Sex comedy aims for zero laughs, hits bullseye

Sleeping With Other People is a soul-crushing void of raunch, flimsy paper-thin comedy and dialogue written by a sixth grader who likes to snicker at the entries for “penis” and “vagina” in Webster’s Dictionary. It’s about people who are having lots of sex, although I left wondering if anyone involved with the movie had actually participated in the act or if they had just learned of the practice from cheap porno and a dial-up connection.

I will gladly sit through edgy, or vulgar, or filth as long as there is something that anchors everything into place. This is just random word association with sex flashcards, and delivered with dialogue so mundane that two mechanics discussing radiator repair would be downright erotic in comparison. It’s the kind of movie where the two stars are introduced by her complimenting his porn, and him complimenting her panties. Classy. 

She is Lainey (Alison Brie) and he is Jake (Jason Sudeikis). They meet in college and lose their virginity to each other. Fast forward 12 years and they meet at a sex addiction support group, which is really where all the nymphomaniacs go to get ideas (Billy Eichner’s here doing a routine that would funny in any movie but this one). Lainey’s boyfriend has just broken up with her, and her side-guy, a dorky gynecologist, refuses to leave his wife. Jake drifts from one sexual encounter to another, a boat bobbing in the current. “Hey,” they figure, “let’s be benefit-free friends to keep each other company during our miserable descents into nowhere.” They even have a safe word, “mousetrap,” to signal when the sexual tension is overwhelming.

Yeesh, this movies just doesn’t stop blabbing. So much dialogue, it feels like it never stops. Not just dialogue either, but then narration, pop-up text messages, phone calls, all of it made up of grown adults internalizing their sexual failures until they eventually glitch out and have to reboot in safe mode. And all of it explicit in one way or another. At one point they talk about their favorite sex positions in front of a TV salesman, who smiles and nods like it’s the most normal thing in the universe. The film really lost me in an early scene, when Jake’s business partner turns to Lainey and asks, “Are you the one who made my friend a slut, or was it his father who molested him?” Yikes, it’s so bad it stings. 

The wheels really come off when Sudeikis, who’s unable to hide complete and utter embarrassment at this point, takes an empty tea jar, jams his fingers inside and instructs his female costar where all the landmarks are in her most intimate place. And the detail he goes into is enough to make Larry Flynt gag. Poor Brie, she’s watching this poor jar and wishing a truck would crash through the set and drag her off the studio lot. She was on Mad Men, damn it, and this is so far beneath her it’s subterranean. 

The logical path through the filth is telegraphed in the opening scenes: of course these two wayward souls must fall in love, “mousetrap” or not. Getting to that point is so agonizing that even people who fetishize agony are searching, clawing, scraping for their safewords. 

Woodley sparkles in starry cancer drama

The Fault in Our Stars is a compendium of dying-people clichés. You’ve seen and heard all its parts scattered throughout other films, but here they are all together in one place — a junk drawer labeled “cancer.”

This isn’t meant as an insult, just an observation of the film’s inclusion — and then clever re-tooling — of all those sick-people scenes that other movies perpetuate, from the first ominous cough to the agonizing funeral. But that’s why John Boone’s film, based on John Green’s hit young adult book, is a deeply moving and beautifully written piece of humanity: it’s not just a strummer of heartstrings, but a delicate examination of young people as they maneuver through the final chapters of their lives. And where it hits cliché, it does so in interesting ways that does not detract from the presentation.

We begin with teenager Hazel, our narrator and star. She’s cancer-free thanks to an experimental drug that has permanently eradicated the cancer, but rendered her lungs terrifyingly fragile. She must breathe from an oxygen tube that snakes around her ears and under her nose, an accessory she wears well. The oxygen tank is in a cute little rolling backpack she tows at her heels, her life-giving trailer. Although her health is good, Hazel is a broken soul: her sickness has made her cynical and depressed, and she’s slowly spiraling into a void. When she stands up at a survivor support group, she tells everyone that “oblivion is inevitable.” Her doctor wants to prescribe her an antidepressant. She resists: “Depression is a side effect of dying.”

Hazel is played with astounding confidence by Shailene Woodley, an actress who seems to have no limitations. Fault in Our Stars shows her simply and exquisitely: her hair is short and simple, her makeup is minimal, her actions are muted and hushed. But there is never a single moment that Woodley does not own the screen. Her Hazel meets Augustus (Ansel Elgort), an eccentric older boy who was robbed of one of his legs by cancer. Gus, as he’s called, is the opposite of Hazel: confident, bright, smiling, and eternally hopeful. In an unfortunate quirk that claims is a metaphor, Gus walks around with a cigarette in his teeth. He doesn’t smoke it, just chews on it, because by not lighting it he’s taking away its power. (Nevermind that he funded big tobacco for that privilege.) He’s especially kind to his best friend, who’s about to lose his eyes to cancer. When the friend is dumped by his girlfriend, Gus gives him his basketball trophies to smash in a cathartic rage.

Gus and Hazel meet at their support group — colliding in a trademark Meet Cute — and they start dating. “I fell in love with him the way you fall asleep: slowly and then all at once,” she says. His infectious smile seeps into her life, and before she knows it, she’s happy and invigorated — her outlook brightens. Aside from her failing health, and his upbeat spirit, the film spends a great deal of time worrying about author Peter Van Houten, who wrote Hazel’s favorite book, An Imperial Affliction, about a cancer patient. After Gus and Hazel start an online correspondence with Van Houten (Willem Dafoe), they travel to Amsterdam to meet him and to get answers about his cryptic novel, which ends mid-sentence, signifying the character’s sudden death. Of course, they show up and Van Houten isn’t who they thought, which sends them on a detour through the Anne Frank house and other gorgeous locations. 

This is what happens in The Fault in Our Stars, but this is not the core of the movie. Within the scenes, and the loosely thatched plot, is a dialogue to young people about their mortality, their love and their fragile hearts. Hazel and Gus ponder their existence, the eternities, cancer … they seem to be struggling through a thoughtful analysis of the entire universe, stars included. The dialogue is smart and engaging, and the characters are informed and intelligent. They act and talk like adults, a believable aspect to young people who have encountered adult-sized illnesses. This might all sound very existential and ambiguous, and it is, if only because the film wants you to sort out what it all means — life, love and death. 

The comedy can be grim; gallows humor is probably the right classification. At one point, someone says the word “cancertastic.” Later, Hazel and Gus take a blind friend to an ex-girlfriend’s house so he can chuck eggs at her convertible. Van Houten is awkward and awful, even as he blasts Swedish hip-hop for his new guests. Cancer seems to hang over everyone, yet they have to smile and push forward under that gloomy cloud. Such is life. 

The Fault in Our Stars is not a reinvention of teen dramas — it’s certainly no dismal Nicholas Sparks book-to-movie — but it does take great care in trying to understand teens and their hopes, dreams and fears. Teenagers aren’t the idiots that movies make them out to be. They yearn for smart movies as much as adults, if not more so.

Wiig ditches comedy for cerebral drama

Teenagers trick a homely live-in maid into thinking a down-on-his-luck man with a drug problem has a crush on her. The teens keep the ruse going through an elaborate series of letters and emails, each of which ignites the passion of their victim, who eventually steals some furniture, cashes out her bank account and relocates hundreds of miles away to start a new life with her unsuspecting pen pal.

Hateship Loveship has the bones of a comedy, which I certainly thought it was, especially when I saw Kristen Wiig’s name in the opening credits. The first scene shatters your expectations: an elderly woman turns to her caretaker and says she wants to wear her blue dress. When the caretaker returns with the dress, the woman is dead. Before she calls the police, the caretaker dresses the woman in the blue dress in a final act of humanity and love. 

The caretaker is Johanna (Wiig) and she finds another job caring for a widowed man (Nick Nolte) and his granddaughter, Sabitha (Hailee Steinfeld), who treats the new member of the household with a mixed bag of petulance and boredom. Sabitha’s father, Ken (Guy Pearce), comes around every couple of months, though he’s not welcome to stay over because he’s a drunk and an addict. After one of his visits, Sabitha and a friend hatch their plot to fool Johanna. The trick works marvelously: after a dozen or so letters, Johanna shows up to Ken’s place in the middle of the night and finds him passed out in bed. She doesn’t know what to do, so she starts cleaning. The next morning he’s in for a shock when his drug den is transformed into a remarkably livable space.

Liza Johnson’s delicate film, based on a short story by Alice Munro, plays out in what can only be described as a funereal crawl. It’s the kind of movie that shows Johanna unpacking her bags, but doesn’t cut away to abbreviate the scene. No, you see her take out a sweater, find a place for the sweater, and then return to the suitcase for more items. When she shows up to meet Ken, she wanders through the dumpy hotel he owns and the movie goes to great lengths to show her knocking on each of the doors, turning on doorknobs, hollering through windows. Some of it feels like unnecessary padding to the runtime, but other parts seem to open a lonely window into Johanna’s soul. 

Wiig, wearing her best June Cleaver outfits, mumbles much of her dialogue in quiet little bits. Her Johanna isn't entirely aware of the world around her; the word “aloof” comes to mind. Early in the film, she tries on a dress at a clothing store and whispers to herself, “It’s probably what I’m going to be married in.” Later she makes out with herself in a mirror and I couldn't help but this this was the first time she'd kissed anything, living or not. At this point you’ll think she’s either emotionally unstable or just terminally sad and alone. The film begs for your empathy, though some viewers will feel pity — neither emotion is wrong.

This slow-moving, deeply nuanced picture’s turning point is at Ken’s hotel, where he slowly finds himself won over to Johanna’s kindness. There is no promise of a relationship, or marriage, or commitment. Johanna shows up, realizes she’s been tricked and then never leaves. And Ken never asks her to leave. The bond they form is pure, even if what led them together was not.

Central to the story is Wiig, who doesn’t really act in the film — she mostly witnesses. I think she smiles twice, and maybe frowns once. She gives Johanna no personality because Johanna doesn’t have one. She simply lives, and feels, and admires — everything — from an internal mechanism that the viewer is not granted access to enter. It’s an honest performance, one that will stump some viewers and obliterate others. I think it’s exquisite.

Secrets hidden in every furtive glance

In Secret sent me careening backward through time to the tragic loser-hero Walter Neff, the star of Billy Wilder's intensely serious film noir Double Indemnity: "Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money — and a woman — and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty isn't it?"

Though it's far removed from James M. Cain's crime novel and the movie it spawned, In Secret pulses with their passionate energies. Where Double Indemnity was an insurance scam in 1940s Los Angeles, In Secret is a love affair in Victorian-era France. Its central figures suffer similar ailments: marriage has shrunk their worlds, and murder has imprisoned them in it.

In Secret opens in the 1850s with young Thérèse as her father abandons her with her aunt, Madame Raquin (Jessica Lange), who is not pleased with the addition to her sleepy farmhouse, where her only child has a rather serious lung ailment. Many years pass and the Madame marries Thérèse, now played by Elizabeth Olsen, to her cousin, the runtish, sickly Camille (Tom Felton, Draco Malfoy from the Harry Potter movies), who seems unable to discern the features of a woman from those of a travel trunk. Poor kid, he just seems constantly aloof.

The three move to Paris to take work: the women in a linen shop they own and Camille in some kind of financial institution, where papers are shuffled from desk to desk with little else getting done. At work, Camille runs into a childhood friend, Laurent (Oscar Isaac), who is everything Camille is not, including handsome and unabashedly sexual. When Laurent visits the home on Thursday game night, Thérèse can only gasp and swoon. She stands at an open window and pants, sweat dripping from her face. They begin a steamy affair that is difficult to keep hidden — in one episode Laurent hides under Thérèse's billowy skirt while the Madame skulks around her bedroom.

These affairs can never last, not without spilling over the edges of their own containment. Sure enough, Laurent hatches a plan that will forever destroy the balance of the house, their jobs and their love. Thérèse is mostly bullied into the scheme, aside from one moment of serious reflection that is interrupted by Camille, the boy who unknowingly sealed his fate with a misplaced joke.

The movie is the directorial debut for Charlie Stratton, who does a commendable job bringing the 1867 Émile Zola novel to the screen. The first and second acts are more solidly constructed than the third and final act, where the film staggers against the emotional weight that bears down on Thérèse. She has visions of dead bodies, she mopes around the house, sleeps in the store window and basically gives up on life. Much of the final act is spent dealing with Madame Raquin, who has had a stroke, her eyes trapped in a lifeless body.

The acting is superb all the way around. Isaac, fresh off Inside Llewyn Davis, is fantastic, as is Felton, who brings a boyish innocence to his tragic Camille. The movie really belongs to the women, though — Lange and Olsen are hypnotic in their tormented deliveries. Olsen's porcelain features give her a childlike demeanor, while Lange's elegant, but older, features reveal an instinctual aspect the film's young lovers can never anticipate. Generations apart, the two actresses somehow occupy the same devastating groove within In Secret’s anguished turmoil. When they face off late in the film, Olsen lets defeat wash over her character’s face while Lange, frozen in place, lets her eyes fill with terror and hate.

I must also commend the cinematography by Florian Hoffmeister, who uses mostly natural light — or candle or fire light — to paint his images. Much of the film takes place in shadows, in sunless corridors and dimly lit parlors, where dominoes are slapped on tables and lies are carefully manipulated onto unsuspecting witnesses. A scene early in the movie struck me as especially remarkable: Olsen sitting at a window, beams of sunlight shooting through in long horizontal bars and, back in the shadows, a bed with a sick boy stirring in the darkness. The movie holds the shot long enough for you to appreciate its composition.

If you’ll recall how Double Indemnity ended, then you’ll know some of the paths In Secret will be traveling. It’s not a pretty route. In fact, it’s terrifyingly dark and morose. But it’s an interesting period piece, one full of remarkable performances, finely detailed costumes, exquisite lighting and a finale that will suck the wind from your chest.

Angels, demons collide in vapid fantasy romance

A Winter’s Tale is undiluted romance. Cut it with some sugar and water and you’re likely to get a quadrilogy of sappy love stories.

This movie knows its audience and preach-panders directly to it. I don’t want to generalize and say the audience is women, but it’s mostly women. They’ll adore this movie. They’ll cherish every innocuous detail, every pretentious prop, every whispered stanza of romance. It will live on in their spongy lovelorn hearts as the ultimate personification of emotional tenderness, sacrifice and redemption.

Listen, I’m going to complain about this, but please understand this is the way it goes: men get dragged to these movies and, after a brief window of whiny complacency, they shrug their shoulders and admit the movie wasn’t made for them. This is my window to complain. 

A Winter’s Tale plunges headfirst into lady culture. It’s about a girl effortlessly playing the piano, the exchanging of miracles, flying magical horses, princess kisses, charcoal drawings of feminine figures, cute little girls in overly large woolen mittens, beds of roses, an abundance of star metaphors, boxes full of sentimental mementos, cancer scares and eternal love sprinkled in the cosmos. This laundry list might sound exaggerated, but I promise you it’s entirely accurate.

It begins in the 19th century when an immigrant family is turned away from America at Ellis Island because the husband has some sort of contagious disease. In the New York harbor, before a boat takes them back to their home country, the couple stuffs their baby in a wooden model boat and sends it sailing toward Manhattan — because pulling a Moses on your infant is better than, oh I don’t know, being a parent. The baby grows up to be Peter Lake (Colin Farrell), a masterclass thief whose special move is using a comically large grappling hook to shimmy up the front of Brownstones in broad daylight.

After running afoul with henchman Pearly (Russell Crowe), Peter prepares to leave the city on an especially agile horse that won’t gallop away until Peter makes one more score. This horse is a bad influence, but nevertheless Peter Bat-grapples into the home of Beverly Penn (Jessica Brown Findlay), who is home sick with “consumption,” which means she has to stay icy cold like a comic villain. They meet in the parlor, her at her piano banging out Brahms and he with his pistol unholstered and his burglar bag empty. She invites him in for tea. Of course, they fall in love. 

What happens next I wasn’t prepared for: angels and demons reveal themselves as vital players in this otherwise sleepy game of romance. And when I say angels and demons, that’s not allegory or metaphor, but actual angels and demons. Pearly plays the demon, and he has a scene where he ventures to meet Lucifer, who turns out to be Will Smith in a cameo so nutty it felt like a product placement for Planters. Lucifer and God have an agreement that neither angels or demons will interfere too much in the lives of humans. “Lou” has to tell Pearly to back off a little, which makes him even more sinister.

Meanwhile, Peter, who might be an angel, has to escape from Pearly without endangering Beverly and without using his “miracle,” which is apparently something he can just give away to anyone, although I first thought it was Beverly’s virginity which also figures into the plot. Before he knows it, though, Peter is waking up in modern-day New York City and trying to right more than a century of wrongs. And Pearly, his crime den now filled with flat screens instead of blackboards, still has a chip on his shoulder for the one who got away.

Yeesh, this movie. It just keeps going and going. And as the dialogue gets blander and blander (“You are my distant star, bright and special … blah, blah, blah”) the acting grows more and more frustrating. Beverly is interesting, if only because her medical condition is so laughably odd. She has to sleep in tents in the winter, walk through the snow in nightgowns, and take icy baths when her hand can fog a mirror. If only they had a refrigerator they could stuff her into like that baby and the boat. Farrell is also intriguing, even though I never thought he knew what was happening. I can picture him on the set asking questions and then shrugging, “Bollocks, it’s easier when I don’t know.”

The movie is directed, written and produced by screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who worked tirelessly for many years to bring Mark Helprin’s novel to the screen. While I thought A Winter’s Tale was tirelessly self-involved and plotted, I must acknowledge that fans of these types of movies will likely adore all that transpires. Two women sitting near me were unabashed by their infatuation for Peter, Beverly and their magical tale; when the movie ended, they were in puddles. I also must admit that his movie makes much more sense than anything in the Twilight series — not a difficult feat, though.

And a quick word on women and Valentine’s Day movies: I’ve made some cheap jokes here about how A Winter’s Tale is a woman’s movie, but we live in a changing world, where a woman might soon be in the White House, a gay man might soon be in the NFL and the pictures on bathrooms doors are merely suggestions for bathroom users. The gender landscapes are ever changing. Women will appreciate this movie, but they won’t be the only ones. If a movie brings joy into your life, then it has succeeded at something.

My heart does go out to spouses and dates, no matter the gender, though — grumble silently without ruining it for anyone else. It'll be over soon enough.

Perceptive truths revealed in college comedy

At Middleton isn't really about college. It's about a parent's perception of college, then funneled into fantasy and dreams, then boiled back to reality. It's a complicated formula, but one that is well worth all the chemistry.

The movie is about heart surgeon George and upscale furniture store owner Edith. They're married, but not to each other. They're taking their children — George's son Conrad and Edith's daughter Audrey — to Middleton University for a guided tour of the campus. They meet in the parking lot when George, nerdy and obsessive — “He probably irons his underwear,” Edith says — decides to be that guy who must back into his parking space. Edith steals the spot, sparking a lovable little feud.

Their tour group is led by Justin, who has witty little wisecracks for everything including how the school statue was stolen, where the bathrooms in the library are located ("Ironically, just past the Ps.") and a rather sinister joke about campus rape. This actor is playing this role like his career depends on it. I hope he lands another movie.

As the tour progresses, George and Edith, still in their catty feud, are separated from the group. As they bicker and trade barbs, they come to appreciate their similar predicaments: they’re both without their spouses touring a college with children who mostly hate them. The rest plays like a movie-length version of a Meet Cute, a phrase Roger Ebert pioneered and championed, a phrase that describes that charming set of circumstances that brings adorable couples together.

At Middleton works because the dialogue is snappy and smart — and brutally honest — and George and Edith are played by a bowtied Andy Gracia and a free-wheeling Vera Farmiga, both of whom can retire from romantic comedies now that they they've nailed this one. The people they play are mostly dopey and written as if they were on a Disney sitcom, but by the end of the movie I was cherishing them.

The movie follows them around Middleton as they skip from adventure to adventure, including when they steal a pair of bikes, break into French film classes, smoke pot in a dorm and bare their personal wounds in heartbreaking sequences that are so unique I found myself wondering how they ended up in this small disposable movie of all places. It's like finding the Hope Diamond at the Walmart jewelry counter.

Some of it is silly and fun: they sneak into a music classroom and play a dazzlingly manic version of “Chopsticks.” Other scenes are brutally honest: after infiltrating an acting class they're asked to perform an improvisational husband-and-wife scene. As they role play the scenario, they project their own spouses onto each other. And for the first time in maybe their whole lives, these two people are honest with themselves about love, relationships and marriage. It's one of the finest scenes of the new year, and it certainly would have ranked high even if At Middleton had opened in the frenzy of awards season last year. 

Some of the acting is rather awful, and college is portrayed as if the screenwriters had never actually been to one — at one point a kid wearing a football helmet on a unicycle rides past. They do manage to get Peter Riegert, an Animal House alumni, in there as the campus radio DJ. Mostly, though, college is shown as a fantasy, a place teens go to escape their parents, a place parents regretfully send their teens to grow up.

As the college-bound picture progresses it becomes abundantly clear that this isn't just a romantic comedy, but also a family drama as the two parents begin to contemplate their lives without their children in the home or, as Edith sees it, to be alone with her husband after 18 years, which terrifies her. The kids, played by Spencer Lofranco and Taissa Farmiga (Vera’s youngest sister), aren’t doing their parents any favors by rubbing salt in their expanding wounds. At one point, fed up, Edith turns to another parent and shrieks: “You want to know about Middleton? It doesn’t include you.” All George sees is flashes of parenting memories: “Sleepovers, soccer games, slamming doors. Where did the last 17 years go?”

At Middleton is a gloriously mediocre movie wrapped around some very perceptive ideas about parenting and love. It plays fast and loose with its mid-life quirkiness, and some of the neurotic banter will have you looking for Woody Allen cameos, but the film is filled with kernels of truth. And those truths resonate with surprising clarity. That's all I ask from my movies, and this one goes above and beyond.

Her: Spike Jonze's delicate masterpiece

I'm going to say something kinda nutty and audacious, so brace yourself: Her features the most heartbreaking movie romance since Casablanca.

Yes, Her's intricate power play of heartache, loss and existential exile from love is comparable to Ilsa and Rick's devastating acceptance of love's victory in Casablanca, a movie that has, over countless decades, come to symbolize the momentous weight of the heart's needs and desires.

Her is directed with beautiful resonance by Spike Jonze, a soft spoken and gentle director, whose careful personality and soft presence must be inviting to actors. How else would someone get this kind of performance from Joaquin Phoenix? He's so delicate and vulnerable that he spends the whole movie in a suspended state of shattering.

Phoenix plays Theodore, a nebbish wimp who sits in a cathedral-like office and writes poetic love letters for other people. Technically, though, he doesn't even write them; he speaks the letters out loud and his computer transcribes his words into a handwritten font. In the movie's quasi-sci-fi universe, even love is outsourced to others. After a modern Apple-like reveal, a new cell phone operating system hits the market. Theodore downloads it, answers three simple questions and in chimes Samantha, his personalized operating system voice. She's no Siri: her voice is smooth and measured, and her responses show personality and grace. The voice is played by Scarlett Johansson, though we never once see her. It might be one of the single greatest voice casting performances in the history of the cinema. Hyperbole much? See the movie and disagree with me; I dare you. 

Samantha begins by making Theodore's life more organized. She spell checks his emails, responds to his divorce attorney and streamlines his appointments. But she's more than a digital assistant — she's attentive to his needs, she can hear fluctuations in his voice that might indicate concern or worry, and she has a personality. One of the great mysteries of the film is trying to decide if she was programmed this way, or if she naturally learned to show her user so much compassion.

The movie takes place in the not-so-distant future, but it is only barely science fiction. One can make all kinds of pointed accusations about the film's intentions, but I don't think it's an indictment on our reliance of technology. It certainly makes the case that we depend on our phones and the Internet too much, but I think the soul of the movie resides in its central pairing — the human Theodore and the discombobulated voice of Samantha.

Of course Theodore falls in love with Samantha. More surprisingly is how Samantha falls for him. They share long discussions in bed, in his living room, on the beach and out in the city, where other people are also cooing intimate whispers with the earpieces socketed into their heads. The world is accepting of their courtship, at least as accepting as Japanese culture is with people marrying video game characters or body pillows — odd, but harmless. (Speaking of Japan, this will remind you heavily of Lost in Translation, another movie about love and longing with Johansson.) At one point Theodore and Samantha go on a date with another human couple, and it works simpler than you'd think: Theodore's cell phone is propped up so Samantha can "see" and she becomes an active participant in conversations. It's essentially a conference call. And when Theodore walks around he puts a safety pin in his shirt pocket, like a booster seat for Samantha's digital eye. It's kinda cute.

Sex is handled in an interesting way — it's basically phone sex. Later in the film, Samantha wants to provide Theodore with a deeper, more physical encounter so she hires a sex surrogate who serves as her body. Theodore is flattered, but it feels like cheating, so he backs out. The real woman, impressed with their commitment, can only sob with envy. It's a strange world they all occupy. 

Like Ilsa and Rick, this relationship has limits that neither can sustain, or want to. One has to leave, to where they do not know, but it's uncharted territory. Her's conclusion, neither set in stone nor ambiguous, is gratifying because … well, of course this is how it had to end. In a movie about connections — how we connect and to whom — this script finds all the right balances when it comes to organic versus electrical, real versus artificial, spoken versus unspoken. I was not entirely stunned when I saw that Jonze had written it as well as directed it. It looks exactly like the kind of movie a director who had already made Adaptation, Being john Malkovich and Where the Wild Things Are would make — one of profound presence. (Let me also suggest Jonze fans check out his sci-fi short, I'm Here, which shares some of Her's central themes.)

And let me reiterate how phenomenal Phoenix and Johansson are: they are simply breathtaking. I razz Johansson a lot for taking so many stupid movies, but here she is simply perfect. For the performance to work, we have to fall for her voice. For me, that happened almost instantly. It has just the right timbre; a little scratchy, but curious, sexy and devastatingly precise in mood, tone and speed. Phoenix has more at stake — a voice and a face — and he keeps up. To think, this guy almost retired, or "retired."

Now, I said this movie is comparable to Casablanca. While the two movies vary greatly, they contain one central driving mechanism: love is as much letting go as it is holding on. Both can be painful. Both can be exhilarating. Rarely are they both.

The Spectacular Wow

A monotonous static growls in the margins of most movies about teens: sex, drugs, prom, Friday-night football, cafeteria cliques, weekend keggers. It’s a rare film that can find a way to work without, or against, that well-established mantra. And The Spectacular Now is a very rare achievement, indeed.

Simply put: it is a uniquely written, marvelously acted and confidently directed film about the perils of falling in love when your compass still hasn’t found true north. It is one of the finest movies this year. And yes, it’s spectacular.

It is directed by James Ponsoldt, an up-and-coming director with an endless knack for framing the delicate and profound beauty that bubbles up from within the madness of addiction. He also believes in long, unbroken shots that allow his actors to, you know, act. In last year’s Smashed, a devastating portrait of alcohol abuse, Ponsoldt spun sympathy and dread around a terrifyingly young woman consumed by drink. Here, less than a year later, he again focuses on alcoholism, but also on another unfortunate addiction: people.

In comes Sutter Keely, the most popular student at his high school. He’s one of those kids with so much confidence that he needs a second backpack to carry it all around in. He’s constantly winking, smirking, plotting … at any moment he could explode from his seat and pinball down the locker-lined hallways. He loves the attention that swirls around him; he thrives off of it. Popular teens in movies are portrayed as cruel bullies, but not Sutter — he’s sincere and gentle, kind even. In the opening reveal, we see him in all his glory: at a party, beer in hand, diving into a pool with all his clothes on. His girlfriend, another elite member of his high school, has dumped him because he always lives in the now, never thinking of his — or their — future. He leaves the party and sneaks into a nightclub, where the warm blanket of bodies at the bar and on the dancefloor give him comfort. 

We truly meet Sutter the next morning. He’s passed out on a stranger’s lawn and he can’t find his car. Aimee, the newspaper delivery girl, finds him and lets him tag along until he gets his bearings. They strike up a friendship and then later a geometry study group. When she invites him into her room, he admires her nerdiness: unicorn figurines, kitten posters and Japanese manga on the bookshelves. The next day, in a sweet scene, he buys and starts reading one of the books on her shelf. She smiles — beams, actually — when she recognizes his innocent effort to learn more about her interests.

He invites her to an outdoor party, where they walk through the woods and kiss. They begin a dazzling and dizzying relationship, one that looks like a desperate rebound to Sutter’s friends, like a fire hazard to Aimee’s. Of course it looks odd: he is hyper and unrelenting, and she is fragile and studious. Somehow they balance each other out.

I could stop there and you’d think this were a romance (it is) or a relationship drama (that too). But it is volumes more. It’s about teens confronting their problems with brave faces. It’s about fathers and mothers, how their shortcomings reflect on their children. It’s about intimacy, but not so much about sex. It’s also about underage drinking, but without being preachy and underhanded. Sutter introduces Aimee to hard liquor, even gives her a flask as a gift. Here’s the honors student who first refused beer now sipping shots between lunch and fourth period. Their shared habit grows concerning, but the film refuses to address it further because its very existence is acknowledgment enough.

Mostly, though, The Spectacular Now is about being young. Sutter and Aimee are so carefree and likable that you can’t help but think of your own high school experience, back when the entire world seemed to hang on those first parties, those first kisses, those first heartbreaks.

This all probably sounds so audaciously simple — and it is — but The Spectacular Now looks upon all this with a fresh set of eyes and with two remarkable young actors who are capable of conveying all the doubt, the embarrassment, the confusion and ecstasy that comes with first loves. Sutter is played by Miles Teller, whose elongated face and scarred chin do nothing to halt Sutter’s fierce charisma. Sutter walks through life glowing and he knows it, and Teller captures that essence with a knock-out performance. Aimee is Shailene Woodley, who played George Clooney’s daughter in the Hawaiian family drama The Descendents. Woodley bares her heart here as Aimee, the girl no one looked twice at until Sutter turned his white-hot spotlight on her. Throughout most of the movie it looks like Woodley wears little or no makeup, and still she radiates.

This movie is one for the ages, at least as far as high school movies are concerned. Where Fast Times at Ridgemont High and Dazed & Confused were windows into particular points in time, and the teens swarming within, The Spectacular Now is more a window into the souls of two teens who are increasingly torn about the next step in their relationship. Aimee yearns for a ranch, a job at NASA and husband very different from herself (“It keeps things interesting.”) An adult tells her it sounds like a dream. “I think it’s good to dream,” she says. Sutter thinks only of the “now” and never the future, and he’s much more complicated, especially when he comes to learn who his father is. The film has a brutal and honest exchange between Sutter and his good-natured boss. “If I were your dad this is where I’d give you a lecture or something,” the boss tells him. Sutter replies back: “If you were my dad you wouldn’t have to.”

The movie touches on that mantra I discussed earlier, but it doesn't obsess. Prom and graduation come and go so quickly they feel like abbreviations compared to other movies. And even those scenes are turned upside down. Prom, for instance, has a tender moment where Aimee can clearly see Sutter's ex-girlfriend on the dancefloor. She could be jealous and spiteful, but she insists they dance. Maybe she's testing Sutter's love, or maybe just testing her own. Other scenes, including a violent argument with a shocker ending, prove how raw and real this relationship has been written. These aren't your typical teens; they love and lust, argue and bicker, second-guess and self-doubt like real teens. By the end of the film, long after graduation, we have a troubled near-alcoholic kid, who has so many abandonment and daddy issues that he can barely acknowledge the perfectness of the girl who seems ready to right his veering ship. And we also have a love-worn girl who fell for the first guy who laid eyes on her, and he brings her down more often than she lifts him up. These are mesmerizing figures, and also a little tragic.

This is a beautiful movie directed by a fantastic new director and starring two talented actors playing complexly written teens. The movie doesn’t reinvent high-school movies, but it does peel down a layer to reveal a deeper humanity at the core of every teen. Maybe you’ve made some regretful movie choices this summer — I know have. Do yourself a favor and go see The Spectacular Now, one of the best movies of the year.

And you thought your OkCupid date was bad

The world is ready for a zom-rom-com. That's zombie romantic comedy. It sounds more like an identity crisis, but just roll with it; Warm Bodies will surprise you.

Just when I thought our civilization couldn't hold another piece of the as-yet-to-take-place zombie apocalypse — from video games, comics, podcasts, books, movies and TV's rapidly decomposing Walking Dead — George Romero's famous genre, with its lumbering living dead shuffling around for braaaaaaains, has come up with something fresh, downright charming even.

The film begins with narration that casts a non-judgmental eye on society's deteriorating state: Here is the world now. Here is the chaos. Here is a zombie. Here is a zombie eating someone. "And, oh, by the way, I'm a zombie." The narrator is R — just the letter R — because he's been dead so long that he can't really remember the rest of the letters. Though he speaks to us with wit and a splendid self-deprecating sense of humor, R can only manage a grunt or two within the world he inhabits. He does have interests, though ("Yeah, I'm a hoarder"), and even a zombie friend who stands next to him at a demolished airport bar and grunts during their daily bro-date.

R's wandering zombie routine is interrupted when non-zombie Julie is sniffed out in a nearby pharmacy. Against R's primal zombie instincts, he saves Julie (after munching on her friends) and walks her back to his curio-stocked zombie lair on an airplane, where he tells her in one-word sentences that she'll be safe until the roaming undead scatter. She, of course, is mortified of him — his cold skin, his hazy eyes that often stare uncomfortably at her, and a gaping chest wound that she created in a fit of panic — but then he starts forming rudimentary sentences and they struggle through conversation. The movie doesn't throw her into his arms; he really has to work for it until he earns her admiration. "You're very different than all the others," she says. What she doesn't know is that her warmth and compassion are healing R's cold, dead, mucus-y zombie heart.

There are other moving parts to this machine, including John Malkovich, playing Julie's father, who is hunting for a zombie cure yet finds it unbelievable that R might be curing himself with his daughter's affection. Another subspecies of zombie also turns up: the bonies, super-feral creatures that have un-evolved even past their undead counterparts. These are the film's real villains, and Warm Bodies must have had a tight budget because the CGI models for each one are identical, as if only one were created and then ctrl-v'd in the background. The subpar effects are noticeable, yet also forgivable once you start getting attached to R and Julie's Romeo-meets-Juliet-in-a-cannibal-kitchen romance.

R is played by Nicholas Hoult, who played the curious little boy sharing the screen — correction: owning the screen — around Hugh Grant in About a Boy. He plays a convincing zombie with an impeccable shuffle and his taste in vintage vinyl is noteworthy. Julie is played by relative newcomer Teresa Palmer, a lovely actress whose job, falling for a decaying corpse, is a grueling task that she pulls off with heartwarming believability. I loved these two and their awkward moments.

Warm Bodies, a title that sounds more like a late-night feature on Cinemax than a quirky horror-comedy, takes some zombie liberties that purists will grumble at — "Zombies can't open doors! Blasphemy!" — but considering the film is so richly humorous I think the zombiephiles will forgive some of the genre-bending sequences as they did with the last original zombie movie, Shaun of the Dead. And just listen to all the fantastic music: Bob Dylan, Bruce Springsteen, Chad Valley, M83 and many more. Each song fits the scenes they appear in perfectly. In one sequence, R puts on "Patience" by Guns N' Roses, a playlist choice so fitting it's as if the whole song, sad whistling and all, existed to prop up this scene. A gag with a Roy Orbison song and a Pretty Woman reference also turns up with a rewarding payoff.

The movie is directed by Jonathan Levine, a young filmmaker with a knack for movies about young people — alive and dead — treading their own path in complicated worlds with rules dictated by others. His 50/50 and The Wackness are exceptional films that showcased his unmistakable skill for the language of filmmaking. Warm Bodies is more of Levine having fun and letting loose, and I enjoyed the places he took me.

Warm Bodies asks a lot from its audience, but don't all zombie movies? Certainly if you can accept a movie where the dead rise from the earth and start eating people, then you can also accept that perhaps, just maybe, a zombie and a human can put aside all that bitter violence to fall in love. It's not that much of a stretch, and Levin guides you to that point with careful cleverness. This is the first hit of 2013, and it could not have been more unexpected.

Zom-rom-com will not be alone long, though. I predict a zombie opera before long. A zopera. Or maybe a zombie western. Hey, the more the merrier.