“Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty,” a young Spanish stud (Jon Kortajarena) tells George Falconer (Colin Firth), a bereaved professor, in A Single Man. He’s talking about a lurid, smog-inflected California sunset, but he could just as easily be talking about this film, the first directed by fashion designer Tom Ford. Beautiful beyond comprehension and dramatically inert, A Single Man is a gorgeously made-up corpse. Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty, yes, and sometimes awful movies have their own critiques embedded right in their scripts.
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"The other day I felt stupid. Fuck that day."

“What do I mean,” a teacher asks a class of problem students late in Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire, “when I say ‘The protagonist’s circumstances are unrelenting’?” It’s a question that seems wildly out of place in this particular classroom setting, given the difficulties these troubled teenage girls have shown thus far with basic skills — reading, writing, not being horrible to one another in class. Paula Patton, the actress who plays the teacher in question, delivers the query with a bit of a sly smile, because it’s addressed not to the students, of course, but to the movie itself.

But it turns out she’s asking the wrong question of Precious, directed by Lee Daniels. After watching this much-praised, much-criticized drama, you may ask: What, if anything, does it mean that the protagonist’s circumstances are so fucking unrelenting?
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"While Scrooge remained unaltered in his outward form, the Ghost grew older, clearly older. "

I’ve been dreading A Christmas Carol for a long time. Exactly how long? Thanks to the internet, I can find out! On July 9, 2007, news hit the trades that Jim Carrey would be playing not just Ebenezer Scrooge but all three of the ghosts haunting him in Robert Zemeckis’s motion-capture 3D version of the Dickens classic. My snap response: “Anyone who goes to see this movie deserves what he gets.” I didn’t feel much better when the news broke, a year later, that Gary Oldman would be playing not just Bob Cratchit and Jacob Marley but also Tiny Tim. (Reportedly, to maintain eyelines, he performed his scenes in a trench.)

It’s not that classics like A Christmas Carol are untouchable; one of the finest versions of Scrooge’s story is the 1992 Muppet one, which was hardly faithful to the original, inasmuch as it gives Jacob Marley a brother named Robert (!), and features, as the Marley ghosts, Statler and Waldorf. But the idea of sitting through Jim Carrey, Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Jim Carrey, Gary Oldman, Jim Carrey, and Gary Oldman in Robert Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol just seemed like a horror. I assumed that Dickens’ tale would be not just adapted poorly but Carreyfied: overstuffed with the horseplay and rubber-faced baloney that Jim Carrey brings to his comedy performances.

So imagine my surprise when I discovered that Zemeckis’s A Christmas Carol is, in fact, an extremely faithful retelling of the story, with nearly every single line of dialogue coming directly from Dickens’ original. It’s not at all perfect — in fact, it’s seriously flawed in some very important ways — but it’s not a fiasco, it’s not Carreyfied, and it delivers Dickens’ tale of midnight terror and Yuletide repentance remarkably effectively.
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"I was like a blond farmboy on a distant desert planet."

The Men Who Stare at Goats, a poker-faced comedy about paranormal research in the United States military, has a lot of problems. Director Grant Heslov hasn’t mastered the kind of deadpan buffonery that, say, Steven Soderbergh made look so easy in the Ocean’s series. Peter Straughan’s screenplay rests uneasily in the gray zone between earnest current-events drama and stoner comedy. And despite an opening title that proclaims, “More of this is true than you would believe,” The Men Who Stare at Goats invents most of its major plot points and, sadly, greatly exaggerates the history of military interest in the paranormal. That is to say: While some small parts of this fact-based movie are true, the bits that you’ll most wish were true are not.

All that stipulated, it is awfully hard to dislike a movie in which a mustachioed George Clooney tries to convince a whimpering Ewan McGregor of his own psychic abilities by snapping, “Haven’t you ever felt like you were different? It’s the Jedi in you!”
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"I'll eat you up, I love you so."

Where the Wild Things Are, directed by Spike Jonze from a screenplay by Jonze and Dave Eggers, is many things: a kids’ movie that many kids won’t like; an experimental narrative that reportedly cost $100 million to make; and a minor masterpiece that will likely lose its studio, Warner Bros., a great deal of money. It seems less interested in entertaining children than in replicating childhood, as carefully, beautifully, and creatively as possible, on a screen. Watching the entire film, about nine-year-old Max and his adventures on an island inhabited by Wild Things, is an experience not unlike spending ninety minutes with an actual nine-year-old: You’ll be in turns exhilarated, nervous, bored, entertained, awestruck, annoyed, and deeply in love with this precocious, hyperactive film. In the end you’ll be grateful for the time you’ve spent with Where the Wild Things Are, even as you’re itchy for some grown-up time alone.
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