The Hurt Locker is not about Iraq, why we went there, what we did when we got there, or whether we should have gone in the first place. It is not about American foreign policy or domestic disagreement over that policy; it’s not even about soldiers or their qualities or character …  it’s not about politics at all.

The Hurt Locker is about an adrenaline junkie who gets off defusing bombs.

Sgt. Will James is very good at this narrow work. He is occasionally a fool who takes unnecessary chances. Far more often he is an expert who enjoys that his wisely bold tactics occasionally make him appear a fool—because a fool’s luck has nothing to do with his success. Early in the picture and after much prodding, Sgt. James admits to a superior officer that he has defused “873 bombs, counting today.”

Nobody’s luck is that good.

This is a telling scene for another reason: He’s happy for the recognition, but painfully shy about it, too. He fairly leaps from the truck to reply to the officer—but it’s because his inquisitor is an officer, not because the question will give him a moment of glory. The officer, played by the always interesting David Morse, has to pry the information out of him and turn it into a boast on Sgt. James’ behalf. Morse’s officer is so unabashedly enthusiastic with his praise that we’re not sure—and apparently neither is Sgt. James—if it is genuine, or a set-up to a dressing-down for the apparently insane risks he’s just taken.

The little-known (for now), Jeremy Renner plays Sgt. James, and he plays him like a guy who would enjoy solving a Rubik’s Cube while sitting on a high-wire over a pit of rabid alligators. Renner’s James is incapable of simply existing. Every moment must be a deadline or the run-up to some test. In his off-hours he plays punch-out with another soldier, and not just for the sake of taking a punch. The two are working through a grudge right out in the open. He creates a brief mission for himself that can have no benefits in its outcome aside from having survived on the quality of its execution. He looks for reasons to get next to live bombs, once on the pretext of rescuing a pair of entirely disposable gloves. Yet even this has more danger attached to it than anyone first thinks, but Sgt. James knows (at least, I think he does), and gets off on the errand all the more because of it.

The Hurt Locker is also a good-looking picture. For instance, the shots of explosions are carried out much more thoughtfully than with the standard “cover it with cameras” action-picture approach. Director Kathryn Bigelow (whose last great pictures were 20 years ago—Blue Steel and Point Break) shoots the gravelly ground rising in slow motion; she gets the shuddering and the debris exactly right (again, as someone like me who hasn’t seen this stuff for real will imagine they should look)—there is never an obvious, go-for-broke FX shot for its own sake here. At times our view of the explosions is mostly one-off detail, and rather than distracting us from the moment, it enhances how we perceive it. That is the purpose of good direction and good camera work: not to draw attention to itself, but to enhance the story.

Which is a little ironic, because The Hurt Locker is not a story at all, but a character study. It is rare that a character study is carried out with so much expert attention to making a truly engaging and entertaining picture. The Hurt Locker is an apolitical and very entertaining movie about a very interesting man.

Well, I liked it. That’s no guarantee you will.

Years ago, I did stand-up. Learned a lot doing that. One thing you learn is that there’s often a difference between the craft of comedy and what it takes to reliably get laughs. Some of the most inventive, impressive comedy minds don’t sell a lot of tickets. (I could name them. You wouldn’t know them.) But one act you can almost always count on selling tickets—putting “butts in seats,” as a venue-owner will say—is one that is big and loud and shocking. That is, there is The Fine Art of Stand-up Comedy, and then there is Getting A Reaction Out of The Audience. (That’s why many comedians curse so much. That’s why I cursed so much.) Turns out the latter is almost always going to sell tickets, and people are going to laugh for much the same reason a baby laughs when you play peek-a-boo with him. I think most people laugh at Gallagher not because he’s particularly creative in busting that watermelon with a sledgehammer, but because he had the stones to drag the thing up there the first time and smash it at all. We are surprised, and all but the most unpleasant surprise begets laughter.

So “comedy”—rather, the getting of laughs—comes in two basic approaches, wit and shock. The former takes skill; the latter takes immodesty, but both are saleable and, to the vast majority of people, entertaining. (Hence the basis for the fact that the vector of quality for entertainment points ever downward.)

Sometimes, and it’s rare, you get wit and shock together. Borat was that. The problem with the combination is that a whole lot of people are so offended by the shock that they have no interest in digging through the muck to get to the wit. They may even deny that it’s there, or claim it’s not worth getting dirty to find it. Fair enough. But Borat did find that combination at times, and many controversial performers do (and did) find it fairly often:  Sam Kinison, Bill Hicks (both dead too young, bless ‘em), Howard Stern, Penn & Teller.

Bruno, though, is almost pure shock, and for that reason it will probably make more money than Borat. Bruno is pure raunch. As I said to a friend who saw it with me (my second viewing, I must admit), “If someone handed you this R-rated movie and asked you to make it NC-17, what could you possibly put in it to make it so?” I was stumped. So was he. Yet, as I said, shock is a pretty effective kind of entertainment. Bruno works if you don’t believe in the possibility of moral decline from an hour-and-a-half of immoral repose. I laughed. A whole lot. Sue me.

So what’s in the movie? Well, it’s mostly “gay fashionista” Bruno doing, describing, pantomiming, praising, parsing, and peeling back homo – and hetero-sexual, umm, acts, to the outrage of immediate onlookers, for the better (or worse) part of an hour and a half. It is explicit and vulgar and unflinching. Because of that, it is also riotously funny. It is tighter (sorry) than Borat; no scene simply marks time or advances the (almost non-existent) plot without incident. Unlike Borat, it tiptoes up to some of the sacred cows of the left, though it comes nowhere near tipping them over. It takes the easy shots at Alabama rednecks. (Memo to Sacha Baron Cohen: there are rural areas and rednecks outside every major city—New York, Washington, Chicago. Go there next time and expose the un-popped prejudices of some of your smug coastal fans.) It zaps stage parents. It digs at people too nice to dig back.

What it doesn’t do is preach about gay rights. I think the whole social consciousness shtick attached to this picture is nothing more than preventive marketing. Sacha Baron Cohen and director Larry Charles don’t have any political agenda that I can find, and I’ve dug through this thing twice (the second time to hear the jokes I laughed over the first time). They just want to get laughs. By any means necessary.

Mission accomplished.

Not this time. And that is why, despite spectacular visual effects, a brooding and hyper-popular Christian Bale in the lead role, and marketing that pretty much stamped the title across my kids’ foreheads, Terminator Salvation is not nearly the success that the other three movies were.

John Connor and his mom (and his friends and pretty much everybody else with whom they ever come in contact) become instant targets for future-born Terminator robots. The setup is pretty straightforward. The time is present day.

I’m talking about the other pictures, not this one.

This picture is the dog that caught the car: finally we are carried into the future where the post-nuclear dystopian world is filled with killer robots on a constant hunt. This is what we have been (well, I have been) curious to see since the very first of these pictures. Turns out, though, that a bunch of anonymous killer robots aren’t much more interesting than a bunch of trees in the wind or a bunch of cars in traffic. You gotta have a personal story to make the movie take off—you gotta have a conflict so clear it bats you in the head, for instance, the marketing campaign for a big summer movie about killer robots from the future.

In this picture, John Connor is… umm… I think he’s trying to save a guy long enough for that guy to go back in history to impregnate Connor’s mother-to-be so she can give birth to him (Connor) so he (Connor again) can grow up to—save the life of his father so he can go back in time to impregnate Connor’s mother to give birth to him? Maybe? Wasn’t this supposed to be about a killer robot? Ah, well. I wish it was just John Connor and his mother-du-jour on the run from a Terminator, in a series of hair’s-breadth escapes that make mayhem and carnage of and around the lower-billed actors, each of who should enjoy a nifty/gross death scene that they can put on their reel.

This picture needed a bad guy, or a bad robot (which might make it a job for J.J. Abrams, haha) to chase the good guy around—and this good guy didn’t come off as particularly likable, by the way, or even particularly good.

Oh—and the final cheat is that after spending two hours hearing that this is the decisive battle against the evil Skynet, we learn in an end-of-movie voiceover that—surprise!—this is actually just one more battle in the apparently eternal march against Skynet. Can they never be defeated? Only by relatively bad box office, I guess. Maybe this time.

Zahn plays a slacker (Yeah, what else is new, but he’s so good at it!) wasting away as the night manager at his parents’ rural motel. Aniston sells motel owners the painted-in-bulk art you find in motel rooms. For reasons that are never made clear, she doesn’t try to sell Zahn and his parents any art. She’s in the tiny town to sell to someone else — which made me wonder…

A) Just how many other third-tier motels does this little town have?

B) How much does this bottom-shelf art go for that a salesperson can make enough money selling it in such small quantities to justify flying across the country to close the deal?

Bonehead Zahn falls for middle-management Aniston. She feels no chemistry, so in exchange for leaving her alone she proposes that she will allow him to “touch my butt.” As you might imagine, neither of them sticks to the “leave me alone” part of the deal, and a second encounter inspires Zahn’s cross-country pursuit of Aniston.

It’s a funny premise that’s been done before (except for the butt-touching), but there’s always room for a fresh attempt. The problem here is that Management is populated by people we are never made to care about. It is further marred by long passages that go nowhere carried out by people whose backgrounds and motivations are largely a mystery. For us to care about Zahn’s goofy character, we need a reason to like him. We never get it. Aniston’s character seems just simple-minded; she is not curious or ambitious, and we don’t know why she lacks these or other basic characteristics that interesting people usually have. That’s the heart of it, really: these people are given some interesting things to do, but they are not portrayed as interesting people. The characters are simply participants—actors, if you will—in various scenes that fail to engage the audience emotionally.

The movie suffers further from radical shifts in tone: One minute, it’s calm and romantic, then it’s surreal (an Airplane-style episode of Buddhist monks playing volleyball with Steve Zahn? Really?), then it’s supposed to be touching. Even that sort of thing can work, since life itself sometimes gives us radical changes in tone, but it only works in the movies when we care about the people it’s happening to.

Management needs a better script, a better director, or both.

But just because the characters are sympathetic doesn’t mean they’re in a good movie.

Sin Nombre is at once an illuminating portrayal of anonymous people (hence the title: in English, Nameless) and a thriller marred by long stretches of un-illuminating inactivity, poutiness by the lead character as a substitute for acting, and a spectacularly clichéd climax. The fact that the picture is in a language other than English elicits in some American critics the same reaction that British accents bring out in American audiences: This doesn’t sound like what I hear every day, so it must be important.

It’s not that it’s a terrible movie. It’s not at all–it’s pretty good in fact, for what it is. But there are better thrillers out there with superior dialogue and deeper characters that never get the kind of acclaim that Sin Nombre enjoys. I believe it is being praised more for the sympathetic and PC nature of its characters and story than for the artistic or entertainment value of the picture itself.

Sin Nombre may be a filmmakers’ attempt to influence the immigration debate in the U.S., but that’s not apparent from the movie, which is a straightforward story about people in dire straits. That their situation is an element in a larger political debate is never mentioned. This lack of a direct appeal makes it a more effective plea for sympathy for illegal immigrants, and perhaps that was the filmmakers’ intent.

But again, the implications of the story are just that, assumptions that viewers may make (which is a whole lot of the reason people make and see movies in the first place). Moreover, the problems that the would-be immigrants face are almost entirely the doing of South and Central Americans governments, not Washington, DC. Compared to the other obstacles the characters face in getting to America, getting across the U.S. border is quite literally a trivial matter.

There is quality filmmaking here, at times top-shelf, but even top-shelf is still off-the-shelf. Sin Nombre is as well-directed as anything else in the sub-genre of the real-world thriller, but that’s a mighty narrow niche, and the occasionally inspired visual or intense moment does not make up for the pedestrian feel of the rest of it—pedestrian in the sense that we’ve felt this kind of tension in a movie many times before, and we know reflexively where it’s going.

The most notable achievement here is the extraction of the franchise from fanboy fever swamps into mega-mainstream entertainment. The first three or four Star Trek movies were events with fanfare and media pomp, but after that they diminished into little more than baubled-up TV episodes for fans. You had to know not only the characters but also the Star Trek “universe” to really care about what was going on and why. But this picture works for anybody who even stumbles into it: Kirk is a tough guy, Spock is a smart guy, the rest are identifiably quirky in a Syd Field kind of way, and everybody who aspires to be above the title in their next movie is sexy.

The visual effects are impressive, and evoke those from the earlier pictures while still being gussied up with the latest computer-driven miracles. The costumes are closer to those of the original series than the movies—another nice touch. In fact, the whole thing is wonderfully clever in acknowledging the series and even the movies while still updating the characters and setting with the possibilities of 21st century movie-making.

If there’s a big failure here, it’s the screenplay. After the first hour, the story is almost impossible to follow–something about time travel and alternate universes (with utter disregard not only for basic physical laws like the conservation of energy but also vital pensées such as Are you now liable twice for your outstanding credit card balance? and Can you collect double social security?).

But this Star Trek still thrives, and for one reason:  It drops familiar characters and backdrops into the 21st Century Action Movie Machine. That means certain inherently attractive things are guaranteed: a furious pace, lots of explosions and close calls, eye-popping visual effects, a few futuristic characters created with computer animation, and a nostalgic cameo. Every year, the machine gains a new and faster-spinning gear. The old Star Trek movies look dated and, in a few years, this one will, too. But not today. The “rebooted” Star Trek is, as Elvis Costello put it, just “this year’s model.” It’s simple, ephemeral fun. Not that there’s anything wrong with that.

Crank: High Voltage is surely the most visually inventive picture of the year. It is not just candy for your eyes, it is amphetamines. It is among the best times I’ve had at the movies in the past few years.

A director usually focuses on one or two typical movie elements to the detriment of the others, which is why you so often see a dull picture filled with intense acting, or a blockbuster story with throwaway characters. The most common of all permutations is action ueber alles in which car chases follow bar fights follow gunplay follows airplane battles follow robot wars. But the rarest is one in which the director finds a string of absolutely original things to do for nearly every minute of the movie. That’s what happens in Crank: High Voltage, and that’s what makes it so exciting.

Start with the look of the picture. When you first see it, you can’t quite put your finger on why it looks different, but pay close attention: the motion has a stutter. When people and objects move quickly in a typical film, they smear. In this picture, fast motion looks more like a series of stop-action photos flipped past very quickly. (Turns out this is achieved using a “narrow shutter angle”—simply put, each frame is exposed for less time than in a typical shoot, so there’s less motion to record.) Combined with modest overexposure (overexposed for light but underexposed for motion–hmm), the effect is hyper-reality: sharp edges, crisp foregrounds, rough textures. This in turn is amplified by something I didn’t notice until I saw the picture a second time, that directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor (working as Neveldine/Taylor) use well-timed sound effects to emphasize the action.

A description doesn’t do justice to the effect, which changes the look of both action and relatively static shots. The beauty is that you don’t have to analyze it or even notice it to feel it.

The attitude Neveldine/Taylor has about how they shoot extends to what they shoot. The movie gives way at several points to a hilariously profane newscast, an educational film strip, a Jerry Spinger-style talk show, a guide to locations via Google maps, and a papier-mache-and-rubber-mask homage to Godzilla movies. There are nods to other pictures, too, including a direct mention of the Die Hard series and a box with gold-glowing contents (which acknowledges either Pulp Fiction or Kiss Me Deadly, depending on how far back you care to go). The violence is graphic, constant, bloody and close-up, and sometimes the results fly out to land literally on the lens. There’s sex, and it’s played for laughs as spectator sport, and carried out at the same frenetic pace as the rest of the picture—but there’s always dissonance, and in this extended scene it comes from the wonderfully inappropriate soundtrack music.

Crank: High Voltage is titillating and vulgar and exhausting and exhilarating and absolutely fantastic. It’s going to be way too much for many viewers, and I guess that’s fine. But to miss out on this is to miss out on a rare and great exploitation of what can be done only with film—and a couple smart, twisted minds. I love this movie.

Yet Wolverine still feels like an afterthought, a distant cousin to the original franchise, a sidebar that adds little to the main narrative. That’s probably because the picture is a gloomy exercise:  There’s no one to cheer for except Wolverine, and he’s working so hard at being Eyore with Elvis sideburns that it’s hard to root for him anyway. Then again, who can blame him? The character lives in a world populated almost entirely of bad guys. Besides your standard-issue unrepentants, you’ve got good guys who turn out to be bad guys, family members who turn out to be bad guys, trusted leaders who turn out to be bad guys, and lovers, friends, and comrades in arms who turn out to be bad guys, too. There are a few good guys who don’t turn out to be bad guys (I counted two), but they don’t survive long enough to earn a spot beyond the last third of the closing credits.

The biggest problem for me is that the various superpowers on display often fail to follow a consistent physics, let alone common sense or human nature. Wolverine’s talons (Swords? Sharp extra fingers?) rip through flesh and bone, but break when they’re stepped on. The triumph of one character’s super-strength over that of another depends less on clever moves than the requirements of the plot. The ability to disappear and re-appear–useful, that–is deployed to make a fight more interesting, not by a combatant to save his life. A sock in the jaw knocks a mutant to the ground or through a wall, but a helicopter crash barely registers. I guess Bruce Willis and every other action hero gets away with plenty of inconsistencies, too, but those characters are supposed to be human. I’m familiar with humans. Mutants, though, I don’t know what to expect. I’d like to consistently see their strengths and limits so I can know what they’re capable of, and what might defeat them. (You know, in case I run into one.)

Oh–and if you’re looking for a tour of action-picture cliches, you’ve come to the right place. I counted three times that a major character yelled at the sky in anger as the camera pulls away from directly above (otherwise known as the Super Villain Shout–think “Noooo!” or–better–”Kaaaaahn!”). Then there’s the obligatory unaffected-by-the-pyro shot in which the hero walks, expressionless, into the camera and away from a devastating explosion (unless you count a complete lack of expression as an expression).

Is any of this worth your time or money? If you like the X-Men series, then it’s indispensable. If you are perfectly happy with a well-executed genre picture of this type, it’s certainly that. And if for some reason you like an elbow-to-elbow crowd of bad guys, you’ll find so many here you’d swear they shot it at a meeting of the Fidel & Raoul Castro fan club. X-Men Origins: Wolverine is nothing special. But if it’s hot outside and you’re looking for air conditioning and things that go boom, well, this is that.

This poison goes down smooth because Last House is creepy, frightening, and well-executed, as horror movies go. The movie looks as good as any other mid- to big-budget Hollywood picture. The acting is above-average for this kind of thing, the villains are creepy (though made oddly sympathetic at times), and the updates to the original story make the plot far more believable than it was in the amateurish, junk-pile original from 1972.

But rape isn’t something to portray for kicks. It’s a valid element for a plot, but it ought to be handled with care. Unlike other extremes in movies—we see murders all the time, for instance—rape is freighted with cultural and psychological impact that deserves special respect, for both the victims and for ourselves as civilized people. Portray rape once like this and someone will do it again, and again, and then again, and each time we’ll notice and care a little less. That coarsening effect goes beyond entertainment. Ultimately, it makes it harder for us to get along with each other in a civilized society.

The first reaction by many is that “there oughta be a law,” but laws and regulations about this sort of thing are blunt instruments that always reach further than we intend. That’s why we have to take these responsibilities on ourselves.

The makers of Last House either didn’t think or didn’t care about any of this (or pretended their horror remake was performing some service to “art”). Or maybe they just overreached, seeing dailies day after day and losing sight of the impact. Whatever the reason, no matter–they ought to be ashamed to the core.

So, what do do about this kind of thing? Should we urge some kind of statutory action anyway?

Absolutely not.

The price of free speech is that sometimes, people will abuse it, and the result will be to coarsen society and injure the emotions of others. But that’s the price we must pay if the other choice is the introduction of speech police, no matter how clear-cut the issue seems to be. Such rules are the slipperiest of slippery slopes. Of course, we’ve already started downhill, especially on university campuses, where speaking or even holding the wrong opinion can lead to expulsion or firing.

When filmmakers abuse their rights as they’ve done in Last House, they give a little more ammunition to those who would “protect” us (or the culture, or the country, or “the children,” or someone’s conveniently delicate sensibilities) from offensive or so-called “hate” speech. Never forget that there are a whole lot of folks who are anxious to use your offense as a way in–as the first stroke toward harnessing the coercive power of government to control what you can say about that government–plus entertainment, politics, and everything else.

Left and Right once stood together on this: We may have disagreed with what someone said but we would, as Voltaire said, defend til death their right to say it. Now both Right and Left make room for speech cops: Many conservatives make personal morality a public issue, and just as many liberals draft lists of so-called “hate crimes” and verboten ideas in order to punish thought as much as action.

So what’s worse about Last House on the Left, its callous depiction of rape or its incremental assistance to those who would limit free speech? Call it a toss-up.

Buck Howard the man is an old-fashioned show-business type: He is a mentalist—a magician who does mind-reading tricks. But he is preternaturally good at what he does (in contrast to his complete lack of self-awareness), and he was once a pop-culture fixture, a regular on The Tonight Show. (“The real one—with Johnny Carson,” he constantly reminds—this will have its intended melancholy effect only on those over 40 or so.) Now he plays half-empty halls in third-tier markets. Not that this tempers his enthusiasm, or that of his fans. Which is exactly the point.

In service to this show-biz valentine, the movie deploys a raft of actors and personalities in situations similar to that of Buck: George Takei, Tom Arnold, Gary Coleman, Jack Carter, and Michael Winslow appear as themselves (and in an especially sweet touch, Happy Days’ Donnie Most plays not himself but a minor character in the story—how appropriate!). Each of these cameos fits the grain of the picture: these, well, faded celebrities appear without introduction or frame. They just show up to be in a piece of entertainment because they are entertainers and that is what entertainers do.

Ricky Jay is cast as Buck’s manager-agent. It’s a wink to the audience, because Jay has devoted much of his own career to rescuing guys like Buck from obscurity. Besides being an astounding magician and performer (and an occasional actor with a fascinating resume), Jay is a historian of magic, magicians, and performers like Buck. He is a walking encyclopedia and archivist for the kinds of shows that used to define show business: largely unknown entertainers traveling from town to town, putting on shows because that’s how they make a living. Jay’s presence here fairly writes in neon the affection that producer Tom Hanks and writer/director Sean McGinly must feel for the Buck Howards of the world.

What’s more, the picture features a Who’s Who of A-List actors who often take quirky roles in so-called “small” projects, and by doing so show us the pleasure they take in practicing their craft, just like Buck. John Malkovich plays Buck, plus we get Steve Zahn, Emily Blunt, Griffin Dunne, Adam Scott—and Tom Hanks playing the father to his real-life son, Colin Hanks.

The last great wave of anonymous-and-getting-by performers washed over America in the late 1980s and early 1990s as stand-up comedians. Some of them are still around. You haven’t heard of them—not because they’re not funny, but because the Big Time is not what they do. They’re working comedy clubs, grabbing the occasional corporate gig, swapping stories in the green room with other performers, finding ways to make a little extra by selling t-shirts or a self-published book. It’s an honorable and noble profession that’s largely unknown outside of its participants: the traveling, professional entertainer. The Great Buck Howard is a document of that kind of life, and a gentle, personal tribute to those who live it.

I liked this picture when I came out of it and, in the days since, I have come to love it. Does it show much? Here’s a sweet, smart picture without a bit of post-modern cynicism. Wow.

Note: Director Sean McGinly lost a brother in the World Trade Center attack. He made a documentary, Brothers Lost, about 31 men who also lost brothers that day. I have not seen it, but I will. The Great Buck Howard is a respectful and affectionate picture about a character easy to ridicule. I can’t put my finger on it just yet, but what does it say about a man who can suffer great sorrow and injustice and still find nobility in those most ripe for parody? That’s an artist I intend to keep watching.