Philadelphia Weekly

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"People don't talk like that." This is the chief complaint by viewers annoyed by overly stylized movie dialogue like that employed by David Mamet, Quentin Tarantino and Kevin Smith. Little do they realize that if movie characters talked like real people, they might sound like the rambling, wildly inarticulate protagonists of "mumblecore"--the new(ish) wave of Amerindies by directors like Andrew Bujalski (Funny Ha Ha), Aaron Katz (Quiet City) and Joe Swanberg (Hannah Takes the Stairs).

Lately there's been some grumbling over the term--a joke coined by Bujalski's sound editor Eric Masunaga--as it implies the mumblecore wave is a mere fad. But simply making a movie like Baghead--the movement's first foray into genre, namely horror--does more to expand their cause than any petty bitching over classification.

For the record, Baghead isn't all-out horror, though the final reel boasts some genuinely nail-biting intensity lifted straight out of Blair Witch. Following up their razor-sharp The Puffy Chair, directors Jay and Mark Duplass instead spend most of their time on a reflexive send-up of the very film world they inhabit.

Spurred on by the ridiculous wares at an independent film festival, four struggling actors--aging stud Ross Partridge, his stripper girlfriend Elise Muller, pudgy dork Steve Zissis and his cheerfully unrequited love Greta Gerwig (the scatterbrained star of Hannah Takes the Stairs)--head off to a remote cabin to bang out their very own lo-fi masterpiece over the weekend.

It doesn't take long for them to realize they have no ideas, and they become increasingly distracted by the possibility that the person running around outside sporting a paper bag is a fifth party.

Yes, there are scares, but the Duplasses never lose sight of their real agenda: a savage, unsparing dissection of egocentrism and neuroses that calls to mind early Albert Brooks. The wrinkling Partridge hops in the sack with Gerwig behind Muller's back after swearing to smitten best bud Zissis that he won't. Zissis, meanwhile, suffers the indignity of Gerwig adorning his head with tiny hair clips and later pathetically begs Partridge to make her his "movie girlfriend" in the casting session.

Is some dude running around the woods with a bag on his head really scarier than the passive-aggressive psychological damage these friends do to each other and themselves? Baghead doesn't seem to think so.

The opening minutes of Man on Wire depict people breaking into the World Trade Center. Relax: It's 1974 and they're French. In fact, their ringleader isn't some America-hating ne'er-do-well but simply Philippe Petit, an excitable French tightrope walker who, one balmy August afternoon 34 years ago, hung a wire between the two towers and straddled it for 45 minutes before finally relenting to police requests to cut it out.

Apart from the opening, director James Marsh (The King) has exactly zero interest in conjuring up any thoughts of 9/11. He realizes this is a whale of a tale, one best told as a bouncy, freakishly entertaining documentary. Petit, still very excitable, talks about getting an unstoppable urge to walk from one of Manhattan's highest peaks and the way he then spent the next six years planning it as one would the perfect heist.

Petit didn't go through any proper channels or involve any authorities beyond an "inside man" with a hilarious handlebar mustache. Instead he and a small team snuck into one of the towers, hid under a tarp for a day then did their thing, hoping passers-by would suddenly notice some dude walking midair 110 floors above the ground.

It's hard not to imagine what Werner Herzog, chief documentarian (and kindred spirit) to thrill-seeking nuts, would have done with Petit. But you could do infinitely worse than Marsh, who rightly views him as an artist not unlike Christo and Jeanne-Claude, creating conceptual pieces in which public reaction is half of the art's worth. Even the cops who arrested and briefly detained Petit expressed reverence at the otherworldly sight he'd briefly allowed them to see.

As a documentarian Marsh suggests Errol Morris doing pure exposition; he moves through the story quickly while nimbly jumping between interviews, home movies and fuzzy black-and-white recreations. Even so, when Petit finally gets to his act, he segues from bouncy, energetic music--mostly Michael Nyman scores from Peter Greenaway films--to morbid, introspective Erik Satie, turning a moment of triumph into one of melancholy and serene beauty.

Only when Man on Wire has to wind down does its lack of deeper analysis prove to be a handicap. Marsh briefly touches on some vague sadness once the feat had been accomplished, then quickly gets the hell out before anyone notices there's no satisfactory ending. But not quickly enough.

When Indiana Jones and the Whatever of the Whatzit came out earlier this summer, its fiercest detractors claimed it would be no different than the season's big Indy ripoff, the long gestating third installment of The Mummy. Oh, ye of little imagination.

If Tomb of the Dragon Emperor had been helmed by previous franchise director Stephen Sommers--preferably more in the vein of the pleasingly silly first outing than the bleating second--that prediction might have turned out to be accurate. Alas, Sommers is off desecrating G.I. Joe, leaving the reins to uberhack Rob Cohen (The Fast and the Furious, xXx).

Cohen can do bloated, yes, but not funny (at least not intentionally so), and his Mummy feels peculiarly joyless for a movie boasting ninja babes, firecracker rocket launchers, a central baddie who can shoot fireballs and shape-shift, a three-headed flying lizard, an immortal Michelle Yeoh, a mummy-vs.-zombie battle and much more.