News You Can Bruise for 2014 November 3

Pretty slim pickings this month. (Damn, shoulda used that line back in April after I saw 1941. Oh well, no one will even know—wait, am I typing this? Computer, end program.)

• Paul (2012): Seen on the flight to San Francisco for Books in Browsers. Let this film serve as a test case for what Edgar Wright brings to the Edgar Wright/Simon Pegg/Nick Frost trio. Paul has tons of intertextuality and nerd references and stunt casting. It's got fun slapstick, good one-liners, and even that elusive element known as "heart". But "heart", while necessary, is not sufficient. There's some other element, let's call it "heart-prime", which is required to take a big nerdy self-referential heartfelt mess and make it into a tight narrative with non-cheap emotional payoffs. That element is missing here, and the most obvious variable that got changed is the director, so that's the conclusion I'm gonna draw.

  It was nice to see Jesse Plemons as a vengeful hick, in a bit of prescient stunt casting.

• How To Train Your Dragon (2010): I didn't see this movie, the person next to me was watching it while I was watching Paul, but I wanted to mention that I thought the newt-cat black dragon was cute.
• Moonrise Kingdom (2012): I saw this on the return flight! Nothing works like a Wes Anderson movie for letting me forget I'm on a plane for two hours. It looks great, the story is meh, I won't complain. I will admit that I fast-forwarded some of the slow dialogue-free scenes to make sure I'd get through the film before my plane landed. I wonder if Wes Anderson has ever looked into doing site-specific installation pieces.
• Gonna throw in the matinee of Chuck Jones cartoons I saw at the museum on November 2. I won't review every single cartoon, but I do want to single out "Deduce, You Say" (a Daffy Duck/Porky Pig Sherlock Holmes spoof) as an especially clever and funny entry. I loved the way it lets Porky, a character I always found dull, play a dry-witted straight man. In general I think Looney Tunes cartoons are more interesting when the main characters face an external threat rather than spending the whole cartoon trying to kill each other. (With "Rabbit Fire" you get both, of course.)

It may appear that I wouldn't have seen any movies in October were it not for my trip to San Francisco. What you don't know is that by taking the trip to San Francisco I missed out on a weekend of cool old horror movies at the museum. So it was probably two movies either way.