The Flick Addict

RV

2006-05-03T23:35:00.000-07:00

This movie hasn't been well-received by most critics, and to be truthful, it's nothing special. And yet, it's no worse than many other summer fun movies. It's no There's Something About Mary, but it's no Dumb and Dumberer, either.

Robin Williams plays a marketing man working for a major soft drink company run or owned (it's not clear) by a major schmuck. His job takes him away from his family more than he and his wife would like. The result: resentful and rebellious kids. (This, strangely despite the fact that mom is a full-time homemaker.)

His family consists of an annoying son (Josh Hutcherson) who is into rap music, a disturbingly jail-baity daughter played by (I'm not kidding with this name) "JoJo Levesque," and a wife, played by veteran actress Cheryl Hines. JoJo was only fifteen when RV was filmed, but she was playing a girl about to go to college at the end of summer (age=17?). Normally, actresses play younger than their chronological age, not older. Now, she has a great figure and in some of the clothing she wore, nipple bumps were evident. She also has a pronounced "hourglass" figure. Ms. Hines also is well built. In short, Robin appeared to have a Penthouse Pet of the future for a daughter and a Penthouse Pet of 20 years ago for a wife.
By the way, "JoJo" was in another movie recently, Aquamarine, where her supposed lack of development compared to more popular girls was part of the story.

Anyway, they (the family) are planning on a Hawaiian vacation, but Robin's boss requires Robin to help pitch an Odwalla-like natural beverage company to sell out and become part of the major soft drink company.

In order to vacation with his family and still make the presentation, he cancels the Hawaiian vacation and rents a large RV trying to convince his family that a road trip to Colorado (where the presentation will take place) is actually better. He doesn't explain that he's actually doing this so he can be there for the presentation at a time when they had been planning to be on the beach in Hawaii, which further incurs resentment since his family feels they are being hijacked into a vacation they don't really want.

Along the way, they meet a cheerful and positive family. The husband and wife are played by Jeff Daniels and Kristin Chenoweth. They have a son and daughter who are appropriately aged for Robin's family (coincidence? I think not). We learn later on that Robin's family finds their positivity annoying mostly because of their own family's unresolved issues.

Much of this movie is predictable: You know that the family's issues will be resolved and that they will grow closer. The annoying Jeff Daniels family will prove their salvation and prove to be true friends. Robin will leave his company if the choice is between his job and his family.

Even though it's a formulaic movie, a lot of movies are, especially summer movies.

While it won't be mentioned at Oscar time, for what it is, it's not such a bad movie.

2046

2005-09-03T18:55:00.000-07:00

I've been waiting for this movie for months based on the previews. I knew it was a sequel to In The Mood For Love, a previous movie made by Director Kar Wai Wong, but I couldn't figure out how the sci-fi aspects hinted at in the previews could possibly intrude into a story as earthbound as In The Mood For Love.

As it turns out, the movie shifts around in time and has certain stream of consciousness aspects as real events mix with scenes from the sci-fi novel the protagonist (Tony Leung) is writing, which is interwoven with fictional characters and situations and situations and women from his own life.

Speaking of women, this movie features three of the most beautiful and well-known Asian actresses. I'm speaking of Gong Li (Raise The Red Lantern, Farewell My Concubine), Maggie Cheung (In The Mood For Love, Hero), and Ziyi Zhang (Couching Tiger, Hidden Dragon; Hero; House Of Flying Daggers).

In The Mood For Love took place in a Hong Kong boarding hotel where the Tony Leung character lived in room 2046 and collaborated on a sci-fi story with a woman (Maggie Cheung) he loved but could not have.

Now a sleazy, cynical guy with money problems, he went back to the hotel to rent room 2046, but ends up taking 2047 because 2046 is being renovated. He decides to stay in 2047 and a beautiful young woman (Ziyi Zhang), who is also the hotel owner's younger daughter, moves into 2046.

We witness his dalliances with the hotel owner's younger daughter and older daughter (Gong Li) as well as flashbacks to his earlier affair.

As his meandering and irresponsible life both helps and damages the women he encounters, scenes from his novel interweave and the female characters appear in 1960's wardrobe and wardrobe from the future.

Now, as to the title. Not only is 2046 a room number but it's the title of his sci-fi novel in progress (though the title changes to 2047 when he collaborates with the Ziyi Zhang character).

If you like linear plots and tied up loose ends, this movie won't be for you. But if you like mystery, intrigue, and gorgeous visuals, not to mention stunning Asian women, I can recommend this movie wholeheartedly.

Transporter 2

2005-09-02T21:09:00.000-07:00

There are so many ways to start this movie because there are so many things to say about it. I think I'll begin with a digression.

The Transporter is one of the best action movies of all time. The charismatic Jason Statham (Lock, Stock, and Two Smoking Barrels and The Italian Job, among others), established himself as a leading man and something of a martial arts star with well-choreographed fight scenes.

It was that rare movie that bucked the general flow of movies from comic books. I don't know of a comic has resulted from The Transporter but it doesn't really matter: essentially it was a cartoon.

In this movie, Frank Martin, ex-special forces guy with a love of fast cars, returns doing what he does best: getting something or someone from point A to point B as quickly, recklessly, and dangerously as possible. He's the best of the best, and as lethal as he is behind the wheel, the bad guys had better seek cover when he gets out of his car, because he really knows how to fight!

The influence of Jackie Chan is evident here, because many of the fight scenes involve acrobatics and the creative use of props to defeat anywhere from one to a dozen opponents. Of course the difference is that Jackie Chan really does it, and while it seems Jason Statham does almost all of the fight scenes himself, creative cutting and special effects are obviously involved as well, whereas when Jackie does it, he really does it. No matter, you're not thinking about that while you're watching the movie.

I mentioned that the previous movie was essentially a cartoon, and this one ratchets up the cartoonishness even further with stunts that are not just hard to believe, but which are literally impossible. Just to take one example, knowing that there is a radio-controlled bomb magnetically attached to his car, Frank drives one side of his car up a ramp (funny how ramps seem to be wherever needed in action flicks), forcing his car in to a flying 360. While passing under a cast iron hook on a heavy chain, the car flies just perfectly relative to the chain to knock the bomb off before it explodes.

This is just one of many examples of impossible stunts in this movie.

Back to the car for a second. Having traded in his BMW for an elegant and sexy Audi A8 W12, a 12-cylinder 420 horsepower sedan that manages hit all kinds of objects, to be hit by numerous bullets, and to plow through a masonry and concrete wall without getting so much as a scratch on the bumper. It's an impressive car and, especially in the beginning, this movie takes product placement re: automobiles to a whole new level. Audi will be selling lots these because of this movie.

Here is the story in a nutshell. Filling in for a friend, Frank Martin is now in the states acting as transporter and bodyguard for a young boy whose father (Matthew Modine) happens to be the Federal Drug Czar. Frank has actually developed a soft spot borh for the boy and for his frustrated and unhappy mom (Amber Valletta of Hitch and What Lies Beneath). As this job is winding down, he accepts the task on his day off of taking the boy to his pediatrician's office, which unbeknownst to him has been taken over by kidnappers working for a vicious international criminal.

Leading the kidnapping crew is the criminal's psychopathic girlfriend, who makes a rather peculiar-looking nurse in her red platform shoes and with makeup seemingly applied with a trowel. When Frank notices blood seeping out from under the door of a closet in the doctor's office (the real doctor and nurse, now dead, were stashed there) he really realizes something is amiss and goes about getting the boy out of there, with limited success. The rest of the movie is pretty much about carrying out his promise to protect the boy, and we all know that when Frank makes a promise, you can bank on it.

Transporter 2 is, if anything, even better than it's predecessor, which had a couple lulls in it. No lulls here, though like all action movies it tends to unravel somewhat at the end, but even so it's the best action movie in a while. Even the recent Batman movie doesn't even come close.

Not a "chick flick" by any stretch of the imagination, if you're looking for best popcorn movie around, most likely this is it.

November

2005-08-29T23:34:00.000-07:00

November stars Courtney Cox and has Ann Archer as a supporting cast member, but they are the only "name" actors in the film.

If you like style over substance, this is a good movie. If not, it's the pits.

Ms. Cox plays a female instructor of photo arts who is coming home from dinner with her boyfriend and feels a hunger for chocolate ice cream. She sends him into the neighborhood convenience market to buy some for her and while she is in the car distracted by loud music from the car's radio, and by reading an artsy-fartsy tabloid, he is shot to death in a robbery.

Shortly thereafter, while viewing some student slides, a slide appears which seems to have been taken during the robbery, for there is the store and there is the car with her in it. Scary shit! What does it mean?

Unfortunately, this is one of those movies that not only doesn't answer ANY of your questions, but in which you know seem to know less and less as time goes by until at the end, you're unsure of anything.

Was the boyfriend killed or was she killed with the movie as her dying thoughts? Or, alternatively, were they both killed in the robbery? How can a photo on her wall before the crime occurred have been taken from the crime scene?

I could go on...

This is one of those movies that seems like an art school student's class project. Today, too many students waste their time and talent on that school of art which has given up producing art with a value based on beauty or idea or even utility and instead has decided to toy with the public by giving them puzzling art. Art whose sole raison d'etre is to confound and annoy.

The movie seems to have been shot in a combination of camcorder video and 16mm or even 8mm film. Don't expect Hollywood production values! Instead, expect it to look "arty." And it does. LIke I said, style over substance.

The Cave

2005-08-27T01:01:00.000-07:00

I'll admit up front that I don't generally enjoy movies set in caves, mines, or any other kind of subterranean location. That's part of what I dislike about this one, but only part.

Actually, this movie is a mess. Sloppy cinematography, sloppy editing, bad special effects and computer graphics. The acting is not exactly Oscar caliber, but it's no worse than your average horror flick and perhaps a tad better.

I go back to the setting. What's wrong with an entire movie set in a cave is that the surroundings are so different from what we know, totally lacking in the geometry of our everyday world, that it's very disorienting. Momentary disorientation can be useful to a director. When it permeates the whole movie, you start to get a headache.

Combine that with lots of shaky camera shots, intentionally out-of-focus shots, shots aimed away from the action (to make us guess or imagine what's going on) and if you're anything like me, you'll be seriously considering giving up and leaving the theater, considering the cost of the ticket a write-off.

On the plus side (and one does have to reach to find plus signs here) is that the movie features not just one, but two gorgeous actresses: Lena Headey as the staff scientist (cave expert) and Piper Perabo as the sexy and tomboyish member of the dive team.

In most of these movies you know early on who is going to be gone by the end of the movie. This is one area where the movie has surprises, which I won't get into.

As for the standard goners in these films, they tend to include any black man in the movie, any nerd, and if there is more than one female, their chances of being eliminated are in inverse proportion to their beauty (the less attractive, the more likely to be monster food.

One exception to this rule is that any slut in the movie can't be alive at the end, either. In the most stereotypical of such stories, it is usually the handsome leader of the group and the sexiest chick who come out with their skins. Someday I hope to see one where the last ones standing are the black guy, the team's computer nerd, and the most beautiful girl.

At any rate, don't hurry to your theater for this one. If you must see it, wait for it to go to video, probably next month.

The Great Raid

2005-08-27T01:00:00.001-07:00

I'm a big fan of Benjamin Bratt but I fear the day when he's paired up with Lou Diamond Phillips because it may be hard to tell them apart!

This is a dramatic movie that mixes drama with documentary aspects. As it begins, we are told/warned that it was "inspired" by actual events. I fear this word "inspired" because what it means is that the makers of the movie gave themselves a lot of latitude to change the characters and facts for dramatic and artistic purposes.

What can't be doubted, apparently, is the fact that the event that inspired this movie is the most successful rescue operation of American troops from a prisoner of war camp. Successful in terms of the number of prisoners (511) and in the lack of casualties on the American side (1 killed, and several wounded).

I think one of the things that is covered by the "inspired" designation is the required love story between the highest ranking US officer and a nurse he had a "thing" for and whose officer husband is now dead. While they never meet, she working in the Philippine resistance and helps smuggle medicine and other necessities to him for the men in the camp. She loves him as well and, apparently, only after the war will they be able to be together.

The setting is the end of the war in the Pacific (WWII of course). With General Macarthur leading a successful assault on the Japanese on the Islands, it's estimated that the camp will be overrun by Americans in as little as five days. Since the Japanese have accomplished horrific mass executions of prisoners in other camps, it's deemed essential to liberate these prisoners before that can happen.

Bratt, a Lt. Colonel who leads the newly-formed Army Rangers, gives the planning of the attack to an underling Captain (James Franco). The attack will involve moving on the camp through the jungle and somehow moving their team across a huge grassy clearing during the daylight hours so that they can conduct the attack as dusk turns into dark.

This is one of the better war movies I've seen in a while, though it's certainly no Saving Private Ryan. It's a guy movie, primarily, though I'm sure many of the gals will sympathize with the love story. Definitely recommended as a good popcorn movie.

The Skeleton Key

2005-08-27T01:00:00.000-07:00

This occult thriller centers on a young nursing student who is tired of working for a heartless hospice business and so accepts a job as a live-in caregiver for a mute and largely paralyzed stroke victim (John Hurt).

To be accepted for the job, she has to deal with the thinly-veiled doubt and hostility of the man's wife, ably played by the veteran actress Gena Rowlands. Morally supported and championed by the family's handsome young attorney (Peter Sarsgaard) she is accepted and begins her job in this old southern home which looks something like a scaled-down plantation mansion, complete with columns on the front porch, a brick wall, and a wrought iron gate.

As she performs her duties, she has lots of spare time and rather impolitely starts wandering into parts of the house which one would think are none of her business, such as the attic. There she encounters a locked door which starts shaking as though someone on the other side wants to get out.

When she eventually does get into this room, it turns out to be what her young black girlfriend tells her is a "hoodoo room." We are told that "hoodoo" isn't to be confused with "voodoo." The latter is an actual religion, the former is the practice of casting white and black magical spells.

This sets of the mystery of the story: Why is there a hoodoo room in this house? How much does the wife know about it? Does it have anything to do with the husband's affliction?

She finds out that in the past, the owners of the house at that time had a pair of servants who practiced hoodoo, and who were lynched on a day when the owners' two children disappeared.

Naturally, as with any movie like this, it has a twist ending. And like almost every thriller, it tends to fall apart at the end, with people we thought of as good being evil and people turning out to be not at all who we thought they were. And of course there's the standard running and hiding and attacking.

As you may have guessed, if this is the sort of thing you like, you'll probably like it. It's certainly not the worst of the genre while it certainly can't claim to be the best. It fails by comparison with last year's Hide and Seek, but it's certainly far better than such recent films as House of Wax and Dreamcatcher.

The 40-Year-Old Virgin

2005-08-27T00:59:00.000-07:00

Steve Carell is hardly new to acting for a wide audience. He's been in well over 20 movies and TV series since 1991. You may remember him from Anchorman, Melinda and Melinda, The Office (TV), and Bewitched, not to mention his ongoing role as a correspondent on TV's The Daily Show. However, this is his first major role as the lead character and not merely a cast member in an ensemble.

Carell plays a 40 year old man with a secret, and you don't need to guess what it is if you know the title of the film. When his secret slips out to his buddies, they vow to help him get his dipstick wet without the aid of K-Y Jelly or Astroglide.

All of these guys profess to know the ways of women and seduction and give him one bit of bad advice after another. (The one exception, possibly, is the "Just ask question...women love to talk about themselves" advice, which leads to two hilarious bits with a very sexy Elizabeth Banks (Spider-Man, Catch Me If You Can, Sea Bisquit, Spider-Man 2, Heights, to name a few recent roles).

Some of their advice is good, though, and should be borne in mind by male audience members who seem to have trouble landing girls, such as the advice to get rid of some of the boyish posters for lame bands and the numerous action figures (still in the original packaging of course), which are scattered throughout his apartment.

In the meantime, he has a chance encounter with the owner of a local small business named "We Sell Your Stuff On EBay" who actually shows some interest in him, since she gives him her card and invites him to visit. This character is played by Catherine Keener, who despite being in her 40's manages that klutzy, warm, and homely sort of charm that some people possess.

While the boys are dragging him into clubbing situations and buying a hooker for him (who turns out to be a transvestite), he slowly warms to the Keener character, although he does have to overcome the resistance of her older daughter. How he charms her is one of the better scenes in the movie.

This movie is quite funny though it really does earn its "R" rating with foul language and even fouler sexual references (I certainly heard a few new terms). The opening scene, in fact, shows how shuffling to the bathroom with a morning boner. Some people may even feel a bit uncomfortable due to their empathy for Carell's character, who he plays as an extremely sincere guy who'd make a great dad.

I think most people will enjoy this film. If you're not such a person, I think I've given you enough clues here to stay away from it. Me? I found it quite enjoyable though of course, like most comedies, it probably won't be remembered at Oscar time.

Asylum

2005-08-27T00:58:00.000-07:00

Part gothic romance, part thriller, and part cautionary tale, this is the story of a woman, bored in her marriage, whose weakness sets of a tragic chain of events.

Set in Britain in the 1950's, Natasha Richardson plays Stella, the wife of a psychoanalyst hired by an insane asylum. Her marriage is a bit iffy and we get strong hints that she has spoken and behaved in ways in the past that have not much helped her husband's career.

She has a 10-ish boy she obviously loves dearly.

And yet...she finds herself strongly attractive to a trustee inmate, Edgar, repairing their house's greenhouse. Resisting her impulses at first, and after dancing with him at the Asylum Ball (a mixer involving both the Asylum's staff and inmates), her interest in him grows so intense that one afternoon she sneaks off to the greenhouse and without even uttering a word makes her body available to him.

Bear in mind that by now she has heard Edgar's story, that he murdered, mutilated, and beheaded his wife.

Edgar is the pet patient of the impeccably dressed elderly psychoanalyst, Peter (Ian McKellen) who competes with her husband for the position of Superintendant of the Asylum.

One day, Edgar wanders into their home after Stella's mother-in-law takes the boy on an outing. Having forgotten something, the mother-in-law returns home with the boy in tow. The boy stumbles upon Edgar in the act of escaping and once on the road again mentions it to the mother-in-law, who stops the car. Edgar, who has secreted himself in the car's trunk uses this moment to exit the car and make good his escape.

Stella is now in disgrace and vows to recommit to her marriage and family. However, she receives a message from Edgar and begins visiting him in his lair in London. Eventually, she gives in to his entreaties to move in with him, so she abandons her husband and child and moves to London to live with him and his assistant/roommate.

The nasty, jealous side of Edgar's nature comes out as the bloom wears off of her relationship with him, he beats her badly, and now Stella is trapped in another unsatisfying relationship. Luckily, the police finally catch up with her and she is sent back to the Asylum where she once again recommits to the marriage.

Unfortunately, her husband has been relieved of his position and now they shall have to move to Wales, where he has obtained another job.

After a while, Edgar figures out where they are and gets in touch with Stella. This is where I would have ended the movie (after he finally murders her and possibly her entire family as well) but the movie isn't finished just yet and the rest of the film has a rather "tacked on" feeling to it that struck me as a flaw.

In her younger days, Natasha Richardson was one of the great English screen beauties. Today, she's still attractive in a MILFish way and we see her in several scenes where she's either nude or clad in garters and stockings. Not half bad!

As is typical of British films, the acting is fine. It's the story that sucks. Even so, the movie is worth seeing if only as a cautionary tale to writers and directors of the future to try to know when the story is over.

Saint Ralph

2005-08-27T00:57:00.001-07:00

Ralph is a young student in a Catholic school in Hamilton, Ohtario, who has two main problems: 1) authority figures and 2) his mother is dying of a brain tumor. He needs a miracle to help him with 2).

He has other problems, too, a main one having a big crush on a lovely girl student who seems headed for life as a nun and being known throughout school as the kid who was caught wanking in the swimming pool while he peeked through the half-open door of the girls' locker room, thus forcing the school to drain the pool and scrub it down.

His mom then slips into a coma.

When he hears that "only a miracle" would save his mom and then is told that it would be a miracle for him to win the Boston Marathon, his duty is clear: He must win the marathon so that his mother may live.

Against the wishes of the principal of the school, the stern Father Fitzpatrick, and with the aid of the friendly and helpful former runner Father Hibbert (Campbell Scott), a sympathetic nurse who has had experience working with athletes (played by the underappreciated Jennifer Tilley), and the spiritual assistance of his lady love, he sets about becoming a world-class athlete...and succeeds!

Does he win the marathon? You can either see the movie or check the record books, but you won't hear it from me, not just to be difficult, because this isn't really what the movie is all about.

This is a great date movie with plenty of appeal to both males and females. Adam Butcher as Ralph is very good as are all of the supporting performers in this fine movie which is as much a comedy as a sports story.

Murderball

2005-08-27T00:57:00.000-07:00

If you think you know quadriplegics, this movie will probably show that you don't.

This documentary follows the US Quad Rugby Team, sometime world champs, through about three years of competition.

With a soundtrack often supplied by, surprisingly, Ministry, this movie is fast-paced, dramatic, and often funnier than even the better comedies playing against it in other theaters in the multiplex.

Much of the drama surrounds the fact that their main competitors, the Canadian team, is coached by a man, Joe Soares, who once was a lead player on the US team. He's viewed as a traitor by the US players but he feels he was robbed by not being allowed to become the coach of the US team. Not wanting to leave the game, he gladly accepted the challenge of coaching the Canadians.

Every good team has at least one player who is the engine of the team by playing well and playing hard in a "take no prisoners" fashion, and on the US team this person is Mark Zupan, who is so fascinating and charismatic that I think that eventually he may be cast in fictional movies. As for the Canadians, Soares seems to perform that function, but we learn much less about the Canadians than the Americans.

Neither Zupan nor Soares can be described as "pleasant" people, especially Soares, who almost goes out of his way not to be pleasant. Nevertheless, they are both admired and respected for their prowess.

The movie moves from competition to preparation for the next one, to that competition and prepping for the next one, and so on until the final showdown at the 2004 Olympics in Greece.

The glory of winning and dealing with loss are always themes in movies about sports, and this one is no exception. The one thing you may come away with from this movie is an understanding that just because someone is in a wheelchair and is dealing with impaired physical functionality, it doesn't follow that they compete any less strenuously than "normal" people.

Junebug

2005-08-27T00:56:00.001-07:00

A beautiful and sophisticated Chicago art dealer, Madeleine (Embeth Davidtz of Thirteen Ghosts, Mansfield Park), and her boyfriend Johnny (Alessandro Nivola of Laurel Canyon and Jurassic Park III) trek into the Southeast so she can attempt to convince a backwoods folk artist to let her represent him.

While there, they visit her family, which has many of the stereotypical traits we associate with small-town America. The supporting cast in this movie is great with a strong-willed simple-minded mother, a quiet and gentle father, an angry disturbed brother, and his good-hearted airhead wife Ashley played by Amy Adams in a performance will no doubt be opening doors for her all over the film industry.

This is a city mouse/country mouse story in which the sophisticated Madelaine must find ways to relate to people who find it almost unbelievable that she was born in Japan and is well read.

She means well and puts up with Ashley's brutal motormouthing, the brother's brooding hostility (which it turns out is founded on his lust for her), and the subsurface contempt felt for her by her boyfriend's mother who, apparently, has seen it all (all that really matters anyway) and thus knows all.

A subplot develops when the folk artist threatens to leave her for a New York dealer, forcing her to decide how to divide her time and attention between this family whose hearts she sincerely wants to win and her financial interests as a dealer.

Everything comes to a head in a crisis when birth time arrives for Ashley. Lots of things get sorted out, Madeleine's values come into sharper focus, Johnny sees her more clearly just as she has, through seeing him interact with his family and community, learned much more about him. The other characters (with the exception of the possibly mentally-disturbed brother) become more understandable as well.

The last scene as Madeleine and Johnny return home in their car may seem a little weird and may run counter to what one might expect, but perhaps that's one of the glories of this little masterpiece of the slice-of-life style.

Four Brothers

2005-08-27T00:56:00.000-07:00

This is a revenge story pure and simple. Four men who were raised as foster children by the same mother return for her funeral. She was shot in what at first appears to be a neighborhood convenience store robbery, but which, upon closer inspection, looks more and more like a "hit."

The main gimmick of this film as that the brothers, who she took in as juvenile delinquents because no one else would have them, are mixed races with two of them white and two of them black, and yet they feel like brothers and have all the love and conflicts that real brothers-in-blood might have.

Considering the rather fabricated premise, the lead actors (Mark Wahlberg, Tyrese Green, Andre Benjamin, and Garett Hedlund) generate believable chemistry as they investigate their mom's death, determine it was a murder, and hunt down the men responsible for her death.

It is set in Detroit in winter but was actually filmed mostly in Ontario, Canada, a city with neighborhoods and industrial areas very similar to those of Detroit.

No Oscar nominations will come from this movie but it's an above average thriller and while not perhaps a great "date movie," it's certainly a good afternoon popcorn movie.

The Aristocrats

2005-08-27T00:55:00.000-07:00

There's a joke which apparently has mainly been told among comedians. A typical version goes like this: A group walks into a talent agent's office. It consists of a father, a mother, a teenage daughter, and a sub-teen boy, plus a small dog. There are variations on the group in different tellings but the father and mother tend to remain stable. Sometimes it's two daughters. Sometimes the dog is a horse. Sometimes one or two grandparents are added into the mix.

The father says to the agent, "We'd like you to represent us," to which the agent replies "Tell me about your act." The father says, "Well, we're a family act." The agent stops him and says, "I don't handle family acts." "But we're a very unusual act," says the father. "Okay," says the agent, "tell me about it" (or sometimes, "show me").

At this point either the father either describes the act or the family demonstrates the act. What's funny about this joke are two things: the act itself is totally and outrageously repulsive in every conceivable way, which may involve sexual perversions (running from shit eating to bestiality), sexual fetishes, torture, violence, with even murder mixed in, along with other audience offenders including ethnic slurs and racism.

Then, once the description or act done, the agent says "That's interesting. What do you call your act?" Here is where the second humorous point comes in: The father then dramatically and haughtily says "The Aristocrats!"

You may have heard buzz or have expectations from previews that this movie is 70 or 80 comedians and/or actors retelling the joke. Not true. The classic joke itself is told all the way through only several times. Most of the movie involves the huge cast of comedians and actors commenting on the joke, telling particularly juicy variations on the "act," musing on how to tell the joke most effectively, and so on. So, don't expect to be laying in the theater aisle breathless throughout the whole movie, though it does have its moments of hilarity. Often, people on the screen are laughing when the audience is not.

There are times when almost all the women in the audience are laughing and the men are not, and vice versa.

One thing this movie (and the joke) does, then, is to help everyone in the audience analyze their own values regarding what is appropriate to laugh at, where good taste lapses into bad taste, and what one's tolerance is for offensive and "gross" humor.

Red Eye

2005-08-22T00:35:00.000-07:00

It turns out that Wes Craven is a great director of straight thrillers involving nothing supernatural or horrific.

Rachel McAdams (Mean Girls, The Notebook, Wedding Crashers) stars as a flying-phobic hotel desk manager who encounters a charming and handsome guy (Cillian Murphy) while waiting for a delayed flight. You may remember Murphy from his roles in Girl With A Pearl Earring, 28 Days Later, Cold Mountain, and Batman Begins.

When, to her surprise and delight, she finds he owns the seat next to hers on the plane, it seems at first that their flirtation may continue, except that he soon reveals himself to be a terrorist with cohorts holding her beloved father (Brian Cox, the sole "big star" in the movie) hostage under threat of death if she doesn't change the room arrangements of the Deputy Secretary of Homeland Security (including his wife and small children) to make it easier for all of them to be assassinated in a rocket attack.

After several attempts to short-circuit this plot are thwarted, she finally makes the change with the help of her assistant, played by Jayma Mays in a delightful performance sure to get her noticed.

Many critics have criticized the last act of the film which takes place off the plane, but what the seem to forget is that virtually all thrillers fall apart at the end. You can't keep suspense going forever, so of course the film lapses into chases and fight scenes. What else could it do?

McAdams and Murphy turn in very good performances. Ms. McAdams is a very rapidly rising star not just due to her beauty (beauty being common in Hollywood), but due to her engaging personality and acting skills.

I found this movie to very interesting and exciting. Don't listen to critics who pan it: it makes for an enjoyable afternoon or evening entertainment and is a great date movie.

Broken Flowers

2005-08-21T18:51:00.000-07:00

The latest effort by master director Jim Jarmusch.

Bill Murray once made a living by chewing the scenery on Saturday Night Live and in screwball comedies such as Meatballs, Caddyshack, and Stripes, then took on comedy roles of more complexity and intelligence in movies like Groundhog Day, Rushmore, and The Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou.

Somewhere in there, Murray started handling roles that could actually be called serious, such as when he played Polonius in the recent reworking of Hamlet or when he played Ed Harris, the emotionally lost cynical movie actor revitalized by a chance (and totally chaste) encounter with a 20-ish girl (Scarlett Johansson) in the sublime Lost In Translation.

In my own pantheon of movies, Lost In Translation is so high up on the list that I can't help but compare Broken Flowers with it. Looked at that way, it is a disappointment. Both movies leave you with questions at the end, but somehow this technique works far better in Lost In Translation. When the ending comes to Broken Flowers, I saw moviegoers looking at each other wondering if perhaps the last reel had been forgotten...but no...the credits are rolling, aren't they?

This is not to say it's a bad movie. It's far better than many of the movies showing in moviehouses concurrently. And it does have one scene which will cause a lot of buzz and will likely give one of the supporting characters a huge career boost. More on that later.

The story is about a man we are told is a wealthy computer entrepreneur. Presumably, he sold his business and made a lot of money. So...why does he live in a decidedly middle-class neighborhood. His house is no mansion and the interior bespeaks a man of tacky taste.

It starts with his current girlfriend (Julie Delpy who is on the screen for not much more than two minutes) leaving him. At the same time, she hands him the mail which has a mysterious pink letter envelope in it. After she leaves, he opens the letter which informs him that the anonymous writer, one of his former girlfriends, had a boy by him who is now 19 and may be looking for him. According to the writer, she has not given out any specific info about him to her son, but she says he's a bright and resourceful boy and there is some chance he'll figure out where our protagonist (named Don Johnston, which has him correcting people who call him "Don Johnson" several times in a repetition joke).

Since "John" equates to "Juan" in Spanish, his name bears a certain similarity to "Don Juan" as well, and we are led to believe that Don has been a ladies man and womanizer, although there's very little evidence of this charm in the movie (one of its several flaws).

His neighbor, Winston (Jeffrey Wright), is intrigued by the situation and becomes a junior gumshoe doing basic research to track down Don's girlfriends. Eventually, he cajoles Don to go on a Quest to discover which of the women in his life made him a father, and thereby to track down his son.

His first visit is to Laura (Sharon Stone) who isn't home when he arrives. He is invited into their living room by her aptly named daughter, Lolita (Alexis Dziena), where probably the single most memorable scene occurs as she later walks into the living room to answer her cell phone, surprising Don by being dressed in her birthday suit. This is full frontal nudity lasting several seconds that will probably boost sales of the eventual DVD by several percentage points. Ms. Dziena is a very well formed female with really nice tan lines. While maybe not a star-making moment, I'm sure important people have been writing down her name and the she is suddenly being considered for quite a few roles that were out-of-reach before. A very smart move on her part and on the part of director Jarmusch.

I won't describe the other visits except to tell you what you'll almost certainly hear as a complaint from anyone else who's also seen the movie, which is that his search is fruitless. This isn't really much of a spoiler, since this isn't where the movie ends and the quest for the boy is a classic Maguffin (aka McGuffin) anyway. (A Maguffin is something a story is built around but which has no real relevance to the plot.) In the end, the movie isn't about the quest for the boy, it's a character study of a man forced to confront the debris left in the wake of his bachelorhood.

On his return, he sees a boy first in the airport and then near a cafe in town. This may be his son and I'll leave the story there, though as I said earlier, this is not a movie with pat answers to that question, and this is not really what the movie is about anyway.

While this is neither Murray's nor Jarmusch's best effort, it's still a rather good film. As far as Jim Jarmusch goes, I'd recommend you see some of his better efforts: Down By Law, Stranger Than Paradise, Mystery Train, Night On Earth, and Ghost Dog: The Way Of The Samurai come to mind.

Grizzly Man

2005-08-18T19:52:00.000-07:00

Timothy Treadwell lived among the bears in Katmai National Park, Alaska, and paid the price for forgetting the maxim "It's not smart to fuck with Mother Nature."

Seeing himself as a defender and even savior of the bears, he crossed a line one doesn't cross, disrespected the bears and the harsh laws governing the wild, and in so doing paid the ultimate price. Adding to the sadness of the situation is the fact that his girlfriend ended up being killed while trying to defend him from the attacking bear. (To make things sadder still, she was apparently about to break up with him.)

Fear not: master director Werner Herzog spares us such details as autopsy photos or the audio track from a video tape that was recording during the attack. Mostly, we see Timothy himself with interviews ranging from his friends and family to the coroner who examined his remains to experts who disagree with his type of approach.

Herzog does not stand back and adopt a studiedly neutral attitude toward Treadwell, but instead portrays him as a sad, self-involved, mixed-up soul who needed an escape. He needed to escape from a world in which he didn't fit. He also needed to escape into an obsession to replace his addiction to drugs and alcohol.

One can't avoid, while observing Treadwell's self-recorded videos, feeling sorry for a man who, although he seemingly believed himself to be sincere, was so obviously living a life as the proverbial "legend in his own mind." Most of his recordings are not so much about the bears as about Treadwell himself and his philosophy of relating to bears. One soon tires of hearing him use the words "I," "me," and "my" almost incessantly.

He makes such a point of portraying himself as heterosexual and brave and totally up to standing up to bears testing him (even describing himself as a "samurai" at one point), that one can't help but notice how effeminate he is and how frequently he preens his hair as he talks. It's easy to theorize that the poor guy was so deep in the closet that not even he realized his homosexuality. I have no conclusive proof to offer, but see if you don't draw the same conclusion. And it's not that I see anything wrong if this is the case, except that it fits in with his generally unrealistic view of the world to be in total denial over something so central to his interior life.

The brief interview with his parents reinforces this view because, believe me, they are David Lynch weird, especially his Grecian Formulaed father, who wore sunglasses indoors while being interviewed, and his teddy bear-hugging mother.

Werner Herzog is one of the great directors, who normally shoots very dramatic feature films. This film proves he's equally adept at documentaries.

Last Days

2005-08-05T00:18:00.000-07:00

Michael Pitt, who you may remember from Murder by Numbers and The Village, stars as a Kurt Cobain-like rock star burning out furiously on heroin.

One has to infer the drug is heroin from Pitt's behavior, wherein he varies from being totally passed out to wandering around like a zombie.

This doesn't need to be a long review. Why? Because there's only about 20 minutes of movie here, except that each cut seems to go on much longer than it normally would. Like five or six times longer. This is something David Lynch can get away with. Gus Van Sant hasn't mastered it yet.

Don't bring your No-Doz because you will want to sleep through this movie.

Crónicas

2005-08-01T19:26:00.000-07:00

It's great seeing John Leguizamo playing a relatively "straight" character, by which I mean not a comic character and not a drug dealer or latin "homie."

Here, Leguizamo plays a TV journalist traveling with his female producer and male camera man who is sent to cover the latest funeral in a series of sexual murders of small children.

While there, a traveling salesman returning from his business route accidentally hits a boy who ran out in front of his vehicle. Unfortunately, this boy is the twin of the latest murder victim and the crowd turns on him.

He is saved from being lynched and burned alive by Leguizamo's intervention, although he is also sent to jail. The man offers to trade information he has about "The Monster" (as the murderer is called) if Leguizamo will use his influence to get him out of jail.

The rest of the movie is about Leguizamo getting information out of the prisoner and trying to determine whether the prisoner is faking, actually has valuable information, or might even be the killer himself.

Leguizamo is torn between getting the truth and advancing his career. To complicate matters further, he enters into an affair with his producer who is the wife of a much more powerful anchorman (Alfred Molina) back at their network.

The supporting cast is extraordinarily good, especially Leonor Watling as his producer.

Once again we see that a good story and a great cast can make a great movie on a budget that in a typical Hollywood production would probably hardly cover the catering bill.

The Beautiful Country

2005-07-31T21:22:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-30T22:30:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-29T23:19:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-27T23:31:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-24T22:17:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-24T00:06:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-07-22T21:46:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-19T21:45:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-19T00:00:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-17T19:35:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-16T16:12:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-15T23:34:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-11T23:10:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-08T21:05:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-05T17:36:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-04T18:28:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-02T15:29:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-02T00:05:00.000-07:00

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

2005-07-01T08:59:00.000-07:00

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.

War of the Worlds

2005-06-29T16:19:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-27T22:20:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-25T23:04:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-24T20:22:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-22T18:06:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-21T14:05:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-20T16:56:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-18T16:47:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-17T19:28:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-17T18:46:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-06-16T23:37:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-14T21:06:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-13T19:15:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-12T23:38:00.000-07:00

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)

2005-06-12T23:01:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-10T16:21:00.000-07:00

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

2005-06-06T10:26:00.000-07:00

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?

The Smartest Guys in the Room

2005-05-29T11:46:00.000-07:00

Remember that sleaze Gordon Gecko from the movie Wall Street? His motto was "Greed is good!" and the top managers of Enron certainly practiced what Gecko preached.

I just saw The Smartest Guys in the Room, which is the story of the rise and fall of Enron, and it's an amazing and appalling story of how greed at the top trickled down to the company's front lines, with its traders running amok, going so far as to shut down power plants in California in order to drive up the price of Enron stock so they could earn generous bonuses.

Enron was in the habit of counting estimated/predicted future profits as income. It also hid its debts in offshore satellite firms which it effectively owned. It financed itself by talking leading investment banks like CitiBank, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and Merrill Lynch into lending it money merely based on its reputation as a hot company. It didn't do this purely through fraud or "smoke and mirrors." No, just as much it relied upon the greed of people in the banks, in their law firm, and in their accounting firm (Arthur Anderson, which also had a conflict of interest through acting as a consultant to Enron as well). It also bribed and bullied stock analysts into giving its stock favorable ratings and reviews.

The firm was flying high as a Wall Street darling when, in 2001, senior reporter for Fortune Bethany McLean asked a smple question which for a healthy and honest firm would have had a simple and obvious answer: "How does Enron make money?" She asked this because, strangely, Enron was in the habit of not producing financial reports.

With the publication of McLean's Fortune article, "Is Enron Overpriced?" more questions arose, and Enron's house of cards began to tumble. Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO during this period left for undisclosed "personal reasons" a few months before Enron declared bankruptcy. By doing so, he left Ken Lay, the Chairman, holding the bag. Lay became the CEO at the helm when the firm was forced by circumstances into bankruptcy.

Unfortunately for Skilling, he probably didn't bail soon enough to protect the huge profits he made by dumping his Enron stock. (The one winner in this category is Lou Pai, former CEO of the Enron Energy Services subsidiary, which failed, and who took $335 million in profits early enough to escape insider training charges, and who quickly became the second largest land owner in Colorado).

The biggest tragedy of the failure of Enron, though, isn't the big people. It's the little people who had Enron stock in their portfolios. This includes numerous employees of Enron. To take one example, when Enron bought Portland General Electric, PGE employees' PGE stock became Enron stock, which was frozen when Enron filed for bankruptcy. While the stock was frozen (could not be sold), the value of the stock was not frozen, and so all of these little people had to watch the value of their investment decline daily until it was worth virtually nothing.

And then let's not forget all the individual investors and mutual funds which were heavily invested in Enron. Countless Enron investors were left holding Enron's bag while Enron execs tried to abscond with hundreds of millions of Enron funds. Funds which, if recovered at all, will be in the "pennies on the dollar" range.

The tragic truth is that even if we learn a lesson or two from this financial train wreck, it can happen again, and again, and again, as long as people believe that "greed is good." And so...it will happen again, as sure as the sun will rise tomorrow morning.

Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy

2005-05-20T00:27:00.000-07:00

Let me start off by saying that A Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy is an absolutely visually dazzling movie and it's as wryly witty as can be. The casting is quite good, with Martin Freeman (Shaun of the Dead, Love Actually) playing the Walter Mittyish Arthur Dent; Mos Def playing the alien contributor to The Guide, Ford Prefect; Zooey Deschanel playing Trillian, the love interest to both Dent and Zaphod Beeblebrox,who is ably played by Sam Rockwell. The voice of the depressed (and depressing) robot, Marvin is done by Alan Rickman, a stroke of casting genius. Inside the robots Warwick Davis (Willow).

The story is absurd, and it's not sci-fi at all, but rather a spoof of sci-fi. Basically, the story in a nutshell is that Arthur Dent wakes up one morning to discover that a demolition crew is outside his house preparing to demolish it for a new freeway bypass. While he's in the midst of an act of civil disobedience in an attempt to stop the demolition, his best friend, Ford Prefect happens along with a shopping cart full of beer. He gives the construction crew the beer to stop the demolition and drags Arthur off to the pub, where he tells Arthur that the world is about to be demolished by a Vogon demolition crew in order to create a hyperspace bypass. Ford is there to save Arthur from the fate facing other earthlings, which he does, and which propels Arthur off into a very funny (if not exactly hilarious) galactic adventure.

Along the way, Arthur meets the President of the Galaxy, Zaphod Beeblebrox, who is more insane rock star than politician, and is on the lam after stealing the spacecraft Heart of Gold in order to discover the question regarding life, the universe, and everything. (You see, the answer is already known, but makes no sense apart from the precise question. Coincidentally, aboard the ship is Trillian, the girl Arthur met and fell in love with at a party, but lost because he wasn't willing to drop everything and go to Madagascar with her (haven't we all had that experience?). Coincidences are omnipresent in this story, to the extent that even the spacecraft has an "infinite improbability drive," dangerous to use but handy to get out of tight spots.

I think perhaps the weakest casting has to be Zooey Deschanel. Trillian could have been played better by any number of other actresses. Zooey seems best in stoner-type roles such as the one she played in The Good Girl. Roles, in other words, where not much acting ability is required.

Star Wars: Revenge of the Sith

2005-05-19T10:56:00.000-07:00

I just got back from seeing Star Wars: Episode III - The Revenge of the Sith.

It's hard to believe, but the original film, just plain old Star Wars, appeared almost 30 years ago in 1977. Princess Leia was played by a then 21 year old Carrie Fisher who is now (arghh!!!) nearly 50. That's how much time has gone by.

The original movie was a ground-breaker. If you're not around my age, almost 60, you can't know the thrill it was to see that gigantic spaceship cruise down from the top of the screen at the beginning. We'd never seen anything even vaguely like that before.

Computer graphics hardly existed back then. The spacecraft in the original were scale models, and the difficulty of making them (frequently in several different sizes) limited what could be done. Today, with the aid of photorealistic computer graphics, a sci-fi director can put hundreds or thousands of spacecraft on the screen, all moving independently of each other an with no risk of wires getting tangled.

Even with all the realism however, some things can't be changed and really date this series of films.

Just as when I was a boy in the 1960's I could see all the flaws in the sci-fi films of the 1950's, so anyone who spends much time watching the Discovery or Science channels can point out all kinds of flaws in the more recent star wars.

Let's start with an obvious howler: In a galaxy long, long ago and far, far away English is spoken, even though England doesn't even exist yet.

And while we're at it: Yoda, would it be so hard to take a few night courses and learn proper English syntax? You can hop around like a grasshopper while wielding a light saber, but you still are saying things like "A worried mind have you." Someday one of your Jedi buddies is going to be cut in half while trying to parse something like "Out to your left look. Being attacked are you by clone."

Apparently back then in that galaxy far, far away, a person can hop into a spacecraft in about 10 minutes be at the other side of the galaxy. At least Dune had an explanation (albeit a wacky one) for being able to do this. In Star Wars movies, you just accept that this is possible.

Then, there are all those strange-looking aliens. The problem with them is that if there is life elsewhere, it's probably much more different from us than the Star Wars aliens. It seems like most aliens in Star Wars are based on a human model: two arms, two legs, and a head. The aliens in these movies are basically nothing other than very badly deformed humans.

There's a scene in this film where on one of the alien worlds, the planet apparently has a twin which is so close it looks huge in the sky. The thing is, objects that large and that close would have an enormous gravitational effect on each other which would cause so much internal friction that both planets should probably be so volcanic as to be uninhabitable. After all, our little moon can raise the ocean 60 feet in some places, but if the Moon were the same size as the Earth, the effects would be much more dramatic, and probably incompatible with life. Also, unless the two planets were rotating around each other (or more correctly around their mutual center of gravity), they would be drawn into a collision with each other.

The philosophy in this world is of the penny ante variety. The Matrix actually gives us much, much more to think about. And sometimes the Jedi in this film seemed confused as to right and wrong themselves, breaking their code because Chancellor Palpatine was evil. Well, gee, if your code isn't adequate to help you in the face of evil, isn't it time to hang up your light saber and join The Dark Side?

Of course, maybe the problem the Jedi were having involved the fact that Chancellor Palpatine had the blessing of the galactic legislature, so that if Palpatine (who was planning a kind of coup) was a traitor, in a sense so were the Jedi. Both sides mouthed a support for democracy, but both sides were more or less ready to suspend the galactic constitution in order to get their way.

Just like the Matrix series, the Star Wars series has grown more and more bloated and over-designed as time has gone by. The final Matrix movie was worse, with graphics which were at times so alien and gigantic in scale that it was hard for a mere human to relate to them. The computer-generated interiors, exterior architecture, spaceship design, and battle scenes were just way over the top. The same could be said about the wardrobe and makeup, but at least Natalie Portman's Padme didn't have to wear the kind of outrageous hairstyles and outfits she wore in Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace.

The idea of the Jedi knight is almost custom-built for the mind of the 13 year old boy, what with special swords, monkish garb, and magical skills, and perhaps that is George Lucas' genius. Even I, at age 58, still find this aspect somewhat cool, but in an embarrassing way, as if I still thought Nehru jackets and Beatles-style "mop top" haircuts were cool.

Someday someone might explain to me how it is that Jedi can be slammed around the room like rag dolls and not break every bone in their body. They are highly-trained warriors with lightning fast reflexes, an ability (through the mysterious "force") to anticipate their opponent's actions, and someother powers that are actually magical. None of this explains how they avoid the many broken bones you'd think they'd have after some of the fight scenes.

One thing that doesn't work very well is the love relationship between Anakin and Padme. I for the life of me can't imagine what she would see in him. From the start, Padme has been wise beyond her years. Anakin has been immature and impulsive.

Of course, a lot of the dramatic tension is gone from the story since the whole story has been told out of order and in a fashion where we already know who lives and who dies, so the movie is not so much about what happens as the how and why.

Even so, I found it an enjoyable two hours, even if during the time it took George Lucas to give us the last three parts of his story, Peter Jackson showed us all how to do an epic by giving us the Lord of the Rings trilogy, much better movies in almost every way.