I would buy a used coffin from this man. In Richard Linklater‘s droll comedy “Bernie,” Jack Black plays an east Texas funeral director named Bernie Tiede, and it is surely one of the performances of the year. I had to forget what I knew about Black. He creates this character out of thin air, it’s like nothing he’s done before, and it proves that an actor can be a miraculous thing in the right role.

Black is not a giant. He stands 5’6.” Yet the word for Bernie Tiede is “hovering.” He seems to hover above even those taller than him. He is solicitous, gentle, tactful. When Marjorie Nugent’s husband dies, he is the angel at her shoulder, creating the impression that no client has ever touched him quite so much as she has. That’s a triumph because Marjorie (Shirley MacLaine) is the most disliked woman in Carthage, Texas.

Bernie Tiede’s story is factual, based on a celebrated Texas Monthly article titled “Midnight in the Garden of East Texas” by Skip Hollandsworth. The late Mr. Nugent, apparently a prince of a fellow, owned the local bank. Marjorie took over after his passing and started throwing loan applications into the waste basket and otherwise offending the locals.

Was it her money that attracted Bernie? No one can say. Bernie was known and liked by almost everyone, sang in the church choir, served on charity boards, organized civic functions, provided a sympathetic shoulder. His origins were obscurely in Arkansas, but his manner was such that he got the job at the Carthage funeral home almost just by presenting himself. Among his many abilities was the tact to convince mourners he believed they had selected precisely the right coffin.

Bernie’s courtship of Marjorie is a masterpiece of social delicacy. In the odd dance between the two, he never seems to want anything in particular. Not sex, certainly; there were those in Carthage who assumed Bernie was gay and rumored to be a few who knew. Nor was he boldly after her money, although he suggested purchases which in embellishing her lifestyle did nothing to diminish his. Surely Marjorie knew she was hated in the town and surely she enjoyed being paid tribute; MacLaine allows the slightest of smiles to sometimes shine out from a fixed frown. They began to be seen around town, especially at the theatrical and artistic events that Bernie supported and sometimes performed in. They shared such sublimated sexual experiences as holding hands while having simultaneous massages in a (respectable) local spa.

There are flat-footed ways this story could have been told. Linklater finds a tricky note difficult to define. “Bernie” never declares itself a comedy; often when we laugh we’re thinking, “I can’t believe I’m seeing this.” An unspoken compact grows between Bernie and Marjorie in which neither one declares exactly what’s going on, but the fiction is maintained that Bernie believes her worthy of his kindest attentions, and she believes that at last a man has gotten her right. But a relationship this problematic can’t last forever, and eventually Bernie shoots Marjorie four times in the back.

Now Linklater surpasses himself. Bernie’s attempts to conceal the death is based on the ability of many good funeral directors to know instinctively what people really think about each other. In Marjorie’s case, no one liked her, and she isn’t particularly missed. Bernie redoubles his charity efforts and continues to lead his accustomed lifestyle. Only a curious district attorney named Danny Buck Davidson (Matthew McConaughey) eventually sniffs out something wrong, and even as he comes under suspicion, Bernie remains a man who knows exactly how to behave in difficult situations.

Richard Linklater has made all kinds of movies, most of them very good. They have little else in common: He worked with Black in a completely different mode in “School of Rock.” Why did he make “Bernie”? I suspect he read the magazine article and knew it was a natural movie. Anyone could have seen that. His genius was to see Jack Black as Bernie Tiede.

Review: Bernie / ***1/2 (R) is a post from: Movie Sniper

“This could be like Columbus and the Indians,” a nerdy radio astronomer worries. “Except we’re the Indians.” From a powerful transmission facility in Hawaii, he’s supervised the transmission of a signal to the Earth-like Planet G in another galaxy, and in no time at all, aliens come calling. Considering that they arrive in weeks, they must have discovered faster-than-light speeds, so it’s a little strange that when they arrive they’re strictly analog. Their vast warships splash down in the Pacific (except for fragments that devastate Hong Kong in one of those toppling skyscraper scenes so beloved in disaster movies). But these alien craft are only armed at a level that makes their battle with U.S. warships more or less a standoff.

Why would the U.S. fleet conveniently already be near the splashdown point? It’s involved in war games with allies such as Japan, which provides an excuse for a Japanese officer to take temporary command of one of our ships and thus boost the grosses of “Battleship” in Asia. It’s also handy that the aliens create a force field that forms an impenetrable barrier around their craft, which seals in three U.S. ships, locks out all other ships and explains why our jets don’t simply nuke the SOB.

Of course, in the old B-movie tradition, our response to the alien visit is immediately military. There’s not one word of discussion about the aliens possibly just making a social call. We invite them, they come and we open fire. This despite the fact that they’re remarkably humanoid; when we finally remove the helmet from one alien’s spacesuit, he turns out to look alarmingly like James Carville.

In the set-up, we meet a shiftless beach bum named Alex Hopper (Taylor Kitsch), whose brother Stone (Alexander Skarsgard) is a naval officer. In a bar, Alex hits on the lithesome Samantha Shane (Brooklyn Decker), who wouldn’t you know is the daughter of the admiral of the fleet (Liam Neeson). Breaking into a convenience store to get her a burrito, Alex is arrested and his brother delivers an ultimatum: Join the Navy or else.

Meanwhile, the nerdy Cal (Hamish Linklater) supervises transmission of the signal to Planet G, and in no more time than it takes to get Alex into uniform and on board a U.S. destroyer, five alien spacecraft enter our solar system in tight formation. One alien craft then levitates from the ocean depths, as large as a skyscraper and bristling with ominous protrusions. You gotta say it takes real nerve for a communications officer (Rihanna) and two seamen to speed over to it in a rubber boat armed with just a machinegun.

In a parallel story, we learn Samantha is a physical therapist working with the Army vet Mick Canales (real-life Iraq hero Gregory D. Gadson). She takes him on a hike up the mountainside where the big NASA radio dishes are located, they meet the nerd, and much depends on preventing the aliens from phoning home. In the Pentagon situation room, officials fret. There’s the obligatory montage of cable news reports on the alien invasion, and the U.S. destroyers exchange fire with the aliens. Two ships are destroyed, including the one commanded by Stone, and after several officers on Alex’s ship die, he turns out to be next in command and becomes the captain of the surviving U.S. destroyer. So that’s convenient. The characters we met at the beginning all become the key players.

(Enlarge Image)

“Battleship” is based on the Hasbro board game of the same name, unplayed by me. You get a sense of that when radar doesn’t work, and Rihanna figures out a way to deduce the underwater movements of the alien craft by tracking wave patterns on a grid with old-fashioned weather buoys. The film eventually comes down to lots of scenes in which things get blowed up real good. One alien weapon is especially fearsome: a large metal ball with spikes, which rolls through things and flattens them. Were less sophisticated versions of this used in medieval times, maybe made of flaming tar balls?

The film is in the tradition of the “Transformers” movies, also based on Hasbro games, and you get the feeling that Hasbro showed director Peter Berg some Michael Bay movies and told him to go and do likewise. To his credit, “Battleship” is a more entertaining film than the “Transformers” titles, because it has slightly more fully fleshed characters, a better plot and a lot of naval combat strategy. The work of Gregory D. Gadson, as the disabled vet, is especially effective; he has a fierce screen presence. Rihanna is as convincing as the character allows, and Taylor Kitsch makes a sturdy if predictable hero.

But the nicest touch is that “Battleship” has an honest-to-God third act, instead of just settling for nonstop fireballs and explosions, as Bay likes to do. I don’t want to spoil it for you. Let’s say the Greatest Generation still has the right stuff and leave it at that.

Review: Battleship / **1/2 (PG-13) is a post from: Movie Sniper