How melodramatically directed, by Brian DePalma, Casualties of War (1989) is!–so much so that the film almost fails.  As it is, it is neither quite a failure nor a success; it’s just worth seeing.

Based on a true story about a war crime—the rape and murder of a girl—during the Vietnam War, it has a hero in Michael J. Fox but a very low view of human nature.  It does what author John Irving once said the novels of Kurt Vonnegut do:  It makes us wish we were more virtuous.  It makes us wish the world made greater moral sense, that human nature wasn’t so filthy.  The screenplay by David Rabe is earnest and scintillating.  Consider: the opportunity to rape a Vietnamese girl prompts Sean Penn’s Sergeant Meserve to laughingly praise life in the army, to which Michael J. Fox responds despairingly, ‘This ain’t the army, Sarge. . . This ain’t the army.”  The army, he knows, is honorable, the war crime despicable.

Casualties of War (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

English: AnnaSophia Robb at the July 2006 San Diego Comic-Con International. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The new Nat Faxon-Jim Rash movie, The Way Way Back (2013) doesn’t quite work.  Fourteen-year-old Duncan (Liam James) takes a trip with his mother, his mother’s boyfriend and the boyfriend’s teen daughter to a beach house whose locale is inhabited by sundry interesting folks.  Virtually none of them, I’m afraid, is complex or multidimensional, like actual human beings.  Duncan’s mother, Toni Collette’s Pam, is complex enough, but where is the screenwriters’—Faxon and Rash’s—psychological insight?  For Duncan, a quiet nerd, to gain self-confidence as rapidly as he does is preposterous.

Duncan’s relationship with a girl played by AnnaSophia Robb, a “love interest”, amounts to almost nothing, and that this girl has a friendship going on with the boyfriend’s teen daughter comes as a near-surprise, so glossed over is it.  Even the directing in The Way Way Back—again, by Faxon and Rash—is not always what it ought to be.

What the filmmakers do well is write dialogue.  It sparkles.  In truth, however, the movie should be seen for its performances.  Collette couldn’t be shallow if she wanted to be.  Sam Rockwell and Allison Janney display marvelous energy and savvy, although with Janney there is the benefit of charm as well.  Steve Carell plays a deeply flawed man adeptly and enjoyably.  Ah, but it may well be that by saying the film should be seen for its performances, I’m saying that nothing else about it justifies its being seen.

Actor Vince Vaughn (a libertarian Republican?) knows perfectly well we have a sub-par economy these days and has co-written, and stars in, The Internship (2013), about two watch salesmen whose company folds and thereby leaves the gents jobless.  Afterwards Billy (Vaughn) and Nick (Owen Wilson) decide to become unpaid interns for Google—oh, let us glorify Google; wall-to-wall product placement is here—in the hope of getting hired by the lucrative company.  The pair learn a thing or two about computers and how to sell the Internet while blithely taking the young interns who are their co-competitors out of their insulated digital world for a while (not invariably in ways I condone).

Shawn Levy directed, and it is an indubitably superior flick to Levy’s Date Night (2010).  Alas, to me it is not much funnier than Date Night but neither is it a total loss as comedic cinema.  Far from it.  The cast is fun, Vaughn and Wilson most of all—and pretty Rose Byrne and Tiya Sircar are on hand.  A few hokey bits pop up, and I regret that the Byrne character is such an easy lay for Nick, but the movie is good at thrusting us into the Contemporary Scene, consisting of young adult worries about employment no less than of computer apps.  It’s a genial piece with workmanlike directing, editing and cinematography behind it.  In addition, I’d call it . . . libertarian.

English: Vince Vaughn at CMJ Festival 2007 (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

The comic movie Bachelorette (2012) is slight.  Not slight-but-good, in my view; just slight.  And it shouldn’t be.

The three main women in the film (based on a play by Lesyle Headland, the movie’s director) are obnoxious and distasteful, two of whom (Isla Fisher and Lizzy Caplan) are cokeheads and one of whom (Kirsten Dunst) is simply bitchy.  Motivations for Fisher’s drugged-out behavior are naught but a mystery, and not much is done with Dunst’s character either.  Some of the movie’s scenes are amusing, and the acting is spot-on, but too often the film tries to get its laughs merely through obscene talk.  It’s a unremittingly profane film.  Indeed, profanity or not, for Regan (Dunst) to urge an overweight friend to adopt a vindictive “F**k everyone!” attitude is, or should be, offputting.

The very pretty Miss Kirsten is a good actress now, deserving better pictures than she has been in lately, Bachelorette included.

Kirsten Dunst (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

Notwithstanding I am one who never wants to see chickens escape their farmyard concentration camps, I had a good time observing the efforts of all the freedom-seeking fowls in Chicken Run (2000), by the creators of the well-known “Wallace and Gromit”—viz. Peter Lord and Nick Park. 

A family picture, it serves up conventional and wholesome humor as well as clay animation not exactly at its most attractive (I’m thinking of the chickens).  Oh well.  Nearly everything about CR comes off.  Screenwriter Karey Kirkpatrick manages the one-liners skillfully.  Consider:  it is a frightful, awful place, this chicken farm, and by and by the fowls find out they are to be ruthlessly transformed into chicken pies.  “I don’t want to be a pie,” blurts out a dumb but sweet chicken called Babs.  “I don’t like gravy.”  Even funnier are many of the nonchalant utterances of Rocky, an American rooster on whom the chickens depend for salvation.  I note that he’s American because all the other animated figures are British, which leads me to an observation:  Emanating from Brits, this picture depicts British know-all and American muscle (Rocky’s), but never American know-how.

Cover of Chicken Run