Until we get a movie about Boo Radley time-traveling to 1980 western Texas ...

... we'll have to recap a few movies seperately.

Nope, still flawed: "No Country for Old Men"

We got this from Netflix as part of our 2008 Oscars tour. My wife was curious, and I was willing to see it again to see if the bizarro left-turn three-fourths of the way through went over any better the second time. It didn't.

I still liked Josh Brolin as the hunter in the wrong place at the wrong time and Javier Bardem as the soulless killer with the bad haircut. Tommy Lee Jones was OK as the sheriff but nothing great. Best of all were the deliberate scenes that exploded into action, especially when Bardem gets close to Brolin. Some really good atmosphere here.

But no, the fadeout-fade-in 90 minutes into the movie that brings one character's life to a sudden halt is still jarring and leaves too many questions. If they had handled just that thread a little better, the rest of the final minutes would have been OK. It's a shame, too, because "No Country" pretty much had me up to that point.

Wait a minute ... did I miss the nunchucks?: "The Killer Elite"

Weird movie, maybe just because it's in hindsight. I mean, even as a young man, Robert Duvall didn't have much hair. Combine that with a mustache, and he just doesn't look the part of an assassin-for-hire.

Duvall and James Caan are both hired killers who work for the CIA. But as the deputy in "No Country" might say, "Whoooaaa, differences." Caan ends up with a bad elbow and a bad knee, which means we spend a lot of time watching him in rehab. Lucky for him, he gets a chance at redemption and revenge through a new assignment. Just stay away from that tollbooth, Sonny.

There's plenty of double- and triple-crossing here, as well as some of Sam Peckinpah's quick cuts during action scenes. It's a far cry from "The Wild Bunch," but you can recognize the same technique. In general, though, this movie is kind of boring, even once the ninjas show up. Maybe that's because it was in broad daylight. Um, those dark pajamas aren't hiding anybody, boys.

Can I go back to 1998 and not date Janet Patton?: "Primer"

Can't decide if this movie is one of the best thinkers of all time or just a bunch of bullsh*t. Could be both. And this from a guy who loves the time travel stuff.

For something that could be classified as sci-fi, "Primer" is pretty minimalist. A couple of guys -- working on the side to find something that they can make money from -- stumble across something that apparently allows them to travel into the past. There was a lot of technical stuff, and I won't pretend to understand how it worked. I also can't really fathom how all the different doubles of the characters and time-travel loops fit together, even with the occasional voiceover.

Of course, their plans to make money give way to other complications, and that's where we get all these guys time-traveling at different times. It's way confusing, and I'll go along with the critic who said that anyone who claims to understand what happened after just one viewing is either a savant or a liar.

Still, it's different and thought-provoking, and impressive given the budget was about $7,000. The movie also is fairly zippy after a slow start. Once these kids start messing with physics, they don't fool around. DeLoreans and flux capacitors? Those are for suckers.