After wandering out of Bad Teacher, I dropped in to the adjoining theater to see why the local paper had given this movie four stars. Accordingly, I didn’t see the first twenty minutes, but I sort of think that any “explanation” I missed is beside the point. This was E.T. for the age of video games, and the action was there for action’s sake, not to develop a meaningful plot. What mattered, instead, were the people, specifically the five youngsters, who while making their own movie got caught up in the bigger movie around them –  a Blow-Up hommage, literally. There was more honest chemistry between Joel Courtney and the spectacular Elle Fanning than you see between most grown-ups who are bedding each other, and the interplay among the boys was as good as Diner. Best was the completed home movie, shown alongside the credits, in which the same young actors who were convincingly realistic in the main movie were just as convincing as untutored seventh-graders. If every scene in the kids’ movie was a cinematic cliche, the same could be said for the entire film. But what fun!

When a movie has a simple message to deliver, it can do a lot worse than getting Owen Wilson to deliver it. Moreover, he was the best Woody Allen-character surrogate I can remember, channeling Woody’s physical moves and intonations without the harsh edge or credulity strain when beautiful women fall for him. That simple message and Screenwriting 101 plot were simply the armature for Woody’s paean to Paris and, more particularly, Paris in the ’20s. Every line in Gil Pender’s fantasy world was an inside joke, not all of which I got (Djuna Barnes??). And what was that fantasy world but Woody’s literary answer to Inception, clinched by the presence of Marion Cotillard, playing a far more suitable role and playing it brilliantly. Not a major movie by any measure, but for someone who still churns out a flick a year (at age 75), it was a happy evening at the cinema.

The plot, I think, ultimately made no sense, and many steps along the way weren’t credible, but the journey itself was powerful and disturbing. The two women actors, especially the daughter played by Melissa Desormeaux-Poulin , were extraordinary, and the overall depiction of Arab-on-Arab violence was hauntingly, and depressingly, real for someone who lived with the story of Sabra and Shatila for many years. So, too, was the juxtaposition of the mdern high-rise and mud huts, of cell phones and tribal culture. In the end, will a moment of love break the cycle of anger and hatred? I don’t think so.

“Cute,” was the word I heard most often from the decidedly older crowd leaving the Friday night $3 movies at the Hopkins Cinema, and that struck me as just about perfect. Like an Adam Sandler movie, it was sweet-spirited, with the bad guys not really being bad, just pompous. Sure, no one could be as naive as Tim Lippe, played adroitly by Ed Helms, but he was more the foil, the Pogo/Jerry Seinfeld around whom the more interesting characters revolved – none more wildly than John C. Reilly, who was beyond perfection as Dean Ziegler. Ann Heche and Isiah Whitlock were pretty good, too. The setting reminded me of Up in the Air, but where that hit a number of discordant notes, this was pitch-perfect throughout. And in every awkward scene, of which there were many, the director simply cut away before I started squirming.