Not in a good way.

The problem isn’t that the movie’s three hours long. The problem is how those hours pass. But I shouldn’t say the problem. Really, it’s one of several. Because if you can have several plots whirling around simultaneously within a single film, you can have several simultaneous problems. That’s what “Cloud Atlas” proves.

Written and directed by Lana Wachowski, Andy Wachowski, and Tom Tykwer, it was adapted from David Mitchell’s novel — and while admiringly familiar with Mitchell’s work, your correspondent is big enough to admit he hasn’t read this particular novel. (How could he, having been stuck in the movie for half his life?) But the Internet helpfully explains that there are six distinct stories at play in “Cloud Atlas,” and I’m so exhausted by now that I’ll just say yes, fine, that sounds about right.

The outermost framework of setting, a primitive sea-adjacent woodland, is described as “106 winters after the Fall.” Others, then, are litanies of prelapsarian tedium — respectively the Pacific Ocean in the 19th century, England in the 1930s, San Francisco in the 1970s, England again in the present day, and Korea in 2144. Each has its own hokey melodrama to contend with, usually to do with stifled lives seeking some manner of liberty or consummation.

These are woven together by countless self-delighted segues, plus several lead actors prosthetically gunked up to play multiple roles. The intended effect is an awe of human connectedness, but the result is closer to the giddily apocalyptic recurrence of Peter Sellers in “Dr. Strangelove.” Except criminally less fun. For all the attention it draws to its stars — including but not limited to Tom Hanks, Halle Berry, Hugo Weaving, Jim Broadbent, Jim Sturgess, Doona Bae, Ben Whishaw, Hugh Grant, and Susan Sarandon — “Cloud Atlas” has a way of treating them as puttylike extras.

They’re troupers, at least. With his usual fine touch, Whishaw is the best of the lot. Hanks delivers some substance, but also some rotten ham. Bae has a hard time in English. Berry goes bland; Broadbent, broad; Sturgess, soft; and sameness sets in all around. Which is not the same as unity.

But maybe de-emphasizing people is a way to emphasize ideas. “Cloud Atlas” does have breathy high-minded platitudes about freedom, music, science, journalism, literature, and love. What intentional humor it has is low and crass. Maybe these are populist touches. (Admittedly my audience laughed a few times — perhaps most robustly and deservingly at the moment when a critic got thrown off a skyscraper balcony.) But cheese is cheese. To call the film “ambitious,” as people already have and maybe always will, is to hedge on questions about its actual entertainment value or respect for audience intelligence.

The book, I understand, is a puzzle of pleasure — or, if you prefer, a vast sanctuary in which the readerly imagination becomes entwined with the writerly one. The movie is a booklet of vouchers for sweep and spectacle, and an unsatisfying game of internal reference-catching. Doesn’t it defeat the purpose of an epic to keep dicing it up into shorthanded mini-epics? If it’s a deconstruction of an epic, it lacks the courage of that conviction.

There is an inviting piece of music in there, a vaguely Debussian reverie, which ought — By Mitchell’s own design, I think — to hold the whole thing together. But the movie seems to find it intimidating, and slinks off in more pedestrian directions. Soon enough (soonness being relative here), “Cloud Atlas” comes to seem like a film that exists more to challenge the notion of unfilimability than to pay forward whatever inspiration its source material may once have provided. Compulsively digressive, glutted with pseudo-cliffhangers, it behaves like some pompous and bottomlessly budgeted series on a premium cable channel, routinely nullifying its own suspense: After a while each return to any particular storyline brings only a pang of resentment that none in particular has yet been wrapped up. Rather than boggle the mind, it benumbs.

The tone, too, is a poorly tossed salad: geriatric farce here, gloomy dystopian satire there, not enough real flavor anywhere. Grand camera moves and music swells nudge a theoretical awareness of deep feeling, but under these circumstances real emotional investment is fleeting at best. Somewhere along the loopy line, one character asks another how he knew they might become friends. The other points at his eyes and says, “All you need.” So true. And yet here’s a movie overflowing with so much more than it needs. As you read this, someone somewhere probably is begging for it to fucking end already.

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1. @pattonoswalt: “If Clint Eastwood ever talks to a chair on national TV, people will need a way to reassure each other” — inventor of Twitter, March 2006

2. @GeorgeTakei: Clint Eastwood’s RNC speech was to imaginary Obama in an empty chair. I’m drafting a DNC speech to imaginary Romney in an empty factory.

3. @studiesincrap: Holy hell, I just saw the Clint Eastwood thing. Remember when it seemed cruel of Michael Moore to interview Charlton Heston?

4. @superchunk: Every Which Way But Lucid

5. @erikmal: If Clint ends this bit with “The Aristocrats!”, I swear I’ll vote for Romney.

6. @invisibleobama: Someone should tell Marco Rubio he’s standing on my foot right now.

7. @funnyordie: Clint Eastwood doesn’t give a fuuuuuuuuuck.

8. @rstevens: I’m more of a Charles Bronson fan anyway.

9. @chrisrockoz: Clint Eastwood on the phone with Obama now: “It all went according to plan,sir.”

10. @susanorlean: I LOVE REAL LIFE.

BONUS!

11. @gregmottola: Good thing Clint agreed to speak. Next option was a one-eyed, incontinent chihuahua. After that, Victoria Jackson.

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For some of us, Woody Allen could film the phone book and we’d find pleasure in it: How nice all those listings might look in his signature white-on-black Windsor typeface. Poignancy, too: The phone book, like the Woody Allen movie, doesn’t seem as useful to as many people as it once did. But after a very bracing “Midnight in Paris,” he’s off, maybe hurriedly, “To Rome With Love.” The new film faintly tingles with unfocused quasi-recollections of earlier movies and motifs. At times it even seems vaguely demented, as if a test to determine whether we’ll just stand politely by as Allen finally descends, doddering, into the void. At other times, though, it’s invitingly dreamy. This is Fellini country, after all.

The tales, very loosely interwoven, are these. Beset one morning by a random mob of paparazzi, a middle-class Roman everyman and self-described schmuck (Roberto Benigni) becomes suddenly famous for no apparent reason. Getting to know the fiancé (Flavio Parenti) of their daughter (Alison Pill), a retired American opera director (Allen) and his psychiatrist wife (Judy Davis) discover the fiancé’s mortician father (Fabio Armiliato) to be a world-class tenor — who can only sing in the shower. Honeymooning provincial newlyweds (Alessandro Tiberi, Alessandra Mastronardi) find themselves separated by the respective temptations of a call girl (Penélope Cruz) and a movie star (Antonio Albanese). An American architect (Alec Baldwin) revisits bittersweet memories of youthful romantic missteps, as evidently replayed before his eyes by Jesse Eisenberg, Greta Gerwig, and Ellen Page.

Baldwin seems the most at ease of the bunch, maybe from having been in similarly muted magical-realist territory before, as the wisecracking apparition of an affectionate ex-lover visible only to Mia Farrow in Allen’s “Alice.” Certainly he comports himself more casually than the younger American actors here who nearly choke on Allen’s generationally anachronistic dialogue. The Italians, and Cruz, suffer mild translation losses too, although it’s also clear that Benigni hasn’t had this much fun pulling off a Roman riff since he played the compulsively confessional taxi driver in Jim Jarmusch’s “Night on Earth.”

The aspiration to work with Allen has become automatic among contemporary actors, who reportedly do so on the condition that they see only those portions of script in which their characters appear. The risk of such auteurist dominion is that all big-picture views, then, are privileged and purposely myopic: An assistant director deals with production scheduling, not narrative consistency; a script supervisor monitors only the minutiae of continuity between takes; and an editor’s efforts necessarily aim for Allen’s final approval. Meanwhile keeping busy in front of the camera as well as behind it might well leave Allen too distracted or exhausted to tidy up expositional false starts and loose ends, not to mention meager ideas and misfired jokes. It shouldn’t be a problem for a filmmaker with so much experience, but Allen has a way of making seniority seem like complacency.

So was the title change his idea? For a while this movie went by “The Bop Decameron,” and there is that brisk tempo, that noodly phrasing and sometimes ragged harmony, although any allusions to Boccaccio seem mostly academic. (Italy did produce a spate of portmanteau films at just about the time Allen came of age.) Somebody — maybe a producer, or maybe Allen himself — managed at least one clarifying insight: Just get the word “Rome” in there somewhere and then go wait at the bank. Of course he’ll reap complaints about being out of touch with reality, even in a season whose other offerings include a guy who’s part spider, a guy with a talking Teddy bear, and Tyler Perry back again in fat-suit drag. (Brand maintenance as minstrelsy: discuss.) But anyway, the routines are merely perpetual. It’s the city that’s eternal.

The post “To Rome With Love”: Eternal City, Perpetual Shtick appeared first on The Faster Times.

The new Wes Anderson movie certainly is a richer pastiche than anything else you’ll see at the multiplex this season. And in its Andersonian manner, “Moonrise Kingdom” is a nourishing regressive pleasure, a sort of summer movie for grown-ups. Yes, the manner is mannered, but the intention is noble: to affirm the dignity of escapism by direct example.

And so we find the New England island town of “New Penzance” sent into mild upheaval when a serious and sensitive Boy Scout (Jared Gilman) runs away with the headstrong misfit girl he decides he loves (Kara Hayward). This being a Wes Anderson movie, the kids are precocious: souls old enough to seem wise beyond their years or at least beyond the callowness imposed on them by limited life experience. Their elopement is a matter of mutual acceptance and a common want of freedom — hers from a house called Summer’s End, where her parents and younger brothers live in the resigned harmony of torpid estrangement; his from the clockwork conformity of the scouts, later waggishly characterized as a bunch of “beige lunatics.”

It feels good and righteous to root for these two, like reclaiming those pre-adult prerogatives once regrettably ceded to the pose of maturity. Wasn’t summer once supposed to be about the pure liberty of endless possibilities? Anderson still knows better than anybody how to survey the cusp of adolescence with all the existential angst of a midlife crisis, and, for relief’s sake, to salt his findings with droll irony. If there’s a basic problem here, it’s the same basic problem as in all of the director’s six previous features — namely, that his particular piquancy is not to every taste.

Co-written by Anderson and Roman Coppola, and set in the 1960s, “Moonrise Kingdom” accommodates not just retro flourishes of Euro-mod chic (young lovers on the run were a rage in movies of that period), but also the emotional aura of some wistfully remembered Charlie Brown holiday special. Habitually Anderson revels in bric-a-brac production design, eloquent riffs on stagings from his earlier films, and a tendency, abetted by regular cinematographer Robert Yeoman, to arrange his stars — Bob Balaban, Harvey Keitel, Bill Murray, Frances McDormand, Edward Norton, Jason Schwarzman, Tilda Swinton, Bruce Willis — in handsome tableaux. Indeed, it’s all very Instagram-as-movie, this transparently contemporary simulation of a bygone era, viewed through flaxen-tinted filtration and built for frictionless dissemination. But this is where we’re at now, and to a large extent Anderson is the guy who got us here.

At times, even his props seem to be posturing. Gosh, what a beautiful sans-serif typeface the Island Police use on their car doors, we can’t help but notice; might that be the same Futura Bold routinely favored by Anderson for his screen titles and credits? And gosh, just imagine all the wondrous young-adult adventures suggested by those library books stashed in the girl’s suitcase. (Or at least do look online for supplemental animations thereof.) Meanwhile, occasionally insinuating a phobia of stillness and silence, the filmmaker’s typically tasteful musical affinities lean here toward English composers especially; sometimes it seems like instead of a full film narrative he should’ve just tried a music video for the entirety of Benjamin Britten’s “A Ceremony of Carols.” Which of course would be fantastic.

But the movie’s characters — in particular its refreshingly unactorly protagonists, so poignantly and palpably unformed, and so nicely set off against all that art direction — seem quite helpfully people-like. All the grown-ups are in some way hapless, and therefore implicitly obliging to the youngsters’ enterprise. With heart-swelling sympathy and sincerity, Norton, as the scoutmaster, redeems potential caricature, and Willis stands out as the cop, a melancholy and reflective figure of earned adult authority. “It takes time to figure things out,” he advises the boy, tenderly.

That might also be Anderson talking to himself. “Moonrise Kingdom” has a welcome new allowance of naturalness, particularly in landscape and weather. (Fittingly, the action takes place during the run-up to a storied New Penzance hurricane.) It is another of Anderson’s dollhouses, unavoidably, but with its windows open and without any shortage of fresh air in circulation. Except maybe for coherence, the film doesn’t strain, and if Anderson now lacks the will to innovate, he has traded it for the real benefit of relaxing into vision-refinement. Now we know for sure that he makes movies, even summer movies, the way he must.

The post “Moonrise Kingdom”: Wes Anderson Summers in New England appeared first on The Faster Times.

The tale of how Admiral General Aladeen became President Prime Minister Admiral General Aladeen is not one for the ages. As told by “The Dictator,” it is basically the tale of a flabby political farce about oppressive narcissism which marauds uncertainly into the realm of romantic comedy. Sacha Baron Cohen not being your rom-com go-to guy is one reason to find it amusing. Another is the notion of rapacious world leader as portrayed by compulsive boundary overstepper. Neither is quite reason enough, but the movie does have its funny moments, and also sufficient grace to get itself over with in less than an hour and a half.

In his fictive oil-rich North African nation of Wadiya, Aladeen lives large among gold-plated Hummers and nuclear ambitions, by day personalizing the national language and ordering capricious executions, by night adding snapshots of celebrity sexual conquests to his wall of Polaroids. (Quick, mute star cameos are among this film’s most potent comedic weapons.) And yet, for all his prowess, he goes woefully uncuddled.

Then he goes to New York, where he finds himself betrayed by a senior advisor (Ben Kingsley, inert), kidnapped by an American agent (John C. Reilly, adequate), replaced by a simpleton (Baron Cohen, again), reunited with a sacked scientist countryman (Jason Mantzoukas, alert) who’s now a Mac Genius (“Mostly I clean semen out of laptops,” the disgruntled former subordinate reports), and accommodated by the potentially cuddle-worthy peace-activist manager of a Brooklyn grocery co-op (Anna Faris, intrepid), who neither shaves her armpits nor seems to mind being called “lesbian hobbit” or “little boy in a chemo wig.”

It’s a lot for our dictator to take in, and many possibilities glitter before him. Democratization is afoot, at least in the sense that Baron Cohen is an equal-opportunity vulgarizer: With this brazen autocrat thus ensconced in a stronghold of the smugly progressive, the way is paved for duelling caricatures of entitled, adolescent-minded tyrants. Dully, though, the result is a draw — a bit too much like some Adam Sandler knockoff, with requisite tugs at heartstrings and other body parts. (Although admittedly the masturbation montage, complete with footage of Forrest Gump in physical epiphany, is inspired.) After a few mildly outrageous misunderstandings, it’s pretty much indifferently ever after.

The director here is Larry Charles, who also directed Baron Cohen in/as “Borat” and “Brüno” before this, mostly by turning him loose like a bull in the China shop of how we live now. “The Dictator,” too, is situational and vaguely improvisatory, but also obviously scripted — by Baron Cohen with Alec Berg, David Mandel, and Jeff Schaffer — and rehearsed. Adding a despot to Baron Cohen’s stable of blustery imbicles may have seemed nervy and necessary, but in this case the method tends to moot the results. Earlier, his way of taking aim at too-easy targets made us complicit in their exploitation, and that’s just the sort of tension this effort needs and lacks. At times uproarious but never cathartic, the odyssey of Aladeen is too expectedly rude and securely self-contained: culture-clash ambush with the safety left on.

Although dedicated “in loving memory of Kim Jong Il,” “The Dictator” also pays respects of sorts to Charlie Chaplin, who in 1940 saw history coming and seized a very specific opportunity with “The Great Dictator.” Both movies culminate in big speeches: Chaplin’s was a portentous refutation of earlier silence; Baron Cohen’s, oppositely, is a palaver on the subject of autocracy that’s really a sly critique of debased democracy. In Hitler Chaplin had the easiest-ever and most deserving target, but he also had deep wells of poetry and pathos. Baron Cohen, by contrast, has the audacity to dredge those wells after they’ve run dry, and to redraw whatever border is thought to be at the dead end of political-cartoon cinema. But in this toothless, talking-points satire we do see how history has advanced: from the heart-on-sleeve to the nearly heartless.

The post “The Dictator” Doesn’t Rule appeared first on The Faster Times.

It seems like a fine idea to put Joss Whedon in charge of “The Avengers.” Given his knack for wisecracking-ensemble revitalizations of chancy entertainment properties (there’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer” and then there’s “Buffy the Vampire Slayer”), Whedon’s superhero summit, adapted by him and Zak Penn from Stan Lee and Jack Kirby’s comics, might well be the ultimate Marvel.

Culled from their respective blockbusters, clad in flashy costumes and CGI, Captain America, the Hulk, Iron Man, and Thor (Chris Evans, Mark Ruffalo, Robert Downey Jr., Chris Hemsworth) come together at long last. As established by covert military administrator Nick Fury (Samuel L. Jackson), their ranks also include the archer Hawkeye (Jeremy Renner) and the martial artist Black Widow (Scarlett Johansson), who haven’t yet had movies of their own and now don’t seem to need any.

So this amounts to an enormous and very expensive juggling act. As if in a forced march from one set-piece to the next, “The Avengers” gathers at least enough momentum to get beyond two hours without getting discernibly bogged down. But really it works best in the downtime, when Whedon just seems to be hanging out backstage with some sort of temperamental action-figure supergroup. It’s sweet to see him treat these characters with his typical teasing reverence, as if little individual rituals of gentle ridicule can redeem the sheer silliness of loving how they look together.

Obviously Whedon wanted the essential infighting, be it verbal or forest-flatteningly physical, to seem more intimate than a mere din of clanging metallic collisions. Accordingly the best internal-battle scene involves Ruffalo’s scientist recounting desperation over his innate Hulkdom, which prompted him to put a bullet in his mouth — whereupon “the other guy spat it out.” In a movie like this, telling instead of showing takes confidence, to which good actors take well. Other Whedonisms include redemptive self-sacrifice as grand thematic theory and regrettable supporting-player sacrifice as operative practice. Whedon does understand that at the core of superhero mythology is the thrilling possibility of transcendence, even if it’s, oh, you know, an aircraft carrier becoming an aircraft.

For the humans, reconciliation requires an external enemy, and our villain this evening will be Thor’s brother Loki (Tom Hiddleston), an arrogant extra-terrestrial Viking with one of those bullies-are-secretly-insecure personalities and the sort of fascist urge that really gets Captain America’s goat. When Loki summons a warmongering horde through a hole in the sky, the Avengers get collectively to work, dispatching disposable baddies as if rushing through some technically sophisticated yet narratively forsaken video game. These invaders make more of a mess than a threat, but at least we can tell what’s going on: the climax.

What’s most fun is Loki’s suggestion to a throng of kneeling civilians that they’d be happier in supplication anyway. Might that also be aimed at hardcore fans of movies made from comics? As the T-shirt says, “Joss Whedon Is My Master Now.”

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In postwar London, an emotionally volatile young woman (Rachel Weisz) flees her marriage to an aloof magistrate (Simon Russell Beale) for an affair with a differently aloof ex-RAF pilot (Tom Hiddleston). Destruction ensues. As adapted and directed by Terence Davies, Terence Rattigan’s 1952 play transcends merely tasteful period English melodrama; expectedly well appointed and well shot, it’s also somehow newly vitalized, a smoldering cauldron of soft lamplight and exquisitely intense feelings. Davies’ directing style is a carefully modulated meditation, and the script eschews sentimentality in favor of abetting elegant performances. What a pleasure, if also a heartbreak, to see how well these three actors respond. For aspiring thespians, or anyone who appreciates great displays of range, a Hiddleston double-feature of this and “The Avengers” is recommended.

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Faced with geographically opposed career opportunities, a newly engaged couple discovers that their life together has gotten in the way of their life together. And with this casually yet not automatically comedic concept, stars Jason Segel and Emily Blunt comport quite well. A Judd Apatow production, it runs purposefully long, loosening the corset of rom-com conventions to accommodate presumed authenticity, even if that includes misfired humor (beyond awkwardly funny, there is something nervier and more poignant: awkwardly not funny). As if in solidarity with all noncommittal young lovers everywhere, director Nicholas Stoller, Segel’s co-writer and fellow Apatow protégé, doesn’t push, instead just letting the movie coast along on baggy charm. A female co-writer might have kept some details in better check, but to complain of this is to seem stubbornly hard-hearted. The amiable supporting cast includes Chris Pratt, Rhys Ifans, and Alison Brie.

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In his Tehran apartment, the filmmaker Jafar Panahi sits down to breakfast with a video camera pointed at himself. For a man being tyrannized, he seems in decent spirits. His apartment, the camera records, is brightly lit and well appointed, his breakfast tactfully deluxe. Somewhere outside a muffled boom occurs. Then a siren. Panahi doesn’t seem surprised or disturbed. He’s focused, reflecting on his own situation.

For “making propaganda against the system,” Panahi has been sentenced by Iranian authorities to six years in prison, and 20 without making more films. Under house arrest and awaiting the outcome of an appeal, he spends some time on the phone with a lawyer, then summons a colleague, cameraman Mojtaba Mirtahmasb, for assistance with the video diary already under way. “This Is Not a Film” is what they’ll call the result, and that’s true enough. It’s merely an “effort,” by which the prisoner of conscience testifies to his experience. Disarmingly, and rivetingly, his approach is not so much a matter of rebellious defiance as of creative problem-solving.

Stasis being the focus of its examination, the camera doesn’t move much, and neither does the story. But in his sly way Panahi commands attention. He resorts to blocking out and reading from a pending script — about a girl who can’t go to art school because her parents have locked her in her room — and even his spoken description of the opening shot is transfixing. Inevitably, though, ingrained circumspection gives way to frustration. “If we could tell a film, why make a film?” Panahi says, stepping gloomily out onto the balcony for a smoke and a moment alone. Later, perusing DVDs of his previous films reveals earlier precedents for Panahi’s adaptiveness as a seeker of serendipity, but also makes clear how necessary freedom is to him.

Before long those offscreen blasts are revealed as fireworks — sounds of celebration, not violence. It’s New Year’s Eve, and Panahi also spends time on the phone with his celebrating family. The conversation turns uneasily to talk of cops and checkpoints. In one allegorically affecting image of grace under pressure, he responds gently to an indignity inflicted by his daughter’s pet iguana.

In recent years, with minor variations, “This Is Not a Film” has been a movie title several times. As such it evokes the self-interrogating art prank of René Magritte’s 1929 painting of a pipe, under which was written “Ceci n’est pas une pipe.” The English title of that painting is “The Treachery of Images.” Sometimes it’s translated as “The Treason of Images,” although that might sound a little dramatic to anyone but the Iranian authorities. Before Magritte, in 1772, Denis Diderot wrote a story called “This Is Not a Story.”

Panahi’s project is nicely tempered by an awareness that everything radical also is cyclical. Accordingly his title seems by turns cheeky, despondent, and sincere. Good artists understand the usefulness of restriction, and “This Is Not a Film” draws much power from its maker’s humility. A conviction to continue his work is not the same as a sense of entitlement.

Of course there is that also basic satisfaction of a big FU — the not-trivial moral victory of having out-maneuvered and humiliated a bully, without ever stooping. Maintenance of Panahi’s dignity is the essence of his effort, and a more than adequate reason to make it.

All the not-film lacks is a scene of its own epilogue: Reportedly smuggled out of Iran on a USB stick hidden in a cake, it made it to France just in times for Cannes. Later, Mirtahmasb spent three months in prison for his participation. Panahi remains under house arrest, awaiting a ruling on his latest appeal.

The post “This Is Not a Film”: Jafar Panahi Makes an Effort appeared first on The Faster Times.

“John Carter,” the movie, has been in development for a hundred years. No wonder it’s such a tangle of time, space, and narrative point of view.

John Carter, the man, hails from Virginia, but he was in Arizona when he wound up on Mars. That was in 1868, but our tale, as unfurled in a 2012 film based on a 1912 story, begins in 1881. And he is its protagonist, although the account is relayed through his young nephew, who, with our disbelief kindly suspended, will grow up to become the prolific pulp fictioneer Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Meanwhile Burroughs’ swashbuckling sci-fi serial will grow up to become a movie by the director of “Wall-E,” with writing help from the author of “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” and starring the heartthrob from “Friday Night Lights.” If the result feels disorderly, not to mention derivative of “Star Wars” and “Avatar” and everything in between, well, that’s an irony given source material without which those movies might not have existed. And that’s just what a century’s worth of development will do.

Carter, played by Taylor Kitsch, is a former Confederate Army captain who finds himself teleported to the red planet, where lesser gravity lets him leap tall boulders, and toss them around, like a superhero. How he breathes and keeps warm is not explained, but we get the idea that actually there is an atmosphere on Mars, and it retains at least enough sunshine that a loincloth is all the outerwear one really needs.

Also, there are Martians. They aren’t little green men but big ones, tall and reedy, with four arms each and facial tusks. With their brute exoticism and clannish codes of honor, they exude an old colonialist’s idea of noble savagery, as quaintly outdated as the astronomical understanding that inspired their fictive world. But these folks are not the only residents of Barsoom, as Mars is known in the local parlance. In fact the place is all too crowded. It has humans, of sorts, as well, and the problems they bring.

Having tried to put America’s War Between the States behind him, Carter inadvertently catalyzes a war between Martian city states. Theirs is more of a swords-and-sandals affair, if Lynn Collins as the lusciously bikinied scientist-warrior princess is any indication, but our man seems up to it. And with a visual scheme so handsomely commensurate with fantasy artist Frank Frazetta’s eye-popping covers for Burroughs’ books, well, who wouldn’t be?

The princess’ father, an affably pudgy Ciarán Hinds, has arranged for her marriage to a blandly villainous Dominic West, who’s been terrorizing the planet with powers on loan from a meddling Mark Strong, the apparent alpha in a trio of lurking non-Martian aliens. From here things become more tangled.

It all seems rather a lot to handle for Pixar mainstay director Andrew Stanton, here making his live-action debut. Written by Stanton, his writing partner Mark Andrews, and superstar novelist Michael Chabon, himself a longtime Martian-adventure freak (see also “The McSweeney’s Mammoth Treasury of Thrilling Tales”), “John Carter” comes across as smart and sleek but also strangely subservient to its own rich legacy. It’s just not special enough.

Kitsch certainly has the right last name for this enterprise, and more or less the right cipher-like presence: a vessel into which 12-year-olds of all ages might project themselves. (Sometimes he seems like a poor man’s James Franco. But then, sometimes, so does James Franco.) His other co-stars include Willem Dafoe, Thomas Haden Church, and Bryan Cranston, variously obscured by fabricated pixels or facial hair. And if they too appear periodically to fade into the scenery, at least the scenery is exquisite.

Living up to reported uncertainty about whether it’ll become a trilogy, “John Carter” feels hurried and crammed. Of course that’s true to its source material too. Ultimately the movie, like the man, is lighter on its feet than expected. Never does it lack commitment to its own pulpy panache. You want to tease it for being so earnest, but there’s no time, and too much to take in, so instead you just keep the fistfuls of popcorn coming.

The post “John Carter” Is Not About the Character of That Name Played by Noah Wyle on “E.R.,” Although Who Knows, Maybe He’s In There Somewhere appeared first on The Faster Times.