Let’s address the Titanic comparisons first.  Yes, Leonardo and Kate are again the love interest, this time as Frank and April Wheeler.  You’ll have to imagine all but a scene or two or their falling in love  - before you’ve finished the popcorn, they are 1950′s suburbanites with two kids.  And yes, there are other spoiler comparisons that don’t need to be spelled out here.  But how about this one: Kathy Bates also plays a significant role in each.  She was something of a maverick in Titanic as the wealthy socialite who lent Jack a tux for the ball, but here her character is a very conventional – a crushing force of oppressive conformity.

The movie’s best moment is when April talks Frank into checking out of the stultifying conformity of their suburban life and moving to Paris to figure out how to be more alive.  They have tried to “find life” in Connecticut but can’t.  He knew Paris from the war, and has spoken longingly of how alive he felt there.  The scenes that follow create a hopeful and optimistic mood once again – the characters’ intimacy, the sense of childlike delight they display as if sharing the same hilarious inside joke, completely takes over the movie.

But that mood does not last.

Besides the knock-down drag out fights between the main characters, the movie’s most telling moments are their conversations with a crazy man.  They are visited by a former mathematics PhD on leave from the state mental institute.  Whether the result of his brilliant mind or his electro-shock therapy, John is consistently honest and unbound by any of society’s conventions.  His scenes create great tension – the audience laughs, his parents cringe, and in the heat of this crucible, the changes in the main characters are brought into sharp focus.  John’s mocking of their safe little suburban life turns to admiration when they reveal their plans to jump up and move to Paris.  He has never met anyone else that honestly deals with the “emptiness and hopelessness” of conventional life like the Wheelers.

But while the lunatic embraces their idea, others are more skeptical.  The idea of a poorly financed, find-your-true-self at age 30 with two kids in tow does not make much sense to their friends and co-workers.  And when, for complicated reasons, their plans change, so does their relationship with the lunatic.  John turns the whole force of his very strong personality into a probing analysis of their decision and relationship with an ugly, ugly result. You are left saddened, but wondering if crazy is the new sane.

Can I use a genre-bending comparison here?  I can’t think of too many ways Harry Potter is like Revolutionary Road, but it does portray a sharp division between two kinds of people – the magical wizards and the clueless and ordinary muggles.  Real life is experienced by wizards, while muggles, whether through fear or ignorance, just blindly bumble through life.

The Wheelers seem caught in-between – they want to be exceptional and magical, but they also like the comfort and security of a successful, ordinary life.  They think for a time that they can be wizards in the muggle world, but they eventually become what they do, transformed by their world instead of transforming it.  Once they realize this, they think their Paris plan will free them to become the wizards they believe themselves to be.

We are left with questions – were they wizards who failed to grasp their full life or are they muggles who fancied themselves wizards and flew too close to the sun?

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ 

Seven Pounds is a powerful, mysterious film, slow to reveal itself, but engaging all the way.  In the opening minutes, we hear Will Smith’s character make a 911 call reporting a suicide – his own – before flashing back to a series of seemingly random, inconsistent, disconnected actions.  He tells us that he has shattered his life, and we see he is troubled and hurt.  A few dream sequences hint at the source of his demise, but we spend the bulk of the next two hours trying to figure out both what it was that shattered his life, and how it affects his resulting actions.

The worst thing I can say about the movie? The camera loves Wills Smith’s face too much.  Whether showing his you-can-trust-me-I’m-a-good-guy smile, or his I’m-in-pain-but-a-good-guy-can-bear-it grimace, the movie attempts to tell too much of the story through the emotions playing on his face.  Nothing wrong with the guy’s face, but there are other ways to express feeling and move the plot along.  As a result, there seems to be some disconnect between the slick, MIT-educated aerospace engineer Smith and the wooden, Forest Gump-awkward Smith who becomes as an IRS agent looking for good people.

Because I heard several people talking about the title after the movie who totally missed it, I’ll give you some of the background.  A “pound of flesh” is what Shylock, the money lender in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice requests and receives as surety for a loan he makes to the merchant Antonio.  When the loan cannot be repaid, Shylock, who has been hurt and insulted by Antonio, insists upon literal fulfillment of the terms of the contract.

Nowadays, someone who insists upon having his “pound of flesh” cruelly demands the repayment of a debt, no matter how much suffering it will bring the debtor. In Seven Pounds, the main character is both debtor and debt collector, deadbeat and loan shark.  And unlike those involved in the recent sub-prime credit collapse, he means to both pay and collect.

It isn’t until the final five minutes of the film that the whole thing comes together.  Now, personally, I like stories that are told from the beginning, but I suppose that art is imitating life here – the only story we know from the beginning is our own, and everything else we ‘know’ is pieced together from what we see and hear as we go along.  My worry here is that too many people will hear about the film and skip seeing it, thinking they have enough of those pieces to understand the conclusion.  In the Internet Age, it’s pretty risky for a studio to think that early audiences won’t blab the conclusion.

What challenges does the movie present?  It raises some powerful questions, questions that get to the core of our humanity:  “Do you consider yourself a good person?”  “How do you tell if someone is a good person?” ” What would be the impact of a life lived for the benefit of others?” ” How far would you go to atone for a mistake you made?”  And, “What does it mean to love someone?”

“Greater love has no one than this…” If the raw emotion of this movie doesn’t kill you, it might make you a better person.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆ 

This is your captain speaking – thank you for choosing Air Penguin.  As a wholly owned subsidiary of DreamWorks Animation, we aim to please.  In that spirit, when brainstorming ideas for the sequel to the popular Madagascar movie, we said yes to absolutely every thing.  That’s right, we cut nothing.

Adventure?  Check – the penguins and the apes team fix up the plane not once but twice.  And the second time, they have to strip parts from stolen Land Rovers.

A search for your true identity?  Check – we’ve got Marty finding himself after joining a herd of virtual clones – crack-a-lackin’!

Love story?  Check – we liked that idea so much, we included two, just so we could play them off of each other (and play with your emotions while we’re at it.)

Baldwin brother?  Check – we’ve got Alec as the devious alpha-lion wanna-be (think Scar from the Lion King).

Tough and Courageous New Yorker?  Check – even 7 years after 9/11, the stereotype lives.  “We ah New Yorkas!”  The fight scene between the surprisingly tough granny and Alex (the lion, not the Baldwin) gets some of the biggest laughs.

Familial expectations?  Son not living up to his father’s expectations?  Check – the reunion of Alex with his mom and dad is the closest thing we have to a main story-line.  Predictably enough, performing for crowds of adoring fans in the zoo does not prepare Alex for the rigors of life on the plains of Africa, at least until the surprise ending

Comic Relief?  Sacrifice?  Troubled Friendships and their Resolution?  Check, check, check.  King Julian (king of the lemurs, “I like to move it, move it”), a volunteer to go into the fiery volcano, zoo alum fighting and making it up – I’m telling you, this movie has it all.

Don’t think that all these story lines will be a drag on the pace of the movie – its a fast 89 minutes.  When I said we cut nothing, I meant we cut no story ideas – each one moves with lightning speed from conflict to resolution as fast as we could animate it.

Thank you for flying Air Penguin.  We know you have choices when you fly, and “all of the above” is usually a good bet.  Enjoy your movie.

Rating: ★★★½☆ 

Religulous?  For starters, it rhymes with incredulous.  As in “Bill Maher can’t help being incredulous in the face of anything he deems supernatural,” or “Bill Maher is incredulous that anyone could think differently than he does” – you get the idea.  On the surface, the 100 plus minute mockumentary is a humorous exposé of the the irrationality and inconsistency of people’s religious beliefs.  On another level, the movie probes Maher’s own religious experiences.  And on some metaphysical level, the movie is a universe in which Maher gets to play God.  Think about it – the planning, scripting, and especially editing of a project like this is a pretty God-like experience – you ‘speak’ the thing into existence (And God said, “Let there be comedy!”  An, lo, there was comedy.)  If you can’t create a universe, I guess a movie is the next best thing.

If you noticed that Larry Charles of Borat fame is the director, you have a pretty good idea of what to expect from this film.  The main dish is a series of interviews with sincere if unprepared Christians, Muslims, ex-Mormons and Jews, the guy who plays Jesus at the Holy Land Experience in Florida, a guy who thinks he is Jesus. . .   And there are plenty of side dishes too – cuts of campy Jesus movies, spliced in commentary of Maher in his car, subtitles poking fun at his interview subjects, and short clips of everything from “Scarface” to “The Flintstones.”

It seems that Maher hasn’t ever gotten over his disappointment over finding that Santa Clause is not real (sorry kids).  Seriously – Santa comes up in a couple of the interviews – once with his mom and sister, and once with a formerly Jewish Christian who appears to be running a kitchy Catholic gift shop.  The attempt to probe his own formative experiences is admirable, but the film can’t maintain that level of seriousness for long.

While the finished product showcases Maher’s wit and ability to prod his subjects into absurd self-contradictions, it tends more toward the quick laugh than the real substance the subject would suggest.  This makes the self-righteous tone he takes at the end all the more surprising.  Returning to Megiddo, a desolate, rocky, apocalyptic-looking hill that he has told us earlier is the supposed site of Jesus’ second coming, and with dramatic music building in the background, Maher focuses on the decidedly non-funny topic of the violence and wars he holds religion responsible for.  With no hint of a wink or a grin, he confidently, almost religiously, sums up religion as a “neurological disorder” and encourages his audience to “grow up or die.”  No punch line – that’s it.

Maher does have a couple of good challenges for those of us not quite ready to create our own (alternate) universes.  First, he proposes that doubt take the place of arrogance, and if this was applied to the discussion and spread of religious ideas, the (real) world would probably be a better place.  Secondly, his statement that “faith makes a virtue of not thinking’ is a challenge to examine our beliefs.  If more people asked themselves “Why do I think that?”  or “Is this truth or just a superstitious tradition?”, Bill Maher would have one less subject for his comedy.

He’s funny enough to find another way to make us laugh.

And Mr. Maher?  Like the drivers in the truckers’ chapel, we’ll be praying for you.

Rating: ☆☆☆☆☆