Somewhere out in space sometime in the future, an Earth colony on the lush-and-beautiful-but-primitive planet Pandora works on mining all of the “unobtanium” from the planet.¹ Of course, Pandora is populated by giant blue, peaceful, nature-worshipping beings called the Na’vi, and the Na’vi have to be dealt with before this massive military-industrial stripmining can occur. So the corporation hires Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) to infiltrate the Na’vi and convince them to leave the giant tree where they’ve lived for generations so that they can blow it right the hell up. To do this, they transfer Jake’s consciousness into a genetically-engineered human-Na’vi hybrid, which works out well for Jake since his human body is paralyzed from the waist down. There’s the scientist who becomes Jake’s friend (Sigourney Weaver) and the Na’vi Jake falls in love with (the CGI likeness of Zoe Saldana) and the weak corporate executive (Giovanni Ribisi) and the warmongering colonel (Stephen Lang) and the wise old native mentors (the CGI likenesses of Wes Studi and CCH Pounder)…and if you’ve ever seen another movie ever, you can probably figure out the rest.

Yes, the story is simplistic and derivative of any number of other “white man goes native” stories. But really, that’s utterly beside the point: Cameron wanted a story and structure on which to hang his special effects, so he cribbed together pieces from other sources to suit his needs. You’re not going to convince me that this was “a story he’d always wanted to tell” when it’s been told a dozen times over. Cameron’s a smart enough filmmaker to know that he couldn’t get away with no story — you’re not going to keep an audience engaged for two-and-a-half hours and encourage repeated viewers if all you’ve got is your special effects. He knew that a hackneyed story was better than none at all.

The characters were fine, I guess — while you can have sparklingly original characters in a trite story, Cameron chose not to go that route; taking the time to develop characters would have taken time away from developing his special effects. But stock characters or no, the actors played their parts well, even if these weren’t the sorts of roles which push one’s acting abilities to the edge. It’s worth noting, though, that Cameron does know how to work with his actors, how to get convincing performances out of them, and I think ultimately that’s one of the biggest separators between Avatar and the most recent Star Wars movies: George Lucas took fantastic actors and directed them to completely lifeless performances in his CGI-fests. Cameron might have been more interested in the CGI, but still had some viable humans in there, too. Even if Cameron’s directorial strategy was simply to hire talented actors and get the hell out of their way, that’s a serious improvement over Lucas’s techniques (whatever the hell they may be).

Half of the acting in the movie, however, is done through motion-captured big blue not-quite-human aliens, and it’s difficult ever to get to that point where you don’t realize you’re watching CGI — it’s not quite “uncanny valley”-esque, but it’s not as natural-seeming as, say, the Gollum effects in Lord of the Rings, either. Somewhat ironically, especially given what I said above about the acting being generally acceptable: the times the CGI-ness was most painful was during the times when Cameron attempted to have his giant Smurfs actually emote (most notably when once Na’vi wails and weeps over the death of another).

Avatar isn’t a great movie, no, but for all of it’s flaws it’s still a good movie. Cameron succeeded in doing exactly what I imagine he was attempting to do: he made an entertaining with absolutely stellar special effects. And it certainly affected my eight-year-old: she became truly distraught at some of the events of the movie, and has been begging me to let her watch it again. (She has pronounced it “the best movie ever”; she and I clearly need to have a talk and see more movies.) The simplistic story and overwrought environmental message certainly didn’t drag down her experience, and maybe even enhanced it — maybe what Cameron has made here is a gloriously violent (though bloodless) kids’ movie.

Avatar may not have revolutionized filmic storytelling, but in its own way it revolutionized filmmaking, and Cameron deserves a lot of credit for that. The movie was nominated for nine Oscars (including Best Picture) and won three: Best Visual Effects, Best Art Direction and Best Cinematography, and all three awards were merited. I know plenty of people were angry or confused about the fact that Avatar was nominated for Best Picture — I even just said in the last paragraph that it’s a good but not great movie. But that nomination was awarded more for the “holy hell, Jim Cameron, look what you managed to pull off” factor than anything else. It’s much the same reason The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King scored so many nominations…but the fact that Return of the King was a much better film explains why that one won Best Picture.

[The mild spoiler light is on now — probably nothing you can't figure out from the trailers or any preview articles, but just in case, I'm letting you know.]

After an absolutely fantastic five-minute sequence to open the movie — seriously, I could’ve watched a full feature done just like the opening here — we’re thrown immediately into the melancholy new status quo of Woody (Tom Hanks), Buzz Lightyear (Tim Allen) and the rest of our heroes from the first two movies. As Andy prepares to go off to some unnamed college some unspecified distance away, his old toys haven’t been played with in years and finally have to accept that their time as active playthings has long gone. In the first of many instances where director Lee Unkrich shows us that even if they’re comprised solely of pixels, these toys can act, we discover that not all of the toys from previous movies are still with us anymore. Those that are left show a remarkable degree of self-knowledge: they know that they’re likely facing either the attic or the dump.

(Incidentally, whether he still plays with them or not, Andy must still care about these toys, because they’re all in absolutely perfect shape. I wish I could get my kids to take care of their toys so well.)

Through a series of coincidences and accidents and numerous callbacks to the the previous movies, the toys instead end up at Sunnyside Day Care, a facility that at first seems to be a complete paradise for toys looking for kids to play with them. Sunnyside is populated by a host of new characters (most notably a Ken (Michael Keaton) to go with Andy’s sister’s Barbie (Jodi Benson)) and is ruled by the furry, strawberry-scented fist of Lotso Huggin Bear (Ned Beatty), who somehow manages to drip sweet Southern-fried menace even when seeming to be perfectly friendly. Sunnyside isn’t all that it seems, of course — there’s a dark side both from without (the terrorizing toddlers for whom our heroes are not age-appropriate) and from within.

The toys get separated yet again when Woody hightails it out of Sunnyside in an attempt to rejoin Andy yet again. But instead of feeling like a simple retread of the driving plot of each of the previous two movies, Toy Story 3 knows that it’s not the first (or even second) time the series has been over this particular ground, and so both purposefully references what’s gone before while also dramatically upping the stakes for the characters. We get several scenes of derring-do, a surprising torture sequence(!), and one final rescue-and-escape sequence that shows us far more than we might have wanted to know about what happens to our trash after the garbage trucks pick it up.

For all its humorous situations and light-hearted character moments, Toy Story 3 is by far certainly the darkest of the three Toy Storys and among the darkest of all Pixar’s films. Pixar has never shied away from the darkness when it’s helped to tell a story; hell, there’s more death in the first five minutes of Finding Nemo than in most Disney animated movies combined. There were moments in Toy Story 3 that were truly scary — I think my children might have developed acute monkeyphobia now thanks to this movie. Near the ending of the grand action sequence at the end, I actually began to wonder for a minute if Pixar would let these characters meet a gruesome, all-too-final fate. (Mild spoiler: they didn’t.) But the genuine emotion that these toys exhibited when they thought they were facing their imminent destruction was astonishing (again with the “these toys can act” thing, or more accurately, these animators can act).

I doubt it’s all that much of a spoiler to say that Toy Story 3 had a happy ending — but I have to admit it was a happy ending that made me bawl like I’d just lost my own childhood toys. And it wasn’t just a happy ending, but the right ending, the only way to wrap things up that truly respects the growth and stories of all of the characters involved. Any other ending would have been cheating the characters or pandering to the audience and would just have felt wrong. Things had to end the way they did, even if for awhile I wasn’t sure it was actually going to happen.

This movie really pushed my buttons as a parent in a way the first two never did; while I certainly enjoyed the hell out of them, neither ever truly affected me emotionally. Man, was that not the case with Toy Story 3. I suspect that this movie touched on my own unexplored issues with losing or abandoning toys, but it also made me took at my kids’ relationships with their toys differently, especially my younger daughter’s with her stuffed lion Alex, who has always been to her what Woody was to Andy. By the time the movie’s pitch-perfect ending arrives, my buttons hadn’t been pushed, they’d been mauled.

(A final aside: Toy Story 3 raises some interesting metaphysical questions about toys and where their “life force,” that bit that makes the toys what they are, truly resides. If Mrs. Potato Head can still see through one of her eyes when it’s detached from her, do all her senses work similarly independently? Given the disturbing-but-funny circumstances that befall Mr. Potato Head, what is it exactly that constitutes his essential Potato-Head-ness? Where, exactly, does Buzz’s Buzz-ness, that self-knowledge that makes him different from the millions of other Buzz Lightyear toys, live? This topic seems like a good one to ruminate on while drinking.)

On the island of Berk, located somewhere that looks to be very, very far north, a clan of Vikings spend their nights fighting off random attacks from dragons that attack their island and steal their sheep. (All of the adult Vikings inexplicably speak with Scottish accents. The younger ones speak with American accents. Maybe it’s a puberty thing? You come of age, your testicles drop or your breasts grow, and as a consequence you develop a thick Scottish brogue?) The scariest of these hated dragons is the near-mythical Night Fury, a dragon so fast, so vicious that none of the Vikings have ever actually seen one.

Until our hero, Pancho or Hippo or Pustule or something (I never could remember his name, even while watching the movie) shoots one out of the sky with a slingshot-like contraption of his own invention.

You see, while all of the adult Vikings have muscles on top of their muscles and fearlessly fight off the constant dragon attacks with enthusiastic machismo, young Pinochle (Jay Baruchel) has brains on top of his brains. He’s scrawny and smart as hell, but inherited the fearlessness of his Viking forbears and wants desperately to earn the approval of his father, clan leader Stoick (Gerard Butler). So Peanut takes out this dragon using his big brain, goes to find it and discovers he hasn’t killed it but only injured it — and that’s where his journey to self-knowledge begins.

How To Train You Dragon features some fantastic characterization, especially with the catlike dragon Toothless — but that shouldn’t come as a surprise given that the movie was directed and co-written by Chris Sanders and Dean DeBlois, the guys behind Lilo and Stitch, a movie that featured one of my favorite characterization sequences in any movie, animated or not. Somehow I didn’t realize they were the ones who made this movie, or I’d have been much more enthusiastic about going to see it. (I thought I was just doing something nice for the kids.) Toothless even has some Stitch-like characteristics, though none of that character’s mania.

Sanders here comes up with some solid character design — we know just from looking at Pencil or Peggle or Giggle or whatever the kid’s name is exactly where he stands in his society. (The quivery voice Baruchel gave him annoyed me a fair amount, but it actually fit the character’s fourteen-or-so-year-old-ness, so overall I guess I won’t complain too much.) Sanders also plays a neat trick with the designs of several other characters, a gag understated enough that I didn’t catch onto it at all until he revealed what he had done — there was a level of subtlety at play that’s unusual for a kids’ movie.

Also unusual for the genre was the ending, which was absolutely fantastic and surprisingly thrilling in a true “holy crap, I’m really not sure what’s gonna happen here” way. I assumed that a kids’ movie wouldn’t kill off its main character, but Dragon did a superb job of keeping up a sense of suspense and keeping me on edge. Some of the visuals during the climactic battle at the end — a raging fight between dragons that we see only as far-off flashes of light inside clouds — stayed with me for some time after I left the theater.

One of my favorite things about this story was the way it subtly encouraged thinking and questioning as, you know, a Good Thing To Do. Most of the Vikings assume the dragons are evil and launch their attacks because they don’t understand the dragons — they’ve never asked the question why. Human nature, as has been detailed in countless movies, novels, and Arizona laws, is to hate and fear that which we don’t understand. Once Pinhead has the opportunity to see an actual dragon for himself, though, he starts to question — the dragons, his culture and even himself, what he believes and what he’s capable of.

That’s a pretty subversive idea for a kids’ movie to teach, if you think about it. This isn’t a Harry Potter-esque “oh hey, here’s a new world totally unlike the one you know.” And it’s more than just “be accepting of those different from you because you’re more alike than you are different,” which is a fairly standard trope in movies aimed at kids. Dragon really does say “your entire society may well be wrong about one or more of the fundamental assumptions on which it’s built, so you need to think for yourself.” I can’t right off hand think of another kids’ movie that preaches the same idea. It’s certainly an idea I want my own kids to learn, and while I’m happy to teach it to them, I’m more than happy to let this masterpiece reinforce the idea.

(Hiccup, that’s his name. Hiccup.)

Oh, wait, I’m sorry, that’s what a right-wing government would do. My bad.

Instead, they evacuated all of them from the ship and set them up in a dingy slum outside of Johannesburg which was, I’m sure, so much better for them. By the time the movie’s story begins, the slum houses 1.6 million “prawns” (the derogatory nickname for the insecty-looking aliens), and the government has decided that’s just way too many of them way too close to the city, and it’s time to relocate the lot of them to a much more concentration-camp like setup much further out of town.

And that’s where our protagonist, mid-level bureaucrat Wikus van der Merwe¹ (Sharlto Copley) comes into play, as it’s his job to head up the relocation operation. Thanks to the “mockumentary” format director Neill Blomkamp employs, it’s not initially clear that Wikus is our lead character — Blomkamp throws a whole bunch of talking heads at us at first, and it only becomes clear we’re supposed to be paying the most attention to Wikus after the movie’s inciting incident does its inciting. (Though in retrospect, I suppose, it was probably obvious: he was the first of the many heads to start talking.)

Once incidents have been properly incited (and I don’t want to say anything more specific on that front in case you haven’t yet been spoiled), we move into what turns out to be a pretty damn exciting movie. Most of the scenes kept the tension ratcheted up once the story kicked into gear, and I had two distinct “oh, shit, that was cool” moments. This seemed like the sort of movie where I should have known exactly what was going to happen before it did, but I honestly had no idea where the story was headed — it felt like just about anything could have happened to the main characters and I’ve have just rolled with it.

I like the idea of the mockumentary format in general, but District 9 suffers from some of the same problems with the format that most other faux documentaries do: there’s a need to show stuff which the camera could not possibly have picked up. Director Neill Blomkamp keeps the feel up pretty well for awhile, but eventually needs to show some of the aliens talking and plotting amongst themselves, and from that point on the mockumentary bits are mostly thrown aside except for some shots which were supposedly from security cameras. I’m sure Blomkamp made the choices he did because they thought they’d best let him tell the story he wanted to tell, but I think I’d have preferred he just not even start the documentary-style footage if he couldn’t carry it off throughout.

But that relatively minor quibble aside, District 9 was a solid piece of science fictional entertainment, and one with a much more well-developed emotional core than one might expect from a movie where soliders frequently get exploded into bloody splotches. Copley had apparently never before acted in front of a camera until Blomkamp, a childhood friend of his, cast him as the lead in his movie, but you’d never know he was so inexperienced: there certainly was never a point where I wasn’t sure what Wikus was feeling. Even the main “prawn” character was driven by his emotion moreso than by the simple needs of the plot. I was about to say that I guess that sort of emotional depth should be expected from any SF movie which manages to get itself nominated for Best Picture (expanded field of entrants or not), but, well, Avatar also scored a nomination.

For a relatively low-budget movie — and I do mean “relative to Avatar” — the special effects were indeed special. (I feel safe in guessing having producer Peter Jackson’s WETA Workshops working on the movie probably helped.) Mixing bipedal insectoids, miles-long spaceships, alien weaponry and a heavily-armed twenty-foot-tall battle suit into the middle of Johannesburg and the sad tin hovels of the arid alien slum made for visuals different from most SF FX-fests.

Recommended for fans of: Thoughtful, unexpected, explody movies; precocious insectoid children; Johannesburg; science fiction as metaphor for real-world problems.

I say to you, Will, the same thing I recently said to Seth Rogen about his recent decision to appear in the (so I’ve heard) execrable Observe and Report: you’re a naturally likable guy. That’s why you’re one of the biggest movie stars in the world — because people like you. You’re a good-looking man, you’re obviously smart as hell, you’re filled almost to overflowing with charisma. So why in the world would you want to appear in a movie in which you’re so not likable — especially in a disaster like Hancock? I’d understand if this movie were a matter of your trying to stretch yourself as an actor; that desire would be and is commendable. You’ve made plenty of movies for exactly that reason, and you’ve earned yourself two Oscar nominations so far for it.

But this? This isn’t stretching, Will; Hancock represents exactly the sort of SFX-laden blockbuster which has been your bread and butter for the last decade. Were you so desperate to play a superhero — any superhero — that you thought this was a good choice? It wasn’t, Will. Hancock‘s big draws are A) you (wasted, since your charisma and intelligence were so damped down), B) Charlize Theron (almost entirely wasted) and C) big special effects sequences. Those the movie has in excess, but they’re not even close to well-done enough or compelling enough to make up for its almost complete lack of humanity.

There’s some massive worldbuilding fail going on in Hancock: the entire story is rooted in ideas which clearly weren’t thought through very well. The world of Hancock is one in which Smith’s John Hancock is, in theory, the only super-powered person on the planet, yet there’s no real discussion of the implications of that reality either for him or for the world. We know that Hancock occasionally begrudgingly helps stop some crimes, destroys lots of property, and the people of Los Angeles hate him. But why did this happen, what does any of it mean? What does it mean to have one super-powered person in an ordinary world? Yes, we get a nod to “it’s lonely to be Hancock,” but there’s no serious effort put into what it really means to be this man. You may argue that director Peter Berg doesn’t want to get into those discussions, and you’d probably be right; but avoiding the questions made the movie feel much more lightweight to me — and again, that might well have been Berg’s intent, to produce light, brainpower-lite summer entertainment.

I know that I’m getting dangerously close to violating my own rules here. I’m putting forth what I think the movie should have been trying to do and not simply accepting what the movie gave me. But dammit, this is a Will Smith superhero movie — he should’ve known better, should’ve done better.

See, Hancock feels like a superhero movie created by people who don’t know, like or understand superheroes…and I know that in Smith’s case, that’s absolutely not true. He’s one of the most famous comic book fans in the world, and surely should have been capable of making a better superhero movie than this. Hancock features exactly two likable characters (neither of whom sports any superpowers), a metric crap-ton of property damage, and very little to no logic or sense. Things happen without consequence, or with inconsistent consequence: for example, Hancock’s disregard for property or, from the looks of it, human life drive the first half of the movie’s plot and what tiny bit of characterization Smith and Berg attempt, but a later massive CGI rampage through downtown L.A. causes not so much as a ripple in the movie’s world. Again, there’s that unshakable feeling of “not thought through very well.”

The one bright spot to me — and sadly not even a bright spot throughout — was, entirely unsurprisingly, Jason Bateman. His character, while entirely unbelievable as a hotshot public relations exec, also provided most of the comedy and likability in the first two thirds of the movie. After the movie’s Big Shocking Twist, however, Bateman seemed to have no idea what to do with his character — and it was at that point that his reactions and feelings should have been most important to the story. I place the blame there on director Berg, because Batemen didn’t even try; had he tried to act like a human being and done so unconvincingly, I might have blamed Bateman, but when there’s no effort whatsoever, that seems more like the fault of the director.

I’m going to give you a Mulligan on this one, Will. I think you’ve got a quality superhero movie in you, but Hancock certainly wasn’t it. Of course, the $227 million domestic this movie took in means your next superhero flick will probably be Hancock 2: Hancockier, so I have a sad feeling that quality superhero movie inside won’t ever see the light of day.

I’ll admit that I had doubts when I heard that Affleck had cast his little brother Casey Affleck as put-upon P.I. Patrick Kenzie — I’ve long been a fan of Dennis Lehane‘s Kenzie-Gennaro mystery novels and, like you do, had my own vision of what the characters looked like, a vision what I knew of Affleck the Younger just didn’t fit. I’m sure I’m not the only person who assumed the casting was pure nepotism. And perhaps it was — but even if so, it doesn’t matter, since Casey Affleck’s performance fits the character as if Lehane had written Patrick Kenzie with Affleck in mind from the start. Kenzie and partner (in life and in business) Angie Gennaro (Michelle Monaghan, whose character is sadly less involved here than in the books) are hired to find a missing four-year-old girl; of course, the case becomes far, far more convoluted than expected.

Affleck the Elder also draws stellar performances from his supporting cast, including Broadway vet Amy Ryan (who earned an Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actress) as the perhaps-not-quite-as-anguished-as-she-should-be mother and the always-reliable Ed Harris as a cop reluctantly working the case with Kenzie and Morgan Freeman as the head of the Boston Police Department’s missing child division.

Gone Baby Gone is a mystery, technically, but almost not quite; who was responsible for the crime committed — or even which crime was committed — proves less important than what the events say about the people involved, both the victims and the investigators. The plot has all the mechanics of a whodunit, all the reverses and reveals, but those concerns are secondary.

Never, never have I so badly wished for a character not to do something which his nature insisted he must. I’m not one given to talking to characters in the movies and TV shows I watch, but I wanted to grab Patrick Kenzie and slap some sense into him: “You’re not a parent, you don’t — perhaps you can’t — understand. This situation is out of your depth. All of your moral absolutes are whispers in the wind when the well-being of a child is involved.” But I think Kenzie knows he’s stuck in a murky area ethically and his rigid divisions between Right and Wrong provide his only signposts toward right action; the movie’s heartbreaking final scene shows him that those signposts might not have been guiding him correctly after all.

• The Breakfast Club (1985)
• Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986)
• National Lampoon’s Vacation (1983)
• Mr. Mom (1983)

…and if I were to extend this list with other movies from the Eighties which I really enjoyed but couldn’t necessarily count as “among my favorites,” you’d see:

• Sixteen Candles (1984)
• Weird Science (1985) (Yes, really.)
• Planes, Trains and Automobiles (1987)
• National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation (1989)

That’s a pretty impressive list, especially for covering only a six-year span. Every one of those movies was written (and some were directed) by John Hughes, who passed away yesterday.

Hughes didn’t look down on nerds, unlike so many of his contemporaries. In fact, Hughes celebrated them (mainly through his nerdly avatar, Anthony Michael Hall) and showed us — or, rather, showed all of you who weren’t nerds in the 1980s — that they were real people, too, and their stories deserved to be shared just as much as the pretty people’s do. Even iconic “cool kid” Ferris Bueller was really a nerd at heart: he might have gotten a computer instead of a car for his birthday, but he used that computer to hack into the school’s computer and change his number of absences, a very nerdy thing to do.

Of all of Hughes’ movies, The Breakfast Club most particularly spoke to me (and many others like me, I’m sure), in no small part because I was basically the same age as its characters when I first saw it. That movie was the first time I can recall that I was presented the idea that we are all freaks in some way, we are all of us different, no matter how “normal” we may look on the outside. I remember a couple of long walks from my house with my dad to get milkshakes at McDonald’s, and we’d talk about that movie and the characters and what it meant and how it related to me and my friends.

So thank you, John Hughes, for creating so many characters I could relate to when I was a teenager, and for creating so many movies I enjoyed so much. You can be sure my kids will be watching your teen-oriented movies when they’re teenagers themselves — which will be thirty years after those movies came out — and that’s a fantastic legacy for you to have. (Of course, my kids adore Beethoven, which you also wrote, so they’re already in love with your work.) Rest well.

Yet for all of the threat which lies barely underneath the surface of the film, Half-Blood Prince certainly feels much lighter in places than Order of the Phoenix ever did. While the newer film certainly has some of the scariest moments in the series yet, it’s balanced nicely by a frivolity the previous film lacked. That lightness, of course, comes largely thanks to the hormones bubbling over in most of the now firmly teenaged characters. With all of the big important goings-on happening around them — and knowing what’s coming up for them in the final two installments — it was a good thing for director David Yates to let the kids have some fun with the romance. Ron (Rupert Grint) in particular gets to provide some much-needed comic relief, a feat at which Grint has become quite adept over the last few years.

Personally, I enjoyed seeing Ginny Weasley (Bonnie Wright) — one of my favorite characters from the series — with a much bigger part in this film, more on par with the importance her character took on in the books; she seemed almost to be on an equal footing with Ron and Hermione this time out. Ginny seems worthy of Harry (though she and Radcliffe don’t exactly set the screen ablaze with their chemistry): Ginny’s someone who’s now proven repeatedly that she’s not afraid to risk her life to protect her family and friends. I’ll also admit that it certainly doesn’t hurt that Wright has turned into an absolutely stunning young woman.

The grown-ups in Half-Blood Prince don’t let the kids have all of the fun, of course. Alan Rickman has possibly his biggest part as Professor Severus Snape to date, and he makes the most of the opportunity, reveling in his character’s moral ambiguity (though perhaps not quite as much as I’d like; that’s a topic for another time). Series newcomer Jim Broadbent provides an astonishing performance as new Potions professor Horace Slughorn; I’ve seen a couple of critics indicate Broadbent could possibly be up for a Best Supporting Actor Oscar for his work…if it weren’t in a Harry Potter film. I’ve finally started to warm up to Michael Gambon‘s version of Dumbledore (or maybe I’ve simply gotten used to it), though he’s never exuded benevolent wisdom the way the late Richard Harris did, and that’s the one trait I most strongly identify with the character. Still, once I’m able to put my personal prejudices aside, I can admit that Gambon does a fine job in his most difficult outing with the character yet.

I can’t imagine someone seeing this movie without either having seen the previous five in the series or having read the books: there’s zero effort made to introduce viewers to any of the characters or situations. Characters are brought on-screen without any explanation of who they are or their relationships to anyone else; locations are shown without naming them; magical objects are used without explaining what they do; situations are referenced without context. For those viewers already well-immersed in the Potterverse, the shorthand works well, but Yates and returning screenwriter Steve Kloves had to sacrifice new-viewer friendliness in order to get even as much of the novel as they did in here; had they tried to hand-hold the uninitiated, the movie would have been six hours long.

Yates has set the series up for what I’m hoping/expecting will be a fantastic conclusion with the two-part Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows. While I might not agree with all of the changes he and Kloves have made to the source material — and really, what Potter fan does? — I believe they’ve changed what they have in order to ensure those last two movies will end the story in an exciting and memorable fashion. I can’t wait.

The Nines contains three stories which more or less add up to one larger meta-story. Each episode features the same three actors in roles which roughly correspond consistently: Reynolds is the focus; Melissa McCarthy is someone important to him in some way; and Hope Davis tries to keep McCarthy’s character away from him. Each story includes numerous callbacks (or call-forwards) to the others. To say more than that starts to eat into the fun of the movie, that piecing together of little bits of information and visual clues.

Reynolds in particular makes the most of his multiple roles. It’s easy to think of him as something of a one-note actor because most of the time he suffers from Movie Star Syndrome: he’s handsome enough and charismatic enough and naturally funny enough to carry a role by essentially playing himself (or so it seems; it’s not like I’ve ever met the man). But in The Nines, he shows that when given a part which requires it, he actually can act. Two of his roles here are well within his regular wheelhouse, but in the second segment, he plays a thinly-veiled version of writer-director August: his turn as a reserved, driven gay man runs refreshingly against the normal Ryan Reynolds type, and it give me hope that he’ll find more roles in the future which can bring this level of work out of him.

(On a side note, I’d like to say that I was very happy to see Gilmore Girls‘ Melissa McCarthy given such a large part in a movie. Her performance here was mostly nothing exceptional, one scene of barely-contained rage withstanding, but it’s always nice to see an actress who so flouts conventional Hollywood wisdom about body image get to do her thing in a major role and remind people that there’s more than one way to define beauty. Of course, this movie wasn’t especially Hollywood in the first place…)

The Nines kept me intrigued through its first two thirds, but the conclusion gave me a serious case of whatthefuckitis. I can’t say that the ending didn’t play fair or set itself up properly, because it did, but I kept waiting for some indication that there was another layer to be peeled back to give me the real ending. Even though everything we’d seen in the previous ninety minutes had indeed been building toward this particular conclusion — in retrospect, anyway — the final nine minutes of The Nines seemed very much like a left-field copout. I’d rather have had a much more open, vague ending than having something decisive but which felt so awkward. Watch this movie to enjoy Reynolds’ performance, but don’t go in expecting to have everything wrapped up satisfactorily.

(Incidientally, I’m curious to see the seeming shift in her on-screen persona in the more recent The Proposal — she’s clearly playing against type as the less vulnerable of the leads and letting the also-affable Ryan Reynolds take on the more likable role. The shift didn’t seem to affect the movie’s box office any, but I’m curious to see if I’ll like her in the position of power.)

Lonely Chicago transit system employee Lucy Moderatz (Bullock) spends her days in a tiny booth taking an endless supply of train tokens from commuters; she spends her night in her apartment alone with her cat, eating frozen dinners. Lucy has convinced herself she’s fallen in love with Peter, a handsome, well-dressed man (Peter Gallagher) who comes through her station every morning, though of course she’s never spoken to him. On Christmas Day, she witnesses him get mugged and knocked onto the train tracks, then manages to pull him off the tracks in time to save his life. At the hospital, in the sort of misunderstanding on which romantic comedies are designed, his family mistakes her for a fiancée they’d never heard about. Peter’s in a coma and can’t clear up the issue, and Lucy’s unsure how to do so and unsure she wants to…until she meets Peter’s brother Jack (Bill Pullman).

Bullock’s Lucy is the perfect sort of heroine for a movie like While You Were Sleeping: she’s endearing and harmless, letting herself sink into the moral morass of the film’s plot because she can’t bear to break the hearts of her newly-adopted family. Even when we disagree with her choices, we get where she’s coming from — she only has the best of intentions. We’d never stand for her decisions in real life, but within the context of the movie, they’re, well…adorable. Bullock’s natural charm shines through in this movie — as does Pullman’s. In many romantic comedies, some even starring Bullock, we think the protagonists should end up together only because their names are above the credits and we know they’ll be together in the happy ending. Here, both Bullock and Pullman are so likable that we want them to work their way through the convolutions of the plot so they can find each other.

The movie’s very professionally directed by Jon Turteltaub, and I don’t mean that to sound disrespectful. So many movies feature awkward reaction shots or questionable line readings or bizarre transitions, just to name a few pet peeves, which make the film seem amateur no matter what the budget. But Turteltaub leaves none of those moments in While You Were Sleeping (with the possible exception of some strange lines from the venerable Glynis Johns, but I’ll cut her some slack). Turteltaub assembled a thoroughly professional cast (and again, I use that word as praise). Any cast with Peter Boyle, Jack Warden, Gallagher and Pullman will yield some solid acting; Gallagher in particular plays his part with glee, even the throwaway lines. (Of course, he spends half the movie in a coma, but still.)

In the end, While You Were Sleeping might not be extraordinarily witty or incisive and might be more than a little predictable, but it is very pleasant, charming and heart-warming, and I can think of many worse ways to spend an hour-and-a-half.

[1] No, it’s not because Ryan became all collagened and scary-looking; that actually happened later on — indirectly as a result of her dethroning.