Cinematical

I think it's safe to tell you, without spoiling the movie, that The Men Who Stare at Goats includes a couple of scenes with Jeff Bridges and George Clooney dancing around. The scenes are amusing and a little strange -- why are soldiers dancing? But they did fit consistently with the film as a whole. However, I was reminded of moments in movies that aren't musicals, but suddenly shift to some crazy kind of dance or musical number. I love these moments, and in fact I wish the dance scenes in The Men Who Stare at Goats were a little less toned-down and a little more "WTF?"

Okay, I'm kind of BS'ing you here. The Men Who Stare at Goats is a flimsy excuse. I really just wanted to write about surreal dance numbers in otherwise straightforward movies, because that can be so much fun. Last year's Adam Sandler vehicle Bedtime Stories was an annoying dud ... except for one glorious, shining moment where Guy Pearce launched into a song-and-dance number. Sometimes these dance moments are the best part of a movie, sometimes they spoil the mood and sometimes they're just one more weird aspect of an altogether bizarre film. Here are seven of my favorites.

In Austin, you can set your watch by the fall film festivals. We don't just have SXSW in the spring. Starting around Labor Day, it feels like we have a film festival practically every week, from Austin Gay and Lesbian International Film Festival (aGLIFF) to the Austin Polish Film Festival, Austin Asian American Film Festival and of course Fantastic Fest. One of the oldest and biggest of these local autumn fests is Austin Film Festival (AFF), which spans eight days and seven screening venues, and includes a screenwriters' conference. In 2009, AFF celebrated its 16th year.

AFF focuses on screenwriters even in its film programming selections, as was evident with the opening-night film. Serious Moonlight is best known as the last script written by the late actress/filmmaker Adrienne Shelly. I admit I wasn't fond of the movie, but director Cheryl Hines was a trip -- mock-vampy on the red carpet (as shown above), and full of excitement about her film. Her screening was up against heavy competition: Matthew Weiner brought an episode of Mad Men to the festival and didn't reveal which one until just before it screened. (It turned out to be this season's "Guy Walks Into an Advertising Agency" episode.) Weiner also was featured in panels during the conference portion of AFF.

It's not uncommon to hear people discussing -- or complaining about -- the ways in which Hollywood celebrities are involved in politics, whether they're airing their opinions during a concert or speaking in public on behalf of a politician. Barry Levinson (Diner, Good Morning Vietnam) thought this was an interesting enough topic to address in his documentary Poliwood, which focuses on the 2008 national Democratic and Republican conventions. Unfortunately, the documentary shows us little that we haven't already seen, and tends to preach to the converted.

Poliwood is subtitled "a Barry Levinson film essay," which signals us that this will be a more personal style of documentary. Levinson opens the movie with shots from his 1990 feature film Avalon and uses this footage to discuss the ways American lives have changed because of television. His focus is on the Creative Coalition, a non-partisan organization of celebrities that focuses on issues such as arts education. The documentary shifts to the 2008 Democratic National Convention in Denver, where Creative Coalition members such as Anne Hathaway, Tim Daly, and Ellen Burstyn talk about how they include politics in their lives. It's especially surreal to see Richard Schiff at the convention after his role on The West Wing -- in one scene, someone from the Clinton administration walks up to him and says "You played me!" -- but Schiff handles it all with good humor.

The first thing everyone seems to mention about Serious Moonlight is that its screenplay is the last one written by the late Adrienne Shelly. Actress Cheryl Hines, who had a role in Shelly's film Waitress, is making her feature directorial debut with the dark comedy, which stars Meg Ryan and Timothy Hutton. The movie opened Austin Film Festival this year. It sounds like a sure-fire comedy, but unfortunately it just left me with a headache.

Serious Moonlight focuses on a married couple, Louise (Meg Ryan) and Ian (Timothy Hutton), who are supposed to meet in their country house for a rendezvous, but both arrive a day early. Louise wants to surprise her husband, but finds out that he also has a surprise: he's leaving her. She refuses to accept this, and ends up cracking him on the head with a vase, binding him with duct tape, and refusing to let him loose until he comes to his senses and realizes how much he loves her and wants to stay with her.

The new biopic about Amelia Earhart, Amelia, succeeds in portraying the famous aviatrix in a whole new light ... as a mundane soap-opera character with relationship issues. The movie looks beautiful and is obviously being released now with Oscar hopes, but it is a dull, uninspired recounting of the less interesting parts of Earhart's life.

The plot is structured around Earhart's final attempt at flying around the world, then flashes back to tell her story starting from her first meeting with George P. Putnam (Richard Gere) in 1927 about a transatlantic flight, and looping back to that final flight and the mystery surrounding it, in 1937. It's a standard structure for biographical films, but is confusing at times. For one thing, I couldn't tell you whether the round-the-world attempt that the film flashes forward to periodically is her first one, or her last one. Near the end, they start to blend confusingly. The film also includes a lot of voice-over from Amelia Earhart (Hilary Swank), which I presume is probably taken from her real-life letters and diaries.

Sometimes it's hard not to feel sorry for a top-notch bad guy (or girl) who's stuck in a terrible movie. Many of us cherish some guilty pleasure films that we watch just for the evil characters. The plot may stink, the hero or heroine may be as dull as dishwater, the dialogue makes soap operas look subtle ... but oh, those glorious villains add a much-needed spark of life. Often, such villains and villainesses are played by critically acclaimed actors who need a gig with a big paycheck.

I've always wished I could pick up a few of these notably evil characters and move them to a better movie, one where their talents are more appreciated, one that doesn't end up on a DVD that people hide on the bottom of their shelves so no one makes fun of them. Here are a few of my favorites -- who am I missing on this list?

Last month, I was out of town for my little brother's wedding and stayed in a hotel room. You know how it is in hotel rooms -- late at night, you watch things on TV that you wouldn't bother with at any other time. My husband and I ended up watching part of Eurotrip, a rather lame comedy from 2004 about a couple of guys who travel to Europe so one of them can make nice with his longtime (female) pen pal.

I fell asleep fairly quickly, but not before watching a memorable scene with a cruelly comic song that reveals the main character's girlfriend is cheating on him. The song is called "Scotty Doesn't Know," and since the main character is named Scotty ... you get the idea. The lead singer looked oddly familiar, but it wasn't until later that I learned it was Matt Damon. Admittedly, Damon's singing voice is dubbed by the real lead singer of the band performing the song, Lustra. Also, we don't usually see Damon with a shaved head, chin piercing and a tattoo on his neck. An IFC article about Damon's numerous cameos in film claims Eurotrip was shooting in Hungary while Damon was there for The Brothers Grimm, and the Eurotrip filmmakers convinced him to appear in their film too.

One of the most chilling bad guys I've ever seen on film is in a soft-core sex flick -- a Russ Meyer movie, even. If you think of Meyer only as the director who featured supremely large-chested women in his films, you probably haven't seen his 1975 film Supervixens. Sure, there are plenty of voluptuous females in the movie, and some comedy moments, but there's also Charles Napier, and his character is truly villainous.

Supervixens is about an ordinary guy, Clint, who's married to the title character, a bad-tempered tease who is brutally murdered by an even nastier cop, Harry Sledge (Napier). Clint -- who is honestly the least memorable part of the movie -- flees town to avoid Sledge, and ends up encountering all kinds of delightful women whose names begin with "Super," like Supersoul, SuperCherry, and SuperHaji. His soulmate, though, is the amazing SuperAngel, played by the same actress as SuperVixen, Shari Eubank. Just as Clint is ready to settle down to a happy ending with SuperAngel, Harry Sledge returns.

Over at Moviefone's Inside Movies blog, a lively discussion is going on about animated family films. Jason Newman is concerned that many recent movies like Wall-E, Battle for Terra and the upcoming Astro Boy may be presenting young audiences with a hidden left-wing agenda.

I've watched a fair number of children's films for someone who has no kids of her own, and I'm not seeing the "blatant socialist themes" to the extent Newman is. For one thing, I disagree about Wall-E. Saying that Wall-E promotes liberalism is insulting to conservatives, as though they are the equivalent of the slothful humans on the spacecraft. "Don't be wasteful" isn't a liberal agenda, it's something most parents try to teach their kids. Astro Boy won't be in theaters until Oct. 23, so I can't say if it really contains "Marxist" themes and story elements. However, Newman says these story elements are played for laughs, and it strikes me that laughing at Communism is traditionally a right-wing practice.

I asked a bunch of people over the weekend about their favorite movie villainesses, and discovered something amusing: When you say "movie villainess," most people automatically think "Disney." Disney animated films seem to have set the standard for evil, conniving women in Hollywood. Other people bring up the Wicked Witch of the West from The Wizard of Oz, another unquestionable, unwavering villainess, although I always found the flying monkeys scarier than Margaret Hamilton, myself.

Our best villainesses in film are sometimes scary, sometimes a little campy, sometimes seemingly inhuman. Disney's witches are fine if you want uncomplicated opposition, and fun to watch, but I also like the women who seem to have everyone's best interest at heart while they spread nastiness throughout a movie. We have so many memorable, wonderful, terrifyingly evil women in film that I can't simply make a list of five or six, so I've instead compiled a list of categories into which many of our most villainous female characters fall.