Precious has once again put me in the uncomfortable position of debating just how much I can really enjoy “inspirational” tales about situations slightly too horrific to be believable. Yet, simultaneously, the film that relies on the audience recognizing physical, sexual and emotional abuse in a way that falls just out-of-bounds for cinema stereotype. It’s a mixed bag that is saved by its performances even when the sloppy assembly of the film makes itself obvious.

Precious is the tale of Claireece “Precious” Jones (Gabourey Sidibe), a obese 16-year old living with her abusive mother (Mo’Nique). We pick up on her life in 1987 in Harlem right as she’s been impregnated by her rapist father for a second time and as she gets kicked out of her public school in lieu of a more specialized GED education at an alternate schooling center called Each One, Teach One. Her teacher, a lesbian named Blu Rain (Paula Patton) encourages Precious to write everyday in her notebook, a assignment that eventually leads to the poor girl coming into her own.

The film is directed by Lee Daniels, who brought Cuba Gooding Jr to Shadowboxer in 2005 (Mo’nique plays a character named ‘Precious’ in that film). Shadowboxer wasn’t the most masterfully constructed tale, so it’s not a surprise that Precious shows some strides forward in terms of character and storytelling. However, if one thing didn’t work for me in Precious, it was Daniel’s directing.

From the rape scene that focuses on sweat and fried food to Precious’ fantasy sequences, Daniels is visually inconsistent and doesn’t seem to trust his narrative to tell the story. There are points where Daniels’ little tricks work, like when the heavy-set, dark-ebony Precious looks in the mirror and imagines she’s a skinny white girl, but there are also a handful of cutaways and fantasies that don’t contribute much more to the story than the sparse voiceover.

It may seem like a weird aspect to point out, but: for a film that has such great performances, it plays like it was made by a director that didn’t trust those performances and instead had to make sure the audience is “getting it” with broad strokes when silence or minutia could have said so much more.

If we take a similar sort of cinema, really any of the countless movies where a child in an unfortunate situation finds a teacher that is able to connect to her, and start drawing comparisons, Precious starts looking a little too bold-faced in its intentions. Take a film like Half-Nelson, where the teacher is a white guy with a crack addiction and the student is an African-American female. They both bond in a quiet and realistic manner and the whole time we understand that both parties are in impossible situations and looking for companionship. Part of the problem with Precious, the character, in this film is that she takes so much abuse before she finally cracks that it makes the lesser abuse stereotypical and therefore less effective. Someone who gets frying pans thrown at them has a hard and horrible life and someone who has a seconds child by her father has a horrible life, but as soon as we get to the incest, the pans seem lesser. I know that’s horrible, but that’s how it plays.

There is a tipping point for Precious, another roadblock of life that eventually makes her emote (Hint: the movie IS set in the 80s when this roadblock was the talk of the nation…God, I can’t keep calling it a “roadblock;” it’s HIV). Up until that point, the brilliance of Gabourey Sidibe’s performance is the subtlety, even when that subtlety works against the shock we are supposed to be feeling.

I know it’s not fair to watch a movie then pretend you had seen something different, but Precious was a great drama when all it was showing me was the chronological progression of the main character. A scene where she steals a tub of fried chicken showed me more about the character than the fifth cut-away to a fantasy world where Precious is a celebrity with a whiter accent.

There’s a point in the movie where Precious is bringing a baby back to her mother’s place and the entire audience around me started turning up the tension, knowing that things were about to go horribly wrong. That’s about where I disconnected from the film. I realized that I was in a sold out theater with a full-balcony and at least half of the theater came to see a sixteen year old girl in the worst situation imaginable.

Lee Daniels could have turned Precious into something more like torture porn where the audience comes to see the horrors of the real world enacted on the unfortunate. Daniels also could have side-stepped some of the more extreme abuse and let these characters bounce off each other. What Lee Daniels did was land somewhere in-between, sometimes making a fetish of Precious’ fantasies and other times lingering on the abuse.

The bottom line is that Precious is a good film saved by fantastic performances from all its actors and actresses. It’s probably going to grab one of the Best Picture nominations and litter other Oscar categories with its cast. But like other films that exist to show a mainstream audience the worst of the “other half,” it sometimes swerves too close to exploitation of the minority experience. The end result is a film that will jerk tears out of you if you’re prone to opening your heart to inspirational cinema but will leave you feeling ambivalent if you’re judging the film based on what you see.

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“This Is It” is an ironic title for this Michael Jackson concert documentary. One one hand, the tour was titled that long before we knew it would never see the lights of London’s O2 Arena. On the other hand, This Is It is the opening call in the posthumous marketing of the Michael Jackson Legacy. The title has double meaning, making this film the most obvious link between what Michael Jackson was and what Michael Jackson will be for future generations.

Let’s make sure we’re all on the same footing here: I love Michael Jackson. I have four-to-five collections of Michael Jackson songs, from #1s to HIStory to The Essential Michael Jackson. At one point, I owned all these albums on cassette tape. I’m often reminded that when I was 5 I mookwalked at a wedding and it was – apparently – the cutest thing ever. Michael Jackson is part of my personal history.

Now that a few months of hindsight have accumulated, I can safely say that Jackson is in the top three celebrity deaths I’ve experienced in my adulthood. The other two were Johnny Cash and Hunter S. Thompson. Each left a very real mark on my view of pop culture and my growing up.

Now that you know where I’m coming from, you know why I caught This Is It this Halloween weekend: I had to. The question left to answer is: should you shell out your hard earned cash to see This Is It in theaters?

The short answer is that you probably don’t have to.

Kenny Ortega’s cobbled-together documentary uses MJ’s personal footage of concert rehearsals to form its feature-length look at what Michael Jackson’s This Is It show would have been. The sad thing is that it would have been epic with legions of acrobatically-inclined dancers, full CGI and 3D music videos and giant production props.

Watching the rehearsal footage and the behind-the-scenes shots of the green-screen dance interlude The March had me slapping my forehead with the pure potential of it. This Is It, as a show, would have rolled right from the opening notes of “Wanna Be Startin’ Something” into this massive and precisely choreographed piece of dance that serves as a thesis for the performance: Michael Jackson never went anywhere. He might be older, but he’s still got his distinctive style.

The problem with This Is It, or why it is getting more of an audience than it probably deserves, is the rough nature of the footage. These were rehearsals of a show that was never fully produced and Jackson holds back both vocally and with his solo dances. The few times MJ forgets himself in the moment, both with some vocal improv during a mid-set ballad and during a stripped-down Billie Jean dance number are where the star’s joy shows through the process. The rest of the film really is a process movie, with the show being built around Jackson’s perfectionist standards.

However, we never get to see anything fully realized and This Is It never becomes a true concert film. Jackson doesn’t sing all of his vocal parts and the sound mix hasn’t been processed or tweaked much beyond what’s happening on screen. If your hope for This Is It involves loud and interesting mixes of your favorite Jackson hits, you’ll probably find more solace in the companion CD released with the film.

This Is It is interesting and a very fitting swan song for Jackson, especially after the news coverage of his death managed to twist the truth enough to turn the man back into a public spectacle.

This Is It starts to work after about 15 minutes when you stop trying to look for clues about Michael’s health and personal life and once again start viewing the man as an artist who knows every dance move and every musical part to his large repertoire.

If you’re a Jackson fan, I wouldn’t be surprised if this DVD made it into your personal collection, but nothing about this film suggests that seeing it in the cinema is required. This isn’t a 3D/Dolby Surround extravaganza, it’s a quiet last look at genius. Even after walking out of the theater, I wished I had seen the film somewhere more private where I could tap my foot to the beat and silently gawk at the dancing.

I’ll see This Is It again, but not at full ticket price.

• Sony Close To Obtaining Last Michael Jackson Concert Footage
• Universal Cuts Michael Jackson-Sensitive Scene from Brüno?

If I were to give you a quiz on Amelia Earhart right now, how well would you do? Probably not so well, unless you are a female pilot or someone interested in the pop culture of the early 20th Century. Everyone knows Earhart disappears during her attempt to circumnavigate the globe, probably ending up dead, possibly getting sucked into a time vortex, considering no remains were ever found.

If director Mira Nair and writers Anna Hamilton Phelan and Ron Bass decided to take the “sucked into the sixth season of Lost” crazy theory about Amelia’s death, this movie might have ended on a high note. It would have left me confused, but highly entertained instead of the reality: me, left bored and hungry after a boring film.

Amelia is beautifully shot and features a fantastic, possibly Oscar-worthy performance from Hilary Swank as the titular Earhart. The production used a real, polished, reflective Lockheed Electra while filming and re-created Amelia’s circumnavigation from African locations. The whole thing has a National Geographic gloss to it, and when the film’s score starts swelling every other scene, the gloss reveals itself to be sugary sweet and sticky.

There’s something about Amelia that doesn’t work.

Conflict, my screenwriting teachers told me, is the seed that sprouts all drama. One character is in a situation with another character and they both want something from each other. That sounds a lot like drama, and it might fit some loose definitions, but the sparkle of interesting interaction can be added to this scene by making both characters withholding of the other’s desire. Amelia fails to establish this basic level of conflict.

I’ve been describing it to people as a film made like a bad Disney sports movie. Swank as Amelia is an eyebrow-less but bright-eyed female pilot in 1928, when the film introduces her. She’s meeting with George Putnam (Richard Gere), a book publisher who hires her to command the first female-commanded flight across the Atlantic. Amelia isn’t psyched about not being able to fly, she’ll just be “commanding,” but the success of the flight will bring her fame enough to do what she wants, so she goes and successfully flies over the Atlantic. After that, there is no more conflict in the story.

Disney Sports films like The Mighty Ducks or Iron Will always take our heroes and put them in impossible situations. Even when the going gets tough and everyone laughs at a Jamaican bobsled team, the main characters hold on to their dreams of being great and won’t let anyone stop them. They work harder, train more and display more will power than the opposing team, so when they win, we’re ready. Amelia is like a Disney Sports movie character in the sense that she just wants to fly because it makes her feel free. Amelia, the movie, is not like Disney Sports because after Amelia crosses the Atlantic no one is interested in stopping her from doing anything.

• The Men Who Stare at Goats poster (with added goat)
• The Men Who Stare At Goats trailer
• Angels & Demons Super Bowl TV spot
• Jim Carrey and Ewan McGregor kissing
• I Love You Phillip Morris Pic

Where The Wild Things Are is a fantastic art film about what it feels like to be a child, and that probably means it’s going to perform sluggishly at the box office.

Based on Maurice Sendak’s brief children’s book and directed by Spike Jonze, the film could have developed a linear plot about Max in the world of the Wild Things, but instead it floats through its running time on childhood emotion, using the audience’s feelings as its internal pacing. And that’s risky business…

I’m guessing that critics are going to be divided on this one, but those that recommend this movie to you are going to tell you it’s a must-see, a cult classic in the making – and it is. Those that don’t like the movie are going to say that it’s slow, aimless and possibly boring – and it is. If Where The Wild Things Are didn’t have such a following amongst the 20-something age group and the trailer featuring Arcade Fire’s “Wake Up” didn’t garner so much attention online, I doubt this movie would have gotten a release as wide as it has.

This isn’t a children’s movie as much as it’s a movie about being a child. I don’t have children, but I can imagine that I’d be the type of possibly-misguided father who would bring his 9 or 10-year-old to check out Wild Things. It might bore them, but I think they would find some emotional truth in it. Max, played by Max Records (seen this year as a young Bloom Brother), is a little terror who has defaced the opening credits and who dominates the first half-hour of the film with his wild emotions from the glee of a snowball fight to the tantrum caused by his mother’s new boyfriend (Mark Ruffalo in a cameo-level appearance).

Instead of transforming his room into the land of the Wild Things like in the book, Max runs out of his house, down the street and to the waterfront where he gets in an abandoned boat and sails away. The film’s version is much more dangerous (Want and adventure kids? Get in that abandoned boat!) and the tone of very real danger remains throughout Max’s time with the Wild Things. When we first meet our pack of furry emotional stand-ins, Carrol (James Gandolfini) is throwing a tantrum by firelight and Judith (Catherine O’Hara) threatens to eat their new king. Just in case we had forgotten that the Wild Things represent some real danger, Max finds the human bones of the previous king(s) pretty early on.

Gandolfini turns in an amazing vocal performance as Carrol. It’s one of the few times I’ve been able to fully separate the man from Tony Soprano, and it might be the first time in a film that an actor’s voice-over performance made such awesome use of breathing. Gandolfini’s Carrol huffs, pants, sighs, and damn if it isn’t effective.

Each Wild Thing represents and emotion that Max has inside of him and Carrol contains the anger and frustration that lives in every child. Carrol is the part of you that was pretty sure life was going to be easier than this, he’s the part that lashes out and sometimes gets people accidentally hurt, he’s the part of you capable of the deepest sadness and the most fiery rage simultaneously. He’s all these things and it plays really well.

I’m unsure if you need to have had a brother or be a man now to understand this facet of childhood. It’s interesting that Carrol represents a childhood emotion I most associate with being young and male, yet the Wild Thing is still our featured creature. Reactions from female viewers have been mixed, but as a guy, I understood the film as it was unspooling.

Here’s an example: My brother and I are building a fort in our basement. We’ve emptied out our two toy chests and pushed them together with a large cardboard box to make a spaceship. One of our toy chests is the “observation room,” a tiny plastic container that could only fit one of us. I was relegated to the “observation room” which I quickly made the cockpit (since I’m older and therefore the captain). As my brother was outside the fort on a “space walk” repairing our ship, for some reason that was a mystery then and remains one to me now, I removed the cockpit windshield (a small, transparent plastic tub) and threw it at my brother’s head as hard as I could.

I don’t know why. Maybe I was pissed that I was stuck in the observation room, maybe my brother had taken the toy out of the cereal box that morning and I had relegated vengeance to my unconscious mind.

Seconds later, my brother is wailing and bleeding profusely from the face. It turns out that a corner of that seemingly-harmless plastic tub had cut him right below his eye. My parents, being the caring folks that they are, took my brother and I to the hospital. He was wailing and bleeding and the doctor said he needed stitches.

I stood in the waiting room, staring at the fish tank, almost shitting my pants. Of course, my parents had gotten mad and asked the logical questions: “What did you do? Why did you do that to your brother?” And here’s the thing: I didn’t know, but I felt horrible. So horrible, in fact, that when my brother got his stiches, my parents came back into the waiting room, took one look at me and decided that I had punished myself far more than they could ever punish me.

That’s what Where The Wild Things Are is all about: that moment; from the seemingly random outbursts of energy and violence to the totally unexpected consequences that follow your actions. Sometimes these things don’t make sense the first time you experience them. What you write off as “shit happens” when you get older is painful, confusing and thrilling when you’re nine.

If you are open to seeing a movie with fantastic visuals and think you can follow an emotional plot rather than a fact or action based one, Where The Wild Things Are is a beautiful film I’ll be watching for years to come. If you’re looking for an adaptation of your favorite children’s book for children of your own, see if Cloudy With A Chance of Meatballs is still playing in your area.

• Second Where The Wild Things Are trailer

Anyone who is/was surprised that Zombieland took this weekend’s box office in the US hasn’t seen the movie, because this flick is a fun, episodic romp through the inevitable zombie apocalypse that is more likely to thrill than offend. The nice thing about a zombie horror/comedy/road-trip film that clocks in under 90 minutes is that the enjoyable moments never stop coming and – on the off chance this film doesn’t do it for you – the pacing stays consistent.

The flick is the directorial debut from Ruben Fleischer who has directed a few episodes of Jimmy Kimmel’s late-night show and from Paul Wenick and Rhett Reese, two writers that cut their teeth in television.

The plot follows Jesse Eisenberg (reappearing in a “land” movie after this year’s Adventureland) as Columbus, a geeky shut-in WoW player who finds himself one of the last human survivors of the zombie apocalypse based on his social anxieties and list of rules to survive Zombieland. Along the way, he meets Tallahassee, played by Woody Harrelson (unironically doing his best Woody Harrelson persona), a snake-skin jacketed redneck who has a penchant for zombie killing.

The buddy comedy is interrupted when Columbus and Tallahassee are conned by Wichita (Emma Stone) and Little Rock (Abigail Breslin), two sisters on their way to Playland outside Los Angeles. The unlikely group of friends bond on their way West, flirting, bullshitting and killing zombies until a very funny cameo appearance by a certain Ghostbuster in his Hollywood mansion.

Wenick and Reese originally wrote Zombieland as a television pilot and sold it to CBS, who eventually killed the project and gave the rights back to Wenick and Reese. The pilot was expanded into a feature-length script by adding what would have been episode two to the pilot plot and Zombieland was birthed again as a feature.

The Zombieland script started making the rounds in Hollywood, languishing in the screenplay piles for eventual stars Eisenberg and Harrelson. In 2007, the script made the Black List, a yearly list assembled by Hollywood insiders naming the best unproduced screenplays making the rounds in the industry. Zombieland got picked up for Sony, who gave it to Fleischer, the rookie film director, and funded it to the tune of $23.6 million.

This is how projects come out of left field to really surprise you: a script that came to be purely based on the quality of its content on the page. In a year where at least half the films released on any given week are adapted from a book, video game, This American Life episode or toy line, it’s a breath of fresh air to see Zombieland and enjoy the hell out of it.

The zombies of Zombieland really get their change to shine for the first half of the film, when we’re dropped into the middle of the zombie apocalypse, which is just fine, because I don’t know a single fan of zombie movies that doesn’t secretly (or publically) have their own plan for the eventual dawn of the zombie apocalypse. People who have read World War Z (by Max Brooks, adapted screenplay currently at Brad Pitt’s Plan B production company) have especially realistic strategies for surviving the downfall of non-zombie civilization. The basics of any given apocalypse are the same and usually comprise the first few minutes of any zombie movie. Zombieland knows its audience well enough that it disposes with the apocalypse story with a few well-placed lines: patient zero ate a contaminated hamburger with an evolved version of mad cow disease. Simple.

Because the film is a television pilot, some of the outings feel like episodes tied together with greater one-off glimpses of character. In a specific example, we learn that Harrelson’s Tallahassee had a child that he lost once things went zombie. Instead of allowing this to motivate Tallahassee’s action like a B-movie would do, here Tallahassee has instead been given as maddening hankering for a Twinke. If Zombieland was a television show, a few episodes would be spent finding Tallahassee’s Twinke, but the child would be left for sweeps week or a season finale. In the film, the eventual Twinke is Tallahassee’s character dénouement after a zombie-killing climax, leaving the question of Tallahassee’s parenting character flaw open, ready to be explored further should Zombieland get a sequel.

Zombieland’s focus on character comedy often gave me the feeling that I was getting a glimpse into the beginnings of something instead of a complete picture or plot. Luckily, the comedy of a continent of zombies doesn’t require much in terms of an inciting incident. The film layers on elements of a romantic comedy, zombie horror flick, buddy movie and road trip film in an attempt to distract from its episodic structure. The format fits the film since staying put in a post zombie apocalypse world makes no sense.

The structure and the theme don’t allow Zombieland to make a lasting impression, but it doesn’t really want to, it just wants to entertain you with its gore, witty banter and situation comedy. In that sense it succeeds wildly. If you’re the type of person wondering what Zombie Rules fall in between the few we get to see, there will be lots of holes to poke your fingers through. Thing is, those holes are deliberate gaps that were chiseled into the plot to provide character comedy – no one promised you an entire list of Zombie Rules.

I knew I had gotten my money’s worth with Zombieland as soon as the slo-mo credits over Metallica’s “For Whom The Bell Tolls” ended, and that was before I even knew the other three main characters this film make dance in front of you. It’s visual candy, it’s pot for people who don’t smoke, it’s a laughably fun experience for anyone who has thought about their reaction to the zombie apocalypse and if contains the apology for Garfield that I’ve always wanted to hear.

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I don’t think I can talk about Paranormal Activity without mentioning The Blair Witch Project, because the same thing is going to happen to this movie.

Paranormal Activity is good. It was shot by Oren Peli on a budget of $11,000 – even if the version Paramount Pictures is releasing is a tad more expensive, the core of the film is cheaply shot. Paramount bought the film with the intention of remaking it, but when they held a screening for writers they had a near-record amount of walk outs. The studio thought they had a bomb until the talked to the walk outs: they had left because they were scared.

In 1999 The Blair Witch Project was released on the general public. It was an independent phenomena that ended up grossing $248 million on a $60,000 budget. The backlash was quick to come. The shaky cam was too much for people, not enough actually happened on screen for the hardcore horror fans, a number of valid and fictional reasons piled on the media hype for this movie, eventually leading to one of the film’s stars, Heather Donahue, to call the experience a “train wreck.”

When I saw The Blair Witch Project, it was in limited release like Paranormal Activity is now. I was taken by a friend of mine and I had no idea what I was in for. As we waited in line, a Lionsgate representative gave everyone a glossy mini-magazine with press clippings and backstory of what we were about to see. Then we saw it, and we were blown away. When Blair Witch was released wide and the print was forced to grain out over the large screens of the nation’s multiplexes, I saw the film twice more and neither time replicated the atmosphere of the first. The movie did its job with its editing and story, but the atmosphere was never there. The movie’s hand had been tipped, its secret out.

Paranormal Activity stands to do the exact same thing down to the letter.

I’m not a huge horror fan, but I can appreciate it. I’ll take fear of the unseen over the gore of the torture porn subgenre, but I don’t mind seeing someone’s head cleaved in half. That doesn’t happen in Paranormal Activity. I’m not going to say what happens in Paranormal Activity except to say this: If you can and have up to this point, avoid the trailer. It’s not misleading, but the necessary evil of teasing money shots in three-second blasts doesn’t serve what this movie is. I didn’t ever leap out of my chair at a jump scene, but I did do some nervous gripping of the arm rests.

Paranormal Activity is “found footage” shot by Micah Sloat and his girlfriend Katie Featherston. Kate has been haunted by something since she was 8 and Micah is determined to tape the phenomena even as things get worse.

The problem with a movie this cheap being this good isn’t what you initially think it is. Remember Blair Witch? Remember your smart ass friends worrying that now any crappy little movie with no action could be shot on a Hi-8 camera and released? Remember how that didn’t happen?

The problem with the cheap-to-good ratio is that the studio that releases it doesn’t know when to scale back the hype for maximum effectiveness. They don’t need to, because even if they get your butt in the seat and you hate it, you still paid for your butt space. But, the hype on this one isn’t going to help it. If you go below a $20,000 budget, your film is going to have some visual limitations (or you end up being Robert Rodriguez), and the movie season we’re in now – coming out of summer and into Halloween – is peppered with leftover, flashy fare (Pandorum, anyone?). Paranormal Activity may have been a fantastic movie going experience and I could have resorted to hyperbolae and written something like: “The most fun I’ve had at the theater all year!”

But Paranormal Activity can’t live up to that, and the movie deserves to be seen with little-to-no expectation if at all possible.

Spoiler: It’s not possible. Countdown to backlash, starting now.

Demand Paranormal Activity in your area HERE.

• How Studio Movies Die, Featuring Moneyball

I’ve been itching for an interesting musical recently. While watching television and doing a little YouTube surfing before I go to bed, I occasionally wonder if the short attention span that is always attributed to the dawn of the information age doesn’t mean that America is ready for a return to something like Vaudville, with traveling sets of variety acts, from singing and dancing to LOLCats and sketch comedy. I’m not sure what a LOLCat would look like live, but I bet you could flash 30 hilarious ones while the next act was setting up.

The variety show thought was nothing more than a tangent, my actual pop culture narrative of musicals on screen probably has roots in the Disney animated classics of the 90s. As soon as those started to drop off in quality, I was a theater kid in high school, getting my education in the Broadway musicals while memorizing the soundtrack to Moulin Rouge. From high school it was off to art school, a monumental waste of money that hopefully embedded eggs of success somewhere deep inside me, deep enough that they are still incubating and might hatch in the near future. In the recent musical past, I checked out Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself, which had musical interludes to forward the plot and have been enjoying the hell out of Fox’s new musical/satire Glee.

The pieces were in place for me as a movie-goer to have a pleasant experience with a Fame remake. The original wasn’t good or bad, but it was fun. In an age of American Idol and countless other singing and talent programs captivating eyeballs worldwide, a re-imagining of a new class for the School of Performing Arts could have touched on some interesting subjects about what fame means now, 29 years after the original.

Unfortunately, the movie I got thought a Fame remake should be something else entirely.

Fame takes the structural lead of its predecessor. We follow a handful of teens as they attend a private school in New York for gifted performing artists. It’s called the School of Performing Arts, but everyone in Fame 2009 calls it “P.A.” Each teen has their own dream and their own obstacle to overcome during their four years at P.A. The film is split into five sections: Audition Day, Freshman Year, Sophomore Year, Junior Year and Senior Year. Each character gets one or two scenes per year for us to catch up on their progress, which means a total of 8 character scenes and one concluding scene for those actors with the most screen time. Peppered between those scenes are dance a musical numbers.

I wrote down the characters as the movie was playing, because they were all such stereotypical high school characters that would have had trouble working dramatically in 1980, let alone 2009. Each character is so shallow that they take two sentences at most to describe in full.

Jenny (Kay Panabaker) is a singer/actress consumed with stress until she dates Marco, then she is the victim of actor-on-actor sexual assault, pisses off Marco and graduates. Looks like a young Larisa Oleynik and would be perfect in a remake of The Secret World Of Alex Mack.

Marco’s (Asher Book) dad owns a restaurant where Marco started performing when he was young and therefore is one of the more talented students from scene one on. Dates Jenny and totally sees the sexual assault coming before he gets mad at her and graduates.

Denise (Naturi Naughton) is a singer/piano player whose father only wants her to play classical piano. She has a great voice and wants to sing, so she does and her father sees reason by the time she graduates.

Malik’s (Collins Pennie) sister was killed when he was young and his single mom works too hard for him to be wasting his time trying to be an actor. He wastes his time, ends up being a rapper and graduates anyway.

Kevin (Paul McGill) is the talented kid from the Midwest. However, that talent isn’t enough and after a quick suicide attempt Kevin graduates only to head home and take over his mother’s dance studio.

Victor (Walter Perez) is a producer who exists to connect Malik to Denise. He graduates.

Anna Maria Perez de Tagle plays an Asian girl whose name I never caught. She gets a job on Sesame Street and fails out of P.A. when her grades fall below a C average.

Alice (Kherington Payne) is a bored snob who has talent and briefly dates Victor, I guess. But she’s played by the So You Think You Dance girl, so none of that matters and life goes on regardless of her existence.

The only characters in the film that actually work are the teachers played by Kelsey Grammer, Charles S. Dutton, Megan Mullally and Bebe Neuwirth. Mullally is the only teacher who gets a humanizing backstory to illustrate how not everyone is going to be famous based on talent alone. The rest of the adults just know how to act, adding sadness, pride and wisdom as undercurrents to their performance. They aren’t written any better so this ends up highlighting how under-performed the kids are, maybe because the adolescent actors spent too much time rehearsing choreography and not enough time adding depth to their brief moments in the spotlight.

The performance aspect of Fame 2009 should have been the saving grace of the film. I still dig Step Up 2 The Streets because the ending dance scene in the rain is done well enough to make me forgive the drivel that comes before it. Sadly, Fame seems to think that the only thing that has changed between 1980 and now is pitch-corrected vocals and the pervasive inclusion of hip hop. The songs and dances want so hard to be organic, but they never are. Kherington Payne has a sexy piece of choreography that gets intercut with a dramatic scene between Kevin and his dance teacher, but not because the content of the dance informs the dialogue, but because it was time for another Kherington Payne scene and her character wasn’t up to anything interesting.

And – JESUS – we get it: hip hop beats and rapping are here to stay. High School Musical was a hit and all, but a movie with the plot of Fame shouldn’t forget that talent isn’t always what’s in the pop culture zeitgeist of your target audience. I’m sure there’s modern dance, ballet, concertos and operettas that teens would enjoy if Fame was interested in presenting anything in an interesting way.

This is the directorial debut of Kevin Tancharoen, who might as well be a robot for how bland this film looks. It’s not bad, but it never catches your attention. Even when the camera tries to create excitement by highlight specific pieces of chorography, it creates a division between “performance” scenes and hand-held “dramatic” scenes. An argument could be made that these characters only see their lives as stable while they are performing, but I don’t think Kevin’s that deep into his directorial job. At least let’s hope he’s not, because this level of mediocrity shouldn’t be anyone’s magnum opus of directing.

Fame may be the movie I had the least fun at all year, right down to my squeaky theater seat which made me self conscious of shifting my weight lest I distract the dead-quiet audience being subjected to cinematic oatmeal in front of us.

Why remake Fame if you don’t want to say anything about how the concept of fame has changed for the gifted youth of today? They have less public music programs and more access to internet fame. A DJ could have gotten sued for copyright infringement instead of the forgettable filmmaker character getting taken by a fake producer, someone could have found early-and-unwanted fame and had to deal with the paparazzi. Hell, there isn’t even a gay character to be handled stereotypically, and aren’t we supposed to be putting different sexual identities in our culture’s fictional high schools?

There’s just nothing interesting about Fame. You could have the exact same experience watching half-an-episode of American Idol, half-an-episode of So You Think You Can Dance and reading Chicken Soup For The Soul during commercial breaks. And doesn’t that sound fun?

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Steven Soderbergh has been putting films in theaters for 20 years, starting with sex, lies and videotape at the Sundance Film Festival in 1989. He made Sundance the festival it is today, for better or for worse, and though rumors and quotes from those close to him suggests that Soderbergh still gets frustrated with the movie business to this day, the man continues to be prolific.

The Informant! is Soderbergh’s third film this year (counting Che: Part One and Part Two as a single movie, the other is The Girlfriend Experience) and his third shot digitally and, like his other releases in 2009, The Informant! is a character piece. Christoph Waltz’s performance as Hans Landa in Inglorious Basterds is still the best performance of the year, but Matt Damon carries this film with his character work, even when he’s being helped along by straight-faced comedians.

The Informant! is based off a non-fiction book by Kurt Eichenwald, but the first frame of film, even before the studio credits is a disclaimer about the movie being based on fact, but altered for drama, “So there.”

Matt Damon put on the pounds to play Mark Whitacre, vice president of ADM, a company that processes corn and corn byproducts. The plot summary would have you believe: “The U.S. government decides to go after an agri-business giant with a price-fixing accusation, based on the evidence submitted by their star witness, vice president turned informant Mark Whitacre,” but that’s really just the setup for the crazy amount of lies create the narrative structure of the movie.

We are dropped into Whitacre’s head with voiceovers by Damon as we see him wind through the office or stare into space with a blank look on his face. He seems like a happy guy, and he’s genuinely enthusiastic about corn products. As the voiceovers continue throughout the film, they diverge from the visuals more and more, until the asides begin to shape the context of the scene they blast over, sometimes playing over dialogue that we don’t get to hear.

The result was that I felt I was on Whitacre’s side, privy to the information he was (or as much of it as I could understand as the first ten minutes of the flick are filled with a lot of corn-processing data and facts) and hearing his thoughts as he multitasked through his business and let his mind wander. Up until the FBI gets involved at a serious level, Damon plays Whitacre like a harmless innocent, just doing his job and looking out for his family. The blank look Damon keeps on his face when he’s not talking looks like it could erupt into a grin at any minute. Damon plays Whitacre with a touch of wonder, as if there is still something amazing about corn processing. Then, the shit storm starts.

There’s a virus attacking the production of lycene (it’s not important that you know what that is, a pre-screening cram session would be unnecessary), and Whitacre gets chewed out by his superiors. With his ass towards the fire, Whitacre reports to his bosses that their Japanese competitor might have a mole injecting the virus into the lycene-producing bacteria and for a few million dollars, the company will out their own man.

Against the wishes of Whitacre, the FBI gets involved, and that’s when the film opens itself to some comedy.

After he turns informant, Mark Whitacre reveals himself to be something of an idiot. Multiple times throughout the film, I was shaking my head as he let more company secrets escape or almost blew the case for the FBI. Soderbergh and Damon spent enough time during the first parts of the movie to get me on Whitacre’s side, so even when his deceptions and mistakes start to cause more damage than they are worth, I couldn’t help but feel for the picture Mark Whitacre had of himself: a family man who caught a lucky break and just wants to take care of his own people. He does pointless acts of charity, but also owns 8 cars. He turns informant for the FBI because every consumer in the world is getting ripped off “before they finish breakfast,” but also wants to build stables on the grounds of his home for his kids.

As the film winds up, we’re exposed to more of Mark Whitacre. As soon as the investigation into global price-fixing begins, the Soderbergh starts to peel away layers of the pleasant looking, harmless Mark Whitacre we spent 40 minutes watching. As a more accurate picture of the character develops, the film picks up, gets funny and Damon’s performance reveals itself as much more than it initially appeared.

This movie is funny the way I find the humor in the tiny sect of absolutely insane conservative Christians in this country. Both Mark Whitacre and the insane Christians (the kind that kill abortion doctors; far from the majority) do bad things but they think that because their intentions are good, things will work out in their favor. Call it repentance or “catching a break,” it’s blind idiocy to think that Hail Marys cancel out physical violence in any aspect or that taking down your own company will somehow make up for the very real crimes you’ve committed.

After the summer movie season had me out week after week watching things explode, be they aliens, space ships, nuclear reactors, a 1930s bank, transforming robots or Hitler, it was nice to take a trip into the darkness of the theater and see a well-constructed and performed character piece that made me laugh, sometimes uncomfortably.

With awards season just around the corner, it’s time to plug our brains back in for 4th quarter cinema.

• Invictus trailer
• First trailer for Matt Damon’s Green Zone
• Matt Damon talks Bourne 4
• Is It Really All About The $$$? Amy Pascal and Sony Gain Clooney, Ditch Soderbergh
• How Studio Movies Die, Featuring Moneyball

Until this week, I had never seen a Tyler Perry movie. I was only aware that there was a man with that name who was producing movies at a break-neck pace and distributing them through Lionsgate. In fact, the Tyler Perry story goes back years to a broadcast by Oprah Winfrey that motivated Perry to write down his thoughts. That eventually lead to a play and life in theater lead to Perry donning fake breasts and a wig to make Madea, his famous mad black woman that first appeared on stage in I Can Do Bad All By Myself.

This week, the film adaptation of I Can Do Bad All By Myself opens in the US as Perry’s 8th movie with Lionsgate, and he’s completed the 9th film, Why Did I Get Married Too?, for release in April. The man is certainly prolific and seems to have a message he wants to get across to his audience. It’s just that the audience he plays to is middle class African and Latino Americans, the forgotten demographic when it comes to the weekend box office. When Perry opened Diary Of A Mad Black Woman in 2005 to $50 million dollars, almost all of it domestically, people started to take notice.

Throughout I Can Do Bad All By Myself, I was acutely aware that this movie was not made for me, was not playing to me and, in the one of the oddest feelings I’ve had during a film for awhile, didn’t really care that it kept its distance from me.

Should you, reader, see Tyler Perry’s I Can Do Bad All By Myself? Well…

The film is very loosely adapted from Tyler Perry’s play of the same name, but the differences in the public’s perception of Madea and some changes in overall message make the film its own entity. It’s about April, played by Academy Award Nominated Taraji P. Henson (The Curious Case of Benjamin Button), a lounge singer who is dating a married man named Randy (the overly sleazy Brian White) and drinking her life away. When her niece Jennifer (Hope Olaide Wilson) and her two nephews are caught breaking in to Madea’s house, the kids move in with April while the community church tries to track down April’s mother, the guardian of the children.

April, of course, is doing bad all by herself and can’t be bothered with kids. Enter the X-Factor, Sandino (CSI: Miami’s Adam Rodriguez), a Latino handyman who was sent by the church to repair random things in April’s house in exchange for room and board. Sandino quickly forms a bond with Jennifer and April, and instantly dislikes Randy.

To add another layer of story, I Can Do Bad All By Myself is, in part, a musical; Mary J. Blidge plays the owner of the nightclub April works at, and Gladys Knight plays Wilma, one of the local church matrons. A various times thoughout the film, we’ll be treated to a song in its entirety that was placed to echo April’s emotional state at that point in the plot.

At first, this feels hokey, but when Mary J Blidge sings the original title track to the film, “I Can Do Bad,” the charisma of Blidge comes though and the song actually contributes a more accurate character portrait of April than any of the staring into space the teary-eyed Henson provides during montages.

Before I come down on either side of this movie, I feel a disclaimer is needed: this movie is a parable for mostly ethnic communities that I make no claim to understand. Growing up in the middle of Colorado didn’t shut me off to ehnic diversity, but it did shut me off to the culture that’s being spoken to here.

For instance, the film brings up crack addiction and fails to mention a single positive father figure throughout the entire film. The modern African American community and Latin/Hispanic community in the United States have serious paternal issues. From what I understand, it’s been that way for long enough to be taken as a given, but it also serves to narrow the focus of the film. It doesn’t take the time to set the stage for everybody, I Can Do Bad All By Myself is talking to a specific audience right from the start.

By the time the subject of molestation and sexual assault enter the story, these themes become troublesome. The first time we see married Randy meeting April’s new wards for the first time, we know that Randy is a uber-sleaze who is going to assault one of the kids. Brain White plays Randy broad with no redeeming qualities. Eventually, Randy attempts to rape Jennifer, which leads to a teary confession that she was assaulted in her youth.

My thought: “Wow, this family must have some molestation and crack issues.”

The movie’s thought, as outlined by Tyler Perry at a press conference: “Talking about molestation and abuse and sexual abuse, it is very, very clear to me that a lot of our own issues result from, including myself as a person, what has happened to us as a children. So when I was thinking about April and her, ‘I don’t care about anyone but myself,’ and where that would come from, molestation is the route to so many things. So I wanted to explore that a little bit. I think that when people really see it they get it. They understand. They go, ‘Wait a minute, is this why I’m this way?’ So many people it’s happened to and in my house it was, ‘Whatever goes on in this house stays in this house –’ and nothing heals or ever gets covered. That’s what I wanted to address here. I think that as people see it they’ll really get it. I’m speaking to people for the most part, that base, that core audience that everyone has ignored for years and we are a people that exist and need to be spoken to in a way that we get it, in a way that we understand. I’m just really, really fortunate and blessed to have that opportunity to do that.”

How do I judge a parable movie that is making no attempt to speak to me? Of course I found myself getting a little bored during redemption songs in the local church, played in their entirety. Of course it seems weird to me that Gladys Knight’s Wilma would be invited to sing on stage at the nightclub, even though people don’t randomly show up at venues I frequent to show off their pipes.

I Can Do Bad All By Myself is on track to win the weekend box office, again. And several people I’ve talked to since I’ve seen the film have seemed bewildered that Tyler Perry is capable of opening at number 1 with little outward appearance of effort. What’s happened is Terry has found his audience and he’s telling them stories of hope, teaching them that they can also rise above their collective experience and hurt. It’s practically in the title: I Can Do Bad All By Myself means that the only Good you can do comes from family, community and love. Yes, the characters a broad and some of the dramatic moments play large like a play instead of realistically subtle like a film. But, it’s ballsy to make a movie that will never appeal to a majority. If it succeeds, like Tyler Perry’s other films have, the minority being spoken to develops an insider love, like a shared secret amongst friends.

I’m just not part of that secret. What I saw was a mediocre movie with a few good musical performances. However, I never stopped feeling like I was observing the Tyler Perry phenomena from a distance, a distance given to me by my parents and geography, not the color of my skin.

I don’t get it.

I do get #1 Opening Weekend, so does Lionsgate. So, embrace Tyler Perry if you want, but ignoring him isn’t going to stop him.

• Lionsgate to release Kick-Ass

[This week sees Greg Mottola's Adventureland released in the UK, and while the release schedule in the US remains somewhat stale since the beginning of my August hiatus, Adventureland is worth seeing. For our users outside of the US, this Adventureland review is for you. American readers can tune in later to check out their review for the week as I have my first Tyler Perry experience.]

Adventureland is one of those movies you should take a date to if you are between the ages of 20 and 40, because I’m fairly sure you will end up having a good time with said date, and I’m looking out for you, buddy.

Why bound the suggestion to that particular age group? Are you not going to like it if you’re a Twilight fan and just want to see the next Kristin Stewart movie? It has a lot to do about what growing up means and the reality of the entire experience, a reality that I’m convinced Adventureland portrays in a realistic manner and a reality that specifically speaks in a very real way to people that grew up in the 80s and early 90s.

The film is set in Pittsburgh, PA in 1987, and though I wasn’t old enough to be attending amusement parks like Adventureland in that time period, I did hang out at malls in my early 90s teenage years. Despite the title Adventureland, as a drama, could have been set in a mall. The love story of the film and the coming of age plotline don’t require Adventureland the park to work, but knowing that writer/director Greg Mottola used to be employed at a theme park goes a long way to explaining why Adventureland is Adventureland and not titled something like “Bag Full Of Joints” (I’ll explain that later). The comedy beats of the movie don’t really depend on the film being set in a theme park either, and me being the cynic I am, I’m going to guess this has something to do with the reality of shooting a film on an independent budget in a theme park where the insurance allowing crews and stars to get on the rickety rides was ultimately too expensive.

But don’t let the setting and title being secondary get you down, because Adventureland isn’t and shouldn’t be about Adventureland. Adventureland is about growing up and finding that first love that means something for reasons you can’t really define, it’s a film that spends so much time making its characters feel real that it abandons the too-cool-for-school attitude that (possibly by a fluke) elevated Juno to a mainstream hit. Next weekend, when you’re picking what you’re going to see in theaters, Fast & Furious is going to be your candy bar: you’ll get a sugar rush and feel good until it drops you hard. Adventureland isn’t a buffet of lobster and caviar, but it is a solid full meal of a film.

Because Mottola is off of his hit SuperBad, a lot of the trailers for this film are trying to slant to that same audience, especially with the Red Band trailer which makes much to do of a character named Frigo and his penchant for punching people in the nuts. If you check out the poster, you’ll notice a little addition of tracks featured in the film, because the movie has a killer soundtrack. However, both of these are marketing gimmicks. I think there’s a high chance that if you like what I’m telling you and not the film’s advertising that you will like the film Mottla wants to present to you. I recommend you see it because you need to give yourself a chance to see this flick without expecting Superbad. It’s not going to try and be that for you, which would suck if it didn’t deliver an experience of its own.

That’s about as far as I can go SPOILER FREE. But I do have the details to back up my boasts. Under the cut, that is…

When I was being a mall rat in the early 90s, my parents refused to latch on to the pager fad that was in full swing. I was actually present for conversations where some other parent would tell mine how amazing it was to be able to get in touch with your children at any given time. This later evolved into cell phones and my parents eventually caved, but only after I turned 16, since in the suburbia where I lived had no trouble within biking distance.

My high-school-to-college summer was spent smoking pot, hanging around at the mall and drinking way more than I ever will again. It was spent pining after those relationships I had in high school, always goading myself to actually say something to those hot girls I had been stalkerishly (I might have just invented that adverb) obsessed with. I had a list (Hi, Tamra Sheldon) but ended up saying nothing to the people on that list because I had no way to engage them. Even in the throes of massive keg parties just off the CU Boulder campus, I had no opening line, no way to start new relationships and a crippling obsession that I hadn’t done everything (everyone?) I was supposed to in my “youth.”

And it’s because I didn’t have a bag of joints.

I’m fairly sure Adventureland is about the magical power of a bag of joints, and let me explain how by telling the story (filled with review-a-riffic asides) by tracking that bag of joints.

We meet James Brennan (Jesse Eisenberg, who kind of did this same part in The Squid And The Whale, but that shouldn’t be held against either film) at a party where he’s being me and bemoaning the loss of one of those high-school sweethearts that never was going to mean anything. We learn James is a virgin (marked by an invisible scarlet V), but a witty one. James is planning a European summer vacation before heading to Columbia Grad School where he plans to eventually become a travel essayist.

Cut to a mid-afternoon dream-crushing session where Dad (Jack Gilpin) is letting Mom (Wendie Malick) do most of the talking. Dad’s been giving a lesser job and is effectively going to kill his son’s future by canceling the European trip outright and making his boy work for the money needed to attend Columbia. Dad drinks while Mom slams the hammer down: Jesse’s gotta get a job.

Cut to James telling his traveling buddy that he won’t be able to go to Europe, but will meet him in New York to start Columbia together. Semi-douche friend feigns sorrow, but instead hands James a bag of joints to get him through the summer.

REVIEW-A-RIFFIC ASIDE: Jack Gilpin as the Dad does a fantastic job of creating a three-dimensional Dad character. He secretly drinks, he feels bad that he can’t provide everything for his son, but he happened to married a woman who is going to take control and make the best of it.

James can’t get hired anywhere, so he bops over to Adventureland, the kind of place where they even hire the local mentally-challenged twentysomething to police the parking lot. There isn’t an interview, but rather Bill Hader and Kristin Wiig (as the husband-and-wife owners slash comic relief) just hand him a shirt and botch any ceremonial asides Hader might have in mind.

James gets placed on Games, though he’d rather be on Rides, and within the first week gets into a little trouble for giving away a Big Ass Panda (which he was told specifically not to do). Swooping in to save him is Em (Kristen Stewart) who James is taken with. She has a party coming up that she invites the new guy to, and at the party James and Em get to sneak away and have their moment when…

THEY SMOKE A JOINT

Unless you were a bully or football star in high school (in which case I say to you now: What seems to be the problem, officer?), chances are you see yourself as an outcast. Don’t feel bad, 80% of the people you went to high school with feel like the outcast. That’s what high school is. So, even though you might be making the best of it by using the “I was a geek in high school” line to pick up hipster-geek chicks, try to remember what it really felt like to be socially awkward.

It’s my opinion that if James didn’t whip out the pot as a conversation-starter that Em and him would have never gotten together. Adventureland is a film populated with characters who wear their character flaws on their sleeve. Side characters get one-scene reveals to show us their pathos, and the Hader/Wiig “flaw” is that they are just simple people running a park (pretty basic), but the main characters of James, Em and Connor (Ryan Reynolds) are all realistically fleshed out, giving each character an emotional center for their flaw, which is really all you can ask for from those characters. This isn’t Mission Impossible 3, we didn’t give Tom Cruise a wife as something to drive set pieces, this story is based about the revelation of people’s flaws.

And if you think about it, isn’t that what growing up is? Discovering that the people around you: the hot girl, the stud, your parents are all deeply flawed humans who are just as clueless as to where life is taking them as you are?

It turns out Em is damaged. As she puts it very simply herself later in the film: her mother started dying of cancer and her dad remarried a woman who went bald from the stress of her first divorce. Bald woman he loved exchanged for just a bald woman who is a bitch (Mary Birdsong). Em’s damaged interior manifests itself in a clandestine affair with Ryan Reynolds, an older married man who does repairs on the Adventureland rides and games.

Although I’d love to talk more about the delightful (but flawed) side characters played by Freaks and Geeks alum Martin Starr and Paige Howard (yes, Ron Howard’s younger daughter), I’ll leave some of the film unspoiled and just say that these characters, like Em, start hanging out with James WHEN THEY SMOKE A JOINT.

We learn about Connor and Em’s affair while James is left in the dark. Ryan Reynolds might turn in the best performance of this film, adding credence to my theory that the man knows how to pick a project. Even in crap like Just Friends, Reynolds knows how to play any character as likable, and when someone makes a horrible movie watchable for just a few seconds (Waiting), we should notice the actor if not the film.

The moment I was convinced I was watching Reynolds do good work is when James comes to Connor for advice on Em and Connor – who in a lesser film would have created some sort of comic misunderstanding for the purpose of plot – actually tells the dude how it is. Or, more specifically, Connor isn’t lying. We also learn that Connor’s life sucks, his wife forced him into a possibly loveless marriage and he has affairs with young Adventureland girls in his Mom’s basement. We also learn that his Mom is a pain in the ass when Connor has to go to her house to explain to her what her stove pilot light does. How do we learn that? How does James get to hang out with anyone? JAMES AND CONNOR SMOKE A JOINT.

Later, with the introduction of Lisa P, the sought-after hottie who acts like a slut even though she’s a virgin (played by the stunning Margarita Levieva, whose number I failed to retrieve under fear of being uber-unprofessional, and possibly because I forgot a joint) shows up in the park. She’ll provide the expected counter-point to Em for James, because – before he learns of her possible virginity – Lisa P, the Megan Fox of Adventureland, approaches our loner protagonist because she hears he has some pot.

That’s right. THEY SMOKE A JOINT.

Just in case you’re not getting the picture, for as charming as the cloistered geek is when played by Jesse Eisenberg, the device used for him to be let into their lives. The lead in to the film’s romantic breaking point (not going to spoil that) is based around James’s guilt about secretly going on a date with Lisa P leading him to give the rest of his joints to Em who uses them to make pot cookies, which leads to Em confessing feelings (possibly ones she only thinks she has) for James.

In other words, by the time the bag of joints has been depleted, all the characters have been set up for the third act. By the time the characters stop being high, no one has any developing left to do, situations just have to resolve themselves.

And they do, and it’s done with wit and emotional honesty and it fits.

This movie made me remember certain things about growing up. Specifically, how everyone is too damaged and awkward to talk to and/or help one another. I love how I still don’t know exactly when Em falls in love with James, I don’t know when he makes the transition from “the other person who is not part of this fucked up situation I’m in” into “the person I love.” It might not be towards the very end, and that rings so true for me.

Because growing up is confusing and fucked up for all of us, but when you finally get to look back at it from adulthood, you realize that everyone was so afraid of being the weird, confused one that we were all just passing the time trying to get hot chicks (or hot guys) to notice us, and we never had enough joints to open up all the stories.

If you live in the UK, you can find this film in theaters this weekend. If you live in the US, check it out on DVD.

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