On DVD: “Forgetting Sarah Marshall”

Dir. Nicholas Stoller
(R) ★ ★ ★ ½

It’s always a pleasant surprise to see a romantic comedy that’s about the characters in it. Most are about formula, and the characters are moved about the formula like props, with little regard for their personalities or intelligence. Forgetting Sarah Marshall has four main characters: Peter (Jason Segel, also the co-writer) is a composer for a TV crime show and the boyfriend of its star, Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell), who abruptly leaves him for vain rock star Aldous Snow (Russell Brand). To nurse his wounds, Peter takes a trip to Hawaii, where he meets lovely hotel receptionist Rachel (radiant Mila Kunis).

The story is founded on an improbable scenario — Peter and Sarah find themselves vacationing at the same resort — but the characters do not behave as creatures of formula. Their relationships depend on who they are and who they want to be. They speak intelligently, and their conversations are as important to the screenplay as the broad gags. They do not break up and reconcile on cue. I found myself having great affection for all of them, even Aldous, who is written as a narcissistic womanizer, but comedian Russell Brand is so charming in the role that we can’t help but like him. He’s not a villain; he knows what works for him and doesn’t apologize for it.

The film comes out of the Judd Apatow factory, with which I’ve had a strained relationship. Apatow is an excellent writer and director, but the films he has produced, made by various friends and colleagues, have failed to measure up. Superbad, Step Brothers, and Drillbit Taylor were dreary affairs, relentlessly mean-spirited and with a sledgehammer’s understanding of comedy. But this one is up there with The 40-Year-Old Virgin. Its humor is joyously lewd (note Jack McBrayer as a newlywed desperately trying to please his wife during their honeymoon), but its tone is gentler, and it treats its characters with compassion. There is a scene where Sarah tells Peter why their relationship didn’t work, explaining, “It got really hard to keep taking care of you when you stopped taking care of yourself.” Kristen Bell’s performance and Segel’s writing of the scene show surprising, gratifying emotional honesty.

Much of the broader humor is reserved for the talented supporting cast: Paul Rudd as a slow-witted, slacker surf instructor; Jonah Hill as a hotel employee who has an unhealthy obsession with Aldous; and Bill Hader as Peter’s stepbrother. Hader provides one of the film’s funniest moments when he’s not even on-screen; we only hear his voice over a cell phone.

This is the first film directed by Nicholas Stoller, which suggests either beginner’s luck or a comic filmmaker with a bright future. According to the DVD feature commentary, he only learned how to do coverage during the making of this film, but he already has Apatow’s gift for balancing ribaldry with sensitivity. He was previously a writer for Apatow’s TV series Undeclared and has learned well. He should go back to the factory to teach the others.

“Changeling”

Dir. Clint Eastwood
(R) ★ ★ ★

Changeling is a familiar sort of film, a surprise given how much depth director Clint Eastwood has recently plumbed in well established genres like the sports movie (Million Dollar Baby) and the war epic (Flags of Our Fathers and Letters from Iwo Jima). Here he has made the crusader movie, in which a single person is pitted against a corrupt monolith and wouldn’t you guess brings about change to the social order. Because he is Clint Eastwood, it is no surprise that this is a good film, though we are perhaps spoiled by his recent glut of Oscar-winners; Changeling is merely a good film, not a great one, though only for the highest order of filmmakers is that a complaint.

Angelina Jolie plays the crusader, Christine Collins, a supervisor at a telephone switchboard whose nine-year-old son Walter disappears from their Los Angeles home. It is 1928, and we learn that the LAPD is awash in allegations of corruption and abuse. Led by Captain J.J. Jones (Jeffrey Donovan), they return a boy to Christine and claim he is her son, but he is not. Jones is no fool, but he hopes that she is; when she discovers that the boy who was returned to her is circumcised, unlike her son, Jones suggests that the boy’s kidnapper had the procedure done and the boy blocked the memory. Jones doesn’t care who the boy is; the reunion between mother and son was an invaluable photo op for a department beleaguered by bad press.

When Christine complains — to the press, the last straw for Jones — he has her involuntarily committed to a psychiatric hospital. This is similar to another recent crusader movie, HBO’s Iron Jawed Angels, like this film based a true story. In it, suffragist Alice Paul is abused in a mental hospital for making noise about women’s rights during World War I. The early 20th Century was a perilous time to be a woman in America.

The film casts a wide net, perhaps a little too wide. The film runs 140 minutes and the narrative gets a bit tangled. There are awkward montages of court testimony and cross-cutting between the verdicts in parallel trials. But the Eastwood hallmarks are there: the evocative, de-saturated photography, by frequent collaborator Tom Stern, which in this film is especially effective in how it shrouds the police characters’ faces half in darkness, and the score by Eastwood himself, plaintive and subtle, heavy on piano. Eastwood also makes good use of flashbacks, which flow naturally with the story instead of jutting into it.

The film is further elevated by its performances. Jolie can be fiercely self-possessed, but also vulnerable and brittle, a dichotomy that has distinguished some of her best performances, including Girl, Interrupted and A Mighty Heart. It serves her well as Christine, whose most impactful scenes aren’t the defiant outbursts but the quieter moments where she is on the edge of panic or despair. One such scene takes place in the psychiatric facility with Denis O’Hare as an unsympathetic doctor; Christine figures out quickly that any answer she gives will be used against her.

John Malkovich plays Rev. Gustav Briegleb, a character who turns up nothing but this film in Google and Wikipedia searches of his name. I suspect the character was invented for the film, or composited, because his primary function is to advocate for Christine and move the plot along. His sermons are broadcast on the radio, and he can frequently be heard blasting the corrupt police department and giving exposition.

A pivotal performance is given by Jason Butler Harner, who plays the suspect in a case closely related to the disappearance of Christine’s son. Though he could have benefitted from greater control or firmer direction from Eastwood, his performance of erratic sociopathy is frequently arresting and elicits sympathy at surprising moments. I wondered if the characterization might have been more consistent if Harner had underplayed the role, like Javier Bardem in No Country for Old Men, though I suppose sociopaths are like snowflakes: no two the same.

On DVD: “Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed”

Dir. Nathan Frankowski
(PG) ★

Early on, a talking head in Nathan Frankowski’s Expelled: No Intelligence Allowed argues that science would benefit if we admit our biases, religious or otherwise, rather than demonize faith. Fair enough. I am agnostic, a lapsed Catholic, a proud liberal. I believe in evolution broadly, in the sense that I believe that our species, and others that walk the Earth, have changed over time from earlier forms to the ones we now occupy. As for the more specific and minute details of Darwinism, I am not a scientist and not well equipped to lead that charge in one direction or the other.

The star and subject of Expelled, Ben Stein, makes a persuasive case for intelligent design, and establishes convincingly that there is a suppression in the scientific community of anyone who dares breathe its name as a legitimate scientific approach. It is important that we define our terms. Intelligent design, as Stein and his impressively credentialed interview subjects explain, does not purport to ascribe any particular deity with creating the building blocks for life, but rather posits that there is a reasonable question that Darwinian evolution fails to answer: Why is their life instead of no life?

There’s merit to the argument, but pitting intelligent design against evolution is a faulty proposition from the start, not because evolution is right and intelligent design is wrong, but because both may be right or wrong since they pose different questions. From evolution, we may derive an understanding of how we got from the single cell to the creatures we have become today. From intelligent design, we may derive an understanding of how that cell got there in the first place.

It seems to me that the bigger problem with intelligent design as a scientific theory is that it is limited. To believe that life is too astronomically complex and improbable to have begun by any process but a deliberate architect of our molecules is to assume that the answer is unknowable by any other interpretation. You cannot test that hypothesis. You can neither prove it nor refute it. Critical examination ends. A brief featurette on the DVD discusses the advances made through intelligent design-guided research; scientists look to principles of engineering to understand the function of the human body. A reasonable approach. But one does not need to believe in God to imagine parallels between the human body and efficient machines. And short of isolating the creator, which no current science can do, when it comes to the big question — how did life begin? — intelligent design can’t explain itself any better than evolution can.

Neither should Darwinism be a sacred cow. Reasonable scientists in the film question Darwin’s theories, though Frankowski and Stein fail to shed adequate light on the specific tenets of evolution they find faulty. They discuss Darwinism more as a political and philosophical construct, an ideology, and I would have liked more rigorous science. The film upholds neither theory with any certainty, but calls for the best science to prevail, be it Darwin or intelligent design or … something else. Both sides of the debate would do well to take the counsel of William Shakespeare, who wrote, “There are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamt of in your philosophy.”

By the halfway point, Stein has made a strong case for broader intellectual curiosity. So how then to explain my rating of this film? Anything lower than two stars I reserve for films I begin to resent.

The problem is not Frankowski and Stein’s defense of intelligent design but their discursive dishonesty. I do not believe they have admitted their biases, and in launching into propagandist diatribes they contradict themselves and undermine any valid points they might have hoped to make.

After spending time insisting that religion and science need not be mutually exclusive, and that intellectual dissent should be debated rather than dismissed, Stein launches a deeply offensive attack against Darwinism, not as science, but as a godless and dangerous philosophy. Many evolutionists interviewed confess that their religious faith eroded as the result of Darwinism, from which Stein segues shamefully to the Holocaust. A godless society produces scientific minds hellbent on eugenics and Naziism, Stein claims, philosophies that were founded, at least in part, on Darwin’s theory of evolution. His implication is that belief in Darwinism leads to atrocity, and by extension evolutionary scientists are somehow complicit in the extermination of six million Jews. Wretched.

Stein’s argument is specious. Evolution was perverted into genocide and involuntary castration at the hands of Hitler and eugenicists, but even if we can accept that evolution kills God, one can simply counter by citing the perversion of God by His believers. It would be easy to demonize Catholicism on the basis of the Spanish Inquisition, or Islam on the basis of 9/11, but it would be equally unfair. How can Stein defend intellectual freedom and in the same breath conflate Darwinism with Naziism? How can he defend freedom of faith and vilify atheism? And how dare he exploit the Holocaust as the basis for his hypocrisy? This entire segment of the film is emotionally manipulative, intellectually dishonest, and morally bankrupt.

Expelled becomes increasingly self-important. Darwinists are equated with the Third Reich. The struggle of intelligent design proponents is likened to the civil rights movement. Science and reason are established as the gateways to genocide. At one point Frankowski equates Stein with Ronald Reagan when he called for the destruction of the Berlin Wall, and he trains the camera on the standing ovation at the end of Stein’s oratory. Patting themselves on the back for a job well done? Any semblance of fairness has long since vanished, because Stein talks out of both sides of his mouth. He’s full of it.

As an agnostic, I am in a special position to observe the fundamental irony of religion and atheism. They share something that an agnostic does not have: faith. A belief in God versus a belief in the lack thereof, but belief nonetheless. As I write this, I am still agnostic. I do not have the answers. But if there’s one thing I know for sure, neither does Ben Stein.

On DVD: “Southland Tales”

Dir. Richard Kelly
(R) ½★

Serpentine: “Two identical souls walking the face of the Earth, co-existing in the same domain of chaos. What will happen if they shake hands?”

Boxer Santaros: “The fourth dimension will collapse upon itself, you stupid bitch!”

Richard Kelly. Oh Richard Kelly. He made a really interesting movie in 2001 called Donnie Darko. It was an intriguing head-trip of a movie, though if you listen to Kelly’s explanation of it on the DVD commentary, it turns out to be quite a stupid movie. I can’t remember when I’ve been as deflated by a film as when I listened to Kelly matter-of-factly deconstruct his moving character study and put it back together as a superhero yarn about repairing the space-time continuum. Think about his analysis for too long and it comes apart like tissue paper.

Southland Tales is what happens when that same creative mind is given free rein with more money (a still-modest $17 million, compared to the $6 million Darko). It’s a fiasco. It’s a crock. It achieves a kind of greatness by the sheer force of its awfulness. It reveals a filmmaker with little control of his own impulses and an even more tenuous grasp of character, plot, logic, theme, continuity, dialogue. There’s a feeling that words don’t connect with other words, that scenes don’t connect to other scenes, that actors don’t connect to their co-stars; they’d have to guess at how to play their characters at any given moment, because none of their lines have any reference point in reality. (The Rock takes to twiddling his fingers, apropos of nothing.)

And what a cast of actors to assemble for such a folly! I had to pause each time I recognized the face of an actor who doesn’t look like he belongs anywhere near this movie. The Rock, Sarah Michelle Gellar, and Seann William Scott I knew about already. But then there’s Jon Lovitz. And Nora Dunn. And Wallace Shawn. John Larroquette. Bai Ling. Cheri Oteri. Amy Poehler. Wood Harris. Miranda Richardson. Mandy Moore. Christopher Lambert. Will Sasso. Kevin Smith!! The music is by Moby, and the narrator is Justin Timberlake. I’ll repeat that: The narrator is Justin Timberlake. He has a drug-induced hallucination where he lip-synchs to the Killers’ “All These Things That I’ve Done.” Apropos of nothing.

But I’m getting off track — wait, there is no track.

With such an unlikely and eclectic ensemble, you could do something great. Really great. Extraordinary. Kelly tries to. Oh, how he tries! This is the story he put them in: After the United States suffers a nuclear assault, World War III begins. The Republicans trounce on our civil rights; they expand the PATRIOT Act and create a Big Brother-esque watchdog organization called USIDent. Opposing them are left-wing revolutionaries called Neo-Marxists. Sound like an intriguing premise for a political satire? You’re right, it is, but keep reading.

Actor Boxer Santaros (The Rock) is married to the daughter (Moore) of a vice-presidential candidate in the 2008 election. He loses his memory and gets entangled with a porn star (Gellar) who has cut an album called “Teen Horniness is Not a Crime.” They co-author a screenplay that foretells the apocalypse. Wait — I’m getting ahead of myself … or behind myself, or maybe under myself. There’s a rift in the space-time continuum. And there’s an Iraq vet (Scott) who has a twin brother, or they may be the same person. Something happened in Fallujah between him and a guy named Pilot Abilene (Timberlake), who deals drugs. And there’s a zeppelin, and a double-murder conspiracy, and two Hummers having sex with each other. And we’re assured that, and I quote, “pimps don’t commit suicide.”

I’m thisclose to recommending this film, because you’d have to see it to believe that it exists, that rational adults would commit time and money to it, that a selection committee thought it belonged at the Cannes Film Festival. Not long ago, I saw and loathed Eraserhead, the first film by frequently brilliant weirdo auteur David Lynch, which features creepy worm creatures, an alien baby, and a woman in a radiator with a deformed face — no humping Hummers, but maybe that’s in the director’s cut. If you think two identical souls are bad news, I wonder what would happen if he and Kelly ever shook hands.

On DVD: “Funny Games”

Dir. Michael Haneke
(R) ★

I rented Funny Games out of curiosity. They say it killed the cat.

I had read the reviews and was fascinated — mostly, fascinated by the scorn with which some critics responded to it, moving beyond a simple objection to its content to a resentment of its maker, Austrian director Michael Haneke (Caché). Said Newsweek’s David Ansen, “So as you’re squirming in your seat, gagging on Haneke’s cinematic castor oil, try to remember: this movie is good for you!” And Mark LaSalle of the San Francisco Chronicle: “… just because it’s a conscious commentary on other vile, useless, pointless cinematic exercises doesn’t make it any less vile, useless and pointless.” Even some of the film’s defenders are ambivalent, like Owen Gleiberman from Entertainment Weekly: “He’s a clever and sophisticated filmmaker; he’s also a self-important highbrow Euro pain freak.”

The review that most made me curious to see it for myself was by A.O. Scott, of The New York Times — ironic, as his review is the most searingly negative of all. He wrote, “Funny Games tries to insulate itself from its own awfulness in the fine cloth of self-consciousness … It actually knows it’s a movie! What a clever, tricky game! What fun! What a fraud.” If you read only one review of Funny Games, it should be his. If you read a second, go ahead and parse mine.

The fourth paragraph. I have cited the opinions of other critics but as yet have not offered my own. Haneke’s film is an intellectual exercise, an example of cruel cinematic violence intended to comment on cruel cinematic violence. So I gathered my thoughts, regained my bearings, and sought out further analyses to better inform my own. My conclusion: I’m with Mr. Scott.

According to Haneke, Funny Games is “a reaction to a certain American Cinema, its violence, its naiveté, the way American Cinema toys with human beings.” He made a German-language version in 1997, and he has remade it, reportedly shot-for-shot, in English, to bring his scorn for us straight to our doorstep. How generous of him.

The story concerns an affluent American family: Ann (Naomi Watts), her husband George (Tim Roth), and their son Georgie (Devon Gearhart). Soon upon arriving at their posh, gated cabin, they encounter a pair of polite young men dressed all in white, including their gloves. They are Paul (Michael Pitt) and Peter (Brady Corbet), and they are sociopaths. They hold the family hostage in their home and bet that all three will be dead within twelve hours.

That’s the story, but that’s not what the film is about. On occasion, Paul speaks into the camera, addressing the audience directly. He talks to us about our desire for neat resolutions and asks us if enough is enough. How should we answer? In one scene, he presses rewind on a remote control and repeats an event for us differently. The film knows it’s a film and means to consider not the interactions of the characters, but the interaction of the audience with the cinema.

But Haneke, you see, is a moral coward; his camera, in the merciless, indifferent way it observes the family’s plight, identifies with the sociopaths, but he absolves himself of responsibility by asserting that he is only feeding the beast, providing fodder for the bloodlust of us depraved Americans. “You asked for it,” he seems to say through Peter and Paul as he commits unspeakable crimes against the innocent family. It’s the philosophical equivalent of pounding us with our own fists and asking, “Why are you hitting yourself?”

But of course Haneke has a point. Fetishistic violence has been a commodity of American cinema for a long time, and the advent of so-called “torture porn” seems inevitable in hindsight. (Saw V opens October 24 in a theater near you!) So it is not Haneke’s theme I object to, but rather the manner in which he expresses it. He directs with icy, meticulous skill, and he effectively creates an atmosphere of dread, but he inflicts it upon the audience like a cudgel. Smug and sanctimonious, he scolds America for its exploitation of suffering for entertainment, but is it any less contemptible to exploit suffering to make a ham-handed statement about our thirst for it? “How dare you enjoy this!” he chides, while beating, violating, and humiliating his characters. Well, I didn’t enjoy it, Mr. Haneke. Do I pass your test? Is my misery penance enough for the sins you have ascribed to me?

One scene questions whether there is an appreciable difference between reality and fiction, implying that by celebrating violence on the screen we promote violence in the world. Well, let’s imagine a scenario as it might unfold in the real world. A man walks down the street. A philosopher crosses his path and for no reason throws a stone at his head. As the man bleeds to death on the pavement, on-lookers watch the scene in horror, and as the police arrive to arrest the philosopher, he says, “It does not matter that I have thrown the stone or that the man suffers. What matters is that you watched.” “Yeah, yeah,” says the cop, rolling his eyes as he puts the philosopher in cuffs. “Tell it to the judge.”

On DVD: “The Visitor”

Dir. Thomas McCarthy
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★ ½

Walter Vale is an unhappy man. He is a college professor in Connecticut and a widower, and has receded from his life, except to try to learn the piano, which he can’t get the hang of. Early on during The Visitor, writer-director Thomas McCarthy (The Station Agent) shows him in lonely static shots: his life in a series of solitary tableaus. Walter is played by character actor Richard Jenkins, who played the deceased father on HBO’s Six Feet Under and most recently played beneath his talents in Step Brothers. Here, he gives an internal performance expressed mostly with eloquent body language. His Walter carries himself rigidly, in a closed, defensive posture that keeps others at a distance. To make us understand Walter, Jenkins doesn’t need to say much; we need only watch how he stands, moves, and glares.

Walter is forced out of his comfortable seclusion when he must present a paper at a conference in New York City. He owns an apartment in the city but hasn’t lived there for years, and he is surprised to find a young couple illegally subletting. They are immigrants Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), from Syria, and Zainab (Danai Gurira), from Senegal. But the couple has lived there on good faith and has nowhere else to go, so Walter lets them stay. For a while, the immigrants and the professor are mutually suspicious and unsure what to make of each other.

McCarthy and his actors are very good at establishing who the characters are in-between their polite interactions. Gurira conveys a learned caution in Zainab’s early scenes with Walter; she appears to always be searching his charity for a cynical motive, and when we learn more about her and Tarek we understand why. The magnetic Sleiman makes Tarek as open-hearted as Walter and Zainab are guarded. It would be smart of him to be more careful, but he has a trusting nature.

The heart of the film is watching Walter gradually lower his defenses the more he is drawn into Tarek and Zainab’s lives. He becomes more involved than he ever wanted to be, but we believe the decisions he makes; he grows to care for them and feels responsible for them. They have made his life better, and he is unwilling to abandon them.

Tarek is arrested and subject to possible deportation, and this introduces another character, Tarek’s mother Mouna (Hiam Abbass). The second half of the film marks a significant, though not entirely successful, change in tone. Abbass and Jenkins are touching in their scenes together, but the screenplay develops their relationship in a way that I resisted; there’s an intimacy that feels rushed. And the poignant character study shifts to accommodate a political tract about immigration.

These changes in the story aren’t disappointing, per se — Walter has a particularly powerful scene in which he angrily rants to a guard in the immigration facility, “We’re not helpless children!” — but abrupt. A movie with characters as strong as these doesn’t need the added politics or overt romance. Consider the very last shot, which I will not divulge except to say that it is another static shot of Walter, and visually it expresses how far he has come from where he has been. There is nothing extra in the scene, just character; it’s perfect.

On DVD: “Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull”

Dir. Steven Spielberg
(PG-13) ★ ★ ½

Of course, there’s no reason Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull needed to be made. The job of Steven Spielberg, George Lucas, and company is to convince us why we should want one. They succeed some and they fail some. Considering the favorable but not rapturous reviews, I set my expectations low, and it met them.

The plot is more or less immaterial; Indiana Jones and the Bedazzled Port-O-Potty would sell as many tickets. What matters is Harrison Ford’s return as the adventuring archaeologist and Karen Allen’s as his former flame Marion Ravenwood. This is a success. The actors have a playful, undiminished chemistry, and despite their advancing years are still robust action heroes. We’re happy to see them and their well-cast companions who include such stalwart character actors as Ray Winstone and John Hurt. Joining them also is Shia LaBeouf; the studio’s publicity machine labored so greatly to obscure his character that they practically spelled it out on his forehead. I won’t say it here, but you’re already thinking it.

But then there is the plot, which may be immaterial but it’s necessary to move these characters from point A to B to C. It’s the plot that gums up the works. The story is front-loaded with exposition, and screenwriter David Koepp is bad at hiding the seams. Egregious is an early scene where Indy explains how closely the government guarded its secrets when Indiana inspected a mysterious crash at Roswell — hint, hint. Everyone in the room already knows everything he’s saying, so this dialogue can only be for our benefit — it may as well be spoken into the camera.

The rest of the plot involves a skull that may or may not be crystal, from a creature who may or may not be an alien. It has mysterious powers and holds the secret to a lost city of gold, and — I find myself no longer interested in writing about it. It’s all a bit daft, and the creatures, their powers, their identities, and their lost city remain vague despite being over-explained. I wish they had kept it simple, and left more room for the cast to settle into their characters and interact.

Another problem — and I never thought I’d say this about a film — is Cate Blanchett. I never completely believe her as underwritten Soviet operative Irina Spalco, and a large part of it is the accent. Blanchett, who rivals Meryl Streep in her talent for mimicry and accents, may very well be speaking in a technically proficient Eastern Ukranian dialect — I wouldn’t know — but what is it about affecting a Russian accent that makes actors sound like Boris and Natasha? Perhaps Spielberg and Blanchett are in on the joke — how preposterous this entire enterprise would be if they took themselves too seriously. Still, once we reach the finale, we wish they had at least given it more thought.

On DVD: “Sex and the City: The Movie”

Dir. Michael Patrick King
(R) ★ ★

Carrie Bradshaw: “You brought me back to life!”
Louise: “And you gave me Louis Vuitton!”

Not a fair trade if you ask me. Louis Vuitton is a high-end designer of bags and purses. Most of us will never own a Louis Vuitton bag. If by chance you have never heard of Louis Vuitton, you’ve probably lived a full and enviable life. The characters in Sex and the City: The Movie, we come to understand, would die without Louis Vuitton. They would also die without Prada, Chanel, and Manolo Blahnik. Their shoes cost hundreds of dollars per pair. Their closets are as extensive as the wardrobe departments of Hollywood studios. In one scene, a character looks down at a pile of magazines; on top is an issue of New York Magazine whose front page story is the declining real estate market, but she instead picks up the Vogue underneath. When she asks her partner if they can afford an expensive penthouse apartment, he answers smugly, “I got it.” He hasn’t read the magazine either.

I was a fan of the Sex and the City television series than ran on HBO from 1998 to 2004, and I remember that its quartet of New York City socialites always had a weakness for designer labels, but on the series, fashion was the window dressing for a witty, articulate comedy about contemporary single women. In the film, fashion is an end unto itself. Scenes have been constructed to showcase the extravagant clothes, and the names of designers appear in the screenplay as regularly as the names of the characters. Fashion is the subject, and now the women are the window dressing. They are not as witty or articulate as they once were. They are frivolous and irrational.

The DVD includes a feature-length commentary that sheds light, in the way that Luminol reveals evidence at a crime scene. Michael Patrick King, the writer and director of the film as well as an executive producer of the series, seems to have lost his characters in the shuffle. There is a throwaway line — “You’ve got pudding in your Prada” — and King explains that it prompted the crucial search for exactly the right Prada bag for the scene, but both the line and the prop are forgettable. He points out Chanel earmuffs and a Hermes blanket. He tells a story of how a production assistant was flown to Mexico to retrieve a dress for the filming of a scene. He put a lot of thought into costumes; he has directed a fashion show and not a movie.

He also discusses his characters’ relationships, but he gets those wrong too. His greatest miscalculation is his neglect of the character of Mr. Big (Chris Noth). In the film’s central storyline, Big becomes engaged to author Carrie Bradshaw (Sarah Jessica Parker), his on-again, off-again love from the series. As the wedding approaches, she allows herself to become a bridezilla, and the thrice-married Big behaves out of fear. Carrie is heartbroken, but so is Big, yet he disappears for an hour while we spend that time with characters who vilify him. King’s unbalanced sympathies cause mine to teeter in the opposite direction: Carrie is entitled to heartbreak, but why does the film make Big the villain, rather than give equal consideration to his feelings?

Their conflict would best have been dealt with thoughtfully and with humor, but King resorts to melodrama. The breakup scene is the film’s worst, using indulgent slow motion and sending the characters screaming into the street. The director intends to highlight Carrie’s emotional devastation but succeeds only in turning it into farce. It’s a scene out of a bad romance novel, and it yields uncharacteristically bad performances from good actors.

The subplots are a mixed bag. Miranda (Cynthia Nixon) is faced with an interesting dilemma: a rift in her marriage to bartender Steve (David Eigenberg), but this storyline is announced abruptly and underdeveloped. It’s strange how lenient the film is with Steve’s behavior given the hard line taken against Big; one wonders where King and his characters draw the line for betrayal and why.

Samantha Jones (Kim Cattrall), known for her unapologetic promiscuity, has settled into a relationship for five years with her public relations client, actor Smith Jerrod (Jason Lewis), but domestic bliss has made her restless. Despite an unnecessary interlude about a horny dog, this is the film’s most natural storyline, and it leads to a resolution that is mature and organic to character.

Charlotte (Kristin Davis), who spent the series pining, has settled into romantic bliss with her husband Harry (Evan Handler). She is a counterpoint to the other three and gives the film a shot of realism; not every couple can live happily ever after, but it would equally strain credulity for every couple to endure a contrived romantic quandary.

A fifth character is new to the group: Louise (Jennifer Hudson, Oscar winner for Dreamgirls), Carrie’s personal assistant. She also has romantic troubles, but hers feel tacked on to a screenplay too overstuffed to accommodate her.

King’s narrative shows admirable ambition, but he has bitten off more than he can chew. The running time is two and a half hours, much too long, but because of his excess stories much of it feels condensed; instead of an extended episode, the film plays like the Cliffs Notes for an entire seventh season. Consider this: Most films about reconnecting include one reunion scene in which the characters squeal upon seeing each other — this one includes four.

Why, then, does he waste so much time on consumerism? “Let’s stop chasing those boys and shop some more!” sings Fergie on the soundtrack. That’s a sentiment worthy of Bratz: The Movie. The Sex and the City women should be better than that.

On DVD: “Iron Man”

Dir. Jon Favreau
(PG-13) ★ ★ ★

I admit, I bring too much reality to movies like this. Like how I couldn’t help but wonder how Iron Man stayed in the air when he flew. Hand and foot rockets always pointed straight behind him, he’s all thrust and no lift. Or how the computers all seem a little too futuristic to be credible in the present day, even for a billionaire who built his first circuit board at age four. Or how it strains credulity that a weapons developer would ever make the cover of Rolling Stone magazine. I know, I know. Lighten up, you’re thinking. But I’m a stickler.

Iron Man is a good superhero movie, though not as good as its hype. It’s not at the level of Spider-Man 2 or the earliest Superman films. But it’s a great deal better than clunkers like Spider-Man 3 and Superman Returns. It’s on par with films in the middle of the pack, like the second X-Men film and Batman Begins — the latter of which also failed to measure up to its reviews. It’s a good film, but not one that stirs my inner geek.

What doesn’t work: (1) The villains, who are rather flat. Up-front, we are treated to a brand of Middle Eastern terrorists so familiar in film and television these days as to become disheartening. I come to think of the actors in these scenes more than their characters. Specifically, I thought of Sayed Badreya, who in 2003 starred in a satirical short film about the typecasting of Arab actors as terrorists. His character in this film? Yes, a terrorist. I think he must have had higher hopes for his career than this.

The other villain I won’t reveal, because his identity involves important plot details. But I found him underdeveloped — the kind of baddie who is evil for its own sake, without a clear guiding motivation or personality. A perfunctory explanation is given, but it doesn’t explain what he hopes to accomplish with a destructive public brawl on the freeway during the climax.

(2) An excess of earnestness occasionally and unintentionally underlines the silliness inherent in a superhero story. A character is introduced early on who exists just to die tragically. A scene dramatizes the siege of a village, where we watch a woman and her children separated from their father; they’re props of innocent suffering and exist only to look sad and be rescued.

(3) Pepper Potts (Gwyneth Paltrow). No, she’s not a bad character. I simply question the wisdom of comic book writers who name their strongest female character “Pepper Potts.” With that name, your career options are stripper, teenage detective in a young-adult book series, or plucky lawyer in a David E. Kelley series.

What does work: Iron Man himself, Tony Stark. As played by Robert Downey Jr. — impetuous, snarky, and unapologetic — Stark is a refreshing kind of hero, without any of the tortured do-gooder-ness or woe-is-me brooding of previous comic book protagonists (no offense to Peter Parker or Bruce Wayne). He brings the film alive from the first scene, cracking wise with American soldiers in Afghanistan. How entertaining to watch a man with enough conscience to do the right thing but not so much that loses his sense of whimsy. He’s kind of a jerk, but where is it written that all good guys have to be nice guys? Watching him, all cocksure swagger and impertinence, we realize that, indeed, with great power comes great responsibility, but great power can also be really, really cool.