Paul Blart: Mall Cop

The premise of Paul Blart: Mall Cop is hilarious by itself.  Here you’ve got a mall security guard, with no gun and no social authority, vying for respectability in an upper-class shopping mall, a place filled with women and elderly folk.  Like most rent-a-cops, Paul Blart is overweight and bumbling.  He’s at the lowest end of the hierarchy of police and security guards, and yet he takes his duty seriously.   That duty includes stopping senior citizens who are speeding through the mall in their electric carts.

There are of course a lot of ways to screw this premise up, and the movie producers did that plenty of times here.  But Paul Blart: Mall Cop isn’t all that bad. It’s not horrifically stupid or vulgar, which is 90% of making a decent movie comedy these days.

Blart himself probably represents the intended audience for this movie.  He’s a lower middle-class, middle-aged white guy with a sweettooth.  In the movie’s opening scenes, Blart tries out as a state trooper, only to be thwarted by his hypoglycemia.  Disappointed, Blart returns home to where his mother and daughter reside.  Blart’s daughter, whom he clearly loves, is the child of a love affair in which Blart was fooled by an illegal immigrant from Mexico into marrying the immigrant and thus granting her citizenship.   Blart then goes to his job, which he loves, even though no one takes him seriously.  And, finally, Blart pines for the love of a woman.

Inevitably there’s a love interest, a major problem, and a showdown.  It was right to have the major showdown take place in the mall, which is really an indoor carnival.   The main problem is that this showdown — which lasts half the movie — doesn’t exploit the possibilities of the premise, and it’s absurd without being all that funny.   With some tweaks — a better cast and improved writing — this movie could’ve been pretty darn good.

The best thing about Paul Blart is that it blows away all of the pretentious Cannes-Telluride-Oscar-winning nonsense  that’s so often marketed as “artistic greatness.”  Blart is the kind of guy we middle-class, middle Americans all know, and because we know him we enjoy watching him and laughing at him.  Someday some movie studio is going to figure this out.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 1

Morality: 7

The Karate Kid

Ah, the mid-1980s.  When Italian-Americans could team up with Japanese-Americans to defeat rich, white California karate snots.  The Karate Kid was a monster hit way back when, playing in theaters for several months and capturing the hearts of soon-to-be 30- and 40-somethings.  Most people are terribly nostalgic about this movie, but frankly almost all of it has aged badly.

For many, this movie probably captured some kind of high school experience.  In it we find crummy ’80s pop music, adrenaline-pumping fights between bullies and the bullied, and a new kid in town who instantly captures the heart of a rich, popular blonde.  Basically it’s story of a weak outsider who hates his school but ends up learning lots of life lessons and becoming a cool dude.  This is the personal dream of millions who never come close to satisfying it.

The movie stalls and stalls only until Mr. Miyagi enters the picture, the only redeeming feature of the movie twenty-five years after its release.  A Japanese-American who can barely speak English, but who we are led to believe served in the U.S. Army in WWII (yeah, right!), Miyagi serves as a father-figure for the teenage boy main character, Daniel.  Of course the screenwriters aren’t idiots.  Daniel does not have a father, because a father would only get in the way of the teenager learning martial arts and becoming ultra cool.

Miyagi is in the movie mostly to dispense Oriental ways and wisdom to his student, who must learn karate in six weeks so that he can defeat much larger men who have studied karate all their lives.  To teach his student karate, Miyagi has Daniel wax cars and paint fences and houses.  After three days of menial labor, Daniel is a professional at defensive karate moves.

Miyagi then proceeds to teach Daniel the “crane kick,” a karate move that is so effective that there is no defense for it.  The move involves standing on one leg and raising both arms, then delivering a swift kick to an opponent’s face.  Somehow the move is ultra-powerful even though it involves jumping and therefore momentarily losing one’s balance, which is never good.  Moreover, this move is an ancient one which Miyagi, who learned it from his father, passes down to his surrogate son.  A lot of this movie is about Daniel, a high school American immersed in pop culture, learning about one of the only traditions within a thousand miles of him. When Miyagi miraculously heals Daniel twice with a rubdown, we know that in this movie Miyagi’s traditional magic is the elixir Daniel is going to need.

If all this seems ridiculous, it’s probably supposed to be.  That’s without even mentioning Daniel’s blooming relationship with a blonde who, in real life, wouldn’t give him the time of day.  But this is movie magic, so Daniel gets the girl, wins the fight, and therefore gets to play the winner.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 1

Morality: 5

Knowing

Knowing is yet another Hollywood commercial product that dumbs down the philosophical material it contains and turns it into hogwash.  Ten minutes into the movie, you know you’ve seen this all before — creepy kids who hear whispers, mysterious numbers that seem to predict the future, and philosophical lectures by the stereotypical scientist as main character.

The movie features Nicolas Cage as an astrophysicist at MIT (yeah, right!) who specializes in solar radiation.  This astrophysicist gives us a lengthy lecture early in the movie about the sun’s power and randomness vs. determinism, a lecture that experienced moviegoers will understand is a giveaway to the ending of the movie.  Of course this astrophysicist believes in randomness, even though his dad is a pastor and he has recently lost his wife.  Does he not know he is in a Hollywood movie, wherein he will be required to find the vaguest of faiths in some higher power?  Here, he finds faith in “heaven,” ultimately realizing that once we die, we’ll all just be okay.  It doesn’t get any deeper than that, dear reader, but did you expect it to?

Undoubtedly the starry-eyed Christian movie reviewers elsewhere will praise this movie for its “Christian elements.”  After all, the movie favors a predestined plan implemented by a higher power, it calls its characters to “faith” in something, and it features the Bible for a few minutes.  Of course “Christian elements” can be found anything if we look hard enough.  The Koran, the Bhagavad-Gita, the Analects of Confucius — plenty of “Christian elements” here.  There’s even potential glory in any sewer, right?

SPOILER ALERT.  Knowing follows the “theory” of Intelligent Design to one of its logical conclusions by claiming that angel aliens — who are creepy white men until the end of the movie — have planned our futures for us.  Ultimately two children get raptured to another planet, to start all over as a sort of Adam and Eve.  These two children are “chosen,” while at the same time everyone and everything on Earth has to die, even though the angel aliens have the technology and ability to transport everyone off the Earth to safety.  Not the nicest of guys, these angel aliens.

And why are movies like this always so bleak about the end of the Earth?  Knowing takes global warming to the extreme, as the Earth in consumed in a wave of solar radiation so powerful that it scorches everything. Just before this heat wave of destruction, our faithless astrophysicist learns to accept death and the words of his pastor father, who consoles us with the view that everything’s going to be alright after death.

Meanwhile, the two kids are raptured into the heavens just like Richard Dreyfuss was at the end of Close Encounters of the Third Kind.  Apparently we all just want to escape this hideous planet, which we are destroying at an alarming rate, and even if we aren’t destroying it all that fast something else will destroy it for us.  For once, we’d like to see a movie where the Earth is renewed.  (Oh wait, that was Wall-E’s point.)

Actually we liked the last five minutes of this movie, as the director (Alex Proyas) overcame the movie’s lame script with good visuals and the Adam-and-Eve surprise.  Prior to that, the characters go into the dark woods just because this movie is supposed to scare us, and when they aren’t going into the dark woods they of course live in a secluded house in the dark woods.

Someday someone will make Out of the Silent Planet and far surpass these regurgitated sci-fi flicks.  Granted, C.S. Lewis’ space trilogy will be dumbed down to the point of stupidity, too, but they can’t screw it up completely.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 5

Open Range

Open Range is Kevin Costner’s tone poem to “freegrazers,” or cowboys who once could graze cattle freely where they pleased.  If you’re a Western buff like us, you’ve already figured out without watching the movie that there will be trouble between the freegrazers and the cattle ranchers.  Definitely a gun fight at the end.  Probably a cowboy or two with a mysterious past.  Definitely an outlaw with a fast draw.

Yep, these are all here.  It’s as if Costner decided to do everything that’s standard Western fare, only he got Robert Duvall to spice up the cliches.

Costner’s added twist is the romance between his character and a middle-age nurse.  Everybody knows that cowboys — at least the stars of the show — don’t need romance.  Yet here is romance, one where the cowboy says he’s going to give his bride-to-be “a thousand kisses” not once but twice.  Bleeeeech.  The Western has long been the vehicle for extreme male independence.  Do you not know that, Kevin?

Yes, he does apparently, because the two cowboys go off in the end to rustle up their cattle.  The bride-to-be is left waiting for her beloved.  The cowboy remains hanging in a state of independence at the end of this movie.  So Open Range has it both ways — romance, but independence — yet, practically speaking, the romance aspect is totally unnecessary because females won’t be hanging around for the love relationships to develop after Duvall hits a few guys in the head with the butt of his gun.  The nurse could have been left out, and it still would’ve been the same movie.

What contemporary political issue do the freegrazers in this movie signify?  Free trade, perhaps?  Open immigration?  It’s never quite clear.  It is true that the cattle ranchers have bought and paid for “the law” — that is, the sheriff is working for the rancher.  Thus it’s up to the freegrazers to provide true, natural justice and return the world to its natural order.  This includes killing those who have murdered the innocent.  With lots of bullets.  There’s probably some theological analogy in here, but ultimately it doesn’t matter that much.  This is one of those movies — like 99.5% of all those you’ve ever seen — that you’ll forget about two hours later.

Entertainment: 5

Intelligence: 4

Morality:

Fireproof

Although under high standards it deserves a trouncing, Fireproof is decent entertainment.  Realize that our bar is quite low here and that we laughed at the movie’s blunders.  Still, this is comparable to 95% of the fare you’ll find either on  the small or big screen.  It is certainly no worse, cinematically speaking, than the several dozen brainless romantic comedies released each year.

Fireproof is, above all else, a religious tract.  There is nothing wrong with making a tract movie — Hollywood is churning out several a day — though one must realize that a tract is not on par in terms of quality with a timeless theological treatise. That this tract is a full-length feature movie should point us to the obvious: that it’s ridiculously expensive for Christians to engage in making “Christian” movies.  The time and capital put into Fireproof boggles the mind. Dreams of a Christan movie industry or counterculture will continue to be dreams without billions of dollars invested.

This Fireproof tract is mostly about how to make your marriage work.  The formula for successful marriage is here: first convert to faith in Christ, listen to your parents, humble yourself, pursue your spouse. The characters fit into the formula perfectly; they are not played with subtleties, but then no one here is aiming for high praise.  The main character works through a 40-day, win-back-your-wife recipe book, which looks like it was inserted into the movie as a marketing tool to sell the Fireproof Your Marriage Devotional Guide.    Make no mistake, the suggestions in this recipe are quite good, although some require a decent income.

The pleasant surprise in this movie is that certain problems and moments are genuine.  Unlike its sister movie, Facing the Giants, Fireproof does not allow its main character to win life’s lottery immediately after conversion.  He still suffers internally, and he still faces a looming divorce.  He considers indulging in pornography.  Probably every modern American, bourgeois, Christian adult will find some problem or temptation to relate to in the movie.   Roughly 50% of Christian marriages end in divorce, so this movie should hit a nerve with the greater population.

Yet the movie is nearly ruined by its sideshows.  The main character is a firefighter, which calls for two unnecessary action scenes that have relatively little to do with the rest of the plot (yes, we get it: he saves total strangers but can’t love his wife; he needs to “fireproof” his marriage just as he does his job, etc.).

Those action scenes are acceptable given what Fireproof is, but the firefighter practical joke scenes are ridiculous.  This has to be the first serious movie about a dissolving marriage that’s interrupted by a hot sauce eating competition.  What exactly is it about mainstream evangelical culture that loves goofiness for goofiness’ sake?  Nothing else can explain the character of Wayne Floyd except that occasionally acting juvenile — e.g., imitating Adam Sandlar, performing silly dances, etc. — is a virtue for American Christians.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 10

Flash of Genius

In this movie, Greg Kinnear plays the guy who invented intermittent windshield wipers and wound up spending the rest of his life in legal imbroglios.  A subject this dull needs spicing up, so Hollywood adds an ‘f’ word and personal tension to every minute of every character relationship.  Voila, Entertainment!

To be fair, this movie isn’t as bad as you would think, assuming your expectations are rock bottom like ours were.  Kinnear’s character, an electrical engineering professor, invents his wipers only to have the Ford Motor Company “rip off” his design for windshield wipers.  Outside of a couple of family scenes, the movie is a watered-down ideological primer on the subject of intellectual property.  With Hollywood having recent billion-dollar issues related to “piracy” and such, the movie comes down firmly on the side of a man’s (i.e., gargantuan multinational corporation’s) right to have the government grant him monopoly rights to his own ideas, however terrible they are.

From a legal perspective, Kinnear’s character may have a case, though the movie is far from true to the actual history of the intermittent windshield wiper problem.  From a Biblical perspective, it seems difficult to us to justify such as thing as “intellectual property.”  An idea is not a tangible good.  And who is to say exactly when an idea has been “stolen”?  Ultimately, the government.  This privilege only further empowers the most massive government in world history (Pharoah and Caesar look upon it in awe).

But we digress.  The Ford Motor Company is the bad guy, the face of which is a mysterious character who keeps showing up and tempting Kinnear with loads of money.  Kinnear, an idealist, rejects this temptation every time by appealing to an abstract notion of Truth and Justice.  While he is supposed to be the hero, Kinnear (a Roman Catholic) alienates his wife and eventually divorces her in pursuit of Justice.  It would probably not be wrong to say an ideal became his mistress.  This is not the lesson the movie tries to teach, but it’s there anyway.

Entertainment: 6

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 3

Prince Caspian (The Chronicles of Narnia)

Sometime after the release of Braveheart, movies took a horrible visual turn.  Since then, during any action or fantasy movie that features large armies, you get the standard stuff.  The good guy army faces the army of darkness at around the 110-minute mark, and for the next 30 minutes there’s an incredible amount of grunting and sword clashes.  All of the main characters are featured in the battle, one of which will probably die bravely, saving someone else’s life.  Usually there’s a group of archers who fire arrows high into the sky, which the camera tracks for us.  There may be slow motion at a key point.  These battle scenes are, when you think hard about the depth of them, extraordinarily boring.  There is rarely nothing meaningful at stake for the individual characters, and since neither the good guy army or the army of darkness is nuanced, it is a fairly bland ending once the obvious outcome is decided.

Prince Caspian celebrates this blandness.   It has nothing great to offer except an attempted 150-minute emotional high, driven by the musical score featuring blaring french horns.  It’s as if John Williams went berserk and decided to write a rousing theme for every second of this movie.  After awhile, you get worn out listening to and watching this.  Life isn’t this tensely pitched.  Usually when it is, it’s really annoying, like when you’re driving through rush hour traffic.

There are stretches of this movie that are reasonable, especially those that are quieter and that feature lines that were obviously C.S. Lewis’s.  This could’ve easily been a more contemplative, dialogue-driven movie, which would’ve allowed the movie to  attempt to approach the profundity of the book it was based on.  But that wasn’t to be.  Because the movie features cardboard cutouts for characters, the final battle (and the battle before that) offers us little reason to care about who wins.  Sure, Peter might learn a lesson in humility.  Except for hair color and accent, he is indistinguishable — personality-wise — from Edmund or Prince Caspian.

And where is Aslan?  The Disney DVD intro claimed that Disney movies were “magical.”  Certainly Aslan provides the magic here.  He makes one brief appearance early on, and then arrives right on time during the final battle.  He’s a deux ex machina, coming from nowhere to make a big “ta da!” and save the good guys.  In this movie he is entirely superfluous to the plot, which is more worried about how to get to the next battle scene than anything else.

After we were watching, a comment was made that this movie was less intense, and thus more watchable, than the Lord of the Rings series.  That’s like saying that the roller coaster with five vertical loops is much more pleasant than the one with twenty.  Mostly, we’d prefer to not ride the roller coaster at all.  But if were going to compare these two series, Lord of the Rings is far more preferable insofar as it is a much better spectacle.   Prince Caspian is for those who need a Harry Potter/Lord of the Rings fix, but can’t get it because they aren’t making any more of those stories.  Lewis’ works deserve better treatment.  We are waiting on the Christian Orson Welles to give the Narnia series another try.   Heck, we will settle for the Christian Michael Curtiz.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 2

Morality: 7

Holiday Inn

An acceptable song-and-dance movie.  As with almost any musical, the plot is wholly irrelevant and secondary to the music,  which, compared to today’s fare, is top notch.  Would you rather watch Fred Astaire or washed-up minstrels and athletes on Dancing with the Stars?  Bing Crosby or American Idol karaoke?

It’s a wonder that musical narratives haven’t yet evolved to make musicals a leaner, more meaningful genre of film and stage art.  We have sat through most of the most well-known — Oklahoma, Mary Poppins, Singin’ in the Rain, etc., — and clearly the main storyline is irrelevant.  Those that might be relevant, like My Fair Lady, have been radically altered from the original source material.  If you watch musicals at all, you watch them for the songs and the dance numbers.  Why not string several of these together and omit the filler altogether, while making the songs interrelate musically and lyrically?  Or else go back and learn from something slightly more intelligent, like Gilbert and Sullivan.

Note that Holiday Inn is not exactly a Christmas movie.  It does contain Crosby singing “White Christmas,” but the premise is that Crosby’s character owns a getaway inn which has dinner and performances for its guests on each of the year’s 15 holidays.  So Crosby rouses the troops on the Fourth of July and performs in blackface on Lincoln’s birthday. As for the latter, it’s just another reminder of how quickly values change.  Your great-grandchildren might think that you have hideous, unconscionable beliefs, too.

Entertainment:  7

Intelligence: 0

Morality: whatever

Enchanted

Enchanted is another fouled-up fairy tale, like Shrek and whatever snarky twists on folk stories they’re putting out these days.  We can’t go anywhere without encountering snark.  It’s all over the Internet.  It’s all over TV.  Everywhere, everyone seems to want to make a pointed, wry barb out of something serious.

Thankfully, Enchanted is not all snark.  It is also sappy at times and bizarre at others.  Probably the most enjoyable moments occur when the princess, from the cartoon world of storybook ideals, meets the real world.   She plays her character straight, or as it were, cartoonish.  Still, you will have to deal with a pigeon eating a cockroach right after the cheery “Happy Working Song.”  This is what we mean by snark.

There is good-heartedness here, but that’s what all Walt Disney musicals have.  The plot?  In the cartoon world, a prince rescues a lady, and they decide to marry.  The prince’s mother, however, tricks the lady into falling down a dark hole, the end of which is the three-dimensional world of New York City.  The princess walks around New York, bewildered, until she stumbles into a divorce lawyer.  The cartoon prince, obviously, finds out where his princess is and follows her into the real world.   A hunt ensues.  The characters spontaneously burst into song.  Lots of fish out of water scenes.  You’ve seen all of this before, though this movie feels slightly above average, thanks to good casting.

Kudos to Disney for portraying evil witches as evil witches.  Unfortunately the princess is a princess in 2007, not 1907.  So she looks like a Barbie doll but dresses like she’s desperate for a male.  There are at least two scenes in which the princess accidentally enters a wet T-shirt contest, thanks to the weather, and one in which she gets caught in a bathroom shower.  Her cleavage is available for all to see throughout the movie.  She is supposed to be naive.  After watching this movie, your boys will not be.

Entertainment: 7

Intelligence: 3

Morality: 4

Papillion

Papillion is a jailbreak movie that doesn’t induce claustrophobia.  It might induce some yawning, but that only will come later in the movie.  Our prisoner, a man nicknamed “Papillion” for the butterfly tattooed onto his chest, travels from France to French Guiana to Honduras and back to French Guiana.  As a prisoner in the dreaded French penal colony system, Papillion has a will to survive like no other.  He also tries to break free, constantly.

“Man is born free, but everywhere he is in chains.”  So said Jean-Jacques Rousseau, complaining that human society corrupts all individuals who in an otherwise natural setting would be happy, content, and uncorrupted. Papillion pays attention to Rousseau’s philosophy.  The French penal colony system is as oppressive as human society gets, so we are shown, and if only Papillion could get outside of it and live freely.  For a time, he does, living amongst a native South America tribe for a few weeks of idle bliss.  When the film gets to this moment, it becomes too idealistic and inconsistent, and therefore it lags.

The above paragraph answers the key question, “Freedom to what?”, since Papillion is escaping to something as well as from something.  Some viewers might get the idea that the movie is about spiritual liberation.  Perhaps to some degree that is true, but recall the scene where Papillion shows up at the nunnery.  The head nun deceives him and turns him back into the authorities, who ship him back to French Guiana for five years of solitary confinement.  The church, the movie seems to be saying, is complicit in society’s oppression.  Papillion just wants to get away from it all.  That seems to mean everything you can see in this movie, which is nearly everything.

The movie is compelling in its early going, when Papillion and his fellow prisoners arrive at the penal colony, up through the point where Papillion exits solitary confinement for the first time.  Papillion forges a lifelong friendship with another prisoner, Louis Dega, who each save each other’s life.  “Someone saving my life is a new experience for me,” Dega tearfully exclaims, as he explains why he is risking his life to bribe guards just to make sure that Papillion gets sufficient nourishment.  Papillion had the potential to be a wonderful movie if just for the Papillion-Dega relationship.  If only the movie had been properly edited.  If only.

The movie also should be considered a soft “R”.  You might look at the PG rating and think “okay,” but if you are wanting an okay movie to watch with the kiddos, catch Papillion on TV.  Otherwise you will see a decapitation, a man get his throat slit, lots of other scenes with bad 1970s fake blood, prison talk and innuendo, and a 5-minute scene with naked, tribal women.

Entertainment: 5-7

Intelligence: 4

Morality: 4