RIDDICK and THE ULTIMATE LIFE

A few weeks ago, before heading off to see Kick-Ass 2, a friend asked if I thought 2013 was, as he felt, the year of the completely unnecessary, unrequested sequel. As I had, by that point, already sat through The Smurfs 2, RED 2, Percy Jackson: Sea of Monsters, The Last Exorcism: Part II, and Scary Movie V - to say nothing of The Hangover: Part III, Fast & Furious 6, and Grown Ups 2, all of which someone must have requested - I told him yes.

Had he asked the same question this past Friday, before my double-feature of Riddick and The Ultimate Life, I would have told him hell yes.

BLUE JASMINE

Woody Allen's new drama Blue Jasmine is modeled, both loosely and very specifically, on Tennessee Williams' A Streetcar Named Desire, and if you're familiar with that stage classic - or, really, with Williams' oeuvre in general - you can correctly presume that the movie will not end on a note of cheer. Yet for the life of me, I couldn't convince my face of that, because Cate Blanchett's almost impossibly fine performance in the writer/director's latest left me smiling so contentedly you would've thought the screening came with an open bar and complimentary full-body massage. Catching up with me on the way out of the auditorium, a friend, regarding Blanchett's portrayal, said, "I think I'm gonna be high for a week." I'm pretty sure I vocalized my agreement but was feeling too high to be certain.

ELYSIUM

In Neill Blomkamp's Elysium, the sophomore sci-fi effort from the writer/director of District 9, the Earth of 2154 is a poverty-infested hell-hole that the richest of humans have evacuated for the gleaming, rotating space habitat of the film's title. An orbiting gated community of luxury, privilege, and (from what we can tell) almost universally white people, it's the utopia that our hero, Matt Damon's steelworker Max, longs to escape to, particularly after a fatal dose of radiation limits his time left on Earth to five days. (Medical advances on Elysium have eradicated disease completely; after one cycle through a futuristic CAT-scan machine, even cancer cells are killed.) The unaddressed joke of Blomkamp's film, however, is that Elysium - with its sterile mansions and perfectly mowed lawns and vacuous non-entities sipping champagne from crystal flutes - looks like a dismally dull place to be compared to the lively, recognizably human Earth, even in its decimated state. What's less of a joke is that Elysium itself, once we land on the titular site in its last half hour, is also dismally dull - or at least, dishearteningly formulaic - compared to the Earth-set goings-on of the film's first 70 minutes.

THE SMURFS 2

Upon returning from my screening of The Smurfs 2, a buddy asked what I thought of the film, and I told him that Hank Azaria - the comic genius who plays the nefarious, Smurf-loathing wizard Gargamel - was awfully funny in it. My friend asked, "When isn't he?", and beyond the TV-movie tearjerker Tuesdays with Morrie, I couldn't provide an example. (And in truth, at appropriate moments in his Emmy-winning dramatic turn, the actor is awfully funny in Tuesdays with Morrie.) Consequently, as he's nearly always this inspired on-screen, Azaria's hilariously outlandish performance probably isn't reason enough to see director Raja Gosnell's blue-hued sequel, at least if you don't have small children pressuring you to do so.

If, however, you're a childless adult who chooses to attend The Smurfs 2 anyway, your secret's totally safe with me, because Azaria actually does make this kiddie comedy worth sitting through - though perhaps only if you catch it during bargain-matinée hours, or have a cineplex gift card that you were just gonna throw out otherwise.