the week in movies

Taken: When a former CIA operative (Liam Neeson) mistakenly allows his hot-assed teenage daughter (Maggie Grace) to visit Paris, she is abducted by Albanian sex traffickers. If he is to prevent her virginity from being taken, he must kill every man in the city within 24 hours.

Paul Blart: Mall Cop: A mall is overtaken by a suburban gang, and it's up to a mild-mannered security guard (Kevin James) to kill them. When Blart is rendered paraplegic during a botched apprehension on an escalator, his family leads an advocacy campaign in support of euthanasia and his right to end his own life.

Under a Pile of Sailors: When a West Village dinner party exceeds all expectations, a young couple (Viggo Mortenson and Don Cheadle) move to central Jersey to save their relationship. New neighbors (Paul Giamatti and Marisa Tomei) recount their own Fleet Week experiences, and the four develop a shared appreciation of maritime history. A far-reaching inquiry into the nature of sublimation, set against a rolling sea of flashback sequences.

Curvas Peligrosas: A Mexican geometry teacher (a reinvigorated Cantinflas) finds himself transplanted to South Central Los Angeles, where he inspires his students using a novel method: tantric sex. Under his enigmatic tutelage (“Stand… and deliver” and “It’s like tic tac toe in circles”) they learn key lessons in math and life, until a grim school board chair (Iman) threatens all. The resultant appeal to the United Nations was filmed before the General Assembly.

Quest for the Yarmulke: After a sequence of prophetic dreams, a young Jew (the excellent newcomer Herman Rosenbluth, who also directs) drops out of law school and begins his search for the golden yarmulke that will usher in a new Messianic age. His worried parents (convincingly played by Rosenbluth’s own parents) give chase, following our hero across the American Midwest and as far as South Dakota, which he stubbornly refers throughout as “the New Israel.”

Bride Wars: Best friends (Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway) become rivals when they schedule their respective weddings on the same day. Recognizing the bitter futility of the American wedding ritual, they vow to kill themselves simultaneously on the internet, and will the proceeds toward eliminating child mortality from malaria in the developing world.

Facebook of Evil: After installing a mysterious application on her Facebook page, a young woman (Kirsten Dunst) is at first amused to notice a sequence of seemingly innocuous changes to her profile. When one by one her friends die under mysterious circumstances, she enlists the help of her hacker ex (a trim Wayne Davis), who may know more than he lets on.

one about mexico

I've been trying to think of the right Mexico story.

One would be about an obese American who visits Todos Santos. His Spanish is perfunctory and poor by that standard, but his sense of dumb mission is unquestionably intact. He makes the trip alone or with his helpless family, and over a single night he makes it his goal to eat all the tacos in town, pot by steaming pot of goat, carne asada, fillet after fillet of fish, thousands of breaded shrimp.

The toppings can be left to the imagination, but the impression should be of a man determined to burn away entirely his memory through the effects of pepper on the tear ducts and mouth. In his quest, the man must confront the laws of gastrointestinal physics and (at a certain point nowhere close to achieving his goal) his heart or some other part or parts of his body best left imagined invariably give way.

The good people of Todos Santos leave a simple white marker at this gentleman's final stand or cart, and whether it's as a cautionary reminder or salute to the improbable, we'd better not speculate.

The guy's ghost wanders out into the desert, marking time with all the other dead things, marking the gray beauty of the Pacific, paying proper respect to Venus as it descends each night, plummeting into the sea on fire.