Lotsa movies this week…

OK, banner week: three movie reviews for you. Wanted and War, Inc. over at the Washington Times, and the new direct-to-DVD Futurama movie, The Beast with a Billion Backs over at the Standard. A quick additional comment on each…

War, Inc. was kind of a tough movie for someone like me to review; virulently anti-war (almost comically so, and not in a good way), there wasn’t a single thing I agreed with in the film. But judging the film’s political content isn’t my job–I need to judge it from an artistic standpoint. Does it work on its own merits? Will it hold up over time? What do the performances tell us about the actors and ourselves? That sort of thing. If I rail against War, Inc. because I despise its politics (which I most certainly do), I’m no better than liberal reviewers who denigrate films with conservative, pro-American, pro-family themes simply because they disagree with the sentiment. I only gave it 2 stars (out of a possible 4), but I bet some on the right will still criticize me for going easy on it. And that’s a shame…

I don’t have much to add about Wanted. Instead, I’d recommend checking out Anthony Lane’s review. My Lane-love is well known around these parts, but for good reason: he’s the best there is.

Finally, Futurama. Terribly disappointing DVD. I really loved Futurama, going all the way back to its first season. Once it hit its stride, the show was right up there with The Simpsons in terms of cleverness (though rarely in terms of outright humor–The Simpsons, especially in seasons 2-9 or so, was chock full of belly-laugh, hard to breathe comedy; Futurama, meanwhile, was more of a subtle “ha ha, that’s quite clever” brand of comedy). This DVD retains much of the cleverness (like when Bender, presiding over a secret meeting of robots, pulls out a copy of “Robot’s Rules of Orders”), but it’s simply too disjointed to work as a coherent narrative. Like I said: terribly disappointing.