The Beautiful Country

The children resulting from dalliances and romances of American GI's and Vietnamese girls are pariahs known as "Bui doi" (less than dust). This movie focuses on one such young man (in his 20's) who goes on a quest not just to find his father but to relocate to America, where he hopes his lot will be better.

His mother gives him some money and asks him to take his brother along, who is, I would say, about 4 or 5 years old.

On the first leg of his trip, which lands him in Malaysia, he and his brother end up in the hands of authorities who put him in a refugee camp where, he learns, they could spend the rest of their lives since they are wanted by no country.

In this camp, first his brother and then he are befriended by a lovely woman (Bai Ling) who turns out to be a prostitute. It's not clear whether she was always a prostitute or turned to prostitution to curry favors in the camp. At any rate, she has crossed that line.

The three of them escape from the camp and pool their money (several thousand dollars) for a ride on a tramp ship that ferries illegal aliens from Asia to New York City. The ship is run by a ruthless trafficker in humans and a captain (Tim Roth) who, it turns out, is even more ruthless.

After a storm, food is spoiled and disease sets in. People die, including our protagonist's younger brother. How will he ever tell their mother?

In New York City, he does menial work for a Chinese Restaurant, learning after more than a year that as the child of a veteran, he could have come to live here anytime, and would have been flown free of charge. The entire ordeal of the journey, it turns out, as well as the death of his brother was entirely unnecessary.

His female friend has settled into the life of a bar girl who may marry a late middle-aged businessman who's been kind to her. This disappoints and disgusts our protagonist, though he understands her position.

He finally figures out where his father (Nick Nolte) lives and even though it may seem I've given away a bunch of spoilers, this movie isn't a mystery. It is the meeting with his father that the movie is all about, and so this is where I'll stop telling the tale.

This is an excellent, well-made movie about a subject that's uncomfortable for both Americans and Vietnamese. Americans know why they are uncomfortable, but I suspect Vietnamese will be embarrassed at the prejudice, racism, and lack of understanding displayed by people in the homeland toward children who can't help their mixed ancestry.

Must Love Dogs

Diane Lane has to be the cutest middle-aged actress around. And John Cusack is equally cute in a guy way, and this is a cute movie. Not an Oscar contender by any means, but if you like light romantic comedies, this is a good one.

There is no serious plot to speak of. Lane plays a recently divorced woman whose family is trying to get her back into the dating scene. She doesn't feel ready, however. Despite this, her older sister (Elizabeth Perkins) puts her up on a dating site and she starts getting voicemail responses.

At the same time, the separated father of one of the children at the kindergarten where she works shows interest in her (he is played by Dermot Mulroney).

She meets several of the voicemailers and seems to hit it off somewhat with one (Cusack), who is also recently divorced. Both of them have their hesitations about getting close and possibly getting hurt again.

The movie is about how she finally settles on the right guy.

This sort of thing is a common setup for a romantic comedy and if this one is better than some, it's due to the excellent acting by a top-notch supporting cast which also includes Christopher Plummer as her father, a distinguished and lovable old guy with a taste for young women and good poetry.

There isn't too much more to say. If this is the sort of movie you like, you'll like this movie.

Stealth

In the preview for Stealth there is a glimpse for about a second of Jessica Biel in a robin's egg blue bikini, and yes, fellas, you do get to see more. I'm guessing about 20 or 30 seconds altogether, but that's far better than the momentary tease in the preview. Ms. Biel doesn't have the classic Playboy centerfold figure; she's not nearly hippy enough for the hourglass that would require. However, she does have the figure of a beautiful woman with an athletic body and it's a sight to behold.

Now that the most important part of this review is over, let's get on to the movie.

Okay, I've noticed that some critics have panned Stealth. This is silly. Movies like this are entertainment not art. This is not to say there's no art in the movie. Some of the computer graphics are astonishing. Rob Cohen knows how to do explosions. And then there's Jessica Biel in a bikini.

This and the heat outside are the reason we go to air conditioned theaters in the summer. I was cool and the movie not only didn't put me to sleep, it kept me awake for two hours.

This isn't to say the plot stands up to close scrutiny or that the dialog doesn't get dumb from time to time. But noticing things like that just makes movies like this more fun and fun is what it's all about.

Here's the basic plot: Three hot shot Navy pilots have been training in a top secret super-cruise fighter/bomber. "Super-cruise" means that the cruising speed for the aircraft is supersonic even before it kicks in afterburners. These are aircraft (actually in design if not production) which can hit mach 4. That is fast.

Just after their first mission, they are introduced to a new aircraft that will be flying with them. This new craft is a "UCAV" designed to supersede manned combat aircraft by being more maneuverable (pulling tighter turns and more G's than a human can endure) and by not risking the lives of pilots.

This UCAV is controlled by an onboard AI (artificial intelligence) computer. The reason it's flying with them is to learn combat techniques and decision making by observing and participating in missions.

Unfortunately, the team leader (Josh Lucas) is not a model of obedience to authority and between this and being hit by lightning, this aircraft goes nutso, picking a target in Russia that could cause a dangerous international incident. The team is sent in pursuit.

That's about all the plot you need for purposes of this review.

The one thing that really bothers me about this movie is something I see time and time again in action and horror movies. Let me put it to you this way: The three members of the team include a white man and woman (Josh Lucas and the aforementioned Jessica Biel, whose ethnic ancestry is actually pretty complex, but she's white enough for us here) plus Jamie Fox. One of them gets killed in the course of the movie. Can you guess which one of the three that might be? (Hint: "You lose, buckwheat!") It's reached the point in action and horror movies that as soon as I see a black man in a group of characters I know he's probably doomed.

There are times here when the aircraft are obviously real (though mock-ups, I'm sure, only on the ground) and the transitions from these to what have to be CG aircraft are absolutely seamless. It seems there is almost nothing you can't do in CG anymore.

Like I said earlier, the plot has its absurdities, which I won't detail here, and the dialog is riddled with clichés and cheap philosophizing, which isn't to say it doesn't raise some of the fundamental issues of mechanizing and dehumanizing war, which is something we really need to be thinking about. And if the movie has you thinking about things you never thought about before, there's nothing wrong with that.

The Devil's Rejects

This is apparently a sequel to Rob Zombie's 2003 directorial debut, House of 1000 Corpses which, by way of disclosure, I did not see.

Based on some local print reviews, I was expecting a badly made piece of crap. To my surprise, it turned out to be rather well made. It's still a piece of crap, but it's not a badly made one.

The plot in a nutshell is this: after a police raid on their home, which results in a big shoot-out, an adult brother and sister of a family of murderers escape and hit the road, planning on meeting up with their father, known to the world as a clown named Captain Spaulding.

When the local Bible-banging sheriff (William Forsythe) discovers some scrapbooks indicating that one of their victims was his brother he declares a holy war on the family in which the usual legal restraints will be thrown to the wind.

Along the way, they take hostages, murdering all but one after various degrees of taunting and torture.

That's about all I'll say, except to reiterate that this movie isn't for the squeamish who can't deal with cruelty and/or gore. It seems like almost the paradigm of a movie that didn't need to be made, serves no particular purpose, and really stretches the concept of art almost to the breaking point.

It'd be nice to see Mr. Zombie apply his obvious talents to something a bit less dreadful. He certainly could direct a major horror movie someday if he applied himself.

Hustle & Flow

This story of a black marijuana dealer and pimp named DJay (Terence Howard) who aspires to be a rap musician has been receiving awards all over the place. It's not a bad movie. In fact, it's a good one. However, I'd never nominate it for an Oscar. It's simply not that good!

Howard, straight off a great performance in Crash is convincing as the Memphis hustler whose life is in a rut as he sells the occasional dime bag, shakes down nudie bar dancers, and pimps out a trashy little white girl hooker named Nola (Taryn Manning).

I guess what we're supposed to get from this movie is that even the lowest of low-lifes have aspirations. The pimp wants to be a musician, the little hooker wants to have something real to do other than blowing strangers (though she can't say exactly what), and his churchgoing seemingly-straight childhood friend named Key (Anthony Anderson) would like to be a big-time producer.

An opportunity arises when Skinny Black (Ludakris), a guy from the hood who's made good as a rap singer, is coming back and will be holding sway in a bar owned by DJay's good friend (Isaac Hayes, in a nameless role). DJay's plan is to slip him a demo tape.

Well, that's the setup. The supporting performances I haven't mentioned yet are all quite good. Special mention should go to the almost indescribably ungainly D.J. Qualls as Shelby, the white musician who knows how to run all the electronic instruments (drum machines, etc.). Another outstanding performance is turned in by Taraji P. Henson playing a pregnant hooker living in DJay's home who is given hope and a modicum of self-esteem by singing a hook on one of his first songs.

However, I think that after Howard's performance as DJay, it is Ms. Manning's performance as the little prostitute Nola which is most affecting and memorable.

The Island

One of the best sci-fi flicks since the last movie in the Matrix series, The Island is a treat on many different levels, from the supersaturated colors of the excellent cinematography to the incredible production design to the perfect casting.

Lincoln 6 Echo (Ewan McGregor) and Jordan 2 Delta (Scarlett Johansson) are citizens of a subterranean hive of refugees from a contaminated outside world. Only one uncontaminated place exists, referred to simply as "The Island," and hive members who win a lottery get to go to this heaven on Earth.

Hive members are kept at a rather low level of education (we see adult men reciting text from a book of the "See Spot Run" variety), but one member of the hive, played by McGregor, has a livelier intellect than most and is beginning to ask questions.

Then he stumbles on proof that the hive is really a nightmare and that there really is no Island at all, but that the Island is a fantasy designed to keep hive members docile until it's their turn to give their lives. But why?

One thing is certain, his beloved friend, Johansson, who has just won the so-called lottery will die if they don't escape, which they do.

The rest of the movie is about the two escapees, who find themselves in a world they've never seen before and really don't understand, piecing together what the hive is about and who they really are and deciding what they must do about it.

Constructed in the same form as a classical concerto: three movements with the last movement reprising the first, only much faster, I doubt if you'll be bored for one second. And if you are into chases, I think more cars were trashed in this movie's chase scene than in any film since the second Matrix movie.

If you're into sci-fi, one thing you might do while watching the movie is to try to catalog all the ancestors and references embodied and contained in this film. I would list The Matrix, Logan's Run, 1984, Vanilla Sky, Running Man, and Blade Runner (one of the all-time classics), and even The Time Machine among others.

Ms. Johansson seems to get more beautiful by the year to the point where at times her beauty is almost distracting, and I'm sure many of the ladies who fell in love with Ewan McGregor when they saw Moulin Rouge would say much the same about him as well.

As I said at the start, this is certainly one of the best sci-fi movies of recent times and I have a feeling it'll become a classic. You should see it.

Bad News Bears (remake)

Okay, so Richard Linklater took on the unwise task of remaking a comedy classic. Even so, I enjoyed this version quite a bit, due in no small part to Billy Bob Thornton who proves himself time and time again to be one of our master screen actors.

Let me note something right from the start: I'm no fan of sports movies, so the fact that I enjoyed it has nothing to do with a love of sports in general or baseball in particular.

The role Thornton plays here is a semi-reprise of his Bad Santa character. He plays a ball player who played 2/3 of an inning as a Seattle Mariner before being given the boot.

Now, he makes a living as an exterminator and took on a job coaching a local junior league baseball team. The team he ends up with is the typical pack of misfits one finds in movies in this genre.

I can't say it deviates far from the clichés of this genre, either, with the coach who doesn't give a rat's ass to start with finally getting his own act together enough to whip the team into shape for the big game. And of course, it's a movie about how the kids rise to the occasion.

There is a subplot about his relationship with the 12 year old daughter of an ex-girlfriend who can throw a 95 mph fastball which is surprisingly touching, more due to the acting of the girl (Sammi Kraft, who actually is a baseball star) than Thornton. One can feel her longing to be loved which seems forlorn because the Thornton character seems totally incapable of exhibiting anything a kid would recognize as affection.

At first not caring, he begins to feel competitive with the egotistical tightass coach of the current champs, played in an almost phoned-in performance by Greg Kinnear. Now, wanting to win, he teaches the kids to play and actually swings a bit too far in the wrong direction, wanting to win so badly that he forgets that the kids want to play as well, so he has kids walking into pitches in order to get on first base and he's telling a kid who's a talented fielder to grab any ball he can reach even if the ball is going more directly to one of the other fielders.

The misfit kids are good enough in their roles, but it is Thornton who carries this movie, and even if he's not nearly as bad as the character her played in Bad Santa he's bad enough to keep it interesting. I think you'll enjoy this movie even if you won't hear its name at Oscar time.

Yes

Every now and then a movie escapes from one of those channels for chubby chicks munching on chocolates as tears run down their cheeks and finds itself in an actual theater, and that's what happened here.

Only thing is...it went a little insane on the way.

Insane in the sense it's got a video look rather than a film look that for no particular reason goes into choppy and slow-mo effects. Craziest than that, all of the dialog is written in rhyming iambic pentameter, like a Shakespearean play.

Granted, the characters (chief among them the protagonist, Joan Allen) deliver the lines in a way that somewhat obscures the rhythm and rhyme, but it leads to occasionally stilted dialog.

Aware, as I am, that poetry is as much music as literature, I found myself listening more to the music than the meaning much of the time, so I'm not sure that this experiment ended up mimicking Shakespeare so much as mocking him.

A much bigger, problem with the movie is the way it handles the East vs. West theme, for it's the chronicle of an affair between a Lebanese Muslim man, once a surgeon, but now working as a cook in and the character played by Joan Allen, the wife of a distant and wealthy man (Sam Neill).

They make love, but they live in two different worlds. She in the world of an Irish-American woman married to a rich British man, he in the world of a political refugee, scraping by in a country where he is an outsider.

There is a scene where he lays out the vast differences between them and their lives and she finally sees the chasm between them.

This East vs. West thing is punctuated by constant reminders of the classism that exists everywhere in the West, but is more pronounced in the UK. The "cleaner" (maid) in the house who delivers several soliloquies on what the lower-class person knows about the hoity-toities they serve. Now and then a servant or menial laborer will break character and look directly at the camera as if to remind us that there are people leading ordinary, dismal lives around the main characters.

The problem is that the movie betrays its intellectual self by giving us a romantic ending, as if to say that "What the Hell? Who cares about all this political shit? Let's just go out on a beach and roll around in the sand and then go back to our hotel room and fuck."

In the end, it's just an Oxygen Network romance done in an overly artsy-fartsy way.

Happy Endings

Maggie Gyllenhaal always seems to be good but in this movie you'll see the possibility of an Oscar nomination. Ditto for exceptional actress, Lisa Kudrow, who has stopped passing herself off as a "dumb blonde" character actress and is now proving that she's really one of the best we have.

A warning: If you hate self-consciously stylistic movies which use the split-screen technique and flash cutesy textual comments on the screen, and if you hated Magnolia and American Beauty, then stay away from this movie.

But if you can set all that aside, this movie is a real treat, especially the performance of Maggie Gyllenhaal. I realize that actresses (or actors) which fascinate some people will drive others up the wall. I'm certainly in the former category.

I was introduced to Gyllenhaal in Secretary, where I found her character absolutely irresistible. She has a mysterious ability to be incredibly attractive despite not being drop-dead gorgeous. For example, I find her much more attractive than the admittedly much more beautiful Nicole Kidman.

Why? She just looks like someone it'd really be fun to spend a weekend with fishing and drinking on a houseboat or to go hiking with or to find yourself sitting next to on a Greyhound bus. She might be the most insufferable bitch on Earth, but to me, that's not the way she comes across.

This is one of those interwoven plots movies. Lisa Kudrow plays a woman who had a child by her step brother that he incorrectly thinks she aborted. Actually, she put it up for adoption, and ironically now she's a counselor in an abortion clinic. Her little secret is that she goes for occasional massages and is having an affair with her Hispanic masseur.

Into her life comes an aspiring young filmmaker who wants to make a kickass documentary, and somehow he has figured out that she has a living child out there, now 18, and he'd like to make a movie about their reunion. She would rather not and proposes a more interesting alternative.

Maggie Gyllenhaal plays a free-living and opportunistic young woman who, after giving a good karaoke performance, is asked to join a band by the band's drummer. She agrees and discovers that the boy is supposedly gay and has a wealthy widower father and she sets out to engage in some world class manipulation.

Then there is the pair of gay males whose best friends are a pair of lesbians who just had a baby. One of the males donated sperm which the lesbians claim wasn't used...or was it? Enquiring minds seemingly need to know.

There isn't a boring moment in this movie which begins with a bang (you'll see what I mean) and ends with a fantasy reunion sequence.

After being so effusive above regarding Maggie Gyllenhaal, I really need to say a few words about Lisa Kudrow, who is turning out to be a major dramatic actress. Sure, she has some ticks that reappear in just about every performance, but I find hers much less irritating than Tom Cruise's.

Tom Arnold is turning out to be one of those underrated actors who can be very good in the right role, and this is one of those roles.

Obviously, I'm recommending this movie, but one last comment about Maggie Gyllenhaal: She sings several times in this movie and she's excellent in that way that untrained singers who can stay on key can be. The way those seemingly naive and unschooled Brazilian singers of the bossa nova period sang. Singers like Astrud Gilberto.

March of the Penguins

I think we can add to the category of "chick flicks" a new category, "chick documentaries." Of course, since March of the Penguins is all about how the Emperor penguins make their chicks, that's a bit of a pun, but if you're looking for a nature documentary that's all about cute, this is it.

The Emperor Penguins leave the waters around Antarctica at the onset of winter and start walking inland to their rookery. The movie says they always return to the same place, but this conflicts with another seemingly good source of Emperor Penguin information. So, who knows?

What can't be doubted is that the Emperors have chosen probably the harshest environment on the face of the earth in which to pair off and produce just one egg (there are no "clutches" of eggs in this bird's world). It's a wonder the species persists at all. In fact, it may be due to the fact that they apparently live about as long as humans can: 70-100 years.

The link I gave two paragraphs above will get you up to speed before seeing the movie if that's what you want to do. What I want to do here may seem strange: I want to discuss the audience.

I referred to this movie as a "chick documentary," and one thing I noticed as time went by was how frequently the females in the audience would go "Ohhhh" or "Awhhh" whenever something cute happened.

I was reminded of a Nightline segment I saw once in which a researcher expressed considerable concern over some of the "smart" toys being produced in Japan that mimic the behavior of puppies, kittens, or other cute critters. Apparently, he took some of these toys to a mall and put them on display and women flocked to see them, talking to them as if these mechanical objects could hear, understand, and had feelings. Even reminding the women that they were interacting with complex toys would only stifle this sort of response briefly. He was recommending a law against using artificial intelligence to mimic living beings.

Women seem to be hard-wired to respond to cuteness, and Penguins are plenty cute as they walk around in their little tuxedos. They do things that look like things people do. However, I saw no evidence that Emperors are particularly smart. Now, I have no prejudice against birds. I know, for example, that parrots appear to be at least about as smart as porpoises, and crows and ravens may be nearly as intelligent, but Penguins give every evidence of being as dumb as posts, their every behavior being due much more to instinct than any thought process. Parrots are smart enough not to live in the Antarctic, for example!

Despite the fact that this is a "chick documentary," I did find the movie fascinating and enjoyable. I just took the humanization of the birds with a huge grain of salt. Of courze, I had to resist the homey baritone of Morgan Freeman's narration. Mr. Freeman could describe a beheading and make you feel like you were witnessing the reunion of long-separated twins.

I assume this film will receive a big push at Oscar time and I hope the voters in this category have the balls to reject it in favor of movies that are about important subjects and rely on facts instead of emotions to make their points.

March of the Penguins is an entertainment much mroe than an education.

Wedding Crashers

Vince Vaughn and Owen Wilson are two of the funniest comic actors around, but sometimes directors give comic actors too free a hand. Both of these guys are good at getting the most out of a line, but one gets the feeling they were given too much latitude in this movie. In other words, underdirection.

Sometimes letting things go on too long is funny, but the fun comes from a kind os squirm-in-your-seat discomfort. Beyond a certain point the fun stops while the discomfort remains and that happens several times in the movie.

We tend not to like lying, too, so there's a limit to how funny lying can be, especially when you begin to empathize with some of the victims of the lies. Of course, this can all be woven into a redemption story if you also care about the liars. Owen Wilson in this role becomes sympathetic, but I never developed much sympathy for the Vince Vaughn character.

Basically, it's the story of two shallow guys who crash weddings in order to meet horny girls and have one night stands. When they crash the biggest wedding of the year involving the daughter of a Presidential cabinet minister (played by the always good Christopher Walken), they meet his two other daughters. Vaughn picks the little redhead who is a firecracker but seems to be as nutty as a fruitcake. Wilson makes the wiser choice, the more levelheaded brunette daughter, who unfortunately is spoken for by a snobbish, extremely competitive, and unethical guy played by Brad Cooper.

As Vaughn realizes that the girl he chose is nuts, he wants to leave, but Wilson wants to stay because he thinks he can win the heart of the girl he chose. So, they end up spending the weekend at the Cabinet minister's compound, where things tend to continue to go well for Wilson and poorly for Vaughn.

And then...their deception is discovered and revealed. I'll leave it at that so as not to spoil the ending.

The movie is funny, but not as funny as it could have been. A cameo by another well-known comic actor leads to a very uncomfortable sidebar in the movie and then it has a fairly predictable ending.

It's a movie I could have lived without seeing, but if you want to go, it's good for a few laughs. But there are many better movies playing and there certainly are far better movies you might rent.

Charlie and the Chocolate Factory

I went to see this with a close friend who was really pumped. She had enjoyed the 1971 version (staring Gene Wilder and titled Willy Wonka & the Chocolate Factory) and because she's a big fan of Johnny Depp she could hardly imagine a movie she wanted to see more.

Both versions are based on a Roald Dahl story. Roald Dahl writes children's stories with an edge. While other authors have lovable fluffy lambs and huggable bunnies, Roald Dahl stories explore the dark and creepy side if the children's imagination. Despite bucking the cutesy trend of children's literature, Dahl's books, such as George and the Giant Peach and The Witches, both of which have been turned into movies, are among the most loved books in contemporary children's literature.

Dahl's books are beloved by adults as well, because many aspects of his stories go right over kids' heads.

The new version seems much more like a Roald Dahl story than the older one, probably because it was directed by Tim Burton, who of all modern directors might be described as most in tune with Dahl's dark brand of insanity. The production design of most of Tim's movies already look like they've been influenced by Roald Dahls illustrations.

Let me say right here that this in easily my favorite Tim Burton movie. It's also the best looking movie in quite a long time.

Tim Burton is himself something of a production designer because his movies so frequently have a certain creepy, decadent, rundown look (some more than others, witness Planet of the Apes, Mars Attacks!, and Big Fish, which have less of a stereotypical Tim Burton look than most). The production design here is as good as it gets.

The world is a dismal place in this film until, that is, we enter the giant gray Wonka chocolate factory. We discover, then, that on the inside it's a decorated with a rainbow palette.

I digress. Let's lay out the plot.

The story's hero, Charlie Bucket, lives with his family (mother, father, and all of his grandparents) in a ramshackle house virtually in the shadow of the huge and monolithic Wonka factory, which, strangely, manages to produce chocolate totally without employees.

Willy Wonka, founder and owner, announces a contest in which five tickets will be randomly distributed in his chocolate bar shipments. The holders of the tickets will (along with an adult escort) be allowed to tour the factory.

In short, Charlie is one of the lucky winners.

The moment when they enter the factory is one of those scenes, like the scene in The Wizard of Oz, where a dully colored movie transforms to one rich in color in an instant. Once inside the factory, the vividness of color is almost overwhelming. One feels almost like someone pigging out on candy as one enjoys the almost overwrought colorfest of the factory interior.

According to Wonka's offer in the film, one of the five would receive an unimaginably special award, the nature of which isn't described. Which of the five will it be? Gee...can't you guess?

Depp is very good here as Wonka, although apparently he's given a bit more of a back story here than in the previous movie or the book. He's a bit of a sad figure, overseeing a factory that packages chocolate using robots and South American pygmies known as Oompa Loompas, played amusingly by an actor named Deep Roy.

I should mention here that the production numbers featuring Deep Roy are among the major highlights of the movie and are extremely entertaining, and this coming from someone who really can't stand traditional musicals of the 1920's-50's.

One thing to watch for, if you're a movie nut like me, is references to other movies. (This is one of those aspects that goes over kids' heads.) You'll find references to 2001: A Space Odyssey and Psycho, among others.

Obviously, I'm recommending Charlie and the Chocolate Factory. It may take a while for a more entertaining movie to come along. I'm sure you'll enjoy it.

Dark Water

I've been looking forward to this film for a good six months or more and now that I've seen it, I must say it's a bit of a disappointment. It's not dreadful...not like The Ring 2, but it's far from the bar set by The Ring and Ju-On (the Japanese version, not the redundant American rip-off named The Grudge).

The plot in a nutshell is that a young mother (Jennifer Connelly of the magnificent eyebrows) in the throes of a divorce who has to find a new place to live with her 5-ish daughter (played well and sometimes very eerily by Ariel Gade). She has to find a place quickly, so despite misgivings, and without really agreeing with the ridiculous sales pitches of the rental agent (John C. Reilly), she decides to take it.

Almost immediately, water is a problem, starting with a disgustingly wet and drippy brownish patch in the bedroom ceiling. Disgusting water is a recurring theme in this movie: she runs tap water into a glass and hair comes out of the tap, brown water surges out of faucets, her washing machine fills with disgusting dark water.

To add to the tension, her ex-husband is pressing for sole custody, citing her mental state, there are boys in the building who menace and sexually harass her, neither the rental agent nor the building's super (Pete Postlethwaite using a weirdly unidentifiable accent) seems to be willing to take responsibility for the leaks and plumbing problems, and finally her daughter has developed an imaginary friend.

She gets an attorney played by Tim Roth, in probably the best single performance in the movie. Once he is on the case, things seem to start to go right for her.

But appearances can deceive.

There you have the makings of a crackerjack horror/thriller. Unfortunately, somewhere along the way it gets lost.

I started noting things that I simply couldn't believe. For example, she goes upstairs to investigate noises and the water, and of course while knocking on the door, it opens for her (standard horror genre cliche). When she walks in, there's about 2 or 3 inches of water on the floor. Now, I don't think any apartment building is so tightly built and sealed that water like that would only make for a wet spot in the ceiling below.

Toward the end of the movie, and totally disgusted with her apartment building, she proposes to her ex that they live closer together to make things easier and eliminate one thing that had become a sore point between them. This may not seem strange, but you need to realize that it's pretty well established in the film that he had hired the teen boys who'd been harrassing her!

The Tim Roth character seems wasted in many ways. He was very interesting but once you see the movie, you'll realize that he was just padding in a sense. He didn't really contribute much to the story.

Before I wrap things up, I must note that Jennifer Connelly continues to be one of the four or five most classically beautiful women on the screen today, and to top it all off, she can act as well as any other actress in Hollywood today. The career problem she's having, though, is that lately she's too frequently playing women on the edge and in various kinds of mental distress (House of Sand and Fog, Requiem for a Dream, A Beautiful Mind).

Maybe it's time she took a role in a remake of Hamlet.

The ending is one of those "Huh? That's it? It's over?" endings, as if the director lost the last 20 pages of the script or had his budget cut unexpectedly.

Fantastic Four

Well, not that I'm that much of a fantasy or comic book aficionado, but I was actually looking forward to Fantastic Four. In the end, though, it's kind of a low-rent, poor man's X-Men.

If X-Men was aimed at a 16 year old mind, Fantastic Four is dumbed down to about the 13 year old mind. The dialog is incredibly lame with the expected pseudoscientific jargon sounding like obvious mumbo-jumbo.

The special effects, with one or two exceptions, are no better than what you see in other movies (or TV, for that matter) all the time, and are far less impressive than what we've seen lately in such movies as Star Wars: Episode III - Revenge of the Sith or Batman Begins.

In a nutshell, four people, two of them scientists, and a billionaire businessman, are rocketed up to a space station to perform some experiments during a radiation storm. an accident happens and all them are exposed to radiation. As a result, each of them acquires a different power. The female scientist, Jessica Alba, can become invisible and also project force fields. Her ex-lover (Ioan Gruffudd) develops the ability to stretch as if he were made out of rubber. His assistant (Michael Chiklis of The Shield fame) becomes a being made of stone with great weight and strength, and finally Alba's brother (Chris Evans) can burst into flames, develop extremely high heat, and fly through the air. The billionaire develops a bio-metallic physique and can affect and control power sources around him.

These characters are named, in order, The Invisible Girl, Mr. Fantastic, The Thing, and The Human Torch. The bad guy is Dr. Doom.

The drama, such as it is, comes from the conflicts between members of this group, sparked primarily by Alba's rebellious and irresponsible brother and The Thing's desire to regain normal appearance. Added to this is the bitterness of Dr. Doom, who, after the accident in space lost control of his corporation.

No explanation is given as to why each one developed a different power. Normally, radiation sickness follows a fairly predictable course depending upon the degree of exposure.

I was looking forward to seeing the hottie from Sin City, Jessica Alba, but in the first part of the movie her hair was pulled back so severely, it almost gave her a facelift. As the movie progressed, and she warmed up to the character who supposedly had once been her flame, her hair loosened up a bit (an old movie trick). Even so, as time went by I began to realize that as pretty as she is, she has a very big head. I'm not talking about ego...I mean physically large. She has a big head.

While on the subject of The Invisible Girl, there is a scene partway into the movie, just after she has discovered her ability, where she has to take off her clothes to be unseen. Later on, when she's wearing a Fantastic Four uniform it seems to go invisible with her.

There some dopey humor, such as when The Human Torch pops Jiffy Pop popcorn by simply putting the tin on his hand.

Obviously, I didn't like this movie all that much. I wasn't bored stiff, but I was disappointed that it could have been better and aimed just a bit higher.

Heights

If you've been missing Glenn Close and if you like New York City and if you are into Byzantine relationships involving secrets and betrayal, this movie is for you.

Ms. Close plays a famous movie actress, Diana, who is currently doing stage work and is in the process of preparing to direct one play while at the same time rehearsing to play Lady Macbeth in a more mainstream production. She hs a daughter, Isabel (Elizabeth Banks), who is a talented young photographer in search of her first big break. Isabel's wedding to her live-in boyfriend, Jonathan (James Marsden), a young attorney.

We soon learn that Diana is in an open marriage and has a wandering eye that favors men half her age. She uses her celebrity and what (little) remains of her good looks to attract and seduce them. She sets her sights on a young actor, Alec (Jesse Bradford), who auditions for a part in the play she will be directing. For reasons unknown at first, he is uncomfortable to find out she is the director and much less comfortable when she makes rather obvious attempts at advances with him. Later on, of course, we discover why.

Diana seems unsure about Isabel's impending marriage and questions the wisdom of it several times, while professing to like Jonathan.

The catalyst for the events in this story is the appearance on the scene of a journalist assigned by a Vanity Fair editor to write an article about a famous gay photographer who will be exhibiting his nude portraits of young men. It's well known that he had an active sexual life involving his models.

The journalist interviews a number of young men, one of whom invites him to a party Diana is throwing that evening. This is where things start unraveling for a number of people in the story, with some characters' relationships coming unglued, opening up new possibilities for some, changing the course of their lives for others.

Deep dark secrets are discovered and hidden betrayals are revealed.

This movie, like one of Woody Allen's more serious efforts, studies characters most of us won't be able to relate to, not just because we don't live in New York City, but because even if we did, we probably wouldn't be moving in Diana's circles.

It's an excellent movie, unremittingly well acted, and totally fascinating. With much enthusiasm, I recommend it.

Saving Face

This is Alice Wu's directorial debut and it is a worthy first film.

We people of European heritage are aware of those of Asian extraction living with us here in the US. They dress like us and talk like us and work side-by-side with us, but we are not always aware of how different their lives are, especially if their parents or grandparents came from the old country.

This movie is about three generations of Chinese people. The older the generation, the more they embody and want to perpetuate their traditional Chinese values.

Ma (Joan Chen, the only really well-known actor in the movie) plays Ma, a 48 year old widow with a late-20's surgeon-in-training daughter named Wil (Michelle Krumiec). She seems intent on getting Wil married, pressuring her to go to social events and seeing to it that eligible men pay attention to her.

The problem is that Wil is a lesbian.

At one of the socials, Wil encounters a beautiful girl named Vivian (Lynn Chen, as far as I know, no relation to Joan Chen). Vivian is a ballet dancer taking time off to do modern dance. They hit it off, and after some false starts are having sex.

Wil wants to keep this a secret because it would embarrass her family.

Meanwhile, her mother, Ma, who has been living with her own parents (Wil's grandparents) since being widowed, is kicked out and moves in with Wil. Wil's attempts to find out what her mother did are to no avail for a while, but she eventually discovers that her mother is pregnant and will not admit who the father of the child is.

Ma is causing her parents to lose face, and Wil is afraid of causing her mother to lose face, so this is where the title of the movie comes from.

Vivian is much more the free spirit and insists upon meeting Wil's mother. After much hesitation, Wil caves in and there is an uncomfortable (for them...humorous for us) dinner scene with Ma asking questions and getting accurate but misleading answers. Does she know that her daughter and this beautiful woman are lovers?

Ma's father decides that Ma must marry to remain in the family, so we see her go on a series of dates with strange men.

Meanwhile, Vivian is becoming dissatisfied with Wil's unwillingness to make their relationship public. When she receives an invitation to work in Paris, it's time for Wil to decide what she wants of Vivian, who, if she accepts, will be gone for four years.

This is a well-made and engaging movie from one end to the other. It's hard to believe that it's Alice Wu's first foray into directing. The actors, even those with relatively small parts, most of them absolute unknowns, are all quite good.

The three leading women (Joan Chen, Michelle Krusiec, and Lynn Chen) are all superb. Joan Chen is still quite beautiful at 46 and the other two gals, who are topless in one scene by the way, are extremely beautiful.

Many people avoid "chick flicks" and the idea of it being about a lesbian relationship will also keep some away. That would be a shame. This is a fine movie if not a great one, and it's well worth a trip to your local art house.

Me and You and Everyone We Know

I sincerely hope...no I pray that Miranda July never gets a big budget to play with, because it's so wonderful to see what someone can do with a tiny budget and actors all of whom but one are unknowns.

Miranda wrote, directed, and plays one of the leads in this movie which is about two people crossing the void of fear and hesitation to establish human contact. It's not about two people whose underwear is getting moist as they think about each other. It's about people who simply need someone who wants to be with them.

The movie introduces us to a female performance artist (Miranda) who's doing a piece on love and relationships and to a disheveled young man (John Hawkes, most recently of the Deadwood TV series) whose marriage is coming apart, leaving him with joint custody of two boys, one about five and one about fifteen.

In an irrational act to get the boys' attention, he burns his hand as he had seen someone else do, but he wrongly uses lighter fluid which burns hotter and is more difficult to put out than alcohol, so he really burns his hand. This plays no particular role in the movie except to show his emotional state and to stimulate a little dialog.

Miranda drives an Elder Cab which takes old people out to do shopping and run chores. John works as a shoe salesman in a mall department store. They meet when Miranda takes one of her rides (Hector Elias) shoe shopping. When he takes the time to ask her about her feet and she complains about her shoes and he tells her she deserves better (probably just as a sales line), she is somehow smitten by him and more or less initiates a conversation while he's walking to his car (which inexplicably seems to be parked well away from the mall, as is hers, but let's not think about that). At first he reciprocates her flirtation but when she climbs into his car asking for a ride to hers, he panics at her forwardness and asks her to get out of his car.

Meanwhile, we have some subplots, quirky and otherwise.

In the otherwise category is the love story between the elderly man she drove to buy shoes and his girlfriend who seems to be seriously ill with some sort of respiratory disorder (she breathes oxygen through some sort of respirator).

More interesting are some subplots surrounding his two boys. The 15 year old chats online and lets his little brother (who, naturally, doesn't know half what's going on) sit in. Eventually, the young boy unwittingly ends up doing some pretty randy chatting (without knowing it) with an anonymous adult identified later.

Meanwhile, two neighborhood girls (17-18ish) are exploring their own sexuality and use the older boy to settle their dispute as to which gives better fellatio (though it would appear neither one of them has actually done it before).

We are introduced to a neighbor girl who's a bit more age-appropriate for the older son, but she's a bit weird, since she's assembling a hope chest which already contains towel sets, a shower curtain, kitchen appliances, etc.

One last subplot involves Miranda trying to get a tape of her performance work heard at a local museum of contemporary art. There is a funny scene where she and the Director end up on an elevator together and Miranda hands a tape of her work to the Director, who refuses to take it, instead handing her a card and telling her to send it to that address. Miranda looks at the card and queries "but that address is right here?" "I know the Director responds, but it's less likely to get lost that way." We're also treated to a scene of the Director who is a charicature of all of those pretentious art people that we all suspect don't know their ass from a hole in the ground, reviewing art submissions and commenting on them. At one point, she looks at something and says, "This is so real. It looks just like a hamburger wrapper" and the artist tells her, "It is a hamburger wrapper. I always include some real things in my shows."

Are you getting some idea that this movie is quirky? It is...but I didn't really find it annoying. In fact, I can safely say that I enjoyed every minute of it, despite the fact that John Hawkes and the actress playing little girl next door are the only characters (even including Miranda) whose acting is really at a professional level. And the cinematography isn't even at a Nickelodeon level. This movie has so many other little virtues in terms of the ideas and sincerity behind the writing that I forgive all that stuff. And even though Miranda July has a way to go before she becomes a really good actress, she's just charming and endearing enough to pull it off here.

Rebound

Adam Sandler used to be the actor I simply could not stand. Before him, it was Pauly Shore. However, Adam has shows some promise in more dramatic roles such as Spanglish and Punch Drunk Love. However, my current most annoying actor is Martin Lawrence. Looking back at his oevre, I couldn't find one single performance I really enjoyed.

In this film, Lawrence plays a bigtime basketball college coach for an Ohio State-like university, who is an egotistical and self-centered showboater. When, on the way from being ejected from a game for bad behavior, he kills the oposing team's falcon mascot, he is kicked out of the athletic association. However, the association's rules allow for reinstatement after an ejected coach successfully coaches a team outside the league.

At the urging of his agent, Lawrence volunteers to coach the basketball team at his middle school and this sets up the main body of the movie.

It's predictable that the team is a bunch of nerdy misfits who don't know shit from Shinola and that, at first indifferent, he grows to care about them and starts really pulling them together as a team and teaching them how to play. They start winning, win the big championship, and he grows along with the kids. (Oh, did I spoil it for you?!!!)

Lawrence is just about the worst actor in the movie. The kids are pretty good. However, the problem isn't the acting or even Lawrence himself, it's the directing. The movie is a bit short, and time after time I had the feeling something was missing from middle part of the movie where Lawrence is training and teaching his team.

While films like this are predictable, this one was tediously predictable. A little bit of suspense would have have helped quite a bit, especially for those of us who've seen so many movies like this.

A sick industry in a sick world

What is Hollywood doing to adapt to a new world where you can rent a movie for $1-$3 but you have to pay $8 per person (give or take a buck) to see it during prime dinner date time? And let's not even talk about the fact that anyone who wants to poke around a bit can probably find a foreign-based site, if not a US-based one, where it's possible to download movies. Today's broadband speeds make downloading entire movies a lot more practical than it used to be.

At the same time, the people who download free movies don't seem to be thinking about the impact they are having on an industry where blockbusters cost many tens or millions of dollars to produce. If a dubious case can be made for file sharing music files, none can be made for file sharing any movie that's not in the public domain.

Movies like The Lord of the Rings trilogy, Star Wars, The War of the Worlds and so forth cannot be made as volunteer projects.

One big change that's going on is that more and more people have larger TV screens, making the experience in the living room more like being in a theater from the purely visual standpoint. Or so they think. However, there really is no substitute for the social aspect of the theater experience, especially in terms of making it an evening of a dinner followed by a movie (or a movie followed by a dinner). Believe me, most women won't count viewing a rented or stolen movie as quite the same thing as having a movie ticket bought for them.

While in the case of the music industry, one can talk about cutting out a corrupt middleman, in the case of the film industry, if there are to be big budget movies and movie theaters at all, there have to be paying customers.

The sad thing is that, given the lower cost options of renting or stealing movies, more and more people are watching movies at home instead of in theaters, and the more people don't go to movie theaters, the more the cost of a movie ticket will have to go up.