Review: "The Smurfs 2"

If you suffered through "The Smurfs," an un-entertaining combination of live action actors paired with CG-spawned little blue guys, then the sequel won't hold any surprises. There's lots of goofy slapstick, some kid-friendly gastrointestinal jokes, talking critters and a few sugary life lesson moments.

Hank Azaria, playing the evil wizard Gargamel, is once again the best thing about the movie, supplying a gleefully over-the-top performance that's more cartoonish than the smurfs themselves. Gargamel wants to extract the "smurf essence" from their bodies to fuel his plans to dominate the real world after being zapped there from the smurf universe in the last flick.

The joke is that since his banishment, Gargamel has become a world-famous magician, whose shows of fantastical illusions -- turning audience members into toads and whatnot -- are of course powered by real magic. Part of the fun is that he employs the same sneering, bow-before-me behavior, but audiences lap it up as part of his act.

The main plot is driven by Smurfette (voiced by Katy Perry), the only female, being smurfnapped by Gargamel, who actually created her before wise old Papa Smurf turned her good and blue. Now Gargamel wants Papa Smurf's magic formula.

Smurfette finds herself questioning her past, and chumming up with Vexy and Hackus, two of the gray-hued "Naughties" that the sorcerer has created as follow-ups to her. Vexy (Christina Ricci) is smart and tricky, while Hackus (J.B. Smoove) is brawny and doltish.

Papa Smurf (the late, great Jonathan Winters) intends to rescue Smurfette with his A-team of smurfs in tow, but through a typical smurf-up he ends up bringing Clumsy, Grouchy and Vanity (Anton Yelchin, George Lopez and John Oliver, respectively) instead. Predictable hijinks ensue.

Supplying the totally unnecessary human counterparts are Neil Patrick Harris, Jayma Mays and Brendan Gleeson. Friends of the smurfs from the last movie, they have to go through some paces about accepting others, choosing to be yourself, etc. Frankly, every minute with non-Gargamel people onscreen is deathly boring, though Gleeson getting turned into a duck has its moments.

It's pretty obvious that "The Smurfs 2" is intended for really small children and not grown-ups, which is why I brought my almost-3-year-old along for his take. This is someone who was delighted by the lackluster "The Croods" and "Despicable Me 2." I got a giggle or two out of him, but that's it.

If you won't believe a film critic, take it from a critic's kid: this one's a smurfing waste of time.

Video review: "The Devil's Backbone"

If you’ve checked out “Pacific Rim” in local theaters, you might already be familiar with director Guillermo del Toro. He got his start in his native Mexico, then came to Hollywood to make some commercially successful but not particularly good pictures (“Mimic,” “Hellboy”). In 2001, he returned to his native language to make a minor masterpiece, “The Devil’s Backbone.”

This moody, gorgeous horror/drama is now being issued as a Criterion Collection – the gold standard for video releases. It comes with a host of extra goodies, in addition to a sumptuous transfer of the film.

The story is set during the waning days of the Spanish Civil War. A young boy, Carlos (Fernando Tielve) is sent to a remote orphanage where strange things are happening. An unexploded bomb sits buried in the courtyard like a religious totem, and there are rumors of gold hidden somewhere underground, perhaps being used to fund the Republicans.

Carlos is assigned the empty bed that used to belong to Santi, who disappeared mysteriously and whose spirit is still lingering around. Meanwhile Jacinto, a former resident turned groundskeeper, has various swindles and schemes going on.

Rife with symbolism and dark portents, it’s a beautiful and genuinely frightening film, part ghost story and part coming-of-age drama. If you want to see a true representation of del Toro’s prodigious talents, start with “The Devil’s Backbone.”

As is expected with any Criterion Collection, the video includes a raft of exhaustive bonus materials. These include an all-new digital transfer of the film, and a feature-length commentary track and introduction by del Toro.

There is also a making-of documentary, archival interviews, deleted scenes, perspective from a Spanish Civil War expert, storyboards/sketches a new English subtitle translation.

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Reeling Backward: "Broken Arrow" (1950)

"Broken Arrow" is a product of its time, but attempted to transcend it with a progressive view of American Indians compared to contemporary films. Consider that in 1950, Indians were pretty much always seen onscreen as red-skinned savages brought in to imperil the white heroes. Their lack of individual identities or even basic humanity made them operate much like zombies did in later horror films -- as an existentialist threat.

They were literally the red menace.

Directed by Delmer Daves, the film was written by Albert Maltz (Michael Blankfort received the screen credit since Maltz was blacklisted at the time). Although Jimmy Stewart opens the story with the narration that "everything you see is true," in fact the film is a highly fictionalized version of the events surrounding the peace treaty signed by Apache chief Cochise, based on the novel "Blood Brothers" by Elliott Arnold.

The plot is pretty straightforward. Tom Jeffords (Stewart) is a gold prospector and former Army scout who befriends Cochise during his long war with America. He persuades the great chieftain to refrain from attacking the mail carriers who carry the post through the Arizona territory. This leads to a tenuous armistice and eventually a peace treaty, though renegades on both sides continually work to stoke the fires of war.

The film goes out of its way to present a realistic portrait of the Apache people, from their bloodthirsty reputation as warriors to their strong belief in truth and loyalty, exemplified by Cochise himself. The story opens with Jeffords captured by the Apache for prospecting in their territory, but they let him live because he healed a wounded Apache youth.

However, just as their encounter is about to end, some other prospectors stumble along. Jeffords is gagged and bound, and forced to watch as the Indians decimate the white men. Two survivors are buried in the sand and their faces smeared with fruit juice to attract ants. Though the actual depiction of the torture is oblique, even the description is horrifying. However, the Apaches did not act without cause -- scalps of their tribe mates were found in the prospectors' saddlebags.

This sequence sets the tone for Jeffords' early encounters with Cochise, who is a hard man but a fair one. He's played by Jeff Chandler in an oustanding performance that earned him a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination. (Blankfort/Maltz and cinematography Ernest Palmer also earned nods from the Academy).

Chandler was a Jewish-American with dark, brooding good looks that lent him to ethnically exotic roles, much like Anthony Quinn. Giving the lead role to a Caucasian is somewhat ameliorated by the fact that most of the other Indian characters in the movie were portrayed by actual Apaches recruited from nearby reservations.

Jay Silverheels, a Canadian Mohawk best known for playing Tonto on television's "The Lone Ranger," has a brief but powerful appearance as rebel chief Geronimo, who defies Cochise's breaking of the arrow, signifying peace with the white man.

I should note, however, that the real Cochise was nearly 70 during the events depicted in the movie, while Chandler was barely into his 30s. Cochise died (of natural causes) not long after the signing of the peace treaty, which -- like most of the promises made by the U.S. government to native peoples -- proved to be fleeting.

The film suffers from an ill-advised (and historically bogus) romance between Jeffords and Apache maiden Sonseeahray (played by Debra Paget, another dusky-skinned Caucasian). Their courtship and marriage ends up dominating the entire middle of the film, and her death, though tragically portrayed, feels inevitable and cheap.

"Broken Arrow" ends rather abruptly, with Jeffords wandering off into the mountain country, heartbroken but filled with resolve that his wife's murder "put a seal upon the peace."

Of course, nothing of the sort happened. In real life, Jeffords became the Indian agent for the territory, though he was later removed from his position via a political campaign by his enemies. He rambled around, working as a stagecoach driver, lawman and prospector.

I don't mind the historical inaccuracies of "Broken Arrow," but the love affair feels like it was dreamed up in the office of a studio chief, worried about the story not having enough appeal for women moviegoers. The friendship between Cochise and Jeffords, and their attempt to forge a peace neither of their peoples wanted, is strong enough storytelling material to not need the addition of grautious smooching.

Review: "The To Do List"

I wish Aubrey Plaza had made this movie a few years ago when she was just starting out as the acerbic April on TV's "Parks and Recreation." It's a classic transitionary role perfect for a new star, playing a high school goody-goody on a mission to lose her virginity before college.

When you're 23 or 24 playing 17 or 18 is a stretch, but still doable. Plaza is 29, so when they put her in the right clothes and makeup she looks exactly like ... someone pushing 30 playing a teen.
I also wish "The To Do List" was just plain better than it is.

It's part of the chicks-can-do-raunch-too movement, of which I am fully supportive. Comediennes have grown tired of their male counterparts eating up all the sex-and-cursing bandwidth, and have launched their own front with "Bridesmaids" and the like.

Written and directed by Maggie Carey, "List" certainly doesn't shy away from the dirty talk, though depictions of sex acts are more coy than flagrant.

The setup is that class of '93 valedictorian Brandy Klark is a total grind who's deliberately ignorant of even the basics of sex. Sister Amber (Rachel Bilson) is a party girl and her parents (Clark Gregg and Connie Britton) are pretty buttoned up, so she determines to achieve her deflowering before summer's end, as sort of a rite-of-passage meets science project.

Brandy being the methodical brainy sort, she researches sex acts and makes a comprehensive list of everything she wants to do. We've seen gosh knows how many sex comedies in which young lads determine to lose their cherry. But Brandy's list looks more like the chapter titles on a porn DVD.

She even has her sights set on the ultimate prize: going all the way with Rusty Waters (Scott Porter), a dude-ish older guy who works at the same pool where she does during the summer. Meanwhile, waiting in the wings is Cameron (Johnny Simmons), a nerdy classmate and longtime pal who'd like to be more than the warm-up act for Rusty.

Bill Hader plays Willy, the slacker pool manager who's both her boss and chief teaser; Andy Samberg is a rocker and potential checkmark on Brandy's list; Donald Glover and Christopher Mintz-Plasse play hangers-on and hopefuls.

The primary other relationships in the story are with Brandy's best buds, Wendy (Sarah Steele) and Fiona (Alia Shawkat). I liked the foul-mouthed repartee between the trio, which combines hardcore sex talk with a certain sweetness. They all call each other "Pancake" while discussing the intimate details of their sexual encounters.

The main problem with "The To Do List" is that it's structured like a series of skits rather than a cohesive narrative. The characters are merely props for the jokes. Plaza tries hard to find the neurotic center of Brandy, but it's tough when the script calls for her to be brazen one minute and a wallflower the next.

There are some individually funny scenes and throwaway jokes -- make sure to check out the graffiti that gets sprayed all over the pool house by a rival gang. And there's one instant classic bit where Plaza pulls off a water joke that's ... well, let's just call it a reverse "Caddyshack."

I think Aubrey Plaza has serious potential as a comedic lead actress, but this movie feels like a stumble. If you want to see her in something infinitely more clever and less bawdy, check out last year's "Safety Not Guaranteed." That little-seen gem should be on everyone's to-do list.

Video review: "Trance"

There are plenty of dumb movies, a few smart movies, and even fewer too-smart movies. “Trance” is one of the latter.

This twisty psychological thriller from director Danny Boyle (“Slumdog Millionaire”) is full of fake-outs and never-minds. The film spends so much time fooling the audience, it forgets to really engage us or make us care about the people we’re watching.

The trio of main characters end up as chess pieces, moved around for the convenience of the plot.

James McAvoy plays Simon, an art auctioneer who gets beaten into a coma during the botched robbery of a famous, valuable painting. He wakes up with amnesia about the event, which doesn’t sit well with Franck (Vincent Cassel), the dogged head thief. He and his goons pay Simon a visit and put the squeeze on him.

Turns out Simon was in cahoots with them all along, but now he can’t remember where he stashed the painting. They turn to Elizabeth (Rosario Dawson), a psychiatrist and hypnotist, to help him pore through his memories for a clue.

This unlocks all sorts of strange stuff going on in the mind of Simon, who may not be the mild-mannered schlub he appears to be. Soon there’s a love triangle and a three-way competition for the loot in the offing.

Boyle’s visual style is hyperkinetic and gorgeous. But you’ll probably end up feeling more dizzy than entertained.

Bonus features are sumptuous. They include deleted scenes and a “Trance Unraveled” easter egg. Plus a making-of documentary and several featurettes on hypnotherapy, the film’s distinct visual look, a final script rewrite and other topics.

The Blu-ray also has a retrospective of Boyle’s movies and “Eugene,” a short comedic film by Spencer Susser.

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Reeling Backward: "Battle of Britain" (1969)

Made nearly three decades after the events it depicted, "Battle of Britain" is an exercise in deliberate hagiography. It's a British movie extolling the heroism and and strategic thinking of their own kind during the summer and fall of 1940, when the over-matched Royal Air Force stopped Hitler's planned land invasion of the U.K. long before it even got started.

It's a big-budget spectacle with an all-star cast, including Michael Caine, Laurence Olivier, Trevor Howard, Christopher Plummer, Susannah York, Robert Shaw, Ralph Richardson and Edward Fox. A young Ian McShane even turns up as a novice pilot with a family of young children who are imperiled during the London bombings.

The cast is distinctly subservient to the aircraft, however, with very few characters getting any sort of development. Pretty much the lone exception is Plummer as a Canadian pilot married to a British section officer. He needles her to ask for a transfer so they can be nearer, but bound by a sense of duty, she puts him off.

It's notable that York wears a short pouffy bob haircut and modern makeup, resulting in a look that transposes 1969 for 1940. She could easily be one of Austin Powers' flower-power girls via a quick wardrobe change.

Director Guy  Hamilton and screenwriters James Kennaway and Wilfred Greatorex (working from the book "The Narrow Margin" by Derek Dempster and Derek Wood) approached the material with the apparent goal of making the most historically accurate account possible. Much of their efforts went toward recreating the airborne battles, gathering together a sizable air force of actual WWII craft, or close approximations.

They also used a large number of realistic replicas, both life-size ones on the ground and flying models. The special effects are decent enough for 1969, although it isn't too hard to detect the shifts between real and replica aircraft.

Explosions on the ground look too much like rigged effects -- such as how a lone airplane on the ground will be hit dead-on by a single bomb, with no other explosives landing nearby. That's simply not how cluster bombing of that era worked; that tactic involved hordes of bombs being dropped at once, hoping a small percentage would detonate on target.

They also employ not-very-special effects for the flying explosions, which appear to have been hand-drawn directly onto the celluloid. The result looks something like when you successfully hit your target in an early 1980s arcade game.

Coming out a year after "2001: A Spacey Odyssey" and only eight years before "Star Wars," the effects in "Battle of Britain" were already anachronistic.

The film is mostly fair to the German side, though the lack of comparable Teutonic stars as counterparts to the English ones belies the notion of a truly balanced depiction. But we get to see how the cockiness of both sides' pilots soon crumbles into fatigue and despair.

The movie does illustrate how the tides of war, and even human history, can be changed by the smallest of events.

Hitler had expressly decreed that London was not to be bombed, with the Luftwaffe instead concentrating on wiping out the British airfields along the coasts. But during a run a German Heinkel bomber goes off-course, and the pilot decides to dump their payload before heading back. In retaliation for some minor damage near the outskirts of London, the Allies organize a bombing run of their own on Berlin -- something the leaders of the Third Reich had vowed would never happen.

Vexed, Hitler and company shifted the focus of their airborne attacks from the airfields to the British capital. This resulted in terrible loss of life -- but it also gave the RAF a chance to recover sufficiently to start mounting a serious air defense. Most historians regard this blunder as a turning point in the war.

At the start of the movie, Air Chief Marshal Hugh Dowding (Olivier) had unctuously predicted that they would have to inflict losses on the German attackers in the neighborhood of 4 to 1 to have any hope of winning the air battle. Eventually, the German losses indeed became too high, and the plan to invade Great Britain was scrapped.

I think "Battle of Britain" is one of those movies that recedes as time goes by, rather than its reputation swelling. Seen now, it's an often dull litany of aerial sequences interrupted by talkie exchanges of dialogue on the ground with little impact. The film's only real enduring legacy is the fact that its aerial footage was reused many, many times in other cinematic portrayals -- including "Midway" and "Hope and Glory."

Part of this had to do with the considerable skill with which those sequences were shot (minus the hokey fake explosions). But also with the fact that the airplanes used in 1969 simply weren't available later on.

A serviceable if unremarkable WWII war film, "Battle of Britain" exists mostly as a marker of great deeds rather than truly capturing them.

Review: "The Conjuring"

"The Conjuring" dredges up nearly every trope of the exorcism subgenre of horror, and faithfully puts its characters and the audience through the paces. It doesn't do much of anything that we haven't seen before, but what it does it does mostly well.

Director James Wan gained notoriety with "Saw," kicking off the (thankfully) now-waning "torture porn" fad. Here he turns to more cerebral frights, based on building a sense of dread mixed with sudden scares. The first half really drags, but once they get to the hard stuff of demonic possessions and thrashing exorcisms, it's a genuine thrill.

(I should point out that the R rating from the MPAA seems hard to justify. There is no cursing, sex or drugs, and though there is a constant threat of violence, very little of it actually occurs. "Overly forbidding" wouldn't seem to be part of the association's charter, but there you have it.)

Usually with these sorts of movies, the focus is on the family plagued with an ominous spirit, and the paranormal experts show up about halfway through. Here, the demonologists are just as much a part of the story as the haunted.

Like many movies of this ilk, we're assured that the events we're seeing are based on a true story. Ed and Lorraine Warren (Patrick Wilson and Vera Farmiga) were real-life occult investigators, who tried for decades to get a movie made about themselves. The idea is that although they have a really strange job, the Warrens are perfectly normal folks with a strong marriage, Christian values and a loving daughter.

We get to see them presenting film and audiotapes of their disturbing cases on college campuses, and it's pretty eye-opening stuff. One possessed man has bloody tears and speaks Latin, despite having only a third-grade education. Of course, what they encounter in the movie is far worse than anything they've seen before.

Parallel to the Warrens' story is the Perrons, Carolyn and Roger (Lili Taylor and Ron Livingston). It's 1971 and they have just bought an old farmhouse cheap at auction to live with their five daughters, ranging in age from cute little pixie to surly teen. The house seems like a dream come true until, as they say, strange things star to happen.

Things go bump without explanation, clocks stop at precisely 3:07 a.m. every night, and the younger girls start to see things looming in dark spaces. They bust through a boarded-up stairwell and find a basement loaded with all sorts of cool stuff that just screams, "Evil spirits residing here!"

The strength of the film is depicting the Warrens as careful, rational people with lives outside their demon-hunting. For instance, Lorraine is a clairvoyant, meaning she can get a sense of the spiritual aura of things and people just by being near them. But their ghostly encounters each cost her a little piece of her own emotional stability.

Farmiga brings a matter-of-fact calm to her role, an unflashy sort of competence and groundedness that offsets nicely with her character's supernatural talents. The kid actors all acquit themselves nicely, particularly Joey King as the initial target of the spirit's ire.

I respected the craft with which "The Conjuring" was made, and its attempt to insert a little sober rationality into a familiar ghost story. It won't haunt your dreams, but this film will creep you out sufficiently for a couple of hours.