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* Going to see "Up" in the only way it should be seen: with four kids 6 and under. Thank God for Valium. And stun guns.

* 10 minutes into movie, large pop is already 60 percent 2-yr-old mouth slurry. Yay, the movies!

* Funny movie. Funnier watching a theater full of small children try to keep the spring-loaded seats horizontal using bodyweight alone.

* Movie continues to amuse. 2-yr-old continues to cover Reese's Pieces in thin layer of hand/mouth drool.

* This movie is amazing on 3 pounds of Sour Patch Kids. Wonder what it's like sober?

* This is Up: Extended Potty Break Special Edition

* 2-yr-old also pretty amazing on 5 gallons of pop. Wonder what she's like sober? And by sober, I mean "not poopy".

* Dog-based sight gag at about 80 min. into film was exquisite.

* Excellent job, Pixar. 4 of 5 stars. A real tear-jerker, but lots of laughs too. Visit www.celebrationcinema.com

Title: Burn After Reading
MPAA: R
Runtime: 96 minutes
Director: Joel and Ethan Coen

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

When I review movies, I always like to start out with some kind of synopsis (from two Greek words, "syno", meaning "arbitrarily concise", and "psis", meaning "stuff I made up"). I won't lie to you: I watched Burn After Reading almost four days ago, and I have been sitting in front of my computer ever since, hands on the keyboard, trying to think of some way to summarize the plot. I'm getting very hungry, and the lack of sleep is starting to cause hallucinations (for example, I watched M. Night Shyamalan's The Happening, and it appeared as though there was no "twist" at the end of the movie, which is impossible), so this is the synopsis I'm willing to go with:

"Burn After Reading is a movie. There are a crap-load of characters, all of whom will remind you of someone you know. Stuff happens to these characters. Then more stuff happens. Then there are so many freaking sub-plots crawling up out of the floor, the drain, the base-boards, and the vents, all vying for primary status and attempting to kill off the other sub-plots, and just when you're about to call in the exterminator because you can't keep track of what's going on, somehow one of the sub-plots emerges as the Dominant, which then viciously slaughters and consumes the others, and quietly returns to the hole from whence it came."

There you have it. A perfectly accurate synopsis that somehow manages not to squeak out even the slightest whiff of a plot spoiler. You can worship me later.

The point is, the Coen Brothers are amazing. And Burn After Reading is so multi-layered, with so many cross-threads and connecting points in its convoluted story, you will be applauding when the Brothers Coen manage to pull it all together in the end (please make sure you are alone - it can be embarrassing to start spontaneously applauding in public). If you know anything about the Coen Brothers' corpus of cinematic literature (Fargo, The Hudsucker Proxy, The Big Lebowski, O Brother, Where Art Thou?, Miller's Crossing, No Country for Old Men, etc.), then you know what to expect here - although, with some slight variations.

The Coen films are usually a bit on the dark side, and Burn is no exception, although it somehow feels a bit more polished than other Coen films. Not by much, just a bit. You can expect dialog that is unbelievably real, you can expect scenes to linger over real-life details (the Coen Brothers don't do "sound-byte" scenes), you can expect some top-notch performances, you can expect a wee bit of gore and violence, and you can expect to laugh out loud at some of the story's incredible situations and the way the characters deal with those situations.

John Malkovich is great in this film (as the washed up CIA agent who needs new direction), because he is allowed to be Malkovich; the movie cries out for some seriously over-the-top Malkovich-ing, and no one does a better John Malkovich than John Malkovich. George Clooney is hilarious as the paranoid womanizer - his facial expressions and inflection are, at times, cartoonishly funny. J.K. Simmons (you know him as J. Jonah Jameson, editor extraordinaire, in the Spiderman movies) has a bit role as the CIA Superior that affords him maybe three or four scenes, which is a shame - his performance is probably the show-stealer. Brad Pitt is also in his element as the slightly off-his-nut and flighty gym trainer, turning in some surprisingly funny moments.

Now then. I've praised Burn for its pleasantly complex story, its very believable realism, and the performances put in by the quite talented cast. But the Coen Brothers are always, always going to be comparable to British beer: it's strong, it's dark, it makes you burp, it can give you nightmares, it's very hearty and substantive, but if you're used to draining pop-top cans of Carbonated American Horse Urine (an image not at all intended to conjure up associations with the Clydesdales that are the well-known mascot of a certain American brewing company), then the British beer is going to seem harsh and bitter. The Coen Brothers take some getting used to (I recommend popping a few antacids before you start the film).

I'm not sure if it's because the Coen Brothers aren't afraid to show humanity on film, and humanity is (let's face it) pretty ugly sometimes, or if it's because the Coen Brothers like to inject a few radical and extreme elements into their stories to keep audiences on their toes (call it "shock factor"), but their movies can be a bit off-putting at times. As good as Burn is, it has a lot of crude language, a few quick injections of rather gruesome violence, and some sexual content that features ... well ... I can't say it out loud, so I'll just wink and clear my throat loudly, and then say, Don't go Inside Larry and Don's Optometry supply Store, ok? OK?! (If you still don't get it, I can draw you a picture)

Still ... if you've been suffering through "comedies" like Tropic Thunder, Pineapple Express, Zack and Miri Make a Porno, Step Brothers, The Love Guru, and You Don't Mess with the Zohan, then I think Burn After Reading will be a welcome breath of fresh air. Lots of good stuff here, and if you watch it with a group of other people, there will be plenty of topics for discussion after the film (not the least of which will be, "Gosh, Brad Pitt seemed really natural in that role ... do you think he's a Poofter?").

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Title: Valkyrie
MPAA: PG-13
Runtime: 120 minutes
Director: Bryan Singer

Rating: 4 out of 5 stars

What is a Valkyrie? Being committed to accuracy and factual truth, even if it takes hours of painstaking research, I looked up "Valkyrie" on Wikipedia. I realize that someone may object: Wikipedia is a free-for-all encyclopedia, written by laymen and untrained amateurs who have no special training in the subjects they address - anyone can write anything on any subject they want, even if it's not true. To that objection, I would point out: yes, anyone can make up anything they like and post it as "fact" at Wikipedia, but since it is a free-for-all encyclopedia, anyone else is free to come along and edit the factual errors of others, replacing them with other made-up stuff.

Wikipedia tells us with absolute certainty, until someone edits the entry, that a "Valkyrie" is a mythical goddess figure from Norse mythology. The valkyries choose who will live or die in battle, and they take the fallen heroes to their glory in the afterlife. They also appear to enjoy riding a lot, based on the title of the famous Wagner piece from his opera, Die Walküre. The piece is instantly recognizable to the culturally well-rounded, by which I mean, of course, anyone who has watched Bugs Bunny cartoons.

But this post is, as far as I can tell from the title, a review of the movie Valkyrie, starring Tom Cruise and bunch of other guys whose faces will have you distracted for the entire movie, thinking, "What movie did I just see him in?!" (the answer, in order, is Harry Potter, Pirates of the Caribbean, and Batman Begins).

As the movie begins, we find Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) writing in a diary, giving voice to his sincere feeling that he has had it up to here with Hitler and the Nazis - which is rather unfortunate, since Stauffenberg is, technically, a high-ranking officer in the German army. Even this would not be so difficult a problem, if not also for the rather inconvenient fact that World War II is in full swing, which puts Stauffenberg in a bit of a pickle.

Luckily, he is then horribly maimed in battle, which gives him a reason to decide, "Ah, the hell with it, I think I'll assassinate Hitler and save Germany." And Stauffenberg's plot would probably have succeeded, except that Valkyrie just opened in theaters on Christmas Day of 2008, while Steven Spielberg's epic film Schindler's List, in which Germany loses the war and Hitler kills himself, has been a wildly popular movie since the early 1990s - so Stauffenberg was doomed to fail.

The movie runs for an even two hours, the first hour being dedicated to the planning and plotting of the assassination, and the last hour showing how the first hour was a complete waste of time. Personally, I would have liked to have seen a little more build-up in the beginning; by the time we meet Stauffenberg, he has already resolved his internal crisis of where he stands - he must oppose Hitler in order to truly serve the Germany he loves. It would have been nice to see what led him to that conclusion. If The Matrix: Reloaded and Spiderman 3 could run over the two-hour limit, surely a decent historical movie like Valkyrie could be given a little more room to explore its subject.

The movie title, by the way, comes from the name of the emergency military operation that Stauffenberg hoped to trigger after he bumped Der Führer. Operation Valkyrie gave power to the German Reserve Army in the event of Hitler's death and subsequent revolt of the people living in occupied countries; Stauffenberg revised the military operation to also include the arrest of S.S. and Gestapo leaders.

In a pivotal scene in the movie, Stauffenberg and his family are hiding in their bomb shelter during an air raid, while a record player upstairs is cranking out Wagner's Die Walküre. The theme phrase from "Ride of the Valkyries" hits Stauffenberg's ears, and gives him the idea to use Operation Valkyrie as the foundation of his plot. I think it goes without saying that Stauffenberg would have succeeded in his plans if, instead of listening to Wagner's opera, he had been listening to Queen's We Will Rock You.

All in all, it was a very good movie. Lots of high drama and suspense, despite the fact that you know darn well how its going to end, before the movie even begins (this is known as the "Titanic Syndrome"). None of the actors used put-on German accents, a directorial decision that I applaud with unusual intensity. I don't know if I could have sat through a two-hour movie that featured Tom Cruise slushing his way through a faux German dialect.

And the message, as I understood it, is inspirational: not all heroes succeed, because success is not the measure of a hero; the measure of a hero is the determination to do what is right, even if it means you lose everything. Stauffenberg and those who stood with him will be honored by having their story told through this movie, which highlights the fact that not every German citizen was a Hitler groupie.

Now if you'll excuse me, I have some ripping good yarns to post at Wikipedia.

+++++++++++

This review was made possible in part by the generosity of Celebration Cinemas in Grand Rapids, MI. Feel like taking in a movie tonight? Celebration has a broad selection of films, stadium-style seating, a clean environment, and best of all, they never show commercials after the advertised showtime. Visit Celebration Cinemas online.