I don’t think I need to remind anybody about the significance of this weekend, but just in case: it’s the opening weekend of Resident Evil: Extinction.

I haven’t been reading or watching anything about the movie except for the trailer, because I don’t want no haters dragging me down. If I’d listened to the kind of people who go on about “bad” movies that “suck” “hard,” then I would’ve missed out on the laser-grid-slicing, zombie-dog-jumping, nipple-flashing, Michelle-Rodriguez-shooting magic of the first Resident Evil.

So what if that first movie could rightly be called “barely tolerable” by anybody watching it objectively, or that it seemed like it managed to be good purely by accident? This movie has even more hot women shooting guns and kicking zombie dudes in mid-air, which means I’m guaranteed to be there sitting right next to Front-Row Joe.

If I’m lucky, the shooting and kicking will be done to really loud thumping techno music. A guy can dream.

I remember when the intro clips they showed at movie theaters used to be cool. You’d be flying through space and there’s a Coke formation up ahead but all of a sudden popcorn starts exploding all around you and then they thank you for not smoking. Nowadays, the theater conglomerate that currently monopolizes Marin is called CineMark, and for some reason they’ve chosen to start every movie with a trip to the concession stand with a couple of furries. Their mascot, who has the vaguely dirty-sounding but I can’t explain why exactly name of “Joe Front Row” does a Busby Berkeley dance with a bunch of generic candy and his ballgown-wearing girlfriend. I’m convinced there’s some kind of subliminal messaging going on, because by the time the movie starts, I’m always overcome with the urge to buy some popcorn and screw a cat.

I’m 0 for 2 in my attempts to see a good, stupid summer movie over the past two weeks. Last weekend I got invited after work to go see Balls of Fury. Tonight, a sudden power outage at the office left me with no option but to see Shoot ‘Em Up.

If the ads for concessions weren’t confusing enough, the choice of trailers is almost as baffling. The trailers before Shoot ‘Em Up, a gun-heavy action comedy aimed at post-adolescent males, were: a Sean Penn movie about some guy in his 20’s discovering himself by becoming a hobo (sure, fine); Hitman (obviously); a horror movie about vampires in Alaska (I see where you’re going with this); a movie where Stiffler’s mom is played by Susan Sarandon (all right); and The Jane Austen Book Club (…the hell?)

Before Balls of Fury, there were ads for all the latest attempts at comedies, including The Comebacks. Anybody who thought that the double-whammy of White Chicks and Little Man finally put an end to the Wayans, not so fast: they opened Pandora’s box with Scary Movie, and we’re going to be feeling the after-effects for decades to come. You can see why Hollywood would be attracted to these parody movies, since they let you save the expense of hiring comedy writers. The Comebacks claims to be a parody of those schmaltzy Disney underdog sports movies, which sounds like a reasonably clever idea, except the trailer has a lot of footage where they’re parodying Dodgeball. Which was itself a parody of underdog sports movies. How much more can you scrape the bottom of the barrel and still be inside the barrel? Isn’t that a little like releasing a parody of a Leslie Nielsen movie?

So why have I been going on about the trailers, instead of talking about the movies themselves? Well, because there’s not much to say. I went into each having lowered my expectations as far as they could go while still looking forward to the movie, and they still managed to disappoint. Each time, I was hoping for a fun, stupid comedy, and each time they only managed one out of three.

Balls of Fury is the easier target, since it aims so low and misses. I’ve seen a lot of movies where all the good bits are in the trailer. This one is remarkable because they managed to take everything that was funny in the trailer, and then render it unfunny in the actual movie. I’ve read reviews that call it offensive, but it’s not. It’s just kind of lazy. It feels like they took a concept with a lot of potential (even the most soulless person has to admit that an Enter the Dragon / Bloodsport parody based around ping pong sounds like a can’t-fail idea), got together a bunch of funny people to make cameos, then started filming without realizing they’d neglected to write any funny material. It’s like they wrote the screenplay in Microsoft Word using “BLIND MAN WALKS INTO POLE” as a macro for “INSERT JOKE HERE”, then forgot to do a search-and-replace. “Oh well, Christopher Walken in a geisha wig will patch over the weak spots,” is all well and good, but the guy can only do so much.

Shoot ‘em Up is basically what you should expect from a movie called Shoot ‘em Up. Emphasis on should expect. I expected an over-the-top action comedy with actors chewing scenery and big, ridiculous shoot-out sequences — a movie every bit as ridiculous as John Woo’s Hong Kong movies, but which didn’t take itself at all seriously.

What I should have expected was a movie made by people who aren’t clever enough to come up with a better title than Shoot ‘em Up. It’s a deadpan riff on Hong Kong shoot-out movies with over-the-top action scenes, a Bugs Bunny or Roadrunner cartoon done in the style of Quentin Tarantino, but without Tarantino’s subtlety or nuanced dialogue.

That’s right, I said without the subtlety of Quentin Tarantino. I’m as stunned as anyone else; I always thought the appeal of Tarantino was the same as that of listening to a really imaginative, hyperactive 15-year-old who’d been raised on B-movies and TV shows describing the most boss fight scenes ever. It’s a hell of a lot of fun mostly because there’s just no sense of restraint or self-censoring.

Before seeing Shoot ‘em Up, I never fully appreciated what goes into Tarantino’s movies — it’s actually very risky to go as balls-out as he does, because when you get it wrong, it’s like nails on a chalkboard. I would’ve welcomed any of the interminable dialogue scenes in Death Proof if it meant I didn’t have to hear another unforgivably, suck-the-air-out-of-the-room unfunny attempt at a one-liner or the “ain’t BMW drivers annoying?” moments in Shoot ‘em Up. This movie feels like it was made by the type of guy who’s watching Kill Bill, and needs to lean over to his buddy and say, “Did you see that? She’s driving a car called the Pussy Wagon! Get it?”

The action scenes are decent, and there are a couple of genuinely clever* moments. Almost all of them are in the first 10 minutes, though. And the cast are good but all feel like they’re slumming. I’d think that Clive Owen was parodying his performances in Children of Men and those BMW ads, except that even that obvious a parody feels too subtle for this movie. The unintelligible Monica Bellucci seems wasted, and she was in The Matrix movies. It even seems like a low point for Paul Giamatti, and he was in that movie with the Nickelodeon stars where he gets dyed blue.

I think I’ve about given up on movies that are trying to be bad, because they’re so good at it.

* “Clever” in this context means (spoilers): killing a guy with a carrot, and delivering a baby by shooting through the umbilical cord.

There’s a scene in the the trailer for the upcoming re-remake of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, where Nicole Kidman’s character is walking through a crowd of people and is warned not to show any emotion, because that’s how they can tell you’re still human.

Looking at the Rotten Tomatoes page for Stardust is a little like the opposite of that scene: you can easily pick out the people who panned Stardust, and identify those as people who have no soul.

Now, I didn’t love the movie, but I liked in an awful lot. Overall, it’s just charming and clever, smart where it needs to be, corny where it needs to be, funny and exciting more often than not, moving at the good parts, and imaginative throughout. It’s hard to find fault with it.

But not impossible: Robert De Niro’s character was endearing and played at just the right level until they took it a step too far and had him camping it up. Ricky Gervais’ cameo was just awkward and out of place and threatened to suck all the air out of the movie during the few minutes he’s on screen. And Claire Danes was annoying the hell out of me for the first 30 minutes or so she was on-screen, which is surprising because she usually has me in her thrall in seconds. (Like that Gap commercial, which doesn’t make me want to buy pants as much as it makes me realize my current pants have suddenly gotten uncomfortable).

Still, the movie does all the things an adventure story should, and it usually stays a step above the obvious and cliched. I’ve seen it compared a lot to The Princess Bride, a comparison that is just inconceivable. As much as I like The Princess Bride, it’s very much an 80s movie, with a very Zemeckisian sensibility and very much aware that it’s a story about stories. Stardust is very much a late 90s movie, minus the overbearing irony — it’s more of a straightforward fairy tale/adventure story, told cleverly, but without as much self-awareness. I doubt it’ll become a classic like Princess Bride has, but it’s definitely got at least Labyrinth-level staying power.

I’ve heard that the movie is more simple and shallow than Neil Gaiman’s book, which may be true. I’ve started the book a couple of times, but it’s never held my interest long enough for me to finish it. I think Gaiman may be one of the most imaginative story-tellers alive today, but I’ve never been able to make it through his prose work for some reason. After seeing this movie, I’m going to force myself to read Stardust and American Gods and Anansi Boys. Probably after seeing a bunch more movies and comic books, though.

I’m one more movie closer to death, since I saw The Night of the Hunter last night. And it’s at least a dozen kinds of awesome.

A movie like this is really difficult for me to describe. Something like His Girl Friday is easy: it’s timeless, just as cool today as it was 67 years ago, so no qualifications are necessary. The Killers feels undeniably dated, but it’s still undeniably cool, and it has shots that are just perfectly composed. And Ace in the Hole (now available on DVD!) is over-the-top early 50s style, but is full of brilliantly unforgettable dialogue.

But how can you explain in words the genius fever dream that is Night of the Hunter? I submit that you can’t. So I pulled together brief bits of the most inspired moments, because I say the only way to believe it is to see it for yourself.

Edit: I had a six-minute clip included here, but thought better of it. I realized that it gives too much of the movie away, both in terms of copyright infringement and in terms of ruining the movie for people who haven’t seen it. It was a well-intentioned but misguided case of getting carried away with iMovie and thinking, “This is the best part of the movie, you’ve got to see this! No wait, this is even cooler!”

If I can pick a single favorite scene, I’ll put that one up. Until then, just see the movie. It’s sustained brilliant wackiness on a scale I never expected.

What do you think of that compromise, Ms. Winters?

I was really impressed with The Bourne Identity. I didn’t see it until the second movie had already been out on DVD for a while, so I’d already heard the consensus, that it was better than you’d expect from an action movie starring Matt Damon and directed by the guy who did Swingers. But even with the advance notice, I was still really surprised by how good it was.

So now The Bourne Ultimatum is out, and it’s been getting really favorable reviews, and they’re all completely deserved. It really is one hell of an action movie. I definitely recommend it to anyone, especially if you liked the first one.

And if you’re wondering whether to see it in a theater or wait for DVD, I’d recommend the theater. Not for the big screen — almost all of the movie is filmed with shaky handheld cameras — but for the crowd. About halfway into the movie, there’s an extended chase scene through Tangier that you can really only describe as masterful. When it finished, the audience was dead silent for a few seconds, and then just burst into applause. I honestly hadn’t realized that I’d been holding my breath for the last minute or so.

One of the things that impresses me so much about the movie is how they do so much with so little. Not so little action, or sets — they shoot on location in at least 5 different cities, and have a big, stunning car chase — but so little dialogue. It wouldn’t surprise me to hear that Matt Damon has less than 50 lines in the entire movie, and Julia Stiles even less. The plot isn’t all that convoluted, but still, for somebody as long-winded as I am, watching this movie is like seeing acrobats perform without a net. Aren’t the filmmakers afraid that the audience won’t get it? Don’t they want to explain that bit a little more? After having my intelligence assaulted by movies like The DaVinci Code and Transformers, it’s really nice to see one that just expects you to be able to keep up.

Reviewers are saying that this is the best in the series, but the first one is still my favorite. The second one, The Bourne Supremacy, had the most interesting plot twists; and the third one, The Bourne Ultimatum, has by far the best action sequences; but Identity was more complete in terms of setting up characters and how they relate to each other. I wasn’t that impressed with Supremacy; in the end I thought it was entirely competent but mostly forgettable.

Ultimatum is pretty much five extended action sequences strung back to back, but none of it is disposable or forgettable. They’re genuinely suspenseful, and they’re all filmed so as to give you no room for disbelief. There’s none of the detachment of spectacle that you get from most action movies; you’re convinced that everything is really happening, and the cameras just happened to catch it all.

And you can follow Ultimatum just fine without having seen the first two, but I highly recommend seeing Supremacy beforehand. I don’t want to spoil anything, but I’ll say that the epilogue of Supremacy plays a very important part in Ultimatum, and it’s really impressive how they structured it.

Edited to add: Reading a review by Stephanie Zacharek of Salon (warning: there’s a big spoiler in there for The Bourne Supremacy if you haven’t seen it yet) reminded me of another thing that really impressed me about this movie. It’s got a very clear sense of morality. More than you’d expect out of a movie this sparse, based on pure action. And not the pig-headed false patriotism of most action movies. It’s entirely human, not American, and it’s summed up in actions, not words. I’ve already spent more words describing it than the movie uses. It’s all basically summed up by a simple line from Joan Allen’s character after Bourne asks her why she does what she does; it’s something like, “That’s not what we’re about.”

Before the movie there were two trailers for Very Important Movies Starring Meryl Streep: Lions for Lambs and Rendition. I’m sure they’re going to be well-made. And I’m mostly sure that, in some sense, it’s important that they’re being made, that people are speaking up as best they can against injustice. But they still struck me as being insufferably self-important, dismissible as yet another case of liberal Hollywood poking its nose into politics. I liked that The Bourne Ultimatum dispensed with all of that, saying in effect, “it’s really not that complicated: People are important. Try not to kill them, or reduce them to simple ‘targets’ and ‘assets.’”

My Transformers experience wasn’t a total wash, though, because before the movie they ran the trailer for a new “Untitled J.J. Abrams Project”. According to the IMDB, it’s got a writing credit by Drew Goddard, who was heavily involved in “Lost”, “Alias”, and “Angel”.

There are rumors and speculation up on ain’t it cool news, which I’m avoiding partly to go into it as unspoiled as possible, and mostly because I don’t like to linger on that website.

The trailer’s up on Apple’s trailer site. It’s not nearly as cool seeing it on a computer as it is in a theater, but it’s still pretty intriguing. Based on the people involved and the potential of that trailer, I’m tempted to start standing in line now.

Qatar is in the Middle East! I learned that from the Transformers movie. Each of the dozen or so times the movie cut over to the action in Qatar (Middle East), there would be a shot of the desert and some army guys and a building with mosaic-lined archways and guys in turbans, and there’d be a subtitle that said “QATAR - THE MIDDLE EAST”. So you can’t say the movie doesn’t teach you anything.

The most valuable thing to be learned from Transformers, though, is exactly how not to make a movie about the Transformers. It’s really just awful. Don’t think that the caption thing is my biggest complaint about the movie — far, far from it. I only bring it up to demonstrate how the movie manages to use every single possible channel of communication available to cinema in its two-and-a-half-hour-long assault on the audience’s intelligence.

I’ve seen several positive reviews of the movie that include disclaimers as defense against the cultural elite who are supposedly going to be stumbling into Transformers and ending up baffled and outraged: you read a lot of reminders that it’s a big, loud action movie; and you see it’s supposed to be campy; and you’re bound to be disappointed if you try to judge it as high art instead of summer blockbuster spectacle.

Yeah, thanks, guys, but I think we get it. It’s 2007; we’re already over a decade and a half through the ironic generation. I think we all knew what to expect when we paid ten bucks to see a Michael Bay movie based on an 80s cartoon based on a toy about cars that turn into giant robots. Hasbro gets second billing, for crying out loud. The problem isn’t just that it fails to deliver as a real movie, it fails deliver as a campy marketing-driven giant robot action movie.

Action? I’ve read reviews that say the filmmakers knew what the crowd wanted, so they made sure to let you see the Transformers from the first scene of the movie. But that’s not true. It starts with the biggest of cliches, the character-building army guys discussing “what are you gonna do back home” sequence, which would be annoying enough even if the characters involved had anything to do with the rest of the movie. By the time you’re ready to see all of them dead, our first Decepticon lands and starts demolishing the base.

At least I think that’s what happened. The Transformers of the title are all so badly designed it’s impossible to tell them apart when they’re not in their General Motors® form, and it’s near impossible to tell what they’re doing. And in the movie, everything’s filmed with shaky cams and covered in smoke and explosions and lasers to make you feel like you’re really there. So the end result is a bunch of gray metal forms moving around incomprehensibly while people run around screaming, punctuating with the occasional cool shockwave effect and a car flying over something. Repeat that formula about a dozen times, and you’ve got all the action sequences.

Story? The “plot” is something about a giant cube that landed on Earth and the Decepticons are going to get it and the Autobots want to destroy it and the key is in Shia LeBeouf’s great-grandfather’s glasses. And you know really, whatever. A movie about cars that turn into robots doesn’t have to be better than that. But by about two hours in, when they started introducing another group of characters (this one led by John Turturro, which just made me very sad), I’d thought of at least a dozen better ways to tell the same story.

None of them involved dicking around for an hour and a half, and then suddenly bringing every character in the movie together in the same place to reveal that the main villain and the super-powerful object the villain wants to get have been sitting right next to each other for the past 80 years. Seriously, guys, that’s just lazy.

Comedy? You’ll hear that the movie is just smart enough to know that it’s campy, and inserts humor to make fun of itself. Don’t believe it! The height of the comedy is Turturro in comically ludicrous underwear getting peed on by one of the Autobots, while another makes a joke about lube. The same joke that they’d already made not five minutes earlier, when a chihuahua in a comically oversized foot cast pees on one of the Autobots during the sequence where they’re all hiding out around the main character’s house while his parents make belabored jokes about masturbation.

If I’m an expert on anything, it’s on the subject of overly-labored and stale jokes. And I could write a thesis on Transformers. There’s no joke so stale (e.g. President Bush stand-in asking for ding dongs) that the movie won’t make it at least twice. In a movie called Transformers that has only about eight or nine transformers, there are two, repeat two wisecrackin’ black grandmas.

Some of the “humor” was so unrecognizable as such, that the music guy was confused. Apparently Bay or somebody involved in the movie had just seen The 40 Year Old Virgin and Knocked Up, and decided he wanted to try that new semi-improv comedy thing that was all the rage. There’s a bit with an overzealous cop accusing Shia LeBeouf’s character of being on drugs that I’m guessing was supposed to be hilarious, but had string-filled orchestral tension music playing throughout.

Performances? You’ll hear a lot about Shia LeBeouf, and sure, he’s just fine in the movie. Most of the cast is, actually. And you’ve got to give them credit; everybody seems to get that it’s a comedy, so you don’t have some people trying to play it straight while everything around them is goofy. But none of them have anything to work with.

Sound Design? The sound design rocked. Seriously. In fact, it was the only single thing in the movie that I thought was well done. The sound of the transformations, the alien broadcast signals, the sound of Starscream turning into a jet and taking off, all excellent.

Except I just remembered: as part of the astoundingly cheesy product placement throughout the movie, one dude’s Xbox 360 comes to life and grows arms it uses to attack him with. And it makes the Xbox 360 startup sound when it comes to life. Which makes me sad. Because it showed that somebody involved was detail-oriented enough to put that in, but was too oblivious to realize that he was working on a movie that was completely without soul or conscience and ultimately stands as an example of everything that’s wrong in 2007 American society. So there’s that.

Oh yeah I forgot! I failed to mention one of the things that bugged me the most. One of the Decepticons disguises himself as a police car. I’d read in other reviews that they replaced the “To Serve and Protect” motto on the car with “To Punish and Enslave.” And when I read that, I thought, that’s approaching a clever little joke there, maybe the movie’s not all that bad. But in the actual movie, there’s a big close-up of the back of the car during an action sequence, to make sure you see the joke. And then there’s a slow-motion drive by with the camera on the back-bumper to make absolutely sure you get it. And then, I’m not kidding, they added a CG effect where the words light up.

I’m assuming that Bay wanted to put a big flashing arrow pointing to the joke, but he’d already used up the budget getting a robot to pee on John Turturro.

This week Mac got me into a preview screening of Ratatouille. It’s really an outstanding movie.

It’s gotten to where you just expect the highest level of quality from Pixar movies, and Ratatouille exceeds that. At the technical level, of course, it’s perfect — Pixar movies always have much, much more going on behind the scenes than is immediately apparent, and the effects always serve the story. There are hairy characters that don’t really need to have every hair individually simulated, and segments that don’t really have to be set underwater with accurate water caustics and bubbles and realistic movement, but they do it just because they can.

That’s the case here, but still the effects work stands out: in Ratatouille, I was most impressed with the 2D animation. There are several scenes where book illustrations and billboards come to life and begin speaking, and the movement and lighting and coloration are perfect; they really do look like paintings brought to life, and make the surrounding three-dimensional characters seem even more realistic.

The animation is perfect throughout, which is remarkable considering I don’t really like the character design for any of the non-rat characters. They’re all fairly off-putting, with grotesquely exaggerated features and a skin texture that makes them look like PVC figures. (But still nowhere near as unappealing as Dreamworks characters). But that’s just a personal preference, and even I quickly forgot it because the characters all move completely convincingly.

It’s full of laugh-out-loud moments, and like all the best animation, many of those come from small details. Just the shape of the food critic Anton Ego’s writing room, and the image of his typewriter, were enough to get a laugh.

And it’s got my single favorite scene in any Pixar movie to date. It would’ve been a great movie without it, but that one scene in particular — when Ego first tastes the ratatouille — was just so brilliantly done, it knocked it completely out of the park.

So Ratatouille gets my unqualified recommendation: go see it as soon as you’re able.

But…

I’ve got to mention the problem that kept distracting me throughout the movie. It was the same unsettling undertone that caused me to feel ultimately ambivalent about The Incredibles. (And for the record, I liked Ratatouille much more than The Incredibles, which is doubly surprising because the latter has superheroes and retro-future homes and a Bondian supervillians lair and fight scenes and explosions, while the former is about cartoon rats and French cooking).

What bugged me about The Incredibles was the sense of Objectivist preachiness that kept slipping in. The “Be true to yourself” message has been a staple of Disney movies for decades, but it’s usually of the innocuous (and vapid) “Follow your dream!” variety. I thought The Incredibles pounded home the darker variety, saying “I am an exceptional person and I deserve to be treated as such!”

The subtle aspects didn’t bother me — naming the characters “Parr,” setting Mr. Incredible up with a desk job — but when they veered into speeches — Mr. Incredible’s browbeating by his tiny middle-manager boss, and Dash’s browbeating by his nerdy teacher and the lecture about “just fitting in”, and especially the villain’s final speech — it just seemed like the screenwriter had some baggage he wanted to get rid of.

Ratatouille isn’t anywhere near as glaring — if you weren’t bothered by the parts I mentioned in The Incredibles, you probably won’t notice it at all in Ratatouille. But there are still a couple of moments of speechifying. Remy makes a speech to his dad about “moving forward” that seems more petulant than affirming. A book mentioned throughout the movie is called “Anyone Can Cook;” but ultimately, we’re reminded that anyone can try, but very few are going to be good at it. And even more blatant, the food critic begins his final review with a completely out-of-left-field dissertation about how critics are worthless and produce nothing of value, doing nothing but bringing down the ones truly capable of greatness.

Now, I’m willing to admit I’m sensitive when the topic of Objectivism comes up; it’s a completely alien and repugnant philosophy to me, and somehow I ended up with roommates all throughout college who were hard-line devotees of Ayn Rand. (Edited because that sounded overly harsh: they were perfectly fine people on every level; I just completely disagree with their philosophy.) So I could be reading more into it than what’s there.

But then I see stuff like this featurette about how Brad Bird is the Messiah, and I just feel kind of nauseated afterwards. One of the cardinal rules of filmmaking is supposed to be “show, don’t tell.” Bird has shown us three times over, with The Iron Giant, The Incredibles, and now Ratatouille, that he’s an exceptionally talented filmmaker, capable of making astounding movies that genuinely raise the bar for everything that follows. So I’d just ask that he stop reminding us of that.