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.

This mockery of a remake takes place yet again in the quiet little town of Springwood Ohio; where the teenagers are attractive and  absolutely stupid. The movie starts in a diner, yes you heard me right, a diner, in a film about a serial killer in your dreams we start in a diner. Anyway in the first five minutes you see Freddy slice and dice his first victim, a depressed and sleep deprived  Thomas Dekker. After the first predictable bloodfest, we get to meet little Nancy Holbrook ( a cheap rip off of Nancy Thompson from the original) played by Rooney Mara, a girl who makes Kristen Stewart look like Ms.Congeniality. From there the plot follows the traditional slasher movie formula the main character and her friends are stalked for 90 minutes by a killer, who gives them no relief. Oh wait in addition to the formula let’s add a gritty subplot that just makes the audience uncomfortable, adding nothing of real value and overall enitrely detracting from the mystique of the original.

Another serious issue with the remake is Freddy himself. Robert Englund (the original Krueger) created a darkly comic killer, that still made the girl sitting next to you squirm in her seat. Jackie Earle Haley, although he dawns the hat, sweater and glove, was not and will never be Freddy Krueger. Haley didn’t deliver a single witty one liner that Krueger has become so famous for. Even the makeup detracts from the true visage of Freddy, the new designers tried to make him more like a true burn victim, and less like a monster from your own nightmares… something the original knew better than to try.

If you want to see Freddy Krueger kill self righteous teens, go watch the original, you’ll save yourself from this lack luster abomination of a  Nightmare!

Contributing Critic… C.C. Edwards

Danny Trejo was in the Robert Rodriguez-produced Predators earlier this summer, now he’s back, and Machete is a real film.

He’s called Machete because, well, he carries a machete. He’s a former Mexican Federale, double-crossed and left for dead. He’s fled to Texas, working as a day laborer, and there he’s approached by a rich businessman to kill a U.S. senator for money.

Machete!

If an action-adventure TV series (particularly science fiction) goes on long enough, they usually do “The Most Dangerous Game” episode. This was a 1924 short story by Richard Connell, where an eccentric millionaire kidnaps people to hunt them on his private island.

Here’s a Predator movie that goes along these lines.

Predators

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Pandora has an atmosphere, but humans can’t breath it without a mask. There are 9-foot tall blue humanoids in the jungle, the Na’Vi, hunter-gatherers. To interact with them, humans have genetically engineered, in effect, biological puppets of the Na’Vi, called avatars, grown in a vat with a mix of human and Na’Vi DNA. Humans go into a tank and are cybernetically connected to their avatar, which they can then use to explore Pandora. Yes, it’s kind of like an avatar in World of Warcraft or other computer games.

Avatar

Also Michelle Rodrieguez (Lost) is a tough-as-nails hovercraft-warship pilot.

Sully, once he is controlling his avatar, finds himself in a strange alien world. The jungle is a beautiful and dangerous place with life forms of all descriptions; flying creatures, others of dinosaur proportions. Even the grass glows with phosphorescence when you run through it at night.

Now comes the conflict: the corporation, and their mercenary-marines, want to relocate one tribe of Na’Vi from their big tree, because the biggest unobtanium deposit is right under it.

Sully, over time, has gone native. Through his avatar, he’s even fallen in love with one of the Na’Vi, Neytiri (played, through motion capture, by Zoe Saldana, who played Uhura in this summer’s J.J. Abrams Star Trek).

Yes, this is basically Dances With Wolves with blue aliens. Dances With Blue Aliens?

But James Cameron brings those little touches that set his movies apart. Here he’s constructed all sorts of future-tech, and a fully realized alien world. Its jungle planet reminds of the worlds created by science fiction authors I read as a kid, like Joe Haldeman, John Varley, and Alan Dean Foster. And there are a lot of elements of Aliens here (especially in the corporate and military trappings of the humans), as well as The Abyss, and, during one battle scene, even a nod to the conclusion of True Lies.

And I realized how dumbed-down big budget science fiction movies have gotten, with this summer’s Terminator Salvation and Star Trek. Both dumb fun, but not chock full of good science fiction ideas, like Avatar is.

So there’s a lot of exploring of the alien planet, and then an eventual showdown between the human marines and the natives, in the planet’s holy of holies, which oddly looks a bit like the Roger Dean cover artwork on old Yes record albums.

The computer animation is spectacular. Does it look “real?” Well, it looks really neat. It looks like the best computer animation you’ve ever seen, or the best next-generation computer game you’ve never played. There’s still a level of suspension of disbelief required, that’s equal if not more to when they did big-budget science fiction movie special effects with puppets and stop-animation.

But you couldn’t have done this movie any other way, and it creates an alien world unlike anything ever created on film. I wondered briefly, would it have been more seamless if the humans had been animated as well (as in Beowulf, for example). But no, having actors like Sigourney Weaver really there sells it.

It’s playing in some theaters in 3-D, in others in 2-D. Also 3-D IMAX. Is the 3-D worth it? Yes it is, but it’s not mandatory, I expect this will look look good on movie screens without 3-D, and also eventually on DVD and Blue-Ray.

The movie is 2 hours and 42 minutes long, so get comfortable in the theater.

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

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.

Set in the distant future Zombieland stars Columbus (Jesse Eisenberg), a young man on a quest to see his family in Ohio after the Zombie apocalypse has ravaged the entire world and he’s desperate to find one thing that feels like home. Columbus has a knack for talking to himself and along the way imparting pearls of wisdom for us the viewing audience should we ever find ourselves in a similar situation. Perfect example, Rule #1 Cardio… Zombies can’t eat what they can’t catch. There are plenty of these and they’re presented throughout the film, and they’re all hysterical.

Anywhoo, back to the point; Columbus encounters Tallahassee (Woody Harrelson) who’s only purpose in this now F’d up existence is the never ending search for a golden flaky, cream filled slice of heaven known to the common man as the Twinky. Which in case you didn’t know actually does have an expiration date of 25 to 30 days, so sorry to be the bearer of bad tidings but contrary to popular belief they do go bad. Our two heroes go from place to place in search of these spongy beauties and through this obsession they encounter the final characters of importance Wichita and Little Rock (Emma Stone, Abigail Breslin), who constantly gain the upperhand no matter what the situation may be. Con Artists it would seem come in all shapes and ages when the world has turned to sheeot and you only have a life expectancy of the afore mentioned Twinky, so these girls do what they have to do, including stealing the heroes ride… never rub another mans rhubarb. On that note I’ll stop before I accidentally give away a key piece of info and mess it up for everyone.

The plot is pretty simple at the heart of it all; Zombies chase and eat human kind and our 4 heroes kill zombies to stay alive, and along the way have some very hilarious misadventures, and find out that life is worth living even if its just for the little things.

Zombieland is very heavy on the funny and off the charts on the gore but it’s well worth your Friday night and the cash that it takes to see it. My only question to the readers is this… Is it just me or is Jesse Eisenberg a poor man’s Michael Cera? Or is Michael Cera a poor copy of Jesse Eisenberg? A thought to ponder while waiting in line because those two cats are totally interchangeable.

The Hangover

The premise is classic.  Doug, played by Justin Bartha, is getting married.  So, three of his friends are taking him to Vegas for the classic bachelors last stand a couple of days before the wedding.   These guys have a night in Vegas that is for the record books.

But the story is told in a very unique manner.  We do not see the night, we see the aftermath.  The boys wake up in a trashed hotel suite.  The groom is missing, so is one of the guys’ pants and underwear.   But they do have a few additions including a live tiger in the toilet, a chicken and a baby in the bar.   What follows is one absurb hysterical situation after another as they try to unravel what happened and find the missing groom in time to get him home for his wedding the next day.

This is not a huge name cast, nor a big well known director.   And I’ve seen some of the stuffy critics reviews.   Don’t believe any of them, this movie is flat out funny and looks to be one of the largest comedies of all time.   Unfortunately it probably means we’re going to get a run of progressively worse and worse sequels, but hey, enjoy this first one it rocks!

Go see it, grab it on DVD for your collection.  I’m sure we have a uncut unrated version to look forward to.    This gets 5 stars, I can’t recommend it highly enough.   And be sure to stick around for the credits.

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.

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

(500) Days of Summer

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This version of Star Trek comes from director J.J. Abrams of “Lost” fame.  Don’t worry, no smoke monster here.   What he does do is bring a much needed reboot to the Star Trek franchise that I would liken to what happened to the Batman franchise starting with Batman Begins.   Basically he threw out all preconceived notions of the franchiase and make a movie for today’s audience.   He does stay true to the characters for the most part, they are all quite recognizable with their trademark quotes, etc.   And the NCC 1701, the original Enterprise looks as you would expect, so nothing too radical there, but he does not limit himself to the known history of the existing franchise.

So what you end up with here is the original crew in their youth as they assume their roles on the Enterprise, but you also get a solid reboot of the whole franchise.   All of the new actors give great nods to their predecessors, playing off of some of their stereotypes and catch phrases.   They have a little fun with it and go tongue in cheek but stop well short of being campy.    I was worried about some of the casting.   I mean, I have to admit there were times that I was expecting to see John Cho (from Harold and Kumar) as Sulu plot a course for White Castle.   But it worked surprisingly well, I didn’t even hear ticking whenever I would see Sylar as Spock after a while.

This would be an easy movie to spoil.   I think you’ll enjoy it most by going in not really knowing much about what to expect and just sit back and enjoy it, so I’m not going to go into the storyline much.   What I will tell you is to expect a lot of absolutely killer effects, stunts, fighting and good old fashioned space battles.

We’ll bottom line it for you.   5 stars.   Go see it, then buy it on Blu-ray as soon as it’s out.   I don’t care whether you are a previous fan or a hardcore trekkie fanboy, if you love SciFi movies, I cant see how you could possibly not have a blast watching this movie.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

There’s a lot of fun cameos from various aspects of fandom, which I’m not going to list here, so as not to spoil it. And it ends with a caper sequence onto George Lucas’s Inner Sanctum.

This is a funny film, affectionate towards nerds (although harsher on Trekkies than Star Warsers…uh, whatever you call Star Wars fans).

And even for the non-fan, it’s funny, the humor doesn’t depend on you being up on How Many Parsecs Han Solo Did The Kessel Run in. But, if you are a fan, there’s a lot to chortle at.

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.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

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

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!