Who’s more unrealistic: Michael Scott, the charmingly inept, stuffed shirt of a boss at the head of the Scranton branch of Dunder Mifflin in NBC’s The Office or Dan Burns, the advice columnist who is remarkably emotionally immature in Dan in Real Life? More importantly, for which role should Steve Carell be more applauded? In the former, he consistently raises the bar from within a uniformly talented cast and crew. In the latter, he shows a strong dramatic muscle and manages to stand out in a film with a weak script and a bunch of actors going through the motions.

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As summer creeps steadily into autumn, enjoyable moviegoing experiences seem to fall away even more quickly than the browning leaves in my back yard. In a way, that’s why I haven’t been all that active posting lately (and I promise, I’ll keep trying to remedy that inertia). There’s little impetus to go to the theatre, and some movies I see don’t wind up warranting review (e.g. Good Luck Chuck, * 1/2). Thank goodness, then, for Wes Anderson, purveyor of fine art house cinema, whose meticulously constructed style of filmmaking returns with The Darjeeling Limited.

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There’s a reason that America went ga-ga over Bruce Springsteen’s The Rising in 2002. It was a time when America needed to lean on its homegrown folk heroes, and the Boss responded with politically charged, yearning numbers that recalled the glory of old New York and ached over the day that changed it forever. We ate up The Rising because Springsteen and the E Street Band were something familiar, but the album – artistically bombastic but commercially bland – was far from the product we had become familiar with. On Magic, the Boss’ new album and first collaboration with the band since ‘02, he offers an age-defying set of nostalgia, the aura of which should last far longer than his previous effort.

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It’s rare that you walk into a new musical already singing its songs. But what those songs are part of the framework of pop music, it’s almost expected. Herein lies the challenge for Across the Universe, a film that leans heavily on the audience’s adoration of the Beatles and nostalgia for the era that produced them. It’s an ambitious effort, roping together more than 30 of the Fab Four’s best, and more often than not, it successfully translates the songs it chooses.

The story focuses on Jude (Jim Sturgess), a Liverpool native who crosses the pond to find his American father and to lift himself out of the doldrums of his everyday in England.
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