Ill-Informed Gadfly

No two people experience the same story the same way. A reader or listener can contribute just as much imagination as a storyteller. “The Fall,” a beguiling and ravishing movie from director Tarsem, celebrates the power of a listener to transform a tale. The storyteller is Roy, a recently paralyzed movie stuntman in a 1920s Los Angeles hospital; his audience is Alexandria, a six-year-old girl recovering from a broken arm. Lee Pace finds the charm, pathos and self-loathing in Roy, while as Alexandria, Romanian actress Catinca Untaru has the unself-conscious naturalism of the best child stars. Roy rivets the girl’s attention by making up an adventure involving five exiled bandits who seek revenge against a cruel despot. Alexandria fleshes it out and colors it in with her mind’s eye. And Tarsem finds ways to communicate visually her bountiful imagination. He shot “The Fall” over a four-year period in 18 countries, and he makes spectacular use of the Mughal forts and palaces that hover over the cities of his native India. I’ve visited many of these locations, and I can attest that Tarsem didn’t alter or dress them up in any way. They are so magnificently strange that they can support the wildest fantasy. “The Fall” evokes both “Pan’s Labyrinth,” with its imagined world that may or may not provide solace from an ugly reality, and “Days of Heaven,” with its early-20th Century setting and child hero with an incomplete understanding of adult motives. It doesn’t quite measure up to those two masterpieces, but it’s the most exciting movie I’ve seen this year.

LISTEN: The Fall

Mike Myers likes to take a mediocre gag and hammer it to death. Sometimes, like David Letterman, he can wring laughter out of repetition through sheer kooky enthusiasm. Think of the shushing scene in the first “Austin Powers.” Myers finds no such inspiration in “The Love Guru,” in which he plays an American-born, Indian-raised self-help crackpot. It’s funny the first few times Myers says hello by pressing his hands together and solemnly intoning “Mariska Hargitay,” the musically named “Law and Order: SVU” star. But when he greets Hargitay herself early in the movie, the joke jumps the shark – and Myers keeps at it anyway. “The Love Guru” feels like a desperate attempt to stay relevant by Myers, whose brand of literal-minded gross-out humor ran its course in the 90s. He’s still playing wacky caricatures when the likes of Judd Apatow, Will Ferrell and Vince Vaughn have married bawdy comedy with honest emotion. Myers also appears reluctant to yield the punch lines to his co-stars. Otherwise he’d surround himself with more nimble performers than Jessica Alba, Justin Timberlake and Verne Troyer, the erstwhile Mini-Me who shows up only so Myers can mock his diminutive stature. The plot – involving the guru’s attempt to reunite a neurotic hockey player and his wife – wouldn’t keep a six-year-old in suspense. The movie runs out of gas in the first half-hour. For the rest of its mercifully short 90 minutes, “The Love Guru” serves up more of the same.

LISTEN: The Love Guru

“The Incredible Hulk” is lean and mean and has the good sense not to take itself too seriously. Such qualities have been in short supply in the recent crop of superhero movies. And they should ease the angst of anyone who saw “Hulk,” Ang Lee’s plodding and pretentious 2003 attempt to bring the angry green man to the big screen. Presumably those viewers included the star and uncredited writer of the new movie, Edward Norton, and his hired-gun director, Louis Leterrier. Their wise strategy is to pretend the earlier movie didn’t exist. “The Incredible Hulk” has as much exposition as any comic-book adaptation needs – brisk flashbacks during the opening credits show scientist Bruce Banner injecting himself with radiation that turns him into a 10-foot-tall, pea soup-colored beast. He’s an impressive-looking creature, too: You feel the heft of his muscles, the power of his stride and the rage and confusion in his eyes. We’ve become jaded by digital effects, but the CGI in this movie truly dazzles. More important, Leterrier assembles crisp and coherent action sequences, and he smartly raises the stakes every time the Hulk clashes with a sneering mercenary played by Tim Roth. Leterrier is less comfortable with humor, but I appreciate the attempt. The movie even acknowledges the absurdity of Banner’s pants staying on when he quadruples in size. During a critical moment, the Hulk gets to let loose with a signature outburst: “Hulk smash!” I don’t know if that describes the movie, but “The Incredible Hulk” delivers a solid impact.

LISTEN: The Incredible Hulk

The new Adam Sandler movie contains a running gag about sex with elderly women, Rob Schneider doing another one of his noxious ethnic stereotypes and a mild strain of Sandler’s recurring homophobia. Nonetheless, “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” gives off a sunny, even innocuous vibe. It’s goofy and zany and slap-happy. Sandler plays a sex-crazed Israeli commando who dreams of retiring from the military to become a hairstylist. He stows away to New York, where he lands a job at a ragtag salon run by a fetching Palestinian woman. Sandler keeps the Israeli accent more or less consistent and shows genuine affection for the quirks of Middle Eastern pop culture, from hacky-sack to bizarre soft drinks to cutoff jeans shorts on men. While Sandler has shown an adventurous streak in recent years, he tends to keep the comedy crude and broad when he works under the banner of his production company, Happy Madison. “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan,” which he co-wrote, maintains that tradition, but it’s not afraid to take the target audience out of its comfort zone with jokes not everyone’s going to get. Sandler also shows a burgeoning political consciousness. He promotes peace and tolerance by depicting Jews and Arabs as happily coexisting on a studio mockup of a Manhattan block that’s about as gritty and realistic as Sesame Street. “You Don’t Mess with the Zohan” is a timely valentine to America the melting pot, a country whose strength and character come from its vibrant mixture of cultures. All that, and sometimes it’s even funny, too.

LISTEN: You Don’t Mess with the Zohan