MOVIES: Rise of the Planet of the Apes (Rupert Wyatt, 2011)

Rise of the Planet of the Apes is a better movie than you'd expect it to be. The action sequences at the end of the movie are well planned out, with surprisingly few cheap thrills from blowing stuff up, and the human actors are smart enough not to get in the way of the effects.

James Franco stars as a research scientist whose attempt to develop a cure for Alzheimer's leads to the birth of a super-intelligent chimpanzee named Caesar, who will ultimately lead the rebellion of the apes. Frieda Pinto is on hand in the underwritten role of the girlfriend; she's not asked to be anything more than pretty, and she is adequate to the challenge. John Lithgow gets to ham it up as Franco's father, and Brian Cox and Tom Felton are cheerfully evil as the abusive father and son who run the local primate shelter.

Caesar is played in motion capture by Andy Serkis, and it's the best motion capture performance I've seen. As often happens after one of Serkis's performances, some in Hollywood are murmuring that he ought to be an Oscar nominee for the role. I think that's nonsense; as with all motion capture performances, there's no way of knowing how much of it is Serkis and how much is created by the CGI team. The collaborative effort, though, is every effective.

(I did find myself frequently distracted by the fairly obvious attempt to cheat our sympathies toward Caesar by altering the shape of his head a few notches away from standard chimp towards standard human -- the brow is a bit less recessive, the mouth and jaw a bit less protruding.)

The movie is almost never surprising, but it moves through the expected story beats with great efficiency and the occasional sparkle of wit. Worth going to the theater for if you like this sort of thing; worth catching on cable if you're not a particular fan.

MOVIES: The Future (Miranda July, 2011)

And speaking of polarizing: Miranda July's first film, Me and You and Everyone We Know, was sharply divisive; some adored its quirky look at unusual emotional relationships, and some thought it was too precious and twee for its own good. I don't think The Future is going to change many minds either way.

The movie stars July and Hamish Linklater as Sophie and Jason, who've been living together for four years. They've recently rescued a sick homeless cat, and have decided to adopt it, but they have to leave Paw Paw at the shelter for a month while it recovers from its most serious illness.

Neither Sophie nor Jason has ever made a serious commitment to anything -- their relationship is so passionless that we're more than halfway into the movie before they're finally defined as something other than brother and sister -- and the realization that they're a month away from the first real responsibility of their lives is an emotional shock, and The Future follows them through what they see as their last 30 days of freedom.

It's a sign of their refusal to commit, even to one another, that their panic doesn't bring them together. Each flies off in their own direction, quitting their job and diving into new projects that they think will be more emotionally fulfilling (and neither of them doing very well at their new task).

One of the more divisive elements in the movie will surely be the occasional bits of voice-over narration from Paw Paw (voice provided by July), who provides philosophical perspective on the life of a street cat who's finally on the verge of finding a home. And while those scenes are terribly twee, there are enough lovely moments in the movie to make up for it. July's dialogue isn't naturalistic, exactly, but she's got a great gift for finding actors who can deliver it as if it were, and there are striking images throughout -- a small girl digging a deep hole in the lawn for no apparent reason, or Jason standing on the beach trying to undo something he's done without knowing how he did it in the first place.

July and Linklater are a charming couple, with their matching unruly mops of hair and their identical emotional states, which are so relaxed and casual as to border on the comatose. The Future is going to drive a lot of people up the wall, but I think it's worth seeing; certainly fans of Me and You won't want to miss it.

TV: New Girl (Fox, Tue 9)

In advance of the show's September 20 premiere, Fox is making the first episode of New Girl available for free at iTunes.

The show stars Zooey Deschanel, who is one of the more polarizing actresses of recent years, with audiences finding her quirky winsomeness either completely adorable or insufferably twee. I'm generally on the "adorable" side of that fence, but she's cranking the quirk up to about 15 in this pilot, and I begin to understand the haters' POV.

Deschanel is Jess, who needs a new apartment after breaking up with her boyfriend, and moves in with three guys. The only one of the three with any discernible personality is Coach, played by Damon Wayans, Jr., and he's being replaced after the first episode (because ABC unexpectedly renewed Happy Endings at the last minute); he's a personal trainer with a bit of an anger problem, and his relationship with Jess is fairly funny.

The other guys are Nick (Jake Johnson) and Schmidt (Max Greenfield); Nick is marginally the more sensitive of the two, but both are prone to moderate douchbaggery. They are, at least, aware of this tendency; one of the show's better running jokes is that the guys have a "douchebag jar," in which they have to place a dollar when the others catch them in particularly obnoxious behavior.

But the show is all about Deschanel, and though I do find her likable, she's pushing the limits here. Melodramatic weeping to repeat viewings of Dirty Dancing, constant singing to herself, bizarre dancing about the room -- she's going to have to turn the quirk way down for the show to work.

So I'm a bit nervous after the first episode, with the show losing its most amusing supporting character and Deschanel desperately in need of being reined in, but I have enough faith in her to keep watching for another week or two.

Goodness, I have been away for a while, haven't I?

I'm a bit behind on posting the movies I've seen, so we'll try and get caught up over the next few days. Also, the new fall TV season begins this week, so there's also the annual marathon of reactions to first episodes to look forward to.

BOOKS: Darkside, Belinda Bauer (2011)

There's a serial killer at work in the small English village of Shipcott. His victims are elderly, people whose frailty and disabilities have made them burdens to their families. Village constable Jonas Holly is nervous about what would be his first murder investigation, but he's rapidly pushed to the side by John Marvel, the inspector from the nearest large regional police department.

Feeling guilty and inadequate, Jonas is goaded into investigating on his own by a series of anonymous, taunting notes ("Call yourself a policeman?") that accuse him of failing to protect Shipcott as he ought to have done. Failing to protect people is something of a sore spot for Jonas, whose wife is entering the final stages of multiple sclerosis and is the survivor of a recent suicide attempt.

I was a big fan of Bauer's first novel, Blacklands; this one isn't quite as good, but it's still an entertaining story. The characters are memorable -- DCI Marvel is a particularly good rendering of an officious asshole -- and you understand their motivations, even in their most blundering moments.

On a side note, though this isn't a direct sequel to Blacklands, it's set in the same village, and the principal character of that novel plays a small but important supporting role here. That necessarily involves a lot of spoilers for Blacklands, so if you're at all interested in the books, you should read that one first. If you should happen to pick up Darkside first, though, Bauer does an excellent job of working those Blacklands details into the narrative without getting too info-dumpy, so you won't have any trouble following those parts of the story at all.

MUSIC: My 2011-12 LA Philharmonic season

So, after the annual trip to Disney Hall to exchange a few subscription tickets and buy a few extras, I have tickets for 11 concerts this season. I will no doubt miss at least one or two to the other demands of life, but it's a good mix. Very little Dudamel, though, for two reasons -- nearly half of his subscription concerts this season are spent in his month-long slog through the Mahler symphonies, and I would rather have half-a-dozen root canals; and though Dudamel as music director programs a lot of the new and contemporary music that I enjoy, Dudamel as conductor isn't conducting much of it, at least not this season.

My season includes:

• Dudamel; Johannes Moser, electric cello / Adams: Tromba lontana; Chapela: Magnetar (concerto for electric cello - world premiere); Prokofiev: Symphony #5
• James Conlon; Yuja Wang, piano / Britten: Sinfonia da Requiem; Prokofiev: Piano Concerto #2; Dvorak: Symphony #7
• Semyon Bychkov; Katia & Marielle Labeque, pianos / Ravel: Rapsodie espagnole; Dubugnon: Concerto for Two Pianos and Double Orchestra (world premiere); Rachmaninoff: Symphonic Dances
• Esa-Pekka Salonen; Emanuel Ax, piano; Anne Sofiie von Otter, mezzo-soprano; Los Angeles Master Chorale / Beethoven: Leonore Overture #2; Beethoven: Piano Concerto #2; Hillborg: new work for chorus, soloists, and orchestra (world premiere)
• Thomas Wilkins / "Pacific Standard Time: The Hollywood Sound" (program of film music)
• Miguel Harth-Bedoya; Jean-Yves Thibaudet, piano / Dvorak: Hussite Overture; Liszt: Piano Concerto #2; Saint-Saens: Symphony #3 ("Organ")
• Pablo Heas-Casado; Martin Chalifour, violin / Beethoven: Egmont Overture; Matheson: Violin Concerto (west coast premiere); Strauss: Ein Heldenleben
• Neeme Jarvi; Alisa Weilerstein, cello / Dvorak: Carnival Overture; Tchaikovsky: Variations on a Rococo Theme; Respighi: Adagio con Variazioni; Shostakovich: Symphony #5
• Osmo Vanska; Martin Frost, clarinet / Strauss: Der Rosenkavalier Suite; Aho: Clarinet Concerto; Sibelius: Symphony #6
• James Gaffigan; Andre Watts, piano / Respighi: Trittico botticelliano; Bartok: Miraculous Mandarin Suite; Grieg: Piano Concerto
• Rafael Fruhbeck de Burgos; Pepe Romero, guitar / Turina: Danzas fantasticas; Rodrigo: Concierto de Aranjuez; Brahms: Symphony #2

"Pacific Standard Time" is a six-month long arts festival devoted to Los Angeles art from 1945-1980. Weilerstein's appearance is part of the Piatigorsky Cello Festival; the Dvorak/Shostakovich part of the concert will be given three times, each time with a different solo cellist performing a different work (or in Weilerstein's case, works).

So I get lots of new music, some not-quite warhorses from composers I like (Britten, Rachmaninovv, Respighi), and a few pieces that I have particular weakness for (Egmont, the Rodrigo concerto). Should be a fun season.

MOVIES: The Help (Tate Taylor, 2011)

And so: The Help, which has suddenly become the most controversial movie in America, with (among other things) the Association of Black Women Historians issuing a statement of protest.

And yes, there are huge problems with the story and the way it's told. It's a movie that tells the story of black women through the eyes of a spunky white girl, and (yet again) defines the civil rights movement as the effort of heroic white people. It forces the black characters to speak in embarrassing, stereotypical dialect (one of the maids actually has to say, "Mmm, I loves me some fried chicken!") And it makes its principal villain so hideously ghastly that we don't really see racism, we just see her as generally nasty to everyone. (Her comeuppance at the hands of her former maid is the story's biggest miscalculation, a gratuitously nasty and vulgar joke that drags on forever as it's turned into a major plot point.)

Beyond the trivialization of the civil rights movement, the basic premise of the story -- would-be author Skeeter (Emma Stone) convinces the black maids of Jackson, Mississippi to tell her their stories so that she can publish them in a book -- is beyond implausible. It's 1963 Mississippi, for god's sake (the murder of Medger Evers is reduced to a bit of mere background detail); there is no way any of these women would tell any white woman what they really think of the white families they've worked for.

And yet, there is much to be admired here. Taken on its own terms, the story is effective; the laughs and tears flow as called for, and there are some genuinely moving moments.

The cast is superb, particularly Viola Davis and Octavia Spencer as Aibileen and Minny, the two maids at the center of the story. Bryce Dallas Howard brings more depth to Hilly, the principal villain, than is to be found on the page; and Jessica Chastain is delightful as Celia, the "white trash" girl (the movie's term, not my mine) who can't break into Jackson's social circles. There are fine turns in smaller roles from Allison Janney, Sissy Spacek, and Cicely Tyson; and while Emma Stone's character isn't particularly interesting, Stone continues to impress me with her sheer charisma and screen presence.

So, seriously mixed feelings. If you can accept the movie as the feel-good fairytale it wants to be, you may enjoy it very much. But I don't think I can accept it on those terms, and I'm not entirely sure that it's even appropriate to try.

BOOKS: What You See in the Dark, Manuel Muñoz (2011)

Muñoz tells the interwoven stories of three women in 1959 Bakersfield, against a backdrop of murder, both real and imagined. Each of the women is, in some way, dealing with what happens when desperation leads to violence.

Arlene is a middle-aged waitress and motel owner. Her husband has abandoned her, leaving her on the outside of the social circles she once traveled in; her greatest pride is that she's raised her son to adulthood with no serious problems.

Teresa is a poor Hispanic girl, dating a popular white boy, which raises eyebrows. He nurtures her gift for singing, and she begins to think that her voice might be a way to a better life.

And The Actress is in town with The Director to shoot exterior scenes for their new movie. (Though they are never named, it quickly becomes obvious that they are Janet Leigh and Alfred Hitchcock, working on Psycho.) She fears that the role, more of a bad girl than she's ever played before, will alienate her fans.

Muñoz's style is a bit cool and detached; the characters may be passionately emotional, but his narration rarely is. The writing is never difficult, but it's got a richness to it, a density that required me to set it aside at the end of each chapter to digest what I'd read. (It is to prose what cheesecake is to dessert.) A sample:

How people change when they get a taste of the good life! When suddenly the dollar bills in your hand can go for things you want instead of need. A fork-and-knife meal at the cafe; scarves and pearl chokers; pendants and brooches; jewelry boxes with ballerinas springing to attention; that lovely sound of pushing rings and earrings and bracelets against each other while you're searching. Flowers from Holliday's like the good husbands do: tulips and Easter lilies from Los Angeles in the springtime, a wrist corsage for attending a wedding. A car trip over to the coast, to Morro Bay and the enormous, beautiful rock basking just off the shoreline. A day in Hollywood, the exhiliration of knowing movie stars breathe in the very same sunshine. Silk blouses brought home in delicate paper; dresses that require dry cleaning; lingerie so elegant it refuses to be scandalous.

The period details are impeccably re-created, and Muñoz is particularly fine at capturing the emotional impact that music has when you hear the right song at the right moment. What You See in the Dark is a lovely book, a muted tragedy of potential unfulfilled.

BOOKS: Moonwalking With Einstein, Joshua Foer (2011)

Another "I spent a year in a quirky subculture" book, and a fairly entertaining one.

Foer's subject is the world of competitive memory, and he decides that the best way to understand it is to take part. He begins studying the memory devices that the world's best competitors use, and ultimately takes part in the US Memory Championship.

Along the way, he delivers an entertaining look at the quirks and the history of human memory. Most of the techniques the top memory pros use derive from those described by Cicero, and were once commonly taught; as memorization has fallen out of favor in modern education, those techniques have become the province of specialists. The decline has only accelerated with the advent of modern technology, which has made it unnecessary for most people to remember much of anything. How many phone numbers, for instance, did you know by heart 20 years ago? How many do you know today, now that they're all stored on your cell phone?

For most of the competitors on the competitive memory circuit, it's not about brute force memorization, but about creativity -- finding ways to turn numbers and faces into a series of striking images that can be remembered more easily than the raw data. There are, of course, a handful of people in the world whose prodigious memories appear to derive from unusual medical conditions, and Foer visits some of them; he also spends some time with a man at the opposite end of the spectrum, who has lost the ability to remember anything for more than a few moments.

This is far from essentially reading; even by the standards of the "quirky subculture" book, the skills of the dedicated memory competitors are arcane and relatively useless in the real world. But Foer's a charming companion, and he's found enough interesting characters and anecdotes to keep me reading happily.

BOOKS: The Sisters Brothers, Patrick deWitt (2011)

I was sitting outside the Commodore's mansion, waiting for my brother Charlie to come out with news of the job. It was threatening to snow and I was cold and for want of something to do I studied Charlie's new horse, Nimble. My new horse was called Tub. We did not believe in naming horses but they were given to us as partial payment for the last job with the names intact, so that was that. Our unnamed previous horses had been immolated, so it was not as though we did not need these new ones but I felt we should have been given money to purchase horses of our own choosing, horses without histories and habits and names they expected to be addressed by. I was very fond of my previous horse and lately had been experiencing visions while I slept of his death, his kicking, burning legs, his hot-popping eyeballs. He could cover sixty miles in a day like a gust of wind and I never laid a hand on him except to stroke him or clean him, and I tried not to think of him burning up in that barn but if the vision arrived uninvited how was I to guard against it? Tub was a healthy enough animal but would have been better suited to some other, less ambitious owner. He was portly and low-backed and could not travel more than fifty miles in a day. I was often forced to whip him, which some men do not mind doing and which in fact some enjoy doing, but which I did not like to do; and afterward he, Tub, believed me cruel and thought to himself, Sad life, sad life.

Now that's a voice that makes me want to keep reading.

 

That's Eli Sisters speaking at the beginning of The Sisters Brothers, a marvelous dark comic Western. Eli and his brother Charlie have been hired to kill a man, and the novel tells the story of their journey through Gold Rush-era California to find him. They don't meet their victim until late in the book, and most of the story is simply a series of strange encounters with hoodlums, thugs, whores, and a wide array of life's downtrodden.

 

Through the journey, Eli finds himself beginning to question the life that he and his brother have chosen, and wondering if it might not be preferable to settle down in a quiet life of less danger and more lawfulness. Charlie isn't convinced; he likes the life he lives, and can't understand why Eli would want to give in to the burdens of civilization. (Eli's discovery of the toothbrush, and Charlie's lack of interest in the device, is a nice running joke in the early going.)

 

True Grit is an obvious touchstone here -- the story's structured around a manhunt; it's filled with quirky characters; the comic tone and even the prose are somewhat evocative of Portis. This is hardly an imitation, though, and I think I like deWitt's characters even more than the sometimes two-dimensional Rooster and Mattie.

 

I could have done without the mild detour into fantasy that the story takes in its final act. Surely the brothers' meeting with their intended victim could have been driven by a more realistic plot device. But that's a relatively mild quibble; this is a delightful novel that deepens as it goes along, and by the end turns into something quite moving.

MOVIES: Crazy Stupid Love (Glenn Ficarra & John Requa, 2011)

For most of its length, Crazy Stupid Love is a better than average romantic comedy, and while it does fall somewhat into predictability in the last half-hour, it's still worth seeing.

Steve Carell stars as Cal, and the movie opens as his wife, Emily (Julianne Moore), announces that she wants a divorce. Before long, Cal's hanging out at the neighborhood bar, where the local ladies' man, Jacob (Ryan Gosling), takes pity on him and adopts him for a fashion/personality makeover. Before long, Cal's taking home a different woman every night, all the while pining for Emily.

There's a lot of pining going on in this movie; the one girl Jacob can't pick up at the bar is, of course, the one who most intrigues him. That's Hannah (Emma Stone), who's slowly coming to the realization that she doesn't really love her schlumpy boyfriend (Josh Groban, surprisingly effective in a small role). Cal's 13-year-old son Robbie (Jonah Bobo) is in love with his baby-sitter Jessica (Analeigh Tipton), who is in turn crushing on Cal.

Not everything in the movie works -- there's an obligatory Brawl of Misunderstanding when all the male characters come together late in the movie, and the Robbie/Jessica/Cal storyline plays out in a queasy way, with a particularly icky final scene. But there are a lot of wonderful scenes here, and given the strength of this cast (Kevin Bacon and Marisa Tomei are also effective in small roles), I was rather surprised that the best moments feature Carell.

One mark of a good actor is that he makes his co-stars look good, and almost everyone in this movie has their best moments in scenes with Carell. A barroom chat in which Cal explains why he can't be truly happy that Jacob's found true love, a father-son catch with Robbie, an awkward car ride with Emily after she asks for a divorce -- Carell shines in all of these scenes. He's funny without mugging, and he makes the serious moments work, too.

If you like romantic comedy, you'll certainly want to see this, and it's good enough that you might enjoy it if even if that's not your genre of choice.

MOVIES: Project Nim (James Marsh, 2011)

This documentary tells the story of Nim Chimpsky, a chimp who was the subject of a linguistics experiment in the early 1970s. As an infant, Nim was placed in the home of a New York family, who were instructed to treat him as they would a human baby; the goal was to teach him sign language and see if he could learn to actually communicate.

The project seemed to go reasonably well at first, but as Nim got older (larger, stronger, less adorable, more dangerous), he was shuttled from person to person and from facility to facility. His early years in such close contact with humans made it difficult to adopt to life among other chimps.

It's a fascinating story, and if nothing else, you should come out of it freed of the desire to anthropomorphize animals; Project Nim makes it clear that pretending that animals are people is good for neither the animals nor the people involved. And yet, it's a hard habit to break; even the people who were most closely involved with Nim are describing what happened to him as "betrayal," or talking about his "forgiving" nature, words that simply have no meaning in an animal mind.

A sad story, and an important cautionary tale.

MOVIES: Another Earth (Mike Cahill, 2011)

Here's one of this year's award-winning films from the Sundance Film Festival. It's the story of Rhoda (Brit Marling, who co-wrote the movie with director Mike Cahill), a high school senior who is responsible for a fatal car crash; John (William Mapother), who loses his wife and child in that crash; and the relationship that develops between them.

There's also the story of the discovery of a new planet, which appears to be an exact duplicate of ours and comes to be known as Earth 2. From our brief radio communications with Earth 2, it appears to be not merely a duplicate of the planet itself, but something very close to a duplicate of everything -- the same nations, languages, people -- which leads to much speculation along the lines of "I wonder if the other me has made the same choices/mistakes I did."

That SF story is very much in the background, though, serving mostly as clumsy metaphorical background to Rhoda and John's more personal story. The movie is so uninterested in Earth 2 as a real scientific event that it ignores the basics; Earth 2, for instance, continues to get closer to Earth throughout the movie, and by the end it dwarfs the moon in the night sky. That would have extraordinary gravitational, tidal, and climatological consequences, all of which are utterly ignored.

The movie's an uneven mess. There are certainly memorable scenes and images -- the moment of first contact with Earth 2 is a striking model of how one can make a big impact very simply -- and Marling and Mapother give solid performances. But the movie's not nearly as profound as it thinks it is -- its metaphors are far too clunky and muddled -- and Cahill is far too in love with Marling's face; the movie is filled with long, lingering closeups on her for no particular reason.

Wait for cable/DVD.

MOVIES: Tabloid (Errol Morris, 2011)

Morris's latest documentary gives us the story of Joyce McKinney, who became the center of a British tabloid scandal in the 1970s. As she tells the story, her boyfriend disappeared, and she hired a private investigator, who tracked him to London. When she arrived there, she found that he'd been kidnapped by the Mormon Church and was being brainwashed him; she rescued him and took him to the English countryside for a romantic weekend, but he was eventually re-captured by the Mormons.

As the reporters who covered the story at the time tell it -- and their grasp on reality does seem rather more firm than hers -- the young man was doing his Mormon missionary stint in London when Joyce arrived and kidnapped him. She took him off to the cottage, tied him to the bed, and forced herself on him for several days before he finally escaped. She managed to get out of the country before being charged with anything, but the story was prominently featured in the tabloids for months. Depending on the day of the week and which paper you'd picked up, Joyce was either an innocent victim or a sexual predator with a tawdry past.

Morris allows McKinney to tell most of the story herself, and she's a spectacularly entertaining figure. She is still convinced (or at least she certainly seems to be) that she is a tragic romantic heroine, robbed of her one true love by an evil cult. One could argue that Morris is exploiting a delusional woman here (and McKinney has shown up at several screenings to complain about the way she's depicted in the film), but surely after 40 years, McKinney is at least aware enough to know that most people dispute her version of events; if she chooses to put herself on display anyway, I have a hard time blaming the director for how she comes across.

Tabloid is a lively, funny movie. Recommended.

MOVIES: Captain America: The First Avenger (Joe Johnston, 2011)

Virtue is a lot harder for an actor to play than vice, which is part of what makes Chris Evans' performance in Captain America such a delight. Evans plays Steve Rogers, a kid who desperately wants to enlist in the military during World War II, but keeps getting rejected for not being up to military standards. (The CGI that's used to make Evans look short and scrawny is very impressive.) He's recruited by a military scientist (Stanley Tucci, having a ball with an appropriately comic-book German accent and Einstein hair) for an experimental project that turns him into a tall, muscular super-soldier who will become Captain America. (And I do mean muscular. As in yummy yummy yummy I want that for Christmas.)

Steve/Captain America is all virtue. He's kind, sensible, intelligent, charming, polite, and above all, decent in a way that seems to have gone out of fashion these days. (It's going to be very interesting to see the character in the current era when The Avengers arrives next summer.) He's a guy who could easily come across as a simpering goody-two-shoes, someone we'd all instantly hate, but Evans makes him both believable and likable. It's a performance that won't get nearly the attention it deserves.

On the villain side, the movie makes the smart move of avoiding all the potential poor-taste pitfalls of making Hitler the bad guy in a silly comic book movie by creating a secondary threat. Hugo Weaving plays the German scientist who has broken away from Hitler's research team to create his own private army, and Toby Jones is perfectly sycophantic as his chief henchman. Also giving fine performances are Tommy Lee Jones, deliciously droll as Captain America's commanding officer, and Hayley Atwell, all feistiness and spunk as a British intelligence officer who becomes Steve's romantic interest.

The effects are well done, the period look of the movie is right on target, and the action scenes are thrilling; a climactic scene set on Weaving's airplane hits just the right note of giddy comic-book implausibility. You even get a top-notch song as part of a sequence in which Captain America is forced to tour with a USO troupe to sell war bonds. Alan Menken wrote "Star Spangled Man," and it is a precise evocation of the 40s musical style; I wouldn't be surprised to see it on Oscar's Best Song list.

If you enjoy this sort of movie at all, Captain America is a must-see.

TV: Emmy nomination predictions

I'm not normally into the psychic thing, but what the heck, everyone else seems to be taking a stab, so here's my guess as to what we're going to hear when nominations are announced tomorrow morning (along with some parenthetical thoughts about who I'd really like to see get in). I should note that omissions from my list of preferences doesn't necessarily mean that I think actor X is untalented or undeserving; it more likely means that the show just isn't one I watch regularly.

COMEDY SERIES

• The Big C
• Hot in Cleveland
• Modern Family
• The Office
• Parks & Recreation
• 30 Rock

(I'd like to see The Big Bang Theory, Community, and Episodes get in; I'd drop The Big C, The Office, and Parks & Rec to make room for them.)

LEAD ACTRESS/COMEDY

• Toni Collette, The United States of Tara
• Courtney Cox, Cougar Town
• Edie Falco, Nurse Jackie
• Tina Fey, 30 Rock
• Laura Linney, The Big C
• Amy Poehler, Parks & Recreation

(I'd prefer Kaley Cuoco (The Big Bang Theory), Martha Plimpton (Raising Hope), and Yvonne Strahovski (Chuck) over Collette, Falco, and Linney. Yeah, I know, Plimpton doesn't belong in this category, but that's how weak the field is.)

LEAD ACTOR/COMEDY

• Alec Baldwin, 30 Rock
• Steve Carell, The Office
• Matt LeBlanc, Episodes
• Joel McHale, Community
• Matthew Morrison, Glee
• Jim Parsons, The Big Bang Theory

I'd add Johnny Galecki (The Big Bang Theory) and Zachary Levi (Chuck); I'd drop Carell and Morrison.

SUPPORTING ACTOR/COMEDY

• Ty Burrell, Modern Family
• Chris Colfer, Glee
• Jesse Tyler Ferguson, Modern Family
• Neil Patrick Harris, How I Met Your Mother
• Ed O'Neill, Modern Family
• Eric Stonestreet, Modern Family

(I'd only keep three of the Modern Family guys, dropping Ferguson along with Colfer and Harris; to take their slots, I'd add Garret Dillahunt (Raising Hope), Donald Glover (Community), Stephen Mangan (Episodes).)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS/COMEDY

• Julie Bowen, Modern Family
• Jane Krakowski, 30 Rock
• Jane Lynch, Glee
• Sofia Vergara, Modern Family
• Betty White, Hot in Cleveland
• Kristen Wiig, Saturday Night Live

(Add Tamsin Grieg (Episodes), Melissa Rauch (The Big Bang Theory), and Naya Rivera (Glee); drop Krakowski, Lynch, and Wiig.)

DRAMA SERIES

• Big Love
• Boardwalk Empire
• Dexter
• The Good Wife
• Justified
• Mad Men

(Let's cut Big Love and let's add Game of Thrones.)

LEAD ACTOR/DRAMA

• Steve Buscemi, Boardwalk Empire
• Jon Hamm, Mad Men
• Jeremy Irons, The Borgias
• Peter Krause, Parenthood
• Hugh Laurie, House
• Timothy Olyphant, Justified

(Cut Buscemi and Irons; add Sean Bean (Game of Thrones) and Jeffrey Donovan (Burn Notice).)

LEAD ACTRESS/DRAMA

• Kathy Bates, Harry's Law
• Connie Britton, Friday Night Lights
• Mariska Hargitay, Law & Order: Special Victims Unit
• Julianna Margulies, The Good Wife
• Elisabeth Moss, Mad Men
• Kyra Sedgwick, The Closer

(I'd add Mireille Enos (despite the serious flaws of The Killing), Sally Field (still doing fine work on Brothers & Sisters), and Anna Torv (Fringe); cut Bates, Britton, and Hargitay.)

SUPPORTING ACTOR/DRAMA

• Andre Braugher, Men of a Certain Age
• Alan Cumming, The Good Wife
• Peter Dinklage, Game of Thrones
• John Noble, Fringe
• Michael Pitt, Boardwalk Empire
• John Slattery, Mad Men

(I'd add Vincent Kartheiser (Mad Men) and Brent Sexton (The Killing) over Braugher and Pitt.)

SUPPORTING ACTRESS/DRAMA

• Christine Baranski, The Good Wife
• Michelle Forbes, The Killing
• Christina Hendricks, Mad Men
• Margo Martindale, Justified
• Kelly McDonald, Boardwalk Empire
• Archie Panjabi, The Good Wife

(I'd add Emilia Clarke (Game of Thrones) and Kiernan Shipka (Mad Men), dropping Martindale and McDonald.)

BOOKS: Among Others, Jo Walton (2011)

By all rights, I should hate this book. Just look at all the things it's got going against it:

• It's a novel in the form of a teenager's diary. Even worse, it's in the form of a "how tragic to be a misunderstood genius like me" diary.
• It's set mostly at an English boarding school for girls.
• It's got frackin' fairies in it.
• What you would expect to be the principal action of the book -- the heroine's world-saving battle against her evil mother's attempt to become a world-dominating dark witch, a battle in which the heroine is seriously disabled and her twin sister killed -- happens offstage, before the book even begins. (There is a second battle with the evil mother near the end of the book, but it's remarkably brief and anticlimactic.)

Given all that, it's a miracle that I finished the book, and I can't figure out what it is that kept me reading. There's no plot to speak of and no particularly interesting characters, and Walton's prose style is functional, but not compelling or distinctive in any way.

Our heroine is Mori, a Welsh girl who's left home to live with the father she barely knows; he's packed her off to boarding school. She's unhappy there; she can't take part in athletics or other school activities, doesn't fit in with the other girls, and (worst of all) the few fairies there are in this part of England are nothing like the Welsh fairies she's used to.

What joy Mori does have in life comes from books, and she spends a lot of time droning on about how wonderful this book or that book is, or how excited she is to have made new friends at the library's science fiction book club. (She's not even allowed to enjoy that small pleasure without burying it in guilt; she's afraid that these people haven't come into her life willingly, but have been forced into it by a minor spell she cast.)

Maybe it's the librarian in me, unable to hate anyone who loves books (especially SF books) as much as Mori and Walton clearly do, that kept me reading. Maybe it was the belief that surely something had to actually happen eventually. I can't quite figure it out. It's a strange book, and though I can't exactly recommend it, I didn't loathe it the way I would expect to loathe a book with all the above-mentioned bullet points. How's that for inconclusive ambivalence for you?

MOVIES: A Better Life (Chris Weitz, 2011)

A Better Life is sort of a Los Angeles take on the classic Italian film Bicycle Thieves. The central character is Carlos (Demian Bichir), an illegal immigrant who works as a gardener in Los Angeles; he lives with his 14-year-old son, Luis (Jose Julian, making his acting debut), who is solidly in the middle of his sullen years.

Carlos's boss is ready to retire, and wants to sell his truck and tools to Carlos so that he can take over the business. Carlos borrows money from his sister; on his first day as an independent businessman, the truck and tools are stolen. That sends Carlos and Luis on a trek through Los Angeles, desperately searching for the truck, which will make the difference between ruin and a shot at financial advancement.

We don't very often see movies set in cities in which the main characters rely on public transit to get around, and this movie does a marvelous job of showing just how large the city is, and how long it takes to get around it on the bus.

Among other things, this is a movie about honor and the desire to do the right thing; Carlos and Luis have very different ideas about how to handle certain situations, and one of the most interesting things in the middle section of the movie is watching how they negotiate difficult ethical moments. The story's got a few too many cliches -- we know that Carlos and Luis will learn to respect one another and heal their frayed relationship as they go about their search -- but the performances are good enough to keep the movie entertaining.

Bichir, a Mexican movie star best known here for a supporting role on Weeds, is excellent. It's a quiet, understated performance, and Bichir never overplays a moment or pushes for dramatic effect. Julian is a bit less steady, and his inexperience occasionally shows, but he does nice work showing Luis's increasing understanding of and respect for his father.

MOVIES: The Trip (Michael Winterbottom, 2010/US 2011)

The Trip is slightly under two hours long, and it's been edited down from a six-hour British TV series for the American movie market. It stars actor/comedians Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon as "themselves," and finds them taking a week-long road trip to visit the finest restaurants of rural northern England. Most scenes are set either in the car or at a dinner table, and much of the dialogue is improvised. You could think of it as something like a British My Dinner With Andre, if Andre Gregory and Wallace Shawn had been neurotic, career-obsessed, vaguely depressed bores incapable of going more than five minutes without doing another bad impression.

And, oh my friends, there are a lot of bad impressions in this movie. Steve and Rob think nothing of spending ten minutes or so arguing over whose Michael Caine is better, or trading random Woody Allen punchlines. Rob is so obsessed with impressions that he can't even get through phone sex with his wife without slipping into Hugh Grant. (How do we know it's Hugh Grant? Because Rob is thoughtful enough to tell us so; we'd never have guessed it otherwise.)

There is an occasional flash of wit and cleverness, most notably, there's a marvelous riff on period war dramas and their obligatory inspiring speeches of period war dramas ("And now, to bed, for tomorrow we rise at dawn!") And when the two visit the homes of great poets, we occasionally get a lovely reading of poetry (marred somewhat, of course, by Rob's insistsence on reading it in the voice of Ian McKellen).

But there aren't enough of those moments to make up for the generally aimless meandering of the thing. There's a reason that movie scripts are written out in advance; very few people are interesting or funny enough on their own to hold anyone's attention for two hours. Sadly, Steve Coogan and Rob Brydon are no exception.

MOVIES: Cars 2 (John Lasseter & Brad Lewis, 2011)

Until now, I don't think you'd have found much disagreement with the idea that Cars was the worst of the Pixar movies, and by a fairly wide margin. But with the arrival of Cars 2, we have a new contender for that title.

Cars 2 finds race car Lightning McQueen (voiced by Owen Wilson) back home in Radiator Springs, looking forward to a few weeks of rest and relaxation. That doesn't last long, though, as he allows a pompous Italian car (John Turturro, doing an overly broad accent that's a bit too close to that of Tony Shalhoub's returning minor character) to goad him into taking part in an international series of races. That gets the sequel out of bucolic Americana and into a series of new settings -- Tokyo, London, Paris, the Italian Riviera -- which isn't a bad idea.

What is a bad idea is putting Lightning's sidekick, Mater the tow truck (Larry the Cable Guy), at the center of the story. Mater tags along with Lightning -- the first time he's been allowed to do so -- and while in Tokyo, he is mistaken by a pair of British spies (Emily Mortimer and an impeccably cast Michael Caine) for their American contact. He must be a spy, they reason, because no one could actually be that stupid. The spy story itself is a convoluted mess about an international conspiracy of Big Oil companies and clunker cars to discredit alternative fuels, which is where Lightning works his way back into the story, as his races are being sponsored by an alt-fuel mogul (Eddie Izzard).

As ever with Pixar, the movie looks spectacular. An opening Bond-esque action sequence is gorgeously done, and the new settings are wonderful to see. The London scenes that close the movie are especially beautiful, bordering on photorealism; there are moments when you'd swear these cartoon cars were driving through actual London streets. And the physical details of giving cars faces continue to be creative; Caine's Finn McMissile, for instance, has a grille in the shape of a perfect slim mustache (very David Niven).

But the story is such a confusing muddle, and Mater so horribly unappealing a character -- stupidity is not, in and of itself, funny -- that the impeccable art work goes to waste. Which Cars movie is worse? It's not even a tough call. The original Cars was merely a disappointing failure to live up to Pixar's high standards; Cars 2 is aggressively bad.