A few late Christmas gifts

Bedtime Stories
It’s nice to see that Adam Sandler has softened over the years. He has yet to outgrow his penchant for silly voices, but you can’t always get what you want. “Bedtime Stories” is his first PG-rated family movie, and it finds a happy medium between cute and ribald, although it’s never all that funny or enchanting. Sandler plays a hotel handyman who discovers that elements from the bedtime stories he’s making up for his niece and nephew are coming true—gumballs rain from the sky, he’s accosted by a dwarf and the fairest maiden in the land falls in love with him. Kids will no doubt like the bedtime stories themselves, which are rendered in fast-paced special effects sequences, as well as the jokes about horse flatulence and a guinea pig with bulbous eyes, and they probably won’t care (or even notice) that the plot is a by-the-numbers job that hinges on whether or not the local elementary school will be demolished to make way for a new mega hotel. Adults will no doubt appreciate the inspired casting of Russell Brand as Sandler’s best pal, and fans of Sandler’s comedy won’t find the film nearly vulgar enough. “Bedtime Stories” is a mild diversion, energetic and sweet, but also predictable and forgettable.
Grade: C

Marley and Me
“Marley and Me” has a high sniffle factor, meaning it’s the type of movie that sets out to make you bawl your eyes out by the end. I didn’t cry myself, but I did, almost in spite of myself, feel a lump in my throat when Owen Wilson delivered a teary deathbed monologue to his dog (this is not a spoiler, as any film about the relationship between a human and a dog inevitably ends in the canine’s demise). Yes, the hard-hearted cynic in me was won over. I normally hate movies like this, movies that parade around cute puppies and attractive Hollywood stars and expects us to fawn over them and then get all blubbery at the end. But “Marley and Me,” based on John Grogan’s bestselling memoir, is smarter and funnier than most movies of this sort; it has personality and heart (and a good supporting performance by Alan Arkin, which never hurts), and its sentiments seem genuine. I went along with the misadventures of Marley, the world’s worst dog, and Wilson and Jennifer Aniston, who play his harried owners—they chase Marley around the house and fret as he chews on table legs and eviscerates couch cushions. Yes, it’s warm and fuzzy entertainment, punctuated by lots of “awww” moments, but it’s certainly not saccharine enough to engage your gag reflex.
Grade: B-

The Spirit
“The Spirit” looks great. If they had turned the sound off, they might have had something. It is a baffling, hollow, aimless mess, a sort of distant cousin to “Sin City”—it borrows that film’s visual palette (black, white and sepia tones with splashes of bright red and yellow) but can’t reproduce its excitements. It has all the right ingredients for a quirky pulp fantasy: Gabriel Macht has self-aware pluck as the titular masked crime fighter; Samuel L. Jackson is just right as the arch-villain the Octopus, so named because he has “eight of everything;” and the women in the cast—Eva Mendes, Scarlett Johansson, Jaime King, Sarah Paulson, Paz Vega—are so gorgeous that they upstage the CGI. But “The Spirit” has enough material for at least a dozen movies, and it juggles so many directionless subplots, empty characters and contradictory tones and styles, and the script never bothers to make heads or tails of it all. The movie has been written and directed by Frank Miller, who has taken Will Eisner’s 1940s comic book series and updated it to look like a pale retread of his vivid “Sin City” universe, but it’s black and white and dead all over.
Grade: D

Valkyrie
Here we have a good historical thriller that is prevented from ever being great because we don’t give a damn about anybody in it. “Valkyrie” stars Tom Cruise as General Claus von Stauffenberg, who led the German Resistance, plotted to kill Hitler and masterminded Operation Valkryie, which would have overthrown the Nazi regime had it been successful. It’s a fascinating story, yes, but none of the characters in the movie are written or acted with a sense of real human emotion. There are some great actors at work here—Kenneth Branagh, Tom Wilkinson, Bill Nighy, Terence Stamp—but when the famous July 20 assassination attempt finally unfolds in the film, we’re enthralled by its mechanics, not because we really care about Stauffenberg or any of his accomplices. Cruise is so sterile and unmoving that we never get the sense that he’s the great man the movie wants him to be, and that creates a gaping void at the emotional center of the film. “Valkyrie” is a finely-tuned machine, and although it hits all of its marks at exactly the right time, it does so with very little feeling.
Grade: B-

Yes Man
In 1997, Jim Carrey made a movie called “Liar Liar,” in which he played a dishonest lawyer who, by way of his young son’s birthday wish, cannot tell a lie no matter how hard he tries. Now Carrey has made “Yes Man,” in which he plays a negative bank loan exec who gets a new lease on life when he challenges himself to say “yes” to everything. Both concepts are very similar, which makes this movie easy to review: “Liar Liar” was funny, “Yes Man” not as much, so if “Liar Liar” gets a B, then “Yes Man” clocks in somewhere around a C. Remember the scene in “Liar Liar” where Jim Carrey wants to say the blue pen is red but can’t? Or the scene where he beats himself up until he’s a bloody pulp? Or the scene where he goes into the board room meeting and has to tell all of the horrible businessmen what he really thinks about them? There are no sequences like that in “Yes Man,” no big comic set pieces that allow Carrey to tangle up his body parts and contort his face and really steal the show. It’s a mundane plot about a mundane character that quickly develops into a mundane love story, as Carrey courts the beautiful Zooey Deschanel, who, once she catches on to the whole “yes-to-everything” bit, wonders if he really meant his answer when she asked him if he loved her. “Yes Man” is pleasant enough, but it’s missing the big laughs we expect when we go to a Jim Carrey comedy.
Grade: C