Valkyrie

The timing of this release is head-scratching... Hooray holiday season! Let's go watch Tom Cruise try to kill Hitler in a historical thriller?

Omg totally. So there.

As engaging a premise as this is, thrillers are all about the suspense, and in Valkyrie there's absolutely no suspense. We know how this ends already. It's really not that exciting. He fails. Miserably. Probably doesn't even come remotely close to getting it done. I mean, it's cute that he tries. But we know that ultimately the Allies clean this mess up. I guess we could give the guy a gold foil wrapped chocolate medal for participation?

The only suspense related to this film is getting giddy over seeing Tom Cruise try and act all Nazi-like. Germans probably wanted this movie to be made in hopes that it would further rehab their image ("Look! Some of us didn't like Hitler as well! Honestly!"), but really all it does is associate Nazis with pirates, thanks to the film's historically accurate homage to Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg's eyepatch (soooo just copied and pasted the Colonel's name).

I didn't really want to harp on the eyepatch, but let's face facts: It's the star of the film. Besides getting the good Colonel laid, I reckon the eyepatch is probably the reason his assassination attempt failed. I mean, if I were a paranoid Hitler hiding in a bunker while WWII goes down the shitter, you know who I wouldn't wanna be around?

The dude with the lousy eyepatch who's probably ridiculously pissed off that he's lost an eye in service of his (losing) country.

Just sayin'.

Bolt: An Epic for Our Time

There is a long and storied tradition of animated films which take great works of drama and literature and adapt them for children, generally by turning the main characters into adorable animals. The Lion King is Hamlet, only with lions and some characters live at the end. The Jungle Book is the Jungle book only with singing. The list goes on and on. Into this crowded but noble arena steps the latest contender, Bolt, a film which breaks new ground by being an adaptation of two different works of literature.

Bolt takes it structure from Homer's famous epic, The Odyssey. As we all learned in Mr. Bosch's ninth grade English class, The Odyssey is the story of Odysseus, a brave Greek hero who finds himself far from home and uses only his wits to overcome all manner of monsters and gods so he can return home to his loving wife. In the film, the Odysseus character is Bolt (John Travolta), a dog who plays a really kickass super dog on TV. However, when Bolt ends up somewhere other than the TV set, he discovers that he does not possess any of the powers he thought he did and instead must rely only on his wits (see the connection?) and a few friends (who end up getting eaten by Charybdis in the second act) in order to get home to his true love, Some Girl (Miley Cyrus).

While Bolt uses the narrative arc of the hero's journey, its emotional heart is taken straight out of Nabokov's famous novel Lolita. For those unfamiliar (we didn't read it in Bosch's class, so you're excused), Lolita is a tale of unrequited love between an older man and a far-too-young girl. Though John Travolta and Miley Cyrus fit neatly into these roles, the creators of Bolt wisely decided that, in this era of Ashton-Demi and Alanis-Uncle Joey, a February-October romance just doesn't have the same edge it did in Nabokov's time. You gotta hand it to Disney: beastility is the new statutory rape and they totally called it first.

I could go on and on about Bolt's myriad literary allusions--its reinterpretation of Hegel's Master-Slave dialectic in the the third act is particularly clever--but this is a movie review, not literature class. What really matter is how well this movie compares to Wall-E. And frankly, it's just not even the same league. Wall-E was a pleasant but ultimately cold movie, with some good laughs but little to say. Bolt, on the other hand, takes many of the seminal works of the English canon and reinterprets them in a way that is understandable and meaningful to kids, adults, and even dogs. So bring Fido along, because this isn't just Lolita with heart, it's also a whole lot of fun.