Review: "Source Code"

Most science fiction thrillers get the "hardware" part of the movie right -- the technology, the fantastical shifting realities -- and skimp on the human stuff.

"Source Code" is the exact opposite: A flick that engages us with its protagonist and his plight, but the technical part of the story never really seems to add up. After the lights came on, I was left scratching my head trying to figure out the metaphysics and quantum mechanics of it all.

Still, I was caught up in the tale of Jake Gyllenhaal as a soldier on a mission to stop a speeding train loaded with a bomb. In the end, the whys and wherefores became less important to the cinematic experience than the urgency of this time-traveler's duty.

Now, see, I already misspoke. Technically, Colter Stevens is not traveling through time. You'll have to bear with me here, since I can't reveal too much about this movie without compromising its secrets.

Colter wakes up on a commuter train, a sleek modern double-decker hurtling toward Chicago. There's a pretty, friendly girl named Christina (Michelle Monaghan) sitting across from him who acts like she knows him. He goes into the lavatory and sees another man's face staring at him. He's just starting to make sense of it all when a fiery explosion engulfs everything.

Colter wakes up in a dark, dank metal prison, like a Mercury astronaut capsule sunk to the bottom of the ocean. A woman's voice, reassuring but commanding, appears on a speaker asking him to recount what just happened.

Next thing he knows, Colter is back on the train, waking up back where he started. The scenario seems to be playing out exactly the same way it did before ... or is it?

Colter, a helicopter pilot on tour in Afghanistan, soon learns what's going on: He's a recruit in a top-secret new military experiment in "time reassignment." It seems the human brain has a sort of short-term memory track, about eight minutes long, that scientists can access even after death. They also have the ability to project one's consciousness into a similar person's mind and control their actions.

To wit: Colter is sent into the head of a mild-mannered school teacher who must find the bomber from among the hundreds of people aboard the train. Strangely, Goodwin, the officer guiding him in his missions (the capable Vera Farmiga) instructs him not to worry about defusing the bomb, but locating who set it.
Is this an alternate reality? A time loop? A "Matrix"-like facsimile meant to dissemble?

Furthermore, how can Colter keep repeating those eight minutes over and over again, doing something different every time, a la "Groundhog Day," without ever being able to stop the bomb from going off?

(One hint is the code name of the operation, Beleaguered Castle, a form of solitaire in which the player tries to build the cards into foundations, but most games end in failure after just a few moves.)

Director Duncan Jones (who made the wonderful and little-seen "Moon" a couple years back) and rookie screenwriter Ben Ripley ably keep the audience misdirected, making the mechanics of what's happening seem less important than the exigency of it.

So beyond the obvious concern of finding the terrorist, we're constantly asking questions: What exactly is the teacher's relationship with Christina? Why does Goodwin seem a little sad behind the sternness? What are Colter's handlers not telling him?

With "Source Code," the audience may not always understand what's going on, but we care about the outcome.

3 stars out of four

Video review: "Tangled"

"Toy Story 3" took home the Oscar for animated feature, but "Tangled" was actually the best Disney film of last year.

I mean it -- this delightful mix of music, adventure and romance was the finest princess movie since 1991's "Beauty and the Beast." It's loosely based on the Rapunzel fairy tale from the Brothers Grimm, but has been jazzed up and modernized by screenwriter Dan Fogelman and co-directors Nathan Greno and Byron Howard.

Rapunzel is no blushing maiden eagerly awaiting her rescuer, but a feisty teen (voice by Mandy Moore) hungry for adventure beyond the tall tower in which she's been locked away her whole life. Little does she know evil enchantress Gothel (a terrific Donna Murphy) kidnapped her as a babe from her parents, the king and queen, to exploit the magic of her flowing golden hair.

When Flynn Ryder (Zachary Levi), a charming cad of a thief, hides in Rapunzel's tower, she knocks him cold with a frying pan. Soon they're off on a quest and -- of course -- falling in love.

The movie starts out all fun and games, but gains unexpected heft and emotional resonance as the plot unspools.

Coupled with a handful of Broadway-style showstopper musical numbers, "Tangled" is an old-fashioned charmer.

Video extras vary from meager to decent, depending on which version you buy.
The DVD edition contains only two earlier versions of the storybook opening, and a countdown of all 50 Disney animated features.

The two-disc DVD/Blu-ray combo adds three deleted scenes, a making-of documentary and two extended versions of songs.

Upgrade to the four-disc combo pack and also receive a 3-D version of the film, plus a digital copy for your computer or portable device.

Movie: 3.5 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Reeling Backward: "Murphy's War" (1971)

"Murphy's War" has the bones of a great movie, but forgot to add the flesh.

In general, I appreciate films that are understated and minimalist, especially when tackling big subjects like war and revenge. It makes the message more powerful when the filmmakers aren't underlining and highlighting it for the audience. But director Peter Yates and screenwriter Stirling Silliphant, working from the novel by Max Catto, construct a story so lacking in relatable characters that the movie seems to exist as pure allegory.

The film is most remembered now for being the most significant of only two onscreen pairings between Peter O'Toole and his then-wife, Siân Phillips (the other being "Goodbye, Mr. Chips"). Phillips is best known to my generation as the evil Reverend Mother in "Dune" and the TV miniseries "I, Claudius." She has a wonderful, sharp-featured face with large, expressive eyes and a slightly otherworldly quality -- think Angelina Jolie without the menace.

She plays Dr. Hayden, a Quaker doctor living in a remote Venezuelan coastal village in the waning days of World War II. O'Toole plays Murphy, an Irish merchant seaman whose ship was destroyed by a German submarine. After being rescued and patched up by Hayden, he vows revenge despite the fact he is only a mechanic, and armistice could be declared any minute.

It's a treatise about one man's obsession, and yet we never really feel like we get into Murphy's head. Why exactly does Murphy feel compelled to throw away his life trying to kill the Germans? The submariners machine-gunned his crew mates to death in the water in order that no signal about their location could be given, but this is hardly the worst war crime committed by the Nazi regime.

There's a suggestion that Murphy was something of an outcast on his ship, the Mount Kyle, evidenced by the fact that when a lieutenant washes ashore badly injured, he's distressed that the only other survivor is Murphy. Later, having heard the doctor broadcast about a survivor claiming to have seen a submarine, the Germans arrive at the village and shoot the lieutenant in his hospital bed, not realizing Hayden was talking about Murphy.

This is the point at which Murphy, who had seemed content to ride out the war in exile, determines to take out the submarine. He fixes up the lieutenant's crashed seaplane with the help of Louis (Philippe Noiret), the French custodian for a distant oil company. The last half of the film is taken up with Murphy's fixing the airplane, learning to fly it through trial and error, and a bombing run on the sub using some improvised Molotov cocktails. When this fails, he commanders Louis' barge and attempts to ram the U-boat.

Eventually, both Murphy and the submariners die when the hot-headed Irishman uses the barge's hoist to pick up a live torpedo the sub shot at him from where it beached itself, and drops it on top of the submerged vessel, which had run aground. The crane crashes onto Murphy, pinning him as both barge and sub sink into the waves.

Illogic reigns throughout this scenario. Let's start with the Germans. Why in the world would the Nazis order a submarine to Venezuelan waters as their regime crumbled, under orders of strict secrecy? And then have them hide out in a river? There's no possible strategic assets in that area requiring such measures, and the U-boat skipper (Horst Janson) carries out his orders reluctantly, as if he knows they are inhumane.

And even if it were somehow necessary, having the submarine appear off the coast of the village and the men coming ashore with machine guns is surely not the way to ensure such secrecy. Hayden had already broadcast Murphy's warning, so the cat was already out of the bag, so to speak. The doctor had scoffed at Murphy's claims of a submarine, so their appearance simply turned rumor into hard fact, with hundreds of witnesses.

The flying scenes are the highlight of the film, wonderfully shot and daringly maneuvered by the stunt pilots, though they too don't really stand up to scrutiny. The idea that a shot-up airplane could be restored to flight in  a couple of days strains credulity, but not nearly as much as the notion of a man who's never been a cockpit before being to able to a get plane into the air, let alone learn to maneuver it without instruction.

Beyond these logistical matters, though, is the pervasive sense that I never felt connected to any of the characters. They seem to exist with no backstory, no motivation or inner presence. Why would the murder of an officer he hated compel Murphy to take up his fanatical revenge? Why has the beautiful Hayden chosen a life of solitary celibacy? Why is Louis so malleable and passive?

"Murphy's War" not only never answers these questions, it never even asks them.

2 stars out of four

Review: "Sucker Punch"

An overheated steampunk fantasia of girls in go-go outfits wreaking vengeance with ninja swords and machine guns, "Sucker Punch" is a bowl full of hot mess of filmmaking.

I'm all for crazy, off-kilter movies packed to the hilt with the fertile imagination of the creators. But this latest from "300" director Zack Snyder (who co-wrote the script with Steve Shibuya) is a greenhouse of cinematic references crammed together, sprinkled with steroid fertilizer and the heat cranked up to sweltering jungle temperature.

The result is an overgrown thicket of ideas, smashed together indiscriminately without any thought of coherence, instead relishing in the sheer cool juxtapositions of loopy elements for their own sake.

To wit: In one scene, our team parachutes from a World War II B-24 into an army of orcs from "The Lord of the Rings" and blow them away with modern weaponry. And when I say the orcs from "LoTR," I don't mean they kinda/sorta resemble the snarly brutes from the fantasy trilogy, I mean they look exactly like them. Their HQ even has the same sharp spires of Mordor. Then, for good measure, the girls take on the fire-breathing lizard from "Dragonslayer."

That follows on the heels of another sequence set in the trenches of World War I where the girls battle zombie German soldiers, whom the Kaiser has reanimated with "steam power and clockworks." They're assisted by one of their crew piloting a giant mechanized warrior, which appears to be straight out of "Avatar" by way of "Aliens." They tangle with the Red Baron and blow up the Hindenburg.

These two scenes, indisputably the coolest in the movie, have their own kooky energy and kinetic style -- highlighted by Snyder's now-familiar spiraling camera moves replete with sped-up and slo-mo action heavily augmented by CGI.

As he falls back on these fancy technical tricks again and again, they begin to grow wearing -- as in a fight aboard a train against a couple dozen Terminators, which despite the nonstop mayhem manages to become downright dull.

And whenever the story drops out of its fantasy realm into the framing device -- in which our winsome warriors are inmates at a Gothic mental hospital in Vermont -- the film loses all momentum.

Or is the madhouse actually a front for a burlesque theater-slash-bordello, in which the girls are captives made to dance and service the pleasures of the customers? Snyder and Shibuya think they're keeping the audience guessing with their morphing prism of reality. But any half-awake observer will figure out the real scheme of things, as clear as the peal of a hammerstroke.

Our protagonist is Baby Doll (Aussie actress Emily Browning), a pint-sized pixie with blonde pigtails and a perpetually vacant gaze. Thrown into the hospital after tangling with her evil stepfather, Baby is determined to break out. As she dances for the evil head orderly/club owner Blue (a slithery Oscar Isaac) and his minions, her consciousness slips into the Bizarro-world universe of her "missions."

She even has a sensai to guide her, a wily, wrinkled warrior played by Scott Glenn. He always has "one last thing" to warn them about, and invariably the worst-case scenario always comes to pass.

Baby's recruits are her fellow inmates/prostitutes: Sweet Pea (Abbie Cornish), the lead girl who doesn't like risks; her sister Rocket (Jena Malone), who dreams of going home; and an interchangeable pair (Vanessa Hudgens and Jamie Chung) who are just around to service the plot.

Their instructor is Gorski (Carla Gugino), who's a doctor trying to help the patients through role-playing therapy in the nuthouse, and the stern dance instructor in the brothel part. Her Russian Svengali accent so drips with rolled r's and glottal clicks I kept expecting her to call out for "moose and squirrel."

I can't deny there are parts of "Sucker Punch" -- I'm clueless as to the title's meaning, btw -- that are screwy fun: Strange vignettes unhinged from reality or any sense of logic. But it takes more than a scoopful of geekboy fantasy elements to make a movie, and this one just keeps piling ingredients into the gumbo without ever considering how they'll taste together.

2 stars out of four

Video review: "The Tourist"

It seems like most of my video columns lately have spotlighted movies I felt got a raw deal: "127 Hours," "Morning Glory." Well, I'll continue the roll: "The Tourist," flayed by critics (20 percent on the Tomatometer) and largely ignored by audiences -- at least American ones; it cleaned up overseas -- is a thoroughly enjoyable bit of popcorn moviemaking.

This spy thriller starring Angelina Jolie, Johnny Depp and the city of Venice is a skillfully-made bit of weightless piffle. No, it will not become a fixture in the annals of cinema. It's a fancy sundae, a concoction of sweet thrills and empty calories. We shouldn’t take too long admiring it, because it’ll melt if we do.

Just scoop it up, enjoy the sugary rush and smile.

Depp plays Frank Tupelo, a sad-sack math professor from Wisconsin riding the train to Venice for a lonely vacation. Onboard he meets an exotic, dangerous woman named Elise Clifton-Ward (Jolie), who brazenly flirts with him. It's soon revealed that she's a spy on the run, who's merely using Frank as a patsy.

The rest of the movie is one long bit of chase-chase, a classic Hitchcockian convoluted plot of double-crosses and MacGuffins. Something about Elise's long-lost lover duping a British mobster out of billions, with Paul Bettany starring as the unctuous spymaster hunting everyone. There's a glamorous formal ball, a boat chase or two -- it's Venice, how could there not be? -- and some rooftop hi jinks.

It may not make much sense, but the ride is brisk and fun.

Video extras are good no matter what format you choose.

The DVD version has a feature-length commentary track by director Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck, a reel of outtakes and goofs, an alternate title sequence done in animation, and two featurettes on staging the fancy ball scene and the film's take on Old Hollywood glamour.

The Blu-ray edition includes all these features, plus three more featurettes: "Action in Venice," "Canal Chats" and "Tourist Destination: Travel the Canals of Venice."

No digital copy of the film, though. Now that is a raw deal.

Movie: 3 stars out of four
Extras: 3 stars

Reeling Backward: "It Happened Tomorrow" (1944)

I first heard of "It Happened Tomorrow" when a local blogger and former colleague at The Indianapolis Star, Ruth Holladay, approached me asking for names of newspaper movies for a post she was writing. She already had this 1944 picture starring Dick Powell and Linda Darnell on her list, and I admitted I'd never heard of it before.

Perhaps it's because "Tomorrow" is less a movie about journalism than a fantasy-slash-morality tale. An enterprising young reporter receives the next day's paper a day early, and uses that information to advance his career and love life. It's amusing enough, but I suppose because I was expecting something completely different, it underwhelmed a bit.

The film opens with a clumsy framing device. An old man and woman are celebrating their 50th wedding anniversary in a grand mansion. Rows of children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren are lined up to greet them when they begin arguing over a newspaper. Powell and Darnell -- shown only in long shot to disguise an inept attempt to age them up -- talk about an article he wants to publish about his life, and she forbids it to save him embarrassment.

It brings a note of awkwardness to the film's opening and closing, and I don't see what it really adds.

Powell -- who directed last week's classic film subject, "The Enemy Below" -- was at this time a song-and-dance man who had grown tired of being cast in lite musicals and comedies. After "Tomorrow," he refused his next assignment and broke his contract to star in the film noir "Murder, My Sweet."

The setting is turn-of-the-century New York. Powell plays Larry Stevens, a young reporter for The Evening News who's just written his 500th obituary, and has now graduated to full-scale reporter. He and several colleagues are celebrating with some two-fisted drinking in the newsroom after closing out that evening's edition -- a much more common practice in the trade than is generally known

(By the time I broke into newspapering in the 1990s, overt imbibing had disappeared, but a few old-timers were known to keep a bottle somewhere in their desk. And I saw more than one editor put together the next day's section in a red-eyed, bleary state.)

Stevens and the other fellows josh around with Pop Benson (Hoosier actor John Philliber), the ancient curator of the paper's morgue, who tells them that every day's edition contains both the past and the future. Larry offhandedly claims he'd give up 10 years of his life to see the next day's news ahead of time. Pop, who we later learn actually died that night, appears to Larry over the next three days to hand him a copy of the following day's Evening News.

Larry uses the information in the manner of any hungry reporter: To be present wherever the next day's biggest news is going to happen so he can get the front-page scoop. Of course, when Larry gets the paper it already has the story under his byline, so he doesn't even really have to write it, just copy it down.

His first blockbuster is a shoot-out a the opera house between some bandits and the police. Interestingly, Larry makes no attempt to stop any untoward behavior, but simply uses it to make a name for himself.

If you think that's ethically shaky, it's also not unusual in the hyper-competitive world of newspaper reporting, where front-page bylines are the mark of relevance. When I moved from my first job at a tiny newspaper to my second at a middle-sized one, I heard tell of one unscrupulous reporter who brazenly stole from her own colleagues. The editors asked each reporter, before they left for the night, to enter what they planned to work on the next day in a shared file.

This newshound made it a habit to show up early every day, scan the list of proposed articles, and start working on the most promising idea -- whether it infringed on another staffer's beat or not. When the other reporter showed up later that morning or afternoon -- a typical schedule for that ilk -- the editors would invariably say, "Well, she's already deep into it, so we'll let her finish." She had a lot of front-page stories, and few friends.

Any way, Larry becomes enchanted with Sylvia (Darnell), a girl working in a magic act with her uncle Oscar, who goes by the stage name of Cigolini. He pretends to put her in a trance, while she stands out in the audience and makes predictions about the future. Cigolini/Oscar is played by Jack Oakie, who was known for doing a tongue-twisting Italian accent, despite being from Oklahoma by way of Missouri. He used this same skill in his most famous role as Benzino Napaloni, the caricature of Mussolini in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator."

The Larry/Sylvia romance is one of those swept away deals where they're getting married two days after meeting. By this time Larry has received the last day's early paper, with his death notice on the front page. Morose, his only goal is to marry Sylvia, win a bunch of money at the horse track, and leave her with a comfortable inheritance.

Reticent before to change the future, Larry now does everything in his power to avoid being at the appointed time and place of his demise. Of course, events conspire to bring him there anyway, where he learns the paper had his death wrong. The thief who made off with the $60,000 he won at the track is shot dead by the police, who find Larry's wallet on him. The error is not discovered in time before the first edition of the Evening News goes out with the incorrect identification.

This begs lots of metaphysical ponderables: Was Pop always bringing Larry the first edition? Why not the last, most factually complete one? What kind of slipshod ghost/guardian angel is he?

And why exactly is Pop's ghost passing out newspapers a day early? He says something about not being able to change the future despite knowing it in advance, but it seems to have a major impact on Larry's life. Also, if Larry lost his winnings -- the cash is missing when the wallet is recovered from the thief -- how did he ever become rich enough to afford the mansion we saw?

More a daffy comedy than a true newspaper movie, "It Happened Tomorrow" left me with more questions than answers.

2 stars out of four

(I couldn't find an embeddable clip from the film, but Turner Classic Movies has one here.)

Review: "Paul"

"Paul" is quite possibly the first extraterrestrial stoner comedy. At least, I couldn't think of any others offhand. I Googled "movies in which aliens get stoned" and got zippo. Maybe I should've used Bing.

The alien and his human cohorts do not actually spend the entire movie getting high, but this film definitely has a crunchy road-trip vibe. Think "Cheech & Chong" meets "Starman," with some "Shaun of the Dead"-type genre spoofing. This latter flavor is not surprising, considering that "Shaun" collaborators Simon Pegg and Nick Frost wrote the screenplay and star in "Paul."

The title character, a buggy-eyed protagonist who can turn invisible and heal people and animals with a touch, is voiced by Seth Rogen in his blowsy, cool-dude mode. We get the distinct impression that on his world, he's the Jeff Spicoli. At least, we hope he is. Paul (a nickname, and later we discover how he got it) crashed his spaceship in the desert more than 60 years ago, and seems to have little ambition or direction in life.

He's been the guest-slash-prisoner of the U.S. government ever since, and would've been content to stay there until he recently learned that he's outlived his usefulness. He goes on the lam, smashes his stolen car and gets a lift from Graeme and Clive (Pegg and Frost), a pair of British nerds taking a tour of Area 51 and other alien-themed hot spots in a rented RV.

There's a lot of funny in-jokes about why all aliens in pop culture have the same general resemblance as Paul. He tells them the government disseminated those images so in case more of Paul's folks show up, people will at least have a frame of reference and not totally freak out. There's even a hilarious flashback where Paul gives Steven Spielberg the idea for E.T.'s glowing magic finger.

Hot on his trail is Zoil (Jason Bateman), a Secret Service agent who's really serious about his job, and seems impervious to humor. He takes orders from a female boss we only hear over the phone, and has to deal with a pair of nitwit rookies (Joe Lo Truglio and Bill Hader) assigned to help.

Paul, Graeme and Clive hide out in a trailer park, where they bump into Ruth (Kristen Wiig), the daughter of a Bible-thumper. She wears those odd glasses with one frame blacked out to conceal an eye condition, and it doesn't take special powers to guess Paul will have something to say about it.

His intervention helps her cling a little less bitterly to her religion, and soon Ruth is tagging along, determined to try out some new swear words and maybe break a few commandments. It's a charming, cheeky and funny role, and underlines the burning necessity that Hollywood give Wiig her own star vehicle, now.

"Paul" is directed by Greg Mottola, who helmed the ridiculously overrated "Superbad," but also the criminally ignored "Adventureland." Together with Frost and Pegg's script, they manag to find a loose, entertaining groove that's way funnier than "Pineapple Express." The humor is generally in well-traveled terrain with a generous helping of dick jokes, but somehow having it coming out of the mouth of a little green man makes it fresh and ironic.

3 stars out of four