Movie: We Own the Night. A movie about New York cops, family guilt trips, and drug dealing Russian emigré gangsters. The most striking thing about it is that there are no more than 2 or 3 scenes in the whole film where anyone appears to be having a good time. They involve drug use, but are hardly limited to it. Rather, drugs are just one part of a free and open enjoyment of life. You sure don't find any pleasure among the cops, nor are the gangsters much better, but at least they aren't as stuck up as the cops. The latter don't even appear to have a bad apple on the take, less an avoidance of a cliché than an escape from reality. Mark Wahlberg plays the most rigidly hectoring cop in memory, at least until he gets shot and starts to smell the roses. By then his club manager brother [Joaquin Phoenix] has turned around to fill the breach. We're supposed to be inspired, but we can tell he's going to be a miserable prick for the rest of his probably short life, and he deserves it. (Robert Duvall, in a thankless role, plays the father who put these two basket cases together.) Some scenes are sharply drawn and a pleasure to watch. But if I had to draw a lesson from the film, it's that the worst two groups of people to allow anywhere near the drug trade are gangsters and cops. It would be so much better just to legalize the shit, treat those who can't handle them, and let everybody else enjoy their freedom. B-

Movie: Michael Clayton. I hate guys with gambling problems, not to mention movies about them, so that's one strike against the lawyer George Clooney plays here. That's about the only one. He has a sense of place, an understanding of what he's good at and when he's in over his head, that is refreshing, and put to good use. That's a skill that the corporate lawyer played by Tilda Swinton doesn't have, and she winds up paying for it in a deeply satisfying ending. Tom Wilkinson's unbalanced litigator doesn't have that skill either, but he has occasional moments of magnificence, and will get an Oscar nomination for them. A-

Movie: Gone Baby Gone. Boston crime movie, with private detectives [Casey Affleck and Michelle Monaghan] called in to augment the police investigation of a child abduction. The ultimate ending strikes me as much too pat, although it raises a real question about what Affleck should do and what it costs him to do that. Meanwhile, the characters, excepting the head cop [Morgan Freeman], are finely drawn, the local color is so bright you gotta wear shades, and the pacing has a couple of interesting twists. Affleck's gumshoe is an interesting mix of soft speak and quick moves -- Monaghan explains that he only looks young. A-

Movie: The Darjeeling Limited. Wes Anderson movie, follows three well-heeled brothers on a trek across India trying to put their relationships in order after their father died, their mother ran off to a convent in the Himalayas, and the dominant, presumably elder one [Owen Wilson] cracked his face in a motorcycle accident. The other two [Adrien Brody and Jason Schwartzman] are reticent, outwardly submissive, inwardly fraught. It doesn't make for much of a story, but sets up various skits. Meanwhile, the scene and its people take over the movie. India is so overwhelming it's hard to tell when or if it's being satirized. A stupid scene with a snake ends smartly. A funeral turns touching, in contrast to the father's flashbacked funeral. An encounter with the mother [Anjelica Huston] is anticlimactic. B+

Movie: Into the Wild. I read Jon Krakauer's book a few years ago, so for once I have that reference point. The book is far more ambivalent about its subject than the movie is, partly due to Krakauer's own troubled identification with Alexander Supertramp, partly because he's looking backwards for clues, whereas the movie's camera always has a clear shot of the story -- after all, no matter how skeptical we are about what we read, seeing is believing. The puzzle quality is retained in interleaving the fatal Alaska venture with the mostly good fortunes that preceded it. It's hard to draw any conclusions about either: each episode strikes me as arbitrary and meaningless, which is the way real life works but unknown in fiction. Given this, it's hard to derive any satisfaction from the story, but the film is something else. It shows you things you rarely if ever see, and gives you slices of lives that rarely if ever get shown. Numerous small performances are notable, especially Catherine Keener's. A-

Movie: Lions for Lambs. Supposedly, three legs will stand without wobbling even on uneven terrain. This story is built from three such sticks, but each is so flimsy they collapse of their own weight. In one, two Special Forces soldiers -- one Afro-American, one Mexican-American -- are sent on a "forward point" mission to the top of a mountain in Afghanistan. Their helicopter is shot up, they fall or jump onto an ice field, and are finished off by Taliban while their commanding officers watch helpless from some sort of satellite feed. Mission unaccomplished, FUBAR actually. Meanwhile, a Senator in DC, played by Tom Cruise, is trying to plant a story about how this new strategy will bring victory in the GWOT, lecturing and cajoling a skeptical reporter played by Meryl Streep. Cruise gets a phone call near the end of the interview which may be news of the mission's debacle, but that's not part of the story he's leaking. Streep then goes to her editor, who's eager to be spooned whatever the government wants to feed him, but rejects Streep's suspicions as not newsworthy. Meanwhile, a Stanford poli-sci professor, played by director Robert Redford, is chewing out a cynical, smart-alecky, rich kid student for not giving a damn and making a commitment -- unlike two underprivileged students he had who were so engaged by the professor they joined the army to prove themselves, and wound up in Afghanistan, dead in the ice high on a remote mountain -- an ending presumably unknown by Redford, although he's so full of shit it's hard to be sure. There's enough in these angles to yield some powerful lessons -- the impotence of the military, the callousness of the politicians, the callowness of the media, the fatuousness of academia, the futile hopes of the lower class and the withdrawal of the upper class -- but that would take more skill and brains than fit the budget here. (Aside from the name actors, the budget must have been pretty skimpy: the Afghanistan sequence looks crappy, and the rest, aside from a cab ride, was shot in interiors, mostly in two offices.) The best critique comes from the otherwise dislikable student when he observes that the only science in politics these days is the study of manipulation, and that in turn dismissed any interest he initially had in Redford's class. The Cruise-Streep thread has some interest for that reason alone -- he handles the word "victory" like a chef's knife, eviscerating Streep's instinct to resist. But Cruise's manipulations are slicker but not far from standard issue neocon propaganda: the willingness to say whatever it takes to get whatever one wants is the ethical norm. Redford's thread is hamstrung from the start, not least because he's bought the notion that process -- commitment, engagement, etc. -- is all that's needed to balance off the right. This asymmetry is indeed a big part of what's wrong: if I'm willing to share and you want it all, even a compromise favors you. The trap that Cruise and his ilk prey on is the concession that there's any justification for war. Give them an inch and they'll slip their favorite war through it, because even a little war compounds ferociously. Redford and Cruise both share blame for getting those soldiers killed: the former by getting them committed without giving them principles, and the latter by abusing their commitment. C+

Some movies that came to Wichita that we thought about seeing but didn't make it to: The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford; Eastern Promises; Elizabeth: The Golden Age; The Kingdom; Rendition; Things We Lost in the Fire. Curiously, we saw trailers to two after they left town. Movies still here that we might get to: American Gangster; No Country for Old Men.