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.

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.

Eventually they decide to be very pale together. Star-crossed and fairly chaste loving ensues. Edward, it turns out, is from a clan of moral vampires who don’t drink human blood, despite temptation. He’s 107 years old, and has been stuck in perpetual high school since 1918 (presumably his vampire “family” moves every four years).

There’s also some American Indians who may be a little werewolfy.

And, eventually, there’s a clan of some bad vampires who’d like to make a snack of Bella.

This is a pretty bloodless vampire flick. It’s not scary, it’s not gory, it’s all vampire romance.

And a little bit of vampire baseball, which is novel.

Sunlight isn’t fatal, just revealing, to these vampires, so they live in overcast and rainy Washington state. Sort of like the vampires in 30 DAYS OF NIGHT going above the Arctic circle to take advantage of the lack of sunlight.

I’m giving this two stars. It’s not a badly done movie. If you’re a teenage girl (or an adult) who’s a fan of the books, add 2-3 stars.

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.

Well, I admit I am something of a Spike Lee fan. Not just because we share a skin tone, which used to be a rarity but isn’t so much any more. For some reason, I pretty much see anything that he and Woody Allen release, so even though this means the occasional Curse of the Jade Scorpion or Girl 6, I still tend to venture out during the first run of their films.

Miracle at St. Anna is an attempt at an epic WWII picture. Weighing in at a somewhat pudgy 160 minutes running time, it is a bit fleshy and ponderous, kind of like Serena Williams was at the French Open this year (Glad to see somebody got in shape for Wimbledon and “opened up a can” on the rest of the women!). The first 40 minutes have all of the WWII set pieces. The headquarters commander that has a clue but is too far removed to effectively help; the on-the-scene Captain that hasn’t a clue and gets people killed just because he’s incompetent. D.B. Sweeney playing Henry Fonda in The Battle of the Bulge. There’s even a Tokyo Rose equivalent that is piped in at the battlefield via a P.A. truck to tell our Black troops how the Nazis appreciate them ever so much more than White Americans. Yeah, right.

I spent enough time watching WWII movies and TV shows in the late fifties and early sixties to be familiar with most of the devices here and Spike rings the requisite bells fairly early on. Regrettably, as much as I wanted to like this film, it is just too unevenly paced, and inadequately edited to really work on the screen. Moreover, there are just too many stories going on here. I suspect this could have been a good film if it had been about 45 minutes shorter and lightened by at least a couple of storylines.

Still, there are a couple of interesting things going on here. First of all, I can remember Mr. Lee’s great opening credits sequence to Clockers. In the midst of the popularity of gangsta glorification a la New Jack City, he set an immediate tone hitting us with shot after shot of real crime scene photos that took all of the romance out of violence and informed the viewer of how ugly the consequences of violence are. Similarly, this film is unrelenting in its portrayal of the shock and horror of bullets and bombs tearing into human bodies. I love a good action film with lots of bullets, but I found myself flinching throughout this film. Time and again, a sudden strike of a bullet slams into a person as time dilates. Not a gratuitous splatter fest, mind you, but a realistic portrayal as the camera often circles back to show us the resultant corpse realistically bloodied and soul-absent. Masterfully, Mr. Lee doesn’t let us get anesthetized to the violence, for as we become more invested in individual characters, those are the very ones whose bodies are so graphically violated before our eyes. The woman next to me was covering her eyes during some of the sequences, and there were exclamations all around me in the theater as well. Where Saving Private Ryan shocked us on a grander scale, this may be even more powerful, if less meticulously portrayed, because it is played out on a smaller stage and is revisited many times over the course of the film.

The second interesting exploration is that of belief, religion and faith. There are multiple references to the mysticism of religion, both Protestant and Catholic. From Private Train talking about the Holy Spirit, to a woman attempting to divine the future from floating grease puddles we are treated to a hodge-podge of objectified spiritual snapshots, that I doubt will ring very true to any Believer. Still the pervasiveness of the commentary on belief is something new for Mr. Lee.

Consistently throughout his career, Spike Lee has never been known for subtlety, and this is no departure. Remember that incompetent Captain I mentioned earlier? Of course, since he is commanding Black troops, he’s a foul-mouthed Southerner ably played by Walton Goggins who fans of The Shield will recognize as Shane. To show us fear in battle, there’s a bawling private crying loudly for his mother as they attempt to quietly approach the field of battle. Not whining like Bill Paxton’s Pvt. Hudson in Aliens, I mean bawling like a kid. Every point is belabored. Every nuance pulled to the foreground. The Nazis are portrayed as incredibly cruel, particularly in the pivotal St. Anna sequence. Yet even here, after a general atrocity is committed, it is topped off by an ultimate act of cruelty via a bayonet. Okay Mr. Lee, I get it, I get it!

As for the performances, Michael Ealy is consistently menacing as light-skinned, gold-toothed, predatory Bishop, and Derek Luke is believable as the straight-arrow Sergeant Stamps. Nine year old Matteo Sciabordi as Angelo, who seems to be the moral center of the piece in some ways, is quite good considering that this is his first film role. On the other hand, Omar Benson Miller as Private Train, or, as he is referred to by Angelo, “Chocolate Giant,” is good through most of the film but seems to be asked to drop character from time to time to become the comic relief, sometimes in an almost embarrassing way.

But, returning to my main theme here, most of all, it just seems long and meandering.

Can I recommend this movie? There are some things worth seeing here, and I suspect that the graphic violence works particularly well on the big screen. Valentina Cervi is hot, with a sultry mouth and a smoldering gaze, and she manages to doff her top in a couple of memorable sequences. Still, I struggled to give this movie a second star. I can only hope that there will be a Director’s Cut released that runs maybe 110 minutes. That might be a film worth a look.

JadeInTheATL

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.

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.

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.

Both involve members of a primitive tribe being kidnapped and enslaved by a more advanced, pyramid-building culture, escapes, long pursuits across savage landscapes.

But APOCALYPTO is the real deal.

Set in the 16th century but before Europeans arrived, it’s an odyssey across the Mayan civilization.

Jaguar Paw lives with his tribe in the remote jungle. He has a wife and child. He and other members of his tribe are kidnapped by one of the Mayan pyramid-building cities, destined to be sacrificed, to have his heart cut out atop a pyramid while he’s still alive.

But he gets a lucky break, and then he’d Better Run Through The Jungle, pursued by his captors.

This movie makes some overtures to our society; the pyramid-builders are destroying their environment, they’re controlled by a religious fanaticism that their cynical leaders don’t really believe in, and their society is very definitely divided into rich, middle class, and poor. Guess who gets sacrificed?

I think there’s also a subversive element here; Mel Gibson probably saw one too many DANCES WITH WOLVES-type movies that postulate a Garden of Eden in the New World before it was ruined by the White Man. And he said Give Me A Break, somebody’s always pounding on somebody else, long before Europeans got here.

This is a a fascinating, brutal society built around human sacrifice.

But people are people, and the family dynamic, and the humor and camaraderie of the tribe are also depicted.

This is an epic unlike anything you’ve seen, huge city-sets constructed, hundreds of extras (looking like thousands of extras), like a Cecil B. DeMille Bible epic (maybe not surprising since Gibson’s previous movie was THE PASSION OF THE CHRIST, and like that, the movie is in original dialect with subtitles).

But it’s also just a good action flick, and the final half of this movie is one amazing foot chase through dangerous territory.

DVD Extras: A commentary with Mel Gibson and writer-producer Farhad Safina, deleted scenes, and a Making Of featurette.

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.

Sex and Breakfast is a good example of the marketing tease, it would have been even better had the movie been unrated and had a red band trailed up on youtube. This is a 100% chick flick, and I’m honestly not sure what they hell kind of conversation you’d end up having with your date if you made the horrific mistake of watching this one together.

James (Macaulay Culkin) and Heather (Alexis Dziena) are having problems in the bedroom, basically Heather can’t get off. James blames himself, Heather gets frustrated and they end up going to a seminar for a therapist who suggests couples engage in group sex to help grow their relationships. It takes four to tango, so the other couple are Ellis (Kuno Becker) and Renee (Eliza Dushku) who are adventure seekers more than anything else, but they have their problems as well.

I was sure that the emotional baggage would be the women in this movie, but nope, it’s the guys. Heather is the horny little devil that gets everything moving, while James is an utter pansy. Also, when Renee tells Ellis (I would have sworn his name was Alice until the credits told me otherwise) that she’d like to be with another woman and he could watch and he freaks out in a negative way… totally unrealistic. Totally and completely unrealistic.  I don’t discount that there’s some guys out there who actually wouldn’t want that to happen with their SO’s, but Ellis is into the group sex thing and has just expressed that he’d like to watch another couple doing it right in front of him when Renee speaks up. Nope, impossible for that to be a compatible mindset. “Oh sure hon, let’s go get a hotel room with this other couple so I can watch this guy bang you, but his wife better keep her hands off you!!” Puleeze.

OK, it’s not all bad. I do like indie/artsy flicks on occasion and can deal with a chick flick now and then, and keeping that mindset at the front of my mind the story had potential. The acting was ok, the setups were amusing and I was entertained on some level, and I knew going into this that it was gonna be a talkative movie. You just can’t have a movie that deals with a subject like this that doesn’t contain lots of people dealing with emotional issues. But dang, this thing makes a Tarantino movie seem like a silent film.

On an artsy/fartsy scale I’d rate this higher, but on our scale I’m gonna have to go to the bottom… 1 star. Guys, if your SO brings this home to watch with you on movie night.. let me know how that goes for ya.

Every time I think about this movie, I can feel a surge of testosterone coursing through my system. I swear, I think my penis gets an inch longer for a time, too. Guys like war movies and this is my all-time favorite. It doesn’t have the best battle scenes or the best special effects. The main character never engages in any hand-to-hand gladiatorial battles with the enemy. It doesn’t have a lot of blood in it, either. So why is it so good? One name: George C. Scott.

General George S. Patton was a warrior without compare and a true man’s man. He was, perhaps, the greatest general this country has ever seen. To say he was bold, audacious, hard, bloodthirsty and aloof would be wholly inadequate. He was, perhaps as simply as can be put, larger than life itself. And to successfully portray a man like that requires a supremely gifted actor giving the performance of a lifetime and, in this, Scott does just that. The famous opening speech gave me goose pimples the first time I saw the movie. Hell, I wanted to go grab my father’s .30-06 rifle out of the closet right then and there and march off to war behind the man I was seeing on the screen. Nevermind it was the mid 70’s and we weren’t at war with anyone at the time. It just didn’t matter because I wanted to follow that man into battle. Such was the nature of General Patton. That George C. Scott could recreate him so accurately and intensely puts his performance at or near the top of any ‘best of all time’ list.

“The Nazis are the enemy. Wade into them. Spill *their* blood. Shoot *them* in the belly.”

After the stirring speech the movie takes a breath and begins to unfold in a more normal fashion. Patton, like the hand of a god, takes command of the U.S. forces in North Africa and transforms these rag-tag soldiers into a hungry, aggressive army through sheer force of will. His victories pile up as does his fame. He is just what the doctor ordered! Morale improves and soon it appears we might win WWII after all! There is a problem, however. General Patton is not a quiet man nor is he a particularly nice man. He is, in the eyes of many, quite offensive and he does some very harsh things. Such is the nature of war. But now that things are going well, it seems the American people are much less inclined to allow him his faults. And then, at a very inopportune time, he gets angry at a soldier suffering from battle fatigue. He slaps the soldier, calls him a coward, and orders him to be marched to the front. Popular opinion turns against him and his turn from brilliant field general to worldwide embarrassment is complete.

“We’re not just going to shoot the bastards, we’re going to cut out their living guts and use them to grease the treads on our tanks.”

Buried in controversy and shame, he is removed from command. America, it seems, cannot afford a harsh, unforgiving general to lead its armies. He is used as a decoy for a while; a humiliating duty, to be sure. But, as all fallible heroes of legend do, he gets a second chance. Being a true hero, he takes advantage of this second chance and leads us, once again, to victory multiple times after the invasion of Normandy. He even used the Nazi’s own Blitzkrieg tactics against them and pulled off some of the most remarkable victories of the entire war.

“The last great opportunity of a lifetime – an entire world at war, and I’m left out of it?!? God will *not* permit this to happen! I *will* be allowed to fulfill my destiny! His will be done.”

But what then? What if doctors finally managed to cure the world of all its ailments? They would no longer be needed. They would fade from existence over a short time. Such is what happened after World War II. With no more fighting, there was no need for the pure warrior. A glimpse into this lonely afterlife is seen; an afterlife that the general himself was well aware of. In real life, General Patton died of complications of injuries incurred after an automobile accident in December of 1945, not long after the war. Some people would point that incident and decry the unfortunate timing and the ironic nature of his death. I suspect, though, that the General himself wouldn’t have thought it so bad. Better for a warrior to die than to live out a long life with nothing left to fight for.

“There’s only one proper way for a professional soldier to die: the last bullet of the last battle of the last war.”

Well said, General. Well said.

Jack plays Edward Cole a self made billionaire. Cole has lots of ex-wives and employees, but not any real family to truly care for him. Even while in the hsopital battling for his life against cancer, his only visitor is his long time ever loyal personal assistance Matthew. Edward calls him Tommy instead and reminds him he can fire him anytime, which probably explains why he is not getting a lot of visitors.

His roommate in the hospital is Carter Chambers, played by Freeman. As you might guess, he’s much the opposite of Cole. He has a family who loves him and a wife of 45 years. But although he’s an extremely intelligent man who absolutely dominates Jeopardy, he has spent his life working as an auto mechanic. His wife got knocked up during his freshman year of college, and he dropped all of his life plans to support his family.

The two get to know each other and find out at about the same time their diagnosis calls for them to only live a few more months. The Bucket List is created. Now imagine the fun you could have with absolutely nothing to lose and a billionaires’ bank account at your disposal. Wanna see the Great Pyramids of Egypt? No problem, fire up the jet!

That’s the concept, but what really makes this movie work are the characters and two great actors to portray them. This is a perfect role for Jack at his current age. He makes a great grumpy geezer in the hospital. Their condition is handled very candidly with some admittedly dark humor. This is the type of thing director Robert Reiner, aka Meathead, has always been so good at, and Nicholson is the perfect guy to be able to get a laugh while his head is shoved in a toilet trying to puke up his little toe due to sickness from chemotherapy.

We went in expecting a movie tailored to an older adult audience and women with one of those bitter sweet tear jerker endings where everyone gets a good cry afterwards. I wont spoil the ending by commenting too much on that, but I’ll say there is so so much more to this movie. If you’re a fan of Jack, you’re going to love this movie. And there’s even a car chase of sorts thrown in with a couple of cars we really love. We give this one 4 stars, and it’s a great date movie as a bonus.

About that opening sequence… the movie starts with a teenage hottie entering a dressing room and taking her top off. In a few minutes her girlfriend joins her and takes her top off (apparently teenage girls don’t wear bras, bless their hearts.) They proceed to have a conversation about bleaching their butt holes and then check to see if either of them needs to have that done. Yeah, this is a FINE way to get a guys attention. Then one of the girls decides to steal a blouse as she puts hers back on over the new one. As they leave the fitting room we follow them through a sequence of security camera shots where we see them get out of the store just in time, and get introduced to a few more characters in this story.

A cashier in the store is asking a manager for assistance with a customer return, and we see him squeezing her butt while he’s talking to the customers. They have a thing going on, but we soon learn she’s not the only girl he’s taking into the storeroom on a regular basis.

We get to watch a couple of guys who work the overnight shift at a gas station, one who wants to be a rock star and the other who just hangs out. We also see a routine traffic stop from the dashboard camera of a police vehicle that turns out to be anything but routine. Businessmen with secret lives, workers who getpranked constantly, security cameras on a bus, security cameras in a high school, nanny cams, and so forth.

What is so ingenious about Look is that you can completely believe you are watching real footage that has been pieced together to tell a story rather than watching a tightly written script that’s being expertly filmed and acted. Every person acting in Look is first rate, down to the people sitting in a mall food court trying to not be seen as a mother frantically looks for her daughter. It’s 100% believable, and it’s brilliant. And like real life security footage, this is just a snapshot in these peoples lives. Don’t expect every story to get wrapped up before the credits roll, life just doesn’t work that way. If I had one complaint it would be the lack of closure on a couple of the story lines, but it’s not bad enough to really bother me.

Look should make you think. When you get up and leave the theater, start noticing how many cameras have been watching you, and think about what would happen if a system were in place to link all those cameras together so that an individual could be tracked from place to place, day to day. There are seven cameras that I know for certain I pass by on my way to and from the office each day, how many are there that I don’t know about? A movie like this could make you paranoid if you let it, and maybe you should…

We know from the previous movies that these fellows aren’t just business partners, they’re all good friends, so when Reuben gets shafted in a deal with Willy Bank (Al Pacino)and has a heart attack as a result, they all drop what they are doing and rush to his aid. OK, that sounds good and all… but stopping in the middle of a bank robbery? That was just a bit silly.

Anyway, Reuben has pretty much lost his will to live so Danny (George Clooney) decides that if they can fix the business problem then that will in turn fix Reuben. Unfortunately Willy doesn’t see Danny as a serious threat and blows him off. If Willy won’t play nice, then Danny figures that getting even with him should make Reuben happy so they put together an elaborate plan to jinx his hotel and cost him a ton of money on opening night.

All well and good, but the lengths they go to just make this utterly unbelievable. How to disrupt the “perfect” anti-cheat computer system? With an earthquake of course! How to create one of those? How about digging a tunnels under the hotel with a tunnel making machine.. the same one that made thechunnel in fact! OK, sorry, but you lost me there. That’s not just silly, that’s plain stupid.

The point of the movie is to entertain though, and it does a fairly good job of that. Unlike the previous movies the cast doesn’t seem to be having quite as much fun, and sometimes it seems like they are just showing up to work for the paycheck. It’s not always like that though, there are some moments where you see the qualities of the first movie shine though, but they are few and far between. I think the problem might have been that they read the plot.. and just shook their heads at the whole thing.

If you’re in the mood for a caper, you could do worse. I didn’t dislike the movie, but I didn’t really like it either. So, by process of elimination, it’s 3 stars.

Florentino Ariza, played by Javier Bardem (who plays the stone-cold killer in the new movie by the Coen Brothers, NO COUNTRY FOR OLD MEN) is a lowly telegraph operator who falls for a rich man’s daughter, Fermina Daza (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). Forbidden to see each other, she instead marries a doctor. He meanwhile vows to pine for her until her husband dies. The tale of unconsummated love unwinds over the next fifty years.

But Florentino never took a vow of chastity. Over the next fifty years, despite his advancing years, he manages to bed more than 600 women, most of them beautiful and young (and often displaying their bare breasts).

I found this an interesting journey through another time and place. The period is meticulously reconstructed, and the age makeup on the two actors is convincing. This is a good date movie. Having never read the book, I’m not entirely sure what the point was; if you can’t be with the one you love, love the one you’re with, until you can be with the one you love, apparently. But it’s a funny, bittersweet film.

It’s all about expectations, I suppose. Had this been a movie starring, say, Mario Van Peebles and Don Johnson, I’d be ecstatic about being able to give it 4 stars. With Washington and Crowe, however, you almost have to expect a near perfect effort based on their stellar careers up to this point.

In American Gangster, they give us two very interesting characters: Frank Lucas (Washington), a career sidekick to Harlem crime boss Bumpy Johnson who had previously been known as a quiet and deferential guy but quickly turns that reputation on its ear as he reaches to become the dominant crime figure in all of New York, and Ritchie Roberts (Crowe), a soft-spoken but honest cop whose integrity gets him the choice job of trying to bring down the biggest crime bosses around.

Both characters are extremely interesting and are played out competently, but there is a certain level of depth missing from them. And, too, even though the movie was really quite long, I could have done with more exploration of how Lucas went from Mr. Nobody to Mr. Top Dog without so much as a whimper from his rivals or from the Italian mob figures. Likewise, I would like to have seen more of Roberts’ life and background, too. These areas, and a couple others, were just glossed over and I feel a bit cheated by that.

Additionally, I got the sense that, as good as his performance was, Washington got a bit lazy with regard to making this character truly unique and not just a rehash of previous people he’s played. As a for instance, Washington established Lucas’ trademark phrase as “My man!” Can you think of at least one other movie where he did that? *cough* *cough* *Training Day* *cough*

Another peeve was Crowe’s insistence upon making sure he adopted the REAL LIFE Roberts’ vocal traits and characteristics. That might normally be fine and dandy, but in this case it sucks because Roberts was apparently a mush-mouth mumbler and there were more than a few lines in the movie that I just didn’t catch or didn’t fully understand what was being said.

But enough complaining! Adjust your expectations and be confident that you’re getting your money’s worth as you walk into the theater. Expect a really good movie….just not a great one.

-Alex

Meanwhile, the train engineer’s wife (Marcia Gay Harden) is dying of cancer.

The son of the dead woman, although he knows his mom was trying to kill herself, still believes the train engineer has some responsibility for her death, and confronts him.

This sounds like the makings of a sappy and maudlin movie, but it works. The actors, including the kid, are exceptional. And the movie is competently directed by Alison Eastwood, the daughter of Clint Eastwood (she’s also an actress who has appeared in some of her father’s movies, and other movies). It manages to sell a premise that in other hands would have come across as improbable.

My only real fault with this movie is the way it details the train engineer’s hobby, which is model railroading. But the model railroad depicted in the movie is the kind a twelve-year-old would make. No adult, especially one who works for a real railroad, would have a layout as depicted in the movie.

This is more about the evolution of her, how she gets to the point where she’s using sex in a spy game.

In 1938 Hong Kong, during the Japanese occupation, a young Chinese woman in college joins a theater group, which turns out to be a rather half-assed resistance cell. They plot to assassinate Chinese collaborators. She poses as a married woman to infiltrate the Chinese collaborator society. But since she’s a virgin, she has one of the resistance fighters take her virginity, so she’ll have some sexual experience to draw upon to play the part of a married woman seeking an affair.

Three years later in 1941 Shanghai, the real resistance movement calls upon her to again serve her country.

It’s a plotline I don’t think you’d see in a Western film: The guy she’s seducing ends up borderline-raping her, but, as it happens, it’s the best sex she’s ever had. And he thinks he’s raping a married woman, but she’s actually a spy setting up his assassination by pretending to be seduced and roleplaying as a married woman, so her reaction to the rape is basically bemusement. And the more they have sex, the less S&M it gets. Certainly the film earns it’s NC-17 rating.

She’s in a dangerous situation where to be caught will mean she gets shot. But the line blurs between pretending to be in love with her hated target, and actually being in love with him.

And the film has a lots and lots and lots of Mahjong in it.

This is a chick flick, but it’s not a bad one.

Also, it has quite a bit of nudity, a half-dozen scenes or so. All fairly short, but things aren’t hidden in shadow.

It’s got funny moments, but there’s a little too much pain per capita for it to be a romantic comedy.

I noticed this movie features actresses that have been in the RIDDICK movies; Radha Mitchell from PITCH BLACK, and Alexa Davalos from THE CHRONICLES OF RIDDICK.

The movie starts out with a very graphic attack on a housing compound of an oil company in Saudi Arabia, by a terrorist cell. The group infiltrates the high security compound and detonate a bomb during a company softball game killing a couple of dozen people. The news wire lights up and the feds send out their field agents to investigate, along with other first responders (fire, police, emt), which spawns the second assault that kills hundreds. Among the dead is highly decorated agent of the FBI, and best friend of Lead Investigator Ronald Fleury (Foxx). The attack on what some consider sovereign American soil demands governmental intervention, and that happens to be Fleury’s teams specialty.

Certain agency figures that seem to be more concerned with insulting the Saudi’s rather than finding the killers, refuse to send an American presence this close to the attack and leave the investigation to the local Saudi police. Fleury finds a creative way to interject himself and before long he gets the green light to go in and ‘assist’ in the investigation but he’s told in very clear terms he’s not to interfere. Now we all know that’s not going to last and it’s that part of the film that makes it worth seeing.

The supporting cast of Garner, Cooper, Bateman and Jeremy Piven as the representative of the US embassy (stooge), are all really good but my favorite character was played by Ashraf Barhom. Barhom plays Colonel Al-Ghazi the police officer charged with protecting Fleury’s team, but his real orders are to protect the Prince from losing face. The two orders are the key to a social and ethical dilemma that makes him choose between his job and doing what he knows is the right thing to do, regardless of faith or politics. Overall the movie is kind of like a 2 hour episode of CSI: Baghdad with a lesson, but the acting, direction and story make it well worth the 10 bucks you’ll be shelling out to see it.

I will warn you the last 20 minutes are extremely intense, and the way Berg is able to bring the emotional rollercoaster you’re gonna feel to life is nothing short of amazing. I saw the film with a packed house and there wasn’t a person in the entire auditorium that wasn’t speechless. The movie carries a very powerful message, and the ending will drive home an opinion that some people will hate, while others will stand up and cheer.

He’s moved on to thrillers, but they still have that Cronenberg touch. Within the first few minutes of this film, we see a throat cut, someone else hemorrhaging, and a baby covered in placenta.

The director teams up again with Viggo Mortensen (A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE). This time it’s a tale of Russian gangsters in London.

A teenage junkie dies in childbirth, leaving a baby. A hospital’s midwife (Naomi Watts) tries to find how to get the baby to her relatives. This leads her to a Russian restaurant, whose kindly owner may be a Russian gangster. Viggo Mortensen is his chauffeur, but seems conflicted about the life of crime he’s locked into.

Unfortunately, the midwife soon knows too much about the crime family, putting her and her family at risk.

The depiction of Russian gangsters is pretty much like every other movie depicting Russian gangsters. They’re more viscious than the Corleones. And they like bathhouses. But Cronenberg makes it distinctive.

Since this comes on the heels of SHOOT ‘EM UP, another movie about dangerous men and a baby, it should be pointed out that this is not a nonstop actionfest. This is a movie of violence waiting to happen. And it’s got Cronenberg’s desire to make violence realistic. There’s a showdown in a Russian bathhouse that puts the viscera in visceral.

It’s a good taut thriller, wrapped around showing people who are aliens in another land. And the finale goes in direction I wasn’t expecting.

“So what!” you say? This was *HUGE*! Practically every episode of Star Trek prior to B5 ended with the “Big Red Reset Button” that made everything go back to the way it was at the beginning of the episode. And B5 came along and changed the ENTIRE game! It was the first…and practically every sci-fi series since then that is worth watching has emulated that format.

But the original is and always will be the best. I know I’m far from alone in that opinion…and perhaps it’s people like me that are responsible for the existence of things like Babylon 5: The Lost Tales, a truly hollow echo of the Babylon 5 that used to be. Like old boxing champs that can’t seem to ever leave the ring and continue to fight until they can barely make it out of the first round, we collectively pine away for the Glory Days….and B5 creator J. Michael “Don” Kingzynski is more than happy to put a li’l “sumpin sumpin” together for us.

This time we get two distinct, chronological stories…almost exactly as you might expect two sequential episodes from the original series to be. In the first, a worker on the station seemingly becomes possessed by a demon…and all hell breaks loose, so to speak. Well, ok, not really. What takes place then is actually a very well balanced theological discussion with lots of interesting points that get you into a groove. And then it just kind of ends when Lochley suddenly figures out the whole thing. Not an awful episode, but it’s woefully short of the great ones.

Next up was a story that was just ridiculously transparent…and it was quite stinky in all other areas, too. For both stories, it’s painfully obvious that there was little or no budget to work with. And to make matters worse, except for Lochley, Sheriden and Galen, none of the original characters were present. No Delenn, no Vir, no Londo, no….anybody! The production values were also pretty low, but thats more a funding problem rather than effort or talent.

All in all, it was a pretty poor showing. This one is for truly HARDCORE B5 fans ONLY!

I was RIGHT there with him.

The Fountain is not something I can describe and do the film any justice at all. The visual effects are beyond anything you’ve seen before. This isn’t because of the technology behind them, but rather for the unfettered imagination that came up with the imagery in the first place. And then there are the philosophical and metaphysical elements of the movie that defy any rational attempt to quantify.

I have given a lot of thought to this movie over the past few days and I still don’t fully understand what I was seeing in some places. But that’s kind of ok, I guess. There is a message in this movie. I got it. And the really odd thing is that I think the message will be different for each person that sees it. This is because you will be forced…no, that’s too strong a word. You will be urged to let your mind walk a path that you don’t want to go down; a path you probably have never even dared approach. It is the path of death.

Yes, director Darren Aronofsky (Pi, Requiem for a Dream) wanted to make a movie about death and what it means to us mortals. He does so by showing us three different timelines: Spain in the middle ages, the present day, and some future time. The movie posters and trailers say 2500, but there is absolutely NO way to reference that. The only *real* character you see in that timeline is Jackman’s and he never talks about what year it is. You can’t even judge by his surroundings since he is WAY out in space, floating along in the odd bubble and living in it like a hermit or monk.

In the Spain timeline, Hugh Jackman is a decidely loyal conquistador who pledges himself to finding the Fountain of Youth in order to preserve the life of his Queen, Isabel, and thereby Spain, as well. In the present, Jackman is a dedicated research scientist doggedly trying to find a cure for brain cancer. He is doing so because his wife, “Izzy”, is terminally ill with it. During his research, he stumbles upon a miraculous anti-aging compound that has interesting implications…and complications to his research. In the future timeline…ah, hell, I have no idea what was going on there. It was a spectacularly beautiful…and confusing acid trip.

I honestly cannot say whether or not I recommend this movie. It just defies normal ratings and classifications. I can say, however, that if someone very close to you has recently died or is dying, it will stir your very core. And that may or may not be a good thing.

Now if y’all will excuse me, I’m going to watch some football follies and continue my recovery from this flick.

The Notorious Bettie Page is a documentary that’s not a documentary, but is documentary-ish… kinda like a Michael Moore film. I went into this not knowing anything about Bettie Page other than she was a hot pinup model from the 50’s and that she also did some bondage photos. Now I know that her mother was too strict, she married her first boyfriend who proceeded to beat her, after leaving him she was gang raped and then fled to New York City for a new life. She was also a very smart girl in school, barely missing out on a scholarship to Vanderbilt and was an aspiring actress before giving it all up and dropping out of the spotlight.

I guess I just kinda told you the entire plot of the movie, though I don’t think that counts as a spoiler due to the nature of the film.

Most of the movie deals with Bettie’s participation in creating bondage photos and films, both because it’s an excuse to show Gretchen in leather outfits and because of the scandal such photos caused back then. On a side note, it’s amazing how tame these photos are when you look at them now. We also see Bettie do some nude modeling and for that I’m quite grateful. Did I mention that Gretchen Mol is SMOKIN hot? Oh yeah, I did.

One complaint I have about the movie, and this is a rare complaint to make, is that it’s a little too short. It’s only 90 minutes long and at the 80 minute mark I was wondering how the director was going to wrap up the movie in just 10 minutes. Then answer is that he didn’t. Apparently in real life Bettie found Jesus while on vacation in Miami and dropped out of the business and the spotlight very quickly, and that’s just what happens in the movie. After the church scene we get one more of her preaching in Central Park before the credits roll. I would have appreciated a little more story here on what happened when she went back to NYC, what her friends did, etc.

Overall it’s a pretty good movie if you’re interested in the story, and is certainly worth watching if you’d like to see Gretchen Mol naked, and who wouldn’t want to see that?

Lazurus (Samuel Jackson), is a poor farmer and former blues musician whose wife has left him. One morning while taking out his garbage, he finds Rae, passed out, beaten, and in her underwear on his driveway. He undertakes to nurse her back to health, and then, as he says, “I aims to cure you of your wicked ways.” He chains her inside his house so that her nymphomania doesn’t tempt both her and himself.

Well, it’s the best movie ever made about a black man in the Deep South chaining a trashy white girl to a radiator.

That said, I kind of wish I hadn’t seen the trailer, because the first half of the movie is really just the trailer elongated.

Or I wish this had just been another faux trailer in GRINDHOUSE.

I don’t think nymphomania is a recognized medical condition anymore, but even if it was, this is some weird movie nymphomania.

You have to give them points for audacity. But, really, the Grindhouse overtones of the movie are something of a bait-and-switch, it’s really MY FAIR LADY with a little light bondage.

The acting is pretty impressive. Of course, we’ve come to expect nothing less from Samuel Jackson, but Christina Ricci is fearless, and Justin Timberlake actually does a good job.

Look for Kim Richards, the girl from ESCAPE FROM WITCH MOUNTAIN, all grown up.

I think the second half of the movie suffers somewhat because so much of the writing energy went into producing the template for the movie trailer.

At first, I thought Christina Ricci was pretty hot, but then, eventually, my fantasy shifted to wanting to buy and watch her eat a steak dinner, followed by a cheeseburger and a milkshake and a slice of pie. She is a scrawny thing. But you have to give points for a character who would consider Daisy Duke overdressed.

Somewhat bizarrely, she seems to get skinnier when she stops drinking, taking drugs, screwing—-and after she starts eating some of Sam Jackson’s good home cooking.

Or, to put it another way, she’s hot and curvy when she’s mostly naked; paradoxically, when she starts putting on more clothes, she seems too skinny.

This 2005 movie (DVD released 2006) is the true story of New Zealander Burt Munro, who, in the 1960s when he was in his 60s, set landspeed records at the Bonneville Salt Flats with his heavily modified 1924 Indian motorcycle.

His record still stands today, 200 MPH on a streamlined 1000 CC motorcycle.

This guy is sort of an aging MacGyver. He’s working on a shoestring budget. He makes his tires high-speed safe by cutting off the treads with a kitchen knife. His bike has a latch from his garden-gate on it.

Anthony Hopkins does an excellent job of capturing Burt Munro’s enthusiasm to do something nobody has ever done before, despite the danger.

This is a fun movie, but it’s also an inspirational movie. Despite a smattering of salty language, it’s good for young, and particularly old, alike. It’s a movie about following your dreams and never letting yourself be told you’re too old to do something. Yet it avoids being corny.

The DVD also contains the 1971 documentary about the real Burt Munro by the same director, Roger Donaldson

Knocked up is all about a guy that gets really lucky one night, only to find out his luck may have ran out about 8 weeks later and a girl who’s luck ran out the second she saw him nekkid the morning after. Now I realize that story doesn’t sound that complicated and to be honest it isn’t but in the right directors hands it can turn into a pretty funny story. Throw in a few twists and turns, some sentimental BS and you’ve got yourself a movie… Now that’s Italian!

Our Guy; Ben Stone (Rogan) is an out of work fat Canadian that works at home with his friends in hopes of making it rich by creating a web site that details hot female celebs in the raw… all the while not knowing that one already exists (censored to protect our hit count:), and he’s down to his last 200 bucks, so his life not so good. On the other side of the coin we have our Girl; Alison Scott (Heigl), an up and coming, smoking hot ‘E’ network on air personality with her professional life ahead of her… with only one small exception, she mooches off her sister and her husband (Mann & Rudd) by living in the pool house in their back yard, things are going pretty well for our Hotty. Do you see the wackiness that headed your way?

On the night of Alison’s promotion to on air personality from go-fer, she and her sister Debbie decide to head to the club to celebrate and that’s where she meets Ben. They dance, drink and make out at the bar and then the most unlikely thing in the world happens, this hot chick that would NEVER in a million years talk to anyone that looks like Rogan (he needs to thank his lucky stars he’s an actor), asks him to come back to her lilly pad for the night. He scores (Yay!), she craps out (Aww!) and the rest of the story just kind of tells itself.

The strongest parts of this movie by far are the dialog and Seth Rogan’s delivery (Alison’s not so much, you’ll see what I mean) but the supporting cast of… well basically the entire cast of Freaks and Geeks is also freaking awesome; Rudd and Mann have their moments at stealing the spotlight too but for me the best part of all is the cameo provided by Ryan Seacrest… I believe whole heartedly the lines he spews out of his mouth are exactly how he feels and he was funny as Ish delivering them. It’s nice to see celebs make fun of themselves and this movie has a few of those (cough..Carell.. cough) but Seacrest was the high point.

In short, the movie is funny but it also has a very dramatic tone to it as well that will suit anyone that has kids, or wants them. There are some moments in the movie that touched me and some others that had me howling, so a nice mix. I liked it enough to give it 4 stars but not quite enough to give it 5 so you should give it a shot if you like Apatow’s work… And, If you think 40 Year Old Virgin and Anchorman were the beginning of Judd’s genius and you didn’t get the Freaks and Geeks comment, you need to add that series to your queue as well and then you’ll see where his style really started.

Anywhoo, this famous photo makes it’s way to the US shores and the military gets a great idea, bring those 6 boys (well 3 now, 3 of them died within days of the photo being taken) home and have them go on a coast to coast tour telling their story, and asking the stateside Americans to invest in war bonds. By this time fighting a war on 2 fronts had nearly bankrupted our country and according to some of the points outlined in this film (book as well), if we didn’t find more money we would lose both wars. FDR had just died, the military didn’t have the resources or cash to build ships, tanks or even ammunition, and the war department was desperate to do whatever they had to, to get money, and this was the opportunity they’d been waiting for, and in their estimation could not have come at a better time.

Flag of Our Fathers follows the 3 survivors Ira Hayes (Beach), John Bradley (Phillippe), and Rene Gagnon (Bradford) as they go from place to place selling their story to the millions at home, that needed something to believe in, and some sign that all of the hundreds of thousands dead or dying was worth it. This late in the war the morale of the troops as well as the citizens at home was at an all time low and judging by the outcome, this was exactly what was needed for everybody, and the rest was as you say history.

The survivors deal with the pressure of the loss of their friends as well as the multi layered lie the government is telling it’s people, as much as they hate being a part of it, they know the need for the lie is even greater and their story means more to the folks back home then it ever could any of them. It’s a great book and the movie is a very solid representation of it. So if you liked the book you should like the movie.

Eastwood out does himself in my opinion with his direction and had it not been for his annoying score, I would say it was his best directing effort ever. I realize one has nothing to do with the other but come on Clint you need to give us a break! You did the same thing in Million Dollar Baby and it was annoying then too! We get it, your talented and you can do whatever you want… but enough is enough, pick one or the other! Now I’m curious to see how the second half of this epic will play out. In case you didn’t know, Clint filmed 2 movies back to back about the same battle. One from our perspective (this one) and one from the Japanese that’s due out next year called Letters from Iwo Jima. Who knows, that one may be the 5 star choice of the pair.