There was a time when, for whatever reason, some filmmakers liked to see how far into a movie they could put the credits. Watching Amelia, you may find yourself wondering if this was the case here: surely any biography of the famed aerialist would spend a reel or so on her early life?

I assure you that you did not walk into the movie 20 minutes late. Aside from a brief shot of a pre-teen Amelia Earhart in Kansas, looking at a passing plane from a cornfield vantage point and vowing that she would someday fly, this handsome but largely uninvolving movie shows us none of the early struggles of the woman who, for most of the 1930s, was one of America’s biggest celebrities. I mean, I hate to second-guess the film’s capable screenwriters (Ronald Bass (Rain Man, The Joy Luck Club) and Anna Hamilton Phelan (Girl Interrupted, Gorillas in the Mist), working from the Earhart biographies East to the Dawn and The Sound of Wings). Maybe they researched it and Earhart’s early life wasn’t very interesting.

But given that women in our era form only a small proportion of licensed pilots, I can’t help but suspect that a woman trying to learn to fly in the 1910s and 20s must have had a hell of a time of it. As it is, when we first see Amelia (played by Hilary Swank, who bears a strong similarity to the real Earhart) she is being disappointed to learn that the flying stunt she has been hired for is a fraud in which she is expected merely to be a passenger on a plane flown by a man.

The bulk of Amelia, which is framed around scenes depicting the attempted round-the-world flight during which she and her navigator vanished in 1937, is concerned more with her romantic life than her professional career. These are to some extent intertwined, given that her husband (Richard Gere) was the publisher who promoted her career and her lover (Ewan McGregor) was an aviation pioneer and director of the federal government’s Bureau of Air Commerce. But despite her open avowal of non-conformity to her husband, none of it is so compelling as to make up for the stuff about Earhart for which she is remembered today—her passion for flying.

Prettily but blandly directed by Mira Nair (Monsoon Wedding), Amelia is at its best in its final reel, which goes into the details of her final hours in the air, based on records of radio transmissions with her plane. It may a bit on the technical side (it seems to come down to a dead battery), but it’s genuinely suspenseful. As for the rest of the movie, it is briskly passed and edited, but overall less dramatic than the musical score, which seems to be working overtime to make up for the lack of a strong script.

Watch the trailer for Amelia:

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by George Sax

Gigi it’s not. The piquantly wry take on high-end Belle Époque French life that animated Colette’s novel, and the Vincente Minnelli movie musical it inspired, is moderately evident at the beginning of Stephen Frears’ adaptation of another, earlier Colette work about the same period. But they soon give way to a more astringent, vulgar and skeptical view of the voluptuously self-indulgent protaganists. The joke is on these two in Chéri, but it’s not by any means a funny one.

The title character (Rupert Guest) is a very young, intensely self-indulgent son of a retired courtesan (Kathy Bates, trying hard but rather out of her element) who asks the youth’s godmother, Léa (Michelle Pfeiffer), to intervene for his own good. Léa’s reluctant attempt to oblige quickly precipitates a six-year-long affair between them, at which juncture Chéri thoughtlessly accedes to his calculating mother’s wish that he marry the eighteen-year-old daughter of a rich former colleague.

Neither he nor Léa admits to the other any sense of great loss, but her stricken response when she’s alone and his grim bearing during the wedding give the game away with little fuss or surprise. What follows is a descent into quiet personal torments and sentimental tragedy. Both of these practical amatory cynics learn about love tragically late.

Chéri reunites Pfeiffer, Frears and writer Christopher Hampton more than two decades after they worked together on Dangerous Liaisons, but the feel and insights of Colette’s little novel seem to have eluded them. Their movie is an efficiently streamlined version of a work that proceeds methodically and with a pointed Gallic irony. Early on, the filmmakers lean a little too heavily on a tone of dry romantic comedy, and in the second half they don’t really convey the emotional trauma adequately.

Pfeiffer’s Léa is a bit too unknowing and vulnerable, and although Guest is petulantly and impetuously persuasive, Frears hasn’t given us much room to develop sympathy for his plight.  The portrayal of emergent emotions that surprise the ill-starred couple is too cursory and flat. When the movie relies on a narrator at the very end to summarize Colette’s sequel (The Last of Chéri) and the significance of what we’ve just sat through, the absent qualities are only underlined.

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Like just about every adult reviewer who saw the first Transformers movie in 2007, I was astonished at how good it was. It wasn’t simply that it was better than anyone expected from a movie made for an audience of 8 to 25 year old males: Director Michael Bay smartly balanced his digital effects with several interweaving storylines and multiple characters who held your attention through the film’s two and one-half hours. And you never lost a sense of awe at the size of the giant robots, culminating in a spectacular finale set on the streets of I forget which major American city.

The paradigm of the filmmaker who works with techniques honed in commercials and music videos, Bay has a reputation for overkill. But often as not he deliver solidly entertaining movies like Armageddon, The Rock or the underrated The Island.

So it’s a disappointment to have to report how lousy the sequel is. I won’t attempt to recount the plot, which essentially brings more giant robots both good and evil to Earth to duke it out. Someone apparently decided that the success of the first movie (which grossed $700 million worldwide) was entirely due to the sight of giant robot battles, and so this sequel eliminates most any other story concerns to concentrate on that. (It’s like the current remake of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, which is inferior to the original because it cut out all the ancillary stories and characters that made the 1974 movie so engrossing.)

The opening sequence, a battle in a European city, gives you so much in terms of special effects that there’s nothing left for the rest of the movie to do: there’s no sense of anticipation.  It’s like a monster movie where you see the monster at the beginning. And maybe it’s just me, but I find it frustrating that the giant robots are never still long enough to get a good look at their details. Optimus Prime appears to be comprised of a scrap heap that somehow holds together—is there a design there? If so, let us see!

Even the gag central to the line of toys from which the franchise originated years ago—that these robots can be folded into cars, trucks, and other common vehicles—is treated perfunctorily. Watching them digitally change shape is substantially less fun than a young child might have at doing the same thing with a cleverly designed toy he can hold in his hands.

As for the humans, Shia LaBeouf is back, well on his way to becoming the Corey Feldman of his generation. The story ships him off to an Eastern university whose student population seems to consist entirely of technonerds and Maxim models. Megan Fox is also back as his girlfriend, in which role she is photographed slightly less pornographically than she was last time, but not by much. Bay, whose first directing credit was for a Playboy Centerfold video, so often photographs her running in slow motion that you start to wonder if she got paid by the mile. (Or by the bounce.)

John Turturro is also back to play comic relief, though he’s reduced to buffoon status. An actor of this caliber shouldn’t have to expose his ass on camera for the sake of a cheap joke, though I’m sure his salary for this was enough to fund another independent film he might want to direct.

The whole film is pretty much a matter of killing time until we get to a dull climax set in an Egyptian desert. Suffice to say that giant robots fighting amid sand dunes is much less interesting to look at that giant robots fighting amid skyscrapers. Along the way we get leg-humping robots, farting robots, and street-talking robots who are this films’ equivalent of Jar Jar Binks.

The first Transformers proved that you could make a special effects blockbuster that appealed to all audiences. This sequel only proves that lightening doesn’t strike twice.

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I imagine that someone in Hollywood looked at a calendar and noticed that it’s been a few decades since they used one of their standard templates, the one that involves putting modern comedians in a prehistoric setting. Maybe it’s because they overused it in the late 70s/early 80s, with diminishing results: Life of Brian, Caveman, History of the World Part 1, Wholly Moses.

And so we have Year One, starring Jack Black, Michael Cena, and a lot of people who you’ve seen in Judd Apatow movies. Apatow produced this, which I will point to in the future as proof that I don’t automatically like everything Apatow touches. It was directed—and here’s the key—by Harold Ramis, who was with Second City for a spell back in the 70s and made enough famous friends there to guarantee himself a long career.

As far as I’m concerned, Ramis has directed exactly one good movie: Groundhog Day. Sure, his name is on a lot of hits, but they’re all movies that got by on the strength of their casts. Uwe Boll could have directed Caddyshack and Analyze This without hurting them much.

I’m going to have to apologize for this next remark in advance, but Year One was written by one Gene Stupnitsky—and it looks like it was written by a Stupnitsky.

I suspect Ramis thought he could get away once again with coasting on the public appetite to see his stars. But Black’s limited schtick wore out its welcome somewhere before the second reel of Nacho Libre, and Cena is too bland not to have to depend on strong material.

You could tell in advance that Hollywood had no faith in it because theaters, which tend to cram summer movies onto as many screens as they can get away with, are mostly running this on a single screen. Crowds, in other words, are not expected to be a problem.

Here’s how bad it is: all of the funniest stuff in the movie is in the trailer. And there’s nothing funny in the trailer, which you can see below.

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It’s hard to have anything intelligent to say about a movie when you can’t figure out why it was made in the first place. Land of the Lost is a $100+ million movie based on a Saturday morning TV show that ran for three years in the mid-1970s. The show was produced by Sid and Marty Krofft, who also gave kids of the era “H. R. Pufnstuf” and “Sigmund and the Sea Monsters” (film adaptations of which are also in the works), as well as “Lidsville,” “The Brady Bunch Hour,” and “The Krofft Superstar Hour with the Bay City Rollers.” (MacDonalds commercials featuring Ronald McDonald and the other denizens of Hamburgerland weren’t made by the Kroffts, but they sure look like they were.) If you grew up in that era, I guess you might have some nostalgia for the cheesy cheapness of those shows. Will Ferrell, who stars in the movie and presumably was the 800 pound gorilla behind it, was seven when the show premiered. But as far as I know from friends who consider themselves Kroffts fans, what they enjoy is the surreal aspect of regular people interacting with manic characters in bizarre costumes that don’t even try to be plausible on sets made on a budget that apparently couldn’t afford papier mache. In other words, an expensive Kroffts remake is by definition dead in the water. For the non-fan who won’t be able to discern any subtle references to the show which the writers have worked into the script (I’m giving them the benefit of the doubt), there’s pretty much nothing of any interest here. It consists of ninety minutes of Ferrell, Anna Friel and a slightly-less-unbearable-than-usual Danny McBride running around an “alternate universe” (how they got there isn’t worth the explanation) being chased by CGI dinosaurs and foiling the universal domination plans of some bipedal lizards. The special effects are adequate, the characters utterly uninteresting, and the jokes way too PG-13 to make this suitable for young children. There’s even a joke about how dumb the Polish are, which I thought went out in 70s.

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You can take the boy away from the monster movies, but you can’t take the monster movies out of the boy. Few filmmakers who make their first success with horror movies are ever able to break out of being stereotyped for the rest of their careers – just ask George Romero, Wes Craven, Dario Argento, Tobe Hooper, Stuart Gordon, any of those guys.

After establishing himself as a hot young talent with The Evil Dead and Evil Dead II, Sam Raimi spent most of the 1990s trying to break out of the horror mold. He did so largely as a producer of junky-but-fun TV shows like “Xena,” “Hercules,” and “Cleopatra 2525.” By now, after the three hugely successful Spider-Man movies, he has to rank as one of Hollywood’s 800 pound gorillas.

So what does he do with all that hard-earned clout? He dusts off an old script that he and his brother Ivan wrote in the early 1990s, just after Army of Darkness, that plays like another Evil Dead movie.

It’s not quite the same plot. In Drag Me To Hell (I admit, it’s a great title) an ambitious but repressed bank loan officer (Alison Lohman) is pursued by demonic forces after being cursed by (what else?) an old gypsy woman. But it’s still the same formula of nasty monsters leaping out of familiar but shadowy places, with a solid dose of Tex Avery in the mix.

It moves in lurches, a collection of set pieces more than a unified whole. There are at least three fake endings, scenes which would seem to bring the story to a conclusion but which we know won’t because (a) the movie would be over too soon and (b) they lack the climactic oomph we expect out of someone like Raimi.

But that last ending really is the end of the movie, and it’s a bit of a cheat. You leave the theater feeling like you didn’t quite get your money’s worth, though you’ll be back for the inevitable sequel.

Along the way Raimi amuses himself with some dry wit, though I’m not sure if we’re meant to think that the gypsy woman’s license plate, 99951, if turned upside down would read “I IS 666.” There is a scene that cat lovers will not enjoy, and a lot of gross-out jokes involving mouths. I don’t know what that says about Raimi’s personal predilections, but guys, if there’s a girl you’re working up your nerve to kiss for the first time, I wouldn’t take her to this movie first.

So why did Raimi even make this? Maybe to put his family to work-aside from Ivan, there’s another brother and three Raimi kids in the cast, and more in the crew. Or maybe he’s just flexing his monster muscles before his next film, a reboot of The Evil Dead. Either way, it’s a best a competently crafted time killer.

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At no time does Hollywood have less respect for story than the summer, when the total world wide gross of a movie stands in direct proportion to the number of special effects shots and direct inverse proportion to the amount of actual plot. (I just made that up, but I’m sure it’s what your average producer making a movie for the school recess market believes.) Thinking is for cold weather: bring on the explosions, CGI critters, and pop culture references!

It helps a lot to go in expecting that. Take the marquee- (not to mention definite-article-) unfriendly Night at the Museum: Battle of the Smithsonian, which those of you with kids too young for the new Terminator movie will probably be seeing this weekend.

As I never saw the original Night at the Museum, I am in no position to offer you a comparative analysis. What I can tell you is that while by any critical standard it’s noisy, disposable junk, it is more often than not fun disposable junk.

Since the last movie, our hero Larry (Ben Stiller) has become a success inventing and marketing the kind of crap that gets sold on TV infomercials at 3 am. (time that used to be put to much better use airing old sitcoms, movies you’ve never heard of and test patterns). Apparently he’s doing pretty well, because he has not only offices but a warehouse in Manhattan. No new business can afford a warehouse in Manhattan -that’s what Jersey and Queens are for.

On a visit to his friends at the Museum of Natural History, the ones who came to unexpected life during the last movie, he is consterned* to find they are being put into storage to make way for new special-effects intensive displays. (The irony of a big summer special effects movie about how evil special effects are is not pursued.)

They are stored in the enormous archives under the Smithsonian, and I won’t waste any more of your time detailing how Larry comes to track them there. Suffice to say that the magical Egyptian table that brought everything to life in the last movie has more subjects to work on here, including a villain who wants to use it for world domination. (I’m not sure why movie villains always want to dominate the world, which seems like it would be an awful lot of work and no fun at all, but there you go.)

Said villain is played by Hank Azaria, who uses a voice stolen from Boris Karloff, all soft-spoken aristocratic lisp. I don’t know if this is a reference to the fact that Karloff played the movies’ original undead Egyptian more than 75 years ago in The Mummy. But it’s a wonderful voice and delightful to listen to.

Azaria gets to have fun doing goofy stuff that has nothing to do with driving any story along. And that’s what I liked about the movie. It doesn’t always work – there’s a tiresome bit with Jonah Hill as a security guard that seems to go on forever. But there are fun bits by Steve Coogan as bit-sized Roman centurian Octavius, who’s crowning moment of glory comes with a fearsome squirrel; Bill Heder as one George (Armstrong Custer) that keeps threatening to turn into another one (W. Bush); Eugene Levy as the voice of a gaggle of bobblehead Albert Einsteins; a cameo by Oscar the Grouch; and a funny bit by, of all people, the Jonas Brothers, as – but why should I spoil it for you?

Look fast for scriptwriters Thomas Lennon and Robert Ben Garant, of Comedy Central’s “Reno 911,” as the Wright Brothers.

There is also Amy Adams who, as Amelia Earhart, spends the movie in a pair of skin-tight aviator pants that threaten to nudge the movie into a PG-13. It never happens, but it’s something for the fathers in the audience.

There is both more and less of a story in Dance Flick, the latest in an endless line of parody movies that depend on you recognizing references to plot elements from other movies. In this case the target is urban dance movies, and even though that is a genre I have studiously avoided over the past decade, I recognized all the clichés anyway.

So why did I even go to see this? Because it was from the Wayans Brothers, who sometimes manage to make this kind of thing funny. (I admit to liking both White Chicks and Little Man).

The trouble is that, with a second generation of Wayanses now in on what has become the family business, there are so many of them in on it that you just never know what you’re going to get when you see the label “Wayans Brothers”. The director of record here is Damien Wayans, a nephew of the brothers, and the result is a lot more miss than hit. With a PG-13 rating it isn’t as gross as their Scary Movie entries, but a depressing number of jokes are based on familiarity with tabloid celebrity scandals. I could report as a point of reference how the audience reacted, but at the Friday afternoon show I went to there were only two other viewers.

* I know there’s no such word as “consterned.” But if there is a noun “consternation,” then why isn’t there a verb “constern”?

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Michael Caine faces death in IS ANYBODY THERE?

John Crowley’s Is Anybody There? really packs it in. Crowley and scripter Peter Harness have tried to amalgamate a lot of scenes that are serially, and sometimes almost simultaneously, intended to register vulgarly mordant humor, dreary Brit-kitsch kitchen sink drama, piercingly poignant human dilemmas and delicate philosophical insights. As might be expected, the filmmakers’ attempts to bundle all this together are sometimes awkward and arbitrary.

What’s surprising is how well they get away with it. The most important reasons are the performances of Michael Caine and young Bill Milner and their unexpectedly appealing and affecting teamwork. Caine’s performance might seem to be the vital force in this essentially slight and uneven film, and it is, but it is designed to work in tandem with Milner’s Edward. To the extent a point of view prevails in the picture, it’s the boy’s.

Caine’s Clarence is a used-up music-hall magician sent by social workers in 1987 to lodge at the seniors boarding house run by Edward’s parents (Anne Marie Duff and David Morrisey) near the English shore. Waspishly embittered and dismayed to find himself in this less than genteel, sometimes disturbing group setting, Clarence is ill-disposed to deal graciously with a ten-year-old boy who resents being displaced from his room, first by the lately deceased previous occupant and now by the old magician.

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Donald Faison and Mos Def consider getting new agents.

I’m sure they don’t get paid what they’re worth—hell, you can’t even see their names in the credits—but the unsung heroes of the movie business work in the trailer department. They’re the ones who can rescue some of the production money put into a dog like Next Day Air by finding enough scenes that can be re-arranged into a two-minute commercial that will make you want to spend your ticket money on it. For the same reason they are the curse of us, the viewers, who never seem to learn that a good trailer does not guarantee a good movie. (Remember, after you’ve paid for your ticket Hollywood is done with you.)

Next Day Air concerns the hurlyburly that ensues in a Philadelphia neighborhood when a stoned deliveryman leaves a box containing ten kilos of high-grade cocaine at the wrong apartment. If you’re already asking, “Who would be stupid enough to FedEx that much cocaine?” you are not the market for this movie. You would be even more astonished to see that the drug lord uses not FedEx, or even UPS, but rather a bargain-basement delivery company whose branch in Philadelphia—not a small city, if you’ve never been there—is run by a single woman and her two sons.

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