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He’s Just Not That Into You

 

Beware the chick flick that pretends to tell it like it is; because it wants to send you home happy, it will eventually have to lie. “He’s Just Not That Into You” is a fictional romantic comedy based on a nonfictional advice bestseller subtitled “The No-Excuses Truth to Understanding Guys,” and, like the book, it’s aimed at the kind of single woman who stares at her silent answering machine with geometrically progressing anxiety. That title implores: Ladies, drop the excuses, gather up your self-esteem, and move on.

The film version, a pleasurable if empty-headed all-star roundelay, stays true to that sentiment until it doesn’t, at which point smarter audience members will mutter “Burned again” while the gullible will coo in delight and tell all their friends. The movie plays like “Love Actually” with half the brains and none of the nerve.

Still, “He’s Just Not That Into You” is good comfort food for most of its running time, thanks to a cast of attractive, unchallenging pros and Ken Kwapis’s smooth direction. The script by Abby Kohn and Marc Silverstein settles into the yuppie environs of Baltimore – nice to see someone other than John Waters and the “Homicide” crew there – and introduces us to eight or nine rotating characters.

Janine (Jennifer Connelly) and Ben (Bradley Cooper) are the young marrieds, pouring money and energy into a brownstone rehab even as he’s tempted by a comely yoga instructor named Anna (Scarlett Johansson at her most lusciously bimbotic). Anna, in turn, is yearned for by realtor Conor (Kevin Connolly), a nice-guy-friend-with-not-enough-benefits; Drew Barrymore plays Anna’s self-absorbed boho pal Mary, constantly offering lousy advice. (If it’s any comfort, her outfits are worse.)

Over in this corner are Beth (Jennifer Aniston) and Neil (Ben Affleck), the latter content in their seven-year relationship, the former raging passive-aggressively for an engagement ring that never comes. And then there’s Gigi (Ginnifer Goodwin), the needy singleton for whom the film’s title is intended. She works herself into a lather whenever any cute guy at a bar doesn’t call her in 24 hours; the idea that he might see she’s desperate for any man, as opposed to this man, doesn’t occur to her or the movie.

Gigi gets a mentor, of sorts, in Alex (Justin Long), a bar manager who coaches her in “what guys really think” with brutal comic sadism. These are funny scenes: A date tells Gigi he’s “leaving town on business for a few weeks,” she ducks into his bathroom to phone Alex for advice, he asks where the date says he’s going, she answers “Pittsburgh,” he says “Run!”

“He’s Just Not That Into You” offers a world in which young and pretty people have endless technology for communication at their disposal but still have no clue how to talk to each other. That’s a cutting observation, but the movie’s content to be a bread knife.

Goodwin, a capable and chameleonic actress, is stuck playing a ninny, and Long’s Alex is good company until the screenplay insists he start behaving in ways that make no sense. The triangle between the married couple and Johansson’s blithe interloper is strained but more interesting to watch, especially when Connelly sublimates her anger over the husband’s infidelity by channeling it into a towering fury at his secret smoking.

Surprisingly, Affleck and Aniston create the two most appealing people in the movie – both actors let their maturity show in unexpected ways – but “He’s Just Not That Into You” isn’t sure what to do with them until the end, when it caves in to the audience’s presumed desire for closure and corn.

That would be fine if it didn’t feel like a surrender on the filmmakers’ own mild commercial terms. Kwapis and his writers stall the inevitable, dogging each storyline until the movie turns long and then overlong, but they know that for this movie to succeed – for the singletons to not torch the theater in a mob – it has to remember it’s a movie, which means it’s a fantasy, which means it has to end not just happily but nicely.

It’s not often you see a film sell out a paperback advice book, but that’s what happens here. “He’s Just Not That Into You” serves up a big bowl of Chunky Monkey that says: You know what? He really is.

 

The Reader

Review in a Hurry: Fifteen-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) has a torrid affair with thirtysomething Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet) but then finds out she’s a Nazi. You too will be seduced by Winslet, who certainly displays the Reich stuff.

The Bigger Picture: There’s plenty of aging in this curious case of Michael Berg (promising, fresh-faced Kross), as he tries for decades to reconcile his relationship with a former SS guard. There’s also plenty of time-jumping—hey, what do you expect from the same team that gave us The Hours? But The Reader remains riveting as long as exquisite Winslet stays on screen.

The unlikely lovers hook up in postwar Germany, and for a summer, teenaged Michael reads aloud to Hanna—everything from The Odyssey to Lady Chatterley’s Lover—as a form of foreplay. Haunted and world-weary, she bares her body but never her soul, and then one day…disappears. It’s only 10 years later, while a law student, that Michael learns of Hanna’s Nazi past, coincidentally attending her trial for war crimes.

In the mid-1970s, Michael becomes Voldemort, er, an attorney (same thing?) played by Ralph Fiennes, who unfortunately looks little like Kross. He reaches out to Hanna, now serving a life sentence, by recording and sending her books on tape. It’s a beautiful sequence, but the pacing in later scenes gets uneven, especially an unnecessary framing device involving Michael in the ’90s with his adult daughter.

Wonderfully acted and gracefully directed, The Reader tackles the challenging subject of a nation’s guilt by portraying it on an intimate level, its characters scarred by secrets and shame. Though Hanna herself is an enigma, Winslet allows so much to be revealed—her steeliness, vulnerability, self-loathing and longing. She makes this “monster” accessible and even sympathetic—and makes The Reader an affecting experience for the viewer.

 

Notorious

“Notorious” gives the Hollywood superhero treatment to the rapper Notorious B.I.G. For hip-hop partisans, watching Christopher Wallace become Biggie Smalls, then the Notorious B.I.G., must be what it’s like for comic-book fans to see Tony Stark become Iron Man. Biggie’s hard-knock life and premature death (he was shot in 1997 at age 24) have been repackaged into an enjoyably ridiculous entertainment about a pursy young man with mysterious sex appeal who turns the rap world on its ear.

Built around a relaxed but vibrant performance by the rapper and first-time actor Jamal Woolard, “Notorious” is part melodrama, part bullet-riddled cautionary tale, all nostalgic trip back to the mid-1990s. I left the movie more desperate for a Coogi sweater than I ever was when it was appropriate to want one.

“Notorious” was produced by Biggie’s mother, Voletta Wallace, and Sean “P Diddy” Combs, his close friend and producer, which is to say it’s predictably protective of the rapper’s legacy. (Biggie’s son, Christopher Jordan Wallace, plays him in a few early scenes.) Excepting some dirty business with the California rapper and actor Tupac Shakur (more about that in a minute), the movie’s not a total whitewash, either. It hits many of the high notes of Wallace’s life and some sour ones, too.

It’s true that Voletta Wallace has paid herself quite a compliment by having Angela Bassett play her in this movie, but the relationship the film depicts between mother and son isn’t simple. Even though Voletta, a Jamaican immigrant, gives him lots of love and a stable home in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, her son is drawn to the instant financial gratification of dealing drugs. (She thinks the white stash under his bed is mashed potatoes.) But mother evicts son, and son eventually gets busted for possession and winds up in jail.

He has a daughter with his high-school girlfriend (Julia Pace Mitchell), but his life doesn’t really begin to turn around until he meets “Puffy” Combs, a big-talking recording-industry upstart, played as a dancing exclamation point by Derek Luke. (To see Luke, in track suits and an S-Curl, expertly re-create Comb’s shuffle-stutter dances and to hear him chronically over-inflect his words is to witness heavenly comedy.)

Puffy is prone to offering Biggie ultimatums – “the studio or the streets” – and making dreams come true. (“By the time you’re 21, I’ll make you a millionaire,” he promises.) Combs didn’t write the script – that’s credited to Reggie Rock Bythewood and Cheo Hodari Coker, who’s also written a book about the Notorious B.I.G. – but one imagines he had the opportunity to do some polishing.

Not everyone who pops up in the film is so lucky. “Notorious” offers up a feisty young sales clerk named Kimberly Jones (Naturi Naughton) who after a few afternoon trysts with Biggie, explodes into the lascivious rapper Lil’ Kim. The movie suggests that her signature look was Biggie’s idea (“Keep the suspenders, lose the shirt”) and that installing her in his Junior M.A.F.I.A. collective only led to headaches since she was so viciously hung up on him.

Things only get worse after he starts dating and marries a half-white singer named Faith Evans (Antonique Smith). “What’s she got that I don’t?” cries Kim. Where to start: blonder hair, lighter skin, decorum.

Even with Faith, monogamy doesn’t come easy to Biggie, if it comes at all. And the movie, directed by George Tillman Jr., has a good time showing the blowups and meltdowns in the rapper’s relationships. It’s all overblown, and yet in these entanglements, you get a nifty convergence of pop folklore – Ray Charles’s love life in Fatty Arbuckle’s body. Despite Bassett’s steeliness, few people come to a movie like “Notorious” for acting fireworks, but some of the performances are strong, especially Smith’s. She finds the wounded warrior in Evans more dramatically than any of Evans’s music.

The film’s dramatic crux, of course, is Biggie’s relationship with Tupac, whom a shameless Anthony Mackie plays as a kind of thrill-seeking nutcase. The Biggie in “Notorious” admires Tupac, who is already a rap star while Biggie’s on the rise. But after a shooting in the lobby of a recording-studio building wounds Tupac, the relationship is strained. “Notorious” suggests that a delusional and paranoid Tupac thought Biggie and Puffy set him up and never dropped his grudge. Biggie, meanwhile, has no idea what went wrong and sits home watching old footage of him and his buddy with tears in his eyes. (I said it wasn’t a complete whitewash!)

While dropping some funny datelines (“The Source Awards,” “The Soul Train Awards”), Tillman effectively captures the resulting East Coast-West Coast furor that culminated in Tupac’s death in 1996, then Biggie’s six months later. The drama around these two men riveted the nation for over a year. This version of the relationship may even stoke new debate since it tells one side of two unsolved mysteries. Yet “Notorious” doesn’t aspire to be a work of journalism. Nick Broomfield’s 2002 procedural documentary “Biggie and Tupac” boldly went down that road and turned up only more speculation.

While Woolard doesn’t try to fully imitate Biggie’s distinctive slurry sound, he captures just enough of its essence. The revelation is how with a little crisper diction, Woolard tips Biggie’s raps from the blues to rock ‘n’ roll – there’s fresh anger in this music. Otherwise “Notorious” is only loosely interested in Biggie as a creative artist. The movie stints on any psychological connection between Biggie and his songs, instead using the rapper’s life to teach lessons and to offer its audience reassurances (the sky, for instance, is the limit).

After 110 minutes of the “n” word being deployed with abandon, Biggie vows to renounce it. And just like that a deluxe episode of “Behind the Music” turns into an evening at church.

 

Revolutionary Road

Maybe it’s a cheap shot to call “Revolutionary Road” “American Beauty” without the laughs, but it gets to the heart of the problem. The British director of “Beauty,” Sam Mendes, has returned to probe the existential angst of American suburbia, but this time he has a great novel at his back, and he’s weighed down with his responsibility to literature. This film isn’t told, it’s Told. There will be a quiz.

After decades of John Cheever, J.D. Salinger, and “Mad Men,” the film’s story line is familiar to the point of cliche. There’s a vast, gnawing unhappiness behind the picture windows of the middle class, or didn’t you know? Published in 1961, Richard Yates’s debut novel came at the end of the genre’s initial post-WWII cycle, and the book has lasted only through the awesome surgical relentlessness of its prose. The marriage of Frank and April Wheeler is described in passages that peel apart layers of truths, half-truths, lies, and self-deceit; the book is intensely depressing yet incandescent. Rarely has a writer shot fish in a barrel so brilliantly.

Less than half of this makes it to the screen, and most of it is brought there by Kate Winslet. She plays April with so many buried reserves of anger, sorrow, and self-loathing that it hurts to look at her, yet the surface is chic and artful. (She makes the desperate housewives on TV look like mannequins.) Her neighbors in late-1950s Connecticut, a lumpy suburban couple played by David Harbour and Kathryn Hahn, have placed her on a pedestal. Her husband, Frank (Leonardo DiCaprio), is torn between climbing up there with her and pulling it down.

The drama of “Revolutionary Road” isn’t much, which is to say it’s the stuff of “real life”: the Wheelers fight like alley cats, decide to relocate to Europe, get bogged down by inertia and Frank’s confused ambitions. Some in the audience may object to paying for what they can get at home for free. In the book, the couple’s very ordinariness was a secret they withheld from each other and themselves, and that was the tragedy as Yates saw it: We’re never the stars of our youthful dreams, and it hurts like hell to admit it. Where the novel had a cold (and elitist) empathy, though, the movie is merely cold.

Part of the problem is DiCaprio, who seems too callow for his role even at 34 (Winslet looks like she could lick him with one hand tied behind her back). Without Yates dissecting his inner motivations into their constituent molecules, Frank is a much thinner character. When he drifts into an affair with a secretary at his office (Zoe Kazan, herself less interesting than on the page), he seems merely caddish. Mendes can’t locate the visual equivalents of the book’s unsparing psychology, so he embalms it with pristine cinematography (by Roger Deakins), costumes (Albert Wolsky), and score (Thomas Newman). There’s a splash of blood toward the end of “Revolutionary Road,” and it was so perfectly beautiful I wanted to scream.

One of the characters that survives this funeral march is John Givings (Michael Shannon), a mentally disturbed man whose mother (Kathy Bates) brings him over to the Wheelers on his days off from the institution, to give him someone “interesting” to talk with. He functions (rather baldly) as the book’s jester, saying all the cruel things the others can’t bear to blurt out, but Shannon’s performance is so angry and unpredictable, so weirdly mouthy, that “Revolutionary Road” jerks briefly to life in his scenes. Here at last is the scorn both Yates and Mendes work so hard to conceal; the movie, at least, might have been more honest to let more of it show.

But, again, it’s Winslet – Mrs. Mendes, by the way – who shoulders the emotional burden in the film’s final scenes. This actress is so good, so sure of herself, that she makes you ache for April’s descent into bourgeois hell. The Wheelers have young children who, as in the book, are unimportant stick figures – both book and film have a terror of parenting that is left unexamined – but in April’s frozen smile you can sense the selfishness that’s both monstrous and noble. Winslet gives a fearless performance here. It’s not her fault her husband has shrouded it in Taste.

 

The Unborn

The most effective horror movies prey on fears percolating just beneath society’s surface. And then there’s writer-director David S. Goyer’s “The Unborn,” which conceives a demon unleashed by Nazi experiments in Auschwitz to justify its derivative Japanese-horror-style scares, rather than tapping into the anxiety of a pregnancy suggested by its title. Rogue Pictures, just sold to Relativity Media, should deliver healthy opening-weekend crowds for the PG-13 thriller by stressing Goyer’s “The Dark Knight” connection as well as the genetic advantages of young leads Odette Yustman, scene-stealing Meagan Good and “Twilight’s” Cam Gigandet.

Pic marks a departure for Michael Bay’s Platinum Dunes shingle, representing the first original scarefest from an outfit best known for remaking such horror classics as “The Texas Chainsaw Massacre” and “The Amityville Horror.” And yet, so familiar are the recycled bits that make up this “The Exorcist”-meets-“The Grudge” combo that Goyer isn’t likely to get much credit for all the background research he did trying to flesh out a fresh backstory for such supernatural shenanigans.

In this case, he combines Jewish mysticism — technically, that’s a dybbuk possessing the people in scandalously sexy coed Casey Beldon’s life — with the perverse pseudoscientific experimentation practiced on twins by German doctors during World War II. Early in the film, Casey (“Cloverfield” vet Yustman) learns she is a twin, though her brother died in the womb. Casey is still haunted by visions of her mother (Carla Gugino), who went crazy and hanged herself years earlier, and now she fears the same thing may be happening to her. How else to explain the fact that Jumby (the dead boy’s nickname) “wants to be born now”?

Casey has creepy dreams about demon fetuses and hears an ominous knocking behind her bathroom mirror; breaking eggs one morning, she’s startled to find giant potato bugs in her skillet. Each of these visuals is accompanied by all the usual racket that can be expected to make teens jump that much higher in their seats — though widespread giggling seemed to be the more pervasive response at a preview screening.

It doesn’t help the director’s credibility that Casey spends much of her time taking showers and running around in her underthings (carefully balanced by footage of her beefcake boyfriend, played by Gigandet). Eventually, the sheer number of disturbances compel Casey to do some amateur sleuthing, which leads her to a Holocaust survivor (Jane Alexander) with clues about her family history.

Goyer presents these revelations in all seriousness, but betrays his comicbook background in the process. Whereas “The Dark Knight” (for which Goyer received a story credit) surprisingly allowed the Joker’s origins to remain a mystery, the medium typically goes to great lengths to explain villainy through a single, iconic creation myth. Here we get a fetishistic Nazi montage caught somewhere between camp and outright offensive, meant to explain the most original of “The Unborn’s” supernatural details: Casey’s eyes, which have been brown her entire life, are slowly turning blue.

An exorcism is Casey’s only hope, and for this task, Goyer enlists “The Dark Knight’s” Gary Oldman to play the rabbi charged with casting the demon out. But pic doesn’t imbue Rabbi Sendak with any of the self-doubt that afflicted “The Exorcist’s” Father Merrin, and the actor seems content to phone in his performance.

To Goyer’s credit, he never shies away from showing the things that terrorize Casey and her circle, which range from a snarling dog with its head upside-down to a multi-tentacled Lovecraftian presence lurking in the walls of a public restroom. But before long, the connective tissue between scares starts to call attention to its own preposterousness. Whereas Japanese horror movies have been criticized for not making sense, “The Unborn” errs on the opposite extreme, coming off all the more ridiculous for over-explaining itself.

More than one option

• (Co) Rogue Pictures
• (Co) Rogue Pictures (Focus)

More than one option

• (Person) Brad Fuller
  Executive Producer, Producer, Associate Producer
• (Person) Brad Fuller
  ADR Editor, Apprentice, Assistant Editor
• (Person) Brad Fuller
  Assistant Director

More than one option

• (Film) The Dark Knight
  L Zharkova, Oleg Kovalov
• (Film) The Dark Knight

More than one option

• (Film) The Unborn
  1991 – Brooke Adams, Rodman Flender
• (Film) The Unborn
  Intira Jaroenpura, Bhandit Thongdee

More than one option

• (Film) The Texas Chainsaw Massacre
• (Film) The Texas Chain Saw Massacre

More than one option

• (Film) The Amityville Horror
  1979 – James Brolin, Stuart Rosenberg
• (Film) The Amityville Horror
  2005 – Ryan Reynolds, Andrew Douglas

More than one option

• (Film) The Grudge
• (Film) Ju-On

More than one option

• (Person) Jane Alexander
  Narrator, Executive Producer, Thanks
• (Person) Jane Alexander
• (Person) Jane Alexander
  Script Supervisor
• (Person) Jane Alexander
  Actor

Camera (Technicolor, widescreen), James Hawkinson; editor, Jeff Betancourt; music Ramin Djawadi; music supervisor, Spring Aspers; art director, Gary Baugh; set decorator, Desi Wolff; costume designer, Christine Wada; sound (Dolby/DTS), Curt Frisk; supervising sound editors, Aaron Glascock, Curt Schulkey; special makeup effects, Greg Nicotero, Howard Berger; visual effects supervisors, Nathan McGuinness, Mitchell S. Drain; visual effects, Asylum; assistant director, Craig Pinckes, casting, Juel Bestrop, Seth Yanklewitz. Reviewed at Mann Chinese 6, Los Angeles, Jan. 6, 2009. MPAA Rating: PG-13. Running time: 86 MIN.

 

Gran Torino

 

In the context of Clint Eastwood’s career as a star, an actor, and a filmmaker, “Gran Torino” is an endlessly fascinating movie. If only it were a good one.

Eastwood, of course, has long since reached the point where he can do as he damn well pleases, and one of the things that has pleased him in recent years is to drop a movie at the very end of the Oscar season and thoroughly reshuffle the field. “Million Dollar Baby” was one such movie; this awkwardly conflicted drama about inner-city racism, struggle, and redemption is not. Still, if you want to see Dirty Harry collide with Eastwood’s idea of the real world, “Gran Torino” is something to see.

In what he has announced is his final acting performance, the star plays Walt Kowalski, a Korean War vet and retired Detroit auto worker who has watched his inner-city neighborhood dwindle away until he’s the last white man standing. The film opens with his wife’s funeral – Walt’s dutiful, blobby sons (Brian Haley and Brian Howe) drive in from the suburbs with their nasty little children – after which the widower retires to his front porch like an old soldier surveying the battlefield.

Down the streets ride the gangbangers, cruising like complacent sharks; the surrounding houses are filled with an influx of immigrant Hmong, the mountain people of Southeast Asia. Walt looks at the mess the newcomers have made of their properties and growls. Really: He growls, like a cartoon dog.

“Gran Torino” shifts into gear when Thao (Bee Vang), the shy teenage boy next door, is bullied by a Hmong gang into trying to steal Walt’s prize possession, a green Gran Torino that sits shining and undriven in the old man’s garage. Walt brought it off the factory line himself, and so it stands for an entire vanished world – not to mention a vanished economy – that’s well worth protecting at rifle point.

To atone for Thao’s shame, his family orders him to help Walt out around the house, whether Walt wants the assistance or not. (He doesn’t.) The scenes in which the two come to know each other form the heart of “Gran Torino,” and the scenes between Walt and Thao’s sister Sue (Ahney Her, giving the film’s breeziest performance) are the film’s brain. Upwardly mobile and brutally illusion-free, Sue patiently instructs the retiree in the ways of her people and the ordeal of climbing up America’s ladder.

There’s sentimentality to this story, and it’s honest enough, but Eastwood has decided to keep it at bay by making his hero an unapologetic, venom-spewing racist. In part, this keeps the audience off-balance, because we’re never sure when and if Walt will disappear down the Korean foxhole in his mind. “Gran Torino” is alive to the web of racial and ethnic discontent in this country, but the script by Nick Schenk and Dave Johannson has a tin ear. When Walt and a barber friend (John Carroll Lynch) try to teach Thao how to cuss like a real man, the humor of the scene works but the language is dreadfully forced – a screenwriter’s conceit of how “real people” talk.

So much of “Gran Torino” plays like this – heartfelt and smart but with fatally off-kilter rhythms and thin, unbelievable characterizations. (Would suburban parents really let a teenage girl wear a belly shirt to her grandmother’s funeral? I don’t think so.) Eastwood is consciously playing with stereotypes here, up to and including a callow young priest (Christopher Carley, doing what he can with a thankless part), but he only brings them partway into the modern world. Tonally, the movie’s a botch – a melodrama that wants to be a work of realism but can’t figure out how.

One of those stereotypes, obviously, is the urban avenger Eastwood spent much of his early career establishing (with a lot more complexity than most critics credited him with at the time). Walt probably saw “Dirty Harry” more than once back in 1971, and it’s certainly how he thinks the world should behave. The real drama of “Gran Torino” lies in watching the character’s black-and-white mindset melt away under a steady diet of Hmong home cooking, replaced by a starker sense of duty.

It works and it doesn’t. The scene in which Walt faces down a group of street toughs harassing Sue is both gloriously funny and suspenseful, because this old, unbreakable man so completely crosses these bad boys’ wires. Yet as “Gran Torino” builds toward its conclusion, everything Eastwood is trying to stuff into one simple movie – justice, revenge, melting-pot America, career summation, religion – topples over into something much too close to camp. Are we ready for the Last Temptation of Clint? That’s what we get here.

Your reaction may depend upon how much affection you bring to this film, for Eastwood the ornery, intelligent movie icon, and for Eastwood the questing filmmaker. Some people have come out of early screenings intensely moved, others shaking their heads. The man has made the movie he wanted to, so the only question remaining is whether you feel lucky. Well? Do you, punk?

 

The Day the Earth Stood Still

 

“The Day the Earth Stood Still” need not have taken its title so seriously that the plot stands still along with it. There isn’t much here you won’t remember from the 1951 classic, even if you haven’t seen it. What everyone knows is that a spaceship lands on Earth, a passenger named Klaatu steps out and is shot, and then a big metal man named Gort walks out and has rays shooting from its eyes, and the Army opens fire.

That movie is at No. 202 in IMDb’s top 250. Its message, timely for the nuclear age, is that mankind would be exterminated if we didn’t stop killing one another. The message of the 2008 version is that we should have voted for Al Gore. This didn’t require Klaatu and Gort. That’s what I’m here for. Actually, Klaatu is non-partisan and doesn’t name names, but his message is clear: Planets capable of sustaining life are so rare that the aliens cannot allow us to destroy life on this one. So they’ll have to kill us.

The aliens are advanced enough to zip through the galaxy, yet have never discovered evolution, which should have reassured them life on earth would survive the death of mankind. Their space spheres have landed all over the planet, and a multitude of species have raced up and thrown themselves inside, and a Department of Defense expert intuits: “They’re arks! What comes next?” The Defense Secretary (Kathy Bates) intones: “A flood.” So this is the first sci-fi movie based on Intelligent Design, except the aliens plan to save all forms of life except the intelligent one.

All this is presented in an expensive, good-looking film that is well-made by Scott Derrickson, but to no avail. As is conventional in such films, the fate of the planet narrows down to a woman, a child and Klaatu. Jennifer Connelly plays Helen Benson, a Harvard scientist who is summoned by the government to advise on the glowing sphere in Central Park. She has to leave behind her beloved little Jacob (Jaden Smith), her late husband’s son by his first wife (more detail than we require, I think; just “her son” would have been fine). She meets Klaatu (Keanu Reeves), who looks human (and we already know why), but is a representative, or negotiator, or human-looking spokesthing or something, for the aliens.

She discovers his purpose, takes him with her in her car, flees a federal dragnet, walks in the woods, introduces him to her brilliant scientist friend (John Cleese), lets him listen to a little Bach, tells him we can change if we’re only given the chance, and expresses such love for Jacob that Klaatu is so moved, he looks on dispassionately.

That’s no big deal, because Klaatu looks on everything dispassionately. Maybe he has no passions. He becomes the first co-star in movie history to elude falling in love with Jennifer Connelly. Keanu Reeves is often low-key in his roles, but in this movie, his piano has no keys at all. He is so solemn, detached and uninvolved he makes Mr. Spock look like Hunter S. Thompson at closing time. When he arrives at a momentous decision, he announces it as if he has been rehearsing to say: “Yes, one plus one equals two. Always has, always will.”

Jennifer Connelly and Kathy Bates essentially keep the human interest afloat. Young Jaden Smith is an appealing actor, but his character Jacob could use a good spanking, what with endangering the human race with a snit fit. Nobody is better than Connelly at looking really soulful, and I am not being sarcastic, I am sincere. There are scenes here requiring both actors to be soulful, and she takes up the extra burden effortlessly.

As for Bates, she’s your go-to actress for pluck and plainspoken common sense. She announces at the outset that the president and vice president have been evacuated to an undisclosed location (not spelling out whether undisclosed to her, or by her), and they stay there for the rest of the movie, not even calling her, although the president does make an unwise call to a military man. Make of this what you will. I suspect a political undertow.

One more detail. I will not disclose how the aliens plan to exterminate human life, because it’s a neat visual. Let me just observe that the destruction of human life involves the annihilation of Shea Stadium, which doesn’t even have any humans in it at the time. And that since the destruction begins in the mountains of the Southwest, yet approaches Shea from the east, the task must be pretty well completed by the time Jennifer Connelly needs to look soulful. And that Klaatu is a cockeyed optimist if he thinks they can hide out in an underpass in the park.

 

Slumdog Millionaire

I’ll keep this simple: Cancel whatever you’re doing tonight and go see “Slumdog Millionaire” instead. Yes, you, the girl obsessed with “Twilight” and the guy still hung up on “The Dark Knight.” Take the grandparents, too, and the teenagers. Everyone can play.

You’ve never heard of the actors. A third of the film is in Hindi. Much of it takes place in the most fetid, poverty-ridden corners of the Indian subcontinent, and most of it isn’t nice. Yet this sprawling, madly romantic fairy-tale epic is the kind of deep-dish audience-rouser we’ve long given up hoping for from Hollywood. “Slumdog” is a soaring return to form for director Danny Boyle (“Trainspotting”), but mostly it’s just a miracle of mainstream pop moviemaking – the sort of thing modern filmmakers aren’t supposed to make anymore. Except they just did.

Unfolding with the scope and brisk energy of a Dickens novel transplanted to Asia, “Slumdog Millionaire” is the tale of Jamal Malik (Dev Patel), a lanky, sad-faced Mumbai slum kid who, when we first meet him, is poised to win 20 million rupees on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire” He has already aced the first rounds; tonight, the entire country will be tuning in to hear his final answer. The show’s host, a blow-dried slickster played by Bollywood superstar Anil Kapoor, is not happy. So much so, in fact, that he has arranged for the local cops to give the kid a working-over.

Is Jamal a genius? Is he a cheat? How would a young man with no education and a life on the streets know whose picture is on a US $100 bill? That’s what a police lieutenant (Irrfan Khan, the father in “The Namesake”) hopes to beat out of him. When torture doesn’t work, he sits the boy down in front of a videotape of his appearances on the show and demands to know, question by question, how Jamal did it. And thus an entire life unfurls before us, as does the history of modern India itself.

Boyle, working from Simon Beaufoy’s adaptation of a novel by Vikas Swarup, gives us Jamal’s unsentimental education in head-spinning, vertiginous flashbacks that become the main story line. Each answer on the TV show becomes a key that unlocks another chapter of the boy’s past, a pat narrative device kept from cliche by the deft, vital filmmaking.

The first sequence, prompted by a question involving a famous Indian movie star – the sort of factoid any Mumbai kid would know – shows the hero’s early years as both horrifying and exuberant. Jamal (played as a child by Ayush Mahesh Khedekar) and his brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail) take their desperate existence as merely the soup in which they swim; Boyle and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle visualize that soup with an astonishing pullback that reveals the vastness of Mumbai’s tin-roof chaos.

The siblings’ innocence, such as it is, ends when their mother (Sanchita Choudary) is killed in the anti-Muslim riots of 1992-93 and they take to the streets, picking up an urchin girl named Latika (Rubina Ali) in the process. The three small musketeers are taken in by a smiling villain (Ankur Vikal) who runs a school for child beggars; what this Fagin does to create an extra-special line of underage street singers marks the grueling nadir of “Slumdog Millionaire,” yet the movie, knowing such things happen, doesn’t let us look away.

The trio grow into adolescence and young adulthood, by which point the brothers have chosen their respective paths. The adult Salim (Madhur Mittal) has gone for quick cash and gangster glory; Latika (Freida Pinto) is the kept plaything of a mobster boss (Mahesh Manjrekar). Jamal has found work as a gofer at one of the new Mumbai’s energetic, youthful call centers. He serves tea, absorbs everything around him, and, when needed, dons the headset to deal with cranky old ladies in Scotland.

Good brother, bad brother, childhood sweetheart torn between the underworld and true love: We’ve all been here before. Warner Brothers and MGM used to dine out on this stuff in the 1930s, with actors like Jimmy Cagney and Pat O’Brien and Ann Sheridan in the roles. Boyle cherishes the tale’s popcorn durability, though – it’s an old story because it works – and his team retrofits it, polishes it up, and sets it careening.

Mantle’s images and Chris Dickens’ editing are infused with the go-go colors and rhythms of the subcontinent; the co-direction by Loveleen Tandan adds to the sense of teeming sensory overload; the music keens with beauty and corn. (Even the subtitles feel fresh, popping up like speech balloons all over the screen.) The characters are archetypes draped with specifics of time and place and, in Jamal’s case, of character. As Patel plays him, he seems too studious – too inward-directed – to be the hero of such a big movie, yet that’s why we come to love him. In the rushing slipstream of “Slumdog Millionaire,” he’s our anchor.

This sort of headlong melodrama has long since dropped out of fashion in our irony-drenched age, and some audiences, I’m sure, will turn up their noses. There have been grumblings that the film’s just too pretty, and that a movie about India directed by an Englishman can’t be taken seriously. Allow me to float the idea that it’s possible to talk yourself out of intense moviegoing pleasure.

And “Slumdog Millionaire” is a pleasure, as Jamal negotiates every obstacle before him (including, in one nerve-wracking turn of events, a psychological showdown with Kapoor’s preening host), and teeters between intelligence, luck, and a destiny that he has in large part made for himself. In his story, the movie implies, is that of an entire modern nation. After the dust has settled, the Bollywood dance scene that explodes under the closing credits feels both incongruous and earned: Young India kicking up its heels.

You may even feel like dancing in the aisles yourself. Sure, the real world doesn’t always work this way. Have you forgotten that this is one of the reasons why we go to movies in the first place?