READY, WILLING & DESPICABLE

Superheroes are absent from Despicable Me; the supervillains appear to operate with impunity. In this movie’s world, the activities of the big leagues of villainy seem almost like some sort of conceptual art—the focus is on stealing major world landmarks. In the opening minutes, for instance, we learn that the Great Pyramid at Giza has been kyped.

The “Me” in Despicable Me is Gru, a tall fellow with a bald dome, a leering, long-nosed face and a down-in-the-throat Eastern European accent (provided by Steve Carell).

He lives in a handsome if forbidding suburban house sitting atop a palatial underground laboratory. It’s run by Dr. Nefario (Russell Brand) and staffed by hundreds of Minions, cheerful little guys resembling ambulatory yellow Tic Tacs in dungarees, some with one goggled eye and some with two, who chatter and giggle energetically in an unidentifiable patois.

On the whole, Gru doesn’t seem to have it so bad, but he’s nagged by feelings of inadequacy common to middle-aged men: His career has fallen short of his ambitions. Sure, he’s stolen the Statue of Liberty, but only the small one, from Las Vegas. Plus, he never received the approval he craved from his brusque, dismissive mother (Julie Andrews). The Pyramid caper, performed by an insufferable up-and-coming supervillain who calls himself Vector (Jason Segel), makes Gru desperate to top it. So he decides on a pretty grand gesture: Stealing the Moon right out of the sky.

When Gru sees three cute little orphan girls out selling cookies, it occurs to him that he can use them to solve a snag in his scheme (“Light bulb,” he says out loud, with a sinister smile, when he gets an idea). So he adopts the lot of them, temporarily he thinks, and you can see where the movie is heading from there. Gru quickly learns that parenting three girls easily requires as much energy and resourcefulness as stealing the moon.

This charming & truly funny computer-animated effort from Universal is one of the bright spots of this summer’s so far mostly unappealing blockbuster season. Despicable Me is loaded with visually inventive, often riotous gags. The plot is preposterous but wildly imaginative—the stealing-the-moon bit is worthy of Voltaire—& the sentimental side of the story is sweet but not sticky.

Want to know one of the best things about this movie, though? It’s short. It’s not skimpy short, just not needlessly overextended in the manner of so many blockbusters. A friend of mine theorizes that with ticket prices so high, studios feel that they have to give us plenty of length, to create the sense that they’re giving us bang for our buck. Despicable Me demonstrates that if this is indeed the strategy, it’s misguided—this movie covers everything from multigenerational parent-child dynamics to the purloining of celestial objects, all at 51 minutes shorter than Sex in the City 2.

SHAKIN' BACON

Happy Birthday Kevin Bacon!

In honor of the star famed for six-degree ubiquity…


Monster-of-the-Week: …this time around let’s honor Stumpy, the most recognizable of the “Graboids,” the predatory subterranean terrors from 1990’s Tremors.

Graboids are giant wormy creatures who can tunnel through the desert at alarming speeds a few inches below the surface, like Bugs Bunny. They’re equipped with awful beaky maws &, as the name implies, grabby tentacle-like appendages, with which they can yank unsuspecting people—their favorite snack—under the sand.

Stumpy—so dubbed because he (she?) lost a grabber in the course of the story—& pals lay siege to the hapless residents of Perfection, Nevada, & it’s up to Bacon & Fred Ward, as two scruffy handymen, along with cute seismologist Finn Carter & husband-&-wife survivalists Reba McEntire & Michael Gross, to do battle with the ghastly desert landscapers.

This lighthearted chiller, by the way, is The Wife’s favorite monster movie. I like it too; if you've never seen Ron Underwood’s goofy yet occasionally creepy picture, which spawned a number of sequels & a TV show, I recommend.

EQUALLY YOLKED

The Wife & I dined Tuesday evening at D'Arcy McGee's, a chain Irish pub in Tempe. The place has half-price appetizers between 3-6 p.m. Monday-Thursday, so I had a Scotch Egg. I confess that I was unaware of this delicacy: a hard-boiled egg in four quarters, each quarter in a cradle of fried banger sausage. It looked a lot like this...

...& was freakin' delicious.

ALAS...

...Uruguay was eliminated from World Cup contention today. Sorry Pablo!

Also: Very late-in-the-day happy birthday to the Dalai Lama, & to Frida Kahlo.

FOURTH & BACK

Hope everybody had a great Fourth! Also, Happy Birthday to my pal Pablo, who’s already received his present—his beloved home country, Uruguay, is one of the final four teams in the World Cup.

My pal Tom was kind enough to send me this cheering item.

WILY CYRUS

Two opening in the Valley Friday:

Cyrus—John (John C. Reilly) is an LA video editor who’s been divorced & seriously depressed for a few years now. His ex (Catherine Keener), concerned about his funk, drags him to a party where, wonder of wonders, he actually meets somebody. Indeed, he meets the woman of his dreams, Molly (Marisa Tomei)—gorgeous, eccentric, sexually avid. If you’re guessing that this isn’t the end of John’s troubles, you’re no fool. Before too long he meets Molly’s grown son Cyrus (Jonah Hill), a chubby experimental musician with a soft-spoken manner & an aggressive, wide-eyed stare.

Cyrus still lives at home, & he & his mother have an unnervingly boundary-free relationship. Though he feigns supportiveness of her new relationship, he’s enraged at John’s encroachment, & privately wages war on him.

This indie was written & directed by Jay & Mark Duplass, the brothers behind the interesting if uneven 2008 horror comedy Baghead. At times Cyrus seems like it, too, may take the plunge into all-out psychothriller territory, but the Duplass Brothers once again keep it light & unpredictable, & focus on the performances. Reilly has gradually become one of the great screen everymen—I found myself worrying about poor John the same way his ex-wife does—& Tomei is sexy & poignant. Hill, part of the Judd Apatow Mafia that has taken over popular movies the last few years, is first-rate, too. I thought he was a scream in The 40-Year-Old Virgin & Knocked Up & in his scene opposite Ben Stiller in Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian. But as Cyrus—maddening & creepy, yet also pitiable, yet also smart & funny—he shows a range I might not have guessed.

The Last Airbender—Channel-surfing last week I happened upon M. Night Shyamalan’s The Sixth Sense, about 20 minutes in, & stopped to watch a while, marveling again both at the cunning structure & at the heartfelt punch of the performances. It’s a classic, I thought, & if Shyamalan never makes another good movie, he’ll still have earned his place in movie history.

But it looks like he really might not, alas. Almost every movie he’s made apart from Sixth Sense has been an interesting but severe misfire. My favorite of his subsequent efforts is one that everybody else seemed to particularly hate—The Village (2004). I wouldn’t call it a masterpiece, certainly, but it’s coherent, well-acted &, for me at least, not without chills.

His latest, The Last Airbender, is a sort of martial-arts action-fantasy based on some animated show I’ve never seen. It’s in an alternative Earth, maybe the far future or a fairy-tale past, in which the world is divided into feudal realms based on the traditional “elements”: Earth, Water, Fire & Air. These kingdoms are policed by “Avatars” (the original title was Avatar: The Last Airbender, which had to be dropped for obvious reasons): warriors who can manipulate their elements through Tai-Chi-like moves, flinging them at their enemies as offensive weapons or summoning them up as defensive shields.

At the beginning, a brother & sister living in an arctic, Inuit-like culture—though they look like junior-high kids from Appleton, Wisconsin or someplace—are out hunting & find a boy frozen in the ice, along with a gigantic mammal. They thaw them out, & the kid (shaven-headed, pained-looking Noah Ringer) turns out to be a.) not dead, & b.) the title character, an air-bending avatar with the power to overthrow the cultural dominance of the Fire-bending kingdom. The mammal turns out be a sort of cross between a yak, an otter & a Pekingese, except he can also fly.

A complicated plot involving the intrigues of the Fire Kingdom’s royal family ensues, along with many attempts on the poor little airbender’s life, lots of choreographic martial arts moves, & loads of New Agey bromides. There’s a big battle finale in an ice city that looks like a blend of Maxfield Parrish & Thomas Kinkade.

Maybe some kids will get into this; I confess it just seemed too dumb for me—like Tolkien infused with Hannah Montana or the Beach Party movies. Or something.

All I can say is that there were moments of splendor in the design & captivating fanciful images, like warriors riding on giant monitor lizards, or like the huge ironclad warships of the Fire people, but these pleasures are outweighed by the stubbornly vapid dialogue. There was nobody to root for. The heroic kids are vastly less interesting & complex than the Fire people—by far the best performances are by Dev Patel & Aasif Mandvi as, respectively, a conflicted Prince & the villainous general trying to beat him to capturing the LA. But then again, these two have the meatiest roles.

Anyway, for my money this is yet another unfortunate miss for Shyamalan. But the film is optimistically subtitled Book One: Water, so perhaps he plans to have three more tries to get it right.

TO FUR, WITH LOVE

Since The Twilight Saga: Eclipse is out…

Monster-of-the Week:…this week let’s recognize another movie in which a lycanthrope is pitted against a blood-sucker. Our honoree this time is Andreas Obry (Matt Willis), the hapless werewolf servant struggling against the mind-control of his Dracula-esque master, Armand Tesla (Bela Lugosi), in Columbia’s atmospheric 1944 programmer The Return of the Vampire:

I’ve always had an affection for this very traditional, old-school melodrama set against the backdrop of World War II-era London. Also, while The Twilight Saga: Eclipse runs over two hours, The Return of the Vampire clocks in at just under 70 minutes.

That does it: Put me down for Team Andreas!