So, after writing movie reviews here the past several years, I have come to discover there's only one real downside to the enterprise. Every so often, I happen to catch a movie that's so by-the-numbers and pedestrian that it sorta stops GitM dead. I mean, an unmitigated stinker like Southland Tales or Gods and Generals can be as easy to write about as a good film. And even an annoyingly botched flick like Alice in Wonderland can compel a few paragraphs of copy, out of sheer annoyance if nothing else.

But then you get a bland, summer-movie-for-summer-movie's-sake like Phillip Noyce's ludicrous espionage thriller Salt, and the site grinds to a halt. Salt isn't out-and-out terrible or anything. It's just so perfunctory, so lazy and lackluster in its storytelling, that even commenting on it one way or the other seems like more than the movie deserves. (FWIW, this is the second half of the Kids are All Right double-header I mentioned a week ago.) Probably the most interesting thing I can say about Salt, other than that its Anna Chapman meets Terror Babies, Cold War-hangover plotting could be ripped from the headlines of right-wing nightmare, is that it somehow manages to be both predictable and preposterous at the same time. [Major spoilers to follow, but if you haven't seen it by now...don't.]

Predictable, because Salt is so clearly the type of movie that wants to blow your mind that a second-act "twist" -- think No Way Out -- is well nigh inevitable. (But even when it happens, the filmmakers don't have the guts to follow through: Angelina Jolie's character can't just be undercover. She's deep, deep undercover.) And predictable because, sorta like Peter Sarsgaard skulking around in Knight & Day a few weeks ago, anybody who's vaguely into movies will know Liev Schrieber isn't taking the role of Government Functionary #2 unless there's some scenery to chew into at some point. (It may not be his fault, but Schrieber has become William Hurtish to the extreme to me -- just a hambone waiting to happen.)

And yet, Salt is preposterous. Because, even though you kinda see the big turns coming in all their ridiculous glory, Salt still does not make a lick of sense. As the trailers indicate, Evelyn Salt (Jolie) is a CIA agent who is forced to go on the run from her bosses (Schrieber and a wasted Chiwetel Ejiofor) after a KGB defector (Daniel Olbrychski) outs her as a Russian spy. This mostly involves a lot of running and hiding and hair-dye and whatnot. (Shoplifting too. Here's your drinking game to make Salt palatable whenever it hits cable -- Drink every time Jolie ganks something.)

And, as I've already alluded, at a certain point in the middle going, Agent Salt [Spoiler Spoiler Spoiler] switches teams. (You can figure this out even if you're a touch slow, or you're watching on a plane without sound or something, because Jolie starts vamping it up like Natasha from the Rocky & Bullwinkle cartoons, and even starts wearing a Russian hat as a signifier.) So, ok, edgy second-act twist, I guess...except the whole getting-outed-by-the-KGB-guy plot at the very beginning now doesn't make any sense at all. (You could argue he was "activating" her -- but he could've done that with a phone call.) Multiply this sort of nonsense by three acts, and you end up with a mild fiasco by the final reel.

But that makes Salt sound more howlingly terrible than it in fact is. Phillip Noyce has made some very good movies in his day (The Quiet American, Rabbit-Proof Fence), and he's nothing if not competent. But his action sequences are just that: competent, middling, and kind of a bore. In terms of actioners, Noyce previously made the two Harrison Ford Jack Ryan movies, Patriot Games and Clear and Present Danger, and it's probably not a positive sign for the shenanigans here that in neither film is the most memorable scene an action sequence. (In Games, it's Ryan watching the video-gamey US counter-strike on the bad guy's base from the Pentagon. In Danger, it's Ryan playing cat-and-mouse on the PC with the bureaucratic bad guy next door.)

Here's, there's some passable stunt work, to be sure. But Salt is one of those action movies where the geography and physics seem completely random. (And I don't just mean the rail-thin Jolie knocking out gimongous cops and robbers cold with one roundhouse punch -- They mostly get around that with karate chops and such.) Salt is in downtown DC, then a highway overpass, then a full-on highway, then back in DC. She's ten feet above the bad guys on an elevator...no, she's five minutes behind them, in some random hallway we didn't see before...no, I'm sorry, she's right behind them again, because the big door is closing and she just makes it through. One gets no sense of danger or of propulsion when Jolie just seems to be teleporting around to accommodate the needs of the script.

As for Jolie herself, well she's a movie star, and better than the film probably deserves. But, when you get to thinking on it, that's pretty much always Jolie's m.o., isn't it? From Alexander to Mr. & Mrs. Smith to the Tomb Raiders to The Bone Collector (also a Noyce picture) to Wanted, Jolie tends to be the most impressive thing about otherwise terrible films. It's a neat trick, sure, but at a certain point, you would think it'd be time to exercise a little more quality control, right?

Salt isn't the worst film of Angelina Jolie's career or anything, nor is it the worst film of the summer, but it is a lowest-common-denominator, assembly-line entertainment that ends up being both drab and absurd. My advice is save your money, comrades. We may have a hard winter ahead of us yet.

Since Glenn Beck and his elderly white army ventured to DC this weekend (via roads, highways, and mass transit) to complain about socialism (in a public park), what better time to break away to nearby Baltimore for a gathering of fanboys and fangirls? Baltimore Comic-Con was Saturday, and, as with the NY Comic-Con back in 2006, I've put a few pics up on the Flickr Feed. (I mostly took pics of cosplayers, but there were quite a few venerable comic names out and about as well, including Walt and Louise Simonson, Bernie Wrightson, Howard Chaykin, Jim Shooter, and Jim Starlin.)

As real-life mountain climber Aron Ralston, James Franco is a carefree daredevil who's gotten himself in a tight spot in the new trailer for Danny Boyle's 127 Hours. Um...ok. Striking cinematography as usual, but, in turning this disarming tale into a full-length movie, it's hard to see how Boyle will improve on a film like Touching the Void.

Still in catch-up mode on the movie front, so this past weekend I saw two flicks that have been making the rounds for awhile now. The first, and by far the better of the two, was Lisa Cholodenko's well-observed situation dramedy The Kids are All Right -- a smart, tautly-written family portrait that for at least its first two-thirds (before the inevitable recriminations pile up and all the characters start to vent at each other endlessly) is decently good fun.

Like I've said of movies like The Station Agent and You Kill Me in year's past, Kids is unabashed indie-tainment, the type of small-bore, character-driven film that IFC or The Sundance Channel will no doubt be running into the ground six months from now. So, no, it's not really the type of film anyone needs to rush out and see on the Big Screen, per se. Still, it is a well-made, well-acted picture, and not half bad as counter-programming if you're looking for a grown-up, television-y alternative to the usual summer movie mayhem.

If nothing else, The Kids are All Right gives the promising Mia Wasikowska a peg to hang her hat on in 2010 after the thoroughly atrocious Alice in Wonderland. As Joni, an eighteen-year-old on the verge of leaving the family nest for college, she and her brother Laser (Josh Hutcherson) impressively hold their own with their two, thespian A-lister moms, Annette Bening (Nic) and Julianne Moore (Jules). Taken together, this foursome is a 21st century nuclear family just like any other (a point which the movie perhaps overly belabors at first) -- controlling oenophile Nic can't leave work at work, flighty, hippie-ish Jules feels taken-for-granted, Joni's chafing under the maternal yoke, and Laser has lousy choice in friends -- until the two kids decide, out of curiosity, to get in touch with their biological father, a.k.a. their moms' sperm donor.

That would be Paul (Mark Ruffalo, who I find more palatable now that he's less over-exposed), a charming if self-satisfied local restauranteur who needed some easy money way back when and has scarcely taken on any more responsibilities since. Still, Joni digs his insouciance and his motorcycle-riding ways, and Laser likes him ok too, even if Dad's not quite what he was expecting, and so Paul slowly becomes integrated into Nic and Jules' household. Too integrated, for Nic's taste -- Perhaps slightly paranoid even on the best of days, she starts to feel pushed out of the way as the materfamilias, and after awhile, for very good reason.

And so the family tension crackles and pops, as per films of this genre. For the most part, the writing here (by Cholodenko and Stuart Blumberg) is admirably subtle and character-driven -- the problems that emerge seem natural outgrowths of these particular people's traits. Still, I have to confess the film lost me a bit in its final act, as the winds of marital strife blow in earnest, and everybody keeps yelling at everybody else. This isn't to say it's not well-done (although one of the main characters does seem to drop out of the story rather perfunctorily), only that watching people clearly in love writhe in pain, and/or waiting for second act bygones to get bygonned, as they pretty obviously will, becomes unengaging to me after awhile.

As a sidenote, which I doubt will affect y'all's enjoyment of this movie one way or the other, I'll also admit to feeling some distance from these characters throughout the entire story -- not because of the non-traditional (yet universally applicable) marriage at the movie's heart, but because the action, locale, and characters here are so...Californian. Nothing against the Bear Flag Republic -- I've got great friends out there and from there, and, as Biggie says: Great place to visit. But, as someone who grew up in the South and has lived on the East Coast for decades, I always feel a bit like Alvy Singer or Roger Greenberg while on the Left Coast -- ever-so-slightly not among my people.

And, what with the locavores and the wine-enthusiasm and the car culture and the emphasis on landscaping and the skater rats and the sandals and all the "Right On"!s, Kids is as California suburbs as Mystic River is Boston, or, for that matter, Larry Clark's Kids is N.Y.C. It's to the film's credit that it possesses such a strong sense of place, I guess. But as a processed-food-eating, beer-enthusiast, carless renter of the East Coast persuasion, at times The Kids are All Right seemed as much of an exercise in local color as the Appalachia of Winter's Bone.

This is merely a quibble, of course, and probably speaks less well of me than the movie. In any event, Lisa Cholodenko's The Kids are All Right is certainly All Right, and probably a good bit better. It's a reasonably compelling dramedy that's precise in its details and laugh-out-loud funny at times. If you're in the mood for a slightly Lifetime-ish family drama this summer, you could do much worse. And, if you were to wait until it ends up on Netflix a few months hence instead, well that'd be all right too. Right on.

Best brush up on those Thriller moves, y'all: AMC and Frank Darabont's adaption of Robert Kirkland's' The Walking Dead gets a 4-minute trailer and a start date: Sunday, October 31st.