Battle: Los Angeles (Also Blu-ray/DVD/Digital combo) (One and a Half Stars)
U. S.: Jonathan Liebesman, 2011 (Sony)

 Seeing Battle: Los Angeles is like being forced to simultaneously watch, on big  TV screens covered with grit, War of the Worlds and Black Hawk Down being mashed to a pulp. Ear-splittingly loud and mind-numbingly violent, jam-packed with gung ho war movie clichés that suggest Duke Wayne on a off-day, and jittery camerawork that suggests The Hurt Locker on crystal meth, stuffed with pseudo sci-fi drivel, and  even somewhat dubiously titled (this movie is set mostly not in Los Angeles but in Santa Monica, a different city), Battle: Santa Monica — excuse me, Battle: Los Angeles — never really justifies its sometimes impressive carnage-and-destruction visual effects (by Everett Burrell). It just stays a big, loud, clichéd, obnoxious movie all the way to the end.

The show starts out in Camp Pendleton, a Marine training ground, where we learn that the brooding Sgt. Nantz (Aaron Eckhart)  had some tragic foul-up in Iraq, and intends to retire. Fat chance, Nantz. Soon reports start blasting in about monsters from outer space — the same space hooligans responsible, we’re eventually told, for almost every UFO sighting since the famous earlier WW2 “Battle of Los Angeles,” immortalized in 1941.

According to director Jonathan Liebesman and writer Chris  Bertolini, who have ripped off H. G. Wells’ “War of the Worlds” and its various radio and movie versions  in the most inane ways imaginable, Earth is being attacked by horrible, ick and goo-covered reptilian monsters who first invade the oceans of the world, wreak havoc everywhere, and then encase themselves in sub-Transformer robot outfits,  and start marching around and firing on the cities of the world, driving the populace into flight and the TV newscasters into frenzies.

The reason? These damned aliens want to steal all our water, which is their primary energy source. (Why didn’t they just hire somebody like Chinatown’s Noah Cross and have him float a bond issue? )  But,  just as you must have figured, Nantz now has a chance to redeem himself, and he’s pulled back into action, with the famous Second Battalion, Fifth Marines (the “Retreat Hell!“ battalion), sent off  to Lincoln Boulevard to rescue some kids trapped in a school, then somehow make it back to, I guess, the Santa Monica Pier area, and incidentally to show these bastards from outer space what “Semper Fi” really means.

By the time we and they get to the kids, along with a tearful dad played by Michael Pena and a knockout animal doctor played by Bridget Moynihan, we’ve seen what an awful mess these outer space invaders have made. Rubble is piled up all along what was once the 10th street area, the buildings are empty and askew, and the freeway ramps have been sliced and sheared off as if they were fireplace logs being chopped. Haze and dirt are everywhere. Meanwhile those disgusting buggy-looking marauders in their sub-Tranformers robot outfits,  roam around what might have been the Third Street Promenade, somewhere near the Interactive Café maybe, blasting humans and looking for God knows what. (The water’s out by the pier, fellas.)

Cleverly, the filmmakers cut us all off from the outside world, by messing up the platoon’s radios and cellphones. (They’re too easily tracked.) So, though we learn briefly about invasions going on everywhere, from Paris to Ireland, we only see that one lone platoon, led by soon-to-be-heroic and redeemed Sgt. Nantz. I could tell you what happens next, but I’ll bet you‘re already way past me, all the way to this movie’s last scene, and deep into its sequels, if any.  (How about “Battle: Pasadena?”)

“Battle” director Liebesman and cinematographer Lukas Ettlin are both veterans of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning (2006) and their new  movie often made me feel as if somebody with a chainsaw was after me. It never lets you relax for a second, which is why I got tired of it. We don’t see much of  the pre-invasion city, so we never have a sense of normality being disrupted.  Except for a little exposition and the setup, this movie is all chaos, all the time.

I can’t say some audiences won’t enjoy this — some people will enjoy anything, including staring into the toilet, waiting for little green men to pop up and start water-skiing — but I feel duty bound to report that Battle: Los Angeles, despite its overwhelming effects, despite Eckhart, lacks sense, point, logic, psychology, raison d’etre, good dialogue and the Third Street Promenade, where at least we could have gotten a pizza slice. It’s a video game movie, done almost in the style of a video game, which this movie may eventually become, if the sequels don’t work out.

Extras: Many featurettes.

Red Riding Hood (Also Blu-ray/DVD/Digital combo) (One and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Catherine Hardwicke, 2011 (Warner Bros.)

They’ll even finance something like this: a fairytale picture about a blonde girl in the snow in a red hood –a big plush studio movie about Little Red Riding Hood, shaped (supposedly) as a sophisticated, erotic fairytale/romance/horror story, targeted for girls and young women, and directed by Catherine Hardwicke, who made the first Twilight movie.

The star is the supernaturally beautiful Amanda Seyfreid as Valerie a.k.a. Red Riding Hood, a girl we can well believe is the daughter of Virginia Madsen, and the granddaughter of Julie Christie. Val/Red is torn here Twilight-style, between two hunky guys named Peter and Henry (Shiloh Fernandez and Max Irons). Meanwhile Red’s father (Twilight’s dad Billy Burke, looking a bit like Stephen King) drinks like mad, and a giant clunky-looking wolf prowls around and kills villagers, while Wolfbuster and Witchfinder General Gary Oldman (called Solomon but playing it more like Sheba) spreads a Crucible-like reign of terror. Snow falls throughout the film, but not fast enough to bury anything.

I like Hardwicke’s Thirteen. But, after ten minutes I didn’t think there was a chance in hell this would be a good movie. The only thing I thought could possibly save Red Riding Hood, would have been  if Paul Giamatti had shown up as a rival wolfbuster, and he turned out to be the wolf, and Julie Christie killed him, and he died in her arms, saying sadly “Grandma, what big teeth you have!” NO SPOILER ALERT NECESSARY. Or if maybe the villagers had gotten together, and somebody had shown Tex Avery‘s cartoon Red Hot Riding Hood in the town square. But Paul Giamatti can’t play everything, and neither unfortunately, can Julie Christie — or the late, great Tex Avery.

Or Neil Jordan. The crazy thing about all this is that back in 1985,  Jordan made a movie, an adult version of “Little Red Riding Hood,” which was shaped as a sophisticated, erotic fairytale/romance/horror story. It was called The Company of Wolves and it was wonderful. It was written, terrifically, by Jordan from a story by the late, great Angela Carter. It had more ideas, more tension, more stunning imagery every five minutes or so than all of Red Riding Hood. But, though The Company of Wolves won a number of international festival prizes, it got mixed reviews (a rave from me) and I guess it’s been at least partly forgotten. It’s on Henstooth Video, and you should try to find it.

Red Riding Hood you can skip. And give that wolf a hook.

Extras: Extended cut with alternate ending; Featurettes; Casting tapes; Rehearsals.

Hall Pass (One and a Half Stars)
U. S.: Bobby and Peter Farrelly, 2011 (Warner)

Hall Pass, the first Farrelly Brothers comedy since they messed up The Heartbreak Kid four years ago, is a forgettable, mostly bad movie about two horny forty-something married guys named Fred and Rick (played by Jason Sudeikis and, it seems, Owen Wilson), who, thanks to the amazing tolerance of their wives, Maggie (Jenna Fischer) and Grace (Christina Applegate), and the questionable advice of the wives’ therapist Dr. Lucy (Joy Behar), get a spouse-approved “Hall Pass” to go out and make whoopee with other women for a week.

That sounds pretty unlikely to begin with, even if it comes with an official, womanly seal of approval from TV’s Ms. Behar. But their orgy turns into a fiasco. Rick and Fred discover that they don’t know how to pick up chicks or swing any more, if they ever did. (Rick confesses to monogamy; Fred has been perfecting the art of the disguised ogle and how to masturbate in minivans.)

They give it a shot anyway. Suckers. Their ice-breaker lines are losers (“You must be from Ireland, because my penis is Dublin.”) Their timing is off. Their strategy and presentation are ludicrous. SPOILERS. They try to score at the local Applebee’s, and wind up stuffing themselves. And when they do find a willing woman, like the awesome café waitress Leigh (Nicky Whelan) or the hot-to-trot baby-sitter Paige (Alexandra Daddario), or whomever, she either gets a diarrhea attack (this is Farrelly humor, remember), or they get guilt pangs and back out, or a psycho deejay boyfriend (Derek Waters) shows up, with murder in mind. END SPOILERS

Meanwhile Maggie and Grace, holed up at a beach house in Cape Cod, are pursued by the studs of a minor league baseball team. Author’s message: These guys should have stayed home, been good husbands, stopped ogling and jacking off and dreaming about café waitresses, and instead bought and watched movies like Hall Pass for diversion on their big-screen TVs.

So much for Joy Behar as a sex therapist. So much for that den of iniquity, Applebee‘s Retreat. So much for the Farrelly Brothers and their gross-out comedy throne, now teetering and tittering over Apatow-Land.  Anyway, when I say forgettable, I mean forgettable. I’ve actually forgotten the whole movie, and I had to struggle to write this synopsis. To elucidate: I know there was a Wilson brother in Hall Pass, but was it Owen or Luke? Or was it Brian, Dennis or Carl? (Yeah, I know, two of them are dead. But which two?) And which actress had diarrhea?  Didn’t Ben Stiller do a cameo as an Applebee‘s waiter? Or was that Adam Sandler? Maybe I just mean Hall Pass should be forgettable. Possibly, I just don’t want to remember this damned movie. It’s a good show to forget, even before you see it, Especially before you see it. This movie makes you appreciate stuff like Just Go With It.

Oh yeah, now I remember. The Hall Pass Wilson brother is Owen Wilson. Luke was the Wilson ogling along with Will Ferrell in Old School. Brian wrote “Good Vibrations.“ Dennis was the drummer; Carl sang the high parts.  Meanwhile everyone should forget Hall Pass — especially the Farrelly Brothers. (Peter was the drummer; Bobby sang the high parts.)

Monogamy (Two and a Half Stars)
U.S.: Dana Adam Shapiro, 2010

The first dramatic feature of writer-director Dana Adam Shapiro, who made the documentary Murderball, and not bad: Chris Messina plays a photographer whose marriage (to Rashida Jones) is rocky, and whose business, called “Gumshoot”  — surreptitiously photographing clients who want to track themselves — is pretty peculiar. Especially peculiar is his assignment to shoot a sexy young lady (Meital Dohan) who likes to expose herself in public. This movie is too often reminiscent of other, much better films (Blowup, Rear Window, A Short Film About Loving), and the subpar dialogue suggests the use of improvisation in a more forced way than Loach, Cassavetes or Leigh. But Shapiro tells his story well visually.  And the New York City atmosphere gave me a shot of nostalgia. Winner of the Tribeca Film Festivals’s Best New York Film Award.

Extras: Music video for “You Don’t Know” by Rashida Jones; Deleted scenes; Behind-the-scenes footage; Screenplay by Dana Adam Shapiro and  Evan M. Weiner; Excerpt from Shapiro’s book “You Can Be Right Or You Can Be Married”; essay by critic Amy Taubin. 

Such Good Friends (Three Stars)

U.S.: Otto Preminger, 1971 (Olive)

One of Otto Preminger’s better — and better-reviewed — late films, this dark sex comedy is about a star Manhattan magazine editor (Laurence Luckinbill of  The Boys in the Band), lying comatose in a pricey hospital, while his wife (Dyan Cannon) discovers he’s been cheating on her with almost everybody, including her friends. She decides to make a little whooppee herself with the talent available, including his friends.

The source for this nasty, funny, sexy anti-romantic comedy is Lois Gould’s novel, adapted (pseudonymously) by Elaine May. Sharp, urbane and acid-tongued, the movie shows Preminger trying to invade the worlds of Nichols and May, Paul Mazursky and Neil Simon — and also, in a way, of Woody Allen (though it’s closer to the later post-Annie Hall Allen). The cast includes Woody’s ex-wife Louise Lasser, as well as James Coco, Jennifer O’Neill, Ken Howard, Nina Foch, and Burgess Meredith, in his only movie nude scene — at least the only one I’ve seen. (Cannon has one too, and this is also the movie with Coco’s hilarious hide-the-corset bit.) 

     A couple of decades earlier, Preminger had seemed to break all kinds of taboos with his then-scandalous, eventually-tame 1953 sex comedy with William Holden, David Niven and Maggie McNamara, The Moon is Blue (absurdly attacked by ’50s bluenoses for its script containing the words “virgin” and “seduce”). Such Good Friends is more daring, and better, in every way than Blue, including in its exposes of radical chic and poor hospital care. But by 1971, past the Sexual Revolution of the ’60s, this movie looked almost conventional, despite May’s tart dialogue and irreverence. Preminger seemed to some passe. After the debacle of the director’s1968 Jackie Gleason–Carol Channing–Groucho Marx flower-power catastrophe Skidoo (also available from Olive), this was his last chance to be hip. And, though it was pretty well neglected then, Such Good Friends looks and sounds pretty good now.

No extras.

As the Captain Josiah Newman of this movie‘s title — head doctor in a stateside Army hospital’s psych ward during World War 2 — Gregory Peck once again plays the kind of handsome all-American liberal crusader on which he and Henry Fonda held the patents. As you’d expect, Peck’s long, tall, easy-going Newman amiably and doggedly battles the stuffy military brass (including James Gregory, stuffiest of the stuffy), to get more humane treatment for his patients, while battling the demons of his patients to get them well.

Newman‘s other duel is a friendly one with the wily operator, Jake Leibowitz played in a lustily Jewish key, by Tony Curtis, a.k.a. Bernie Schwartz. Curtis acts as the ward’s master scrounger and go-to guy (a Jack Lemmon sort of role), and he isn’t above Playing Santa and sawing off the top of the hospital’s Christmas tree for one of his schemes. Angie Dickinson is the medical love interest, and who could be better?

The movie, directed by David Miller, belongs to its own strange sub-genre somewhere between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Operation Petticoat (the Blake Edwards comedy where Curtis bedeviled Captain Cary Grant aboard a submarine). And surprisingly, both its drama and comedy work well, though initially, they seem an uneasy mix.

Instead, Captain Newman, M. D. shifts easily and effectively between Curtis’ Bilko-like shenanigans and the solid, strong way Newman handles the most persistent demons afflicting his patients — including a breakdown case played by the young and brilliantly reticent Robert Duvall, and two guilt-ridden seeming psychopaths played at Oscar-caliber emotional levels by Bobby Darin as a delinquent rebel/loner and Eddie Albert, in a very atypical performance, as a spit-and-polish officer gone loony. They’re all impressive, and Darin has one blow-away scene, an aria of terror on the death of his best friend, that is a couple inches short of greatness. (Darin, in fact, did get an Oscar nomination, as did the screenwriters.)

As for Peck and Curtis, always very generous actors (especially Curtis), they’re generous here too — with each other, with Angie, with their three psych ward virtuosos, and even with the creepy officer played by Gregory. And film history should also perhaps be more generous to director Miller, who made one top film noir (Sudden Fear), one great modern Western (Lonely are the Brave), memorably matched Marilyn Monroe with the Marx Brothers (in Love Happy), usually managed to entertain us even with mediocre scripts, and made, so smoothly and well, this underrated movie: one of the most likable of its hybrid comedy-drama type.

Captain Newman M. D. was well-reviewed at the time, but out of vogue in the year just before Dr. Strangelove, and it was Miller’s last really good shot. He didn’t get another. The script, by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Nora’s parents) and Richard Breen, was based on the book by Leo Rosten, creator of that memorable immigrant English student, H*Y*M*A*N K*A*P*L*A*N.

No extras.

As the Captain Josiah Newman of this movie‘s title — head doctor in a stateside Army hospital’s psych ward during World War 2 — Gregory Peck once again plays the kind of handsome all-American liberal crusader on which he and Henry Fonda held the patents. As you’d expect, Peck’s long, tall, easy-going Newman amiably and doggedly battles the stuffy military brass (including James Gregory, stuffiest of the stuffy), to get more humane treatment for his patients, while battling the demons of his patients to get them well.

Newman‘s other duel is a friendly one with the wily operator, Jake Leibowitz played in a lustily Jewish key, by Tony Curtis, a.k.a. Bernie Schwartz. Curtis acts as the ward’s master scrounger and go-to guy (a Jack Lemmon sort of role), and he isn’t above Playing Santa and sawing off the top of the hospital’s Christmas tree for one of his schemes. Angie Dickinson is the medical love interest, and who could be better?

The movie, directed by David Miller, belongs to its own strange sub-genre somewhere between One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest and Operation Petticoat (the Blake Edwards comedy where Curtis bedeviled Captain Cary Grant aboard a submarine). And surprisingly, both its drama and comedy work well, though initially, they seem an uneasy mix.

Instead, Captain Newman, M. D. shifts easily and effectively between Curtis’ Bilko-like shenanigans and the solid, strong way Newman handles the most persistent demons afflicting his patients — including a breakdown case played by the young and brilliantly reticent Robert Duvall, and two guilt-ridden seeming psychopaths played at Oscar-caliber emotional levels by Bobby Darin as a delinquent rebel/loner and Eddie Albert, in a very atypical performance, as a spit-and-polish officer gone loony. They’re all impressive, and Darin has one blow-away scene, an aria of terror on the death of his best friend, that is a couple inches short of greatness. (Darin, in fact, did get an Oscar nomination, as did the screenwriters.)

As for Peck and Curtis, always very generous actors (especially Curtis), they’re generous here too — with each other, with Angie, with their three psych ward virtuosos, and even with the creepy officer played by Gregory. And film history should also perhaps be more generous to director Miller, who made one top film noir (Sudden Fear), one great modern Western (Lonely are the Brave), memorably matched Marilyn Monroe with the Marx Brothers (in Love Happy), usually managed to entertain us even with mediocre scripts, and made, so smoothly and well, this underrated movie: one of the most likable of its hybrid comedy-drama type.

Captain Newman M. D. was well-reviewed at the time, but out of vogue in the year just before Dr. Strangelove, and it was Miller’s last really good shot. He didn’t get another. The script, by Henry and Phoebe Ephron (Nora’s parents) and Richard Breen, was based on the book by Leo Rosten, creator of that memorable immigrant English student, H*Y*M*A*N  K*A*P*L*A*N.

No extras.

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