Worlds of Wonder

Appleton is tagged a communist by the HUAC, loses his studio gig, gets blasted with booze, then conked on the head, whereupon he wakes up with amnesia in a coastal town that Darabont and screenwriter Michael Sloane seem to believe is a little bit of heaven but plays out like a whole lot of hell. There’s a cozy diner with a gold-hearted waitress, a glad-handing mayor, acres of blue sky and miles of white picket fence. There’s a platinum blond with cornflower eyes and Technicolor lipstick (Laurie Holden as the bombshell-lawyer-turned-love-interest) and a twinkly Martin Landau with a smile so merciless you’d think the pod people had already swept through town. And because this is a Darabont film, there’s also, naturally, an avuncular black man waiting in the wings (here, a basement) to choke out salt-of-the-earth tears and deliver an interminable knowing speech. The film’s title, incidentally, refers to an abandoned movie palace that’s waiting for someone (guess who) to warm up its neon. Apparently, the townsfolk have forgotten to dream along with the movies — and in this case, who the hell can blame them?

If it sounds lousy, it plays worse. The whole thing is unbelievably phony, but what’s freakish about Darabont’s brand of phony is that this is exactly the sort of imitation of life most of the interesting movie characters in the 1950s were desperate to escape. The town and its inhabitants incarnate the very values — the herd mentality and terrifying sterility — that Marlon Brando sneered at across his motorcycle handles in The Wild One and James Dean railed against in Rebel Without a Cause. Given how thick and high they spread the manure, Darabont and Sloane seem never to have made it to these movies (or lived in a small town). Given, too, the gaseous swamp of patriotism and self-righteousness in which Appleton and the rest of The Majestic’s zomboid aliens finally land, it’s obvious that the filmmakers have been watching Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. The problem is they’ve been watching Capra in slow motion with the volume turned all the way down — no wonder they think if they just filibuster their way to an ending, they’ll bore us into surrender.

THE LORD OF THE RINGS: THE FELLOWSHIP OF THE RING | Directed by PETER JACKSON Written by JACKSON, FRAN WALSH and PHILIPPA BOYENS | Based on J.R.R. TOLKIEN’s first volume of The Lord of the Rings, The Fellowship of the Ring | Produced by JACKSON, Walsh, BARRIE M. OSBORNE and TIM SANDERS | Released by New Line Cinema | Citywide

MONSTER’S BALL | Directed by MARC FORSTER Written by MILO ADDICA and WILL ROKOS | Produced by LEE DANIELS | Released by Lions Gate Films | Selected theaters | Opens December 26

THE MAJESTIC | Written by MICHAEL SLOANE | Directed and produced by FRANK DARABONT Released by Castle Rock Entertainment | Citywide