PERCY JACKSON AND THE OLYMPIANS: THE LIGHTNING THIEF

The god of the banal. The god of the vulgar. The god of chatter—shut up, you two. The god of translation. The god of the rip-off. The god of the franchise. The god of jailbait. The god of acne. The god of acne medication. Voila: A pantheon, complete and capable of instigating or resolving whatever problem you might require.

In this story, the Hollywood sign guards the door to the underworld—ha ha, but where else do we get our ghosts? Grey and garrulous and out of focus they come to the void-edge of our reach. Then, bereft, half-satisfied, we turn our back and are enjoined to keep it turned. This film is printed on celluloid designed to burn itself up as it passes through the projector: the theater will send back the studio, tonight, seven tin cans of ash.

“The gods are angry.” My beloved Athena shows up, played by the woman from Providence who, if hardly grey-eyed, claims to be Greek. Remington Steele is the kindly centaur. Medusa and the hydra seethe convincingly—the ancients knew anxiety but made a slayable monster of it. The satyr is African-American, cracks wise, fist-bumps, and while the others stay on task mostly digresses after money and ass. We hate ourselves.

Upon Olympus, the kid meets the parent-gods and finds they are four or five times normal size. No CGI but a classic old effect is used: the kid looks up at the father projected on a screen. I knew father was a movie! I go to gaze upon him in the dark. And friends, you haven’t gone until you’ve gone with me.

CRAZY HEART

“Old age is hell,” reports the 88-year-old monkey-man shoveling a substantial square of blizzard off the theater curb. And we’re all old men. Or rather, more or less adrift on the boundless seas of middle age (Colin Farrell looks too thin). Titanic is a love story, of course…between an iceberg and a boat. It’s no simple navigational maneuver to meet one’s chunk of destiny where it lurks beneath the waves.

“You’re going to learn a lot about MEN and WOMEN,” observed Madeleine, while we watched the previews before Nine. But give essentialism its due. I’ve never quite believed Je suis un autre. I is an avatar, sent from the world within to inspect the damage in the world outside. We’ve all heard that Lebowski’s clothes—the robe, the jellies, the Guatemalan pants—are Bridges’s clothes. When the sun flares the camera lens, fixed on a stretch of desert road, it’s not the movie that disappears through the trapdoor of belief but Bridges. Whatever a Bridges is. A gut you strap on. A peppery-gray wig. A press-on lower lip to press against the top one. Plausible guitar.

“Give the people what they want”—amen. He plays a venue called the Pavilion. You find out how much is in life when you resolve not to slowly dole but instead slash and burn months or years of feeling to write one good song—

Lighting the next day with the butt-end of the last.

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE

Travolta weighs 250 if he weighs a pound. I’ve got chills, they’re multiplying. His massive shaved head no small part of the total. As unorthodox but inimitable secret agent Charlie Wax he snorts coke to stay alert, enjoys a cheeseburger whose name he made famous, slings two guns Hong-Kong style and racks up a body count in the twenties or thirties, minimum. His casual racism is borne out by the plot—a French-made film, we note—in which spy wannabe Jonathan Rhys Meyers is betrayed by his Parisian girlfriend when, seduced by an Islamic svengali, she puts her fashion expertise into designing the headscarf under which she sneaks into the American embassy carrying a load of C4 strapped to her chest. In the showdown, JRM begs her to leave this madness behind, he will forgive her, he still loves her. A decision: she moves for the trigger: he shoots her in the forehead on behalf of the greater good.

It seems clear it’s the girlfriend’s perspective we’re meant to take, wending our way home, turning back on or up our cell. She imagines, and we with her, that the love this man professes is imperfectly understood, circumscribed by his limitations, hollow to the point of affront. Salinger—may he rest in peace—gives his Franny a hard time, no doubt. But even her tentative initiation into the forms of prayer shame the clueless preppie who when he meets her, do you remember, at the train station tries to empty his face of all expression. A cheap shot, I guess, but the kind one keeps in mind for years.

Devotion is the enigma. And like a terrorist in the faded capital of secular pleasure, it perplexes us most because we know it is within. We know—would we stop it?—that our own heart beats for us like a slave.

DEAR JOHN

French toast and bacon are matinee ideation.

A line in the sand is an ambiguous figure, an announced boundary but surely a fragile one. This is not to congratulate myself for demographic-hopping—two pairs of female friends, today, are my company, seated at my two and ten o’clock—but to sympathize for once with a nation that fights in a desert so cross-hatched with lines, now, as to be a mirror, a maze, and a text. This film is based on a popular book I’m sorry to admit I haven’t read.

Where does a love letter begin? It begins: I am lost. Not one but two catty friends of mine have called starlet Amanda Seyfried a skank. I don’t know, she sings nice and makes a convincing bruised flower, is yellow and white as a farm-fresh egg, which some like. The guy’s all Abercrombie and Fitch. 9/11, Iraq, and two autistic characters pull the young lovers apart. Over a coin collection father and son are, across years, both estranged and reconciled. My father and I had hobbies too, but more interesting ones: we went, every weekend, to the movies.

One half of one of the female pairs is coming from a bathroom break just as the sex scene—finally! in a barn!—begins, and her friend leaps up to wave her, with two manic hands, back in. The lovers wait so long. As Anne Carson reminds us, the Greeks compared eros to holding an ice cube in your hand. The giddy, not-a-second-longer pain of that.

WHEN IN ROME

Look around you: we are. The first city purely dreamt into existence came out looking at the same time bombastic and austere, in marble buff-white as the teeth of Kristen Bell when she draws back her bloodless lips. Madeleine: “Those are Louboutins, you can see the red lining. Those are thousand-dollar shoes.” Bell plays a young and super-successful curator of the Guggenheim, the ostentatiously classical museum on New York’s regal Fifth Avenue. Uptight, she loosens, and when her four comic suitors come, near the climax, all to her door, one wonders…

I didn’t mean to say before that anyone fucked, sometimes or often, gains any special understanding or even pleasure from it, always or ever. I’m just saying, sometimes having a cock is like operating the robot arm from within the space shuttle’s hermetic pod. How much better to pop the airlock and let nothingness crumple you like a can.

What do you get for the girl who has everything? Honey, just get me those red-lined shoes. I’m giving away my beauty, sitting in the dark like this, gang-banged by gravity, laid waste by the barbarian afternoon. But at the same time I pull gravity apart, I leave it the slightest bit more slack. The barbarians ride home with the contagion of ruin inside them. The EXIT sign marks a door where the cold sneaks in. Our will to conquer leaks, by the same derelict portal, steadily out.

EDGE OF DARKNESS

As the marquee once read: It’s Complicated. In the course of the film it comes out, just by the way, that Gibson is a war veteran, and he is asked his view on post-traumatic stress disorder. It’s a scam, he says. In his experience, one leaves combat as pretty much the same person who went in. It’s complicated. All the violent deaths I’ve seen on screen over the years, where did they flow or pool? Could their materials be refined, if a refinery I am, into mercy? Do not forget the man’s reputation as a prankster and practical joker. Arrested for drunk driving in 2006, he ranted, “Fucking Jews... Jews are responsible for all the wars in the world.” It’s complicated. Intertwinement is the torture he loves best. His acting tricks are wild eyes and dead eyes. His forehead is a dense grid whose horizontal lines are astonishment and vertical, rage. His foil in this film is a fixer-type, quote, I’m usually the guy who stops you connecting A to B. Any child could tell you, they don’t connect.

In 14 movies I haven’t seen a single sex scene, not even the conventional man above the woman, moving beneath a modest sheet, one or both going unh unh. Do the movies feel this as redundant, since it is the movies and I moving this way, the movies above me going unh unh? The day after the orgy no one remembers the taut, lascivious beast who ranged through the rooms with stamping hoof and steaming nostrils. No, they dream and whisper of the creature who went limp before all comers, who assented to be annihilated by desire in the way they only wish, if not for all this fussy desire, to be.