Culture

I survived high school. I didn't know anything about American Teen, but with that title I was hoping Kristen Bell had a lead role. Somebody should have warned me. I hate documentaries. It's a character flaw. I hate self-awareness books; and of course high school is self-awareness on steroids around every locker-lined hallway and family dinner crisis. I don't like animation and this film has flotsam and jetsam of animation sprinkled about. Even with all that going against it and without Kristen Bell or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I liked Nanette Burstein's slick movie of high school angst. It was interesting. It was entertaining, maybe a bit enlightening and a trifle compelling at times. Some of the scenes and relationships seemed forced or even scripted, but so does my life at times. I'm always calling for rewrites and a stand-in.

The press info on the film has lines that remind me of the loudspeaker in M*A*S*H giving plots to morale boosting films in Korea. "Documentary follows the lives of four teenagers in one small town in Indiana….We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future." Isn't that what everyone remembers about high school-all those damn profound decisions about the future? If we only knew then that events and not agonizing decisions sweep us along in life, we could have had more time for beer and sex.

It's senior year in a Midwest high school. There will be cruelty, humor, strangeness, scary moments, more talk of sex than actual sex, a dash of drinking, and a pinch of smoking. Yeah, some things never change. But a funny thing happened on the way to gym class. I ran across real people who could somehow carry on with their lives, perhaps not quietly but at times with desperation, and pay little attention to microphones and technicians and cameras. That is one thing that has changed in today's world: everyone is on camera; everyone is on the web.

With a promising beginning scene and dazzling credits, Mirrors looked like it was going to deliver. I was actually smiling and nodding to myself that this was going to be the horror flick I'd been waiting for. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) an alcoholic cop on leave of absence for the accidental killing of his partner, living with his sister Angela (Amy Smart), separated from his wife Amy (Paula Patton) and kids, is somewhat unstable. To take his mind off his troubles, he takes a job as a night watchman at the Mayflower department store, a gigantic burned out but ornately columned building. The inside charred ruins manage to look pretty haunting with disfigured mannequins everywhere and a ton of mirrors. The history behind the store is textbook ghost story: a lot of innocent lives were lost in a fire. Maybe their spirits are trapped in the mirrors and want out.

The director (Alexandre Aja), who I HAD nothing but respect for, flounders badly here. His first two movies, Haute Tension and the re-dux of Hills Have Eyes were above par, showing extremely ground breaking vision, cool camera work, supreme editing and lots of mind-numbing gore. Mirrors seemed like it was going to take this path. Aja throws in R-rated risks, bloodletting like crazy, but then plays it safe reeling it in, like the stupid plot would hold its own. You'd think with gore, nudity and NYC you couldn't go wrong. Instead Aja falls back on tired old horror movie conventions: slow moving flashlights, investigating dark corners, looking into mirrors over and over and quick jump scare tactics.

Oh, to be that cigarette.Vicky Christina Barcelona continues what seems to be Woody Allen's never-ending introspective into the long and winding road of love's labors lost and found and lost again and forever talked about. The prolific and diminutive Woodman has been regurgitating his New York City neuroses across the screen on an almost annual basis for more than 40 years.

The film begins and continues with a narrator. Other than the name Chuck Norris in the opening credits, there is nothing that makes me cringe in dreaded anticipation more than voice-over. If I had wanted a novel on tape, I would have gone to the Bend Library. I was glad that VCB didn't have Allen the actor in it. He has become a sad caricature of himself. But there he was, taking over an early scene in a restaurant. The character Vicky, played by the Brit actress Rebecca Hall, was doing Woody better than Soon-Yi ever could. She had the same lines, tensions, the facial expressions, the fears, constrained tone, and probably the same NY shrink. Ten minutes, and the movie was burdened with a monotone narrator filling in this sketchy New Yorker short story pretending to be a movie, and a tall, female version of Allen. I moved against the wall separating my theater from the one showing Mamma Mia and pressed my ear deep into the dried popcorn oil stains in the hope that Meryl Streep's wailing ABBA tunes would drown out the nonsense Allen was forcing his actors to inflict on the six of us in the auditorium. I longed to be in the next theater with the middle-aged, cat-owning women singing along with Meryl and Pierce.

I eventually overcame Hall's imitation of Allen to marvel at her perfect American accent and ability to play a short, neurotic New Yorker, even at 5'9". Patricia Clark was perfect in her limited screen time playing a woman trapped in a loveless life of quiet desperation. Scarlett Johansson, I think she was saying something but I'm sorry. Anytime she's on the screen, I have this humming in my ears, and breathing and time both stop.

Jungle boogie. In the decade since he became a household name Ben Stiller has drifted primarily towards two comfortably generic personas: the tightly-wound, put-upon Everyman (see: Meet the Parents, Night at the Museum) and the preening buffoon (see: Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch). All the world loves a clown, and Stiller has been content to be one, nuance be damned.

Tropic Thunder, however, finds Stiller as star, co-writer and director attempting a skewering of Hollywood - a genre that requires a scalpel, where he favors blunt instruments. The set-up casts Stiller in buffoon mode as Tugg Speedman, an action-film star whose box-office clout is running out of steam and whose attempt at "serious actor" respectability playing mentally-challenged in Simple Jack flopped miserably. He's leading the ensemble in a Vietnam War drama titled Tropic Thunder, along with co-stars — including multi-Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.), a Method maniac who had his pigment altered to play an African-American soldier; and heroin-addicted comedy actor Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) — who are causing just as much trouble for rookie director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan). So Cockburn and the movie's grizzled technical advisor (Nick Nolte) decide to drop the actors into the jungle for a more guerilla-style filming technique — where they promptly encounter real danger in the form of a well-armed drug operation.

The opening 10 minutes hold out the promise of one of the year's most hilarious comedies, including a trio of faux movie trailers introducing the preferred milieu for each of the three principal actors. Lazarus and Tobey Maguire make cow eyes at each other as closeted gay monks in Satan's Abbey; Portnoy plays multiple flatulent, fat-suited characters in a vicious swipe at Eddie Murphy. Even the early moments of over-the-top violence from the movie-within-the-movie — a bayonet-slashed private (Jay Baruchel) tries to gather his intestines, and Speedman's character goes down in a hail of Platoon-inspired gunfire — are funny in context. Give Stiller a full-length feature of cinematic parody sketches, and it'd kill.