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*Across The Hall * Head Butts * Star Ratings * Video Games * NEW! Entertainment: July 3, 2009 - Public Enemies (**1/2) Added to Flixster Reviews NEW! Entertainment: June 24, 2009 - Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen (**1/2) Movie Review NEW! OUR so-called SPORT: June 22, 2009 - Must List ENTERTAINMENT July 3, 2009 Flixster Reviews Since I've gotten a Facebook page and started using the Flixster application there, I've done a number of movie reviews in a much more concise and occasionally obnoxious fashion. Some are theatrical releases, some are DVD reviews, some I watched on HD cable. Here are said Flixster reviews: PUBLIC ENEMIES A stylish, overlong letdown from Michael Mann about the Federal government's "first war on crime" targeting Pretty Boy Floyd (not Mayweather), Babyface Nelson, and Public Enemy Number One John Dillinger. None of the bank heists depicted have even a fraction of the pulse-pounding energy as the heists in Heat. The most interesting stuff in the picture is the background stuff involving J. Edgar Hoover (Billy Crudup) attempting to validate his plans to expand his Bureau of Investigations into what will become the FBI by capturing the notorious bank robbers. Meanwhile, the high public profiles of Dillinger and his ilk become a liability to the nationalizing gambling and crime syndicates that once gave them save haven. The life of a bank robber never comes off as exciting as Johnny Depp would have hat check girl Marion Cotillard believe as he whispers macho sweet nothings in her ear. Nor is Depp himself, complete with disappearing pencil-thin mustache, as charming as Clark Gable, whom Dillinger is shown to idolize. Even with the film's 2 1/2 hour length, we barely get to know any of the characters, especially not Christian Bale as steely lawman Melvin Purvis. At least Bale never screams at anyone. TROY Troy re-imagines the decade-long Trojan War epic as a moronic two week-long pissing contest over Diane Kruger. Gone are the gods' meddling and the sweeping tragedy of Homer's The Iliad. In their place are a bronzed Brad Pitt posing and snarling as Achilles, irascible Eric Bana as proud and snarling Hector, doughy Brian Cox as scheming and snarling Agamemnon, scruffy Brendan Gleeson as haughty and snarling Menelaus, and effete and ineffectual Orlando Bloom as effete and ineffectual Paris. Thousands of computer-generated Greeks and Trojans smash over flat, dusty battlefields but who really gives a rat's ass what happens or why? Troy even makes up its own ending, especially in when and why Achilles meets his demise. Two actors escape from this embarrassment relatively unscathed: Rose Byrne as Briseis, Achilles' hot little slave girl prisoner, and Sean Bean as Odysseus. The real tragedy here is that an Odyssey movie starring Bean will never be green-lit. 12 ROUNDS In 12 Rounds, John Cena plays John Cena, a "freakishly large" New Orleans beat cop who manages to capture the world's most super duper master criminal, played by Aiden Gillen. After breaking out of prison, Gillen returns to the Big Easy and takes revenge on Cena in the most ludicrous manner possible: He kidnaps Cena's girl (Ashley Scott, The Rock's love interest in Walking Tall, who seems to be making a career out of being the WWE Films moll) and forces Cena into a game of 12 Rounds, where Cena has to perform stunts across the city causing untold millions of dollars in property damage. 12 Rounds started out pretty decent, but watching Cena race across New Orleans grew tedious even before the signature action set piece where he stops a runaway trolley from exploding. Later, Scott reveals a previously unmentioned skill as a helicopter pilot and, when Cena leaps onto the skids to save her from Gillen, she decides to take the chopper on a joy ride across the city while her boyfriend gives Gillen an attitude adjustment instead of just landing the chopper. (Thank goodness for convenient hotel pools on rooftops.) The monosyllabic Cena shows little of whatever it is about him that's so captivating to 11 year old WWE fans and 15 year old girls. Cena maintains his wrestling character's invulnerability in the movie, such as when a house explosion blows him across the street into a parked car and he gets back up and brushes himself off. Gillen, so good as Mayor Tommy Carcetti in The Wire, apparently had the help of Macauley Culkin from Home Alone in rigging New Orleans into a deadly obstacle course. The only character who actually has an arc is the black FBI agent who didn't care if Cena's girl lived or died as long as he caught Gillen, but had a change of heart and joined the Chain Gang by the end. 12 Rounds is directed by Renny Harlin, who was once an A-list action director but has fallen on such hard times he now has a movie executive produced by Vince McMahon to his credit. LARA CROFT: TOMB RAIDER The only reason to ever sit through Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, and indeed the sole reason it should be preserved in the Smithsonian, is to gaze at the physical perfection of 25 year old Angelina Jolie, who threw herself into the role with aggressive aplomb. Otherwise, this movie is an epic disaster. A shit script directed with frenzied incompetence by Simon West. West directs Jolie into a collection of video game action hero poses, as if he was perpetually shooting the movie's poster. He failed to shoot the movie itself in any coherent manner. Lara Croft: Tomb Raider is also notable for Daniel Craig in a supporting role as Lara's lesser male rival and counterpart lickspittle five years before he became James Bond, back when he was just That Ugly British Guy. MOON Incorporating elements of 2001: A Space Odyssey and Blade Runner, Moon is an intriguing science fiction-based drama about a man on the moon. In some unspecified time in the future, 2/3rds of the world's energy will be supplied from solar fusion-infused moon rocks, harvested into Helium-3. There is a man on the moon, alone, providing maintenance and overseeing the harvesting. His name is Sam Bell, he lives in a cold, functional, well-appointed space station. His only company is an artificially intelligent computer called Gerty (voiced in both an eerie and cheery manner by Kevin Spacey). In three years, Sam's contract with the Lunar corporation expires and he gets to go home to Earth to see his wife and young daughter. Saying more would be spoiling the pleasures of Moon. Sam Rockwell is an excellent one man show (so to speak) as Sam Bell, a tricky role where he is on the screen in every scene and literally talking to himself. But if you believe, they put a man on the moon, a man on the moon. A man on the man on the moon. HOT ROD I like this stupid movie. Andy Samberg is a go-nowhere loser who wants to be a daredevil. There's a lot of funny stuff in here, including tons of people-getting-hurt physical humor reminiscent of Dodgeball, endless 80's songs and references, and brutal smackdowns between Samberg and his stepdad Ian McShane. Will Arnett drops by as -- get this -- a smarmy asshole. Through it all, Samberg anchors the picture with a cheerful doofus charm and Isla Fisher is cute as hell as his love interest. THE TAKING OF PELHAM 1 2 3 Slick, perfectly-all right remake. Engaging thriller about a hostage situation on a NYC subway train is nearly derailed by some cringe-worthy subplots and totally gratuitous car crashes. The NYPD, en route to deliver the ransom money, inexplicably crash a motorcycle into stopped cars and have their money car smashed off a bridge. There was no reason to have the car crashes but the filmmakers probably felt all the radio talk between Denzel Washington and John Travolta wasn't thrilling enough. Didn't care one bit about the hostages, like the Man Who Couldn't Pee or the inane teen lovers' spat via laptop webcam. Denzel's boss started out hating him but that subplot got dropped. Travolta ranted and raved as the heavy but is about as menacing as Vinnie Barbarino. Denzel, my favorite movie star, didn't say "Muh man!" or kiss two fingers and then press them to the camera so that was disappointing. At least he remembered to bring home the gallon of milk so he wouldn't get an earful from the wife. UP Pixar does it again! What a fantastic movie Up is. A brilliant adventure yarn, buddy comedy, and one of the most touching love stories I've seen in years, told in an unexpectedly powerful first act montage. The crazy cartoon adventures old man Carl Fredricksen and friends survive in the South American jungle totally one-up (pun intended) the crazy cartoon adventures in the South American jungle old man Harrison Ford, old man John Hurt and friends survived in last year's Indiana Jones. A flying house held aloft by a thousand balloons in an aerial dogfight with talking dogs pilotiing byplanes while another pack of talking dogs have a literal dogfight inside a giant dirigible is one of the greatest crazy ideas in cinema history. THE READER Not an easy film to summarize in a few pithy sentences. Powerful, multi-layered story of - it's not quite a love affair, is it? -both a kind of love and hurt set against the unforgivable sins of Nazi war crimes and the Holocaust. Very moved by several aspects of the film: the affair in the first act, the war crimes trial Kate Winslet's character endures, the moral debates during the trial, the reveal of the secret Winslet was so ashamed of she was willing to spend life in prison for her role in the Holocaust to hide it, and the sequence where older Michael sent her tapes of books he read to her. No quarrels with Winslet's Best Actress Oscar win. If there's a weak link, it's Ralph Fiennes; the flaw not being in his performance but in the choice of casting him. Fiennes will never go hungry playing thin-lipped and stiff-assed, but doesn't quite line up with David Kross' performance as young Michael Berg. The lesson The Reader imparts might be best summarized by the stripper who once offered the following sage advice to Michael Scott in The Office: "Secret secrets are no fun. Secret secrets hurt someone." THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS Tragic, heartbreaking film about the friendship between a young boy whose father is a Nazi kommandant overseeing a Jewish death camp and a young Jewish boy living in the death camp. Really good performances from David Thewlis, Vera Farmiga, and the young actors who played the children. Different and interesting to look at the Nazi side of World War II from the perspective of the moral compromises German families made in the name of Der Fuhrer and the German duty to the cause of the Fatherland. Even a precocious child's innocence has its cost. THE UNINVITED Decent American remake of Korean horror film A Tale of Two Sisters, liberally incorporating elements of Hamlet, Fight Club, Girl, Interrupted, and The Hand That Rocks The Cradle. Worked better than it probably should have because of ripe, appealing leads in Emily Browning and Arielle Kebbel, who share a convincing camraderie. Elizabeth Banks, working against comedic type, plays an effective heavy but David Strathairn is wasted as Browning and Kebbel's distant (disappearing when convenient to the plot) father. The shocking payoff reveals at the end twist what the audience is told to believe but don't seem to entirely add up upon closer inspection. UNDERWORLD: RISE OF THE LYCANS Dreary, coated in viscera, for-fans-only prequel steeped in who-honestly-cares Underworld mythology, Rise of the Lycans is also a sweaty, screamy vampire-hearts-werewolf version of Romeo and Juliet. Rhona Mitra, daughter of vampire king Bill Nighy, loves Michael Sheen, the big bad wolf. The doomed lovers live in a questionable period of history where armored vampires live in some sort of mountain cave city surrounded by werewolf-infested forests. Between the loud, bloody battles between vampire and werewolf are loud, boring debates about vampire politics and loud, screaming arguments about vampire family loyalty. Meanwhile the werewolves plot for their interests against the vampires. What's never clear is why a human audience would be interested in any of it. THE LAST LEGION Even worse than expected, The Last Legion plays fast and loose not with actual history, but with the pseudo-history borrowed from other bad movies to create a patchwork quilt of bullshit. Follow along: In 480 AD, the last Caesar, a boy named Romulus Augustus Caesar (sure), watches Rome fall to the Goths, and is charged by his wizard mentor Ambrosinus, who it turns out is Merlin (of course), to find the sword forged for Julius Caesar, which turns out to be Excalibur (no kidding). Romulus, guarded by his loyal band of interchangable, stock Roman legionnaires and a hot Saracen chick, then head to Britannia to hang out at Hadrian's Wall and swipe from the King Arthur movie that came out a few years ago. All of that tripe can be swallowed if the movie were well-made and entertaining. The Last Legion has an abominable script with every character spouting blunt exposition and insipid one-liners, horrible direction, and schlock action edited so that you'll just have to take their word that whatever happened happened. The too-good for this cast, including Ben Kingsley, Colin Firth, and Kevin McKidd have good cause to fire their agents. SON OF RAMBOW Strange, bittersweet, fun little movie set in the mid-80's about two young English boys bonding as they make a homemade film inspired by First Blood. Both children come from troubled homes: Will, escaping to fantasy from a strict religious upbringing, and Lee, lashing out from absentee parents and an indifferent older brother. Both boys find freedom and exhilaration in their dreams (and dangerously reckless stunts) of making a movie. Really good 80's New Wave soundtrack used effectively. Not at the level of Danny Boyle's Millions, but curiously enjoyable and well-made, with touching performances by the two lead boys. The Son of Rambow movie they made wasn't too bad either for a couple of pre-teens. I'd say it was better than the last three M. Night Shyamalan movies. INTO THE STORM Into the Storm is as classy and staid a piece of TV movie historical fiction as there ever was. Excellent performances all around, lead by Brendan Gleeson chomping at the bit as the old British Bulldog. Immersive production values beautifully recreate Great Britain and other locales circa 1940-1945. Convincing makeup and performances by Aleksei Petrenko as Stalin and Len Cariou as FDR made their scenes with Churchill the most compelling of the picture. The largely unreciprocated admiration Churchill held for Roosevelt and their mutual distrust of Uncle Joe Stalin were major themes that was handled particularly well. It's unfortunate that Into The Storm's running time presents a Cliff's Notes version of World War II from Winston Churchill and England's perspective. History would have been better served if Into the Storm were a multi-part mini series. Enjoyed Into the Storm more than its predecessor The Gathering Storm overall. But I wonder if history actually records Winston Churchill gave Franklin Delano Roosevent a full monty? 28 WEEKS LATER Despite an excellent opening sequence, the chilling imagery of empty London post-zombie infection, and an intriguing setup of the US Military slowly repopulating London with ex-pats, 28 Weeks Later quickly falls apart from a story and logic perspective. The first 20 minutes of the picture are actually worth seeing, until the two kids discover their zombie mother, then the Idiot Plot kicks in full-charge. Characters behave in the stupidest manner possible in order to enable a new zombie outbreak, then the rest of the picture is run run run from the running zombies! The US military, despite being specially deployed and equipped to deal with the zombies, get buttfucked by the zombies in near-record time. The talents of Idris Elba, Rose Byrne, and Harold Perrineau are largely wasted. Meanwhile, Robert Carlyle as big bad daddy zombie seems to know what his kids will do before they even do it. The truly fantastic soundtrack by John Murphy is worth owning. The main lesson to be learned from 28 Weeks Later: Don't make out with your zombie wife. You turn into a zombie. THE SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS 2 Because I'll watch anything if it's on HD cable. Unnecessary sequel about four BFFs who don't seem to like each other or themselves very much. Each girl has their own generic subplot including pregnancy scares, parental abandonment issues, and copious heapings of general bitchiness. They all struggle and fail to find meaning or happiness in what to the casual observer seem like otherwise ideal situations, until reuniting in Santorini and jumping off a cliff magically solves all their little dilemmas. America Ferrera is especially unpleasant, scowling at everyone with an enormous chip on her shoulder but Amber Tamblyn is determined to wrest the crown of Queen of the Harpies from her. The other two sure are pretty, especially Blake Lively with the hair and the boobs. The magical pair of jeans themselves are an afterthought. My theory is the pants were actually trying to get away from these broads. Mike Vogel was a smart, smart man to take his soccer ball and run from this money-grubbing retread. DEFIANCE A cross between Schindler's List and Robin Hood: Prince of Thieves, Defiance is the true story of the battlin' brothers Bielski. They saved the lives of 1200 Russian Jews by shepherding them out of the ghettos, outlasting the Nazis for years in the forests. Daniel Craig, Liev Schreiber, and Jamie Bell play the three Bielski brothers. Everything they do, they do it for Jews. When Craig romances Alexa Davalos in the forests, I half expected to hear the Bryan Adams song. Joking aside, Defiance's screenplay feels sloppy and unfinished. Numerous times, subjects are pointedly mentioned, telegraphed, and then hammered home immediately: Pregnancy is forbidden in the camp, so a character quickly is discovered to be pregnant. An elderly scholar teaches the children in the camp the story of Moses - right before the camp is attacked by Nazis and Daniel Craig has literally act like Moses and lead the survivors across the Red Sea/green swamp. The conflicts and changes of heart of the main characters are so predictable, at one crucial point Schreiber might as well have looked right at the camera and announced he would save the day right when he's needed the most. Though earnest and well-meaning, Defiance looks and feels like a TV movie that just happens to star James Bond and Sabretooth. THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE Steven Soderbergh's ode to the professional escort, circa October 2008. The Girlfriend Experience stars Sasha Grey as Chelsea, a New York City working girl for higher class clientele, most of whom spend their time with her complaining about the economy and dreading Obama beating McCain in the election. Shot in warm natural light, Soderbergh employs a frustratingly fragmented narrative to show glimpses into the tight-lipped Chelsea's professional life and heavily armored personal life. The result is a cold, ultimately uninvolving experience. Ten minutes of one of Sasha Grey's hundreds of other films is much, much more bang for the buck. THE HANGOVER The Vegas movie for everyone who's tired of the ultra cool Ocean's Eleven crew breaking every bank on the Strip. The biggest surprises were the coherent story that held the Vegas gags together and how likable and relatable the four leads were. Bradley Cooper's reaction shots to everything Zach Galifianakis said and did were especially funny. The Hangover is a hilarious all-inclusive checklist of everything a gang of buddies would and wouldn't want to happen during a Vegas bachelor party: Marry a stripper, wrangle a tiger (no). Hang out with Mike Tyson (yes). The picture slideshow over the credits filling in the blanks of what actually happened that night were worth the price of admission on their own. QUEEN OF THE DAMNED The Vampire Lestat awakens from his coffin and decides to conquer the world as a douchey goth vampire rock star. Somehow, Lestat's douchy goth vampire rock music awakens Akasha, the Queen of the Vampires (or something) and she decides to make sweet undead music with Lestat. The douchey goth humans in the movie decide this isn't a good thing and try to stop them in a conclusive confrontation where I didn't understand what the hell was going on. Or give a damn. As long as the movie ended. Stuart Townsend made me miss Tom Cruise in his poofy blond wig but the late Aaliyah was pretty hot slinking around in her vampire getup. 30 DAYS OF NIGHT Shitty. Vampire violence descends upon an isolated Alaska town in the middle of their month-long night. It's the opposite of the circumstances of Insomnia starring Al Pacino, except with vampires instead of Robin Williams. The latter is more terrifying, though not as soaked in viscera. Danny Huston, a great actor, slums it as the head vampire while Ben Foster plays the exact same nutjob he played in 3:10 to Yuma and no one seemed to notice. Here's a fun exercise: count the number of times you can actually see squinty Josh Hartnett's eyeballs during the movie. (It's like counting sheep and you go right to sleep. It works. Try it. Spare yourself having to watch the whole movie.) RACHEL GETTING MARRIED Rachel Getting Married achieves the verisimilitude of being an uninvited guest who doesn't know anyone at a wedding. What's more, attending an entire weekend of wedding festivities, including the bitter family squabbles and reveals of long-nursed grudges and traumas. The bizarre but absorbing multicultural rehearsal dinner and wedding sequences go on and on. And on. Strong performances from the cast lead by Anne Hathaway in her Oscar-nominated role as a deeply troubled recovering drug addict. The only other certified movie star in the picture was Debra Winger as Hathaway's mother. There's a startling argument between them where they both haul off on each other. Hathaway suffers a split lip. Winger is perfectly fine. So, unlike her mother, Hathaway can't take a punch. THE STRANGERS Beautifully shot but pointless. Liv Tyler is lovingly photographed and the cinematography is excellent: all moody blacks and warm browns. A young couple is attacked in their country home by masked psychos. The first act is remarkably good with solid performances by Tyler and Scott Speedman trying to sort through a dramatic crossroads in their relationship. Then there's a pounding at the door and the B-movie horror schlock kicks it, though gradually and with an effective bit of dread at first. There's a novel moment involving who Speedman shoots with his shotgun that's really the only interesting part of the horror story. Ultimately, The Strangers reveals itself as maddeningly grim and nihilistic. THE LIMITS OF CONTROL A baffling but fascinating cypher of a film from Jim Jarmusch. One way to describe The Limits of Control might be the Strangest James Bond Movie Ever, but that doesn't quite cut it. A hard-faced hitman who hardly says anything is sent on a mission that requires him to travel to different cities in Spain and encounter a slew of oddball characters who speak to him in a bizarre code and trade matchboxes with him. The contents of the matchbox are understood by him alone but ultimately lead him to his target. The oddballs are played by famed character actors like Tilda Swinton and John Hurt, while Paz De La Huerta spends the entire movie in her birthday suit. Bill Murray pops up as well. Some compelling imagery and the characters' weirdly curious behavior force the viewer to draw their own conclusions. I can't honestly say I understood what I saw or what The Limits of Control was all about, but I still rather enjoyed it. DRAG ME TO HELL A pleasant surprise. Sam Raimi enthusiastically returns to schlock-horror with an entertaining, gross-out romp involving a pretty bank loan officer being menaced by a goat devil conjured by an angry gypsy crone. A fetching Alison Lohman is totally game for her haunting, supported ably by Justin Long as her understanding boyfriend and Dileep Rao as her spiritual guru. Not just a very entertaining good time, Drag Me to Hell also shows us exactly why Borat is right to hate gypsies. There are so many good reasons, not the least of which is gypsies always put it in the mouth. ANGELS AND DEMONS A droopy-eyed Tom Hanks returns as Robert Langdon to pull more pseudo-historical nuggets out of his ass while racing around Rome to stop the Illuminati from murdering four priests and detonating antimatter to destroy Rome. I'd heard going in that Angels and Demons was better than The Da Vinci Code. It isn't. Angels and Demons and The Da Vinci Code are lurid trash, but at least Da Vinci was somewhat entertaining lurid trash, thanks to Sir Ian McKellan chewing the scenery and Audrey Tautou generating some empathy and chemistry with Hanks. Angels and Demons has none of that; just a bunch of priests endlessly pontificating over who should be the next Pope while Langdon and everyone else drone on and on about Religion vs. Science. All of the action revolves around Langdon and the audience trying to unravel a Sinister Plot That Makes No Sense. The Da Vinci Code and Angels and Demons also share the patented Dan Brown swerve as to the identity of the real villain that's so shocking it's completely retarded. Without the shocking. Ron Howard must have been too busy cashing his paycheck to pay much heed to Brown's numbingly-inane plot and dead-on-arrival characters. Angels and Demons is an unholy piece of garbage. TYSON Went into Tyson expecting the wall-to-wall hilariously absurd boasts of his later years when he fought Evander Holyfield. Instead found a tired, deeply reflective former heavyweight champion dealing with a lifetime of regret peppered only with fleeting, empty memories of his past greatness. In his own words, Mike Tyson narrates his entire life, describing his angry childhood of being bullied on the streets of Brooklyn, to his meteoric rise as Heavyweight Champion of the World, to his rape conviction (which he still pleads innocent to), prison time served, and his misadventures leading to his retirement from boxing. A lifetime of fighting, abuse, sex, wealth, and (he feels) misunderstanding. Tyson remains wistful of his failed marriage to Robin Givens. He saves his harshest words for Desiree Washington, the woman who accused him of rape ("that wretched swine"), and Don King ("that reptilian motherfucker"). Throughout, Mike Tyson is surprisingly eloquent, clear-eyed, and gentle. Can't help but feel bad that the former Baddest Man on the Planet may just be the saddest man on the planet. LET THE RIGHT ONE IN Let The Right One In returns the vampire movie from the stock horror violence and profitable tween sexiness of recent years to its origins of moody dread. Here, the vampire is not romanticized or adrenalized; the toil, logistics, and misery of nocturnal bloodlust is on full display. Yet remove the vampire aspects from the movie and Let The Right One In is a sad, touching, strangely sweet story of Oskar and Eli, two desperately lonely 12 year olds living in bleak, wintry Sweden, who find a genuine connection with each other. The themes of love, loyalty, and sacrifice between the two children, one of whom has been 12 years old for a very long time, are moving and powerful. But the girl Eli is a vampire, who lusts for blood and must feed on the living. Oskar deduces this, sees it all for himself, asks the right questions, and understands. The stripped down, practical effects used for the vampire in Let The Right One In - such as when Eli climbs up the sheer wall of a hospital, leaps onto a victim to feed, and saves Oskar from the bullies trying to kill him at the swimming pool, are far more intriguing and terrifying than all the CGI Hollywood has been able to muster. Let The Right One In also answers the age-old question of why a vampire must be invited inside a home and what happens to her otherwise. Vampire horror aside, the heart of Let The Right One In is the relationship between Oskar and Eli, as they each discover what it means to truly have a friend you love and would do anything for. Though the vampire's heart no longer beats physically, it's still very much alive. STATE OF PLAY Murder, political corruption, and a slick Hollywood attaboy to the dying state of newspapers and print media. State of Play argues strongly in favor of the importance of newspapers - specifically pavement-pounding, truth-seeking reporters - in uncovering conspiracies within circles of power and influence. Even Rachel McAdams's Capitol Hill gossip blogger learns the error of her insubstantial, trolling-for-website-hit ways and becomes a real reporter by the end. Looking like a scruffy, portly lion, Russell Crowe leads a very fine cast including McAdams, Helen Mirren, Robin Wright Penn, Harry Lennix, and Jason Bateman in a scene stealing walk on. (Now I know what a "gay-rage" is.) Ben Affleck returns in front of the camera (against my wishes) as a callow US Congressman who's unconvincingly supposed to be the same age as and the former college roommate of Crowe. Affleck wastes no time in crying during his second scene, preserving his winning record of bursting into tears in his movies intact. The plot is a slightly cracked Mobius strip; the verisimilitude State of Play works so hard for tarnished by occasional heapings of patented Hollywood bullshit. Aspects of the plot so closely resemble the events of 24 season 7 that I half expected Jack Bauer and Renee Walker to burst into some scenes and start shooting. The use of Washington DC locations was enjoyable. I liked the last shot, with Crowe and McAdams's matching silhouettes walking off together. ADVENTURELAND Surprisingly honest, sweet, funny, and raw. Adventureland is a gem of a film about twentysomethings working a dead end summer job in a depressing amusement park in suburban Pittsburgh. The dialogue is careful and clever; the jokes and insights sound familiar and true to the bright, bored and lazy souls who may recognize aspects of themselves in these characters. The pacing is lackadaisical; invoking a summer of tedium interrupted by moments of life-changing excitement, with all the confusion that arrives with those moments. I enjoyed how much was said between the lead characters without verbalizing, thanks to the well-tuned performances by the cast. It was nice to see Kristen Stewart. That's an accurate general statement, but I'll further clarify: It was nice to see Kristen Stewart play a complicated real person and not lusting after a shiny vampire. Jesse Eisenberg at first seems like an older Michael Cera impressionist; his character James is a well-read intellectual with no lack of inherent douchebaggery, but he turns out to be a pretty decent guy overall. The 1987 setting and the killer soundtrack, which was woven organically into the movie, were among the best things about Adventureland. STREET FIGHTER: THE LEGEND OF CHUN-LI Jean-Claude Van Damme and Raul Julia screaming "GAME OVER!" were sorely missed. Bewildering attempt to transport some of the characters in the Street Fighter video games, strip them of practically any resemblance to the game, and then set them in the real world of Hong Kong and Bangkok -- a "real world" where Chun-Li can still summon and hurl a swirling ball of energy at M. Bison. Virtually nothing about the story or the background of the characters makes sense, with especially huge holes surrounding Bison's back story. These include the source of his Irish brogue when he was born and raised in Bangkok and why he speaks to his enstranged daughter in Thai when she wasn't. Debatable which was more believable: the idea that beautiful little Kristin Kreuk is such a potent wu shu fighter that she can flatten five guys twice her size, or Chris Klein's two day beard growth and feigned, snarling, tough guy cop badassery. Spending a couple of hours watching Kristin Kreuk wander around Bangkok would have been more enjoyable if her quest to find her missing father via chop-socky nonsense stopped getting in the way. CORALINE Held against the standard of Henry Selick's The Nightmare Before Christmas and Neil Gaiman's MirrorMask, Coraline doesn't quite measure up. The voice over work by Dakota Fanning as Coraline was very good, and the music was delightfully eerie. Yet both the stop motion animation and the story of a young girl going through a hole in a wall into a magical world too good to be true was done better in the previous films mentioned. Coraline was well-meaning but left me cold. I liked the cat, though. DR. NO A classic. Though certain aspects are unavoidably dated, the first-ever James Bond film holds up very well 47 years later. The cinematic debuts of Bond, M, Moneypenny, Felix Leiter, the Walther PPK, Quarrel, and first mention of SPECTRE. Refreshingly gadget free and straightforward as an investigative adventure. The secret island 5 star resort, amenities, and nuclear laboratory of Dr. No is the forebearer of every outlandish supervillain and headquarters to follow. Connery's Bond would never be as young, fit, or dashing as he is here. This early Bond is not yet as unflappably invincible as he would later become. Here, Bond admits to being frightened after being captured by Dr. No (unthinkable today) and Connery's Bond would never again be as dirty, bruised, bloody, and beaten as he is the last act as he fights to foil Dr. No. The Bond girls were gorgeous even then; Ursula Andress as Honey Rider was a golden goddess. Too bad they had to get old, Stallion. FRIDAY THE 13TH I have a lifelong history of not giving a rat's ass about the slasher movie genre in general and Friday the 13th in particular. This 2009 re-imagining doesn't reverse my position in any way. Having never sat through any of the previous (how many have their been? Ten? More?) Friday the 13ths in their entirety, the slasher genre's rules are still so ingrained and obvious, every move Jason made was predictable even before he would "suddenly" appear in frame. The kills were pretty uninspired and the ending is a cheat; appropriate for the franchise but a slap in the face to the consistency of the story the movie told. The curious departure this Friday the 13th made was Jason taking a prisoner, whom he held in captivity for over 6 weeks. Despite being chained up in a dungeon for a month and a half, the girl in question looked reasonably clean and well-kept. Did Jason let her have bathroom breaks? Cook her meals? Give her an hour outside to get some exercise? Brush her teeth pearly white for her? Another big logic break was Jason somehow not killing a major character despite appearances; odd considering how efficiently he kills every one else. But who cares about logic in this genre? There was some fun stuff here and there, mainly in the breasts department. With so many ample racks on display (even Willa Ford's), Friday the 13th validated the beauty of the natural over the implant. Celebrated it gloriously, in fact. I also liked the token black kid using a frying pan as a shield. Marvel Studios is currently casting Captain America. Look no further. I did like this fast, athletic Jason, who moved like an athlete and could shoot a bow and arrow with Olympic precision. I also thought he looked better wearing a bag on his head in the early scenes before he donned the iconic hockey mask. Finally, a pleasant surprise for the Star Trek nerds in the audience (yo!) is the cameo of who plays Jason Voorhee's mother. Major Kira, how could you? THE INTERNATIONAL About a third of the way into The International, some blah blah exposition occurs where we learn this whole picture is about an international bank trying to broker an arms deal into the Middle East. At this point, I decided "this doesn't concern me. I don't care." But there was still 90 minutes to go. The International lives up to its billing with some sweet location shots of Berlin, Luxemburg, Istanbul, and New York. Clive Owen plays a blood-stained Interpol agent trying to bring down the bank with his glower power. Almost as an apology to the audience for all the thin-lipped European men making secret deals in gun metal grey offices, The International stages a wildly bloody shoot-em-up sequence in the Guggenheim where the blood flows out of wounded men like geysers. The only thing almost as out of control as the squibs was all the philosophizing in the screenplay. Every character had some hackeyed code of living they would drop to each other like: "When there's no way out, the best thing to do is go deeper", "Sometimes we find our destiny on the road we take to avoid it," and "In life you have to know which bridge to cross and which bridge to burn." There were at least a half dozen more fortune cookies like those. I might have been able to pay more attention to the complex plot ripe with betrayal but every time Naomi Watts was on the screen, I was mesmerized by her lustrous blonde hair, pulled tightly in a pony tail but with the bangs on the left side framing her face just so. Stunning, stunning hair. I wanted to bathe in it. I'll bet her hair had its own animatics in pre-viz. TAKEN Taken stars Liam Neeson as the World's Greatest Dad. When his daughter is kidnapped in Paris and sold into sex slavery, Neeson, a retired government operative, goes ballistic and stops at nothing to find her and those responsible. Taken is basically a two hour version of 24 season one set in Paris with Neeson as Jack Bauer and Maggie Grace as Kim Bauer. There's even a small role for Xander Berkley, who played George Mason on 24, as Grace's wealthy stepdad. I half suspected Nina Myers was behind Grace's abduction. As Neeson searches for his daughter, cutting a path of destruction across half of Paris, killing Albanian gangsters, foreign businessmen, and even a Sheik, Taken becomes more and more implausible and preposterous. But Taken is also an entertaining B action movie that's hugely satisfying on a visceral level. The weirdest thing was Grace, a 25 year old, playing a 17 year old so naive and sheltered, she behaves more like she's 13. She's rich enough for an all-expense paid trip to live in Paris but wears a demin jacket that's been worked over a by a Bedazzler. There's a subplot that opens Taken where Neeson is a part-time bodyguard for a pop star and gets her help in possibly starting his daughter on a pop singing career. Wanting his daughter to be a pop star is the one big tarnish on Neeson's perfect-dadditude. After all, look how Britney Spears turned out. PUSH The problem with Push is that it's incoherent at the screenplay level. Push introduces a world where hundreds of telekinetics and various forms of psychics are pursued by a shadowy government agency called Division, which employs their own telekinetics and psychics. These men and women are categorized by their one specific ability with words like Pusher, Watcher, Mover, Bleeder, Screamer, Gouger, Scrounger, Flounder, and other words that end in 'er' - I lost track. The characters are all running around day-glo, colorful Hong Kong chasing after a MacGuffan, in this case a syringe that when injected could make a psychic even more powerful, except it has a 99% death rate. Those are shitty odds. Why they wanted this syringe so much, I couldn't fathom. A cast of actors I quite like - Chris Evans, Dakota Fanning, Camilla Belle, Djimon Hounsou, Chris Curtis (having a Sunshine reunion with Evans I rather enjoyed) - don't seem to make much more sense of the story than the audience but they're pretty game anyway. Fanning and Evans quickly developed an easy big brother/little sister chemistry that comprises the most enjoyable aspect of Push, while Belle is a pretty cypher with one facial expression and almost no dialogue. The telekinetic battle scenes are pretty good, the action is bloody and super violent (Belle even gets punched right in the babymaker), but the Watchers' seeing the future and drawing it is straight out of Heroes. There's also a lot of irritating talk where the Watchers keep taunting that they know how each other will die but they end up wrong, so how useful is their clairvoyance? Still, I thought Push was fun to watch moment-to-moment even though I didn't care what was happening. I might even be interested in the Push sequel they shamelessly teased at the end. MILK Excellent movie centering around a fantastic, thoroughly convincing lead performance by Sean Penn as Harvey Milk. Lost count of how many scenes Penn made out with dudes, but I think they were outnumbered by the gay riot scenes. After the second or third, I began thinking instead of Victor Garber, San Francisco's mayor should have been Mayor Quimby. Just so Quimby could have said, "Can't this town go one day without a gay riot?" REVOLUTIONARY ROAD Revolutionary Road postulates an alternate reality where Jack and Rose didn't meet on the Titanic but instead got married and moved to the suburbs of New York in the 1950s. Except Jack kept calling Rose "April" and Rose kept calling Jack "Frank." Revolutionary Road is seriously damaged by the existence of Mad Men, which is a more subtle, layered take on many of the same themes of the lies, hopelessness and emptiness behind the American Dream of love and marriage in the 1950's. DiCaprio's character sometimes even alternates between behaving like both Don Draper and Pete Campbell. Kate and Leo have scenes together where they're really excellent, and then there other moments where Sam Mendes directs them up to the edge of shrill histronics, then lets them dive right over without a net. (Leo busts out the Harrison Ford Finger of Doom more than once.) There are intriguing issues regarding marriage, compromise, happiness, manliness, and the 1950's cultural image of what a perfect life should be vs. the pursuit of an ideal life free of culturally-determined burden and responsibility. There's also an interesting exploration on why married people have affairs. Some of the arguments and emotional blackmail between Kate and Leo become so uncomfortable, the audience's reaction becomes laughter just as a release to the tension. While the performances are generally terrific from the leads and the issues are intriguing, the movie doesn't end when it should and goes on ten minutes too long, filling in details that just weren't necessary. There is a built-in laugh where Kate and Leo plan to go to Paris and decide to go there by steamship. It probably would have been better for them to go out that way than remain on the sinking ship of their marriage. GRAN TORINO The strangest movie I've seen this year. In its own way, the funniest movie since Borat. Gleefully racist; in between scowls and growls, Cliint Eastwood somehow gets away with firing off every insult in the book to just about every race and creed, with special attention paid to Asians. And judging from the applause at the end, we love Clint for it. About halfway through it turns into a bizarre race/reversal of Karate Kid when Clint takes the Asian boy next door under his wing and makes him do all the odd jobs Miyagi made Daniel do, plus a bunch more Miyagi never thought of. Finally, Gran Torino dives into the crazy old man revenge fantasy it purports itself to be, then it pulls the rug out from under us. Such a weird movie, but still really satisfying. BEAUTIFUL GIRLS One of my favorite movies of the 1990's. Tim Hutton comes home from New York to the snowy New England town he grew up in, reunites with his old friends for his high school reunion, meets 13 year old Natalie Portman, some lessons about life and love are exchanged, and it all turns out all warm and satisfying. Seeing this movie a decade later, its flaws are now more apparent: the patter is too snappy with everyone having just the perfect comeback, many of the subplots have resolutions telegraphed half the movie away, Uma Thurman enters the movie as a blonde bombshell/plot device then abruptly disappears in the third act, and even its ace-in-the-hole set pieces like the Hutton/Portman "Pooh" moment during her ice skating haven't aged as well. Also, that infamous Rosie O'Donnell monologue remains shrill and intolerable. Still, Beautiful Girls perfectly captures living in a wintery New England town. The camadaderie between Hutton, Matt Dillon, Michael Rappaport et al feels genuine. It's got a lot of heart and sweetness, and men haven't changed all that much ten years later so the observations about what men want (and fear) in women are still relevant. I still love this movie. It's a keeper. THE CURIOUS CASE OF BENJAMIN BUTTON Natalie Smyka, star of Across the Hall, hails The Curious Case of Benjamin Button as the best film of 2008. I share her enthusiasm and I'd say it's right up there. Benjamin Button is a sweeping, ambitious film of stunning scope and depth of feeling. Far from being what I joked would be a remake of the last season of Mork and Mindy, with Brad Pitt standing in for Jonathan Winters, Benjamin Button told an unforgettable story of a boy born old and growing younger and the extraordinary life he lead from 1919 to 2003. The special effects are so seemless, the illusion of Brad Pitt growing young is completely persuasive. I found Benjamin's early years as a young/old man much more more interesting than his later years as an old/young man, though the ladies might disagree, after having to wait close to two hours to finally see Brad Pitt all handsome and strapping. Me, I liked the shriveled up, hobbled Brad Pitt who went to his first brothel at 14 but looking like he was 74. I was also more fascinated and moved by his relationships with his adoptive mother and birth father than his love affair with Cate Blanchett. And though the film loses a bit of steam in its last act and glosses over what would be annoying details regarding Julia Ormond's character, it can be forgiven. Benjamin Button is groundbreaking, epic film making. Not without its flaws, but quite grand. DOUBT The few years I spent in Catholic school growing up instilled in me a healthy ...what's the word?... fear of nuns. Priests? Priests were cool (save the jokes, folks) but nuns, not so much. Nuns were the ballbreakers of the Catholic schools. As nuns from Hell go, Meryl Streep plays a doozy. And though Doubt is set in 1964, the story could have been ripped from the 6 o'clock news of just a few years ago, when sordid tales of priests tickling young boys' balls and not busting them like the nuns were rampant. Caught in the middle of the war of uncertain conviction between Sister Streep and Father Phillip Seymour Hoffman is Amy Adams, a sweet-hearted young nun in Streep's Catholic school. Perhaps the great tragedy in Doubt is how Streep's intolerant hard-assedness creeps into Adams's soul and she gets pulled more and more towards Streep's methodology. Doubt gets the details just right of Catholic school and being an altar boy. It all looked very familar to what I remember growing up. The acting is superb, though the writing and blocking is very stagey and the camera angles strangely tilt so that Doubt looks like the old 60's Batman TV show. THE TALE OF DESPEREAUX This review isn't in the Christmas spirit but Tale of Despereaux blew. I have a standing rule that I don't see any animated movies that aren't from Pixar. Broke the rule because my niece wanted to see this. Sometimes rules are made to be broken, but that rule exists for a good reason. Shoddy, awful script that needed a serious rewrite and doctoring; no way that script should have gone into production. Not a single character said anything interesting or clever and there was no one to root for. The main character Desperaux is an underwritten collection of dull cliches, and the rest of the characters were even less developed. The storytelling is shoddy and as full of holes as the cheese the mice eat. Gloomy and cheap-looking animation compared to Pixar. There was no humor or joy. The mice and rats can speak but the movie plays fast and loose with when people can hear the rodents and when they can't. There's a theme involving cooking soup that Ratatouille did far better. Even the voice acting sounded trite, especially the narration by Sigourney Weaver, which at times entered Mohinder on Heroes territory for insipidness. Unless you're 6 years old, this movie sucked. FROST/NIXON Celebrated former sitcom voiceover narrator and occasional guest star on The Simpsons Ron Howard outdid himself with Frost/Nixon. I'm just goofing on Ron, but what a great reminder of how formidable a director he can be. The 1970's setting in Frost/Nixon is persuasive and the performances in the key roles by Frank Langella and Michael Sheen are two of the finest of the year. Especially Langella, who creates a tormented, fascinating, sympathetic portrait of Nixon. The interviews between David Frost and Richard Nixon play like a devastating prize fight. The war of words and unlikely triumph by the underdog over the tenured, superior champion is in its own way as thrilling as a Rocky movie. We see an awkward, uncomfortable, but defiant Nixon ultimately, painfully humbled by the unlikeliest of giant-slayers. I loved how Langella's Nixon spends the whole movie mindfucking Frost, who maintains a bizarre obliviousness that ultimately benefited him. Meanwhile, Nixon is so embroiled in his guilt and self loathing that despite running rings around Frost, he provides Frost with the means to glean that historic confession out of him. (The pivotal, entirely-fabricated scene where an inebriated Nixon calls Frost and lays his soul bare was the one moment I couldn't fully buy into, though the acting is killer and cemented the similarities Nixon saw between him and Frost.) There's a brilliant runner throughout the movie about Frost's "too effeminite" Italian loafers that ends with a terrific payoff. It was also fun to see Kevin Bacon, who said in JFK "Nixon was gonna be one of the great Presidents of this country before Kennedy fucked it all up!", get to play the Waylon Smithers role to Langella's Nixon. If Josh Brolin is worthy of an Oscar nomination for W., then so is Langella. Between George W. Bush and Richard M. Nixon, I vote Nixon by a landslide. TROPIC THUNDER Way better than I thought it would be. Shades of The Three Amigos and Bowfinger mixed with Apocalypse Now and other Vietnam movies. Solidly funny script. Some right-on skewering of Hollywood actors, studio heads, agents, and excesses. The fake trailers opening the picture were real good, especially the gay priest movie starring Robert Downey Jr.'s character and MTV Movie Award for Best Kiss winner Tobey Maguire. Downey's confused Australian method actor in blackface was the best thing in the movie although Tom Cruise's asshole studio head is a close second. Best conversation for me was the runner between Downey and Ben Stiller on why an actor looking for an Oscar shouldn't go full-retard in a role. THE RUINS It's rare I like a gimmicky dead teenager movie but I like this one. Better than the similar Turistas; not a bad concept with supernaturally evil foliage protecting a Mayan temple from intrusive ...turistas. The four Americans and the German they followed to the ruins were above average in their behavior and relative intelligence level usually found in movies like these. Once one gets over wondering what Jena Malone is doing in this movie, it turns out the acting was also above average. I liked the kid who was studying to be the doctor incredulously stating, "Stuff like this doesn't happen to Americans on vacation!" Standout was Laura Ramsey, who I just saw seduce Don Draper in season 2 of Mad Men the other day, so it was great to see her here. The Ruins is quite all right. PUNISHER: WAR ZONE At a rating of 1 1/2 stars, the best Punisher movie ever made. There was one gag I liked: a bunch of parkour gangsters were flippy-flopping across a rooftop, and then the one in the middle gets exploded by an RPG rocket. That was fun, cheered me up for a second. War Zone is violent, yes, but it goes for the Tom and Jerry level of violence. In this movie, the Punisher can punch his fist right through a man's face. Every male character and one female cop is shot, exploded, impaled, amputated, deformed, with as much blood splurting out as the budget would allow. I'd love to see squib budget for this picture. Ray Stevenson steps in for pouty Tom Jane as ol' Killy McSkull Chest. Stevenson was awesome as Titus Pullo in Rome, but here he has nothing to play. A few dumb one liners aside, he mostly has to be stoic and shoot people. By saying next to nothing and squeezing triggers on some big, fake looking guns, Stevenson manages to out-act everyone else. The rest of the cast decided to compete in the Bad Acting Triathlon and the Iron Man is Dominic West as preening peacock turned ugly mug Jigsaw. Holy shit, was West terrible, swaggering around in a grating Italian New Yawk accent. Getting two fine actors from Rome and The Wire together in the same movie and making them perform at the caliber of 13 year olds playing the Marvel Superheroes Role-Playing Game was a mean feat. Numerous scenes and moments outright stolen from other superhero movies; primarily Batman (1989), including the famous "the mirror!" scene when the Joker removes his bandages. Jigsaw's clothes and demeanor are textbook Harvey Two-Face from Batman Forever. They even swiped "The World Is Yours!" from Scarface. The simple and depressing origin of The Punisher is touched on: Frank Castle sees his family brutally murdered during a picnic in a park for witnessing a mob hit. Castle goes insane, yet comes up with a wildly marketable skull design to wear on his chest, decides to call himself The Punisher, and declares war on the New York mob and other bad people. That's it. Apparently, this story is so powerful it was worth adapting three separate times into three unrelated motion pictures. (Except it really isn't.) War Zone more or less stays close to the details of the comic book; the 2004 Tom Jane starrer changed the details and moved the battleground from New York to Tampa. War Zone disavows its predecessors the same way The Incredible Hulk did the 2004 Hulk directed by Ang Lee. One doesn't need to see any prior Punisher movie to see War Zone. Also, eliminate every word after "see" and before "war" in the previous sentence. BABY MAMA Figured out early on I'm not the target audience. Surprised to find out at the end Tina Fey isn't credited as the writer, but that helps explain why it's formulaic and disappointing. Still had its funny moments and uncomfortable humor. Best joke was the runner about rubbing extra virgin olive oil on Amy Pohler's taint. CHANGELING Curious title, "Changeling," for a movie where not a single character grows or changes throughout the course of the 2 1/2 hour story. Everyone is exactly the character they were at the end as from the start. The trailer says Angelina Jolie's son was abducted, the LAPD "found" him, but she says "It's not my son!" (300 times). Then they throw her in the loony bin for making their shitty policing look bad. That's what happens, all right. But there's an extra hour more to the story, most of it pretty unnecessary. The loony bin stuff was Girl, Interrupted circa 1930, only with Amy Ryan in a walk-on instead of, well... Angelina Jolie. Angie looks frail and sickly; it makes me long for the days when she was 25, fit, athletic and Lara Croft. I sure miss 25 year old Angie. The sweetest parts of Changeling were all the scenes they shot at the Universal backlot in the same streets we shot Across the Hall. The final shot of the movie was a long, loving look at the street we shot on, complete with the exterior of our Riverview Hotel. Ah, the memories. SUPERBAD The most overrated movie of 2007. I must have missed all the hilarious jokes people loved so much between the constant, uncreative swearing. FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL Watched the Extended DVD, which was a bit of a mistake. Redundant and self-indulgent; by that I mean way, way too much footage of Peter Segal's dick. No one needed to see that. At its best moments, a decent comedy about a big, boring crybaby dumped by a TV star - although the fact that they were together in the first place was tough to swallow in and of itself. Some funny moments, but there damn well will be when you've brought in that many semi-famous funny people throwing that many jokes out there. Dracula puppet show idea was funny in concept but not in execution. It was nice to spend two hours in gorgeous Hawaii, though. Too bad it was with these people. W. W. is no JFK, no Oliver Stone masterpiece. Not even close. Stone didn't learn his lesson from Alexander about time-jumping structures hurting his biopics. Josh Brolin's performance and impersonation of George W. Bush is Oscar worthy. Brolin is amazing and he's surrounded by an all-star cast, caked in various degrees of makeup, portraying Cheney, Rummy, Rice, etc. as a grotesque menagerie of lunatics and suck ups. No sympathy is offered for Cheney, Rove and Rummy; none asked. Thandie Newton in her Condeleeza Rice makeup resembles a gargoyle. The most sympathetic portrayals are saved for Jeffrey Wright as Colin Powell and James Cromwell as George H.W. Bush, who is presented heroically as W's opposite and emotional enemy. Overall, W. is a weird, purposely-manipulative collection of moments that may have been or never were - mixing in famous W quotes like "misunderestimated" and "fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice... I won't be fooled again!" - all dreamed up by Stone and his writer to explain away who the sitting President is. But to what end? Brolin's W never comes off as sympathetic or likeable. Perhaps he's never meant to. I know that by January 2009, I'll be glad to be rid of the real life W. BODY OF LIES Entertaining Middle Eastern spy thriller with strong performances from DiCaprio and Crowe, but the attempted verisimilitude gradually chips away and shatters completely by the third act. The budding relationship between DiCaprio and his Iranian nurse was probably the most interesting aspect of the picture for how well the cultural difficulties are played. Some effectively bloody and jarring violence. Mark Strong all but stole the picture as DiCaprio's handler in Jordan, my dear. Ultimately, it felt a lot like Blood Diamond mixed with Syriana, although I'd say it's a bit better than both. Still, I probably won't ever watch, much less think about Body of Lies again.
FLASH OF GENIUS Exactly what the ads say it is. Good, not great. Similar in many respects to The Insider, but without the teeth. NICK AND NORAH'S INFINITE PLAYLIST A miss by a fairly wide margin, which is unfortunate because the good things about it were really quite good. It was nice to have a perspective where the female lead (Kat Dennings, very appealing in a very non-CW way) really liked the male lead and pursued him. Usually it's the other way around in these movies. I really hate the hackneyed "One CRAAAZY night where CRAAAZY things happen" formula. It did no service to the characters of Nick and Norah, who were trying to have a pretty sweet little romance, except the stupid plot kept interrupting them and trying to keep them apart according to Screenwriting 101. The last 15 minutes turned out to be really good; it's a damn shame we had to wait so long and slog through so much muck for that payoff. Why couldn't the last 15 minutes be the first 15 minutes and then gone on from there and see where the characters take us? HOW TO LOSE FRIENDS AND ALIENATE PEOPLE A WTF trainwreck featuring one stunning Megan-Fox-in-her-underwear scene. Skip the movie, wait for the clips on the Internet. RELIGULOUS Bill Maher is just all right with me. THE DUCHESS Indulging my Keira Knightley in a corset fetish this time finds a rather fine -- if long, two hours felt like three -- British tragedy of manners. Occasionally felt like Masterpiece Theatre crossed with an episode of Married... With Children. Gorgeous English scenery; the city of Bath in particular. Made me want to book a flight to the UK straightaway. The story spans fifteen or so odd years but no one ages. Ralph Fiennes added another character to his arsenal of thin-lipped, rod-up-his-ass, sneering villains-who-don't-wish-to-be-but-that-doesn't-stop-him. Fiennes was good enough to state the theme of the movie at the end, in case anyone's mind had wandered off: "How wonderful to be so free." Fiennes did have a couple of awesome dogs. There weren't enough of those dogs in the movie. I'd cast Fiennes' dogs with the dog Will Smith had in I Am Legend and make a movie. Two hours of me playing fetch with them. EAGLE EYE Somewhat entertaining, gimmicky techno-thriller sabotaged by its own preposterousness. Eagle Eye, an intelligence-gathering AI program turns into Skynet's overly patriotic, equally crazy girlfriend. Eagle Eye should have just built time traveling Terminators. Would have been a huge improvement. Credibility of the plot stretched far beyond breaking point. Steals from every other movie where a "computer turns on humans", including the very similiar Wall-E just three months ago, and The Simpsons episode when they had a robot house. Even reduces itself to cribbing from Stealth and sends a robot plane to shoot missiles at Shia LeBeouf and Billy Bob Thornton. Why do sentient computers always think missiles are the best way to resolve a problem? Eagle Eye's plan to make Vic Mackey President of the United States is ill-advised at best. There's a shocking swerve where Eagle Eye calls Michelle Monaghan and gives her a secret order. Only Shia and complete retards were surprised the order was "shoot Shia." I did like Eagle Eye's impatience when Monaghan hesitated. Rosario Dawson's idea of acting like an Air Force liaison was to let her pants suit handle most of the performance. There's a nice scene on a plane between LeBeouf and Monaghan where the bullshit took a break and they were allowed to have a quiet character moment together, but overall Eagle Eye is a Greco-Roman thumb to the eye. THE HOUSE BUNNY Occasionally amusing bad movie. Comic timing was way off throughout. Jokes funny on paper blown in execution left and right. Constant mixed messages; movie had no clue whether it was glorifying Playboy or mocking it. Tried to have it both ways and failed. Yet at the center was Anna Faris giving an earnest comedic performance. Very endearing. Emma Stone was also good. Kat Dennings was unrecognizable prior to makeover. Colin Hanks did a Luke Wilson impersonation. Probably the best runner was Hefner so distraught at Anna Faris leaving the Playboy Mansion all he could do was eat Haagen Daas on his bed for days, but even that joke never found its sure footing. Still, I know what I hate and I didn't hate this. BURN AFTER READING Calculatedly strange screwball comedy. Some amusing performances and genuine unexpected developments. A couple of laugh out loud moments. Ultimately it all adds up to nothing. Pointless, but fiercely proud of it. BABYLON A.D. Children of Men for retards. WALL-E A pretty strange, pretty wonderful tale of little robots full of anthropomorphic personification; also containing a pointed, half-satirical warning about modern (American) society's obsession with consumerism and over-reliance on technology. The use of the little plant in a boot as the MacGuffan was very well done. I wouldn't have thought a vision of the future where little robots are in love while fat people try to repopulate a garbage-strewn Earth would be uplifting, but there you go. The Pixar animation and storytelling were standard, which means it's of the highest quality. The movie was also a showcase for the spectacular sound design by the great Ben Burtt and his team. Nice to hear a new Peter Gabriel song close the picture. THE X-FILES: FIGHT THE FUTURE A fine, fine movie; the 1998 playbook for how to adapt an existing television series into a feature film. Fight the Future includes the important elements of the series for its fans while still being accessible for the mass audience. The scene in the bar where Mulder monologues the entire mission statement of his character and the TV series to his bartender, summarizing the core X-Files mythology for the audience in just a few sentences, is excellent. It's also interesting to see the pre-9/11 treatise on terrorism that opens the film. Duchovny and Anderson are at their most appealing, cohesive, motivated, and attractive. The dialogue is tight and compelling, the plot devious and exciting, the foreboding sense of paranoia and dread The X-Files is famous for palpable. Though it does play somewhat like a big episode, and aspects of it are now unavoidably dated, Fight the Future is a roller coaster thrill ride of an X-Files episode with a fantastic slam-bang visual payoff. Makes the recent attempt at a sequel look even more like a pile of puke. MIDNIGHT EXPRESS "Joey, have you ever been to a Turkish prison?" ALIEN VS. PREDATOR: REQUIEM Even worse than the first one. One of the biggest steaming piles of garbage I've ever seen. STOP-LOSS Earnest and moving in some moments, but otherwise sloppy, exploitative and manipulative story of young Iraq veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress syndrome forced to return to the war. Learned one important thing before GI Joe next year: Duke and the Cobra Commander used to be friends. But one is a much better actor than the other. MUTINY ON THE BOUNTY I'd mutiny too for some Tahitian love. SMOKIN' ACES Incoherent and asinine. A 90 minute checklist of virtually everything and everyone I hate in movies today. Only the presence of Jason Bateman and Nestor Carbonell keep it from being completely worthless. Still, pretty worthless. Back of the Head is a one-way conduit of information. SITE NEWS |
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