Altman and Aldous

Get Him To the Greek: Unrated Version (2010): based on characters created by Jason Segel; written and directed by Nicholas Stoller; starring Jonah Hill (Aaron Green), Russell Brand (Aldous Snow), Rose Byrne (Jackie Q), Colm Meaney (Jonathan Snow), Dinah Stabb (Lena Snow), Sean Combs (Sergio), and Elisabeth Moss (Daphne Binks): Rapidly becoming an all-timer on my list of film comedies that cheer me up. Jonah Hill has never been funnier. 

Russell Brand has only been used well in one other film -- Forgetting Sarah Marshall, in which he also played dissipated Brit-rocker Aldous Snow. There's a bizarre, endearing, obscene, profane chemistry between Hill and Brand that makes me wish they'd do another movie with writer-director Nicholas Stoller and Aldous Snow-creator Jason Segel. Even Sean Combs is hilarious. And Aldous Snow's songs are hilariously catchy. Highly recommended.

Altman (2014): written by Len Blum; directed by Ron Mann: Excellent, too-short documentary from Canadian Ron Mann on the life and times of Top Ten All-Time director Robert Altman (1925 –2006). The iconoclastic Altman spent about 20 years in TV and B-movies before his film version of M.A.S.H. made him an 'overnight' success. 

Even when ha had access to major-studio money in the first decade after M.A.S.H., Altman was fiercely iconoclastic and eccentric in his film choices. Losing studio money after 1980 or so didn't finish him -- instead, he directed on the stage, came up with an innovative TV show, and eventually came back 'into the fold' (sort of) with popular and critical hit The Player. His movies are his testament; this documentary does a nice job of looking at the man, and the affection so many actors had for probably the greatest actor's director of all time. Recommended.

Baby Driver (2017)

Baby Driver (2017): written and directed by Edgar Wright; starring Ansel Elgort (Baby), Jon Hamm (Buddy), Eliza Gonzalez (Darling), Lily James (Debora), Kevin Spacey (Doc), CJ Jones (Joseph), Jamie Foxx (Bats), and Paul Williams (The Butcher): It's my least favourite of the movies Edgar Wright (Hot Fuzz, Shaun of the Dead, Scott Pilgrim vs. The World) has directed. That still makes it pretty good. Baby Driver, named for a Paul Simon song, is slathered in songs. Our hero, 20ish guy 'Baby,' drives the getaway cars for a heist operation run by Kevin Spacey. He doesn't want to, but he's stuck. When 15, Baby stole a car loaded with stolen property from Spacey. He's been paying it off ever since.

How are the car-chase scenes? Very good. Anedgar wrightd the conceit that Baby listens to music constantly to drown out the tinnitus suffered in the car accident that killed his parents means, well, a nearly constant, eclectic flow of pop music. Wright gives Baby a couple of interesting quirks -- most notably a deaf African-American foster father whose existence, and Baby's mastery of American Sign Language, tells us that Baby is All Right. Lily James plays Baby's cute-as-a-button diner-waitress love interest, labouring away in the world's (or at least Atlanta's) largest yet most empty diner ever.

The improbably named Ansel Elgort seems to have been intentionally selected for his sweet, occasionally blank niceness. I don't know that it entirely works. He's often overpowered by the other actors, most notably the acerbic Spacey, a mercurial Jamie Foxx, and Jon Hamm as The Terminator. Wright nods to one classic 'Driver' film, The Driver (1978), directed by Walter Hill, by casting Hill in a cameo. One is also reminded of the more recent, excellent Drive with Ryan Gosling as a preternaturally cool heist driver. In all, Baby Driver is an enjoyable entertainment, the sort of summer movie that used to be more common before the Rise of the Tentpoles. Recommended.

Dunkirk (2017)

Dunkirk (2017): written and directed by Christopher Nolan; starring Fionn Whitehead (Tommy), Damien Bonnard (French Soldier), Mark Rylance (Mr. Dawson), Tom Hardy (Farrier), Kenneth Branagh (Commander Bolton), and Cillian Murphy (PTSD Soldier): Between May 26 and June 4 1940, about 400,000 troops from Belgium, the British Empire, and France were trapped on the French beaches of Dunkirk. Then, for various reasons still argued about by historians, Nazi Germany chose not to overwhelm those trapped forces with infantry, tanks, and heavy bombing. 

The result was the greatest and most important Maritime evacuation in military history as a fleet of British military and civilian ships of about 800 evacuated approximately 350,000 of those troops to England. Lose those troops and the Allies probably lose the war long before the United States of America joins it.

Christopher Nolan doesn't attempt a wide-reaching, expository historical epic here. Instead, he focuses his film on three targets operating on three different but converging timelines. That would be a week on the beach with the waiting troops, a day on a civilian-piloted boat helping with the evacuation, and an hour in the air with RAF pilots engaging the Nazi air force over sea and land.

It all works beautifully. The only drag is a fictional sub-plot on the boat that seems clumsy and obvious. Otherwise, Dunkirk is a war movie that portrays the fear and tension of warfare in a number of set-pieces. The only traditional war-movie 'release' comes with the RAF's battles with the German fighters and bombers. Otherwise, Dunkirk is the war movie as psychological horror, with groups of men listening for the sounds of bombs dropping through the air, pinned down under fire from an enemy they can't see, or struggling to escape the flooding compartments of a sinking rescue ship.

Civilian boat captain Mark Rylance and Commander-on-the-beach Kenneth Branagh supply the personable acting here, with smaller turns from several of the young actors who portray the troops and Tom Hardy as one of the RAF pilots. The aerial combat scenes are thrilling and expansive; the rescues at sea are thrilling and horrifying. It's a marvelous, focused movie (less than 2 hours long!), and it may come to be regarded as Christopher Nolan's best. Highly recommended.

Prequel and Sequels

Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them (2016): written by J.K. Rowling; directed by David Yates; starring Eddie Redmayne (Newt Scamander), Colin Farrell (Graves), Katherine Waterston (Tina), Alison Sudol (Queenie), Dan Fogler (Jacob), Ezra Miller (Credence), and Johnny Depp (Grindenwald): A Harry Potter prequel (one of at least four, apparently) set in New York in the 1920's. The rare modern movie whose charms lie almost entirely on the CGI end of things. Eddie Redmayne, mumbling and whispering and retiring, was a terrible choice to play the lead: he's perpetually drowned out by pretty much everything else in the movie. 

The film might have been 25% better if David Tennant had played Scamander in full blustery Doctor Who mode. Between this and his performance in Jupiter Ascending, bad in a different way, Redmayne really needs to avoid potential tent-pole blockbusters. He's too finely tuned an actor to look comfortable in front of a green-screen battling for attention with giant birds and immense balls of crackly darkness.

J.K. Rowling's first original screenplay is a mess, vague and unfocused and rambling for the first hour. Characters we don't care about whiz by, leaving only Eddie Fogler's Muggle-out-of-water baker and Alison Sudol's perky telepath to cheer for, and be cheered by. A movie about the two of them and their magical bakery would be a Potter prequel I could get behind. The appearance of Johnny Depp at the end inspires the wrong kind of dread for the future of the series. Lightly recommended.

Spider-Man 2 (2004): based on characters created by Steve Ditko, Stan Lee, John Romita, and others; written by Alfred Gough, Miles Millar, Michael Chabon, and Alvin Sargent; starring Tobey Maguire (Peter Parker), Kirsten Dunst (Mary Jane Watson), James Franco (Harry Osborn), Alfred Molina (Dr. Octopus), Rosemary Harris (Aunt May), and J.K. Simmons (J. Jonah Jameson): 15 years further into The Superhero-Movie Age, Spider-Man 2 seems smarter and more human than ever. The actors charm, the villain is more of a tragic figure than anything else, and everything hinges not on a final fist-fight but on a final appeal to a doomed character's humanity. 

In terms of choreography and spectacle, the final battle isn't quite as interesting as two earlier set-pieces, though that may explain the sudden left-hand turn the plot takes at its conclusion away from all-out punchiness. Only the decision to have Spider-Man's webs be biological rather than mechanical is a drag: the fun of Spider-Man's encounters with super-villains in the comic books sprang partially from his scientific and engineering prowess deployed in the service of stopping said super-villains, and Spidey could really use some high-test webbing when he battles the homicidal, cybernetic arms of Dr. Octopus! Highly recommended.

The Dark Tower (2017): adapted by Akiva Goldsman, Jeff Pinkner, Anders Thomas Jensen, and Nikolaj Arcel from the series by Stephen King; directed by Nikolaj Arcel; starring Idris Elba (Roland), Tom Taylor (Jake), and Matthew McConaughey (Walter): Shortly before its release, The Dark Tower was called a sequel to the 8-novel+ Stephen King series by its creators. And it actually makes sense as one if you've read the series. 

Is it a great movie? No. It's bracingly short and compact, though maybe 20 minutes' more questing and world-building would have been nice. Idris Elba does fine work as a more tortured Roland the Gunslinger than we see in the novels. Tom Taylor does fine work as Jake, the boy on 'our' Earth who dreams of the Gunslinger and his fantastic quest to save the Dark Tower at the centre of reality. And Matthew McConaughey is suitably smarmy and smug as Walter, the Man in Black who's trying to bring down the Dark Tower in service to his own dark god(s). 

There are Stephen King Easter Eggs galore (Hello, Charlie the Choo-Choo! Hello, Room 1408!). There are rat-men and assorted other servants of darkness. Its weakness is occasionally seeming rushed, though that's better than bloat in my book any day. The Dark Tower also understatedly offers a multi-racial cast, something that seems to have gone unremarked upon the curious critical rush to pan the movie. Oh, well. Recommended.

Ultimate Karnak

Karnak: The Flaw in All Things (2016/ Collected 2017): written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by Gerardo Zaffino, Roland Boschi, and Antonio Fuso: A six-issue miniseries disguised as a quickly cancelled title, Karnak follows the adventures of the only one of Marvel's Inhumans to lack a superpower caused by the Terrigen Mists. Instead, Karnak, created by Jack Kirby and Stan Lee in the late 1960's along with the other Inhumans in the pages of the Fantastic Four and now destined for a 2017 TV series, can see "the flaw in all things." Hence, you know, the title. 

Of course, this originally meant that Karnak could pinpoint the physical weak spot of anything so as to attack it. Writer Warren Ellis expands Karnak's ability to include everything from personalities to entire ideologies. It's an interesting idea that could bear more development -- the 'need' for fight scenes repeatedly stops the interesting stuff for yet another fight scene. And none of the credited artists (three for a six-issue run!) are anything more than mediocre at drawing and choreographing fight scenes. Indeed, one late battle is about six pages of boredom and confusion. Karnak is better than most things Marvel because of Ellis's writing, but this is far from great Ellis. Lightly recommended.

Ultimate Fantastic Four Volume 1 (2004/ Collected 2004): written by Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar; illustrated by Adam Kubert: If it weren't for the art of Adam Kubert, Ultimate Fantastic Four Volume 1 would actually be worse than the 2015 movie it served as a template for. It's certainly just as boring, and it certainly supplies the world with an unlikable group of teens who become the FF. Brian Michael Bendis and Mark Millar seem to be clueless as to how to write the Fantastic Four, so they graft them onto a Professor X/Xavier's School for Gifted Youngsters template and spin their wheels from there. 

And if you thought the original 1961 FF villain Mole Man was a little over-determined by looking vaguely like a mole, wait until you meet Bendis and Millar's version -- he looks like a mole, he has the word 'mole' embedded in his last name, and he's covered with moles! Truly, Bendis and Millar are great creative talents! Not recommended.

Hitchcock, Affleck, and Ford

Lifeboat (1944): written by John Steinbeck and Jo Swerling; directed by Alfred Hitchcock; starring Tallulah Bankhead (Connie), William Bendix (Gus), Walter Slezak (Willi), Mary Anderson (Alice), John Hodiak (John), Henry Hull (Rittenhouse), Heather Angel (Mrs. Higley), Hume Cronyn (Stanley), and Canada Lee (Joe): Hitchcock's 'Bottle Show' movie remains a surprisingly prickly delight to this day, with terrific performances and tense direction. The survivors of a U-Boat attack on a freighter are stuck in a life boat with a survivor from the U-Boat, also sunk during the exchange. The set-up is a lot like the earlier Stagecoach, if you couldn't get off the titular stagecoach without drowning.

Various class issues play out, as do issues of bigotry and vengeance. People die. The dialogue crackles, especially when spoken by Tallulah Bankhead in one of her rare film appearances. She's a quick-talking female reporter who could be played by Rosalind Russell a la His Girl Friday. Lifeboat defies current Hollywood stereotypes and plot points by not killing the black guy first: nope, Lifeboat kills a baby first. A baby! And the black guy turns out to have the warm family life that all the white characters lack! Good old Hitch. If only we had more like him now. Highly recommended.

Presumed Innocent (1990): adapted by Alan Pakula and Frank Pierson from the novel by Scott Turow; starring Harrison Ford (Rusty Sabich), Brian Dennehy (Horgan), Raul Julia (Sandy), Bonnie Bedelia (Barbara Sabich), Paul Winfield (Judge Larren Lyttle), Greta Scacchi (Carolyn Polhemus), John Spencer (Det. Lipranzer), and Bradley Whitford (Kemp): Veteran screenwriter Alan Pakula's turn as a director wowed people in 1990 with this courtroom thriller. The heavyweight list of actors helps a lot, with stand-out turns from Raul Julia, Paul Winfield, and Brian Dennehy. Harrison Ford is fine, though his haircut is weirdly ridiculous.

Presumed Innocent succeeds or fails on the basis of how well it plays 'Whodunnit?' with the audience. Accused of murdering a colleague he'd had an affair with (Greta Scacchi), Harrison Ford's Chicago-based Assistant District Attorney has to survive a wealth of circumstantial evidence. Or did he do it? Scacchi's ADA Carolyn Polhemus is about as distilled a version of a femme fatale/career-bitch as one ever gets, while Bonnie Bedelia gets stuck with the role of the weepy, wronged wife of Ford's ADA.

The movie holds up pretty well, though it would hold up better if the film-makers had kept the novel's coda, which contextualizes the ending in a way that makes logical sense and adds depth to certain performances. Of course, the movie leaves everything in that leads to this coda, so you can just pretend the coda is there once you discover what it is. Recommended. 

The Accountant (2016): written by Bill Dubuque; directed by Gavin O'Connor; starring Ben Affleck (Christian Wolff), Anna Kendrick (Dana Cummings), J.K. Simmons (Ray King), Jon Bernthal (Brax), Cynthia Addai-Robinson (Agent Medina), and John Lithgow (Blackburn): Ben Affleck plays an autistic accountant who's also a super-assassin philanthropist. Basically, he's BatRainman. The Accountant is a competent, entertaining thriller. Don't ask more of it. Lightly recommended.

Ten Graphic Novels for People Who Don't Read Comics

There are dozens of others that could fit this list. Note that I avoid super-heroes and their fellow travelers science fiction, fantasy, and horror in this list because all these things put some people off.

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Louis Riel by Chester Brown

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Stuck Rubber Baby by Howard Cruse

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Kings in Disguise by James Vance and Dan Burr

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Maus by art spiegelman

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American Splendor by Harvey Pekar and many artists

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The Book of Genesis by God and Robert Crumb

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Palomar by Gilbert Hernandez

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Can't Get No by Rick Veitch

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From Hell by Alan Moore and Eddie Campbell

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Signal to Noise by Neil Gaiman and Dave McKean

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Junk Bonds

On Her Majesty's Secret Service (1969): adapted from the Ian Fleming novel by Simon Raven and Richard Maibaum; directed by Peter Hunt; starring George Lazenby (James Bond), Diana Rigg (Tracy), Telly Savalas (Blofeld), and Gabriele Ferzetti (Draco): George Lazenby remains a mostly baffling choice to replace Sean Connery as James Bond. I say 'mostly' because I assume his status as an unknown fashion model caused the producers to believe that they would have much more control over him than they would over a more established actor.

Lazenby is terrible: wooden and totally absent of charisma. However, he isn't much helped by the movie. On Her Majesty's Secret Service is painfully long and slow.  It's also got some of the most ridiculous scenes in Bond history. A few problems...

• It wastes its best asset -- Diana Rigg as Bond's love-of-his-life Tracy -- by sidelining her for the middle third of the movie. 
• It gives Blofeld his least cinematically interesting Doomsday Plot (seriously, there's no way to dramatize a biological attack on the global food supply, so the film-makers don't even try). 
• It gives Blofeld his most pathetic Doomsday Goal (to be made a titled nobleman and be granted amnesty for all previous crimes).
• It dresses Bond up in a frilly shirt that's clearly the model for Austin Powers' frilly shirts.
• It puts Bond and Tracy through a car chase that puts them inside a car race inside a tiny oval, thus leading to Tracy asking not once but at least twice 'How do we get out of here?'. The way you came in, maybe?
• It involves not one (fine) but two (enough already!) downhill ski races.
• It involves a climactic bobsled race because Blofeld uses a bobsled to escape his mountain-top HQ and Bond chases him in another bobsled. What is this, the goddamned Winter Olympics? Eventually, the two of them end up in a wrestling match in one bobsled. OK, that would be an interesting Olympic event.
• It keeps the downbeat ending of the Ian Fleming novel for no apparent reason other than to see how a downbeat ending played with movie-goers, I guess.

Sean Connery would replace George Lazenby for the next Bond movie, (plus ca meme chose!) Diamonds are Forever, before giving way again to a new Bond. That would be Roger Moore, who would have a much more successful career than George Lazenby as 007. This stinker is not recommended except for its awfulness.

Becoming Bond (2017): written and directed by Josh Greenbaum; starring George Lazenby: Part documentary, part broadly acted docudrama, part George Lazenby's 77-year-old talking head. Becoming Bond tells the story of how Lazenby won and then intentionally lost the role of James Bond after only one movie (On Her Majesty's Secret Service), ostensibly because he refused to sign a 7-picture contract with the Bond producers. 

The Bond material is interesting but somewhat scanty -- the viewer will have to endure nearly an hour about Lazenby's pre-Bond life, which writer-director Josh Greenbaum seems to find nigh-endlessly fascinating. Your results will vary depending on how many scenes of Lazenby having sex, getting the runs, having sex, selling cars, taking LSD, and having sex you can tolerate. 

As another reviewer noted somewhere, you may also be distracted by the fact that the actor playing Lazenby looks and acts a lot more like Sharlto Copley than Lazenby. On the bright side, there's a lot of female nudity, if you look for that sort of thing in documentaries about George Lazenby.

If you're interested in the Bond movies, the movie is interesting though frustrating. Greenbaum spends perhaps 20 minutes on the material about On Her Majesty's Secret Service, far too little in a movie that clocks in at about 95 minutes. Lazenby himself comes across as a bit of a lucky yob, and the film itself strongly implies that he stopped acting after On Her Majesty's Secret Service, an implication belied by his dozens of IMDB screen credits after the Bond movie, including a stint as Superman's biological father Jor-El on the early 1990's Superboy TV series. The film also makes much of how popular Lazenby was as the new Bond, which seems like at least a bit of a stretch given that even adjusted for inflation, On Her Majesty's Secret Service is the 21st highest grossing Bond film in North America out of 25. Lightly recommended.

The Living Daylights (1987): adapted from the Ian Fleming short story by Michael G. Wilson and Richard Maibaum; directed by John Glen; starring Timothy Dalton (James Bond), Maryam D'Abo (Kara), Jeroen Krabbe (Koskov), Joe Don Baker (Whitaker), and John Rhys Davies (General Pushkin): Competent, occasionally bland movie introduced the world to Timothy Dalton as James Bond. He's fine, for the most part, though he and the film-makers strand Bond between Sean Connery's grimly mocking Bond and Roger Moore's self-mocking Bond. Like Rambo in Rambo III, Bond gets help from the Afghanis who would become the Taliban. Oops. Jeroen Krabbe and Joe Don Baker make for an underwhelming pair of Bond villains, while Maryam D'Abo is fine but a bit bland as Bond's (only) love interest. Lightly recommended.

Price and Nesbo, White and Red All Over

The Whites (2015) by Richard Price: Richard Price's newest crime novel is a delight from start to finish, a pungent look at police and criminals and New York City. Our protagonist is Billy Graves, a Manhattan night-shift detective whose past as a member of a group of patrol cops who called themselves the Wild Geese may finally be catching up with him.

Billy is a flawed, wounded, introspective protagonist. He's also a very good detective who finds himself in two parallel situations that may not be so parallel. Someone seems to be stalking Billy and his family in pursuit of vengeance for some unknown wrong. And the lives of perpetrators investigated by Billy and his former Wild Geese are being snuffed out -- these perpetrators were never convicted for their crimes and are thus known to Billy and company by the slang term 'Whites.'

Price deftly draws the characters and their relationships, presents cop life in all it sordid details, and presents page after page of note-perfect dialogue. It's the sort of novel that someone who loved The Wire would love. Highly recommended.

The Redbreast (2000/ Harry Hole#3-Oslo Trilogy#1) by Jo Nesbo, translated into English by Don Bartlett: The Nazi Occupation of Norway supplies the back-story for this, the third of Jo Nesbo's detective-thrillers about Norwegian police officer Harry Hole and the first of the 'Oslo trilogy'-within-a-series. Harry gets caught up in trying to track down an assassin who was one of the Norwegians who fought alongside the Nazis during the Siege of Leningrad during World War Two.

Harry is on pretty good behaviour in this novel as he fights his demons (alcoholic and otherwise). Section dealing with the Norwegian collaborators of World War Two and the war's aftermath fascinated me -- it's not an area of history I knew anything about beyond the name 'Quisling.' The depiction of Harry's detective work is also top-notch. Norway itself fascinates, in the past and present, in Nesbo's depiction of Neo-Nazis and apologists and unctuous civil servants and historians and many others. Recommended.

Chaplin on Chaplin

My Autobiography (1964/ This edition with new introduction 2007) by Charlie Chaplin: The first third of Charlie Chaplin's autobiography was excerpted and sold as its own book, My Early Life. This suggests that Chaplin (or someone in his estate) knew that his autobiography was excellent pretty much right up to the point that he became the most famous person, film star or otherwise, on Earth -- in 1916, roughly speaking.

The first third details Chaplin's Dickensian childhood in London, England. And it is detailed, and marvelously described. Chaplin didn't use a ghost writer -- the prose is all his, with some corrections for spelling and grammar. He's a gifted memoirist, at least until he becomes famous. Then he becomes an anecdotalist, with the narrative switching to an exhausting string of Chaplin's encounters with famous people.

The first third of My Autobiography, though, is dynamite. Chaplin draws a picture of late Victorian England that is grimy but often full of life and heartbreak. His early adventures on the stage as a member of a travelling acrobatic troupe, as an actor, and ultimately as a dance-hall comedian are memorable and informative.

The introduction to this edition -- written 40 years after the initial mid-1960's release -- notes some of Chaplin's curious omissions. Unless his long-time collaborators are actresses, he omits them almost entirely. He also omits almost any mention of the process of making his films, especially once he's on his own. His first two wives get less than a page's worth between them. He does deal with his 1940's trial and subsequent exile to Switzerland, along with his last marriage, to the then-18-year-old daughter of playwright Eugene O'Neill when Chaplin was in his mid-50's. He fails to mention his last movie -- A King in New York -- at all. 

Oh, well. Some of the anecdotes are interesting, depending on your tolerance for name-dropping, especially when many of those names have faded into history. The several pages devoted to Chaplin's relationship with William Randolph Hearst and his mistress Marion Davies are probably the most rewarding of the lot.

One thing is certain -- Chaplin was no Communist, even if he did get branded as such for some of the speechifying he did in person and on film. He really, really loves money and he lets it show. Given his impoverished background, it all makes sense.

In all, My Autobiography is immensely rewarding for the first 150 pages or so. After that, one really must proceed at one's own risk. Recommended.

Austin City Limits

Austin Powers: International Man of Mystery (1997): written by Mike Myers; directed by Jay Roach; starring Mike Myers (Austin Powers, Dr. Evil), Elizabeth Hurley (Vanessa Kensington), Michael York (Basil Exposition), Seth Green (Scott Evil), and Mindy Sterling (Frau Farbissina): The first and by far the freshest of the Austin Powers movies was a moderate hit in theatres and a giant hit on home video, thus paving the way for two sequels.

Canada's Mike Myers indulges his love of many things English and a few things Scottish (and a few thing Canadian) in creating his groovy hero -- the glasses are a nod to Michael Caine's bespectacled spy in The Ipcress File and others, while the film parodies James Bond movies and The Avengers spy series while also homaging Our Man Flint and a lot of other previous comedies, including The Pink Panther movies. The distinctive, Quincy Jones "Austin Powers Theme Song" (not its real name -- that would be "Soul Bossa Nova") originally came to Myers' attention when it was used as the theme song of the El Cheapo 1970's Canadian game show Definition.

Anyway, Myers just gets in there and keeps swinging with physical comedy, body-horror comedy, puns, and winks to the audience. It works beautifully for the most part, as does co-star Elizabeth Hurley, who's funny and fresh and seems to have real chemistry with Myers. Myers' Blofeld-parody Dr. Evil is also funny here, possibly because Myers doesn't have him do a parodic rap number as he will in the subsequent two movies. Highly recommended.

Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me (1999): written by Mike Myers and Michael McCullers; directed by Jay Roach; starring Mike Myers (Austin Powers, Dr. Evil, and Fat Bastard), Heather Graham (Felicity Shagwell), Elizabeth Hurley (Vanessa Kensington), Michael York (Basil Exposition), Seth Green (Scott Evil), Verne Troyer (Mini-Me), and Mindy Sterling (Frau Farbissina): More of the same, only louder and grosser. Verne Troyer still steals scenes as Mini-Me all these years later, and Mike Myers continues to be a gamer, this time playing three characters. 

Sending Austin back to the 1960's jettisons much of the first movie's 'Fish Out of Water' comedy. And Heather Graham, also a gamer, just isn't all that funny as the perpetually wide-eyed Felicity Shagwell. Myers' comic grotesque Scotsman Fat Bastard grows on you, especially his repeated verbal riffs on eating babies (and Mini-me). That he wears a delivery-man outfit with an 'FBD' patch on it (Fat Bastard Delivery, I presume) cracks me up with its attention to detail. Recommended.

Austin Powers in Goldmember (2002): written by Mike Myers and Michael McCullers; directed by Jay Roach; starring Mike Myers (Austin Powers, Dr. Evil, Fat Bastard, and Goldmember), Beyonce Knowles (Foxy Cleopatra), Michael York (Basil Exposition), Seth Green (Scott Evil), Verne Troyer (Mini-Me), and Mindy Sterling (Frau Farbissina): The Austin Powers franchise runs out of steam pretty quickly here. An opening piece of meta-comedy doesn't play as funny as it sounds, while the celebrity cameos now seem like something of a drag. 

The funniest bits all seem to involve Michael Caine as Austin's swinging spy daddy in a nod to Caine's formative influence on the glasses-wearing Austin as a glasses-wearing superspy in 1960's spy films The Ipcress File and Billion-Dollar Brain. Beyonce and Myers have no chemistry, which at least allows Beyonce to escape the movie with her dignity intact (unlike Heather Graham in the previous installment, stuck in bed with Fat Bastard).

Padding the movie are lazy parodies of British boarding schools (and perhaps the first Harry Potter film), The Silence of the Lambs, and possibly Myers' dramatic turn in the film 54. Beyonce is charming and cute as a bug. Roller-skating Dutch egomaniac Goldmember (Myers again) is grotesque without being particularly funny. There are enough laughs for an Austin Powers completist, but the subtitle of this third film in the Austin Powers 'trilogy' could very well have been So Very Tired. Lightly recommended.