Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull: 1/5 monads. Many reactions I read were similar: one shouldn’t expect more from a silly action serial. These individuals shouldn’t be trusted to report on action serials: they’ve been so distracted by practical implausibilities that they’ve missed the fact that some preposterous fantasies are witty, charming, and human, while others are plastic, boring, and stilted. None of the other Indy movies particularly resembled Babette’s Feast, but at least two of them used the language of outlandish stunts and pseudo-historicism to create adventures of significant delight. Indy 4 is another sad adventure in meta-narrative, where all of its action and jokes are for the sake of characters we’re supposed to care about for other reasons. We’re expected, throughout the movie, to experience joy in being reminded of what Indiana Jones is already supposed to mean to us. As such, they have not bothered to craft anything surprising, interesting, or sympathetic.

WALL-E, 4/5 monads. Pixar has achieved such a level of astonishing consistency in its movies, that I can no longer judge them accurately amidst its milieu. The only movies I want to compare them to anymore are Miyazaki’s and, I’m sad to say, they still come up short. WALL-E does not have the kind of substance to it that is present in Miyazaki’s best movies, it doesn’t have the moments of shockingly piercing beauty that stick with one for years afterward, like the charge of the Ohmu in Nausicaa or the train on the tracks just below the surface of the water in Spirited Away. Of course, compared to absolutely everything else you might see this summer, the movie is simply outstanding, especially if you’re the sort of person who tends to pay attention to choreography, and who cannot help gasping at the audacity of a person who proposes to fill a screen with such constant motion for such a long time and have it all still work. It is glaringly apparent that Pixar produces the best animated movies in America and has relatively few competitors for the honor of producing the best American movies period. But one can still be a bit sad that we haven’t yet caught up with the Japanese.

(One way of talking about what I wished for after seeing WALL-E: where are the risks? Everything’s simply too good, too well-executed, too easily loved to really alienate anyone. Is it possible to have a script that is really, truly excellent that has no sharp edges at all?)

Hancock, 2/5 monads: This movie, astonishingly, is not dumb. Its story is sincerely noble in its aspirations, which makes it all the more disappointing that almost every aspect of its actual execution is so strikingly poor. Will Smith’s acting, the directing, the ultimately incoherent plot… it’s difficult, mostly, to diagnose exactly what combination of things made each scene fail. Yet, constantly, there was the spark of inspiration, that true form of the movie that wouldn’t let itself be ignored. The idea, in fact, struck me as having so much essential permanence to it that I already want it to be reinvented, ala Batman Begins. It deserves another incarnation.

You Don’t Mess With the Zohan, 1/5 monads: I like Adam Sandler so much… if only he had taste. He’s a rather talented actor and a gifted comic. But he should not be in charge of his own projects. He needs better writers and better minds in charge of filtering the good from the bad. Sandler’s marvelous in PT Anderson’s Punch Drunk Love and is the best part of the so-so Spanglish. Sandler could mature into a sympathetic character actor, a man able to to convince the audience of simultaneous mirth and tremendous sadness in a single expression. Sadly, I get the sense that he enjoys his traveling carnival far too much to ever give it up voluntarily. I guess I just need to stop being such a sap and hoping for another Wedding Singer.