Capsule Reviews: Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie, Skyfall, The Best Exotic Marigold Hotel

Tim and Eric's Billion Dollar Movie (Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim, 2012)

Anticipating the ire of their many detractors, Tim Heidecker and Eric Wareheim build their feature-length Billion Dollar Movie on a joke that plays on them inexplicably receiving money from major corporate interests to do their thing in the mainstream. The creative duo's audacity has often eclipsed the actual content of their 11-minute episodes on Adult Swim, making the prospect of a 95-minute feature daunting. Surprise, surprise, this is amazingly focused, with something approaching a plot and everything. Because a relatively stable foundation grounds the film, Tim and Eric's usual diversions manage to pack more punch for letting the nuances of their weirdness shine through. Every technical hiccup, awkward insert shot and flat line of dialogue delivered just a second too late creates a sense of discomfort like a low-frequency sound. I cannot explain why I find that effect hilarious, but then, the sight of John C. Reilly hacking up a lung as a Dickensian, wolf-raised orphan or Ray Wise presiding over a grotesque sort of body cleanse need no justification. Grade: B-

Steven Spielberg: Hook

The story of Hook's inspiration is, like the film itself, at once so brilliantly and frustratingly childlike that everything that works and fails can be gleaned from its conception. Nick Castle, originally slated to direct a Peter Pan movie after Spielberg gave up the idea, got the idea from his son. The boy did something that only a child ever has the gall to do: when presented with an absolute -- Peter Pan never grows up -- he questioned why. That twist made it perfect for Spielberg to take over the project; only a Disney-fed eternal child like him would think to continue pursuing that idea, and only Spielberg could use it as the last major expulsion of his pet themes before he entered the more serious phase of his career.

Originally slated to make a version of the original Peter Pan in the '80s, Spielberg shelved the project when he had his first child. Wisely, he also believed his thoughts on childhood and the perversion of either staying young in a harshly adult world or maturing too quickly were thoroughly expounded with Empire of the Sun. For Hook, he approaches the same topic from the opposite angle: now that he's a father, a father who might be gone months of the year on location shooting, Spielberg clearly fears he might become the same absentee father that he endured as a child. Thus, for all the light, occasionally distracting comedy of the tale, Hook has as much to say about the director's hangups as any of his other films.

Ingeniously, he recasts Peter Pan as Peter Banning, a Baby Boomer lawyer who, as Wendy (yes, that Wendy) rightly notes, has become a modern pirate. Opening with a Truffaut homage in the form of children's upturned faces as they watch their peers perform a school play of Peter Pan, Hook's gentle mood is broken ever so slightly the second it settles upon Peter (Robin Williams) as he watches his daughter on the stage playing Wendy. Then, it shatters when he cell phone rings. Ignoring his daughter, he then makes plans that conflict with his son Jack's baseball game in the morning.

Though the film tracks Peter, Spielberg roots it in a child's perspective, preparing for the eventual shift back to Neverland but also allowing everyone but Peter to see the effects of his behavior. It is a shame that Spielberg never gives us the point of view of Peter's adult self, the desire to work hard and provide comfortable lives for his family, but then that point of view has always reeked of self-justification anyway and the misery of his family hardly speaks to their well-being.

Only when the family heads to London with a still-fuming Jack does Peter's humanity show. There to help Granny Wendy (Maggie Smith, who in her younger days played Peter on the stage) with a hospital wing dedication in her honor, Peter is still distracted. At the actual dinner, however, he shines, beautifully paying tribute to the woman who took in him and other orphans without saying much at all. Contrasted with his previous coldness, and an ill-timed shift in the deal he thought was a lock causes him to explode at his children, we can see the good man in Peter, even if he cannot.

The lighting in this first segment is soft, tranquil but also ghostly. This is most visible at the charity ball where dozens of table lamps first illuminate the power and meaning of Wendy's efforts with orphans then turn cold and ominous as Hook's return sends waves of chilled atmosphere rolling across an already frigid London. Once Peter is lured back to Neverland -- by, who else, that zipping ball of light known as Tinker Bell (Julia Roberts) -- Spielberg alters the lighting scheme to something brighter, more optimistic, replacing artificial light with the natural sunlight the office-bound Peter likely had not noticed in years.

Spielberg has his fun with the character, making Peter Pan not only a grown man but one with an intense fear of heights and flying. After stumbling into Hook's pirate hangout and confronting the mad captain, Peter must suffer the humiliation of having to chase his trapped children up a mast under the ultimatum that, if he can simply fly like Pan and touch Jack and Maggie's hands, they can go free. All the poor man can do is tremble and fail when he attempts to climb out and grab them. Only Tinker Bell's quick-thinking saves the Bannings from death, and her successful plying of Hook's vanity gives Peter a shot at rediscovering his past self to add some punch to the fight.

Without question, Hook is a flawed film. Nowhere are the issues more apparent than in the Lost Boys' hideaway, a bizarre yet unimaginative mash-up of classical tree house structure with modern touches like a skate park(!). The use of oddly placed bright paint -- contained in suction-cup arrows, placed in a large pool used for rough landings in flying lessons -- captures less a sense of the childhood id gone mad than Spielberg grasping at straws for something that might amuse a kid. For a director all too often accused of being emotionally stunted, Spielberg suffers from the opposite problem here: like Peter, he's grown up, and returning to his innocence proves an unexpected challenge.

The most egregious indicator of the director's age showing is the dinner scene, where Peter looks on helplessly as the Lost Boys eat what appears to be nothing until he too plays along and finds a feast laid before him. As the dinner begins and the children exclaim over the foods they're eating, one boy exultantly shouts "banana squash!" What goddamn child in the history of human existence has ever lost his mind for banana squash? Adults don't even get excited for it. You're telling me that a child (a runaway child with no parental conditioning, no less), left to imagine his ultimate meal, would A) have anything that could even pass as a vegetable and B) wouldn't invent some magical meat made of ice cream? It's a small detail, I grant you, but it's indicative of the issues that mar the film.

Likewise, the Lost Boys themselves lack characterization beyond their appearance, from the jovial, roly-poly Thud Butt to a wee lad whose shortness reveals an impish cad. I've been watching this film since before I could even remember, and I've yet to decide whether Rufio works as a character or derails the entire picture. That a Lost Boy would assume authority of the troupe in Pan's absence is sensible, but there are several problems with Rufio. For one thing, even though Pan was always the biggest of the Lost Boys, he hovered around 12 and 13. Rudio looks like he drove into Neverland after stealing his stepdad's GTO and avoiding the prom because his high school suspended him. For another, he does not ever fit in with the other boys, and his attempts to engage in the goofy imagination that occupies the Lost Boys' time resemble a teen awkwardly breaking out old toys and messing with them like an Alzheimer's patient who has forgotten their function.

By the same token, he obviously looks like the clear leader in Peter's absence, and his half-punk styling fits within the genteel vision of Lord of the Flies that is the adolescent anarchy of the Lost Boys. He regards Peter with scorn because he's a grown-up, but the more Peter proves himself and reveals his inner Pan, the more Rufio prepares to hand power back without a fight. Dante Basco clearly had fun working on this large-scale production, an undeniable step up from his start as a child breakdancer and bit actor, and the twinkle in his eye as he gets to sneer at Robin Williams carries the character much further than anything he actually says.

What the film does well is explore Peter's half-regression, half-evolution to a man who remembers his responsibilities but also taps into his childish side. Williams finds one of his best mixes of his manic, often grating comic style and powerful but occasionally maudlin dramatic side, and he arguably wouldn't better the balance he found here until World's Greatest Dad last year. He plays Peter as the sort of man who would yell, "When are you going to stop acting like a child?" at his 10-year-old son, who has the only possible answer: "I am a child!" In Neverland, Williams has the unlikely role of straight man, the one who has to remain calm and incredulous instead of unleashing his series of impersonations and stream-of-consciousness rants. Fresh off two lauded dramatic performances in Dead Poets Society and Awakenings that showed off his Julliard-honed skills, Williams perhaps uses Peter's arc to get back in touch with his own roots.

Still, even when the old, playful Pan reemerges, the best comedy of the film by a mile belongs to the double act of Hook and Smee. Hoffman and Bob Hoskins could not be more game for their roles, and they play their relationship less as master and servant than mental patient and caretaker, Smee constantly trying to buck up Hook in his incessant and hysterical bouts with suicidal depression. Hoffman takes the same tics and obsessive mannerisms that made Rain Man so borderline offensive and turns them into comedy gold: his Hook is all slight nods and twitching lips, trying vainly to act respectable until he explodes in villainous glee. There's a reason the film is called Hook, because whenever he's on-screen, the film swells.

Symbols of emotional and physical baggage run through Spielberg's films, from suitcase a starved, half-mad Jamie drags out of the internment camp in Empire of the Sun to the image of the Devil's Tower Roy cannot get out of his mind until he leaves it, and Earth (and his family), behind him in Close Encounters of the Third Kind. Several predominant symbols in Hook lock and unlock memories, their potency enhanced by Neverland's ability to make one forget himself. Before leaving for the charity function, Peter attempts to make amends with Jack by giving him his watch, a sign of adulthood and responsibility. Hook, naturally, hates clocks of all kinds owing to that damn crocodile that haunts him even after he killed it, uses that watch to break Jack. Playing on the boy's resentment of his father, Hook brainwashes Jack into loving him instead, and the clear break comes when the boy smashes Peter's watch.

Another symbol is a baseball, which Jack carries around with him. Hook organizes a baseball game to fully win Jack over, and when the boy hits the home run he never could in the real world, he finally gets his perfect childhood wish even as he sends the symbol of his innocence rocketing away from him. When it hits Peter on the head, it helps jog back his own priorities, but he must find his own repository of childhood to fully reawaken his own powers. This he finds in a teddy bear, a symbol Spielberg already used way back in his first theatrical feature, The Sugarland Express, thus tying Peter's childhood with his own.

These intelligent touches keep me coming back to Hook long after I should have grown out of it, but they remain frustrating when taken with the film's many missteps. There's a terrific moment of slapstick during the pirates' ballgame when a man tries to steal second and is shot, much to Hook's annoyance, but the funniness of the moment also begs the question why Jack just doesn't react at all to a man being murdered in front of him, in some ways because of him and his desire to play a game no one else in Neverland understands. The climactic fight should carry the weight of two old rivals engaging in their final duel, but the slapstick of the Lost Boys' involvement turns a bloodbath into Home Alone; I half-expected Commander Macaulay Culkin to lead a division of Lost Boys. And in one of the film's true serious moments, Peter's recollection of his mother and how he came to Neverland, Spielberg and his writers come up with a backstory that clashes with the director's visual accompaniment. Peter speaks of fleeing his family because he was afraid of mortality, yet the film shows his baby carriage simply sliding away (and his mother just not reacting in any way whatsoever). Even setting that aside on grounds of whimsy and fantasy, we're still left with a baby who was apparently engaged in philosophical rumination on the nature of death, and suddenly we're back in banana squash territory.

Yet I still do enjoy Hook, with its Hook/Smee dynamic (further proof that Spielberg can make comedy work when he adheres to a more classical structure instead of his more epically scaled missteps) and the form that only Spielberg can bring. He breaks from reality as soon as possible here, casting an intense but cold light reminiscent of the the passing UFOs in Close Encounters of the Third Kind outside the children's bedroom in Wendy's house. Shots bookend each other, whether in close proximity -- a long shot of Peter standing on the balcony after the children's abduction to Tinker Bell flying in and assuming a similar scale with the dollhouse inside. Spielberg had no reason to go to Neverland, not after saying everything he could have said there in an internment camp in Shanghai, but he does find new topics for discussion even if they might have been better served elsewhere. At its core, Hook is one of two expulsions of Spielberg's "old" style before he entered into the modern phase of his career. Unlike Empire of the Sun, both Hook and Jurassic Park would couch his themes in his more broadly entertaining élan. But if Hook is all about taking out all the childish things we put away, the director used it to stow his old self as he prepared for one of the most remarkable late-careers of any prominent filmmaker.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

After running through my marathon viewing of the previous five installments of the Harry Potter franchise in the last two days, I've come to a simple realization: as a whole, the series is frustratingly average. For a series set in a magical alternate world tucked away from our weary doldrums, it never conveys any sense of the wonder of J.K. Rowling's mad creation. Even as the series grew darker with each sequel, half the fun of reading them was exploring new places and oddball characters, which gave them an unassailable joyousness no matter how bleak the outcome looked for our heroes.

Not that Harry is feeling particularly cheery at the start of Half-Blood Prince. Now exonerated in the court of public opinion following proof of Voldemort's return, Harry must endure press junkets mere minutes after watching his godfather Sirius die. This devastating moment rarely has any impact on the story at all, however, perhaps because the last film failed to wring much emotion out of it. Dumbledore whisks him away, and soon he plucks Harry from his summer break begin the hunt for their nemesis.

Michael Gambon has been a treat ever since he took over for the late, great Richard Harris in the third film, but he brings his A-game this time, mixing regret, quiet strength and subtle humor effortlessly. He holds the entire film together as he takes Harry on strolls through a magical Memory Lane to trace Voldemort's history.

The first act of the film is perhaps the best stretch of the film series: it captures the darkness of the novel, and Yates' direction is sturdy and evocative. Harry's trips with Dumbledore and the Pensieve scene involving a young Tom Riddle (Hero Fiennes-Tiffin, nephew of Ralph Fiennes, Voldemort himself) are deeply and wonderfully unsettling, and I caught myself tensing up at times. A note, though: when Death Eaters fly through London and destroy a crowded Muggle bridge, the effect is somewhat spoiled when the camera zooms out from people frantically running to see the bridge twisting...without a soul standing on it. That's pretty basic animation, guys.

Then we start following our beloved trio through the school year, and Half-Blood Prince loses its way. Yates and writer Steve Kloves suddenly drop the dark air of the first act in favor of a protracted inspection of the romantic woes of all three. Ron and Hermione's attempts to woo the other only drive them further apart, while Harry apparently has to queue up for a crack at Ron's little sis Ginny (Bonnie Wright). These slightly comical interactions throw off the pacing and greatly distract from the mission at hand. I've read a number of reviews claiming that this movie works because it shows the characters maturing like normal teenagers despite the predicament surrounding them, but Kloves only explores this aging through unfunny comic relief.

There is one moment, when Hermione sits dejected as Ron snogs a clingy devotee and asks how Harry feels when he sees other boys with Ginny. As Ron walks past with his facesucking buddy in tow, Harry nearly whispers, "It feels like that." That one line is achingly beautiful, and more lines like that would have made the distraction from the Voldemort story because it genuinely would have fleshed these characters out. But no, that line is sadly just a fluke. Why Yates decided to stick with these subplots at the expense of the excellent Voldemort history lesson is beyond me.

Furthermore, the final battle in Hogwarts has been drastically altered and excised, and Yates took the emotional weight of the scene along with it. When the identity of the Half-Blood Prince is revealed, it's already been softened by a scene cut and pasted from the seventh book that openly hints at the true nature behind the final tragedy. And for all the planning the Death Eaters put into breaking into Hogwarts, they seem to stroll out as quickly as they enter, leaving only a single vandalized room in their wake. Imagine if Robert De Niro's character spent all of Heat planning, only to walk into the bank at the end and make a deposit.

On the positive side, the acting is up to the usual standards. Radcliffe may never be convincing as a reluctant, angsty leader (or even one of the three), and Watson still over-pronounces each line, but the others are great. Poor Rupert Grint has always made the best of a bad situation with the under-written Ron -- heck, when the fame-whore Slughorn (Jim Broadbent) never remembers his name, I felt he did so not because the Weasleys are ordinary wizards but because even I know nothing about him at this point of the film franchise -- but he gets some big laughs with his dopey grin and his constant bemusement. Both Fiennes-Tiffin and Frank Dillane (who plays the teen Riddle) are pitch-perfect in their roles, and Dillane in particular makes me wish far more of the film had been devoted to him working his icy charm on unsuspecting adults.

However, it's Tom Felton, the best of the child actors since the first film, who steals the show as the hardened yet tortured Draco. He's always had that haughty sneer down pat, but we see another side of him in this film, and he outperforms even the adults. If only Yates had stopped replaying the scene of him ripping the curtain off of a magic cabinet over and over and used that time to let Felton do something else, because I believed every choice Draco made in this movie, even more so than I did in he books.

All in all, Half-Blood Prince, like all of its predecessors save Prisoner of Azkaban, has excellent moments but fails to add up into a cohesive whole. Its omissions and alterations result in an enjoyable movie, but one that builds to a climax that never comes. As with "Order of the Phoenix," it takes an emotionally charged ending and mishandles it to the point of tedium. And for the love of God, will they give Alan Rickman something to do before this series ends?

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone

With the release of the sixth Harry Potter installment upon us, I decided to revisit the other five films for the first time in ages, to chart the series's progression on celluloid but also because nostalgia is a dangerous, dangerous thing and I seek to undermine it where possible. Then again, I don't recall ever going crazy for any of the actual films; it was the book series that, like countless others of my generation, gripped me. It didn't make me want to read -- I was always an avid reader, though I've shamefully fallen off the wagon since leaving for college -- but the series always kept me entertained.

Until I tried to re-read them, that is. About two years ago, before the final book hit shelves, I had a marathon reading session over a few weeks, most of which felt like arduous labor the writing had so soured on me. I actually gave up on the first two books altogether because I found their styles to be so simplistic, while the fifth was so cumbersome and tangential I wondered if they just published her first draft by mistake. But films tend to cut stories down to their barest essences, and they allow the director and adapting writers to explore their own themes. "So why not give 'em a go?" I wondered.

Sometimes I wish I didn't just go with every thought that pops into my head. As with the first book, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone -- I will never understand why American publishers changed the title from the original Philosopher's -- churns out all the mythology-establishing exposition needed to launch a franchise, and it gets so bogged down in telling us about this incredible alternate world that it never bothers to take advantage of the properties of film and actually show us.

Oh, there is Computer-Generated Imagery aplenty, but too often characters describe Hogwarts' splendor as they quickly whisk through the scene, as if to outrun budget limitations. Then again, $125 million should have gone a long way since epic action pieces don't really enter the series until the fourth book, so they really could have fleshed things out a bit if only they just cut the sodding thing down some.

Oh my God, now I know why I liked this as a 12-year-old back in November 2001: they didn't leave out a goddamn scene. There's a false perception among the fans of any piece of literature on its way to the big screen that the movie's quality is directly proportionate to how rigidly it follows every scene, every line even, of the book. This is, of course, utter hogwash: where some films work wondrously for adhering to the author's vision (No Country for Old Men, which is almost certain to go down as the best film of the decade), many of the best deviate notably from the narrative and even themes of the source to explore new territory (The Shining, Ran). Director Chris Columbus and screenwriter Steve Kloves are too afraid of angering children to take any chances.

I mean, I'm so confident that people are aware enough of the phenomenon that was Harry Potter that I haven't even gotten down to the plot yet; do you really need me to? Harry (Daniel Radcliffe), an orphaned lad sent to live with his aunt and uncle after surviving an attack by the dreaded Lord Voldemort, is abused and mistreated by his guardians. On his 11th birthday, a giant, Hagrid (Robbie Coltrane) finds him and reveals that Harry is a wizard and shall attend Hogwarts, the finest magical institution in the world. Soon, we discover that Harry is the biggest celebrity in the magic world, simply for surviving Voldemort's attack.

On the way to his new school and life, he befriends Ron Weasley (Rupert Grint), the second youngest member of a seemingly endless family, and Hermione Granger (Emma Watson), a book-smart Muggle-born who knows more about magic in her first year than is mentally possible. None of these kids really has a grasp on the characters yet, what with Radcliffe's inability to convey any sense of rage, or pain or anything other than a dopey grin, really. And that's nothing compared to Watson delivering every line like she just got done running three miles, or her distracting emphasis on any word starting with an 'h.' They lack charisma at this juncture, which is an unfair thing to criticize in a child, but they're meant to carry the film.

To take the weight off of them, Columbus assembled a cast comprising some of the finest British actors in the biz, from Maggie Smith (Gryffindor professor McGonagall) to the aforementioned Coltrane to Richard Harris (Albus Dumbledore). Such a team could carry just about any movie, but Columbus never features any of them prominently enough to let them pick up the slack. Alan Rickman is a good choice for the venomous Severus Snape, but it will be a few films before he pours into the role with the oily bitterness it requires. Ian Hart's role as villain Professor Quirrell is, by nature of the novel, so underwritten that he cannot make an impression, and the final reveal of his "better half" is undone by some dodgy CG.

That weak animation also hurts some of the better sequences of the film, chiefly the Quidditch match. Quidditch rapidly became such an annoying distraction in the books that Rowling relegated it to the background starting with the fourth book, but it once was a fun break from stories that were light enough to support the aside. Here, it's the most exhilarating moment of the film, which reflects on the tepid direction of the final gauntlet of challenges protecting the Philosopher's Stone and Columbus' inability to fill them with any sense of tension or even excitement. So, it's up to the Quidditch game, but the animation is choppy and you can practically see the green screen behind the actors on their broomsticks. Still, it carries a bit of dramatic heft to it, and I actually found myself caring about the outcome even though a) I knew what would happen and b) I don't even care about real sports.

Elsewhere, though, the script is so concerned with just throwing every single narrative event of the novel on the screen, only to leave out what minimal character growth existed. I understand that the novel was all about setting up the sandbox in which these characters played, but as that's the case, the film hardly needs to be 2-1/2 hours long. It almost feels like five episodes of the first season of Harry Potter: The Series than a proper film, making the whole thing more of a chore than an escapist fantasy.

That dogmatic adherence to Rowling's writing means that the same contrivances of the book now appear on-screen: Harry, who must wear glasses because of weak eyesight, becomes "the youngest player in a century," and as the Seeker no less. How can someone who needs corrective lenses somehow see a tiny, darting ball that becomes entirely invisible if it moves more than six feet away from your face? For that matter, is there not a spell that has a similar effect to eye surgery? A number of older wizards wear spectacles as well; this is a bigger logic gap than Captain Picard's baldness in the future of Star Trek: The Next Generation. Furthermore, McGonagall actually buys Harry the finest broom on the market so he can bring home the Cup? Isn't that kind of like a football coach bribing his star players?

These are nitpicks, of course, more about the book than the film, and it's not like Columbus could alter Harry's already iconic look. But it's the director's responsibility to shift my focus away from the minutiae and contrivances, especially in a light-hearted romp such as this. Starting with the third installment, the series took a firm left into young adult literature from of children's books, but the first two are all about the spectacle. What a shame that Columbus and Kloves so utterly fail to convey any of it.