Cellist prettifies dead folk

It happened again: I was very upset with the Academy’s choice of foreign film. I had seen “Waltz with Bashir” and I knew that it must win. But this other movie, “Departures,” won instead. And I was like, “Whaaaat? Bullshit.” But I’d said the same thing in 2006 about “Pan’s Labyrinth” which fell to “The Lives of Others.” I was really pissy about it. Then I saw “The Lives of Others.” And then I kind of understood. Now I’ve seen “Departures.” And I kind of understand.

I don’t know that it was better than “Waltz with Bashir,” but it was close. They were different movies entirely. One’s animated, one’s not. One deals with bulk death, one deals with one death at a time. One twists your intestines and opens your eyes, one probes for your heart. (It found mine—well, at least my tear valves. Let’s just say I’m glad I went by myself this time.)

The film begins with Daigo, its doubtful narrator, driving on a snowy road, an old man in the passenger seat. He’s wondering whether he can actually do this new job: this job of ceremoniously preparing the dead for the casket. A cellist by trade, Daigo had been recently hired by an orchestra, only to have the orchestra dissolved shortly thereafter. So he’d moved back to his hometown, where his mother had left him a house, and started looking for work. Then he stumbled upon a newspaper ad that mentioned working with “departures”—and the rest is history.

At first he does it because it pays well, but the quiet beauty of the preparation ceremony quickly grows on him. No one comes out and says it, but there is an obvious parallel between the pre-casket ceremonies and his cello performances. Both are slow, precise, and elegant solemnities. No one will be left wondering, “why a musician?” The film does a wonderful job convincing us that someone who loves the cello could not help but love jazzing up cadavers. Ludicrous, I know, but you believe it.

Before the job starts to grow on him, however, is when the film has its best comedic moments: the infomercial for his business in which he plays the dead body; the suspiciously expedient hiring process; Daigo’s inability to deal with a decaying corpse; and the dodging of a cute, effervescent, sweetly inquisitive wife. This last item eventually plays a major role when she leaves him, calling him a liar and declaring him “unclean.” Well, honestly, what did you expect? Hiding the nature of your occupation from a spouse is rarely a successful enterprise (see “Mr. and Mrs. Smith”).

However, this is not a love story. The connubial drama is a plot device—an obstacle, in a way. One of many. The movie is about Daigo finding his calling in an unexpected place, after his musical ambitions were ostensibly lost in the laundry. He knows that his new job has a certain nobility. It’s just that no one else knows. Besides us. The other characters’ inability to see this is maddening.

Toward the end, I was afraid it was losing focus. There comes a hackneyed monologue from an old man about how he thinks death is “like a gateway,” which is initially an eye-roller—until you realize that this is exactly the speech this blue-collar old-man character would give. He didn’t say anything revelatory, but he meant every word. There’s something admirable in that. Much the same, “Departures” will stick, even if you’ve heard it all before.

“Gigantic” needs to get a life

One look at the poster for “Gigantic” and you know what  it’s trying to be. There are tall, lank-haired Paul Dano and ostensibly pantsless Zooey Deschanel standing in a starkly furnished, sunlit apartment, staring off somewhere behind the camera, looking slightly uncomfortable.

This hipster-genius writer/director is going to show me his revolutionary vision of the nature of urban relationships through an idiosyncratic story of gangly Brooklyn twenty-somethings! And look: a solid cast. Another “Squid and the Whale” perhaps?

Nope. It’s just overwrought garbage.

Brian Weatherby (Dano) wants to adopt a Chinese baby. It has been his dream since childhood. (Fair enough.) He’s now 28, unmarried, and working on a sales floor for extremely high-end Swedish mattresses. Not the best candidate for an adoptive parent, but he’s persistent. One day, some big rich jackass (John Goodman) with a very tolerant gay assistant saunters in to buy a mattress, but leaves the actual purchasing to his daughter, Happy (Deschanel). Happy falls asleep on one of the beds when she comes to make payment, and Brian very sweetly covers her with a blanket. Later, when Brian delivers the mattress, they have sex in her papa’s fancy car. They’re smitten until Brian actually gets his adoption passed and Happy, predictably, freaks out and makes for the door.

That’s the plot. It’s not a good one, but it’s salvageable. Apparently, though, the writer didn’t think it would be enough. Soon after the opening credits, Brian is attacked by a bearded homeless guy who gives him a black eye. The same guy later appears, firing a gun at him in the woods while he’s with his father and brothers, and then appears again later, when Brian finally kills him with a sharp object and mutters an incongruous aside: “This has been going on for longer than you’d think.”

Conceded: this could easily be one of those “Dave didn’t get the hidden symbolic meaning” things. But there’s something to be said for coherence and subtlety. The flighty, lo-fi mood of this movie had no place for some unexplained quasi-Lynchian subplot ending in a dumpster-side murder. I don’t care what he’s trying to say. He needs to put a leash on his ego and say it another way.

I would see it again to try to understand it if the film weren’t so boring. A few John Goodman one-liners aside, the jokes were flat and the dialogue was forced and overwritten. One of the most entertaining parts of the film was watching Zooey Deschanel teeter all over the set in her high heels. We never learn much about her character other than that she’s capricious. Nor do we learn much about any of the other one-adjective characters. Give me another layer, Mr. Director. Or at least some nudity from closer than 30 meters. Entertain me or make your point. I’m not even asking for both.

A Classic BildungsBROman

I know, Man. I feel you.

I didn’t have exactly the same problem as you, Paul Rudd. (What was your character’s name again? Ah, fuck it. Who cares.) But it was pretty close. I’ve never had a problem with having a “best friend” or a “go-to guy.” It was just that my m/f ratio was all messed up for awhile. Way too many platonic chick friends. I was the Ancient Mariner: “Water, water every where / Nor any drop to drink.”

Paul Rudd, you’ve got plenty to “drink”; you’re happily engaged. You’re in love. But there’s something missing; you don’t have a man in your life. And now your fiancé’s friends are telling her that your lack of a male best friend is going to cause problems with clinginess and dependency. It’s weird because—I mean—what kind of a guy doesn’t have any real male friends? You need to get you some, Paul Rudd. And if I did it, you can do it.

Such is the premise of “I Love You, Man,” the latest successful comedy of the Apatowian Confused Boys Era. Peter Klaven (Rudd) needs a Best Man and just doesn’t know where to look.

Male bonding isn’t a new phenomenon, but it’s recently been given a new name, “bromance,” and an eponymous VH1 reality show. This movie satirizes that whole potentially awkward process, the careful quickstep between “I don’t want him to think I’m a pussy” and “I don’t want him to think I’m a tool” one must perform to win quality male friends. Klaven can’t do this dance very well, as we see through his various encounters, but he knows that he has finally found a potential friend in fellow Rush fan Sydney Fife (Jason Segal), and must struggle to win him over.

The courtship, as many courtships are, is painful to watch. But because it’s these two, it’s hilarious. Rudd’s performance is genius, from his failed sobriquets (“Jobin”? Brilliant.) to his little-man stiffness. There’s no one in Hollywood better for laughing at. Jason Segal complements him well with his effortless California whimsy, but doesn’t steal the spotlight. This is Rudd’s movie, and he makes it.

This is the first movie I can remember of its kind. There have been flashes of awkward male-to-male courting before—the one springing to mind being “Tommy Boy,”—but never a movie fully dedicated to the cause. Perhaps it is the moment for it, what with the aforementioned “brocabulary,” and perhaps it is also the place. I don’t know if this comedy would work in, say, Europe, where homophobia (and sorry, but that’s at least part of what the humor is based on) doesn’t seem as pervasive, but here, where the “man date” is still a pretty funny concept, it’s good laughs.

To see a straight grown man in a cubicle pacing and rehearsing like we males (or at least this one) used to do in high school before dialing up our still-unravish’d paramours is ridiculous in itself. To know that he’s calling another straight grown man makes it all the more so.

“I Love You Man” isn’t without its peccadillos—a few too many shots of the iPhone and one dispensable scene involving animal-howling under a bridge (a scene of which some iteration seems to be present in every “boyz” movie)—but its charm is undeniable. It’s another movie that seems a little too familiar. We know these people, or we are them. Or in the case of Paul Rudd, we want to sing karaoke with them. Because Lord knows it’s hard to find a good man.

Long-winded on “Watchmen”

Watchmen’s dark refrain is that “It’s all a big joke.” I think they’re talking about life, the world, existence, etc. But I’ll tell you what the real joke was: giving us all free 20oz. Coca-Colas at 10:00 in the morning then sitting us down for a two-hours-and-forty-minutes movie that you don’t want to take your eyes off of.

Real funny, you clowns.

Kidding aside, I was lucky enough to see “Watchmen” a day early and for free, thanks to some folks at work. I was definitely planning on seeing it anyway, so now I can take that $12 and spend it on something nice, like fancy cheese, or an ironic belt buckle.

After enjoying a book so immensely, there’s never a question, for me, about seeing the movie. Even if I’m completely sure there’s no way I won’t be disappointed (see: Everything is Illuminated), I will still see it—in theaters—if only so that I can mount my literary high horse and berate it.

The problem with writing about these films is that I no longer end up writing about the film; I end up writing about the adaptation. Which I’ll do once again. I have very strong opinions concerning adaptations, the gist of them being that movies adapted from complicated, cerebral, or non-linear works should, at most, be “inspired” by the original. Any attempt at re-creation in those cases usually has a result of desecration. It’s people-pleasing at its most lethal.

I can understand the director Zach Snyder’s choice to follow Watchmen almost panel-by-panel. If he hadn’t, he would’ve had fanboy feces all over his doorknobs every day for the next eight months. Divergence from an iconic work with such frothingly devoted fans is more than just risky—it’s masochistic. So, just as I would, he played it safe.

The result, while a decent and entertaining movie, will not (and should not) achieve the same kind of shelf-life and iconic status that its storyboard namesake has—nor the iconic status that C. Nolan’s Batman movies enjoy. I heard a few of my colleagues comparing “Watchmen” to “Dark Knight.” I don’t think that’s fair. The people behind “The Dark Knight” didn’t face the same sort of pressures. It was based on a character, not on a book, so the director and the writers had much more freedom to create in their own medium without fearing for their lives and porches.

Reviewer after reviewer has been saying that the opening-credits sequence is the best part of the film. My theory is that this is because they are all older than me. The theme of the credits is Costumed Heroes Throughout the 20th Century. So there’s costumed heroes taking Marilyn’s place in Andy Warhol prints, knocking off JFK, landing on the moon, etc. It’s probably more interesting for the older crowd, who was actually around for that stuff. My earliest memory of a national event is when the Pistons won the Championship in ‘89.

Personally, I enjoyed the visuals most. The image of Dr. Manhattan striding through the Vietnam fields and disintegrating people was awe-inspiring, the murder of the Comedian was strangely beautiful, and the Mars scene was a spectacle superior to anything in any other comic book movie.

Trumping all, though, unfortunately, was a sense of obscuring gratuitousness. It’s almost unfair to say, since the book could also probably be called “gratuitous,” but looking at cartoon panels of a man having his arms sawn off or a hatchet entering a man’s skull is different than watching it unfold in front of you in live-action. As a rule, the “Watchmen” cameras are not shy. They linger, maybe to their detriment, every time. Another form of gratuity lay in the unsubtle and seemingly aimless symbolism: the “Obsolete Models” sign hanging in the car lot from which Night Owl and Laurie Jupiter emerge,  or the way Rorschach’s splattered body made a Rorschach blot on the snow.

It’s difficult to say the film “tried too hard,” because ”trying too hard” is inevitable when working with material this lofty–well–lofty in some circles. It wants so bad to be iconic. You can tell by the music they chose: ultra-well-known anthems from a few generations ago (some of them odd…99 Luftballoons? What?). But it won’t make it, as pretty as it looks and as profound as its themes may be.  Alan Moore had a case when he claimed Watchmen was not meant for this medium. The dialogue sounds funny spoken aloud. The novel’s ironic self-consciousness is gone. Its subtlety is gone. And there are too many distractions.

Mr. Snyder made a valiant effort and did a respectable job, but, unlike its source material, it can be forgotten.

The Animated Ones

Unfortunately, I was proven right by the Oscars last Sunday. As I mentioned in the post below, when making one’s picks, it’s better to have not seen the movies. The one live-action short that I didn’t like won the little gold man last Sunday, and I wanted to throw my cupcake at the TV.

In the other “small-potatoes” categories, Best Animated Short and Best Documentary Short (categories in which I hadn’t seen any of the nominees), my picks of “Smile Pinki” and “La Maison de petits cubes” both won. I’d picked them because I liked their names, mostly. The whole phenomenon makes me want to shove a spoon in my eye.

But I’m glad I didn’t, because then I never would have gotten to see the animated shorts. It was the best $12 I’ve spent since I upgraded to boxer briefs.

Not only was I impressed by the quality and diversity of the art involved in making these films, but also by how funny some of them were. France’s “Oktapodi,” for example, had me laughing for about three minutes straight, and “Oktapodi” was three minutes long.

Once, a few years ago, my friend Sharon “Turbo” Marquart told me a French joke whose punch line “No arms, no chocolate!” When I looked at her with a Pomeranian blankness, she explained that “it’s really funny in French.” I took her word for it. She has a great sense of humor. Watching these animated shorts, though, there was no need to take anyone’s “word for it” about how funny they were: None of the five nominees had even one line of dialogue.

The obvious upside, then, is that they translate really well. I don’t have to speak Russian to appreciate “Lavatory – Lovestory” exactly as much as a Russian guy might. They’re truly global, and I love that.

I’ll rank these too, but they were all really damn good.

1. La Maison de petits cubes: This was the least funny, but the most interesting and imaginative. And old man lives in a land where the water level keeps rising slowly, as it has for many years, and he must build new floors on his home whenever it starts to flood. When he drops his pipe, he must rent some scuba gear and retrieve it, and we see him remembering his life, stage by stage, as he goes down through the levels.

2. Oktapodi: An extremely short, action-packed love story of two octopi, one of whom is nabbed from the tank by a spiteful truck driver. An incredible, slapstick chase scene ensues.

3. Presto: A Pixar joint about an egotistical magician in battle with his sly, carrot-starved rabbit. Bugs Bunny would be proud.

4. This Way Up: An extremely well made and wildly inappropriate story of two casket bearers having a really bad day after a boulder crushes their hearse. This may have been closer to the top of my list if it weren’t for a Dumboesque scene of macabre song & dance that didn’t seem to fit.

5. Lavatory – Lovestory: A lonely public lavatory attendant finds flowers in her coin jar, but has no idea who has given them to her. Its beauty lies in its simplicity. Like Justin Timberlake lyrics.

Quickies in a small theater

It’s one of those categories in the office Oscar ballot that your friend wins, and it puts his total just above yours, and now you’re in not third but fourth place, for which there’s no prize money, and there goes your ante, and now you’re secretly upset because you know it was all luck because there’s no way that guy had seen all those short films because no one sees short films.

Ha, well, that was moi a few years ago. The irritatingly lucky friend, that is. I nailed the short film winners on my ballot going solely on title. It was glorious.

But this year, it’s different. This year, I’ve seen them. And now there’s pretty much no shot at getting it right.

IFC in the west village is now showing “Oscar Nominated Shorts” of both the live-action and animated variety. Unfortunately, I was too hungry to stick around for the animated shorts, but I did get to see the live-action numbers. Just as I suspected, they were a treat.

Outside of student films when I was in college, I haven’t seen very many shorts. It’s really too bad, because they’re so appropriate for my generation’s Twitterific attention span. I tend to see them once a year or so in sets of five or six, usually at theaters where you can sit in the back row and still spit on the screen.

What usually strikes me the most when I see them is the diversity of the selections. They’ve always been from different countries and in all kinds of languages with an enormous range of moods, themes, aesthetics, etc. I remember a collection called “The World According to Shorts” where I saw one movie about a group of nine old men who get stuck in quicksand juxtaposed with another—animated B & W—about abstract, tentacled cowboys and a giant vagina. (American. Go figure.)

This year’s Oscar nominated shorts are much the same in their differences. Let me see if I can do about a sentence for each. And I’ll rank them in order of how much I liked them, because I can.

1. The New Boy: Freckled English grade school delinquents antagonize a new boy in school who’s transferred from South Africa after his father—who was also his schoolteacher—was murdered. Almost unfathomably, it has a happy ending.

2. On the Line: A quietly powerful German meditation on love, jealousy, and regret featuring the puffy-faced security-camera stalker, Rolf, with whom you can’t help but sympathize even for all his undeniable creepiness.

3. Manon on the Asphalt: Wistful narrations of a dying woman who’s been struck by a car, wondering how her friends will react to the news of her death and what her lover will think when she doesn’t show up to meet him, which are striking in their absurdity despite their ostensible accuracy.

4. The Pig: An absurd ditty about a docile-turned-cantankerous old man in surgery who falls in love with a painting of a pig jumping into a lake, which causes a clash of cultures when he’s put in a room with an Islamic patient. Nice twist at the end.

5. Toyland: A semi-confusing piece about the Holocaust and two little boys, one of whom is nearly sent off to a camp, but (his?) mother rescues him at the last moment. Seemed very hackneyed after The Boy in Striped Pyjamas, but I possibly didn’t “get” it.

HELLBOY II: The Ferngully Fairies Weren’t This Violent.

Hellboy, for those unfamiliar with the first movie and the Marvel creation in general, is a large, red, horned creature who’s been rescued from the depths of the Underworld by some American soldiers and raised in a special facility in (where else?) New Jersey. He likes candy, cats, and cigars, and he grinds down his horns to “fit in.” He has a thankless career a monster-fighter for the government, along with his buddy Abraham Sapian, a fish-guy with vague telepathy powers, and his girlfriend Liz, who tends to combust with varying degrees of force when she gets emotional. (Hellboy, fortunately, is fire-proof. Because damn, he’s messy.)

In the first Hellboy film, as often happens, a sect of the Nazis were the bad guys. Hellboy II’s antagonists are your more conventional LOTR-standard mythical individuals—trolls, elves, et al. The subtitle of the movie, “The Golden Army,” comes from a tale Hellboy’s father told him when Hellboy was young and awkward. Story goes that, long ago, when the forest creatures were at war with the humans, the Elf King created an indestructible army of golden…how should I describe them…mechanical sword-brandishing lineman…controlled by a magical crown. But then, after seeing them mercilessly lay waste to the enemy, he felt guilty, so he broke the crown into three parts and gave one to the humans. The army has been dormant since. But now, with the forests disappearing, the young badass prince is belligerent, and will stop at nothing to wage war on the humans.

Giving the film its interesting edge is the fact that the prince is almost justified, morally. His lands are being threatened and nothing is being done about it. The lesson here is fairly simple to grasp: you mess up nature, and there will be a price to pay. Del Toro doesn’t pound us over the head with it, but it’s indubitably there. Our hero hesitates before slaying a giant, building-smashing forest demon—a which erupts into a beautiful city-blanketing oasis upon its demise—only to be publicly maligned. The whole thing’s kind of like a Bizarro Ferngully.

But aside from the “green” undertones, this movie is pure fun. Del Toro’s imagination is nearly off the charts, comparable in my mind only to perhaps Hayao Miyazaki, who did “Spirited Away.” Monsters are lurching and gurgling all over the screen. I have to give credit to the special effects team; they look phenomenally real. Meanwhile, Hellboy is punching things and saving kittens and getting his ass kicked and quarrelling with his flammable paramour. In one of my favorite moments, he sings a lovelorn drunken duet with Abe (the fish guy), who’s fallen for the elf princess, which complicates thing later.

It’s all just endless fun and world-saving. They even threw in a few great one-liners, which I won’t write here. I will write this, though: don’t take your kids. Del Toro redefines “tooth fairy” in a very off-putting way, which would have caused me, as a child, to attempt to rubber cement my fallen baby teeth back into my head. And possibly hyperventilate.

The Saddest Happy Movie of All Time

Having just obliterated one of the gnarliest rum & cokes in recent personal history at an awkward social event, I was already feeling a little emotional. So it’s possible that “The Visitor” had a heightened effect on me. The bar was literally next door to the Landmark Sunshine Cinema in SoHo, so, having bought my ticket, I was able to move from a leaning position against the lounge jukebox to a leaning position against the cinemaplex urinal in a matter of seconds. Then, even before the ice cube in my mouth fully melted, I was seated and ready for the evening’s good long cry.

My eyes water sometimes, admittedly, when I watch movies. What sets me apart, though, from your normal crier, is that I only tear up at happy moments: a reunion (“Antoine Fisher”), a slow-clap (“Cool Runnings”), a carry-off (“Rudy”), etc. Almost never do my eyes water at sad moments. Just keep that in mind.

“The Visitor” opens with a series of “highlights” of Professor Walter Vale’s life, the point of which is, it’s boring. Walter Vale (Richard Jenkins, “Six Feet Under”) is bored. He reuses his syllabus each semester. He’s frigid and uncompromising with his students. He takes piano lessons because he feels like he should.. The message is that he’s resigned. His wife is dead and so is his passion for academia, if there had ever been any. We saw a similar jaded professor character earlier this year in “Smart People,” sharply played by Dennis Quaid, who, reinvigorated by a romance with a former student, finds his way again in his field and as a father. One can only guess that something will free Walter’s boots from the muck as well.

This time, it’s not romance, but an African drum, that’s able to inject a little life into a somnambulant academic. Reluctantly returning to New York for a guest lecture at NYU, Vale goes to stay in his apartment that he hasn’t used in many months, only to find it inhabited by an immigrant couple who have been scammed into thinking it was vacant. After a painful exchange, husband and wife Tarek and Zainab arrange to gather their things and leave peacefully. As they wait with their worldly possessions on a corner, desperately seeking shelter for the night, Walter, his heart seemingly uncorked by Tarek’s undeniable charm, decides to let them stay with him until they can find a place.

Tarek plays the djembe, a west-African drum, in a local band. Vale, intrigued, picks it up one day a gives it a few curious slaps. Tarek, delighted in his interest, begins to give him lessons, and, before long, the cantankerous Walter Vale is playing djembe with Tarek in a drum line in Washington Square. He’s not especially talented, but he’s welcomed, and his friendship with Tarek blossoms (much to the dismay, at first, of his wife).

Things change suddenly when Tarek, having trouble fitting his drum through a subway entrance, hops the turnstile and is immediately confronted by two stern officers of the law. He and Walter plead that he has paid (he had) and was simply jumping it because of the bulk of the drum, but this is to no avail, and we begin to see the ugly face of the post-9-11 consciousness emerge from the film’s otherwise feel-good atmosphere. Tarek is immediately hauled off to a detention center in Queens, where he is held for immigration-law violation.

To see a character like Tarek, so full of life and positivity, in a jumpsuit and trapped behind a pane of glass, with a desperate wife and mother on the outside (both of whom cannot visit, themselves being illegal), is excruciating. Walter visits regularly and hires a lawyer to work on getting Tarek out, and we see Tarek’s desperation mount to a point of anger, and we can’t help but share in it.

The beauty of the unlikely friendship and the ugliness of Tarek’s legal injustice superimpose to create a madly vivid and tightly wound crescendo that will loosen just about anyone’s plumbing. “The Visitor” is full of love and full of pain full of music, engendering hopes as often as it dashes them. The rare harmony of happy and sad: This is why I spent almost the entire movie blinking, not just at the happy parts.

It’s not the years, Honey. It’s the mileage.

I was just very opposed to this whole thing. Not like hunger-strike opposed, but a little more than just annoyed. The new “Rocky” installment last year annoyed me. “The Land Before Time 17” annoyed me. “Basic Instinct 2”—well, that was just comedy gold. But this? Did they really have to? Indiana Jones?

The third one was called “The Last Crusade.”

“LAST.”

I took that to mean that there weren’t to be any more Indiana Jones adventures.

And I was fine with that. The existing three were beautiful and timeless things.

But I get it now—that “crusade” was used in the narrower, historical sense of the word. Middle ages. Grail. Nazis are bad. I get it. The fourth is here. I blame semantics.

I had to blame something. It has been nineteen years since “The Last Crusade.” In movieland, it’s the 50’s. Dr. Marcus Brody is dead. Professor Henry Jones the First is dead. (Wait: didn’t he sip from the Holy Grail? Whatever.) The atomic bomb has been invented. Suburbia has risen. Preppies hate Greasers. Communism looms. And the Soviets want an ancient crystal skull—Mayan—which happens to be curiously elongated and severely magnetic. Allegedly, its possessor wields unknown powers! So the stiff-chinned Soviets abduct none other than Dr. ‘Indiana’ Jones to help them find it.

You can probably guess at what happens from here. Indy escapes. He discovers that his old friend—who has been raving incoherently about Akator (also known as El Dorado) and some mysterious skull—is being held captive in South America. He sets out to free him (and to, of course, find the damn artifact). He’s followed. He’s captured. He’s followed again. Then he’s captured again just after a major discovery. Et cetera. People with guns and accents. It’s the Raiders formula—not that we’re complaining. It’s very predictable, is all. And it used to be very endearing.

Somehow, though, the charm is lost with this new installment. I found it more difficult to suspend my disbelief. Especially when young Mutt Williams (Shia LaBeouf, “Transformers”) starts swinging on vines through the jungle and manages to head off a pair of speeding vehicles. Or when Indiana gets caught in a nuclear test-blast but survives by locking himself in a lead-lined refrigerator.

But the other films had scenes like this too. Why didn’t it work as well this time?

It may just be the prevailing aesthetic of the “right now.” Recently, Hollywood’s revamped James Bond by making it more realistic. Before that, they revamped Batman by making it more realistic. But, at the same time, we’ve seen a rise in popularity of the outrageously unreal—300, Beowulf, Kingdom of Heaven, Wanted. Just like in politics, there’s a move toward polarity, extremes. A plotting of the “realism” points might look like cellular mitosis. Maybe there’s no room in the middle anymore for a dusty, ophidiophobic hero whose lips bleed right alongside magical crystal skulls and twenty-something Tarzans.

Then again, maybe the whole “alien” thing threw me off. Among the things Harrison Ford is not, there’s Will Smith.

All this is not to say that the movie was completely without merit. A few well placed one-liners were enough to show that Indiana hasn’t lost his wit. And Spielberg, in general, knows how to direct. The movie runs almost seamlessly, bounding along to the timeless John Williams score, and is packed with the razzle-dazzle action sequences we’ve come to expect.

Comparisons are inevitable. The guy in front of me was really upset. The girl next to me was pleasantly surprised. In the end, neither was reacting to “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull.” They were reacting to “Indiana Jones and the Crystal Skull” vs. its predecessors. The fairness in this is questionable, but they must have known what they were facing. It’s a tall order to dust off something so colossal as Indiana Jones and present it anew. Antiques don’t always function so well. But if we’ve learned anything, they’ve got some monetary value.

Beauties and the Schlep

I’ve only been to a screening once before, for “Match Point” in 2006. They really do make you feel pretty important, screenings. For this one, they even had a girl in a hula skirt present me with a lei after they patted me down for recording equipment. Nice of them.

I remember we didn’t run a review of “Match Point” until after the film’s release, so I don’t even know if I’m allowed to write this, but, whatever, I’m going to anyway. The hell with protocol…right? Now watch some Hollywood kneecrackers tackle me tomorrow evening as I sit here in my computer chair in gym shorts and a sombrero watching Jabbawockeez videos. I don’t think I’d even fight back.

My friend declared the other day that she doesn’t approve of movies where “the schleppy guy gets the hot girl.” I guess I can see that. In this one, “Schleppy guy #1” is Jason Segal of “Freaks and Geeks.” Doughy, pasty, and sweatpants-clad-if-clad-at-all, he plays a good one. Does he not deserve the girl? Well, at least in my book, if the schleppy guy writes the movie, the schleppy guy does what he wants.

Peter Bretter (Segal) is a musical composer for a hit cop show starring his long-time bombshell girlfriend Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell, “Veronica Mars”), who, as we find out almost immediately, has “found someone else” and cannot be with Peter anymore. It’s very hard news for Peter, who loves her very much, and it’s very hard news for us that we must watch him—all of him—as he takes it, in the nude. This is not heteronormative glossing. His five or six full frontals are a lot of lumpy paleness to bear—for anyone. I have to admit, though, I was kind of amused. (And I felt a little better about my body.)

The awkwardness continues when, after a few rounds of inadvisable sex, Peter decides to get away to Hawaii where, sure enough, Sarah Marshall herself is also vacationing with her new boyfriend, British rockstar Aldous Snow (Russell Brand, the actor, not the athletic equipment). The situation itself is unfortunate enough, but the real genius in the writing is the incredibly stupid and masochistic way Peter deals with it. Anybody who’s been in a similar situation knows the hideous truth of it—the sneaking around, just aching for a glimpse of exactly what we don’t want to see. No one knows why. We just know it hurts, and we laugh because it’s not us.

As luck would have it, though, the front desk chick is really hot, and she feels some sympathy for Peter and his predicament. Who knew Mila Kunis could act? The ditzy chick from “That 70’s Show” turns in a believable star performance as Rachel, college dropout turned Hawaiian resort clerk, and manages to maintain an buoyant chemistry with Peter—despite a serious deviation on the pulchritude scale.

Surrounding them is one of the funniest assortments supporting characters in recent cinema: a strung-out surfer (Paul Rudd, “Knocked Up”); an obsessive super-fan waiter (Jonah Hill, “Superbad”); a nervous, poorly-endowed honeymooner and his sex-hungry bride (Jack McBrayer, “30 Rock” and Maria Thayer, “Strangers with Candy”); a giant, shiny-headed Hawaiian sage (Taylor Wily), a hotel staffer obsessed with sea turtle copulation (Davon McDonald), and Peter’s “happily” married step-brother (Bill Hader, “Superbad”). McBrayer is especially funny as the recently de-flowered and baffled newlywed, mumbling airily about the “mythical clitoris” and eventually taking sex lessons from the knowledgeable Aldous.

While “Forgetting Sarah Marshall” is funny—very funny—it also has, in the tradition of “Superbad” and “Knocked Up” before it, a degree of sanguinity and tenderness that penetrates in a way that other screwball comedies cannot. Even the evil Sarah Marshall shows her human side once or twice, and we can sympathize. I hate to use the phrase, “it had a lot of heart” to describe a movie. I think what people really mean when they say that—and I’m guilty—is that it affected more than their diaphragms and their cheeks. I don’t think I could say that about “Happy Gilmore,” but I can say it here. Despite its highly improbable concept, this movie has something real-life about it, and it deals with a phenomenon—coping with a lost love—that almost everyone has gone through or will go through (fortunately? unfortunately?). “Sarah Marshall” is a rarity. It’s comically outlandish and dangerously real. It’s life. It’s the best kind of funny.