Video review: "Allied"

I didn’t catch “Allied” when it came out in theaters for its all-too-brief run -- and I was hardly the only one who missed it. The film got lost in the shuffle of Oscar hopefuls stampeding into theaters in December and never found a large audience.

I finally caught up during my effort to see all the Academy Award nominees -- it got a well-deserved nod for costumes -- and was surprised to find a splendid war drama/romance.

Brad Pitt and Marion Cotillard play spies working for the British government during World War II. He’s Max, a Canadian, she’s Marianne, a French resistance legend. They meet up in North Africa, posing as a married couple, so they work hard at appearing familiar with each other -- a little too hard, it would seem.

Their assignment is to assassinate the German ambassador to Casablanca, so they know there’s a high likelihood one or both of them may not survive.

But they do, and get married and have a sweet baby girl, while Max takes an office job in London. But with the Normandy invasion coming up, his superiors start to suspect that Marianne may not be who she claims.

So he’s ordered to perform a “blue dye” operation on his wife. I’ll spare you the details, but the important part is that if she fails the test, it becomes his duty to execute Marianne -- personally. Failure to do so is considered treason.

Director Robert Zemeckis and screenwriter Steve Knight give us a gorgeous-looking movie filled with fraught sequences and keen emotional anguish. How much of Max and Marianne’s ardor is genuine, and how much is the result of circumstance and espionage intrigue? Does one’s patriotic obligation extend so far as to demand you kill the person you love?

Give “Allied” a look-see on home video, and you’ll find a well-made film that goes beyond typical spy stories.

Video extras are pretty decent, though you’ll have to shell out for the Blu-ray combo pack to get them, as the DVD version contains none.

They consist of 10 making-of featurettes: “Story of Allied,” “From Stages to the Sahara: The Production Design of Allied,” “Through the Lens: Directing with Robert Zemeckis,” “A Stitch in Time: The Costumes of Allied,” “‘Til Death Do Us Part: Max and Marianne,” “Guys and Gals: The Ensemble Cast,” “Lights, Pixels, ACTION! The Visual Effects of Allied,” “Behind the Wheel: The Vehicles of Allied,” “Locked and Loaded: The Weapons of Allied,” “That Swingin’ Sound: The Music of Allied.”

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Video review: "The Big Short"

Fresh off its Oscar win for Best Adapted Screenplay (and a strong late bid for Best Picture), I’m hoping more people will give “The Big Short” a look. I’ve no doubt many potential ticket buyers took one look at the subject matter – high finance rebels who foresaw the real estate bubble bursting – and said, “No, thanks.”

What they need to know is how smart, funny and downright entertaining this movie is. While its primary fuel is anger at a rigged system, the film uses comedy as its entry point.

Consider Adam McKay, director and co-writer, whose previous credits include lowbrow comedies “Anchorman,” “Step Brothers” and “The Other Guys.” And Steve Carell as Mike Baum, a cartoonishly loud and obnoxious money manager. Even Ryan Gosling, Brad Pitt and Christian Bale, actors not normally known for eliciting laughs, are funny and engaging in an ensemble cast with no real traditional lead.

What’s most astounding is how the film takes a complex subject and breaks it down into digestible bites. The problem began when financial institutions started packaging risky mortgages as assets to be traded and sold. There’s no real single villain, just a system in which everyone looked the other way -- including the government’s watchdogs -- in order to maintain the appearance of financial stability.

Hilarious and bitter, “The Big Short” is a heist movie in which we’re the ones getting fleeced, and the good guys are the ones pointing to the crime who get dismissed as loons.

Bonus features are pretty decent, though you’ll have to buy the Blu-ray upgrade to get them: the DVD contains none.

These include five making-of documentary shorts: “In the Trenches: Casting,” “The Big Leap: Adam McKay,” “Unlikely Heroes: The Characters of The Big Short,” “The House of Cards: The Rise of the Fall” and “Getting Rea: Recreating an Era.” There are also several deleted scenes.

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Review: "The Big Short"

I’m not sure if I’ve ever seen a movie as simultaneously funny and angry as “The Big Short.”

Ostensibly a dramatic, spit-flecked tirade against the real estate crash and the widespread financial shenanigans that caused it, the film is also wickedly hilarious, dripping in black humor and rife with sharp one-liners. It’s a smart, insightful howl against a system that was rigged -- and, the movie argues, still is.

Here is a sure Oscar contender, and one of the year’s best films.

Director and co-writer Adam McKay, known for lowbrow comedies often starring Will Ferrell (“Anchorman: The Legend of Ron Burgundy”) unbeloved by me, makes the unlikeliest left turn in Hollywood history. He and Charles Randolph deftly adapt the book by Michael Lewis, celebrating a disparate band of anti-heroes who bet against the real estate market when the rest of the world of high finance, from the most junior broker to the Chairman of the Federal Reserve, viewed it as Gibraltar solid.

The most amazing accomplishment of the film, beyond maintaining that bravura blend of wit and fury, is making the complicated world of mortgage financing not only understandable, but turning it into the villain of the piece. We glimpse a few smarmy manipulators, a handful of real estate brokers writing mortgages they know their clients won’t be able to pay, etc. – but they’re cogs in the machine.

Christian Bale plays Michael Burry, a former M.D. who founded his own hedge fund. It was he who first looked at how banks were packaging subprime mortgages and selling the debt as an asset, using volume to hide the millions of cracks in what appeared to most observers to be an unassailable wall of strength. Burry, a kook who runs his office barefoot, bet early and bet big that it would all come tumbling down.

Others took his cue and ran with it, further uncovering pieces of the jumbled puzzle. Steve Carell is terrific as Mark Baum, a money manager operating his own shop under the umbrella of Morgan Stanley. A provocateur who lashes out at those who seek to take advantage of others – an odd disposition for an investor, obviously – Baum sees the looming crisis as less an opportunity than a fount of outrage.

Ryan Gosling plays Jared Vennett, a slick operator who helps put the pieces together for others and acts as our snide narrator. Brad Pitt turns up as Ben Rickert, a dispossessed trader brought in to act as mentor/facilitator by a pair of young hotshots (John Magaro and Finn Wittrock) who sniff out the opportunity. Pure mercenaries looking for a score at first, they slowly become educated that those numbers on a spreadsheet represent real homes, families, lives.

The story essentially moves forward as a triad, each of the three investor groups experiencing pushback and pressure from their colleagues. Just when we think the house of cards must come tumbling down, it magically stays afloat through the sorcery of confidence and delusion.

Like “Spotlight,” this is an ensemble film that essentially has no central character or leading performances. Only with Carell’s Baum do we learn much about him outside of the office, which provides a little illumination into how somebody dedicated to making money could wear his conscious so plainly on his sleeve. As good as he was in “Foxcatcher,” Carell is even better here.

Even as it lauds the rebels who went against the grain and said ‘no’ when everyone else said ‘yes,’ “The Big Short” never lets us forget that the accounting chicanery that caused the worst recession since the 1930s is the real story. Burry, Baum and company may have won a pile of money for their insight. But we all lost in the big game we didn’t even know was being played.

Review: "By the Sea"

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that “By the Sea” will not be everyone’s slice of pie. Set in the 1970s, it’s a throwback to a style of filmmaking from that same era we don’t see much anymore: contemplative, personal, forthrightly erotic, at times wandering and hazy, at times mesmerizing.

I’ve long made it a point not to read other reviews or articles about a movie before I’ve written my own, but couldn’t avoid a growing and nasty wave of commentary about this film. Much of this seems to owe to it starring Hollywood supercouple Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, and that it was written and directed by the latter (who is credited, perhaps tellingly, as Angelina Jolie Pitt).

They haven’t made a movie together since “Mr. & Mrs. Smith,” when of course Pitt was married to somebody else. It seems eons ago, but it was just 10 years. Since then they’ve wed, had a gaggle of children (adopted and natural), gone through a major medical scare for her, seen their careers bounce high and low.

Now in his 50s, he’s become choosier about his film projects, and she’s starred in fewer and fewer, preferring the space behind the camera. “By the Sea” is Jolie Pitt’s third film as a director, the first in which she also acted, and her best.

There’s not much to the story. The Bertrands, husband and wife, are motoring along the French coastline. They find a nice place with a gorgeous view of a rocky bay, and stop for a while. Their linger becomes a wallow, as he tries to use the setting as inspiration for his writing, and she seems to have little reason to exist beyond embodying resentment.

The Bertrands are not happy people. Married 14 years, they’re engaged in a wary pas de deux through the “second stage of life.” Roland mostly drinks and takes notes at the local café, but the sheet of paper in his typewriter remains obstinately unchanged. Vanessa (Ness) hangs around the hotel balcony, spying on sunbathers, occasionally going shopping in town while wearing an enormous hat and sunglasses, Audrey Hepburn-like.

They act like celebrities hiding out, and indeed he was once a noted novelist and she was a famous performer (the venue is vague). Money does not seem to be a problem, as they wear expensive clothes, buy their suppers, smoke cigarettes and drink, drink, drink.

A colleague commented after the screening that this is the sort of movie “Liz & Dick” -- meaning Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton -- might’ve made a half-century ago, and the comparison is apt. Like their earlier counterparts, Brad and Angelina are world-famous figures who seem bored and bothered by their status, and are looking to use this movie to comment upon and distance themselves from their public personas. Ness is an object of curiosity to most everyone she encounters, but she prefers to remain remote and aloof.

Things happen, slowly. Roland befriends the older bartender (Niels Arestrup) and tries to squeeze every considerable ounce of wisdom out of him -- both for his book and the sake of his marriage.

A younger couple on their honeymoon (Mélanie Laurent and Melvil Poupaud) moves into the suite next door, and Ness begins spying on them through a forgotten pipe. Meanwhile, she and Roland are virtually asexual. He soon joins her in voyeurism, simply to have something they can share.

“By the Sea” is an amazingly beautiful movie; Pitt and Jolie Pitt have never looked more gorgeous. It’s a very observational film, keying on little details like the way Ness always tosses her sunglasses onto the table, and he always rights them so the glass doesn’t get scratched. We watch a red-shirted fisherman row his tiny boat out of the mouth of the bay and back every day, but never meet him. There are fleshy flashes of thoughts that bound around inside Ness’ head, but it’s torment rather than desire that makes her vibrate.

This is the sort of movie that isn’t really “about” anything, other than the question of whether Roland and Ness make it as a married couple, or not. At times their situation seems dire, later hopeful, then less so. Their disillusion, carefully staked out in their days spent apart, is challenged in ways unexpected. This movie is less about the what than the how.

Some people are ready to dismiss “By the Sea” as an old-school vanity project, but I think that’s missing the point. People -- especially those who’ve spent their lives pretending to be somebody else -- often understand others better than they do themselves. Here are a pair of stars behaving like nobodies, and having a swell time acting miserable.

Review: "Fury"

One of my favorite things to do as a critic is to point people to great movies they’ve probably never heard of. Case in point: “End of Watch,” which was in and out of theaters so fast in 2012 you probably missed it even if you didn’t blink.

Writer/director David Ayer’s next film, the Arnold Schwarzenegger vehicle “Sabotage,” similarly disappeared without a trace. I’m hoping that won’t be the case with his latest, “Fury,” a World War II action/drama starring Brad Pitt that mostly takes place inside a single Sherman tank.

Fair notice: this a grim, dark movie about the dank corners hidden away inside men’s souls. It makes “Saving Private Ryan” seem like a lullaby.

The battle scenes are gruesome, and what happens when the shooting stops is often even more troubling. American soldiers are portrayed not as decent men who sometimes commit evil deeds in the heat of combat, but killing machines who only want to murder the Germans before the krauts murder them.

What a pitiable world Ayers has drawn for us. Unlike most WWII movies that are set when the Nazis still have the upper hand, here it’s April 1945 and the Germans are offering their stiffest resistance before the collapse they know is inevitable.

The soldiers are all scarred, grimy beasts; the German landscape is an open wound, ripped and gasping; the detritus of war lies all around, smoking armored hulks like prehistoric behemoths brought low. It’s not so much that death and carnage are everywhere, but everywhere is death and carnage.

To wit: when the fresh young recruit, Norman (Logan Lerman), is assigned to the crew of the “Fury,” the battered tank that has survived many battles, his first duty is to clean out the bloody mess left by his predecessor. While doing so, he finds part of the man’s face, perfectly intact, staring at him.

So again I say: not for the squeamish, this.

Pitt has a stout, merciless role as Don, aka “Wardaddy,” the sergeant who commands the Fury. His face done up with scars and hair chopped in a deliberately unattractive fop with shaved sides, Don is sure-handed and unrelenting with the enemy, and the same with his crew. He’ll let them bicker and bitch, but when it’s time for them to perform he will brook no hesitation.

When Norman fails to spot and kill a German soldier with an anti-tank gun, and absolutely horrific results ensue, Don makes personally sure that the lad will not flinch next time, using brutal but effective means. He’ll let the Neanderthal gunner, Grady (Jon Bernthal), indulge his base instincts, but only up to a point.

Don takes a softer hand with Bible, a thoughtful young man played thoughtfully by Shia LaBeouf, and Gordo (Michael Peña), the rock-solid tank driver. The sergeant has promised all his men he will keep them alive, but their latest mission will test that pledge.

The Fury is assigned to a platoon of five tanks to guard a crossroads against a force of fresh German troops, who are threatening the advancing division’s supply line. If they fail, the entire Allied advance will ground to a halt and the war could last months longer.

Ayer shows an expert hand for the battle scenes, keeping the focus on the men inside the Fury while giving a pulse-jumping view of the action outside. Tracer bullets and ordnance flash at the screen like lasers, lending the proceedings an eerie stuck-out-of-time feeling. An encounter with a technologically superior Panzer Tiger is especially effective.

The movie works better as a war picture than a character piece. We never quite get all the way inside the heads of the characters, so their peril doesn’t carry as much emotional freight as you’d expect. And a scene inside the apartment of a German woman and her cousin goes in many different directions at once, like a grenade, rather than focused, like a sniper’s bullet.

Still, this is one depiction of war destined to linger in our memory. At times this movie almost seems like a pugnacious middle finger to the classic war epics, in which disparate men come together for a violent but altruistic cause. “Fury” crushes the notion of the nobility of war under its grinding, pitiless treads.

Review: "12 Years a Slave"

It caused quite a sensation when it came out, but since 1853 the book “12 Years a Slave” by Solomon Northup has largely faded from memory. The movie adaptation by director Steve McQueen and screenwriter John Ridley brings the sin of slavery back into our faces with searing honesty about the brutality and dehumanization of an entire people.

Chiwetel Ejiofor, in an Oscar-worthy turn, plays Northup – an educated and talented musician and engineer from Saratoga, New York, kidnapped and sold into bondage in Louisiana, where he toiled and struggled to survive. Forced to take on the persona of “Platt,” he hid his abilities, including reading and writing, to pass himself off as a field laborer.

Over the next dozen years he experiences untold degradation and torture, having his back flayed until it is little more than a crisscross patchwork of scars. Separated from his wife and children, he can only imagine their own pain and torment. And he must submit to the rule of white Southerners who view him as a piece of chattel to be used and discarded as needs or whims serve.

Ejiofor brings an earnest grace to the role, an ordinary, intelligent man placed in hellish circumstances that defy logic. He holds onto his pride with great care, even violently defying an especially cruel overseer (Paul Dano) who can’t stand that a slave knows more about building houses than he does.
Even though he eventually learns not to make waves, he never loses track of his inner soul. Because of that, hope never truly dies.

If the film has a weakness, it’s that McQueen and Ridley overplay their hand. Northup’s life prior to his ordeal is an idealized existence in which whites and blacks live in perfect harmony -- eating at each other’s tables, shopkeepers enthusiastically offering their handshake and assistance.

Ironically, it’s only in traveling to our nation’s capital (where slavery was still allowed in 1841) that he exposes himself to nefarious types who make a business of carrying off free blacks to the deep South, where they can fetch prices of $1,000. A decent, law-abiding man, Northup at first reacts with disbelief and threats to sue his oppressors. Defiance is soon (literally) beaten out of him, and a host of merchants warn him upon threat of death never to mention his real name or origin again.

At first Northup is placed in the hands of a genteel owner named Ford (Benedict Cumberbatch), who treats him with respect and makes use of the engineering skills of “Platt.” He even gives him a violin out of patriarchal devotion -- both to soothe the slaves and please his own ear.

But circumstances change, and Platt is sold to a vile man with a reputation for being stern with his slaves.
The film reaches its greatest emotional heights -- and depths -- under the reign of Epps, a plantation master played by Michael Fassbender. Conflating his religious beliefs with his inhuman instincts, Epps is a caricature of a character, frightening to behold but difficult to accept as truthful.

Fassbender is leering and electric, not content to just subjugate his slaves but fawn while doing so. A favorite move is putting his face right into theirs, practically nuzzling Platt or his favorite, Patsey, before putting them to the whip, or indulging his sexual cravings, or both.

Lupita Nyong’o is a terrific presence as Patsey, a slender reed of a woman who can pick three times as much cotton in a day as most men. But she must navigate the tumultuous river of jealousy springing forth from Mrs. Epps (Sarah Paulson), who fears that her husband values a slave more than his wife.

“12 Years a Slave” is a mesmerizing cinematic experience, easily one of the best of the year. I couldn’t help feeling, though, that the filmmakers would’ve better served the audience by exercising a little more restraint. By making the villain better resemble an actual human, the crucible of slavery would have had the weight of authenticity, and been made even more harrowing.

Review: "The Counselor"

Cormac McCarthy is a glorious novelist, and many of his books have been turned into exceptional films -- "The Road," "No Country for Old Men." But his first attempt, at age 80, at an original screenplay falls flat on its Gucci boot heels.

This story of drug intrigue along the U.S./Mexico intrigue is a murky mess, all character but little plot. The movie at one point actually loses track of its main character, an amoral (and never-named) attorney played by Michael Fassbender. In the final act, McCarthy and director Ridley Scott start introducing a bunch of new characters played be recognizable actors, who say a few lines and disappear with little consequence to their appearance.

It's almost as if there was a raffle entered by a bunch of thespians who wanted to say they were in a Cormac McCarthy film.

A strange undercurrent of sexual energy runs through the movie, with many encounters between characters having the feel of a power-trip seduction. There's very little actual sex, though, and one comes away believing these people like to talk about sex more than actually engage in it.

Penelope Cruz plays his girlfriend and soon-to-be wife, a sweet and unsullied woman who has no idea her man is in deep with the Mexican drug cartel. He provides her the high life of magnificent houses, cars and meals, and she's innocent enough to accept that he earns his pile defending low-rent criminals (like Rosie Perez, who has a strong, single scene).

The counselor has an association with Reiner (Javier Bardem), a flashy club owner and drug kingpin, and decides to go in with him on a big narcotics deal. The lawyer thinks this will be a one-off, but Reiner knows better. The two men like each other's company, so going into business seems like the next step.

Hanging around the edges is Malkina, Reiner's cruel cat of a girlfriend, played by Cameron Diaz in a performance shockingly devoid of any nuance. Malkina is a predator in every way -- for money, sex and attention. As if the filmmakers hadn't made this point clearly enough, they gift her with a cheetah pattern tattoo all over her body, and a pair of the actual animals as pets/guardians.

My biggest problem with this movie is that all the characters speak as though their dialogue was written for them. Everything sounds very arch and constructed, as if we're supposed to revel in the resplendence of McCarthy's prose instead of believing these words would actually fall out of somebody's mouth. It's the sort of thing that works on the page but not on the screen.

Example: "Isn't that a little cold?" "The truth has no temperature."

Considering the story revolves around drug trafficking, the actual mechanics of the plot are left rather unclear. We never actually see or hear from the cartel people, though shadowy go-betweens turn up and depart without much rhyme or reason. The truck hauling the drugs -- we're never even told what kind it is, other than it's a lot -- has all sorts of adventures on the road, changing hands several times. The counselor and Reiner get blamed for the loss, even though they were just victims, and spend the rest of the movie on the run.

Brad Pitt appears a few times as Westray, a slithery associate of the counselor who also has some skin in the game and delivers apocryphal warnings about what's to come.

This is the sort of movie in which early on, we are told about a particularly nasty way for someone to die. And we know we're just marking time until one of the people we're watching meets that grisly fate.

This is the sort of movie that is bewitching to actors, since they get to speak a lot of pretty dialogue and wear cool clothes and engage in conversations where everyone's trying to pretend how smart they are. But for audiences it's a listless wander through the desert, where the scenery is pretty but the map was lost long ago.

Video review: "World War Z"

The best movie review I saw of “World War Z” was actually a Venn diagram by The Oatmeal, one of the sharpest webcomics around. In the area between the overlapping circles that showed everything the book and the film had in common, it simply read: “It’s titled World War Z.”

Hilarious, and true. Because if you go into this big-budget horror/disaster thinking it bears anything more than a passing resemblance to the novel by Max Brooks, you’re bound to come away disappointed.
Which isn’t to say the movie they did make is terrible. It’s merely OK, with a few highly engaging action sequences interspersed with stuff that is loopy and/or dull.

Good, bad or indifferent, it’s just not the book.

While Brooks opted for a journalistic approach following an ensemble cast of characters, director Marc Forster and his trio of screenwriters went with a standard leading man story. Brad Pitt plays Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator picked to lead the team tracking down the source of the plague rapidly turning the world’s population into a swarm of zombies.

He travels the globe, including a stop in Jerusalem for an epic battle against a horde of undead attempting to scale the ancient city’s walls. He picks up new allies along the way, but also loses many good people.

Forster is ham-handed at the non-special effects action scenes, to the point we sometimes have trouble discerning exactly what’s happening. One fight-and-flight up a skyscraper stairwell looks like it was shot with a camera draped in dark cloth.

Things build up to a decent but rather predictable showdown in a remote laboratory where the ultimate zombie cure can be found. Again, this veers wildly from the book, where the only panacea for the outbreak was: “Kill all the zombies.”

Personally, I would love to see a faithful adaption of “World War Z” – as soon as Hollywood gets around to making it.

Video goodies are so-so. The DVD version gets you exactly nothing, so you’ll have to spring for the Blu-ray upgrade to get any extras.

The highlight is an unrated version of the film featuring more gruesome action that in the watered-down PG-13 theatrical edition. You also get six featurettes on the making of the film, bringing the book to the screen (sort of), and the scientific realities behind zombie mythology.

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Review: "World War Z"

The thing you have to understand about zombie movies is that we've reached the point where virtually every example is a hybrid comedy. Winks and smirks have become an indelible part of stories about the walking undead. There's gore and death, but we take it sardonically -- even cheering when a loathsome human takes the bite.

People thought "Shaun of the Dead" was such a revelation, but all it really did was take a genre that was 60/40 horror-to-funny and flip it around.

That changed with the novel "World War Z," which approached the notion of a zombie apocalypse with total earnestness. Author Max Brooks, following up on "The Zombie Survivor Guide," tackled the material with a completely different mindset from the familiar ragtag group of survivors gradually getting chomped.

Brooks had an almost journalistic approach, relating vignettes from myriad different characters and perspectives from all over the globe. Rather than a single dominating story thread, it was a patchwork of diverse tales skillfully woven into a pattern.

The long-gestating movie starring Brad Pitt and directed by Marc Forster ("Monster's Ball") takes the mindset of the book, and throws away most everything else. The focus is on Gerry Lane, a former United Nations investigator tasked with finding the source of the virus that is rapidly turning normal people into ferocious flesh-eaters. Gerry, and nearly everything that happens to him, is a concoction of the movie.

In effect, they kept Brooks' frame but painted a completely different picture inside it. The result is plausibly entertaining, and commendable for the sober way it approaches the concept of a plague of undead.

About those zombies. Like other recent iterations of their ilk, a person can morph into one in a matter of seconds after being bit. They're of the "fast zombie" variety, running and jumping faster than an Olympic-level human athlete, and have a tendency toward spasmodic twitching and clattering their teeth, like they can't wait to sing their fangs into you. They seem to behave with a collectively mind at times, working cooperatively to scale high walls and other feats we've never seen before.

It's a novel, unnerving approach.

After an intro in which Lane gets his wife and two daughters to safety aboard a Navy ship, he's strong-armed into leading an expedition to South Korea, where it was believed the outbreak first started. His further questing takes him to Jerusalem and then Wales, his allies rapidly getting picked off, as he frantically searches for a weakness in the virus.

Some of the story is extremely effective, such as the rapid spread of the virus amongst a jetliner full of passengers. James Badge Dale has a memorable turn as an Army officer cut off from his command, who's adopted a doggedly systematic approach to fighting zombies.

Other parts are just loopy, such as an encounter with a rogue CIA agent who's pulled out all his own teeth and has a nutty theory about the Jews having known about the danger all along. Turns out he's right (!), leading to a sequence in Israel that strains credulity. Although we do pick up another interesting supporting character there, Daniella Kertesz as no-nonsense soldier Segen.

A trio of screenwriters keeps the audience guessing, though some of the contortions of the plot sap energy from the proceedings. The tamed-down PG-13 violence doesn't help, nor does Forster's ham-handed camera work during many of the action scenes. A chase up a building stairwell is so murky and jangled, we can barely tell what's going on.

(Definitely pass on the 3-D upgrade, which hardly makes a difference other than rendering the image even dimmer.)

I like the idea of "World War Z" more than the movie they actually made. I suppose a jumble of random characters wouldn't have been possible for a mainstream movie. But the filmmakers end up jettisoning the very thing that made Brooks' book special.

Oscar picks and predictions 2012

One of the few good things about a feeble cinematic year is there is no overwhelming favorite set to dominate the 84th Academy Awards. For 2011, things are especially up in the air.

Consider that the two films with the most nominations, "Hugo" with 11 and "The Artist" with 10, have a combined box office total of less than $100 million. The also-ran, "The Descendents" with five nods, barely passed the $70 million mark.

Brisk ticket sales often don't correlate with quality filmmaking -- just look at 10 most popular movies of last year, nine of which were sequels (and the other was "Thor").

But when hardly anyone has seen the films being honored, that makes for little enthusiasm among potential Oscar-watchers. Even with the blessed return of Billy Crystal as emcee, I expect this year's Oscar telecast to be among the lowest-rated.

For those of us who like to see the awards spread around based on actual achievement, rather than following the bandwagon of a swaggering favorite, it's an exciting time.

Here are my predictions of who will win the Academy Award in each category, followed by my personal pick of who I think most deserves the statuette. For fun, I'll also suggest someone who should've been nominated, but wasn't.

BEST PICTURE

Winner: The Artist
Pick: The Artist
What About...: A Better Life

Very tough call here. It had appeared to be a two-way race between "The Artist" and "The Descendents," but then "Hugo" popped up in a late rally to take the lead in Oscar nominations. There's no end of love between the Academy and Martin Scorsese, flavored with a dollop of guilt because it took him until late in his career before he finally won an Oscar. But I'm betting my own pick, "The Artist," will follow in the footsteps of "The Hurt Locker," and the Academy will vote its conscience for a little film that truly is the best of the year. An even littler film that hardly anyone saw is the wonderful immigration drama, "A Better Life."

BEST DIRECTOR

Winner: Michel Hazanavicius
Pick: Hazanavicius
What About...: Pedro Almodóvar

It appears the director of "The Artist" will pick up the directing Oscar, and he deserves to. Hazanavicius won the Director's Guild prize, which has proven one of the most reliable bellwethers for the Academy Awards. Though, as noted above, the chance for a Scorsese upset is never to be discounted. Spanish auteur Almodóvar deserved more love for "The Skin I Live In," his most dazzling movie in at least a decade.

BEST ACTOR

Winner: Jean Dujardin
Pick: Brad Pitt
What About...: Michael Shannon

This category is as interesting for who was left off the list as who will win. There was much gnashing of teeth about Michael Fassbender ("Shame") and Leonardo DiCaprio ("J. Edgar") being passed over. But the most worthy snubee was Shannon in "Take Shelter." Dujardin of "The Artist" won this prize from the Screen Actors Guild Awards, which usually preludes the Oscars. I would've thought George Clooney was the frontrunner for his game-changing role in "The Descendents;" the Hollywood establishment adores him. For my money, I thought Pitt gave the performance of his career in "Moneyball."

BEST ACTRESS

Winner: Viola Davis
Pick: Meryl Streep
What About...: Tilda Swinton

Davis of "The Help" seems to have this award wrapped up, despite early frontrunners status by Streep. It's a familiar spot for the grand dame, who always seems to get passed by a younger competitor late in the race -- despite 17 nominations, Streep is still looking for her first Oscar win in three decades. The feel-good political correctness of "The Help" seems to be buoying Davis; she would be only the second African-American woman to win this prize. Personally, I thought her role, in both scope and depth, was a supporting one. I have a lot of problems with "We Need to Talk About Kevin" -- starting with that title -- but Swinton is amazing in it.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTOR

Winner: Christopher Plummer
Pick: Plummer
What About...: Andy Serkis

Plummer, playing a septuagenarian widower who comes out of the closet in "Beginners," has this category totally locked up. A lot of people were angry Albert Brooks wasn't nominated for his turn as a gregariously malevolent mobster in "Drive," but from my perspective it was just Brooks doing a very good Brooks impression ... with razors. Serkis, whose digitally augmented performance carried "Rise of the Planet of the Apes," practically needs his own category.

BEST SUPPORTING ACTRESS

Winner: Octavia Spencer
Pick: Spencer
What About...: Jessica Chastain

Another foregone conclusion: Spencer took a role in "The Help" that had been custom-written for her by a friend and knocked it out of the park, with sass and soul. Ironic that Chastain was nominated for "The Help," when she was so much better in several other roles during a fantastic breakout year, including "The Tree of Life," "Coriolanus" and "The Debt." Her turn as a supportive but realistic housewife in "Take Shelter" was probably her best.

ANIMATED FEATURE FILM

Winner: Kung Fu Panda 2
Pick: Rango
What About...: The Adventures of Tintin

Astonishing that "Tintin," Steven Spielberg's first animated film, was not nominated. It's not a great movie, but head and shoulders above limp sequels "Puss in Boots" and "Kung Fu Panda 2." Something tells me, though, that one or the other will win -- the history of this relatively young category runs more toward "most popular" than "best." "Rango" was clearly the latter.

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY

Winner: The Artist
Pick: The Artist
What About...: Rango

Many were overjoyed about "Bridesmaids" picking up a screenwriting nomination, but for me it falls into that category of movies that aren't nearly as funny as they seem to think they are. Plus, say what you will, it was a knockoff of "The Hangover." Michel Hazanavicius, who wrote and directed "The Artist," came up with the most truly inventive and fresh story of the year. The only challenger for sheer originality would be the wonderfully weird "Rango," but animated films rarely get nominated for writing.

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY

Winner: The Descendants
Pick: Moneyball
What About...: The Skin I Live In

A competitive category with several really strong nominees. It would seem to be between "The Descendants" and "Moneyball." I thought the latter had the screenplay of the year, by script wizards Steve Zaillian and Aaron Sorkin. But the screenplay awards tend to be given out as consolation prizes, and I think Alexander Payne will be honored similarly to his last film, "Sideways," which lost out on the biggest prizes but took home the writing statue.

And the rest...

Sure, it's easy enough to make predictions for Best Actor or Best Picture. But what about those smaller, technical awards that are given out when most viewers run to the bathroom or warm up more popcorn? It takes a true prognosticator of mettle and grit to make picks for Best Soundwave Mix Editing. (That's a fake category ... I think.) Here are my stabs in the dark.

CINEMATOGRAPHY

Winner: The Artist
Pick: Hugo

I have plenty of reservations about "Hugo," but not its gorgeous look courtesy of Robert Richardson. I have no complaints, though, about Guillaume Schiffman's vivid black-and-white photography winning for "The Artist."

ART DIRECTION

Winner: Hugo
Pick: Hugo

COSTUME DESIGN

Winner: The Artist
Pick: Anonymous

EDITING

Winner: The Artist
Pick: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

DOCUMENTARY FEATURE

Winner: Paradise Lost 3: Purgatory

DOCUMENTARY SHORT

Winner: Incident in New Baghdad

ANIMATED SHORT FILM

Winner: La Luna
Pick: The Fantastic Flying Books of Mr. Morris Lessmore

LIVE ACTION SHORT FILM

Winner: Raju
Pick: The Shore

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM

Winner: A Separation

MAKEUP

Winner: Albert Nobbs
Pick: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2

MUSICAL SCORE

Winner: The Artist
Pick: The Artist

BEST SONG

Winner: "Man or Muppet" from The Muppets
Pick: "Man or Muppet"

In an embarrassing occurrence, only two songs were nominated this year -- a clear indication of how weak the field was. How we miss you, Howard Ashman.

SOUND EDITING

Winner: War Horse
Pick: Drive

SOUND MIXING

Winner: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo
Pick: The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

VISUAL EFFECTS

Winner: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows Part 2
Pick: Rise of the Planet of the Apes

Video review: "Moneyball"

I truly believe Brad Pitt gave the performance of his career in "Moneyball," far outpacing his overrated work in the pedantic "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button."

Playing Billy Beane, the general manager of the dirt-poor Oakland A's baseball club, Pitt shows layers and nuance that have been missing in his previous straightforward acting turns.

Billy is outwardly brash, even cocky in the face he presents to the his organization, the media and even his family. He has to, when he's trying to beat teams that can spend three times as much on player salaries. Inside, he's a nervous wreck who's convinced he's cursed.

With the help of a socially awkward young computer genius, Peter Brand (Jonah Hill), Billy institutes the then-radical concept of sabermetrics. Essentially, this means jettisoning tried-and-true methods for evaluating players and instead relying on complex mathematical algorithms to determine the best team to be had at the lowest price.

Soon Billy and his apprentice have assembled a cast of players who are over the hill, injured or playing out of position -- what Peter dubs "an island of misfit toys." After some initial stumbles, they start racking up W's.

Director Bennett Miller and screenwriters Aaron Sorkin and Steve Zaillian succeeded in making a baseball movie with very little baseball, where the real action happens not on the diamond but in the executive offices.

Video extras are a solid base hit, but they failed to put some mustard on the offerings.

At least the basic DVD edition has a few nice features -- it's so common nowadays to find all the good stuff saved for the Blu-ray. The "Moneyball" DVD comes with a making-of documentary, a feature on the real-life Billy Beane, blooper real with Pitt and Hill, and a number of deleted scenes.

The Blu-ray version adds a featurette on selecting the movie's cast and crew and another about adapting a non-fiction sports book into a feature film. There's also a preview for the 2012 season of the "MLB" video game series.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 2.5 stars out of four

Review: "Moneyball"

“Moneyball” is simultaneously deeper and funnier than I thought it would be. Based on the nonfiction book by Michael Lewis, it’s a look at how number-crunchers have changed the game of baseball through something called sabermetrics. Instead of relying on gut instincts and baseball acumen to evaluate players, this method employs computers and bean-counting to identify the best players that can be had for the least amount of money.

Now, baseball is not my thing. And mathematical algorithms are even less my thing. But instead of zeroing in on the technical aspects of sabermetrics, “Moneyball” is the story of Billy Beane. The General Manager of the cash-poor Oakland Athletics, Billy must try every year to put together a roster that can compete against teams like the New York Yankees, which can spend three times as much on payroll.

It’s a terrific performance by Brad Pitt, quite possibly the best of his career. His Billy Beane constantly operates on two levels: The brash, confident side he presents to his employees, the media and even his family; and the dark and brooding side that expects failure at every turn, refusing to even attend his own team’s games because he’s convinced he’s jinxed.

There’s one great scene where Billy confronts his newly-acquired 37-year-old star player, David Justice (Steven Bishop). It’s a standoff between two savvy baseball veterans who see through each others’ bluster, and want the other guy to know it.

Justice tells Billy he knows face-saving patter when he hears it. Billy cannily wins Justice’s loyalty by laying out their respective goals in stark terms: I want to squeeze the last bit of baseball ability out of your aging body, and you want to stay in the big leagues.

Billy’s scheme doesn’t go over so well with the rest of the organization. The head scout quits/gets himself fired after being pushed aside: “You don’t put together a team with a computer!”

The manager, Art Howe (Philip Seymour Hoffman), at first refuses to put Billy’s new recruits on the field, such as a catcher Scott Hatteburg (Chris Pratt) with permanent nerve damage in his elbow, who Billy thinks will make for a cost-efficient replacement at first base for recently departed free agent Jason Giambi.

Howe, who’s been rebuffed in his demand for a contract extension, coldly tells Billy why he won’t put Hatteburg in: “I’m playing my team in a way I can explain in job interviews next winter.”

But Billy has faith in his young right-hand man, Peter Brand, played against type by Jonah Hill. Peter’s golden measuring stick for players is their on-base percentage – doesn’t matter if it’s a home run or a walk, though players who get walked a lot tend to come much cheaper than those walloping dingers. Peter gets his own lessons from Billy on how to deliver the news when trading or cutting a player: ‘One bullet to the head rather than five in the chest.’

The end result of Peter’s calculations is what he dubs “an island of misfit toys” – players who are injured, or too old, or playing the wrong position, who have been systematically devalued by their teams and the sport of baseball. By patching together a quilt of utility men, Billy and Peter believe they can not only win games, but change the game itself.

After a disastrous start, the A’s soon prove the naysayers wrong, even breaking the American League record for consecutive wins. Eventually, other teams come calling for Billy’s magic potion, and with big paychecks to pay for it.

The film ends with a coda that doesn’t quite tell the whole story. It says Billy is still the GM of the A’s and is still trying to win “the last game of the season,” aka win the World Series. What it doesn’t mention is that the team hasn’t even made the playoffs since 2006, and that other teams have adopted Billy’s methods with more success than he.

“Moneyball” was adeptly directed by Bennett Miller (“Capote”), who wisely concentrates his energy less on the action inside the baseball diamond than the grunt work that goes on behind the scenes.

But this film’s success is attributable mainly, I think, to some heroic script work by two heavyweights: Aaron Sorkin, who won the Oscar for “The Social Network,” and Steve Zaillian, who has his own statue for “Schindler’s List.”

The creative team decided not to make a typical sports movie, but a deep and probing film that gives us a glimpse at the high-stakes games that happen off the baseball diamond.

3.5 stars out of four

Video review: "Megamind"

It's a testament to the wondrous state of animation we know find ourselves in that "Megamind" registers as a routine feature rather than something amazing. The computer-generated animation from the DreamWorks crew is top-notch, crisp and full of lots of little details.

But this super-villain tale just doesn't have the storytelling sophistication of a "Toy Story 3," "The Illusionist" or "How to Train Your Dragon" -- which explains why those three films got Oscar nominations, while "Megamind" didn't.

Will Ferrell sassily voices the main character, a blue-skinned evil scientist type with a giant head and even bigger plans for conquering Metro City (which he mispronounces badly, like many other common words). His nemesis is Metro Man (Brad Pitt), a fellow traveler -- they both were rocketed off their respective dying planets as an infant, Superman-like, to find greatness on Earth.

Metro Man is the white-costumed defender of the city, while Megamind decks himself out in studded black leather and builds robots and other gizmos to do his bidding. Roxanne Ritchie, the plucky female reporter (Tina Fey) continually kidnapped by Megamind, who secretly adores her.

It's good clean fun aimed at children under 10, though their parents might long for something a little less doofy.
"Megamind" hits video stores Friday, Feb. 25.

Extras are quite plentiful, and are heavy on interactive games and such aimed at kids.

The single-disc DVD comes with a solitary deleted scene, commentary track by the filmmakers, and a meet the cast feature. It's notable, like the rest of the video features, for the complete lack of participation by Brad Pitt. Too good for goodies, Brad?

The double-disc DVD adds a bunch more featurettes, including a look inside Megamind's lair and the animation process. The highlight is "Megamind: The Button of Doom," a new 16-minute short that's an amusing look at Megamind's post-movie life.

The Blu-ray/DVD combo pack includes all these features, plus four more featurettes and interactive stuff.

Movie: 2 stars out of four
Extras: 3.5 stars out of four

Review: "Megamind"

"Megamind" is in the unfortunate position of being the second animated movie this year where a super-villain plays the hero (or at least the main character). "Despicable Me" was a disappointment, but the sheer fact it came out first inevitably gives "Megamind" a patina of staleness.

Not that it isn't a wonder for the eyes. The animators at DreamWorks are now on par with the wizards at Pixar, and everything about it visually is a triumph. I especially liked the various robot contraptions built by the blue-skinned, big-skulled mad scientist title character, which have a clunky, mid-century retro look reminiscent of "The Iron Giant."

For those convinced the 3-D fad is just an excuse to squeeze a few extra dollars out of ticket-buyers: I saw "Megamind" in IMAX 3-D and can report that the layered effects were especially sharp and crystal-clear. I can't say as the film would be much diminished by seeing it on a regular screen, though.

The set-up is a takeoff on the old Superman origin, with a babe being blasted off his dying planet to find greatness on Earth. The tweak here is that in addition to lantern-jawed hero Metro Man (voiced by Brad Pitt), another infant traveled through space at the same time on a parallel course, setting up their lifelong enmity.

"Even Fate picks its favorites," Megamind (Will Ferrell) intones during the opening narration, and it's not hard to see why he thinks so. Instead of being endowed with awesome strength, laser vision and the ability to fly, Megamind was born with a big ol' noggin that made him an outcast at school.

While Metro Man landed in a rich couple's home and had everything handed to him, Megamind's spaceship splatted into a prison where he grew up educated by career criminals. Megamind also has the requisite minion, named Minion (David Cross), who's actually a fish whose bowl is connected to a robot exo-skeleton that for some reason resembles a gorilla.

I can't say as I'm the biggest fan of Ferrell's comedic abilities, but I thought his voice work here was proficient. His Megamind has a preening, boastful cadence, and has a tendency to mispronounce commonly used words. (For example, "Metro City" rhymes with "ferocity.")

Tina Fey voices Roxanne Ritchi, who exists in the comic book tradition of plucky, alliteratively-named girl reporters.

The next part of this review contains a spoiler, but since it happens so early in the film, and is so central to the story, I feel compelled to comment upon it.

After years of very public battles, Megamind suddenly is able to defeat his nemesis, annihilating Metro Man with his sun-powered death laser. But without an arch-enemy to fight, he finds himself growing bored. So he stumbles upon a plan to create a new hero by infusing some schlub with Metro Man's powers.

Unfortunately, he chooses Hal (Jonah Hill), Roxanne's lovesick dweeb cameraman, turning him into a rampaging mass of muscles called Titan. For reasons never explained, Titan changes this to Tighten.

Anyway, Tighten decides that being a hero is for chumps and starts tearing up Metro City, leaving Megamind to act the hero to keep things in order. Also, he begins a sneaky romance with Roxanne abetted by one of his nefarious gizmos.

"Megamind" was directed by Tom McGrath, who helmed the "Madagascar" movies, from a script by rookie screenwriters Alan Schoolcraft and Brent Simons. It's reasonably entertaining, though aimed more at the single-digit-age crowd than most such fare.

But in this golden age of "Toy Story 3" and "How to Train Your Dragon," Megamind looks like second-tier goods.

2 stars out of four

Reeling Backward: "Fight Club"

"Is that what a man looks like?"

To me, that is the central question of 1999's "Fight Club," a revolutionary movie about revolutionary men in a time of complacence.

Like a thousand cinematic rebels without causes before them, Edward Norton and Brad Pitt play young men uncertain about their place in the world. Lacking fathers, traditional male role models or even identities beyond what consumer culture dictates for them, they define themselves by rejecting the definition that society has placed upon them.

To wit: Study, work hard, play nice, climb the corporate ladder and you'll be rewarded with a home with nice furniture, a decent wardrobe, lots of cool gadgets and a woman to marry so you can replicate your experience for a new generation of men.

Norton plays Cornelius -- though that name may just be an alias -- who works for a major auto company, calculating whether it's more profitable to fix safety problems discovered in their cars, or cheaper to just let people die. Troubled by insomnia, he finds an outlet in attending therapy groups for troubles he does not have: Testicular cancer, infectious diseases, tuberculosis, etc. Only in the emotional outpouring between the afflicted can he find the release that helps him get by.

He's annoyed by the presence of Marla (Helena Bonham Carter), a chain-smoking fellow "tourist" who is also faking her way into sessions. Cornelius is a faker, but he needs to believe others' pain is real. They come to an understanding not to expose each other by splitting up their groups.

On a business flight soon after Cornelius meets Tyler Durden (Brad Pitt), a inexpressible cool guy who looks how he would like to look, fucks the way he would like to fuck, and does things he only dreams of having the balls for. They become friends and roomies when Cornelius' swank condo is blown up in a case of suspected arson, and he moves into the run-down condemned shanty Tyler calls home.

On a whim after a night of drinking, they each reveal that have never been in a fight. How can they call themselves men if they've never experienced the male ritual of combat with fists? They have a bout that's quite bloody but holds no animus. They're not fighting each other, but their status as boys who need this rite to call themselves men.

I'll stop myself right here to explain that near the end of the film it's unveiled that Cornelius and Tyler are actually the same person, halves of a split personality. It was a big reveal in 1999, but after more than a decade I believe the statute of limitations on spoilers has expired.

The film, directed by David Fincher from Jim Uhls' screenplay (based on the book by Chuck Palahniuk) was groundbreaking in that it was the first mainstream Hollywood film in which the reality of everything we'd seen is ultimately revealed to be false, or at least faulty. It was used so much in subsequent, inferior films like "Vanilla Sky" that it soon become tiresome. But back then, audiences hadn't been so gobsmacked by a turn of the plot since "The Crying Game."

This essay's opening quote comes from a brief, seemingly unimportant moment when Tyler and Cornelius board a city bus. Spying an ad for one of those Calvin Klein/Abercrombie type of outfits, Cornelius nods toward the portrait of a mostly nude boy-man, his body impossibly lean and completely hairless, like one of God's angels rendered in marble and put on a pedestal.

Is that what a man looks like? The irony, of course, is that Brad Pitt epitomizes the new standard of male beauty, a denuded figure that seems stuck in the in-between years of adolescence.

But beyond superficial indications, the question goes deeper. Does a man wear a tie and a white dress shirt and go to an office every day? Does he bring home a nice paycheck and drive an expensive car and have sex with lots of beautiful women? Are these the things that make him a man? In an era where it's no longer necessary for a male to prove his worth by strength and deed, these Madison Avenue cues have become their substitute -- and, Tyler argues, unworthy ones.

Tyler starts a movement built around underground fight clubs. There are some professional types like Cornelius, but for the most part their recruits are the disaffected and the downwardly mobile: Waiters, mechanics, bartenders -- the people in service jobs who keep things running to ensure the comfort of the comfortable, and who are looked down upon for their efforts.

The famous first two rules of Fight Club are that you do not talk about Fight Club, but of course people do and they spread all over the country. The combat is not about winning and losing, but the rush of fighting another man, just to say you are capable of doing so. The primal reasons for doing so in a modern society may have vanished, but these wayward souls want to -- literally -- get medieval on each other.

The film's chassis gets looser and looser in the second half, the suspension becomes balky and the steering grows uncertain. The movie (unlike our two anti-heroes) never drives right off the road, but it careens through the breakdown lane at times.

Tyler expands the fight clubs into something called Project Mayhem, with random acts of vandalism against corporate symbols evolving into outright terrorism. The final image, of skyscrapers of industry collapsing upon themselves in a manner shockingly similar to the World Trade Center towers, feels blasphemous now.

At this point in the story, the Tyler/Cornelius split has been revealed, so the audience isn't really sure how much of what we're seeing is real and how much the duo's collective, fermented imagination.

The character of Marla flits in and out as the plot demands. Cornelius can't stand her, but she and Tyler start having lots of wild sex, which of course is actually with him, since it's his alter-ego. It's not really so much of a well-defined character as the connective tissue between scenes where the filmmakers want to go.

"Fight Club" is one of those movies that needs the separation of years for proper perspective. When I first saw it, I thought it was a spectacular failure of a film, ambitious and unwieldy. More than 10 years later, it looks like a truly audacious movie with a lot of important ideas underneath the kooky terrorism plot and spurting blood of the club's arena. Give it another 10 for the true reckoning.

3 stars

Review: "Inglourious Basterds"

The idea of a kooky, hyper-violent World War II comedy with Quentin Tarantino doing his usual mishmash of eclectic music and circuitous dialogue sounds like a delightful romp -- especially when paired with Brad Pitt as the Appalachian-twanging bandit leader of a group of Jewish-American soldiers sent behind enemy lines to wreak terror on the Nazis.

Except for one problem: The "Inglourious Basterds" are bit players in their own flick.

If you've watched the trailer for the new film written/directed by Tarantino, then you've already seen a good chunk of the entire screen time of Pitt and his crew. There's essentially one scene of them bashing in Nazi skulls, and away they go. They reappear a couple more times, but only as supporting figures in another plot line.

The bulk of the sometimes-thrilling, oft-onerous 2½-hour running time is occupied with four other characters: Shoshanna (Mélanie Laurent), a Jewish girl hiding in the open as a Parisian cinema owner; Col. Hans Landa (Christoph Waltz), nicknamed the Jew Hunter, who kills her family in the film's opening sequence; Bridget von Hammersmark (Diane Kruger), a famous German film star secretly spying for the Brits; and Fredrick Zoller (Daniel Brühl), a German war hero and star of a Joseph Goebbels propaganda film based on his battle exploits.

Landa is by far the most compelling of the foursome. As played by Waltz, the colonel is a slithery and cunning adversary, whose modus operandi is to engage his victim in social banter until he finds a weakness, and then burrow into that crack in their facade like a boll weevil.

Kruger has a pivotal role in the film's best sequence, a meeting between Hammersmark, a British agent and two of the Basterds in a basement pub to set a plot to blow up Shoshanna's theater, where Zoller's film is set to premiere. The scene starts on a frivolous note with churlish parlor games, but suspicion and hostility are ever so patiently ratcheted up. We can practically smell the fuse burning.

This is Tarantino at his best, using his gift with dialogue and mood to stir the waters, subtly at first but with increasing turbulence.

Less engaging is the Shoshanna/Zoller storyline, in which the German soldier becomes smitten with the clearly unreceptive French (he thinks) woman. This culminates in an impromptu lunch date between them and Goebbels that just goes on and on.

Oh yes, the Basterds. Pitt plays Lt. Aldo Raine, his accent dripping with Tennessee molasses, who demands his eight Jewish recruits each gift him with 100 Nazi scalps -- and he's not talking figurative scalps, as Tarantino demonstrates in one unnecessary close-up after another.

Sudden, gruesome violence is a signature ingredient of the Tarantino gumbo, and others also crop up. There's a kinetic scene set to deliberately incongruous music (in this case, David Bowie's "Cat People (Putting Out Fire)"). A Mexican standoff takes place -- in fact, two characters have a debate about whether they are engaged in one. And Diane Kruger gets to be the latest actress to showcase her feet for extended close-ups to serve Tarantino's icky fetish for females' lowest appendages.

The name "Inglourious Basterds" comes from a cheapie 1978 Italian flick starring Fred Williamson and Bo Svenson that was basically a knockoff of "The Dirty Dozen," and bears no resemblance to this film other than the wartime setting.

Like "Death Proof" and the "Kill Bill" duology, Tarantino's newest work is that of a blazing cinematic talent who only seems to be interested in making movies that satisfy his own off-kilter, retrograde fantasies. Perhaps one day he'll invite us in.

2.5 stars

DVD review: "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button"

I am not trying to be flip when I say that the impressive set of extras that come with the two-disc DVD edition of "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" are more enjoyable to watch than the movie itself.

Despite a Best Picture Oscar nomination, "Benjamin Button" curiously lacked emotional punch. The tale of a man who is born old and ages backward (based on a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald) was an unmitigated technological triumph, as director David Fincher and an army of computer animators believably changed Brad Pitt from a handsome middle-aged movie star into a decrepit old man and eventually a teen, and every age in between.

But even though the nearly three-hour running time skips along crisply, the film fails to resonate on a human level. Pitt comes across as a Zelig-like figure, trotting through history without his journey ever coalescing into a coherent theme or purpose. Even an affecting performance by Cate Blanchett as Benjamin's lifelong love doesn't overpower the fascinating physical transformation they both go through.

Every minute detail of how this change was achieved is explored in the special edition DVD (from the unmatched Criterion Collection). We see how a succession of body doubles wearing blue masks performed the early scenes, and Pitt -- wearing green kabuki face paint -- is recorded, his features aged and transposed onto the body.

The extensive featurettes can be watched individually, or as a single hefty making-of documentary that touches on every aspect of the production. Producers are unusually forthright in describing the two-decade-long process to bring "Benjamin Button" to the screen, with a succession of directors dropping out.

There is also a lavish set of still galleries including the entire film storyboard, and feature-length commentary by Fincher. In digesting all this material, one senses how seriously the entire cast and crew approached making this movie. Unwittingly, the extras provide an arresting portrait of a filmmaking effort gone awry.

Movie: 2 stars
Extras: 4 stars

Oscar reax

Is there anyone out there who really thinks that "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button" is hands-down the best movie of the year? Other than people who got a paycheck from it, that is?

I mean, 13 nominations? That's "Return of the King" numbers. Since Oscar members tend to vote in packs, the sheer number of nominations is indicative of their ardor for a particular film. Based on this morning's nominations just announced a little while ago, "Benjamin" is king of the mountain.

I was glad to see "Slumdog Millionaire" get 10 nominations. I put it number two on my Top 10 list, and it's certainly the most original among the big contenders.

Other observations:

Kate Winslet, widely expected to receive two acting nominations, lead for "Revolutionary Road" and supporting for "The Reader," was shut out for "Road" and nominated for leading role in "The Reader." Studios push actors for particular categories, but voters are free to choose whomever they wish. Today's results indicates a lack of regard for "Revolutionary Road" -- well placed in my opinion. And I would argue that her job in "Reader" is also a leading role. Does this make her a favorite to win the statuette?

I was really happy to see Frank Langella get an acting nomination for "Frost/Nixon," since I think his performance makes that movie. Ditto for Melissa Leo in the little-seen "Frozen River," which I put as the best performance by an actress in 2008. (Bully for Courtney Hunt for nabbing an original screenplay nod.)

The big surprise was Richard Jenkins, a largely obscure but extremely well-respected character actor, getting an acting nod for "The Visitor."

I was neither surprised or disappointed that "The Dark Knight" was shut out of the major categories except for Heath Ledger's written-in-stone nomination for supporting actor. It got eight nominations total, but in technical categories except for Ledger's. Even though it was a monstrous box office hit and was reviewed very well and a favorite of the fanboys, I think in the months since its release Academy voters had a chance to look at it again and realized what a mess the plot is, particularly the last half. Face it: it goes on a half-hour too long, and should have ended with Harvey Dent's maiming.

I'm ecstatic that "The Reader" had such a great showing, with surprise nominations for Best Picture and Best Director. I had it number 3 on my list, so I'm hopeful this great showing will spur more people to go see it. It got five nominations in all.

I was glad to see Robert Downey Jr. get a supporting nod for his quirky and brave performance in blackface in "Tropic Thunder," although not for the obvious reasons. I don't think it's particularly deserved, nor was I big fan of that over-praised movie, but it's just all too rare for comedies to be given their due by the Oscar folks.

Also glad to see Angelina Jolie nominated for the largely missed "Changeling." For once she's not playing the brave, bold woman, and it pays off.

Watch for the envelopes to be opened Feb. 22. I'll be live-blogging the event that night, so tune in.