The Last House on the Left - Review

Most Dangerous Game without the honor, Daniel Ilidias’ remake of Wes Craven’s cult classic The Last House On The Left is a depraved portrait of humanity, specifically the lack there of we all display at our worst. Inside the woods, there’s no order, morality or people to hear you scream, just impulsive beasts nourishing themselves with the weaknesses of others. To call this film a disturbing lens into the nightmare inside all of us might be overstating its depth and scope, but these questions linger beneath the movie’s surface, pushing what could have been a mediocre horror flick further beyond just above average and into downright decency. Like Scorsese’s Cape Fear, another remake, The Last House On The Left is less a fright fest of ghosts in the shadows and more a creepy, disturbing battle of savage wills.

Teenage swimmer Mari Collingwood (Sara Paxton) and her friend Paige (Superbad’s Martha MacIsaac) are kidnapped, raped and tortured by a motley crue of creepy-eyed drifters. How exactly they got entangled with such a blood-thirsty lot is neither relevant nor important. They have been abducted by monsters, forced to do things they promised they never would. They’ve become monsters themselves. And this inhumanity malaises over the hour and forty minute film, giving it the stench of degradation and seedy lust.

Escape attempts are hatched and the girls do fight back but it’s not until the four villains unknowingly leave the nefarious crime scene, looking for refuge from the storm in the Collingwood’s secluded second home in the woods that Last House On The Left’s proverbial crescendo is reached. As Mari’s parents (Monica Potter, Tony Goldwyn) slowly discover what exactly happened to their daughter and who was at fault, the film soars, voyeuristically letting us watch the father morphing into the evil he so despises.

The Last House On The Left could be so much more, but sadly, it seems comfortable nuzzling in the same embankments other money-making horror remakes continually seek refuge inside. That it’s not just another money-making horror remake comes out through a great acting performance by Big Love’s Aaron Paul and a careful muddling of heroes and villains, but the density is all shrouded in been-there-done-that formulaic horror devices. An unhappy family is alone in the woods. A pretty, naïve blonde girl is kidnapped. A seemingly gratuitous shot of a bizarre talent sets up its convenient use later in the story.

I hate to further the media’s vicious need to denigrate the horror genre, but it’s hard to refute when promising, thought-provoking films like Last House On The Left idle, pinioned to their obsession with staying inside their niche. In a time where superhero movies are blossoming amidst dark undercurrents and stunning acting turns, horror movies have yet to follow suit. This isn’t the film that shoots the moon, but its emotional complexity might be the right pass left.

Better than Quarantine worse than The Orphanage, Last House On The Left is worth seeing, and it’s worth enjoying. But after it costs you a few hours of sleep and a careful examination of your own moral compass, ask why this film wasn’t just a little bit more. Ask why subject matter this ethically haunting won’t even be talked about as a candidate for the year’s best film. Ask why the remake of The Last House On The Left is just another horror movie.

Sunshine Cleaning - Review

There are so many superficial similarities between Sunshine Cleaning and that fellow Sundance success, Little Miss Sunshine, that the new movie was probably doomed from the start. It's all too easy for snide critics to point out the cute kid, charming old grandpa played by Alan Arkin, desert setting and quirky family drama, and deduce that Sunshine Cleaning is just another mishmash of indie tropes trying to cash in on the success of that movie with the big yellow van.

While it's true that Sunshine Cleaning indulges in a little too much quirk, and is not as good as Little Miss Sunshine, the new movie starring Amy Adams and Emily Blunt has a lot to recommend it, starting with the honest performances from its two leads. As two very different sisters scrabbling out a living in dusty Albuquerque, Blunt and Adams build a believable rapport between them, and each digs deep in their characters to give the audience a view into their difficult, lonely lives.

Adams is Rose, a single mom raising an oddball son (Jason Spevack) by working for a cleaning service, and keeping her social life on hold while she engages in an affair with her married high school boyfriend (Steve Zahn). He's the one who gives her the idea to go into crime scene cleanup, and motivated by the chance to re-imagine herself as an entrepreneur, she talks her slacker sister Norah (Blunt) into joining the business.

Norah and Rose are incredibly inept at first, and the movie indulges a little in some blood-and-guts sight gags before taking the sisters in some unexpected directions thanks to the new job. Rose turns out to be really good at the business, and imbued with some of the can-do spirit from her entrepreneurial dad (Alan Arkin), she uses the business as means to get the rest of her life in order. She ditches the ex, works up the guts to attend a baby shower held by a ritzy former classmate, and starts a very tentative, warm flirtation with the guy who sells their heavy-duty cleaning supplies (Clifton Collins Jr.). Norah, on the other hand, is much more emotionally affected by the crime scenes they clean, and finds herself in a semi-romantic friendship with the daughter (Mary Lynn Rajskub) of a suicide victim.

Megan Holley's screenplay slips into stilted language and awkward coincidence sometimes, especially in the subplot that finds Rose and Norah recovering from their mother's suicide when they were children. Where other parts of the movie capture so much realism, from dingy parties to the tyranny of school principals, it's a ridiculous notion that two sisters struggling to get over a death that happened 25 years earlier would go into crime scene cleanup. As a result some of the key moments of the film, in which Rose and Norah are supposed to have found inner peace and new realizations about themselves, ring hollow and cliched.

But director Christine Jeffs is great with her actors, and takes a light, witty approach to the material that largely steers the movie away from the maudlin. Every time one of the characters does something unbelievable, like talking to her dead mom through a CB radio, Jeffs inserts a clever camera angle or well-timed edit to pull the mood back from the brink. Sunshine Cleaning avoids a tidy ending, and despite being cute redheads, Rose and Norah emerge as genuinely complicated, not always likable characters. Beyond the over-reliance on easy quirks, there's an intent toward real storytelling at the heart of Sunshine Cleaning that sets it above typical indie schmaltz.

Watchmen - Review

To me it wouldn’t have mattered if it were bad or good. More important in a Watchmen movie is that it’s ambitious. That it tries to say something, to be something, even if it implodes amidst the struggle to achieve it. Better a spectacular failure than miserable, lukewarm mediocrity. Alan Moore’s amazing comic deserves, and gets better than tepid tap water dripped out of Hollywood’s rusty faucet. As a movie Watchmen is every bit as risky, edgy, and aspiring as it ought to be. As a bonus it’s also really, really good.

Directed by Zack Snyder using a slavishly faithful script adapted, from what is often considered to be the greatest comic ever written, by David Hayter and Alex Tse; Watchmen shies away from none of the brutal and deeply thoughtful tones of its source material. The comic book is dense, the comic is complicated, the comic is filled with more characters and brilliant ideas than anyone could ever fit on screen in a single movie, even a 163 minute one. Yet Snyder does it, without losing any of what made Watchmen so perfect, so genre changing in the first place.

Snyder squeezes it all in with a few key changes. The comic’s complicated ending is modified and replaced with something simpler to explain, but with most of the same impact, meaning, and ideas. It’s a masterstroke of adaptation and while, speaking as a fan of the comic, it’s not as good as the final solution in Dave Gibbons and Alan Moore’s original, it’s literally the only way this movie could have been done. It frees up massive chunks of time for Snyder to focus in on the real heart of the matter, the people who make up Watchmen’s world and the desperately dark path their society, and in a way our society, is on.

Watchmen does not however, take place in our world. It’s set in an alternate universe, a parallel 1985, what our 1985 might have been had the superheroes we see in our comic books actually been given form, actually existed. In the world of Watchmen masked avengers came to prominence in the 50s. Not beings with super powers, but a realistic breed of hero who used earthly talents to fight crime and, in some cases, help America win the Vietnam War. Those heroes changed the course of human history, not drastically, but subtly enough that in this parallel place Richard Nixon has been elected to 5 terms as president and the Cold War which gripped our own country back then has pushed them to the brink of nuclear annihilation.

The film follows a cadre of different characters, most of them superheroes who dropped out of the heroing game after a governmental act banning masked avengers. Some retired, some went to work for the man, and then there’s Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley) for whom ban or no ban, there is no compromise. Through Rorschach we’re launched into the lives of a group of former heroes, some his contemporaries, others his predecessors. Rorschach, tenacious, damaged, and full of hate investigates the death of The Comedian, whose life we see intermingled with others in skillfully used flashbacks. Gradually the story of these people’s past and present is told and in the process a bigger, broader, more frightening, audacious story; one with dire implications to humanity as a whole, begins to unfold.

More than a movie about men in tights facing off against bad guys, Watchmen is about people trapped in a world spiraling out of control. It’s a superhero movie without a self-evident nemesis to battle, or an obvious evil plot to foil. Adrian Veidt, self-styled smartest man in the world declares his battle to be one against all that is bad in humanity. He’s not battling crooks or killers, his fight, and in the end Watchmen’s fight, is against the rot inside mankind’s soul.

First though, there’s a murder mystery to solve. Rorschach suspects someone is out to kill masked heroes, and sets off to warn his fellow avengers. We meet Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup), the only character with real super-powers, and a detached god complex to go with it. With him is his girlfriend Laurie Jupiter (Malin Ackerman), his only remaining connection with humanity. As he becomes more godlike, his interest in us is rapidly fading. We meet Dan Dreiberg, formerly known as Nite Owl (now retired) and the closest thing Rorschach has to a friend. Patrick Wilson plays Drieberg and at first his performance is off-putting. It’s as if Dreiberg is doing a never ending Clark Kent impression. But he develops and you realize there’s more going on. This is a man uncomfortable in his own skin, a man without purpose or direction, mourning for something he’s lost but doesn’t want to admit he needs back. Clark Kent is a persona Superman puts on to hide his real identity, but for Dreiberg an impotent, awkward Clark Kent amalgam is all that’s left once he’s been stripped of his mask, stripped of who he is.

Wilson’s performance is indicative of so much of what’s going on in this movie, more than it seems and often not what it appears to be. It dares to tackle things beyond the by now over-explored notions of good and evil, heroes and villains. This is the deconstruction of the superhero, which was begun last summer with The Dark Knight, taken right to the edge. It’s a movie with a deeply troubled soul, as troubled as the one hovering inside us all. Dipping into those dark corners requires something unflinchingly adult, and Watchmen delivers, refusing to shy away from broken bones, horrifying travesties, and more than occasionally, the naked human body. To do otherwise would be a betrayal, not only of its source material but of the basic truths of our existence, poured like molten lead into the movie’s core.

Snyder has found the right people for these roles and gets in almost every instance, stunning performances. Here’s the exception: Laurie’s mother Sally is a minor part of the film, but Carla Gugino’s take on her is nothing short of an abortion. It’s a disastrous turn, made only worse by a failed attempt to age her with bad makeup. She’s handles heady and meaningful dialogue with all the panache of a hastily put together, boozy SNL skit, the kind that goes horribly wrong and invariably results in whoever the current cast’s token fat guy is, bursting out into laughter somewhere slightly out of frame.

Any minor problems in Watchmen’s script are more a result of what’s missing than what’s been done. In particular the movie’s big finale, which should be shocking and horrifying, ends up feeling cold and clinical. It’s not because of any particular mishandling. Instead we’re talking about an honest byproduct of limited running time. We never get the chance to know the common man, whom the movie’s central disaster affects. There’s no time for Snyder to let us sit down with the guy on the corner to talk politics, or really step inside the life of normal, non-hero characters like Rorschach’s psychiatrist or Dreiberg’s mentor Hollis Mason. For the pain of the world to hurt, to have real meaning, we needed to see that. With an already expansive running time, there’s no way to do it. Instead you’ll connect with Dan and Laurie. You’ll ache for Dr. Manhattan’s lost humanity. You’ll sicken with anger over the things Rorschach has seen and suffered. With his stopwatch ticking, Snyder doubles down on the emotional investment in his primary characters, and that’s more than enough to see Watchmen through.

What matters most is that this is a movie with ambition, a movie with balls, a movie unafraid to tear across the screen leaving a trail of broken lives and unanswered, frightening questions in its wake. It revels in moral bankruptcy and delights in forcing on its characters into unmakeable choices. Stunning visuals exist in the service of ideas, not cheap thrills. It hinges not on some particular, awe-inspired action sequence, but on the quiet conversations of people struggling to save a world gone made. They’re different from us only in that when they talk, instead of punctuation marks, they use fists. When the material on which it’s based first hit stands, it forever changed the world of superhero comics. If successful, Watchmen may do the same for superhero films.

Friday the 13th - Review

I realize it's not easy to get anyone to feel sorry for movie critics. We work from home in our pajamas, see all the movies early and for free, and spend most of our free time bitching to you about what terrible taste you have in cinema. But keep in mind we often get stuck seeing movies we would never, ever see on our own-- and I don't just mean bad stuff like Confessions of a Shopaholic, or tawdry genre stuff like Underworld.

I mean stuff like Friday the 13th, a movie I hated, moment for moment, more than any I've seen this year. I scare easily, and have no fond childhood memories of Freddy or Jason or any supernatural killer targeting teens. I have no idea what appeal anyone can find in this tired formula, especially when it's used so poorly here, 13 years after Scream parodied it so brilliantly.

But the people in the theater with me screamed at all the right moments, and even got in a few unintended laughs, so Friday the 13th seems to have a few things going for it. Even so, there are enough needless musical cues, fake scares, and suspense-free moments for even gigantic horror wimps like me to see through it for the trash it is. Whether or not it's good, entertaining trash probably depends on how much you grew up fearing Jason's hockey mask, but fans looking for that same horror jolt they got from the first film 19 years ago will probably find themselves too old for this shit.

It's not much that the movie traffics gleefully in the genre cliches-- hot dumb teenagers trapped by a killer in the woods-- but that it doles it all out so haphazardly. The movie opens powerfully by recreating the end of the first movie, the final surviving camp counselor (attractive female, of course) chopping off Mrs. Vorhees' head. Then there's a second prologue that theoretically distills everything you're looking for into 10 minutes, but drags on even longer than you'd think possible for something so content-free. There's sex and drugs, but when it comes time for the gore, director Marcus Nispel has no idea how to pace things to create any kind of suspense. By the time they bite it you're ready, not so much for entertainment but just to finally move on to the real story.

When we do, we're "rewarded" with the most obnoxious group of teens this side of The Hills, a handful of bleached blond dudes complemented by some girls in tight T-shirts and the token minorities, an Asian guy (Aaron Yoo) and a black guy (Arlen Escarpeta) who obviously aren't allowed their own love interests. The gang has piled into the summer home belonging to Trent (Travis Van Winkle) and his parents, and we learn that we're supposed to hate Trent both because he's a jerk to his girlfriend and to kindly strangers, and because he's obsessed with keeping the house clean. Meanwhile his pretty, virginal girlfriend Jenna (Danielle Panabaker) is sympathetic when they run into Clay (Jared Padalecki), a soulful guy looking for his missing sister Whitney (Amanda Righetti), who just happens to be one of the victims we saw Jason slice and dice at the beginning of the film.

Or did we? As soon as we meet Clay it's pretty obvious that Whitney is alive somewhere, just as it's obvious in which order the stupid teens will die, and how. Jason shows up to dispatch them all in various creative ways, including a truly surprising arrow to the head in one scene and later, a disappointingly generic tire-gauge-to-the-throat. Since this is a franchise reboot, rather than a sequel, Jason doesn't feel the pressure to top his previous antics, and the screenplay follows suit by failing, at every turn, to add anything new to the formula. The flawless production values and rock and roll songs are great, sure, but a reason to care about the characters or even a hint of wit could have gone a long way toward validating this movie's reason to exist.

But as I said at the beginning, I'm an automatic hater-- it takes a lot for me to enjoy any slasher movie, which I admit makes me a less-than-objective critic. Whatever you loved about the original movies, be it the blood and guts or the blatantly obvious sound cues that SOMETHING SCARY IS ABOUT TO HAPPEN!, you'll find it here in full force. But mostly Friday the 13th is proof that horror movies haven't progressed at all since Jason first emerged from Crystal Lake, and bothering with the new stuff is mostly going to be exercise in gruesome disappointment.

Confessions of a Shopaholic - Review

Every Manhattan-set movie or book aimed at women, from Sex and the City on down, has essentially been part of a fantasy world. There are few black people, or poor people, or anyone who can't pronounce Christian Louboutin, and all it takes for success is some wide eyes, a trim waistline, and a fix on the perfect guy.

But Confessions of a Shopaholic takes the whole chick lit package, the candy colored dresses and the personal chauffeurs, to a ridiculous, intolerable new level. Isla Fisher, normally an appealing and capable actress, is reduced to a fluffy pink stereotype here, and all the name-brand talent surrounding her gets shoved into one-line cameos, all to make room for more shopping montages. Setting aside the unintentionally funny moments that remind you how distant this movie is from the economic crisis we're in, Shopaholic is awful in its own right-- shallow and screechy and completely rotten at its core.

Fisher's Rebecca Bloomwood is intended as a lovable goofball sort of character, a less world-weary Carrie Bradshaw, but largely comes across as an idiot as she shops her way into $16,000 in debt, then stumbles into a job at Smart Savings magazine. The editor who hires her (Hugh Dancy) seems about as blindsided by her looks as he is impressed with her talent, and for inexplicable reasons overlooks her complete lack of financial knowledge, bizarre behavior (she's evading a debt collector, you see) and overall stupidity to keep her hired.

And of course, it turns out she's a hit-- because most Americans are as stupid as Rebecca, and we need her to explain finance in terms of shoes and handbags. She impresses the president of the publishing company (John Lithgow, wasted in a stern suit role) and even the haughty editor (Kristin Scott Thomas) of the fashion magazine she really wanted to work for to begin with.

With her life on the upswing Rebecca promises her sensible, slightly kooky roommate Suze (Krysten Ritter) that she'll get her finances in order. But there are balls to attend! And mannequins who actually come to life and coax her into stores. Of course, just when Rebecca thinks she has it all, her personal financial troubles come back to haunt her, and it's up to her to sort things out, win back her man, and give us the generic ending demanding by anyone who bothered to buy a ticket for this.

Most of the intended comedy comes from Rebecca's various pratfalls, which include hiding in a clothes rack to steal back a letter, fighting other women at a sample sale and diving across the table to answer the phone. In most movies these kinds of slips endear us to the female character, but here they only serve to make Rebecca seem like more of an idiot, devoid of all personality except a fetishistic love of shoes. In one scene, Fisher gets to cut loose and dance, showing wild moves similar to what made her notable in Wedding Crashers. But the scene doesn't fit at all with her character, and immediately after Rebecca is back to blank, cute neutral. It's as if Fisher took the reins for one moment and gave actual characterization a shot, but director P.J. Hogan stopped her before it was too late.

Everyone in the movie overacts wildly, with the exception of cool British Dancy, but especially grating are Ritter and the always-hyper Joan Cusack, both of whom bug out their eyes at least twice a scene. The mugging is almost preferable,to the blank presence from so many other actors, including Lithgow, John Goodman as Rebecca's dad, and Scott Thomas, whose customary restraint gets swallowed by the movie's frenetic pace.

There's lots to look at, between Patricia Field's gonzo costumes and Dancy's sparkling blue eyes, but nothing to feel in Shopaholic, other than a deep regret that we ever thought this kind of lifestyle was funny, much less admirable. Sophie Kinsella's books, on which the film is based, were written at the beginning of this boom decade, but feel as antiquated here as a story from the Gilded Age. A better, smarter movie could have let us forget modern troubles and lose ourselves in this candy-colored world, but Shopaholic has too many comedic dead spots and too little wit to carry anyone away.

The International - Review

The International has a big obstacle in its way right from the outset: How do you make banking interesting? Like making math fun, turning the world of money lending into something that’ll keep you awake for two hours, is a tall order. A Beautiful Mind made math exciting by using a lead character who is not only crazy, but experiences amusing hallucinations. The International tries to make banking more fun than watching paint dry, by turning the finance industry into one big, espionage ridden shoot-em-up. Though recently laid off Wallstreet workers looking for payback may take pleasure in seeing a few bank executives rubbed out, when the bullets aren’t flying you’re likely to find yourself wishing for that wet paint.

The problem is really the plot, which never makes a lot of sense. Clive Owen plays Louis, an Interpol agent investigating a vague and complicated banking organization called the IBBC. He’s after them because, they lend money to people. Some of their lendees are even bad people and apparently banks are supposed to do some sort of background check before opening a saving account? I’m not sure, but Clive Owen seems really pissed about it. Or maybe he’s just pissed that the bank keeps sending assassins to kill his friends. Ok, killing people is a crime so I understand why he’d take them down for that, except they wouldn’t have killed his friends if he hadn’t already been investigating them for, again, money lending. Last I checked, aren’t banks supposed to lend money? It’s not like the IBBC was selling bad mortgages. If there’s an accountant in the audience, see it and send me an e-mail straightening this whole thing out.

Luckily The International doesn’t wait long before it starts inventing excuses for Clive Owen to fire off a gun. When that’s happening, the movie is intense and visceral. In between those scenes, it’s full of artifice in which cliché, brain dead superiors scream that our heroes are out of time and must drop the case, even though they’re obviously getting massive results and doing everything right. But the movie needs tension when the bullets aren’t flying, so there’s a lot of talk about needless timelines which serve no other purpose than to be a ticking clock. Clive needs a reason to drive his car really fast. Gotta stop those bankers, before they make another loan!

At some point Naomi Watts gets into the mix as a New York investigator with a stake in what’s going on. She’s left out of the gunplay and I’m not entirely sure why she’s in the story at all. It doesn’t matter. There’s a fantastic shootout in the middle of the movie, set inside the Guggenheim museum. This is almost certainly the only thing you’ll remember when walking out of the movie, and since Naomi Watts isn’t involved, feel free to write her off. The Guggenheim sequence though, you’re not likely to forget. The International is worth sitting through if only to see it. It’s well shot yes, but spectacular mainly because of the setting. The museum is a series of never ending, spiraling, balcony ramps with beautiful glass artwork in the center. You can guess what happens when Clive Owen has to fight off an army of guys armed with machine guns. Big fun. That’s what.

Still, this a movie about banking. Shoehorn all the bullets you want into it, but it remains a plot driven by accountants. Maybe that’s relevant, with the economy in shambles because of the greed of banking executives like the ones Clive sets out to blow up in The International. I know I’d certainly like some revenge against those bastards. Unfortunately The International’s approach is stark, cold, and not one that lends itself to revenge. In the movie’s final moments the script takes a vicious left turn in an effort to strip away everything and leave us with only the emotional and raw. Yet even there, Tom Tykwer’s direction ensures that the film remains calculating and distant, as if instead of a movie we’re watching a monetary transaction between a filmmaker and his audience.

Pink Panther 2 - Review

Steve Martin continues to be a revered comedy icon even 10 years after his last relevant comedy (that would be Bowfinger), but even he knew he needed some help to get anyone to accept a second remake of the classic Peter Sellers Pink Panther films. So for The Pink Panther 2, Martin stacks the deck with talented comedians and actors from across the globe. Emily Mortimer and Jean Reno are back, John Cleese has replaced Kevin Kline as Clouseau's nemesis Inspector Dreyfus, and Alfred Molina and Andy Garcia have joined as international investigators brought to France when, once again, the Pink Panther diamond is lifted. Add in Aishwarya Rai as a mysterious diamond expert, Lily Tomlin as an etiquette teacher and Jeremy Irons as a suspected culprit, and it's a cast that would make anything worth watching.

Anything except The Pink Panther 2, that is. The movie that brings together all these stars is a dull and obvious comedy that either squanders the talent of its cast or leaves them to founder within the scrambled and episodic screenplay. Decent pratfalls and physical gags will take you a long way, but there needs to be some semblance of wit and coherence to keep viewers older than 10 interested. Harald Zwart steps in for director Shawn Levy here, but his poor sense of comedic timing and lack of visual style may have only made matters worse.

When the film opens Inspector Clouseau (Martin) has been relegated to parking meter duty after winning a Medal of Honor at the end of the last film, with Dreyfus hoping to keep him out of the office and out of the way. But when the Pink Panther is stolen, along with priceless artifacts from Italy, Japan and England, Clouseau is the obvious choice to join the international Dream Team charged with recovering the items. There's a Brit (Molina), an Italian (Garcia) and a Japanese whiz kid (Yuki Matsuzaki), all of them exasperated by Clouseau's ego and clumsiness. The Italian is more interested Clouseau's secretary Nicole (Mortimer), whom he woos even while Nicole and Clouseau refuse to acknowledge their mutual crushes.

Joined by jewel expert Sonia (Rai), the Dream Team travels the globe on the trail of the mysterious thief The Tornado. Each location is essentially just a new opportunity for a Clouseau pratfall. He runs atop a giant globe in a mansion, he falls off the Pope's balcony, he burns down a restaurant in Rome. The physical gags, as tired as they may be, work a whole lot better than the French jokes, which once again find Clouseau unable to pronounce "hamburger" and, in his scenes with Tomlin, constantly ogling women. The goal seems to be to establish some kind of witty repartee among the assorted comic legends, but all the verbal scenes are draggy and obvious, making Tomlin's presence, for the first time ever, unwanted.

Mortimer brings some sparkle as the dopey and devoted Nicole, and Molina especially makes a fun opponent for Clouseau, as in one early scene where the two size each other up by lobbing random insults like "You were 14 before you learned to enjoy the taste of avocado!" Reno, though his character lurks weirdly on the sidelines for most of the film, gets a beautifully bizarre song-and-dance scene with Martin. You get the sense that, in a better movie with more ambition, the audience could be having as much fun as the stars did behind the scenes.

Once I was watching The Office on DVD, and spent 10 minutes watching deleted scenes before I realized it wasn't the actual episode. The Pink Panther 2 is pretty much the same experience, making you wonder if there's a cut of the film that doesn't linger so needlessly on Clouseau's love triangle, or leaves out the scenes (Clouseau karate fights with tweens?) that have nothing to do with the plot. But apparently Martin and Zwart really did want to make a movie this aimless and derivative, aware that their target audience of children won't know what they're missing. Would that the rest of us could be so lucky.

Taken - Review

Taken really has no right to be as much fun as it is. A movie with less interest in character development and dialogue than in roundhouse kicks and gunplay, Taken is brutish and loud and slow in parts, but also undeniably entertaining.

The presence of Liam Neeson in the lead role is a bonus, but surprisingly, not really the source of success. Credit goes to Pierre Morel, the director who previously made the gonzo French action movie District B13 and brings the same frenetic, sadistic energy to the manifold action sequences here. The plot takes forever to get going, and suffers throughout from terrible dialogue and ridiculous twists, but when it comes to the action-- which is why you bought the ticket in the first place, of course-- Morel is completely in charge..

But first, there's an interminable half hour or so spent meeting Bryan Mills (Neeson), a former spy now living in Los Angeles in order to be closer to his teenage daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), who lives with her mom (Famke Janssen) and a rich stepdad who buys her a pony for her 16th birthday. Mills, poor guy, can only afford a karaoke machine. We needlessly watch Mills return briefly to the job to protect a pop star-- and take down an assailant in the process-- and hang out with his old spy buddies, since apparently screenwriters Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen took the "show, don't tell" method of exposition way, way too seriously.

The plot finally emerges when Kim asks permission to spend the summer in Paris, and Mills, an insanely overprotective father, denies her at first. She then confirms the worst suspicions of every overprotective parent on earth by getting kidnapped, along with her friend Amanda, within minutes of arriving in Paris. After a frantic phone call with Kim that gives a few key clues about the kidnappers, Mills has packed his toolkit of weapons and jetted overseas, preparing to "tear down the EIffel Tower if I have to" in order to find his daughter.

He stops just short of that, but destroys any number of cars, construction sites, and lives as he races through the seedy underbelly of Paris. He determines Kim and Amanda have been taken by Albanian traffickers, who kidnap unassuming young women and, usually within 70 hours, ship them away forever. A number of plot threads that might give more insight into this under-discussed, tragic world are abandoned, including an odd moment when Mills cares for a kidnapped woman whom he first thinks is Kim. There's also an encounter in which Mills' French government contact appears to be in cahoots with the traffickers, but that's mostly an excuse for Mills to throw a few more punches and track another clue.

The action, though sometimes over-edited and confusing, is mostly thrilling, including an early chase scene at a construction site and a final confrontation on a boat in the Seine. Neeson is such an automatically empathetic figure that he gets away with a lot, including torturing a suspect, threatening innocent bystanders, and shooting a man's wife in the arm to teach him a lesson. There's a whole lot of violence within the PG-13 rating, and not all of it of the satisfying, "justice to the bad guys!' kind. But action fans will be continually impressed by Morel's skill behind the camera, and instinctive understanding of how to pace even the most extended action sequence.

Maggie Grace, even given how little she has to do in her role, is astonishingly bad at playing a teenager, and Famke Janssen adds another to her line of blank, stuck-up wife roles. But all the movie really needs is Neeson and a row of henchmen for him to mow down, and as long as the action is moving, it all works fine. A 5-minute coda to wrap up the characters reminds you of how awful the beginning was, and keeps the movie from really qualifying as "good." But as fast, dumb entertainment goes, Taken is tough to beat.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans - Review

Six years ago Underworld brought an unimpressive vampire vs. werewolves story to theaters. Playing with far too frequently used archetypes and concepts, and featuring horridly filmed combat sequences, the result was underwhelming and disappointing. Now we get a prequel that shows us the back story that Underworld told the audience in its dramatic climax. Despite being material we’ve heard before, with no real twists to speak of, Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is probably the best movie in the series, although that’s still not saying too much.

The third movie in the franchise backs up several centuries in the Underworld storyline, showing the origin of the Lycans, a breed of werewolf that starts with Lucian (Michael Sheen). The vampires breed the Lycans as protectors - slaves intended to protect the vampires during the harmful daylight hours. Through the events of the film, the werewolves rebel against their former masters, exactly as we’d been told before, and the war between the vampires and Lycans begins.

The key to Underworld: Rise of the Lycans is substitution - take the elements fans liked in the original movie and find a way to make them fit here. Instead of Kate Beckinsale, Rhona Mitra steps into the corset of the heroine, playing Sonja, who is the daughter to Viktor, the vampire leader (Bill Nighy). It also borrows the star-crossed lovers caught in a forbidden romance storyline from the previous movies, placing Sonja and Lucian, as the young couple, which is what leads to the beginning of the war as their secret passion is revealed.

Rise of the Lycans takes on a difficult task - tell a story we’ve already been told, without any possible threat really occurring for the main characters, since we know both of the mortal enemies, Lucian and Viktor, are around for the subsequent films. Despite that, the movie does a good job of telling its story, perhaps because it doesn’t try to throw any twists in or adjust the story from what fans know it to be. We were told the original story in the first Underworld, and the writers stay faithful to that 100%.

Somehow, the more primitive setting works better visually for this movie than the gothic take on the contemporary city did in the previous pictures. In particular, the ornate armor and garb of the vampires creates a really neat environment that feels a lot more true to the vampire culture the movies have established than the Matrix appearance the other movies have sported. The visuals aren’t perfect though, especially because that annoying inability to film combat sequences has been carried over from the other pictures. When the action starts, prepare to get dizzy and lose most of the context of what’s going on. The visual effects for the Lycans, which put me off from the first movie, look a little improved here as well, although that could be due to the fact that they mostly appear during the ill-filmed action sequences.

Underworld: Rise of the Lycans isn't solid enough to fully convert anyone unimpressed with the previous chapters, but this is definitely the strongest movie in the series and sure to please existing fans of the series, especially because it stays true to the pre-established history of the franchise. I would even go so far as to say I wouldn’t mind seeing another Underworld picture set in this era. Maybe a departure from the previous movie’s storyline and characters is exactly what this franchise needed.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button - Review

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button takes nearly three hours to unfold and every bit of it is depressing. As the story of a man aging backwards through time director David Fincher’s film is a failure; not much seems to happen and for a guy miraculously de-aging right before our eyes Benjamin is surprisingly uninteresting. As a panic provoking examination of death though, maybe he has something. Fincher’s movie seems to exist solely to remind us of our own mortality. It’s a series of constant, manipulative, downer bullet points which arrow towards the muddy grave we’re all headed for. Spending 3 hours in a darkened room meditating on your own eventual demise isn’t exactly my idea of a good time, but getting that kind of thoughtful reaction is at least an of accomplishment of a type. In that sense Benjamin Button is deeply affecting, but because of the way it reminds us of unavoidably miserable things in our own future, not because of anything interesting happening on screen. Afterward, I suggest going home for a stiff drink. Scotch. Neat.

The film’s fascination with the ticking clock that is our lives begins right at the outset, as we meet our narrator. She’s the daughter of an elderly woman (Cate Blanchett under heavy prosthetics), lying on a hospital bed in front of her and clearly close to death. The fading invalid, gasping for air, asks her daughter to read from a mysterious journal and the daughter complies. While she reads, we’re told that hurricane Katrina is bearing down on their hospital. Yes we’re in a New Orleans, right before the 2005 disaster which left so many drowned and extremely dead. Oddly the approach of Katrina, while frequently referenced, never amounts to anything in context of the movie except as a way of adding the specter of even more mortal misery and allowing it to loom listlessly in the back of our heads like an overlong obituary.

As she reads the daughter discovers amazing things about the life lead by her mother and of a singular man named Benjamin Button (Brad Pitt). As mentioned, Benjamin was born aging backwards. That’s not to say he popped out of his mother’s womb as a fully formed adult. Actually he looks sort of like one of the rubbery alien Muppets from the original Star Wars; a creature with all the size, proportion, and mental faculties of a newborn infant, but the wrinkled skin, arthritis, and pre-death health problems of an extremely elderly man. Everyone predicts that this freakish baby will soon be dead. He isn’t.

Abandoned by his father Benjamin ends up being raised by a kindly healthcare worker at a retirement home. Benjamin who, at the age of 6 looks like he’s 96, fits right in. Though he looks like he has one foot in the grave, every day Benjamin grows younger, stronger, and loses many of his troublesome wrinkles. Mentally he’s a kid, physically he’s an adult, and oh isn’t it depressing that he can’t live the normal life of other kids? I bet he’ll soon be dead.

Ben hobbles around as the narration shifts to his voice, Brad Pitt droning on in a slow, Louisiana drawl about the world as seen through his eyes. The world he sees is not one with a lot of excitement. Things seem to get moving in the latter half, when Benjamin is at least old/young enough to get up out of his wheel chair and hobble onto a tug boat, but there aren’t enough moments of wonder and enlightenment along Benjamin’s journey to justify it. He’s not exactly Forest Gump.

Worse, the most potentially interesting bits of Benjamin’s life are omitted entirely. We never see Benjamin as he nears his final years. What would it be like as an eighty-year-old man, with all the wisdom and world weariness of an aged soul trapped inside the body of a 20-year-old? A 16-year-old? What would it be like for Benjamin in those days, struggling to convince people he’s old enough to buy beer, rent an apartment, date a girl? You’d think with three hours of movie dedicated to Benjamin’s aging issues some film might be used in exploring these oddities, but it isn’t and we’ll never know. The film is limited to the story of a clueless child trapped in an old man’s body until at last Benjamin reaches middle age and then becomes pretty much like everyone else. From there on he’s simply Brad Pitt, in a mildly romantic love story with Cate Blanchett, one which we’ve already been told will not end happily.

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button isn’t exactly disappointing, it’s only that I’m not sure why it was made. David Fincher, the masterful director of such films as Fight Club and Se7en is incapable of shooting something without any redeeming qualities. This movie, like everything else he’s done is well shot and capably acted. His special effects, while not the eye-popping wizardry some seem to be expecting, are good enough to do the job. The de-aging process primarily involves slathering Brad Pitt in an intimidating number of rubber prosthetics. Pitt succeeds in an adequate performance underneath all that makeup, a disguise which serves its purpose, though perhaps without any particular flair. Cate Blanchett is beautiful and ethereal as love interest Daisy though even her character, like everything else in this movie, seems incapable of providing anything uplifting or heart-warming.

It’s just that Benjamin Button is a tremendous downer, and a downer without any clear purpose. There’s nothing better than a well-crafted, downbeat movie with something worth saying. I don’t mind being depressed, just give me a reason for feeling as if my hourglass is nearly out of time or alternatively, offer some light at the end of the tunnel. Benjamin Button does neither. We get it Fincher, some day we’re all going to be dead. Now what?

Valkyrie - Review

Tom Cruise is back! But did he ever really go away? He's spent the last few years as more of a tabloid figure than a box office draw, but the magnetism and and intensity that made him a gigantic movie star have never left him. In Valkyrie he takes a role that could have turned ludicrous-- an American in an eyepatch playing a German hero-- and makes it riveting. That goes double for the movie itself, which once again proves Bryan Singer's unassailable skill as a director, crafting a suspenseful and exciting story out of an ignored bit of history.

The whole thing is made with a no-nonsense, stripped-down attitude you imagine John Wayne would appreciate. It starts with the accents-- everyone keeps their natural inflections, including Cruise, which makes for an interesting mix of Brits, Americans and Germans who still fit in together nicely. And except for a brief prologue set in Tunisia, where protagonist Claus von Stauffenberg (Cruise) loses his eye and most of his fingers in a air raid, the story sticks within the close confines of Berlin's military headquarters, where Stauffenberg and a cohort of conspirators use their insider status to plot Hitler's demise. Tresckow (Kenneth Branagh) has already made a failed attempt on the Fuhrer's life with a bomb hidden inside a gift, and introduces Stauffenberg into his secret circle of conscientious objectors, including Olbricht (Bill Nighy) and retired general Beck (Terence Stamp). On the eve of D-Day in 1944, the group devises a scheme to defeat Hitler through use of the top-secret plan Operation Valkyrie.

The plan is a bit too complicated for proper explanation within the film, and involves a few too many characters to keep track of, but the basic details are pretty simple. If these guys can kill Hitler, Operation Valkyrie allows the military to take over the country due to a "national emergency." After getting Hitler to approve an edited version of Operation Valkyrie (in a particularly spine-tingling scene), Stauffenberg plans to set off a bomb at the Wolf's Lair, an enclosed bunker where Hitler held high-security briefings. Stauffenberg and the other conspirators enlist the help of telecommunications chief General Eric Fellgiebel (Eddie Izzard) and a more reluctant General Friedrich Fromm (Tom Wilkinson), who turns a blind eye more so than he provides any help.

There's one aborted assassination attempt before the real one takes place on July 20, and both are tightly scripted, expertly staged bits of action. Singer and screenwriter Christopher McQuarrie waste little time reminding us of the Serious Moral Implications of what Stauffenberg and company are about to do; the Hitler assassination angle is just a bonus element of what, in some sections, feels like a really good heist story. When the assassination appears to have succeeded, and Stauffenberg returns to Berlin to begin restructuring the government, the story expands without ever losing its sharp, pared-down efficiency.

Carice van Houten pops up in a fairly thankless role as Stauffenberg's wife, as the movie wisely moves most of the focus to the conspirators and the relationships among them. The performances are all strong if unexceptional, and Cruise fits right in, never letting an overacting tendency get the best of him. The script moves a little too swiftly sometimes when introducing these characters, and it's a good thing so many of them are famous, so that we can tell them apart. Except for a brief voiceover from Stauffenberg in the beginning, none of the men really express their precise oppositions to Hitler, and it's never clear how so many of them have served the German army for so long, and been so opposed to Hitler, without being found out.

But what keeps Valkyrie so light on its feet is an appreciation for history, not slavish devotion, so that timelines can be condensed and characters excised with the basic, thrilling story intact at its center. It doesn't have anything grand or new to say about World War II, other than revealing the existence of Germans who actively fought against Hitler during the war. But it's refreshing in its lack of pomp and circumstance, a movie that exists to be a movie and nothing bigger. Amid a flood of World War II movies this December, Valkyrie is by far the most entertaining and satisfying.

Revolutionary Road - Review

We tend to forget this about them, given the stellar careers they've built for themselves as adults, but most of us first met Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio aboard the most popular doomed ship of all time, Titanic. This is not an irrelevant bit of trivia in the background of their new movie, Revolutionary Road. Even if you've wiped away all memories of Titanic, sworn it off as trash, you and the rest of the world have seen this couple's courtship. And as Frank and April Wheeler, a couple as realistic and miserable as Jack and Rose were carefree fantasies, Winslet and DiCaprio, bearing crow's feet and fuller faces, have twice the capacity of any to break your heart.

It helps a lot that the movie, directed by American Beauty phenom Sam Mendes, is very, very good in its own right. But it was special casting brilliance to make Winslet and DiCaprio the Wheelers, the "golden couple" of their specific universe, whose dissolution is just that much harder to accept for themselves. The pair gives commanding, emotionally raw performances that make up the heart of a film that, not nearly as cynically as the novel it is based on, sears to the heart of where the American Dream probably ended.

With master cinematographer Roger Deakins, Mendes has recreated 1950s suburban Connecticut as still and verdant, a forbiddingly placid pond. Frank and April aren't the only unhappy ones, as we learn through quiet moments with supporting characters, but their disappointment is so immense they've no choice but to turn on each other. Seven years into their marriage they've memorized each others weaknesses, opening the film with a roadside argument that's unbearably vicious. Each of them once fancied themselves citified intellectuals, and treated their move to the suburbs-- seen in a single flashback-- as a kind of grand ironic adventure. But seven years later they've settled into lives neither of them wanted, but neither knows how to escape-- Frank in a low-level position at the same machine tooling company that rendered his father an anonymous gray flannel suit, and April a lonely and despairing housewife.

On his 30th birthday Frank impulsively starts an affair with office secretary Maureen (Zoe Kazan), a naive girl who falls for his false masculine bravado. He arrives home and is moved to tears by the birthday greeting from his wife and children, then blindsided by April's big idea to escape. They'll move to Paris, she'll get a job, and he'll finally figure out what he really wants to do with his life-- something we know, even at this early stage, he will probably never find. Their plans to move away disappoint their earnest friends Millie (Kathryn Hahn) and Shep (David Harbour), as well as neighborhood gossip Mrs. Givings (Kathy Bates), but the Paris dream gives them a summer of marital bliss they haven't known in years. But the dream, of course, is just that, and as the moving date moves closer both Frank and April confront their own terrors both of changing, and the knowledge that nothing really ever changes after all.

Blazing through all this like an aggressive Cassandra is John Givings (Michael Shannon), Mrs. Givings' mental patient son whom she hopes will benefit from Frank and April's genteel presence. He derides them and their classy lifestyle from the beginning, and when Frank jokes that Paris will help them escape the "hopelessness and emptiness" of the suburbs, John points out that it's not joke. His ability to see through Frank and April's bullshit further divides them, April recognizing John's brashness as truth, and Frank further retreating to the safe comfort of the life he thought he wanted to escape.

Adapted as it is from a novel that spends huge sections inside its characters' heads, it's remarkable how well Revolutionary Road is able to capture the same truths about its characters. Small gestures take on huge significance, entire series of emotions wash across a face within seconds-- all of the actors, from Winslet and DiCaprio down to Kazan, work together beautifully to externalize a story that's all about what's never said. Frank and April lay it all out in their screaming matches, but the real story is in the moment Frank's face breaks during their fight, or the suspiciously even tone in April's voice when she prepares him breakfast the night after a blowout. Hahn and Harbour are especially great at this, given their limited scenes, and perhaps it's because Shannon's performance is the most external that I was less impressed than others have been, though duly overwhelmed by his mesmerizing character.

While not quite reaching the masterpiece level of Yates' novel-- was that even possible?--Revolutionary Road is the rare classy literary adaptation with a beating heart, a cry of sorrow for Frank and April's despair as much as it is a sly deconstruction of all they hold dear. Vital and brilliant, without American Beauty's occasional pretension, it's a shot in the arm for the dull holiday season, a shattering experience well worth having.

Slumdog Millionaire - Review

Slumdog Millionaire moves with the lickety-split pace of the city in which it's set, Mumbai, where slums become high-rises within a decade and even the smallest children are out to make a buck. Danny Boyle, always a lively director, has found his match here, and he, his enormously talented cast and cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantle plunge headfirst into their story of love, poverty, ambition and always, energy.

But even more importantly, there's also Boyle's continuing sense of good humor and decency, which buoys both the moments of darkness and the eventual fairy tale ending. Scotsman Boyle has not traveled all the way to India to expose the horrors of the slums or seek some half-baked spiritual awakening. He's here to tell a fantastic, fantastical story, one that could only happen in ever-changing, ever-alive India. The conventional story may not have gone far in an English-language or more familiar setting, but with Boyle's kinetic energy and the wonders of another culture, Slumdog turns sparky and vibrant.

At 18, Jamal (Patel) is an average menial laborer in Mumbai, but he's poised to win a fortune on India's homegrown version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire. The host (Anil Kapoor) is suspicious of how this slumdog could know all the answers, and during an overnight lull in production, Jamal is taken into custody and tortured by some tough cops (among them Indian legend Irfan Khan) to find out how he cheated. Turns out he knows the answers, all of which lie in a series of flashbacks to his past, from the race riot that left him and his brother Samir orphans to their childhood spent as street hustlers, organized by a Fagin type who is willing to burn out the eyes of the best singers so they'll earn double.

Thankfully, Simon Beaufoy's satisfying and twisty script is smarter than the strict Q&A format-- questions posed early in the film aren't answered until the end, and the story movies fluidly between past and present and locations all over India. It's aided by the zippy camera, a Boyle trademark, which turns the tight corners of the slums and flies at the speed of the train on which Jamal and Salim hitchhike. Jamal and Salim's story intersects early on with Latika's, a fellow orphan who meets up with them at various points in their lives. As maturity brings out the violent and ambitious side of Salim, and Latika's beauty drafts her as a kind of courtesan to the wealthiest gangsters, Jamal is left alone to pursue a more mainstream life. But Latika, and to a lesser extent Salim, never fully leave him, and Jamal's TV appearance is his last-ditch chance to bring them all together.

The movie ends so happily there's actually a dance sequence involved, but everything before it has been so consistent that the brief dip into fantasy isn't a problem. The performances are uniformly exceptional, from veterans Kapoor and Khan to the seven-year-old children, speaking only Hindi, who play the young Jamal, Latika and Salim. The actors' enthusiasm, couple with Boyle's energy behind the screen, make magic out of Slumdog Millionaire's songs and sorrow, its bursts of energy and carefully selected moments of reflection. A story of coincidences and luck and eventually fate, it's a classic, perhaps cliched tale-- but one that has rarely felt or looked so alive.

Frost/Nixon - Review

In 1977 Richard M. Nixon granted British playboy presenter turned journalist David Frost a series of twelve television interviews. This was the first time Nixon had spoken since his resignation in the midst of the Watergate scandal and Americans waited with baited breath, longing for the trial they’d been denied by newly president Gerald Ford’s blanket pardon. For eleven of twelve interviews nothing happened. Nixon, a master politician squared off against a foppish interviewer, dominated the conversation and twisted every question to earn sympathy. It was only in the final interview, the twelfth, that Frost struck by back pinning Nixon to the wall and forcing a moment of honesty in which Tricky Dick gave America the admission and apology it hungered for.

So perhaps it’s appropriate that Ron Howard’s movie, based on a play written about the event, reels out much the same way. For most of its running time Frost/Nixon languishes. Nothing happens. It’s only in the film’s final moments, as Frost at last decides to take the interview seriously, that Howard ratchets up the intensity, slamming home his movie’s place in this year’s Oscar race and justifying the existence of an otherwise low-key, forgettable movie.

It is Frank Langella’s performance as Nixon which carries the film. His Nixon is a brilliant and broken husk, desperate to return to power and unwilling to admit that it’s no longer possible. When he’s contacted by David Frost (Michael Sheen) for an interview, he jumps at it in the perhaps unrealistic hope that speaking out will somehow rehabilitate him in the eyes of the American people. This movie is, more than anything else, about his journey in coming to grips with the fact that his political career is over, and that the best he can hope for from here on out are endless days wearing loafers and playing his most hated sport: golf.

Golf is a horrifying game, but being forced to spend his life putting hardly seems an appropriate penance for Nixon’s national villainy. To prepare for the interview, Frost assembles a team of American researchers, who urge him to make this interview count for something. Give America the trial is never got, they urge, while Frost traipses off to star-studded LA parties with his leggy British girlfriend (Rebecca Hall). Michael Sheen and the rest of the actors in Frost’s interview team are criminally underutilized. Sheen, who looks almost uncannily like Frost, does an admirable job but he’s far too rarely on screen. When he is on screen, he’s dominated by others, in particular Nixon, and more often than not reduced to half-hearted platitudes. Nixon calls their interviews a duel, and it’s a duel he’s winning.

It’s Langella’s Nixon that you’ll remember, growling at his subordinates or ranting uncontrollably over the phone as Frost sits in stunned silence. It’s as if Frost can’t come to life until Nixon finally starts to fade away, and until he does David Frost is a man in the shadow of a giant. Kevin Bacon plays Nixon’s chief of staff Jack Brennan, delivering an almost creepy performance as a man so totally devoted to the ex-president that his loyalty at times borders on sexual attraction. Whether that’s an intentional choice by Bacon or only a side effect of the script is anyone’s guess, but it’s eerily effective in adding to the overbearing presence of Tricky Dick.

In setting up the interviews, Frost/Nixon struggles to find focus. David Frost isn’t taking things seriously, is barely involved in the process outside of fund raising, and so it’s hard to make him the center of the film. Nixon’s journey ends up being the heart of the story, but he’s the villain. David Frost is still our protagonist and the guy we’re rooting for. It’s a strange dynamic and one which the movie never quite sorts out until those final moments when director Ron Howard cuts to the chase, Frost drops his devil-may-care persona, and in one of the most intense conversations you’ll see on screen this year crushes Nixon between an interview vice grip. This is an ending which justifies the means taken to achieve it. Everything which came before it becomes worthwhile in those final moments, and makes Frost/Nixon a must see.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa - Review

Madagascar was a cartoon and a good one. The difference between an animated movie and a cartoon is plot, which in the case of Madagascar was always paper thin. In the first film, story was minimized in favor of wacky, Looney Tunes style humor and it worked the way any good big-screen Bugs Bunny style novelty act should. In the sequel, solid story has been pushed even further aside, and while the animals retain their wit the cracks are showing.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa finds Alex the Lion, Marty the Zebra, Gloria the Hippo, Melman the Giraffe, and the rest boarding a cobbled together, penguin piloted airplane for the long ride home to New York. Unfortunately penguins aren’t known for their flying skills and they crash in Africa, their ancestral home. Alex is reunited with his parents, Marty joins a herd, Gloria meats a chunky-sexy hippo named Moto Moto, and Melman is… well… sick.

There’s not much here for even the youngest kids to sink their teeth into; it’s typical homecoming, save the herd stuff and it breezes by so fast that it’ll feel like the movie belongs squeezed into a Saturday morning, half-hour block of cereal-selling kiddie entertainment. Missing is the original’s carefully constructed, almost lyrical waves of cartoony gags and wacky asides set to pulse pounding, hip-hop beats. Madagascar 2 is so slapdash and rushed that it makes Madagascar 1 look complex.

The first film at least made some effort to deliver an appropriately cinematic adventure. It had scope, it had scale. Madagascar 2 does not. It happens mostly in one location, it’s focused squarely on the four main protagonists, and the brilliant side characters which made the original movie so funny are relegated to caulk squeezed into the gaps left when the script starts to run out of gas.

Madagascar 2 may not be particularly daring or innovative, but it doesn’t get stale. It never holds still long enough to fall flat, and new additions to the cast like Alec Baldwin and Bernie Mac help keep old gags fresh. This is an inferior sequel, but one which still contains plenty of laughs. Madagascar 2 runs off the cliff, looks down, and plummets towards the ground. We’re there to chuckle at the little puff of dust that follows its flattening impact. Though it arrives without a decent tale to tell, Madagascar 2 is good fun. You will laugh, your kids will laugh and you’ll be in the parking lot, full of smiles and on your way home long before realize how hollow this sequel is.

Zack And Miri Make A Porno - Review

With the casting of Seth Rogen as his lead, I’ve heard people dismiss Zack and Miri Make a Porno as writer/director Kevin Smith’s attempt to be Judd Apatow. I can’t think of anything more spectacularly unfair. Kevin Smith was pulling off raunchy humor with a heart of gold long before we’d even heard the name Apatow, he’s just never gotten the same kind credit for it. If anything, that’s probably because Kevin is often less interested in the heavy dramatic elements Apatow uses to win critics and audiences over. Smith is, self-admittedly, into dick jokes. Usually there’s a touch of dramatic sweetness mixed in, especially in some of his more poignant, focused movies like Clerks II and Chasing Amy, but more often than not he’s there for a laugh, the dirtier the better.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is the ultimate embodiment of Kevin Smith's cock = comedy philosophy. It's pure comedy. In the age of internet voyeurism, the story of two average nobodies making pornography happens all across America on a daily basis, but unless they’re shooting a sequel to two girls one cup, it’s almost certainly never this dirty and definitely never this funny.

Zack (Seth Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) have been best friends since high school. They share a crummy apartment, work lousy jobs, and instinctively avoid becoming romantically entangled with one another (though it’s obvious to us that they’re soul mates) while living lives that are clearly going nowhere. Financially speaking, they’re utterly destitute and after an encounter at their high school reunion Zack and Miri decide that the only way they’ll ever make it big (or pay their rent) is to do their own porno movie. After all, everybody wants to see everybody else naked, even if it’s two nobodies from the mid-west. Couple of problems though. They don’t have any money for food let alone movie making, they know nothing about shooting porno, and despite their bravado, neither of them is very comfortable with the idea of getting naked on film, much less having sex with each other.

To make the movie happen they recruit a group of misfits including Smith regulars like Jeff Anderson and Jason Mewes, a couple of porn stars to provide nudity in Traci Lords and Katie Morgan, and Office alum Craig Robinson to bring the funny. Actually, if there’s a problem with Zack and Miri it’s that the supporting cast is so good you may find yourself more interested in watching them than the movie’s two leads. Anderson delivers some of the funniest lines of the film, Mewes finally whips his cock out, and Craig Robinson literally steals every single scene he’s in. Extended cameos from people like Superman Brandon Routh and Mac guy Justin Long really kill too, and they’re so good you’ll likely leave the theater wondering if there’s some way to convince Smith to make Routh and Long’s characters the subject of his next film.

For better or worse though, Zack and Miri’s relationship remains the center of Zack and Miri. For me, the film lags a little when it spends time exploring their softer sides and it soars when we stop worrying about how Zack and Miri are feeling, instead getting down to the business of letting their friends attempt to shoot porno. Whenever they’re working on putting their sex flick together, the movie is filled with big, big, raunchy laughs. The story needs their relationship of course, lest it turn into pornography itself. The sweetness of their awkward, mutually unrequited love is what keeps the audience, even you puritanical types, on their side. When Smith does get around to the business of making his two leads have sex they’ve been avoiding, that moment between them is touching, a sharp bit of directing, and one of the most memorable sequences in the film. It’s just that Zack and Miri Make a Porno is at its most consistent when it’s more “Make a Porno” and less “Zack and Miri”.

Kevin Smith is known for his smart, edgy dialogue and there’s plenty of his brilliant, wordy style on display in Zack and Miri. He’s combined that with a great cast, maybe the most talented he’s ever worked with, and the result is one of Smith’s funniest, dirtiest, most gleefully offensive movies to date.

The Boy In The Striped Pajamas - Review

It’s a rare occasion that any movie has such impact that when the film ends, the entire audience exits the theater in total silence. It was a good several seconds after the credits finished rolling and the lights came up before I even realized what I was experiencing. It happens so rarely that it took that a moment for me to recognize it: I was speechless.

Films about the holocaust are nothing new and while they’re almost always moving stories it’s rare to find one that offers a perspective not explored before. The Boy In The Striped Pajamas generally sets aside the powerful stereotypes of evil German and besieged Jew and instead offers up two innocent eight-year-old boys, one Jewish and one German, neither of whom subscribes to the idea that they’re supposed to hate each other. In the wrong hands this sort of film could easily have been tediously trite, full of stock moral commentary and tagged with a touching but unoriginal feel good ending. Instead the movie presents something much more tragic and evocative, ultimately sending the audience away with more to consider than just the historical atrocities of the Nazi regime.

OK, so by this point I’ve probably already lost the interest of two-thirds of our readers. Let’s face it, most moviegoers don’t want to spend their money on a dark historical drama, no matter how moving or thought-provoking it is. Odds are that unless this movie wins a major Academy Award very few people will see it. That’s the real tragedy here. Not catching The Boy In The Striped Pajamas would mean missing one of the best films of the year.

Bruno (Asa Butterfield) is the young son of a Nazi commander (David Thewlis) whose new promotion means his entire family must leave their comfortable Berlin home and relocate to a spartan country compound. This new home is situated just within sight distance of the commandant’s new post, a Jewish work camp. The naive Bruno decides the camp must be a strange farm where odd people in pajamas work, an illusion his hesitant parents are willing to indulge to protect him from the reality. But the nature of the place means little to the boy. His only concern is that he has no one to play with in his new home, where the only company he and his older sister enjoy is that of their propagandizing tutor.

One day, after breaking the rules and sneaking out of the compound, Bruno wanders in the direction of the farm. There he encounters Shmuel (Jack Scanlon), a boy his own age who lives on the farm which, Bruno discovers, is surrounded by an electric fence. The boys strike up the kind of camaraderie you would expect from two lonesome young children, but both struggle to comprehend the complications that arise from their association. Both Butterfield and Scanlon are relative newcomers to the world of screen acting and haven’t been tainted by the demands of the business. Their performances are simple and genuine, so much so that they’ll be overlooked for any award even though no trained or experienced child actor could have been more perfect.

Bruno and Shmuel’s innocence in the face of the lies and violence going on around them is at the same time humorous and heartbreaking, but it is Bruno’s efforts to resolve the father-soldier that he loves and the one that runs Shmuel’s camp that will prick at your soul. The relationship between the father and son explores another risky and rarely touched on subject: the humanity of the Nazi officer. It figures prominently in the movie’s poignant ending, and although you might not find the conclusion satisfying, there’s no denying that director Mark Herman navigates the topic brilliantly and leaves the audience with a lot to consider.

The father’s militaristic duty is balanced out by Bruno’s mother (Vera Farmiga) who always seems uncomfortable with the treatment of the Jews but becomes outwardly enraged when she discovers the true nature of the black smoke roiling from the camp every few days. Farmiga gives a wrenching performance that provides an outlet for all the indignation and hostility that you feel watching Thewlis’ character parade the party line with callous cruelty. At the outset of the film there’s no way to tell where it will lead or how it will end, but as the story draws to a close it’s easy to see where things are headed. That sort of predictability usually ruins a movie for me, but Herman’s carefully laid final act is so breathtaking and James Horner’s score woven in so masterfully that nothing could have spoiled it. As close to perfect as a film can hope to be, The Boy In The Striped Pajamas is nothing short of a masterpiece.

Quantum of Solace - Review

He's back. Daniel Craig allays any fear that he was just a one-Martini Bond, with this, his second 007 adventure, the perplexingly named Quantum Of Solace.

I've got to admit that this didn't excite me as much as Casino Royale and the villain is especially underpowered. But Craig personally has the chops, as they say in Hollywood. He's made the part his own, every inch the coolly ruthless agent-cum-killer, nursing a broken heart and coldly suppressed rage. If the Savile Row suit with the Beretta shoulder holster fits, wear it. And he's wearing it.

This is a crash-bang Bond, high on action, low on quips, long on location glamour, short on product placement.

Under the direction of Marc Forster, the movie ladles out the adrenalin in a string of deafening episodes: car chases, plane wrecks, motor boat collisions. If it's got an engine, and runs on fuel, and can crash into another similarly powered vehicle, with Bond at the wheel, and preferably with a delicious female companion in the passenger seat - well, it goes in the movie.

There are plenty of references to other Bond moments. A horribly dangerous skydive recalls The Spy Who Loved Me. A pile-up in Haiti which spills a macabre lorryload of coffins recalls the voodoo creepiness of Live And Let Die. And, most outrageously of all, the grotesque daubing of a female corpse brings back Goldfinger - though Sean Connery got an awful lot more mileage out of that sort of thing.

As in Casino Royale, the famous John Barry theme tune is saved up until the end; a baffling, decision, I always think, not to use this thrilling music at the beginning of the film.

Bond has hardly got his 007 spurs, when he's infuriating M, Judi Dench, with his insolence and insubordination. Out in the field, he's whacking enemy agents in short, sharp, bone-cracking bursts of violence when he should be bringing them in for questioning.

In theory, he is out to nail a sinister international business type: Dominic Greene, played by French star Mathieu Amalric, who under a spurious ecological cover plans to buy up swaths of South American desert and a portfolio of Latin American governments to control the water supply of an entire continent. As Greene, Amalric has the maddest eyes, creepiest leer, and dodgiest teeth imaginable.

Clearly, Bond has to take this fellow down. But he also wants to track down the man who took his beloved Vesper away from him in the previous movie: he is pathologically seeking payback, and to the fury of his superiors, this is getting personal. But it hasn't stopped him cultivating female company in the traditional, fantastically supercilious manner. His companions are as demurely submissive as ever. Olga Kurylenko plays Camille, a mysterious, smouldering figure, out to wreak vengeance on the corrupt Bolivian dictators who killed her family.

Britain's Gemma Arterton plays Agent Fields; she greets 007 wearing a trenchcoat with apparently little underneath, like some sort of MI6 strippogram. And she is the recipient of his ardour in the luxury hotel suite - that quintessential Bond habitat. This movie is, in fact, a reminder of how vital hotels are in Bond films, providing the essential narrative grammar: the checking in, the fight with the stranger in the room, the messages left at reception, the luxury cars lovingly photographed outside.

I was disappointed there was so little dialogue, flirtation and characterisation in this Bond: Forster and his writers Paul Haggis, Neal Purvis and Robert Wade clearly thought this sort of sissy nonsense has to be cut out in favour of explosions. Well, perhaps that is what Bond fans want (not this Bond fan, though). But I was also baffled that relatively little was made of the deliciously villainous Amalric: especially the final encounter.

But set against this is the cool, cruel presence of Craig - his lips perpetually semi-pursed, as if savouring some new nastiness his opponents intend to dish out to him, and the nastiness he intends to dish out in return. This film, unlike the last, doesn't show him in his powder-blue swimming trunks (the least heterosexual image in 007 history), but it's a very physical performance. Quantum of Solace isn't as good as Casino Royale: the smart elegance of Craig's Bond debut has been toned down in favour of conventional action. But the man himself powers this movie; he carries the film: it's an indefinably difficult task for an actor. Craig measures up.

The Secret Life of Bees - Review

The Secret Life of Bees belongs in part to the troubled genre of “magical Negro” stories, in which a white protagonist is somehow enlightened or rescued by a particularly special black person (Jim in Huck Finn is an early example). But happily, Sue Monk Kidd's novel and its adaptation by Gina Prince-Bythewood avoids stereotyping and easy answers, presenting a coming-of-age story that goes easy on the life lessons and forced moments of racial understanding. Crowded with vibrant characters and a wealth of talent, Secret Life of Bees is cuddly enough for Oprah but never cloying, a refreshing take on the more standard, calculated stories of female empowerment.

Dakota Fanning stars as Lily, a 14-year-old who grew up only with her abusive father, T. Ray (Paul Bettany, a surprisingly convincing Southerner), after she accidentally shot her mother at the age of four. When Lily's nanny Rosaleen (Jennifer Hudson) is beaten by a white mob one her way to register to vote, Lily takes the opportunity to run away from home. She and Rosaleen make their way to the nearby town of Tiburon, South Carolina, where Lily's only remaining mementoes of her mother suggest she'll find a home.

That's precisely what Lily finds at the Pepto Bismol-pink home of the Boatwright sisters, a trio of black women who run a beekeeping business on their property. The oldest, August (Queen Latifah), immediately accepts Lily into her maternal embrace, while youngest sister June (Alicia Keys), a burgeoning Black Power activist, is more skeptical of the white runaway. Also in the house is May (Sophie Okonedo), emotionally damaged by the death of her twin sister some years earlier, who forms an immediate bond with Rosaleen.

The story then follows a series of episodes with each character, as Lily tentatively falls for August's godson Zach (Tristan Wilds), June repeatedly turns down proposals from her boyfriend Neil (Nate Parker, as charming here as he was in his breakout Great Debaters role), and Lily slowly decides to tell August the real reason she's arrived on her doorstep. There's tragedy and a racially-motivated mob attack, but for the most part Secret Life of Bees brings more tears of joy than sadness.

The bees of the title don't amount to much more than a story gimmick-- the Boatwrights could just as easily have been jelly makers or tomato farmers-- and you get the feeling that some characters, May and Rosaleen in particular, were better fleshed out in the book. But each of the actresses stake out their characters as defined individuals, aided greatly by Prince-Bythewood's unwillingness to take the easy way out and make the whole thing about one white girl's coming-of-age. Okonedo is plainly transformed as the childlike May, and even Hudson, who hadn't really demonstrated acting talent to this point, holds her own. Fanning has grown well into adolescent roles, even if she's still over-reliant on wide-eyed stares, and Keys is fierce and funny as the modern June. Latifah, in a role that leans dangerously close to the stereotypical Mammy, brings unusual warmth and intelligence to August.

In fact, it's unusual warmth and intelligence overall that makes Bees such a pleasure, a cut above the sappiness and schmaltz so many directors think women demand in their movies. Filmed beautifully on location in rural North Carolina, Secret Life of Bees captures a South that contains kindness and beauty even in a time of hate, moving beyond some of the usual preconceptions about the Jim Crow era. As a coming-of-age story, the movie is mostly the usual stuff, but it's a rare opportunity to see a group of fantastic actresses in a story that, for once, doesn't revolve entirely around men.