The Good Shepherd (**)

THE GOOD SHEPHERD 

The Good Shepherd is Robert DeNiro's fictionalized account of the birth of the CIA. It stars Matt Damon as the head spy. He's married to Angelina Jolie, who he isn't attracted to at all. Say what? How could that be? One reason the movie gives is that Damon's character is a member of Skull and Bones, the Yale secret society. The Good Shepherd goes out of its way to depict Skull and Bones as an exclusive haven where affluent white boys get naked, lie on a stone table, confess their darkest secrets, and then take turns peeing on each other. The Skulls starring Joshua Jackson and Paul Walker painted a cooler and more heterosexual picture of Skull and Bones, if you can believe that. The biggest gripe I have against The Good Shepherd is that it's three hours long and it's fucking boring. Real spies can't be this uninteresting and I know movie spies are a hell of a lot cooler than this (see: Bond, James and Damon's own Bourne, Jason). Hell, I complained about it in MI:3, but The Good Shepherd could have seriously benefited from some latex masks, a lot of rappeling, and a helicopter chase or two. Also Damon has a perpetually nervous son in the movie who's about 10 years younger than he is. The Good Shepherd spans about 30 years of Damon's life but he hardly ages a day. What's his secret to perpetual youth? It must be the golden showers he received in college.

Children of Men (****)

CHILDREN OF MEN

Children of Men, a tour de force by Alfonso Cuaron, paints a harrowing possible future of how the world would degenerate if women were suddenly unable to get pregnant. Clive Owen has to awaken the idealist in himself and protect the first pregnant woman on Earth from enemies on all fronts. In a broken world, with the human race 50 years from extinction, society has all but imploded with only England maintaining a sense of order, at the expense of the immigrants trying to reach its shores.

Moe Syzlak: Immigants, I knew it was them! Even when it was the bears, I knew it was them!


Children of Men is riveting speculative fiction. And it doesn't need the gimmicks of bald Natalie Portman or a guy in a trick or treat mask who spends his nights blowing up buildings and his days frying eggs in toast. But either way, when the badness finally hits, I'm getting on a boat or plane and going to England. The movies say that's the best place to be when the world comes crashing down. And the movies never lie.

The big question for Children of Men 2:  So, who gets to nail the world's first black baby?

Babel (**1/2)

BABEL

I might have been inclined to put Babel would have been one of the best pictures of the year if it didn't overstay its welcome. The last half hour or so was a grueling excerise in audience frustration. Babel is a movie about people who made bad choice after terrible choice and suffered the compounding consequences. It's beautifully shot, amazingly acted, and powerful but after a while, the endless misery got to be too much. Of the three main storythreads, including Brad Pitt caring for his wife Cate Blanchett who was shot in Morocco and their children being taken to Mexico by their nanny and almost killed in a ridiculous series of events, the most intriguing by far was the tale of the deaf-mute Japanese girl who is desperate for sexual contact. Rinko Kikushi gets my vote for Best Supporting Actress. For the first time ever, thanks to Babel, we the audience can experience what it feels like to be a deaf-mute teenage Japanese girl living in Tokyo. It's a hell of a lot more compelling than the life of a Morrocan shepherd or a dumbass Mexican illegal alien who's a nanny to two rich white kids.

Rocky Balboa (***)

ROCKY BALBOA

If Rocky Balboa were real and actually owned an Italian restaurant, I'd hang out there all the time. I'd love it sit down to a plate of Italian food made by Mexicans in the basement and listen to Rocky tell the same stories over and over about how he knocked out Clubber Lang and won the title from Apollo Creed. Rocky Balboa is a strange movie; it's about 70 minutes of a first act, a ten minute second act of training for his big fight, and then the fight itself is the third act. And it doesn't matter one bit because the movie works. It embraces the nostalgia those of us who grew up idolizing Rocky have for the character. To see the old man train and go for one more fight where he's the underdog who overcomes impossible odds was awesome. I liked how Rocky was brought into the modern boxing world with all the trappings a real HBO fight would have, including the announcers and the Mike Tyson cameo. I didn't care for how Stallone went for the Sin City-style black and white with color splashes during the fight scene, but that's a minor quibble. It was great to see Rocky one more time and see him resume his place as one of my heroes. He's one of the best movie characters ever. I actually went back and saw Rocky Balboa again the next day just to hang with Rocky once more.

Curse of the Golden Flower (***)

CURSE OF THE GOLDEN FLOWER

Of Zhang Yimou's last three pictures that received wide release in the United States, I think Curse of the Golden Flower is the least, with Hero second and House of Flying Daggers being the best. (A lot of people would reverse the top two, but I like Daggers better.) I didn't know anything about what Curse was about going in so I was pretty surprised when I realized there isn't a lot of kung fu in the picture, mostly saved for the awesome battle scene in the end. Curse is about betrayal and intrigue in the Chinese Imperial Family, a clan even more incestous and disfunctional than the Bluths or the McMahons. Chow Yun-Fat's emperor was sort of a Chinese Vince McMahon. Watching Curse was a stange experience as there were about 40 people in the theatre and I was one of the 7 or 8 non-Chinese in attendance. The Chinese girls in the audience reacted to Chow Yun-Fat and the other actors in the movie as if Brad Pitt, Leonardo DiCaprio and Justin Timberlake were all sitting in a sauna together. Also, at least one Chinese dude in the audience was pretty slow on the uptake. The unwitting incest between one of the princes and his secret half-sister was pretty well spelled out long before the dude audibly gasped and put his hand over his mouth after putting it together. I bet he was equally disturbed when he saw Return of the Jedi and learned Luke had the hots for his sister in Star Wars and Empire.

Apocalypto (***)

APOCALYPTO

You Could Be Mayan 

A few seasons ago when he guest starred on The Simpsons and Homer helped him edit his new movie, Mel Gibson said "It's hell being Mel." These days it's pretty true and it's his own fault. But what's even more true is "It's hell being in a Mel movie." There aren't too many directors who seemingly beat the shit out of his actors like Mel does. Between Braveheart, The Passion of the Christ, and Apocalypto, acting for Mel means you're gonna be filthy, you're gonna get bloody, you're gonna be tortured, and you're gonna get your ass kicked. Jesus had it the worst by far but Mel doesn't take it easy on the Mayans.

The trailers for Apocalypto were remarkably deceptive. I was expecting Mel Gibson to tackle the subject of the end of the Mayan civilization in a way similar to Terrance Malick's The New World. I went in looking for some kind of lyrical or anthropolgical exploration of Mayan culture. The last thing I was expecting was one of the best action movies of the year.  

Apocalypto opens with Mayan hunters killing a tapir and then tricking one of their party into eating the tapir's severed balls. It's all testicle-based humor up front, base and ribald. When the violence starts as a hunting party storms the helpless village of the hero, Jaguar Paw, and burns, brutualizes, rapes and enslaves the villagers, it's terrible and brutal. A lot of the movie hard to watch, mostly because Mayans are gross. They're hard on the eyes. Their civilization, while advanced in many ways, was equally brutal: human sacrifices, slavery, mutilizations. While Mel doesn't shy away from showing any of it, it turned out he's just warming up for what he's really up to: crazy ass action.

When Jaguar Paw escapes from the Mayan city and races home to his pregnant wife and young son, Apocalypto turns into a full-on, balls to the wall, action chase movie, and it's awesome. Almost an hour of pure adrenaline follows as Jaguar Paw desperately runs for his life and the evil hunting party gives chase. It turns out Apocalypto is actually a very simple story: A man needs to race home and save his family from people trying to kill them. It's extremely effective, satisfying, and rousing. 

The transformation of meek Jaguar Paw into a sort of Mayan Martin Riggs, and his progression from hunted to hunter as he is pushed to his physical and emotional limits, finds the warrior inside of him and fights back is simply fantastic. When he survives a waterfall jump, is "reborn", and defiantly calls out to his pursuers: "My name is Jaguar Paw! This is my forest!" and then dares them: "Come on!" I wanted stand and cheer.

Mel Gibson is a hell of an action director; he's starred in some of the best ever made like Mad Max and Lethal Weapon, and he has learned his lessons well. Apocalypto is really not much more than a heart-stopping thrill ride with a unique Mayan gimmick, but it's the real deal. Through Jaguar Paw's hardships and triumphs and the larger-though-vague setting of the decline of the Mayan civilization, Mel spins an action yarn that thrillingly conveys the indomitability of the human spirit.

Does Jesus show up in the movie? No, but when the cross does appear at the end as Spanish ships arrive on the South American shores, it's as if Mel is saying, "That Jaguar Paw is something isn't he? Too bad he's not Catholic."

Casino Royale **1/2

CASINO ROYALE


Bond Begins

Casino Royale is a weird, uneven curiosity. To borrow one of the sad double entendres from the last Pierce Brosnan Bond movie, Royale has no narrative thrust to speak of. Practically three movies in one, it opens with no less than three escalatingly violent and insane action sequences then grinds to a near-complete halt for an hour where all the action revolves around Bond playing poker. Then Royale becomes the sappiest love story this side of Love Story before one more violent action sequence, followed by an overlong coda. 

Casino Royale is also very entertaining and has several tremendous moments. It gives us a jacked Bond who looks older and tougher but behaves younger and more carelessly. It claims it's a stripped down, more realistic Bond, but Bond is the one constantly getting stripped. The movie presents us with wild action such as a building collapsing in Venice and a chase scene at an airport so over the top Bruce Willis in Die Hard 2 would have smirked at the absurdity. And plot holes? We got plot holes royale. And yet there's a lot to like here, starting with the leads. 

Daniel Craig gets better as James Bond as the movie goes along. He's more callous, more reckless, less refined, a work in progress creating as many problems as he brutally solves. Craig's Bond and Christian Bale's Batman should meet for tea in the Batcave, compare bruises and scars, and trade stories of all their fuck ups. While he is the most convincingly physical of all Bonds, I enjoyed Craig far less in the ultraviolent first act of the picture than when he meets Eva Green on the train to Montenegro.

Eva Green is a star-making revelation here and Royale's finest achivement (for a while). Finally, a three dimensional woman in a Bond picture who is not only beautiful but intelligent and has depth and complexity. I think I fell in love with her about the exact same time Bond did. Green and Craig have palpable chemistry and together have the best moments in the picture.

I would gladly trade all the action sequences in Royale for more scenes like their first meeting on the train as Bond and Vesper size each other up and see right through each other while trading witty barbs, zealously and futilely trying to hide their inner selves behind transparent armor. Rather than trade sleazy double entendres, the most cringe-inducing sin of Brosnan's Bonds, Craig and Green actually talk to each other, their eyes and body language saying much more than their guarded, imprecise words. There isn't a more tender, more human (finger-lickin' good) moment in the Bond franchise than Bond sitting with a traumatized Vesper in the shower and holding her. For once, Bond isn't thinking about fucking the girl, but he's empathizing with her, feeling something foreign to him: love. Love of someone other than himself.

Bond and Vesper are magic until the third act when Vesper suddenly devolves from a spirited, confident equal to Bond to a standard issue love interest. Craig and Green eschew their prickly reparte and devolve into lovey-dovey fuck buddies, rendering both the characters and the movie limp until a telegraphed revelation that nastily robs us and the movie of the best thing about it.

What else did I like? I liked the black and white cold open showing how Bond earned his 007 status. I liked Chris Cornell's song, "You Know My Name," a rocking relief from the aural atrocity Madonna commited in the previous Bond movie. In Madagascar, the acrobatics (parkour) performed by the man Bond chased to the embassy he ultimately blew up were fucking amazing. I liked Bond's petty vindictiveness towards the asshole who thought he was a valet by smashing his Range Rover. I liked Bond gradually inventing his trademarks such as his drink of choice, the vodka martini, shaken, not stirred, and how everyone at the poker table ordered one too. I liked the big fat black guy at the poker table. Bond wears some really nice suits. Most of all, I liked Bond when he made mistakes, when he was arrogant, when he was reckless, when he was learning. I liked how Vesper Lynd saved his life no less than twice.

Craig's Bond is more vulnerable than any other Bond ever. He gets hurt and gets so much blood on him when he fights it's almost comical. Speaking of comical, Casino Royale teaches us that an hour is enough time in between poker games for one to get into a bloody fight, kill your enemies, and then shower and change into a fresh tuxedo. And Eric Cartman would appreciate the scene where Le Chiffre is breaking Bond's balls, man, he's breaking his balls.

Problems and questions royale: The biggest one is why Vesper didn't just tell Bond that she made a deal for his life? Much of their conversations revolved around his abilities, the things he can do. Why not trust him to help her? One answer is that she'd already seen him nearly die twice and have his balls pounded into powder and didn't want to put him in harm's way. But still, she was guaranteeing they'd have no life together and his whole idea of retirement would never stick if she weren't in his life. And it doesn't.

Who is Bond's enemy in the movie? Le Chiffre is a disappointment as a Bond villain, especially compared to how Brosnan's debut gave us Sean Bean as Alec Trevelyan, 006, a hall of fame Bond villain. Le Chiffre is just a quiet, weird looking guy who cries blood and likes poker. He's sadistic and dangerous but at the end of the day, he's not very interesting. He just wants money because he's in debt to other, more sadistic and dangerous people. Bond ends up against a phantom menace ("the terrorists") represented by a series of thin-lipped European men.

The airport sequence is chock-full of plot holes, such as the terrorists evil plan apparently revolving around blowing up a gigantic new airliner before it leaves the ground. Haha! You have one less airplane! Take that, decadent America!

Finally, the movie is badly structured. It's front loaded with escalatingly crazy action before we have time to properly invest in Craig as Bond. Then the movie essentially hits the reset button for the middle hour of Bond trying to beat Le Chiffre at poker. Eva Green walks into that train and for all intents and purposes it's a new movie. The third act limps to its end. Bond and Vesper make like rabbits and we stumble along towards an unsatisfying conclusion where we lose the second best character in the picture while M gives Bond motherly advice and explains what it all means.

What is up with M this time around? Is she the head of British central intelligence or the den mother of a boy's preparatory school? Do all Double-0 agents get coddled like Bond does? Harry Potter's wizard teachers don't hold his hand and whisper "there, there" to him as much as M does Craig's Bond. 

Casino Royale doesn't add up to the sum of its parts. Its strengths lie in the fine performances by Craig and Green. Brosnan's Goldeneye was generally more successful as an introduction to a new Bond without the radical alterations, but Royale is better and more memorable than Brosan's last three Bond movies.

As soon as I got home, I popped in the DVD of Brosnan's final Bond, Die Another Day, for some perspective. It was the movie I remembered from four years ago: a preposterous cartoon about conflict diamonds, a Korean genetically turned into a pasty-white Englishman, a laser in orbit, an invisible car, an ice castle, Halle Berry foreshadowing her shitty turn as Catwoman, and Bond unable to identify which MI6 agent betrayed him when there's only one other MI6 agent who happens to know all the same villains he does in the movie. This was a series that needed a drastic change.

Compared to Die Another Day's straightforward silliness, Casino Royale, when it's working, is a far better film. But we can already see the seeds planted where Craig's Bond will bring us right back to where Brosnan left us. At least Craig's Bond gives us the impression it won't be a smooth shake and stir.

Marie Antoinette (**1/2)

MARIE ANTOINETTE

The Girlie Show

Ever been trapped following your girlfriend and her girlfriends around the mall all day while they shopped and giggled and gossiped, leaving you to carry the bags? Marie Antoinette is a lot like that for the heterosexual male moviegoer. This is Sofia Coppola's Girlie World, circa 1770's France, an age where girls acted like girls and men were also girls. I like girls and I liked the movie, but only up to a point. By the end I started fantasizing about Arnold or Stallone or Bruce Willis bursting into the palace at Versailles and shooting everyone dead with the loudest, bloodyingest machine guns imaginable. Even Tom Cruise rappelling into the palace in one of his latex masks would have been sweet. Some violence - any violence - anything at all resembling machismo would have been pleasant. I was even looking forward to the famous "off with their heads!" moment that never actually came.

No one gets their asses kicked in Girlie World France, but there wasn't a single person there who didn't deserve at least a low blow or a bitch slap. Am I glad I wasn't alive back then! I'd have killed as many people as I could and then myself, in that order, just to get the hell out of there. But I should also point out for the fellas who get dragged to see this by their girls, it's not all bad. Kirsten Dunst gets repeatedly undressed by her courtesans. Nice.

Sofia Coppola has gentle, elegant directing style, and she has really good taste in 1980's New Wave music. Unfortunately, she felt no great urgency in telling the story of Marie Antoinette, a young Austrian princess arranged to marry the Dauphin Louis XVI and become Queen of France, as a narrative. The key events of Marie Antoinette's life are depicted in fitful, almost after-the-fact moments. The focus of the movie is the audience being immersed in the decadent world of French royalty in Versailles as Marie Antoinette herself is. Coppola is much, much more interested in the over-the-top opulence of the food, the clothes, the art, furnishings, and mind-boggling wealth of the time. Marie Antoinette almost feels like a Terrence Malick picture, with long, loving beauty shots of food and the grounds of Versailles, only lacking Malick's lyricism.

Coppola eschews the Hollywood Fish Out Of Water formula of storytelling; Marie Antoinette only fleetingly rebels against the stifiling protocol and endless boredom of her world (the best moment is when she leads applause at an opera, which we're told is frowned upon). Coppola and Kirsten Dunst's Marie is no rebel or radical out to change the system; she's just a rich girl who wanted to have some fun once in a while. Coppola is extremely effective in depicting the wasteful lives of the wealthy rulers of France: A whoring King Louis XV, his fey son Louis XVI, and all the chattering, gossiping, insufferable members of the royal court. Coppola is at her best when staging and blocking shots of the movement and elegance of the characters set to her unique musical choices. But there are no strong performances; when the actors would speak, they mostly sounded like actors from a Laguna Beach school play as directed by Paris Hilton.

Gradually, the decadence of the movie becomes deadening. Midway though, I'd had enough of food, clothes, and beauty shots of the palace. The characters in the movie hadn't; it was all they knew and they didn't much care what was going on beyond the manicured palace grounds. There was no one interesting, no one to root for. The primary conflict in the movie is whether or not Marie can get Louis to sleep with her, after years of angelic patience and failed attempts, so that she can produce an heir and solidify both her position as queen and the Franco-Austrian alliance. Despite looking, sounding, and acting gay, we're pointedly told Louis XVI is not in fact gay, he just somehow can't get it up for Marie. I see... Eventually Louis fathers three children by her, though we never see Marie Antoinette pregnant. For that matter, Kirsten Dunst remains perfectly thin for the entire movie despite consuming thousands of calories a day. I ate a donut and drank coffee every morning this week and felt like my ass was expanding. Somehow, Marie Antoinette can burn all those calories by flitting about her palace and laying about her luxurious satin sheets.

It's clear what Sofia Coppola was trying to say: these were rich, spoiled kids who had no business and no interest in running the country. They were the Laguna Beach castmembers of their day and their conversations were about as deep, interesting and informed. Girls are gonna always just want to have fun. The "men" in the movie are all dandy fops.

Marie Antoinette is genuinely baffled why she's loathed by the people of France. Neither she nor Louie had any real compehension of or interest in the bloody and violent Revolution happening in their midst until the angry mob marched right up to their palace doors and literally demanded their heads. The final shot of the movie is not the famous beheading of the king and queen but of a room of the palace completely trashed. The message is clear: The party's over.

On the way out of Marie Antoinette, I overheard a father explain to his young daughter why the people of France were mad at Marie Antoinette: "She was a bad queen. She didn't care about France." That seems to be accurate, but as a bad queen she was a product of a bad court. The people of France did the right thing. All those worthless people had to go.

The Shinning

THE SHINNING

No TV And No Beer Make Homer Something Something 

This weekend at the Red Bank International Film Festival, we got to watch (a DVD of) The Shining on the big screen.  I don't remember when the last time I saw The Shining was - it'd been over a decade at least - but damn if I don't remember The Simpsons parody of it ("The Shinning") way more.

Probably the most disappointing part of The Shining was the ending, where there was no mention of "television's warm glowing warming glow."  Another instance where "The Shinning" is superior is in the motivation of why Homer went insane and tried to kill his family: Mr. Burns made sure there was no TV and no beer in the hotel.  You can't help but be a little confused as to why Jack Nicholson went insane.  Was it the ghosts?  His alcoholism?  Was he reincarnated from a murderer in 1921?  With Homer, it's very clear.

Homer:  "No TV and no beer make Homer something something"
Marge:  "Go crazy?"
Homer:  "Don't mind if I do!"

Hell, if I was stuck for five months with no TV and no beer, I'd make friends with an ax collection too.  I'd kill you.  I'd kill all of you!  (Did I say five months?  Five minutes might break me.)

A couple of observations from The Shining: 

Jack was really quite a fuck up.  The ghosts really bet on the wrong horse there.  All he had to do was shove an ax into his mousey wife and his spaced out son.  That's it.  Just kill two people.  He could have just gone up to them and said, "Can I ax you something?" and then axed them.  He lived in the same apartment with them.  He could have easily parted their skulls with the ax as they slept.  They wouldn't have seen it coming.  But no, he totally, completely blew it.  His incompetence reflected badly on the ghosts, all of whom killed their families without any trouble.

The poor black guy.  He's sitting in bed in Miami safe and sound with his nudie paintings of black women with huge 'fros hanging over his bed, not a care in the world, then he gets the Shining from the kid.  He puts on a dapper zoot suit, flies all the way out to Colorado, drives five hours in a blizzard, a few more hours on a snow truck to the hotel, and for what?  An ax in the chest.  Him, Jack can kill.  But if the black guy'd never shown up at all, Jack would have been the only casualty of his attempted killing spree.

When Shelley Duvall finds Jack's manuscript, hundreds of pages with only "All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy," and he sneaks up on her and asks her what she thinks, there's really only one response:

"Jack, you're a really shitty writer."

Can't imagine why anyone would stay at the Overlook Hotel after all the killings that go on there.  But you know, I'd still rather stay there than at a Hilton

SuicideGirls

SUICIDEGIRLS

A few weeks ago, Jeff asked if I wanted to come check out the SuicideGirls live burlesque show. I'm down for burlesque. Never been to a live burlesque show except for the striptease Dita Von Teese did at the Playboy Club a couple of years ago. (I still have the stocking she wrapped around my head somewhere. I'm sentimental.) Otherwise, I know The Pussycat Dolls used to do burlesque in LA but my familiarity with burlesque came mainly from The Simpsons episode with "Le Maison Derriere."

I'd only tangentially heard of the SuicideGirls before. They're pretty hot.  Tattooed girls with piercings usually aren't really my thing, for better or worse. The 'pretty hot' part won out after a consultation with my penis. He agreed with Jeff and seemed to think the SuicideGirls live burlesque show was worth a look-see. Both of them together know better than me, plus it was only $15, so yeah, I'm in.

The SuicideGirls put on a terrific fucking show. I didn't really have a solid idea of what we were in for on the outset, but the girls totally delivered. First, yes, they are naked, but no, not entirely. They always wear bottoms and electrical tape covers their nipples (they kept asking us if we wanted to see their nipples and then called us perverts. Hey, lady, I resemble that remark.) Besides that, they're as God made them, except for the ink. The SuicideGirls are not Playboy models; they don't resemble the stripper-next-door that Hef became infatuated with as he's grown ancient. They don't have implants and their bodies are all natural. And holy shit, are they hot. They are much, much hotter in person than even their photographs on the SuicideGirls website.

Eight girls performed for us, sometimes in groups, but each had at least one spotlight vignette to herself. The vignettes each told a specific story, always with the capper of the girls removing their tops. Some of the best included the girls dancing on a ladder and one of them using a glowing hoola hoop. Some vignettes were dark and violent, like a recreation of the ear cutting scene from Reservoir Dogs or one involving "Paris Hilton" and her like getting their throats slit by Nixon, the most goth Suicide Girl. The funniest by far involved one of The Middle East's burly security guards getting a lapdance and being dominated. He was absolutely intent on staring straight ahead and keeping a poker face, seemingly willing an erection away. The other SuicideGirls watching from the sides were dying from laughter. He was a pretty good sport.

The girls were diverse enough for various tastes, leaning decidedly towards goth, punk and club styles. They were each in their own way totally awesome. One of our favorites was Austin, the redhead with arms so toned Evangeline Lilly would have to do a couple of hundred pushups a day to compete. And Austin's ass shaking could force Shakira home to Columbia and send her back to the drawing board. Jeff was pretty enamored with Austin 's hotness. My personal favorite was Reagan, the tall, lean blonde of the group. (She's the blonde in the picture above the word "Coming." Apt.)  Reagan introduced us to the rules: no cameras and, like George Sr.'s prison in Arrested Development, no touching. Reagan doesn't just have charisma, she has the extra oomph, what Chris Jericho used to refer to as cha-RAZZ-ma. She laughed and smiled, interacted with the crowd, and looked like she was having the most fun out there. Her Napoleon Dynamite dance was another real crowd pleaser. And she was the one who got on the house mic and kept calling us perverts. That always wins me over.

The girls got us pretty dirty in the end, spraying the crowd with beer and silly string. Reagan is so good at drinking a beer and spitting it out in a cloud, Triple H ought to consider a new finish for his monster ring entrance. The burlesque show ran somewhere between an hour and ninety minutes. But even before the SuicideGirls took the stage we'd already more than had our $15 of entertainment.

The opening act was advertised as RedYellow and they were pretty good. They had a really hot bass guitarist and their lead singer made several forays into the crowd, singing to one guy in particular in the front row who left after their set was over. What we never saw coming was the second act: Tsu Shi Ma Mi Rae, three tiny girls from Japan who barely speak English. They put on a set as bizarre as it was surprisingly musically accomplished. They sang entirely in Japanese. Their crazy bassist convulsed around the stage with no regard for her own physical safety. Their drummer broke one of her drums ("Numba one strong drumma!") and while the roadies replaced it, the nigh-incomprehensible lead singer told stories to the crowd, occasionally leading us in chanting Japanese curse words. They were cute, energetic, and so happy to be there, you had to be a churl not to appreciate them. The churl I speak of, a guy named Seth we were crammed up next to in front of the stage, spent their entire set complaining and burying his face in his hands. He was being quite a douche. Tsu Shu Ma Mi Rae was weird and a lot of fun. After the sheer entertainment and money's worth they provided, the SuicideGirls themselves were all gravy.

One of the benefits to being 30+ is that I can get in anywhere. The line stretched all the way around the block of the Middle East in Cambridge, MA and the show was sold out but Jeff had our tickets on him. Being over 21, we didn't have to wait in line. We marched right past the throng of rave kids and strolled right in, making our way to the front of the stage. Unfortunately, there was no way it was going to be a comfortable night. The Middle East downstairs is a dark, relatively cramped space with bad sightlines. By the time the SuicideGirls hit the stage, there were 500+ raver kids wedged in deeply, all trying to get as close to the naked girls as possible. It was a humid, sweaty, odorous three hour endurance test, though the entertainment was well worth it. Unfortunately, there are always going to be some douchebags in the crowd. One particular asshole kept trying to worm his way to the front of the stage, shoving and elbowing me in the back. Jeff turned to yell at him and he fed us some bullshit about how he was trying to get to his girl. What a lying cocksucker. After three hours of standing in the same spot, we know who was with everyone around us. I stonewalled that piece of shit, he never got past me.

By the end of the show, we were all suffering from the heat and exhaustion; the beer the SuicideGirls sprayed on us was sweet relief.   The silly string made us look extra cool. Normally, I feel I'm too old for this shit. I'd put in my time in sweaty mosh pits a decade ago. But you just don't get to see something like that very often. Damn if the SuicideGirls didn't leave me satisfied and invigorated. And feeling, looking, and smelling dirty, in a good way.

**Three days later, I saw the SuicideGirls again with Alex Merkin, director of Across the Hall, in a dingy club in New York.  Just as much fun to watch, just as dirty coming out. (That's what she said.)

Meet The New Boss, Same As The Old Boss

MEET THE NEW BOSS, SAME AS THE OLD BOSS

September 17, 2006 

Saw The Who last night at the TD Banknorth Garden. Hands down one of the very, very best rock concerts I've ever been to. Those fantastic old men can fucking rock. They've not only never lost it, they maintain a level of quality and ability high above kids a third their age.

Musically, The Who put on a jaw-droppingly accomplished and consummate performace. The presentation, light show, and sensory immersion was top-notch. And look at those two codgers, they look great. They must bathe in formaldehyde. They're not leathery, animated mummified corpses like Jagger and Richards. Nor were they dressed like rock star clowns: Roger Daltrey was in faded blue jeans, blue T-shirt and blue shades; Pete Townshend wore a black shirt and blue jeans. They were dressed like stand-up comedians. They curse like sailors. And holy shit, can they rock.

We also discovered the hidden jewel of the TD Banknorth Garden: The Promenade section. No. it's not a mall in a space station, nerd, it's a hallway that rings entirely around the very top of the arena above the balconies. There's a single row of seats all around with an all-emcompassing view. There are private restrooms, your own snack bar, plenty of space to stretch out, you're separated far away from the rabble; it's great up there. I don't know which band was the opening act but the crowd hated them and let them know it. They even got booed when they said The Who were coming out next before leaving the stage.

Unlike, say, Axl Rose's two hour late arrivals, The Who made us wait a mere half an hour before taking the stage. Speaking of the stage, it seemed very plain compared to a U2 stage, no heart-shaped ramp filled with fans Bono can pull up and dance with, nor a curtain of lights telling us to join The One campaign. (In fact, never once did The Who batter us with their political views or tell us to text message Nelson Mandela's prison number.)

The Who's stage seemed very simple until they arrived, then a sea of lights changing color would bathe the arena while enormous, crystal clear high definition screens broadcast amazing vintage 16mm video of The Who's lives, the places they've been, the people they know, and all the eras of history they've rocked in. (Swinging 60's London seemed like it really was incredibly cool. I understand now how disappointed Austin Powers was in the world after he came out of cryo in 1997.) The effect of the lights, sights, and music was so immersive, you couldn't take your eyes of the stage. They pulled the 17,000 strong in attendance right into the show and never let us go.

Daltrey's not as agile as he was back in the day but he can still swing a microphone around like nunchucks. His mike control is excellent. And no one windmills his guitar like Townshend. Also, I had no idea Townshend loved to shoot the shit on the microphone as much as he does. Between every song, while Daltrey was stretching or pacing the darkened stage, Townshend got on the house mike and spun yarns. He name dropped Jagger and Richards (who got booed - Keith Richards is a heel in Boston?) and the Flaming Lips. Half the time, between the acoustics and his accent, he was unintelligible, but still fucking entertaining. The only thing missing from Townshend's chat's with the audience was an armchair and a fireplace. Also a laptop and some kiddie porn.

The Who are touring to plug their new album which drops in October and most of the new songs are pretty good, as was a tribute to Elvis Presley and a cover "Can't Help Falling In Love". But like any concert, especially by a superband that's been around for decades, the crowd came to hear the hits. The Who delivered "Behind Blue Eyes", "My Generation", "Pinball Wizard", and of course the CSI theme songs: "Who Are You", "Won't Get Fooled Again", and "Baba O'Riley".

"Baba O'Riley" came in about midway through after The Who tore through a medley of six short songs. It was one of the greatest out-of-body experiences I've ever had at a concert. Unforgettable. They carried the entire crowd in the palm of their hands. What was left out of the show was a bit of a disappointment. No "Bargain", "The Song Is Over", or "Love Reign O'er Me", the omission of which traumatized Jeff's brother Alex as we were leaving the Garden. The Who's encore was a few songs from "Tommy".

During the show, I was reminded of the concert held to honor the police and firefighters in Madison Square Garden after 9/11. They carted out people like Jay-Z, Beyonce, and the Backstreet Boys to entertain our brave public servants who put their lives on the line and lost so many of their peers that day, and I remember thinking what a miscalculation it was to have hip hop acts and boy bands out there. The cops and firefighters don't care about the fucking Backstreet Boys. Maybe their daughters did, but the concert wasn't to honor them. When The Who came out to close the show, I remember the pure joy on the faces of those cops and firefighters. They were so happy to hear The Who. Now I know how that feels. I hope those hard-rocking English coots stay healthy, keep rocking, and come around again. And play "Magic Bus."

The Last Kiss (**)

THE LAST KISS

September 12, 2006

Ten years ago there was a movie called Beautiful Girls. Timothy Hutton comes home to a snowy New England town, reunites with his old gang, is tempted by 13 year old Natalie Portman and Uma Thurman, and comes out of his personal crisis with a new understanding and affection for his fiance. There's a subplot about adultery, where Matt Dillon is cheating on Mira Sorvino with married Lauren Holly and gets his ass kicked for it. Hutton, Dillon, and their friends struggle with their relationships, hopes, dreams, and the realities of being in their 30's, becoming better people in the end than they were at the start. That was a good movie about good people.

The Last Kiss is about shitty people. It touches on some of the same themes as Beautiful Girls: men afraid to grow up, being tempted to throw away your relationship over fleeting lust for a younger girl, and adultery. Especially adultery. Adultery takes center stage. This movie is populated by jerks and assholes fucking their loved ones over. Zach Braff plays the lead asshole, engaged to Jacinda Barrett, who is three months pregnant. He's terrified of turning thirty, of being a husband, being a father because such a life will have "no surprises." What a shortsighted fucktard this guy is. At a wedding for one of his buddies, Braff is inexplicably hit on by Rachel Bilson, a bouncy hot college sophomore who inexplicably wants to do him. Braff hems and haws about how wrong this is but doesn't hesitate for a second to make dates with Bilson, go to frat parties with her, and make out with her, all the while continuing to hem and haw about how wrong it is. Then Barrett finds out and Braff lies to her face until he realizes the lies aren't working. She throws Braff out, so he decides to fuck Bilson, and then realizes he really loves Barrett. Kicking Bilson to the curb after finally telling her about having a fiance and kid on the way, Braff runs back to Barrett and sits on the porch of their condo until the movie ends and she forgives him for no good reason after rightly hating him for half the movie. What a treat it was to spend two hours with this guy. And what a treat for all these shitty things being done by shitty people to be played as a "dramedy", with jokes and humor erroneously and jarringly woven into the scenes of people screaming at each other over their adultery.

Meanwhile, Blythe Danner and Tom Wilkenson play the Jewish mother and Irish father to Barrett, who is incapable of hiding her Australian accent. Danner is jealous because Braff enjoys fucking his daughter and she wishes Wilkenson would fuck her more while the old man just wants to read a book in peace at bedtime. Danner throws a glass at him, reveals that she fucked Harold Ramis behind his back, and moves out of their house. Wilkenson's reaction to his wife fucking a Ghostbuster and then leaving him? He doesn't really have one. Neither does Barrett, who finds out over the phone and is pretty non-plussed about it. Nor does she react when she finds Danner suddenly back home and forgiven by her father after she finds out Braff cheated on her. Why did Danner have a change of heart and come back home? She couldn't figure out how the treadmill in her hotel gym worked and she burst into tears, I shit you not.

Meanwhile, Braff has some uninteresting friends who are in the movie mostly to pad the running time. One of them used to fuck Marley Shelton, makes an embarrassing scene at the wedding where Braff meets Bilson, and then decides he wants to go to South America. There's a second friend who is a big pussy hound but when his fuck buddy asks him to meet her parents, he suddenly also decides to go to South America. Finally, there is Casey Affleck, who is stuck in a loveless marriage with an infant son. He decides he has to leave his wife and go to South America. The three of them rent an RV and head off to drive from Wisconsin to South America. But Affleck, who it turns out is the only decent guy besides Wilkenson in the whole movie, decides to do the right thing and stay with his son, but not with his wife, who he can't stand. The other two assholes decide to drop Affleck on the side of a road so he has to hitchhike home. What the fuck is that? They couldn't turn around and drive their friend Affleck home? What, did they have a strict timetable to make the drive to South America? Also, the first friend, the one who used to fuck Marley Shelton, has a sick father who dies. The father's funeral is a meaningless throwaway, used a backdrop for Barrett finding out Braff has been cheating on her with Bilson. Braff never finds out or much cares his friend's father died and they left for South America. Who the fuck wrote this shit?

The big moral of the story, the big lesson Braff learns from Wilkenson after swearing up and down his cheating on Barrett had nothing to do with how much he loves her, is the exact same lesson from another, much better movie Wilkenson was in last year. What's the lesson, Mr. Wayne?

Bruce Wayne: It isn't what I say, it's what I do that defines me.

There you go. What matters is what you do. Children the world over learned that lesson thanks to Batman. Braff must not have seen Batman Begins. You can say you love someone all you want, but if you get them pregnant, agree to marry them, and then go fuck a hot college student because you're afraid your life will have "no surprises", then you're a fucking asshole. Hell, everyone knows that already, but Braff acted like this was somehow a new idea. If there are people in the theatre seeing The Last Kiss who slap their foreheads at that moral revelation and say, "I learned something from this movie", get up and sit far away from them, they're probably date rapists.

The Last Kiss got a few things right. Braff acted appropriately creepy and uncomfortable hiding in the bushes of a college campus waiting for Bilson to get out of class. Affleck had a scene where he figured out Braff was cheating on Barrett and wanted nothing to do with helping him lie. Barrett's anger at Braff hit the proper notes, although she had no reason to forgive him in the end. Also, there was a good bit of gratuitous nudity, both female (and unfortunately some male bare ass). But no nudity from Bilson as the lighting and use of body double go out of their way to hide her in a sex scene that demanded nudity.

To earn Barrett's forgiveness for cheating on her and throwing their entire future in disarray, Braff's penance is to sit on the porch of their condo until he's forgiven. At first he can't come in because she locks the chain on the door. He spends a few days lying on the porch, never leaving it, even when Barrett leaves the house to go to work. Apparently Braff, an architect, is free to not go to work and sit on his porch for days. This makes even less sense since he has keys to his condo and can enter when Barrett is away because the chain in the door isn't locked. But no, instead of doing anything logical, Braff stays out on the porch until Barrett forgives him and lets him back in so they can start over. If Barrett had half the sense she's supposed to have, Braff should sitting out there until the cops drag him away. She deserves what she gets for letting him back in. And I deserved what I got when the movie suddenly faded to black and the credits rolled; I got to leave.

Miami Vice (***1/2)

MIAMI VICE

I can feel it comin' in the air tonight

Here it is, finally, what I've been starving for.  Pirates and superheroes, narfs and clerks, impossible missions and sinking ships, none of those slaked me.  Here now is the nourishment I've sought, probably the best movie of the summer; a grim, gritty, sad, immediate, relentless, sexy, stylish, flawed, violent, visceral tour de force of crime and the brave, enigmatic, tragic men and women who fight it by pretending to be part of it; pretending too well and always on the blinding edge of falling in too deep.  

Michael Mann's new Miami Vice is as if the 80's television show never happened.  The difference between this movie and the Don Johnson and Phillip Michael Thomas series is the equivalent of throwing away your old 20” Sony Trinitron color TV with the rabbit ears and upgrading to a 50” Sony plasma HDTV.  The old set did the trick then but that was yesterday.  Yet, the upgrade isn't entirely smooth and without kinks. 

Mann's high definition video cinematography is erratic, occasionally lovely, most often off-putting.  There are some shots that are rather beautiful, specifically the daylight photography as Tubbs's airplane soars above the clouds. The imagery of the perfect blue sky and milky white clouds made me wonder why Superman Returns did not do the same thing:  mount their HD cameras onto a plane, fly as high as they can into the clouds and then digitally insert Brandon Routh into the shots in post.  The real sky is always going to be more magnificent than a CGI recreation.  But then there was the multitude of nighttime photography which was occasionally riddled with lush colors popping in the distance but most of the time was a grainy eyesore. 

Miami Vice percentages 60/40 in favor of Crockett's story.  Yet even with less screen time devoted to him, Jamie Foxx blows Colin Farrell off the screen in terms of sheer charisma.  The movie even sort of takes this position in the first meet with the sub-villain Jose Yero, when he sizes up drug traffickers “Sonny Burnett” and “Rico Cooper” and decides he trusts Foxx and not Farrell, that something's off about Farrell, there's something he just doesn't like.  And he was right; he was right in terms of the story and in terms of the movie. Who do you like more, Ray Charles or Alexander the Great?  The answer is obvious.  

Not to knock Colin Farrell.  Farrell is a good actor.  He doesn't hide behind his mullet and Fu Manchu; he works hard and he's sincere but there's something about Farrell that is just lacking while Foxx's star power crackles effortlessly.  There's a reason why one of them has an Oscar and it's evident.  Tubbs repeatedly regards and reassures Crockett and the audience: “I will never doubt you.”  But I'm not so sure he doesn't.  I know I do. Tubbs is a rock, he says what he means and does what he says with style to spare.  Meanwhile he has to deal with his partner suddenly asking out their Chinese/Cuban money laundering business associate and then disappearing for days, to Cuba, of all places. 

The imbalance between Crockett and Tubbs is also reflected in their love relationships with Gong Li and Naomie Harris. There's dueling shower sex in Miami Vice, simultanously sensual and awkward. While Foxx's sex scene with Harris is played for a big laugh, Crockett gets to tear down Gong Li's hardened emotional walls and makes her cry during sex.  Although they're both accent challenged – Farrell's Crockett, a Floridian, claims in his Irish brogue he's “a fiend for mojitos” like I'm sure any Floridian would, and sometimes it was impossible to tell what Li was saying – they have some touching conversations about how there is no future between them.  She sadly rebukes his chivalrous speech when he speaks “as a man… who if he were your husband… he'd never let you within a thousand miles of anything that can hurt you.”  She knows that's impossible, that's not the people they are or the world they live in, and so does he.  Plus he's lying to her anyway, he's a cop pretending to be a drug trafficker.  

Later on in the final shoot out, when Isabella hides from the gunfire and looks for him, sees him with the badge around his neck barking orders to the SWAT team, she's devastated because he was never honest with her as she was to him.  "Who are you?!" And what does Farrell do?  He shoves her in a car, drives her to a safe house and sends her back to Havana. I'd like to ask my friend who's a federal prosecutor in Miami if Crockett shouldn't have instead questioned Isabella about her organization and placed her under federal protection.** Instead he has Uncle Sam pay for her boat ride back to the communist country he illegally visited with her.  Meanwhile, I wish Foxx's sweet, playful relationship with his co-worker Harris received the same amount of emphasis.  

Miami Vice piles on the awesome from the get-go, dropping us with no preamble right in the middle of Crockett and Tubbs undercover in a club with the Linkin Park/Jay Z song from the trailer blasting away.  I loved how they were in the middle of an entirely different case when they got the call that feds were murdered by white supremacist drug suppliers when their informant gave them up and Crockett and Tubbs are yanked off their case into the new one.  I loved being immersed into the Miami Vice world right away, having to pay attention, watching what Crockett and Tubbs are looking for, figuring it out as we go along since so much of their line of work means throwing away the playbook and making it all up as they go. The story, motivations, betrayals, and reversals were pretty straightforward to me. 

The peril of working undercover is palpable as we follow Crockett and Tubbs into Haiti and Columbia.  They are all alone, meeting with the powerful heads of cocaine cartels,  hoping their aliases hold up against the drug dealers' technology. One wrong move, one false note, and their cover is blown. And they're dead. While being undercover and always in danger of being compromised must be a living hell, it's not like there aren't perks. Crockett and Tubbs get to drive Ferraris with dual rear jet thrusters, speedboats, and lear jets repossessed by the government for law enforcement use.  Even Batman must feel a little envious, all his toys come out of his own pocket.

There is an incredible moment when Jose Yero watches Crockett dancing with Isabella and sees through his watery eyes that “this is more than casual”, that they have fallen for each other. All that's needed is the look on his face to convey that he's always lusted for Isabella. When he shows the footage to the main drug lord with the piercing eyes, Archangel de Jesus Montoya, Mann keeps the camera behind him so we never see Montoya's face and have to imagine what he's feeling about his mistress falling for a gringo. And then the depth of their vengeance is laid out as Montoya lets Yero have her to do with as he wishes, to “carve her up and send her head one way and her leg the other.” 

Mann must have visited the set of every HBO original series, grabbed a bunch of the actors, and shoved them in a van to the Miami Vice set because it's a regular HBO actor jambearoo around here: Ciaran Hinds from Rome, John Hawkes, and the telegraph operator from Deadwood, a couple of actors from The Wire (no need for these guys to get out of costume.)

A cover version of “In the Air Tonight” plays over the closing credits but if I could have wished for just one callback to the television show, I'd want the Phil Collins version of that song to play right as Crockett and Tubbs rolled to the final shoot out with Yero and his men.  Similarly, nothing against Barry Shabaka Henley's fine work as Lt. Castillo, but Edward James Olmos was missed.

The violence is off the charts in the final act.  In the same way I believed the dinosaurs were real in Jurassic Park, I could almost swear Michael Mann actually killed people in this movie.  The bodies being riddled by a torrent of bullets, holes bursting through people's heads, the violence couldn't feel more authentic.  The assault on the white supremacists' trailer to rescue kidnapped Naomie Harris was the most bad ass thing I've seen in forever. I'm not sure if normal vice cops get to do SWAT-style raids but who cares, it's fucking awesome:  Foxx disarming the kid with the knife charging at him, stabbing him repeatedly with his own knife, taking out the guy behind him and popping him in the head in under five seconds - amazing!  Tubbs is the shit!  And then his partner Gina calmly telling the other guy that she would shoot him in the base of the skull and he'll be dead before his body even knows it, and then POP!  She caps him right there. Fantastic. Then right when it looks like Harris is safe and sound Yero remotely blows the trailer to kingdom come with Harris still in the doorway.  Holy shit.

Foxx is no less incredible in the final, eye-level "you are right there in the middle of it" shoot out when he sneaks up behind the enemy's line and blows a bloody, gaping hole right through Jose Yero. When it's all over, Mann doesn't relent, doesn't let the audience breathe as Crockett takes Isabella away to the safe house while Tubbs returns to the hospital for Harris's recovery. We can breathe when the movie suddenly stops as Crockett joins Tubbs at the hospital. 

It's an ending for us but not for Tubbs and Crockett.  They won this battle but not completely, they'll never win completely.  Montoya is still out there, as are countless other drug lords.  One line of drug smuggling has been cut off but there'll always be more.  For the men and women of Miami Vice, tomorrow is another day undercover.

** "Crockett should have questioned Isabella about her organization and placed her under federal protection.  Man, she would have been a wealth of intel.  She knew where all the money was.  If there is one thing Uncle Sam is great at it's going after money.  We could have frozen all that fucker's assets and brought his organization to its knees.  Instead she gets to spend the rest of her days sipping mojitos under the protection of Castro." 

Mako

MAKO

July 24, 2006

Mako died on Saturday, July 21, 2006 after a long battle with cancer.  He was 73.
In my head there is a list of character actors I've always wanted to work with.  Mako was always at the top of the list.  Strangely, with a couple of exceptions, I've almost never seen Mako in a good movie.  Before I knew who he was, I remembered him as the Wizard in Conan the Barbarian and Conan the Destroyer.  The first time he truly came to my attention as Mako was in 1993, in Sidekicks, when he played Mr. Lee, the Mr. Miyagi-like karate teacher to the late Jonathan Brandis.   As the head of the Nakamoto corporation, he had very little to do in the movie adaptation of Michael Crichton's Rising Sun besides look stoic and play golf with Sean Connery.  In 1994, Mako played the sorcerer Nakano, chewing the scenery and teaching Connor MacLeod “the power of illusion” in Highlander: The Final Dimension.  Although he was in Bulletproof Monk, I don't remember him in it or anything else about that movie.  I don't recall seeing Mako again until he appeared as Admiral Yamamoto in that piece of garbage Pearl Harbor.  He got to utter the key line: “I fear we have awakened a sleeping giant and filled him with a terrible resolve.”  The exception to the Mako-in-bad-movies rule was his brief cameo appearance in Memoirs of a Geisha.  Mako would have been the voice of Splinter in the animated  Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles movie next year. Good movie or bad, Mako always stood out to me; he was always fascinating to watch, a twinkle in his eye, his performances filled with nuance. It was always a pleasant surprise when I'd watch a movie and Mako appeared (he is rarely billed in promotional materials.) A glance at Mako's IMDB page shows a career spanning over 40 years in film, television and animation.  You've seen Mako's work too and probably never realized it.
He was a pioneer for Asian-American actors in the United States. Mako has a star on the Hollywood Walk of Fame and he was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Supporting Actor for The Sand Pebbles in 1966.
It's as Mr. Lee in Sidekicks that'll always remember him best.  Sidekicks is one of my favorite bad movies and I loved Mako as the cantankerous but wise and caring karate teacher who called Jonathan Brandis "Mr. Dumpling." I still watch Sidekicks like a mental patient if I see it on cable just to watch Mako.   Mako was usually called upon to play wise but mischievous characters, something he did exceptionally well. He had tremendous natural comic timing and he had a gift for being able to convey that he knew a lot more than he was letting on.  One of the reasons I love Mako was that he reminds me of an older, Japanese version of my dad.  Mako always seemed like a nice man and a great guy.
I wish I got to work with him or at the very least meet him and tell him how much of a fan of his I am. I'm probably always going to regret that now.
I'll miss you, Mako.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest (**1/2)

PIRATES OF THE CARIBBEAN: DEAD MAN'S CHEST

 

July 8, 2006

Yarrrr.

Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest is a Wile E. Coyote and Roadrunner cartoon come to life. It's over the top, mateys. Over the top. I don't like seeing quite so many loud clanging things in my movies, not even my summer blockbusters. Pirates of the Caribbean: The Curse of the Black Pearl was a model of restraint compared to this sequel. It was also a better movie by far.

Coming to kill Captain Jack Sparrow, Will Turner and Elizabeth Swann were Davey Jones, the East India Trading Company, island cannibals, every kind of CGI-fish monster the sea could spit out, and even familiar faces like ex-Commodore Norrington. Yet never once are Jack, Will, and Elizabeth in any real danger. Never once are they in genuine jeopardy. There is no chance whatsoever that any of the three main characters will be harmed in any lasting way. No matter what kind of absurdity the movie throws at them, they manage to scream, run in just the right place in just the right way, fight anything just well enough, and they never get tired or hurt, hungry or thirsty, or bored with all the screaming, running, and fighting they have to do.

Actually, that's the movie's strength: It's not boring and it's hellbent on entertaining you. It's weakness is that it's hellbent on entertaining you Saturday morning cartoon-style. Not one but two very long rolling ball gags: the first act with Will Turner and the crew of the Black Pearl caught in a bone version of those rolling spheres on American Gladiators , and then another one with Turner, Sparrow and Norrington having a triple threat swordfight on a wheel rolling along an island. Dead Man's Chest throws everything it can think of at you to show you a good time and thinks you'll have an even better time of it throws it at you again. Many critics have complained the storyline is incomprehensible but the multitudes of children in the audience understood what was happening just fine because they're used to cartoons.

For the pubes and post-puberty crowd, there was some enjoyable stuff. Johnny Depp is still pretty entertaining as Captain Jack Sparrow. His performance is no longer surprising and unique, but he was the only character who was in on the joke and conveyed to the audience that he understood everything that was happening was ridiculous. Sparrow is half-mad, but he's really more half-sane in a madman's movie.

Sparrow's character thankfully wasn't compromised: he's still a rogue out for his own ends, coming up with strategies on the fly and using everyone around him constantly as means to an end while fighting his heroic inclinations every step of the way. I liked the twist in the big finish where his one big act of conscience: returning to save the Black Pearl from the Kraken, was met with his being betrayed and essentially doomed to death by Elizabeth Swann.

The cliffhanger was Star Trek II: The Wrath of Khan all over again, which is now officially both the greatest and most borrowed-from second-act finish in movies today. (only McCoy didn't turn on Spock and chain him to the exploding warp core.) Jack Sparrow “dies” to save his crewmates, who vow to bring him back in the third movie. We just saw this aped three years ago in X2: X-Men United and here it is again. Kill a main character and promise to bring him or her back in the third movie. Works every time. Those Star Trek writers were geniuses. I hope they get a check every time someone steals their gimmick.

Oddly, while I didn't really enjoy myself while I was watching Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest, looking back at it, I'm dwelling a lot more on the things I did like: 

Keira Knightley got to play like a boy this time and she can run, scream, and swordfight CGI monster men with the best of them. I can't imagine a circumstance where I'd ever get tired of looking at her; I found myself fitful and impatient whenever she wasn't on screen. The third act of the movie when she finally shared scenes with both Depp and Orlando Bloom was the part I liked best. I liked the reveal that Sparrow's broken compass points the user towards what he or she really wants and the running gag of Elizabeth being frustrated that it kept pointing her towards Sparrow. I suppose she'll figure out in the next one that it isn't telling her she wants Jack but that she really wants a pirate and for Will to become a real pirate. And that she wants to be a pirate as well. I also liked Elizabeth using her dress to “haunt” the merchant ship she was stowed away on. I loved the shot where the dress sinks down to the depths of the sea and the implication that Elizabeth and Will's intended life together as regular people is lost forever. 

Bill Nighy is such a fantastic actor that it's a shame he was buried under the CGI claws and tentacles as Davey Jones. The animators did manage to convey some of Nighy's trademark facial expressions: his pout and his raised eyebrow. Davey Jones didn't quite have the menace he should have had, but he was much more effective and relatable than the CGI fish monsters who crewed the Flying Dutchman. Davey Jones was a neat idea in conception but lacked the menace and pathos of Geoffrey Rush's villainous Captain Barbossa, and that's the damn CGI's fault. (Rush's cameo at the very end as the Captain on the expedition to World's End was a great fucking twist that sold me on the third Pirates movie instantly.)

I liked the Kraken and I liked the plan Jack, Will, and Elizabeth executed to blow it up with the gunpowder and rum. I also liked the expanded roles of the two pirates, the fat one and the wooden-eyed one, and their philosophical conversations. They're a non-gay pirate version of R2D2 and C-3PO.

It's a strange dichotomy: ultimately, I think Dead Man's Chest is a bad movie but a good cartoon. Regardless, I still want more Pirates and I'll be there with bells on for Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End .

Superman Returns: An IMAX 3D Experience (**1/2)

SUPERMAN RETURNS

"WRONG!"

Superman's back but he didn't bring the fun.  What's lacking from Superman Returns is joie de vivre. Superman Returns has lots of good intentions, a few beautiful and poetic visual moments, a bittersweet love story, and some (but not-quite-enough) awesome action and spectacle.  Yet the movie, burdened by angst, never lifts off.  Everyone is dour, somber, and grossly underwritten.  The characters lack sparkle and there's only a modicum of wit. Every character seems down in the dumps that they're in a Superman movie.

Superman never quite soars and takes our hearts and imaginations with him.  He's more human and vulnerable but not awe-inspiring; the movie not exhilarating.  At the end of seeing a Superman movie, you should feel like you're up there in the stars with him.  You shouldn't feel like buying Superman a beer and telling him, “Everything's gonna be okay, man.  You're still the godddamn Superman.” 

As Superman, Brandon Routh is good. Good enough.  I'm still not entirely sold on him but he's a fine rental with serious fixer-upper potential. Comparisons to Christopher Reeve are inevitable and not unfair considering he was hired in part because of his resemblance to Reeve, and he is taking over the character Reeve forged in a wobbly continuation of the movies starring Reeve. Routh was earnest and credible but he didn't quite have Christopher Reeve's authority, style or panache as Superman or as Clark Kent. Nor did he quite make the role entirely his own. Routh was also done a disservice by having relatively little dialogue, and none particularly memorable that weren't direct quotes from Richard Donner's Superman: The Movie.

I wish Routh's Superman said more and didn't internalize everything. Routh's Superman seems younger and is much more emotionally vulnerable, which is fine and works for this story, but this also remained at odds with the fact that Superman has been active for years and has fought Lex Luthor, three Kryptonian villains, and has turned back time once.  Though Routh was burdened by the shadow Reeve left, he had a moment early on in the Daily Planet where he smirked just like Reeve did that was really kind of wonderful. Superman's lack of joie de vivre was disappointing and it carried through to everyone else throughout the entire movie.

Superman Returns presents us with an unfortunate reality of being Superman: After Superman Superstalked Lois and her family at their house, it seems that one of the reasons he flies around saving people is that he doesn't have any friends or anyone to talk to. He has no hobbies, no other interests.  Saving people is how he spends his days. But a fundamental aspect of Superman that this movie didn't quite get across is that Superman loves saving people. It gives him great joy to help people in need, he has fun with it, he loves interacting with all kinds of people, even criminals he's busting, and he has a wry humor about it.

Watch Chris Reeve in his first night in Donner's film when he's saving people.  He's having a good time. Helping people is not a burden or his sacred duty (or a curse of being a messiah figure) as much as it is Superman loving using his powers to help people in need. Because he loves people. One of the most important lines of dialogue ever spoken about Superman is by Lois Lane in Superman: The Movie: “Superman cares about everybody.”  Joie de vivre again. Routh's Superman had some fun but it was all polite and restrained and a little distant. After five years being in space alone, you'd think Superman would have loved being with people again. Still, Superman's good deeds around the world, starting with the amazing space shuttle/airliner rescue sequence and including visits to Manila and Gotham (nice touches), were my favorite Superman moments in the movie.

Kate Bosworth's Lois Lane still can't spell, a lasting invention of the Donner movie. Bosworth's Lois worked best when she was on the space shuttle grilling Peta Wilson and doggedly tracking down the story behind the blackout. As a hard-news reporter, she was believable enough, one supposes. As a Pulitzer Prize winner, not so much. Unfortunately when she wasn't at work, Bosworth's Lois was a frowny face who pouted her way through the movie. Whether flying with Superman through the Metropolis skies, dealing with her fiancé or her son, or just trying to catch a smoke on the roof of the Daily Planet building, she wouldn't turn that frown upside down. (Also, what happened to her ass?  Where did Blue Crush Kate Bosworth's hot body go? There's a moment when Lois is in the kitchen cooking; she turns around to go to the sink and her ass was flat as an ironing board.  I think I speak for the male audience when I say I would like nothing more than if Lois Lane would put down the cigarettes and took up surfing again.)

Though his very existence is a lightning rod of criticism and discontentment, I actually liked Jason, Lois's son and also the son of a mysterious person the movie keeps as a big surprise. (It's Superman.) It was pretty obvious from the start who the kid's father is just from doing the math.  (Gee, Superman left Earth five years ago, right after having sex with Lois. Jason is roughly five. Unless heartbroken Lois Lane immediately jumped Richard White's bones in the rebound, or she was whoring around on the side, there really isn't any other candidate for the father.)  But young Tristan Lake Leabu was a sweet, sincere, likeable kid.  It was a nice touch that he has asthma.  I especially loved when he took one look at Superman and then at Clark and figured it out right away.  Sadly, Jason was as underwritten as everyone else, so we didn't get to know him better, but there's a Superboy idea here that may have potential. 

Kevin Spacey's Lex Luthor is stunningly a bust considering the casting of Spacey seemed like the slam dunk. The evil billionaire Luthor is the most popular version of the character but of all the Luthors, I'm in the minority in that I've always loved Gene Hackman's egotistical, homicidal land baron the best. I did like how Spacey's Lex is still obsessed with real estate, with a side hobby of killing people that he really enjoys. Spacey was playing that character but a darker, bitter version of him. One can understand his bitterness: Five years in prison. A throwaway line about how even a man of his intelligence is worthless locked up with lunatics indicates he was forced to drop the soap in the shower more than once. And then pimping himself to a withered old crone to get her dough.  This Lex Luthor had some hard times and it took the twinkle out of his eye that Hackman's Luthor had. I miss Hackman's self-amused wit and wordplay but what I missed most were Hackman's self-aggrandizing monologues. “Lex Luthor!  The greatest criminal mind of our time!”

Spacey's Lex was grossly underwritten and he didn't seem to start having much fun playing the role until the third act when Lois and Jason stumbled onto his yacht. His diabolical master plan had the sole virtue of being novel: creating the crystal Krypton continent, wiping out 3/4th of the United States, and killing billions of people. A neat idea even though it makes zero sense. (He still wasn't going to name a town on his new continent Otisburg.) But again, he was subdued when he could have gone all out. He didn't seem to enjoy and relish getting to physically beat the shit out of Superman and stab him with the Kryptonite shiv like you'd think he would. Nor did he seem particularly crushed when Superman lifted the ice continent into space (which was awesome).  Spacey's Lex was kind of a buzzkill and couldn't appreciate when he was supposed to be having a good time.

Lex's henchmen were dull as dishwater. In the Miss Teschmacher-substitute role, Parker Posey was mostly shrill and irritating. She had one good moment when she screamed at Lex for actually cutting the brakes to her car (one of Lex's finest moments in this movie). Other than that, she did everything else Valerie Perrine did as Miss Teschmacher, such as flirt with and then feel bad for Superman when Lex was about to kill him, but nowhere near as well. Still, she fared better than Kal Penn and the other two nameless, humorless henchmen. They made me really miss Otis. None of Luthor's sour faced, no-charisma goons in this movie were worth a pair of Ned Beatty's soiled underpants. 

James Marsden came off pretty well as Richard White, considering. He had a lot to do. He was understanding of his fiancée's confusion towards Superman, he loved his adopted son, and he was damn heroic when he took his sea plane to save them from Lex Luthor. Sometimes, nice guys do get the girl too. Lois staying with Richard and kept the family together in the end was for the best. Still, Superman's gonna disrupt his happy family and wreck that home eventually. Richard White ought to start a support group with John Jameson of Spider-Man 2. And also, Cyclops, but that would be weird.

After years of being spoiled by Annette O'Toole as Smallville's hot redhead Martha Kent in her early 40's, it was a little disappointing to have old lady Martha Kent back, Eva Marie Saint notwithstanding. When Superman's rocket ship or whatever that was crashed on the farm and she pulled Superman out, the burning debris and heat didn't seem to bother the old lady a bit. One of the most compelling moments in the movie was when Superman was dying in the hospital and Martha couldn't get into see him without exposing his secret identity. Too bad the movie couldn't have done more with that idea. Martha could have tried what Howard Stern did when Christopher Reeve was paralyzed and called the hospital as Jor-El demanding to see his son, but thankfully, she didn't.

It's great that Marlon Brando's Jor-El was resurrected for the movie, but it seemed like his flashback voice overs came out of nowhere half the time. Lex was also pretty non-plussed about returning to the Fortress of Solitude for the crystals and seeing the Jor-El hologram. In the theatrical version of Superman II Superman Returns is sequeling, Lex had already met Superman's mother's hologram but he seemed less impressed by the father. And then there was the terribly composed, ambiguous dialogue: “You act like you've been here before, Lex.” No response. Lex ought to have said: “Why yes, once with Miss Teshmacher, whom you can't hold a candle to, and then again with Lois Lane and three Kryptonian arch villains who were going to let me be ruler of Australia. I think their corpses are around here somewhere…”

Surprisingly, I hated every bit of dialogue lifted from Donner's movie. Might as well have Superman actually wink at the audience then hand out Superman: The Movie DVDs.

“Statistically speaking, flying is still the safest way to travel.” 
“What was it my father said?” “Get out!” 
And especially: “Good evening, Miss Lane.  I didn't mean to startle you.” 

That last one pissed me off the most. The first time Lois encounters Superman in five years, he gives the “statistically speaking” quote and blows her off.  The very next time they speak, he surprises her with the same line he opened with in their first interview. “Good evening, Miss Lane”?!  Is he trying to be funny? They slept together, they have a relationship. Dump your wife or girlfriend, leave for a week, and then sneak up on her and call her “Miss Whatever her last name is.” You'll sound like an asshole. What's more, the Donner movie's dialogue written by Tom Mankewicz is so zingy and iconic, it served to show how lacking the rest of the dialogue tended to be.

Having said that, there were enjoyable subtle visual references to the Donner movie, especially Lex's wall of books (no Wikipedia for him), the chunk of Kryptonite from Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, and Lex's maps of the world. The opening credits brought back the nostalgia, with the use of the streaking credits used in the prior Superman films and the welcome return of John Williams' score by John Ottman. Fun seeing the ice crystal world of Krypton again, complete with the dome where General Zod was tried and sentenced to the Phantom Zone.
 
After five years "away" where no one compared his reappearance to Superman's return, Clark Kent's returned to the Daily Planet and he noticed how different everything was. I'll say. The last time Clark showed up for work, they didn't have the Internet or Samsung plasma screen HDTVs.  Everyone smoked at their desks and used typewriters . Notice how Clark never actually did any work. All he seemed to do was hang around the office and wait for Lois to show up so he could fumble a conversation. Perry White assigned Clark the blackout story, but Lois juggled that and the Superman Returns story on her own while Clark dicked around the office eavesdropping on everyone with Super Hearing.

The glum lack of emoting trickled down to the supporting cast. It seemed to skip Jimmy Olsen but Perry White was practically comatose. He whispered his command to his news staff to get on the Superman story and then barely got the words “Great Caesar's Ghost!” out when Superman saved him from the falling Daily Planet globe. This Frank Langella Perry White seemed pretty exhausted.  Maybe he should have been sucking some hot intern's blood on the side. Speaking of the falling Daily Planet globe, Superman did a real asshole move after catching it when he rolled it on top of some guy's car.  Why would he do that?  How's that guy gonna get home?  Who's gonna pay for the damage?  Man, Superman is a dick sometimes.

The Superman rescue of the airplane sequence was, again, awesome. And so was the climax of that with Superman landing the airliner in the baseball field and getting the standing ovation from the capacity crowd.  The kicker of Lois fainting and sliding down the inflatable ramp was also a great comedic touch. However, the flashback about young Clark leaping across the cornfields and discovering he could levitate didn't seem necessary.  It doesn't lead to anything in the story and seemed to contradict Superman: The Movie, where Clark couldn't fly and walked to the North Pole to build the Fortress of Solitude.

When Superman was in the coma in the hospital towards the end, he was totally faking it, like Buster on Arrested Development. The doctors and nurses at the hospital couldn't inject anything into him, but they managed to get the suit off of him. Begs the question:  Does Superman wear underwear inside his suit too?  Which nurse got to put the hospital gown on him?  Will there be pictures of Superman's ass or balls on ebay?

The penultimate scene where Superman spoke to his sleeping son was something we've never seen in a Superman movie before. (I think Jason was also faking sleep. Like father like son.) Routh nailed the emotion of Superman saying to his son all the promises Jor-El told him.“One day, I'll explain to you why I wear glasses and goof around my office not doing any work.  One day, my son, you'll wear glasses too.  Or a red cape and booties.  Preferably both.”

And that's just about all I've got to say about Superman Returns. I hope the next one will be better.

The Omen (**)

THE OMEN

Devil May Care

Hey kid, smile once in a while, will ya? You're the goddamned Antichrist. That's gotta be good for some shits and giggles. Nannies hang themselves in your name, priests get impaled, monkeys go apeshit when you visit the zoo, your adoptive mother falls off a third story balcony and ...what? Nothing? Not even a chuckle. C'mon, kid, what's a guy gotta do to amuse Mr. Satan's Baby Boy?

I saw Richard Donner's The Omen a couple of years ago and it was pretty good for its time. This remake by John Moore is the same movie, not so good for our time. Moore changes a few things (9/11 and the tsunami of 2004 are portents of the coming of the Antichrist, says the movie) and not for the better by any means. Everything else plays exactly like the 1976 movie. Except not as good by any means. The plotline of The Omen has always been preposterous, but it seemed less so in the original.

Julia Stiles and Liev Schreiber have no chemistry as husband and wife. Their dialogue together is tedious and lumbering. They are simply not believable as a powerful married couple, he a 34-year old U.S. Ambassador and she a stay-at-home unwitting mom of the Antichrist. When Damien goes all out to kill his mom, there's little sympathy for her, it comes off as a vehicle for inadvertant laughs. Schrieber's Robert Thorn is a steel-jawed dope. The talents of three of the great British character actors, David Thewlis, Pete Postelwaithe, and Michael Gambon (in a cameo) are largely wasted. Mia Farrow's evil nanny gets upstaged every time she's in a scene with Damien's evil dog.

There were numerous opportunities to go beyond the 1976 film and stake new ground but this remake doesn't try. For instance, Stiles complains to Schreiber that she feels like a terrible person for thinking her son is evil and trying to kill her. That's interesting and could have been explored further. Instead, Stiles chooses to turn Damien over to a total stranger who is clearly behaving maliciously while she sits around her house in silent terror waiting for Damien to do her in. While she's waiting, she has spooky dreams of being in a bubble bath and having her wrists slit while people in Halloween masks watch. Then Stiles inexplicably decides to water the plants hanging from the ceiling so she can fall to near death because of Damien. She could have just let the maids handle that chore.

The biggest problem with this story is Damien. Although only five years old, he hardly ever says a word, just glares when the director calls action. It's supposed to be spooky that Damien rarely speaks. That's not like any 5 year old I've encountered; kids hardly ever shut up unless the TV is on. Damien apparently doesn't even watch TV. It's never entirely clear what Damien is thinking or how much he understands about who and what he is. And for being the embodiment of evil walking the Earth, he doesn't seem to enjoy it all that much. Surly glares at the camera don't equal malevolence.

The ending of The Omen is a bit of a cheat. According to the movie, the only way to kill the Antichrist is to stab his body repeatedly with knives, forming the shape of a cross. But neither versions of the movie have any intention of showing a father stab his evil five year old son like that, so it never gets to happen. The ending is exactly the same, with the heartwarming message that evil is among us and it's all a matter of time until we're fucked and dead. Hopefully, in that order, at least.

One thing I liked was that every time Schreiber asked who Damien's real mother was, he kept hearing that "his mother was a jackal." Naturally, you assume it's a metaphor. Nope, Schreiber exhumes the grave of Damien's real mother and sure enough, it's an actual fucking jackal. He really is a son of a bitch.