Drag Me to Hell is, to borrow from Roger Ebert, a “bruised forearm movie” and a return for Sam Raimi to his wild roots, specifically the Evil Dead movies, exuberant splatter-fests still guaranteed to push the buttons and tighten the stomachs of all but the most jaded of horror aficionados. Although the PG-13 rating ensures that no limbs are dismembered, the steady flow of spittle, maggots, and blood seems specifically calculated to push that rating to its limit. A loose remake of a Jacques Tourneur masterpiece called Curse of the Demon (in design if not in execution), it finds Alison Lohman’s insecure loan officer under a gypsy curse that if left undone will send her straight to You Know Where. Her morals are tested in the most rudimentary ways, culminating in a telegraphed twist that’s more jokey than judgmental.

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The Boys: The Sherman Brothers’ Story, contrary to what its advertising campaign would have you believe, is significantly more than an paean to the Magic of Disney—it’s an instructive example of how art can be created under tumultuous circumstances. And the multi-decade collaboration between two personable but behaviorally incompatible brothers, Robert B. (a romantic) and Richard M. Sherman (a sentimentalist), saw its fair share of tumult. Immensely popular in their day, the Shermans were the only fulltime songwriters at Disney throughout the ‘60s, scoring such cherishables as Mary Poppins, Bedknobs and Broomsticks, The Jungle Book, The Sword in the Stone, and The Many Adventures of Winnie the Pooh.

Though the issue isn’t pressed as far as you’d like, various divergent tensions led to the brothers disbanding and leading separate lives for a number of years, even keeping their respective families secreted from each other.

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The Brothers Bloom, a conman comedy by Rian Johnson, is a film eager to be liked, and as such seems fated to have the opposite effect. “Quirky” is too complimentary an adjective for the film’s cloying brand of humor, which seems borrowed, lifted, or flat out filched from sources as various as Jean-Pierre Melville and Frank Oz. Johnson, whose second film this is, seems to relish trying out new ideas, but he tries too hard to curry favor with his audience—the entire movie can be reduced to a formula: adorable stars (Rachel Weisz, Adrien Brody, Mark Ruffalo, Rinko Kikuchi) wearing cute costumes posing in front of postcard-pretty backdrops. (Shot in Serbia, Romania, and the Czech Republic, Bloom certainly looks attractive.)

Johnson’s debut, Brick, which I admired when it came out, was so outlandishly conceived that it succeeded as a fantasy.

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And so we have the first grand film of 2009. I use the word “grand” because the reviewer’s usual fallback, “great,” is tossed around so carelessly these days as to lose all meaning. Up is no masterpiece, but it provides what most moviegoers secretly want: an unabashedly emotional experience. The high point hits early and lasts about five minutes. It comes in the form of a flowing montage of moments in the marriage of a pixie-ish redheaded girl named Ellie and a diffident, square-faced balloon seller named Carl Fredrickson, who will become the hero of the story. Set to a shamelessly heart-tugging Michael Giacchino score, it lands an emotional blow akin to an Acme-sized anvil drop. Movies are in a unique position to do this sort of thing, to compress and distill, “turning the accomplishment of many years into an hourglass,” to quote an obscure English playwright. It’s refreshing to see a mainstream movie—a family movie—step back and consider the long view of life.    

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A deep-rooted desire for a variety of cinematic experiences led me away from the bright multiplexes of my Orange County burg and into the smaller, less brightly lit buildings that bore the name of Laemmle, L.A.’s art house theater chain. This is what I found:  

Tokyo. A recent example of the anthology film, Tokyo is comprised of three shorts by three directors, and connected only by a common locale: the metropolis of the title. Michel Gondry’s segment begins absorbingly with an aspiring filmmaker and his girlfriend attempting to secure an apartment while crashing at a friend’s place. It takes shape only in the final few minutes, at which point it descends into surrealism, offering the jarring visual of a girl transmogrifying into a chair. The middle segment, by Leos Carax, is an invigoratingly strange political parable about a red-bearded, cross-eyed, long finger-nailed imp that emerges from the sewer to wreak havoc on the population. Opening with a striking extended shot set to the original Godzilla theme music, it progresses surely and unpredictably to a bizarre climax, culminating in a prankish visual gag. The third segment, helmed by Bong Joon-ho, about a recluse who falls in love with a pizza delivery girl, doesn’t add up to much, but it’s done with an artist’s eye. The sum total of the three works amounts to an entertaining, well made, but ultimately disjointed omnibus.  

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If I haven’t been inspired to write about movies lately, it’s for the simple reason that so much of what’s offered these days is uninspiring. Audiences are so desperate for a good time, a distraction, a laugh that they make bad movies popular. Are the pickings so slim that a nominal comedy about a hypoglycemic security guard (Paul Blart: Mall Cop), a sequel of a sequel of a sequel of a remake of a Roger Corman road movie (Fast and Furious), and a kiddie flick whose entire scenario is represented in the title (Monsters vs. Aliens) represent the three most desirable choices in mainstream entertainment? Is that really the best we can do? 

An undiscriminating viewer will not care what he sees as long as it diverts for a while, but a cinephile must choose his battles wisely. His hard-earned dollar must not be spent in support of an industry that has no respect for his taste or intelligence. I saw exactly three—three!—typical, middle-of-the-road Hollywood movies in the last ten weeks and that seems about as dry a spell as I can remember.

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A hailstorm of expectation notwithstanding, my hunch is that history will soon forget Watchmen, an obedient translation of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons’s influential—some would say landmark—graphic novel (or “comic book,” to the uninitiated). It is mainly a question of timing. Moore’s deconstructed superhero saga may have seemed fresh on its release nearly a quarter of a century ago, but as enshrined by Zack Snyder (the “visionary” director of 300), it comes off as trendy, just another overblown entry in a long line of revisionist action flicks.

The story takes place in an imaginary 1985 and revolves around a second generation of freelance vigilantes known as the Watchmen. Once esteemed by the American public, they have officially retired from fighting crime. Some retain visibility as private citizens, while others recede into the margins of society. The plot kicks into gear when one of their number—the viciously misanthropic Comedian—is murdered in his apartment by an unseen assailant, indicating a conspiracy to eliminate all Watchmen. Snyder doesn’t sustain much interest in the whodunit aspect of the storyline, spending the lion’s share of the 163-minute running time probing the motivations of the rest of the costumed clan: the psychologically scarred Rorschach (who narrates in the noir style); the intellectually superior Ozymandias; the withdrawn, gadget-loving Nite Owl; the voluptuous, love-starved Silk Spectre; and most impressive of all, Dr. Manhattan, a scientist turned by a haywire experiment into a buck-naked blue demigod. When it finally becomes clear who is doing what to whom and why, the film takes on the same morally relativistic posturing that burdened The Dark Knight.

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A brief report of the first two months of the movie calendar, Oscars exempted:

Chandni Chowk to China, soon to be released on DVD, is a noisy genre mash-up that doesn’t blend martial arts and slapstick so much as grate them into a lumpy soup. Akshay Kumar plays the hapless hero, a sort of Indian Jim Carrey, while Gordon Liu glares icily as a villainous kung fu master terrorizing a Chinese village. Much to the film’s detriment, Jackie Chan is nowhere to be seen. Those already attuned to that peculiar brand of Hindi cinema known as the Bollywood film may find a fart gag here or a dance number there to be a fair return on their time. Others should be far less charitable. If the broad comic shtick doesn’t frighten people away, the grotesque length of the thing—a whopping 155 minutes—almost certainly will.

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My latest batch of movie annotations, humbly submitted, and on time, too!

Ballast, a homegrown indie, observes the tentative attempts at human connection between three emotionally wounded working-class individuals in rural Mississippi. Almost defiantly (and certainly unfashionably) subdued, it draws its strength from the bleak expressiveness of the locale—overcast skies, muddy fields, rows of depressing trailer homes, and other such mundanities. Lance Hammer, the debuting writer-director, shows promise as an image-maker, taking some of the more annoying trends in low budget filmmaking (an unsteady camera, wobbly focus) and using them to his advantage. As a storyteller he is on less sure footing (a subplot involving a gang of drug dealers is awkwardly ditched), and the film turns out to be something of a mixed blessing. Better than no blessing at all.

It’s that time again. 

Rachel Getting Married is a smallish drama about a black sheep in a fractured family of four, fresh out of rehab, who returns home to attend her sister’s wedding. Despite the ragged digital video, the film is actually a disciplined study in human brokenness, keen and discerning. Jonathan Demme, the director, is a filmmaker sensitive to fragile shifts in tempo, and he fully exploits his felicity with actors. (Notice how quickly a dishwashing competition turns sour.) Good performances are plentiful (especially by Hathaway as the returning sister and Bill Irwin as the father of the bride), though almost everyone is guilty of a little too much emoting.

City of Ember is the latest family-film from that veritable family-film factory—Walden Media. This costly adventure tale, set 200 years from now in a subterranean city lit by electricity, follows the attempts of two teenagers (Saoirse Ronan and Harry Treadaway) to find an exit to the outside world. Wrought with intelligence and feeling, and niftily designed as a network of pipes and tunnels, the film holds the attention thoroughly and honestly, without resorting to melodrama or sentimentality. Bill Murray has a funny role as a corrupt mayor, and there are a few nicely executed special effects including a beastly half-seal, half-earthworm creature destined to give kids nightmares. Gil Kenan (Monster House) directed.