The screenplay for 50/50 was penned by one Will Reiser and is based on Reiser’s own bout with spinal cancer.  A tragic comedy as opposed to a comic tragedy, it stars Joseph Gordon-Leavitt as the young, dutiful suburbanite with a tumor on his spine.

The most interesting thing about the film is how it exhibits the ways in which people react to and deal with Adam’s (Gordon-Leavitt’s) cancer.  His girlfriend (Bryce Dallas Howard) starts behaving disgracefully.  Adam’s close buddy Kyle (Seth Rogen) wants Adam to get laid–and also uses him to attract women.  But, in addition, he always sticks by him.  Adam himself reacts to the disease by smoking marijuana.  Welcome to the Western world and its young people.

Directed by Jonathan Levine, 50/50 is mildly funny–I don’t consider it hilarious, as some have claimed–and occasionally packs a punch (as when Adam begins to act irrationally behind the wheel of Kyle’s car).  It’s also rather slight, though.  Really, it’s a little less enjoyable than some of today’s lauded TV series such as Breaking Bad, Mad Men, Big Love and Sons of Anarchy.  TV writers are giving motion picture writers a run for their money, notwithstanding 50/50 IS perfectly watchable.

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In Joe Johnston’s comic-book movie, Captain America: The First Avenger (2011), a brave but physically puny Steve Rogers (Chris Evans) becomes, via a serum, a stunningly strong Captain America, eager to defeat a powerful Third Reich psychopath with a red skull (Hugo Weaving).  The time is the 1940s.

There is little chemistry between Evans and British actress Haley Atwell, and the film doesn’t have the guts to be more American than international (it is meant for an international audience), but it’s a captivating, sometimes witty, adventure-fantasy all the same.  It’s visually better than anything George Lucas did–the retro production design can be transporting but is never overdone–and the action can be imaginative.  On the other hand, to me the action eventually gets tiresome in a way it doesn’t in 2010’s Kick-Ass. 

Not great, this picture, but still fun.  And, yes, it is patriotic, despite the international dramatis personae.   

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Religious holiday fare from December 2007,  Noelle presents an American Catholic priest with a guilty secret.  He needs, and receives, the same spiritual consolation the parish padre in Bernanos’ novel Diary of a Country Priest receives.  A small-town Catholicism now dying, now given new life, makes for some palatable material, but almost nothing in David Wall’s script is easy to swallow.  I like his acting (he plays the priest) and directing, but not the bogus writing. 

Cover of Spy Kids

Spy Kids (2002) is yet another action flick–a nutty and charming one.  I’m talking genuine charm, not Hollywood charm, thanks to director-writer Robert Rodriguez.  He patently believes in what he’s doing, he can be funny, and he venerates marriage and family.  (In this movie he does; I don’t know about real life:  in 2006 Rodriguez left his wife and kids for actress Rose McGowan.)  Even his infrequent scatology makes prepubescent sense; prepubescent is what Carmen and Juni, the spy kids, are.

Adequate Alexa Vega provides Carmen with no more and no less than what she should.  Though too soft-spoken, Daryl Sabara (Juni) is sweet and facially expressive.  The stronger actors are Antonio Banderas and Carla Gugino as the spy kids’ spy parents.  Holding the reins of it all is a talented man whose screenplay is original, not an adaptation of a children’s book.  Let’s hear it for Latino heroism!  (In America.) 

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In Priceless, a 2008 French film (with English subtitles) by Pierre Salvadori, Audrey Tautou stars as Irene, a gold-digging beauty who mistakes a waiter-cum-bartender, Jean (Gad Elmaleh), for a rich man, only to discover the truth after Jean has happily bedded her twice.  Following a brush-off, Irene sees red when Jean inadvertently spoils a gold-digging date she is on, but she gets her revenge.  She quickly starts making demands of the waiter which drain him dry of money.  It scarcely matters to Jean, however:  he now loves the naughty gamine.  He also gets his bills paid, mirabile dictu, through becoming the kept man of an older widow played by Marie-Christine Adam, whom he cannot love.  He has his eye on Irene–and she on him!

Corruption runs deep in this film and exists mostly within women.  Two women, Irene one of them, want to marry money, while another, the widow, supplies gifts to a young man for sex and companionship.  It is Jean who is decent in many, though not all, ways.  He unselfishly loves Irene even as the latter tries to play her gold-digging game–seemingly–to the end.  But fear not:  Priceless (or Hors de Prix) is a comedy of reformation–Irene’s.  And, no, it’s not a wholly convincing reformation but it will do.  It will do because, being a comedy, the film needs a happy ending and because Irene is perspicacious enough to see that Jean is deserving.

Sophisticated comedy (sometimes farce) in French cinema may still be going strong, although I don’t know since most French movies don’t get distributed to the U.S.  I do know that the Salvadori film, whose script is by Benoit Graffin and Salvadori himself, is superbly written, with character and plot as its grabbers.  It isn’t cerebral at all, but it is honest and truly amusing.

Elmaleh is nearly stolid as Jean but still does well by him:  a nearly stolid Jean is okay.  Tautou, a good enough comic actress, is as nuanced as she is sensual.  She’s triumphing as often as Virginie Ledoyen.