Movie review by Greg Carlson

Mike Judge’s incisive observations of the foibles and humiliations of the workplace, school, and home have turned several of his creations – most notably the constantly quoted “Office Space” – into grimly comic fables for smart folks who suffer the fools with whom they toil, learn, and live. Since the phenomenal popularity of nearly brain dead underachievers Beavis and Butt-Head in the early and mid-1990s, Judge has satirized stupidity in a way that appeals to people of all IQ levels. His latest feature, “Extract,” continues in that direction, but its point of view swaps unappreciated employee for harried boss/small business owner.

Jason Bateman plays Joel Reynold, a food chemistry whiz who has parlayed his facility for flavorings into a successful little factory. Despite the entrepreneur’s stability and prosperity, Joel struggles with his wife’s lack of interest in sex, and one of the movie’s running gags shows Joel racing against the daily deadline when Suzie (Kristen Wiig) knots the drawstring in her sweatpants. Joel’s carnal frustration stretches to the breaking point when comely temp Cindy (Mila Kunis) takes a position on the extract bottling line. Of course, Cindy’s sudden appearance is no coincidence, and Joel quickly finds himself neck deep in moral quicksand.

Joel’s confidante Dean (played with stoned relish by Ben Affleck), a shaggy hotel bartender, insists that pharmaceutical experimentation is the answer to any problem, and also convinces his horse-tranquilized pal to hire a dim bulb gigolo to seduce Suzie so that Joel can pursue Cindy without guilt. The farfetched plan, which would be at home in any number of stage farces or situation comedies, backfires spectacularly, and Joel finds himself paying hard cash to be cuckolded. Such breathlessly impossible complications can be effectively rendered in the movies – Ingmar Bergman makes the improbable sexual zigzags of “Smiles of a Summer Night” look easy – if the filmmaker brings a delicate touch, but Judge’s methods are lumpier and more blunt, and also fail to respect Suzie as a fully formed character.

Had “Extract” been made during the 1930s or 1940s and been directed by Leo McCarey, Preston Sturges, or Ernst Lubitsch, the film’s female characters would at the very least have been rendered with greater dexterity that Judge manages for Kunis or Wiig. Kunis’ best scene is her (and the film’s) first, as she plays dumb and flirty to more easily rob a pair of enamored musical instrument store bozos. Following that clever sketch, we never learn another thing about her or why she does what she does. Judge is far more comfortable writing for men, as evidenced in the painfully funny scenes between Joel and obnoxious neighbor Nathan (the reliable David Koechner), who materializes at the least convenient times.

“Extract” lacks some of the careful pacing required of its feature length. Judge cannot seem to strike the right tone with the dinkuses, doofuses, and morons on Joel’s payroll, faltering as he shapes an attitude that seems to sympathize with them one moment and ridicule them the next. The film’s memorable workplace accident, in which an elaborate chain reaction triggered by a combination of carelessness and ineptitude results in traumatized testicles, makes for a visually amusing diversion, but “Extract” never quite transcends the mundane grind of its assembly line setting.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Like a less ambitious Sacha Baron Cohen, musician/actor/comic/diorama architect Charlyne Yi constructs in “Paper Heart” a world in which the phony and the real are so blurry they are nearly indistinguishable from one another. Co-scripted with director Nick Jasenovec, who is played onscreen by actor Jake M. Johnson, the movie begins with Yi attempting to interview passersby about the meaning of love and ends with her own expectations and understandings of romance suitably reconfigured. “Paper Heart” wears its aloofness and nonchalance on the sleeve of its zippered hoodie, and Yi’s carefully formulated outsider persona elevates social awkwardness to performance art.

A minor cult personality best known outside of live comedy as the stoned girlfriend of Martin Starr’s character in “Knocked Up,” Yi projects an eccentricity that has a way of dividing viewer opinion. Her oddball interviewer/documentarian guise is nowhere near as elaborate as Baron Cohen’s Ali G, Borat, and Bruno, but Yi’s what-you-see-is-what-you-get faux earnestness plays to a different muse than Baron Cohen’s biting satire. Yi states at the outset that she does not think herself capable of love, and that strange and suspect claim becomes the engine that drives the rest of the feature. To its detriment, “Paper Heart” opts for geographical breadth over philosophical depth, despite an intention to explore one of humankind’s fundamental questions.

Baron Cohen’s wild, disruptive figures contrast with the personality of their creator, but Yi is playing a “character” named Charlyne Yi, and the conceit inspires a similar game which makes you wonder just how much Charlyne Yi is like “Charlyne Yi.” In one scene, Yi is shown performing onstage, and she fools with observers in a Michel Gondry-like illusion, getting the audience to wonder whether her hair is a wig – which she then removes to reveal an identical coiffure underneath. The gag functions as a working metaphor for the whole of “Paper Heart”: it’s a rabbit hole in which logic is a balloon meant to be pricked with the pin of the performer’s trickery.

Michael Cera, who is considerably better known than Yi, plays, as you would expect, a character named Michael Cera, and his droll self-consciousness matches the adorable geek he played on television’s “Arrested Development” and later in movies like “Juno,” and “Nick and Norah’s Infinite Playlist.” Cera quips his way through a series of scenes in which he and Yi fall for each other, but the movie’s alliance with slackerdom robs the fictional storyline’s predictable flirtation-relationship-breakup-reconciliation trajectory of anything that might distinguish it from dozens of other girl-meets-boy yarns.

Somewhat surprisingly, the best parts of “Paper Heart” are the unscripted interviews that Yi conducts with a cross section of average folks (and a few of her famous acquaintances) across the United States. She visits a biker bar, a Vegas wedding chapel, a divorce court, a playground, and several other spots, listening to humorous, clever, and almost heartbreaking tales revolving around the movie’s thematic quest to understand romantic love. These interactions are often accompanied by reenactments in Yi’s handmade puppet theatres, which typify a folksy, do-it-yourself aesthetic that helps to maintain an ironic distance between filmmaker and audience. Unfortunately, the puppet theatre’s cutesy vibe, while in keeping with the facile values of “Paper Heart,” merely reinforces the sense of alienation.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

What many Quentin Tarantino fans had hoped would be the director’s dazzling genre deconstruction/reconstruction of Spaghetti Westerns and WW 2 action flicks unfolds as a sloppy, long-winded, and sometimes dull disappointment. Tarantino’s audacious stylistic flourishes continue to be applied with a virtuoso’s touch, but the purposefully misspelled “Inglourious Basterds” exchanges spectacle for an endless river of dialogue that prevents the film from ever fully taking cinematic flight. The film features plenty of breathtaking images and dozens of Tarantino’s intertextual tributes to favorite films obscure and famous, but the director’s narcissistic ardor for his own words paralyzes the two and a half hour marathon with bottomless scenes of talking, talking, and more talking.

Presented as episodic chapters that occasionally work better as individuated short films, the five sections of “Inglourious Basterds” contribute to an intertwined movie premiere bomb/arson plot that pits a bloodthirsty squad of Jewish trigger-men and a vengeful cinephile against no less than the top command of the German war machine, including der Fuhrer himself. Lt. Aldo Raine, played to the rafters by Brad Pitt, leads the cutthroat Basterds, but unlike major inspiration “The Dirty Dozen,” Tarantino seldom shows the whole group functioning together. With very few exceptions, the Basterds’ bloodiest exploits are also left up to the imagination.

In keeping with a tradition of velvety evil movie Nazis, Tarantino lavishes attention on Standartenfuhrer Hans “The Jew Hunter” Landa, a sophisticated detective whose bearing and screen time nearly make him the film’s ghoulish protagonist (QT admitted in a recent interview with Ella Taylor that he wanted to manipulate the audience into investing in the character’s successes to “see what he’ll do”). As inhabited by Austrian performer Christoph Waltz, Landa is one of the movie’s great pleasures, breathing new life into one of moviedom’s dustiest tropes. Both Waltz and Pitt are funny, but Tarantino’s application of humor is mostly queasy and indelicate, light years from the overshadowing genius of Lubitsch’s “To Be or Not to Be” – a film made during WW 2 that still sparkles with relevance six decades later.

At least two conflicting schools of thought inspire conversation about the movie’s political projections (to suggest an agenda would give the filmmaker too much credit). The first argues that the movie’s over-the-top Jewish revenge fantasy – which baseball bat-wielding Bear Jew portrayer Eli Roth has dubbed “Kosher Porn” – gleefully rewrites Third Reich history with a wink and a nudge. The second, more troublesome reading trades the reductio ad ridiculum of the first with the unsettling idea that Raine’s team of brutal thugs are no better than the Nazis they bludgeon and scalp. Their inhumane atrocities paint the Basterds as a 1940s version of al-Qaeda executioners or CIA torturers, unshackled from any moral consequence.

“Inglourious Basterds” is certainly at its finest when Tarantino’s penchant for self-reflexivity turns the act of watching into a game of “I Spy” for hardcore movie fanatics. A key British military operative played by Michael Fassbender is a movie critic and authority on German Expressionism in his civilian life. Highly flammable nitrate film prints are used as weapons. A well-known academic criticism of “King Kong” provides a clever jest that doubles as social commentary. Characters argue the merits of “The White Hell of Pitz Palu” and “The Kid.” Indulging his foot fetish and passion for theatrical liebestod, Tarantino even works in nods to the pre-cinematic mythologies of “Cinderella” and “Romeo and Juliet.” All these heady allusions guarantee long-term dissection of “Inglourious Basterds,” even if the movie does not live up to Tarantino’s auteurist reputation as a filmmaker’s filmmaker.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“District 9,” a zany sci-fi social commentary blended with bugs-on-the-run brio, arose from the ashes of the failed “Halo” movie that was to have been shepherded by Peter Jackson as producer and visual effects specialist Neill Blomkamp in the director’s chair.  Jackson purportedly offered Blomkamp roughly 30 million bucks to come up with something in the wake of the “Halo” implosion, and Blomkamp responded with an expansion of his short movie “Alive in Joburg.”  Set mostly in a hellish shantytown in Johannesburg, South Africa, “District 9” imagines a world in which stranded aliens are treated with the same kind of contempt that ruling classes have shown toward the marginalized in numerous historical examples.  While the film’s setting makes apartheid the most obvious parallel, Blomkamp applies his brush liberally enough to suggest hints of Nazi Germany’s concentration camps and ethnically motivated conflicts from the Middle East to Eastern Europe.

Mid-level field operative Wikus van der Merwe (Sharlto Copley) works for the ominous Multi-National United, a Halliburton-like contractor retained by the South African government to relocate the alien encampment of the title to a new location outside the city limits.  While Copley’s unfamiliar face is refreshing, the character he plays is a buffoonish dolt whose empty-headed pronouncements make him an ideal candidate for employment at Wernham Hogg paper merchants.  Virtually everything of narrative importance pivots around Wikus, and his fawning, deferential obsequiousness (his father-in-law, who promoted him, comically denies charges of nepotism) initially renders him difficult to like.

“District 9” rockets by so quickly that many of the movie’s hemorrhaging plot gaps won’t bother the grinning customers.  A second viewing might erase some doubts, but Blomkamp and co-screenwriter Terri Tatchell fudge too often to earn a free pass.  One wonders why the brutalized prawns don’t turn their superior firepower against their human oppressors.  For that matter, it makes very little sense that the shady MNU corporation for which Wikus works would seek to eradicate their only link to the technology they so desperately want to control.  Why don’t the humans force an enslaved, terrorized prawn to operate the alien weaponry?

Tonally, Blomkamp attempts to balance black comedy with a superficial soulfulness that aligns viewer sympathy with the beleaguered extra terrestrials.  Disappointingly, only one alien creature (who sports the wryly evocative salvation-oriented name Christopher Johnson) is presented as a thoroughly developed character in his/its own right, and any explanations that the remaining horde of prawns are simply too docile, scared or stupid to stand up for themselves merely reinforces the stereotyping used by dominant groups to justify cruelty against the weak “other.”

Action junkies will relish the movie’s final sections, when Blomkamp shifts all the energy to a video game-style bullet festival.  Recalling the most violent gut punches of “RoboCop.” “Starship Troopers,” and “Aliens,” “District 9” gleefully jacks up a body count worthy of any first person shooter, as scores of expendable human mercenaries are ripped apart in showers of exploding gobs of flesh, limbs, and brains.  The visceral thrill ride diminishes much of the impact made by the intriguing political and social questions posed in the film’s first third and also allows the filmmaker to largely ignore – at least onscreen – the segregationist issues raised at the movie’s outset.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Marc Webb’s “(500) Days of Summer” is, alas, a conventional, male-centric romance masquerading as an appealing hipster fantasy.Were it not for the chemistry of attractive lead performers Joseph Gordon-Levitt and Zooey Deschanel, the movie would have a difficult time sustaining its self-conscious cool throughout the jumble of its fragmented chronology.While marginally better than the bigger budgeted fare that “(500) Days of Summer” closely resembles, the movie would require a total overhaul to be considered a legitimate alternative to glossier “boy loses girl” features.

Gordon-Levitt plays Tom, an unrealistic romantic weaned on the achingly morose poetry of the Smiths and Joy Division – he sports not one, but two tee shirts idolizing the latter, including, in case we might otherwise miss it, the edition emblazoned with “Love Will Tear Us Apart.”Tom clings to the thought that there is a perfect soul mate he is destined to find, and one day he spies the stunning Summer (Deschanel), a new hire at the boutique greeting card company where he works.The two “meet cute” in an elevator: overhearing music from Tom’s headphones, Summer warbles a few lines of“There Is a Light That Never Goes Out,” instantly capturing the young man’s heart.

As Summer, Deschanel thanklessly embodies another variation of the Manic Pixie Dream Girl.Coined by critic Nathan Rabin, the MPDG describes a class of quirky, impossibly beautiful free spirits designed to, in Rabin’s words, “teach broodingly soulful young men to embrace life and its infinite mysteries and adventures.”Ultimately, the MPDG is a second-class cinematic citizen, a muse without her own agency who exists to serve the male protagonist on his quest for self-fulfillment.Deschanel’s Summer, who doesn’t believe in the old-fashioned romantic notion of “the one,” becomes a mere object to be won and lost by Tom.

In addition to its failure to operate outside of a strictly masculine point of view, “(500) Days of Summer” offers up a laundry list of clichés: unnecessary stentorian voiceover narration (wildly popular since “The Royal Tenenbaums”), a wise-beyond-her-years younger sibling who dispenses grown-up relationship advice (in full flower following “Bottle Rocket”), and Tom’s wacky comic-relief pals who grind the movie to a halt in every scene in which they appear (Summer, apparently, does not have any friends of her own).Add to that a post-coital musical number complete with animated bluebird, a tribute to the French New Wave, a couple trips to IKEA, and Belle and Sebastian, “The Graduate,” and J.D. Salinger references, and you have a recipe for smarty-pants vogue overload.

“(500) Days of Summer” wears its heart on its sleeve, and desperately wants to be loved by all the trendy kids.  The movie also shields itself in irony, allowing the dismissive and condescending among us to buy in to the blunt obviousness that love hurts (although the most jaded will still turn up their noses at the inclusion of Patrick Swayze’s “She’s Like the Wind”).  The movie gets to have its cake and eat it, in the late-arriving form of Minka Kelly, whose character’s groan-inducing name is introduced with a fourth-wall breaking wink.  Turns out experience, and Summer, were pretty good teachers, even if it’s all a little too cute.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Veteran Hollywood action filmmaker/adrenaline engineer Kathryn Bigelow offers her finest movie to date in “The Hurt Locker,” a brutal and intense tour of duty with a team of American soldiers charged with the ugly, dangerous task of defusing improvised explosive devices in Iraq. Bigelow, whose credits include several films with sturdy cult followings, including the often-overlooked vampire Western “Near Dark” (1987), the bank robber/surfer hit “Point Break” (1991) and the influential cyberpunk mindbender “Strange Days” (1995), continues to demonstrate her facility with stunningly staged, emotionally charged material, but “The Hurt Locker” boasts a level of gritty realism missing from most of the filmmaker’s previous large scale features.

Mark Boal’s screenplay, structured straightforwardly around seven specific set pieces, adroitly balances the pulse-quickening, heart-racing suspense inherent in the bomb squad’s job description with keenly observed, subtly illustrated hints that help explain why a person would pursue one of the most stressful specialties in the military. At the heart of the story is Staff Sergeant William James, played by Jeremy Renner in a breakout performance. Renner, a dependable actor often cast in supporting roles, is marvelous and commanding as James, a deeply troubled professional for whom the daily risk of his life is nothing short of a calling.

James finds a perfect foil in meticulous professional Sergeant JT Sanborn (Anthony Mackie, also excellent), a point man who provides James with cover whenever a bomb call requires the team’s attention. Mackie and Renner invest their characters with a blend of admiration and disgust for one another that speaks to the complexity of a dynamic based upon critical trust and communication. When James recklessly tosses aside his headphones or strips off his hulking Kevlar blast protection suit, Sanborn seethes with dumbfounded frustration and helplessness that contrast sharply with the military’s masculine codes.

For all of its sweaty anxiety, “The Hurt Locker” modifies many of the expectations of combat thrillers. Sustained tension replaces full-throttle depictions of small arms melees, and Bigelow works wonders with the rhythm and pacing of each of the sequences in which James and company find themselves in harm’s way. Even a long distance face-off in which snipers pin down a small group of American soldiers and fire-eating UK contractors is a miniature marvel of spatial dynamics and carefully timed shots. In the sequence, Bigelow suggests the excruciating passage of time without sacrificing any of the nauseating fear that keeps the soldiers on a razor’s edge. Like many of the movie’s scenarios, the desert gunfight has a way of sticking with you long after the film has ended.

“The Hurt Locker” bests nearly all other Iraq war movies in its examination of the psychological effects of armed combat — without resorting to many of the oversimplified explanations movies tend to offer. Instead, several tricky questions are raised that transcend the good-versus-evil dialectic that governs so much of American popular culture. Is James addicted to his impossibly treacherous work? Is he mentally ill? What does it take to be an Explosive Ordnance Disposal technician when the job is so thoroughly perilous? “The Hurt Locker” never gives any definitive answers, and it shouldn’t. To do so would mute its considerable impact.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

A thoroughly disappointing variation on “The Bad Seed,” “Orphan” will find a loyal audience in viewers who revel in murderous children and creepy psychosexual games. Despite a late twist that provides the movie with a concussive blast, “Orphan” collapses under the weight of its bloated, unnecessary running time and its lack of imagination. Playing on nonsensical cultural fears related to adoption, “Orphan” cooks up all kinds of unpleasantness and mayhem involving preteens, perpetuating the mythology of a class of cinematic cherubs ready to manipulate adults and unleash hell when no one is looking.

Attractively photographed in Quebec, “Orphan” mostly takes place in and around a gorgeous modern domicile that would be right at home on the pages of “Dwell.” Wealthy John and Kate Coleman (Peter Sarsgaard and Vera Farmiga), already parents to a pair of sweet-faced kids, remain devastated by the stillbirth of a daughter. They adopt 9-year-old Esther (the effectively unsettling Isabelle Fuhrman), a poised Russian with a bizarre penchant for old-fashioned dresses and velvety neck ribbons. Despite the wariness of adorable, hearing-impaired Max (Aryana Engineer) and brother Daniel (Jimmy Bennett), the clueless adults fail to recognize warning signs until it is too late.

Director Jaume Collet-Serra, who also helmed “Goal II: Living the Dream,” has not improved much as a horror filmmaker since his 2005 remake of “House of Wax.” Resorting again and again to cheap shocks underscored with loud musical stingers and bursts (just to make sure everyone jumps out of their chairs), the director never bothers to attempt building suspense when nerve-wracking sensual assault will do. One can only imagine what a storyteller like Alfred Hitchcock might have accomplished with the wild material, but it would certainly contain more wit, intelligence, and respect for its audience than Collet-Serra can offer.

Working from a screenplay by David Leslie Johnson and a story by Alex Mace, the director is not shy about depicting very young people in perilous mental and physical situations. The film’s target demographic is not likely composed of parents, but compassionate viewers will flinch at many of the disturbing, emotionally scarring horrors to which the very young characters are subjected. The criticism is especially vexing in the case Max, who witnesses the majority of the traumatizing atrocities committed by her new sister against classmates, acquaintances, and family members. Broken bones, death by hammer, tree house arson, handgun violence, stabbing by knife, and icy drowning are all on the movie’s unappetizing menu.

By the end of the feature, “Orphan” has provided a clinic in lumbering horror flick clichés. The final sections of the movie, down to the Killer Who Will Not Die, practically pulsate with unrelenting trashiness, from a ghoulish seduction scene to a black-lit gallery of fluorescent erotica, which makes one wonder where Esther received her graphic arts training. All three of the child performers turn in solid work despite the shaky source material. Farmiga and Sarsgaard also bring a level of talent to what would under most circumstances be an embarrassing low-budget quickie – a good description of most of the Dark Castle Entertainment filmography.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

“Food, Inc.” is the best of a group of movies focused on issues and problems related to the corporatization of the food industry in America and beyond, even as the documentary opts for breadth over depth on a topic as huge as the ever-expanding waistlines of our population. In recent years, movies including “Super Size Me,” “Fast Food Nation,” and “King Corn” have all tackled various aspects of the way we eat, but “Food, Inc.” summarizes many familiar themes in a compelling admonition that raises many important ethical, moral, and fiscal questions about diet and nutrition and the hazards of unchecked big business.

Director Robert Kenner loads his double-barreled shotgun with journalists Eric Schlosser (“Fast Food Nation”) and Michael Pollan (“The Omnivore’s Dilemma”), who appear on camera to explain several of the central arguments of their popular books. Included among the observations is the unsettling idea that the highly industrialized system of American mass food production has changed radically in the post WW 2-era, and can be blamed for increases in contamination as well as a decline in the quality and nutritional value of practically everything we consume.

Critics of the movie’s anti-big business acumen have claimed that “Food, Inc.” is hurtful to the American farmer, citing the 2007 USDA Structure and Finances of U.S. Farms statistic that 98 percent of farms are owned by families and not corporations. This charge misses the mark, however, as Virginia farmer Joel Salatin (whose Polyface Farm was featured in “The Omnivore’s Dilemma”) is depicted as the closest thing to a hero in the movie. Salatin, with charm and humor, delivers folksy, commonsense advice on responsible and sustainable livestock management. Along with Gary Hirshberg of organic yogurt company Stonyfield Farm, Salatin represents an alternative to the heavily criticized models of the mega-corporations.

The movie’s section on seed company and agribusiness titan Monsanto is frustrating and frightening, spinning an Orwellian vision of domination so complete that the mind boggles at a culture that supports the residual effects of gene patenting. Like Tyson, Smithfield, and Perdue, Monsanto declined filmmaker invitations to appear on camera, but the company was vexed enough to include a section on its website (www.monsanto.com/foodinc/) devoted to the refutation of charges made in “Food, Inc.” In a bulleted list, Monsanto engages in bizarre spin, stating that the movie “demonizes American farmers,” even though the film does no such thing. Perhaps Monsanto equates “American farmers” with industrial food producers.

No matter where one’s beliefs fall along the political spectrum, it is difficult not to be moved by the story of food safety advocate Barbara Kowalcyk, whose two-year-old son Kevin died after eating burgers tainted with E. coli bacteria. Kowalcyk’s tenacious activism, which takes her to the offices of politicians in Washington, demonstrates the underlying optimism of the film – which sometimes lives in the shadows of the stomach turning imagery of slaughterhouses and the dispiriting scenes in which illegal workers are arrested even though the companies that knowingly hire and exploit them face no consequences for their actions. “Food, Inc.” covers so many topics, it might just as easily have been made into a series of episodes for a show like “Frontline.” Even so, it is compelling and necessary viewing.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

An impressive feature movie debut for advertising veteran and David Bowie scion Duncan Jones, “Moon” succeeds as both technical acting clinic and science fiction brainteaser. Like several of his father’s tunes, most notably “Space Oddity,” Jones’ story – which was crafted into screenplay form by Nathan Parker – ponders helplessness on a cosmic scale. Despite the movie’s lunar setting and spectacular views of starry space, the director focuses on the cramped confinement and numbing monotony of the central character’s miserable existence on the moon. Genre fans will be pleased with the film’s thoughtfulness and acuity.

Created on a modest budget that does not hinder the alternating scenes of claustrophobic isolation and the endless darkness outside the base, “Moon” introduces Sam Bell (Sam Rockwell), a tired Helium-3 miner nearing the completion of a three-year employment contract. Struggling to hold his sanity together, Sam’s only companion is an artificially intelligent computer named Gerty (voiced by Kevin Spacey in shades of Douglas Rain) that keeps tabs on Sam’s fragile mental state. Some of the best scenes in the movie exploit the cat and mouse dynamic between the two that sees Sam trying to outsmart his minder.

It is impossible to address “Moon” without acknowledging the movie’s sizable debt to Stanley Kubrick’s 1968 landmark “2001: A Space Odyssey.” From the antiseptic and strangely quotidian feel of the capsule interiors to the image of Sam jogging on a treadmill, Jones is not shy when it comes to emulating the master. “Moon” also includes Kubrickian videophone messages and hibernation pods, and Gerty’s presence closely mirrors the HAL 9000. The shadow of “2001” looms large over nearly every post-1968 science fiction movie with an intellectual agenda, and “Moon” joins Ridley Scott’s “Alien,” both the Tarkovsky and Soderbergh versions of “Solaris,” and Danny Boyle’s more recent “Sunshine” as stylistic offspring.

Following an accident in a moon rover, Sam awakes to discover his doppelganger, a perfect replica of himself. The two Sam Bells accept an uneasy coexistence as they try to solve the impossibility of their dilemma. Jones expertly directs the action to allow Rockwell the opportunity to not only inhabit two differentiated versions of the same character, but to play many scenes that require impeccable timing as the two men heatedly confront one another. Combining new and old-fashioned moviemaking tricks that would make Hayley Mills proud, “Moon” should tantalize would-be performers.

In an explanatory coda, “Moon” appears to close off several possibilities suggested in its early scenes. Some viewers, myself included, prefer to wonder whether Sam Bell’s otherworldly encounters might reside in his fatigued and strained imagination. Instead, the protagonist’s crucible functions more directly as a commentary on corporate greed and irresponsibility. The oft-repeated adage that the best science fiction uses a metaphoric future to comment on the present can be applied to “Moon,” and the movie’s fictional Lunar Industries (which echoes the mercenary culture of the Weyland-Yutani organization in the “Alien” series and the Tyrell Corporation of “Blade Runner”) will remind many of the post-Enron world in which giant, barely regulated machines operate without any moral gravity.

Movie review by Greg Carlson

Noel Coward’s play “Easy Virtue” is reinterpreted for film by Stephan Elliott following the director’s nine-year hiatus from moviemaking. Elliott fails to match the charm of his beloved cult hit “The Adventures of Priscilla, Queen of the Desert,” but “Easy Virtue” is an entertaining enough variation on popular Jazz Age themes celebrating new attitudes about pleasure and the assertion of individuality. Between the clever insults and the pretty design, there is enough to enjoy in “Easy Virtue,” even if it is nowhere near great.

“Easy Virtue” previously made it to the screen in 1928 as one of Alfred Hitchcock’s silent features, but the version produced by the future Master of Suspense is unmemorable, despite its focus on scandal and infidelity. One imagines that a chief draw of Coward (who was in his mid-twenties at the time he wrote “Easy Virtue”) is the repartee, and in that department, Elliott’s spin, co-written by Stephen Jobbins, retains many of Coward’s one-liners and snappy retorts. While the number of brilliant lines is in shorter supply than in some of Coward’s other work, there are still several killers that hold up, including one exchange in which the heroine has a terrific response when asked if it is true whether she has had as many lovers as rumored.

“Easy Virtue” focuses on a battle of wills and wits between a bold American race car driver named Larita (Jessica Biel, holding her own against the seasoned British thespians) and her new mother-in-law Veronica Whittaker (Kristin Scott Thomas) following Larita’s impulsive marriage to the inexperienced John Whittaker (Ben Barnes). The action is typical of the drawing room comedy, and even though outright farce is kept to a minimum, several outrageous complications are thrown in the pot (including a doomed Chihuahua, a motorcycle in a fox hunt, and a saucy cancan sans culottes).

Larita is more comfortable around her new father-in-law, Colonel Whittaker (Colin Firth), a disheveled wreck whose sarcastic put-downs are the only thing keeping his nasty family members in check. Firth lends gravitas to his role as a numbed WW I veteran, which enhances his character’s ultimate payoff. Ben’s vicious sisters join Veronica in undermining and picking on Larita, and the Colonel is the only person decent enough to speak up on her behalf. Oddly, husband John fails to understand the extent of Larita’s ordeal, and if there is one dimension of “Easy Virtue” that would benefit from some additional exploration, it is the specifics of the marital relationship of Larita and John.

The theme of upper crust hypocrisy hovers in the margins of the movie, which moves along at a leisurely pace appropriate to its relatively tight 96 minute running time. Elliott does manage to have some fun tweaking the period setting, blending a handful of newer pop songs (including “Sex Bomb,” “Car Wash,” and Billy Ocean’s “When the Going Gets Tough, the Tough Get Going” in clever, jazzy arrangements) with a group of vintage tunes by Coward and Cole Porter.