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“Moonrise Kingdom,” Anderson’s first live-action film since the disappointing “The Darjeeling Limite,” five years ago, gathers a typically eclectic cast to tell a story that, well, it’s pretty hard to suss it all out.

Anderson’s latest follows a pair of pre-teens who decide to run away from their respective families. The trailer doesn’t offer much more than that, but we get plenty of stylistic flourishes, that uniquely Anderson way of framing his characters and familiar faces cast in unfamiliar roles.

When was the last time Edward Norton looked so lovable, or so lost?

Murray is on hand, of course, along with Frances McDormand, Bruce Willis, Tilda Swinton and “Rushmore’s” Jason Schwartzman.

One’s affection for “Kingdom” might hinge on your reaction to Anderson’s past work. He’s clearly not mucking with his own formula, which is very good news – as long as this isn’t another “The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.” Anderson’s 2004 bomb remains one of the punishing movie experiences in recent memory.

In other words, had Weinstein’s movie been snubbed altogether, I think people would remember it more fondly than they do. If I recall correctly, no one was complaining much that the movie was nominated, but the win immediately changed the perception of the movie.

I loved a lot of movies released in 1998, but only one of them was nominated for Best Picture. It’s a very tough year for me to pick a favorite. The nominees:

“Shakespeare in Love” – Only saw it once, and I liked it. Costume dramas really ain’t my thing, but costume comedies? Well, that’s…wait, I don’t like them much either. But I guess this one’s alright.

“Elizabeth” – See above. Never seen it.

“Life is Beautiful” – Roberto Benigni winning Best Actor for this remains one of the great whiffs in Academy history.

“Saving Private Ryan” - The invasion sequence alone remains worth the price of admission.

“The Thin Red Line” – For my money, this is a pretentious mess. I’ve got a buddy who says it’s his favorite movie. I say he’ s trying to seem smart. But what do I know? I’m the guy who would have nominated…

“There’s Something About Mary” - Stalker? Big time.

“The Big Lebowski” - Am I wrong? Am I wrong? No, you’re not wrong, Walter, you’re just an assh*le.

“Out of Sight” - You don’t have an extra clip I can use, do you?

“Rushmore” - Never in my wildest imagination did I ever dream I would have sons like this.

“Saving Private Ryan” - The Statue of Liberty is kaput. That’s disconcerting.

This is really an absolute squeaker. Why? Partially, it’s because I love all of these movies so much. But mostly, it’s because I’m stupid.

Peter and Bobby Farrelly established themselves with “Dumb & Dumber,” then made the box office bust “Kingpin,” which deservedly found an audience on video. No one expected much from their third movie. Leading man Ben Stiller was not yet a star or a box office draw, but he had honed the nervous stammering act of his in pretty solid comedies like “Flirting With Disaster” and turned in hilarious supporting work in “Happy Gilmore.” In 1998, he had a breakout year, appearing in the underrated “Zero Effect” and the misanthropic “Your Friends & Neighbors.”

Released in the middle of July, less than a week after “Lethal Weapon 4″ and just before “The Mask of Zorro,” the Farrelly’s comedy was a genuine word-of-mouth sleeper hit. It hovered in the lower half of the top five until the end of August, when it finally crept up to number 2 at the box office. First week of September, it claimed the number one spot — a full seven weeks after it debuted at number 4.

Its performance is part of the reason I pick it over the more obvious choices on the Academy’s list and my own list. I worked in a theatre at the time, and I witnessed the slow build. By September, older couples were coming to see the movie — and were loving it. The Farrellys had done something amazing; they had made a vulgar comedy that crossed over to people who would never see a vulgar comedy, much less embrace it.

The key to their success is the unconventional screenplay, and the cast.

Ben Stiller and Cameron Diaz have been more than overexposed by now, but in 1998, they seemed like a breath of fresh air. I don’t think I’ve ever rooted for a dude to get the girl more than I did in “There’s Something About Mary.” No one has ever deserved a girl who was so out of his league in the history of movies.

This is set up from the very beginning and then pounded into our heads, sometimes with subtlety and sometimes with the force of a sledgehammer to the nuts. The Farrellys make Ted (Stiller) go through hell to land dreamgirl Mary (Diaz); it’s a journey during which no good deed goes unpunished for Ted, and our heart sinks with his about a dozen times over the course of the movie. Consider:

- He comes to the aid of her mentally challenged baseball loving brother Warren (W. Earl Brown – fantastic performance) and almost gets his ass kicked for his trouble. He later gives the gargantuan Warren a piggy back ride.

- He shows up to pick up Mary for the prom and is told by her father Charlie (Keith David? Genius casting.) that Mary already went to prom with Woogie — a Mr. Everybody’s All American type from a different high school. Ted slumps, frowns, but what makes it UNBEARABLE is that he not only pretends that he’s not hurt by the jilting, but that he seems to think he deserves to be jilted. Of course, Mary’s dad is “just f*cking with” Ted, and Mary is home the whole time ready to go to prom with Ted.

- Ted offers Warren a baseball but inadvertently touches the big man’s ear; Warren goes psycho, tears the room apart and delivers a belly to belly suplex on Ted atop a coffee table. I love the  tension in the aftermath of this moment. Ted’s freaked out, Mary goes upstairs with Sheila, her hot mom (Markie Post), to fix her dress, and Charlie consoles Warren and barks at Ted. Ted defends himself, Charlie responds: “Are you yelling at me? Are you yelling at me in my own damn house?” Ted insists he’s not. Awesome. But the capper is when Ted asks where the bathroom is and Charlie answers, “Grrrrrrrrrrr!”

- The bathroom scene. One of the two most talked about scenes in the movie. “Franks & Beans!” Once again, a misconstrued situation — this time only a look, a glance, a harmless peek! — leads Ted into an uncomfortable situation. Perhaps the most uncomfortable situation in movie history. Sheila sprays Bactene on his nuts, a cop shows up (“What? The f*ck?” he exclaims), a fireman — pretty soon the bathroom’s packed with people and Warren is in the hallway screaming, “Franks & Beans.” If you don’t exit this scene with pee-stained pants from laughing yourself wet, there’s something wrong with you. More importantly, if you don’t exit this scene hoping Ted gets Mary, there’s something wrong with your soul.

- On Ted’s day off, he helps his boss’s brother move. Not his boss. Not his brother. His boss’s brother, who happens to be a crusty, mean, profane man in a wheelchair. Genius line: when Ted complains that a gigantic armoire is heavy, the guy in the wheelchair seethes, “Heavy?! What I wouldn’t give to know what heavy feels like, you insensitive prick!”

- He also, out of the goodness of his heart, offers a serial killer a ride, takes a fish hook to the mouth, and is made to dress up in a superhero costume. Nothing in the movie would have been as funny without our empathy for Ted. In “Mary,” the Farrelly Brothers dodge a landmine. She likes golf. She likes to drink beer and watch football. She likes to talk about football. In essence, she’s too perfect, and women should have rooted against her. But, using subtlety and a sledgehammer, the Farrellys make her vulnerable… to stalkers. She’s got so many stalkers she had to change her name. The only reason that Ted ever got a chance to go to the prom with her is because her high school boyfriend Woogie “got weird.” Like a stalker.

Ultimately, it’s my pick because from a pure story standpoint, it’s the most difficult of any of nominees (actual and in Cam-Land) to pull off — a comedy about stalkers that’s actually really sweet despite relentless vulgarity. Its unconventional-but-still-mainstream-and-not-weird structure (the romantic leads are apart for a good chunk of the movie — ask Gore Verbinski how hard it is to pull that off) makes it an even more difficult movie to pull off. But ultimately, it’s the constant barrage of jokes both verbal and visual, great characters and strong performances that make it my favorite movie of 1998.

We’re all aware that we live in an era where blockbusters that are either remakes, sequels or based on comic books reign supreme. When a film based on any well-known property, you know studio castrati are taking no risks, going out of their way to make sure their multi-million dollar waste will appeal to everyone. This mainstream mentality makes me more inclined to champion a big film with an original story that isn’t banking to cash-in on a built-in audience.

“Super 8″ was a rare blockbuster this summer that wasn’t based on anything. There was no overt brand to sell it apart from the names of director J.J. Abrams and producer Steven Spielberg. I would have been most pleased if it were this year’s “Inception,” the original title that comes out of nowhere that knocks audiences out and shows that people want good stories and not cynical branding.

It’s too bad that “Super 8″ simply sucked rotten eggs down in the mud with the rest of fanboy crap.

Make no mistake, that’s what “Super 8″ is: a fresh fanboy bowel movement of the highest order. It just doesn’t have a brand to spritz perfume to mask its stink. Instead, it boasts Abrams’ skills as a hype-monger con-artist in order to trick people into spending money on seeing it.

“Super 8″ isn’t all bad. The film’s young cast turns out some nice performances, and the group of youngsters have solid chemistry going on.  The best part of the movie is the cheapie zombie film-within-a-film the cast of kids make that rolls while the end credits grace the screen.  That’s where the movie shines, it has that let’s-put-on-a-show feel film lovers can vibe on. Everything else involves Abrams heating up Spielberg’s moldy leftovers and serving them on cheap TV dinner trays.

(Spoilers Ahead)

What this film does is attempt to combine the aesthetic of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind” with the childlike wonder of “E.T.”, but the alien the characters encounter isn’t nice like the ones we see in these Spielberg classics. What we’re up against is an extra-terrestrial that indiscriminately murders the inhabitants of the film’s small-town setting, yet “Super 8″ tries to tug at our heartstrings in the laziest manner possible by showing us how we should feel sorry for the big bloodthirsty guy.

Abrams attempts to excuse the alien’s murderous behavior by trying to sell us on the premise that it’s because he was mistreated by the U.S. military, therefore earning the monster a free murder pass and an idiotic “we understand you” speech from the protagonists. This is followed by a scene of sub-Spielbergian wonder-corn that attempts to rival the spectacle of the spaceship arrival in “Close Encounters,” but the fact that such emotion isn’t earned makes everyone involved seem lobotomized.

“Super 8″ is a celebration of early Spielberg movies that comes off as a fanboy exercise that acknowledges, yet doesn’t understand, the humanity inherent in Spielberg’s early sci-fi work that made films like “Close Encounters” and “E.T.” beloved films. Terrence Malick once said, in relation to his approach to the movie “Badlands,” that nostalgia is so powerful that it can drown out everything around it.

While “Close Encounters” and “E.T.” take place firmly within the time in which they were shot, “Super 8″ is a movie that wallows in the feces of ’70s nostalgia, something that serves no purpose except to make the Gen-Xers in the audience wax poetic about the good ol’ days, and younger members of the audience attempt to channel the good ol’ days based on what they know through braindead rose-tinted movies like this one.

When I walked out of “Super 8,” I wanted to like it so much that I convinced myself that it was decent, if flawed movie, and I labeled it as such.  A few days of marination brought the awful truth out. Don’t get fooled by the heavy layers of movie-geek make-up, the gal wearing it is a vapid bore.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Other Noteworthy Releases

Conan the Barbarian: Being someone who enjoys Robert E. Howard’s short stories about Conan the barbarian, thief, pirate and warrior-king, I don’t share the erroneous opinion that Arnold Schwarzenegger is the only man who is allowed to play Conan. While I’m on record as being a fan of Milius’s “Conan” film, Arnie hardly resembles the character Howard created on the page. In this new take, Jason Momoa looks more like Howard’s description of the dark, sleek Cimmerian warrior than Arnie does, yet it doesn’t sound like this new take captures the essence of Howard’s memorable adventures. I fear this, because director Marcus Nispel is a director incapable of telling a proper story. That said, I’m going to see it anyway.  Maybe I’ll do it on a double-bill with “Solomon Kane,” so I can two iconic Howard creations get potentially bungled in one drunken evening.

Available on 3D Blu-ray, Blu-ray, and DVD

Three Amgios: El Guapo may be the best name for a villain in a movie, ever. And now you can see every crevice in Alfonso Arau’s beautiful face in glorious high-definition!  This is why Blu-ray was invented, folks.

Available on Blu-ray

12 Angry Men: Sidney Lumet’s classic starring Henry Fonda gets the Criterion treatment. The fantastic cover art is one of my favorites of any DVD/Blu-ray release so far this year. This film is a proof positive that if you have a good script, you don’t need a lot of fancy effects or elaborate sets to engage the audience. If the words on the page are good, the movie will be good. Sell your old “Men” DVD and trade up, Criterion always makes it worth your while.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Rushmore: Criterion is upgrading their release of Wes Anderson’s greatest film to Blu-ray.  Anderson’s first three films (“Bottle Rocket,” “Rushmore” and “The Royal Tenenbaums”) have incredibly well-realized characters that you can’t help but fall in love with. People forget that that Owen Wilson fellow you saw in so many bad comedies could crank out a killer script after locking himself in a room with Anderson and his awesome record collection.

Available on Blu-ray

The Devil’s Double: This tale of a man plucked from Iraqi society to be the body double of Saddam Hussein’s vicious (and thankfully no longer living) son, Uday, looks a bit like “Scarface” in Iraq. Dominic Cooper, who had fun supporting roles in movies like “The History Boys,” “An Education” and “Captain America” stars in both roles.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Spy Kids 4 – All the Time in The World: While the first “Spy Kids” film was an imaginative, fun family affair, Robert Rodriguez’s all-ages oriented movies have become unwatchable and undesirable at this point. Not content to only bungle 3D effects this time around, here his movie infects audience’s nostrils as well. I’d say throw the stink-o-vision cards away, but one could just do the smart, frugal thing and skip the movie altogether.

Available on 3D Blu-ray/Blu-ray/DVD combo and DVD

Birth of a Nation: This one is a bit like “Triumph of the Will” in that it’s a film renowned for its brilliant, groundbreaking technique, but it also exhibits a hideous, bigoted worldview. It’s a bit hard to believe that D.W. Griffith, the father of film grammar, was as oblivious to the overt racism in this story as he claims. He made “Intolerance” his greatest achievement as an artist, by way of an apology, which is probably the most epic way of saying “I’m so very sorry” in human history. “Nation” is required viewing for film scholars and history buffs, but anyone else will probably just find it appalling. Kino gives the film its Blu-ray debut this week, and like Criterion, they always give you bang for your buck.

Available on Blu-ray and DVD

Way Down East: Another Kino Blu-ray release, this one being a far-less controversial Griffith film.  The sequence involving an icy river is the stuff of silent-movie legend, because back then they did a lot of their insane set-pieces for real.

Available on Blu-ray

This post originally appeared over at Parcbench

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Starring Robert Duvall in one of his best and most colorful performances, as Appalachian hermit Felix “Bush” Brazeale, “Get Low” is a character-based dramedy that knows when to mine the comic gold to be had in exchanges between Duvall and his co-star Bill Murray, and when to pull back and allow a powerful yet quiet and deeply human story grab hold of viewers. Based on an improbable yet true Depression-era story, it follows Felix as he embarks on a highly unusual quest: to pay for his own funeral in advance, but not actually be dead in it.

Rather, Felix wants to be alive and watching what others say about him. There’s been a thousand legends created about him throughout the lonely decades of his life, but only some of them are true. The problem is, some of the worst tales may be the most accurate ones.

At first, Felix thinks he can just show up at the town’s white and black churches with a wad of money and buy himself a perfect, custom-made service. The preachers tell him that he’s got to make personal peace with God rather than buying his passage into the Pearly Gates.

Yet Felix has never been ready to crack and admit just what happened on a long-ago night when his involvement in an illicit love triangle took on unintended yet deadly consequences. So he hires subtly slimy and fast-talking funeral parlor owner Frank Quinn (Murray) to create the service for him, and decides that the big event will be the perfect time for him to give the big reveal to everyone and fix his reputation before he dies.

There are plenty of twists and turns from there, but they’re handled in a realistic, matter-of-fact manner rather than the often-brash tones of most current American comedies. It also has a powerful message of redemption and forgiveness that is solidly rendered in the Christian tradition, showing Duvall’s still ready to stand by his faith just as strongly as he did in 1997’s “The Apostle,” which he wrote, directed and starred in.

Duvall is a marvel to watch, both when sporting a crazy-man beard while being a mean SOB in the first part of the film and as he slowly tries to become a nicer person while rekindling another old flame, played by Sissy Spacek.

Murray nearly steals the show, however, with his best role since the Wes Anderson classic “Rushmore” back in 1999. His classic rat-a-tat patter is as timeless as his ability to convey smugness with just a role of his eyes or a flick of his jaw. And Spacek makes a welcome return to the screen, settling nicely into her role as a Southern widow learning to trust and love again.

But perhaps the best part of “Get Low” is its authentic, period Appalachian-style score by Jan A.P. Kaczmarek (an Oscar-winner for “Finding Neverland”) and the luminous cinematography of David Boyd. Brought all together by a constantly fresh and inventive script by Chris Provenzano and C. Gaby Mitchell and surprisingly assured direction by first-time feature director Aaron Schneider, “Get Low” could very well end up high on next year’s Oscar nomination lists.

But, no. Not yet. Can’t stand any one of them. What am I doing wrong?

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2001: A Space Odyssey – Some compare this to watching paint dry, but that’s unfair because when paint dries SOMETHING ACTUALLY HAPPENS.

Kubrick was a genius and his intentional stripping of humanity from many of his later films may have been the point, but not always an appealing one. A film without humanity is nothing more than a cinematic coffee table book, something to flip through with your attention at half-mast during a conversation about your day at the office. “The Killing,” “Lolita,” “A Clockwork Orange,” “Paths of Glory,” and “Spartacus…” those are Kubrick’s true masterworks.

“2001” they should loop at Gitmo.

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Raging Bull (1980) -Technically, “Raging Bull” has a lot going for it, but the ugliness is relentless to the point where you become numb to it. A character study should study a character worthy of your time. De Niro’s Jake La Motta just isn’t interesting. For the whole film we watch the same character act the same way. The situations change, but little else.

After 45-minutes, I get it – I get it – I get it…

Many believe “Raging Bull” wuz robbed for Best Picture by Robert Redford’s “Ordinary People.” Personally, I’d rather watch “Ordinary People” while kneeling on marbles, and my opinion of Martin Scorsese’s “The Departed” is even lower.

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Vertigo (1958) – A better title might have been “Tedious.” To be fair to Hitchcock, the problem could be as simple as casting. My affection for the Golden Age is deep, but not blind, and Kim Novak wasn’t a very appealing actress. Her “Vertigo” character(s) are blah and her make-up atrocious. Therefore, the James Stewart character’s obsession with her makes little sense, which in turn keeps me at an emotional distance. Change nothing else, but put Deborah Kerr in the Novak role and my opinion might change completely. An obsession with Kerr I can relate to.

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Anything By Wes Anderson without the Word “Rushmore” in the Title – “Rushmore” is a flat out masterpiece, the rest not so much. Sure, “Bottle Rocket” is okay in that subdued indie kinda way we all feel we’re supposed to like, but Anderson’s films have slowly degraded since, starting with “The Royal Tenenbaums.” There’s no denying he’s a talented filmmaker with a unique voice, and it may just be that I hate “quirky” with the heat of a thousand suns, but the genius of “Rushmore” was the affection we felt for Jason Schwartzman’s irrepressible Max Fischer. Everything Anderson’s done since has jettisoned characters you feel something for in favor of a sterile, off-beat tone.

No thanks.

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Lord of the Rings: The Fellowship of the Ring (2001 ) – Huge fan of part 2, kinda dig part 3, but the first one is just too episodic for my taste.

We’ve all got a few of these films we dislike that might get us kicked off the cool kids’ table.

Fess up.