The 11th Hour - Review

You’ve seen The 11th Hour before, just in a different form. During those late nights either battling stress-induced insomnia or fighting sickness after one too many drinks, you’ve inevitably stumbled upon a Save the Children infomercial, in which the narrator strolls the desolate streets of some impoverished, third-world country with a malnourished, sickly child in tow. With horrific images and endless statistics, The 11th Hour is just as manipulative and guilt-inducing as any poor child in need of your help.

That’s not to say that The 11th Hour’s message isn’t important. The Leonardo DiCaprio produced and narrated (for no other reason than star power and recognition) film catalogues our destruction of the Earth – starting from when we began rapidly using resources during the industrial revolution to the current aftermath of burning fossil fuels, cutting down forests and polluting oceans, lakes, rivers and streams like there is no tomorrow. Through an endless stream of statistics and expert interviews with ecological big wigs, who love to point the finger, there is clearly a future of consequences that isn’t so bright.

Given the film’s 90 minute run time, 70 minutes is devoted to bashing the audience with devastating facts voiced over horrific images of natural disasters and man destroying his environment. Perhaps the film is best epitomized by the image of a man beating and killing a seal with a voice over condemning mankind. Of course, in a propaganda film that seeks to rally people to a cause, you have to scare the audience out of their complacency. Yet, from Al Gore’s smash-hit An Inconvenient Truth and all the political hubbub, most (sane) people know there’s a problem, and we need to hear less about the causes and more about the solutions.

By the time The 11th Hour gets around to the technological advances that could allow us to turn the environmental destruction around, we already feel defeated. It also doesn’t help that directors Nadia Conners and Leila Conners Peterson let their environmental experts slip into jargon-y, confusing dissertation about the healing properties of fungi and bacteria as a solution while visual explanations of cool, relatable technologies – like a dance club powered by human movement transferred through the floor or a house that is environmentally-designed to be more efficient through solar power – are cut through faster than the audience is able to process. Had Conners and Conners Peterson lingered on the environmentally-hip dance club technology as long as the man beating the seal, maybe we would have a bit more optimism instead of being beaten into submission.

Amidst the gloom and doom, like the Earth itself, several rays of cinematic hope shine through the film. The most profound being the interviews with Stephen Hawking. The disabled genius and author of “A Brief History of Time” communicates through an automated voice program; when he talks, his computerized voice seems to metaphorically fade into the voice of technology telling us about our impending doom. The unfeeling prophecy of destruction layered on top of the affecting music of Sigur Rós and Mogwai, spread over images of environmental destruction, creates the film’s most poignant and terrifying moments.

Ironically, the film mimics the Earth’s desolate fate. 20 minutes of hopeful solutions after 70 minutes of horrifying facts and revelations that almost seem to amount to no hope at all. Although the film’s presentation falters, its message is nonetheless important. However, The 11th Hour’s dismal tone and uninspired filmmaking will keep it from being seen by the masses that it’s targeting – something that's hopefully only detrimental for the film and not Earth.

The Last Legion - Review

The Last Legion opens with a young boy following a Roman soldier into his tent and admiring his sword. The Roman, who is actually not just a soldier, but the commander of the Roman army, thinks the boy is a thief and threatens to cut his hand off as penalty for his sneakiness. If only he had cut the boy’s hand off, we could have been spared the two hours that followed.

Instead, the boy is revealed to be Romulus Augustus (Thomas Sangster), the last in the line of Julius Caesar and the new Roman Empire. Unfortunately this is right as the empire is crumbling and young Romulus is soon on the run from the Goths and some other guy in a golden mask named Vortgyn. We know old Vort is evil since he wears a golden mask. With the aid of the Roman Commander Aurelius (Colin Firth) and an old mystical philosopher (Ben Kingsley), Romulus seeks out the powerful sword of Caesar and makes a stand against the forces against him. Let’s see… child ruler… golden mask… wise old sage character… and a powerful sword… where have I heard this before?

That’s right – the premise of the movie is that the sword of Julius Caesar is also the sword that would reveal the once and future king of England. The movie tries its best to make sure the audience is aware of that concept by directly referring to Excalibur with the bookend open and close of the movie, as well as using a similar framework for its story. It’s an idea that could have been rather slyly executed, but all the references are so overt all possible cleverness is quickly removed.

The film has trouble finding a genre to fit into. For an action flick, there’s an awful lot of time spent talking about politics and attempting to set the stage for a vast setting around the movie. There’s so much talking at times, you wish everyone would just shut up and fight. Then the fighting begins and the fight choreography is so horrid you wish everyone would go back to the talking again. At least with the talking you can take a nap. At the same time, from cringeworthy fighting styles to fantastical weapons such as the rocket launcher style multiple arrow launcher, the environment is too outlandish for this to be historical fiction, which could have saved the story from the need for building the setting so much. It’s just a wash. The movie tries to fit into several genres and winds up not belonging anywhere.

The sword-and-sandal genre hasn’t had much success recently. Troy and Kingdom of Heaven may have been off course, but at least with those movies there was some eye candy for the audience. Here you have Colin Firth, who looks as rugged as Commander Aurelius as you might hope for the Bridget Jones actor, but he doesn’t carry the part with the feeling of any experience for the character. The guys get a bit of a visual treat with Mira (Aishwarya Rai), a warrior maiden who has a forced romantic relationship with Firth. The problem is that every time she shows up it’s an instant reminder of how far fetched the story goes. Given her character’s ridiculous combat moves and equally absurd weapons, it should come as no surprise that director Doug Leftler’s previous experience highlights include “Hercules: The Legendary Journeys” and “Xena: Warrior Princess.” While we're speaking about the cast, would someone please tell Ben Kingsley to hang it up and retire? His appearance in a movie is rapidly becoming a sign of avoidance rather than the audience draw he used to be.

The Last Legion isn’t a step in the right direction for sword-and-sandal flicks. In fact, this is probably the worst entry in the genre in recent memory, competing with Pathfinder for worst sword flick this year. Follow in the footsteps of The Last Legion and make this movie your last pick.

The Invasion - Review

Even after 50 years and three movie adaptations, Jack Finney’s short story “The Body Snatchers” is still irresistible fodder for anyone wanting to make a political statement in the guise of creepy aliens. Even those who don’t remember the Cold War/Red Scare paranoia of 1956’s Invasion of the Body Snatchers, or the Nixonian anti-government fear of the 1970’s film of the same name, are familiar with pod people, alien beings that attack and replace humans in order to completely restructure the human race.

With this summer’s The Invasion, the times have changed a bit, and not remotely for the better. Pod people have become gelatinous cellular alien blob somethings, and instead of killing humans and growing exact replicas in pods in the backyard, they change the host human’s DNA from the inside as they sleep, leaving that person to wake up looking exactly the same, but working for the alien agenda. Despite adhering to many of the details of the original two films, right down to the characters’ names, all attempts to update this property and give it real-life meaning fall completely flat thanks to a meandering plot and an overwhelming lack of vision.

Nicole Kidman plays our persistently human heroine Carol Bennell, with Daniel Craig as her sidekick and love interest. Craig is a doctor who, along with a lab assistant played by Jeffrey Wright, helps Carol wise up to the fact that everyone around them has become emotionless automatons, working tirelessly to transform all remaining humans by (in a disgusting touch) vomiting alien goo into their mouths. Carol soon realizes that her son Oliver—off for the weekend with the new, alien version of his father—is not only in danger of being alien-ized, but may possess the immunity to the alien virus necessary to reverse its effects. And so the chase begins.

Reports say that director Oliver Hirschbiegel’s original cut of the film was further edited and re-shot by the Wachowski Brothers (of The Matrix fame), which might explain the completely disjointed message The Invasion is sending us. The “pod people” concept has always made a great allegory, but this time no one can seem to decide what they want to say. There’s an obvious message about falling “asleep” and waking up not caring about anything or anyone, a slap on the wrist to a culture perfectly willing to ignore current strife. At the same time, the aliens’ lack of emotion results in the end of wars—real wars, like Iraq and Darfur—repeatedly shown via CNN reports. Carol clearly believes that humanity is worth saving regardless, but how about the Iraqi citizens who just achieved peace at the small cost of a few strands of alien DNA? It seems insane for any director to let us root for the aliens, but when it’s the lives of millions of real Sudanese vs. Nicole Kidman and her low-rent Haley Joel Osment son, the choice is easy.

All of the pseudo-intellectual posturing and mixed messages would be tolerable were the film not so damn slow. The main characters spend forever figuring out what the audiences knows within the first minutes of the film, and the last 45 minutes are stuffed with car chases, set-piece explosions and relentlessly-flashy editing that substitute for actual suspense. Because these pod people don’t actually kill their victims, just alter them, they’re not nearly as threatening as they ought to be; a twist thrown in at the end that threatens Oliver’s life simply doesn’t matter so late in the game.

Kidman does her best in an action hero role, but casting her as the only human in a world full of emotionless aliens is almost a joke. She’s one of the most expressionless actresses out there, and is far better at imitating the aliens—as she must do to walk safely among them—than being a real person. Craig does better, miraculously pulling off the “ignored best friend love interest” role despite the James Bond lurking within him, but never gets the attention he deserves.

Despite a classic premise, some talented actors and a few good ideas,

The Invasion is a snore-inducing mess. Though we look to the 50’s and 70’s versions of this story for insights into our national identity at the time, I can’t imagine The Invasion will even be remembered at all. At least, I hope not.

Descent - Review

Let’s face it: the only reason anyone is interested in Descent at all is that it’s being billed as Rosario Dawson’s rape movie. For some reason the public gets all giddy whenever the semi-famous act out being brutalized on screen. The people who are all excited to see Rosario’s rape movie are also probably the same people who’ve been supporting the whole torture-porn thing. You know who you are, a few weekends ago you were stupid enough to show up for Captivity. But Descent isn’t another riff on the whole torture-porn genre, it’s not even that smart.

Descent is a cruel, mindless movie about a woman who gets raped, and then uses the fact of her rape as a means to internally justify exploring a series of bizarre, hidden fetishes. At least I think that’s what’s happening. The film is almost impossible to follow and it’s a mish mash of ill-fitting parts which mean even less than they appear to.

Rosario Dawson plays Maya, a 19-year-old college coed whom she is at least 5 years too old to convincingly play. Dawson has a wise, confident look and the task of portraying some doe-eyed, sassy, innocent is completely beyond her. It’s like watching your mom dress up in a school girl outfit. The clothes don’t make the woman, in this case the years on her face do. I’m not saying Rosario looks old, I’m just saying she’s too experienced looking to be some dumb kid.

After some meandering around with Maya, the movie carefully sets up a scenario in which she gets raped. Except as rape scenes go, it’s not much of one. Actually, I had kind of a hard time figuring out that’s what was going on. It’s hard to be sympathetic towards a rape victim when you can’t even tell if that’s what happened to her, so later when she inexplicably uses this as an excuse to get into drugs and weird control based sex it doesn’t really make sense. Director Talia Lugacy does a lousy job of getting across just how traumatic rape is, and frankly that’s not just bad filmmaking it’s dangerous social policy for a movie that seems to be wrapping itself in the cloak of girl power.

See, eventually Maya turns the tables. This is probably a spoiler, so I suggest you stop reading if you actually want to see this piece of trash. She does it by luring her rapist back to her house, violently restraining him, and then doing horrible horrible things to his anus. The contrast between what he did to her and what she does to him is shocking. While her rape is filmed in a rather tame fashion, his is a horrible, never ending, multi-layered violation in every sense of the word. And it goes on forever. There’s no explaining it. When the credits roll you can’t help but end up feeling sorry for Maya’s somewhat pathetic rapist and hating Maya as if she’s some sort of sicko serial killer. What is Lugacy trying to say here? The only thing I got out of it is that this is a movie which simply, and absolutely hates men and Lugacy is using the film as a way to take out her own aggression towards the male half of the sex on film via vicious, unrelenting, viciously graphic, anal penetration.

That’s really what makes Descent such an awful, awful movie. It’s not it’s misguided social message, it’s not the shoddy script which simply doesn’t make a damn bit of sense, it’s the anger that’s pent up in it and being flung so randomly at the world as if there’s no other outlet than to anally rape every single person in the audience. The movie, and it’s laborious, languishing, ending rape scene exists only to lash out at the world. What happens to Maya is just an excuse for her to become a very bad person, and the movie is just an excuse for Lugacy to live out her own twisted hate-fantasies on the big screen.

Superbad - Review

Superbad is stuck together out of pretty standard stuff. It’s another iteration on the Fast Times at Ridgemont High clone genre, another story about a pair of losers who want to get laid before they leave high school and set off for college. It tries, valiantly, to set itself apart from the pack by making the bosom buddy friendship between those losers the focal point of the film as a way of getting us invested in them, but personally I never bought it as anything other than a slightly more entertaining than usual teen raunch-com.

The losers in question are Seth and Evan, played by Jonah Hill and Michael Cera respectively. Superbad follows them on a night of hunting booze and poon, that as they so often do, goes totally awry and leaves them lying in vomit somewhere. Both Hill and Cera are supremely talented comedic performers, but much of the time they’re completely wasted here on dialogue that can’t seem to get over a bad case of Tourette’s syndrome. It’s an R-rated raunch comedy so you expect a lot of vile, over the top profanity but Superbad takes it to an entirely new level; substituting frequent uses of the words “cock”, “balls”, and “fuck” for actual jokes. Profanity simply for the sake of profanity is only funny for about 5 minutes, unless you’re under 12 and have never watched cable television. Sadly, that seems to be all there is to the story of Seth and Evan, and while they have a few funny moments most of it is lost in superfluous cursing that says nothing and soon wears out its welcome.

Luckily, Seth and Evan aren’t the whole story here. Superbad seems as if it was written to make them the focus of the film, but somewhere in the editing room I suspect someone wised up and realized they needed something else. That something else is their third-wheel friend McLovin (Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who starts out the movie as a footnote but by the end of the film his sub plot is the one that will have you rolling in the aisles. While Seth and Even wander around town screaming “balls!” at people, McLovin encounters two out of control cops played hilariously by Seth Rogen and Bill Heder. They take him on a whirlwind tour of irresponsibility and police brutality; boozing, beating, and shooting their way across the city in a wanton orgy of policeman gone wild with McLovin along for the ride in the back seat. What starts out as a subplot soon becomes the comedic center of the movie, and while Cera and Hill’s story is only mildly entertaining McLovin and his cop buddies are killer funny.

It may be that since he had a hand in writing the script, Seth Rogen is simply better at writing for himself than he is at crafting words for other actors. Or, since movies like this so often involve a lot of improv, it may well be that Rogen and Heder are just a helluva lot better at it than Hill and Cera. Whatever the reason, Superbad ends up being a fairly standard teen raunch romp with some really funny parts involving a completely unrelated subplot. It’s worth sitting through Hill and Cera to get to Rogen, Heder, and McLovin.

Stardust - Review

In Stardust a young man named Tristran must save a woman who is actually a fallen star from an evil witch in a goat powered cart. Along the way he gets help from unicorns, gay pirates, and oh yeah he may just be a long lost prince. Even for a fantasy movie, Stardust is made of pretty silly stuff. In a way it’s a throwback to what fantasy movies were before Peter Jackson, reminiscent of now rather dated work like Willow, Legend, or The Dark Crystal. But inspired directing from Matthew Vaughn and a wry sense of humor saves the movie’s oh-so-80s story from being an out of time curiosity and makes it a completely unique fantasy film unlike any of the other witches and wizards fare flooding theaters.

Matthew Vaughn by the way, was the guy who infamously wrote an X-Men 3 script in seven days and was slated to direct the third mutant film before being replaced by playboy director Brett Ratner. If only Fox had kept him, X-Men 3 might not have been such a disaster. Unlike Ratner, Vaughn has talent and style to spare and it’s all on display in Stardust. He never settles for doing things the easy way, and the movie is filled with glowing, gorgeous wide shots and massive, world-spanning pans in which his camera zooms from a tiny village across thousands of miles, through a castle and into a keyhole. Vaughn’s take on the universe first created by Neil Gaiman in book form is absolutely breathtaking.

His cast is stacked with big names. The movie’s lead is the only face in it you won’t recognize. Charlie Cox plays Tristran, a shop boy from our world who crosses a magical wall and finds himself ensnared in a world of magic and intrigue. He’s instantly likable, if a little dopey, and plays the part of an adventurous romantic out to win the heart of the woman he loves admirably. Claire Danes plays one of the film’s female leads, a fallen star named Yvaine, and she works as a sassy, ethereal beauty. But Robert DeNiro as an air pirate is just bizarre. The character is funny and likable, but only because he’s written that way not because of anything DeNiro is doing. DeNiro, seems rather lost, as if he’s standing on set in front of a green screen unable to figure out which way he’s supposed to be facing. Sienna Miller is a waste of space as Tristran’s lady love Victoria, but thankfully she’s barely in the film. Michelle Pfeiffer seems to be having a blast as the rapidly aging head witch who harries Tristran on his trip.

Somewhat confusing is Ian McKellan serving as the movie’s narrator. Don’t get me wrong, McKellan’s great. There is no better narrator than Ian McKellan, not even Morgan Freeman. But why does the movie have an omniscient narrator at all? It does give the film a nice dreamlike, storybook quality; but it’s almost as if Vaughn felt Gaiman’s story too bizarre to be understood by audiences without someone there to offer explanations. Actually, he may have been right.

Stardust is really weird, but knows it and seems to have no problem poking fun at itself and the fantasy genre for just how strange it all is. That wickedly sarcastic sense of fun, more than anything, is what makes Stardust such an entertaining success. It’s unlikely to become the next big fantasy franchise, but it’s a great way to spend a Friday night. Gaiman’s world looks good on screen, and it’s impossible not to enjoy spending time with it.

Skinwalkers - Review

When Underworld hit theaters there was a world of controversy; a “World of Darkness” controversy, one might say. Role playing game publisher White Wolf decided the vampires vs. werewolves storyline was a little too close to the games they had been creating for a decade, and started to file charges. They should have waited until this year. Skinwalkers is just as close to the “World of Darkness” gaming world, with a slightly better storyline and, more importantly, more actual werewolves in their werewolf movie.

As treated by this movie, Skinwalkers is just a fancy Indian name for werewolves. You know, those humans who wolf-out at the full moon, feast on human flesh, are susceptive to silver bullets, etc? That’s what Skinwalkers is about. There are some skinwalkers who see the werewolf aspect as a curse. Others see it as a blessing. They like to fight a lot, mostly using guns but also with their own hands, claws, and teeth. Some prophecy said that one day the curse would come to an end, and that end would involve a thirteen-year-old boy and a red moon. Those who want the curse to come to an end have protected the boy; those who want to stay a werewolf forever have spent years hunting for this prophesied child. The movie opens with the first day of the red moon, which, conveniently enough, is exactly when the protectors screw up and the evil werewolves figure out where the boy is, causing the kid and his protectors to go on the run in what can best be described as a Road Warrior werewolf mesh at times.

Going into Skinwalkers, I was prepared to be disappointed. The trailers indicated this was a kind of werewolf movie but it made it look like the most animal transformation we would see would be some crummy teeth and maybe some contact lenses, mostly portrayed by biker and gang types. Additionally, the movie was being referred to as the werewolf movie without wolves in some interviews. I’m glad to say these were all mistaken inferences. The movie does have werewolves, humanoid in appearance, created by Stan Winston Studios. While it isn’t exactly groundbreaking in appearance, it is consistent with the feel of the rest of the movie.

What feeling is that, you ask? Well, my first impression of the picture, filled with muted color tones and hairy motorcycling bad guys, was that of a ‘70s horror flick. The score, which has a tendency to be a bit overbearing, added to that effect, as does poorly looped dialog which is seldom mixed well and frequently doesn’t mesh with the movement of lips or visible emotional performance going on up on the screen. Basically it felt like a low budget ‘70s horror flick, which the skinwalker makeup remains consistent with.

If that style doesn’t bother you, Skinwalkers is probably one of the best werewolf movies we’ve had in a while, which isn’t saying much considering the lack of competition. It explains enough to get going and then bulldozes through the story, frequently having to stop and give some explanation for what already happened. Within 10 minutes the bad skinwalkers know where the kid is. Within 20 the kid is on the run, etc. Along the way we find out what makes the difference between that perception of blessing and curse. The result is a movie that kind of feels like White Wolf's Werewolf game, with fighting clans of werewolves continually attempting to gain the upper hand.

None of the performances stand out as being exceptional. The best you really can hope for in a movie like this is “decent,” which is where most of the actors lie. It’s great to finally see a halfway decent movie for Sarah Carter, whose previous roles this year include National Lampoon’s Pledge This! and DoA: Dead or Alive. Yes, she’s cute, but she sure can’t pick the winning roles.

Don’t expect anything extraordinary from Skinwalkers, which at it’s best is mediocre. Being average, however, can be fun and, in all honesty, the movie as a whole wound up better than I expected, leaving me somewhat entertained for its running time. It can’t compete with classic werewolf movies but, in a time of lackluster PG-13 thrillers, Skinwalkers manages some fair thrills.

Reign Over Me - Review

Writer/Director Mike Binder is the master of missed opportunities. HBO gave him a chance to create the “he said” version of Sex and the City, a bona fide slam dunk for the network. So what does he do? Creates a tedious, drawn-out exercise in male unpleasantness, which, to the shock of nobody, faced a quick execution.

Then there was The Upside Of Anger, a film that had its moments but ultimately suffocated on its own self-importance. With his latest release, Reign Over Me, he seems poised to turn it all around. And he does--until his bad habits leak into the movie and pollute it.

For two-thirds of the way, Reign Over Me is a surprisingly solid flick. Don Cheadle plays Alan Johnson, a successful dentist who has a perfect wife (Jada Pinkett Smith) and perfect kids, but feels a gaping hole in his life that resembles one of his patient’s cavities. He craves excitement, something to pry him away from the 1000-piece puzzles he does with his wife before they hit the hay at 10:30 p.m. every evening.

Which is why when he sees his old college roommate, Charlie Fineman (Adam Sandler), riding a scooter around the city and listening to music, he is strangely drawn to him. But Charlie has lived through an unfathomable tragedy: His wife, three daughters--and even the family poodle--were killed on September 11, and he can’t find the will to recover.

The movie is mainly about their friendship and how they help each other reclaim their zest for life. It all sounds awfully hokey, but Binder is smart enough to keep the tone light for most of it, showing them hanging out and doing guy things in between Sandler’s spontaneous fits of rage in clubs or office lobbies. He's blocked out his old life, and if someone dares to bring it up to him, he goes all kinds of ballistic. Call it the Hollywood version of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, similar to the Hollywood version of Cancer Victim where the woman has perfectly applied make-up while resting on her death bed.

But the true standout isn’t Sandler, since his character isn’t written as an actual human being. The movie belongs to Cheadle. He’s the guy you really care about and he’s the guy you want to see get everything he wants out of life. When a beautiful yet unstable patient (Saffron Burrows) tries to corner him in his office for sex, he tosses her out and slams the door. What’s not to like about a guy like that and a movie about a guy like that.

Which brings us back to Binder and his knack for missteps. In a better version of Reign Over Me, the loony patient would not pop up in Charlie’s life as a potential love interest. There wouldn’t be a big courtroom showdown with Donald Sutherland sitting behind the bench scolding his lawyers. And the eponymous song by The Who wouldn’t be played on several occasions to pound home the message.

Reign Over Me is a wildly uneven ride, one that has moments of brilliance that get washed away by the contrivances plaguing the overwrought, lingering last third. Binder almost had it with this one; if only he knew the right time to walk away.

Rush Hour 3 - Review

The Eiffel Tower does not have a bad angle. In 1998's Rush Hour, Jackie Chan was the Hong Kong cop thrust out of his comfort zone in L.A., but finding a buddy in local fuzz Chris Tucker. Three years later, it was Tucker's turn to be the stranger in a strange land when he re-teamed with Chan for Rush Hour 2. Rush Hour 3 begins in L.A., but quickly moves to Paris, making both men fish out of water for their first outing in six years. That does not make this lame buddy comedy twice as funny, as most of the humor is dead on arrival, but at least the action climaxes on the famed Parisian landmark. It will take your breath away in a good way, even if paying $10 or so for a movie ticket to see this mediocrity leaves you feeling sucker punched.

There are a few bright spots. Chan's acrobatics are as fun to watch as ever, if not quite as daring as they were in his youth. Tucker lands the occasional joke, in particular in one scene where he riffs off the old Abbott and Costello routine "Who's on First?" with instructors at a karate academy. But the franchise is definitely showing its age and this seems more like an attempt to cash in on the first two movies' popularity than an honest attempt (however failed) to reinvigorate it.

Lee (Chan) and Carter (Tucker) reunite to chase after the elusive Shy Shen, a notorious figure associated with the Asian criminal gang, the Triads. Their only clues are an address and a name, "Genevieve," and there are any number of Triad associates determined to stop them, including Kenji (Hiroyuki Sanada), Lee's foster brother turned assassin. It is a dangerous situation and only grows more so, once they meet Genevieve (Noemie Lenoir), and discover that she has been targeted for death.

Like Rush Hour 2, the new sequel was written by Jeff Nathanson, who displays none of the skill that earned him a BAFTA nomination for his work on Catch Me if You Can. Instead, he seems to be reverting back to the bad old days of Speed 2: Cruise Control, the legendary bomb that earned him a Razzie nod. How much he is to blame for this nonsense is debatable, since director Brett Ratner appears to embrace every improvisation, no matter how weak, and does not seem to subscribe to the theory that his movies need to make sense just so long as he keeps things moving.

None of that would matter, of course, if the jokes were funnier and the action less thoroughly predictable. The scenes on the Eiffel Tower have a certain panache, but the rest is just action movie cliché. Legendary auteur Roman Polanski pathetically appears in a throwaway cameo as a French cop, while My Wife is an Actress director Yvan Attal no doubt earned a chunk of his next film's budget in the idiotic role of an anti-American French cabbie who learns to embrace all-American violence thanks to new pals Carter and Lee. Rush Hour 3 is just sad, but what is sadder still is the certainty that there will be a Rush Hour 4.

Daddy Day Camp - Review

If you looked in the dictionary under the word “boring,” after the variety of definitions we’ve all become familiar with you would see a more recent addition: any of Cuba Gooding Jr.’s “family friendly” films. The Oscar-winner’s latest endeavor, Daddy Day Camp is so bland and tasteless it looks like Gooding himself had trouble staying awake during half the scenes.

Daddy Day Camp is, of course, the sequel to Eddie Murphy’s Daddy Day Care. Clearly the follow up is so devoid of excitement that it held no draw for a single member of the original cast. In fact, it feels like this probably should have been a different movie entirely, but someone felt it could be “fixed” to work as a sequel to Daddy Day Care. Well, it doesn’t work, either as a sequel or as a stand alone film.

The story picks up a couple of years down the road for Charlie Hinton (Gooding) and his buddy Phil (Paul Rae replacing Jeff Garlin). The film opens showing that they haven’t really gotten better at the whole day care thing. Children run amuck peeing in plants and knocking down celebratory cake while the duo attempts to grill burgers. With such a promising career in day care, it’s no surprise that they attempt to branch out into a summer day camp endeavor, right? Especially when it’s driven by a childhood rivalry with an opposing camp, now owned by the jerk who beat Charlie in a climactic summer camp race. But when the opposing camp proves to be too much competition, Charlie has to call in his militant father (Richard Gant), a powerful figure who Charlie has tried to make sure he’s nothing like, especially in regards to his own son.

As a camp movie, a childhood vendetta story, and a father-son story, Daddy Day Care is simply uninspired. Each element of the overall film has been done before better somewhere else, sometimes even done better in a made-for-TV movie. There is only one unpredictable laugh in the entire movie – one legitimate time in the film that I actually let out a chuckle, and that’s about two minutes from the conclusion of the film. The rest is fart jokes, camp humor, and sad attempts to be sentimental about father-son relationships. Sure, some of the kids will laugh at those jokes, but they really are the only ones, leaving the adults to watch regurgitated humor and storylines for ninety minutes and gaze upon their kids wishing that either they were that young again or that their kids had more sense than to laugh.

The movie is also devoid of logic most of the time. For instance, Charlie and Phil have a thriving day care business, but then decide to branch out into summer camp. So, who’s watching the day care business if they’re tied up with the summer camp? For that matter, why do they have so much trouble finding clientele for their summer camp if they have several years of day care customers? If those kids didn’t have to show up to the summer camp, why should we have to?

Sadly, this isn’t the first review of a Cuba Gooding Jr. “family friendly” movie to accuse the star of being devoid of entertainment or even interest. It probably won’t be the last. It’s not that Daddy Day Care is miserably bad even; it’s just boring and tepid, and has been done better elsewhere. Still, this seems to be Gooding’s decisive career move. The actor should take heed however: if he’s already picking up Eddie Murphy’s leftovers, there really isn’t too far a fall into unemployment.

Redline - Review

The plot for Redline is simple. Cars go fast. Lots of money is spent gambling on who can go faster. Any other plot or character information is irrelevant and extraneous. Redline is about racing, pure and simple.

The number one thing you’d hope for in a racing movie would be good racing sequences. Redline has those in spades. The movie knows how to lay out its races and keep things interesting, finding a good mix between quick cuts and extended shots. The cars look hot and move fast, although a time or two the illusion is broken and the cars don’t appear to be moving anywhere near as fast as their speedometers tell us. The editing also brings in some continuity problems, such as the appearing/disappearing camera copter that plagues several of the races. These are minor issues though, and don’t detract from the fun of watching fast cars go really fast.

Obviously the filmmakers knew this was the strength of the film, so the first half of the movie has very little development to it. Once we get past an initial monologue to set up the character archetypes, everything in the first half is either a race or a scene setting up the reason for the next race. Come to think of it, even the monologue has a race in the middle. Racing is what the movie does well, and for half the picture that’s where they keep their focus.

Unfortunately, the second half of the picture is not quite as focused. The movie slows down as it attempts to set up conflicts between characters and establish motivations for everyone for the final race – the race that, by natural progression, has to be the biggest thing in the movie. Unfortunately, the setup for the race makes the movie feel like sort of a porno – we’re not here for the acting, which is about on par with a porno flick. We’re here for the racing, and the movie can’t get to the good stuff fast enough. This is about fast cars and good looking women (and, I suppose, a few men). Who cares about acting?

That’s not to say the acting is all bad. It just isn’t very good. Truly talented actors like Tim Matheson and Angus Macfadyen are lost here, playing one-dimensional gamblers. Matheson’s gambler always wins, and Macfadyen’s Michael is just way out there. Neither character is explored very deeply, although that’s fine because that would take away from the racing. Eddie Griffin is great at delivering his character’s one-liners, but that’s because he’s Eddie Griffin. I’m going to be completely chauvinistic here and state that Nadia Bjorlin is one of the hottest starlets to appear on screen this year. She looks exotic and is definitely a sign of the movie’s target audience of teenage boys. Lucky for the studio, she’ll bring in the thirty year old men as well. Acting, however… well, the subplot that involves her dead father (who was killed in a race) is pointless, other than attempting to give her added motivation for the final race. She’s just not believably wrapped up in her father’s death. But she is great to look at, so who cares about her character’s motivation?

Redline is the perfect example of cinema eye candy. The movie is easy on the eyes between the attractive cast and entertaining races. When it tries for anything else, the movie falls flat and drags. I wouldn’t even put Redline on the same level with the Fast and the Furious franchise, which achieves a little bit of depth to some of its characters. This is just out and out racing fun. Anything else is unnecessary and takes away from the main focus of the movie.

Delta Farce - Review

If you have to look at the rating I’ve given this movie to figure out that it deserves the lowest possible score, you just might be dumb enough to somehow enjoy the film. Even if that were the case, I would still tell you to avoid it at all costs. Should you decide to go see it anyway and find that it doesn’t completely insult your intelligence, that might be a good sign that you didn’t have any to begin with. I wish I could say that was the only thing being insulted by the film, but regrettably it goes on to backhand the men and women of the American armed forces. It’s not just stupid, it’s offensive.

I used to believe that the worst person to ever be unleashed on a major motion picture was Carrot Top. That thought is being challenged by Larry The Cable Guy. The one-trick-pony, red-neck comedian teams up with long time Blue Collar comedy partner Bill Engval and so-skinny-it’s-scary Hustle and Flow star DJ Qualls to stitch together round after round of painfully obvious jokes. The gags themselves aren’t really enough to make up an entire movie so first time screenwriters Bear Aderhold and Tom Sullivan had to come up with a plot, or at least something they could try and pass of as a plot. Apparently unable to come up with anything they decided to rip off a much better movie.

Larry (The Cable Guy), Bill (Engvall) and Everett (Qualls) are part of a Georgia Army Reserve unit that was sent to Iraq. The three somehow managed to avoid being shipped out but they still show up on base for their “weekend warrior” hours which generally consists of shooting stuff with shotguns and making beer runs. When their little secret is discovered they’re sent through a ridiculous three day training montage and then packed off on the first plane to Fallujah.

Bad weather during the flight forces the pilot to dump his cargo, which just happens to include the idiot trio who snuck off into one of the humvees to sleep. Upon waking, the guys discover they’ve been dumped in the middle of the desert which they mistake for Iraq. Instead they’ve ended up in the deserts of Mexico. I’m not sure how Mexico figures into a flight plan between the United States and Iraq but screwy geography isn’t the biggest problem the movie faces.

Once the guys figure out they’re in Mexico they decide to attend to their soldierly duty of “spreading freedom and democracy” by helping out a small village. The villagers are plagued by an evil bandito named Carlos Santana (Danny Trejo) who raids and pillages from time to time when he isn’t too busy with disco karaoke night at the hide out. The rest of the story more or less plays out like a red neck version of The Three Amigos taking the occasional break to make a joke about the Carlos Santana name or to give Larry the chance to toss in his tired trademark line “git ‘r done”. I don’t care who you are, it’s just not funny.

With the United State military serving under extreme circumstances around the world, it’s perhaps not the best time to make a military comedy. But even so, there are hundreds of ways it could be done without being offensive. Wartime or not, this movie smacks of complete disrespect for a military that works hard to do their job, which is particularly difficult since they don’t get to pick what job they do. Whether or not you like the current politics of the White House, I would hope you could agree that the armed forces deserve some respect for their efforts. It's not just the moronic starring trio, but most of the soldiers in the movie are portrayed as dopes and their fervor for the military generally comes across as lunacy. The biggest blow comes at the end when the credits actually dare to say that the movie is dedicated to the hard working men and women of the armed forces.

I’ll freely admit that I’ve watch the “Blue Collar Comedy Tour” and even laughed a few times during. But the format just doesn’t work when you try to translate it out of the trailer park. Add on that the plot is ripped off and the jokes are insipid and you end up with one of the fattest wastes of screen time since Larry’s last movie. I’d usually stop at saying that the filmmakers of such a pile of crap should be ashamed, but in this case I would add that they owe a lot of people an apology, and not just the audience.

Surf's Up - Review

The penguin fetish started in 2005 by the unexpected popularity of March of the Penguins comes to a screeching halt with the latest attempt at cashing in on the worn out American love for the wobbly, tuxedo wearing fowls from down south. Surf’s Up is a blizzard of filmmaking foul ups, a perfect storm of blatant pandering and studio screenwriting by committee. It plays like it was written by a third-rate marketing department as a series of happy meal advertisements. It’s barely a movie at all, much less a good one.

Surf’s Up attempts to tell the story of a penguin who wants to be a surfer by using short mockumentary clips cobbled together with surfing action sequences reported on by real life surfers animated as penguins and acting as if they’re covering MTV’s X-Games, complete with loud, annoying, music. The penguin star in question is Cody Maverick, voiced by Shia LaBeouf, whose voice work is much better than his Poochie-like (watch ‘The Simpsons’ will ya?) character deserves. Actually, that’s just about the only thing this movie has going for it. Most of the voice cast is pretty good. Jeff Bridges plays a penguin surfing guru named the Geek and Jon Heder is less talentless than usual as the voice of a surfing chicken named Chicken Joe.

Re-enacting the celebrity obsessed, American Idol fueled dreams of the lowest common denominator of America’s youth, Cody is “discovered” by a surfing promoter and travels by whale to a tropical island where a penguin media frenzy is in progress to cover an annual penguin surfing event. Cody hopes to win, and like, totally be awesome on those waves.

Surf’s Up is a movie made for people who think dogs playing poker is funny. The film’s limp attempts at humor come strictly from the animals in it acting like people. They don’t say funny things, they just say human things, which is supposed to be hilarious because, you know, it’s penguins. This movie is exactly what I and many others were scared to death Happy Feet would be and wasn’t. Happy Feet managed to tell a complicated, and epic story about intelligent penguins who were, at the end of the day, still penguins. Surf’s Up goes in the opposite, and altogether horrible direction, of putting penguins on surf boards for no other reason than, hey, wouldn’t it be funny if penguins could surf? Well no, it isn’t.

What’s most baffling thing here is that for a film so desperate to seem cool and hip, Surf’s Up is completely out of touch with pop culture. MTV character confessionals haven’t been hip and hot since 1996. It doesn’t become fresh just because they’ve got penguins doing it. Surfing stopped being a cutting edge part of youth culture when the Beach Boys turned 30. Penguins stopped being awesome last year, when everyone enjoyed Happy Feet, and then got over it.

This is the worst possible sort of kids movie. The animation is bright and colorful, so maybe very young kids who can’t understand what’s going on will like it, just because of how bright it is. But everyone else is going to be bored out of their mind. Large groups of people started walking out of the free screening I was in after about fifteen minutes, and the kids who did stick around were fidgety and disinterested. Most got up and wandered around the theater to talk to their friends. If Surf’s Up accomplishes anything, it will be to bring families together, in boredom. Take your kids and be bored together.

Ocean's Thirteen - Review

For the actors on set, the Ocean’s movies are a party. Famous people show up, hang out, and seem to have a lot of fun with each other . There’s very little acting involved, but that’s also part of the series’ genius. As the franchise wears on director Steve Soderbergh has begun to merge the public persona of his very famous actors with that of the movie’s characters. By now, in the midst of the third film, there’s very little effort at all to develop these people into anything other than themselves. You’re watching George Clooney and Brad Pitt up there, not Danny Ocean and his good buddy Rusty. It’s not that Pitt and Clooney can’t act, it’s just that for these movies, they don’t need to. For Ocean’s Thirteen, that blending of public persona and character is more complete than ever and as a result the Ocean’s franchise works better than before.

It begins without bothering to attempt an introduction. George, Brad, Matt, Bernie and the rest show up and jump right into a heist. Elderly gang member and mascot Reuben Tishkoff (Elliot Gould) has been screwed over by a vicious Vegas entrepreneur named Willie Bank (Al Pacino), sending Reuben to the sick bed and Ocean’s boys to his defense. Clooney and his gang of lovable thieves spring into action to ruin Bank, with their most complicated con yet.

Ocean’s women have been left at home for this adventure, there’s an offhand reference to Tess being unable to come in the film’s opening, and the movie is better for it. Ocean’s Thirteen is about the unbreakable bond between a group of male friends, and the lengths they’re willing to go to honor it. They’re also back in Las Vegas, the perfect place for dudes to hang out and look really, really cool. By now this group has such an easy chemistry together that all of it, seems incredibly natural. They fit together, and by cutting away a lot of the fat that plagued the previous movies Soderbergh has made more room for the easy-going chemistry of his cast to take over. Because everyone seems so natural, for the audience it becomes almost an exercise in voyeurism, as if we’re peeking in at the day to day lives of Clooney and Pitt… if they had secret second jobs as roguish master thieves.

As usual, Ocean’s is all about looking cool. Clooney looks cool, Pitt looks cool, Damon looks cool. They talk cool, they move cool, and that’s good enough. Combine that with one of the better heist plots the series has had and you have a movie that’s a lot of fun. The gang shows up, gets right into the heist, and when the heist is done so is the movie. It’s short, it’s sharp, and because Soderbergh keeps things so simple, stripped-down, and straight to the point, Ocean’s Thirteen is the best Ocean’s movie so far.

Underdog - Review

Thinking of a live action Underdog made me sad,
But the truth about this movie is: it is not half bad

Let’s be honest. Underdog is probably one of the least likely candidates for a movie adaptation. The cartoon super-hero is thirty years past his prime, existing over that time in just over 100 episodes that represent what animation has to look like when it’s churned out on a weekly basis. Yet, strangely, somehow the canine crusader has been targeted for a live-action summer blockbuster movie. Even stranger is the fact that the resulting picture is an enjoyable family picture that has something to offer to both Underdog newcomers and fans who have stuck with the show over the course of its life.

Clearly crediting its origins, Underdog opens with a montage of classic cartoon clips showing the dog hero saving the day against his villains, most specifically Simon Barsinister, the evil genius mastermind. Underdog himself (voiced by Jason Lee) tells us this is his story, but that the cartoon clips are getting ahead of the rest of the story. Transition to the live action picture which serves as an origin story for the super hero.

Originally a failed-police dog, the hero who would be Underdog is captured for experimentation by one of Doctor Barsinister’s henchmen. Before the genius can inject our hero with DNA, the dog attempts to escape, resulting in a lab accident that renders the dog with super powers and disfigures Barsinister (Peter Dinklage). Yes, it’s one of those stories where the hero and villain are born from the same incident, but it’s subtle enough that it doesn’t detract from the story, particularly because Barsinister isn’t exactly a nice guy to begin with.

The dog is picked up by Dan Unger (James Belushi), a former police officer who quit the force when his wife died. He tries to give the dog to his son, Jack (Alex Neuberger), as yet another gesture in their strained relationship, naming the dog Shoeshine because he constantly licks their shoes. Slowly Jack and Shoeshine form a strong relationship, made even stronger when Jack discovers his dog’s secret powers. Jack urges Shoeshine to become a hero, but all the dog wants is a steady home where he doesn’t feel like a reject. When Simon Barsinister rears his ugly head again, there’s no choice to but to save the day as Underdog!

Although this is a super hero origin story, there’s quite a bit more to the movie than just that. It’s also the story of a boy and his dog, the story of a dysfunctional family looking to rebuild, and a story of underdogs on a more literal level, between the police dog who failed, to the police dad who quit, to Jack who is an underdog in school. Each of the stories gets a fair amount of time in the spotlight without feeling like any of them are robbing the movie of its super hero basis. It’s a well crafted story that deserves praise for writers Adam Rifkin, Joe Piscatella, and Craig A. Williams.

On a performance level the movie is a bit varied. Jason Lee provides that deep, insightful narrative voice over that has worked so well on “My Name is Earl,” only without the Southern twang (and, frankly, for a more insightful character). Patrick Warburton gives a typical Warbutonish performance as evil sidekick Cad. Most of the digitally enhanced animal performances are pretty good, although for some reason Polly Pureheart’s dog-talk movements felt very wrong compared to others. Only Peter Dinklage truly rises above with a performance that begins very subdued and builds like a volcano. Regardless of the situation, Dinklage sells his character, making it clear that he took this just as serious as any of his other roles. On the flip side, just the appearance of James Belushi makes it hard to believe he’s supposed to have been this well decorated cop. He looks older and very, very tired (the bags under his eyes could have gotten separate billing they are so dominant). Alex Neuberger is a fairly new performer and that inexperience shows, although it’s easy to write that off to his youth.

For real Underdog fans this movie is chock-full of goodies. From the massive collateral damage created by Underdog, especially with his inability to land, to his rhyming couplets and his signature phrase (“There’s no need to fear, Underdog is here!”) there are lots of things to look for. Even the original source of Underdog’s powers, the secret energy pill, is there in a fashion. None of it is done in a demeaning manner or played tongue-in-cheek like so many other adaptations. It’s just there for you to catch if you are familiar with the franchise, and the way they are played left me grinning. If you aren’t as much a fan, there are still some fun allusions to other origin stories like Spider-Man and Superman, and even a totally clever nod to Disney’s Lady and the Tramp.

As is sadly becoming standard for family movies, there are a few minor issues common to the genre. There are probably more references to dogs eating crap than there really need to be, and the climax of the movie comes to a screeching halt so the family can have a tender moment that solves all of their problems. As a super hero movie, however, this picture is actually a lot better than I expected and surpasses some of the more mundane origin stories out there. As a movie, Underdog is as unlikely, and as surprisingly successful, as the hero himself.

The Reaping - Review

What hath God wrought? That’s the question the poster asked of me as I walked into The Reaping. Once the movie was over I still wasn’t exactly sure what it was God was supposed to have wrought, but I can tell you exactly what the filmmakers hath wrought: a steaming pile of crap.

Somewhere in Hollywood there must be a special place where desperate filmmakers go to get ideas. In this place there is sort of slot machine with three windows and a giant lever arm. Each window has the possibility of showing the title of some past film, some concept that can be rehashed. These desperate filmmakers hand over their dignity and respectability at the door in exchange for a token, which no doubt has Uwe Boll’s face on it. Dropping the token into the slot machine and pulling the lever, they anxiously await their results. This time around twin brothers and writing team Carey and Chad Hayes (the guys who hath wrought House of Wax) pulled the lever and received the inspired combination of The Ten Commandments, The Omen and The Skeleton Key. The resulting script that the Hayes brothers concoct is a horror film nightmare, but not in a good way.

Katherine Winter (Hilary Swank) used to believe in miracles. As an ordained priest she was so convinced of her purpose in life that she followed a calling and took her daughter and husband to a remote, and deeply cultic, African village to serve as a missionary. During her year stay the region experiences a severe drought and the locals sacrifice Winter’s family to appease their gods. Her faith shattered, Winter rejects the idea that there is a God and launches into a lifelong pursuit of debunking so-called miraculous occurrences.

Turns out she’s pretty good at it too. During her many years traveling the world to places where people say miracles are happening, she has discovered a logical and scientific explanation for each and every one of them. One day, while she’s giving a lecture to her college class (apparently they teach Miracle Debunking 101 at LSU), a man named Doug from the tiny bayou town of Haven (David Morrissey) shows up and asks for her help. Haven is beginning to experience what some of its painfully zealous citizens believe is a revisitation of the Biblical ten plagues and he needs someone to figure out what’s really going on.

At first Winter is hesitant but when Doug explains that the townsfolk believe the plagues will end if they kill a little girl (AnnaSophia Robb) who they think is causing the plagues because she murdered her brother, Winter is only too happy to step in and rescue the girl by proving the events aren’t divine intervention. With her Bible believing associate Ben (Idris Elba) in tow, Winter sets out to prove that a river of blood, infestations of various pests, and the mysterious death of otherwise healthy cattle all have a perfectly logical explanation.

As Winter and company are out doing their thing, director Stephen Hopkins does his best to find places to frighten his audience. From time to time he manages something gasp-worthy, but in general he’s forced to fall back on the sorts of gory and creepy stuff that are easy takes when dealing with Biblical plagues. Things like watching lice scatter over children’s scalps as their teachers shave their heads to eliminate an infestation will make your skin crawl, but the most bloodcurdling thing about the movie is the way it hobbles through its ache-inducing storyline. The visual effects are rather well done, but that’s a small concession when the setups are shallow and the scares are predictable. A slightly surprising plot twist at the end nearly makes watching the hour and a half long build up worthwhile, but Hopkins throws it all away with an absurd sequel-setup finale that offers the biggest scare of all: the thought that they’re interested in making The Reaping 2.

Apparently Hilary Swank has had enough of making interesting, meaningful films and what with a second Academy Award under her belt has decided it’s time to go back to making drivel. I would have hoped The Core was a fluke in her otherwise noteworthy career, but I guess not. She should be setting a better example for her young co-star AnnaSophia Robb, whose talent is also frittered away on this film. It’s not to say both don’t do a decent job with their roles, but that kind of compliment is pointless when the roles might just as well have been played by Paris Hilton and a child-sized mannequin with a running stunt double.

It’s not a secret that I’m no lover of horror movies, at least not the frenetic gore fests that are churned out by the roll these days. But I do enjoy a good scare, especially when it’s woven into a good story. The Reaping offers neither. It might have been better titled The Weeping. I know that’s what I felt like doing for most of the show.

Miracle on 1st Street - Review

“Miracle on 1st Street” sees the return of director Yoon Je Gyun, previously responsible for the two Korean comedy blockbusters “Sex is Zero” and “My Boss, My Hero”. Sticking to what he knows best, he delivers another slice of wackiness, putting a farcical spin on the ever-topical subject of forced land reclamation. Returning to help him are Lim Chang Jung and Ha Ji Won, both of whom worked with him on “Sex is Zero” during the early years of their careers, and who have since gone on to become two of the most popular Korean performers.

The film begins with useless lowlife gangster Pil Je (Lim Chang Jung, recently in “My Lovely Week) being sent to the titular slum neighbourhood to clear out the remaining residents and make way for a modern apartment complex. He sets about his task by trying to intimidate people and force them to sign their houses away, but soon finds himself becoming involved with them, and in a supremely ironic, though not exactly unforeseen twist even starts helping to improve their lives. Of course, it helps that he catches the eye of troubled young female boxer Myeong Ran (Ha Ji Won, also in “Duelist”), and the two gradually form a relationship of sorts.

Basic premise aside, “Miracle on 1st Street” is pretty much plotless, with Pil Je’s land grabbing mission going out of the window after about ten minutes and being all but forgotten until the final act when other gangsters turn up, understandably annoyed at his complete lack of effort. As such, most of the proceedings are given over to his wholly predictable conversion from incompetent thug to unlikely saviour, and the film is probably best thought of as a piece of whimsical fantasy, painting the lives of the wacky but happy slum dwellers with a series of broad strokes. There is a definite air of familiarity throughout, with director Yoon cheerfully pilfering scenes from other films, in particular the boxing subplot, which appears to have been culled from the likes of “Crying Fist” and “Champion”.

Where the film does work is in the details, mainly thanks to the fact that its characters are an interesting and likeable bunch, each with a clearly defined dream to chase and their own set of entertaining eccentricities. Although they are not particularly realistic (a case in point being Ha Ji Won’s boxer, who never seems to suffer any facial injuries despite the poundings she takes in the ring, and who somehow manages to win herself a title fight despite being an amateur with no wins under her belt), their relationships with each other, and more importantly with Pil Je do develop in a believable and strangely affecting manner, and the viewer gradually gets drawn into their odd stories and romances. This helps to distract from the lack of an overall driving narrative, and keeps the film moving along and at an engagingly bouncy pace.

It certainly helps that the film is consistently colourful and funny, with plenty of slapstick (i.e. people being smacked in the face and/or crotch) and mild, inoffensive toilet humour. Many of the gags are at Pil Je’s expense, though thanks to a game performance from Lim Chang Jung, he makes for an amusingly idiotic protagonist who it is all too easy to laugh at. Unsurprisingly, the jokes later give way to shameless cheap sentiment and melodrama, though given the time invested in the characters, this development does not feel too forced, and even packs a certain emotional punch. What might not be expected is that the film also contains a number of genuinely harsh and depressing scenes, with a couple of poor children being mercilessly bullied, and with the sudden shift back into the real world at the end bringing a handful of brutally bloody beatings.

This gives “Miracle on 1st Street” a slight, though important edge which helps to somewhat dilute its otherwise sugar sweet centre and to make it far more palatable than it might otherwise have been. Largely sailing by on the charm of its characters and wacky sense of humour, it delivers the good for fans of the form, and may even bring a smile to the face of more cynical viewers, or at least to those willing to suspend disbelief for a couple of hours.

Inland Empire - Review

What is Inland Empire about?” It’s the inevitable, make or break question that everyone asks, and it’s a question that is asked before and after most of David Lynch’s films. Inland Empire is no different; in fact, it’s Lynch at his most extreme and inspired. Don’t let the seemingly incoherent story fool you, there are layers upon layers of meaning that will be unfolding for years to come.

The difficulty of Inland Empire, and Lynch himself, is that he does not make any concessions for his audience. The audience has to work for every plot detail and metaphor, which is not a simple task when watching a filmmaker who knows more about making films than most of us will ever know about watching them. On the surface, Inland Empire is about the duality of acting. Laura Dern plays an actress who lands a huge role opposite Justin Theroux, who plays a hot-shot, womanizing actor. As Dern becomes consumed by her character and her relationship, both professionally and personally, with Theroux, she begins to lose sight of where the fictional character stops and reality begins.

Lynch loves to play with our assumptions and knows that an audience’s attention is caught up in the moment, moments like a rehearsal read-through between Dern and Theroux. We know that they are actors and they are rehearsing but halfway through, something changes. We begin to believe their character, their dialogue. The line between what we know is false and cinematic reality no longer exists. It’s that simple assumption that Lynch plays with for the duration of the film. Just as Dern doesn’t know when she’s acting in the film within the film or when she is just being, we don’t either. While Lynch is commended for crafting a film that skews the lines of cinematic reality so well, it wouldn’t have worked without a powerful performance from Dern. She is believable even when we don’t know who the hell she is.

The confusion of realities permeates Dern’s story to the point where Lynch is commenting on the state of his own film. In the most avant-garde aspect, three rabbit/human hybrids sit in a living room and engage in fairly obtuse dialogue, at which point a ridiculous laugh track interrupts the conversation. These scenes are more supplementary to the film, rather than essential to the brunt of the story. While the dialogue does provide some insight into character motives, these scenes are more of a commentary on us, the audience. When faced with a moment that seems absurd and pointless, we laugh and write it off. Instead of trying to determine what the filmmaker is saying, we chalk everything up to absurdity and rob it of its meaning.

However, Inland Empire is not a film that should be dismissed or panned. It is a film that demands your intelligence, attention and patience. Although the absurdity is humorous at times, the tone of the film is deadly serious. In one swift, three-hour move, Lynch wipes away the meaninglessness of Hollywood movies and reveals the importance of cinema by shooting Inland Empire completely on consumer grade, digital video cameras – cameras that you could walk into a store and buy.

Slick effects and steady-cam shots are replaced with uneven lighting and somewhat jarring camera moves more commonplace in home movies, but in Lynch’s hands, it never feels amateurish. It’s an experience that resides somewhere between a fictional movie and a one-man documentary. It’s cinema for a new age. Although the confrontational avant-garde aspects of Inland Empire will deter the majority of the movie-going public, it’s a film that will rekindle the hope of important cinema in those who have come to feel that cinema is dead.

Dororo - Review

Based on the manga from Osamu "God of Manga" Tezuka, Dororo serves up an entertaining bit of manga-to-multiplex fun despite never finding the right tone. Director Koichi Chigira does a lot of things right but also a lot of things wrong, leading to long patches of boredom and the occasional unintentional laugh. Still, there's fun to be had along the way. Satoshi Tsumabuki stars as Hyakkimaru, a cursed fellow who lacks forty-eight vital pieces of his body. Once upon a time, warlord Kagemitsu Daigo (Kiichi Nakai) traded away forty-eight pieces of his unborn son's body to evil demon gods in exchange for unmatched power on the battlefield. The demon gods agreed, each asking for one part of the boy's body. The reason: the child will one day possess the power to vanquish all demons, and obviously the demon gods don't want to see that happen. This deal looks to make all parties happy - except, that is, the kid himself who's put into a basket and sent down the river like Moses. Unlike Moses, however, this kid has no arms, legs, eyes, ears, and many more body parts.

Fortunately for the incomplete tyke, a crackpot inventor named Jukai (Yoshio Harada) finds the kid, and proceeds to develop fantastic prosthetic limbs that enable him to walk, see, and talk. Sort of. The boy is really blind, deaf, and dumb, but it's his heart, mechanical though it may be, that can see and hear (an artificial voice-box handles the talking). The boy also possesses swords (one of them a famous demon-slaying one) built into his limbs, and prosthetic hands to place over his swords. Now grown to adulthood, the boy has become an incredibly handsome and kick-ass version of Edward Scissorhands, and begins a quest to kill the demon gods who made off with his appendages. Given the name Hyakkimaru, the would-be demon killer takes on a sidekick, a childlike thief named Dororo (Kou Shibasaki of Battle Royale). Together, the two roam the countryside, killing demons and moving closer to the mystery of Hyakkimaru's missing limbs. That mystery: that his father, Kagemitsu Daigo, is responsible for his missing limbs AND he killed Dororo's family AND he's sort of a tyrant who generally treats the common folk rather poorly. What are the odds that Hyakkimaru's demon-slaying blade will taste his father's human flesh before the 141 minutes of Dororo are up?
Why Dororo is called Dororo is a bit of a mystery. After all, the true star of the film is Hyakkimaru, while Dororo is just a glorified sidekick/conscience to the incomplete hero of the story. That said, Kou Shibasaki makes the most of her screentime, acting as annoyingly boyish as a woman of her beauty possibly can. Her performance borders on grating, but she handles her emotional scenes quite well. The same can't be said for Satoshi Tsumabaki, who handles Hyakkimaru's moroseness well, but doesn't bring a lot of inner life to the character. He seems much more comfortable once he gets to stop acting blind, which occurs when he kills the two demon gods who stole his eyes. You see, after killing one of these offending gods, Hyakkimaru doubles over in pain, ejects the synthetic body parts, and regrows his former appendage, complete with chintzy CGI effects. It's actually somewhat amusing to see a tough swordsman cough up a fake liver before growing a new one. During the course of the film, Hyakkimaru also drops a leg, an ear, an arm, and - in the imagination of teen girls in the audience - probably some, uh, more vital body parts that we're not privy to. Thankfully, the movie doesn't go there.
Hyakkimaru also lacks a human heart, which means he can get impaled with no ill effects, but also that he simply cannot feel the true pain of being a human being. Who wants to bet that heartbreak won't be a moment of wonder for this Pinocchio-Tin Man wannabe? You can almost smell the moment in the screenplay, and true to form, the filmmakers deliver. What's surprising is that the moment registers, as do many of the emotions delivered during the climax. Credit the actors for managing to wring some depth out of the pages of static exposition. Dororo clocks in at well over two hours, and a lot of it is people talking, talking, and talking some more. Nearly all the important exposition happens when people are sitting around doing nothing, and seldom does an important revelation occur, say, during an action sequence. Also, some characters in the film seem to exist solely to show up and dispense exposition whenever the script requires it, and sometimes their sudden appearances can cause unintentional laughter.
The action sequences can also cause guffaws. Hyakkimaru faces off against numerous CGI-created or enhanced demons, but some of them are clearly still men in suits. With the bouncy music score and the sometimes subpar CGI chipping in their share of cheap cheesiness, Dororo sometimes resembles one of those wacky Henshin TV series. Veteran Hong Kong action director Ching Siu-Tung provides the sometimes over-the-top action, which only adds to the onscreen silliness. Making things even more uneven is the film's dalliance with the macabre. Jukai's workshop is filled with spare body parts, some of which were collected from dead children on the battlefield. The very notion that Hyakkimaru's prosthetics are made from dead kids is creepy enough to give one the willies, as are some of the creatures, who purportedly feed on kids and talk about it happily. Simultaneously horrific, comic, and dramatic, the concept of Dororo probably works better as a manga or anime than as a live-action film, though the film's cheesiness would seem to indicate that it's some sort of a kid flick. Given the omnipresent blood and gore, that doesn't seem likely.
Then again, the Japanese have a larger tolerance towards violence, meaning the film's copious blood would probably be more disturbing to Mr. and Mrs. Smith than Mr. and Mrs. Tanaka. Besides, genre film is now a thing for adults. It's not just kids who salivate over live-action versions of Spider-Man or Casshern, but ticket-buying adults who get off on seeing their childhood memories rendered in flesh-and-blood big screen form. With that in mind, Dororo has the goods to be fun and enjoyable, albeit a bit messy and slow-paced. Ching Siu-Tung's action is perfectly suited for this sort of acrobatic fantasy film, and the New Zealand location is gorgeous. Plus, watching Hyakkimaru hunt down the thieves of his body parts is kind of fun, in a gotta-collect-them-all kind of way. Whenever Hyakkimaru dispatches his latest demon, there's an undeniable curiosity factor in seeing which body part grows back. Rooting for Hyakkimaru isn't hard. After all, who wouldn't want to see the former incomplete boy become whole once again? Speaking of which, Hyakkimaru doesn't collect all forty-eight parts during the course of the film, meaning Dororo 2 and even Dororo 3 are in the offing. It's an obvious bit of commercialism, but Dororo succeeds more than enough as throwaway fun that the sequels don't seem like a bad idea at all.

Evening - Review

Evening is, to put it mildly, not an easy movie to sell to men. It’s told from the perspective of Ann (Vanessa Redgrave), a woman on her deathbed recalling a pivotal moment in her life 50 years earlier. When she randomly blurts out, “Where’s Harris?” her grown daughters (Toni Collette and Natasha Richardson) have no idea what she is talking about. And there’s no reason they would--in her near-death state of delirium, she is letting them in on a secret.

If ever there were a movie custom-made for women, Evening would fit the bill. It sports a hefty, female-friendly bag of tricks: mother-daughter strained dynamics, wilted romances from years past, deflated dreams, life-changing memories and even a few long walks on the beach. There’s enough sentimentality here to coat a football field, but it excels at what it does and will likely find some weepy-loving fans among the Terms of Endearment/Notebook loyalists.

Evening, the second feature by acclaimed cinematographer-turned-director Lajos Koltai (Fateless), is based on the book by Susan Minot, who wrote the screenplay with Michael Cunningham (The Hours). The story jumps from the present, where Ann is joined by family and a doting night nurse (Eileen Atkins) for her final moments, to the past, where she spends a weekend with close friends for an impending wedding. Young Ann is played by Claire Danes (who looks nothing like a mini Redgrave, but we’ll let that one slide) with an air of sophisticated whimsy.

Her best friend Lila (Mamie Gummer, a.k.a. Meryl Streep’s real life daughter) is set to marry a man she doesn’t much care about, mainly because she can’t be with the one she wants, Harris (Patrick Wilson). He’s a handsome, semi-unattainable doctor that wins everyone over, despite the fact that he’s as exciting as a bowl of Muesli. Even Ann is wooed, much to the dismay of Lila’s brother Buddy (Hugh Dancy), an unstable, vivacious guy who’s been holding onto feelings--and a crusty old note she passed him years ago--for a frightening span of time. Dancy is achingly good at playing this beautiful disaster.

At its core, Evening is about regret and longing. Ann has lived her entire life, with a few failed marriages along the way, and has never forgotten about this dreamy man she barely knew before a tragedy sent them in opposite directions. Was Harris truly all that wonderful? Not really, and that’s one way that Evening gets it right--hindsight can be a nasty mind trick, up to the last breath.

Where Evening gets it wrong is in trying to squeeze too many gifted female actresses into this overstuffed drawer. Collette and Richardson aren’t developed enough to make any real impact, Atkins is criminally underused and Glenn Close appears in a throwaway part as the bride’s mom. The smallest role with the biggest impact is played by (who else?) Streep, as the grown-up Lila. There’s a scene between her and Redgrave, both powerhouse talents, which should be screened in acting classes to teach inquiring minds how it’s really done.

Even with its lack of subtlety, and occasional flair for the melodramatic, Evening is a solid family drama that is hard to dismiss. The incredible all-around acting and sense of bittersweet nostalgia help make the movie seem stronger than it actually is. Don’t be surprised if, much like the girls flocking to Harris, you fall prey to its charms, leaving caution (and arguably logic) out to dry.

28 Weeks Later - Review

In 2004 28 Days Later arrived as a pleasant surprise. British director Danny Boyle and writer Alex Garland had delivered a real modern rarity: A horror film with substance. Set in the early days of a pseudo-zombie apocalypse, the film followed a small group of people trying to survive in a world gone completely mad. What’s great about that original film is that it’s so much more than just another post-apocalyptic horror movie. 28 Days Later had something to say, as it explored the breakdown of society and questioned the very heart of human nature.

Flash forward three years and Fox Atomic is releasing 28 Weeks Later, a sequel made with a screenplay written by group of different writers, new actors, and helmed by a replacement director. The result is a film that feels like it only exists to set up another movie. It’s as if Fox executives counted the first movie’s box office receipts and then locked a committee of writers in a room and asked them to come up with a way to stretch this idea out into three movies. 28 Weeks Later is means to an end and, unlike the original movie, it has absolutely nothing to say except stay tuned and give us your money.

28 Weeks Later picks up, as the title suggests, 28 weeks later after the release of the Rage virus which started everything in Days. Rage is transmitted by body fluids and anyone coming into contact with the liquid innards of one of the infected is instantly turned into a crazed, flesh-eating, mindless killer. After the first movie the island of Britain was left ravaged and devastated, but apparently the outbreak was confined to those shores. 28 weeks later all of the infected, having eaten all the flesh they could find, have died of starvation and a US led military force has moved in to rescue the handful of survivors still left and repatriate those British citizens who were abroad at the time of the disaster.

Anyone who has seen a movie before will instantly realize this is a mistake. Should the world ever find itself in a similar situation, let’s hope the United Nations has the good sense to sterilize the place with a few nuclear bombs before letting people back in. Sadly, that would leave us with a pretty short movie and so we follow the well-intentioned but doomed military and civilian population as things go awry and they lose control. The film starts out following Don (Robert Carlyle), a father who was there during the initial outbreak and survived to be re-united with his kids by the military’s rescue force. His story is an interesting one, and might have provided the philosophical punch 28 Weeks Later so desperately needs to justify its existence but, after only a cursory brush up against his tortured past, the movie abandons him in order to devolve into a big, predictable, pseudo-zombie mess. It might as well be the latest Resident Evil sequel.

Except at least Resident Evil has the scantily clad hotness of Milla Jovovich kicking ass to help sell it. 28 Weeks Later winds up following a couple of kids as they run from the infected, leaving a trail of poorly acted and extremely dead adult characters behind them. The movie seems more interested in lingering over wide, aerial shots of a deserted London than in actually telling a story. When something important does happen, it’s buried under so many camera gimmicks that it’s hard to figure out what’s going on anyway. By the way, 28 Weeks Later’s idea of cinematography is to shake the camera around like it’s being ripped apart by zombies during action sequences, thus obscuring your view and, presumably, saving a lot of money on bothering with things like special effects.

This is a really thin, poorly developed script directed by a stand-in who struggles and fails to mimic Boyle’s movie without adding in anything of his own. Ok, that’s not fair. He does do a night-vision sequence. That’s new. It’s just not very good. If I wanted to watch the movie through a night vision scope I’d bring one with me.

There are a few solidly entertaining moments in the film involving the military’s attempt to exterminate the spreading virus and the civilian attempt to escape from it. A car pushing sequence which evokes the one from the first movie is well executed and there’s the aforementioned abandoned sub plot involving Robert Carlyle’s father character. It’s not enough though. By the time 28 Weeks Later shakes out and figures out where its going it becomes pretty evident that the movie only exists as a setup for whatever globe-spanning, big-budget zombie movie they’re planning to turn the franchise into next. This one is more of a paper-thin transition between Boyle’s gritty, gutty, unique approach to zombies and an almost certainly impending third movie in which they stick the number 28 in front of another standard, glossy, epic zombie apocalypse clone directed by Paul W.S. Anderson.

Becoming Jane - Review

It’s a shame that Jane Austen wasn’t around to write the not-quite-autobiographical movie Becoming Jane, or it might have been filled with the charming insights she injected into her novels. What made the sharp-witted author so brilliant and timeless is strangely absent here; instead, we’re served up another bland, passionless costume drama as stuffy and oxygen-depriving as its corsets.

Pride and Prejudice, one of Austen’s most beloved novels, was adapted for the big screen (again) in 2005 to surprising success, earning over $100 million worldwide and landing acting nods for skinny star Keira Knightley. It was an unexpected, much-adored hit that, naturally, encouraged studio heads to cook up a second helping. The big idea? To make a film about the author while she was writing Pride and Prejudice, so they could essentially make the same movie twice under the guise of creativity. High five.

But Shakespeare In Love this isn’t. Becoming Jane, which is based on Jon Spence’s biography, takes numerous liberties with her life since not much is known about her love affairs. By watching this movie, you’d think that Jane could barely string together an interesting sentence until she fell for a cocky young lawyer from Limerick who, in turn, is to thank for inspiring Pride and Prejudice.

Hear that, ladies? Get into a fleeting, go-nowhere relationship and you just might write the next great novel. Who needs journalism school or, better yet, an ability to write of things you haven’t personally experienced?

Idiotic launching pads aside, the PG-rated Becoming Jane is not terribly interesting to watch. Anne Hathaway stars as Jane and James McAvoy is Tom Lefroy, the guy who steals her heart. It has the typical back-and-forth-banter-as-foreplay exchanges found in all of these movies, but in this case it quickly evaporates. What was harmless, regurgitated fun soon becomes a tiresome, sullen trip with money woes, dead youngsters and enough sulking to make even Paris Hilton roll her eyes.

Director Julian Jarrold (Kinky Boots) is partially to blame for valuing style over substance (attractive actors, beautiful scenery) and TV writers Kevin Hood and Sarah Williams present Jane and Tom as mostly vapid stick figures. The basis of their “romance” is watching him try out his smarmy moves on her (“your horizons must be widened,” he says with predator sleaze) and watching her find it ever so irresistible--anything to avoid marrying the sweet but dull heir (Laurence Fox) that her parents (James Cromwell and Julie Walters) have in mind.

Hey, even the late 18th century yielded its fair share of offspring rebellion. But even if the folks’ dating advice could be fine-tuned, they remain the most engaging, semi-developed characters in Becoming Jane, along with an amusing turn by Maggie Smith as the snooty Lady Gresham.

Just don’t expect to find any of them onscreen much. Chalk it up to another misstep in a marathon of many.