Watch Movie Online

Whew. Color me relieved. There is no need to fear death, even the most horrifying kind of murder. Be cause the afterlife is ex actly like the album cover for a 1970s progressive-rock band.

So ditch your moody blues and come sail away to the point of know return.

That’s where Susie Salmon (Saoirse Ronan, the scary girl from “Atonement,” who this time is merely adequate) roams the freaky fields of “the in-between” — she’s been waitlisted for heaven — while, back on Earth, pop (Mark Wahlberg) and mom (Rachel Weisz) search, respectively, for her murderer and for escape.

When her dad is smashing his collection of tiny ships in bottles, it’s reflected in Susie’s netherworld by giant distorted images of the same, as though she’s standing too close to the screen at a drive-in theater. When things are going well, she sees a symbolic tree in a hyper-green pasture that practically burns with ripeness. More dire moments mean inky swells of murderous waves. The universe is her mood ring.

It’s all a gorgeous error, a bonfire of overreach, from the (long-winded, too serious and overrated) “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson. The story, if any (the movie isn’t really a murder mystery, nor a quest for justice, nor even a guidebook to acceptance, closure and healing, although portions tread each of these paths), is carried away on a blast of imagery.

The movie is roughly as serious about death and dying as “It’s a Wonderful Life.” It uses the excruciating fact that innocents sometimes get murdered to wedge open a door to a landscape of sentimentality populated by Willy Wonka wonders.

Jackson’s commitment, though, is utter. I respect that as much as I scoff at the movie’s magic icicle and its notion that our dead loved ones are telepathically reaching out to us. I’d much rather sit through a dazzling, intrepid fever-dream than more dull cinematic tutelage on the evils of war or racism.

Susie, who at the start of the film is a 1973 teen who wants only to get kissed by the cute English guy (Reece Ritchie) at school, never makes it to her date with him — at a gazebo that becomes a totem of her post-life dreamland. Instead, middle-aged neighbor George Harvey builds an elaborate trap and lures her into it.

That scene, and Stanley Tucci’s performance as the wheedling creep, are fantastically disturbing without being explicitly violent. Tucci goes the full Hinckley with his pervy mustache, his loser’s windbreaker, his sinister spectacles and his maladjusted little laugh. Despite his stock villainy — the character simply needs to kill, that’s all there is to him — Tucci bores in like a virus. It’s Oscar-level evil, a piece of acting you won’t soon shake off.

Making an almost equal but opposite impression, Susan Sarandon plays the dead girl’s brassy grandmother, a nicotine-addled and falsely eyelashed creature who sweeps into the household as the Weisz character falls nearly catatonic with grief, neglecting her remaining children.

The movie positions the grandma as comic relief, unable to make a meal without starting a blaze and trailing a spoor of cigarette ash. But she turns out to represent the family’s best strategy for coping, a lively determination to focus (albeit ineptly) on small tasks while the larger pain slowly fades.

Jackson would have done well to explore her character more and spare us the attention he lavishes on the supernaturally infused pre-Goth girl (her look anticipates Ally Sheedy in “The Breakfast Club”) Susie thinks is kind of weird but who, naturally, functions as a psychic radio programmed to catch Susie’s vibes after she dies. If you’re going for an emotional finish as huge as eternity, try not to make me think of Whoopi Goldberg in “Ghost.”

kyle.smith@nypost.com

By Mike Scott, The Times-Picayune

December 11, 2009, 5:00AM

Michael Clarke Duncan inspects the wait staff of his restaurant in the comedy ‘The Slammin’ Salmon.’I’m sure it was a whole lot of fun making “The Slammin’ Salmon, ” the latest anatomically fixated comedy from the Broken Lizard comedy troupe (”Super Troopers, ” “Beerfest”).

It was probably even more fun to write, a process I imagine taking place late at night around somebody’s beer-can-littered kitchen table.

Watching it, however? Meh.

Moments of light laughter fueled by Broken Lizard’s non sequitur brand of shock humor are served with a flimsy plot and even flimsier characters.

Michael Clarke Duncan horses around in ‘The Slammin’ Salmon.’ THE SLAMMIN’ SALMON 1 star, out of 4 Snapshot: A comedy, set at a five-star restaurant, about a wait staff competing to earn the most money for their employer in a single night.
What works: The occasional sophomoric laugh keeps things from completely falling apart. What doesn’t: With a thin plot and thinner characters, the Broken Lizard gang’s non sequitur, anatomically fixated humor gets old fast — at least for sober viewers. Starring: Kevin Heffernan, Jay Chandrasekhar, Michael Clarke Duncan, Steve Lemme, Paul Soter, Erik Stolhanske, Cobie Smulders, April Bowlby. Director: Heffernan. Rating: R for pervasive language and sexual references. Running time: 1 hour 38 minutes. Where: West Bank Palace. I suspect the filmmakers were aiming to make an “Office Space” for the wait staffs of white-tablecloth eateries, offering the same sort of workplace commiseration that 1999 movie did for cubicle workers. (And that the New Orleans-shot “Waiting” did for employees of chain restaurants in 2005.)

It’s doubtful, however, that “The Slammin’ Salmon” will achieve anything near that same cult status.

What it does offer is a wealth of faintly recognizable TV faces — that lady from “Two and a Half Men, ” the one from “How I Met Your Mother, ” the guy from “Heroes, ” that “Saturday Night Live” dude — playing waiters in a five-star restaurant owned by a retired boxer named Cleon Salmon.

When the champ finds himself on the losing end of a bet — over Japanese albino hunting, which perfectly encapsulates the nonsensical, throw-random-words-together humor at work here — he needs to raise a lot of cash, and fast. So he offers an incentive to his waiters: The one who earns the most money for the restaurant in a single night gets a $10,000 prize. The lowest money-maker, however, will get the tartar beat out of him by Salmon.

Cue the antics, as the waiters jump into action. Eventually they get around to sabotaging one another — an idea with promise but not nearly as early or as cleverly as you might hope. Instead, director Kevin Heffernan wastes time on gags, such as one involving the same split-screen technology that was cutting-edge when it was used to clone Hailey Mills in 1961’s “The Parent Trap.”

The sadistic boxer-boss is played by Michael Clarke Duncan (”The Green Mile, ” “Sin City”), who is far above this material, evidenced by his admirably earnest approach to his role. (Somebody offer this man a decent role, please.)

Early on in “The Slammin’ Salmon, ” a customer sends back a plate of undercooked fish. I can’t imagine a better metaphor for a movie that is named after a fish and that is as half-baked as this one is.

RELATED LINKS

• From Nola.com: Find New Orleans area showtimes. 
• On Twitter: Follow the Twitter feed of T-P movie critic Mike Scott
• From the T-P: The T-P’s A-to-Z movie review archive. 
•  From the T-P: More movie news and reviews from Times-Picayune movie critic Mike Scott

Let us now praise George Clooney. A month ago he starred in the very funny “The Men Who Stare at Goats”; a week after that, the arguably funnier “Fantastic Mr. Fox”; and now — for his third release in a span of 29 days — “Up in the Air,” a romantic comedy that, in its more conventional way, is as good as “Goats” and “Fox.”

Here Clooney stars as Ryan Bingham, a “career transition” expert; i.e., he fires people for a living. This walking pink slip flies around the country from one company to the next, handling the most difficult part of layoffs — delivering the news to the layoffees. His lifestyle — living out of a suitcase and on an expense account — is the perfect setup for a ladies’ man, which he is. He’s like a swinging airline pilot out of a ’50s or ’60s sex farce, except he spends more time in the air. He’s closing in on 10 million frequent flier miles, his life’s greatest goal.

But he who lives by the sword, dies by the sword, and suddenly Ryan finds himself on the receiving end of a “career transition” notice. Natalie (Anna Kendrick), an ambitious efficiency expert, has convinced his employers that, this being the computer age, they can save a bundle of money by having Ryan and his ilk stay at the home office and fire people by video-conferencing — basically, moving his job from sky to Skype.

At just that moment, Ryan is also beginning to think he’s finally hooked up with someone with long-term love potential — Alex (Vera Farmiga), another professional traveler with similar attitudes. (”Think of me as just like you, except with a vagina,” she tells him.)

The three main characters in “Up in the Air” are all slowly revealed as more complex and layered than one might suspect at the start. (J.K. Simmons and Sam Elliott are welcome presences in cameo roles, as well.) In particular, Natalie could have easily been a caricature of officiousness and arrogant youth. But Kendrick’s performance is so good that initially it seems bad. “Boy, is this newbie stiff!” I thought. But as the story evolves, it becomes clear that the awkwardness is in the character, not the actress.

Jason Reitman, who directed and co-wrote, is barely into his 30s, and his filmography — “Thank You for Smoking” and “Juno” were his first two features — already suggests the sort of light touch romantic comedies rarely display nowadays.

“Up in the Air” is often hysterical, but most of the time the humor is low-key. And — as in “Juno” — when the movie needs to be heartfelt, it’s genuinely heartfelt without being sappy. There should be more like it.

–Andy Klein

Photo credit: Dale Robinette/Paramount Pictures

The Year’s Best Gay Film Has Arrived

By Chris Carpenter

It has been four years since Brokeback Mountain touched the hearts of gay viewers, and many of us have been pining for another movie to reflect and evoke our experiences in an authentic way. Well, I’m happy to report the wait is over! A Single Man (released by The Weinstein Co.) opens on Dec. 11 in Los Angeles and will expand to Orange County and across the rest of the country on Dec. 25.
Colin Firth stars as George Falconer, a college literature professor grieving the loss of his lover, Jim (Matthew Goode, who played Ozymandias in Watchmen). Jim died eight months earlier in an automobile accident. The men met at the end of World War II and were happily together 16 years (the film is set in 1962).
Increasingly lonely and unable to function effectively without Jim, George resolves to end his life. The film follows George during the course of what is intended to be his last day. As he goes about getting his affairs in order and making other preparations for his suicide, we gain glimpses into George’s past — even George himself sees unexpected signs of hope for his future, should he choose not to kill himself.
We meet Charley (Julianne Moore), one of George’s lifelong friends who has a particular affection for Tanqueray gin (“I like the color of the bottle,” she tells George. “You like what’s inside it,” he replies.). Viewers are also introduced to one of George’s students, Kenny (Nicholas Hoult), whose own feelings for George develop during the course of the movie.
Based on gay writer Christopher Isherwood’s 1964 novel of the same title, A Single Man marks the screenwriting and directorial debuts of fashion designer Tom Ford. Ford’s eye for detail is evident throughout the film, from the fluctuating, photographic, color scheme to the amazing period props, cars and set pieces and, of course, the costumes (the exquisite fashions in the film were designed by Arianne Phillips). Indeed, A Single Man is the most authentically detailed, period film since 2002’s Far From Heaven, which also starred Moore and was written and directed by out filmmaker Todd Haynes.
I can’t say enough about how good A Single Man is in terms of its artistry and depiction of homosexual life in the 1960s. Not only is it one of the best gay-themed films of 2009 (along with Little Ashes), but I dare say it is one of the best ever. While the gay characters are wisely closeted for the era, they are far from the self-loathing homosexuals of many queer-centric movies of the past, including Brokeback Mountain.
George and Jim are fully accepting of themselves and are unapologetically gay, in spite of Jim’s parents’ condemnation of their relationship, as well as a straight neighbor’s assertion that the people next door are “light in their loafers.” George delivers a powerful, impromptu lecture to his students on how social minorities are the victims of the majority’s fear. He doesn’t specifically mention homosexuals among the minorities he lists; his point is so strong and truthful that he doesn’t need to for his listeners to get the point.
A Single Man is also undeniably erotic. Firth and Goode have romantic and sexual chemistry to spare between them, and Hoult does a striptease for George during the film’s surprising climax. All three actors show plenty of skin in the film, but Ford presents the nudity artfully, which makes it all the sexier in my opinion. I would be remiss if I didn’t note the incredibly sexy Jon Kortajarena as a James Dean-esque hustler who tries to pick up George.
The film may traffic in dark themes and issues of mortality, loss, loneliness, oppression and suicide, but it certainly isn’t humorless. Ford, co-writer David Scearce and Isherwood infuse George’s plight with unexpected wit devoid of bad taste.
Firth (who played gay in 2008’s Mamma Mia!) is emerging as a likely Oscar contender for his performance as George. He has won the Best Actor award at this year’s Venice Film Festival, and it would be the British actor’s first nomination for an Academy Award.