracks. That David’s business partner, Danny (Dominic Cooper, from Mamma Mia! and The History Boys) and Danny’s girlfriend, the sexy but scatter-brained Helen (Rosamund Pike), are a rougher sort, and that the nature of their business is on the shady side isn’t too worrying. Jenny’s hooked, and so, to her surprise, are her parents, who buy the couple’s white lies, figuring that her association with a worldly type who brags about his friendship with C.S. Lewis can only improve her chances of getting into Oxford.

This is a coming-of-age story where sex isn’t the main preoccupation, despite the Polanski-ish age gap. There is sex, during Jenny’s 17th birthday jaunt to Paris, but it’s not exactly earthshaking. An Education is more about the collision of youthful ideals and adult practicalities. Coping with David, who lives in a haze of Gauloise cigarettes, French movies, and romantic daydreams, is in some ways the least of Jenny’s turbulent rites of passage. There’s school, taught by nun-like teachers whose business is turning out correctly brought-up ladies with options that are ultimately as limited as theirs, and home, which buzzes with hypocrisy. This isn’t a spoiler kind of movie, but it’s a shock, to Jenny and to us, when her strait-laced parents react the way they do to one of David’s entreaties, so mum’s the word. Who can ever forget the day when Mom and Dad, the gods who walked among us, turned out to be mere mortals after all?

Danish filmmaker Lone Scherfig is best known for directing Italian for Beginners, one of the best (or at least more watchable) of the stripped-down Dogma pictures that were the arthouse rage for a time. She and Hornby bring a matching his-and-hers sensibility to this more mainstream material, he supplying a rueful wit to underpin the life lessons and she staging the scenes and directing the actors simply and clearly. I wish, though, that someone had toned down composer Paul Englishby’s score, which brims with schmaltz where there might be silence, but this is the only really wrong note.

The British cinema has a deep bench of supporting players to draw from; Williams, from Rushmore and The Sixth Sense, and of course Thompson are outstanding as authority figures whose concern about her wayward behavior runs deeper than Jenny realizes. Usually cast to intimidate, and nicely paired with Cooper, Pike (the bad Bond girl in Die Another Day) is funny without playing down to her role. The movie seemed to be wrapping up and Sally Hawkins, the star of Happy-Go-Lucky, hadn’t turned up yet, but then there she was, very unhappy in a small but key role.

I resisted Alfred Molina for years. The big-boned actor was always too broad and boorish for my taste. But playing a pair of outsized roles in 2004, Fiddler on the Roof on Broadway and Dr. Octopus in Spider-Man 2, cut him down to manageable size, and I found I liked the svelte version. He’s terrific here as Jenny’s dad, conscious of his middle position in the social pecking order while quietly, then avidly, hungering for more for his family. You feel for his entrapment.

You don’t know what to feel about David. Brits and Aussies play Americans so well I no longer notice the body snatching. I feared the worst on Broadway last week when Daniel Craig and Hugh Jackman bit down, hard, on their Chicago accents in A Steady Rain, but it wasn’t long before they had me. Our performers, meanwhile, rarely cross the pond for native parts. Sarsgaard isn’t as airtight as Renee Zellweger, say, in the Bridget Jones films. The slipperiness, though, and the actor’s somewhat unformed and tentative look are good for the character, a child-man for all his irresistible airs.

“Irresistible” is the word for Mulligan. Without her the film would be conceivable, but not nearly as compelling. She was in Pride & Prejudice and the Bleak House miniseries in 2005, then caught my eye in “Blink” (2007), a spine-tingling episode of Doctor Who, after which I turned to my wife and said, “She’s going places.” And she was: I next saw her on Broadway in last fall’s revival of The Seagull, where she was a shattering Nina opposite Sarsgaard’s Trigorin. In a blonde wig she was unrecognizable in two scenes early on in Public Enemies. The 22-year-old holds the screen here, getting right to the heart of the matter of Jenny’s urges, desires, and doubts. An Education does many things well, but as a lesson in star power it’s unbeatable.

An Education opens today in New York and Los Angeles, and expands nationwide next week. Here’s the trailer, which hints at its special quality.

So we hold fast to our lucky jerseys, rally caps, and gameday superstitions, because we know that the slightest deviation from the rituals will, through a macabre act of synchronicity, cause our team to lose, crush our dreams and bring shame upon our community. We want – no, need – to think that, in some way, we have a positive impact on their team’s performance.

But what happens when an average fan’s actions genuinely hurt the team? This is the heart of Big Fan, the new dark film by Robert Siegel (The Wrestler). It stars comedian Patton Oswalt (Ratatouille) as Paul Aufiero, a 36-year old parking attendant who still lives with his mother – his childhood bedroom decked out with New York Giants memorabilia (the late-80s vintage “SIMMS 11” New York license plate was a great touch).

Aufiero spends his days in his booth fine-tuning exactly what he’s going to say later that night when he calls into the Sports Dogg’s radio show. In his mind, he’s become a local hero as “Paul from Staten Island,” praising all things Big Blue and taunting his nemesis, “Philadelphia Phil” (Michael Rapaport), and his fellow Eagles fans with such clever insults as “cheesesteak bozos.”

One night, while out with his best, and possibly only, friend, Sal (Kevin Corrigan), Paul spots Giants star linebacker Quantrell Bishop (Jonathan Hamm), whose poster hangs over Paul’s bed, and the two follow him and his entourage to an upscale Manhattan strip club. Eventually they work up the courage to approach the five-time Pro Bowler, and what should have been Paul and Sal’s greatest hour quickly goes all pear-shaped. With a paranoia undoubtedly fueled by top-shelf booze, Bishop fears he’s being stalked and proceeds to beat him within an inch of his life.

When Paul regains consciousness three days later, he cares less about his health than the fact that, with Bishop suspended, the Giants defense fell apart against Kansas City. Paul now has to determine if filing a criminal and/or civil suit against Bishop is worth having the Giants, who are in a downslide as a result of the incident, tank the season.

But as befits someone whose life is measured out in wins and losses, moral dilemmas are not Paul’s strong suit, and the rest of the film deals with the consequences of his decisions – in his life, on the call-in shows, and, most importantly to him, on the field. Unlike the episode of Curb Your Enthusiasm where Larry David accidentally injures Shaquille O’Neal and then revels in his status as a local pariah, Paul can’t even look at the Bishop jersey in his closet without feeling the ultimate shame: letting the team down.

As Paul, Oswalt is a revelation, carrying every scene with his dumpy features and perpetually dour face. Few other actors could have captured Paul’s eternal state of desperation without launching into stereotype or cliché, but Oswalt pulls it off masterfully, giving Paul a skewed sense of dignity even though he does nothing dignified throughout the film. He refuses to see Paul as a loser, but rather as a man whose life is validated by the Giants’ performances and the patronizing compliments doled out to him by the Sports Dogg after each call.

The rest of the cast is equally strong, especially veteran Marcia Jean Kurtz as Paul’s mother, and Corrigan, who plays Beavis to Oswalt’s Butthead. And as the equally obsessed Philadelphia Phil, Michael Rapaport may have finally found a character whose intellect matches his own. In the interest of disclosure, I should point out that I am a lifelong Giants fan, so seeing an Eagles fan depicted as a moronic, loathsome, vile creature was about right.

Siegel’s script is also excellent, expertly picking out the rhythms of sports talk radio, with its own slang and catchphrases. Although it contains its share of laughs, the humor of Big Fan comes entirely from the realism of the characters. It’s not so much a comedy as a bleak look at the darker side of our obsessions.

It’s been 20 years since Michael Moore burst onto the film scene with his first documentary, Roger & Me. Although his films have gotten bigger in budget and broader in scope, one thing hasn’t changed: Moore’s decisive uphill battle to point out what he perceives as the ills which face this country, and possible ways to correct them. All of this dedication comes to the fore in Capitalism: A Love Story, which details not just the history of capitalism itself, but how much the dream has changed from an idealistic vision that could have allowed us to live in a financial utopia, to a nightmarish quagmire that threatens to collapse our economy at any moment, based on the insatiable avaricious behavior of the 1% rich that unfortunately hold power over all of us.

Capitalism begins with the story of Randy and Donna Hacker, a working class couple who are having their home foreclosed due to lack of payment. Randy had been injured and unable to work sometime earlier, and so they quickly fell behind on bills. At times in Moore’s documentaries, the filmmaker’s mere presence can get greedy, heartless companies to acquiesce at the last moment, allowing the little guy to triumph for one more day…as he did with a man whose daughter needed two hearing aid implants, but his insurance company only wanted to pay for one, in 2007’s Sicko. Here however, Moore’s cameras can only film helplessly as the bank goes through with the foreclosure, and in an absolutely humiliating irony, Randy and Donna have no choice but to clean every last item out of the house and make sure it’s spotlessly livable for the next owners, in the hopes of earning a $1,000 cleaning fee from that same bank.

As with all his works, that’s one of the things Moore does best in Capitalism: display the horrifying hypocrisy of the machine that drives this country, whether it be the insurance company that finally gives the little girl two cochlear implants simply because Moore’s in town, or the bank that figures it’s cheaper for them to pay Randy and Donna to clean out their own foreclosed home for the next owner, rather than hire a cleaning team and let the Hackers leave with some semblance of dignity.

Unfortunately for Moore, all of his films contain some hypocrisy as well. For a filmmaker who specializes in documentaries, he doesn’t always allow his silent camera to just capture the moment and let the viewer make their own informed choices; many times, Moore simply must put his own two cents in, just to make sure we get what he’s showing. It’s at the point where Moore’s filmmaking style has been parodied by others, most notably in the horridly unfunny An American Carol. However here in Capitalism, Moore does inject a few too many “I started to think,” “it made me wonder,” “and then I wondered” asides into the mix. All of this self-reference tends to break the viewer out of the visual narrative at inopportune moments, and it seems to me that he uses far more sad music cues to underscore his heartbreak moments than ever before. Perhaps it was because it is his 20th anniversary and he was in a blow-out mood, but this time he ends up often unintentionally parodying himself.

This is not to say that Capitalism: A Love Story is a failure in any way. It certainly isn’t, but it’s definitely not his best work. Part of the problem is that while the subject of capitalism–both its gains and losses–affects every one of us, that same subject is a snoozer to learn about, and no matter how many amusing film clips he interjects to help tell his story, Economics 101 always puts the class to sleep.

Still, the film is his best researched effort, and it’s that rare film that is a necessity to see. As always, the tales Moore has to tell are terrifying: From the Pennsylvania jail that crookedly made money off the state by incarcerating teenagers for the merest infractions (such as two girls getting into an argument at the local mall) to the scumbag bank which made $1.5 million dollars from the life insurance policy it took out on an employee who died (money which the widow never saw a dime of), Capitalism: A Love Story is a tale of fearful ironies, as most of the classic love stories (i.e.: Romeo and Juliet) truly are. The type of policy which that bank took out is called a Dead Peasants insurance policy, by the way, and it’s not entirely illegal. Any corporation can secretly take out life insurance on its employees and name themselves the beneficiary, so that when the employee dies, the company is rewarded handsomely…while the grieving family has to make due with their plain ol’ joe shmoe policy. Some companies you may have heard of which have Dead Peasants policies: Bank of America, Wal-Mart, Hershey’s and others. Many of these companies keep records of how much money they make in relation to the number of employees who are courteous enough to die for them.

Sadly, Michael Moore has no real answers on how we can fix capitalism. Perhaps that is because this time around, there are no readily tangible clues or solutions on how to fix the problem. Like all love stories that end badly, this country may simply be waiting quietly by the phone for the “let’s make up” call that will never come.

The new horror/comedy Jennifer’s Body, written by Diablo Cody (instantly famous for penning the brilliant Juno) and directed by Karyn Kusama (AEon Flux and Girlfight, the latter of which bestowed upon the world the dubious gift of Michelle Rodriguez) is without a doubt the best of the bunch to come along thus far, although given its surprisingly uneven narrative, that’s not saying much.

First off, for those of you who are wondering: yes, Kusama kept in the scene where the two leads Jennifer (Megan Fox) and her oddly named best friend Needy (Amanda Seyfried) share a “controversial” lesbian kiss. It’s in close-up, it’s almost two minutes long, and for those who are attracted to such, it’s a very satisfying scene. Not since Susan Sarandon got it on with Catherine Deneuve in 1983’s The Hunger have two women looked so good together. Sorry to spoil it for you though, Fox and Seyfried only almost end up in bed together.

Jennifer is the hottest girl in high school in the tiny town of Devil’s Kettle. Although most boys want her and most girls want to be like her, she’s best friends with Needy, an ultra non-cliquey girl who’s friends with many of the social outcasts otherwise overlooked. Although best friends since kindergarten, Needy lives up to her name, and is basically a hanger-on for Jennifer, who heads to dive bars and is able to get alcohol just by shaking the right parts of her body at the bartender. On one night when Needy ditches her nice-guy boyfriend Chip (Johnny Simmons) to hang with Jennifer, the two girls head to the local watering hole to see Low Shoulder, a low-rent indie band trying to make their way in the business. When a fire breaks out in the bar, spreading rapidly and killing almost everyone but the two girls and the band, a dazed Jennifer agrees to head out with the band in their van, over Needy’s protests. Later on, when Jennifer appears in Needy’s house covered in blood and spitting up black bile, Needy realizes something is wrong, but just can’t put her finger on it. It isn’t until the eviscerated bodies of boys from their school start turning up–boys who Jennifer usually wouldn’t show any interest in, but with whom she was last seen–that Needy comes to find that her BFF is possessed by a soul-devouring demon.

Aside from creating The United States of Tara for TV, Jennifer’s Body is only the second feature Cody has written. Like all in Hollywood who achieve instant success with a breakout hit like Juno, Cody’s writing skill has been praised consistently. However, Hollywood revels in failure as much as success, and it’s unlikely that she is aware of how far she has to fall, and how quickly it can happen. Jennifer’s Body is definitely a step down in terms of writing, to some degree, as the character of Needy is simply a lower-rent copy of Juno MacGuff, complete with “quirky” dialogue to make her sound smarter and more worldly than any teen her age could be. Oddly enough, while the writing for the secondary characters like Chip and band leader/scuzzball Nikolai (Adam Brody) is pretty much on the mark, Cody’s dialogue for both Jennifer and Needy tends to be uneven, swinging like a pendulum between believable and unintentionally laughable in parts where the dialogue needs to be taken seriously.

Fortunately for the film, the cast is well chosen. Although Megan Fox (Hope & Faith, The Help) has done a ton of TV work and is famous for providing eye candy in both Transformers movies, Jennifer’s Body is her first time headlining a film on her own, and she does her best to prove she’s up to the task. Of course, her character is not much more than a shallow cheerleader, and Fox does the best with what she’s given…but audiences may have to wait until next year’s Jonah Hex (where she’ll share screen time with the formidable Josh Brolin) to see if she can truly act. Seyfried (Mama Mia!, Veronica Mars), on the other hand, handles the Juno ripoff character Needy (what parent in their right mind would name a child that?) with a natural aplomb, helping us to empathize with her character and keeping her believably grounded at all times, in spite of the often inane dialogue that comes out of her mouth. The always excellent J.K. Simmons (Post Grad, Burn After Reading) puts in an odd cameo as Mr. Wroblewski, the claw-hooked and presumably only teacher at the high school. Fan favorite Kyle Gallner (The Shield, The Haunting in Connecticut) puts in a small appearance as a goth boy Jennifer sets her sights on, and Johnny Simmons manages to snatch his career from the gaping cesspool that was The Spirit to give a very balanced performance as the likable Chip.

Jennifer’s Body doesn’t suffer from most of the standard horror movie cliches; in fact, under Kusama’s able direction, the film makes fun of several of them, even though some of the jump moments are fairly predictable. Although this is only Kusama’s third feature film, she has a capable grip on the material. The main problem is that the movie’s own scriptwriter is working against it. Diablo Cody seems more concerned with how many clever snippets of dialogue she  can put into her characters’ mouths, regardless of whether real teens would ever say such things, as well as being sure to put as many cultural references as possible…perhaps in an effort for future film buffs to be able to turn on their TVs late at night and catch Jennifer’s Body post-opening scenes, and be able to say “Ah, that witty catchphrase-filled dialogue! Now that’s a Diablo Cody film!” The central problem with this, however, is that people can say such things about writer/directors like Tarantino, whose dialogue leaps off the page and screen and comes at you like a rabid ferret in heat. Cody isn’t quite at that stage yet; only when her upcoming Girly Style comes out will we be able to see if the brilliance of Juno was just a fluke.

Although Cody confuses the powers of a demon with those of a vampire at one point, as some action plays out over the end credits, the film comes full circle as a narrative and remains satisfying overall, at least in that regard. So while not altogether perfect–thanks to its own writer–the capable direction and fairly solid cast helps to make Jennifer’s Body into an entertaining distraction.

As for 9 itself–only the second animated film from Focus following their highly successful Coraline–the movie is amazingly entertaining and visually striking. In spite of its ending, which left me sort of flat, it’s very possible this film might make it onto my Top 5 list at the end of the year.

9 takes place in a not-too-distant future, wherein humanity has been betrayed and destroyed by the highly intelligent machines they’ve built. Any similarities to the Terminator franchise end there however, immediately upon the introduction of the titular hero (voiced by Elijah Wood)–a stitchwork figure only inches tall, brought to life by an infusion of part of the very soul of its creator…the scientist who created the machines’ A.I., ironically to usher in an age of peace. The peace has been achieved, all right: the peace of the grave, brought to vivid life via scenes of ruined landscapes and brief glimpses of dead bodies, among them a mother still clutching her child. 

As 9 makes his way across the charred land, he is at first befriended by another stitchwork being named 2 (voice of Martin Landau). After an attack by a feral mechanoid, 9 is then found by 1 (voice of Christopher Plummer), leader of a small group of stitchworks, who remain in hiding, fearful of discovery by the beast that attacked 9 and 2 (all the stitchworks have numbers on their back, correlating to the order in which they were created). Although 1 chooses to keep his people hidden, 9 is insistent on traveling into the vast wasteland to rescue 2, who was taken by the beast. Joined by 5 (voice of John C. Reilly), the two set off on their quest, eventually meeting up with the brave and heroic 7 (voice of Jennifer Connelly), who does her best to help them reach their goal.

From the outset, the CGI for 9 the film is absolutely astounding, and never falters in the slightest. Attitude Studio and the other visual effects artists who worked on this have set a new bar for what can be achieved, and of course it figures that Tim Burton (James and the Giant Peach, Cabin Boy) would be just the right producer to bring director Shane Acker’s (The Hangnail, The Astounding Talents of Mr. Grenade) and writer Pamela Pettler’s (Corpse Bride, Monster House) somewhat grim animated tale to the screen (I give producer Timur Bekmambetov as little credit as possible. He gave us 2007’s abysmal Wanted, and is intent on foisting Wanted 2 on audiences in 2011).

For only his first feature, Acker has a firm grip on the material (his first two projects were shorts), although as good as 9 is, it’s a little early to be calling him a “visionary” director as the trailers put forth…the man’s no Zack Snyder, at least not yet. The voice cast is excellent on every level–although it’s a hilarious yet possibly unintentional in-joke that Crispin Glover (Back to the Future, Beowulf) plays the possibly mentally unstable stitchwork 6. And the music by Deborah Lurie (George Lucas In Love, Whirlygirl) is dark, moody and heroic when appropriate. It’s a challenging soundtrack for children to sit through, no doubt.

There are only a few problems I had with Pamela Pettler’s story, yet they may not fully be her fault. In the trailer, the stitchwork beings’ creator (voiced by the aptly named Alan Oppenheimer) says “9, you shall protect the future.” This would lead one to believe that 9 will somehow save humanity in some way, but the story doesn’t fully concern itself with this, as the focus is primarily on the rescue of his own stitchwork fellows and keeping them safe from the machines that are still around. As I said earlier, the ending also left me flat because it didn’t seem to be the payoff to which the story was leading. However, considering the context of the dark fable–and there is quite a bit of death in it–the ending does fit in. Still, these are minor points which an audience can easily overlook, especially as cheers and applause arose on more than one occasion during my screening. It’s been a while since that’s happened, but 9 is certainly worthy of it.

9 is an awesome achievement in the realm of CGI, and is a thoroughly engrossing story. Although it clocks in at barely just over an hour, it’s well worth the price of admission.

No, you’re not like me. But I’ve got news for you: I’m not like me, either. Drag me to hell: I’m not gonna sit on my ass in some multiplex when the best weather of the season has arrived at the 11.5th hour. I’m going to sit outside and taunt the kids who have to go back to school on Tuesday—man, I hated Labor Day Weekend when I was a kid, knowing that the school bus was going to pull up like Charon the ferryman to escort me back to Hades.

Summer. It was good, now it’s dead. And it’s time to reflect on the corpse.

Boxoffice-wise, the top five films of the season were the Transformers and Harry Potter sequels, Up, The Hangover, and Star Trek. I saw the last three. (In a simpler time in my life, say any day before Aug. 25, 2008, I would have seen them all. The franchises got the boot.) And they were good. Well, The Hangover and Star Trek were good; I can’t say I got down with Up, which struck me as minor Pixar, not out-of-gas Pixar like Cars but a little thin. Still, I’ll buy the DVD—except for Cars, I have them all, even Monsters Inc. and Finding Nemo—and give it another spin.

The best movie I saw all summer, and maybe all year, was The Hurt Locker. Nothing else came close. In dire times for the indie/foreign-language/anything- without-fighting-robots market it wilted in the heat, which was a real shame. Look for it again at awards time. It deserves another shot.

I don’t worship at the altar of Michael Mann but I was enthusiastic about Public Enemies, a distillation of a great book (by Bryan Burrough) that should have been done as a miniseries. What made it to the screen, though, had choice bits. For once Christian Bale’s boring remorselessness, pitted here against Johnny Depp’s dapper brutality, made sense. The digital cinematography, a grainy mess in the Miami Vice movie, was arresting. In a thick haze of notable character actors Stephen Lang dominated with a hard gem of a performance; indeed, that last scene he has with Marion Cotillard was the finest of the year.

I lucked out this summer. I didn’t have to go all that far to see some of the best movies, I just had to wait for them to open at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, a five-minute walk from me. High on the list—and again brought down by the ailing “specialty” market—was the extraordinarily biting British comedy In the Loop, the other great film inspired in some way by the Iraq War. I savored the profanely funny dialogue that results from a slip of the tongue that edges Britain and the U.S. to conflict in the Middle East. Peter Capaldi (pictured) brilliantly whipsaws the gears of the plot into motion. There were complaints that the film was too abrasive in nailing bureaucracy bumbling to the wall, to which I say, war is hell.

I laughed a lot at the micro-sized Humpday, in which two straight friends agree to make a gay porn flick together for a (real-life) Seattle video event. Jitters, regrets, and one-upmanship ensue as the day of the “beyond gay” shoot approaches, while the wife of one of the would-be fuck buddies looks on with mystification. The improbable situation is a good front for a more, umm, penetrating look at middle-aged male friendship.

After my snit over the portrayal of Nigerians in District 9, I was primed for the Jew-hunting Nazis and Nazi-hunting Jews in Quentin Tarantino’s Inglourious Basterds. I found myself sitting next to two Orthodox guys, who would be a litmus test for outrage. I needn’t have gotten myself so worked up; they seemed to have a good time, and so did I. As usual Tarantino has nothing to say about the real world; this is as far removed from the fact-based Defiance, or anything connected to World War II or the Holocaust, as possible. The constant shout-outs to his latest batch of favorite movies are however amusing, if limited, and the soundtrack kills. (We really need to have all of 1967’a Dark of the Sun available in digital form, and not just its main theme.) I could go on—the film is conceived for going on, which is a plus—but I’ll conclude by saying that if anyone is moved to seek out an UFA, Emil Jannings, or Danielle Darrieux movie because of this one Tarantino has done his job as a cinema scholar.

As for the flops, Larry David’s osmosis of Woody Allen in Whatever Works didn’t work. Better, though still a letdown, was the undercooked Bruno, whose unlikable narcissist was a dick with a dick. Warning: Don’t let anyone take you to The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 or Taking Woodstock. They’re taking you for a ride.

A confession. On Broadway there’s something called second-acting. You wait for the doors to open at intermission and, as no one’s paying attention to ticketing, just walk into the theater, scan for an open seat and enjoy the second act of Hair or whatever. I don’t condone this practice but there it is. (See all of Hair. It’s a solid revival.) But I second-act movies all the time now. There’s no one checking attendance at the multiplexes so I cruise in and get a taste of what’s playing next door to the movie I paid to see. And I can say that I spit out the hour or so I suffered through Hugh Jackman in the morose and poorly mounted Wolverine, with the bulk of Terminator Salvation leaving the same pukey aftertaste. But you know what? I enjoyed the 10 or so minutes I caught of G.I. Joe. He’s one doll I might check out on DVD.

So here we are: The beginning of the fall, as the leaves start to brown and the movies glisten with Oscar gold. It can be a frustratingly slow process, though, with a lot of dead spots till the main events arrive. To quote Green Day, wake me up when September ends…or sooner, if the crop arrives early.

When reading a review, everyone always wants to skip right to the point: Is it any good? Should I spend my hard-earned money to go see it?

Well, let’s cut to the chase then with a nice, small hint: Not only will Inglourious Basterds make my Top 5 Best Films list at the end of this year, but I’m already looking forward to buying the DVD whenever it comes out, so I can revel in the brutal playground of director Tarantino’s semi-historical revenge flick over and over again! So, yes…go see it.

There’s pretty much not a casual filmgoer or cinemaphile on the face of the planet who doesn’t know who Quentin Tarantino (Reservoir Dogs, Kill Bill Vol. 1 & 2) is, or hasn’t seen at least one of his films. Some people expect a Tarantino flick to be nothing more than a tart of spicy dialogue dipped into a warm cup of violence with a bloody cherry on top. But that’s not Inglourious. Being that the film is set in World War II, some will expect it to be a non-stop shoot-‘em-up action flick with characters spouting well-worn clichéd lines such as “Let’s get those Ratzis!” while lobbing grenades over a distant hill at the enemy. That is also not what Basterds is all about.

Inglourious Basterds is basically a WWII revenge epic, spanning the course of the war, with the intricate, interweaving subplots for which Tarantino is famous. It’s also a lengthy love sonnet to Sergio Leone, master of the spaghetti western, and a huge influence on Tarantino himself. While Inglourious is practically wrapped up in a nice neat bow with a valentine heart reading “From Q to S, with love” on it, this is an unconventional film in almost every way, with an ending both shocking and satisfying on a highly visceral level. If you’ve read other critiques of the film, you can almost guess what that ending is, since virtually every critic is having a hard time keeping their mouths shut about it…champing at the bit like a little kid discovering their first swear word and eager to test out its shock value on the adults in the room. You know what? Damn them for wanting to give it away and spoil such an outright fun and satisfying ending to a similarly fun and satisfying film…quite possibly one of the best endings to any film in recent memory.

Basterds.

And that’s all I’m going to say about that.

It’s been stated by many in the press—and Tarantino has all but admitted to such—that Basterds is intended to be his great masterpiece, the one he’s been working up to ever since Patricia Arquette bashed James Gandolfini over the head with the back cover of a toilet in True Romance. Unfortunately, while Inglourious Basterds is a damn good film, it’s not Pulp Fiction. Quite possibly, no film that Tarantino ever does will truly reach the gold standard of that film. I remember attending a private screening of PF back in 1994, just like it was yesterday. There was a feeling, both while watching the film and in discussions about it afterward, that a new and powerful presence had arrived in cinema. That presence is still felt today, but cannot be felt in the same manner as his most public debut–therefore, Tarantino has by default already shot his masterpiece. Everything which comes afterward is simply “a film by Quentin Tarantino.”

Which doesn’t mean that said films can’t be triumphs in their own right, and Inglourious truly is one. Set in Nazi-occupied France, the film begins with a visit to a farm by Colonel Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), infamously known as “The Jew Hunter.” Landa is a patient, meticulous man who has a talent for finding Jewish refugees no matter where they hide, which is why he has come to the farm of a Frenchman whom he suspects is harboring a Jewish family. Landa kills them all, but the eldest daughter Shoshanna (Melanie Laurent) escapes, fleeing into the nearby woods. Landa is fully capable of shooting her down, and indeed does have her in his sights at one point, but extends a left-handed mercy upon her in letting her go. After all, the Reich is in the house, and so Hans has all the time in the world to hunt her down.

Cut to a couple years later, and Lieutenant Aldo “The Apache” Raine (Brad Pitt) has assembled a team of Jewish-American soldiers whom the Reichstag will soon come to call “The Basterds,” in order to hunt down Nazi soldiers, murder them, collect their scalps, and thereby instill fear into the heart of the Reich. As you’ve undoubtedly seen in the trailers, Raine informs his men that each of them is accountable for collecting 100 Nazi scalps…and boy, does Aldo want those scalps. The Basterds do indeed inflict severe damage upon Nazi troops, eventually drawing the attention and ire of Adolph Hitler (Martin Wuttke), who in no uncertain terms demands they be hunted down, and in particular that the men stop buying into the fearsome myth of “The Bear Jew” (Eli Roth, obviously having the time of his life as Sgt. Donny Donowitz), known to bash in the heads of captured soldiers with a baseball bat. In the meantime, Shoshanna has changed her identity, come to own a small movie theater in Paris, and has dreamed up a plan with her lover Marcel (Jacky Ido) to kill the leaders of the Nazi party, due to a fortuitous meeting with young German war hero Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Bruhl), who has taken a liking to her, while being completely unaware of her true identity.

Part of the glory of Basterds is that Tarantino doesn’t ever treat the subject of the Nazis’ evil or the ongoing extermination of the Jews as fodder for farce. While there is a good amount of well-placed humor, displayed mainly by the sparkling delivery of Pitt (Troy, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), the proceedings are deadly serious and there is tension in a good deal of the scenes. This is a revenge flick, after all, and the path to such is always lined with the opportunity for treachery and things to go wrong at the last minute. Tarantino also values the necessity of subtitles when the Germans are speaking to one another where no Americans are present—especially in the much talked-about 23 minute La Louisiane scene…although it is a wonderful turn on the cliché of having foreign characters mysteriously speak English, when in the aforementioned opening scene on the farm, Hans Landa specifically asks his French suspect if it’s okay if they speak English so Hans can “practice.”

Another cool thing about Inglourious is that in relation to introducing the primary characters, it chops right to the point when setting up the story. Aside from the most important figures—Raine, Shoshanna, Landa, Donowitz, Zoller, Sgt. Hugo Stiglitz (Til Schweiger), a traitor to the Nazi cause and British spy Lt. Archie Hicox (Michael Fassbender)—we are given virtually no backstory to any of the other members of Raine’s group or semi-peripheral characters. The reason: It’s simply not necessary. We don’t need to know why each of the Basterds has signed aboard; the fact that they’re Jewish is reason enough, given the circumstances of what the Nazis were doing at the time. We don’t need to know about Shoshanna’s lover Marcel or how they met, other than that they are truly in love, and he will do anything for her. We don’t need to know why German actress Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger) is aiding the Basterds’ cause; her character obviously represents the good people who were living in Nazi Germany at the time, but were part of the silent minority, unable to publicly oppose Hitler’s hateful regime. She’s fed up, of course, and wants to rid the world of Hitler however possible…it’s all in her body language. We don’t even need to know how Aldo Raine got that pronounced scar across his neck — the man is somehow looking for payback for some injustice, and if killing Nazis helps him sleep better at night, then so be it. All of this backstory would have unnecessarily eaten up screen time, and with an already hefty run time of just over two and a half hours (I only considered the time once or twice, then was swept right back into the story), Tarantino obviously knew he couldn’t afford to drag his story down.

The acting in Basterds is solid clear across the board, and not for one second (well, with the exception of a rather odd appearance by Mike Meyers as a British general) do you believe you’re watching actors playing their parts…you have been transported to Nazi-occupied France, and you’ve arrived just in time to watch the Basterds get their due.

That’s all that need be said; to do more would give it away, and I’m not about to do that. Go see Inglourious Basterds — it’s a worthy addition to the Tarantino archives, and may very well be the last fun blast of the summer.

Well? What are you waitin’ for? Move out!