State of Play

State of Play has received much attention for its spin on the plight of today's newspapers. The story pairs up a veteran journalist (Cal McAfferey, played by Russell Crowe with an odd accent) with a newbie blogger (Della Frye, played by Rachel McAdams). The plot is technically about the death of Sonia Baker (Maria Thayer) who just happens to be working for Rep. Stephen Collins (Ben Affleck) who just happens to be a former roommate of Cal. It seems there's something rotten in the state department, or in this case the private military company they hire: PointCorp, an analog for Blackwater.

State of Play has two different agendas, one more overt than the other. At its heart, the movie postulates what would happen if the U.S. military had largely surrendered its operations to freelance military operations that are not accountable to the American people. This is no theory. In fact, Blackwater received so much negative publicity that it changed its name to Xe. The supposed hue and cry that would be raised by this revelation didn't amount to much, deflating the entire premise of State of Play.

The other main theme is the tension between supposed cub reporters who only blog on the web and real journalists who aren't afraid to pick up the phone or make a deal. Frye is a foil to make Cal look smart. At no point do we see Frye actually blog or the consequences of her blogging, besides reporting on something Cal felt was private. Or to put it another way: bloggers are self-serving, unethical morons who don't know how to report the facts. The movie feels decidedly lopsided in favor of beat reporters. Oh sure, there's tension and drama and a few surprises along the way. But Frye is completely unnecessary.

In the background is the looming threat of the newspaper being closed, but these occasional reminders (falling from the foul mouth of Helen Mirren, no less) feel forced. To assume one breaking story would save the newspaper is to fundamentally misunderstand the downfall of the newspaper industry.

State of Play was based on a 2003 BBC serial of the same name. And that's the problem. Too long and creaky in places, it feels like a movie drawn from subject matter that's six years out of date.

The Mothman Prophecies

It took me years to see The Mothman Prophecies. I was in the midst of a switch from VCR tapes to DVD player and The Mothman Prophecies was an unfortunate victim of the transition, a tape with no player for it. I promptly forgot about it, but Netflix didn't.

In a somewhat eerie parallel, I recently started prepping the Dark*Matter adventure "The Killing Jar" for my D20 Modern conspiracy game. The Killing Jar has quite a bit of information about the Mothman and provided a helpful backdrop to The Mothman Prophecies.

What's interesting is that this movie actually makes a lot more sense than the book of the same name by John A. Keel. Keel covers a wide range of paranormal phenomena, from UFOs to Men in Black, from ghosts to the bizarre Mothman. The Mothman itself even has a name, Indrid Cold, and isn't afraid to make phone calls late at night.

And that's what's so unsettling about The Mothman Prophecies. The film flagrantly violates movie tropes by having its apparition not only adopt a name but make dire prophecies at length over the phone.

John Klein (Richard Gere) is the perfect foil for an exploration of the beyond, a haunted man who cannot move on after the death of his wife. Klein has an entire conversation with Cold, testing its knowledge of the present and the future. He even tapes the phone call.

But Cold's paranormal abilities extend well beyond phone calls. It can adopt other peoples' voices, both dead and alive. Ghosts show up in the flesh. It can leave messages for you at the front desk. And you can tape it all you want – vocal analysis will show it's an actual voice. Your voice. Only you didn't make the call.

If you know anything about the original Mothman Prophecies, you know how all this ends. But that's beside the point. The Mothman Prophecies is largely about grief and recovery. But it's also about the burden of the future, knowing that there is an inevitable conclusion to all things that we simply cannot control. Death brings that knowledge into terrible perspective.

Unfortunately, the movie drags. And drags. The eerie sounds are a bit overplayed; in some cases, silence would have been more effective than the relentless sound effects. The aural assault may have been more effective in the theater, but on television it's just annoying.

That doesn't detract from Mothman's overall sense of dread. If you have an interest in paranormal procedurals, watch The Mothman Prophecies. It will leave you Cold. And that's a good thing.

Dark Entries

I'm a sucker for haunted house stories, if only because they're such a challenge for modern horror writers to pull off. I also love Blair Witch Project-style narratives, supposedly unfiltered media that catalogues horror without artifice and just presents terror in all its messy glory. So the plot behind Constantine's latest jaunt into the unknown, a reality show about a haunted house, piqued my interest.

Like so many Alan Moore characters, John Constantine is arrogant, wily, grungy, hails from the lower class, and the world pretty much hates him. Constantine and his ilk defined a whole generation of trench-coat wearing bastards that provided a much-needed dose of reality to the comic genre. So it's interesting to insert someone like Constantine in what is an undeniably modern format; that of the narcissistic, relentlessly self-promotional Generation Y-world of reality television.

Constantine shifts very quickly from paranormal investigator of a haunted house to reality show contestant, a shift that isn't entirely believable. We're led to believe it's because Constantine is attracted to a woman on the show who reminds him of someone he once knew. Which is all fine and good, but seems entirely out of character for a drifter who brings bad luck to everyone he meets.

And here's the first problem: it's never realistically explained why all the contestants stay there. The house is a virtual fortress, with no windows or doors. All of the contestants are suffering from grisly, realistic hallucinations. And not one of them cracks enough under the pressure to opt out of the game.

Constantine's arrival mucks up this somewhat delicate balance of greed and paranoia. His sole contribution is sleeping with the woman he was attracted to and asking them all to remember their pasts. In a comic all about Constantine, he barely lifts a finger.

About mid-way through, there's a surprised twist involving demons and hell. I figured it out several pages prior and was actually pleased with the direction the book was going in. In the style of the remake of 13 Ghosts, the book's true premise promised a really dark foray into the human condition as the various contestants realize the hopelessness of their situation and…

But alas, that's for a different book. Once the Big Surprise is revealed, Dark Entries begins a downward spiral into parody. Here's a hint: it includes demons wearing headsets, televisions from hell, and an infernal cannibal who still hears the voice of Sawney Bean.

In other words, instead of continuing the dark noir tone of the first half, or the Gen-Y ironic sensibilities of the second half, it chooses a third route: utter ludicrousness. The infernal forces come off as absurd. When the dismembered head of one of the contestants asks if he'll ever play the piano again, it's clear that Dark Entries has given up.

Rankin seems uncomfortable with the graphic novel format, vacillating between Constantine's noir-style narrative sensibilities, the relentless navel-gazing of modern media, and a bad eighties slasher flick. The result is an uneven installment of the Constantine universe.

Valkyrie

Valkyrie's premise – the plot to kill Hitler – was practically scripted for a movie. Preparing for my Delta Green role-playing game campaign meant researching Nazis and Project Valkyrie, a major historical but oft-ignored event by the American public. Until now.

Because the movie is based on a historical account, typical models of assessing a film – like a twist ending, for example – aren't possible. We know how things turned out. In fact, doing research on how Valkyrie came about and ended somewhat tarnished the movie for me. Valkyrie's not bad, but it wasn't the great drama I hoped it would be.

Tom Cruise is perfectly serviceable as Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, and the surrounding cast does an excellent job of showing what amounts to a typical bureaucracy. The more apparent it becomes that Germany might lose the war, the more urgent the plans to overthrow him.

But there were other factors motivating these desperate men, factors that are somewhat lost in the film. My understanding – and I admit this is limited, as I'm no WWII scholar – is that the nobility that led warfare in olden times, and specifically World War I, felt that there was a "wrong" and "right" way to conduct a war. Hitler didn't so much offend this old guard's sense of moral responsibility as it did their sense of following the rules according to an educated upper class. In a sense, Hitler's war was a peoples' war, waged at whatever cost and using whatever resources necessary and, at times, ignoring the right of the nobility to determine how a conflict was conducted.

This is important because Stauffenberg, and some of the elites involved in the attempted coup, were members of this aggrieved ruling class. This isn't to say that Stauffenberg didn't find Hitler's policies reprehensible, but as a large group, it helps explain the framework for why a coup would even be conceived. This entire thrust seems to be deemphasized in the film. It's almost as if Singer was concerned that playing up Stauffenberg's nobility might be a comment on Cruise himself.

The other part that seems to be lacking from the film is the miserable ending for the conspirators. Stulpnagel, the German commander in France, tried to shoot himself several times before being captured by the Gestapo. There is a brief scene where the surviving conspirators are put on a mock trial and holding their pants up; this is because they weren't given belts, to humiliate them more. The scene flashes by so fast that, to a viewer who is unaware of those circumstances, it just seems like the defendants lost a lot of weight and are holding up their pants.

And that sums up the problems I had with the movie. The tension is ratcheted up, there are little known scenes drawn from actual history that further enhance the film, but it all seems to be disconnected from the greater war. It's like Valkyrie took place in a hermetically sealed film universe. This adds to the claustrophobia of the conspiracy, but doesn't quite satisfy those looking for a historical context.

Wanted

The beginning of Wanted plays out a lot like a scene from the Matrix, with a dangerous-looking man in a suit tracking down the source of a special bullet. What ensues is an over-the-top special-effects laden battle in which said man launches himself out of a skyscraper to engage snipers on an adjacent building and manages to kill them all, only to himself be taken out by a sniper's bullet in glorious and disgusting 3-D. Then we're back to a narrative by office drone Wesley Gibson's (James McAvoy), prone to panic attacks and harangued by his overweight boss. Warning: this review contains mild spoilers.

It's easy to make the parallels between The Matrix and Wanted, given the opening scene, but it's the second scene in the office that really gives the film its heart. This is Fight Club by way of Equilibrium, amping up the fisticuffs in the former with the gunplay of the latter.

Gibson suffers frequent panic attacks and medicates himself heavily in an effort to cope with the insults of everyday life: the stupid job, the unfaithful girlfriend, the backstabbing coworker. He is destined for something better, something that involves the sexiest mentor a man could ask for: a woman named Fox (Angelina Jolie). Jolie looks a little too gaunt here, but she hasn't lost her aura of dangerous cool and she uses it in spades to bring poor Gibson into his own as an assassin.

Gibson is, in fact, a member of a secret society known as The Fraternity, who in turn are descended from a medieval order dedicated to interpreting God's will via a loom – that's right, a loom. After translating the threads into binary coded orders, The Fraternity kills people who might alter the world's destiny for the worse.

Once Gibson transitions from office worker to gun-fu martial artist, complete with curving bullets and hyper-time senses, the movie really takes off: Gibson is out to kill Cross, the man who, Sloan (Morgan Freeman) tells him, killed his father.

Unlike say, The Transporter series, which started out semi-realistic and slowly devolved into action parody, Wanted grounds us in a completely altered reality from the start. It makes some of the gun-ballet and insane acrobatics performed by the characters easier to swallow, in the same way we accepted Neo's superheroic feats in the Matrix.

What's surprising is that Wanted is committed to its tale of revenge and betrayal, willing to sacrifice a potential franchise to tell a good story. It asks the question asked of all religions: how long before the speakers of God's will begin twisting it to their own ends? And what is God's will anyway? Heavy stuff, considering the premise involves shooting lots and lots of people.

Wanted is a surprisingly good action movie that transcends the bullet-time genre without seeming too derivative. Along the way, it tells a tight little story that leaves just about everyone dead. And that's not such a bad thing.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3

I’m a big fan of the original version of The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3. It was a snapshot in time of New York City in the seventies; a cynical, bloated, bureaucratic mess that was entirely unprepared for a terrorist attack. In fact, there were actually concerns that the movie would inspire real terrorists to take a subway train hostage. The original featured everything from undercover cops to hippies, a crisp military professional turned terrorist to the random accidents of people in stressful situations. It even invented the “color codenames” later used in Reservoir Dogs.

The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is catnip to movie directors in the same way that single stage sets are to theatrical directors – be it a subway or a stage with just two chairs, this is a film about two men facing off in a battle of wits. The majority of the movie takes place over an intercom between a terrorist and a dispatcher, with occasional cuts to the havoc their conversation causes throughout New York City. And if the terrorist represents the international Other that is a threat to our national security, the dispatcher represents the everyman of New York, our hardworking servicemen and women who lost their lives on September 11. With material like that, it’s no wonder the film has been remade twice.

Director Tony Scott updates the film to modern day sensibilities. The villain, Ryder (John Travolta in full crazy mode), isn’t a mercenary applying crisp military precision to the art of extortion; he’s a (SPOILER ALERT) former Wall Street tycoon – slightly lower on the villain totem pole than industrialists who pollute the environment. The undercover cop moves into action immediately rather than later in the film, because of course New York’s finest would respond quickly to a terrorist attack. And the dispatcher, Walter Garber (Denzel Washington, looking appropriately puffy and slouched) has a more complicated past and a bigger role.

Unfortunately, the film suffers as a result. In the original, military precision was entirely the point. The trains never ran on time, so challenging New York to meet a deadline was both a delicious irony and a sticking point with a former military officer who expects nothing less than perfection from his men and from the negotiators. Here, that point is muddled by a sort of “we’re all into this together” blue collar ethic that Ryder projects into Garber. Their dialogue still crackles, but this simple change dilutes the force of the film.

The four-man team of bad guys is reduced to two speaking parts, with the other two generic thugs. The emphasis is clearly on Travolta and Washington, and it’s refreshing to have a movie that’s not afraid to spend some time letting actors just act. There’s a lot of talking in this film and that’s not a bad thing.

The movie struggles with the modern updates. A live wireless webcam feed gets broadcast to the Internet without government interference (yeah, right). Even though the laptop’s battery dies, it’s mysteriously back on a moment later. And the two teens on either side of the webcam come off as self-absorbed morons.

Because this is a big budget action film, the quiet subtlety of the original version is glossed over in favor of an MTA agent handling a hostage negotiation, wielding a gun, and ultimately engaging in a showdown with the bad guy. Since Ryder has no principles to speak of, the conclusion is particularly unsatisfying.

Taking of Pelham 1 2 3 is a serviceable action film but not a particularly good update of the original. The seventies version was more of a drama with an ensemble cast that was comfortable playing second fiddle to the biggest character of all: New York City.

Quantum of Solace

Congratulations! You've managed to reinvent your Bond franchise after the tired old boy had sipped his last martini, drove his last fast car, and bedded his last exotic hottie. This new Bond is vulnerable and violent at the same time, a wounded animal that was willing to give up the whole spy life for Vesper Lynd, a woman who betrayed him. This is supposed to explain why Bond's such a cold-hearted bastard, and it blazed an exciting if somewhat jarring new path for the Bond films.

The challenge with reinvention is that there is a blurry line between following the new Bond to his logical conclusion and retaining the quintessential elements that constitute Bond. Or to put it another way, if you constantly make Bond different with each film, he's not really James Bond anymore.

Quantum of Solace chose to continue Bond's (Daniel Craig) destructive path from the first film, picking up where Casino Royale left off. Bond tracks the shadowy global conspiracy (Quantum) that has infiltrated Her Majesty's Secret Service. That's right, there's a double agent in double-oh-seven's midst, and only M (Dame Judy Dench) seems to be the least bit concerned about the entire organization being utterly compromised. This is just one of Quantum's many incongruent plot points that are resolved with "LOOK! EXPLOSIONS!" to divert the audience's attention.

Our resident villain is a pop-eyed Buscemi look-alike named Dominic Greene (Mathieu Amalric), who runs...wait for it...Greene Planet, an environmental organization that is secretly arranging deals for oil. But actually, it's about water. Greene's Blofeld-ian murder signature is to drown his victims in oil. It's not nearly as cool as it sounds.

Bond's supposed lust-interest is an agent named Strawberry Fields (Gemma Arterton), who saunters onto the screen in boots and an overcoat. With her bright red hair, Fields seems like a great romantic foil for Bond. When Bond asks her first name, it's "Fields. Just Fields." No Strawberry. And here we come to the problem: Quantum of Solace seems embarrassed to be a Bond film.

Every opportunity for Bond to be suave gets glossed over. He just commands women, like Fields, into his bed. He kills every bad guy he's supposed to capture. When his license gets revoked, he blithely ignores M's commands. When he attends an opera, Bond lurks in the rafters like some kind of murderous roadie. Instead of cleverly tricking the Quantum cabal into revealing themselves, he crashes their secret meeting and then guns down their goons.

In the first film, Bond's blundering and brutal tactics were excusable because he was new. It was a great way to reboot the franchise with the promise that, over time, Bond would transform into the elegant, suave killer we've come to know and love. It's a particularly American approach, the idea that even killers can better themselves through hard work. But with Quantum of Solace, Bond is so bereft of actual development that he gets a proxy instead: Camille (Olga Kurylenko), an exotic hottie whom he doesn't get to bed.

The movie goes south from there: inexplicable bad guy meeting that brings everyone together in one place, flaming deathtraps that Bond brute forces his way out of, and a bad guy who physically can't compete with Bond but tries to make up for it by being really, really nuts. The clear advantage Bond has over Greene is obvious; it's like a jock beating up a nerd at supervillain convention.

In the end, Bond finally meets up with the agent responsible for Lynd's betrayal, Yusef Kabira. SPOILER ALERT: After all the beatings, blasting, smashing, crunching, and punching, the movie concludes with a quippy aside and some hurt feelings.

Are you kidding me? By the end of the movie I was so frustrated that I wanted to see Bond seriously #$% up the one guy who could arguably be held accountable for destroying the love of his life. Instead of using Camille as parable to tell the tale of Bond's self-destructive path, Quantum of Solace should have STARTED with Bond leaving Kabira in a body bag. Or multiple bags.

Now that we've gotten the murderous quest for vengeance out of the way, can we get back to Bond being at least slightly civilized, seducing hot women, and killing dangerous villains with awesome technology? Please?

Layer Cake

Like Pulp Fiction, Layer Cake’s title hints at the irregular path the film takes to tell its tale. It follows an honorable crook, which we know only as XXXX (Daniel Craig), who specializes in trafficking cocaine. XXXX’s strategy is to never get involved directly with the criminal element, surrounding himself with other honorable criminals who in turn conduct themselves professionally. It’s all a very neat arrangement on the surface, and XXXX thinks he’s got the system beat. He plans to retire and disappear from the business. WARNING: As we eat this cake, there’s bound to be some juicy spoilers inside.

Peel back a layer… and it turns out that XXXX actually has a boss, Jimmy Price (Kenneth Craham). He demands XXXX personally track down Charlie, the daughter of Price’s fellow crime boss Eddie Temple (Michael Gambon, an evil version of Dumbeldore!). This violates XXXX’s rule of never getting personally involved, but he has no choice.

Peel back a layer…and Price also wants XXXX to organize the distribution of “super ecstasy” tablets from The Duke (Jamie Foreman). Except that the drugs were actually stolen from a Serbian gang, who is intent on tracking them down and murdering everyone involved.

Peel back a layer…and we discover that Price is quite vindictive. He wants XXXX to actually kidnap Charlie in a twisted revenge plot against Temple. It seems Price doesn’t like the idea that XXXX thinks he can retire and wants him dead – if Temple’s men don’t kill him, drug dealers certainly will.

Peel back a layer…and we finally get to the best part of the cake. Nobody is innocent. The professional associates have all committed their own heinous crimes for petty reasons: clubbing snitches to bloody pulps, killing people they dislike, and hiding corpses in freezers. This awful truth requires XXXX to get his hands dirty and he does so in the most thuggish fashion.

The visual direction in Layer Cake is superb, using Matthew Vaughn’s trademark whiplash style that he perfected in Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and Snatch. It makes what could be a standard drug dealing tale much more interesting. Although the accents are hard to follow at times, the acting is top notch. XXXX is a complex character that gives Craig an opportunity to experience extreme violence, utter defeat, passionate lust, and a host of other emotions beyond the reach of the Bond films.

Although Layer Cake narrative can be circuitous, stick with it. There’s one more layer at the end of the movie, a surprise twist that shows we were looking at the wrong cake all along.

Changeling

Changeling is most famous for being produced by Clint Eastwood and its lead actress, Angelina Jolie. Those two names unfortunately overshadow a disturbing true tale of one woman's struggle to find her son.

The film follows Christine Collins (Jolie), a single mother rising in the ranks of the 1920s workforce in Los Angeles. When the hectic workday demands of single parenthood conspire against her, Collins is forced to leave her son Walter alone at home. And then Walter disappears.

But that's not the story. Changeling focuses on what happens to Collins afterwards. The LAPD, under increasing pressure for its thuggish behavior, is desperate for an easy PR-win. When a child comes forward claiming to be Walter, the LAPD publicly declares the case solved. There's just one problem: it's not Walter.

What happens next is a heartbreaking tale of male-dominated institutions bringing their full weight to bear against a single mother without family, friends, or resources. Fortunately, her plight gains the attention of Reverend Gustav Briegleb (the always superb John Malkovich), who uses Collins as part of his public chess game with the LAPD. As tensions escalate and Collins continues to deny the faux Walter as her real son, she is committed to a mental institution to shut her up. The story would end there, if it weren't for evidence that Walter was murdered by Gordon Stewart Northcott.

The status of Jolie as an object of male lust often obscures her acting ability, and it is all the more evident here, where she plays a meek woman who only wants the police to find her son. Her nemesis is Captain J. J. Jones, played by Jeffrey Donovan, he of Burn Notice fame. Donovan seems a little uncomfortable in the role; he slips in and out of his Irish accent and he doesn't always exhibit the hard-edged indifference that makes the character so loathsome.

Changeling's author is the eponymous J. Michael Straczynski, most famous for Babylon 5 but also a scriptwriter for numerous cartoons, Jake and the Fatman, Murder She Wrote, and Walker Texas Ranger. Straczynski knows how to spin an investigative yarn and his attention to detail shows in the film. This is as much a commentary on the changing role of technology, media, and women in American society as it is a historical tale. Oddly, some attributes are glossed over: Northcott's mother is notably missing, as is the fact that many of the political and legal improvements made at the conclusion of the film were ultimately reversed.

None of that detracts from the tale. Whenever a child is endangered, every parent can't help but be alternately terrified and enthralled. We keep hoping for a happy resolution, knowing that it will never come. The best we ask for is that Collins finds some semblance of justice and peace – if not for her missing son, then for herself.

Although it takes a long time to get to its conclusion, Changeling delivers. This is a powerful, heart-wrenching film.

Domino

Domino Harvey (as played by Keira Knightley), had a life that just screams to be made into a movie. Basically, Domino was a spoiled model who decided to take the catty take-no-prisoner glare she so ferociously displayed in the modeling field and transitioned that attitude to life as a bounty hunter. The concept certainly has appeal: the modeling industry has turned models into superheroes of sorts, and it's not hard to imagine them with butt-kicking powers, even though most of them could probably be snapped like a twig. Knightley has the unenviable task of trying to project herself as meaner than she really is, albeit a highly sanitized version that features far less drugs.

The plot, if you can call it that, supposedly revolves around a little girl on her deathbed, a bank robbery gone awry, tattooed lock combinations, Jerry Springer, Tom Waits music, and a lot of coin flipping. The idea being that Harvey is some kind Joker-esque madwoman (or perhaps that's Two-Face) who sees life as a coin flip. As Dryden once said: "'Tis Fate who flings the dice, and as she flings, of kings makes peasants and of peasants kings."

A pretty weighty concept, except Domino is so caught up with its whip-snap, hyperkinetic perspectives that the movie quickly wears out its welcome. The plot of Domino has nowhere to go. It's supposed to ratchet up the tension but doesn't, tries to create a love triangle of sorts between Harvey and her two bounty hunter companions but just comes off icky, and yet conveniently ignores the huge white elephant in the room: Harvey's drug use.

The specter of drug use overshadows the film. It killed Harvey just before the film premiered. When the real Domino Harvey shows up in a cameo, she is a skeleton of her former self. And yet drug use is always the dark realm of the bad guys, even though we know full well that it consumed Harvey.

Domino is too long, too distracted, and too clever for its own good. It tries to be everything: black comedy, action film, serious dissertation on life, bounty hunter couture, and more. It ends up not achieving any of those goals and just comes off as a big, ugly mess.

3:10 to Yuma

3:10 to Yuma is an update of the 1957 movie that's in turn an interpretation of a 1953 Western short story by Elmore Leonard. The 1957 movie cleverly tweaked the Western, inverting the white hats/black hats trope at a time when the genre was chiefly focused on morality. And yet while it flirted with the notion that good guys can be bad and bad guys can be good, it wasn't really willing to go so far as to make the characters more than lovable rogues. So perhaps it was inevitable in the era of Westerns like Unforgiven where the West is an unpleasant, unfair place, that the latest incarnation of 3:10 to Yuma is both more brutal and more fanciful than its predecessor.

The story follows Dan Evans (Christian Bale) and his family, a lame Civil War veteran on a struggling ranch. He has been borrowing money and time from Glen Hollander, a landowner who is more interested in moving Evans' ranch than getting paid. As played by Bale, Evans is a desperate man - as weathered and bitter as a piece of broken leather. He yearns for the respect of his wife and two sons. And when he crosses paths with outlaw Ben Wade (Russell Crowe), Evans sees his chance.

Wade is a gentleman outlaw. Suave, violent, and dressed in black, he leads a ragtag band of murderers who will stop at nothing to get the gold, as exemplified by a daring raid on a stagecoach guarded by a gatling gun. Never mind that the gatling gun's weight would make it an impractical accessory for a stagecoach, or that the noise from the gun would most certainly spook the horses.
Given the opportunity to deliver Wade for a bounty, Evans is determined to bring him to justice. At first, it's just for the money, but it becomes clear that it's for more than that - it's to regain a measure of respect, for himself and from his family. Wade comes to like Evans, a man of conviction and courage that he finds lacking in his own gang. When Evans' son William (Logan Lerman) tags along, Wade develops a deeper appreciation for the father/son bond. Through a variety of travails that include Wade's outlaw past coming back to haunt him, the two become brothers in arms.

By the time they get to Yuma, it's clear Wade isn't easily captured or confined; he repeatedly escapes and brags that Yuma prison won't be able to hold him either. So he's literally going along for the ride in the hopes of a happy ending for all: giving Evans his life back and Wade going free once more. That's where the similarities between the movies end. The finale is a gut punch that ratchets up the stakes.

A strong Hollywood Western streak runs through 3:10 to Y uma, starting with the aforementioned gatling gun on a stagecoach. Wade wears a black hat. Charlie Prince (Ben Foster), Wade's right-hand man, twirls his pistols. And for all the talk about Evans being lame, he only occasionally limps - he can shoot, run, and ride with the best of them.

As a realistic depiction of the Wild West, 3:10 to Yuma falls short. But as a meditation on good and evil that gives its actors an opportunity to showcase their considerable talents, Yuma hits its mark ... right between the eyes.

The Bourne Ultimatum

I really wasn't fond of the Bourne Supremacy, which boiled down to, "you're a trained killer, so let's get you involved in a random plot because the audience only cares if you kick butt!" Fortunately, Ultimatum makes up for the lame duck sequel with a movie that actually advances the plot.

Bourne follows a cell phone trail, similar to the latest Bond films (or rather, the Bond films took the idea from Bourne): kill a bad guy, take his phone, page through his address book, trace its location, find bad guy, repeat. This eventually leads to the Treadstone training facility where Project Blackbriar, and Jason Bourne, was created.

The Bourne Ultimatum plays fast and loose with reality; occasionally Bourne just appears and disappears despite the best technology Treadstone has ad its disposable. The message seems to be that even the best surveillance is ultimately flawed because it uses people, and people make assumptions that trip them up. Bourne exploits the arrogance of Treadstone so effectively that he has them running in circles. There are some amazing fight scenes, thrilling chase scenes, and a few scenes that just drag on and on. Jumping from building to building in Madrid gets old after awhile.

Spoiler alert! At the heart of The Bourne Ultimatum is the notion of a black ops team of killing machines. The idea actually has its roots in the conspiracy theory known as Project Monarch: creating superspies through psychological conditioning and torture. It's by no means an original idea, but Ultimatum gives it a twist by showing that Bourne had a lot more to do with the birth of his killer personality than he originally thought.

Who is Jason Bourne? We get his real name, find out where he was trained, and delve into the circumstances that helped create him. The moral implications of who Bourne is and the decisions he made leading up his creation are an important part of the character, and it's a tribute to the screenwriters that it doesn't change what we love about Bourne: killing other spies (AKA "assets").

Casino Royale

My interest in James Bond died the day I saw Pierce Brosnan shoot a machinegun. Gone were the careful headshots of a man who was an expert with his pistol. Replacing that deadly accuracy was frenetic scenes, random gunfire, and Bond bending the laws of reality. The Bond films had become a parody of themselves.

Enter Casino Royale, which makes up for the shambling travesty that was the Casino Royale Bond spoof. Daniel Craig takes on the role of Bond as a newbie, a newbie who is a ruthless killer. Gone are the delicate acrobatics that were the trademark of other Bonds. This Bond is a hulking brute, smashing through walls, ruthlessly shooting people, and otherwise achieving his missions through sheer brute force. It seems jarring at first, but this is the origin of Bond, from thug to international assassin.

The plot, bound by the rules of the original novel, doesn't entirely make sense. Why the entire world, including both the U.S. and British authorities, feel that beating a criminal at a card game is the best way to coerce him is beyond me. But if you're willing to buy into that fact (a requisite, really, for the spy genre where nothing is ever so simple and direct) then the film has a certain cadence to it that really enthralls.

Until the end. The part where, we are led to believe, Bond is going to settle down with Vesper Lynd, a treasury agent, in Venice. Yeah, right.

About ten minutes could have been cut from this scene alone. We get that Bond is enamored with Lynd, that he wants to give it all up for her, but after the torture, the shooting, the gambling, the chasing, the movie becomes something of a snore until it picks up again. And then we're off to the beginning of another movie, with no resolution whatsoever.

Casino Royale is a much improved film, but it's the foundation for the Bond mythology, and as such it breaks previous expectations and struggles to establish new ones. It's much better than the Bond films that went before it, but they set the bar pretty low. As a book-end to Quantum of Solace, Casino Royale can't be really appreciated without seeing the two movies back-to-back.

Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull

Having a baby takes one out of the movie swing of things, so it took a long time before I was able to finally able to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. With over 400 reviews at the time of this writing, I'll skip my traditional format of summarizing the movie and just move on to what could have worked and what went horribly, horribly awry.

It made perfect sense to place Indy in the 1950s. I appreciated the nods to the 1950s alien invasion genre, which includes everything from Roswell to psychic powers to a rampant fear of Communism. And the film expertly sets up the 50s, managing to cram in greasers on motorcycles, ice cream shops, Russians, and nuclear bomb tests in the first fifteen minutes.

This movie is loaded with fan-service. There are nods to the other three films, from a fight in the mysterious warehouse at the end of the first movie to Indy starting to speak just like his father ("This is intolerable!") to his fear of snakes. The quicksand scene had me laughing so hard that I was in tears. But somewhere along the line, Spielberg and Lucas lost sight of the purpose of the film. It transformed from making a thrilling adventure to a "one last act for Ford, Spielberg, and Lucas."

I blame the majority of Crystal Skull's foibles on good old Professor "Ox" Oxley (John Hurt). He is a raving madman who has already made it through all the traps leading up to the crystal skull's resting place, so it's not particularly exciting to have Indy decipher his mad ramblings or retrace his steps. This is an Indy adventure in reverse - Indy HAS the object and he's trying to put it BACK. Which isn't all that exciting.

The villains just aren't all that villainous. Col. Dr. Irina Spalko (Cate Blanchett) is a caricature of a Russian that's not all that scary. Her claim to fame appears to be that she carries a sword (how quaint!). The master plan seems to be vaguely along the lines of "we're going to capture this artifact we don't understand and use it to conquer the world!" It's not even clear the Russians would know what to do with the skull, much less put it to nefarious use. The Australian turncoat is both obviously a turncoat and barely comprehensible. And don't get me started on the bug-squishing scenes that involving ant-ichor splashing on the camera...not once, but TWICE.

Mutt (Shia LeBouf) is a cardboard personality - it took me a second to realize that he never actually cries on cue (the camera whips over to him already misty with tears...twice), filled with angst over Ox, the guy we've never heard of. Mutt appears, with a wink and a nod, to be Indy's successor, but it's a heavy-handed portrayal: Mutt doesn't read but he's worldly! Mutt knows fencing but practices with a knife (that he never uses)! Mutt can ride a motorcycle and calls Indy "old man"! See Mutt swing from a vine and...

I saw this one coming when Mutt got separated from the rest of the group during a fight chase. I prayed: "Dear Lucas, please, please, PLEASE do not have Mutt swing from vines." Then the animated monkeys show up, in much the same way animated gophers showed up in the beginning of the film and threatened to turn Crystal Skull into a nuclear Caddyshack. I prayed again. "Please, please, please, don't have the monkeys swing along with Mutt and help him attack the Russians. Please, please, please..." Then the monkeys attack. Ever see the Simpsons episode, "In Marge We Trust," where Reverend Lovejoy fights off the baboons? It's like that.

In the "making of" docs, Spielberg dismisses using the Nazis as villains out of hand. And yet he went with an off-the-wall sci-fi theme that Lucas struggles to make Indy-esque. They could have easily included Nazis, UFOs, aliens, and arctic bases in one neat, conspiracy-laden package. Instead, two movie-making giants took a weak premise and turned it into an opportunity for nostalgia. It's like Ocean's Twelve and 13...you get the impression the cast is more interested in working than in making the movie work.

Crystal Skull isn't the worst movie ever. But as a final chapter in the Indiana Jones canon, it's more Temple of Doom than Last Crusade.

Taking Lives

I have no idea why this movie was on my Netflix list, but after watching all those Ashley Judd movies I figure Angelina Jolie deserves at least as much of a chance.

Taking Lives is the usual FBI agent stalks the serial killer plot. Pretty/creepy FBI agent, Illeana (Angelina Jolie) is a drop-dead hottie who wears a wedding ring to avoid men asking her out, turns down everyone who asks her out, and likes to sleep in graves to literally walk in the footsteps of her victims. You see, Illeana is the best agent for this sort of case, and presumably anyone interested in catching a serial killer has to be a little strange herself. This supposed brilliance almost never actually appears in the film, unless you count breathless close-ups of Illeana staring at pictures or laying in graves.

Illeana is pursuing a serial killer. This serial killer takes peoples' lives and lives in them, "like a hermit crab." He looks for single men with few attachments who won't be missed for months at a time. Why? Because his mother, Mrs. Asher (Gena Rowlands), believed her son killed his twin brother in a boating accident and kept him locked up in the basement for years at a time. So our bad guy wants to live other peoples' lives because...he has really, really low self-esteem. Sure, okay.

For reasons that seem only to further muddle the plot, all this takes place in Canada. There are several actors in Taking Lives who are most assuredly esteemed thespians in their home country but come off stilted, hostile, and apathetic when speaking English. These angry Canadians are unhappy about an American taking over their case and they're not afraid to speak French around Illeana to let her know it. They showed her!

There are a multitude of problems with this film. It has a really cool ending which doesn't make up for the plodding pace, the ridiculous plot twists, or the leaden acting. Phillip Glass is not the composer for a neo-noir film that needs a dramatic, slow build - his music is too sweeping, too lighthearted, too commercial. There's also a crazy violent sex scene that shows quite a bit of Jolie and seems to exist primarily to boost interest in the film at its nadir.

Taking Lives performs more acrobatics than Illeana in the bedroom to convince us of its plot twists. At one point, a supposedly dead character is propped up by the real bad guy to look like he's committing a crime. Only the shot is CLEARLY of a living person holding a gun to the faux victim's head, and a flashback shows quite a different scene. In other words, Taking Lives simply cheats to pull off its plot twist that we all saw coming a mile away because there's no way the film is going to end in just an hour.

With a subdued Jolie, a bizarre appearance by Kiefer Sutherland, lack of chemistry between the two leads, and a supporting cast that doesn't speak English as their first language, Taking Lives would make for a boring movie even if it were an action film. As a slow-building drama it can barely stir to life.

Live Free or Die Hard

Like most men, I have placed the original Die Hard movie at the pinnacle of macho-action films. What made Die Hard so great wasn't just that it was an action movie, but that it was an old-fashioned tale of cops-and-robbers juiced with testosterone and lots of explosions. John McClane (Bruce Willis) was an ordinary cop thrust into an extraordinary situation, an American-grown defender of justice given the opportunity to strike back against international invaders. Or so it seemed; the joke was on us. The original villain was actually just a petty thief, using the tactics of terrorists to cover his operations. It was a stroke of genius and prescient insight into how the world really works.

Part and parcel of McClane's "normal guy"-ness was his ability to withstand pain and keep functioning. And for that to happen, McClane had to get beat up, stabbed, burned, and otherwise bloodied. McClane was cool in an old-school way; with his stubble, his mumbled asides, and his often-bewildered expressions, he was a fantasized version of every teenage boy (and adult) who didn't have leading man good looks or huge muscles. And he always had a personal stake; McClane was our National Guardsman, protecting his family from crime.

As they say, the more things change, the more they stay the same, and so we're back to Die Hard once more. This has to be the first action movie explicitly based on an article, John Carlin's 1997 "A Farewell to Arms" for Wired magazine. Basically, the article details a "fire sale" - an attack that postulates the next major terrorist attack on America will include an electronic element, combining an electronic attack on the nation's infrastructure with a brute force physical attack.

Into this mix is our pal John, escorting Matt Farrell (Justin Long, AKA the "Mac Guy") to a government safe house. It turns out all the hackers who helped develop the codes to infiltrate the U.S. infrastructure are being eliminated, and Farrell is the only one to have escaped. Thus ensues a new breed of buddy movie, "Boomer Meets Gen Y," and all the hilarity that entails.

Live Free or Die Hard is as much about the consequences of cybeterrorism as it is about the differences in generations. The dialogue between Farrell and McClane centers around these differences in understanding and accepting technology, and what it means to be a hero. In the end, they discover they have a lot to learn from each other (awwww).

The movie is not without its flaws. The PG-13 editing is very noticeable; Willis resorts to grunting and groaning instead of swearing like he did in the earlier films. He moans and groans so loudly that it starts to get comical. There is not one but two unbelievable battles with aircraft that strain credulity, even for a Die Hard movie; I was willing to forgive Car vs. Helicopter, but Eighteen-Wheeler vs. VTOL Jet was just ludicrous. VTOL jets are for taking off and landing, not having old-fashioned showdowns on bridges. And yet, the special effects are so amazing that it's hard to nitpick.

The other problem is the villain, Thomas Gabriel (Timothy Olyphant). His disturbing actions are far more cutthroat and scary than his physical presence on screen. As an actor, Olyphant just can't pull it off. By the time McClane reaches him, you just want him to slap the kid upside the head and pull the plug on his computer. And of course, Gabriel's motives are no more noble than the villain from the first movie.

In theory, there's a subplot about McClane's daughter, Lucy (Mary Elizabeth Winstead), but she doesn't have much to do here other than be a hostage. On the other hand, there's the addition of Kevin Smith as Warlock, a superhacker, that's just hilarious. To people who care about Star Wars and Kevin Smith, anyway.

Live Free or Die Hard tries to have it both ways, appealing to the younger (PG-13 movie release) and older generations (unrated DVD version) and engaging them in a debate about what it is to be a hero. As a believable tale of one man saving the nation, it's often overshadowed by its big-budget special effects. As an action movie, it's a worthy entry in the Die Hard franchise.

Next

I've gamed with my share of psychic characters in various modern-day role-playing games, but for some reason male precogs has never gotten the same attention from Hollywood. The clairvoyant types are always women or kids who talk to ghosts, with the exception of Stir of Echoes...which was about a guy who talked to ghosts. It was high time we had an action-packed, testosterone-injected update of the typical precog movie.

Our hero, Chris Johnson (Nicolas Cage) is wandering around Vegas performing magic tricks. Something is keeping him there: normally, Johnson can only see a few minutes into the future. But when he encounters (or will encounter) Liz Cooper (the delectable Jessica Biel) at a diner, he discovers he can see his future with her, and only with her. At heart, Next is a star-crossed romance.

What's entertaining about this somewhat flimsy premise is that Johnson can make it work. Nobody as hot as Cooper would normally be interested in shlubby Johnson, but he keeps trying alternate approaches, visualizing an endless array of possibilities, until he hits on the tactic that will work.

As you can imagine, precognition is a lot like time travel, and it's difficult to visually pull off. Next does an excellent job of showing what Johnson sees and the innovative ways he uses his gift; at one point, we see him splitting into multiple selves (representing all the possibilities of a particular course of action). In combat, this is really fun to watch - since Johnson can see when someone will throw a punch, he can easily dodge the blow. He can even dodge bullets.

Into this tidy romance steps Callie Ferris (the usually gorgeous Julianne Moore, who looks terrible in this movie), a federal agent bent on using Johnson's powers to stop a nuclear bomb from going off. The plot spins from there. The terrorists, who are tracking Ferris, figure that Johnson must be important because the government wants so desperately to speak with him, so they try to kill Johnson. In other words, the movie is something of a closed loop - the whole reason Johnson gets involved is because people THINK he might be important, and thus he becomes important.

Next has its flaws, however. For one, Cage acts like he's in a daze. His character is bland, confused, and a little addled - not in a cool, I-have-mental-powers sort of way, but an old-man-who-forgot-his-meds sort of way. It's not very appealing, and strains the credibility of any attraction that Biel's character would have to him.

Speaking of Biel, she's simply too attractive for the role. At the time of the film, Biel was 25, Cage was 43. They seem wildly mismatched in age, personality, and temperament. Biel does a good job acting bewildered and enchanted, but she's essentially making goo-goo eyes at a walking, talking zombie.

The other problem is that Next simply doesn't have enough of a budget to pull off all the really cool special effects in the film. The worst is when Johnson drives a stolen car in front of a train; the train, the car, and the crash look like they were made on a Commodore 64. It takes away from an otherwise riveting scene.

The bad guys are non-descript Eurotrash. Their motivation is vague, although they seem to be so powerful that the bad guys even shadow the feds without being noticed. No wonder the only person who can defeat them is a psychic!

When Johsnon and Ferris team up, things really get going. There's nothing like watching a precog and a sniper work in tandem. Or a precog wending his way through a maze trapped with bombs. Or a precog...well, you get the picture. It's fun stuff.

Throughout the movie, Next plays fast and loose with the timeline. At any point in time, we're never sure if we're seeing the future or if Johnson is actually experiencing the future. Depending on your perspective, this is either an interesting twist on the action genre or really annoying. The ending pivots on the phrase, "I made a mistake..."

Was it a mistake? I don't think so. This little movie works with what it has. Sometimes it might overreach, but for the most part it's an exciting science fiction action thriller.

Ocean's Thirteen

I enjoyed Ocean's Twelve. I skipped Ocean's Eleven. I heard good things about Ocean's Thirteen, so I downloaded it.

Ocean's Thirteen is supposed to be better than Twelve; the characters are emotionally invested in the plot (as opposed to the first movie, where they were apparently needed the money, I guess) because this time they're out for revenge. Reuben Tishkoff (Elliot Gould) invests in some properties only to have it forcibly taken from him in a move of Trumpian proportions by the nefarious Willie Bank (Al Pacino). Poor Tishkoff suffers...a stroke? A broken heart? Some kind of nondescript medical condition that leaves him bed-ridden? Our boys are loaded with cash, so it's just a matter of humiliating Bank, returning the property to Tishkoff, and making a quick buck in the process.

The fact that they have to ally with Terry Benedict (Andy Garcia) is supposed to make the movie even more hilarious. But it doesn't matter, because our heroes take it in stride. In fact, there's never a moment in the film when we actually feel like things might go sour.

There's a lot of problems with Ocean's Thirteen, not the least of which is the superhero status of our Justice League of Swinging Hip Guys. There's too many of them. They're all really rich at this point. And it's hard to conceivably rouse them into action, even if one of their buddies got hurt. Or to put it another way, when Superman can punch you through a wall with his fist, does he really get that upset if you cut him off in traffic? Does he even drive in traffic?

Bank is supposed to be a really mean guy, but Pacino barely gets to tear up the scenery because it's crowded with a dozen other actors. So he's only sorta mean. He's also really, really paranoid, which makes breaking into his place a challenge. He invests in all kinds of technological defenses, including an artificial intelligence that uses face recognition to spot cheats. Bank is truly a wonder of the modern age.

Opposing this technological villain are our heroes, who kick it old school. And by old school, I mean they buy a gigantic drilling machine to cause an earthquake, thereby temporarily shutting down the computer security system and giving the team time to get in and get out.

This is pretty much where the movie broke down for me. They bought a giant drill to get revenge on this guy? Seriously? When you have that much money, why not buy a big satellite laser and just nuke the guy from orbit?

There are other nearly interesting plots, like the one in which Linus Caldwell (Matt Damon) decides he's up to the challenge of seducing Bank's right hand woman, Abigail Sponder (the SMOKING hot Ellen Barkin). And what do we get? Caldwell ends up using some ridiculous technological doodad to knock her off her heels, which seems suspiciously similar to a date-rape drug. If the movie was trying to make a statement about outwitting your opponent vs. using technology, it failed. If it was trying to imitate the Rat Pack, I don't think drugging the hot chick (no matter how old she is) is how you do it. And given that Barkin smolders on-screen, the fact that there's no actual pressing of flesh really makes the whole film into one big practical joke. If Ocean's Thirteen were trying to emulate the old style heist movies, you'd better believe Caldwell would be keeping the "cougar" busy. The greater sin is that this leaves Barkin with nothing to do than look stupid. She barely has any lines!

There's other stuff that happens, some of it meant to be funny that's not so funny. Basher Tarr (Don Cheadle, still using that ridiculous accent) gets to ham it up, which is a high point in the movie. He writes touching letters to poor old Tishkoff to bring him out of his funk, but we're robbed of any sentimental feeling because we never find out what's in the letters. And for reasons that don't make any sense to me, Brad Pitt and George Clooney are barely in the movie. It's almost as if the guys thought that their egos got in the way of the second film, so instead they'd make it all not about them in the third film and that would make it better.

It doesn't. Ocean's Thirteen is a photocopy of a photocopy. It feels like it's written by guys who didn't bother to see the original Ocean's Eleven and instead wanted to put in jokes about funny noses and "cougars." The allure of the Rat Pack is that they were men playing a boy's game. Ocean's Thirteen feels like boys playing a man's game.

S.W.A.T.

MT: For a bit of a twist on the usual interview, I've decided to interview SWAT the movie about the movie SWAT.

SWAT: Hi, how are ya?

MT: I'm great. So let's cut to the chase: SWAT the movie is a remake of the 1970s television show. The acronym stands for Special Weapons and Tactics, and it glamorizes the police teams that are brought in when military-style tactics are required for an increasingly violent criminal opposition. I love that kind of military drama, and SWAT has a lot of potential. Bringing the television show into the 21st century seems like a no brainer. So what does the movie have to offer?

SWAT: Well we have a returning tough guy, Sgt. Dan "Hondo" Harrelson (Samuel L. Jackson), who puts together a team of equally tough dudes and dudettes: Jim Street (Colin Farrell), Chris Sanchez (Michelle Rodriguez), Deacon "Deke" Kay (LL Cool J), and some other people that aren't as popular.

MT: I know who's in the movie. What's it about?

SWAT: Oh, right, sorry. It's about how Jim has a falling out with his partner Brian Gamble (Jeremy Renner) and that comes back to haunt him.

MT: I just read the IMDB entry and it says the movie is about an imprisoned drug kingpin offering a huge cash reward for anyone who will spring him out of custody. That sounds cool. So which is it?

SWAT: Oh it's about that too. That's the second part of the movie. The first part is the SWAT training.

MT: The first PART?

SWAT: C'mon, everybody's gotta be trained, right?

MT: But it takes up the first half of the movie?!

SWAT: Well, sure. The tension builds as we watch our rookie team gel. Will Deke run fast enough to catch bad guys? Will Street reconcile his bad boy reputation with his strait-laced boss? Will Sanchez be tough enough to survive SWAT?

MT: Uh, you mean Michelle Rodriguez, who also played tough-as-nails chicks in Resident Evil and Lost? It's not exactly a surprise that she can keep up, since Sanchez is pretty much like every other character Rodriguez plays in other movies. Heck, she was even played the same character in Halo 2. While we're on the subject of actors, what's up with Street? Is he supposed to be American? He doesn't sound like it.

SWAT: ...well. See Colin doesn't really do accents. So, he sort of has this mishmash of tough guy speak and his normal dialect.

MT: Wow. Okay, let's forget the actors for a moment. The tactics and training that took up the first half of the film seem to go out the window when Gamble has an opportunity to take a hostage but instead uses the woman as an anchor by tying a rope to her and jumping off a bridge. That doesn't seem very SWAT-ish to me.

SWAT: ... Did I mention the cool theme song to SWAT? It's really cool. The cast hums it in one scene--*starts humming the song loudly*

MT: Yeah, thanks, SWAT. To sum up...

SWAT: *stars humming the song even louder*

MT: To sum up, SWAT is a movie conflicted about what it wants to be when it grows up. It has a lot of attitude but not a lot of meat. Its central conceit, the idea of a team escorting a bad guy to a destination, is excellent, but not really the kind of thing that you would expect out of SWAT...and it certainly doesn't mimic the training that takes up the first half of the film. All that, and the final fight scene is filmed in near total darkness. Rent the 1970s show if you feel nostalgic. This movie is just riding on its coattails.

Hot Fuzz

I loved Shaun of the Dead, so I expected that same magical combination of action, humor, and homage in Hot Fuzz. And that's mostly what I got. Mostly.

Simon Pegg is Nicholas Angel, a super cop that is driving the London bobbies mad because he's so good at his job. To keep him out of their hair, the London office sends Angel to a little town known as Sandford. There, he is teamed up with Danny Butterman (Nick Frost), a bit of a slob who wants to be a good cop but learned most of it from watching movies like Point Break and Bad Boys.

Life's pretty boring in Sandford, but there's more than meets the eye. Like every good film made by British blokes, the city folk are secretly suspicious of the common people. And that of course means there's a cult lurking about that must be stopped. It all has something of a Wicker Man feel to it.

The first half of the film is something of a murder mystery, as black clad assailants reminiscent of Scream brutally off witnesses. Once Angel and Butterman discover the truth, the film degenerates into an all out gun-fest, including acrobatics, car chases, foot chases, and wicked one liners.

The problem with Hot Fuzz is that it's shot exactly like Shaun of the Dead, complete with the cut scenes, character dialogue, and gore. Frost is playing almost the exact same character from the first film, except that instead of being a useless drug dealer he's a useless cop instead.

And then there's the gore. I've seen a lot of buddy cop shows and none of them are as disgustingly gory as the murders in Hot Fuzz. It's as if the movie was filmed by horror buffs who like action films, but they didn't know precisely how to create an action film so they went with what they know best - whenever a scene calls for gore, the movie goes way over the top. This includes one victim's head exploding on screen as a church spire drives down into his ribcage (we get to watch him stumble about a few seconds, sans head) and another church spire, this time in miniature, stabbing through a man's throat and up through his tongue and out his mouth. I mean, seriously...Scream wasn't this gross and it was a horror movie.

The movie wraps up with our intrepid cops blowing up a bunch of old people. Which is either hilarious or a little tiresome, depending on what you thought of the film up to that point.

Although the interaction between Angel and Butterman are entertaining, Hot Fuzz's pacing is uneven, which is a shame. Pegg and Wright's enthusiasm for the genre is infectious, but in this case they'd be better off renting cop movies than making one.

Those church spire scenes still give me nightmares. *shudder*

Shooter

In "Microtrends," a new book by pollster Mark Penn, 1 percent of Californians between the ages of 16 and 22 expected to be military snipers in 10 years. Why? "Aspiring snipers are evidence of a patriotic generation, who see sniping--a profession requiring reserve and cool in a war without front lines--as the new "Top Gun" military profession." Mix this particular factoid with the "other gunman" conspiracy theory and you have Shooter.

Mark Wahlberg plays Bob Lee Swagger, a military sniper abandoned during a field op. His best friend dies in the ensuing fracas, but Swagger survives to become one of those militia-type recluses who lives alone with his dog in the mountains, spouting conspiracy theory. He's just the kind of antihero America needs, and it's not long before Colonel Isaac Johnson (Danny Glover) asks for his help in serving the country once more. It seems an assassination attempt is planned against the President, and only Swagger can plot out the sniper's moves before he actually makes them. Playing on Swagger's patriotic sympathies, Johnson lures him out into the open and...

Spoiler alert! But seriously, you saw this coming, right?

Surprise, surprise, in retracing the steps of a would-be assassin, Swagger is framed AS the assassin! An all-out manhunt ensues, with Swagger enlisting allies like the girlfriend of his dead buddy (tasty Kate Mara as Sarah Fenn) and an agent in the wrong place at the wrong time (Michael Pena as Nick Memphis). Seems the good Colonel is actually a subversive government agent working for a Dick Cheney-esque senator, Charles F. Meachum (Ned Beatty).

Thus ensues a cat-and-also-cat game between Swagger and everyone else as they struggle to track down a ghost who strikes like a thunderbolt out of the blue. The twists and turns, the blatant pandering to conspiracy theory, and the demonizing of a Republican-run government are all very entertaining or insulting, depending on your views. And Shooter delivers in spades, with plenty of head shots that make this movie the modern descendant of Rambo.

Unfortunately, Shooter is also highly predictable. Swagger's inevitable betrayal is obvious from the start. And the fact that the government agents might not be good guys is clearly telegraphed by Elias Koteas, who dresses like a bad guy in his black suit and tie, and even adjusts it once, goodfella style. I mean, the guy's name is Jack Payne for crying out loud! Why not just call him Major Blood and be done with it?

Still, Shooter is very entertaining. There's enough skin, violence, humor and conspiracy theory to keep an audience entertained. The ending may be complete wish fulfillment, but it's extremely satisfying. Those Californians will have plenty of reasons to want to be snipers by the end of this film.

The Bourne Supremacy

Where last we left Jason Bourne (Matt Damon), he was living in a secluded location with his new girlfriend. The Bourne Supremacy picks up where the Bourne Identity left off: Jason Bourne is a professional killer, a member of the Treadstone Group, who no longer remembers his identity. It turns out that Bourne is a perfect scapegoat for another murder, and it's not long before an assassination is pinned on him.

And that's the awkward thing about this installment in the Bourne series. Bourne's reason for involvement in the plot is basically summed up as "it seemed like a good idea at the time." Fortunately, Bourne slowly unearths information about his own past amidst the machinations of FBI, European assassins, and the Treadstone Group. Unfortunately, professional "bad guy" character actors play the bad guys. I guessed the twist upon his appearance. Hint: look for the slimy political type who has no reason to go along on the mission but gets told to do so anyway.

There are other problems: one of my pet peeves, the blurry memory cam. Bourne's done some very bad things in his past missions, the missions he supposedly can't remember, and the director decided to tell us by having Bourne remember through echoing, blurry shots. They get old, fast.

The trademark gritty fighting scenes are all here, including insane car chases (more like a series of car crashes), the clever turnabouts that you never see in other spy movies, and plenty of fisticuffs. Bourne Supremacy doesn't do everything right, but it has street-level action down perfectly.

By the end of the film we learn Bourne's full name. But that's a cop out: the Supremacy is more about Bourne proving that in the past he was never a very nice guy. That's hardly news.

Bourne Supremacy feels more like an episode in a series than a movie. Bourne fans won't be disappointed, but the rest of us will have to wait until the third installment comes out on DVD to see Bourne develop beyond an amnesiac killing machine.

The Italian Job

I live right around the corner from a Mini Coop dealership and I'm an Italian-American, so I thought it fitting that I finally rented this movie. It's a remake of the 1969 original starring Michael Caine. Whereas that film took place in Italy, the remake stays there only for the introduction and then swiftly moves to California.

I love heist films. Like Ocean's Eleven or Heat, it's all about the cast. You can see a pattern in the characters:

THE WHEELMAN: This is the guy who mans the getaway vehicle, be it helicopter, jet, or car. Handsome Rob (Jason Statham, my favorite action hero) plays a decidedly scrappy, suave wheelman. This also happens to be almost the exact character from The Transporter. Hopefully, Statham will move beyond this type of character, but it's a testament to action tropes that he can actually be typecast as "the wheelman."

THE TECH: This guy is almost always a nerd and usually the comic relief. Lyle (Seth Green) nails this role and actually steals the show with his jokes. One ad-libbed sequence of Lyle mocking Handsome Rob is the funniest part of the movie. Of course, the challenge with this sort of character is that he needs to be able to pull off seemingly magical feats of technological wizardry without overshadowing the expertise involved. When Lyle manages to take control of the entire traffic system, you really have to wonder if he couldn't be better off striking out on his own. He's almost too good for the movie.

THE DEMOLITIONIST: The demolitionist's job is to blow things up. Sometimes he's a homicidal maniac, other times he's cool and collected. Left Ear (Mos Def) is a cool customer. And he doesn't like dogs. He gives Lyle competition for the funniest line in the movie:

Left Ear: This dude got dogs. I don't do dogs... I had a real bad experience, man.
Charlie Croker: What happened?
Left Ear: I had. A bad. Experience.

THE OLD MAN: You've seen this guy before. He's probably the former leader of the group. He's seen too much, been around the block too many times, and he knows his days are numbered. He just wants one last, big heist so he can retire forever. He almost always dies in the film. That pretty much sums up John Bridger (Donald Sutherland).

THE HOT CHICK: A recent invention, the hot chick's purpose is to keep men interested. She can have a variety of roles (tech, wheel-err-woman, demolitionist). Sometimes she has her own unique set of skills as safecracker. That's John's daughter, Stella (Charlize Theron), who competes admirably in the sea of testosterone.

THE LEADER: Handsome, smart, a safecracker himself, this guy is the one who pulls off a sneaky job right under the bad guys' noses. Unfortunately, Charlie Croker (Mark Wahlberg) is more narrator than anything else. He seems to have very little to do, and that's a shame, because Wahlberg's talented enough to do much more.

The villain is Steve (Edward Norton) a thief turned bad. He knows all of our protagonists' tricks, so he knows how to counter them. And since he stole the gold from the original Italian Job, he's the perfect foil. Norton plays him with just the right amount of shifty-eyed sleaze.

The Italian Job has lots of cool car chases, lots of near misses, and a lot of twists and turns (literally and figuratively) that make it a brisk, entertaining movie. You get quickly caught up in the machinations of the characters, which allows the film to get away with a lot of unbelievable nonsense. But who cares? From the funky flashbacks to the quippy asides, it's clear that Italian Job doesn't take itself too seriously.

Although it's more Job than Italian, the Italian Job is still a fun ride.

A History of Violence

David Cronenberg is not the first person I think of for an action film. But then, despite the movie's name, this isn't an action film. It's parable about all kinds of violence: violence between parent and child, between children, between husband and wife, between brothers, and of course, good old-fashioned violence against people who disagree with you.

The Stalls are a perfect family. There's hot lawyer wife Edie (Maria Bello), soft-spoken Tom (Viggo Mortensen), and their children: wisecracking teenage Jack (Ashton Holmes) and cute-as-a-button Sarah (Heidi Hayes). Into this perfect family portrait enters violence in the form of bullies at school and thugs who attempt to rob Tom's diner.

It turns out that Tom has an ugly past he's been trying to keep secret. But when Tom violently repels the robbers and becomes a minor celebrity, his past comes back in force.
Carl Fogarty (a snarling Ed Harris), a mobster who wants Tom to "go for a drive," shows up at Tom's doorstep, threatening his friends and family. Things spiral downward from there.

Tom's struggle isn't just about his criminal past. Cronenberg unspools on screen a litmus test of violent scenarios, and then asks the audience each time: Is this okay? The questions start out easy to answer and become increasingly complex. By the time Tom grabs his wife in a violent embrace that turns passionate, we suddenly understand that each person defines their own boundary of when violence is and isn't acceptable. And the morality attached to each act of violence is a fluid thing indeed.

All the actors pull their weight in History of Violence, except perhaps Hayes--she's no Dakota Fanning, but she acts suitably cute (a little too cute). Everyone else is excellent, from Bello's desperate, hurt looks to Holmes terrified/thrilled rage, to the inimitable Harris as a very scary man. And of course there's Mortensen, who infuses every character with a level of depth with a sad glance.

By the time Richie Cusack (William Hurt) appears, the violence at home has come full circle. I'm not particular fond of Hurt, but he does an excellent, frightening job here, as a mobster completely bereft of any moral compass.

This movie poses important questions that challenge American assumptions about violence, similar to how American History X challenged our assumptions about racism. It's in answering those questions that the movie becomes more than action film and transforms into a morality tale worth seeing.

Mission Impossible III

I avoided the third installment of Mission Impossible for the same reason a lot of people did: Tom Cruise. It's a tradeoff: a bankable star becomes a liability if you happen to dislike him. Of course, the people who don't like these big budget stars are usually not substantial enough to affect sales. Given Sumner Redstone's, CEO of Paramount, decision to cut ties with Cruise, it seems that his outrageous antics finally caught up with him.

And that's a shame, because Mission Impossible III is really good.

The problems I've had with the other installments revolved around what happened to the original conceit of the series: it was a carefully planned operation performed by a team. Being privy to the operation in the beginning, we worried for each agent as they performed their particularly dangerous and important task. This is the whole symbolism of the burning fuse: the agents light the fuse, but the conclusion is an inevitable explosion. In short, we knew what to expect and got it at every episode, even if there were a few twists and turns along the way.

Thus making Mission Impossible a star vehicle is against the spirit of the series. There's no one star agent; there can't be, because every agent is important. Right? The first two movies forgot that point.

In MI3, J.J. Abrams brings the series back to its roots. In essence, Ethan Hunt (Tom Cruise) performs a standard mission extraction. They pull it off perfectly. There's just one problem: the bad guy (Owen Davian, played with chilling aplomb by Philip Seymour Hoffman) refuses to be interrogated. Utterly unafraid, he begins interrogating his interrogator. And suddenly, MI3 has been turned on its ear.

What if everything went right, asks Abrams, and it still all went horribly wrong?

What's so refreshing about MI3 is that even when Hunt defects, even when he's not sure who's on his side, his team sticks by him. When he goes rogue, his team goes with him. And when he goes on a mission to stop Davian, his teammates are right there in the mix, risking their lives for their leader.

There are some amazing scenes, including a sliding fight on the rooftop of an office skyscraper and a helicopter battle in a wind turbine farm. Add into the mix a ticking time bomb and the tension and action keeps the audience on its toes.

By never forgetting what made Mission Impossible great, Abrams brings the magic back. And Cruise delivers without hopping on a single couch.

The Prestige

The Prestige is the "other" film about magicians, which came out right around the time of The Illusionist. Although on the surface the two films seem to be set in similar time periods about similar subjects, they couldn't be more different.

The Prestige is about two magicians and their obsessive quest to one-up each other. Robert Angier (Hugh Jackman) is a polished American magician who performs with his wife, fellow British magician Alfred Borden (Christian Bale) and gizmo inventor Cutter (Michael Caine). When Angier's wife drowns during a trick, he blames Borden for the deed. Borden's unsatisfying response to which knot he tied is, "I don't know."

That burning question ("How could he not know?") consumes Angier and sets the tone for the movie. But this is esteemed director Christopher Nolan we're talking about, so nothing is that simple. The movie has multiple layers. It's broken into three parts (the Pledge, the Turn, and the Prestige). But it's also a duel between the two magicians, consuming everything from their friends (Cutter) to their wives to their mistresses (Olivia Wenscombe, played by Scarlett Johansson) to their very children, retold through each of their respective diaries. It's also a battle of magic vs. technology, illusion vs. reality, showmanship vs. stagecraft. Nolan poses the question: When does a single-minded quest for perfection become ruthless enough to commit murder?

The twists and turns in the film aren't too hard to follow; astute viewers will pick up on the secrets behind both magicians' acts. What's really terrifying is the little sins that magicians commit in performing their illusions. What happens to all cute those bunnies and pigeons that disappear? You don't want to know.

If The Prestige has a flaw, it's that the movie takes so long to reveal the entirety of its performance and deception. Still, the gut-punch ending is worth the wait.

Walking Tall

Walking Tall is a remake of the 1973 film, which is in turn a "semi-biopic" of Sheriff Buford Pusser. Ironically enough, Pusser was a former professional wrestler-turned lawman in McNairy County, Tennessee. For those of you keeping track, the Buford Pusser was renamed to Chris Vaughn (in the world of macho movies, this is understandable) and his background was changed from wrestling to Special Forces. Which is funny, because Dwayne "The Rock" Johnson, who plays the role of Vaughn, is a former professional wrestler turned actor.

In this action movie, Vaughn returns to his hometown of Kitsap County, Washington (instead of Pusser's actual McNairy County, Tennessee) from a stint in the Special Forces. We're not sure what Vaughn did, but it must have been ugly, because he never speaks about it and answers questions about people he killed with a sad stare. Unfortunately, Kitsap County has gone downhill since the local lumber mill closed. His father, Vaughn Sr. (John Beasley) is out of work. Vaughn's sister Michelle (Kristen Wilson) has become a cop, but her son Pete (Khleo Thomas) hangs out with the wrong crowd. Heck, even Vaughn's old girlfriend Deni (Ashley Scott) has become a stripper. All these sins can be blamed on Vaughn's old high school rival, Jay Hamilton (played with sneering arrogance by Neal McDonough).

Vaughn's return is cause for celebration by his friends, including the recovering alcoholic Ray (Johnny Knoxville, of all people), who treat him to a night of gambling and debauchery at Hamilton's premiere casino. But the whole place is dirty, where gamblers cheat and drugs are given to kids. It's at this point that Walking Tall flirts with cartoonish levels of evil. Even Hamilton points this out: "Why would I sell drugs when I own the entire town already?" Why indeed?

Vaughn goes nuts once he discovers that the place is corrupt, and his fisticuffs earn him a form of vicious revenge from the security staff that involves a box cutter and a lot of cutaway scenes of Vaughn screaming. Left to die, he manages to recover on his parents' sofa. The sheriff (Michael Bowen) and his deputies are obviously in Hamilton's pocket and refuse to help. When Vaughn's nephew overdoses on drugs gained from Hamilton's casino, Vaughn's had enough: he takes a four-foot hickory club and smashes the place up. That's just the first half of the movie.

Returning to reality, Vaughn's outburst causes him to be brought up on several charges, brought by the very people who cut him up the first time. Vaughn wins the case by appealing to squeamishness of the jury, who wince once he shows them the scars from the box cutter. "If you acquit me of these charges, I'll run for sheriff!" he shouts. And they do. And he does. What happens next is a good old-fashioned butt-whupping from a big man with a big stick.

I didn't expect much from an action movie headlined by a wrestler, but Walking Tall distinguishes itself in several ways that make it worth watching:

IT'S MULTIETHNIC: Vaughn's father is black, his mother is white; Vaughn's girlfriend is white. The movie doesn't make a big deal about it.

IT KNOWS ITS LIMITATIONS: The Rock is huge. This obvious fact is used against Vaughn when he's on trial, as the poor, beat-up thugs make him out to be a monster. And he sort of is...he's just a monster you want on your side. Ray is both pathetic and amusing, but mostly pathetic, as only Knoxville can play him.

IT UNABASHEDLY LOVES ACTION: This movie is about good guys beating up bad guys. Although Vaughn's Special Forces training is curiously absent from most of the film, he does get into fistfights and gunfights with everybody. The fighting is fast and furious but never overtly cinematic. There are lots of thuds, grunts, and crunches.

I like The Rock. He's handsome and sleek in a way that other muscle-bound stars are not, conveying both strength and speed. He doesn't come off as a brutal thug by just looking at him, unless he's standing next to someone else. And because Johnson is famous for arching his eyebrow in ironic "am I for real or what?" pose, he's able to pull off comedy by standing next to someone considerably smaller, like Knoxville.

Walking Tall has both heart and muscle, a feel-good tale about a tough guy who stands up for his hometown in an era when nobody seems to be standing up for anything anymore.

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind

Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind is another Jim Carey movie I wasn't too sure about. He's had a better track record lately with his more serious films, so I was willing to give it a shot. And I'm glad I did.

Combining all the mental hijinks of Memento and the mind-bending, "is this reality?" confusion of movies like Strange Days and eXistenz, the movie essentially posits one question: if you could erase any one experience from your mind, would you?

But before we get to that question, we see Joel Barish (Jim Carey) meet Clementine Kruczynski (Kate Winslet) on a train. It's supposedly happenstance, and the two hit it off immediately. These first five minutes carry the whole movie. The two actors exhibit just enough nuanced familiarity that it's alternately exhilarating and creepy-they FEEL like they've known each other their entire lives. The rest of the movie then swings back to the circumstances leading up to their meeting.

Joel has, in fact, met Clementine before and had a whirlwind romance that somewhere along the lines lost its whirl. They are strikingly different personalities who find attraction in their opposite: Joel is cautious, Clementine's a maniac. Joel is quiet (hard to believe Carey playing quiet, I know), Clementine is a bundle of energy. They alternately drive each other crazy and are crazy about each other. But unfortunately, the nature of the relationship is so tempestuous that the possibility of erasing one's memory is simply too tempting. Like a madman with a pocket nuke, it's inevitable that Clementine's personality will succumb to the lure of memory erasing...but the consequences have grave repercussions.

Hurt and desperate, Clementine's brash decision pushes Joel to do the same thing. If she's going to erase him, well he's going to do the same thing right back at her! It's a procedure that takes an entire night and it's only a few days into the erasing of her memories that Joel realizes he LIKES his pain, his angst, his embarrassment, and even his hatred of her. The ups and downs, the good and bad parts of their relationship, are ultimately inseparable, and Joel realizes he will lose a part of his soul along with Clementine should his memory of her be erased.

So he fights it. Thus have another plot thread, as Joel drags his memory of Clementine with him through the dark hallways of his mind. All the while, Joel is pursued in the real world by the Lacuna Memory Erasure team. Dr. Howard Mierzwiak (Tom Wilkinson) leads the team, a kindly father figure who is not nearly as nice as he seems. Stan (Mark Ruffalo) and Patrick (Elijah Wood) assist the good doctor, making an on-site visit to Joel's house. Which is at least as horrifying as it is comedic, because while Joel is in a drugged coma on his bed, Stan and Patrick eat his food, drink his beer, get high, and practically have an orgy in his apartment.

Like Memento, Spotless Mind posits that when people aren't looking, the ethics of society don't just fall apart, they explode...whatever you imagine people might do to you while you're helpless is just the tip of the iceberg. Patrick proves just who unethical he is when we discover he has decided to take advantage of Clementine by recycling all of Joel's memories-memories that were supposedly destroyed to complete the erasure process.

As if that weren't enough, Dr. Mierzwiak's assistant Mary (Kirsten Dunst), is dating Stan. The secret she uncovers about herself and her work will shatter the Lacuna program and the lives of all those who it touched.

The director takes an innovative twist on how he conveys the dream world. Images become faded and indistinct. Sound crackles in and then whispers away. Some scenes appear to be lit exclusively by a flashlight, perfectly representing the selective memory of Joel's mind. Other scenes are lensed in distinct colors of yellow and blue. Still other scenes are nightmarish-people are faceless, bodies slide off into darkness, and as Joel's mind stumbles under the technological assault, structures and people literally collapse in front of him.

Ultimately, it's Charlie Kaufman's writing that perfectly blends what could be a horrible mess. Just when you think all the various plotline could not possibly be resolved...we're back at that train, and the thrill and awkwardness of that first attraction.

Spotless Mind is about the maturation of a romance and the decision every couple must go through when they realize that the "honeymoon is over." Joel and Clementine come to a crossroads and stumble horribly astray, just as so many couples fall apart every day without the benefit of erasing the memories of their exes. Love, Kaufman seems to say, is about the person you are after the honeymoon is over.

Carey is suitably restrained, which makes him seem all the more pathetic when the movie focuses on the happier, more energetic times. His hair is a mop top, is sweaters always rumpled. In short, he's a sad sack that Carey captures perfectly...a funny man who has nothing to laugh about.

Dunst plays a perfectly awkward, clueless young girl dealing with a technology she does not understand. Her characters growth, destruction, and rebirth steals the show. The other characters are suitably dazed and confused, not the least of which is Wood's not-Frodo-anymore Patrick. He's so fresh-faced, it's hard to believe he's doing such disrespectful things to Clementine.

But by far, Winslet plays the most compelling character of her career. Winslet not only adopts an American accent, she plays Clementine as herself (a sometimes whiny, neurotic mess), as Joel remembers her (erotically playful, maddeningly confusing, and sometimes just a shrew), and as echoes of Joe's memories. This is a lot to pull off for anybody, but Winslet never missed a beat.

Perhaps the biggest compliment I can give this movie is that I KNOW these people. See it, and you will too.

Lemony Snicket's A Series of Unfortunate Events

I've never read any of the Lemony Snicket series of books, but the basic plot appealed to me far more than the Harry Potter series, if only because it seemed more fresh than the recycled Arthurian-mythos-as-children's tale. My wife and I dragged our 10-year-old nephew to see it with us as our "beard" so people wouldn't wonder if we were some kind of freaks. Not that this stopped us from seeing the Power Puff Girls movie, but I digress.

The movie begins with an animated short titled "The Littlest Elf." I thought for a moment I was back watching the beginning of the Incredibles with that awful "Bound, bound, bound and rebound" Jackelope idiot. Fortunately, the movie's narrator, Lemony Snicket (Jude Law), immediately sets things straight. This is not a movie about a happy little elf. It is a movie about dreadful things happening to good people. He encourages us to leave the "theater, living room, or airplane" if we do not want to witness such things.

I haven't seen a movie actually tell me to leave in a long time. The reverse psychology works, of course-we did not come to see the Baudelaire children ride off into the sunset. We came to watch them be challenged and rise above those challenges.

To whit, a fire has recently orphaned three wealthy Baudelaire children: 14-year-old Violet (Emily Browning), 12-year-old (?) Klaus (Liam Aiken), and their baby sister Sunny (played by Kara or Shelby Hoffman, twins). Each child has a special power that they use to survive.

The movie is something of a cross between League of Extraordinary Gentlemen, The Adams Family, and the A-Team. For Violet, her "super power" is the ability to invent things on the fly. For Klaus, it's his photographic memory and vast knowledge from reading thousands of books. And Sunny? Well, Sunny can bite through practically anything. A Mini-Jaws, if you will.

The Hoffman twins play Sunny with a...well, sunny disposition. Sunny never seems to get too upset by her situation, as if she knows the joke's on the adults. Sunny doesn't quite speak, but does make a lot of cooing sounds that are essentially gibberish. Fortunately for the viewers, we are treated to subtitles of what she's really saying-this clever device keeps the adults amused and often provides levity about what are sometimes decidedly grim situations.

Aiken is suitably dour and introverted. Klaus is the voice of reason, the person who starts screaming "this is insane!" when everyone else seems to be going along with the madness. He's primarily there as a foil for Violet, and in that respect, he does a workman-like job.

Browning is the true star of the show. With her full-lipped pout and wide eyes, she's a teen version of Angelina Jolie. Violet witnesses some horrible things and finds herself in awful situations, and it's a credit to Browning that she reacts in a believable fashion without whining or preaching. She rapidly becomes the adult of the family, and it's easy to forget that she's only 14.

The children are adopted by their new guardian, Count Olaf (Jim Carey). In general, I'm leery of Jim Carey in franchise movies. I loved him in Mask, hated him as the Riddler in the Batman series, and absolutely loathed him as the Grinch. What surprised me is just how perfectly matched Carey is for the part of Olaf. Olaf is an actor, you see, and when his overt attempts to snatch the children's inheritance fail, he switches to more insidious roles by creating different personalities. Olaf, backed by his acting troupe of misfits, oozes his way into each new guardian's life and ultimately offs them so he can bring the three orphans back into his clutches.

All the annoying Carey-traits are perfectly pitched here, as Olaf lies, sneers, chatters, and calls Sunny a little monkey. He's so eccentric he can't help himself, except when he is in disguise. When he's undercover, Olaf disappears and new characters emerge-characters the children can immediately identify as being frauds. The problem is that the adults are all oblivious to Olaf's scheming, which makes the plight of the children that much more desperate.

Olaf could easily become a harmless caricature, but his deeds speak for themselves. He abandons the children on railroad tracks. He gives them impossible demands. And at one point, he SLAPS Klaus. Once that happened, I started paying attention. Olaf is cartoony, yes, but he is definitely not harmless.

The other guardians are played by Meryl Streep as Aunt Josephine and Billy Connolly as Uncle Monte. Josephine is a neurotic mess, terrified of every appliance in her house, which ultimately turns out to be just as deadly as she warned (shades of Final Destination). Monte is a herpetologist who has a fondness for all manner of reptiles and amphibians, including three-eyed toads and giant pythons.

The director (Brad Silberling) does an excellent job in marinating a child's perspective. Characters loom above us, lean into the camera, and at other times are distantly off screen, talking but not saying anything of importance. This is precisely how I remember adults as a child...big, scary, and sometimes not particularly helpful.

The movie's score is perfect and the visuals all evoke a dreamy, Tim Burton-esque quality, without the obvious trademarks that make it so Tim Burton-esque. This is a relief, because Burton's creepy/funny work has started to become a self-parody in its repetitiveness (Big Fish being a big exception).

My nephew liked the movie a lot. Although it condensed three of the books, he said the movie removed a lot of parts that weren't very exciting. The ending is suitably climactic and uplifting, hinting at a long series that will hopefully live long enough to see the final end of Count Olaf.

This movie is not for everybody. But then, if you're a little quirky and have a tendency to think the worst of people, it may be just the palliative for you.

Reservoir Dogs

When I saw Pulp Fiction, I walked out of the movie theater agog. I had witnessed a movie masterpiece that so proficiently weaved all of its elements together that it left me floored. I had never seen anything like it before.

Of course, I've since seen a lot more movies, including Tarantino's most recent Kill Bill series. Although flashes of brilliance are evident in his other films, Pulp Fiction was the maturation of themes he was clearly still tinkering with in Reservoir Dogs. But that does not diminish the tightly plotted beauty of Tarantino's first film.

Tarantino wisely created his film like he would a play, which forces more character interaction and less gun battles. Indeed, the actors must, you know, ACT and tell us the story that we don't see on screen. The movie also introduces the characters as complete strangers by giving each one a nickname. Thus, as they are strangers to each other, they are strangers to us.

These strangers have been assembled by Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney) to pull off a simple heist. The fatherly Mr. White (Harvey Keitel), the reserved Mr. Orange (Tim Roth), the coolly psychopathic Mr. Blonde (Michael Madsen), the calculating weasel known as Mr. Pink (Steve Buscemi), and two guys who die early in the movie, Mr. Brown (Quentin Tarantino in his usual cameo role) and Mr. Blue (Edward Bunker). This ragtag team of strangers are led by Joe Cabot's son, "Nice Guy" Eddie Cabot (Chris Penn), sporting a blue jumpsuit like any good Mob goomba would wear. All of the other thugs wear black suits and sunglasses to make them difficult to distinguish to witnesses.

We never see the actual bank heist, which is part of the fun. Instead, it is told through the eyes of the characters, both in dialogue and through flashbacks identifying each of their backgrounds. The twist is that the bank heist has gone horribly awry and thus our rainbow colored team must rendezvous at a warehouse. In play-like fashion, the majority of the conversations and action takes place in this one location.

But what went wrong? It doesn't take long for the calculating Mr. Pink (who hates his name), to determine that there's a rat amongst them, and it's not until the latter half of the film that the plot is revealed as to which character is an undercover cop. Thus the characters begin their own witch-hunt, struggling to determine whom they can and cannot trust.

Things are complicated by Mr. White's loyalty to Mr. Orange, who has been shot in the stomach. A thief with honor, Mr. White treats Mr. Orange like his child, and it's only through deleted scenes that we discover Mr. White has been horribly betrayed before. Indeed, this is the second attempt at a bank heist, the first having gone equally wrong. Mr. White thus feels at least partially responsible for the younger man's agony.

And how agonizing it is! Mr. Orange bleeds. And bleeds. And bleeds. Indeed, for most of the film, he bleeds, screams, or is unconscious. It is a tribute to Roth's acting ability that he makes it look so painful.

On the other side of the moral spectrum is Mr. Blonde, a killing machine. Having been imprisoned for years and never ratting on his employers, Mr. Blonde is alternately the ideal soldier and a terrifying thug, capable of the most brutal acts. Mr. Blonde vents his anger by taking a cop hostage, whom he graphically tortures off-screen-not to get the cop to reveal who the snitch is, but because "it's amusing, to me, to torture a cop." And after all that, the startling truth is the cop DOES know who the snitch is.

At heart, this movie is about honor, whether amongst thieves or cops. The "rat" kills people in his undercover role, as much a villain as he pretends to be. The stone-cold killer amongst the thieves is the most honorable, while the tortured cop is willing to die to protect the life of the snitch. And through it all, Mr. White does his level best to save Mr. Orange, a man he barely knows. The final twist in the end reveals who played who and in Shakespearean fashion leaves just about everybody dead. The twist isn't in the deaths as much as it is in the revelation: the honor between men who have risked their lives for each other and in doing so, willing place their lives in the other's hands.

The acting in the movie is superb. Keitel, who produced the movie, knew what he was getting into and is the star of the show. He expresses a full range here, from that of a sniggering thug to a fatherly protector to a weeping brother. Buscemi is calculating and freaked-out in his usual bug-eyed staccato-speak. Madsen is cool as ice and puts his cold-dead gaze to good use without over-emoting. When he dances to "Stuck in the Middle With You" as he tortures the cop, it's a devil's dance that is horrifying as it is cheesy.

Tarantino's voice comes through strongly in all of the dialogue, sometimes too strongly (in the interviews, he actually says he has a "God given gift for dialogue," which is a little too complimentary in my opinion). All the characters seem to elucidate and expound on everything at length in a way that sounds just like how Tarantino speaks. Fortunately, all the actors are up to the task-Buscemi can handle it easily, Keitel less so, and Madsen doesn't really need to speak at all (for an example of an actor having difficulty with Tarantino-speak, see Uma Thurman in Kill Bill). Still, the dialogue is engaging and amusing, and it established a distinct narrative voice that has marked all of Tarantino's films.

For all of Tarantino's genius in pulling this movie off as his entrance to cinema, the film loses some of its luster by failing to acknowledge its roots. The naming of characters by colors to keep their identities anonymous and the undercover cop twist was done first in the Taking of Pelham 1-2-3. But most egregiously, the movie has several shot-by-shot parallels with Chow Yun Fat's City on Fire. To be fair, George Lucas doesn't often admit any inspiration from Hidden Fortress or The Searchers...but the similarities between Reservoir Dogs and City on Fire are so close as to be outright criminal in not recognizing them.

With the advent of Reservoir Dogs, traditional cinema, with "thugs sitting around polishing their bullets" got a strong slap of pathos if not realism. While not technically as proficient as Pulp Fiction, it stands as a precursor of Tarantino's skill as a writer, director, and actor.

Okay maybe not as an actor.

The Village

The Village is M. Night Shyamalan's latest movie that, by now, has become something of a shtick - there's always a twist at the end. At some point Night's going to get tired of all this and, like Sam Raimi, will hopefully go on to produce some really great movies that do not have to have a surprising ending. Unfortunately, it seems Night's success has now pigeonholed him and with The Village, the cracks are starting to show.

I appreciate a good surprise twist, but I'm not that easy to fool. I figured out who the real suspect was in The Usual Suspects. The Blair With Project and Fargo did not fool me into thinking they were true stories. But one of the few movies that really did surprise me with the ending was the Sixth Sense, so I gave Night the benefit of the doubt. I loved Unbreakable and liked Signs.

In all three cases, what was great about Night's movies is that they take time to focus on characters. People live their daily lives and then a supernatural element is injected into it. Even better, each plot is easy to summarize in a sentence. I imagine this comes in handy when pitching it to movie studios. For example:

Sixth Sense: Ghosts.
Unbreakable: Superheroes.
Signs: Aliens.

And The Village? "Little Red Riding Hood"

Or rather, "Little Yellow Riding Hood." The movie begins in 1897, focusing on a sleepy Amish-like town where a child has just died. Everyone dresses in black, white, brown, and gray and talks very, very slowly. Nobody uses conjunctions - it's all "You can not," never "You can't."

The characters live out their lives on the screen. Ivy Walker (Bryce Dallas Howard, the strikingly beautiful progeny of Ron Howard, who can actually act) is a blind girl in a man's world. She is fearless, in a town that brooks no violence and that is isolated from the rest of the civilization. It is Ivy's blindness and the repetition of the town's activities that sets her free, allowing her to roam as much as anyone who is sighted since things almost never change.

And oh yeah, she can see the color of peoples' auras. Or something like that.

Ivy has a boon companion in the personage of Noah Percy (Adrien Brody), a Pee-Wee-like character who probably suffers from severe attention-deficit disorder. Child-like and tempestuous, he wears his emotions on his sleeve. He's quite smitten with Ivy, a point that becomes relevant later.

Into this curious relationship enters our protagonist for the first half of the movie, Lucius Hunt, played by Joaquin Phoenix. Am I the only one freaked out that Phoenix also played Commodus in Gladiator, who had a nephew named Lucius? Anyway...Phoenix's character is a staid sort who barely talks at all and he plays him with restraint.

The patriarch of the town is Ivy's father, Edward Walker (William Hurt). He is most noteworthy for being the slowest talker of all. Indeed, this seems like the role Hurt was made for - his slow, methodical approach to everything is perfect for this movie. As opposed to say, Lost in Space.

In the background lurks...something. They are the others, the outsiders, literally big bad wolves in red hoods. Are they werewolves? Aliens? Actors who needed the money? I'm not telling, you'll have to see it for yourself. But what's certain is that they live beyond the borders of the village. To go outside in their territory is to provoke them to violence. All the villagers live in fear of them...everyone except Lucius and Noah. When they stray outside the boundaries of the town, the others start showing up in the town to spread signs that they are not happy.

The plot thickens when Ivy and Lucius decide to marry. Tempers flare, someone gets hurt, and the movie finally shifts gears to be what we were hoping it to be: a scary mystery where half the fun is figuring out what's going on.

When Lucius gets hurt, Ivy must journey into the beyond, violating all the rules she's been told about. And she must do it alone, a blind girl wandering through the woods. Forget the scary boogiemen, the poor girl could trip and spear herself in the eye by accident. That's scary enough.

The problem is that the journey is the real meat of the movie and it takes so long to get there. There is one particularly frightening moment in the film that far exceeds the twist (hint: it involves a knife). It's so sudden and so shocking that it certainly made the film worth seeing. Night knows how to shock and, by now, he knows it doesn't have to come in a surprise ending.

And yet, the surprise ending is there like a big, inevitable sign at the end of a long, circuitous road. If you play close enough attention, you'll start to see the signs clearly enough that give it away. I figured it about halfway through the film (another hint: my dad's an architect).

Having guessed the final twist, the rest is a long, drawn out denouement. Yes, this movie is a story about trying to run away from the evil inherent in all humanity. On some level, Night seems to say, you can take the man out of violence, but you can't take the violence out of man. Okay, fine. But must it take so long to get that point across? And must Night lie to make the twist more effective?

Good movie making means maintaining a willing suspension of disbelief. Fargo, and The Blair Witch project all provided us with info that wasn't accurate - and in both cases, the effect was chilling. Here, it feels like a cheap trick. When Night makes a cameo explaining all the other plot holes in his surprise ending, he starts to sound defensive.

This movie should have been a retelling of Little Red Riding Hood's journey. Instead, we get a Twilight Zone episode not worth seeing twice.

The Day After Tomorrow

The Day After Tomorrow is a disaster film, and I love disaster films, so it was inevitable that I would get to witness Roland Emmerich (infamous director of Independence Day and Godzilla) blow up the Earth again.

He does not disappoint.

Anyone who is a fan of these kinds of films knows the formula. Since there's no real villain to defeat, the heroes become heroes through their sheer will to survive. Thus, we have a paleoclimatologist (professor Jack Hall, played by Dennis Quaid) waging a one-man political war to convince the U.S. government that the world is going to have another ice age. Really soon.

The manifestation of said ice age takes a variety of forms, not the least of which include tidal waves, tornados, hurricanes, softball-sized hail, and killer cold snaps. The killer cold snaps are a new weapon in the terrors wrought by Mother Nature, freezing everything within its path as the temperature drops 100 degrees a second. Or something like that.

Our hero is not a particularly good father - he travels a lot, that's the nature of his job - so it is with particular angst that he discovers his son (Sam Hall, played by Jake Gyllenhal of Donnie Darko fame), is trapped in New York City with all that water and ice. Jack is uniquely equipped to cover frozen terrain because he recently took ice cores from the North Atlantic iceberg shelf. So he sets off to find his son along with his two bumbling but lovable buddies. It's all very American, a sort of road-trip meets disaster movie.

Fortunately, Emmerich has more in mind than just messing up the world, or the movie would be insufferably stupid. Emmerich's vice president seems awfully similar to Dick Cheney .The President even turns to the VP to ask, "What do you think we should do?" in a nod to Bush critics. Ultimately, the First World nations are forced to flee to Third World countries for refuge.

And why? Because we didn't listen to the warnings about global warming and helped kick off an ice age that essentially moves the polar ice caps to somewhere over the U.S. and China.

In New York City, survivors burn books in the public library to keep warm. One librarian, who doesn't believe in God, clings valiantly to the original Gutenberg bible -- a symbol of humanity's civilization in the hands of an atheist.

Democrats everywhere are cackling their heads off.

Wrapped in this allegory are of course the usual disaster elements and required plot devices. We have the unbelieving leader in control, the "will he make it" heart-stopping moment, the love interest, the noble self-sacrifice to save other lives, and more. Everything established in the Poseidon Adventure is here.

From a purely narrative perspective, the movie borders on the nonsensical. Emmerich knows this and eases us into the plot. First we're told an ice age won't happen for thousands of years. Then we're told it will happen in a few years. Then in months. Then in weeks.

Of course, the ice age is integral to the plot and thus can be forgiven. Less forgivable is the extremely fragile all-terrain vehicles that collapse into uselessness when they bump into something, or Jack happening to be present just as the ice shelf falls into the ocean, or the unbelievable (albeit dramatic) effects of the killer cold snaps, or an ocean liner floating through the watery streets of New York. And then there are the wolves.

My wife has a degree in environmental conservation and derived some smug satisfaction from The Day After Tomorrow until the wolves showed up. To elaborate: wolves escape from a local zoo in New York City. They just happen to end up on the aforementioned ocean liner, where our heroes are struggling to find food. Then the wolves act in decidedly cinematic fashion, attacking everyone in sight, even to run away from the food to chase Sam.

I've written a role-playing game book on arctic survival and I'm currently writing a book about werewolves, so I know what I'm talking about when I tell you that wolves would never act like this. It's a slap in the face to the environmentalists who were cheering throughout the movie. Bad Emmerich, bad!

The actors are noticeably visible beneath their cold weather clothing ("How can I emote if no one can see my face?!"). And that's probably a good thing, because there's not very much for any of them to do. The always-lovely Sela Ward plays Dr. Lucy Hall, Jack's wife, and there's a heart-wrenching scene where she must decide if she will stay behind to comfort a child who cannot be easily evacuated. That would be Disaster Flick Plot Device #5.

Gyllenhal carries much of the movie as an ingenious teenager, but he seems a little too old for the pretty young thing (a cute AND smart Emmy Rossum) he pursues. Jake is six years Emmy's elder and no amount of makeup can conceal the difference. Everyone else is a stereotype, although the clichés have evolved somewhat (we now get the "Erkel Guy").

The Day After Tomorrow is an amusing and sardonic attack on American conservative politics and First World excesses. As a cohesive tale of global warming, it is less successful. As a fun disaster flick, it's a serviceable entry in a long list of movies that are otherwise content to blow things up.

Donnie Darko

Donnie Darko is one of those movies you've always heard about but never saw. Here's why: Donnie Darko is about a young man in high school who sleepwalks at night, just in time to avoid a jet engine smashing through his bedroom.

Right around September 11, 2001.

So Donnie Darko, like the titular character of the same name, disappeared with nary a trace. Fortunately, we now have a DVD version and there will be a new theatrical re-release of a director's cut of the film in July, 2004. Perhaps Donnie will still get his day.

Donnie Darko is about the Darko family. They're an average family, with an older sister heading for college (Elizabeth, played by Jake's real life sister Maggie), a cute-as-a-button younger sister (Samantha, played by Daveigh Chase), a white-collar mom and dad (Mary McDonnell and Holmes Osborne), and then there's Donnie. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Donnie as an alternately awkward, exhausted, strung out teenager who exhibits brief flashes of rage at the inanity of modern life. Donnie also suffers from a troubled past, a past that requires him to see a therapist and take medication.

Donnie's life is a textbook troubled soul on the road to nowhere. We could easily see him committing suicide, getting involved in drugs, getting some girl pregnant, maybe joining a gang, or even shooting up his school. All's the pity, because Donnie is also extremely bright and has a piercing wit that embarrasses adults.

All that changes when Frank shows up. Who's Frank, you ask? Why, Frank's a deranged bunny rabbit.

That's a simplification, of course. To be precise, Frank is a deranged being in a bunny rabbit suit. The distinction matters.

In fact, in Donnie Darko, EVERYTHING matters. Every word, every nuance, like an Edgar Allen Poe poem, has significance and meaning. Ironically, the director and writer, Richard Kelly, feels the movie has only one interpretation as a science fiction story. In spite of himself, Kelly has created a movie that alternately weeps at the desperate loneliness of so many humans living next to each other and exults in the sheer joy of existence.

Frank whispers suggestions to Donnie, things that, at least on the surface, seem like very bad things to do. Donnie, in his sleepwalking, always performs these acts of vandalism. And each time, Frank tells Donnie how much he has left before the world ends. He starts the film with 28 days, 6 hours, 42 minutes, and 12 seconds. Screen shots remind us that the end of the world is coming in a manner similar to The Ring (which came out in 2002, one year after Donnie Darko).

Reality lurks in the background. No one can explain where the jet engine came from. Government agents shadow Donnie's every step. In the mean time, town life goes on: Samantha's dance group gets discovered by an agent, a self-help guru (played by Patrick Swayze) spreads his mind-numbing spiritual pap, a book gets banned by the conservative elements for fear that it influences students to commit vandalism, bullies make fun of kids, teenagers do drugs and fool around...in other words, it's a microcosm of Everytown, USA.

All around him, Donnie's life slowly falls apart even as it starts to make sense. Each person in his life is challenged by their mediocrity and must face whether to rise above or succumb to their fears. The movie emphasizes the madness of putting "Fear" and "Love as diametrically opposed elements, emphasizing that the world is never that simple and often involves a mixture of the two. It also struggles with the issue of God's existence, of personal choice vs. destiny, of life and death, of madness vs. sanity, and more.

Drew Barrymore stars as an English teacher who attempts to open the student's minds. She's also executive producer. Unfortunately, her character comes off as stilted and unbelievable. Noah Wyle makes an appearance that's appropriately low key.

Kelly's camerawork is exceptionally mature for a new director. He doesn't shy away from wide-angle scenes and takes on some breathtaking shots; the most memorable being one sweeping panoramic scene that manages to encompass all that is high school in the span of a few seconds.

At least as integral to the film is the 80s music that permeates it. This movie is a love letter to the misbegotten youth of year 2000 twenty-somethings. The music is always appropriate and conveys the slow tumble of Donnie's life very effectively. The song "Mad World" sums up the essence of the film and its fundamental disagreement with what passes for our own mundane reality.

Donnie Darko has a lot in common with movies like Groundhog Day and Fight Club. The themes of personal choice, of growing beyond one's own selfish nature, of facing down one's demons in a universe that doesn't exist make for though-provoking cinema in the tradition of the silver screen. We don't get many films like this anymore.

As the movie comes to a close, Donnie must make a choice. It's not the choice that really matters, but that he was comfortable with his decision in the end. Viewers who stick with the movie and pay close attention will not be disappointed.

Besides, Frank told you to see it.

Troy

My wife's a "fan" of Brad Pitt, so it only made sense that I would inevitably see Troy. She comes with me to see Kate Beckinsale fight vampires all the time, so I figure we're even.

It's easy to categorize Troy as a movie in the vein of the sweeping historical epics like Spartacus and The Ten Commandments. The musical score swells, lots of extras mill about, and the camera moves slowly over panoramic views. Only in the 21st century, the musical score still swells, digitized extras using the Massive engine (first invented for Lord of the Rings) makes the extras mill about, and the camera moves slowly over computer-generated panoramic views. For all intents and purposes, the effect is largely the same.

It's easier to categorize what Troy is not...

Troy is NOT Gladiator. Troy has far too many characters to focus exclusively on one man's revenge. Unfortunately, Troy tries to do just that in the character of Achilles (Brad Pitt). It doesn't work, if only because one has difficulty sympathizing with a killing machine. Even if that killing machine walks around half-naked displaying his tanned washboard abs. Lots of men could empathize with The Spaniard. There's very few folks to like in Troy.

Troy is NOT Helen of Troy. There were plenty of flaws with Helen of Troy, not the least of which being that if you're going to use the premise that Helen's really worth launching a thousand ships for, she better be incredibly hot. Helen of Troy's Helen simply didn't have that much allure. Fortunately, the Helen of this movie (Diane Kruger) is very attractive. On the other hand, her beauty is largely wasted because this is not about romance. Where the Iliad played up the star-crossed lovers angle, this movie makes it clear (over and over and OVER) that the war is actually about much less noble aims. In other words, Helen's just an excuse to start a war that would have happened anyway. Which is sort of like saying that Moses just sort of made up the Ten Commandments. I imagine Charlton Heston would have made a much less impressive movie as a result.

Troy is NOT Clash of the Titans. Every mythical or supernatural trace has been eradicated from the script. Achilles isn't invulnerable ("why else would I use a shield?"). You won't see a bearded Zeus arguing with...well, anybody.

Troy is a semi-realistic retelling of an event, with the presumption - one might say, arrogant assumption - that the Iliad is in fact an embellishment of the whole thing. In transforming it into a simple if somewhat overblown war story, it has parallels to Americas' conflict with Iraq. A powerful nation attacks a smaller country for construed reasons (Helen), only to find the protracted war to be more costly than expected. Indeed, there's even weapons of mass destruction - flaming balls of straw unleashed on slumbering Greeks.

Troy has its moments. Achilles is a true martial artist and his combat is breathtaking. Achilles himself is part of the scenery. Brad Pitt, at 40-years-old, looks like he was sculpted from marble. He FEELS like a hero of Greek myth. Eric Bana's furrowed brow lends a tinge of regret to Hector. And Orlando Bloom is suitably whiny and impetuous as Paris. Heck, even Sean Bean plays the role of Odysseus, lending his measured tones to a man who has seen so much that he has his own string of movies.

Troy's strength is also its weakness. The familiarity of the characters breeds contempt. When Paris picks up a bow and fires arrows at Achilles and the hero continues to stump forward as arrow after arrow thuds into his chest, I couldn't help but flash back to Legolas (Orlando Bloom) firing a bow and Boromir (Sean Bean) stumbling to orc archery. The Lord of the Rings trilogy has not even grown cold...either Troy has an eerily similar parallel or directors are already filming an homage to Peter Jackson.

And that's the problem. Troy feels like a movie made by movie stars about some stuff that happened in the past. Troy plays fast and loose with history and with the characters, but gives the actors plenty of time to enunciate and emote. It is truly an actor's movie. It also not a great movie, in the way Cleopatra isn't a great movie but people still watch it to see the stars.

For historical buffs, Troy is a revisionist travesty. For moviegoers looking for an action flick, Troy's not exciting enough to hold their interest. For fans of Greek mythology, Troy offers almost nothing at all. Troy wants to be something entirely different...but nobody ASKED for that kind of movie. It's almost as if the director felt the actual plot of the Iliad is too juvenile for modern audiences. Homer would disagree.

Collateral Damage

Someone decided that Arnie can't rely on his muscles alone (the man's pushing 50, for crying out loud) and made this movie. It is supposed to show off his acting skills. Arnie gets to cry, rage silently, bicker with sleazeballs, and Do the Right Thing (tm). All the while, he is a fireman out for revenge against a random terrorist act that obliterated his family.

Arnold's character is part McGuyver, part brawny fireman, part Punisher. He travels to Colombia on his own, surviving against all odds and his obviously foreign accent to...well to kill people. Only he learns that there are losses on both sides of any conflict. And he trades revenge in for the opportunity to save a little boy.

This movie stops just short of Arnie singing, "All we are saaaaying is give peace a chance" while holding two babies of different ethnicities in his arms. It's sappy, it's crappy, it's all over the mappy.

Okay, so I couldn't come up with an "appy" word. Point is, this is a mediocre film that would have been utterly ignored if it hadn't been for September 11. The director's commentary pumps up this movie to be of vital importance to American culture when in reality, it's a castoff of the cinema world.

In the end, Arnie takes on the bad guys with a fireman's axe. 'Cause he's a fireman. And stuff.

And oh yeah, there's a twist ending as to who the villain is. Yawn.

Ocean's Eleven

Ocean's Eleven is cool.

I don't mean in the "wow it's really great you should see it" cool. I mean -- it's cool. The movie is genuinely cool. Watching it, you are convinced you probably look cool. Walking around with the DVD, you can imagine it will help you pick up chicks (it won't). But still, you can hope that the coolness inherent in this movie to rub off on you. It's THAT cool.

And with good reason. George Clooney. Brad Pitt. Bernie Mac. Matt Damon. Julia Roberts. That's a lot of slick actors in one package.

Clooney plays Danny Ocean, a recently divorced, recently released from prison con man. His ex-wife, who he is still very much in love with, has shacked up with a real creep -- an arrogant man who puts money before everything else. Danny sets out to get back at him in a rather extravagant way. He gets ten of his old buddies together and they take on the most outrageous heist in history.

The plot is about taking down not one, not two, but THREE casinos at the same time. It's full of manly, geeky fun. The movie doesn't take itself too seriously (how could it?), but the cast is obviously having so much fun that you can't help but enjoy yourself. I never saw the original -- but if it had half the charm this movie does, it must have been cool indeed.

Carl Reiner is excellent as a grumpy old conman. Shaobo Qin players a convincing acrobat (who doesn't talk much). There's two brothers who bicker all the time and you can't tell if it's part of the con or not. In fact, the whole movie plays with the audience -- is it really a con? Because of its playful tone, you forgive it for fooling you more than once, sometimes with the same trick.

The one weak point is Don Cheadle. He's a black guy playing a black guy with a...bizarre (Australian? Cockney?) accent. It sounds like me doing an accent. And I sound fake when I do it.

There are a few other moments that dim the glow of this movie -- Maleficent pointed out that Julia Roberts can't walk like a lady and apparently either no one's telling her or she just doesn't care. She stumps around onscreen like Lenny from the Grapes of Wrath. It's embarrassing. The director tries to compensate, but fails -- in one scene, she's supposed to be sashaying across the screen, but instead ends up gallumphing by instead. For such a pretty lady that's supposed to be a real class act, it shatters the illusion.

But that's me being nitpicky. This movie is excellent. For any guy who has ever wanted to be cool...or in this day and age, isn't sure what cool is in anymore...this movie will help guide the way.

The Sum of All Fears

The Sum of All Fears is a much more disturbing picture than it might have been before September 11, but that just adds to the drama. I'm not a big Ben Affleck fan. And yet, I liked this movie -- there's a strong supporting cast (Morgan Freeman and James Cromwell, specifically) that makes me forgive Ben's blandness.

And of course, he's playing Jack Ryan, following in the footsteps of Harrison Ford and Alec Baldwin. It's fun to watch Jack develop. His inexperience here is refreshing, as he once again is put into combat situations he should never be in.

On the other hand, the movie wusses out. The bad guys are a coalition of Neo-nazis and other random weird, mean European guys. It just seems fabricated, which is odd when every other aspect of the movie strives to be so accurately detailed. I mean, it's like they gave us the Legion of Doom as a set of villains (psst, that's the worst fear -- the sum of all our little fears put together, get it?).

The plan is to force America and Russia into a war of escalation, by setting off strikes that appear to be initiated by the other side. We know now that, even after September 11 with a Republican President who uses words like "Dead or Alive" and "crusade" -- even HE didn't start lobbing nuclear missiles or even ordering strikes on other countries. Still, this is supposed to be a different time (precisely what time, we're not sure, but maybe it's the 1980s) and political tempers flare more easily.

Then there's the strange jiggery-pokery played with Ryan's background. If you watch the "making of" on the DVD, the director uses the words "franchise" and "reinvigorate" and...hyuk...hyuk...BLEEEEEARGH!

Sorry, I just threw up all over those terms. Obviously, continuity is sacrificed so that they can make more money off of Jack Ryan. He's in good company -- I mean, look what they did with Batman. Oh wait...

I do respect the decision not to show the nuclear explosion. The director manages to really keep the tension high. And the budding relationship between Jack and his future wife is believable. When characters die, we feel bad for them. All of that makes it a really good movie. Not the best of its kind, but really good.

The Gift

Sam Raimi takes a detour from his blood and guts horror fare (that's Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness to you Mundanes) to create this spooky picture about a woman with the, well...the gift to perform tarot readings for the local townsfolk. The movie is most specifically about the deep south and its inhabitants. This movie taught me that apparently everyone living in the south is some kind of freakish, backward, ill-educated slob. Such a sad sack cast of characters provides plenty for Kate Blanchett's character to do as a result. Mostly, she acts as a psychiatrist.

More irritating is the use of completely non-Tarot-like reading. In a movie where Kate's character is perpetually harassed for her "Satanic" rituals of Tarot-reading, it's bizarre that an actual Tarot isn't used. Instead, we get the dumbed down version: symbols that represent the four elements, a star, a square, etc. The symbols are used to good effect -- when she reads the future of a murder victim, she draws four "water" cards. But really, couldn't they have used real Tarot cards? I expect a wee bit more daring from a guy who filmed an eyeball popping into a woman's mouth.

But I digress. The two outstanding actors in this film are Keanu Reeves and Giovanni Ribisi. That's right, you saw me type that correctly -- Keanu Reeves. Keanu has a typically vapid look about him that makes him a canvas for more complex stories. I call it the Kevin Costner effect. This is why he works so well in the Matrix -- he's bland enough to allow the ridiculously complex back story of the Matrix to swirl around him. But what's most startling is to see that vacuous stare used to startling effect in The Gift. Add a few pounds, give Keanu a shaggy beard, and his soft brown eyes become the cold glaze of a killer. Or at least, a wife beater. He pulls it off with terrifying menace. It made me want to rent The Watcher just to see if this was a fluke or due to Sam's influence.

Giovanni, of course, plays a psychotic. Gee, who would have thought, Giovanni playing a weird creepy guy! Still, he's like the Jack Nicholson of our era, because he does it SO WELL.

Ultimately, the movie was predictable. Maleficent and I tracked every single surprise, the twist ending, everything -- we mapped this puppy out in perfect detail and were never wrong once. Does this make it a bad movie? Not at all. Does it make it a great movie? Alas, not. Sam can do better. But we still love ya Sam.

One Hour Photo

Robin Williams as a bad guy? Must be a joke, right?

No joke. Ever since I saw Robin play the angry dad, if only for a few seconds, at the end of Mrs. Doubtfire, I realized that he would make a really scary villain. And honestly, he's not even a villain in One Hour Photo (although the director really wants you to think just that). He's more of an anti-hero.

Williams' strength is that he's playing against type. We know he's a nut -- in a good way -- and expect him to burst out into show tunes at any moment. This just makes the bubbling cauldron of his emotions that much more compelling.

And oh yea, Williams supposedly played Dungeons & Dragons once or twice. Which makes me like him even more.

One Hour Photo's plot is simple: a photo clerk (Sy Parrish, played by Williams) at the local Wal-mart (er, Sav-Mart) sees things. Lots of things. Things he isn't always meant to see. He becomes obsessed with a family and has pictures of them all over his wall. It could happen to anyone -- it could be happening right now. Do you REALLY know what happens to your photos when you bring them in?

Things take a turn for the worse when Sy discovers, through his job, that not all is at it seems in said happy family. When he discovers infidelity -- that the image he clung to is in fact horribly tainted and all too real, he snaps. And as he snaps, we descend from the heavenly glow of the Sav-Mart's white lights to a dizzying kaleidoscope of hell.

The lensing is a primary character in this film: Greens, yellows, and reds (the color separation of photos, get it?) are all carefully lensed to give a surreal edge to Sye's rage, his madness, his sorrow. Colors are dissonant even though Sye himself is nearly invisible in his pastel clothes. His home is a stark, barren wasteland of color. The only thing that bothered me about the lensing is that the colors often seemed randomly placed -- something I have been trained by other directors to look for as a hint to further meaning in the movie (thanks to Spielberg and the red coat in Schindler's List and Shamalayan's red everything in Sixth Sense). But that's on purpose too, as there IS no meaning to Sye's world beyond the pictures he takes.

One Hour Photo is as much about the ideal American family that you see in department store catalogs as it is about Eleanor Rigbys of the world. For every American ideal, there is a flawed interior. For every pleasant, affable man, there is a demon waiting to be unleashed.

The ending is twisted and poignant, although some might feel it's a cop out. It explains Sye's history, why he so desperately needs a perfect family in his head, and why pictures hold so much affection for him. It also explains his subsequent violence and rage when said family cannot live up to his ideals. There's even a twist at the end -- something Maleficent picked up on but that I missed.

This is one of those movies that I didn't like nearly as much until thinking about it afterward. It's a classic depiction of suburban hell, an intellectual horror. It reminded me a lot of Session 9, only without the insane asylum.

See it, but don't expect a slasher flick (despite the trailers).

Identity

Ever see Memento?

Identity's like that. It takes place in another person's mind. It's disjointed. It tells the events out of order. The order of the movie's scenes gives insight into what's really happening. And of course, people die and nobody's sure who did it or how.

Identity is not quite as slick as Memento. It's choppy at parts, disjointed or just plain plays dirty pool in others.

10 strangers end up stranded in the rain at a creepy hotel. The laws of their world slowly unravel as they attempt to escape -- cell phones don't work, cars can't cross the flooded roads, and accidents happen that keep them from escaping the area and each other.

There's a lot of interesting characters. There's the cop and the serial killer con he's escorting to an execution. There's the limo driver who was once a cop. There's the hooker with a heart of gold. The couple who just got married because the girl's pregnant. The average family, complete with silent little boy and weird stepdad. The bitchy washed-up actress. And of course, the freaky hotel owner.

Everyone in the movie has a secret. The secrets unravel as things go from bad to worse and each person gets bumped off. Some of the deaths are accidents, some are outright murders. All of them leave the corpse with a hotel key, in the order of each person killed. Things get REALLY weird when the hotel keys starting showing up on corpses that died by accident.

If you haven't figured it out yet, the rest of this review contains a spoiler. It's the only way I can talk about the film with any candor. So kiddies who don't want the ending spoiled for them, leave the room.

Identity takes place in Malcolm Rivers' head. He has 10 personalities in there banging around and Malcolm is about to be executed for murder. Malcolm murdered a bunch of people at a hotel (six victims, I believe), stabbing them to death. But his psychiatrist submits that Malcolm is legally insane and that a new drug treatment will force the personalities to eliminate each other.

The premise of Identity is great. I also figured it out five minutes into the film. If you pay attention, the pictures in the first few minutes of the film -- along with certain phrases said by the patient -- are repeated by characters within the movie. In that respect, Identity is internally consistent. If you know that (and when I was watching this with my brother, he didn't catch it), the rest of the movie falls into place pretty quickly.

I couldn't help but feel the cut scenes involving the psychiatrist broke up the flow. I wanted a real mystery that strung me along and it felt like Identity thought I was too stupid to keep up.

And yet, Identity is definitely an expertly crafted work. There's even a surprise twist -- the dominant personality isn't who you think it is (SURPRISE!) but what's irritating is that while every other twist and turn can be figured out, the final twist simply can't be predicted.

In essence, the movie is internally consistent until it isn't, and I felt a bit betrayed by the way it ended.

On the other hand, the ending is delicious. It's grimly cynical but perfectly poised, a tribute to everything Hitchcockian and "Ten Little Indians" (which the film directly references). Identity loses points for not being perfectly consistent, but it's still a damn fine movie.

Oh yeah. John Cusack kicks ass in anything with him in it. That boosts a movie normally that would get a 4 from me to a 5.

Sorcerer

Sorcerer showed up in the mail via NetFlix and for the life of me I couldn't remember why I ordered it. One theory is that I thought it was a fantasy flick. The title has little to do with the movie itself and it's certainly not about fantasy sorcerers casting spells. Another possibility, and more likely, is that I was writing a review of Vertical Limit and someone mentioned that Sorcerer did it first.

It doesn't matter, I watched the movie anyway. And what I saw was alternately painful and enthralling.

Sorcerer is about four men down on their luck. Actually, that's an understatement. They're not just down on their luck; they're at the very rock bottom of their lives. They are each one step away from complete oblivion, be it at an assassin's hand or their own.

The movie starts out with little apology tracking these four independent threads. The first half hour of the film makes no sense because we don't know what we're seeing: one Frenchman businessman is ruined and flees the country; a New York wheelman crosses the wrong gang; a Middle Eastern terrorist bombs a dwelling; one is an assassin. They are all on the run from their respective countries.

They all end up in Vera Cruz, in South America, a stinking fissure in the earth. Naked children and dogs wander the streets. Everything is encrusted in dirt and the slime of sweat, rain, mud, and oil. The only place a man can find work is at the oil company upon which Vera Cruz depends for its survival.

An explosion sabotages the well. The oil burns and will burn forever unless it is covered - and that requires explosives. Of course, in the South American jungles the nearest cache of nitroglycerin has been festering for years and become highly unstable. It can't be lifted by helicopter, so trucks must carry it. One strong bump and the nitroglycerin explodes.

Finally, the movie gets interesting. We have four unlikable characters forced to work together. They must battle the elements, bandits, and human stupidity to ensure their cargo and their lives make it to the oil well intact.

If you recall Vertical Limit, the concepts were the same: different groups armed with nitroglycerin must brave nature and the elements for some noble cause. While not as gut wrenching as Vertical Limit, Sorcerer manages to inject pathos into the characters. They weep, they take desperate measures, and they become more noble as they rise to each crushing challenge.

Ultimately, all of them came to Vera Cruz to flee something else. Now that they have come to Hell, like Orpheus and Dante they must descend to its bowels to escape it. The journey with the nitroglycerin is their purgatory.

It's no surprise that few of the characters survive, but the movie goes one step further. The sole survivor finds solace in the dirt and horror of the town itself. In short, his journey to get enough money to escape was about selfish ends until he realizes that his struggles had purpose - he saved the town's fate, at least for a little while. His own life is precious. And so, he uses his last moments before leaving to dance with a haggard woman rather than make his escape. His redemption will not be satisfied with anything but his death.

And the name of the movie? Sorcerer is the name of the truck.

K-19: The Widowmaker

I became a fan of the "sub" genre after seeing movies like U-571 and The Hunt for Red October. While U-571 was sort of a pastiche of all the other submarine films that went before it, it made me an immediate fan. It also made me realize just how contrived spaceship movies are.

Unlike the other films, K-19 - The Widowmaker is about a real incident (like the supposed Red October incident) in which a Russian nuclear submarine's reactor nearly had a catastrophic meltdown just off the eastern coast of the United States in the 1960s. Scary stuff.

As a result of this gritty reality, K-19 is powerful in a way that Titanic was powerful. It doesn't matter if the movie isn't quite realistic - the events are so horrible that tension is rife throughout the film. Or at least, it should be.

K-19's initial launch is a debacle. In short, the submarine never has a chance to be successful - the men are inexperienced and costs are cut, such that K-19's crew is lucky that it even works at all. Add in the ship's doctor getting run over by a truck, the failure of the christening bottle to break against the sub's hull, and the firing of the chief engineer and it's hard to disagree with the notion that the ship is cursed.

The new captain aboard Alexei Vostrikov, played by Harrison Ford, pushes the sub to its limits. The tension rises as he forces the crew to do random drills, forces it to dive to near crushing depths, and rise right through the arctic ice. This by far is the most exciting part of the film - there is no enemy except Vostrikov, and it's nail biting after witnessing the poor construction of K-19. Ultimately, K-19 fires its test missile, signaling a message to America that the Russians could launch a nuclear strike if they wished.

Then the sub is pushed to its limits once again, beyond what even Alexei could have feared. They are to patrol the eastern seaboard, right near a NATO base. The ship's original captain, Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson) disagrees. Indeed, he disagrees with everything Vostrikov does because he puts the men at risk. I couldn't help but feel contempt for Polenin, who seems so attached to his crew that he no longer has the stomach for war. I'm not sure if that was the director's intent.

Unfortunately, the second half of the film drags. The ship's engines begin to overheat and the inexperienced chief engineer concocts a plan to pipe coolant into the system from the ship's freshwater tanks. Failure means a nuclear explosion "a hundred times worse than Hiroshima."

And so we have a long, slow, miserable, sometimes disgusting foray into the effects of radiation poisoning on the human body. The men who go in have naught but chemical suits rather than radiation suits to protect them. That is, they have no protection at all. So they are exposed for 10 minutes a time in an attempt to minimize the radiation poisoning.

Not only doesn't that tactic works, the radiation leak spreads throughout the submarine. Alexei's choice: accept help from the Americans and save the men or sacrifice his crew to retain Soviet secrets. This decision takes a loooong time to resolve. The movie loses a lot of its momentum, almost becoming a different film that's a lot more like The Andromeda Strain.

What was most striking about this part of the film was how it's been cribbed in other genres. I couldn't help but be reminded of Wrath of Khan, my favorite Star Trek film. Similar to K-19, an officer takes it upon himself to enter the highly lethal radiation chamber in order to "sacrifice the few to save the many." It's chilling to imagine that real human beings had to make that choice. It certainly changed my perspective on Wrath of Khan. I'm not sure if that's a good or bad thing.

Ultimately, the Russians on board were treated like traitors instead of war heroes. The men weren't fighting any enemy but the politics of Russia itself, and as such they could never leave the disaster of K-19 as heroes. The movie wraps up with what happened to them afterwards, after the fall of the U.S.S.R. At least 27 of the crew died from radiation poisoning.

K-19 is a depressing movie that is torn between being an action submarine flick like U-571 or a disease epidemic battle for survival like Andromeda Strain. It's not as good as either film, but the fact that it's based on real-life events leaves a chilling reminder that sometimes reality is far worse than anything Hollywood can dream up.

Murder By Numbers

Murder by Numbers is a neat concept. What if people who know all about murders decide to commit a murder? Pretty cool, huh?

And what if they were high school students?

Alright, that seems strange. It actually makes it creepier -- the high school students are definitely Columbine types, the kind who have somehow strayed so far from society (and yet right under our noses) that they are no longer capable of empathy. In the case of Murder by Numbers, the two main characters -- in a relationship with mildly homosexual undertones -- decide to prove they are truly free by intentionally committing murder.

It sounds better in the movie than in print.

The woman assigned to this case is Cassie Mayweather, played by Sandra Bullock. Let me state my bias up front: I really like Sandra Bullock. Her button-nosed cuteness allows me to forgive her when she makes crappy movies like Miss Congeniality. She had me at The Net.

But you've got to be realistic even about the actors you like. And Sandra's just out of her league here.

Like Jet Li in The One, this is a complex plot that requires a range of acting abilities that Sandra simply doesn't possess. She's supposed to be a woman with a dark past, a near-death murder victim, a survivor of physical abuse, a licentious woman who sleeps with her partners at a whim. This is not Sandra. And usually, Sandra plays movies around her own carefully cultivated movie personality.

In short, this movie requires actual acting.

She can't do it. Not for lack of trying. But Sandra comes off as cutesy flirtatious when she's supposed to be a maneater. She comes off as an agitated socialite with a headache rather than a down and dirty cop who was nearly stabbed to death. She's much more victim than survivor.

And of course, what Sandra does best is play the victim. She survives, but she's not a SURVIVOR.

The ending has a twist. It's not a great twist. The movie is creepy, but not fast enough to pull it off. The actors who play the high school students are disturbing, but they are not so competent to make it genuinely horrifying.

Slow. Plodding. Not genuinely real enough characters to make us worry about them or believe their plight. A workman-like effort, but not Sandra's best work.

8 Mile

Okay, so like, Eminem is a poor white rapper on the wrong side of town in Detroit. The roads are numbered, and 8 mile is the bad area where the prostitutes are. I know this, because Maleficent lived near (but not in 8 mile, heavens no!) there.

Apparently, there's a whole rap culture going on. Eminem, playing a guy named Rabbit, finally starts to realize that the world he lives in sucks. Actually, he's always known that, but he was embarassed about it. The movie is about him coming to terms with who he is and where he comes from.

And that's about it. For the most part, 8 Mile is a very clean movie. It has all the same plot of a Rocky movie -- poor guy competes against big winner against all odds. Big bad winner has an outside-of-the-competition conflict with underdog/protagonist. There's a girl from whom the protagonist draws his strength. And he has friends who are faithful to him to the end.

There's some important differences. In this movie, the girl is actually sleeping her way to the top. But the movie recognizes that her way is just as valid as anyone else's to get out of the hell hole they live in.

Additionally, the whole final contest -- a freestyle showdown involving rap -- is basically meaningless. Winning isn't about the admiration of people who could give a crap if Rabbit lives or dies. It's about him finally putting his demons to rest by admitting he's white trash. Rabbit draws upon the raw ugliness of his background to pull himself up by his bootstraps -- not his girlfriend, not his family, and not his friends.

And for that, you can respect Rabbit. At the end of the movie, he doesn't go on to become a rapping champion or getting that sweet record deal. He goes back to work.

Formulaic? Yes. Is Eminem a great actor? Hardly. But the movie doesn't try to be more than it is, and for that it earns my respect.

The only thing that seriously mars it is Eminem's "I'm friends to all the gays" rap. His gay pal covers for him at work and Rabbit defends him with his rap.

If you've forgotten, Eminem was seriously slammed for his homophobic lyrics. Eminiem seems to be trying to say that's part of his language. In other words, it's not that HE'S homophobic, it's just part of his speech. Which is complete and utter crap. Reality is, the culture he comes from is homophobic, and that's just the way it is. Ironically, in trying to pretend he recognizes his roots, Eminem rejected the ugly parts.

Please -- those moments in the film reminded me that this is a movie whose sole purpose is to perpetuate the myth and legend of Eminem. A black mark on an otherwise servicable film.

Mercury Rising

There was an article about a script writer's journey in getting his picture made. I sympathize with the guy. He was down on his luck, his rent was three months overdue, and his wife was getting seriously pissed off.

The plot of his script was simple. It was about an autistic boy named Simon who can read the secret codes embedded in crossword puzzles. In other words, he took a common urban myth and wrote a script about it. Not original, but certainly compelling. Add Bruce Willis to the mix and you have a big budget movie.

Then one day, his agent called. He was nervous. A major studio was offering a six figure number for the movie. When other movie studios heard about it, a war of escalation ensued. Soon, they were trying to outbid each other. The price kept climbing and climbing and climbing.

Finally, the agent had enough. The script was sold. Presumably, the scriptwriter got to stay married and pay off his rent. And, I hope, socked the money away into savings. Because this movie sucks.

The movie went through several title changes, a sure sign that there's a problem. It was originally supposed to be Simon Says, but the execs changed it because nobody knew what that meant. So they changed it to Mercury Rising instead. As Dr. Evil would say, "Riiiight."

There's a few problems. One of them is translating onto screen the depiction of code. Apparently, the movie decides code decryption sounds like a high-pitched whining sound. Perhaps it's an accurate parallel, but it's not fun to listen to.

Simon's autism is depicted a little too accurately. His parents are killed early on, so Simon's on his own and fairly incapable of doing much besides wailing his head off when touched. This is very accurate. This does not make for a pleasant movie.

Willis' character is the usual -- haggard, determined, violent. He isn't much more than that. He gets tangled up in the plot (FBI vs. "Government Bad Guys") and calls in favors.

The bad guys show a distinct lack of common sense. It's so blithly nonsensical that it's not even worth the energy to describe the inconsistencies. Suffice it to say, the bad guys show a boogeyman-like ability to pop up anywhere when convenient, and a surprising inability to do it when it might impair the protagonist.

What bugged me most is that ultimately, this movie could have been about ANYBODY who happened to know Something Secret (TM). It wasn't about the boy's ability to crack code, it was about Bruce Willis' character protecting an innocent. Like in Eraser. Like in Enemy of the State. Like in a dozen other movies. Only in Enemy of the State, the main character's skills actually were USEFUL in the plot. Simon never gets to exercise his code-cracking abilities more than once (to meet one of the soon-to-be-dead informants).

Even in portraying an autistic person, Rain Man and Cube still managed to make the character worth liking instead of utterly pathetic.

The other problem is that the villain's execuse is -- *GASP! -- being a patriot to protect undercover agents in Iraq. Well, that dates the movie just a little bit. Not their fault, necessarily, but certainly the movie loses its sting. In addition, the whole concept of "sacrificing one for the good of all" is a little more strict these days. Ask an American if an autistic boy's life should be spared to save thousands of agents attempting to stop terrorism and more than half will doom the boy.

I can understand why the studio execs bid on the idea. It was a great concept but utterly defanged of any real meaning, failing to utilize its characters, its high-minded ideals, or even its action scenes in a way that makes us care about anybody in the movie. Yes, even an autistic little boy.

3000 Miles to Graceland

3000 Miles to Graceland was advertised as a very different movie. I have to say, if I could just watch movies made by the guys who put together previews, I'd be a lot happier.

The preview emphasized the whole Elvis angle. To wit: a bunch of crooks decide to rob a Vega casino dressed as Elvises (Elvi?). Kevin Costner plays Thomas Murphy, the bastard child of Elvis. Actually, there's possibly two bastard children of Elvis in this movie. Ya see, there were 35 claimants stating that Elvis was their pop, but 33 of those DNA tests proved false. So who is the other Elvis-spawn? We're never told.

Anyway, that's all besides the point. That whole Elvis thing? That's not what the movie's about.

In fact, at first I thought the movie was about giant robot mecha. It starts with two computer generated robot-like scorpions battling each other to the death. Only they have big, grinning maws for faces. The black scorpion fights the silver scorpion. One of them is probably supposed to be the good guy. It doesn't matter, the movie seems to say, because they're both mean scorpions and you shouldn't be rooting for either one.

The first half hour of the movie is the aforementioned heist of the casino by the Elvis gang. The potential for entertainment is ruined by weird, stuttery camera shots and a total lack of rhythm. Interspersed between images of Elvis-impersonators firing machineguns are Broadway shows of elvis. But none of it gels quite right.

When we're not seeing Elvis with a gun, which apparently the director thinks is absolutely hysterical since he shows these shots over and over, we're seeing women do naughty sexual acts. Courtney Cox, in the first role as a sexual plaything that I can recall, acts as...well, a sexual plaything (unless you count Ace Ventura too). She also has a thieving little son named Jesse James. He likes to pick pockets and pretend he's a cowboy. There's a lot of Courtney moving up and down in the vicinity of a bed. If you like Ms. Cox, then this is as good as the movie gets.

There's definitely a misogynistic streak running through the film. It's most obvious when a random redhead shows up for no other reason than to provide fellatio for the bad guy - that's Murphy.

I'm no fan of Kevin Costner, but he does play a mad-dog-mean bad guy. The protagonist, if you can call him that, is Kurt Russell as Michael Zane. Russel kicks ass, even in this role. But he can't save this movie. In some twisted, good-vs-evil battle, the two characters go head to head again and again in car crashes, gunfights, and battles of wit. Okay, battles of potty-mouthed swearing.

I expected this movie to be witty, funny, cool in a fashion very similar to Ocean's Eleven. But this movie is like the anti-Ocean's Eleven. It sucks the cool out of other movies playing nearby. It features lots of foul language, the complete desecration of all things Elvis, Courtney Cox's ass, Christian Slater AND David Arquette, child abuse, and women as sex toys. It's a bitter, nasty, dirty film that has little redeeming value.

Big Fish

I'm a big fan of Tim Burton, so I walked into Big Fish with some trepidation. I was aware that this was Tim's big break - a genre movie that wasn't quite so "genre," just like Sam Raimi directing Spider-man. Would he be able to pull off something that's not quite so dark and wonderful but still retain that magical quality that makes Tim's movies so much fun?

Yes!

This is not to say that Big Fish is a happy-go-lucky film. The plot revolves around Will Bloom, a journalist, and his tenuous relationship with his tall-tale-telling father, Edward Bloom. You see, Edward doesn't just make up stories -- he transforms them into Homeric proportions as he spins each tale for his audiences. What Will found to be a wonderful trait as a boy turned to cynicism and frustration as a man. It's like finding out Santa Claus isn't really but still seeing him every day. What do you say to the man?

Nothing, in Will's case. He had long since stopped talking to his father. But then Edward falls ill and Will is called back home. Thus begins a journey through Edward's life, as told by Edward himself and played out for audience as if it were real.

What's compelling about Big Fish is that the events are played with enough seriousness to take them as truth. Yes, there's a witch with a glass eye, a goat-eating giant, the conjoined singing twins Ping and Jin, and a ghostly town named Spectre. But they are all presented with careful maturity. When one of Ed's young friends looks into the witch's eye, he sees his own death on a toilet bowl as a middle-aged man. You half expect his head to explode or something.

That theme, that Ed knows when he's going to die, is an undercurrent throughout the entire film because it crosses the line between fantasy and reality. If Ed's tales are actually false, if they're complete fabrications, why does a man on his deathbed believe in them so strongly? Is it just desperation? Or are they real, in some way?

The answer is both. Ultimately, Will keeps looking for answers that cannot be found - he wants to know his "real father," but in reality he can't accept who his real father is. It is Will who is the fabrication - he has constructed a form of "normalcy" that doesn't exist and that he judges his father by. In the end, it's not about the veracity of anyone's story...it's about listening. All Will ever wanted to do is have his father listen to him.

And at the end of the film and Edward's life, he finally does. This is an exceptional piece and one Tim should be proud of that still manages to stay true to his fantasy roots and yet takes a serious look at very real issues of death, immortality, and a father and son's affection.

Hidalgo

You already know the story of Hidalgo if you've watched Seabiscuit. In that movie, the jockey keeps referencing a tall tale of how he "raced in Arabia." Well, Hidalgo is that story.

Unfortunately, people have come to expect that any film about a horse is a kid-friendly film. One false assumption and a few severed heads later, it was obvious that Hidalgo is not for children.

Here's one of the many things that kept me from enjoying this movie fully: there are lots of subtitles.

This, in and of itself, is not a problem, as I'm a fast reader. But a child under 13 years of age can't read that fast.

Viggo Mortensen, reprising his rough and tumble role as Aragorn, is Frank T. Hopkins. He's a half-Native American, half-white cowboy who has seen better days. He and his horse (Hidalgo) perform in Buffalo Bill's Wild West Show. I was tickled to see this connection, as Wild Bill figures prominently in the Devil in the White City (see my review). It's the end of an era - Indians are being shuttled off to reservations, whites are taking over, and the open prairies are no longer free lands where horses and cowboys can roam. Frank drowns his sorrow in alcohol, sorrow made all the worse by his witnessing the massacre of Indians at Wounded Knee.

Haunted by his heritage and feeling like a traitor to his people, Frank sees the "Ocean of Fire" race as a chance to find himself in a new, unforgiving land. It is journey Frank must make to find his inner Indian, because there are no longer any wild lands to test him.

And off he goes. The tale is wild and wooly and full of adventure. There's an excellent supporting cast, including Omar Sharif in his best role ever as a "Sheik of Sheiks." There's also a host of competitors, rival horsemen, and plenty of horses.

In a lot of ways, this movie has much in common with The Last Samurai (see my review). It's a white man (okay, half-white) co-opting the experience of another land for his own. In that regard, Hidalgo steals both the Arabian experience and the Native American experience. When John has a vision of his ancestors and begins chanting in his native tongue, I couldn't help but wonder if there were any Native Americans who felt slighted.

Hidalgo is a fun movie, but it's also a bit jumbled. Viggo is soft-spoken, a trait that made him unobtrusive as the unknown king in Lord of the Rings. Here, he's practically unintelligible. The plot also wanders - sometimes John is out to win the race, sometimes he's on a rescue mission, sometimes he's wandering around lost.

Hidalgo's a good old fashioned pulp yarn, complete with fist fights, sword fights, gun fights, killer leopards, Arabians, cowboys, slavery, American Indians, and princesses. If you like your horses fast, your men tough, and your landscapes harsh, then Hidalgo will be a real treat.

But for the love of God, don't bring a child under 13. Thank you.

Napoleon Dynamite

I didn't really want to see Napoleon Dynamite, but had that sick curiosity reserved for rubbernecking on the freeway and reality television. Then a friend let us borrow the DVD.

Napoleon Dynamite is about, well, Napoleon Dynamite (Jon Heder), a tall, frizzy-haired, spectacled geek of enormous proportions. Napoleon is a new breed of nerd: The Angry Nerd. Because he's not short, Napoleon is a little too powerful to routinely pick on. Instead, he's randomly slammed into lockers or mocked in gym. But Napoleon never curls up into a ball and weeps. He tells people "SHUT UP! GOSH!" or "Freakin idiot!" through half-closed lids. Everyone knows the Angry Nerd...he's voted Most Likely to Be a Serial Killer by his graduating class.

To be fair, Napoleon never had a chance. We're never told where his parents are, but he lives with his ATV-riding grandmother (Sandy Martin) and his painfully awkward older brother Kip (Aaron Ruell). Kip has a long distance relationship over the Internet with a woman known only as LaFawnduh (Shondrella Avery). Adding insult to injury, they own a pet llama named Tina and Napoleon has to take the bus to school with elementary kids.

And oh yeah, his first name is Napoleon and his last name is Dynamite.

Napoleon is also a gamer. I submit the following evidence:

Napoleon draws a manticore that he refers to as a liger. "It's pretty much my favorite animal," says Napoleon. "It's like a lion and a tiger mixed... bred for its skills in magic." When faced with a job putting chickens in cages, he asks, "Do the chickens have large talons?"

Yep, that's a guy who plays Dungeons & Dragons all right.

Or he would, if he had any friends. Napoleon eventually makes one friend, Pedro (Efren Ramirez), who is also ostracized at school because he's from Mexico. The so-white-its-bright faculty and students constantly look down Pedro upon. But Pedro is confident in his own subtle way. He asks girls out by baking them cakes and most importantly, he plans to run for school president.

Napoleon is not so lucky. He openly admits he has no skills (if this were a more up-to-date movie, Napoleon would say he has no "Mad Skillz"). Well, he has the ability to draw. Unfortunately, he only THINKS he can draw. His drawing sucks too.

So Napoleon lies. He lies about hunting wolverines, about his amazing martial arts prowess, about his non-existent girlfriend, about pretty much everything. Since everything Napoleon says is utterly deadpan, there's no easy way to tell if he's lying.

When Napoleon's grandmother has an ATV accident, his Uncle Rico (Jon Gries) comes to live with them. There's a subtle irony here: Rico is a failed football star that is perpetually stuck in the 80s. He is the ghost of the future, a vicious attack on all those high school jocks who would have gone pro if they hadn't messed up that knee. Rico's entire life is driven by one goal: to travel backwards in time. Once he discovers an expensive time travel kit on the Internet that will transport him backwards, he enlists Kip to join his get-rich-quick schemes. First it's Tupperware, then it's...breast enhancement products.

Yeah, Napoleon never had a chance.

In the middle of this insanity, Napoleon bumps into Deb (Tina Majorino), dressed in full 80s attire and trying to sell her friendship bracelets so someone (her? Her mom?) can go to college. It doesn't go well at first, but it's clear the two are destined for each other.

Eventually, Kip meets LaFawnduh, a luscious African-American woman from Detroit. Her arrival transforms Kip and the entire movie from then on, signaling a change from the 80s death by stagnation to an updated, hipper universe. No literal time travel happens, but suddenly the movie shifts gears and its 2004 again. And finally, all the characters begin some real emotional growth.

Much of the movie's humor centers on the sympathy or disdain we have for characters like Napoleon. A lot of the jokes are around mid-Western foils: the white town's reaction to an ethnic student, heavy usage of the word "sweet," and farmers shooting cows (in front of a busload of schoolchildren no less). Not everyone will get the jokes.

Perhaps more intriguing is the parallels between this film and Donnie Darko. Both films have superhero-esque names, both take place in primarily white high schools, both feature racism against a different ethnicity, both have adults teaching kids confidence building skills, both have a serious 80s fetish, and finally both feature an obsession with time travel. It's likely more people haven't made the connection between the two movies because few audiences have watched both.

Unlike Donnie Darko, the broad parodies of white Midwesterners are smeared with racist undertones. The two ethnic characters play to the most awful racial stereotypes: Pedro has a big family, scary relatives in pimped up cars, and is Catholic while LaFawnduh has long painted nails, lots of gold jewelry, and comes from Detroit.

Throughout the film, the director (Jared Hess), makes liberal use of the buzzing sound of a fly. It's a reminder that whenever we're laughing at Napoleon, we're the big jerks. Which really argues the point that perhaps this movie isn't supposed to be a comedy after all.

Ultimately, Napoleon Dynamite posits the question: what good ARE people like Napoleon? He's angry, rude, insensitive, socially inept, and seems to be in a perpetual daze most of the time. What ARE Napoleon's skills?

We get the answer in a climactic frenzy of events that culminate in the class election. Pedro promises in his speech that he will make "all your dreams come true," and in a sense, the film's conclusion is precisely that.

Sweet!

Sideways

I heard so much about Sideways that I had a completely twisted view as to what it was supposed to be about. I knew it was funny, I knew it was about wine snobs, and I knew it had a lot of good acting-enough to merit an Oscar nod.

What nobody tells you is that Sideways is about a wine snob (Miles, played by Paul Giamatti) who's a neurotic eighth-grade English teacher trying to get his novel published. Or that it's not really about wine at all, but mostly about sex. Or that it's not even really about sex, but mostly about relationships, fidelity, life and death, success and failure, happiness and sorrow. In short, it's a romantic comedy dressed up as a road trip. Anyone who thinks the movie is an art film about guys discussing wine and standing around in sun-dappled fields of grape is in for a rude surprise.

In fact, come to think of it, there were a lot of grandmotherly types who looked utterly horrified after the movie ended. Read on if you want to understand whether or not this movie is for you.

Jack (Thomas Haden Church), Miles' college roommate, is going to get married. Miles plans to take Jack out for one week on a manly tour of the wineries of northern California with a little golf interspersed throughout. Jack has other plans.

Jack is a formerly famous actor from a soap who now only does voiceovers for commercials. Tanned and with an awful mop that looks like a hair transplant, Jack sees this trip as an opportunity to get laid. In essence, this is his last fling...the world's worst (or perhaps best, depending on your perspective) bachelor party.

Discussions of wine are mostly relegated to making Miles look like the awkward, mawkish nerd of the pair. Everyone knows somebody likes Miles. Dressed in rumpled sweaters, balding and with a slight lisp, Miles is everybody's English teacher and sad sack friend. Jack, on the other hand, is the frat buddy who refuses to let go of his college years.

It doesn't take long before Jack begins projecting his lifestyle onto Miles. Miles has been divorced and never quite recovered, so Jack sees it as his responsibility to also get Miles laid. This incidentally makes Jack feel better, as Miles is his only guilty conscience.

The object of Miles' affection is Maya (Virginia Madsen), a recently divorced waitress at a restaurant appropriately names The Hitching Post. Jack discovers a willing companion in another winery's hostess, Stephanie (Sandra Oh). This merry quartet ends up double dating with varying degrees of success.

We follow Miles' ups and downs as he worries about meeting a woman, grumbles about his own mealy mouthed presence, argues with Jack over his infidelity, and ultimately despairs over his writing career. At his lowest moment, Miles sneaks into his mother's house and steals money from her. There's not a lot to like about Miles.

And yet it would be hypocrisy to merely condemn him. In fact, what's exhilarating about Sideways is that the characters appears to be caricatures but are actually fleshed out personalities. The stereotypes that define the two characters slowly dissolve, even as they accuse each other of being a stereotype. Jack is clearly the dominant personality, but eventually he screws things up so badly that only Miles can save him. It's one of the funniest scenes in the movie. It also happens to involve male full frontal nudity. And it's more Al Bundy than Brad Pitt nudity.

AAAGH! I STILL can't get that out of my head! Now I must think of sandpaper to scrape that off my brain!

Anyway, the script is clever enough to allow the characters varying degrees of subtlety in their conversation, comparing their lives to wine. The beauty of the film is that it's not about wine--it could have been about coffee, really-but about how people view themselves and relate to each other. Maya and Miles' conversation about why they like wine is as much a dialogue about the grape as it is about their own relationships.

And that's the charm of Sideways. Faced with major life changes, Jack and Miles take that one week to utterly regress. Maybe they don't quite take a step back because they've stumbled backwards so far already, but they certainly move sideways: in their lives, in their careers, in their relationships. Ultimately, the movie ends on a high note, although perhaps bittersweet.

Any man who has struggled with marriage and adulthood will thoroughly enjoy this movie. Any author that battles to get his book published (guilty as charged!) will sympathize with Miles' struggle. And yes, wine aficionados will probably enjoy it too.