The Lego Movie

The Lego Movie might seem on the surface like a piece of kid fluff. But it's actually a brilliant movie that works on multiple levels, like Rocky and Bullwinkle used to, with lots of puns: In Lego World, our hero, Emmett, has to search for the legendary Piece of Resistance, for example. Emmett and his band, led by wizard Vituvius (voiced by Morgan Freeman) are battling Lord Business (voiced by Will Ferrell). Lord Business wants to lock down everything in the world with the mysterious Kragle, so that the residents of the various Lego environments can't keep rearranging the carefully constructed buildings and spaceships. After all, it's vitally important to follow the printed directions and not have all this anarchy. But Emmett, Vitusius, Wyldstyle, and the other Master Builders want to go their own way and construct spaceships out of roadways, racecars out of saloons, and pirate ships out of buildings. In the end, Emmett and a small person convince The Man Upstairs that some amount of chaos in the world is not a bad thing.

Tampopo

Contrast The Ramen Girl with Jûzô Itami's 1985 masterpiece Tampopo, which is a brilliant, layered comedy. A truck driver happens upon a noodle shop operated by a widow. The widow is not a very good noodle chef but the truck driver agrees to help her improve. Her story is interleaved with other lovely comedic scenes involving food: a gangster gourmet and his beautiful girlfriend make sexual adventure in a hotel out of room service, a matron teaches debutantes to eat western style; executives can't read the French menu they're handed and are shown up by the office boy. Meanwhile, our cowboy truck driver and the noodle-cooking widow go on a quest to learn what how to make her better. They spy on other shops in the neighborhood, sneaking looks at their garbage. They are aided by a very wealthy patron whose life they have saved, not with the Heimlich maneuver, but with a vacuum cleaner. When they find the Ramen Master he's not in a limousine, but in a hobo camp among other epicureans, who wax poetic about the state of the dumpsters of various famous restaurants. In the end, of course, our heroine learns to make excellent ramen, her restaurant is successful, and the truck driver can ride off into the sunset.

Friday night double-feature: Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag / Snakes on a Plane

If you have not seen it, please allow me to recommend an amusing old Joe Pesci movie called Eight Heads in a Duffel Bag, in which a New Jersey mobster has to take proof of a gangland hit --- the aforementioned heads --- to the boss across the country. Of course, a medical student on his plane has the identical duffel bag, and they manage to exchange luggage. The medical student is heading to Mexico on vacation with his fiancé's parents, who are hilariously played by George Hamilton and Dyan Cannon. The mob boss is starting to believe that the hit never took place. The medical student's fiancé and her mother discover the heads. Pesci's character has to track down the medical student. Mexican gangsters and police, hotel staff, dogs and coyotes, and heads stolen from the medical school all add twists to the story. 

We watched this in a Friday night double-feature with Samuel L Jackson's Snakes on a Plane, which I'd never managed to see.  It is exactly what it claims to be. (Indeed, when the movie first came out and Samuel L Jackson was interviewed on The Daily Show, his answer to Jon Stewert's question about the movie was direct and succinct: "Well, Jon, it's about snakes. And they're on a plane.") Jackson is a character in the movie, rather than carrying the whole thing by himself, which is a good thing. Roughly, the plot is that Jackson is an FBI agent who has to transport a witness from Hawaii to Los Angeles, but the mobster he's going to testify against has put poisonous snakes on the plane to prevent that from happening. It's pretty much as you'd expect: the couple joining the Mile High Club are the first to get attacked, the obnoxious businessman passenger gets it, the mom with the baby are saved by a brave stewardess, the two brothers traveling to meet their mom in LA help each other. There is some suspense, but think of it as a suspenseful comedy and you'll be fine.

The Amateurs & Zack and Miri Make a Porno

"The difference between an amateur and a professional is that the professional doesn't wait to be in the right mood."  --- William Arthur Herring

Picture a small town, where there's a guy who decides that the best way to get him out of his mid-life crisis and the town out of its doldrums is to make a porn movie. Thus, The Amateurs. Jeff Bridges stars as the guy who puts the town up to the project. Jeanne Tripplehorn as his ex-wife, Patrick Fugit (from Almost Famous) as the video store manager turned cinematographer, Tim Blake Nelson, Joe Pantoliano, Glenne Headly, Ted Danson and William Fichtner as the townspeople. I almost bailed out on this at about the 40 minute mark, but it's worth watching to the end. It doesn't come out as you might expect: though the good guys definitely win in the end.

This ended up on our screen because Netflix recommended it when I was on a Kevin Smith orgy and wanted to watch Zack and Miri Make a Porno.  Unfortunately, they should have recommended The Amateurs instead of Zack and Miri, not in addition to.  Kevin Smith's rendition of the story is inferior in every regard, from humor, to attractiveness of the actors, to good taste, to overall quality.

The Secret Life of Walter Mitty

James Thurber was one of the great American humorists, and in 1939 he wrote a lovely two-page, 2100-word story in The New Yorker entitled The Secret Life of Walter Mitty. Most recently, the title has been co-opted for a film starring Ben Stiller, which is connected to the story only by the title character having daydreams. In the film, our Walter Mitty is in charge of the photo department at Life magazine, and is unable to find a critical negative from the star photographer on the staff. This allows him to stop daydreaming and start going out on real adventures in search of the photographer so he can ask where the negative is. In the process, he gets the help of the girl he's admired from afar. Once we get past the conceit of Mitty's daydreams the action can actually take off, and it becomes a very sweet movie, with some breathtaking photography.