The John Carpenter one was itself a remake of the 1951 movie The Thing From Another World, which was based on the 1938 John W. Campbell novella “Who Goes There?”

All have the same basic premise: A scientific research base in Antarctica (or the Arctic in the 1938 and 1951 versions) finds a crashed UFO, thaws an alien body entombed in the ice, to everyone’s misfortune.

In the gooey 1982 John Carpenter version, Kurt Russell’s American scientific base finds that something has destroyed a Norwegian scientific base.

Now in this 2011 prequel, from Dutch director Matthijs van Heijningen, we get to see what happened at the Norwegian camp.

The Thing (2011)

The same basic cycle of an alien that infiltrates (messily) and can assume the shape of humans, leading to paranoia in an enclosed space (the base camp) in one of the most dangerous places on Earth (Antarctica) ensues.

We get to see a lot more of the crashed UFO from the John Carpenter version.

Mary Elizabeth Winstead plays the American paleontologist flown in to examine the alien remains.

Like in the John Carpenter version, the alien really has a revolting process of consuming humans and assuming their shape. This isn’t done behind a curtain. The transforming process involves a lot of teeth, claws, stalks, viscera, and tentacles sprouting out all over the place.

It’s pretty well done; icky and suspenseful in the spirit of the 1982 version. Of course; I’m very familiar with the John Carpenter version; what I don’t know is what the experience would be like for someone who never saw the first movie.

For the fanboy, the movie is pretty careful in adding little touches to show that this indeed does link up with the John Carpenter version. I’m sure eventually there’ll be webpages with DVD screencaptures detailing each accuracy and inaccuracy. But, this movie obviously has a healthy respect for the original, and takes pains to make itself a consistent period piece.

I haven’t read the book, so I have no idea how faithful the movie is to the original material. Wes Anderson tends to make movies that are like intricate model dioramas (Bottle Rocket, Rushmore, The Royal Tenenbaums, the Life Aquatic with Steve Zissou, the Darjeeling Limited). So the miniatures-and-stop-animation format is right up his alley.

George Clooney voices Mr. Fox, a dapper vulpine. His wife (Meryl Streep) wants him to change his chicken-stealing ways. But the lure of three nearby farms proves too much for him, and he returns to his gentleman thief ways. Meanwhile, his son Ash (Jason Schwartzman) is jealous of his visiting cousin, who seems to succeed in everything he tries effortlessly.

George Clooney here finally makes a good crime caper movie. Maybe he’ll resist doing Ocean’s 14 now.

The humor is aimed at adults as well as kids, but there’s nothing inappropriate for kids.

Fantastic Mr. Fox

Tarantino loves movies. He loves World War II epics, particularly of the Dirty Dozen variety. He loves espionage films. He loves spaghetti westerns. He loves revenge action movies. He even loves Nazi propaganda films; or maybe more specifically, he admires the skill that produced them.

Inglourious Basterds

It’s also a Jewish revenge movie, for those who’ve wistfully thought, it’s too bad we can’t dig some Nazis up and kill ‘em again.

And it’s also a caper movie. This isn’t a science fiction film, except maybe in regards to an alternate timeline where things play out differently from our World War II. But if you discuss time travel too far into the night with friends, somebody will eventually suggest, what if you could go back in time and change the course of World War II? This movie isn’t overly concerned with the results of that, and more concerned with the bloody logistics.

We follow Brad Pitt’s crew of guerilla fighters, deep inside Nazi-occupied France. Among his crew is a former Nazi soldier whom they liberated because he was in prison for killing his Nazi officers. Also various Jews, including “The Jew Bear” (Hostel director Eli Roth) who has a penchant for killing Nazis with a baseball bat.

Meanwhile, Shosanna (Melanie Laurent) is a young Jewish woman whose whole family has been killed by Nazis. She’s now incognito in Paris, running a movie theater. Nazis decide to hold the premiere of their new propaganda film, and she concocts a revenge plan.

Tarantino has his trademark elements. Very dangerous people having long, interesting conversations in restaurants about trivial but fascinating topics, which any moment may break into ultra-violence.

And he even manages to indulge his foot fetish with the movie’s other femme fatale, a German movie star turned spy for the Allies, played by Diane Kruger (National Treasure).

Christoph Waltz is a Nazi officer who manages to be terrifying the more polite he gets (Who else could intimate by ordering a glass of milk?).

The movie is two hours and 33 minutes. Some might say, a flaw in well-done historically-accurate movies about World War II (Like the recent Tom Cruise movie Valkerie, for example) is that, the viewer pretty much knows how it’s going to turn out. In Tarantino’s movie, there comes a point where what I felt mainly was wonder. Wondering, since I’d seen that it had slipped into an alternate universe that couldn’t again end up in our timeline, how in the hell is this thing going to turn out?

Moon stars Sam Rockwell, and is directed by Duncan Jones, son of David Bowie. It’s set in a not-too-distant future where a corporation is mining the Moon for Helium-3 to provide energy back on Earth.

Moon

Sam is a lone astronaut sent to the Moon to oversee one of the automated bases. He has a three-year stint, his only companion the robot GERTY (Voiced by Kevin Spacey), who seems to be a cousin of HAL-9000.

He’s now a short-timer; a couple more weeks and he’ll be sent home. But he starts to observe strange things on the Moon, and he may not be alone up there. Or maybe he’s just going nuts.

This is a neat little movie in its own right, but it’s also a homage to late 1960s/1970s/early 1980s films like 2001: A Space Odyssey, Silent Running, Dark Star, Alien, and Outland. And, I suspect, the Moonscapes and miniatures of Space: 1999.

And the Moonscapes and miniatures in this are spectacular, and seem for the most part to be done Old School, with models instead of CGI.

This is a science fiction movie where the story drives the special effects, not the other way around. This is a thoughful film that depicts the Moon as a desolate, hostile, beautiful place. There’s no holes in the space-time continuum, no giant explosions, and the robots don’t transform into sports cars and 18-wheel trucks. It goes where no science fiction film has gone in a long time – up a flight of stairs for your brain to climb.

Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen is the second live action big budget summer block buster rendition of the old Transformers animated series.   Or should I say animated toy commercial?   We loved the original Transformers movie, and we gave it a full 5 stars.   It was quite simply a good time.   Michael Bay and the studios obviously thought more of the same would be even better!

So we get more Decipticons, more Autobots, more fights, more action, and well, you get the point.   But the question is whether more is better?   One of the few complaints we had with the first movie was that during the big final fight there was so much action on screen that you really couldn’t keep up with who was who and what is going on.   Instead of a Rocky versus Apollo type fight, there’s just random robot parts, missibles and bullets flying all over.   Well, we get a lot more of that too!

We went into Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen with low expectations.   That’s likely a good thing as we ended up being more entertained that we thought we would be.   What did we like?   Megan Fox running and bouncing in those Michael Bay slow-mo shots for one thing!   The added humor was a nice touch.   There were a lot of cool new bots.

What was not to like?  The action was almost “frantic”.   The plot was predictable at best.   And there was little if any character development.   We do not really get to know any of the new bots, nor do we really find out much about what the others have been up to since the last movie. One exception is a pair of twin Autobots that talk in hip hop slang.  These two suffer from “Jar Jar syndrome” big time as they are so obviously there only to make the little ones giggle and wanna buy toys.   They will annoy most rational adults.

This movie is what we’ve come to expect from Hollywood for sequels.   The summer blockbuster formula is get as much of the original cast as you can, double the action and effects budget, whip up a comfortable safe low risk script, shoot some really cool trailers and let it rip.   But hey, check your head at the door, get in the nice cool theater out of the heat and watch the bots go boom!   Dont expect deep sci-fi, just expect to have fun, and you will.   We give it 4 stars.

Carl Fredricksen (Ed Asner) is a 78-year-old widower, cranky and living in the same house that his wife and he shared all their lives. In their younger days, they dreamed of being explorers, fans of the Professor Challenger-ish Charles Muntz, going to a Lost Plateau in Peru. Carl has slowly watched his neighborhood devoured by skyscrapers, and developers want to tear down his house as well. After an altercation, he’s threatened with being shipped off to a nursing home. So he straps a whole bunch of helium balloons to his house, and sets his sights on South America.

Unfortunately, a boy scout, Russell, who was trying to get his badge for helping a senior citizen, is inadvertently brought along for the ride.

Once they’ve ballooned onto the Lost Plateau, they encounter strange animals and make a nemesis.

Where Pixar stands out is in story and characterization, not just the computer animation. What hooked me on this was the touching extended prologue where we see the guy grow from childhood to an old man with his sweetheart.

This is maybe less ambitious of a movie than the recent Pixar efforts (Ratatouille and WALL-E – a rat going to cooking school and a robot pantomining its emotions) – but it’s a better overall result.

The clever bit here in the action sequences is, after the balloons have lost a bit of buoyancy, the house has ceased being a float that can carry our heroes weight and more of a floating tether that they have to haul around. This leads to a series of inventive and exciting action sequences revolving around what happens when you’re being chased while towing a floating house.

Also, in theaters this is preceded by a Pixar short, Partly Cloudy. There have been plenty of cartoons about how the stork brings babies, but none quite like this one!

This time, McG directs. And most of the movie takes place in the future post-apocalypse.

Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) is on death row in 2003. He donates his body to science. In 2018 he wakes up to discover the world is a post-apocalypse, and killer robots stalk the ruins.  How did he get here?

Meanwhile, John Connor (Christian Bale, who, as we’ve seen on the Internet of late, takes his movie-making ****ing seriously!) leads the Resistance against the robots, getting the few survivors to fight.

Skynet, the killer computer network, has new Terminators at its command; motorcycle-Terminators and underwater-Terminators.

And young Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin, who’s having a good summer, since he also played Chekhov in Star Trek), destined to go back in time to be John Connor’s father in the first Terminator movie, is in danger here, and John Connor has to take steps to save him.

Bryce Dallas Howard is apparently playing the character that Claire Danes played in the third movie.

This is a pretty good action movie. As Terminator movies go, it’s not in the same class as the first two James Cameron ones, but it’s better than the third one (which is still a fun movie).

And, really, the first three movies are all variants on the same basic structure. This one does manage to do something new.

This is the second summer-movie blockbuster in two weeks to revolve around time travel (Star Trek being the other). Without giving spoilers, I think it is arguable that the time travel here doesn’t seem to quite work the way it does in the other movies; but that’s part of the fun of time travel movies; drawing diagrams on a beer-soaked napkin and arguing about what would and wouldn’t work with a completely impossible thing.

Apparently this is going to be a trilogy of movies with Christian Bale. So he’ll be back. And he’ll be back…again.

Along the way, he meets warrior-babe Freya (Sophia Myles), and other Vikings (Jack Huston, John Hurt, Ron Perlman).

Seemingly the idea here is that humans are from elsewhere than Earth, and Earth was colonized so long ago that we Earthlings forgot we were from another planet. Skip forward a few thousand years, and it’s Viking Times! A spacecraft crashs, an alien monster gets loose, and a warrior (who’s lost his ray-gun) has to hunt down the monster. Got all that?

This is basically The 13th Warrior meets Predator. Presumably the idea here is this is the event that inspires the epic poem Beowulf, but the movie doesn’t hit you over the head with it. It’s a B-movie with A-movie production values, and it’s fun.

And the Viking village and costumes are meticulously recreated. We also see some flashbacks from Kainan’s homeworld. It may be that the monster is just misunderstood; however, he’s still trying to eat Vikings, and Vikings Just Don’t Go For That Kind Of A Thing.

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.

On the heels of Twilight comes the Swedish horror movie, Låt den rätte komma in.

A 12-year-old kid finds himself bullied in school in the midst of snowy, cold winter in Sweden.

He befriends a strange girl in his apartment building, who only comes out at night, doesn’t feel cold, and seems to be very hungry for something.

Sort of My Bodyguard, The Vampire.

The movie is set in the 1980s. I’m not quite sure why; presumably the original novel by John Ajvide Lindqvist that this is based on (he also wrote the screenplay) was also a period piece.

This is an atmospheric, bloody movie that’s actually scary. And, oddly enough, about a heartwarming friendship and love between two kids. One of whom may have been a kid for quite a long time.

As for the title of the movie, well, if you know your vampire lore, you can probably figure out how it applies.

In 1928, the son of single mother Christine Collins (Angelinia Jolie) goes missing. Months later, the L.A. police returns her son to her. Only she thinks it’s not her son.

This is a Twilight Zone brought to life without any supernatural or science fictional elements. She finds herself trapped in a nightmare where jumping up and down and screaming “This is not my son!” is only going to get her labeled a crazy person – and in fact the L.A. police department eventually commits her to a mental institution.

Clint Eastwood’s directing just gets smoother with age. The script was written by J. Michael Straczynski (Creator of Babylon 5 and former cop).

The cast is excellent; not just the main actors (John Malkovich, Jeffrey Donovan from Burn Notice, Jason Butler Harner, Michael Kelly, Amy Ryan), but incidental character actors, and the child actors.

In other movies I’ve never been that impressed with Angelina Jolie, but here she shows what a good actress she is.

There have been movies about Los Angeles corruption that are meticulous in recreating the past (Chinatown, L.A. Confidential), but the production of this one stands out even among those. Not just the cars and the costumes, but every prop or thing hanging on the wall creates a tactileness that makes it seem like the film hijacked a time machine.

At 141 minutes, there are probably some who will think the film loses a little steam towards the end, but this has a narrative purpose, showing how real life cases like this don’t neatly wrap up when the press exposes an injustice, or when a trial concludes.

The first straight-to-DVD movie, STARGATE: THE ARK OF TRUTH, wrapped up the unfinished storyline from seasons 9-10 of the series.

This second movie is a little more accessible to the casual viewer.

It’s a story they’ve done before, but never so well. A time travel paradox causes the SG-1 team to be stranded in an alternate timeline.

This time around, those in charge put the brakes on them correcting the timeline. After all, to everybody else on Earth, this is how history is supposed to be. So we get to see the characters spending some time adjusting to their new universe.

At 98 minutes, this is about 2-1/2 times a regular episode, and the movie has time to show us some nice moments with the characters, and explore the ramifications of the storyline.

The movie has all the major characters, including Jack O’Neill (Richard Dean Anderson). Don S. Davis appears as General Jack Hammond, one of his last appearances before his death in June 2008. Various villains from seasons past make appearances.

CONTINUUM has a bigger budget feel than the TV episodes, and it has another spectacular addition as well: The U.S. Navy let the movie film at their 2007 Applied Physics Laboratory Ice Station, nearly 200 miles out on the frozen ocean, above the Arctic Circle. These are some vistas that you can’t get on a soundstage.

Now comes DEATH RACE, directed by Paul W. S. Anderson (RESIDENT EVIL, and the first ALIEN VS. PREDATOR movie), and produced by Roger Corman.

It’s a remake, of sorts, of the 1975 DEATH RACE 2000 with David Carradine. In that one, racers competed in a cross-country road race where the goal was to run over pedestrians. This time, more of an action movie and less of a comedy (though still a satire of televised sports), the race is held within a private prison. Inmates are forced to race, and the games are shown on Pay Per View. The cars are equipped with various weapons.

Jason Statham is a former racer framed for a murder he didn’t commit, and coerced into the race, taking over the role of the legendary masked racer Frankenstein. Tyrese Gibson plays his main rival, Machine Gun Joe (Played by Sylvester Stallone in the original). Ian McShane (DEADWOOD) is part of Frankenstein’s pit crew. And each driver, to help with the pay-per-view ratings, is given a sexy (and largely unnecessary) female convict navigator. Frankenstein’s navigator is played by model Natalie Martinez. She’s sexy, and in case you didn’t notice she’s sexy, every time she gets out of a car, they show it in slow motion, playing a song with lyrics that go, “Yeah, sexy sexy hot girl, gettin’ out of a car, shakin’ her thing, yeah!” Something like that.

Joan Allen plays the bony-sexy-cold evil prison warden. Sadly, she doesn’t get a theme song (”Yeah, sexy-bony-cold evil prison warden, makin’ you race cars in a death race, yeah!”).

All this is window dressing for the race. It’s in three parts, conveniently giving the movie three acts. Their prison is on a man-made island, and the race course looks like a conglomeration of every warehouse and abandoned factory from every ROBOCOP movie. It’s BEN HUR with beweaponed cars instead of chariots.

I was expecting a dumb fun violent action movie, but this movie is slightly better than that. In the beginning I feared it was going to be too much shaky-cam and quick cuts so that you can’t really tell what’s going on in the race, but it settles down. It really peaks in the second part of the race, which has some truly spectacular racing stunts.

The movie falters a bit in trying to arrange an improbable happy ending. In the nihilistic world that it depicts, probably the best that could be hoped for is a draw or a Pyrrhic victory.

Of course, all this is like various violent driving video games, like the Grand Theft Auto series, and others where vehicles are loaded up with weapons. Actually, it provides a reasonable explanation for something I’ve always found weird in those driving games. Often in those games, you’re seemingly driving around in a real world with real physics, but you have the incongruity of floating spheres that give you Power or Shields or Health when you drive over them. This movie provides a credible implementation of that; when the racers driver over certain checkpoints, it sends a signal that activates the weapons in that car.

The original movie was as much a satire and a comedy as an action movie. This can’t really make that claim; it condemns the mentality that would make a television death sport of car gladiators, but it’s also, let’s face it, creating this fantasy world so that we can partake of it and revel in the mechanical mayhem. So, don’t take it seriously and think of it as an escapist fantasy that you’ve had when stuck in traffic. If you had some heat-seeking missiles mounted on your car, you’d be through this traffic jam in no time!

Ben Stiller stars and directs.  We were scared of that combo because we kept having Zoolander flashbacks.   This time he again goes over the top, but stops short of being nauseating.   This is at least partially thanks to being surrounded by other strong cast members who help dilute things.

Ben, Robert Downey Jr., Jack Black, Brandon T. Jackson and Jay Baruchel play 4 actors starring in a Vietnam war film.   However, they end up in real combat with Vietnamese drug lords.   What makes this work is the mix of characters, each actor plays a stereotype of a different “problem” personality type.   Ben is the washed up action hero trying to prove he’s a real actor.   Jack Black is the druggy.   Jay Baruchel is the star struck unknown.   Jackson plays the rapper turned actor.  And the scene stealer is Robert Downey Jr. playing a blonde haired blue eyed Australian 5 time Oscar winner.   Who could they possibly be thinking of when they wrote that character?   Oh,  and by the way, he is such a character actor that he got his skin dyed to play a black man, and he of course refuses to slip out of character until “the DVD commentary is done”.

This makes for a funny funny combination with each of the characters having some really great memorable lines.   Tropic Thunder has potential to be one of those movies that guys quote from for years.   It may also be one of the most politically incorrect movies shot in a long time.   But so far not a lot of controversy even with Downey going “black face”.   The reason?   The movie is hysterical, it’s not offensive it’s just funny as heck.

Tropic Thunder is likely to end up being one of those late summer releases that does ok at the box office, but quickly goes to DVD and really mops up.    We give it a very strong 4 stars.   We laughed til our sides hurt.   And if nothing else, you have to see this one to see what has to be Tom Cruise’s best performance ever.   I wont spoil that, just go see for yourself.

35+ years later, he’s written, directed, and stars in this homage to biker movies. Produced by Quentin Tarantino, this could be a third feature in GRINDHOUSE, after DEATHPROOF and PLANET TERROR.

Pistolero (Bishop) is the leader of The Victors biker gang. Back in 1976, his Old Lady (that is, like all the women in this movie, an improbably hot biker chick) was immolated by a rival gang, the 666ers.

Now, 30+ years later, a similar murder starts off a war between gangs, and a quest for revenge. He’s joined by The Gent (Michael Madsen), and Comanche (Eric Balfour), who was just a boy in 1976 and witnessed the events that set all this in motion.

The rival gang is led by Billy Wings (Vinnie Jones). Biker movie honored veteran Dennis Hopper is along for the ride, and David Carradine makes an appearance.

These guys live in a biker universe, a high desert that could be something out of THE ROAD WARRIOR, only it seems to be set in our time, more or less. But it’s a very rarefied world; there’s no cities or even towns; there’s desert, and there’s occasional stand-alone buildings: Road houses, biker bars, strip clubs, bordellos.

There’s not even other cars on the roads. There are no cops (and apparently, no problems with leaving trails of bodies in your wake as you go on your revenge quest). There’s not even the scene where the bumbling idiots walk into the wrong bar and get the crap beat out of them, or bump into the biker’s bumper at an intersection and get the crap beat out of them, because there are no civilians in this movie, there’s only bikers, and biker chicks (played by a beautiful and exotic group, Cassandra Hepburn, Leonor Varela (Who guested in a STARGATE ATLANTIS), Laura Coyouette, Julia Jones, and others).

We get a lot of gunfights (and some more exotic weapons like crossbows) and some barroom fist fights. We get a lot of nudity in their visits to various strip clubs and bordellos.

It’s violent, with bikers riding around killing each other, for revenge or money or just because. It’s got the feel of a Sergio Leone-style western.

Some of the dialogue is pretty snappy and witty, particularly Michal Madsen’s.

One thing this movie isn’t about is a lot of stunts; there aren’t impossible gunfights at high speeds on motorcycles, there’s not MATRIX-style slowmotion with CGI additions. These bikers go places on their bikes, then they park, get off, and fight. They have too much respect for their motorcycles to fight on them, just as a gunslinger doesn’t want his horse hurt.

I’m giving this movie 4 stars, with a caveat: Either you like the idea of a recreation of 1960s biker movies, or you don’t. If you’re wrestling with whether to see this or SISTERHOOD OF THE TRAVELING PANTS 2 this weekend, this probably isn’t the movie for you. But if you got the joke of GRINDHOUSE, this is a good time at the movies.

While they’re there, the older, jovial Ken wants to play tourist. The younger Ray is bored out of his skull, and also guilt ridden for what he did back in London. They spend a lot of time sitting in restaurants and talking about funny stuff, all while swearing a blue streak. Periodically there’s some sudden, shocking violence.

But the film works at a deeper level than a Tarantino movie. While Tarantino’s characters like to B.S. about philosophy, these guys, surprisingly, actually seem like fairly moral guys beneath their hit men exteriors. And that probably means they’ve chosen a career that isn’t going to end well for them.

Ray strikes up a romance with a Belgian girl (who incidentally is Clémence Poésy, the French Chick in HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE).

He also meets a surly dwarf, hilariously played by Jordan Prentice (And I would have bet money it was Peter Dinklage, because the two actors do look similar, although probably not side-by-side) who is in Bruges to film a movie where he plays the inevitable dwarf in a dream sequence (which is probably a joke reference to Peter Dinklage’s role in LIVING IN OBLIVION).

This is a dark comedy, and very funny, but ultimately surprisingly moving as well. The ending maybe has a little too much synchronicity for its own good.

DVD extras: Deleted and Extended Scenes, Gag Reel, When in Bruges (Making Of), Strange Bruges, A Boat Trip Around Bruges, F**king Bruges.

But John Hancock, Smith’s character, is not your ordinary superhero. Oh, he has all of the usual tricks including the ability to fly, super strength, and skin that bullets cannot penetrate.  But he is also a drunk, and a bit of a mean spirited drunk at that.   In fact, he can actually be quite a jerk.

He is a “good guy” in that he protects the innocent and puts away criminals, but there’s quite a lot of collateral damage, and he frankly doesn’t care.  In fact, it’s a really bad idea to get up in his grill about it.   This is all quite refreshing after watching a couple of dozen comic book films this summer.   First off, a drunk superhero fighting crime with one hand and holding his bottle of liquor with the other is hysterical.   But it is also refreshing to see the fallout from wrecking dozens of cars, tearing up buildings and such actually have repercussions.

You just know if a superhero really existed he would need one heck of a lawyer.   And that’s what Hancock faces.   He’s being sued hundred of times for millions, there are warrants out for his arrest and his attitude makes him far from a favorite of the people.  That and the fact that he tears the road up anytime he lands in your neighborhood.   Enter Ray Embrey, played by Jason Bateman.  Ray is a PR man determined to makeover Hancock’s image.

So let’s boil it down, what do we really have here?   A really neat take on the superhero movie with a heck of a lot of humor at the front.   But Will Smith also plays it very serious as Hancock wrestles with being the only one of his kind and the whole self discovery aspect of the movie.   Although this makes for a good story and avoids being totally campy, frankly we were always waiting for Hancock to fall off the wagon again as the drunk scenes are so good.

Bottom line, we give Hancock a rather generous 4 stars.   The first 30 minutes or so are 5 star worthy, the last 30 minutes are more like 3 star, so 4 star seems fair.     Overall, it leaves us hoping for Hancock 2: Off the Wagon.

Then one day, a spaceship lands and disgorges a new robot, EVE, who seems to be a few centuries more technologically advanced than WALL-E. Out of his league, in other words. But he’s smitten.

This causes him to stow away on her ship when it departs, and eventually he encounters what’s left of the human race in deep space. They’ve been living on a space cruise ship, and pampered by their robotic guardians until they’re overweight couch potatoes.

Pixar/Disney continues to make CGI animated movies far ahead of the competition, because the story is as important as the animation. What’s particularly impressive this time out is that much of the movie is told virtually in pantomime; WALL-E can speak more English than R2D2, but not much. Almost everything is conveyed through body language. That the body is a little robot makes it even more astonishing that what he’s thinking is so clearly conveyed.

And much of the time he’s the only character around, which makes it a bit like Tom Hanks in CASTAWAY, or, more to the point, Will Smith in I AM LEGEND, exploring the ruins of an empty planet.

Also like I AM LEGEND, the movie is perhaps slightly more interesting before he discovers that there are still other people.

The ruined Earth has an amazing tactile gritty feel to it. The space cruise ship is done in a different style; Post-Decadent Jetsons.

A little jarring, among the robots and the couch potato humans (which look like regular Pixar People gone to seed), is actor Fred Willard, shown in ancient video recordings, pretty much as is, seemingly with a minimum of CGI transformation.

Pixar continues to make great films that are almost more for adults than kids (but completely appropriate for kids). This one has a pretty esoteric plotline though. I wonder if the youngest kids parents take to this won’t get a little restless in the theater. Then again, I wondered the same thing about RATATOUILLE, so if your very small kids loved that, they’ll probably love this.

If you saw ‘Hulk’ from 2003, you remember that Bruce is on the run and hiding out in South America. Well, that’s exactly where this movie kicks off, but that ’s the only connection to the 2003 debacle. Yes, Bruce is on the run and yes he’s in South America but not as a continuation of the previous story. This movie starts out almost like the TV series; Bruce Banner (Norton) was a scientist working for the government, and an experiment involving Gamma radiation goes horribly wrong, turning him into the monsterous Hulk. Bruce nearly kills his longtime girlfriend Betty Ross (Tyler) and racked with guilt, not to mention the fear that her father would cut him up like a lab rat… he splits and heads off to find a cure to his curse.

So now that you’re all caught up on the basics of who and what the Hulk is, let’s get to the movie itself and how it stacks up to Ang Lee’s vision. To do this taste test we need to analyze the key components and go from there. You have Bruce, Betty, General Ross, adversary and of course the Hulk himself. Let’s see how each stacks up. Eric Bana was pretty good as Bruce Banner, but Edward Norton is a better actor all around so it’s really no surprise who wins that category. Next was the GF, Betty Ross; Jennifer Connolly and Liv Tyler battle that one out but in my never humble opinion, Liv loses hands down, Jennifer Connolly possesses better ‘assets’ and that’s enough for me. In both Hulk movies General Thunderbolt Ross, Betty’s dad is the real villain but when you have 2 outstanding actors as William Hurt and Sam Elliott, who do you choose… Either one, I liked both of them and they both kicked ass. What’s the one thing that has to be solid for a  comic adaptation to work? You guessed it, the Villain. In ‘Hulk’ you had Bruce’s pop as the Absorbing Man played by Nick Nolte; In Incredible Hulk you get Emil Blonsky AKA – The Abomination - played by Tim Roth. Again, I’m a huge fan of both actors but the nod goes to Blonsky. If you’re bored just bare with me, there’s a point… Last, but never least, the Hulk himself. The most important character in the story is not Bruce Banner, it’s the F’N Incredible Hulk and that’s where Ang Lee went wrong and these fellas got it right. Ang Lee wanted us to feel Bruce’s pain and share in his torment… WTF! I want to see HULK SMASH and that’s what I got. Yes, you do see Ed Norton play the wounded hero filled with doubt and self loathing, but that’s ony about half of the movie. The other half is Emil evolving and Bruce learning to control the  power inside, and it makes a hell of a ride.

If you’re a fan of the site you know I’m almost always the one that write’s anything related to comics and this is no excaption, but in the case of Hulk, I’m not a fan and I doubt I’ve read more than 3 or 4 Hulk stories in my life. So I went in with the need to be entertained, and I looked ot the hard core fans in attendance to let me know if the creators nailed it or not. Well, judging by the standing ovation the crowd gave it at the end, I think they knocked it out of the park. BTW… There are some nice guest appearances (of sorts) that let you know the film makers know how to show appreciation to the guys that made the character matter about 3o years ago.

Now it’s 1957, the Nazis are 12 years defeated, and Indy has become a bit of a relic himself. He spent World War II in the OSS (Perhaps one day we’ll see these adventures told in comic books). Now, America is in the grip of (as it turns out, entirely justified) Cold War paranoia.

Dr. Jones finds himself in the clutches of a Soviet Nogoodnik, Irina Spalko played by Cate Blanchett. She wants him to help them recover an Important Artifact from a U.S. military base in New Mexico. He has a sidekick, Mac (Ray Winstone, BEOWULF), whom he’s had many previous adventures with, we’ve just never seen any of them before now.

Then it’s off to New Jersey where his college campus has become dangerous to him.

And then, with a new sidekick, Mutt (Shia LeBeouf, as a 1950s greaser), it’s off to South America for a search for another artifact, with the Soviets in hot pursuit.

People are going to debate endlessly on the Internet whether this is as good as the movies of the original trilogy. Well, it’s not. But it’s still a fun ride, and a nice encore. There’s a lot of nice touches, references to now deceased characters from previous movies (Indy’s father, and Marcus Brody), mention of an adventure that Indy had as a teenager with Pancho Villa (as shown in the TV series THE YOUNG INDIANA JONES CHRONICLES).

I could nitpick a lot of little things that don’t quite work, but Spielberg and Harrison Ford generate a lot of good will in this; they’re enthused about bringing Indy back one more time and it shows.

There’s still great action sequences, but this is an older, wiser Indy who’s discovering that there are things more important than tomb raiding.

The movie blasts off with Tony riding along with some of our brave men and ‘women’ throughout the mountains of Afghanistan, where he plans to dazzle the brass with his newest weapon of mass devastation, the Jericho… Break the walls Down! This thing is a sight to behold, lord help anyone if we already have it, but it would look damned cool on CNN. For those of you not aware of Tony’s comic adventures, he is a bona-fide war mongering, womanizing, alcoholic that loves to make money, and in the first 10 minutes you get to see just how cool it is to be him. Just think of Batman but less broody.

Anywhoo, back to the plot… Tony is in this Hum-vee, cruising along shooting the sheeot, when suddenly it gets attacked by insurgents, and all hell breaks loose around him. Tony is the only survivor of the assault, and just as he thinks he’s safe, out of no where a brand spanky new ‘Stark Industries’ anti personnel device lands right next to him. The bomb blows up and when he regains consciousness, he finds that he’s attached to a car battery, and he’s being held captive by some very nasty cave dwellers, that want him to save them with a Jericho of their own. Tony has plans of his own and instead of building the Jericho, he builds the coolest suit or armor ever, and begins his journey to redemption.

The story is good and the acting is not too shabby either. Robert Downey Jr IS Iron Man/Tony Stark and that’s the main reason the movie works so well. I have a friend that claims other than Batman Begins, this is hte best comic book movie he’s ever seen. To clarify that statement I’ll just say this, Tony Stark/Iron Man is the star, not Robert Downey Jr. Supporting cast members Gwyneth Paltrow, Terrence Howard, and Jeff Bridges all turn in really good performances.

In closing, Iron Man follows a pretty steady formula from start to finish but if you’ve seen another comic book movie in the past, you’ll know what I’m talking about. WARNING GEEK MOMENT AHEAD – If Iron Man is your favorite Marvel character then the absence of a ‘true’ Mandarin might be a big disappointment but the subtlety of inclduing his 10 rings in the story was nice touch to build on for the sequel.

If fast paced action with very little build up is the corner stone of your viewing pleasure, Iron Man will not be for you. But, if solid story telling, character development, plot devices and a great pay off are more your style, you’ll love it. OR, you’ve been dying to see this movie for 2 years, then you’re definitely Golden!

This is not that movie. YOUNG AT HEART (Also known as YOUNG@HEART) is a documentary about a New England choral group comprised of seniors citizens (Average age: 80) who sing a variety of contemporary songs in concert, including ones by The Talking Heads, The Ramones (”I wanna be sedated!”), Sonic Youth, James Brown, and yes, The Rolling Stones!

Directed by Stephen Walker, this was originally a BBC documentary, expanded to feature length. Bob Cilman, the director of the choral group, formed it in 1982 and it’s continued ever since, with various members.

The group has toured in Europe, although this movie follows the seven weeks preparing for a concert in their home town. Along the way they do a little Jailhouse Rock concert at a nearby prison.

Some songs give them a lot of trouble in rehearsal (”Schizophrenia” by Sonic Youth, and “Yes We Can Can” by The Pointer Sisters in particular), and there’s actually some suspense in whether or not they’ll be able to pull it off.

This is a funny and poignant film about not assuming you’re Too Old For That Kind Of Thing. One outspoken woman in the group is 92.

In some cases the members are fighting the clock, hoping their health permits them to be able to perform, or indeed, hoping that they’ll still be among the living come concert time.

This film is a delight, and there’s no other way to put it:

YOUNG@HEART ROCKS!

Richard Jenkins, a character actor whom you’ve probably seen in a lot of movies but didn’t know by name, plays Walter, a widower college professor in Connecticut. His wife died some time ago, and now he’s just going through the motions, teaching classes he doesn’t care about.

When a colleague asks him to present a scholarly paper at a conference in New York City, he goes to his second apartment there which he hasn’t been to in months if not longer.

To his (and their) great surprise, he finds two people living in his apartment, a Muslim couple living illegally in the U.S. Tarek is a drummer from Syria, his girlfriend Zainab is from Senegal in Africa, in a relationship that would raise eyebrows from some other Muslims.

They first assume he’s a burglar. As it turns out, they’ve rented the apartment in good faith from a con artist who somehow had the keys.

They vacate the apartment, but when he sees them out on a street corner obviously with no place to go, he offers to let them stay for a few days until they can find another place.

Gradually friendships grow between the couple and this guy. He discovers an interest in
drumming, and Tarek begins to teach him to play the drums.

Complications ensue when the INS becomes aware of Tarek’s illegal status.

This is a quiet, touching movie, that revolves around realistic characters from entirely different walks of life coming together.

One train in particular is guarded by a notorious conductor named Shack (Ernest Borgnine). He likes to knock hoboes off his train with a sledgehammer. The movie opens with one guy falling under the train and getting sliced in half.

A-Number-One, who is more-or-less the King of the Hoboes, is determined that he’s going to ride Shack’s train. There’s a young upstart named Cigaret (Keith Carradine) who wants to get into this hobo secret society.

The last hour of the movie is a brutal King Of The Mountain game played atop a moving train. These hoboes don’t have anywhere they particularly need to go on this train, and the railroad probably wouldn’t go bankrupt if a few of them managed to ride the train, so it’s pretty much Men On Trains Behaving Badly.

Something maybe not readily apparent in the movie is that it’s (very) loosely based on stories by Jack London (CALL OF THE WILD), and the real-life hobo A-Number-One. In fact, Jack London’s hobo nickname was Cigaret.

DVD Features: Commentary by a film historian, theatrical trailer and TV commercials.

It’s a spoof of the 1960s animated series JONNY QUEST, but it spoofs a lot of superhero comics, boys action-adventure series, etc.

The Venture Brothers are Hank and Dean Venture. Their dad, Dr. Thaddeus “Rusty” Venture, is a super-scientist. They live in his laboratory/headquarters/compound with their bodyguard, Brock Samson.

Each episode they get into adventures, often due to the nemesis of Dr. Venture, arch-villain The Monarch, and his many henchman.

Several writers of this worked on THE TICK, and it has that feel, but with more sexual innuendo and more fart jokes.

Several episodes spoof The Fantastic Four (The Visible Woman can only make her skin become invisible, leaving muscles and veins like one of those old plastic anatomical models).

Various sometimes-villains-sometimes-allies show up, like Russian femme fatale Molotov Cocktease.

In one episode, Dr. Venture has a yard sale to clear out some of the junk his father (also a super-scientist) accumulated. All the super-villains show up, hoping to buy super-weapons at low low low prices.

This is funny stuff, highly recommended.

DVD features: Each season has 13 episodes (A third season is in the works). Bonus features on the DVDs include the pilot, a Christmas short, and various deleted scenes and mockumentary segments. The first season has 5 commentaries, the second season has commentaries for all 13 episodes. Unfortunately, the commentaries aren’t very good. That’s my one complaint about this DVD set; the creators make fun of the fact that they’re doing commentaries, taking time to answer their cell phones and whatnot. This would be funny a couple of times, but doing it every commentary is a waste; I’d be interested in actually seeing some detail on the creation process behind the show.

George Romero, king of the zombie movie, has made five zombie movies now: NIGHT OF THE LIVING DEAD (1968), DAWN OF THE DEAD (1978), DAY OF THE DEAD (1985), LAND OF THE DEAD (2005), and now DIARY OF THE DEAD.

They’re all in something of a floating continuity; they all depict aspects of a zombie apocalypse, but since they’re filmed decades apart it’s not really the same zombie apocalypse, it’s always as if the dead began rising from the grave just a short while ago.

This time around, like BLAIR WITCH PROJECT and CLOVERFIELD, it’s told from the point of view of people with video cameras documenting the whole thing. Thankfully, Romero keeps the shaky-cam/motion-sickness cam to a minimum. These people can hold a camera steady, even when being pursued by zombies.

The college students are making a low budget horror film, when suddenly they get the news that, unbelievably, there seems to be a world-wide zombie epidemic going on.

One of them has an RV camper (and why a college student would have one is never explained), but a group of them pile in and try to make it back to their hometowns. In route they encounter a lot of zombies, and one guy keeps filming it all, planning to make a documentary from his footage.

This is a lower-budget film than Romero’s last one (LAND OF THE DEAD), but it works. The zombie gore seems realistic, even through the documentary gimmick.

The cast of relative unknowns is sometimes a bit shaky in the acting department; but then again anyone with a camera trained on them during a disaster might come across as a bit artificial.

At one point we get to see how the Amish handle a zombie apocalypse (surprisingly well, all things considered)!

And woven throughout is a wry commentary on how we’ve become obsessed with documenting ourselves on video and posting it on the Internet.

Look for a cameo by Romero in the film; he plays a cop at a news conference.

Romero has had a lot of imitators lately in the zombie movie genre. The homage/comedy SHAWN OF THE DEAD, the fast zombies of the DAWN OF THE DEAD remake and 28 DAYS LATER/28 WEEKS LATER, and I AM LEGEND.

But Romero’s zombies still hold their own. Like the tortoise vs. the hare, his slow-moving zombies know that, at some point, you have to stop running to rest, and they draw inexorably closer.

(At last year’s DragonCon, George Romero was there, and he was selling t-shirts that proclaimed FAST ZOMBIES SUCK!)

Andrew Clay’s career went downhill after the release of Ford Fairlane perhaps due to all of the controversy. It’s easy to forget just how funny this character is, and Ford Fairlane captures The Diceman at his most sexist, politically incorrect best. No nasty nursery rhymes here, but when Ford wakes up with two hotties who upon realizing what/who they’ve done proclaim “But Ford, we just wanted to be held!”, he quickly answers “You got the bonus plan!”. In fact, many of sexist pigs who are fans of his work can pull an insane nmber of quotes from this movie.

But is the movie any good? Critics hated it, still do. We love it. It captures that time between the excess of the 80’s and the beginning of the whiney depressing grunge era of the early 90’s. And it makes fun of the music industry as part of the story. The plotline is simple, Ford is a famous private investigator in Los Angeles specializing in the music industry, he’s known far and wide as “the rock and roll detective”. He gets involved in a case surrounding the death of a rockstar. This is not an edge of the seat thriller, this is pure comedy with a dash of action. The story exists as a platform for The Diceman to do his thing.

The Adventures of Ford Fairlane is one of those movies that you need to just check your brain at the door, sit back and enjoy. We give it a strong 4 stars. The studios were slow to release The Adventures of Ford Fairlane on DVD, but since they have, it has found a new life. It’s also typically a bargain, this one belongs in every guy movie collection.

Tonight I indulged myself with Secrets of Egypt’s Lost Queen. The scoop here is that Egypt once had a queen named Hatshepsut and she was one seriously bad mamma-jamma. She was more powerful than even Cleopatra had ever been. The problem was that after she was gone, her existence was systematically erased from the records and histories of Egypt and, for decades, no one could figure out why…or what had happened to the body of this once powerful female Pharoah.

I have to admit that, after having been bitten in the arse many times in the past by shows of this nature that failed miserably to deliver answers to their respective mysteries, I went into this one with low expectations. I fully expected the conclusion of the show to be something like, “Well, we gave it our best shot but it’s been 3000 years and we just can’t be sure of anything.” Fortunately, I was way wrong!

Over the 100 minute span, they do an excellent job of answering the questions that had long surrounded this mystery and, unlike lesser shows, the answers don’t smack of random speculation. If this is your cup of tea, then consider this one to be worth four full stars.

When we catch up with Rambo he is still in Thailand just kind of living day to day. He has a boat which he uses to do things like round up cobras for the local shows. Meanwhile across the border in Burma there’s genocide going on with entire villages being wiped out in the most viscious manners possible. Enter some do-gooder missionaries who want to bring their religion and medicine to these villages. They need a boat ride and eventually talk John into taking them up there despite his warnings. Predictably, they get captured, and it’s up to Rambo to rescue them.

Ok, so the plot is pretty weak and predictable. The story exists only to setup one really large and long action sequence.

So, next question, can a 62 year old Stallone still pull off a believable John Rambo? Well, first off, Sly is in great shape for his age. And thanks to Grecian formula, he doesn’t look 60+ just yet. This incarnation of Rambo will use big guns when available and a bit of strategy instead of just gutting it out hand to hand against 100 men, but he can still outrun any explosion.

This is by far the most violent and graphic movie in the series. I believe Stallone intentionally went a little over the top, which is a smart business move as it keeps it from being just a lame sequel. Instead it’s a lame sequel with some of the most gruesome action shots you’ll ever see. Bodies explode as they step on mines, throats are ripped out and heads explode like ripe watermelons when shot with large caliber weapons.

We like a movie that knows exactly what it is and embraces it, that’s what is happening here. Even the radio advertising for Rambo is playing “Let the Bodies Hit the Floor”, and they do. People love a bad ass, and Rambo is still that. The audience we saw it with had quite a bit of clapping and cheering at the end. We give the movie 4 stars for being a good time. We’re glad they didn’t tone it down to a PG-13, the kids find their way in anyhow. And I confess to just sitting back enjoying myself thinking “uh oh, now you’ve pissed him off”, and then watching John Rambo do his thing.

Charlie (Dane Cook) is a successful dentist and a good looking guy, who gets lots of women. He’s never found the “right” girl though, and always ends up breaking up for one reason or another. But there’s a twist, it seems that the girl will marry the very next guy she dates after breaking up with Charlie. Boil this down to the essence and it’s Boinking Charlie = finding Mr. Right. Once word gets out Charlie literally has them lining up to have sex with him. For the good of the women, Charlie goes with the flow.. after all, he’s just spreading happiness.

The root of this curse stems from a birthday party where an 8-year old Charlie was playing spin the bottle and ended up getting jumped in the closet by a 10-year old Goth girl. She takes off her shirt, showing that someone out there makes black leather training bras, and asks to see his penis. When he refuses, she rips open his shirt, scratches his chest and starts kissing him. Charlie escapes the closet (something I’m sure he regretted a few years later) and crawls back out into the room, and the embarrassed girl curses Charlie.. resulting in his unusual love life.

Two things go wrong for Chuck. First he realizes that he’s in love with Cam (Jessica Alba) and second he gets bored with all the humping sans relationship. I have to think that it’s Cam’s fault, cause Chuck is banging a ton of really hot women, women that don’t need to be wined and dined, they just want him to lay some pipe. Consider this a moment. Charlie literally can have a lunchtime boink, then an evening boink or two with an endless supply of hot women and never has to do any “relationship work” to make this happen. Better still, the women *all know about each other* so it’s not like he has to keep a secret. But I suppose it wouldn’t have been much of a romantic comedy if he didn’t fall for Cam, damn her.

If I’d seen this movie in theaters I would have given it 3 stars. It was funny at times, it only had one really slow section, and there’s a ton of nudity. But I saw this as the unrated DVD, and that’s getting it an extra star. Why? Well, I was able to do a frame by frame analysis of Jessica taking off her shirt and showing some side boob… when the romantic part kicked in, I was able to fire up the notebook to check email, and there’s a lot of extras worth watching. The extras included a “sex matrix” where you see extended sex scenes, a gag reel that’s funnier than the movie, some featurettes that themselves included lots of boobs, deleted scenes, and an ad lib section where you see just how much funnier the movie could have been.

Final result, it’s a 4 star DVD, toss it in your Netflix queue with confidence.