For your distraction this lazy Saturday morning, here’s my latest Sympatico/MSN movie column, listing the best most successful fairy-tale fantasy films.

And yes, “Picnic at Hanging Rock” is a fairy tale.

Kinda.

Three films are opening this weekend that take place in France; another is set in salons and studios from Austria to England, and a fifth takes place in a maaaagical kingdom adjacent to an English village.

There’s also a couple of really crappy movies that were shot in Canada, so I guess it balances out. Once again, Australia gets no love at all. It’s really sad.

“Klimt“: John Malkovich plays the notoriously contrary painter in Raul Ruiz’ stylized look at art and genius, which — as a character helpfully declares — is not a biopic, but an allegory. (Is there a term for this kind of movie? I propose “notabiography”.) I’m told this is a radically re-edited version of the film, but I can’t imagine the director’s cut makes that much more sense.

“Molière“: I wasn’t aware that France was aching for a “Shakespeare in Love” clone to call its own, but here’s Francois Tirard to show his countrymen what they’ve been missing — an expensively realized but rather stiff notabiography that suggests the playwright lived “Tartuffe” a decade before he wrote it. And I think I’m officially over Romain Duris now.

“Rush Hour 3”: Chris Tucker and Jackie Chan reunite for a sequel of such incredible laziness that it makes “Rush Hour 2” look like “Rush Hour 1”. But the biggest tragedy of all is seeing Max von Sydow show up as a duplicitious French diplomat, right after all the coverage of Bergman’s passing made us remember how respected and intimidating he used to be. Look, the guy gets a comedy pass for Brewmeister Smith … but a Brett Ratner movie? It’s just sad.

“Skinwalkers“: Good werewolves in a truck versus bad werewolves on motorcyles. I’d buy a ticket on the pitch alone … and I’d be sorely, sorely disappointed by this craptacular realization of that pitch, which features truly embarrassing effects from Stan Winston Studios and wastes a really strong Canadian cast. I mean, Elias Koteas and Wendy Crewson can so do better than this.

“Stardust“: Matthew Vaughn, director of “Layer Cake”, would not have been my choice to direct a “Princess Bride” fairy-tale movie, but he makes some of it work very well. And then Robert De Niro shows up as this world’s version of the Dread Pirate Roberts, and the movie just goes fracking insane. Nice work from Michelle Pfeiffer and Ricky Gervais, though.

“A Stone’s Throw“: Camelia Frieberg and Telefilm are probably planning to have my legs broken as you read this, but frankly, sometimes crap is crap and there’s no point in pretending it isn’t to spare anyone’s feelings. And this movie, my friends, is crap.

“2 Days in Paris“: Julie Delpy gets her Linklater on as the writer, director and star of this amiable DV pas de deux, in which she and Adam Goldberg play a pair of squabbling neurotics who wander around the City of Lights at the tail end of a really bad vacation. I don’t think the ending works as well as Delpy wants it to, but otherwise it’s an engaging trifle.

More Europeana today, with a screening of “The Last Legion”. And then I’m having the bathtub recaulked. Variety is the spice of life, after all.

Saw “Daddy Day Camp” yesterday. My Metro review is here. I’m sure it doesn’t tell you anything you don’t already know.

Who keeps telling Cuba Gooding, Jr. that he can do comedies? Who keeps casting him in them? At this point, his presence in anything other than a drama is a huge red flag — specifically, one that says the people who made the movie don’t care about the outcome, or don’t know what they’re doing, period.

The people who made “Daddy Day Camp” know what they’re doing. They’re creating a product designed to appeal to undiscerning families who just want to watch kids run around and make various messes while the hapless grown-ups yell impotently. (“Daddy Day Care” was more or less the same, only they were inside instead of outdoors.)

It’s like those videos of kittens romping or babies sleeping; elements like story and production value are just means to an end, the end being DVD sales. And “Daddy Day Camp”, like “Daddy Day Care”, will probably be successful at meeting its goal.

But it’s not entertaining, not in the slightest, because Cuba Gooding, Jr. kills every single potentially funny moment with his dead-eyed mugging and screechy antics. In the first film, Eddie Murphy brought the tiniest suggestion of edge to his ranting and running around; even if your heart hurt at the sight of this brilliant comedian reduced to starring in a terrible kiddie movie, you couldn’t deny his eyes were dancing.

Gooding, on the other hand, just looks terrified and desperate most of the time, as if he’d do anything not to be in this movie. Whether that’s the sign of an excellent dramatic actor playing the reality of every scene, or an actor with absolutely no sense of play, it kills what little energy “Daddy Day Camp” has.

Robert Zemeckis tells a story about why he replaced Eric Stoltz with Michael J. Fox two weeks into shooting “Back to the Future”. In the big chase sequence — the one where Marty McFly skateboards over Biff Tannen’s car — Fox, he said, had a way of inviting the audience to share the adventure. Stoltz, on the other hand, just looked scared.

Maybe that’s all it is.

… and sometimes they’re the product of sound corporate reasoning.

“Bratz: The Movie“? Hey, the kids love the dolls, and the DVDs are selling well; let’s make a live-action brand extension that has absolutely no merit whatsoever beyond telling pre-teen girls that shopping — and only shopping — will define them as people! Too bad they couldn’t convince the stars to have their noses planed off; then this would have been a complete nightmare.

“Underdog“? Hey, here’s a somewhat fondly remembered TV cartoon from the sixties; let’s
drain it of everything that people respond to, throw in Jim Belushi in a quasi-serious role and have the dog talk like Jason Lee! My kids love him in that show he’s on!

The sad thing is that there are some marvelous notions in “Underdog”, like Peter Dinklage’s John Malkovich impression as the nefarious Simon Bar-Sinister and Patrick Warburton playing a live-action version of the oblivious Kronk from “The Emperor’s New Groove” as his henchman, but they don’t go anywhere.

Tomorrow: “Daddy Day Camp”! Because obviously I’ve been enjoying the rest of my life far too much.

Well, there you go: “The Bourne Ultimatum” is officially a monster, with a $70 million opening that puts it at the top of the spy-movie food chain.

As Variety’s piece is quick to point out, no Bond film has ever made this much money in its first weekend — though I’d take issue with the specifics there, since the only Bond movie to open since $70 million weekends became commonplace is “Casino Royale”, and I suspect audiences will turn out in much larger numbers for the next one, now that Daniel Craig is firmly established in the role.

But still, good for Paul Greengrass, and good for Matt Damon, who’s quite perfect as Jason Bourne. His mixture of remorse and confusion never really lets us forget how intimate this series has always been — it’s not about a hero saving the world, it’s about a man saving his soul.

As far as the larger plots go, I do find it interesting that there are no terrorists in the “Bourne” films — or none worth fearing, anyway — just cynical, calculating political players who use the fear of terrorism to gain ever more control of the systems in which they function.

For all the assassinations and car bombings and insinuations of international terrorism from which we must be protected At Any Cost, the series never offers any villains beyond the U.S. government; it’s always about an internal cancer, rather than an external threat.

You have to hope that message is getting across.

My latest movie column for Sympatico/MSN is a compare-and-contrast on the careers of Matt Damon and Ben Affleck. Perhaps you’d like to read it.

I mean, I didn’t want to be the 75th guy to write a Bourne vs. Bond piece. Though I’m pretty sure Bourne would kick Bond’s ass at first, but then Bond would shoot him in the neck with his secret spear-gun watch.

Just for the record.

This year has seen more movies released without advance press screenings than ever before; I thought 2006 was bad, but this year it seems like I’m spending every other Friday afternoon catching up to something.

Last week, it was “I Know Who Killed Me”; two weeks before that, it was “Captivity”. You got your “Hostel Part II”, your “Dead Silence”, your “Kickin’ It Old Skool” and “The Invisible” on the same day … and now, your “Bratz” and your “Underdog”.

I do not expect I will be in the best of moods tomorrow.

However, there are four other movies opening this week that I have seen:

“Arctic Tale“: Aww, look at the cute widdle polar bear and the cute widdle walrus stwuggling to survive in their dangerous, increasingly endangered habitat! Look at the brave widdle directors, editing unrelated wildlife footage into a narrative to shame Disney! On the other hand, by appealing to its young audience’s emotions instead of their logic, it’ll communicate the global-warming issue in a way Al Gore never can.

“Becoming Jane“: Anne Hathaway affects a very wobbly accent to play Jane Austen in a twee and tweaked reimagining of her life as a budding writer, where it seems she met a dashing man who was not unlike that stuffy Mr Darcy from “Pride and Prejudice”. As it turns out, quite a lot of Austen’s life appears to be not unlike “Pride and Prejudice” … might that be the only DVD the screenwriters bothered to rent before embarking on this project? Just a passing thought.

“The Bourne Ultimatum“: In which Paul Greengrass fixes most of the things I thought were off about “The Bourne Supremacy” — the cutting is slightly more coherent, the camerawork less intentionally disorienting, the script more centered — and Matt Damon finds the tormented core of his rebooted assassin, leading to a thriller where you’re more afraid the hero will kill someone for the wrong reasons than be killed himself. Terrific entertainment.

“Hot Rod“: Andy Samberg and his Lonely Island buddies take a script earmarked for Will Ferrell and turn it into something truly, freakishly their own: Imagine a 1980s movie made by people who spent their formative years watching “Footloose” and “Rocky IV” unironically. And it turns out that watching Andy Samberg get hit in the face over and over again is its own reward.

That’s the week in a nutshell. Time to man up and catch the day’s first show of “Underdog” …

… yeah, I live a charmed life.

Instead of anything approaching serious commentary on the recent string of European filmmaker deaths, I offer a link to the Onion AV Club’s interview with Andy Samberg, whose big-screen debut “Hot Rod” opens this Friday.

Samberg’s one of the few new-media comics to fully cross over into conventional entertainment, and he’s got some interesting things to say about making the transition.

Also, the movie is very, very funny.