There aren’t that many stories to tell. Perhaps that’s why so many filmmakers end up making the same film over and over again. In the films of directors such as Wes Anderson and Tim Burton, the names change, the sets change (to a degree), but they all inhabit the same meticulously fetishized world. Even when a filmmaker manages different stories, they usually resign themselves to one genre. A few make the leap, like David Gordon Greene, director of such introspective indie hits as George Washington and All the Real Girls, who helmed this summer’s Pineapple Express.

But rarely is there someone quite like Danny Boyle. Moving from 1996’s heroin comedy “Trainspotting” to “28 Days Later,” arguably the best horror film made since the death of Alfred Hitchcock, from the feel-good family-friendly “Millions” to the sci-fi thriller “Sunshine,” Boyle is not one to repeat himself. His latest film, “Slumdog Millionaire,” a semi-bildungsroman and a sweeping romance set against the backdrop of India, continues Boyle’s tradition of bringing a consistence of quality to his inconsistence of subject.

The film begins Jamal Malik (Dev Patal) being questioned (in a hold-your-head-under-water and car-battery-to-the-toes kind of way). He is suspected of fraud, being one of the first people ever to reach 10 million rupees on India’s version of “Who Wants to be a Millionaire.” The guard yells at him, asking him what he could possibly know that doctors and lawyers who tried before him didn’t. “The answers,” he says, “I knew the answers.”

And the answers are what guide the film. Sliding between the game show, the questioning, and bits of his life, we are driven by the answers. The detective (Irrfan Khan) asks him to explain how he knew each one, and each one elicits a story from Jamal’s childhood. Growing up in Mumbai, a poor “slumdog,” Jamal and his brother Salim went through nearly insurmountable horrors. Their mother was killed by anti-Muslim rioters, they were rounded up into child slavery, and they never knew where their next meal was coming from. Through much of this, Jamal had Latika, a girl whose parents were also killed in the riots. Their friendship and love drives Jamal and the film, giving him and us hope in an otherwise incredibly bleak story.

Jamal, Salim, and Latika are each played by three different actors. We see them change and grow, from children of around 7 to late teenagers. We see their lives played out in vingettes, each explaining where Jamal got an answer to one of the game show questions. When the game show host (who looks remarkably like George Michael) suspects that he, an uneducated teen from the slums of Mumbai, is cheating, he has the police called. Things for Jamal look as they have looked his entirely life: overwhelmingly bad.

But Boyle doesn’t let his characters or his audience remain discouraged for long. The importance of the film, or rather the meaningfulness behind the action is that from Boyle we’re given hope. The difference between hope and a happy ending is what drives the film, so that a pleasant outcome never feels guaranteed. We’re not sure how it’ll end, nor do we have reason to believe, given the life Jamal has led so far, that it’ll desirable. But what we do have is hope.

The movie begins with two friends, Danny (Paul Rudd) and Wheeler (Seann William Scott), who tour middle schools in the area giving anti-drug talks while pushing an energy drink. After a bad day made worse by a haphazard, refused proposal to his girlfriend (Elizabeth Banks), Danny finds himself on the wrong side of the law. He and Wheeler are able to avoid jail time if they agree to do community service through Sturdy Wings, a Big Brother-esque outreach program that brings together adults and children (“Bigs” and “Littles” in the film).

Here they meet their littles: Ronnie (Bobb’e J Thompson), a loud mouthed 10-year-old that’s scared off all other volunteers, and Augie (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), a cape-clad high schooler that spends his weekends play-fighting in L.A.I.R.E. (Live-Action Interactive Role-playing Environment). That their time with Sturdy Wings will lead Danny and Wheeler to a more enlightened, mature perspective is a fait accompli.

We’re left, instead, to enjoy the interactions between the two friends, their Littles, and other people within the program itself. The best of these interactions is with Gayle (Jane Lynch continuing her reign as character-actress royalty), Sturdy Wings’ director and an ex-drug addict, whose deadpan scenes punctuate Danny and Wheeler’s time in the program and lead to some of the film’s biggest laughs.

Though the movie belongs to Danny, Seann William Scott’s Wheeler, while only a small departure from his work in “American Pie,” is not without his moments. His character’s bravado and reputation as somewhat of a libertine are weaved into a more three-dimensional character we see toward the end of the film. He and his Little, Ronnie, steal much of the film.

By using actors like Rudd, Wain invited comparisons to Judd Apatow (though it should be mentioned that Rudd and Wain have had a long career together that predates the “Apatow Era”). This is not an unwarranted comparison, either. Wain and Apatow have been skating the same territory in comedy for years now,  alternating between deadpan wit and the downright childish. But Wain distinguishes himself here, rising above expectations generated by a broad-audience trailer, and delivers a movie that is at once hilarious and full of heart.

In every single piece of press I’ve read or watched regarding Kevin Smith’s latest film “Zack and Miri Make a Porno,” Judd Apatow has been mentioned. The story is the same every time: Smith influenced Apatow who then brought the “bro-mantic comedy” (terrible nomenclature that has somehow become the industry standard) to a much larger audience and introduced a heap of comedy newcomers. More than a few of these Apatow stock actors show up in Smith’s latest, blurring the lines of what kind of film it’ll be. But when the credits roll, it doesn’t feel like an Apatow film, or a Smith film, but instead something different, and, unfortunately for us, not as funny as either.

The film opens with Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) spiraling into debt, their bills stacking up, sitting unpaid because of unnecessary purchases like ice skates and new sex toys. They’re also gearing up for their ten year high school reunion, where Miri hopes to seduce former jock-crush Bobby Long (Brandon Routh) and be pulled out of poverty in a Cinderellian fashion. While Miri gets a little too drunk and sacrifices herself at the altar of dignity in front of the sweet but meaningfully uninterested Long, Rogen chats up Brandon (Justin Long), an adult film star that works on “all sorts of films with all-male casts” who steals every scene he’s in.

After she’s shot down, Zack takes Miri home to the apartment they’ve shared, platonically, since the end of high school. This is when their bills, long past past-due, catch up to them. The lights, the water, everything goes off, leaving them, as Zack points out, “huddled around a flaming garbage can like a couple of Steno bums.” They need to climb out of debt, and their solution, indicated by the title, is to make a porno.

From here, they assemble a team of stars and crew, working with the money Zack’s co-worker Delaney (Craig Robinson, finally getting more than a few minutes of screen time) was going to spend on a flat-screen. The best scenes in the movie come from the setting up and shooting of the actual porno. Zack and Miri begin to realize that they’ve always been in love, and Smith regulars like Jason Mewes and Jeff Anderson join them, getting bigger laughs than Rogen does.

But all this doesn’t feel much like the Smith we’ve come to love, that I’ve grown up with. The pop-culture rants are few and far between. Smith himself, known for his precise, witty scripts, admitted that this is the most improvisation he’s had in any of his movies. And for the most part, it doesn’t play out nearly as well as words from Smith’s own pen.

This isn’t to say that “Zack and Miri” doesn’t have some big laughs, or even a lot of them, but it all feels like less of an accomplishment when you consider what Smith could’ve made it. Smith has mentioned several times during junkets how star struck he was by Rogen, how eager he was to work with him since seeing “The 40-Year-Old Virgin.” Maybe Smith should’ve taken a deep breath, trusted his own work, and told Seth to stick to the script.

“Synecdoche, NY” is a film about a man waiting. Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman) waits for his wife and daughter to return from Berlin, for his massive play to be ready, and for something significant to happen in his life. He waits for someone to tell him what he’s doing is good, that it’s worthwhile; or someone to just tell him what to do.

Charlie Kaufman, the film’s writer and director, is an unlikely hollywood success. His films are rarely linear, often dreamlike, and always dense. His view of the world is askew, often askance,   but observing the human condition, he has clear eyes.

The film follows Cotard through his life, jumping indiscriminately forward without warning or indication. When we see him first, he is approaching middle age; his wife paints on infinitesimally small canvases in a Fincher-esque basement of the house where they both live and raise their daughter. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is cold; at one point she writes off the whole idea of romantic love—to her husband. She skips out on the opening night of his version of Miller’s Death of a Salesmen to smoke pot with her friend and she skips out on Caden himself when she has a gallery opening in Berlin, taking their daughter with her.

And like this, women come and go from Caden’s life. Adele, Hazel, Claire, Tammy—each one less meaningful than the last, and each relationship poisoned and eventually doomed by the ones that came before it. His relationships with these women end, but they scar. He’s left bruised, weak; a brackish line across his forehead caused by a plumbing accident becomes an emblem of his defeat. It’s the scar he didn’t want, never wanted, but it rose nonetheless.

In the same way that his relationships become more unmanageable, so too does his life. His new project, staging a play by building and inhabiting a life-sized replica of New York city, unsurprisingly increases in complexity each day. He casts the people in his life, the people he encounters, but by doing that he gets to know the actors he cast, and has to find people to play them. He wants to make something “big and true and tough,” a theatre piece where everybody has the same importance. “There are millions of people in the world” he tells Claire, “and none of them is an extra. They’re all leads of their own stories.”

But Synecdoche, NY is ultimately Caden’s story, the story of a man’s life. We see him falter, we see him fail, and we see him grow old. His friends and family leave him, or die, leaving fewer and fewer people to “watch” Caden, to care about what he does and how his life plays out, and leaving us to wonder if anyone was ever watching him at all.

Everything decays. The important and unimportant things in Caden’s life are torn away from him not at once, but in pieces. Everyone eventually dies, but convince themselves otherwise and race towards something, anything to happen before they do. This hurts us,” poet Edward Hirsch writes in his poem “Song against Natural Selection,” “and yet we manage, we survive/ so that losing itself becomes a kind/ of song, our song, our only witness/ to the way we die, one day at a time; [...] this/ is how we recognize ourselves, and why.”

There’s a scene in the first act of Barry Levinson’s “What Just Happened?” in which Scott Solomon (Stanley Tucci) pitches his new film idea about a florist to movie producer and focus of the film Ben (De Niro). After some evasive comments, Ben finally tells it to him straight: “It’s not a movie.”

“What Just Happened?” is a series of increasingly meaningless scenes thrown together; it’s full of characters that we not only don’t love, but can’t appreciate. As we watch the whole thing play out, from tantrums to train-wrecks, we’re left with the same gut feeling that Ben had.

That’s not to say that industry insider stories don’t work. They have before on television (Curb Your Enthusiasm, Extras, the first two seasons of Entourage) and on film (The Player), but here they approached with too little feeling and too much cynicism.

Based on Art Linson’s memoir of the same name, “What Just Happened?” follows two weeks in the life of Ben, a movie producer who’s going through a rough two weeks. With one film finished but testing poorly, another about to derail because Bruce Willis (playing himself) won’t shave off his beard or a few pounds, and his second divorce all circling around him, Ben mutters and frowns his way through the film.

It’s not a pleasant experience for us either. We observe his career pressures and most acutely his relationship problems from a distance. “Mom wants to ask you something,” one of Ben’s daughters tells him, “she said it’s okay for you to go in the house instead of using your cell phone.”  Much of the movie occurs on the phone as Ben rushes around L.A. and eventually France to make cinematic ends meet. In this way, he is distanced from the people around him and we’re denied much of the necessary human interaction that would make us care about the characters in the film.

But even when Ben is face to face with his wife, his clients, or anyone, it’s hard to find any honesty in what he says. He glosses over his failures and magnifies his success. He speaks in equivocations that we’ve come to expect from “Hollywood types.” The few funny moments come from interactions between Ben and an agent (John Turturro) but are not enough to save the movie from irrelevance.

When the curtain falls, “What Just Happened?” is not much of a comedy, not much of a satire, and it’s not much of a movie. Not a good one at least.

Chances are, even if you didn’t grow up in Washington D.C. in the 1980s, you know who Ian MacKaye is. Somehow his music or his influence has crossed paths with most everybody. MacKaye, made famous by fronting the hardcore punk bands Minor Threat and Fugazi (among others), visited the Riverside Art Museum on October 19th to address a sizable crowd of fans and interested parties that had lined up nearly an hour before to get a good seat. But he didn’t come with a speech, he came with answers.

It all started when a university asked him to give a talk at their school. MacKaye was unsure whether or not he’d have anything to talk about for more than a few minutes time and didn’t really have a message to preach. “But,” he added, “I’ve always found having conversations to be compelling. I love to talk.” He also finds it rewarding to be able to communicate directly with his fans. “I’ve done thousands of interviews,” MacKaye told us, adding that with newspapers, magazines, and television interviews, their is always a “publication bias.” This venue allowed him to circumvent that.

And that he does. For a little more than two hours, MacKaye fielded questions from the audience and answered them at length. His style was heavily tangential, but it’s almost to be expected in this format and would always wrench out a great story. The tangents would usually prove more interesting than the answers to the original questions. MacKaye would, however, always politely ask if he had adequately “answered [their] question.”

And lucky for the audience he didn’t stay in one place for very long, topically speaking. He addressed everything from the “straightedge” movement to Kurt Vonnegut, from his music to his affinity for milk.

When one college aged student asked him for advice (many questions took this form) on how to recruit people for a band and how to “make it,” MacKaye answered back with a humble warning. “It’s not about being in a band,” he said, adding that time spent worrying about the band or worrying about making it instead of the music is time wasted.  “It’s just a ladder. It’s work.” he said, “do what seams clear to you.”

When asked about his association with and involvement in the straightedge movement, he had a lot to say. He doesn’t associate himself with the movement, and though he’s often cited as the inspiration for the movement, he sees straightedge less as a clear set of rules or a “movement” and more of a guideline for how he himself want to and does live his life. He made it clear that he saw straightedge as applicable in his life, but that imposing those values on other people was never his intention and even, he said “antithetical to [his] original ideals.”

He continued on warning about the dangers of an us vs. them mentality (citing religion, nationalism, and sports in that category). “When I was eight years old, I would literally pray to God thanking him for letting me be born in America,” MacKaye confessed, “because all I’d ever been told was that America was the greatest country in the world. I felt sorry for people born [elsewhere].” MacKaye likened this blind acceptance of  something to be true to the milk council. “Ever since I was young, I knew I needed three things. Food, sleep, and milk.” This was because, he said, the power of advertising is so strong. He also tied this in with his uneasy feeling that rock venues and drinking/bars are so closely associated.

One of the many highlights of the night was when, when asked if he liked cats, MacKaye informed the audience of the neurological difference between cats and dogs and how each one recognizes and categorizes it’s “master.”

The last question of the night was, like so many others, political. This time, though, he was asked directly who he was going to vote for. After holding his cards close to his chest for a minute, he said, “I’ve always voted for the candidate least likely to start or continue war. [...] Considering this, of course I’m going to vote for Obama. No war. No war.” And for this, for everything, he was met with a standing ovation.

Death Cab for Cutie jokingly named one of their albums “You Can Play These Songs With Chords.” The same can unironically be said for the Vivian Girls self-titled release. It’s simple. You could probably learn how to play the album in less time than it takes to listen to it, a meager twenty-two minutes (Less than half of the albums 10 songs make it over 2 minutes).

That’s not to say that these three Brooklyn natives didn’t make a great little gem. What it lacks in length and complexity it makes up for in what gut feeling. The Vivian Girls hard strumming and quick drumming cuts through like an Iggy and the Stooges song. There’s even the occasional simple guitar line, never more than a few notes long, to keep things interesting.

There are also noticeable limits to their sound. The guitar tone on the album rarely changes and as a result the album blends together leaving little room for stand out tracks. The harmonies work well but are sorely underused.

A good example of the effectiveness of their harmonies is on the albums best track “Where Do You Run To.” The chorus swells and breaks through the normal, flat guitar-rock drone creating the only moment on the album of anything that could be called “atmosphere.”

All this leaves them in a strange situation. Unless they expand their sound, there probably isn’t much room or demand for another Vivian Girls album. This one works on its own, but more of the same would yield less than positive results for the band.

Also, if this album sells as well nationally as it did in Brooklyn (it sold out in ten days when it was first released. the ‘Girls’ were at the time on the small label Mauled by Tigers), their next album might see an increased budget and they might lose what made them great in the first place.

The album is worth the time, but might not continue to impress as time goes on. There’s a thin line between minimalism and repetitiveness, and they might be walking it a little too far to the latter.

“When humor can be made to alternate with melancholy, one has a success,” François Truffaut said, “but when the same things are funny and melancholic at the same time, it’s just wonderful.” “Good Dick,” the debut film of Marianna Palka, is funny, poignant, and leaves a wonderful scar.

The film follows the introduction and interaction of two unnamed leads (Jason Ritter and Palka herself). He works at Cinefile video, where she frequents, silently and regularly renting erotica.

Their first significant encounter is, as one is his friends puts it, “an incredibly odd exchange.” Ritter’s character discourages her from renting a particular pornographic title she’s brought to the counter. “I thought this looked like it had amazing potential too,” he casually informs her, “but it was actually really bad.” She returns with a blank stare, less surprised than annoyed.

What follows are a series of events that might seem off-putting if they weren’t so benevolent and earnestly executed. He looks up her address on the store’s computer, lies his way into her building, and runs into her in her hallway, trying to strike up a conversation. For days after this, he continues to ask her out for coffee and creates elaborate lies about having an sick and eventually, to get himself into her apartment, dead aunt in the building.

If this all seems strange, that’s because it is. This is not necessarily a bad thing. Both central characters in this film are as flawed as they are interesting. Their idiosyncratic interactions hint at deep-rooted emotional trauma, and we see the outlines of this worked through throughout the film.

She lives alone in a sparsely-furnished apartment.  She is depressed and intensely quiet, but his tolerance for her is inexhaustible. Whenever she feels threatened, which is often, she snaps at him. She also does this within the framework of uncomfortable bluntness.  “You have to go or I’ll get upset. Don’t upset me.” she sternly tells him at one point. He agrees to leave without a fuss, but as he’s walking out the door, he says “I care about you.”

It is in this respect that Ritter’s character is so successful. He knows when to fold, to listen to her and give her space, but he also knows when to advance and push her past her comfort zone which is, by anyone’s standards, claustrophobic. He knows how to make her happy even when she doesn’t smile, to make her miss him when she throws him out. Most importantly, he knows that the way he treats her is helping her, even when it doesn’t feel welcome.

He himself is not without his problems. He’s a recovering addict, painfully alone, and recently homeless. The film, therefore, is about mutual appreciation. He does not swoop in and make everything better, but instead holds fast to the idea that together they can make things better for each other.

The movie is also technically impressive, especially considering that it is Palka’s debut. It is perfectly paced; it’s neither rushed nor oppressively drawn out. Time passes organically; there are no unnecessary scenes in the film nor do we feel that we’ve missed anything.

Its slow, meandering soundtrack is also worth mentioning. It grounds the characters and highlights the emotions that play themselves out in the scenes. Delayed guitar overlapped by pedal steel provide a feeling of insularity, a notion that nothing exists outside of the vignettes we’re exposed to.

These characters are wounded, and the film is our witness to them nursing each other. It is our witness to their acknowledgment of life, their invigoration. They find themselves in each other, and find strength in each others weakness. “The vulnerability of precious things is beautiful,” Simone Weil wrote, “because vulnerability is a mark of existence”

In TV news, according to IMDB, Senator Barack Obama’s campaign has “bought a half-hour of television time on CBS and NBC on Wednesday, October 29, before the presidential election.” Here below is a list of things I think he could fill that time with:

1. Obamaman: In which our hero braves the siberian wilderness alone with nothing but a knife and flint for an entire week.

2. Yes We Can: A Barack Opera: In which there are many silly costumes and a ten minute conversation about matchboxes. Also singing.

3. O Bama My Bama: In which a class of kids get a new teacher (Obama) who inspires them to learn and shout Whitman at each other in a cave. Also starring Robert Sean Leonard as some dude that kills himself because Red from “That 70’s Show” is mean to him.

4. Power Changers: It’s legislative morphin’ time!

SCENE 3
Separate post: Barack
SCENE 4
Forrest Whitaker is set to direct and star in a new biopic about Louis Armstrong. Whitaker is a solid actor who does well when the material is good, so I’m being patiently optimistic about this. I’m ignorant to most of Armstrong’s life outside his music, but I hope it doesn’t follow the traditional biopic course. Traumatic childhood, breakout hit, quick fame, lots of drugs, cheat on your wife, more drugs, someone tells you drugs are bad, undergo change.