This time around, Tony Stark must deal with an ambitious industrialist (Sam Rockwell) and a Russian bent on revenge (Mickey Roarke, playing Whiplash, although never mentioned by moniker).

Gwyneth Paltrow returns as his secretary-maybe-love-interest, and Scarlett Johannson plays Black Widow (Although again, the character is never named in the movie).

And Don Cheadle has replaced Terence Howard as Tony Stark’s military buddy. Not really necessary, but it works fine.

This is fun stuff, but the movie is a little too busy; there’s too much going on. It lacks the streamlined storytelling of the better original movie.

As usual, stay through the end credits for a Marvel surprise at the end.

Robert Downey, Jr. plays Holmes as a quirky-but-cool eccentric. He doesn’t do a lot of detecting, but he’s ready to box, shoot guns, and generally get into dangerous situations.

Jude Law is Watson, and the two have a funny, bickering, cop-buddy-movie bromance going on.

Lest they’re a little too much into each other, we’ve got Rachel McAdams as Irene Adler, in the original Arthur Conan Doyle stories the only woman to ever outwit Sherlock Holmes, to be the spunky heroine.

This all works pretty well. The mystery seems pretty secondary, but that was sometimes true in the original stories. And there’s a lot of nice touches that show the writers have actually read the stories. And there’s a nice CGI recreation of Victorian London, complete with an under-construction Tower Bridge. As a general rule in movies, if you see a building is under construction, the climax of the movie will usually be there, with heroes and villains dangling off the building in question.

The first direct sequel to a Bond movie, it starts about 15 minutes after Casino Royale ends. Bond’s in a high-speed car chase in Italy. Then we get a rooftop chase scene in Siena, during the Palio horse race.

Quantum of Solace

I point out just for the record that since there are two Palio horse races in Siena a year, each lasting about 90 seconds, the chances of Bond just happening to get into a chase across Siena rooftops at the same time as the horse race are approximately 85,000 to 1, if my back-of-a-napkin calculation is accurate. This isn’t a criticism of the movie, just pointing out how James Bond is some kind of force who affects probability at a quantum level in his universe.

But where was I. Oh yes, Bond gets into a bizarre trapeze-fight with a bad guy in a Siena church in the midst of restoration, killing said bad guy in the process.   Soon there’s a revelation that there’s a new super-secret bad guy organization that MI6 knew nothing about. Some damn thing (maybe an address on a book of matches, who knows) causes Bond to fly to Haiti. There he kills another guy who attacks him when he enters his hotel room.

Bond seems to spend most of the rest of the movie like this, finding random clues that lead him back and forth across the Atlantic, not really knowing who he’s pursuing or why, but pretty confident that if he just keeps racking up frequent flier miles and defending himself against (and killing) whoever attacks him in the next place he visits, he’ll get a clue and another international flight.

Somewhere in there his boss M declares him rogue and cancels his credit cards and passports and such, but this almost seems more like she’s doing it as an incentive to make him work even harder.

Of course, Bond encounters beautiful, damaged women (if they weren’t damaged before he knew them, they soon are). Gemma Arterton as Ms. Fields (and to the movie’s credit, I don’t think they ever reveal her first name on screen, but, if you know Bond girls, and a certain Beatles tune, and her hair color, you can probably figure it out), and Olga Kurylenko as a woman seeking revenge.

Eventually Bond discovers that the main bad guy is a business mogul trying to buy up seemingly useless land in Bolivia, posing as someone championing the environment but actually doing the opposite. It seems like some of the locals might have noticed his scheme, but it takes Bond crashing a plane in the middle of nowhere to figure it out.

Then there’s a showdown in the Bolivian desert at a fancy hotel that seems to be built out of explosive bricks (Actually filmed at the Paranal Observatory in the Atacama Desert).

So, it seems like a plot that even Bond doesn’t so much figure out as just play an elaborate, violent version of Where In The World Is Carmen Sandiego.

The movie seems to be trying to emulate the Bourne movies, in the frantic pace to the action sequences and the sprinting from one international location to the next with the main character not really knowing why. So… for Bond 23: Stop!

But, despite all this, the movie is never boring, and it’s very stylish, getting Bond into all sorts of scenic locations for the next chase/fight/etc. And it’s very atmospheric.

A lot of people seemed bewildered by the title, wondering what a Quantum of Solace was. It’s a Modicum of Comfort. Now you know.

DVD extras: There’s a regular edition of this and a 2-disk Special Edition.

Regular:  “Another Way to Die” Music Video,  Theatrical Trailers

Two-disc Special Edition:  The above, plus on the second disk:  “Bond on Location” 24-minute documentary, plus 5 short (5-minutes or less) Making Of bits (Start of Shooting, On Location,  Olga Kurylenko and the Boat Chase, Director Marc Forster, The Music), and about 50 minutes of Crew Files, basically excerpts from a web video blog during the making of the film.      Unfortunately, there’s no commentary track on the film.

New York, I Love You

Directors include Mira Nair, Brett Ratner, Allen Hughes, and Natalie Portman.

Unlike Paris je t’aime, there’s more of an effort to tie the stories together, with characters from one segment making appearance in another. So the effect is like one of those Crash gumbos. Whether this was necessary is debatable; if there are 8 million stories in the naked city, 11 of them don’t really need to intersect.

Many of the stories seem to involve alienated people meeting cute; outside a restaurant for a smoke break, or intersecting in unusual jobs, leading to a possible romantic or sexual encounter.

It’s kind of like making a meal of appetizers. But, if one story isn’t to your taste, another will be coming along in a few minutes.

Lest I be accused of spoilers, this is revealed in the first thirty seconds of the film.

(500) Days of Summer

Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt – 3rd Rock From the Sun, the exceptional movies Brick and The Lookout, and strangely enough, Cobra in the upcoming G.I. Joe movie) is a failed architect who works writing copy at a greeting card company. Enter Summer (Zooey Deschanel – The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, and numerous Indie-films), the cute, ethereal, somewhat spooky new girl at the office. Tom is smitten.

What follows is 500 days of ups and downs in their relationship. We see it out of sequence; it jumps back and forth between the 500 days.

Everyone probably goes through this type of relationship early on; puppy dog love that’s blind to the fact that the object of its affections is actually a slightly different species all together.

One example, after their first sexual encounter, Tom walks through the park and imagines random passersby breaking into a coordinated musical number to celebrate his scoring.

This is a clever, funny movie that has some hard truths about relationships that you don’t always see in a romantic comedy.

And the worst part is, she’s completely honest with him: She doesn’t want a long term relationship, and she’s not seeing somebody else. That said, she is also playing games with him, with a studied obtuseness.

Sometimes the comedy is a little uneven; for a movie that seems to be trying to strike a realistic tone in much of it, it strikes a false note when Tom, in his cups at the nadir of their relationship, is reduced to writing greeting cards like “Rose are red, violets are blue,” (inside card) “Screw you, bitch!” Yeah, it’s kind of funny, but if he’s actually turning these in to his boss, it hints that he’s bipolar or something, not suggested otherwise in the film.

But there’s a lot of good stuff here. It’s a bittersweet comedy, and that’s not a throwaway reference; it’s bitter, and it’s sweet.

I do find myself wondering, if the movie hadn’t tipped us off at the beginning that the romance wasn’t going to work out, how audiences would take it. Disappointed that they didn’t get a typical Hollywood romantic comedy?

Beyond the dinosaurs, this does incorporate a lot of atmosphere from the original series. In this version, Marshall, Will, and Holly are not related, and are all adults, so we get a lot of jokes about groping Holly’s boobs. But there are still cliff landscapes, jungles, lost cities, and the lizard-men Sleestaks, along with semi-evolved primate Cha-Ka.

But what it mostly is, is Will Ferrell doing some crude, sometimes gross, and generally pretty funny schtick in dinosaur lands – sometimes Laugh Out Loud funny.

It’s not really much of a parody of the old show – oddly enough, the Sleestaks are played pretty straight. And I’m not sure how much of this really needed to be in The Land of the Lost… pretty much the same jokes would have worked with any time-machine-throws-us-back-in-time story.

But, probably a lot of people seeing it have never heard of the original show.

Quite a lot of the movie takes place in a sort of desert Sargasso Sea of time; where artifacts from our world seem to have dropped in willy-nilly. I don’t remember that in the old show, but maybe that was in the 2nd or 3rd season.

The movie seems a little confused at times as to what kind of farce it wants to be. Still, Will Ferrell dumping dinosaur pee on himself, that’s entertainment!

He learns that many of the figures are being put into storage in Washington to make way for hologram exhibits. So he goes to say goodbye to his pals. But that darn monkey steals the tablet, and so, everything comes alive in the Smithsonian.

Now Larry has to go to the Smithsonian to fix things. But an Evil Egyptian Pharoah (Hank Azaria) has come alive and wants to take over the world.

Yes, this is pretty much the same movie in a new museum, but it’s a cooler museum, America’s Attic. It’s a kid’s movie, but a pretty good one. Museums are cool, and spooky, and there’s probably not a night watchmen in any museum who hasn’t paced the halls at night, wondering, what if all this stuff started moving?

Amy Adams really steals the show as Amelia Earhart. She’s so spunky there should be, and probably is, an Action Figure. It’ll be interesting to compare her Amelia Earhart with Hilary Swank’s in October when the movie Amelia comes out.

Now, if I found myself speaking to Amelia Earhart, there’s probably a question I’d want to ask of her: What the heck happened to you? But, since these museum figures, despite their preternatural animation and sentience, only know what history knows (they’re not the “real thing”), maybe that’s why Larry never pops that question.

One cool addition in this is the Modern Art sculptures coming alive. Also, paintings and pictures come alive, Harry Potter-style. Not sure what Edward Hopper’s NIGHTHAWKS is doing in the Smithsonian rather than the Art Institute of Chicago, but there it is.

I note for the record that a pretty scary horror movie could be made on this same concept – especially the idea of trapped sentience in the inanimate made animate. But, this is not that movie!

This 3-D animated movie asks, what if all of those movies were dropped into a blender?   What if all those monsters existed in the same world, like a kid’s version of Alan Moore’s LEAGUE OF EXTRAORDINARY GENTLEMEN?   A League of Extraordinary Monsters, if you will.

Enter Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon), an ordinary young woman who has the misfortune to be hit by a radioactive meteorite right before her wedding.     She quickly grows to a great height (49 feet 11 inches, so she’s NOT a fifty-foot woman!).  She stomps through her wedding like Bridezilla, and soon government black helicopters are surrounding her, and they’ve got a big tranquilizing dart just for the occasion.

She wakes up in a secret Area 51-ish government base, which is effectively a prison for an oddball crew of Earth-spawned monsters:   B.O.B., a good-natured, dimwitted gelatinous mass (Seth Rogen).  Dr. Cockroach, a mad scientist who combined cockroach DNA into his own (Hugh Laurie).  The Missing Link, a fish-ape hybrid (Will Arnett).  And Insectosaurus,   a 350-foot monster caught stomping Tokyo.

They’re all pretty cuddly, and surprisingly not very upset about being incarcerated in a secret government prison for decades.

The general in charge of the operation (Kiefer Sutherland) informs Susan that she will now be known as Ginormica.    But, since she’ll be kept locked away, she won’t get much chance to use her new moniker.

Things change however when an alien invasion starts, led by Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson), and his alien clone army.    An Attack of the Clones, if you will.    

The government calls on the Earth monsters to win one for the home planet.

What follows is an epic battle in San Francisco culminating on the Golden Gate Bridge (Shades of the Ray Harryhausen movie It Came From Beneath The Sea with the giant octopus attacking the Golden Gate Bridge).

Then Susan gets abducted aboard a UFO because the head alien wants the radioactive stuff that made her big, and her new-found Earth monster pals have to try to rescue her.

Dreamworks made this, and it has the directors of Shrek 2 and Fish Tale.    This is a better movie than either of those, however.

Rounding out the voice talents are Stephen Colbert, Paul Rudd, and Amy Poehler.

It claims to be the first animated movie completely in 3-D (I thought Fly Me To The Moon was also claiming that title).   The 3-D is good, no doubt about it.

This is a fun time; nothing here that isn’t suitable for kids, but plenty that adults can laugh at, particularly if you’re a fan of those old 1950s monster movies.  And the alien invasion is more like what the movie Mars Attacks! should have been.

Now comes a movie that feels a lot more like Frank Miller’s stuff than Wil Eisner’s, because Frank Miller wrote and directed it.

The feel of it is something like The Shadow or any number of other pulp superheroes. It looks a bit like Sin City and 300, using similar cinematic techniques.

The Spirit lives in a future-noir city, where it could be the 1920s, 1930s, 1940s, or 1950s, but they’ve got an Internet (somebody mentions going Online) and cell-phones.

He’s a bit of a mystery. His main power seems to be that he’s fairly indestructible.

His nemesis is The Octopus (Samuel Jackson), who’s a Bad Mother. He’s working on an Elixir of External Life (Well, who isn’t) and has a bunch of identical henchmen who embody that trait that The Monarch’s Henchmen on The Venture Bros. exhibit: Just the right mix of expendable and indestructible.

The Spirit meets more femme fatales in five minutes than most superheroes meet in twelve issues, seemingly. They’re drawn to him like moths to a flame, and vice versa. He’s quite the p-hound. They include The Octopus’s right-hand woman Silken Floss (Scarlett Johannson), Eve Mendes as Sand Sarif, Sarah Paulson as Dr. Helen Dolan (the police chief’s daughter and The Spirit’s main girl, but she has to wait in line), Jaime King as Lorelei Rox, Paz Vega as Plaster of Paris, and Meeghan Holaway as Holly the cop.

I’ve never read the comics, but this doesn’t really seem to capture the look of the original comics like, for example, Dick Tracy did.

And it’s surprisingly risque considering the source material. Frank Miller’s doing, no doubt. And I’m surprised this just got a PG-13 rating due to the violence.

I suspect purist fans of the comic will be scandalized.

But this is a good fun comic book romp. It looks rather like the world of Sin City, but less nihilistic.

I’m giving this 4, count ‘em 4, stars, but with a caveat: If Sin City and 300 left you flat, this probably isn’t going to change your mind on this type of comic book movie-making.

An alien spaceship arrives on Earth and lands in Central Park in New York City. Out comes alien Klaatu, who is promptly shot by an overzealous army guy. Meanwhile, his giant robot guardian Gort (or G.O.R.T in this version) is pissed.

Klaatu is rushed to a hospital, and, from an alien cocoon, emerges butterfly Keanu Reeves.

Jennifer Connelly plays a scientist, Jaden Smith (Will Smith’s son) is her stepson who befriends, sort of, Alien Klaatu, Kathy Bates is the Secretary of Defense, Kyle Chandler from the Friday Night Lights TV series plays another government official, and Robert Knepper (Prison Break) is an army colonel who keeps finding that Earth weapons aren’t very effective against Gort. And John Cleese does a small role as The Wise Old Earth Scientist.

The original movie was about nuclear proliferation, this is more environmental. A conglomerate of alien civilizations isn’t happy about the way humans cause other Earth species to go extinct, and they’re prepared for a final solution.

This is about 3/4ths of a good movie; it’s a very atmospheric First Contact story. And as the aliens (or rather Gort) revs up to begin Operation Destroy All Humans, there’s some spectacular special effects. It progresses to a weak ending though.

Keannu is fine as the otherworldy Klaatu. Like the original, there’s a Jesus motif going (he walks on water at one point).

Mysteriously, the famous alien catchphrase from the original movie isn’t used. Or if it was, it was hidden so well I couldn’t spot it. Seems like they could have fit it in somewhere.

I think the makers of the movie felt it’d be too corny to have a 1950s-style dénouement at the end, but as it is, we’re kind of left hanging.

“So, uh, all 6.7 billion of us will eat bean sprouts and live in teepees and stop killing animals then?”

Starship Troopers 2 was a pretty low-budget outing; surrounded by bug aliens, the soldiers retreated into a fortress and the rest of the movie became somewhat ALIENesque.

This time around, either they had a bigger budget, or they really stretched it filming in South Africa. The sets for the human base are pretty impressive, and the CGI is comparable to the theatrical movie.

Casper Van Dien is back as Johnny Rico. Jolene Blalock (The Vulcan on STAR TREK: ENTERPRISE) also stars.

More importantly, some of the dark humor about the fascist overtones of the Earth government are back from the first movie. Along with the retro-future newsreel footage. Do you want to know more?

A military base on a farm planet is attacked. Johnny Rico repels the attack, but, when he punches a superior officer, is sentenced to hang.

Meanwhile, Jolene Blaloch’s ship is forced to set down on a major Bug world.

Rico is sprung to go on a rescue mission.

There’s lots of weird new Bugs.

This movie manages to be a fun science fiction monster movie, with some of the throwback feel of the original movie. And there’s a big dose of political and religious satire.

Also, there’s a nice homage to the original Robert Heinlein novel, with the introduction of the power armor suits (Marauders).

Keeping in mind that a straight-to-DVD movie isn’t going to be equal to a theatrical movie, this is a pretty good third movie, much better than the second one.

Of course, one thing that’s never been explained in any of these three movies is how the alien Bugs travel between different planets. Seems difficult to hold an interstellar war with creatures who have no means of space travel. Yet they seem to have infested the whole galaxy!

In the first few minute it tries a little too hard to justify its R rating, where a bunch of surfer dudes drop the F-bomb about 30 times, and then comes a pretty gory scene.

Later, a brother and sister, 20-something ex-professional surfer Chris (Tad Hilgenbrink from AMERICAN PIE PRESENTS BAND CAMP), and his 17-year-old sister Nicole (Autumn Reeser, THE O.C.), move to Luna Bay (Not the equally fictitious Santa Clara, California of the original). They’ve been orphaned when their parents die in a car accident, and their aunt offers them a place to stay.

Soon, trying to fit in, they go to a lavish house party which involves a lot of beautiful young people, some of them naked women. Nicole falls for the charms of scruffy ex-professional surfer Shane Powers, who looks a tiny bit like Kiefer Sutherland, because he’s played by his half-brother, Angus Sutherland.

As it turns out, Shane and his pals are vampires. Soon, Nicole has taken a swig from the wrong bottle, and is on her way to being a vampire herself. Her big brother tries to rescue her.

Aiding him in this plan is Edgar Frog (Corey Feldman) from the first movie, apparently a part-time vampire hunter for 21 years now, and with a full assortment of stakes, holy water super-squirtguns, etc. He provides the comedy, because, he was a little crazed 21 years ago, and more so now with his years as a grizzled vampire hunter.

Straight-to-DVD is straight-to-DVD; if you’re expecting a theatrical-quality movie, this isn’t it. It starts out a bit rocky, but it gets better as it goes along. It’s a fairly stylish, rather gory vampire horror movie.

It’s got a bunch of pretty young actors, it’s got some comedy though not as much as the first one (mainly provided by The Brother Frog).

One thing that the original had that this does not is an outstanding soundtrack; this has three songs by one band, and then a revamp (sorry, couldn’t resist) of “Cry Little Sister” from the original.

All in all, for a straight-to-DVD vampire movie, this isn’t bad. And it’s fun seeing what Edgar Frog is up to these days.

Stick around through the end credits; there’s a little extra scene not too far into them.

This theatrical movie takes place between STAR WARS EPISODE II: ATTACK OF THE CLONES and STAR WARS EPISODE III: REVENGE OF THE SITH.

Anakin and Obi-Wan continue to lead clone soldiers in battle against the droid armies on various planets. Anakin Skywalker has just been promoted to Jedi, and he’s been assigned an apprentice, Ahsoka Tano, an orange-skinned alien with 3 head tails. Apparently not the same species as the blue-skinned aliens with 2 head tails. The dress code for Padawans seems to have been relaxed, because she runs around in a halter top and shorts.

Darth Sidius and Count Dooku want control of the Outer Rim systems, and to do this they need the cooperation of gangster Jabba the Hutt. So, they’ve kidnapped his son, Rotta the Huttlet, but made it look like somebody else did it. Their plan is to “rescue” him, return him to Jabba, and get in Jabba’s good graces. Their minion, Asajj Ventress, a bald pale-white goth Sith (She appeared in the 2003-2005 CLONE WARS series), is holed up in an ancient monastery atop a mountain with the little bugger.

Anakin and Ahsoka head to the planet where Lil’ Hutt is being held, while Obi-Wan goes to Tatooine
to deal with Jabba.

Meanwhile, in the film’s most bizarre scenes, Padme, Anakin’s secret wife, goes to a nightclub on Coruscant to try to negotiate with Jabba the Hutt’s gay uncle, Truman Capote the Hutt.

It took me about a half hour to warm to the animation style in this, but then it was fun. The Good Guy assault on the mountaintop monastery where the bad guys are hanging out is truly spectacular, with big crawling tanks going vertically up the cliffs while droids plummet all around.

Either you’ve had enough of STAR WARS or you haven’t, and if you want some more, this is enjoyable. And it’ll be interesting to see what they do in the TV series (Apparently the focus of the series won’t be on Anakin and Obi-Wan, but will follow various characters in the STAR WARS universe).

And perhaps appropriately for a film featuring houseflies in space, the real astronaut they got to recreate his voice is… BUZZ Aldrin!

This is the first theatrical-length animated film made completely in digital 3-D, so you’ll have the glasses in the theater (it’s not being shown in any theaters without the 3-D effect). The 3-D animation is impressive.

Can you make an animated housefly cute? This movie manages it, although they don’t look much like flies. Also, we even get cute maggots.

Our hero, Nate, is a young housefly fascinated with the impending first Moon landing, and as it happens, his housefly family lives right across the water from the launchpad in Florida. His pals, a nerd and a fat kid (and this movie isn’t afraid to poke fun at the fat kid!) are also space-crazy.

Nate’s grandfather (Voiced by Christopher Lloyd) tells Nate how back in 1932 he stowed away on Amelia Earhart’s solo flight across the Atlantic (Mysteriously, she lands in Paris; in reality, she landed in Ireland). So we get some Amelia Earhart 3-D sneezing and snot effects.

This tale inspires Nate and his pals to stowaway aboard the Apollo 11 space capsule.

It occurs to me that, for some kids who will see this, this movie will probably be their main source of info about the Apollo program. As such, it’s a fairly accurate Cliff Notes of how Apollo 11 went.

This movie was made by Belgians, but it’s very gung-ho about the American space program of yesteryear.

This is definitely a film for younger kids, but the 3-D animation is pretty cool.

Based on Steve Niles’s 2002 comic book, it’s set in Barrow, Alaska, a town far above the Arctic Circle. At least as depicted here, around the time of the Winter Solstice, it’s in pitch darkness for 30 days, and so a group of vampires decides this is their Disneyland.

Josh Hartnett plays the small town’s sheriff, Melissa George (ALIAS) is his estranged wife, and Danny Huston is the king of the vampires.

This is an atmospheric, snow-covered film, and you really get the feel of the brutal winter trapping these people in the town while the vampires pick them off one by one.

These aren’t some Anne Rice pretty boy vampires; these are feral, nasty creatures who are just hungry, and they don’t seem to be having a very good time with their preternatural immortality. And they want to pass their misery on to their victims.

The film takes some liberties with Barrow; in reality the town isn’t nearly as cut off during its dark time as this makes it out to be. Here it’s depicting almost as remote as an Antarctic base.

Incidentally, the real-life residents of Barrow, Alaska really do have to take precautions to avoid being eaten alive by monsters. Only they’re not called vampires; they’re called polar bears.

DVD extras: Commentary with Josh Hartnett, Melissa George, and producer Rob Tapert. Eight short “Making Of” featurettes.

Now FOX is producing four straight-to-DVD movies, and this first one, FUTURAMA: BENDER’S BIG SCORE, came out in November 2007.

A race of nudist aliens (and, like most nudists, they should keep their clothes on) has attacked Earth with an email scamming plot, and are taking over the planet with identify theft and stolen credit card numbers.

They discover that, mysteriously, the secret to time travel has been tattooed on Fry’s ass in the form of a Bender tattoo. Using this, they take over Bender and send him into the past to steal Earth’s greatest art treasures.

Time travel was a plotline not explored on the FUTURAMA series, with the exception of one expedition to 1947 Roswell.

This works as an epic story more than just a string of FUTURAMA episodes lumped together (although it’s being sliced up into 4 episodes for syndication). The 4+ year hiatus allowed the writers to bring their A-game back to this. And they get a bit fancier with the animation. About the only thing that doesn’t work is some ill-conceived musical numbers.

If you’re not a fan of the show, this probably won’t change your mind, but if you did like the show, this is a fun reunion.

DVD extras:

* Feature-length commentary with Groening, the writers and director, and the voice actors.
* “Futurama Returns!”, a live reading by the cast of a FUTURAMA comic book at a science fiction convention.
* “A Terrifying Message from Al Gore.”
* “Bite My Shiny Metal X”, A math lecture about FUTURAMA.
* “Everybody Loves Hypnotoad”, a TV show from the FUTURAMA-verse.
* Deleted scenes.
* Character sketches.
* Comic-Con promo.

As we saw in the first movie, Hellboy is a demon-spawn brought through a dimensional gateway during a World War II Nazi experiment as an infant. But the U.S. Army got a hold of him, and he was adopted by a loving human father and raised to be one of the good guys. Now, 60+ years later (he ages slower than humans), he works for a Men In Black-style organization, the B.P.R.D. (Bureau for Paranormal Research and Defense). As his foster father says in the first movie, “There are things that go bump in the night. We are the ones who bump back.”

Hellboy (Ron Perlman) has his motley crew: his human girlfriend Liz (Selma Blair), who has pyrokinetic powers, and Atlantis-survivor fishman Abe Sapien (Doug Jones, The Silver Surfer in FANTASTIC FOUR 2). This time out they get a new leader, Johann Kraus (Voiced by FAMILY GUY’s Seth McFarlane), who has a case of the vapors and doesn’t get along well with Hellboy.

It turns out at the dawn of time humans warred with elves. These aren’t your Tolkien elves, though (And they look a little like the Wraith in STARGATE ATLANTIS) . They have a magical robot army that’s been in storage, consisting of 4900 ostensibly indestructable robots. The son of the elf king wants to crank them up and give humanity an ass-whuppin’. Hellboy begs to differ.

This is based on the comics written and drawn by Mike Mignola (who also did THE AMAZING SCREW-ON HEAD). It’s directed by Guillermo del Toro, who also did an interesting 1993 vampire movie CRONOS, MIMIC, BLADE II, the first HELLBOY, PAN’S LABYRINTH, and has both a DOCTOR STRANGE movie and THE HOBBIT in the works.

PAN’S LABYRINTH was a big influence on this sequel; the look of the creatures and the underworld is along the lines of that movie. It’s a visual feast. The Troll’s Market feels a bit like Neil Gaiman’s NEVERWHERE. Unfortunately, sometimes it’s too much of a good thing; the director has thrown in everything but the troll kitchen sink, and the pace of the movie is sometimes sluggish due to all the visuals.

The pals of Hellboy, Liz and Abe, get a lot of nice character moments. Liz is finding the trials and tribulations of dating Hellboy; Abe strikes up a romance with an elf babe and twin sister of the bad guy. I haven’t read the comics, but I suspect if you’re a big fan of the comics, you’ll really like all the character moments. But again sometimes this comes as the expense of the pacing of the film; this at times seems more like a DVD “Director’s Cut.” Maybe after the critical raves for PAN’S LABYRINTH nobody felt they could tell del Toro to trim some scenes.

Still, Hellboy gets to kick a lot of monster butt, and it’s a fun ride.

Genghis Khan movies. John Wayne in THE CONQUEROR, Jack Palance in THE MONGOLS, and Omar Sharif in GENGHIS KHAN. This time around, Russian director Sergei Bodrov had the novel idea to cast an Asian; Japanese actor Tadanobu Asano as Temudjin, the Man Who Would Be Khan.

This was nominated for a Best Foreign Film Oscar last year, from the glorious nation of Kazakhstan.

This is Khan: The Early Years (Late 12th century). Also The Softer Side Of Khan. He finds true love at the age of 9, choosing his bride. Then comes a lot of setbacks when a warlord kills his father. He’d like to kill Temudjin too, but it doesn’t seem sporting to kill a kid, so, like the Dread Pirate Roberts, he keeps in effect telling him he’ll kill him in the morning. It’s part BRAVEHEART, part the beginning of CONAN THE BARBARIAN. The boy and teen Temudjin spends so much time in stocks that I figured they’d chain him to The Wheel Of Pain.

Eventually he grows to his destiny as a leader. He’s fiercely loyal to his friends (as long as they don’t cross him), considerate of his underlings, and turns out to be surprisingly favorable to adoption (at various times his wife has to use her feminine wiles to get him out of scrapes, which sometimes ends up with her pregnant with someone else’s babies).

The windswept steppes of Outer Mongolia (or Kazakhstan) are stark, beautiful, and… well, windswept. Really windswept. You may be reaching for some chapstick after two hours of their windsweptedness.

The first 3/4ths of this is really good. It starts with Temudjin as an adult in a bit of a fix, and then a lot of flashbacks to how he got there. After this is resolved, the movie drags a bit, until the final obligatory Big Battle. The director is planning a trilogy on the life of Genghis Khan, so it must have been difficult to decide where to end this one.

Clooney plays Dodge, a professional in the not-very-respected game of football, who’s getting a little too old for this stuff. John Krasinski (From the TV show THE OFFICE) plays a young World War I hero who, now just finishing college football, is convinced to Go Pro. Meanwhile, football is about to be transformed out of cow pastures and into the commercial venture we know today.

Renee Zellweger (who seems to be the Go To Girl when it comes to doing a 1920s movie) is a reporter ostensibly doing a puff piece on the team but actually trying to track down a rumor that the hero’s World War I experiences are much exaggerated.

What develops is sort of a love triangle.

This is a good-natured comedy that is funny, but unfortunately runs out of steam about 3/4ths of the way through it. Right before The Big Game finale, which is a bad sign in a sports movie. One problem is that Clooney seems to like all these characters so much that he can’t really bring himself to make anyone The Bad Guy.

How forgiving you are of the movie’s faults probably depends on how interesting 1920s proto-football is to you, and whether or not you know what 1930s screwball comedy is.

But Clooney has great comic timing, and he’s not afraid to poke fun at himself.

Five years later, he has visitation rights to his young son, but is trying to win back the mother of his child. She’s being romanced by a handsome, arrogant American (Hank Azaria, who does most of the voices on THE SIMPSONS).

Somehow Dennis convinces himself that if he can run a marathon he’ll have shown that he can stick with something for once in his life and he’ll win the girl back.

He’s actually not all that fat, but he is out of shape, so this becomes a sort of Labor of Hercules, if Hercules was a slob.

He’s egged on by his eccentric friend (Dylan Moran, also in SHAWN OF THE DEAD) , and coached by his Indian landlord (and his landlord’s incredibly hot daughter).

The writing in this isn’t anything spectacular (it’s pretty much what it appears, Slob-ROCKY romantic-comedy), but it is funny, due to the talents of Simon Pegg, Hank Azaria, and Dylan Moran.

There’s a new outbreak of the plague in London, and the Powers That Be have reason to believe there’s a cure in Scotland. So they send in Major Eden Sinclair (Rhona Mitra), who’s part Mad Maxine, part Snake Plissken’s hot sister, and all woman.

And she’s got the best prosthetic since Rose McGowan’s machinegun-leg in PLANET TERROR.

It turns out there are survivors, and they’ve gone part Thunderdome punk-cannibals, part Renaissance Festival.

It’s no great movie, but it’s got some pretty good action sequences, culminating in a big road chase/battle ala ROAD WARRIOR.

And the movie works a bit in GRINDHOUSE country, but less self-conscious.

They don’t live in caves, but you get the idea.

Roland Emmerich (INDEPENDENCE DAY) directed this epic. If you’ve seen THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW, you know scientific accuracy isn’t his strong point. The depiction of prehistory is pretty fanciful, and yes, those are the Egyptian pyramids you see in the trailer. Some people believe that the pyramids are far older….about 7500 years older, in this case… than they really are. Roland Emmerich must be fascinated with the pyramids, with this and STARGATE. Well, why not. In effect, this movie is a mashup of real Stone Age history crossed with civilizations out of CONAN THE BARBARIAN.

This feels a bit like APOCALYPTO. Primitive guy has to journey across lands unfamiliar to him filled with dangers.

The special effects are pretty spectacular. Mammoths, saber-tooth tigers, and several other prehistoric monsters I won’t mention by name so as not to ruin the surprise. As far as a travelogue for what it might have been like to encounter these creatures, this is fun stuff. The mammoth hunt is like the buffalo hunt in DANCES WITH WOLVES gone wild.

The actors are largely hidden behind grime, although Camilla Belle still manages to look pretty. She’s wrapped up in skins though; there are no fur bikinis like Raquel Welch sports in ONE MILLION B.C.

The story is pretty basic. A bunch of members of a guy’s tribe, including his best girl, are kidnapped by a powerful and technologically anachronistic tribe. So he sets out to get them back. Various big things would like to eat him or stomp him flat along the way.

You’ll see some criticisms of this movie that are silly: People complaining that the characters speak English, for example. Well, we don’t know what languages they spoke 12,000 years ago, so either they speak English, or it’s going to be “Ook ook ock ock” for an hour and 45 minutes. I for one vote for English.

More problematic is the New Age (or New Stone Age) mystical mumbo-jumbo. You’d think living in a world with prehistoric monsters would be enough to drive a story, but this brings in a lot of psychic visions and prophecies that seem to get fulfilled randomly for no particular purpose.

Also, pointing out inaccuracies in a movie like this is like shooting fish in a barrel, but I wanted to make one observation: When these guys are in the mountainous north, they encounter mammoths, but when they get to what one day will be Egypt, there are also mammoths. Why aren’t there elephants? Because the people who wrote this movie don’t realize that elephants were also around 12,000 years ago.

Still, it’s a fairly entertaining romp across a prehistoric land that never existed as shown.

When a patron (Mia Farrow) threatens to tell their boss (Danny Glover) unless they can hand her a videotape of GHOST BUSTERS by 5 PM, they take a video camera outside and shoot their own version. Needless to say, costumes, special effects, and production values leave a bit to be desired.

Then they shot another. And another. These homegrown versions become so popular with their patrons that they end up restocking their shelves with their own versions of movies like ROBOCOP, RUSH HOUR 2, DRIVING MISS DAISY, 2001, KING KONG, ROCKY, BOYZ IN THE HOOD, and THE LION KING.

This may appear at first glance to be a madcap Jack Black comedy, and the movie spoofs are funny, but the movie is really more of a Frank Capra-style fable. It’s kind of sweet.

Directed by Ari Sandel, this is a concert tour film with Vince Vaughn, and four up-and-coming comedians: Ahmed Ahmed, John Caparulo, Bret Ernst, and Sebastian Maniscalco.

Stand-up comedy is not the industry it was in the 1980s. These comedians have been around for 10-15 years each, and some of them may be headlining one week and working as a waiter next week. Vince Vaughn organized this tour to give these four guys a showcase.

In 2005 they went on a month-long 6000-mile bus tour, which happened to coincide with Hurricanes Rita and Katrina.

Also appearing are some friends of Vince Vaughn such as Jon Favreau, Justin Long, and Peter Billingsley (Ralph from A CHRISTMAS STORY, all grown up).

The four comedians: Ahmed Ahmed is of Egyptian descent, and much of his humor comes from the “Really, I’m not a terrorist” vein. Sebastian Maniscalco is from Chicago. John Caparulo is a Midwestern Everyman. Bret Ernest is a Jersey boy.

These are funny, talented, rude comedians. When it shows them on stage, the film is hilarious.

But it only shows us snippets of their stage show, quickly cutting away to other things.

Unfortunately, way too much of the film depicts backstage and what it’s like to be on a tour bus slumber party with Vince Vaughn and these guys. The film greatly overestimates how interesting it is to spend time with these guys offstage. These parts of the film come across as SPINAL TAP… only not funny.

That they managed to hit 30 cities in 30 nights is an amazing feat, and that must have been the impetus to document it. This must have been a grueling tour. But seeing behind the curtain of this tour isn’t that interesting.

I’m still recommending this mildly, because these guys are funny. I just wish the film had a greater ratio of on-stage comedy to off-stage time.

For those of you who aren’t familiar with the show, it’s a little hard to explain. ATHF has three members: Frylock, Master Shake and Meatwad. Frylock, an enormous floating order of french fries, is the brains of the operation while Master Shake, a man-sized milk shake, is the deliquent and Meatwad, a rolling ball of…meat…is the ‘tard of the team. They *are* teens, but the “Aqua” part of the name is pretty much a complete red herring. As for being a “Hunger Force,” welllll…. not so much. They just hang out in New Jersey and make life miserable for their neighbor, Carl, as you can see from the picture here as he gets anally raped by a two-legged mutant dog named “Hand Banana”. Yes, its name is Hand Banana. All he knows is “ball!” and “good!” ….. and “rape!” But I digress…

The fifth season of ATHF has a lot of the things that made the show really cool. But it’s also missing some things, too. Gone are the Dr. Weird and Spacecataz openings. And there’s no MC Pee Pants! Ok, ok, I didn’t really miss MCPP. One thing I do miss, though, is the laid back tone of the first few seasons. It really seems like they’re trying too hard sometimes here in season 5. The bit with Tera Patrick eating a corn dog in the episode Grim Reaper Gutters was beyond lame. I mean, I’m all for porn stars eating phallic objects on camera, but they way it was done here just sucked…no pun intended.

Despite these criticisms, however, there is a lot of brilliance here which is as expected. Unlike the past seasons, however, the negatives come too close to negating the good stuff. The end result is a 3-star effort.

NOTE: The extras on this set are just deplorable. There’s a lot of them but they are pretty universally lame so just do yourself a favor and just skip them entirely.

Miranda (Evan Rachel Wood) is 16 years old and has been living on her own for the past two years while her father Charlie (Michael Douglas) has been in a mental institution. During this time she’s dropped out of school and been working double shifts at McDonalds to make ends meet, and has even managed to buy a car off eBay. An industrious girl for certain.

When Charlie gets out and begins acting strangely, she realizes that his release might have been a bit premature. It seems that while in the hospital Charlie found a book that details the location of a buried treasure, one that many people have looked for but never found. What he discovers is that the book is written in code, and he’s managed to break that code. OK, so your father gets out of the loony bin talking about buried treasure… the logical conclusion is that he’s still nuts, right?

Miranda doesn’t believe him in the beginning but after they find a few clues she starts to question her beliefs, and at the very least Charlie seems happy and they are having a bit of an adventure together. The presense of the gold, be it real or not isn’t the point, the adventure itself is the point.

Michael Douglas is a delight to watch, he plays the crazy old man to perfection and made me smile, a lot. He showed a great conviction that he was on the right path and that he had every right to do some of the things he was doing, and showed that if you act like you know what you’re doing people will generally let you do it. Evan Rachel Wood showed no less talent as the daughter either, the struggle with being the “responsible” one while wanting to just be a trusting child showed through on her face in every scene.

So I have to ask myself, is this a chick flick? Yeah, it is, but it’s one of the few that I feel comfortable in recommending. The relationship stuff is there but amazingly it’s not thrown in your face, it’s just there for observation. Don’t bother trying to watch this one when the guys come over for beers, but this is a good film to watch with your SO or even alone when you want to see a good example of actors embracing a story and giving it their all.

BTW, California got its name from a 16th century Spanish romance that referred to an island plentiful in gold, filled with strange beasts and inhabited by Amazon women ruled by a Queen. It’s true, look it up.

Kong (Jacky Wu Jing) is a nice guy, a nice guy who is also on the Chinese Olympic kung fu team. When he’s not training for the Olympics he keeps himself limber by performing in low budget acrobatic shows, think Cirque du Soleil without the huge cast and stage. OK, he twirls stuff on stage, but he does it really really well! After one of his shows, some guys that run an underground fighting organization approach him and offer him $2000 to fight one match, win or lose. Kong is a nice guy though, and underground fighting is illegal, so he declines.

Enter Siu (Miki Yeung), a cute girl who shows an interest in Kong after he says no to fighting. Unfortunately for Kong, this girl is the definition of a controlling girlfriend. Not only does she encourage Kong to fight, but she keeps jumping in to the negotiations to get him more money.. though I suppose it’s a good thing, since he’s far too nice to handle business on his own.

Anyway, Siu talks Kong into trying out a fight, he does, and he wins easily. They want him to come back the next week, and with her encouragement he says yes.. and wins again. At this point his skills are obviously far above anyone he’s meeting, so the guy running the show starts to raise the stakes, getting better fighters and more money involved. After several rounds of this Kong starts to change.. a little. During the fights he’s getting meaner, but only when really provoked. And even when he does get “meaner” he doesn’t totally come unglued.

There’s other stories involved of course, the guy running the fights is trying to expand his territory, Siu is obviously trying to get Kong to make more and more money for her own reasons, she’s got a friend who’s a hooker that she gives life advice to, there’s “The Captain” (Ronald Cheng) who helps look after Kong and Siu and who has his own story of course.

But it’s all about the fights, and the fights are excellent. Yes, there are wires used on occasion, but it’s the exception rather than the rule. The battles look realistic and there’s no “let’s jump on the roof and run up and down walls” crap here. Picture martial arts street fighting, and this delivers that picture. I really like the way Jacky WuJing moves, he seems to act fairly well judging from his facial expressions (I don’t speak Cantonese so had the English track playing) and I could see him one day becoming a star in Hollywood assuming he learns English.

The story doesn’t suck (except the ending, which just blows) and there’s some good humor to go along with the action. It’s a solid 3 star movie, might have been 4 if the ending were different.

Ian (Ewan McGregor) and Terry (Colin Ferrell) are brothers, two working-class Londoners. They go in together to buy an old boat and restore it, naming it CASSANDRA’S DREAM.

Terry is an auto mechanic with a gambling problem who gets into debt with loan sharks. Ian works in the family restaurant, but has dreams of business deals involving hotels in California. He’s smitten with a beautiful actress, and feels he’s not going to be able to continue to win her affections without suitable financial backup.

With them both needing money, enter their rich uncle who has a proposition. There’s a certain business associate of his who’s causing big problems for the uncle (Tom Wilkonson) which might lead him to jail, and he’d very much like to see the man dead.

Neither brother is a career criminal, but with the one’s gambling problems and the other’s thirst for the good life, they slowly begin to convince themselves that murder is an option.

Then they try to meticulously plan out the murder (With guns harder to get in England, serious consideration is given to strangling, knifing, or bludgeoning). But of course, things don’t go quite as planned.

This is a tense thriller with a a haunting soundtrack by Phillip Glass.

Alvin, Simon and Theodore … did you catch yourself humming the tune? … are minding their own business preparing for the winter when they find themselves suddenly uprooted and moving to the city. Through happenstance they end up with Dave and the fun begins. (By the way, Jason Lee is Dave, he of the “My Name is Earl” fame. I knew I recognized him, but I didn’t realize just how annoying he is.)

The three chipmunks are the same curious “kids” they have always been in the cartoons, always finding ways to turn neat into messy, and with a certain munkish charm. They fall into a nice routine with Dave, singing and playing, but there has to be a villain, right? “Uncle Ian” (of Jett Records) is predictably self-serving and even more so when he learns the chipmunks can sing. He proceeds to do all he can to make as much money as possible on their munky grooves.

The chipmunk story grows weary in parts (and is moderately predictable) and the director tries to cover the lulls with cute chipmunk antics. In some cases … it works. In others … not so much. The movie was entertaining overall but one which I should have waited for the DVD release. It was, however, a great father-son day, so because of that time spent together, I’ll give it 3 stars (instead of 2).

Gretchen Mol has sex with a man who makes her believe in God.

Winona Ryder has an unnatural attraction to a ventriloquist’s dummy, and She’s Gotta Have It (Just in case you didn’t get enough puppet sex in TEAM AMERICA: WORLD POLICE).

The protagonist dumps Famke Janssen for Jessica Alba, then begins to suspect he may have traded down too young when she chirps, “Will you buy me a pony?”

And there’s seven more stories as well. The connection to the commandments is tenuous at times, but it’s usually crude, often strange, and by and large funny.

There’s a strange animated sequence in the middle of the movie.

Pretty funny, weird stuff. 6 of the 10 commandments were hilarious…