Dave and I saw Brave two nights ago, and Magic Mike last night. I enjoyed both of them, though in different ways of course.

Brave has been resonating deeply with me the more I think back on it — I wouldn’t be too surprised if I end up thinking of it as one of my favorite animated movies ever, up there with Pinocchio and Spirited Away. Brave has a lot going on, a lot of levels of meaning weaving in and out of each other — an engaging story, myth, comedy, psychology, spirit. Some of the character animation in the second half of the movie is as on target and touching as any I can remember. The story is well constructed and touches on a number of themes very close to my heart — the place of myths and legends and dreams in our lives, healing broken relationships, inner transformations. And there’s a wonderful, heartfelt twist at the end that I loved but can’t say anything about without giving it away.

Magic Mike is a better movie than we were expecting a movie about male strippers to be, well done and likable and not cheesy at all. The script is surprisingly good, with a lot of genuine humor and well-drawn characters. The acting is good, low key but natural and convincing. The story is simple but engaging. And the dancing is really spectacular. Channing Tatum’s dancing in particular is amazing and exciting even apart from the fact that he’s stripping while doing it — he’s OK when he’s speaking lines, but he’s downright awesome when he’s flying around the dance stage.

Dave and I watched Nine a couple nights ago on DVD. We’d seen it when it first came out in the theaters and it was something of a disappointment to me, because I like the musical a lot and I thought that, while a lot of things in the movie were terrific, there were also a lot that seemed clunky. There were a lot of changes I couldn’t figure out the reason for, and while God knows I’m not going to be the one to object to taking liberties with a work you’re adapting, it didn’t seem like the changes were as good as what was being left out, which is a problem.

I’m also all too aware, though, that I come to the movie with all sorts of preconceptions based on my knowledge of the stage musical, and it’s easy not to see what’s really up there on the screen when I’m comparing against my memories.

I liked the movie better the second time, though I still don’t think it works all the way through. What seems to me to be the biggest problem is that the makers of the movie want to tell a somewhat different story than the stage musical does, in which the central character has a somewhat different struggle. This oversimplifies things but it seems to me that, in a nutshell, Guido’s problems in the stage musical come from his wanting everything indiscriminately, and not being able to make choices and decide what’s most important to him, and let go of the lesser things in order to hold on to the important ones; whereas the story in the movie seems to be trying to tell the story of Guido as an artist who has so mixed up his own identity with his fame and success, and is so frightened of losing it, that he’s gotten stuck trying to recreate his earlier successes and is afraid to take chances, afraid to be authentic and spontaneous not just in his art but in his personal life.

This is, in my opinion, an absolutely terrific and completely valid take on the story and the character. In some ways it’s a better, sharper approach to the story and character than the stage musical takes. The moviemakers dropped a lot of terrific songs from the stage musical, and added a few new ones, and I think that’s appropriate; but it would have been even better if they’d dropped more and added more new ones. The problem is that in too many cases the points that the songs are making are not central to the story any more, they’re just diversions, and the points that are central to the story — as it is now being told in this movie — are made in the dialogue instead.

That puts all the weight in the wrong places. In a musical, the songs seize all the attention, all the focus, all the emphasis. They can’t help but do that. So you want to make use of the songs to emphasize whatever it is that is most important for the audience to notice and understand and concentrate on in order to follow the story and be caught up by it and moved by it.

Many times while watching Nine I found myself thinking, why did they keep this song from the stage musical when it no longer has an important function in the story as it’s being told here? “Guido’s Song” for example is shoehorned into a new situation, the character’s inner thoughts at a bullshit press conference, and while the situation really does cry out for a song for Guido at this point, and while “Guido’s Song” is a brilliant piece of character drawing, it’s drawing a different character from a different story, not the Guido we need to understand here, as this movie is telling this story.

Similarly, the thread of the story in the stage version that gives the “Folies Bergère” number its reason for being has been entirely scrapped. In the stage version, this number presents a hilariously inappropriate suggestion (that Guido should make a movie musical) from a producer who is entirely unsympathetic to Guido’s work, but because Guido has signed a contract, he has to find a way to deal with it — how he tries to do this is an important thread in the stage version. In the movie, though, this song doesn’t come from the producer (and in any case the character of the producer is completely changed); the song is presented as a sympathetic suggestion from Guido’s costume designer, who is a good friend, and it’s framed so that the suggestion is not that he should make a musical specifically, but that he should more generally include more simple entertainment in his movies. It’s turned into a really fabulous musical number on the screen, too, and yet in its attractive new context it’s really just a big red herring. This long, wonderful, compelling musical number inevitably focuses our attention on the question of whether this advice would in fact give Guido a way out of his problems, and it leads us to expect that the story ahead of us is going to turn on this issue in some way. But as it happens, this is a false expectation; the problems that arise to torment Guido as the story develops are not connected with this issue at all, if we try to understand them as being connected with this issue we will end up bewildered, and in fact neither the costume designer nor anybody else ever brings this particular issue up again.

So why go to so much trouble to focus our attention on a side issue? It’s like taking highlighter pens and using them to highlight the digressions on the page rather than the main points. Even if the colors are beautiful, the highlighting makes it harder, not easier, for a reader to get focused on what’s really important.

I also found myself several times listening to a few lines of dialogue and thinking, There! That’s the main point of this scene, right there! Why isn’t this what the song in this scene is about?

So, as much as I love the stage version, and as little of the score as they kept, I found myself thinking by the end of the movie the second time around that they should have kept even less, and written a lot more new songs tailored to this new story about Guido that they wanted to tell.

A couple of nights ago Dave and I watched Jacques Tati’s 1967 movie Play Time. I became a fan of the Tati movies in college — they would show now and then at the Balboa Cinema not far from campus. Mon Oncle was my favorite, and I liked Monsieur Hulot’s Holiday a lot, but Play Time was sort of bewildering as a whole, though it had many very funny sequences. What we watched the other night, though, was a DVD of the movie in a restored version, with some of the footage that had been cut for its released restored (some but not all, as some of it is completely missing), and the whole thing makes more sense now and seems more consistently funny all the way through. Play Time is also a movie that gets better on repeated watching, partly because some of the deadpan humor takes a little time to grow on you, and partly because some of the sequences have actions and subtle visual puns and not-so-subtle sight gags happening all over the screen, all at once, and it takes a couple of viewings to absorb it and get the full point of the comedy. It also helped that we were watching it on a high-def television — the sharpness of the picture brought out a lot of the detail.

On Sunday Dave and I spent the afternoon at the de Young Museum in Golden Gate Park, and then saw the new animated movie Up in the evening.

Up is a lot of fun, with great animation, good characters, a lot of pleasant sentiment without getting gooey, and a wonderfully ridiculous story. The main character is a cranky old man, the kind who sits on his porch and yells at people to get away from his property, and yet the way the story is set up, ten minutes into the movie and you are completely on his side. The other central character is an irritatingly helpful kid in a Boy-Scout-like group called the Wilderness Explorers, and one of the many sweet touches in this movie is that Russell is drawn as Asian and not a word is ever said about it.

Dave tells me that the movie is also a fanboy’s delight, containing all kinds of references to much-admired animated movies from Pinocchio to Howl’s Moving Castle. I didn’t catch much of that.

I cared for the second half of the movie, though, less than the first half. From the point where one character is revealed to be a stock archvillain of the Evil Mastermind genre, the movie becomes a rescue adventure culminating in a way-over-the-top action sequence that is partly meant to be exciting and partly meant to be tongue-in-cheek. It seems like every movie of this sort has to lead to one of these and they’re all trying to top each other and I’ve grown kind of tired of the pattern.

Dave and I saw Disney’s Earth last night. Thumbnail review: Photography is absolutely stunning. Musical score is intrusive and frequently corny or sentimental. Narration is thick with pathetic fallacy. If you made a game out of it and took a drink every time James Earl Jones says that the whale is “celebrating” or the polar bear is “desperate” or the elephant is “lonely”, the entire frat would be passed out within 45 minutes.

Dave and I saw the latest Coen brothers movie a week or so ago. It’s very like Fargo in a lot of ways, so if you liked that and you don’t mind the resemblances, you’ll like this, too. It’s a grisly and intensely suspenseful thriller about a lot of people who are chasing after a suitcase full of money that disappeared from a drug deal that went very wrong. As in Fargo, the various schemes go wrong over and over again with violently bloody consequences, while a likeable rural police officer tries to catch up.

A lot of thrillers that get labeled “Hitchcockian” don’t seem to me to be any such thing except in the most superficial ways; a lot of movie reviewers seem to think that “Hitchcockian” is just a fancy synonym for “suspenseful”. But No Country for Old Men struck me as using a lot of genuinely Hitchcockian storytelling techniques and Hitchcockian touches. Hitchcock wouldn’t have indulged in anything like as much stage blood, but No Country often builds up suspense by the same sort of understated steps that Hitchcock liked to use. In some ways I was reminded of Frenzy, another rather misanthropic thriller that plays some disturbing games with the viewer’s sympathies.