Looping the loop and other sci-fi greatness

Wowzers! Here is a fun one.

Looper is not just the most stupendously awesome thrill-a-minute joyride of the year, it’s also a rally cry that science fiction is still a sophisticated genre with plenty more to say. We may have a robot the size of a car on Mars, but don’t think we’ve tapped the genre out yet.

Moviegoers spent several years on a downward plunge with George Lucas and his green-screen nightmares, but then came a bona-fide sci-fi renaissance: Minority Report, District 9, Moon, Children of Men, Avatar, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, Wall-E, Prometheus, Inception and now Looper, a dazzler about time travel, (very) organized crime and killing children before they grow up to be adult monsters.

The movie takes place in 2044 in a sinister version of the United States, where even Kansas looks like an impoverished favela. Joe (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) is an assassin of sorts. He shows up to a clearing in a cornfield and waits for bound men to materialize out of thin air and then he kills them with a blunderbuss, a shotgun that looks more like a table leg than a gun. The men are delivered to him via time travel that is invented 30 years in the future. It is promptly banned, but mob groups take control of the technology and start using it to send people back in time so their bodies can’t be found. (With as much murder as there is in 2044, though, I can’t imagine 2074 being somehow less body-friendly.)

Joe is your average looper. He murders all day, then he collects his silver-bar paycheck so he can party all night with prostitutes and drip a potent narcotic from an eyedropper into his retinas. Folks, this is our hero: a murdering, drug-abusing john. Joe’s living like there’s no tomorrow, because there is none. When loopers sign up for the job they agree that one day they will eventually kill a future version of themselves. This is called “closing the loop,” and it means it’s the last day of work for the looper, who then retires for 30 years until he’s bound up and sent back in time to be eliminated by himself. Loops are closed to prevent too many witnesses from existing at the same time.

This is not hard science. Not like Primer and its endless computations and labyrinthine flowcharts required to understand its time-traveling plot. Looper is more about ideas — think of a time-traveling Inception — including how we live for today, not for tomorrow. It also makes a very compelling case for and against pre-emptive murder. For instance, if you could stand over Baby Hitler’s crib, what would you do? In 50 years he’ll bring the world to its knees and bring about the deaths of millions. But today he’s a baby, completely innocent and defenseless. I invoke Hitler’s name aware of its weight and magnitude, and because it’s that name that is usually brought up in these philosophical games of what-if. Everyone likes to think they would end World War II before it starts, but could a soul survive the act of killing a baby?

These ideas are the undercurrent of Looper, but that suggests it feels like a lecture or homework. Not the case. It is full-on action, suspense and thrills so unique I found myself unable to predict a single thing that happened next. In one sequence more horrifying than most horror films, we watch as a man’s fingers, arms and legs disappear as he scrambles to save his younger self. We never see where his limbs go, but the implication is dreadful.

Joe, the man with the plan, finds all his plans are ruined when his future self (played by Bruce Willis) turns up in that cornfield. Younger Joe can’t kill Older Joe, so the two hash things out over breakfast — wouldn’t you know it, they take their eggs the same way. Older Joe says things are bad in the future, so he’s here to set things right by killing the child that will one day become the Rainmaker, the fearsome new boss in 2074. This jets Looper off in exciting new directions involving rocket-bikes, telekinetic powers, a deceptively cute toddler version of the Rainmaker and his protective mother (Emily Blunt).

The movie has holes, but all time travel movies do. Even the great Back to the Future, with its fat-free watered-down version of time travel, had holes. My only real problem with the movie was Gordon-Levitt’s prosthetic face, which he wears the whole movie to make him look more like Bruce Willis. It looks, quite simply, ridiculous. I wanted to see the real Joseph Gordon-Levitt, whose actual face is more than acceptable as a younger Bruce Willis. Worst of all, the makeup didn’t make him look like young Bruce Willis, but a young Robert Forster (Jackie Brown).

That aside, all I can really do is gush about Looper and its trippy sci-fi plot and its inventive stunts. I loved Gordon-Levitt’s action-heavy performance, and I think he would make a solid action star, especially since he can convey character depth better than most. I also enjoyed Willis who has a “yippee-kay-yay” moment that is so good it wouldn’t be admitted into a Die Hard movie.

The movie is written and directed by Rian Johnson, who last did the quirky-fun Brothers Bloom, and before that directed Gordon-Levitt in Brick, one of the most innovative film noirs to come out of the 85-year-old genre. Looper has its own noir elements to it, but it never strays far from hardcore sci-fi like another noir-future movie, Blade Runner. The last time I was this excited about a talented young director it was Christopher Nolan; keep your eyes on Rian Johnson.

Ray Bradbury may be dead and the space shuttles may be retired, but our complicated relationship with the unknown future is still producing epic storytelling moments in Hollywood. Looper is one of them.

Young cast blossoms in Wallflower

High schools don’t teach students about the reset button. Somehow that’s left out of the curriculum.

One day high school is all there is — football games, prom, spirit week, homecoming dances — and then graduation ctrl-alt-deletes the whole thing, like a self-destruct sequence to obliterate the evidence of the previous four years. The most popular high school students do not grow up to be the most popular adults. The class clowns and wacky weirdos do not grow up to be society’s outcasts. The social standings change. Upward and downward mobility after graduation effectively shuffles the deck.

I thought a lot about this phenomenon during the beautifully sad novel-turned-film The Perks of Being a Wallflower, about a group of eclectic outcasts who are unafraid to flaunt their personalities amid the class warfare of American high school. I knew people like this in my own high school experience and this movie made me miss them on a profound level. So much of high school is about conforming to the most popular caste that the unique individuals get lost in the shuffle. This film is dedicated to them.

The movie — stunningly directed by the book’s author, Stephen Chbosky — begins with a letter written to a nameless, non-existent friend. The letter writer is Charlie (Logan Lerman), an incoming freshman who has enough emotional turmoil about high school to write to an imaginary therapist/pen pal. The hazing at Charlie’s 1990s-era high school is especially bad, which leaves him without any friends until he is befriended by the eccentric Patrick (Ezra Miller) and the sweet Sam (Emma Watson). They are seniors, but they take a liking to Charlie and his aloof awkwardness. A lesser movie might have had Sam and Patrick pity Charlie and offer their kindness out of self-serving charity, but that is not the case here — these teens care deeply for their new friend.

Chbosky’s gentle composition and a music-heavy soundtrack allow the film to open and expand at its own pace. Some of the beats you will recognize from other high school movies: Charlie gets a crush on Sam, there are scenes at dances and football games, some of the characters use drugs casually (with repercussions) and the friends flirt and fight with the school’s more popular crowds. It has the look and feel of a typical high school coming-of-age story, but it is decidedly much more unique and special.

The nucleus of all this is Charlie, who is so delicately written and acted that I kept waiting for him to fall over and shatter. Lerman, previously of the Percy Jackson franchise, is wonderful and I liked how he allowed Charlie’s range of emotions to grow as the movie commenced forward with new friends and new experiences. Watson, Hermione from all the Harry Potter movies, and her lovable sprite of a teenager are angelic and pure — “Welcome to the island of misfit toys,” she tells Charlie. I kept seeing shades of Kate Hudson’s brave Penny Lane performance from Almost Famous, another character who falls for the nerds while sleeping with jocks.

Really, though, the show would not be the same without Ezra Miller as the semi-out gay friend Patrick. This is an Oscar-worthy performance. He’s an expressive showboat of a character — for his senior prank he pulls an epic stunt on the woodshop teacher — yet he’s given many moving moments, including one where he bares his soul, is wounded by his own embarrassment and then struggles for reconciliation … all within one touching scene in a park. His attitude is flamboyant and loud, but these are not byproducts of his sexual orientation; it is Patrick being Patrick. For a movie to get these tricky things right is remarkable.

The movie is full of comedy, like when Charlie waxes poetic after eating the pot brownies, though it does take some more serious turns in the second half, when Charlie starts to feel terror and worry seeping into the oasis of his new life. He shares much of this to his invisible pen pal as he types letters that will go unanswered. There is a twist late in the plot that I’m not entirely sure the film earned the right to introduce; maybe the book developed it better. I did appreciate the small things that made these teens unique, including the midnight Rocky Horror showings, an inventive Christmas gift exchange and Charlie’s first girlfriend, who he only dates because he’s unsure how to tell her no.

This is a terrific picture; the best movie for teens since Juno. It’s only opening at two Valley theaters, both of them far out of the West Valley. If you are a teen, or were a teen, make the trek to see The Perks of Being a Wallflower. It’s well worth the drive.

Genre mining with warrior Solomon Kane

A dogged enthusiasm races through the clunky medieval action flick Solomon Kane. It knows it’s the scrappy schoolyard kid who’s picked last for dodgeball, but that won’t stop it from racing around trying ever so hard to impress everyone.

The movie was made on a small budget by a no-name studio using barely recognizable actors. It was originally released in 2009, but not in the United States, where it sat on a shelf until now, the dead zone of late September. Based on its pedigree, you can see why no one has too many expectations for Solomon Kane’s success.

I had few expectations myself, which is probably why I’m not piling hatred on top of it in giant shovelfuls. Yes, Solomon Kane is atrocious, but somehow it is a worthy entry into a growing genre of low-budget medieval action extravaganzas.

Solomon Kane, my Internet tells me, began as a serialized cartoon that originally ran in pulp magazines such as Weird Tales. He was a pilgrim-hat-wearing warrior turned Puritan who wandered 16th century Europe “vanquishing evil in all its forms.” Slaying beasts was apparently all that Solomon did because no mention is ever made to a Mrs. Kane, loyal steeds, stamp collections or those community college classes Solomon took in the evenings post-vanquishing pre-slaughtering. Nope, just slaying beasts, that’s all Solomon did.

In that aspect, the movie version of Solomon Kane seems to adhere exactly to the printed version. He is played by James Purefoy, a fine British actor who I will always remember as the sneeringly proud Mark Antony in HBO’s Rome. Solomon wanders the gloomy plains of England killing things and snarling at his troupe of thieves and murderers. In the opening sequence, Solomon invades the wrong castle looking for treasure. Instead he finds a demonic possession that seems to scare some sense into Evil Solomon, upon which he renounces violence and becomes a Puritan and Righteous Solomon.

He quickly falls into the clutches of the most wholesome Puritan family to ever roam the thief-infested forests of the film’s universe. It’s not long before the family, too pure and innocent for this movie, is attacked by evildoers and Solomon must once again kill using primitive iron swords and blunt instruments. He often stabs people with a knife and then drags the blade upward or downward, unzipping his victims like winter coats. Let me juxtapose that bloodletting with this tender little nugget:  there are a number of biblical references, including the names Solomon and Malachi, and also a point in the plot where Solomon is, you know, CRUCIFIED! Subtle, huh? Fear not, though, the movie does not ascend into religious allegory in fear that it might have to slow the rate of eviscerated bodies.

Solomon Kane joins a growing list of other medieval, quasi-magical or sword-and-sandal movies about just men waging war in violent ways with barbaric conquerors. Consider Pathfinder, Centurion, The Eagle, Black Death, Ironclad, King Arthur or the recent Conan reboot. (Widen the net just a little and we also get Ridley Scott’s rather spectacular Kingdom of Heaven and HBO’s Game of Thrones.) The movies are often made on smaller budgets, photographed in muddy and gloomy locations, and often feature a single distinguishing male lead — I liked that Sean Bean one, I forget the title. Most notably, though, many of the movies look, sound and feel exactly alike. Quick, tell me the difference between The Eagle and Centurion? In my head all I see are clinking swords.

This movie sticks to the conventions of the genre with its soupy mix of blood and mud, and also its flawless warrior, who can’t be defeated because the stunt guys apparently like pretending to be inept warriors who can be easily killed by the star’s hiccups. Purefoy is forgettable and bland, though he’s no better or worse than Jason Statham, Ray Stevenson, Karl Urban or any of those other cinematic lightweights each billed as new-age action heroes. The film also stars Pete Postlethwaite, who died last year, and Max von Sydow, who will appear in your home movies for the right price.

Much of the plot is simply Solomon vanquishing evil from bad guys' faces, but also rescuing a sweet little virgin whose innocent blood fills the tanks on movies like this. Some certain supernatural elements turn up, including at the end when a lava monster felt a little left out and jumped through a portal from a different movie. The film leaves the door wide open for a sequel, but with this one sitting on the shelves for three years I doubt that will happen. 

I didn’t like Solomon Kane. I found its action preposterous and dull, and its story tepid and even more dull. But somehow, against all the evidence in the film, I admire its tenacity and motivation. For fans of this medieval genre, Solomon Kane is more of the same, but maybe that’s why the genre thrives with such endurance. Who am I to spoil that?

Twisting your mind, smashing your dreams

Stanley Kubrick had a particular way of directing his actors that involved repetition. He was meticulous — and also a manic perfectionist — to such a degree that it bordered an obsessive-compulsive state, but he was also aiming for greater truth in his films. By having his subjects repeat their lines 30, 40 or 84 times, he could watch as the actors deconstructed their own work in front of him.

I mention this because I thought a lot about Stanley Kubrick during Paul Thomas Anderson’s intellectually obtuse new film of eccentric dreamers, The Master, about a new-age cult leader who invokes a Kubrickian style of leadership that borders on insanity.

The cult leader is played by frequent Anderson collaborator Philip Seymour Hoffman, here as a pink-faced snake-oil salesman named simply “the Master.” Master runs a quasi-scientific cult that believes in trillions of years of reincarnation, alien humanoids from other worlds and in bizarre social experiments that serve as Master’s sacred sacrament. One of them requires all the women dance naked around the living room as he sings songs.

Another Master experiment is called processing, which is a rapid-fire question-and-answer session with some bizarre requests (“no blinking or we start over”) and some even more bizarre questions (“do you believe in incest?”). The first processing subject we see is a persuasive worm of a man named Freddie Quell (Joaquin Phoenix). Master asks his name so many times — a deconstruction not far removed from The Shining — that Freddie starts to doubt his own existence.

The movie begins with Freddie, a Navy man with some psychological issues so severe that it’s a wonder he wasn’t committed even within the film’s 1950s setting. During some shore leave, some sailors build a sand castle of a woman, which Freddie then rapes. During a medical evaluation he’s shown the inkblot cards and, to him, they all look like reproductive organs. At one point he passes out high atop the mast of the ship, oblivious to a boat full of sailors hollering at him from below. He’s so far removed from society’s norms that he can barely muster your pity, let alone empathy.

His biggest problem, though, and possibly the reason for much of his uncontrollable personality, is his drinking. Remember in Airplane! when Robert Hays said he had a drinking problem and then he poured his drink down his shirt missing his mouth entirely? Freddie has a drinking problem that one-ups that: he drinks everything he comes in contact with. Give him gasoline, bleach and lemonade and he’ll mix you a cocktail. Lysol, paint thinner and window cleaner, that’s a party drink. After he leaves the military, we see Freddie working as a photographer at a department store. In the darkroom he mixes the stop bath, fixer and other photographic chemicals into a festive nightcap.

The toxicity of his deadly drinks must evaporate from his pores and hang around him like a cloud because he looks and sounds downright insane. And that’s when he’s discovered by Master, who is smitten by Freddie’s callousness toward life and the stupor that weeps from his face. I’m not sure if Master sees an opportunity or challenge with Freddie, or if he’s envious of Freddie’s freedom to do anything he wants, and drink anything he can slosh into a flask. The movie is ambiguous (which might be the understatement of the year).

Anderson then begins a long, slow descent into madness as Freddie and Master spiral out of control into an abyss of new-age mysticism and nonsensical brainwashing. At one point, Anderson lingers on a scene where Freddie walks to a wall, describes the wall, walks to a window, describes the window and then repeats for what feels like 20 minutes of movie. I wanted to scream at the picture: “We get it! Move along.” The Master is full of scenes like this, of Master forcing his skewed perspective of the universe on Freddie, his wife (Amy Adams) and their children, some of whom are skeptical of their father’s “work” — “He makes this up as he goes,” one son tells Freddie.

The film is marvelously shot, with many single shots and scenes that look staggering in their beauty and production, but the ideas they are filled with feel hollow and pointless. Anderson is a skilled director — Punch-Drunk Love, There Will Be Blood, Boogie Nights, Magnolia … all terrifically ambitious projects — though he seems to wander here in The Master. If the point was to shows us the absurdity of cults, and how they infect the weak minded with oversized lies, then it could have been done with more purpose and perhaps a narrative. Much of the film is episodes: Freddie acting crazy, Master making demands, Freddie driving a motorcycle, Master writing his new book. The characters are engrossing, the horrible wretches they all are, but the story has no hook.

That’s a shame because these are fascinating performances. You’d have a difficult time finding a performance as startling, frightening or original as Phoenix’s Freddie Quell. He’s a disgusting human being, but I couldn’t take my eyes off him for a single second in fear I would miss one of his sneering, mangled smiles as they twisted out of his sour face. I kept forgetting that Joaquin Phoenix was in there. Hoffman is just as good as the bloated ego of his cult’s master plan. You can see the charisma oozing from his dialogue, and also the deception.

Many people are calling The Master Anderson’s “Scientology movie.” There are many similarities: Master could be a stand-in for Dianetics author L. Ron Hubbard, the movie has “processing” while Scientology uses “auditing,” the two share broad ideas about billions of years of meta-physical reincarnation, and both suffer from persecution from outsiders. If I were a Scientologist I would not be flattered by what takes place in The Master, but maybe it’s not even about Scientology. Anderson doesn’t make it clear in the film one way or the other.

What he does make clear is that there is no rationality when religious fervor takes over every aspect of a person’s life. He repeats this theme — Kubrick style: again and again and again — through the entire film. It’s a fascinating, if also long and occasionally stale, journey, one that I can only recommend for fans of Paul Thomas Anderson. Everyone else might want to avoid this dense movie with the ambiguous philosophy. Or wait until it’s a cult hit. 

Keep your eyes on this curveball

Amid all the whacky fanfare that last months’ Republican National Convention created for Clint Eastwood and his chair full of Invisible Obama, it’s nice to see Eastwood in the medium that made him famous — movies.

Several writers, including myself, questioned his health after he stumbled through that painful 12-minute speech that featured the screen legend’s worst acting run since Paint Your Wagon. After the RNC, he went on vacation and has since re-emerged to reassure everyone he is fine and to “get off my lawn.”

Trouble With the Curve is not his greatest role, but it’s a solid one. It features Eastwood doing his cranky old man impersonation, which he exploits more frequently now that he is 82 years old and more likely to be packing a bottle of multivitamins and trifocals than a .44 Magnum.

I was skeptical of the movie at first because it begins painfully slow and then delays, delays, delays what the audience surely sees coming — the switch from a geriatric drama to road movie. When it finally does make the switch, Curve finds its motivation and becomes a touching story of a father reuniting with his daughter.

Eastwood plays Gus, a baseball scout for the Atlanta Braves. Gus is old-school: he listens to the sound of the smack of ball on glove, he watches tiny movements in batters’ hands and he encourages his players with gentle motivation. A younger guy on the scouting staff uses computers and algorithms, and he wouldn’t recognize the soul of baseball if it stole home in front of him. “When was the last time you even watched a game?” Gus asks him. This is Curve’s little jab at Moneyball and Billy Beane, who used math to pick his players. Moneyball is the better movie (if only slightly), but I must side with Gus here: baseball is an art, not an algebra equation.

Gus is getting old and his eyes are giving out on him. He refuses to see an eye specialist because he’s … well, old and set in his ways. I didn’t like this lengthy first act, which features Eastwood acting comically inept as he rams his convertible out of the garage, burns a hamburger to an ashy cinder and says things such as “the interweb” or “yoga, that voodoo.” Curve makes much ado about showing Gus as an old uninformed miser, and provides too much evidence to support it. I wanted the plot to start earlier.

When it did, the movie grew on me fast. It begins when Gus hits the road to track an up-and-coming slugger the Braves want to take as their first pick in the upcoming draft. Gus needs to find out if the athlete is a genuine star or just another flash in the pan. The kid is Bo Gentry and he’s as close as the film gets to a villain. All he can talk about is making the majors so he can bed every female on the East Coast. His appetite for baseball seems secondary to his desire for money, women and fame. Baseball needs fewer Bo Gentrys, but he missed that memo.

Gus can barely drive without smashing something, so his attorney daughter Mickey (Amy Adams), named after Mickey Mantle, is guilted into coming along to watch out for the old man. Growing up in a baseball house, she’s naturally gifted at recognizing talent and spouting off random World Series trivia. This comes in handy when she meets an ex-pro played by Justin Timberlake, who has chemistry with Adams but delivers his baseball lines like he’s reading a parts catalog for a 1985 Buick Skylark.

Baseball is wrapped around Trouble With the Curve, but it’s core is the idea that we are all replaceable. Gus can be replaced by a computer or a younger scout, Mickey can be replaced by another attorney at her firm, and if baseball players can’t cut it they’ll be replaced by those who can. This is an interesting theme, one that Curve uses at every step of its plot, right up to the point where Gus learns baseball scouts are replaceable, but fathers and daughters aren’t. It’s a bit sappy, and has a rather sudden unexpected and dark twist that rattled me, but I liked Curve’s delivery.

I especially liked the last 20 minutes that literally throws a curve at your expectations. I did not see it coming, and neither will you.

The movie is directed by Robert Lorenz, who has been an assistant director on Eastwood’s own films for many years. I would have preferred a faster pacing at the beginning, but I think this is a promising start for a new director. Eastwood himself does a decent job. He panders for jokes occasionally, but there are moments of genius in his delivery. I especially liked one of his lines during a bar fight: “Get out of here before I have a heart attack trying to kill you.” In another scene, this one heartbreaking and raw, he sings “You Are My Sunshine” to a grave. His scenes with Adams, a truly delightful and talented actress, are fun because they play off each other, sometimes with frustrating results.

One technical issue: the film must have been shot digitally, because all of the nighttime or low-light shots have digital noise, or grain, and none of the blacks are very rich. The old film technology didn’t do this so noticeably, but it was replaced.

Much has been written about Clint Eastwood lately. Forget all of it and go see him in Trouble With the Curve, a movie that rewards Eastwood by casting him with equally talented human beings, and not chairs.

Setec Astronomy lives on 20 years later

There are two categories of people in this world: those who love Sneakers, and those who have not yet seen Sneakers. Somewhere there’s a bearded curmudgeon out there who hates the spy-thriller — and also puppies, free cable TV and world peace — but who wants to know their opinion anyway.

Sneakers came out this month in 1992, and even two decades after its release the film has been largely forgotten. Even the weekend super-marathons on TBS, which did wonders for The Shawshank Redemption, have not brought the movie out of the depths of dusty obscurity. “Movies wouldn’t be obscure without devoted fans,” you say. Yes, but Sneakers has fans and many of them are flailing about in the ether of deep-dark space, where they presume to be the only moviegoer in the whole sad universe who appreciated a witty, intelligent and well-made espionage movie.

But, alas, the Sneakers fans are slowly uniting, especially now on the film’s 20th birthday. It also helps that Slate.com has lit a spy-version of the Beacons of Minas Tirith, prompting Sneakers fans to jump out of their loafers (you thought I’d say sneakers!) while yelling “The beacon is lit, the beacon is lit” as Howard Shore music swells in the background. By the way, Slate’s Sneakers material is quite wonderful, please check it out starting here.

I saw Sneakers at a Goodyear theater in 1992. My parents had taken me and my brother; we were too young to appreciate all the jokes. Many years later — the theater is now a Christian center — my brother and I would often revisit Sneakers, which we watched frequently on Netflix’s instant streaming service. We always knew the film was good, but we never appreciated how good.

Twenty years out, it’s a masterpiece.

The movie was directed by Field of Dreams director Phil Alden Robinson, who also wrote the film with Lawrence Lasker and Steven Spielberg collaborator Walter F. Parkes. The plot wasn’t so much about spies and espionage, though those themes were the film’s undercurrent. It was more about technology, old and new. The old was represented by its characters, a motley crew of rejected ex-spies who now worked as “security consultants,” which the film implies is corporate gruntwork for aged hacks. In the first scene they rob a bank just to report to the bank’s board of directors how their security failed them.

The new technology is symbolized by the electronic gizmo they’re asked to recover. It has the ability to un-encrypt encrypted servers on a then-adolescent internet. The device, called Janek’s box after the guy who built it and who only appears in the movie for about 10 minutes, serves as the driving force for much of Sneakers’ tech-heavy story. I’d call the box a MacGuffin, Hitchcock’s word for an immaterial object that everyone wants, but MacGuffins usually serve no purpose, whereas the box and what it does provide one of the film’s most memorable scenes.

Sneakers is perfectly cast: a scruffy Robert Redford plays the founder of the security consultation firm, Sidney Poitier plays his reliable but short-fused partner, Dan Aykroyd is a geeky tech-nerd named Mother with a deep fascination for conspiracy theories, David Straithairn is a blind electronics expert named Whistler, and River Phoenix, the only young guy in the whole movie, does all the heavy lifting when the old timers are left creaking and wheezing.

The movie drifts often toward Redford, the star, but it gives each character their own presence. Mother’s distrust of government is woven into many of the jokes, including one gag about Eisenhower trading cow lips for technology secrets from space aliens. Whistler, who reads Playboy in Braille and uses a special automated Braille keyboard, solves many of the film’s riddles using only his ears. In one sequence he programs road noise into a keyboard to simulate the sounds of riding in the trunk of a car. Even Phoenix, one year before his death, was given great lines, including one where he can have his choice of anything on the planet and all he wants is the phone number of the federal agent pointing a gun at him.

With these actors — and many others, including Ben Kingsley, Mary McDonnell, Timothy Busfield and the great Stephen Tobolowsky — Sneakers creates a stellar heist-thriller using its brains before its muscles. And though guns appear in the movie, they never serve as the driving force of the action. There are no gunfights or explosions. The action is more subdued and grounded, and always backseat to brains and science.

While I love the cast dearly and think it’s one of the greatest ensembles of any movie from any decade, I think I most admire the film’s versions of science and technology, and also the way the movie uses these ideas to beat the ever-expanding enigma contained in Janek’s box. Consider a small scene later in the movie: Redford and his team need to find out whose office is next door to the one they’re trying to break into. Another film would have skipped this scene altogether, but Sneakers takes the long way around by showing us surveillance footage from three days. They wait for the lights to go out in the office and then they watch who comes out of the building. Day 1 produces a set of people, so does Day 2. By Day 3 they’ve accurately established they’re target. By analyzing the data, they solve the riddle. Most movies skip data altogether, or inject it directly into characters’ brains without requiring them to retrieve it in any plausible way.

In another scene, Redford must walk through a room so slow that he fools the motion sensors into thinking he’s just another piece of furniture. He also raises the temperature to the high 90s to trick the body-heat sensors. Other movies have marathon car chases, but this one has a man walking … very … very … very … slowly.

My favorite scene, though, one that I feel is perfect in every way, is in the first act, during a party to celebrate the theft of Janek’s box. The techheads are over at a computer fumbling around Janek’s work while Redford, Poitier and McDonnell are having some wine, chatting and playing Scrabble. James Horner’s clarinet- and piano-heavy score queues up as the film shuffles between the two scenes: Whistler and Mother hacking into Janek’s box to discover they could manipulate any computer system in the world, and then back to the board game, which the Redford character dumps over when he realizes that Setec Astronomy, the company that wants the box, can be rearranged to write “too many secrets.” The scene ends when the plug is literally pulled on Janek’s doomsday box.

The only gripe — more of an annoying quirk than anything — is geared more toward a character and not the movie itself. Late in the film, the McDonnell character is set up on a blind date with Dr. Werner Brandes, the science guy whose office was watched on surveillance footage. Brandes enters his office using a voice-recognition password that he must read aloud: “Hi, my name is Werner Brandes. My voice is my password. Verify me.” The point of the dinner date is to record Brandes saying each of these words, which can then later be spliced together to get into his high-security office.

McDonnell is a sport and before long she has Brandes on tape saying every word except “passport.” Anyone watching the movie can think of a better way to get Brandes to say this word; for instance, ask him if he’s been to Paris, because you haven’t because your … that thing, the paper thing that gets you into other countries … it expired. Brandes: “Oh, your passport.” McDonnell, for mystifying reasons, decides a different approach, to fetishize the word: “I’ve always loved this word. Would you say it for me? I think your voice would sound terrific saying it. Passport.” The movie makes a point to say her character isn’t a professional spy, but wow that is dense and desperate.

By the end of the film — after the blind guy drives a van, Ben Kingsley’s left with the dinner check and James Earl Jones makes an interesting cameo — Sneakers hasn’t reshaped movie history. Its cast is great, but none won Oscars. The camera work is impressive, but nothing is worthy of framing on your wall. The score works terrific within the movie, but I’d have trouble humming more than half a dozen notes with the TV off. The story, while solidly intriguing and tightly wound, is well-written but it’s not Dickens or Hemingway. Why then does Sneakers work so well?

My answer: Because it respects its audience. It assumes everyone watching it is intelligent enough to appreciate its unique solutions to time-worn heist puzzles. And with its lack of bared-teeth, bullet-flying action, Sneakers also assumes (correctly) that its audience can appreciate brains over trigger fingers.

So to you, Sneakers, a very happy birthday. And to Sneakers fans: “The beacon is lit, the beacon is lit.”

Line goes dead on raunchy telephone comedy

 North American culture says a groundhog can predict the end of winter. Summer has its own predictor: when movie studios start dumping trash on the screen, then it’s time to pack up your swimsuit until next year.

September is that odd month at movie theaters. The summer blockbusters have come and gone, and the Oscar contenders don’t start showing their smug faces until October. The kids are back in school. The monsoons set in. The failure of September as a valid movie month is perfectly evident with a picture like the overly punctuated For a Good Time, Call … (that’s the first and last time I type the ellipsis, thank you).

Here is a comedy movie with a single premise, plot point and theme: poor New York girls create a phone-sex line to pay the bills. It might be the first movie in a long time to have a one-sentence plot that requires a spoiler alert. By telling you what it’s about, I’ve just given away the whole thing. And I mean everything, because at no point does For a Good Time want you to forget it’s about prude girls talking dirty on telephones. It reminds us at every step. In case you forget, it reminds you at the half steps too.

Lauren (Lauren Miller) has been dumped by her boyfriend because she’s boring, and indeed she is. She needs a place to live so she moves in with wild-girl Katie (Ari Graynor), who reminds us that she lives in an apartment near Gramercy Park in Manhattan, though we’re never told why that neighborhood is so special, nor do we see inside the gorgeous park, which is one of New York City’s two privately owned parks.

Rent is through the roof, so Lauren and Katie hatch a plan to start a phone sex line to make ends meet. Their number is 1-900-MMM-HMMM. (A better film might have made this a working number for marketing purposes, but alas, it’s a dud number.) Lauren works as the front-office person who jots down credit card numbers and other information, and Katie takes the calls, assuming any role a caller desires, from the wacky weirdoes and their elaborate fantasies to her regular nighttime caller, a gentle hipster who she is bound to meet in real life before the movie ends.

Plenty of minerals can be mined from the topic of phone-sex workers — What do they look like? Do their personal relationships suffer? Is there such thing as a taboo request when everything is just non-physical fantasy anyway? — though most often For a Good Time, Call can only muster about 1,400 masturbation jokes. All varieties. In every combination. And with cameos by actor Seth Rogen and director Kevin Smith.

The picture does find some genuine laughs, though they are often few and far between. I did like the bit about a desperate cab driver and his unseen-until-the-very-end cab fare, who sits patiently through a situation most would not. (The other 1,399 jokes are letdowns.) It doesn’t help that the film’s editing is a half-beat behind the punchlines, often ruining any comedic timing that the weak, often unnecessarily perverse, jokes might have.

The movie is a byproduct of two trends: the 50 Shades of Grey books, which have scandalized bookstores and given sexual power (or taken it away, depending on how you look at it) to its female readers. It also closely resembles HBO’s hit comedy Girls, even down to the opening title treatment and Lauren’s supportive parents who cut the umbilical cord very late in life. Girls is subtle and devastating, not to mention clever, while Good Time is trying too hard to tap into that vein of New York women saying exactly what they feel, no matter how taboo it may be to say. Where Girls, and Bridesmaids before it, succeeds is how it involves women on a deeper level. Here are their needs, their wants, their desires, and then they strive to achieve them in ways women can identify with. Good Time has no such empowerment because the film still relies mostly on men and their wants, their desires, their twisted fantasies. Don’t be fooled by the female stars; this is a movie about men.

Though the frank dialogue about relationships and the graphic, though jokey and light, depictions of sex might serve the film well — I did like that it was unafraid to shock me — the movie does neglect much of the underlying subtext written into the characters. For instance, Lauren and Katie are obviously attracted to each other, and one even tells the other she loves her, but the movie barely acknowledges what might have been an interesting little development.

It’s a shame, too, because Graynor and Miller are endearing as these telephone-wielding sex workers. I didn’t always like what they were saying, or how they were saying it, but I admired that the characters were consistently pleasant and chipper amid all the crude jokes and sex humor. They share many of their scenes with a brilliantly aloof Justin Long, who plays one of those New York City street hustlers who relentlessly tries to get tourists to go to comedy shows with overpriced drinks and amateur comics. Long plays a gay man and I kept thinking Lauren and Katie would give him a telephone so he could expand their empire into New York’s gay community, but it’s another dead end as Long, funny as he is, serves very little purpose to the plot.

For a Good Time, Call is a mediocre comedy at best. If it were funnier I could give it a pass, but its humor often falls flat. And it pretends to be a witty female-empowerment movie, but with no wit and no female empowerment. What it has instead are penis jokes in every configuration possible. If that’s your thing, then ring this one up.