Cinematical

I didn't see a lot of movies in theaters as a child -- when you have younger brothers and a sister, family moviegoing is difficult and expensive. But by 1983, I was old enough to go to movies with friends -- proper PG movies, not that babyish Disney stuff, either. Still, there were many movies I had to miss. Although PG-13 was still a year away, my mom often checked the local Catholic weekly newspaper to make sure I wasn't seeing anything Morally Offensive. I don't know why I didn't just sneak into more movies, but I was a prissy little 14-year-old and suspect most of my friends were too. (Also, a terrible liar.)

Despite the restrictions, I remember 1983 as one of my favorite summers for movies because it marked the first time I stood in line on a movie's opening day to see something I was really, really excited about. I wasn't disappointed, either, although the summer did hold some letdowns. It also marks the first time I saw an R-rated movie in a theater, which my parents would never have let me do at that time, and which was also far from disappointing. I've bolded the titles of my favorite films from that summer.

I love watching Sandra Bullock, who is enjoyable even in the lamest of films. And sadly, there are so many lame movies starring Bullock, and so few that I would enjoy watching more than once -- Infamous is a rare exception. After I saw Speed, I said that I thought Bullock could be this generation's Carole Lombard, but unfortunately the actress has not yet found her Howard Hawks or Ernst Lubitsch. The Proposal is yet another Bullock-starring formulaic romantic comedy with little to offer except sparkling performances, and not just from Bullock.

Margaret Tate (Bullock) is the terror of the Manhattan publishing office where she's editor-in-chief, and even her charming assistant Andrew (Ryan Reynolds) is scared of her. Her Achilles heel turns out to be that she's ... Canadian, and she's about to be deported for a year due to some visa problems. So Margaret hurriedly declares that she's engaged to Andrew, who's American. You don't have to have seen Green Card to guess the rest of the story.

Throughout My Life in Ruins, a couple of characters are frequently reminded that they are not as funny as they think they are. Unfortunately, this also applies to the movie itself. It wants to be a bubbly and occasionally zany comedy with a touch of romance surrounded by gorgeous Greek scenery ... but it often feels flat and forced, and even the landscapes seemed blah. It's being touted as a follow-up to My Big Fat Greek Wedding, with the same lead actress (Nia Vardalos), but it doesn't have the pleasing blend of comedy and family sentiment that made its predecessor a success.

The movie is about a five-day tour of legendary ruins in Greece (thus the title). Georgia (Vardalos), a former history instructor whose stopgap job as a tour guide has extended for years. She hates her job, fusses because she's being assigned "second-class" tourists, and finds fault with everything in Greece that isn't at least 2,000 years old. Various Greeks -- her boss, her bus driver -- tell her that she has lost her kefi, a Greek word meaning joie de vivre or mojo or the ability to not annoy the audience. She just needs to relax and get laid and stop worrying her pretty head about things.

I'm a little annoyed with Up right now, because it made me cry in the first 10 minutes. Crying at the end of a movie is easier to hide -- you can mutter about allergies or how too much computer time makes your eyes red. But crying at the beginning of the movie makes you feel like an awfully sappy wuss. Thank goodness I had big ol' 3-D glasses on, which at least managed to hide any telltale traces of weakness ... until I cried again at the end, damn it.

Up is the latest film from Pixar, and this time the main character is not a robot or rat or monster, but rather a little old man who looks like Spencer Tracy and occasionally growls like Clint Eastwood in Gran Torino. After his wife dies, Carl Fredericksen (Ed Asner) faces a lonely life ahead, possibly in a retirement community. He decides to have the adventure that he and his wife always dreamed of, and sets out for the quasi-legendary Paradise Falls in South America. His method of travel? The family home, lifted by an amazing canopy of balloons. However, he isn't alone ... he's inadvertently picked up an enthusiastic 8-year-old Wilderness Explorer, Russell (Jordan Nagai), who only wants to help.

This week, it feels like Star Trek is everywhere. I've read more about old characters and new characters and new actors playing old characters, whether the new movie counts as even-numbered or odd-numbered, and various other lists and updates and theories.

But Trek references have been all over the place for a very long time, with parodies perpetrated by everyone from Carol Burnett to Miss Piggy to Beavis and Butthead. The Internet has a wealth of home-grown mash-ups and spoofs and fan fiction. I like the bunnies doing Wrath of Khan in 30 seconds, myself, but I just saw Khan for the first time last month so I'm enjoying all the jokes related to that movie more than usual.

Here's a list of seven of the most memorable Star Trek spoofs and parodies from film and TV over the years. I've even included a few video clips. I'm sure there are more out there that I don't know about, so feel free to share them in the comments.

Hollywood loves to stereotype people with mental illnesses as being merely quirky, or easy to cure if you just give 'em a lot of the right kind of love. The Soloist aims for a more realistic portrayal, and even tries to build awareness about the problems of homeless people in America. Unfortunately, the overall film isn't compelling, and the plot falls into the easy traps of traditional melodrama.

Steve Lopez's nonfiction book was adapted by Susannah Grant (Erin Brockovich, Catch and Release). Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) is always on the hunt for more material to fill his LA Times column space, even cannibalizing his own cycling accident to tell a good story. When he encounters Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) playing violin by a statue of Beethoven, and learns that this homeless man once attended Juilliard, he figures he's hit the columnist jackpot. Little by little he starts to try to "fix" Nathaniel -- finding him a cello and a safe place to play, taking him to symphony rehearsals -- but it's not all that easy. And naturally, Steve's life starts to change too, and he's not sure how to handle it.

This is difficult for me to confess, but I'm starting to like Zac Efron ... although not in a crushworthy way, because at my age, that would be creepy. High School Musical 3 was not my thing, and he didn't make an impression on me in Hairspray, but I thought he was wonderfully energetic and fun in Me and Orson Welles when I saw Richard Linklater's film at SXSW last month. And now Efron is starring in 17 Again, a run-of-the-mill family comedy that would be tiresome if not for Efron and a few of the other cast members. Together, these actors kept me from digging through my purse continually for my phone so I could see how many minutes were left in the movie.

17 Again drags out every cliche from body-changing movies -- if you don't know them, check out Christopher Campbell's hilariously accurate list on SpoutBlog -- and unfortunately, doesn't try anything new or suspenseful. In this particular variation, Mike (Matthew Perry) is still reliving his high-school days, when he was the BMOC and a basketball star and everything was perfect, until he made a choice that has landed him with a dead-end job, two kids in high school who practically ignore him, and a wife (Leslie Mann) who's divorcing him because she's justifiably tired of his eternal whininess. So he wishes he were his teenage self again, and does so in front of a Clarence-esque janitor (Brian Doyle-Murray) -- and whammo! He's 17, but everyone else stayed the same age. Now he can go back to high school and help his kids and shoot lots of hoops and make it all better.

My imagination was caught by the title of the upcoming movie Monsters vs. Aliens. I've seen a lot of monster movies and films with aliens in them. I wondered how would some of these characters fare in battle against one another. How would the gentle aliens from Galaxy Quest be able to stand up to vampires? Could Superman defeat the monster from The Host? How would Ford Prefect deal with Noah Cross?

So I decided to stage a smackdown event featuring some of the best-known monsters and aliens in film in one-on-one combat. Instead of matching up characters with similar (or notably different) abilities, I paired them up the old-fashioned way: pulling names out of a hat. Two hats -- I filled one with the names of every alien creature I could think of from movies, and another with every conceivable monster. Here are the results. Be afraid. Be very afraid.

Get out a whole box of Kleenex, one of the jumbo packs, before you see Mine. Movies about post-Katrina problems can be sad enough, but this documentary is about pets, too. You know you're not going to get through this movie dry-eyed unless you have no heart whatsoever. You may even find yourself headed for an animal shelter afterwards, if you're not careful. Director Geralyn Pezanoski skillfully tells an emotional story that rarely resorts to the obvious, or to "good guys vs. bad guys."

Mine focuses on Katrina evacuees who were separated from their pets (involuntarily in one case), and who are trying to find and reunite with the animals. The movie opens with Malvin, a man in his eighties, reminiscing about his dog Bandit while carrying the dog's leash, which he found in his yard after the floods. I immediately suspected this story wouldn't end happily at all. The movie then shows us post-Katrina animal rescue. Shelters and many hotels didn't accept pets, so many evacuees had to leave the animals behind. They assumed it would only be for a few days, but the impact of the disaster was such that people couldn't return to their homes for weeks.

In the meantime, animal rescue teams were able to find and round up many of the stranded pets. Some pets were taken to animal shelters in other states, some of which offered the pets not for fostering but for adoption. Heartbreaking situations resulted, and Mine focuses on a few of them. For example, Victor's dog Max was sent to Florida and adopted by Tiffany, who bonded with her new pet immediately. But Victor missed Max. How could this be resolved?

During the introduction to The 2 Bobs on the opening night of SXSW, SXSW co-founder Louis Black referred to the comedy as Tim McCanlies's "Kevin Smith film." I'd argue that this isn't quite accurate -- instead, The 2 Bobs is the writer-director's Bruce Campbell film. I hope McCanlies won't be offended when I explain that this isn't because he physically resembles Campbell (sadly, so few people do). What I mean is that you don't want to go into The 2 Bobs thinking that this is going to be the same sort of dramatic film as McCanlies's Secondhand Lions, or a super-polished Hollywood studio comedy.

Instead, The 2 Bobs is a cheesy micro-budget film shot on the filmmaker's home turf, very much like Campbell's My Name is Bruce, or maybe Fanboys before the Weinsteins started messing with it. And like My Name is Bruce, I sighed inwardly at the dorky plot, clunky dialogue, and lame gags while at the same time laughing aloud at the unbelievably bizarre situations and jokes.