Wacky, gritty, witty stuff from all over the world.

MOVIE 110

Pineapple Express
(David Gordon Green, 2008, 111 m.)

I laughed and laughed. The movie is rude, rude, rude. It's also the karmic opposite of that Wes Anderson movie in India, The Darjeeling Limited (2007). If that was all neurosis and karma, this is all good weed and dumb luck. I predict this movie will become a classic Judd Apatow production. It makes last year's Knocked Up look as tame as Pillow Talk.

The story (oh, the story) is that a process server (Seth Rogen) and his dealer (James Franco) get tangled in a dangerous cat-and-mouse chase after the process server accidentally witnesses a drug murder and then leaves behind a piece of evidence (his half-smoked "Pineapple Express" roach) that leads the killers inevitably back to the dealer and the customer. What ensues includes an all-out drug war, crooked cops, bilingual ninjas, a lovely high school girl, an old folks home, an over-sensitive hit man, a lovable gay liar who just won't die, the School Liaison Officer to end all School Liaison Officers, the funniest nuclear family since The President's Analyst 40 years ago, and much more than you and I could dream up in our dopest dream-ups.

The movie seems much shorter than it is, always a good sign. James Franco's astounding performance as drug dealer Saul Silver needs to be recognized with an Oscar nomination for best supporting actor, and I hope he wins. In particular, Franco's lovable performance includes maybe the funniest dope joke ever delivered on screen, when he is trying to explain just how good his Pineapple Express product is.

MOVIE 109

The Wackness
(Jonathan Levine, 2008, 95 m.)

The story is about pro-hip-hop, anti-Giuliani New York City in the 1990s. A backsliding psychiatrist (Ben Kingsley), a soulful high school drug pusher (Josh Peck), and the shrink's Upper East Side stepdaughter (Olivia Thirlby) make the basic story. The wise man and the confused boy experiment with switching to become the confused man and the wise boy -- the kid pays for all his therapy by supplying the doctor.

The girl, cruel as Lucy with Charlie Brown, slums with the boy hero for the summer and casually diagnoses his problem-according-to-her: He sees only the wackness (bad) and never the dopeness (good).

This movie is an old standby, the summer romance, but updated with hip-hop attitude for the males and Juno-Goes-Gossip-Girl for the females. The result is not too bad. Ben Kingsley acts like Robin Williams. Olivia Thirlby is the young femme fatale. (She was Juno's funny sidekick in Juno.) But this is hip-hop summer love, remember, so the ending is a little bit tougher minded than usual.

MOVIE 108

Tuya's Marriage [aka Tu ya dehun shi]
(Wang Quanan, China, 2006, 96 m.)

Tuya's Marriage is like a John Ford western -- about a woman -- inside a Georgia O'Keeffe painting. Tuya (played by Yu Nan) is quite a woman, a modern Penelope in Inner Mongolia. She's witty and tough, alluring without trying. Galloping on a Mongolian pony she looks pretty much like some man from the neighborhood. (She rides as well as you ever dreamed, cowboy.) Even though you never see so much as her wrist uncovered, you can see she's also a beauty. And that's not half of who she is.

Most simply stated, Tuya is a wife with two small children and a disabled husband. He lost the use of his legs while trying to dig a well for the family. So, she goes 15 km every day for water and carries it home on a camel or a horse. Lately, the well is low, so she's making two daily trips -- 30 kilometers. Call it 18 miles a day.

When her little boy doesn't come home one afternoon with the sheep, she races out into a snowstorm on the camel. She finally finds him with the flock, and he explains, "There were wolves." Plucky. She wraps him into her huge coat and says, "Don't worry -- if wolves come, Mommy will eat them." Earlier she loses three sheep saving a hapless neighbor friend who has a faithless wife. And she does much more.

Throughout, the spectacle comes out of the story and not vice-versa. When you see these characters in their stark and sculptural landscape, you don't think, "Wow, it's beautiful." Instead you think, "Wow, this is where these people are coming from." If you, too, miss the raw power of the Fifth Generation Chinese movie-makers of the 1980-90s, go see this one. It reminds me of Old Well (1986) and Yellow Earth (1988) and To Live (1994), and why Chinese movies hit the world so suddenly.

MOVIE 107

Up the Yangtze
(Yung Chang, 2007, Canada, documentary, 93 m.)

The director, a Canadian O.C. (Overseas Chinese), looks at the damming of the Yangtze River. Sad, but odd, too.

Is this a movie about poor people being displaced by government? Is it about two young people trying to leave home and their ensuing troubles? It's surely about the social impact of the Three Gorges Dam, but I saw nothing specifically about the environmental impact, an absence which surprised me.

This much-praised documentary gives a remarkable inside view of the lives of a farm family and two young cruise-ship workers, but I felt as though big pieces of the story were not presented. The movie makes me want to see Still Life (Zhang Ke Jia, China, 2006), which I missed, another award-winning semi-doc about the Three Gorges project.

MOVIE 106

Casino Royale
(Martin Campbell, 2006, 144 m.)

The moviemakers' first problem was changing a somewhat thin little novel into a franchise 144-minute James Bond film. The three screenwriters did keep the bare bones of the plot: a card game, a kidnapping, a torture, a "suicide." They added the now-required over-the-top opener -- in this case, five impressive minutes of free running with Sebastien Foucan.

They also added the Bahamas, spectacular murders and attempted murders during card games, extra betrayals, an entire subplot in Venice, and then a mini-plot after the final extra gambit. Whew! And that's not counting a huge airport blowout -- nearly a movie in itself -- connected to the arcane financial wizardry of the "main" plot. All in the service of introducing a muscular new post-9/11 Bond. And it worked.

Even so, the real "innovation" was to include a genuine love-interest as opposed to some dispensable Bond-girls. Since the novel was Fleming's first, he had not yet created the totally iced-over womanizer. The new Daniel Craig Bond is hot and cool.

Nick Otten is assistant director in the Theater Program at Clayton High School and adjunct professor in the graduate Communications MAT Program at Webster University. He consumes vast quantities of books and movies. In his description of Nick's List, he says,  "For every single work, I’ll quickly post a brief commentary — each week, at least 1 book and 2 movies, usually more. Maybe a paragraph, maybe a page. Sometimes, not often, I may go crazy and write some kind of extra, a page or so, on some movie or pair of movies or some genre, actor, or something else, or how one book relates to another or a movie or you or me or us. Such stuff will be just one click away, guaranteed." If you want to reach Nick, rather than comment on the articles, contact Beacon features and commentary editor Donna Korando.

To read the previous Nick's List posts click Aug. 11 , Aug. 4 , July 28 , July 21 , July 14 , July 7 , June 30 , June 23 , June 16, June 9 , June 2 , May 26 , May 19 , May 12,   May 5 , April 28 , April 21 , March .