Robot &

Befitting a movie about a man losing his memory, Frank Langella's character in Robot & Frank is also named Frank to keep things simple. And true to the title, his companion is a robot, assigned to care for the old man. Afflicted with not-explicitly-stated-but-obviously Alzheimer's disease, Frank gradually reveals himself to be a retired thief, still capable of pulling off small grabs and even intricate break-ins but less able to remember what it is he wants to steal, or why it is an awful idea in the first place. Initially resistant to the idea of having his diet and activity controlled by an eerily pleasant, vaguely humanoid being, Frank soon relents when he learns that he can convince his caretaker to assist in burglaries.

That Frank's children (James Marsden and Liv Tyler) did not think to program the robot to prevent their once-incarcerated father from committing further crimes speak to how little they think the addled man can do, an unwitting admission of their perfunctory sense of filial duty. As Frank slowly bonds with his personal trainer and eventual accomplice, the robot becomes a complex repository for the emotionally (and, often, physically) absent parent to both vent his frustration with his kids and to vicariously attempt to make amends with them. So effortlessly does Langella invest these feelings into the emotional void of his "co-star" that Robot & Frank works best when its thin commitment to a narrative evaporates and lets the actor simply inhabit his odd role.

Only for a brief window, in fact, does the storyline truly mesh with the film's emotional content in such a way that neither is sacrificed for the sake of the other. This synergy owes to the emotional investment Langella gives Frank's lingering need to steal, possibly the only thing that makes him feel like himself as so much slips away to dementia. Occasionally, he confides in his robot pal how he wishes he could have planned jobs with his children, his inability to share his greatest happiness with his greatest loves a regret he cannot forget.

As for the "heists" themselves, however, these setpieces serve only to insert story into a film working just fine with its less propulsive, more insular conflicts. Whether the initial break-in of a library on the cusp of conversion into a social museum for hipsters or the spiteful plan to steal from the hipster-in-chief (Jeremy Strong) in charge of this travesty of art and knowledge, Frank's heists do not follow through on the sense of irony and buried affection in the preparation the old thief puts into these jobs. When training the robot to use its super-human mechanical abilities for crime or reinvigorating his own brain with a focus and determination it has not had in years, Frank injects deadpan humor and life into the picture. But the big shows lack the lackadaisical charm and subtle insights of the rehearsals, and they gradually lead to an overactive story that reaches for big emotions and shameless plays on Frank's mental condition (which affects short- and long-term memory at the convenience of the plot), culminating in a twist so offensive in its casual manipulation of mental illness that the already eroding goodwill I had for the film evaporated.

Nevertheless,Nevertheless, Robot & Frank often manages to be quirky without all the tedium that term now entails. Langella's mixture of irascibility and regret gives the moments with Frank's children extra bite, even tragedy. Tyler's Madison rails at the notion of her brother pawning off their dad on a robot, but she decries Hunter from the convenient safe zone of her constant world travel, something even Frank, who pushes his son away, directly notes. When she finally does shows up in a fit of Luddite self-righteousness, she interrupts her father's scheme and prompts Frank to go to darkly amusing lengths to alienate his daughter and get his partner in crime reactivated. Marsden, on the other hand, gets to share some of Langella's pathos as the son who, despite rarely seeing his father as a child, tries his hardest to care for his dad, sacrificing his free time to drive hours at a time to tend to a man who does not want his help. And true to Frank's complex, mordantly funny/painful views of his children, the best moment of the busy climax concerns the old man playing on his son's strained affections one last time, using Hunter's desire for reciprocated acceptance to make the poor man an accessory. That Langella can play this almost sadistic exploitation for laughs without diving into caustic irony is a testament to the easy humanity and puckishness of his performance. That the film relegates this moment to but one minor moment within a distracting, clumsy, caper story is a testament to its wasted potential.

Green Lantern (Martin Campbell, 2011)

Watching Green Lantern in 3D is like watching a glowstick through sunglasses, the already unimpressive neon goop dimmed to a murky hum of sickly light. Its dulled visual scheme matches the narrative, a story about a man chosen for the highest honor in the universe that has all the excitement of finding out one has been selected to be a Nielsen family. In fairness, this movie is not as bad as the increasingly increasingly garish X-Men: First Class, which is aging in my short-term memory like milk left out in a hot sun. Green Lantern at least lacks the pomposity and waste of recent blockbusters, but it makes up for this "shortcoming" with a stupefying lack of creativity, in a film about a hero whose power is his imagination.

The first sign of the dearth of ideas is the hero himself. The Hal Jordan of the comics, a conservative, stoic pilot without fear, is replaced with a smarmy jackass played with much-practiced knowing by Ryan Reynolds. Jordan here is nothing more than Tom Cruise's character from Top Gun, to the point that, after he becomes the titular hero and inevitably saves the day, I expected Hal to buzz the giant lantern core on the planet Oa, making the gruff drill sergeant Kilowog (voiced by Michael Clarke Duncan, because of course he is) spill his galactic coffee all over himself in surprise and rage. But, if wishes were horses...

Green, as we are told, is the color of willpower. But it is also the color of envy, and one doesn't need 3D glasses to see DC's intent to rip off Marvel's approach to their film franchises leap off the screen. I admit to being no expert on Hal Jordan, but even a cursory look into the character reveals an overhaul to slip into Marvel's winning formula. Hal's turn to asshattery aligns him with the wisecracking Tony Stark, while his constant hand-wringing over responsibility ties him to the self-doubting Peter Parker. The decision to make the fear parasite Parallax into a giant space cloud recalls the similarly baffling treatment of Galactus. And like Thor, it introduces an expansive, intergalactic sandbox, only to spend all its time in a banal conceptualization of Earth.

The only thing Green Lantern has to distinguish itself is its loud color palette, all bright greens and yellows with splashes of magenta and fuchsia for Sinestro and Abin Sur. But of course the 3D shaves off the candy coating for the sake of a handful of scenes with any artificial depth. Martin Campbell, a more than competent action director responsible for two of the finest and most exciting Bond movies, Goldeneye and Casino Royale, cannot find the same thrill in the lava-lamp CGI of Green Lantern's hokey powers (really? A Hot Wheels track to stop an out-of control helicopter?) and the all-too-brief forays into space where the film might have worked.

Relegated mostly to Earth, Campbell has to tread through a perfunctory romance with no-nonsense/well-maybe-some-nonsense pilot/businesswoman Carol (Blake Lively) and hysterically tacked-on daddy issues for the hero and undercooked villain Hector Hammond (Peter Sarsgaard). I had to struggle not to laugh aloud at a particularly inappropriate time at the end of Hal's early flashbacks, a predictable and clumsily handled bit of tragedy to weigh upon Hal's shoulders as an attempt to explain away his incessant waffling.

The only true pleasures Green Lantern has to offer are the things it isn't: it isn't overlong like so many bloated franchise starters of late, coming in a good 20 minutes under two hours if you leave when the credits start (and who the hell will want to stay?). It is not self-serious, unlike, say, the "Born This Way" moralism of X-Men. But nothing that actually makes its way into the frame is of much use. The film tries to Marvelize Hal Jordan, but in the end he simply leaps from fool to fearless warrior without progression. But then, origin stories these days always fail to adequately build their franchises, and if Green Lantern is going to skip anything involving character growth and plot development, at least it truncates the running length to send us on our way sooner.

I'm almost impressed that a film this dull can avoid feeling longer than it is. But for the love of God, when is someone going to make one of these epic films with even a hint of wonder? They're superheroes, for the love of Pete; awe is what they do best. But there isn't a single moment of Green Lantern that attempts to capture the overwhelming feeling of being thrust into something unfathomably vast, and I remain ever-unsettled by Hollywood's ability to rob the universe of its grandeur. DC heroes typically lack the psychological depth of their Marvel counterparts, but an insightful film could have been made about Hal's stubbornness and two-dimensional commitment to duty. In trying to ape Marvel, Campbell and the DC team overseeing him have ironically only simplified this character further.