My advice for the weekend's two big dogs is pretty straightforward: "Get Smart," sure, go ahead, just don't expect anything you haven't seen many, many times before. "The Love Guru," only if you relish the cinematic equivalent of having your nose hairs yanked out one by one. Mike Myers and M. Night Shyamalan are now both in danger of seeing their careers vanish -- maybe they should make a movie together?
If you're looking for a good old-fashioned movie, on the other hand, you could do much worse than head to the Coolidge or the Waltham Embassy to see "Mongol" (above), an epic tale that could be subtitled "Genghis Khan: The Early Years". By Wesley's report, it has all the stirring pageantry and Classics Illustrated magnificence that the studios have largely given up in favor of CGI.
Smartest movie of the week? That might be "Operation Filmmaker" at the Brattle, a documentary about an Iraqi film student hired to work on a Hollywood production and the many ways in which this goodwill gesture implodes in everyone's faces.
A weekend of Lina Wertmuller at the Harvard Film Archive. The director herself was originally supposed to show but cancelled; that's okay, since the films are worth seeing on their own. For those of you too young to remember, Wertmuller was the Italian filmmaker whose funny, ornery fables of sex and politics were the thinking couple's date movies in the 1970s. (Maybe you've seen the Madonna remake of "Swept Away"? By all means, give the original a chance.) In many ways, Wertmuller's films have badly dated -- the fate of all topical pop culture -- but their energy and intellectual stroppiness remain undimmed.
New Spanish film at the MFA all weekend -- a strong program anchored by the scratch-card satire "The Contestant" and the moody generational drama "DarkBlueAlmostBlack"
Also: "Son of Rambow" is still around and you still haven't seen it. Shame on you. It's at the Capitol Theatre in Arlington.
