New movies to be released tomorrow on DVD

(500) DAYS OF SUMMER (2009)
Grade: A-
There are two words that, I feel, perfectly describe (500) Days of Summer and ought to be words of recommendation. But they are words so debased in common usage that I fear that invoking them might turn some folks away from a fresh and smart and funny and delightful little film.

With great caution and trepidation, then, I unpack them.

The words are..."cute" and "quirky."

I know: kiss of death, right? But the cuteness and quirkiness of (500) Days are both earned and authentic. It’s a film of obvious intelligence that doesn’t care if it looks silly for having a big, visible heart. At the same time, it’s built and played with an inventive and spry blend of wit and energy that feels more homemade and personal than mass-manufactured and calculated. It’s a DIY-style film with the assuredness of mature craft. In fact, it’s so pleasurable and true that it might even be able to rescue words like "cute" and "quirky" and turn them into badges of honor. (Maybe....)

The film is set more or less between the ears of Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt), a decent enough guy who studied to be an architect but has wound up working as a greeting card writer. On the job, he sets eyes on a new receptionist named Summer (Zooey Deschanel), and he falls. Hard.
After a strained how-do-you-do, they start to hang out: singing karaoke and drinking and going to movies and even making love. But they’re not in love. Or, at least, Summer isn’t. She doesn’t believe in love, you see; it’s one of her tics, like the belief that Ringo is the greatest of the Beatles. Tom, though, has been waiting for true love all his life, and he doesn’t care if his friends, his co-workers, his cuttingly savvy little sister (played with relish by Chloe Grace Moretz) or even his sweetie know it. He is a romantic, and he has fallen for a cynic. And, poor sap, he thinks he can change her.

The highs and lows of Tom’s situation are conveyed in jumbled chronology (the 500 days of the relationship are presented in shuffled order), amid a panoply of new and old music (Hall and Oates and the Smiths, meet Feist and Wolfmother), and with a spirit on behalf of director Marc Webb that’s sufficiently playful to allow room for a cheekily ebullient production number.
Chiefly, though, the complexities are conveyed by the fine Gordon-Levitt, a child actor (Third Rock from the Sun) who has blossomed into a daring, confident and elastic young leading man. His Tom is a goof and a gallant, riding an emotional ferris wheel of bliss and agony, doubt and determination, fear and daring. Opposite, Deschanel absolutely nails Summer’s flitty, cool and casual nature (and sings the McGuire Sisters’ Sugartime predictably spiffily). Together, even in a tale of strained relations, they’re superb, a twentysomething Hepburn and Tracy tricked out with iPods and irony.

The friskiness of (500) Days (those parentheses, for instance) might strike some as glib or juvenile, much in the way that a backlash formed against Juno once its distinctive tone caught the ear of a larger audience. But the film does a lovely job of balancing emotional clarity, formal trickery, pop sweetness, and heartfelt narrative. It is, yes, cute, and it is, yes, quirky. And it is entirely justified, estimable and loveable in being those things.

ALL ABOUT STEVE (2009)
Grade: D-
Nothing against windbags or wackily dressed crossword-puzzle constructors, but I’m not sure a logorrheic cruciverbalist in go-go boots is someone I want to spend an hour and a half with in a darkened theater. In fact, after just a few minutes with her, I wanted to steal the woman’s shiny red footwear and use it to dropkick her straight back to the trash heap of bad movie ideas.

It pains me to say it, because I like Sandra Bullock. She’s smart, unpretentious and perky, three characteristics many in Hollywood would be wise to emulate. I wanted to like All About Steve, too, and not merely because it co-stars hunk-of-the-hour Bradley Cooper as Bullock’s unwilling love object. The notion of a crossword puzzler as a film heroine appealed to my inner word nerd, sparking hope for future epic dramas starring Scrabble champions and cryptogram fanatics. Sigh.

All About Steve is a drab name for a dreadful movie. A slightly better title might be There’s Something About Steve — or even All About Mary, because director Phil Traill and writer Kim Barker care about Steve only to the extent that Mary’s stalking him. Steve (Cooper) is the unfortunate fellow who shows up for a blind date with blabbermouth Mary (Bullock), who’s instantly smitten and jumps him like a rutting hyena in the cab of his truck.

He’s OK with this until Mary starts talking nonstop, and he’s even OK with that until she compares their sudden coupling to "two rare-earth elements brought together by the Norns — that’s Scandinavian for the destinies." End of sudden coupling. Start of Mary’s new career stalking Steve, a cameraman for a cable news network who covers the disaster beat with an ego-crazed reporter (Thomas Haden Church) and harried producer (Ken Jeong, Cooper’s cast mate from The Hangover).

Trailing Steve is a fairly simple matter of pinpointing the next crisis, which might be a hostage situation in Tucson or a mounting protest at a hospital in Oklahoma City, where parents are arguing over whether to amputate a baby’s third leg. If that doesn’t tickle your funny bone (birth defects: hilarious!), just wait until Mary and a couple of newfound friends (D.J. Qualls and Katy Mixon) head for Galveston in a ‘76 Gremlin.

We know from recent experience that stymied obsessive love can be a delightful basis for romantic comedy, but All About Steve has nothing like the melting heart of (500) Days of Summer. There’s no footing in reality. Nothing about it feels authentic: not the blathering Mary, not the lifeless secondary characters, not the bromide-happy dialogue or the plot that twists less often than it spasms.

Twice for our benefit, Mary lists the elements of any successful crossword, and they aren’t that different from the keys to a decent movie. The pertinent questions are: "Is it solvable? Is it entertaining? Does it sparkle?" The answers are: No, no, and no.

BEYOND A REASONABLE DOUBT (2009)
Grade: C-
In theory, digging into the RKO archives for remake possibilities is a fine idea, but this redo of Fritz Lang’s 1956 film noir is no improvement on a potboiler that was no great shakes to begin with. Director-screenwriter Peter Hyams has said that he wanted to redo this legal thriller with younger stars, but the lack of charisma exhibited by leads Jesse Metcalfe and Amber Tamblyn doesn’t help matters, and not even the stalwart presence of Michael Douglas fails to provide the proceedings with sufficient gravitas.

As is typical with remakes, this incarnation suffers from a bloated running time nearly a half-hour longer than the original and several gratuitous actions sequences that don’t add appreciably to the suspense level.

The convoluted plot revolves around the efforts of ambitious TV reporter C.J. Nicholas (Metcalfe) to get the goods on a corrupt and politically ambitious district attorney (Douglas) whom he suspects of planting evidence. Along with his eager-beaver cameraman (Joel David Moore), C.J. improbably sets out to get himself accused of the murder of a prostitute, contriving evidence after the fact that will reveal the D.A.’s crooked methods.

Needless to say, his plan goes awry when he’s sentenced to the death penalty and the exculpating evidence is gotten rid of by the D.A.’s chain-smoking henchman.

Complicating matters further is C.J.’s burgeoning romantic relationship with a lawyer (Tamblyn) working for the D.A. who naturally finds herself facing a serious conflict of interest.

The far-fetched plot might have worked if it had been executed with more stylistic finesse and if the performances were more engaging, but Metcalfe’s protagonist is hard to root for, Tamblyn’s love interest is bland, and Douglas is unable to make his one-dimensional role remotely credible.
Hyams’ screenplay mainly ignores the social aspects of the original, which took a highly dim view of the death penalty. As is usual for the director, he also serves as his own cinematographer, with the results displaying his usual technical slickness.

DISTRICT 9 (2009)
Grade: B+
For decades — at least since Orson Welles scared the daylights out of radio listeners with War of the Worlds back in 1938 — the public has embraced the terrifying prospect of alien invasion. But what if, notwithstanding the occasional humanist fable like E.T., all those movies and television programs have been inculcating a potentially toxic form of interplanetary prejudice?

District 9 a smart, swift film from the South African director Neill Blomkamp (who now lives in Canada and who wrote the screenplay with Terri Tatchell), raises such a possibility in part by inverting an axiomatic question of the U.F.O. genre. In place of the usual mystery — what are they going to do to us? — this movie poses a different kind of hypothetical puzzle. What would we do to them? The answer, derived from intimate knowledge of how we have treated one another for centuries, is not pretty.

A busy opening flurry of mock-news images and talking-head documentary chin scratching fills in a grim, disturbingly plausible scenario. Back in the 1980s a giant spacecraft stalled in the skies over Johannesburg. On board were a large number of starving and disoriented creatures, who were rescued and placed in a temporary refugee camp in the part of the city that gives the film its title. Over the next 20 years the settlement became a teeming shantytown like so many others in the developing world, with the relatively minor distinction of being home to tall, skinny bipeds with insectlike faces and bodies that seem to combine biological and mechanical features. Though there is evidence that those extraterrestrials — known in derogatory slang as prawns because of their vaguely crustacean appearance — represent an advanced civilization, their lives on Earth are marked by squalor and dysfunction. And they are viewed by South Africans of all races with suspicion, occasional pity and xenophobic hostility.

The South African setting hones the allegory of District 9 to a sharp topical point. That country’s history of apartheid and its continuing social problems are never mentioned, but they hardly need to be. And the film’s implications extend far beyond the boundaries of a particular nation, which is taken as more or less representative of the planet as a whole.

No group, from the mostly white soldiers and bureaucrats who corral and abuse the prawns to the Nigerian gangsters who prey upon the aliens and exploit their addiction to cat food, is innocent. And casual bigotry turns out to be the least of the problems facing the exiles. As it progresses, District 9 uncovers a horrific program of medical experimentation yoked to a near-genocidal agenda of corporate greed. A company called M.N.U. (it stands, none too subtly, for Multi-National United) has taken over administration of the prawn population, which means resettling the aliens in a remote enclosure reminiscent of the Bantustans of the apartheid era.

The M.N.U. executive charged with carrying out this program is Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley), a nervous nebbish whose father-in-law (Louis Minnaar) is the head of the company. Cowardly, preening and hopeless at projecting authority, Wikus is the kind of guy who gives nepotism a bad name. It says a lot about Mr. Blomkamp’s sense of humor, and about his view of his own species, that this pathetic little paper pusher is his chosen agent of mankind’s potential moral redemption.

But I’m getting ahead of the story, and perhaps overselling the allegory. Not that the metaphorical resonances of District 9 aren’t rich and thought provoking. But the filmmakers don’t draw them out with a heavy, didactic hand. Instead, in the best B-movie tradition, they embed their ideas in an ingenious, propulsive and suspenseful genre entertainment, one that respects your intelligence even as it makes your eyes pop (and, once in a while, your stomach turn).

The early pseudo-documentary conceit, which uses footage that pretends to have been harvested from news choppers and security cameras as well as some by the unseen crew accompanying Wikus on his tour of the prawn camp, fades away after a while. The academic authorities do too, having served the dual functions of providing narrative exposition and demonstrating the high-minded uselessness of official liberal discourse.

Once a terrible accident befalls Wikus, we are at his side and under his skin, and District 9 subtly shifts from speculative science fiction to zombie bio-horror and then, less subtly, turns into an escape-action-chase movie full of explosions, gunplay and vehicular mayhem.

In the midst of it all you almost take for granted the carefully rendered details of the setting, the tightness of the editing and the inventiveness of the special effects. Not the least of these are the aliens themselves, who are made expressive and soulful without quite being anthropomorphized. (Their whirring, clicking speech, partly understood by Wikus and others who work with the creatures, is translated for the rest of us via subtitles.)

One in particular, named Christopher Johnson (Jason Cope), becomes Wikus’s protector and ward, and their relationship turns District 9, in its final act, into an intergalactic buddy picture, with some intriguing (and also possibly disappointing) sequel opportunities left open.

At its core the film tells the story — hardly an unfamiliar one in the literature of modern South Africa — of how a member of the socially dominant group becomes aware of the injustice that keeps him in his place and the others, his designated inferiors, in theirs. The cost he pays for this knowledge is severe, as it must be, given the dreadful contours of the system. But if the film’s view of the world is bleak, it is not quite nihilistic. It suggests that sometimes the only way to become fully human is to be completely alienated.

EXTRACT (2009)
Grade: C
Sometimes you’re willing to give a comedy the benefit of the doubt. If you laugh, that’s enough. But a good movie can connect that comedy to how we live in the world. Or it takes risks and demonstrates a real sensibility. Mike Judge usually gets most of the way there. His animated television shows — Beavis and Butt-Head and King of the Hill are two — found perverse comic life in Middle American monotony. Characters stagnated on the sofa in front of the television or yammered around a grill in somebody’s backyard. Those shows bespoke an America where the suburban normal absorbed the weird the way a paper towel accommodates a spill. Like the folks over at The Simpsons, Judge is a comedian who can find the poetic glories in stupidity.

You can feel him straining for both effects in Extract, a meandering, only fitfully funny live-action comedy with Jason Bateman as Joel, the owner of a flavor extract business. Joel exists in chronic frustration. His employees on the manufacturing floor are nincompoops whose incompetence manages to cost a worker named Step (Clifton Collins Jr.) one of his testicles. The company is on the verge of being sold to General Mills, which is waiting to see if Step sues before it makes a move.

Lately Joel’s been trying to get home before 8 p.m., the exact time his wife, Suzie (Kristen Wiig), loses interest in sex with him. (She would rather watch Dancing With the Stars.) There’s a possibility for relief with Cindy (Mila Kunis), a grifter with the pertness of a Maxim cover girl. She seduces her way into Joel’s company and Step’s life for his lawsuit money, her sloe eyes popping open when she reads about the accident in the paper. (The camera jerks ecstatically between jackpot phrases on the page — "million-dollar settlement" and "lost a testicle.") Joel wants to sleep with her but doesn’t feel he can unless he knows Suzie is cheating, too. So he hires a pretty, young dunce (Dustin Milligan, in a wonderful haze) to pretend to be their pool boy and bed her. To Joel’s astonishment, it works hilariously well.

Extract is the opposite of Office Space, Judge’s now-beloved film about a life spent toiling amid cubicles. In that movie, the bosses were morons. In this one, the morons are the drones. A movie that mocks their incompetence would have to draw clear archetypes or create recognizably human characters.

Unfortunately, Judge is just whacking at piñata-size sketches.

One reason the popularity of Office Space grows with time (it was released with no fanfare in 1999) is that more people enter the workforce and discover they too work for idiots. It takes a heartless, more eagle-eyed farceur to make a movie about the idiots who work for you. Like the hero in Judge’s previous movie, a monotonous concept piece called Idiocracy, Joel is usually the smartest man in the room. But he needs a foil. For a minute, it looks as if might be Cindy, but she turns into the cupcake you were afraid she’d be.

Nevertheless, there’s classic screwball comedy lurking in this material, a cynic’s recognition that the world runs crookedly. But the movie is logy and repetitive. If we see the ubiquitous utility player David Koechner once as Joel’s pathologically talkative neighbor, we see him a dozen times. And even a little of Gene Simmons’s sleazy ambulance-chaser is too much. The scenes clump together. Rather than escalate to a head, they shuffle sideways.

Bateman, at least, reaches a boil. He’s very good when both backed into obnoxiousness and required to play it straight. The look on his face after he takes a hit off a bong as big as a light saber is priceless. He looks like he might actually choke to death. That moment is a bit in a movie choking on bits — including a few good ones with Beth Grant as the battiest of all the worker bees, Ben Affleck as a bartender with a curly wig, and a dim J.K. Simmons with no wig at all. All we have here are bits, so many, in fact, that Extract feels more like a collection of crumbs.

IT MIGHT GET LOUD (2009)
Grade: B
Rockers out there, it’s time to turn off Guitar Hero and turn on to the heroes of guitar in It Might Get Loud, a six-string "summit" featuring virtuosos of the ‘60s, ‘80s, and aughts.
They are: Jimmy Page, silver-maned lion of licks, guitar supremo of the Yardbirds and Led Zeppelin; the Edge, wool-capped wizard of reverb for U2; and Jack White, pork-pie-hatted plucker of the Raconteurs and White Stripes.

In this electrifying triptych from Davis Guggenheim (An Inconvenient Truth), Page is the extroverted performer caressing his ax like a lover, Edge the cerebral innovator of sound effects presiding over a high-tech arsenal, and White the eccentric Luddite favoring handmade instruments and effects.

The only things these guys would seem to have in common is their instrument and the fact that they are bipeds living in the 21st century.

Do these three artists, representatives of different generations and philosophies — not to mention sartorial styles — have much to say to each other? Glad you asked. Perhaps not, although the movie does climax with their surprisingly seamless, if not exactly timeless, jam on the Band’s signature song, The Weight. But they have a lot to say to the audience.

It’s in the individual interviews, where Guggenheim draws out his subjects, that the movie draws you in. (I say this as a U2 fan, one who never much liked Led Zep and who respects the White Stripes in concept more than I admire them musically.)

With varying degrees of success, the filmmaker gets each musician to talk about the personal and musical roots that blossomed into his technique. All of them worked in the musical eddies (skiffle for Page, punk for Edge and punk blues for White) before making their mark on mainstream rock.

And all of them are walking, strumming, keen-eared encyclopedias of music, helping the tone-deaf hear critically and appreciate the history, politics and poetry of the guitar.