War of the Worlds

A lot of sci-fi flicks are over-the-top space operas that not even kids of moderate age take too seriously, but I have to warn parents, Stephen Spielberg's new War of the Worlds, based on the classic H.G. Wells tale, is not a good movie to bring small kids to. I'm not kidding when I tell you it's not just sci-fi, it's horror as well and at times it's pretty intensely horrific.

At the same time, it's a movie with a heart. It's about a guy (Tom Cruise) who is not a very good dad. Self-centered and inattentive to his kids, his mid-teens boy (Justin Chatwin) hates him and his 10-ish but wise-for-her-age daughter (Dakota Fanning) seems as much his mother as his daughter. His ex-wife (Miranda Otto, who may look strangely familiar because she played the lovely but forlorn Eowyn in The Lord of the Rings) seems to feel a mixture of contempt and pity for his lax way of living.

The first 15 minutes is used to outline the characters and then BOOM! strange shit starts happening, including a brooding storm with lots of lightning, cracks appearing in the pavement, and the first appearance of the Alien machines (and in case you don't know, what you have seen glimpses of in the previews are not aliens but their killing machines).

Now, you know those movies where they save the clear view of the monsters till near the end of the movie? Well, this is not one of the movies! By 25 minutes in, the machines are on the rampage, destroying people, buildings, and just about anything that smacks of "human." The way people are killed is likely to be distressing to small children and there's a lot of killing. The Fanning character is terrorized much of the time and I suspect this terror will be contagious to kids young enough to relate to her.

The tripods (as the killing machines are called in the movie) are definitely alien-looking, being mechanical while looking organic at the same time. Design elements seem to have been borrowed from automotive design on the one hand and crustaceans and mollusks on the other. The tripods walk on three legs, but the legs are snakelike and not very mechanical looking. The machines' appendages resemble the tentacles of a squid. And, did I mention how gigantic they are?

There is also a sound effect that will terrorize the kids (and not a few adults). Based, I believe, on the air horn of a very large ship, it is used to announce the presence of the tripods and, it's implied, as a way the tripods communicate with each other. It's loud enough and low enough that you may feel it through your shoes as well as your ears.

The movie isn't without flaws. Early in the film the aliens stop all kinds of electronics. Electricity gets stopped. Watches stop. Cars stop dead in the street. It's strange that Cruise and family end up stealing just about the only functioning car in the world. Sure, we know he told a mechanic to try changing the solenoids to make the car start again, but nobody else got their car started? Also, there is one guy whose vidcam still seems to work for some reason.

The tripods walk around on three legs. There is a reason legs come in multiples of two. Three legs are great for stools, not great for things that need to walk around. In fact, in a lot of ways, two legs are far better than three. A dog can lose a leg and get around, but it won't get around better than it would if it had all four.

But that's nit-picking. A much more serious problem is how this movie which starts off as a seeming juggernaut of mind-boggling action gets bogged down in a slow and pointless interlude in the basement of a half-crazy survivalist (Tim Robbins). It felt like a half hour was spent there just to pad the movie, which is actually somewhat shorter than most feature films. Of course, it's understandable because there isn't really much plot there: Aliens show up, start killing people, Cruise's family runs from the aliens, the aliens die. The bad father subplot pads things a bit more and is more interesting than the basement interlude.

Another thing that strikes you if you start thinking about it is that supposedly, this invasion was planned a very long time ago. The tripods were laying dormant underground in our cities, but they must have been planted there before there were cities. But if they were there that long, surely many of them would have been discovered by earth movers and tunnelers as the cities' water, sewer, electrical, and subway systems were built.

Dakota Fanning is good in almost every role, and this one is no different, though I personally would have wished for less screaming.

In the end, this is as much a story of the Cruise character's redemption in the eyes of his children, as it is a sci-fi story, which is a big departure from the Wells tale.

What may disappoint many people is how the story ends, but what they may not realize is that the rather wimpy and uninspiring ending is one of the parts of the movie most faithful to H.G. Wells' book. It's an ending that works better in a book, and it would have been better had Spielberg had taken more of his liberties here than elsewhere.

George A. Romero's Land of the Dead

Okay, I don't get the zombie thing. No, I understand what zombies are, I just don't get the interest in movies about them. Old time sci-fi movies used to have men dressed in tin suits posing as robots. They lumbered along at such a slow pace one wondered how they ever caught up with anyone to do them harm. Now the robots in I, Robot had more terror potential.

Zombies are the same thing as the old-time robots. The only difference is that they are made of flesh and blood, can only be killed by cutting off their heads or by a brain-destroying headshot, and if they bite you, you become one, too.

In this movie, which starts off in a world where zombies are growing in numbers and people live in fenced enclaves, zombies are evolving and getting smarter. Not as smart as a parakeet, mind you, but smarter and much less mindless than before.

We have our hero, his sidekick, the guy with dubious ethics, and the girl he meets along the way. All the standard character elements of movies like this. We also have a bad guy in the form of Dennis Hopper who basically phones in the same performance he's given in so many other movies. It's getting old, just like him.

Hopper plays a crooked developer who has created an enclave away from the zombies called "Fiddler's Green." This leaves the other uninfected people outside to fend for themselves. We discover that he's been giving them drugs and diseases to make them food for the zombies.

Our hero is part of a crew that goes out zombie hunting at night. They have a battle wagon named Dead Reckoning, and when our guy of dubious ethics (played by John Leguizamo), who has been colluding with Hopper character, is betrayed by Hopper, he steals Dead Reckoning.

Well, Hopper wants Dead Reckoning to get him and his cronies out of Fiddler's Green and move to a safe place up in Canada, where there are no people. No people=no zombie food=no zombies, get it? So, he hires our hero to get Dead Reckoning back. He and his sidekick (a mentally challenged one-eyed guy who also happens to be a crack shot) and new girl (a hooker he saved from a pair of zombies) set off on Leguizamo's trail. This is important, because Leguizamo will use Dead Reckoning to destroy Fiddler's Green and along with it the encampments of the poor people as well with some missiles that the truck is armed with.

Well, I'll leave the plot there. I'll just say that two or three times I felt like I'd rather be in my dentist's office have a few teeth pulled.

But I don't get zombie movies, so don't take my word that it's bad. Find out on your own.

Bewitched

A local critic really lambasted Bewitched as one of the worst movies of all time. As I sat in the theater watching this movie the first time (I saw it later today with a friend as well), I was wondering if he had seen the same movie I saw.

This movie is not really even a remake of the original Bewitched TV series, but it's a comedy about the making of a remake. The original series which was about a couple with a mortal male and a female witch and all of the situations where the witch tried, with varying degrees of success, to solve her/their problems with magic, while at the same time trying not to use magic so that she could live as a mortal. In this movie, Nicole Kidman plays a real witch who coincidentally ends up acting the Elizabeth Montgomery part. The two twists are that this movie isn't about the TV series, but rather is about the making of the TV series and, secondly, that the actress playing the wife who's a witch actually is a witch. So, essentially, it kind of asks the question: "What would have happened if Elizabeth Montgomery really were a witch?"

Will Ferrell plays an actor who's had a run of movie flops and signs on to play the husband in the TV series to jump-start his career. He insists that the focus of the show will not be on the husband, not the witchy wife. To this end, he wants a total unknown playing his wife. There is a problem, however, in that whoever plays the role has to be able to do the famous nose twitch perfected by the original actress in the TV series, Elizabeth Montgomery. By accident, Ferrell stumbles upon Kidman in a bookstore where she is taking in her first experiences living life as a mortal and trying, with mixed success, not to use magic.

She is very naive and trusting and accepts his invitation to play the role. She soon discovers, however, that it's his intention to upstage her and simply use her to boost his own career. Since she has feelings for him, she is upset and the rest of the movie is about all the funny events whic follow.

I must say I enjoyed this movie quite a bit. Ferrell is his hilarious self, and it's obvious he had plenty of room to ad lib lines.

The real revelation, however, is Nicole Kidman, who reminds us one more time that she's one of the most talented and versatile and surprising female talents in the acting biz. Much of her vocal inflection here is borrowed loosely from Marilyn Monroe's blonde-speak. Kidman's face is at all times expressive and it's almost impossible to take your eyes off her even when other characters are on the screen with her. She's an extremely talented comic actress, and for evidence of her versatility, let's review some of her other roles by simply mentioning the movie titles. You've probably seen most of them: Dead Calm, Days of Thunder, To Die For, Batman Forever, Eyes Wide Shut, Moulin Rouge, The Others, Cold Mountain, and The Interpreter. She is always good, even in a so-so movie.

At least one critic has complained about product placement in this movie. While I understand that many people are anti-business, logos and trademarked designs and so forth are part of everyday life. So what if a scene takes place in a Bed, Bath, and Beyond or if Starbuck's is mentioned. We live in America and these things are part of our everyday life. What would a movie be like that studiously avoided featuring the very objects that populate the everyday landscape? I'd like to see someone try it and give us a movie that doesn't rather strange. Nowadays, one can't totally escape these things in places like Havana or Peking.

This movie being a comedy, the only standard (as Roger Ebert rightly has said) is does it get laughs? And I can tell you theaudience laughed at this movie, and laughed quite a bit. That included me, so this movie, while not destined for an Oscar, was a success. Evenso, Ebert didn't give it a thumbs up, either. Maybe he should screen comedies with a real audience.

Herbie: Fully Loaded

I see lots of movies I probably wouldn't see otherwise because I do reviews. Sometimes, I'm really disappointed and sometimes I'm pleasantly surprised. This time, I got exactly what I expected.

The Herbie movies are dopey. They're about a car that thinks it's a person. Or, maybe if you want to be sinister, it's about a person cursed by being turned into a car. Or, possibly it's a case of botched reincarnation. Who cars, anyway?

This movie wastes the talents of two great stars, Michael Keaton and Matt Dillon, and is the latest stupid career vehicle for that flavor of last week, Lindsay Lohan, who was good in Mean Girls, and that's about it.

The story, such as it is, is about a girl in a racing stock racing family which has fallen on unlucky times. The son, who does the driving, may not have the native talent for the job. The daughter (Lohan) is a gal with well-known racing ability, but her father (Keaton) doesn't want her racing because her father doesn't want to lose a daughter after losing a wife (to cancer, if I recall correctly) because, he says, she reminds him so much of her mother.

As a graduation gift, he takes Lohan to a junkyard to get her a car, and she ends up taking...you guessed it. She soon discovered that this little care not only has a mind of its own but can go fast as hell. So fast, in fact, that she ends up beating legendary stock car driver Trip Murphy in a street race, which makes him angry and sets him up as the bad guy every movie like this needs.

We all know how this movie will turn out. Lohan will end up behind the wheel of Herbie in a big race at the end of he movie. Yadayadayada. At first, the movie wasn't funny at all, but as it got going I got a few laughs out of it. Not so many I can really recommend it, unless you are twelve or younger. So, take the kids for a fun time, but if you're a grown up, there are plenty of better movies to see.

Mad Hot Ballroom

In New York City, ballroom dancing is a mandatory part of the Phys Ed curriculum for kids in grades 5 and 6, which I think means ages 11 and 12. Of all things, why ballroom dancing? Well, you'll understand why when you see how learning to dance teaches etiquette and respect to some definitely "at risk" pre-teens, some of them from some pretty rough New York neighborhoods.

Kids from three different schools are followed, but I don't think there's any doubt that the kids from the mostly Dominican neighborhoods are the ones who not only enjoy the dancing the most but derive the most benefit from it.

If there's a subplot, it may be the dance teachers, many of whom are actually dancers and not just teachers who know a bit about dancing. There is a teacher conference where the teachers all dance together as couples and in group dances that is fabulous. No, they don't look like a top pro dance troupe, but they do look like people who get out on the dance floor and know more than enough to look good and have plenty of fun.

The kids learn the basic ballroom steps including rumba, fox trot, merengue, and tango. I almost think the tango is too advanced for kids in this age group. Obviously, they learned the steps but I can't say I saw any one of the young couples do a tango that would have passed even basic muster on a real tango floor. By contrast, they did fantastic work on the merengue and swing steps.

They are all getting ready for a dance competition to win the city's Challenge Prize, a very big trophy. While the various school troupes get awards, based on point scores, placing them in categories named bronze, silver, and gold, there is a dance-off among the gold troupes and there is only one winner of the trophy, so the competition is intense and for kids in this age group, almost brutal.

A lot of people don't like competitive activities for kids, but as the dance director says in the film, losing can be a good lesson in life: that you don't always get the job, you don't always get the girl/boy, and sometimes the medical tests turn out positive (which in medicine usually means "bad"). Kids have to learn to integrate loss into their lives and that there is always, if not a next time, at least something else to apply themselves to.

I went to this movie almost out of a sense of completeness. Since I review movies, I try to see all of the good ones at least, and the buzz on this one was that it was good. Well, it was far more than just good. It was one of my most thoroughly enjoyable movie experiences so far this year.

Ladies in Lavender

What is it with the British and old ladies. They make far more movies about the lives of old women than we Americans, the Germans, the French, or just about anyone else.

Judi Dench takes some time off from playing "M" to Pierce Brosnan's James Bond in order to play an old woman living in a small Cornish fishing village with her sister, played by Maggie Smith, who is taking time off from playing Prof. Minerva McGonagall in the Harry Potter movies.

One morning the sisters arise to discover a body stranded on their patch of beach. Is he dead or alive? Just barely alive, they find, after getting him into their home and summoning the town doctor. He has an injured ankle and will be bedridden for a while.

It quickly becomes obvious that the two elderly women are competing for the handsome young man's attention. Dench's character actually seems to fall in love.

While the women are close in age, one difference between them is that the Maggie Smith character was apparently married at one time and lost her husband the First World War. The Dench character feels her loneliness and longing much more keenly, probably because she doesn't even have memories to comfort her.

The young man, it turns out is Polish, but they find a small patch of common ground in the fact that he also speaks fluent German and the Maggie Smith character knows a wee bit of this language. Of course, the fact that her sister can actually communicate with the boy creates a certain degree of jealousy of her sister.

By accident, it's discovered that the boy plays excellent violin. His playing catches the ear of an attractive summer visitor to the area, a Russian woman played by Natascha McElhone, who at least gives the sisters a common enemy. When she sends a letter to the cottage explaining that her brother is an important concert violinist, the girls hang on to the letter but query the boy as to whether he's familiar with this musician, and it turns out he's quite a fan. Do they pass the letter along? No, instead they collude to keep the information from him.

They aren't the only ones with concerns about the young woman. The local doctor, a 50-ish man, has designs on the Russian visitor and views the young man as competition. We sense he isn't above doing something underhanded to sidetrack the competition, even though we know it isn't competition that keeps her from being responsive to his advances.

And what about her? Does she have romantic designs on the boy? It would seem natural, but when he actually makes an advance, she cuts him short and sends him packing for the day with a curt "auf wiedersehen" (can be translated various ways, but in this context "till next time" works best). This is a rather mixed messages which adds a little intrigue to the movie.

So,. will the boy stay with the sisters (I think you know the answer to that one)? Will he run off with the Russian woman? Will he be arrested and packed off to Poland or Germany or even prison? Well, that's why you'll want to see this movie.

I'm not a big fan of movies about old ladies or life in small-town Great Britain, and yet I'm fascinated by psychology, and there's plenty of that to go around in this movie.

The Perfect Man

Hilary Duff and Heather Locklear play a monther and daughter at odds. It seems Heather feels a need to change cities for a new start every time she breaks up with yet another loser boyfriend. Hilary will do almost anything to end this cycle that doesn't let her form any lasting friendships and how her plans go terribly awry is what this rather stupid movie is all about.

And what Hilary does isn't merely stupid. As often as not she shows that she has no idea whatsoever how to respect someone else's boundaries. After consulting with a school pal's restaurateur uncle (Law & Order's Chris Noth) on what The Perfect Man would be like, she creates an imaginary man who sends her mother flowers, charms her in letters and e-mail, and gives her false hope that someone is in love with her.

At the same time, it gradually dawns on her that her pal's uncle might be The Perfect Man, and that her shenanigans have made it so that her mom and the uncle must never ever meet or her reckless intrigues will become known. A serious ethical dilemma for a 16 year old!

This whole movie was meant to appeal to the Nickelodeon crowd and seems to have been written by a 13 year old girl.

Chris Noth is totally wasted in this role and almost seems to be embarrassed to be in this movie at all. I hope his fee allowed him to buy a Hummer or something..

One major problem that Hilary Duff has is that her pal in this film, Vanessa Lengies, is not only prettier than her but seems much more interesting. I wish Vanessa a long career in the movies with lots more screen time.

Howl's Moving Castle

Hayao Miyazaki is almost universally acclaimed as the leading animator of the day. If you want to rent some movies or buy some DVD's in preparation for viewing this movie, I'd recommended Princess Mononoke and Spirited Away, and of those two, I'd say the latter is the one to get if you can get only one.

Miyazaki still does movies based on hand-drawn and -painted cels, not computer animation. But that isn't the real distinction between him and what others are doing: It's his fiercely personal and eccentric visual conceptions. He's also a master of the use of color.

Some people are calling Howl's Moving Castle his masterpiece. It's a great movie, but I'll stick with Spirited Away and if you like action, Princess Mononoke has more of that.

The story is of a girl named Sophie who is turned into an old woman by The Witch of the Waste. Sofi, unable to face her family and looking for a counterspell, heads off into the Waste. On her way, she meets a scarecrow who helps her by finding her shelter away from an impending storm. This shelter turns out to be the moving castle of a wizard named Howl. The castle would be very difficult to describe, so click HERE for an image of the castle.

The castle is mechanical with a wooden exterior. It walks around on four legs, and is powered by a cursed fire demon named Calcifer. As Sophie (still in the form of an old woman) makes a place for herself in the castle, she becomes more respected and is given more important duties.

The owner of the castle, a young wizard named Howl, is tortured by a moral conflict between his duty to assist the King in a war against a neighboring country who supposedly has kidnapped or killed the Prince, and his belief that the war is wrong and will result in ruin for his country.

That's the setup and I'll tell you no more, though I think you can see a happy ending coming. One doesn't go to a Miyazaki movie so much for the stories as for the animation, and you won't be disappointed. The movie has a distinctive look, which is quite different from the other two aforementioned movies. The visuals are stunning and the voices are done quite well.

If you don't catch it in the theater (by far the best way to see it), be sure to rent it.

Batman Begins

A lot of us have never really been satisfied with the Batman series. None of the actors playing Batman have really seemed just right for the role, and the villains have seemed almost too cartoonish even for a movie based on a cartoon.

This time around, they did it just about right. Oh, there are quibbles: Katie Holmes somehow doesn't feel right as an Assistant D.A. here. TomWilkinson looks far too British in extraction to have a name like Carmine Falcone. Sure, in Italy you find Italians who don't look stereotypically Italian, but characters in fiction are built on stereotypes, and if they deviate from one, you are given a reason why.

On the other hand, there are sublime casting choices starting with the underappreciated Christian Bale as the manbat Bruce Wayne himself. Michael Caine who is good even in bad movies, turns in a classic performance as Alfred the Butler. Liam Neeson looks about as tough and masculine as a man can look as Wayne's fighting teacher. Gary Oldman gets lost the the degree of almost total unrecognizability in the character of Jim Gordon, the good cop who teams up with our caped crusader. Let's not forget another splendid Morgan Freeman performance, this time playing a "Q" type of character who supplies Batman with advanced weapons and technology. Cillian Murphy and Rutger Hauer turn in good performances as well, though Cillian does seem a little young to head a mental facility 10 stories tall.

This Batman is plagued by guilt for being the inadvertent cause of his parents' murder when he was a young boy. Liam Neeson's character takes Bruce Wayne under his wing and trains him in esoteric fighting arts seemingly loosely based on Ninjitsu (The Way of the Ninja), which allows him to fight through a combination of fighting skill, surprise, deception, distraction, and the ability to disappear.

Wayne now has a purpose in life: the take out the garbage in Gotham, a city overrun by criminals and corruption.

The special effects here are state of the art, although as suits a warrior who fights in the Ninja way, the fights are often a virtual blur. And then there is a Batmobile that is as cool as can be, but I suppose I should complain that it doesn't look like any Batman I've ever seen in the cartoons.

I don't suppose I should expect a movie based on a cartoon to be strictly kosher when it comes to science, but in this version, Batman's cave is literally shared with bats. Now, one thing I can tell you about real bat caves is that they are poisonous places, thick with bat guano, bacteria, and decaying bats on the floor and with air rich in poisonous methane gas. If you ever go into a bat cave, I suggest bringing your own oxygen. Since the bats hang from the ceiling and methane is heavier than air, they are not affected.

Bad science aside, the movie is never boring and one can only hope that this is the beginning of a new series of Batman movies, including a couple "do overs."

My Summer of Love

There are movies where no matter how well things are going, you know in your heart it's going to end badly. You just don't know how it'll end badly or who is going to get the shaft. This is one of those movies.

This is the story of two girls in mid-late adolescence (I'd say they're about seventeen). Mona (Nathalie Press) has a lower class heritage, and is attractive in a redheaded freckly way. Her only family is her older brother, Phil (Paddy Considine of In America), an ex-con who has found Jesus and turned the family's property, a pub downstairs and apartment upstairs into a prayer center.

Mona feels as if she has lost her brother and that she now has no family.

Out riding her bike one day, she meets Tamsin (Emily Blunt). Tamsin is extremely beautiful, almost regal and comes from a wealthy family that lives in a manor house. The girls form an "opposites attract" kind of bond, that eventually takes on lesbian overtones.

The well-educated Tamsin is the brains of their relationship and Mona is the body. For example, when Tamsin emotionally complains about her father having a mistress, it is Mona who picks up a lawn troll and breaks a window of his car.

You see a lot of these girls in this movie. I'm not just referring to screen time, I'm referring to skin time. There are several scenes involving partial or full nudity, and while it will probably strike you at first that Tamsin has the best body, there is a scene where Mona is dancing in nothing but a bra and undies that shows she really does not take a back seat in the body department. The girls turn out to be very well matched in that regard.

Well, as their lesbianism grows, we begin to realize that we are actually watching a romance, yes, but a tragic romance. Both girls are reckless in the euphoria of their mad passion for each other, and at one point both vow to kill the other should she ever leave.

At the same time, Mona's brother is observing his sister moving on what he sees as a road to perdition, and intensifies his attempts to get her to convert to his brand of Christianity. Meanwhile, Tamsin, a very analytical and intellectually aware girl, wants to understand Phil better. But what for?

The movie takes a turn when Tamsin gets herself alone with Phil and what happens changes our perception of the both of them.

This is a movie about love, betrayal, cruelty, and the evil that can lurk in the hearts of even beautiful girls.

If I were you, I'd get out and see this movie soon. It probably won't play for very long.

High Tension (Fr: Haute tension)

If you can still be horrified, this is a first class horror flick. I can't be horrified by anything short of a real news story anymore. When the news shows people jumping out of high floors of burning buildings, when the Internet gives me the option of watching a beheading...that can horrify me. However, movies just can't do it anymore.

However, if you are someone who gets white knuckles, if you jump or gasp or even scream at sudden events under tense circumstances, if you grab the arm of the person next to you or close your eyes to avoid seeing things, then this movie is for you.

Like many horror movies, the story is easily summarized: Two students, one French and one American, are driving into the French countryside to visit the American girl's family (yes, the Americans live in France...and it turns out, we learn, that they've lived in France for a while). The family consists of the American girl, her mother and father, and their young son.

During the night, she is awakened by the sounds of what we are seeing: the father, mother, and young boy are murdered one-by-one, and the American girl is bound and kidnapped. The girl is taken to a truck that looks a bit like a clone of the one from the Jeepers Creepers movies. Our heroine manages to get into the vehicle and ride with the victim, who she cannot release because the girl is bound with chains, not ropes.

To make a long story short, of course there's a confrontation between our brave and innovative heroine and, as in almost all of these movies, of course, the bad guy has to be killed more than once.

But then, the story takes a very unexpected turn which, to me, was very unwelcome as well. I won't totally condemn the movie on this basis, because you may find the twist at the end less objectionable, especially if you're young and haven't seen several thousand movies in your lifetime, as I have.

The complaints I have against this movie are: 1) The movie is sometimes dubbed and sometimes subtitled with little rhyme or reason to it. 2) When there is dubbing, the dubbing is sometimes bad with a noticeable mismatch between what you are hearing and the motion and shape of the lips. 3) People doing things that real people probably wouldn't do.

In case of the latter complaint, it must be said, horror movies depend upon people doing things that real people probably wouldn't do. For example, in the beginning of the movie the girls are driving at night on a dark road that runs through a corn field, and one of the girls stops the car, says that she thinks she saw someone out in the field, and runs into the field to investigate.

Another example, there is a point when our heroine realizes that mayhem is going on down below, but does she go out the window (yes, she's on the third floor, but believe me, I'd take a chance on a two-story jump rather than having my throat slit from ear to ear, wouldn't you?). She also didn't think "Is there anyone here I could save?" Instead she hid under her bed. And (get this!) the killer even came into her room and instead of looking under the bed to see if anyone was there, just lifted a corner of the mattress.

All that said, if you like horror movies in general, I think you'll find this one above average.

The Honeymooners

My elderly father and I remember watching The Honeymooners on TV before there were reruns. Today this series is probably still in reruns in the middle of the night somewhere, but now a movie has been made that is somewhat based on the original Jimmy Gleason show, which co-starred Art Carney, Audrey Meadows, and Joyce Randolph.

Strangely, in these times when you'd think we are much less constrained than we were back then, this movie lacks much of the edge of the TV series. In particular, the signature phrase of the series, which was "One of these days...POW! Right in the kisser!" is totally missing. I guess we can't even hint at domestic abuse today, even if, as in the TV series, you knew for a fact (as did Gleason's wife) that he was just a loudmouth, and that his threats were absolutely idle.

Cedric the Entertainers stars in Gleason's role as Ralph Kramden, the dreamer with the big mouth who is married to the frustrated Alice (played by the ethereally beautiful Gabrielle Union. As beautiful as Union is, Audrey Meadows, who was beautiful herself, never appeared beautiful in the series. Mostly, she had a bandana in her hair as she worked hard washing clothes and cooking for Ralph. In this film, Alice is a bright, independent woman, and their home, while humble, is much homier than the nearly empty apartment of the TV series.

Quite a bit more accurate is the portrayal of Ralph's neighbor and friend, Ed Norton, by Mike Epps. Once again, his wife, Trixie, as played by Regina Hall, bears little resemblance to the Trixie of the TV series, who was virtually a clone of Alice Kramden, and is instead virtually a clone of Alice as played by Ms. Union.

Another jarring difference from the TV series is that the TV series was virtually a weekly stage play and very little that took place in it took place away from the Kramden's nearly barren apartment. This probably won't bother anyone who has never seen the TV series, but to someone familiar with the original, it does make it seem quite a bit less Honeymooner-ish (to coin a phrase).

At the same time, approaching it from the perspective of someone who is unfamiliar with the TV series, this is a basically good movie about Ralph Kramden, a man who is a dreamer, married to a woman who dreams, too, but whose dreams are practical, and who has a friend that somehow always ends up being drawn into Ralph's crazy schemes.

The plot in a nutshell is that Alice and Trixie discover that an old woman is selling a nice duplex at a good price, and want to buy it. However, they are competing against a slick developer (Eric Stoltz). They are also up against the fact that they haven't enough money for a down payment on the house. Meanwhile, Ralph is gambling his and Alice's savings on various schemes, including purchasing a railroad car he wants to turn into a tour bus without considering how he's going to get it out of its subterranean location to street level six stories up.

Finding an abandoned greyhound in a dumpster, he and Ed have the idea of racing the dog to earn money for the house, and they get plenty of "help" from a shifty dog trainer played delightfully by John Leguizamo. I won't have to tell you how well this plan goes if you're at all familiar with The Honeymooners TV show, and this disaster drives a wedge between Ralph, Alice, Ed, and Trixie.

As the movie draws to a close, the question becomes can Ralph redeem himself, and if you're familiar with the TV series, you know the answer to that as well.

Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants

Another film letting us into the everyday lives of adolescent girls. This story involves four girls of almost exactly the same age who met through their mothers who had all taken the same childbirthing class together.

There is the bold and brassy blonde, Bridget; the introspective and shy brunette, Lena; the antiauthoritarian and punkish Tibby; and the chubby Hispanic Carmen. Each girl has her talents and her problems.

It's summer and three of the girls are going out of town to three different places for a month. While shopping, they find a pair of blue jeans that "miraculously" fits all four of them, even the chubby girl, and looks great on all of them.

Because the pants are magical, they reason that the pants are lucky and they decide that each girl will get the pants for a week so that she can have one week of magical luck.

Each girl faces a crisis related to her particular weakness and grows in the process.

Part of the movie is set on the Greek Island of Santorini, and these scenes are frequently gorgeous. Two of the girls, newbie Blake Lively as Bridget and Alexis Bledel of The Gilmore Girls TV series and, more recently, Sin City, are as pretty as girls get. Bledel is positively luminous in many of her scenes and Lively, well, has a great body. Let's put it that way.

America Ferrera, who is best known for starring in Real Women Have Curves, while not conventionally slender, is nevertheless quite appealing.

Strangely, it is probably the least appealing of the girls, Amber Tamblyn of the Joan of Arcadia TV series, who turns in the most affecting performance of all as she learns to love a rather annoying 12 year old with a big problem.

I'm a 210 lb. rather masculine guy, and I don't cry easily, but I got pretty misty in a scene that had the mostly female audience practically bawling.

While, yeah, it's a classic "chick flick," I think many guys will enjoy it as well. I know I certainly don't regret seeing it at all.

Mr. and Mrs. Smith

I've been reading critics who panned this movie, and of course I've seen much better, but I found that the audience in the 2/3 full theatre where I saw it laughed and groaned appropriately and showed other signs of enjoyment.

I, too, enjoyed it to my own surprise.

In a nutshell, Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie meet and get married without knowing that they are both high-end assassins. How they hide this fact from each other is something you don't want to think about because then you'll be distracted by questions like these: How did Brad get that secret room with all of his weapons in it installed under the floor of the garage without Angelina knowing about it, and how did she get that secret weapon drawer in the kitchen installed without him knowing about it?

They've been married "six or seven years" (which in itself is a gag in the movie) and we find out toward the end of the movie that despite the fact that she frequently puts up delicious looking dinners, she just reheats ready-to-heat food. And he has never caught on?

If you have the idea this is primarily a thriller about paid assassins, you'd be wrong. Like The War of the Roses (a much better movie), this one is really about a marriage. On a deeper level, it's about marriage itself, which is the real reason the audience enjoyed it so much. Some of the most enjoyable scenes involve the couple in a marriage counseling situation.

Like many movies in the spy/thriller genre, this film paradoxically begins to drag just when the final action begins. The ending is a mostly positive one designed to please mass audiences with plenty of female in them, but I think Hollywood underestimates the Tender Gender. After all, The War of the Roses and Thelma and Louise had dark endings and are beloved of women. It's too bad that director Doug Liman lacked the balls to go dark.

Holy Girl (La Nina Santa)

This Argentinean movie with English subtitles explores adolescent eroticism in the context of a deeply religious Catholic society.

Amalia is a girl of about 14 or 15 who lives with her divorced mother in a hotel her mother manages.

Many things are unclear to the non-Argentinean non-Catholic watching this movie, but I'll do my best to explain. Amalia attends what appear to be regular Bible study courses with a friend of hers. Her friend is not the most feminine looking of girls and is called "Jose," so naturally I spent some time trying to decide if this Jose was, shall we say, sexually confused. Eventually, I learned that Jose is short for Josefina.

These Bible studies are led by a severe and devout young women named Ines, played by the only actor an American is likely to recognize in this movie, Mia Maestro. Ms. Maestro also plays Jennifer Garner's half-sister, Maria Santos, on TV's Alias). While dressed in street clothes, this Ines might or might not be a nun (I could not tell), and is rumored among the girls to be having some sort of relationship with a man that at least involves French kissing.

While out on the street listening to a musician, Amalia is slightly molested by a man who stands behind her letting his pelvic area touch her backside. He leaves when she turns around but she gets a glimpse of his face.

In their Bible studies, there is much talk of vocation. What is one's purpose in life? Apparently, Amalia decides that to help this man back onto the path is her vocation, at least for now. Ironically, this man (a Dr. Jano, who is visiting the hotel for a medical conference) becomes the object of attention of Amalia's mother, unbeknownst to Amalia.

Amalia has confided in Josefina, giving her the basic details of the molestation. As we know, the only real way to keep a secret secret is to tell know one, so the makings of a human tragedy are in place.

Once the doctor and Amalia recognize each other and realize the situation that they are in with Amalia's mother (who remains oblivious), the doctor grows seemingly repentant and invites his wife and children to the hotel for a visit.

Josefina's mother very nearly catches Josefina in the act of having sex with her boyfriend. Her mother sees that something is wrong with the girl, who is in an emotional turmoil, and in order to explain her state and deflect attention from herself. She declares that she has been relating a dreadful story to the boyfriend, and this forces her to blurt out Amalia's secret. The tragedy begins to unfold.

However, it doesn't unfold as you might expect, and the movie has a frustratingly pointless and unsatisfying ending.

The Adventures of Shark Boy and Lava Girl in 3-D

If you've never seen a 3-D movie and want to see one before you die, it might as well be this one. Otherwise, this movie is a major disappointment.

I try to see most movies because, well, I'm a critic. This includes most of the so-called children's movies. This one I had high hopes for because it's directed by Robert Rodriguez, a very hot director who just released a very hot Oscar contender in the form of Sin City.

Rodriguez also directed all the movies in the Spy Kids series, which have always been fascinating, even if the 2nd and 3rd movies weren't quite as excellent as the first.

The problem with this one is that it had the potential to be as good as Spy Kids, but failed due primarily to the fact that RR indulged his son, who wrote the story and the dialog and obviously had a big hand in the entire decision-making process.

Perhaps the crappy dialog could have been saved to some extent by superior acting, but the acting here was not particularly superior. The kids substituted overacting or not acting for real acting and George Lopez was George Lopez. The only two real actors in the movie were David Arquette and Kristin Davis as the young protagonist's father and mother, but they are not on screen much and don't have a lot to work with interms of dialog.

The result is a movie that would be a Nickelodeon direct-to-video reject.

In a nutshell, a boy of about 12 has invented (or has he met?) a pair of child superheroes, Shark Boy and Lava Girl. His classmates think he's silly until the two young superheroes show up to ask for his help in fighting evil. That's really enough of a plot setup for you.

I mentioned that this is a 3-D movie. You need to wear the glasses with one red and one blue lens. I don't think most people who've seen one 3-D movie is in a big hurry to see another one. Why? Well, while the 3-D effect is somewhat cool, the glasses greatly limits the color palette. and the 3-D scenes tend to be limited to only small variations on red, blue, white, and black. Anything that would normally be yellow or green becomes some yellowish or greenish variation on red or blue. Me, I'd rather have the natural colors. I imagine/hope that when this movie is released to the video market, the 3-D is gone.

Some Things I'm Tired of Seeing at the Movies

1) Movies that begin by flying over water finally hitting land. It sometimes seems to me that 20% of movies begin this way. Why can't directors come up with something a bit more original? Don't they realize this opening has been done to death?

2) Flying over Manhattan Island or some other mealopolis, looking down from a helicopter. Movies can start this way or this sort of footage can be used somewhere in the movie. Is this stock footage? I ask because it's all starting to look the same to me!

3) Perhaps because the primary audience for horror and teen slasher movies are people who are young and haven't seen that many movies, these films continue to feature villains/monsters who have to be killed twice or more. I mean, it's become such a staple and cliche, that by now I know he/she/it isn't really dead. Doesn't the audience realize this?

4) This one may be changing slowly, but in horror movies and thrillers, you used to be able to bet that the black man would die a noble death and that the white hero, not the black hero, would end up taking the white chick home at the end of the movie. Are our racial prejudices so ingrained even now that we can't let the black man win the woman in the end?

What are you getting tired of seeing in the movies?