The very funny, very weird, and very recommendable I ♥ Huckabees is discussed in PSB’s coverage of the Toronto International Film Festival.

We turned the hose on Ladder 49 last week.

It’s impossible to watch Shark Tale and not think about Finding Nemo.  The duo represent Round Two in the animation battle (with similar themes) between DreamWorks and Pixar, and the former fares so poorly, they wish Steve Jobs would gnaw a chunk out of their ear so the ref will just call the thing.  Admittedly, Nemo’s shoes are tough to fill – think of a little kid trying to clomp around in Shaq’s kicks – but Tale doesn’t come close.  It’s Antz to Pixar’s A Bug’s Life, and if that’s not enough to scare you off, keep reading.

Tale, which features three credited directors and four credit writers, has the humor of a typical mid-‘70s-era Tonight Show episode.  It’s bland and broad.  Jessica Shrimpson?  Scallop polls?  Cab drivers who sound like they’re from the Axis of Evil?  These are jokes lame enough to make the writers of Yes, Dear groan like they’ve been mortally wounded (and, yes, they deserve to be mortally wounded).  Tale’s attempt at keeping adult audiences interested – you know, instead of being funny – is to have computer generated characters look like the people providing their voices.  So we get Robert DeNiro as a shark with a mole on his cheek; Martin Scorsese as a puffer fish with huge, bushy eyebrows; and Will “2K” Smith as an ambitious yet lackadaisical fish named Oscar with sticky-outy ears, and a big, irritating mouth.

The comparisons between Oscar and Smith don’t end with the physical resemblance, either.  Oscar, like his real life counterpart, becomes famous for perpetrating a hoax.  Where Smith’s swindle involves the premise of legitimate talent, Oscar – he’s named after the award Smith will never win – cons his oceanmates into thinking he has the ability to kill sharks.  He doesn’t, of course – Oscar’s legend grows after being in the right spot at the right time (Independence Day anyone?) when a dropping anchor takes out a pursuing shark (Michael Imperoli) who happens to be the son of an underwater Don (DeNiro).  Oscar claims he shook up the world, and the balance of oceanic power takes a fairly decent tilt.

The rest of Tale involves Oscar trying to keep up the rouse, with the help of the Don’s other, slightly effeminate son (Jack Black) and a co-worker who has had a crush on Oscar for years (Renée Zellweger).  Things play out predictably, only with more product placement than one might prefer.  Unlike Nemo, I can’t imagine a childless adult wanting to waste their time and money on Tale, unless they’re into listening to A-list voice talent, which is the one area DreamWorks can claim victory over Pixar.  Tale’s animation isn’t as sharp or interesting, and the characters look odd and frightening where Pixar’s are cute and cuddly.  But, unlike Antz, at least none of Tale’s characters look like Benjamin Bratt.  <shudder>

Color me pleasantly surprised by Friday Night Lights (it opens next week), which looked like Remember the Titans II – another movie about a real-life high school football team and their improbable run for the state championship.  Here’s what Lights has that Titans didn’t: A real director (The Rundown’s Peter Berg), a blinding score (Austin’s incredibly lovely Explosions in the Sky), the lack of an archetypical Denzel-ish lead, and a far superior source.

Based on a book by Shattered Glass’ Buzz Bissinger (who happens to be Berg’s cousin), Lights is set in 1988 Texas, where perennial powerhouse Odessa Permian is on the verge of tackling yet another promising season with incredibly high expectations.  Powerful Division 1 college recruits line up just to watch pre-season workouts – yes, football is that big of a deal in the economically depressed town.  Businesses close on game day, and even Odessa’s housewives know the team has size issues on defense, and offer suggestions to the coach as if they were helpings of delicious apple brown betty.

That means there’s a whole lot of pressure on both the players and their coach, Gary Gaines (Billy Bob Thornton).  Anything less than an undefeated season and/or the state championship would be deemed a failure.  Lose a game, and you might just come home and find a half-dozen “For Sale” signs planted in your front yard.

Because Lights is a sports film, it is contractually obligated to delve into only a handful of the team’s players: The Big Star Running Back (Derek Luke) who refers to himself in the first person, can’t read and, undoubtedly, will get his comeuppance; the Son of a Local Legend (Garrett Hedlund) who just can’t measure up to daddy’s (Tim McGraw) high standards; the Emotionally Troubled Quarterback (Lukas Black, who co-starred with Thornton in Sling Blade); the Backup Running Back (Lee Thompson Young) who, of course, will get his chance to shine…after he pulls a Thurman Thomas; the Gentle Giant (Lee Jackson) who doesn’t utter a word…until he unleashes the inevitable final reel speech that motivates his teammates in ways they never imagined; and the Token Latino (Jay Hernandez) who doesn’t really do anything other than being Latino.

This lot, despite being so very familiar, is much more flawed that the usual cookie cutter characters found in sports flicks, and it’s difficult not to become emotionally involved in their plight.  Berg shoots it all with a handheld camera, making Lights look like a gritty art house football film.  This more than makes up for the picture’s fair share of the usual sports clichés, the overuse of Public Enemy (who probably weren’t yet an institution of rural Texas in the fall of 1988), and the fact that Lights is so comically light on swearing, it’s like watching a badly dubbed version of a Tarantino film on Bravo! (sample line: “Shut these cocky sons-a-guns down!”).

My biggest problem with Lights was the portrayal of the all-black Carter-Dallas team as a bunch of D-block thugs who lie, cheat and play dirty.  This wouldn’t have been as much of an issue if it wasn’t for an earlier scene depicting the Carter-Dallas coaches as conniving, suspicious complainers while their white counterparts from Odessa Permian were fair and even-keeled crackers.  Even if this were really how it happened, it still plays really badly.

I often leave CNN on as background noise while I’m doing stuff.  You know, just in case some evildoers do some of that evil.  So the last thing I wanted to see was a movie that had anything to do with John Kerry, Viet Nam, or Swift Boats.  Sadly, those are the three very things that comprise Going Upriver: The Long War of John Kerry, the new documentary from George Butler.  The only thing that could have been worse was if the film threw in Kobe Bryant and/or Scott Peterson.

But here’s the thing: Even though I’m sick to death of Bush and Kerry and the election, I still found Upriver to be a fascinating and moving doc.  It’s also, at least indirectly, a pointed comparison between atrocities committed by US forces in ‘Nam and the nightmarish acts perpetrated at the Abu Gharib prison (and who knows where else – ever get the feeling that LBJ’s war would have been a lot less popular if we had imbedded journalists and 24-hour news channels back then?).  Plus, we finally get a look at that goddamn swift boat.  And ain’t she a beaut?

Upriver begins by showing home videos of the young Kerry, who already had a thick face and bad hair.  We see him spend his Kennedy years at Yale (if you pause on frame 20,763, you can just make out a young Dubya snorting coke off of a whore’s ass in the background of pan across the campus) before shipping off to The Conflict.  Voluntarily, I might add.  You probably know what comes next: Attacks, shrapnel, and three Purple Hearts.  A Bush counterpoint documentary would likely show our fearless, flight-suited leader at a posh country club, yelling at Pedro for not putting enough ice in his rum and coke.

The bulk of Upriver deals with Kerry’s life once he returned home from active service.  You’ve heard only snippets of his testimony before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, but Upriver contains the entire chilling rant.  Fox News tell you about Kerry tossing his medals away like bottle caps?  You get to see it here, and if the extended scene doesn’t put his actions in perspective in a deeply moving way, you’re an evil, cold-hearted prick.  And that probably explains why you were watching Fox News in the first place.  Hey, at least the Kerry clan never airbrushed retards out of their family pictures.