You don’t go to a Warhol exhibition expecting to see a Vermeer or a Rembrandt, but you don’t expect to find only a Jeff Koons, either. Quentin Tarantino obviously has all the techniques of moviemaking at his disposal, but he failed to engage me emotionally or intellectually, and for every gripping scene there was a plot inconsistency that left me puzzled or, worse, annoyed. Casting the Marx Bros. as a Nazi-scalping squad was repulsive, but casting Brad Pitt as their leader was just a mistake.  If Tarantino wants to play in his cinematic fantasyland, fine, but I’d just as soon he, and Roberto Benigni, leave the Holocaust out of it.

Who are the bad guys here? Is it the “prawns” from outer space? The Nigerian hoodlums?  The profit-driven corporate chieftains at MNU? Or the trigger-happy South African Defense Force? We know the good guy is the pencil-pusher Wikus van der Merve, and what a good guy! Meak, somewhat wimpy, none too bright, and yet he emerges as the only one who gets it right, although he does have to kill a lot of people along the way, and I can’t even remember what happens to him at the end. This film is brilliant in its moral ambiguity, its documentary style is oh-so-clever, and its pacing is perfect. And despite the inclusion of a million creatures from a space ship, I found the movie quite realistic, perhaps because Johannesburg was itself an alien backdrop. The only thing I had trouble accepting was the requirement that MNU obtain prawn signatures on their eviction notices.

Glad I saw this with my wife because, whereas I saw Summer as gorgeous perfection, too good for any guy in this movie, my wife saw Summer as vapid, emotionally withholding, not worthy of Tom, whom I saw as a feckless twerp.  Of course, we were both right, which is a testament to the fine acting performance by Zooey Deschanel, and to the difference between the sexes. None of the situations in the movie bore any relation to reality, as I know it – a greeting-card company where a dozen people sit in cubicles to come up with “I Love Us”?, c’mon! – which made the realism of the boy-girl relationship all the more compelling. Cute, well acted, not too deep – a sweet time at the movies and a nice first feature from director Marc Webb.

Hysterically funny, at least the half I was able to catch. It was paced like a sitcom, and the performances were uniformly over-the-top, but the whole fit seamlessly together, like fingers in a glove. An especially deft and novel leitmotif was the role of 20-somethings, pulling and being hit by levers in the power corridors of Washington and London. The story of how British “intel” facilitated America’s rush into a nameless war might have seemed absurd had not every event in the movie echoed reality as we now know it. An inside source on WMD called “Iceman”? Not half as ridiculous as the CIA’s reliance on “Screwball.” The media’s fixation on a crumbling garden wall while war is being plotted? Try the “beer summit,” while health-care overhaul is left to dry.

I had never heard of the “naïve” artist Seraphine de Senlis, but discovering at movie’s end that she was a real person explained in large part why this film was so dramatically inert. To take but one example, Wilhelm Uhde had to flee Senlis at the outset of World War I because that actually happened, not because it moved the plot in any particular direction. The lead role was undoubtedly well acted, but that didn’t make her enjoyable to watch – and why was there a nude scene? Just to show that the film was French (or Belgian)? Uhde himself was extremely boring, and the use of name-dropping (Picasso, Rousseau) to attach importance to what we were witnessing was off-putting instead. Everything the director tried was overly obvious, and none of it worked.