david silverman's THE SIMPSONS MOVIE (2007)

maybe the best thing about seeing The Simpsons finally make it to the big screen is watching a perfectly inflated, good-to-very-good caliber episode of the show with an auditorium full of people; as we've all forged our own personal relationships with American humor's most important family unit, it's easy to forget that millions of others all over the world have done the same, and it's honestly fascinating to sit with a group of strangers and see who's responding to what. (that's not to sound snooty, of course, because no matter what facet of The Simpsons' inimitably broad-yet-oddly-specific humor they're responding to, it's still The Simpsons, and odds are it's pretty goddamned funny.) due undoubtedly to the veritable all-star team of contributors from the show's glory days (go on, ask a Simpsons geek who his favorite writers are), the film manages an effortless return to form, inspired in a way few post-heyday episodes have been and tackling a quadrupled running time with easy grace. there are even a handful of canon-worthy gags, including a razor-sharp look at the proximity of Moe's and Lovejoy's and a single, pitch-perfect celebrity cameo. it's funny how a movie literally a decade in the making ended up being one of the summer's least disappointing.

david yates’ HARRY POTTER AND THE ORDER OF THE PHOENIX (2007)

though only Prisoner Of Azkaban has thus far been a truly successful adaptation of Potter’s exploits from page to screen, Order Of The Phoenix is the first to really fail; Yates and screenwriter Michael Goldenberg (both making their series debut) have mercilessly hacked their way through the fifth installment’s dark, rich corridors and emerged with what amounts to a poorly-compiled Greatest Hits, relegating most of its surviving characters and subplots to clumsy cameos and asides that may as well have joined the other half of the book on the cutting room floor. abridgement is, of course, a sad reality of adaptation (especially for works as wonderfully, deceptively dense as J.K. Rowling’s) but Goldenberg’s unfocused stabs deal just as much damage to the central narrative, from the negligent muddling of the book’s angsty Dark Side Of The Force themes to the inexplicable excision of crucial events and information, not the least of which being the poignant resolution of Order’s central MacGuffin. (sorry, Neville.) even the climactic Ministry Of Magic sequence, which should have played better on the screen than on the page, is rushed and diminished, most egregiously in the case of a key casualty, robbed by cliché of its devastation. all that said, the film isn’t bad, or, given Chris Columbus’ bloodless initial entries, even necessarily the series’ weakest; its young stars continue to grow as actors, the additions to the cast are characteristically spot-on, and for all the new holes Rowling’s story doesn’t falter in its intrigue. but without the mystery infrastructure of the previous films to prop up the narrative, Yates would have done well to put a little more faith in the intricacies of his source material, and as it stands there’s no excuse for the longest book producing the shortest film.

michael bay's TRANSFORMERS (2007)

by and large, Michael Bay gets a bad rap. i myself feel nearly obligated to dislike him, and even the best work in his filmography are films to be defended more than shared, but there's no denying that he's constructed his own outrageous grammar on the groundwork laid by folks like Cameron and McTiernan, and whether or not he's fully hip to the silliness of his stylistic grandiosity is beside the point. what's largely wrong with his worst work, though, is also what's specifically wrong with his Transformers: amid all the gorgeous bluster, there's no dignity, no integrity. that's not to say that a film like Transformers (it's credited source material being "the line of toys by Hasbro") should take itself seriously, per se, but nor should it feel like it was plotted out at a Monday morning Paramount board meeting. the film, overlong by at least half an hour, dawdles at a buffet of computer hackery, military skirmishes, shallow sci-fi, hot chicks, cutting-room floor comic relief, government conspiracy, and teen angst, intent on trying everything and leaving with a stomachache of distancing tonal inertia, and Bay's slick spectacle, fine performances, and jaw-dropping effects are undone by a story that only intermittently engages, and thus rarely thrills. Transformers has a ton to impress, a good bit to dislike, and nothing to love.

leo mccarey's DUCK SOUP (1933) / charlie chaplin's MODERN TIMES (1936)

i'm at a loss as to what to say about these two classics/favorites, except that watching them in a glorious double feature highlights the sharp, giddy plane of anarchy that film comedy's early masters were operating on. both lampoon their targets with a frothy (but no less studied, or profound) ruthlessness that still stimulates and incites seventy years later, casting as bright a light as any other scrap of cultural record on how much, and how little, things have changed since Chaplin and Groucho stepped in front of the camera to chide people about blind nationalism, warmongering, uncareful industrialization, and capitalism, even as they harvested knee-slaps and tears of laughter.

"mister firefly, i'm a man of few words..."

"yeah, and i'm a man of one word: scram!"

mikael håfström's 1408 (2007)

in some senses 1408 is a valiant effort to reintroduce spooks and scares to the horror game, and in the few moments it really focuses, it does succeed; there's some tantalizing whiffs of mood and macabre austerity during the film's middle section (calling it a second act would misrepresent) and a moment or two of commendably casual terror. but it's also a clusmy adaptation of what seems like a fairly shallow King short story, padded out with pace-constricting grabs at structure and bogged down by a disserviceable slickness. there's probably a damn respectable scary movie to be made from the scraps of 1408, but Håfström's is sadly undone by Hollywood compromise.

brad bird's RATATOUILLE (2007)

i have to hand it to Brad Bird: he's really putting Pixar's money where their mouth is. it's evident to anyone who's seen any or all of Pixar's first five productions that they've always been laughably far ahead of the curve where both technological innovation and brilliant family-oriented storytelling are concerned, but it was Bird's The Incredibles where they finally, gloriously set foot outside their comfort zone, after which Cars' admittedly broad return to their iconic m.o. felt almost quaint. unlike The Incredibles, Ratatouille does operate within the superficial boundaries of the Children's Film, but Bird's revolution-minded approach to popular animated cinema is unabated; his themes are sharper in spirit yet muted (even obscured), and the narrative is ambitious in its intricacies even as its general thrust is simple slice-of-life as compared to the rest of the Pixar canon. all of this amounts to both good and bad: clutching their safety blanket of emotionally intelligent yet archetypal kid's stories, Pixar consistently grazed pure perfection, while Ratatouille suffers flaws for its wandering eye. but it's still exciting, and necessary, that our most consistent team of filmmakers keep pushing the limits, lest they fall back on a formula destined to tarnish. Ratatouille doesn't hit the sweet spots of, say, Finding Nemo or Toy Story 2, but it's hardly a blemish on their still-spotless record.

len wiseman's LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD (2007)

i was honestly convinced this was going to be terrible. it's been twelve years since the overlong, racially patronizing, totally sweet Die Hard With A Vengeance sent the trilogy out with a relative bang, and in the meantime the ascendance of CG and superheroes has all but waylaid the hard-R action flick as John McTiernan's original helped define it twenty years ago. fucking awesome, then, that Live Free Or Die Hard is a gleeful, balls-out return to form for the series and the genre at large. Wiseman's action setpieces are thrilling and ridiculous (McClane himself seems to hold back fits of chuckling after every bit of carnage) and despite the PG-13 on the poster, the film never pulls a punch. (or gunshot. or semi-truck vs fighter jet battle.) there are a few misogynistic tendencies (this is, after all, a Manly Man Movie), but there are also some thoughtful preoccupations with machismo's place in the digital age that keep it "current" and self-reflexive without patronizing the audience too much. and though McClane is essentially a superhero himself by this point in the series, it's still nice to see an actioner that succeeds in its wild grabs at its genre's heyday. i went in expecting a neutered retread, and i left having seen the second-best Die Hard.

scott glosserman's BEHIND THE MASK: THE RISE OF LESLIE VERNON (2006)

though there's certainly a rich, worthy canon, horror is almost certainly the easiest genre to really pin down; both its penchant for shameless trendiness and straightforward goals in regards to its audience make focused deconstruction fairly easy work, and somewhat beside the point. it was with some bit of surprise, then, that i enjoyed and even respected the canny meta-horror at work in Behind The Mask, which follows the crossed paths of an aspiring documentary crew and an aspiring serial murderer as an archetypal spree of slasher-flick terror is painstakingly plotted and realized. Glosserman and co-author David Stieve obviously know their stuff when it comes to the minutiae of convention, but it'd be to little avail without the admirable wit to back it up, and though the first bit of the film exudes a seeming Too-Cleverness, it manages to ride it all the way through into the third act before its inevitable collapse, at which point i was forced to concede that it was Just Clever Enough.