The lamentation of St. Zac Efron

Your face is huge on that poster.

“I know, right,” Zac Efron says. “Oh wait, check this out.”

Efron, 22-year-old teen dream, pops up from the leather ottoman he’s lounging on and runs into the next room, leans over his hotel bed flashing his dark-colored briefs underneath his jeans in the process — somewhere a teen girl weeps and she doesn’t know why — and grabs his iPhone 4. He bounds back into the room flicking through images on the phone.

“A buddy who was in Times Square sent this to me,” he says while holding the phone so I can see the image: it’s Efron larger-than-life on the poster of his new movie, Charlie St. Cloud. The poster must be 50 feet tall and 150 feet wide. His eyes stare off the edge of the poster right up the spread legs of a Victoria Secret lingerie model who happens to have found placement above him in the New York City skyline — and she's ready to sit on his face.

“I’m looking right at her ass,” he says, noticeably pleased with the comedy of the two ads create. “Thank you, New York.”

Efron, that plucky young kid from the High School Musical series, is growing up, and the proof is in his persistent survival post-HSM. First there was the starring role in 17 Again, one of those goofy body-switch movies in the vein of Freaky Friday. Then there was Me and Orson Welles, Richard Linklater’s critical darling about Welles’ famous staging of Julius Caesar, a film that no doubt left tweens wondering aloud who Orson Welles was and why he was taking screen time away from Zac.

And now Efron has Charlie St. Cloud, a film in which he’s the unmistakable lead — he plays the title character — and he’s five years removed from high school, which means he’s playing roughly his own age, a bonus for any HSM breakout. “I’m done aging down for a character,” Efron says from his upscale Phoenix hotel room, “but I will age up. The studios are really pandering to a younger crowd by casting older actors in younger roles. Audiences are so much smarter than we give them credit for.”

In the film, he plays a property manager of a cemetery who meets his dead brother every day at sundown to play catch. They chat, reminisce and altogether delay the inevitable day when Charlie must let go, and the brother must venture onward into eternity. There’s also some business with a girl who’s going to sail around the world, and how she’s driving Charlie away from his dead brother. At one point they have sex in the graveyard, to which the women in the audience coo'd and moaned — I laughed hysterically: "They just fucked on a headstone!" The film also is notable for starring two veteran actors — Ray Liotta and Kim Basinger — and giving them nothing to do.

I ask Efron about this, particularly about Oscar winner Basinger, who looks electric in all 3½ minutes she's on the screen only to disappear after her mindless cameo. Was her role originally larger, because it seems pointless to have Basinger there when an extra could have done it just as good? I kept thinking she was going to pop up again. Efron, protecting his director, Burr Steers — Steers, besides directing Efron's 17 Again, was also in Pulp Fiction as the guy on the couch shot by Jules — explains Basinger's disappearance like this: "Hey, when Kim Basinger can be your mom, why not?"

Charlie St. Cloud is not a great movie. It’s one of those pandering melodramatic cheeseballs, the kind that are usually penned by Nicholas Sparks, or some Nicholas Sparks-programmed robot. But even inside this stinker, Efron seems to shine. I’m convinced he can play very serious, but hasn’t yet been given the opportunity. He has this complexity to his gaze, like a dreamier River Phoenix — “Thanks,” he says, “Stand By Me is one of my favorite movies.” But if he's not careful he can drift from River Phoenix to Boone from Lost, who just whined too much and ultimately fell off a plane and died.

How do you pick roles?

Efron, back on the ottoman, his eyes wander, his feet shuffle: “I play it by ear. The voice of the character, can I hear it? What’s learned, what’s the message? Is it cool, is it fun, do I see myself having fun during shooting? What is the rest of the cast like? These are questions I ask myself before I decide … Right now I’m more excited about broadening — or having the potential for broadening — my fan base’s experience at the movies, to see how they respond to more real, more grounded plots.”

But don’t you get a lot of scripts trying to break you with drugs, alcohol, sex or violence? There’s probably a price on your head to get you to do a bad boy role that plays against your High School Musical days.

“I would never do anything like that just to do it … one of those ‘bad boy’ roles,” he says, “but I think if there was an amazing role where I was playing a well-written character who was also slightly villainous I would do it. I would never play bad for the sake of playing bad, and believe me we’ve been given those chances since the first High School Musical.”

In a passing comment, Efron admits to frequenting theaters in the Los Angeles area. It’s hard to imagine movie stars watching other movies. It’s easier to just picture them always on the screen as opposed to basking in its glow like us, the general populace. He and his longtime girlfriend, fellow High School Musical star Vanessa Hudgens — who he is not shy to talk about in front of writers — make it their date night.

“I prefer to see movies at the theater. When I have time off, and if 7-o’clock rolls around and we have nothing to do we’ll go to the movies. No one really bothers us at the theater. People are buying candy and stuff, so no one really notices us. We’ll probably see three movies a week.”

It’s ironic you can find peace — from fans and the paparazzi — at a movie theater of all places.

“I know, right; it’s great,” Efron says. “Also I don’t have a great sound system at my house. Vanessa has a great theater system at home, big screen and everything, so movies are definitely better there, but we prefer to go out.”

Then he admits something: “I still haven’t seen the finished product of Charlie St. Cloud.”
That seems rather odd to me, not because stars should be required to see themselves on the screen — Clooney doesn’t, Nicholson doesn’t — but because Efron is so young, and ego drives the young in Hollywood. There’s this attitude that if you’re young and talented that you’re going to be the next big thing. Lindsay Lohan, now locked in an isolation cell somewhere, probably thought that way. How do you stay so grounded in Los Angeles, I ask.

“I get out [of LA] as much as possible. Also, I’ve been protected and helped. I get uncomfortable around the paparazzi and too much attention, so I never put myself in those situations. Hollywood is just not my thing.”

It’s working so far, though.

What dreams, dreams, dreams may come

With a growing collection of fine work to his credit, director Christopher Nolan — rightfully becoming heir to cinema’s highest orders — has found yet another way to thrill us, this time in our dreams.

His latest, Inception, is an elaborate heist movie that takes place within the fragile scaffolding of a victim’s sleep. The items stolen are not jewels and gems, but powerful ideas. Don’t call it just a heist movie, though; it is so much more, and also so much less. It manages to do something very few Hollywood action extravaganzas do: It provides high-octane thrills with shootouts, car chases and special effects, but also dissects one man’s own very personal story using science so technical and precise that it plays out like an MIT term paper.

Nolan’s fierce one-two punch — big action and personal character studies — is what gave him an edge in Dark Knight, but here it’s fine-tuned even further inside the recesses of man’s unconscious state, to a level that even Freud would find compelling. That Nolan juggles all of his elements— a large cast of A-list actors, a riveting sci-fi plot, hundreds of special-effect shots, a huge nine-figure budget, and a script he’s managed to keep secret for a decade — so precisely is further testament to his powers as a great director.

Inception’s thief is Cobb (Leonardo DiCaprio). Using a machine that fits into a suitcase — which at one point fits into another suitcase, a paradoxical visual — Cobb can boot himself into another person’s dreams, where he accesses their private thoughts to extract secrets. What he steals hardly matters; it could be the formula for Coca-Cola, Colonel Sanders’ secret recipe of 11 herbs and spices, or top secret company documents. It's simply Hitchcock’s MacGuffin: everyone wants it, but it is inconsequential to the actual plot. Inception's MacGuffin is the sell-off of an inherited company. What the company does, or what its wholesaling will accomplish, is not important.

Once in a dream, an extractor like Cobb can manipulate the physics of the dream to a certain extent including one scene where Paris seems to fold in half like a piece of paper, and then the fruit stands explode in a parade of colorful shrapnel. And should he die in a dream he’ll simply wake up, or he can always throw himself off a tall building — after all, that dream of falling always ends before we hit the ground.

Early in the film, Cobb is hired to do an difficult, thought-impossible inception job. We learn that inception is implanting an idea into a sleeping brain, as opposed to stealing one. It's no cakewalk since a dreaming mind is not easily tricked, so Cobb and his team have devised layers of dreams that will hide the true nature of their task. By the end of the film, we’ll see four layers — a dream within a dream within a dream within a dream — with the possibility of even more layers that remain unseen. There’s also this business where five minutes of sleep time translates into hours of dream time, and on the deepest levels, a dreamer can experience decades of dreams inside a single night’s sleep. Meanwhile his real body is booted into the suitcase machine while dream versions of himself are booted into dream machines on descending levels that fall down into the rabbit hole. So climbing back out of the dreams means his subconscious must be woken up on each dream level, sometimes they require a "kick" that adds to Cobb's labyrinthine masterplan.

These are heady ideas, but the film handles them without compromising the dense science of Inception’s world. As confusing as it sounds, Nolan (who also wrote the screenplay) seems to enjoy the complexity of the challenges associated with the plot as it descends into maddening new layers of dreams and collective unconscious. His Memento was apparently light calisthenics to prepare for this. Like time-travel caper Primer before it, or even Alex Proyas’ Dark City, Inception will reward sharp or repeat viewers with further science. After I saw it, I immediately wanted to see it again, mostly because it was such a remarkable experience, but also because the plot warrants further examination.

Besides DiCaprio, who proves his talent with each new role, the film is full of wonderful actors perfectly cast in solid, impenetrable roles. There’s Joseph Gordon-Levitt (500 Days of Summer) as a dapper assistant who has different roles within different layers of dreams. In one dream layer, he has a zero-G brawl in a hotel corridor that apparently took weeks to shoot. Then there’s Ellen Page (Juno), who plays a dream architect able to design the basic structure of a dream. Cobb has her audition for the role: “Draw me a maze in two minutes that takes one minute to get out of.” Tom Hardy, who will be the new Mad Max in 2012, plays a forger who can assume the identity of others, one of them being a character played by Tom Berenger (welcome back, Tom).

These characters, as good as they are at their respective jobs, must rely much on team leader Cobb, whose dreams are easily penetrated by the subconscious taunting of his dead wife Mal (Marion Cotillard), whose name has an ominous meaning in Spanish. In one scene, she interrupts the con by sending a freight train tearing through a place that definitely was not meant for a freight train. Although separate from the dream infiltration sequences, this plot element with the wife really allows Inception to expand on the idea of dreams: that dreams are the unrepressed images of our unconscious fighting to express themselves to our conscious self. Eventually, the film becomes more about what reality ultimately is and isn’t, which leads us into Matrix territory. But what the Matrix movies couldn’t do in three movies, Inception does in just one.

Few films can invent their own worlds, let alone their own brand of science. And few films can juggle so many elements so smoothly. The bigger, more innovative, more ambitious movies become the more they expose themselves to risk. Yet here’s Inception, as bold and ambitions as sci-fi movies can get, and Christopher Nolan makes it look so simple with his latest, easily the best film of the summer, and probably the entire year.

Don’t bother pinching me; I’m not dreaming.

(I like the photos so I'm posting all of them!)

Even more despicable 3-D; stop it already!

Despicable Me has its cute moments — the little doe-eyed children, the caricature-like animation style, those impish yellow minions and their squeaky little banter. But underneath this cutesy icing is a very confused cake.

For starters, it’s a movie about a villain. The most obvious plot arc in a movie like this would involve this villain doing horrible, despicable crimes but eventually growing a conscience, understanding the moral implications of his actions and becoming an upstanding human being who waters his lawn, waves at the milkman and, oh I don’t know, doesn’t steal the freakin’ moon. But that’s in a better movie. This movie justifies the criminal’s crimes by having him read his (kidnapped) children bedtime stories — “Good story, dad, all is forgiven.”

We begin with Gru (Steve Carell), a round gothic thug in the mold of Uncle Fester. Gru is a supervillain. The movie is not shy about this element. Don’t go assuming there’s a caped hero that will figure into this; maybe he’s fled to a better movie. And don’t look to Gru to fill those hero shoes: he begins Despicable Me as a lecherous villain and ends it as a lecherous villain … with adopted children.

How he gets these children seems to go against everything we’re taught in the first scenes: See, supervillains can take whatever they want, be it the Times Square JumboTron or the Great Pyramids. (And why would Egypt try to cover up the theft of their landmarks? It makes no sense.) This kind of thievery renders borrowing money and adopting children pretty much null and void. Yet that doesn’t prevent the film’s three writers to concoct lengthy scenes involving Gru pining for cash at the Supervillain Savings & Loan Office and adopting children. He’s a supervillain — just steal what you want, dummy!

The writers also go to great lengths to show Gru as just another member of the community even though he uses Bond weapons on the Starbucks line, his car is propelled by a Saturn V rocket booster and his house, looking creepier than Dracula’s tool shed, is clearly not HOA compliant. No one involved in this movie considered how irrational it looked to have a supervillain doing villainy in suburbia while the neighbors simply gawked in disbelief in their Izod polos.

And what does Gru or any other supervillain get out of stealing the Pyramids? Or the moon? Is there some kind of ransom? Does the moon hold some larger purpose? Is it a conspiracy to disrupt surf contests? The answer to all these questions is the same: the writers didn’t want you to use your brain while watching this movie, so don’t ask. The internal logic of the film makes absolutely no sense. It’s a flawed concept that wasn’t properly flow-charted by someone who was in a position to question the logic of what happens.

So what does happen: Gru wants to steal the moon, but first he must fake-adopt the children capable of stealing a gun that shrinks things. The gun must also be used as collateral for his moon-stealing loan. He adopts the three little girls and, of course, grows attached to them even though he’s using them for his nefarious plot. The movie excuses Gru’s behavior by making the kids sweet little orphans who are being used in some equally nefarious Mary Kay-like pyramid scheme. So actually Gru’s not that bad and the kids show up to play with lasers, sleep in hollowed out bombs and disrupt his life in all the right ways. And by the end, he’s still a villain, just a villain with three kids.

The movie’s animation is engaging and colorful, although the horrific 3-D darkens all those pretty colors into a soupy mud. I did love the Minions, Gru’s chatty jumpsuit-clad henchmen, who occupy every frame like little yelping gnats that are summoned by Gru’s call. And speaking of Gru, Steve Carell proves something I’ve known for a long time: major stars should stop doing character voices in animated films.

I didn’t much care for Despicable Me. It yawned out a story that made absolutely no sense, and the writers need to be taken to task over it. Will parents like it? Not nearly as much as a Pixar movie, which has more creativity in its brow sweat than this film’s entire life cycle. But will children like it? Of course, because it has a fart gun that will make your 8-year-old howl with delight.