Juneau

Todd “First Dude” Palin: Gov, Honey, I think it's best to just tell 'em.
Sarah “The Gov” Palin: I'm Pregnant.
Bristol Palin: Oh, God.
Sarah Palin: But, uh ah, I'm not going to give it up for adoption and I'm certainly not going to get an abortion. After all, I'm only in my mid-forties and the First Dude and I are the perfect couple. Just look at how well you two turned out. Besides, if I play my cards right with the Geezer, pretty soon the federal government will be paying for the medical expenses and everything. And, and in, what, um, 50 or so odd years when your dad and I are both dead you can just pretend that this never happened.
Track Palin: You're pregnant?
Sarah Palin: I'm sorry. I'm sorry... And if it is any consolation I have heartburn that is radiating in my knee caps and I haven't taken a dump since like Wednesday... morning.
Bristol Palin: I didn't even know that you and Dad were still sexually active.
Sarah Palin: I, uh...
Track Palin: Who is the kid?
Sarah Palin: The-the baby? I don't really know much about it other than, I mean, it has fingernails, allegedly.
Bristol Palin: Nails, really?
Sarah Palin: Yeah!
Track Palin: No, I know. I mean what’s its name going to be?
Sarah Palin: Umm... We haven't decided on a boy's name yet, but if it's a girl, it's going to be Juneau Palin
Track Palin: Juneau Palin?
Sarah Palin: What?
Track Palin: God, can’t you people ever come up with, like, a normal name?
Todd “First Dude” Palin: Huh?
Bristol Palin: Anyway, Mom... Dad... while we’re on the topic of shenanigans....

Constant Viewer: Traitor and Babylon A.D.

Traitor is a slightly better than average suspense thriller with a significantly better than average performance by Don Cheadle in the lead role. Sadly, however, the same cannot be said of his co-star, Guy Pierce, whose American accent isn’t too awful until it is revealed through dialog along the way that he’s supposed to be a Southerner, too. Pierce is a good actor, but we might consider going back to those halcyon days when honest-to-goodness American actors, or at least Canadian ringers, were cast in such roles. Constant Viewer knows all about the wonderfully talented Hugh Laurie in House and all that, but enough is enough.

CV suspects Traitor may slip in and out of your local cineplex before you notice it was there, as it was not produced by one of the major studios and received precious little pre-release advertising. As the contemporary crop of Middle Eastern terrorists versus U.S. intelligence agency films go, Traitor is a perfectly respectable entry. If you like such movies but you waited to see it on DVD, though, you wouldn’t miss much at all.

* * * * * * * * * *

If you waited to see Babylon A.D. on DVD you wouldn’t miss much, either. Then again, that’s equally true if you don’t bother seeing it at all. Vin Diesel turns in an acceptable Vin Diesel performance in this hyperactive but unengaging road movie. The road in question leads from Russia over the Bering Straits, across which Diesel’s character must transport a young woman (Mélanie Thierry) and her governess (Michelle Yeoh) from Mongolia to Manhattan. There are nice performances in comparatively small parts here by Charlotte Rampling and Gérard Depardieu, but the plot is so tissue thin and the directing so uneven and distracting their efforts are largely wasted. As was CV’s time.

Constant Viewer: The House Bunny

Constant Viewer had never seen or at least never noticed Anna Faris before today, and a quick review of her career to date makes it pretty clear why not. CV isn’t exactly part of the target audience for the Scary Movie franchise, after all, and he simply didn’t notice or remember her from Lost In Translation. Apparently, however, she has a loyal and growing fan base, so CV was a bit disappointed today when he saw her performance in The House Bunny. Okay, so the material was predictable, crudely directed and, worst of all, not all that funny for extended periods of time. CV had read, however, that Faris’s performance shines above this otherwise indifferent movie. Perhaps so, but not all that much above and, frankly, that’s damning with very faint praise at best. Comparisons to Reese Witherspoon’s Legally Blond flicks are pretty much unavoidable in any consideration of The House Bunny, and neither Ms Faris nor this new movie fare well in that comparison. Still, CV would very much like to see her in something better than this mostly failed effort, the sort of movie that might, at most, be worth a viewing from one of those supermarket $1 video rental booths.

Constant Viewer Ponders The Movie Business

Not so very long ago a movie had to gross $100 million to be considered a bona fide summer blockbuster. Today, however, $200 million is the new $100 million and a movie that grosses a mere tenth of a billion doesn’t even hit the top 400 all-time domestic grossing movies. That’s not adjusting for inflation, by the way. Gone With The Wind grossed a mere $198 million dollars, but, hey, they were 1939 dollars and a dollar bought just a teeny bit more back then. (In round inflation adjusted numbers, GWTW grossed around $1.5 billion.)

The summer of 2008 has had its fair share of blockbusters, in any case, even at the new $200 million threshold: Wall-E, Kung Fu Panda, Hancock, Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, Iron Man and The Dark Knight, the last three having already grossed over $300 million each and several, especially including The Dark Knight, still raking in the box office cash.

The interesting question to Constant Viewer at this point is how far The Dark Knight can go. Obviously, it’s got sprinter’s legs, having beaten Mummy III this weekend and stayed in the #1 slot in its third week out. But, let’s face it, Mummy III is probably the weakest of this summer’s big movies. Still, earning so far just $5 million shy of the $400 million mark, The Dark Knight now ranks 8th all-time in domestic gross, probably marking the first time Warner Brothers has had a film in such rarefied company since Bogart. (Okay, CV just made that up. Basically, however, aside from the Harry Potter franchise, WB hasn’t exactly been a major player for a long, long time. And CV has the handfull of Time-Warner shares to prove it, too!)

This isn’t going anywhere, in case you were wondering. CV simply finds the business of show business, the industry part of the film industry, interesting in and of itself. So when a movie like The Dark Knight comes along (and CV actually plunks down the purchase price of a ticket twice for it!) he wonders just how big it might end up being.

One thing’s for sure. The Dark Knight is not going to come anywhere close to striking range of, oh, say, Titanic. Here’s a Box Office Mojo page devoted to comparing the two, together with Shrek 2 and Star Wars: The Phantom Menace just for good measure. Notice that Titanic (a) didn’t open all that big, but (b) ended up with a domestic gross of over $600 million. That makes it the biggest PG-13 movie and roughly the fifth or sixth highest (inflation adjusted) grossing movie of any sort, period. Why was it so big?

Because it was a romance men didn’t mind going to see. Or it was an action / disaster movie women didn’t mind going to see. Take your pick. But the next huge, history making movie isn’t likely to involve superheroes or animated characters of any sort and it won’t have to be rated PG or G, either. Somewhere in Hollywood someone is studying Titanic and figuring out that romantic adventure, not romantic comedy, is where the money’s at. At least that's Constant Viewer's best guess. Now, if only he could figure out a cleverly tragic, romantic way for the hero to die in front of his lover in the last act of his screenplay!

Constant Viewer: The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor

The Mummy: Curse of the Dragon Emperor is not, rest assured, a French movie. In fact, it is in many respects an anti-French movie. It’s dumb and it knows it’s dumb. It may even be a little proud of how dumb it is as it revels in over-the-top action scenes and dazzling special effects. None of its characters have anything like an introspective or existential identity crisis or, for that matter, would know it if they did. There’s never a moment when the viewer has any reason to suspect that the writers or director or cast seriously thought “Oh no! We can’t do that! It would be too preposterous. The audiences will never buy it!” Nope, Mummy III knows it's all about the cheap thrills and delivers them up by the pallet load.

Brendan Fraser is the poor man’s Tom Hanks, assuming Hanks was dumb enough to try his hand as an action hero, eminently likable in large measure precisely because he’s an everyman type and not an action hero type. That he’s made a fairly nice film career playing against that obvious fact only goes to prove, as William Goldman so deftly put it, that in Hollywood nobody knows anything.

Jet Li makes a fine bad guy here and the rest of the cast are likewise as plausible as you’re likely to find in so implausible a movie. It’s all Raiders of the Lost Ark meets Lost Horizons meets every CGI battle scene made in the last ten years meets every zombie movie made in the last 20 years, and if the comedic touches sometimes wander into farce territory at least there’s not a single scene where someone languorously smokes a cigarette wondering what it’s all about.

In passing, you might wonder why on earth Mummy III and so many other movies in the last five or ten years have been centered in or at least had a major scene or two shot in China. There are no Chinese mummies, after all. Are there? Well, whether there are or not, this much is clear. There are a whole hell of a lot more Chinese than Egyptians and nowadays, unlike back in the old Red China days, more and more of them go to the movies or rent or buy DVDs. And here you round-eyed devils thought you were still the target audience!

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In response to a few comments from CV’s loyal readers about his recent evisceration of French filmmaking, it should be noted that CV’s theory of movie reviews is that it’s just practical emotivism. You find a reviewer whom you discover yells "Boo!" at the same movies you dislike and "Hurray!" at the same movies you like or even vice versa and then you've got a fairly reliable guide to help you pick what to see. Of course, it has to be tarted up a bit, but there's really nothing more to it than that.

There've been several mentions of noir, aka film noir, too, which is of course a French critical invention (film criticism being to movie reviews what prescriptivism is to emotivism). Hollywood just thought it was turning out B-movie gangster stories back then. Then again, Hollywood is almost always oblivious about those rare occasions when it accidentally creates art, too.

The thing about film noir is that it almost entirely contradicts the auteur theory if both are taken seriously. In the first place, these were almost all quintessentially studio movies, not directorial statements of any sort. None of the supposed genre’s directors set out to make a noir movie the way others set out, say, to make a screwball comedy or, for that matter, some socialist or communist writers were in fact trying to promote certain political themes in various post-war movies. (N.B., this isn’t an implicit defense of the notorious Hollywood Blacklist but simply an acknowledgment that some of the writers of that era were, in fact, intentionally polemical.)

These movies were all shot in black and white because, well, duh, just about all cheap movies were shot in black and white in the late 40s and 50s. Their cinematographic technique relied heavily on shadows and skewed camera angles because that was discovered to be a (cheap!) way to build psychological suspense and, frankly, just because it was trendy then in the same way those damned "let's swing the camera around the subject three or four times like an orbiting moon" shots are practically required by law in every movie made today.

Sure, there were a few movies of that era in which the female lead was a conniving vixen leading the poor, gullible protagonist to ruin, but you'd be hard pressed to make that claim about many of the most classic noir movies, e.g., Sunset Boulevard or even The Third Man. Finally, two of the greatest ‘noir’ movies of all time – Blade Runner and Chinatown – fit none of the noir theorists' criteria except the most important one: mood.

The fact is that the film noir genre is a garment that fits few movies of the era very well regardless of how many movies it will more or less badly fit here or there. It is, in the end, a hole that is neither round nor square nor any definite shape at all into which very, very few movie pegs can be fitted easily but just about any drama or movie of suspense can be pounded into with a heavy enough rhetorical hammer. So much for French theory, too.

Constant Viewer: Tell No One (Ne le dis a personne)

So there Constant Viewer was, standing in front of one of those – gulp! – Art Houses looking for an excuse to eat popcorn. But first, a brief digression.

Lewis Black does a comedy routine about candy corn. You know, the little yellow cones with the orange tips (or is it orange with yellow?) that you still see once in a while in candy dishes among the sort of people who have candy dishes in the Halloween through Thanksgiving season. The routine is, essentially, that candy corn tastes like crap, everyone knows candy corn tastes like crap and yet every year we somehow manage to fool ourselves into believing that maybe this year’s candy corn won’t taste like crap until we taste it and, lo and behold, rediscover that it tastes like crap.

Okay, so an even briefer digression would be Lucy convincing Charlie Brown once again to run and try to kick the football.

Both of which lead CV to the real topic: French movies.

Constant Viewer's Summer Roundup

Constant Viewer is sometimes asked why, since he isn’t paid to do so, he occasionally goes to movies knowing well in advance that they are going to defy the laws of physics and simultaneously suck and blow. Collaterally, CV is asked if there are any such movies so far beneath his contempt that even he won’t stoop to go seeing them.

Good questions. Glad you asked.

In the first place,

Constant Viewer: The Dark Knight

Constant Viewer caught the 12:01 showing of The Dark Knight in a theater nearly filled with some five or six hundred fellow dark knight owls, CV’s 13 year old son included. The theater almost certainly would have been filled but for a second showing some 20 minutes later. CV isn’t venturing any guesses about opening records, especially if you adjust for inflation, but The Dark Knight is a lock for this summer’s blockbuster, no mean feat when you consider the current competition.

Let’s get the accolades out of the way up front here. Christopher Nolan continues to astonish as a director, and no little part of CV’s astonishment is in realizing that The Dark Knight is only his eighth directorial credit. Christian Bale has certainly grown in the part since Batman Begins, a fine movie in which, in CV’s opinion, Bale was its weakest element. CV can’t remember when he didn’t like Michael Caine in anything since the original Alfie and can’t, for that matter, remember anything in which Maggie Gyllenhaal wasn’t an asset, either. Morgan Freeman has one of the most fun lines in the movie in a truely clever scene of attempted extortion and both Gary Oldman’s James Gordon and Aaron Eckhart’s Harvy Dent manage to impress despite all the stiff competition for attention.

And then there is Heath Ledger. Will his Joker earn the late actor a posthumous Oscar? If the voting were held by, say, Election Day, Ledger’s chances would be excellent. But The Dark Knight is still a summer movie, not a ‘serious’ movie, and the Academy has historically been chary about posthumous awards. Nonetheless, Ledger’s performance is simply breathtaking and, as entertaining as Jack Nicholson’s Joker was in the original Batman, this new Joker has to be considered the gold standard against which both earlier and subsequent super villains must be judged.

Ironically, however, the way Ledger’s presence overpowers everything else in The Dark Knight is, given Ledger’s untimely death, the movie's greatest weakness; for CV couldn’t help but be distracted over and over again by the thought that this bravura performance could never be reprised. Imagine, for example, if Anthony Hopkins had died shortly before the release of The Silence of the Lambs.

Of course, you’re going to go see The Dark Knight no matter what CV says even if your girlfriend drags you to Mamma Mia first. Buy the large popcorn and soda, since you’re going to be there a full 152 minutes after the endless litany of trailers. Well, after all, Nolan is reaching for a movie of epic proportions here. And if he just slightly misses, the audience nonetheless was certainly not bored as the second hour came and went with another half-hour ahead of them. In fact, when the credits finally did roll they applauded. And CV, to his mild surprise, joined in.

Constant Viewer: Hellboy II: The Golden Army

Constant Viewer would think lines like “I’m not a baby, I’m a tumor” would be a whole lot funnier if it weren’t for the fact that countless young women have been taught to treat their unborn children exactly in that manner. Still, in the context of the Troll Market in Hellboy II: The Golden Army it’s a pretty clever line. It’s a pretty clever movie, for that matter, even if director Guillermo del Toro may have spent just a little too much time playing Rock’em Sock’em Robots as a boy.

Hellboy II is, after all, a boy’s movie based on a boy’s comic book. Okay, so as comic book characters go, Hellboy is on the other side of the comic universe from Nancy and Sluggo if for no other reason than he actually is funny occasionally. As is the movie. Ron Perlman reprises his Son of Satan turned government agency good guy (an oxymoron, CV knows) with plenty of the right sort of attitude, which is to say not too damned seriously. The rest of the principals from the first move are back, too, and CV was disappointed only in Jeffery Tambor’s character not being nearly as bureaucratically smarmy as before. As for new team member Johann Kraus, IMDb lists no fewer than three actors participating in what is essentially Robbie the Robot with a case of magical gas. CV notes for his fans, among whom CV is not to be counted, that the Kraus character voice actor is Seth MacFarlane. This explains the gas, at least.

As for the story line, Hellboy and his Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense teammates are called to the rescue when the prince of an ancient magical kingdom attempts to break a truce with humanity by reassembling a crown that will give him control of “70 times 70” supposedly unstoppable Rock’em Sock’em Robots Mechanical Warriors. The prince isn’t such a bad fellow, really; he just feels that human beings have taken over too much of the planet. His father and twin sister oppose breaking the truce and a family squabble of mythical proportions ensues. Oh, and there are a couple of love stories kinda, sorta going on in the background, too.

Del Toro obviously has a flare for fantasy yet keeps his tongue firmly planted in his cheek here even as he puts the characters through their more or less predictable paces. Hardly a great film, Hellboy II manages to keep from taking itself too seriously well over ninety percent of the time and settles sensibly for being a fun ride in Summer Movieland.

Constant Viewer: Mongol

Mongol probably isn’t coming to a theater near you or, if it is or already has, it probably isn’t the sort of movie you’re likely to go see unless you’re already the sort of art house film buff who eschews Hollywood flicks and regularly uses words like "eschew."

But Constant Viewer saw it yesterday and, as Mongolian language movies go, CV would give it a thumbs up (if CV had opposable thumbs like those art house snobs, that is) for beautiful cinematography, excellently choreographed and executed battle scenes complete replete with splattered blood galore and the sort of epic sweep we don’t see all that much ever since David Lean died.

Mongol tells the story of the early years and rise to power of Genghis Khan and, lest there be any doubt, it is not a remake of The Conqueror, clearly the most grotesquely funny miscasting of John Wayne ever. Besides, Mongol is all about the gentle side of Genghis Khan; Khan the family man, law giver and all around good guy. It’s not The Wrath of Khan; it’s Yes, I Khan! (Now, if only CV could figure out some way to work The 39 Steppes into this review.) Better still, since Mongols are not what you’d call chatty people, this is the rare foreign language movie where there is absolutely zero chance the rare dialog and therefore rare subtitles will distract you.

Mongol is in many respects an old-fashioned movie. There are no surprising twists or turns and no flashy CGI special effects. It is, on the other hand, an entirely craftsman-like film and, as all movies should, it takes you somewhere you’ve almost certainly never been. By contrast, an increasing number of this summer’s movies take you where you’ve already been far, far too often.

Constant Viewer: Hancock

The first thing that must be said about Hancock is that, its misleading trailer aside, this is not a comedy but a serious summer superhero action movie. Okay, so the phrase “summer superhero action movie” probably shouldn’t ever be qualified by “serious.” Still, Constant Viewer thought he’d be seeing something of a send-up of the genre; the superhero equivalent of Last Action Hero (a much maligned and actually very good movie, by the way).

But no, Hancock has its comic moments but most of them are, in fact, on that disingenuous trailer. What you see when the lights go down is the story of a man whose past has been lost and whose present and future, as a result, are in danger of being lost as well. CV isn’t surprised his fellow reviewers have been all over the map about this movie, he really isn’t sure about it, himself.

This much in favor of Hancock can clearly be said. All three principal players, Will Smith, Charlize Theron and Jason Bateman, turn in strong performances in well written, three dimensional roles. (Okay, okay, 3-D by action movies standards, but hey, you know.) Theron’s part is substantially larger than CV expected, a fact which leads to a plot twist that caught CV entirely by surprise. The special effects are fun and it’s actually refreshing to see the ripple effect, if you will, of the typical superhero’s good deed doing.

On the other hand, CV came away thinking that Hancock is a brilliant concept that has been almost indifferently executed. Surely a malcontented alcoholic superhero is a character worthy of more exposition and exploration than he is given here and CV felt almost rushed through Hancock’s rehabilitation so that the movie’s far more conventional story could get going.

Will Smith is an enormous talent with enormous personal appeal. Among his contemporaries, probably only Tom Hanks is as hot and as personable a star. Smith's string of hits since before Independence Day is a simply amazing streak (never mind that CV thought Wild, Wild West sucked), and he’ll probably carry Hancock securely into financial success just on good will alone. Frankly, however, Hancock didn’t come close to the major movie it could or should have been, and that’s a damned shame.

Constant Viewer: Wanted

Wanted relies on so many dubious premises to advance its plot that it’s a good think it moves so quickly you never have time to think about it. Between Angelina Jolie showcasing her ink covered flesh in various stages of dishabille and bullets whizzing in various stages of stop action camera work through human skulls, it's possible, if unlikely, that the average viewer might not think to himself “Hey, this is pretty damned preposterous!”

But it is. Never mind all the "who’s killing who right now and how and why" business that makes up the slender thread of a story that weaves its way back and forth from homicides to hot tubs, complete with plenty of blood for the former and tomb-like wax coatings for the latter. These tubs, we are told, speed the healing process our poor hero seems to need just about every five minutes, never mind they also give us an opportunity to see a buck naked Jolie! (Albeit from a distance and it’s probably a “stunt rear” anyway.).

No, far more preposterous is the underlying premise of a thousand year old guild of weavers – that’s right, weavers! – whose, yeah sure, discovery of a secret code in their cloth led them to convert the guild into a fraternity of assassins. (“Uthor, look at this!” “What do you mean? Those are just mistakes in the weaving, you dolt!” “No, look! In binary code it spells out “Kill Sir Aldo!” “Ohmygawd! That’s amazing! There’s just one thing, though.” “What’s that?” “What the hell is binary code?”)

Now, in the hands of, say, Umberto Eco this is the sort of idea that could lead to a soporific 1,500 page doorstop littered with twenty or thirty obscure quotes per page in equally obscure, dead or dying languages. In the hands of Russian director Timur Bekmambetov, however, it’s as good an excuse as any for a popcorn flick that after the first reel almost literally grabs the viewer by the throat and never lets go. Okay, so your popcorn might get a little blood on it along the way. It’s a small price to pay for the ride, don’t you think?

Bekmambetov, by the way, also directed the sadly under-viewed but beautiful 2004 Night Watch, a gothic action film well worthy of a rental even if you’re not all that into vampires. Back to Wanted, however, Jolie puts in a satisfyingly sex-drenched performance here and the rest of the casting is very strong and, at least to Constant Viewer, a bit of a surprise. CV’s appreciation of James McAvoy rose appreciably after his work in what was really the best picture of 2007 (the Golden Globe folks were right, the Academy was wrong), Atonement.

But CV wouldn’t have thought of McAvoy as an action flick protagonist notwithstanding his perfect casting as the uber-nebbish cubicle slave we find at the beginning of the movie. Well, CV was wrong and unlike those wimpy film reviewers you’ll find elsewhere he is man enough to admit it. Rounding out the cast we find Morgan Freeman as the head of the assassin’s guild, Thomas Kretschmann as the rogue assassin, Cross, and the recently omnipresent Terence Stamp in a small but important role towards the end of the film. Not a ringer in the lot of them.

If CV were in the star awarding business, Wanted would come in at somewhere around 7 out of 10 stars. (Speaking of which, did you ever wonder why those previously mentioned wimpy film reviewers set up a 4 or 5 star scale and then go and award half-stars? What the hell is a half-star and why don’t they just double their unit of measurement in the first place?) And, of course, those are summer movie stars, not autumn Oscar contender stars, too. Okay, so there are better movies playing right now. But the audience actually applauded several times at the showing CV attended and, let's face it, there are far, far worse movies out there, too. Hey, by all accounts the worst one out there at the moment isn't even directed by M. Night Shyamalan.

Constant Viewer: WALL-E

Constant Viewer wishes he could share in the general enthusiasm over WALL-E. Sure, the animation is of the highest quality, the characters are sympathetic, the story is interesting and the film overall is beautifully executed, and yet... yet ...

Herewith the basic story: We trashed Earth so badly 700 years ago that we simply built a humongous spaceship to take at least some folks off on what was supposed to be a five year luxury cruise while machines remained behind to clean up and the ecosystem began to restore itself. WALL-E is one such robot, specializing in scrap metal compacting and stacking and somehow or other it has kept itself running he has kept himself ‘alive’ all those years, still putting in a good day’s work but then repairing to his ‘apartment’ where he collects humanalia and watches an old VHS tape of Hello, Dolly! Meanwhile, EVE is a probe sent from the spaceship back to Earth. WALL-E is smitten and, as one thing leads to another, close encounters of the mechanical kind ensue.

Perhaps it was that damned video tape that spoiled it for CV. The thought of even a robot still watching Barbara Streisand (let alone Tommy Tune!) seven centuries from now is just too much to take. Okay, so WALL-E didn’t exactly have Netflix service and I suppose it could have been worse; say, a Pauly Shore movie or The Love Guru. But a little bit of whimsy goes a long way with CV and WALL-E dishes the stuff out by the tractor-load. Another thing. Sure it’s a cartoon, after all, and you’ve got to suspend disbelief at least as far as anthropomorphized robots go, but are we to believe [Warning: teeny-tiny spoilers!] that there has been technological progress in the past seven centuries accounting for the vastly different capabilities of WALL-E, on the one hand, and EVE, on the other, especially when both passengers and crew of the AXIOM have literally been waited on hand and foot by robots all those centuries? And given both how detached from physical contact and how blubberous we had become in deep space, where the hell did all those kiddies come from?

Finally, as amusing and even action packed as the thrilling conclusion is, it also stretches credulity even by movie, even by animated movie standards. Let’s put it this way to avoid any further spoilers: there better be a whole hell of a lot more of the prized possession that leads the ship’s Captain to return to Earth than we have any evidence for whatsoever until the Happily Ever After end credits begin to roll. Besides that, as romantic comedies go, CV gives EVE and WALL-E exactly zero chance of sharing in that Happily Ever After. Come on! Sure they''re both robots but otherwise they have absolutely nothing in common. I give them two, three centuries at most before they split up and there’s a bitter divorce and custody hearing in Robo-Court.

Go, take the kiddies. It’s a fun ride and you’ll get your money’s worth. But anyone who tells you WALL-E is as good as, say, Ratatouille or Finding Nemo, frankly has a screw loose.

Constant Viewer: Get Smart

Say what you will about the Cold War, it was fertile soil for entertainment ranging from the literary spy novels of John le Carré to the merely literate but vastly more popular spy novels of Ian Fleming. Back when Sean Connery wasn’t just the best James Bond but the only James Bond and Constant Viewer was trying to trick out a cheap attaché case with concealed “throwing knife” letter openers, television ruthless stole paid homage to the Bond phenomenon with shows that also varied in their artistic quality, ranging from I Spy to The Man From U.N.C.L.E and, of course, Get Smart.

For those of CV’s generation who remember the original show, this weekend’s Get Smart movie includes ample allusions to its roots, especially including a scene toward the end where Agent 86, Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell) pilfers some needed clothing and transportation from a curiously convenient Smithsonian Institution display. For those a little younger who could care less about shoe phones, there are plenty of laughs. Truth be told, the movie is far funnier than the television show ever was.

Which is a shame, especially considering that two of the genuine comic geniuses of the 1960s and ‘70s, Mel Brooks and Buck Henry, were co-creators of the TV series. But television was a far more timid institution back then, and creative talent had significantly less creative control. Still, Don Adams’ original bumbling secret agent with his high pitched voice and running jokes (“Would you believe...?” “Missed it by that much!”) was an iconic bit of ‘60s television. (Younger audiences know the voice, if nothing else, from Adams' later Inspector Gadget.)

Get Smart finds Maxwell Smart as an intelligence analyst for the ultra-secret CONTROL. He wants to be a field agent, of course, like glamorous Agent 23 (Dwayne “I ain’t payin’ to be called the Rock any longer!” Johnson) and Agent 99 (Anne Hathaway). But the Chief (Alan Arkin) needs Max’s analytic skills more until CHAOS’s current mastermind, Sigfried (Terrence Stamp) attacks CONTROL headquarters. Sigfried intends to extort billions from the U.S. or else sell nuclear weapons to terrorists and unstable nations, so Max is paired with Agent 99 to thwart the plot and off they go from Washington to Los Angeles by way of Moscow to destroy the weapons cache and then rescue the President.

Of course the plot is merely the vehicle for the funny stuff, of which there is plenty, the romance, of which there is a little, and the action scenes, which are satisfyingly robust for what is, after all, still basically a spoof. Successfully combining such disparate elements into a single movie is no small feat, and CV gives both the writers and director Peter Segal (The Longest Yard) kudos for pulling it off.

Get Smart isn’t a blockbuster-type movie (which is not a prediction of how much business it will actually do) and it certainly isn’t a movie with any pretensions of artistic seriousness, but it’s a damned fine comedy that just about everybody should enjoy.

Constant Viewer: The Incredible Hulk

Question: Can Constant Viewer resist writing “It isn’t easy being green” in a review of The Incredible Hulk?

Answer: No, but at least we got it out of the way early.

The Incredible Hulk is a vastly better movie than the incredibly bad Hulk , Hollywood’s attempt a mere five years ago to bring Marvel’s not so Jolly Green Giant (There! Got rid of another one!) to the big screen. Put it this way: no movie in which one of the very few highlights was a cameo by Lou Ferrigno, the man who played the Hulk in the late 1970s television series, is destined for cinematic fame. Ferrigno, by the way, and to the obvious appreciation of the audience, reprises his security guard cameo in this later and far better outing. (And, yes, the ubiquitous Stan Lee gets his walk-on, too.)

In fact, there are any number of mini-homages paid to the television series including a brief television clip of the late Bill Bixby who played Dr. David Bruce Banner, a score that includes, if only momentarily, the haunting solo piano theme from the old series and a nicely revised use of the signature tag line, “Don’t make me angry. You wouldn’t like ....” Admittedly, none of this has anything to do with whether the film is good or not, but it shows CV that considerable thought and care was taken this time around.

As does the rest of the movie. The original ‘roid rage berserker, the Hulk / Banner (Edward Norton) has gone to ground in Brazil, working as a day laborer and searching for an antidote to his gamma ray created split personality. That part of the origin story is simply assumed this time around, and the movie is better for it. (Between radioactive spiders and gamma rays and whatnot, Marvel is either scaring off future scientists by the droves or encouraging them to play fast and loose with their sciency gismos, anyway.) Meanwhile, evil Army Lt. Gen. Thaddeus “Thunderbold” Ross (William Hurt) searches the globe for Banner, seeking to weaponize the Hulk. He recruits Lt. Emil Blonsky (Tim Roth) to capture Banner while his daughter Betty (Liv Tyler), Banner’s pre-Hulk sweetheart, reconnects with the big lug and, as love is wont to do, brings out the best in him just in the nick of time. CV finds fault only with Hurt here, finding his Gen. Ross a less than credible bad guy even by popcorn movie standards.

And a popcorn movie The Incredible Hulk surely is. As with Iron Man’s Iron Monger, the Hulk must have his worthy opponent, so Blonsky drinks the kool-aid, as it were, and turns into the Abomination. (See, kids! Don’t take drugs! At least not drugs the Army gives you!) Combat ensues, oddly enough in front of Harlem’s Apollo Theater. (Perhaps because of the otherwise scarcity of black folks?) Anyway, you know what happens after that and if you don’t CV certainly isn’t going to spoil it for you.

My sons are convinced the groundwork is being laid for an eventual Avengers film, but even in the comic books the Hulk wasn’t exactly much of a team player. At least this weekend he made an excellent excuse not to go see The Happening. As though you needed one.

Constant Viewer: Kung Fu Panda

If you’ve got kids, you’ve probably already seen Kung Fu Panda, but if you haven’t – seen it, that is; Constant Viewer doesn’t care if you have kids -- you could do a lot worse at the bijou this weekend. Its got a star studded voice cast (CV has a hard time thinking of Jack Black as a star, but there it is), humor and pathos (Black strikes CV as a much more sympathetic character as a panda), excellent animation just a step or two short of Pixar’s (which is as good as DreamWorks’ animation is ever going to get), wonderfully choreographed martial arts action sequences (which is to say they’ve stolen from the very best live action kung fu films) and even a decent story. What’s not to like?

Okay, so the story is a little, um, shopworn. Po (Black), the heir apparent of a noodle pushcart business, dreams of being a great warrior. Through dumb luck – or is it fate?!? – he ends up getting picked as the Dragon Warrior over the “more worthy” Furious Five, different animals supposedly representing different martial arts styles. Their teacher, Shifu (Dustin Hoffman), must train Po to defeat his former greatest student, now gone bad, the snow leopard Tai Lung (Ian McShane). Wacky antics ensue and, what’s more, just like in an afternoon special, we all learn something about being true to ourselves in the end. Yeah, it’s hokum, but it’s fun hokum and a harmless and very entertaining movie for older children and ‘tweens that adults won't mind watching, either.

Constant Viewer: The Happening

Let this much be said at the outset. In the heretofore consistently downhill career of M. Night Shyamalan, it has finally proven beyond even his uncanny knack for making a worse movie every time out when the last movie in question happens to be Lady in the Water.

Of course, you might be saying to yourself right now that Constant Viewer isn’t being fair here. Lady in the Water barely even qualifies as a movie. It is, at best, the cinematic equivalent of a fairy tale written not for a very young child but by a very young child. And an unusually untalented child, at that. Point taken. Still, it must be admitted that The Happening is not nearly as bad a movie as The Lady in the Water.

Not that The Happening is a good movie, mind you. Like every single one of Shyamalan’s movies after The Sixth Sense (and, okay, maybe Unbreakable), it sucks. In fact, it sucks almost exactly as badly as The Village sucked – CV is the proud possessor of a calibrated suckometer – which raises an interesting question. If we graphically plotted the degree of suckatude of each one of Shymalan’s movies, would we get a parabola? That would mean his next film would suck only as badly as Signs and the next two might actually be watchable and then even good!

The Happening tells the story of a science teacher and his wife who, together with the daughter of a friend and an ever shrinking group of strangers, try to escape from a deadly and rapidly spreading phenomenon. Beginning without warning or explanation in New York City’s Central Park, people suddenly, well, let’s just say they volunteer to become the sort of people Haley Joel Osment’s character could see in The Sixth Sense. Those who do not succumb try to escape.

The movie features comically over-the-top performances by Mark Wahlberg and Zooey Deschanel as the troubled young couple and a barely less broad performance by John Leguizamo as the young girl’s father. Of all the principal characters, only the daughter, played by Ashlyn Sanchez, isn’t preposterous.

CV isn’t a huge fan of any of the principal actors here, but this is a writing and directing problem, pure and simple. Laurence Olivier would have come across as a buffoon given the dialog Shyamalan has handed to Wahlberg & Co. Sadly, if consistently, the camera work only adds to the film’s many problems by, for example, trying to build tension with extreme close-ups that come across instead as simply goofy. In fact, this is the sloppiest movie from a purely technical point of view Shyamalan has made yet.

The Happening has its moments of intentional comedy, as well, intended of course to relieve the very little tension that builds as the movie plods along. David Letterman (whose audience is a bit larger than CV’s readership) let it be known the other night that whenever people started to walk backwards in The Happening, “Watch out!” The extent to which you will be shocked when this happens, however, pretty much depends on whether you’ve ever seen any horror picture made in the last 25 years. The movie is rated R, but CV can’t tell you why. There is certainly no sex, precious little profanity and, although there is a fair amount of overt violence, very little of it is gruesome and none is all that gory.

When it’s all over – the happening, that is, not The Happening – those who survive try to figure out what did, in fact, happen. (In that regard, they are not unlike the movie’s hopefully few and far between viewers, who may be wondering, for example, how just about everyone living in Philadelphia committed suicide but the city is repopulated and humming along as though nothing happened a mere three months later?) Could it have been terrorists? A government experiment gone wrong? Or perhaps “nature” has suddenly evolved a new “defense” against it’s “greatest enemy”? And we all know who that enemy would be, don’t we, Captain Planet fans? Either because it’s suppose to be more mysterious and disquieting that way or, CV's bet, because an interesting and plausible explanation would have required more talented writing, The Happening pretty much leaves the viewer guessing. Assuming, that is, that the viewer gives a rodent’s hindquarters by that point.

But wait! There’s (a little bit) more! Is there any good reason to go see The Happening? Well, if you happen to share CV’s view that France is without question the most ungrateful nation on earth, at least the movie ends on a positive note.

Constant Viewer: Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is the first movie of 2008 Constant Viewer intends to go back and see again. We are, just in case you haven’t noticed, in a period in the movies where the woolly mammoths of yesteryear are making one last charge before, well, you know about woolly mammoths, don’t you?. We saw it with Bruce Willis and (twice, no less) with Sylvester Stallone and we are seeing it now with Harrison Ford, reprising the role that really made him a major star (no, children, it wasn’t playing Han Solo that made Ford a star) for the first time in nearly two decades.

Stallone did a far better job than CV expected, mostly by not actually embarrassing himself in Rocky Balboa, while Willis delivered one of the best action pictures of his career in Live Free or Die Hard. With a George Lucas story and Steven Spielberg behind the camera, so, amazingly, does Ford. This is one of the few movies in quite a while CV just plain had fun watching, almost from beginning to end.

Almost. Rumored claims that Ford did much of his stunt work are clearly preposterous. Judging from the amount of footage in the first several reels where Indy is running in a medium shot with his face hidden in shadows, CV seriously doubts Ford did anything strenuous or dangerous, and the movie gets off to a slow start. By the time he takes refuge in the refrigerator in a suspiciously life-sized doll house on a military reservation, though, you know you’re in the hands of masters who carry you on a thrill ride for the next hour and a half with just enough comic relief and inside jokes along the way to let you catch your breath and enjoy the entire ride. The movie deserves its PG-13 rating (not that this will keep idiot parents from bringing their toddlers) but anyone old enough to ride an adult roller coaster should go see it.

There is an entire generation of moviegoers who have never seen an Indiana Jones movie on the big screen before. Nowadays, CGI makes any screen image possible and thereby makes none of them magical any longer, and it’s hard to describe how audiences felt when the first Star Wars movie was released in 1977 or when Raiders Of The Lost Ark was released in 1981. In fact, in terms of film history, Raiders really only updated the black and white Saturday afternoon “cliffhanger” serials of the 40s and 50s, but then that’s like saying modern medicine has only updated the practices of leeching and bleeding patients. What Lucas and Spielberg and Ford managed to create in the late 70s and early 80s truly was magical. Best of all, they haven’t forgotten how.

Constant Viewer: Prince Caspian

The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian continues C.S. Lewis’s well known series of Christian apologetics thinly veiled as children’s literature and it does so neither better nor worse than The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe, which Constant Viewer also didn't like. Constant Viewer finds it difficult to be objective about the merits of these films because he frankly loathed the books when he (tried to) read (some of) them as a youth. Then again, sentimental drivel of a vaguely Christian nature abounded in Constant Viewer’s youth back when every television series trotted out some sort of saccharine Holiday Special in late December. (And the holiday in question wasn’t Hanukkah, either, Bubala.) These days, by contrast, religious ignorance in America is so rampant that one of CV’s friend's teenage children had never heard the story of Noah and the Ark. It’s gotten so bad that homophobes yelling “Adam and Eve, not Adam and Steve!” have to stop and explain who Adam and Eve were.

Sorry. CV ‘went away’ there for a moment, but he’s back now. Where were we? Oh yes, Prince Caspian. There’s certainly no reason not to take the kiddies to see Prince Caspian. The battle scenes aren’t gory -- they aren’t all that exciting, either, sadly enough -- and even the scene in the tomb when the White Witch (Tilda Swinton) tries to escape probably isn’t frightening enough to scare the little ones. Unlike the original books, the movie doesn’t flog the Christian mythos and symbolism incessantly. On the other hand, for all the supposedly magical mystery of Narnia, Prince Caspian is a surprisingly lifeless and nearly joyless affair, three parts medieval warfare to one part talking animals. Worse yet, what few interesting special effects there are seem almost gratuitously trotted out at the end, making the trailer a bit of a ‘bait and switch’ ploy in CV’s opinion. Aslan the Great Lion of Narnia (voice acted by Liam Neeson) has little more than a cameo at the finale, mostly just to summon the walking trees and water giant in the nick of time to vanquish the human army’s catapults. Frankly, there isn’t enough here to sustain nearly two and a half hours and CV wished he had a catapult to hop on, better to flee the theater, Iron Man like, as quickly as possible no matter how painful the landing.

Pssst! Hey, Can You Keep A Secret?

What I am about to tell you is controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination:

1. George W. Bush is an idiot.

2. As controlled unclassified information goes, #1 isn't much of a secret. Still, try not to let it slip out beyond, oh, say, our solar system lest galactic embarrassment ensue.

3. "Controlled unclassified information enhanced with specified dissemination" sounds simultaneously pompous and stupid, like Dean Wormer's "double secret probation" except it's even more like how Otter would explain to Flounder where the emergency beer keg was hidden.

4. Reading any biography of the young George W. Bush makes points #1 through #3 not only obvious but unnecessary. That is all. Over and out.