My Bloody Valentine 3-D

When slasher films dominated the local theater chains way back in the '80s, holidays seemed to be the sensible starting place to develop your fear franchise. Halloween had proven profitable, and Friday the 13th definitely scared up big bucks. So why not milk the rest of the festival calendar and see what transpires? Sadly, for every April Fool's Day, there was a Happy Birthday to Me.

For a long time, a cult has centered around one of the era's most talked about titles: My Bloody Valentine. With most of its violence cut out and a "blue collar" perspective on the carnage, it remains for many a good time guilty pleasure. Now Lionsgate has seen fit to remake the movie, using an old '50s gimmick as a selling point -- and you know what, it works like a blood-spattered charm.

The setup is familiar. Ten years ago, the only survivor of a horrible mining accident -- a man named Harry Warden -- went on an inhuman killing spree. When it was all over, 22 people were dead, with only good friends Alex (Kerr Smith), Sarah (Jaime King), Irene (Betsy Rue), and Tom (Jensen Ackles) left to tell the tale. Now, bodies are piling up once again, and ex-sheriff Burke (Tom Atkins) and local businessman Ben Foley (Kevin Tighe) think that Warden has returned. But Axel, now the current lawman, has a different theory. He's targeting Tom, recently returned from nearly a decade in self-imposed exile and desperate to sell the mine and having rekindled his romance with Sarah, who oddly enough, is married to his old buddy. Still, the visage of Warden looms large.

My Bloody Valentine 3-D is shameless. It panders. It exploits. It hits below the belt and keeps delivering cheap shots deliciously. It is one of the most blatantly gore-filled fright films in recent memory, starting off insane and just getting nastier from there. A lot of credit has to go to writers Todd Farmer and Zane Smith, as well as director Patrick Lussier. They have remained faithful to the 1981 original while recognizing the need to update the entire slasher genre for a 2009 audience. This isn't some film filled with stunt-inspired, Rube Goldbergian deaths. Instead, our killer metes out punishment with a pick axe and nothing else. But the brutality of his efforts, matched by the amazingly graphic special effects, excuses any lapse in slice and dice mythos.

This is a craven crowd pleaser, the kind of old school scarefest that should have teens tweaking in their seats while shouting back at the screen. Lussier and the gang leave nothing to chance. One sequence features a good five minutes of nearly continuous full frontal female nudity, including the standard slayer square off and butchering. Another finds Atkins wandering through a collection of hacked up corpses, offal strewn everywhere. And just when it looks like things will calm down and the script will focus on characterization and formulaic love triangles, our gas-masked fiend shows up and starts swinging again. This version of My Bloody Valentine must have the highest body count of any recent fright film -- maybe ever.

The 3-D also helps. The feeling of depth, plus the lack of restraint employed in using the dimensional device, really adds to the excitement. We don't get too many of the obvious Dr. Tongue moments, and the effect aids in giving the inevitable false shocks added emphasis. Still, Lussier knows what gets butts in theater seats and there is sure to be some buzz about the ample arterial spray on display. My Bloody Valentine 3-D actually rivals several of the Saw films in the amount of vein juice spilled in pursuit of a plotline -- and it's infinitely more fun. All remakes should follow this unapologetically in-your-face effort.

Aka My Bloody Valentine 3D.



Thank God it's not Arbor Day.

RocknRolla

Here's some good news for Guy Ritchie fans. RocknRolla gives off the impression that the once-heralded filmmaker isn't trying so hard any more to jolt, confuse, stimulate, and entertain his demanding followers. As a result, he delivers his most jolting, confusing, stimulating, and flat-out entertaining picture since Snatch in 2000.

RocknRolla is sexy, fast, loose, smart, and extremely funny. It's crammed with colorful criminals, which Ritchie and cinematographer David Higgs backlight to great effect. It chokes on delightfully screwy schemes, which the director and his editor James Herbert slice, tape, and test drive at breakneck speeds. And that's the key. It keeps moving, hardly caring if you are keeping up.

Archie (Mark Strong), our narrator, works for London kingpin Lenny Cole (Tom Wilkinson), who double-crosses charming thugs One Two (Gerard Butler) and Mumbles (Idris Elba) on, of all things, a semi-lucrative real estate deal. As can be the case with Ritchie, this deal is the tip of a filthy, dirty iceberg that sweeps up Russian money-man Uri (Karel Roden), crooked accountant Stella (Thandie Newton), and One Two's loyal crew, the Wild Bunch.

Ritchie, who wrote the Rock script, keeps us guessing which game will eventually take center stage. Will it be the house One Two and Mumbles hope to acquire? Or will it be the Euros Lenny owes to Yuri? How about Yuri's missing painting, which we're never shown, a la the glowing whatever-you-think-it-is in Marsellus Wallace's briefcase)?

Or will Ritchie's focus fall on Johnny Quid (Toby Kebbell), Lenny's oft-mentioned rock star son-in-law with a debilitating drug habit? Ritchie has said in interviews it wasn't his intention to tell Johnny's story, but Kebbell so effectively steals this show that the director had little choice. We're witnessing the birth of a star in Rock, as Kebbell unleashes a wild-card performance from his gnarly gut. When he's on screen, it's impossible to look away.

And that's impressive when you consider the eye-catching insanity Ritchie attempts in Rock. One Two and Mumbles pull off the most gentle carjacking you'll see on screen this year. Later, they endure the longest (and strangest) footrace, as they are relentlessly pursued by unstoppable Russian war veterans. It's one of many scenes played for big laughs.

Ritchie has gone back to writing lyrical dialogue, tough-guy poetry delivered by a hardened but extremely polished cast. And for the first time in a long time, you can understand almost every spoken word. Butler's quite at home in Ritchie's underbelly. Newton manages to be more than eye candy, and Kebbell's an exhilarating treat.

Near the end of the film, I realized I was going to miss these original characters. So, apparently, is Ritchie. A brazen title card dropped before the credits promises more adventures with Archie, Johnny, and the Wild Bunch. Even more good news for fans of Ritchie and RocknRolla.

Aka Rock N Rolla.



We're gonna rock thiis tunnel, rock it inside out.

Last Chance Harvey

A film so mild-mannered it only occasionally registers a pulse, Joel Hopkins' Last Chance Harvey is best viewed as proof that not all filmed entertainment these days is nihilistic and grim. Occasionally there are still movies made about gentle, middle-aged people who have had a (mildly) hard time of things but still manage to find love in the gloaming of their years. The problem here being that mildness of heart does not translate into quality of art, or even entertainment.

The Hallmark-ready story begins with Harvey Shine (Dustin Hoffman), a borderline jerk of a guy who appears to have shut down on life by the time we find him. A jingle writer who once hoped for greater things musically, he's on his way to London where his daughter is marrying into a family that seems to have a greater affinity for his ex-wife's new husband than himself.

Set up on the y-axis of the meet-cute diagram is Kate Walker (Emma Thompson), a woman of depressed disposition who works at Heathrow when she's not fielding phone calls from a batty and lonely mother. Kate is the sort of character who is always being pushed into romance by co-workers who worry about her, but is sick of being disappointed by love, so would just rather stick with a good book and give the love a pass.

After far too long a setup, in which both Kate and Harvey (but particularly Harvey) undergo a series of increasingly uncomfortable humiliations, the two are finally tossed together in the same airport restaurant. Kate is getting over a particularly painful blind date experience, while Harvey has just left the wedding early to fly back to New York for work, only to find out that there's no job waiting for him anyway. And his flight was cancelled. Harvey does the logical thing: start drinking and flirt with the attractive woman reading a book over a lonely salad.

The budding romantic interlude that follows would have been easier to swallow had writer/director Hopkins not spent so much time establishing Harvey as an exceedingly unpleasant brand of jerk. Kate seems perfectly fine, a nice woman who has simply had a run of bad luck; it's no wonder that an exhausted and at-wit's-end man would fall for her. But the witty, intensely romantic Harvey who emerges after his moment of crisis is so unrecognizable from the self-centered guy who had so recently inhabited his skin that it's a hard transformation to swallow.

Hopkins establishes an unhurried mood early on, and so it's comparatively easy to watch Harvey and Kate wander the streets of London -- a strange place in the film's world, where Paddington Station appears to be a stone's throw from the Thames -- and bat light humor and mild flirtations back and forth. But the film is too light a creation to make believable their sudden infatuation, burying the glimmers of romance underneath schmaltz and manufactured obviousness.

Having both been relegated for too long to the status of prominently credited quality supporting actors, it's wonderful for both Hoffman and Thompson that they are allowed to take hold of the screen and leave nobody with any doubts that they are stars in every sense of the word. Of course, it would have been nice had they chosen a better vehicle for such an endeavor, but you can't have everything in life.



Tonight... make it Michelob Light.

Just Another Love Story

The narrator in writer/director Ole Bornedal's Danish thriller Just Another Love Story -- a film that's probably too aware of its genre signifiers -- rhetorically asks the audience "A beautiful woman and a mystery. Isn't that how any film noir starts?" Indeed that's true, at least for the better ones. And for a time, Bornedal's cheerfully dark story hits the right admixture of seductive danger that it doesn't matter how many other films and books it might remind you of. Bornedal at least knows his noir well enough to remember that the more accomplished genre entries don't just have a femme fatale with a past, they also feature a grade-A schnook, the kind of bona fide sap who believes everything a dark-haired beauty tells them and thinks he can handle himself. They never can.

Bornedal's sap is Jonas (Anders W. Berthelsen), a police crime scene photographer who lives with his wife and two children in some dead-soul Copenhagen high-rise that he can't afford and still smells of paint. It's a grim life, photographing dead people while his colleagues make self-consciously bad jokes and his midlife crisis churns in overdrive. But Bornedal -- after a stylized opening sequence that tosses out a trio of teaser scenes, including one showing Jonas bleeding to death in the rain -- doesn't do much with Jonas' ennui before throwing the other woman at him and cranking up the noir. It's a whopper of an entry, with Julia's car smashing into Jonas's, after which she slips into a coma and awakes with no memory to find Jonas saying that he's her lover Sebastian, whom her family had heard about but never met. In the first of several hard-to-swallow developments, Jonas is mistaken by Julia's family for Sebastian when he shows up at the hospital to check up on her, and he never corrects them -- he's got a fatale to fall for.

As fatales go, Julia (Rebecka Hemse) is top tier. Hemse presents her character as less the standard-issue sultry risk-vixen than a fragile and damaged soul, etched with an underlying tone of hauteur from her surprisingly upscale background. Her performance provides a deep well of mystery that the rest of the film's story draws heavily from, propping up some weaker plot elements. Even though it's hard to buy Jonas' instant transformation from family man into obsessed lover, Hemse's soulful, wounded-bird presence makes his interest at least plausible. Not hurting things is the fact that Julia's family is incredibly wealthy and quite taken with him; also, she doesn't mind making love to Jonas while still in her hospital bed.

Since Jonas is a sap, of course, he neglects to care about a few things. Like the real (and apparently much more butch) Sebastian, shot dead in Hanoi where Julia may have been working as a drug mule. Like Jonas' wife (wonderfully played by Charlotte Fich) and children. Like the fellow in the wheelchair and the bandaged face hanging around the hospital and staring at him from a distance. If the script had set up a more desperate pre-Julia situation for Jonas to flee from, instead of just a garden-variety midlife crisis, then his illogic rush into oblivion would have made more sense. But by the time Jonas has become thoroughly enmeshed in Julia's life, hoping the whole time that she never regains her memory and realizes that he's not Sebastian, the film has turned into more of a waiting game to see exactly how Jonas will get his comeuppance.

With all its knowing nods towards genre conventions, solid performances, and chilly air of Danish gloom, Just Another Love Story could have been a perfectly fine B-grade thriller, but Bornedal overestimates his cleverness, and after a time his little plot stingers become so perfunctory as to be distracting instead of adrenaline-ratcheting. More Billy Wilder and less David Fincher might have helped.

Aka Kærlighed på film.



Love on the rocks?

Pride and Glory

Police thrillers these days aspire to replicate the CSI formula on the big screen. Not Pride and Glory. It wants to be this generation's Serpico.

Director Gavin O'Connor certainly understands the difference between the two. Though Glory lays out a complex yet solvable mystery, it's far more interested in loyalty and the familial bonds that exist among lifetime police officers. It also wears its adoration for the badge -- and those who wear it -- on its sleeve.

O'Connor co-wrote the film with Joe Carnahan, the screenwriter of the similarly gritty Narc and the bullet-ridden Smokin' Aces. These men possess such intimate knowledge of "The Job" that I'd be willing to bet either or both have police officers in their immediate family.

In the film, Edward Norton, who can be great but is capable of coasting on his inner fire, clamps down on the multi-faceted role of Ray Tierney. One brother in a family full of cops, Ray wallows in the NYPD's Missing Persons bureau, far removed from the investigative successes enjoyed by older sibling Francis (Noah Emmerich) and impulsive brother-in-law Jimmy (Colin Farrell).

O'Connor gradually clues us in to Ray's checkered past, which involves a headline-grabbing scandal that put him on the stand where he thought he'd have to testify against fellow officers. As you probably know, most cops would rather eat a bullet than rat out a brother in arms, so Ray does the right thing -- by NYPD standards -- and kills his career instead. When four cops from Francis' precinct are gunned down in a botched raid, however, Ray's father (Jon Voight) pulls his talented son back into the fold to investigate, even though clues start pointing back to Jimmy and other cops who are under Francis's watch.

Glory methodically lays out its details, revealing minor surprises instead of forcing major twists. This, I imagine, is how an actual murder case plays out, with theories and hunches trumping grandiloquent confessions from weeping perpetrators.

The textured story is stitched together with a thick emotional fabric that is weaved by the excellent cast. Norton takes the lead, delivering a raw and subtle performance that bares his character's conflicted soul. The actor's commitment trickles down through the ensemble, sweeping up Voight and Emmerich (both first-rate) and even elevating Farrell to a level rarely seen from the volatile actor. To his credit, Farrell's enjoying a good year. His turn in the black comedy In Bruges was equal parts sympathetic and psychotic. He's growing as an actor and making smarter choices in roles, which can only extend his career.

O'Connor, for his part, makes a number of intelligent decisions. He doesn't hurry his action, giving his absorbing characters room to breathe. He shoots a sullied version of New York that's organic and real, not the polished Hollywood version we too often get on screen. Credit cinematographer Declan Quinn for diving into slummy tenements and low-lit police precincts, as well as modest suburban homes which officers could afford on an NYPD salary. O'Connor makes one false step near the picture's end, and for that brief moment, Pride doesn't feel right. I'm more than willing to go along with him, however, for the greater good.

Because of its subject matter -- noble cops investigating crooked brethren -- O'Connor's Pride reminded me of The Departed, though in truth I preferred this to Martin Scorsese's Oscar-winner. Pride isn't flashy, tricky, or showy. It doesn't fall back on incessant double-crosses and last-second betrayals to confuse its audience. When a script is as good as Carnahan's and O'Connor's, it doesn't have to.



Something to be proud of.

Vicky Cristina Barcelona

Woody Allen's Vicky Cristina Barcelona, the venerable director's fourth consecutive film made outside of the U.S. (and more importantly, outside of New York City), is made up of scenes featuring well-spoken, awkwardly-placed rich people drinking wine, eating excellent Spanish cuisine, and visiting beautifully-aged sets that range from odd museums to classic villas to an amusement park that looks too gorgeous to run electricity through. As if one needed more reason to love Barcelona, it now turns out they have a Tilt-A-Whirl.

When previously in London, Allen used all sharp tones, imagery wise. Even the shopfronts had perfect diction. At first, this yielded excellent results (Match Point) and the stage was set for a resurrection of the eternal Kvetch. Allen's two follow-ups, Scoop and Cassandra's Dream, debunked those hopes, proving that very same sharpness can lead to the visually mundane. In Spain, however, everything already has a built-in romance to it. The old-style Spanish houses, the Gaudi architecture, the auditory splendor of Spanish guitar playing: You're supposed to swoon on cue and you do.

When dealing with Allen personas as expectedly pretentious as Vicky (Rebecca Hall) and Cristina (Scarlett Johansson... again), two American students on holiday in Barcelona, the robust decor of the country helps. The two girls are enjoying a good glass of red when they are approached by José (Javier Bardem), who invites them for two days in Oviedo, full of good wine, sightseeing, and lovemaking. Vicky has a fiancé back in New York; Cristina warns him that he'll still have to seduce her.

As may be expected, both are seduced and, indeed, enjoy a round in the sack with the Spanish painter. Vicky sweeps away her romp with the artist but Cristina sees José as her perfect man: an unpredictable one. Her relationship with the painter gets a swift kick in the soft stuff when Maria Elena (a fantastic Penélope Cruz), José's ex-wife, shows up and takes both her ex and his new flame as her lovers. The arrival of Vicky's groom-to-be (Chris Messina) puts the whole farrago in a pressure cooker.

Despite all these messy emotional double-downs, Vicky Cristina Barcelona has a breezy skip to it. Its central quandary (Is stability more important than true passion?) isn't spelled out quite as heavily as it has been in Allen's similar both-sides-of-the-issue films, allowing the story to immerse the viewer on its own terms. The voice-over narration, courtesy of Christopher Evan Welch, lends a literary timbre to the film, rendering the narrative tone into something like a short story by Hemingway.

And yet the film never seems at home in this calm. The picture has a restlessness to it that often upsets the atmosphere of Allen's writing and the general ease of the performances. Perhaps it's Cruz and Bardem, agents of such chaotic force and intensity that Allen's film simply can't realign them to his sang-froid dialectic. Or perhaps it's Allen himself, unable to decide whether he's interested in an answer or just obsessed with the argument. Either way, the result is a palpable uneasiness that inflects both the film's lofty aspirations and its debonair composure.

This anxiousness doesn't bore, nor does it signal a complete misfire. After a career that covers 40-odd films, Vicky Cristina Barcelona certainly isn't one of Allen's best, but it's a country mile ahead of the bevy of mediocrity that showed up from the late '90s until Match Point. Like the man behind it, the film seems unsure of its bearings. Vicky shows Allen deflecting his chapter-and-verse filmmaking for better and worse and, in a career that was already cemented as legendary by the early '90s, that counts for something.



Mmmm, tapas.

The Wrestler

For those who have been following Darren Aronofsky's career since he broke out in 2000 with Requiem for a Dream, his latest work, The Wrestler, might very well come as a bit of a shock. Unlike Requiem and 2006's The Fountain, the film does not garner its power from hyperactive editing (the former) nor grandiose flourishes of the patently ludicrous (the latter). Shot in grainy 16mm by the estimable Maryse Alberti, a cinematographer who has spent the last few years shooting documentaries, The Wrestler realigns Aronofsky as a director concerned with the slow burn of American neo-realism more than hyperactive pseudo-transcendentalism.

It is also the resurrection, renovation, and reinvention of Mickey Rourke in the King Lear of self-reflexive roles. Walking hunched with his long strands of bleached-blonde hair covering his face until he puts it up under a hairnet, revealing an unsightly hearing aid, Rourke's Randy "The Ram" Robinson, an aging legend of the 1980s pro-wrestling boom, walks like a grand warrior just starting to get used to the knife in his back after years of minor shows as a nostalgic draw. After suffering a heart attack, Randy declines an upcoming rematch with his erstwhile nemesis The Ayatollah and tries to clean himself up, taking a weekend shift at the local deli counter, ensuring that his landlord won't evict him from his trailer.

The Ram's step away from the spotlight mean's a step towards a life. A relationship with a stripper named Pam (a stunning Marisa Tomei) offers a mirror for the Ram's addiction to both his physical prowess and his deflated ego, but a short-lived reunion with his neglected daughter Stephanie (Even Rachel Wood) reveals the specter of darker times. After a heartbreaking confessional on the Jersey pier, things begin to look good for father and daughter, whose rocky past is hinted around here, but an inevitable relapse into the life of fame ends that quickly, complete with cocaine and a quickie in a bar bathroom with some primo Jersey trash. "I don't know why I do this" the Ram admits as his daughter severs all ties. Her reply is simple, honest and believable: "Because you are a fuck-up."

"The '90s sucked" Randy muses to Pam at a bar. He's talking about the death of macho music brought on by Kurt Cobain but Rourke himself could be channeling anything from his divorce from Wild Orchid co-star Carré Otis to his ill-fated return to boxing. There have been a few great male lead performances this year: Benicio del Toro in Che, Sean Penn in Milk, Frank Langella in Frost/Nixon, and Philip Seymour Hoffman im Synecdoche, New York spring to mind. But Rourke towers over these performances in terms of sheer prowess. Immensely physical and unfathomably personal, the role of the Ram calls forth decades of bad decisions and psychological bruising for Rourke and he stares deep into his own Bermuda triangle to face the Ram's inability to say goodbye to the mat. His final speech to the cheering masses shakes the very ground the theater is built on.

The Wrestler, like Clint Eastwood's underrated, razor-sharp Gran Torino, is a rare form of critical Americana. Here, Aronofsky's focus and singularity is nothing short of (wait for it) a drop kick to a career many perceived to be adrift in a sea of metaphysical pabulum. Watch the intimacy he gives the scenes between the Ram and his fellow wrestlers, the horror when he confronts an Elk's Lodge full of other retired wrestlers, the fascination given the post-show check-up. Building on Robert Siegel's smart, acute script, Aronofsky lines the physical wreckage with existential dread and a weighing fatalism. Climbing the ropes one final time to deliver the RamJam, his signature move, Randy "The Ram," whose actual name is Robin, channels everything into one moment that haunts modern America. Most of all, it confronts our greatest fear: that no one is watching.



Shoulda watched Beyond the Mat.

New in Town

Minnesota is a very cold state. Because of that, the populace is susceptible to a number of maladies the come with the chilly climate, one of which is hypothermia, the symptoms of which, thanks to the Renée Zellweger/Harry Connick Jr. romantic comedy, New in Town, a moviegoer can experience in the comfort of a heated movie theater and not have to be troubled to take a biplane to Duluth.

When hypothermia is first experienced, you gasp, your skin begins to cool, your muscles tense and shiver, and your blood pressure increases. This happens almost immediately in New in Town when we are introduced to tight-assed Miami business executive Lucy Hill (Zellweger), sent to New Ulm, Minnesota by her employer to close down a local food manufacturing plant. (As she tells a factory worker, "I'm here to do a job, not to make friends.") Lucy is so stiff and uptight, she recalls an ancient film performance like Elizabeth Allen's priggish and cool New Englander sent to Hawaii and thawed out by John Wayne in Donovan's Reef -- or maybe even Diane Keaton in Baby Boom.

You can see where this is going. With such a well-worn story line, no one feels much vested in such a stale, old, and bankrupt premise. Zellweger comes across a collection of cartoonish Minnesota denizens, so completely repellent in their idiocy and cornball stereotypes that it's hard to believe Bob Dylan and Roger Maris where conceived within the borders of the state. Lucy encounters the okey-dokey-perky Blanche (Siobhan Fallon) and the surly plant manger Stu (J.K. Simmons). But the focus of her lip-puffed, snarky contempt is the bearded hunk of union leader Ted (Harry Connick Jr.), whom she encounters the day of her arrival, only to end up arguing about Fergie and beer over a meatloaf dinner. The two cardboard cutouts meet cute, hate each other, and fall in love. Of course Lucy thaws out and gradually learns to love the coat-clad New Ulmites. It's a Gran Torino for the North County.

After some time one becomes hyper-aware of the direction of Danish director Jonas Elmer (Nynne), here with his first American film. Subtlety and finesse are lost in his over-strident directing style, which consists largely of a barrage of close-ups, punctuated by what Elmer considers a laugh line and then a Pinteresque pause to make room for the rolling wave of laughs from the theater. Unfortunately those laughs don't arrive. In the script by Kenneth Rance and C. Jay Cox, the jokes are bald and obvious, strained and cheap -- Elmer gets a lot of mileage out of Lucy having to pee outdoors and an extended joke about erect nipples. All who venture into this one are skating on thin ice indeed. Bundle up.



I'd recommend a jacket.

Taken

Of all the men you would expect to tear through Europe to save his daughter, leaving a trail of dead like Jonestown in his wake, Liam Neeson would be relatively low on the list, coming in somewhere between Chevy Chase and Zero Mostel. Neeson has always been known for playing men of impassioned rhetoric, guys whose tongues are more powerful than their physical prowess. So, watching the man who played Alfred Kinsey, Jean Valjean, and Michael Collins take two large nails and slam them into a another man's thighs before connecting jumper cables to said nails might leave a viewer understandably flabbergasted.

This is just one of the actions taken by Bryan Mills (Neeson) when he receives a call from his daughter (Maggie Grace) as she is being kidnapped by Albanian sex-traffickers while on vacation in France. An ex-CIA man, Mills uses a few decades worth of weapons knowledge, intelligence training, and fighting styles to basically purge France of any and all Albanian abducters to find his sugarplum and return her to the loving arms of his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) and her absurdly rich second husband (Xander Berkeley).

There is a small preamble to the action involving Mills 'distrust of his only daughter being able to handle going abroad and some risible nonsense about Mills saving a pop star's life, both of which approach insufferable. The same could be said of the film's concluding scenes, which follow a climactic battle on a Parisian yacht. But director Pierre Morel, who directed the likewise action-toned District B13, hits the accelerator early and doesn't give it much of a rest through the films 94-minute runtime.

Morel's smartest decision would be placing most of the action, and the success of the film, on the shoulders of Neeson, who makes a startlingly convincing action hero, bringing a domineering stoicism and a rattling charm to Mills. While the film purposefully never gives us a real arch-nemesis besides, possibly, the entire nation of Albania, the director stays firmly focused on Mills as the hero. He gives Neeson some genuine moments to play-up a scene or two, especially in the film's most tense sequence when Mills tortures the wife of an old friend whom he outs as a traitor supplying information to the Albanians.

Written by French action auteur Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen, the ingénue behind the Transporter franchise, Taken is steadier and more streamlined than Kamen's box office juggernaut but it misses its mark in the realm of physicality. No matter how much fun it is to watch Neeson dispose of four dozen or so European scumsicles, it never quite hits the visceral and marketable fighting aerobatics that come naturally to an action star like Jason Statham. The action is engaging but rarely exciting; the drama heftier but still far from convincing. I blame Albania.



Don't open it, it's Gwyneth Paltrow's head!

The Uninvited

As part of our ongoing battle with mortality, ghosts have become a comforting conduit to "the other side." No longer are they purely spectral poltergeists bent on driving the living insane. Instead, if you believe most of the movies made since the arrival of Eastern horror on these Western shores, these supernatural envoys are hell-bent on warning the living about the unholy terrors crawling beneath their very noses. In the case of the burnt-up phantom at the center of this remake of the Korean hit A Tale of Two Sisters, the message is loud and clear: Stay away from the incessantly dull American version.

After 10 months in a psychiatric hospital, young Anna Rydell (Emily Browning) returns to her family home in Maine. There she must face a distant father (David Strathairn), sarcastic sister Alex (Arielle Kebbel), and the newest member of the clan, nurse turned girlfriend Rachel Summers (Elizabeth Banks). You see, Anna's mother got very sick -- so sick that Dad had to hire a blond bimbette to care for her. Naturally, their relationship turned sexual, and all Anna remembers a bell, a fire, a horrific death, and a stint in the loony bin. Now that she's back, she wants to remember what happened -- and all signs point to Rachel as some kind of brash black widow. Anna is convinced that her Dad's new galpal is out to destroy the family, and there are ghosts from a supernatural realm who appear to agree.

The Uninvited is piffle, a Lifetime family drama masquerading as a stand-up big screen horror film. To call it generic would be an understatement -- it's so obvious in what it tries to accomplish that it practically provides a roadmap. Directed with little or no panache by Britain's Guard brothers (Charles and Thomas) and featuring one of the most overused twists in the entire Sixth Sense school of scares, this is a movie made up solely of false shocks and dull stretches of pseudo seriousness. There are frequently times when we're not sure if this is supposed to be The Grudge or Shoot the Moon. The tone is so uneven, the narrative threads so patently unraveled, that there's no way to get a handle on what is happening.

In the Korean original, the ambiguity of what is going on lends the finale a far less substantive spin. We can go back over events and realize how much was real and how much was manipulated and manufactured. Here, the script simply gives up the whodunit set up, puts Banks in the spotlight as the main suspect, and then gamely tosses red herrings at the screen. By the time of the big reveal, we don't nod in appreciation as much as shrug our shoulders in disbelief. The Guards do so little to prepare for the big unveiling that the moment comes off as confusing, and ultimately counterproductive, to everything we've seen before.

And it's too bad really, because Banks does a very good job at playing implied evil. She finds little ways of reading her open-ended lines to convince us that she's no good. Strathairn is given the thankless job of playing one of those out-of-touch fathers who can't help but ignore everything his pleading, desperate daughters say. As the heroines, Browning and Kebbel are willing, if grating at times. With the need to play most of the secrets very close to the vest, the performances must really be convincing. In the case of our young leads, they're just adequate. In fact, everything about this flaccid film needed to be tweaked a notch or two. As it stands, it barely delivers a single shiver.



Certainly deserved an invitation.

Three Monkeys

The telling differences between Three Monkeys, the fifth film -- and third released stateside -- by Turkish auteur Nuri Bilge Ceylan, and its predecessor, 2006's superb Climates, can be found in a singular, central scene that appears in both films. One of Climates' most haunting moments involves a feral bout of copulation between the film's lead and an ex-flame, a violent and rigorous flailing of limbs and crashing of furniture. Three Monkeys finds the beginnings of a similarly vicious row between an adulterous wife and her husband, fresh off a nine month stint in the big house. But where the round between Climates' lovers endures, suggesting the savagery of their ruinous relationship, the wife and her husband flame out before anything really gets started, the specter of the lady's affair revealing itself in their halted catharsis.

The wife is Hacer (Hatice Aslan) and her husband, Eyüp, is played by the brooding Yavuz Bingol. Eyüp took a year in prison to save the political career of his employer, a politician named Servet (Ercan Kesal), who accidentally ran over a woman when he fell asleep at the wheel on a dark road. As she watches the AK Party and Prime Minister Erdoğan take power on television, Hacer flounders about what to do with her son Ismael (Rifat Sungar), a layabout who gets in trouble with gangs and drinks too much. She finds escape through an affair with Servet, only a few months before her husband is set to return, which her son walks in on one day.

The Istanbul-born Ceylan retains almost all the benchmarks that made him such an instantly-provocative filmmaker when Distant premiered in the U.S. in early 2004: extraordinary, prolonged shots, subtle performances, restrained dialogue, simple yet impeccably-calculated editing. Of the things you first notice about Three Monkeys, the change in the director's aesthetic scheme is the most blatant, his imagery now bathed in sun-drenched yellows and dull oranges rather than the ubiquitous wintery gloom that typified his two previous features. The change is intriguing and entrancing at times, especially considering that the director explores interiors here more than he has before.

What Monkeys lacks is Ceylan's trademark punctuation of unsettling, emotional pangs. It makes the minor eruptions of catharsis feel empty and somewhat expected rather than shattering. Working with Climates lenser Gökhan Tiryaki once again, Ceylan has made a technically-assured, intelligently-acted feature but has added more narrative totems than his understated style can account for. Few of the additional pylons ever seem to matter or pay off, chiefly the ghost of Eyüp and Hacer's other son who intermittently appears for no reason.

This makes it even harder to bear the film's final quarter when Servet casts Hacer away. The arrangement struck between the stoic husband and a local coffee boy in the film's concluding scenes toes to ignite the notion of a world bereft of morals but simply acts as the film's logical conclusion. Thematically unconvincing, the director nonetheless continues to frame action and space beautifully with the morose candor of an elegy. Whether Three Monkeys is a disappointment or not depends largely on how (or whether) you've viewed the filmmaker's work to date. That it is vastly preferable to the majority of films released so far in January is less a matter of opinion than a matter of common sense.

Aka Üç maymun.



We're gonna need some more monkeys.

Outlander

We are apparently in the midst of a minor Viking renaissance. In 2007, Marcus Nispel followed up his successful revamp of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre with the little seen Pathfinder. Centering on an orphaned Norsemen, the Native Americans who raised him, and their battle against returning Scandinavian hordes, it was not a box office success. Heck, one imagines that most people reading this opening paragraph don't even know the movie existed. Now comes Outlander, a surreal sci-fi link up of Alien, Predator, Species, and Beowulf. When it stays in space, it works. When it hits the ancient lands of Odin however, it flops around like fetid smoked fish.

On his way back to his home planet on a funereal mission, extraterrestrial Kainan (James Caviezel) discovers a deadly alien beast known as a Moorwen onboard his ship. It causes the vessel to crash land in Norway circa the 7th century. After getting his bearings and sending a distress signal, Kainan begins to explore the area. He is soon trapped by warrior Wulfric (Jack Huston) and taken to the fortified stronghold of King Rothgar (John Hurt) and his wild, unwieldy daughter Freya (Sophia Myles).

With the arrival of an "outlander" everyone is on edge. And to make matters worse, it seems like someone -- or something -- has destroyed the village of enemy leader Gunnar (Ron Perlman). Now he is vowing vengeance. Soon, all the Vikings are teaming up to take on the bloodthirsty Moorwen. Of course, they need Kainan's help, as only his advanced ideas and strategies can save them from the terrifying, murderous fiend.

In the realm of specious speculative fiction, Outlander out-befuddles Battlefield Earth. If movies can be classified as certifiably insane, this one would get the Baker Act almost immediately. Howard McCain, the driving force behind this oddball juxtaposition of Hagar the Horrible and monster movie schlock, must have been experimenting with highly hallucinogenic Swedish meatballs when he manufactured this Valhalla fever dream. It's just that bizarre.

Like oil and water, the two concepts being crammed together here don't necessarily mix. The alien stuff is interesting in a tolerable Man Who Fell to Middle Earth kind of way. Whenever McCain takes us to Kainan's planet and the battle with the Moorwen, we get lost in all the interstellar overdriving. But the Viking stuff is just laughable, looking like a Renaissance Faire that forgot to pay its dry cleaning bill. No one appears Nordic. Instead, we get a selection of British and American actors decked out in bad beards and leather body armor. Only Hellboy himself Ron Perlman looks at home here which is more indicative of the actor's "otherworldly" looks than careful casting.

How McCain, a man who previously helmed two TV police procedurals and a goofball kids film, got the green light to make this movie will probably remain a mystery. He must be really good when it comes to pitching his projects. Caviezel, who still seems to be channeling his previous messianic role, makes for an interesting action lead. He's more of a compatriot than a conqueror. The fight sequences do have some sizzle, but we really want to understand more about Kainan's far off distant world. The sloppy CG shots of the Moorwen invasion are intrinsically engaging. The Vikings on the other hand are so overloaded with testosterone and rage that you'd swear they invented steroids. Their brawny, beefy response to everything grows old quickly.

Had it aimed much higher (totally somber and serious) or a helluva lot lower (lots of bawdiness, blood, and gore) Outlander might have worked. Even the odd melding of eras and ideas could have gelled. As it stands, we are left awash in inexplicable incompleteness, rendering the entire concept uninvolving and inert.



It's the director. He's just resting.

Of Time and the City

"We love the place we hate/We hate the place we love/We leave the place we hate/Then spend a lifetime trying to regain it." Director Terence Davies recites these words as his camera moves across a church edifice like an incantation in his moving and emotional paean to the lost Liverpool of his youth, the impassioned documentary Of Time and the City.

Davies' films (Distant Voices, Still Lives; The Long Day Closes) have always looked to the past as both memory and memory's sometimes distorted recollections. Much like last year's My Winnipeg of Guy Maddin, Davies looks at both the past of a city and his own past there, twisting both into a funhouse mirror. Maddin, of course, barely gets out of his childhood alive, but for Davies, his Liverpool is a state of lost innocence killed when modernity and puberty set in. He quotes Shelley in the opening shot, an image of a slowly opening curtain in a movie house, "The happy highways where I went and cannot come again." Davies is already placing Liverpool as a mythic town of his childhood and boldly states, "If Liverpool did not exist, it would have to be invented."

Davies covers his formative years 1945 to 1969, liberally quoting not only Shelley, but also a collection of quotables from Joyce to Chekhov to Jung as he interweaves archival clips and newsreel footage of Liverpool and post-WWII England around it. Davies' narrative voice is mildly sarcastic and heavily melancholy as he recalls his golden youth, peppering the film with Mahler, Sibelius, and Bruckner, along with The Hollies, The Spinners, and Peggy Lee.

The film is divided into two sections, the first section outlining the wonderful childhood days in his city and the second section showing the inevitable destruction of his youthful wonders. Linking the sections are film clips of children in strollers pushed around the Liverpool sidewalks as the backgrounds change from one era to the next.

Davies introduces his childhood recollections by saying, "Here was my whole world -- home school and the movies." Of Time and the City offering a wonderful collection of footage from the 1950s as Davies recalls his trips to the cinema with an evocative series of theater marquees and television footage of movie premieres ("At seven, I saw Gene Kelly in Singin' in the Rain and loved the movies and swallowed them whole."), Liverpudlians on the beaches and partaking of the amusement piers, clips of British football games (Davies remembering his mother in the kitchen listening to the games on the radio and shouting out the scores), his love of wrestling with clips of games from Liverpool Stadium and his burgeoning homosexuality (his interest in wrestling making him aware of "dark desires which thrilled and compelled"), and the oppressive church, which tipped him to a lifestyle decision ("Caught between canon and carnal law, I said goodbye to my girlhood").

Of Time and the City is a longing tone poem of Liverpool, not bracing like the original, impressionistic city documentaries like Berlin: Symphony of a City or A propos de Nice, but infused with a smoldering undercurrent of time lost and a churning, haunted passion for that lost time. It's a time not only for Davies, but for us all: "Come close now and see your dream. Come close now and see mine."



I think I see a Beatle.

Frost/Nixon

If there's a single misstep in Ron Howard's expertly calibrated Frost/Nixon, it eluded me.

Howard's spellbinding adaptation of Peter Morgan's Tony-nominated stage drama understands the politics that manipulate Washington and Hollywood. It comprehends how many interviews are won and lost long before the Q&A begins. It figures out the best way to transition an airtight theatrical production to the roomier silver screen (giving the elements plenty of room to breathe). And -- most importantly -- it illustrates the intimidating power of television, which creates and destroys legacies on a daily basis.

Television was never kind to President Richard M. Nixon. It's widely recognized that a disheveled Nixon's poor "performance" in the televised 1960 presidential debate contributed to his eventual loss to John F. Kennedy. Later, when in office, intense media scrutiny by the chief television networks kept a white-hot spotlight on the Watergate scandal -- and forecast our current 24-hour news cycle. Finally, Nixon's eventual resignation from the Oval Office was televised to an attentive audience, a first in U.S. history.

Frost/Nixon takes place after Nixon's historic exit from the presidency, when British talk show host David Frost (Michael Sheen) pitched an idea to his producers: a series of interviews with the embattled ex-president (Frank Langella) that would put both personalities back on their respective maps.

The project should have been laughed off. Frost largely handled celebrity puff piece interviews for his UK and Australian-based outlets, and Nixon was turning down major press opportunities left and right. But several factors came into play for this event. Nixon's agent, "Swifty" Lazar (Toby Jones), successfully negotiated a huge fee for Nixon -- which came out of Frost's pocket when the U.S. networks showed little interest. And Nixon's chief advisor, Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon), implemented strict ground rules which he believed would protect Nixon from embarrassment and even set him on a path back to Washington. Frost's team, meanwhile, treated the interviews as the chance to give Nixon the trial he never received. And few could account for the enormous egos and competitive natures shared by both Nixon and Frost.

Sheen and Langella originated their roles on the London stage in August 2006 before moving the act to Broadway a year later. Howard's wisest decision in pre-production was luring these vets to the feature film, a tougher task than anticipated. Langella hinted in an interview that he doesn't believe he was the first choice for Howard's Frost/Nixon film. Having seen his performance, it's clear he is the only choice to play the shrewd, coy, and playfully manipulative statesman. Langella doesn't impersonate Nixon. He inhabits the man's skin to find the character within the caricature. Nixon's a fascinating part. His impatient need to control every situation hangs over Frost/Nixon, while his craving to succeed -- or, at least, to be considered a success -- drives the heavyweight bout between this slighted duo.

Frost/Nixon is a rock-solid historical crowd pleaser, a showcase for subtle yet mesmerizing dramatic performances that whip up obscene amounts of suspense for a story whose ending is never in question. Morgan adapts his play into a precise chess match between egotistical power mongers constantly angling for the upper hand. Howard, himself a product of television long before his directorial career reached its peak, finds inventive methods of conveying television's impact on the careers of these men. The ensemble, from top to bottom, is flawless.

All that said, this production of Frost/Nixon -- and any production of the stage show -- will be judged by the actors playing the men in the title. Howard turns them loose in a pivotal scene, a late-night phone conversation between Nixon and Frost that takes place on the eve of their final scheduled debate. Nixon, allegedly after a few cocktails, drops his guard momentarily to goad Frost and chip away at his armor. "The limelight can only shine on one of us," Nixon warns. But it's this scene -- coupled with the entirety of the project -- that will earn both of these actors an invitation to the Academy Awards in February. And perhaps, in Langella's case, a seat at the winner's table.



He's tricky.

Revolutionary Road

Everyone's cage looks different. April Wheeler's is a plain, white Cape Cod with blood-red shudders that nests atop a manicured lawn in the suburbs. It's not just the house that's holding April down, though. She also feels constrained by her dissatisfied husband, their needy children, and the unfulfilled dreams she left in her wake.

Welcome to Revolutionary Road, the feel-miserable movie of 2008. For their post-Titanic reunion, Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio have teamed with American Beauty director Sam Mendes (also Winslet's husband) on a dour, shrill adaptation of Richard Yates' respected novel about an unhappy couple steadily sinking in the quicksand of their discontent.

Road takes place in the mid-1950s, where newlyweds Frank (DiCaprio) and April (Winslet) have moved to a prototypical suburban abode on the street of the title. There are multiple meanings to the moniker, of course. Frank and April only agree on the move after promising each other they'll avoid the suburb's trappings. Their cavalier attitude and disdain for societal norms firmly plants them in the free-spirited 1960s, ahead of the curve. Frank even angrily dismisses what he calls this little "trap" in the first of several arguments with April, though he could be referring to suburbia, their marriage, their chosen lifestyle or, most likely, all of the above.

Frank and April are unhappy at the start of Road, and things don't improve. She's a struggling stage actress. At least she has aspirations. Frank has no defined path. He listlessly mopes through workdays at the same faceless company that employed his father for decades. It's heartbreaking how Frank feels so dead at the age of 30. And DiCaprio hangs resentment and defeat on choice lines, as when Frank admits, "Who ever said I was meant to be a big deal, anyway?"

But April suggests a ray of hope. She convinces Frank to pick up and move to Paris with dreams of starting over. April agrees to work so she can support the couple while Frank discovers his "calling." Is this the helping hand Road needs to pull it from its crippling funk?

Mendes would almost have us believe it. One of the director's earliest shots continues to resonate with me weeks after having seen the film. It's Frank, standing in New York's Grand Central Station on the afternoon he has decided to quit his meaningless desk job. As the commuters steadily stream by him, Frank stands still and stares. Freedom dances across DiCaprio's face, and we can almost see an emotional weight being lifted from his shoulders as he realizes, "Their lifestyle, it's not for me."

Foolishly, I believed him -- and the film. I viewed this sequence as an exit sign beckoning Frank, a means to a better end. But Road chooses bitter over better. Before they can escape their straightjacket of a life, Frank is tempted with a promotion, April gets pregnant with their third child, and these distractions become hooks that sink into their flesh and ground them in their sad reality. The film sheds happiness in favor of a cynical, treacherous slog toward anger, resentment, fear, loathing, and death (in both literal and figurative senses).

Appealing to a melancholic crowd isn't a problem. Many choose to see films that make them feel empty and sad, and Revolutionary Road scorches with the intensity of malaise, and the resentment that entrapment can trigger.

But like so many awards-baiters this year -- from Milk to Doubt -- it is an acting showcase that suffers from narrative shortcomings. Plus, I never once forgot that DiCaprio and Winslet were acting (with a capital "A") in these discontented roles. Still, it's not often you see someone call DiCaprio out, going toe-to-toe with the versatile performer and often winning the upper hand. No, not Winslet. I'm talking about Michael Shannon, who decimates scenery as the brutally honest and off-his-rocker son of a local realtor played by Kathy Bates. Shannon is the mirror that turns the miserable truth of Frank and April's existence back on them, and he's a bright spot in this otherwise turgid, depressing drama.

On a side note, Road does offer a brief insight into the ups-and-downs of a film critic's daily cycle. Those of us who watch films thrive on anticipation. We obsess over trailers, absorb almost every preview, and comment on projects both pending and playing. But the cycle can be vicious. Sometimes we have such high hopes. And it hurts when those expectations aren't met. Sadly, Road reminds me how, in 120 minutes, a picture can go from "I can not wait to see that" to "I never want to see that again."



You say you want a revolution? Well I want breakfast.

Hotel for Dogs

Recently, film critic Roger Ebert has been bemoaning the fact that even bad movies look good. If he were putting together a list of such flicks, Hotel for Dogs would surely make the top five. It looks great. And it's bad. Really bad.

Hotel for Dogs clearly wants to rank alongside films such as Anna to the Infinite Power, The Goonies, E.T., and Radio Flyer, films that balanced lighthearted playfulness with a darker, grittier reality. Like the recent Spiderwick Chronicles, Hotel for Dogs plays all the same Spielberg/Donner riffs (a cast of doe-eyed youngsters wise beyond their years dressed in corduroy and plaid, moments of adult menace cut with "oh, thank goodness" relief) and even apes the look of these early '80s flicks. Yet for all its nostalgic bravado, the film never feels more than surface, more than flash.

Andi (Emma Roberts, who is 23 but looks to be 13) and Bruce (Jake Austin) are two orphans (read: mischievous but oh so sweet) living with bumbling foster parents (Lisa Kudrow and Kevin Dillon in butt-rock mode as barely-making-it musicians) who don't know about the existence of the kids' little dog, Friday. Bruce is something of a technical wunderkind, having devised all manner of Rube Goldbergian devices to keep Friday hidden, but even he has difficulty keeping Friday out of the grasp of a Brazil-styled army of stormtrooper dog catchers. Fearing their foster parents will find Friday, the kids hide him in a dilapidated hotel (where there are priceless fixtures just lying about and the electricity is still running) that quickly becomes a makeshift shelter for the city's well-behaved curs.

Bruce being Bruce, the hotel is outfitted with all manner of mechanical devices to keep the dogs occupied (the best is a car ride simulator), fed (at a long table), and clean (both a dog wash and a toilet service). The wonky machines (they should have ACME stamped on their sides) are fun but hopelessly fraught with problems (as soon as Bruce steps away they start breaking down), and it's never clear why the dogs would actually use them.

Add a love interest (kindly pet store employee Johnny Simmons), an overly concerned social worker (Don Cheadle), and a montage (complete with Tomoyasu Hotei's instrumental "Battle Without Honor or Humanity," as heard in Kill Bill), and Hotel for Dogs rapidly degenerates into every other cheesy tween movie aired on Nickelodeon.

The script is ramshackle and cliché ridden, the performances narrowed down to gawking (Roberts is particularly dull), and the story, when it isn't sappy, misses all the good beats. Clearly, the film should have abandoned its human cast and just let the dogs run crazy in a hotel. I've never been so eager to relive the simple joys of Benji the Hunted. And as I mentioned at the outset, the film looks really good. Director Thor Freudenthal (a first-time helmer) and cinematographer Michael Grady (Wonderland) shoot the film as though it were one of the Coen brothers' early thrillers. The lighting, the crane shots, I've never seen so much wasted atmosphere.

For all its clever cinematography and dramatic play-acting, Hotel for Dogs loses steam and sense whenever the dogs are off the screen. Small children might enjoy the film but it's unlikely they'll want to revisit it. Perhaps one day there will be a fan edit of Hotel for Dogs removing all the people and strained dialog -- a 20-minute highlight reel of the mutts just letting loose -- and that will be something worth seeing.



If they catch the rabbit, they never race again.

Defiance

Decades after the last shot was fired, filmmakers continue to find intriguing narrative passages into WWII. The latest, Edward Zwick's Defiance, tells the true story of the Bielskis, three Jewish brothers who, in 1941, avoided capture by the Germans and fled to Poland's Lipicanzia Forest.

Willing to help as many fellow exiles as possible, Tuvia (Daniel Craig), Zus (Liev Schreiber), and Asael (Jamie Bell) formed what eventually came to be known as the Otriad, a mobile community that grew to encompass 1,200 Jewish refugees. The Otriad provided food, shelter, safety, and a moderate sense of stability. There were rules and guidelines, which bred harmony and conflict. Relationships were forged, as male and female widows took on "forest" husbands and wives. The toughest challenge -- beyond basic survival --seemed to be maintaining civility in this makeshift civilization.

Over the course of his career, Zwick regularly finds compelling subject matter with difficult emotional conflicts that can sustain noteworthy dramatic performances, and Defiance is no exception. Schreiber and Craig distance themselves from the sturdy ensemble, conveying their courage and conviction as well as their fears and loss. Zwick and Clay Frohman's screenplay doesn't avoid tough questions. Tuvia must ask who is worthy of being saved, and how many individuals can be assisted before it starts endangering the larger community.

Yet, as in his past films, we can actually see Zwick reaching out to push the emotional buttons. He dresses up his drama, and I was turned off by almost every style choice. Like when Craig mounts a white steed to deliver what can only be described as his Braveheart speech on freedom. Or when, in one of the least subtle sequences, a marriage in the Otriad is paralleled with a massacre conducted by Zus and his Russian compatriots. And Zwick commits a cardinal sin -- gratuitous slow-motion cinematography during a vital raid to retrieve medicine from a heavily guarded bunker.

It's strange to say, but Zwick's movies -- from Glory to The Siege to Legends of the Fall -- almost succeed despite him. Defiance carries moving images of unified strength, but the director's obvious flourishes are a distraction. This is a valiant, courageous story of fortitude, which Zwick churns through the Hollywood playbook. Under Zwick's guidance, Defiance is an interesting story, sporadically told in an interesting way.



We defy you not to cry.

Bride Wars

These are not preliminary selections for the inaugural class of an as-yet-unfounded Hollywood Hall of Shame. They are instead the most recent cinematic abominations to have been released in the early weeks of the new year, dating back to 2005. My colleagues and I regularly joke that if a studio hopes to bury a movie in the cold, efficient style of the mob hiding Jimmy Hoffa, they release it in early January (late August is a suitable alternative). And I've long believed if an intelligent studio sought a surefire hit, they'd counter-program a halfway decent film against the post-holiday garbage, then sit back and watch the box-office receipts pour in.

Bride Wars is that halfway decent film. And if that sounds like a backhanded compliment, it's only because I enlisted in these Wars with tempered expectations (again, the release date) and left pleasantly surprised.

Since their earliest days, best friends Liv (Kate Hudson) and Emma (Anne Hathaway) have dreamed of getting married in Manhattan's luxurious Plaza Hotel. Miraculously, the two end up getting engaged within weeks of each other, bringing their collective dream one step closer to reality. But when renowned wedding planner Marion St. Claire (Candice Bergen) accidentally books their Plaza weddings on the same day, the girls bare their claws until one of them backs off the overcrowded calendar.

By winning a few small battles, Bride goes a long way toward winning the larger Wars. Director Gary Winick finds sharp laughs in the nooks and crannies of the formula. He wrung charm out of similar fluff when he helmed the Jennifer Garner vehicle 13 Going On 30.

Hudson and Hathaway also enjoy a happy marriage of comedic styles. Both leave their inhibitions at the door and embrace the escalating insanity that overwhelms their characters as the "big day" approaches. It helps that the screenplay, while improbable, doesn't talk down to its audience. And the guys in the cast appear as bewildered by the marital mania as most guys in the theaters will be.

Perhaps the biggest surprise arrives just before the credits. I didn't cringe when Wars laid the groundwork for a sequel, which may arrive, oh, nine months from now.



That's not a moon...

The Unborn

In a world bereft of rationality, such as that of popular Hollywood, Odette Yustman could play the slightly-younger sister (or, heck, even twin) of somebody like Jessica Alba, and it's fitting that their careers seem to be synching up. Almost a year to the day after Alba started seeing ghosts from a pair of haunted peepers in The Eye, Yustman begins seeing ghosts because -- well, gosh, I don't know why -- in David S. Goyer's sophomore effort as writer/director, The Unborn.

Yustman plays Casey Beldon, a college student who suddenly begins seeing scorpions in her eggs, dogs with masks, and all sorts of other crazy things. Her doctor gives her the boring reason: genetic mosaicism, a retinal irregularity usually seen in twins. It takes her Holocaust-survivor grandmother (Jane Alexander) to root out the real, much more evil reason, and, as per usual, the Nazis are involved. The reason that creepy blue-eyed zombie child keeps following her around has something to do with experiments done on Casey's great uncle in Auschwitz that naturally turned him into a mythical Jewish demon named Dybbuk. And it's up to Gary Oldman, as a Rabbi, to exorcize the malicious bugger.

In a deeply generic sense, Yustman is very nice to look at. The California-born twentysomething, who you may remember as the innocuous love interest of the equally-plain lead in last year's Cloverfield, has silky dark hair, a model's face, and a body that looks good in a bathing suit or plain-old underwear. Goyer knows this and that is why, I assume, he cast her in Unborn, which features at least two scenes where the camera is fixed firmly on the actress's white-cotton-covered derriere. Even the initial poster for the film highlights this attribute.

Not much else is pulling focus, though, including the cavalcade of mutated demons that start going after Casey's loved ones, including the obligatory best friend (Meagan Good). The useless boyfriend character is played by Cam Gigandet, who successfully played villains in two movies last year (Twilight, Never Back Down) but plays nice here like he's overdosed on Ambien. Along with Oldman, quality actors like Idris Alba (from HBO's The Wire) and Carla Gugino (Sin City, the ludicrously-anticipated Watchmen) are regulated to bit parts that could have been played by marginally-talented pistachio nuts.

Like its kin in the seemingly endless onslaught of J-horror remakes and rip-offs, The Unborn has the psychological weight and perversity of a mildly racy episode of Touched by an Angel and garners most of its shocks from simple auditory stimuli. Blaring, cold, and blunt, the film's sound design replaces every chance at genuine fright with loud noise. Amongst its many other cardinal sins, Goyer's film ends on a note of irrefutable sequel-baiting that makes the previous 90 minutes of incoherence even more infuriating.



Ah, just like when my kids were born.

Silent Light

In September 2007, New York art rock outfit the Dirty Projectors released Rise Above, a conceptual cover record consisting of 90 percent of the songs on Damaged, the legendary album from punk godfathers Black Flag, redeployed as skittering indie anthems. The result was something closer to Paul Simon jamming with the Pixies than the power-chord chug many might have anticipated. What was once mainlined aggression and teenage angst now transmogrified into jabbering hysteria and lilting nostalgia.

Similar is the transformation given to Carl Theodor Dreyer's Ordet in Carlos Reygadas' Silent Light, the third and most powerful film so far from the Mexican enfant terrible. Filmed in a Mennonite community in Mexico and the first Plautdietsch film to ever be made, Reygadas' picture takes Dreyer's stoic religious parable and incubates it in a tale of infidelity amongst the most devoted of people. The Mennonite non-actor cast is used, in the strictest Bressonian sense, as models rather than actors that wander about Reygadas' heavily-spiritual, nature-heavy imagery. What emerges is something completely unexpected and unclassifiable: part ethnological study, part spiritual-crisis drama, and part passion play.

While likely to be berated for its pretentious and artsy sensibilities, Silent Light actually ends up being the director's most straightforward affair and certainly his least obviously risqué feature. Against a disillusioned suicide case (Japón) or the frustrated driver for a Mexican general (Battle in Heaven), the grievously-conflicted Johan (Cornelio Wall) registers as nearly innocuous. He goes about his tasks for the day in his pick-up truck, so excited to be seeing his mistress Marianne (Maria Pankratz) that he does a happy dance when he stops to chat with some friends at a farm supply shop. Father of six and son of a preacher man, Johan takes the implications of his affair with Marianne on his wife Esther (Miriam Toews) quite seriously, so much so that he erupts into a fit of tears early in the film as his family leaves for the day.

What weighs completely on the film is the feeling of encompassing transcendence: life itself as holy act. The film itself is one that is based, both aesthetically and narratively, intrinsically on ritual, whether that of the daily or religious. The film's breathtaking bookends, consisting of the camera swooping down from the night sky into a breaking dawn amongst fertile trees and a primal nature scheme, is only the most showy of Reygadas' grasps at the beyond. Even when taking in the black-garbed attendees at the funeral that closes Light, there is a sense of preparation for those very same ends.

In a film of such eerie calm, even the most minor of things seems perverse. The central tragedy happens in a stretch of skeletal trees amongst fog and rain, somewhere that seems equally representative of God and the Devil. Things as minor as a bizarre French singer's elongated number on television and the act of the family bathing in a small shaded pool are scenes of such striking bewilderment that the cumulative strangeness of Reygadas' work may simply seep into you at first before it completely wallops you.

Though Dreyer's style and narrative sense hang over Silent Light like a tattered halo, it is the final act that completely cribs from the master. Struck dead by incommunicable grief and loss of faith, Esther lies in an open pine box at film's end with a praying Johan by her side. The miracle that concludes the film is the very same that concludes Ordet but where Dreyer's gothic visions were embryonic in their power, Reygadas' sunlit act of faith is as expansive as it is enveloping. The result is an object so elementally based in pure cinema that one might call it, well, miraculous.

Aka Stellet licht.

The Reader

Mein Kampf meets Penthouse Forum in Stephen Daldry's The Reader, a chilly and surprisingly detached adaptation of Bernhard Schlink's passion play about a susceptible yet pensive teenage horn dog seduced by the former, female SS trooper who popped his cherry.

Reader reunites Daldry with his The Hours screenwriter, David Hare, and the two collaborate on another aloof, literary period picture. The action transitions between 1995 and 1958, when 15-year-old Michael Berg (David Kross) first comes under the spell of Hanna Schmitz (Kate Winslet), the stern but attentive woman who paid him a bit of kindness after the boy was felled by Scarlet Fever.

Their kinky relationship is fueled by carnal and intellectual curiosity. Hanna willingly beds this overeager virgin, then requires that he read to her as both foreplay and post-coital wind down. Winslet and Kross go largely au natural for Michael and Hanna's formative scenes. Clothing, in fact, is optional through most of Reader's early scenes. College students spend more on fast food than Daldry spent on costumes. The film alternates chapters and sex, sex and chapters. And we await the heartbreak that usually follows when a young person (or older person, I suppose) gives of their soul so completely.

Daldry has a hard time with the tonal shifts of Reader, though. He makes an odd choice painting Michael's raw, sexual awakening on a dull palette of bleached and muted colors. Despite all the love-making, Reader is about as sexy as a wool coat. And the tone contradicts Kross's openhearted, wholly amorous performance as the smitten teenager. Winslet playfully banters with her willing partner, but saves her fireworks for the next act.

Daldry's somber mood makes far more sense in the film's stronger second half, when Hanna stands trial for war crimes committed at concentration camps and Michael contemplates whether he should reveal knowledge that could prevent serious jail time for the penitent Nazi. Daldry continues his time shifts back to 1995 to raise questions about Michael and Hanna's relationship while adding mysteries which are carefully guarded by Ralph Fiennes, who is effective as the older version of our young Romeo.

Fiennes has had a tremendous year, juggling killer comedy (In Bruges) with royal philandering (The Duchess). Here, he brings closure to Michael's difficult journey by showing us how Hanna stirred a second passion in the character: one for justice, one for the law. It's not about titillation. The Reader is a film about life's transitions. And like any kind of rude awakening, it is alternately painful, perplexing, awkward, melodramatic, and slow to overwhelm.



NILF!

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Every great filmmaker is allowed one bad film. For David Fincher, his first was his worst.

An intelligent director, Fincher cut his teeth on television commercials and music videos before making his feature debut in 1992 with a forgettable and regrettable installment in the Alien franchise. It was all uphill from there. Fincher's next five films arguably are modern classics, each impressively different from its immediate predecessor. Gen X fanboys idolize him for the basement-dwelling aggressions of Fight Club. The director brought flash -- and a needed backbone -- to pulp thrillers like The Game and Panic Room. And cineastes found plenty to appreciate in the meticulous musings of Fincher's cold-case police procedural, Zodiac.

His latest film is a bold step in an alternate direction, but it shares a single quality with Fincher's previous films: brilliance. Beautiful and incredibly moving, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button credits a short story by F. Scott Fitzgerald, but really, screenwriter Eric Roth only lifts the basic premise of a man who is born old and ages backward. The timeframe of the source material is altered, and events imagined for the movie will not be found in Fitzgerald's story.

No matter. The journey of this unique and gentle character easily enchants as it gives new meaning to the term "turn back the clock." Born at the conclusion of WWI, the decrepit and frail Benjamin (Brad Pitt) is rejected by his father (Jason Flemyng) and left at the doorstep of Queenie (Taraji P. Henson), who runs a retirement home in New Orleans. The resident doctor guesses Benjamin's chances of survival are slim. Needless to say, the resilient child perseveres, and goes on to lead one of those lives most of us would envy.

With each picture, Fincher continues to improve his already impressive filmmaking skills. His dedication to specifics -- without forgetting the overall big picture -- sets him apart from the directorial pack. He's also finding collaborators who match his enthusiasm for a project. Button enjoys exquisite period detail, pillow-soft cinematography from Claudio Miranda, and a lush, inspirational score by Alexandre Desplat that enhances the film's wide array of moods.

Then there's young/old Benjamin, who Fincher creates with seamless digital trickery that somehow attaches Pitt's made-up face to another actor's body. I stared at the effect for the better part of an hour and never once saw the strings that elevate this cinematic magic trick.

Beyond his technical wizardry, Fincher is maturing as a magical storyteller. He and Roth, who won an Oscar for penning the marginally similar Forrest Gump, embrace sprawling life lessons in Button that will bewitch a willing audience. The amenable Benjamin welcomes outcasts, social misfits, and lonely souls as tour guides during his spiritual journey. They point him in the right direction until he connects with Daisy (Cate Blanchett), his soul mate.

Benjamin and Daisy's relationship ends up carrying Button, though Fincher deftly explores many variations of love with his picture. The deepest connection is Queenie's maternal love for her foster child, an eternal bond between mother and son. But Button also deals in nostalgic love for lost friends and family, as well as fleeting love exchanged between needy strangers.

Cate's great, and Henson is better as Benjamin's tender, genteel Southern mother. But it's Pitt who gives Fincher's epic its heart and soul. Acting beneath a series of digital effects or layers of makeup, Pitt still imbues Benjamin with a youthful exuberance, a wide-eyed innocence, and a passion for worldly experience.

Not that each of Benjamin's adventures fits comfortably with our perspective. His stint in the Navy seems out of place, as does a nocturnal affair Benjamin conducts with the forlorn wife (Tilda Swinton) of a foreign diplomat. But I partially blame myself. Fincher has created a supple, stuffed, and rewarding tapestry of emotions and themes. It's one of those films I imagine I'll revisit often, hopefully finding new meaning depending on where I am in my life.

As romantic, impulsive, creative, and alive as Button can be, however, Fincher rarely strays far from his somber point that life, like love, is temporary. He frames his story with a narrative device in which Daisy's daughter (Julia Ormond) reads Benjamin's diary as Daisy rots on her deathbed. As if that weren't enough, Hurricane Katrina also bears down on New Orleans as the story progresses. What seems overwrought takes on new meaning in the film's final shot, however. Floodwaters seep into a Bayou basement, overtaking a clock that bears significance in the film's opening scenes. And we know that building -- like so many buildings in the Gulf region -- will be destroyed by that devastating storm. Because, as Button soberly reminds us, nothing lasts.



Baby face, you've got the cutest little baby face.

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire, which is based on the novel Q&A by Indian diplomat/novelist Vikas Swarup, could very well be the closest thing genre-hopping director Danny Boyle ever makes to a crowd-pleaser. It won the coveted Audience Award at this year's Toronto Film Festival and comes pre-packaged with glowing reviews from both Roger Ebert and Variety's Todd McCarthy. Written by the English screenwriter Simon Beaufoy, who many may know as the scribe behind The Full Monty, Boyle has blended this romantic fable with his own, frenetic style and some nods towards a Bollywood aesthetic in order to create the Scottish filmmaker's most accessible work to date.

On the other hand, few of Boyle's images are as instantly tasteless yet characteristic as a young Indian boy jumping into a swamp of feces in order to secure an autograph from Bollywood icon Amitabh Bachchan. The boy running around covered in excrement, some of which is his own, is young Jamal (Ayush Mahesh Khedekar). Moments after that presentation, Jamal and his older brother Salim (Azharuddin Mohammed Ismail) become orphaned when their mother is murdered for being a Muslim. The two boys take up with another young orphan Latika (Rubina Ali) and join up under Maman, the Fagin of this revisionist Oliver Twist. Salim saves Jamal from being blinded by Maman and the duo make off in the night, leaving Latika to fend for herself.

The Oliver similarities hit a peak when older Jamal (Tanay Hermant Chheda) and Salim (Ashutosh Lobo Gajiwala) begin pickpocketing tourists at the Taj Mahal. Salim gravitates towards a popular gang leader, for whom he murders Maman, after which he banishes Jamal and takes Latika as his prize. Years later, Jamal (now played by Dev Patel) hunts down Salim (Madhur Mittal) through his job as a chai boy at a telemarketing agency. A senior trigger man for the gang he initially ran with, Salim has offered Latika (Freido Pinto) to his boss and suggests Jamal forget about her. This, of course, puts Jamal on a course to win back Latika, the love of his life.

The film gets its title from the structuring mechanism of Jamal on the Indian version of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?, with the sleazy Prem (Indian movie icon Anil Koopar) in for Regis Philbin. The timeline plays hopscotch, bouncing from the game show to flashbacks to flash-forwards of Jamal being questioned by a police inspector (the great Irrfan Khan, criminally underused) for allegedly cheating on the show. It's a mad dash, and the energy often disguises the fact that this is a worn-thin narrative arc. Edited for momentum rather than consistency, the seductive aura of India, so beautifully captured last year in Wes Anderson's The Darjeeling Limited and Mira Nair's The Namesake, is rendered a blur of epileptic neon and swirling, loose-limbed action in an attempt to present the slums as alien terrain.

Since when has sheer energy been reason enough for critical praise? Boyle has proven himself able at mixing his style with several genres thus far, but here, his bold color schemes and hyperactive camera finds scraps for a story, and the buzzing production drowns out Beaufoy's structurally-intriguing script. Life-affirming and brazenly romantic, this rags-to-riches tale is, for better or worse, built for comfort, and Boyle, with co-director Loveleen Tandan, keeps things moving at all times; For all its flaws, Slumdog is not, by any means, boring. Cinematographer Anthony Dod Mantel, who has done some excellent work with Lars Von Trier and with Boyle on 28 Days Later, at least shoots the slums of India in a buoyant rush.

Boyle's most popular works are fitted with a contrast between narrative arc and a singular musical agent. What would Trainspotting's opening motor-mouthed salvo be without Iggy Pop howling over it? Slumdog's central montage is galvanized by M.I.A.'s "Paper Planes" and it dutifully averts a lag in action as Salim and Jamal panhandle on the train away from Maman. The scene is endemic of the film's chief defect: As the flash and burn of Boyle's imagery loses its sugar high, the limp proposition that it's covering up becomes more and more evident.



He's got a lust for trivia.

Gran Torino

Do you miss Archie Bunker? Are you curious to find out how Carroll O'Connor's stone-cold bigot would have reacted to our current, culturally diverse society? And did you ever dream of seeing racist old Archie packing heat as he spewed bile all over the "spooks," "gooks," and other non-Caucasians who were unlucky enough to cross his path? Then Clint Eastwood's Gran Torino is the movie for you.

Walt Kowalski (Eastwood) served his time in the military, paid his dues at the auto plant -- American cars only, of course -- and wants to spend his days as a widower in peace. He is disgusted by his ignorant, oafish sons and their selfish children -- the ugliest characters you'll see on screen this year. But his disdain isn't limited to kin. Walt also hates the "eggroll," "fish-head" "Charlie Chans" who've moved into his blue-collar Detroit suburb.

Walt's worst nightmare comes true one evening when Thao (Bee Vang), a painfully shy Hmong teenager, tries to boost the old man's vintage Gran Torino as part of a gang initiation. Walt catches Thao in the act, bringing shame to the family. To pay off the debt, Thao begins shadowing Walt so he can learn to grow up and be a man (translation: hate people with a passion).

This odd-couple pairing has powered many a comedy, but the laughs in Torino are unintentional. Eastwood plays his material very seriously, and I believe he thinks we'll be moved as Thao accepts more responsibility and Walt grows less intolerant. But the storytelling is plodding and ham-fisted, and Torino ends up spinning its wheels.

Eastwood does do something unique in Gran Torino -- he surrounds himself with rank amateurs, from "intimidating" gangbangers straight out of central casting to his neighbors who, in time, will learn to respect the curmudgeon living next door. Vang, in particular, is shockingly blasé and uncomfortable delivering lines. Character actor John Carroll Lynch, meanwhile, is miscast as Walt's racist, Italian barber. And I felt sorry for apple-cheeked Christopher Carley, who plays an optimistic parish priest. The character serves two purposes. Eastwood enjoys having Walt talk down to whippersnapper cast members, and the idea of challenging religion has become a constant through the director's recent pictures.

But Nick Schenk has penned a graceless and insensitive script littered with clunkers that are meant to pass as life lessons handed down from one generation to the next. "Sounds like you know more about death than you do living," Carley's priest utters to Walt over drinks at the local watering hole (where, coincidentally, the men gather during the day to share racist jokes). And in return, Clint squints. It's pretty much his lone response through much of Torino, until the credits, when he sings the film's theme song. That's when you'll wince.



Where are the American-made tool belts?

Inkheart

Nothing warms a writer's icy heart more than something that champions books -- and reading, specifically. As communication becomes more and more a collection of texting abbreviations and message board protocols, the art of literature appears to be slowly sinking. So something like Inkheart should inspire all kinds of good will for fellow scribe Cornelia Funke, especially with its love of imagination, fiction, and all things erudite. Sadly, Hollywood's hand in the mix has created yet another attempted Harry Potter clone, a clever idea anemically adapted to capitalize on its commercial, not creative potential.

Mo Folchart (Brendan Fraiser) is a "silvertongue" -- one of a rare few who can "read" characters out of books and bring them to life. Sadly, he discovers this trait one night while entertaining his wife Resa (Sienna Guillory) and their daughter Meggie (Eliza Bennett). While indulging in a passage from the fantasy novel Inkheart, he unleashes fire juggler Dustfinger (Paul Bettany) while accidentally sending his spouse into the tome. Now, 10 years later, Mo is still looking to save her, even though his efforts have let loose more fictional faces from the book, including evil master thief Capricorn (Andy Serkis). But the criminal is not content with being a viable member of the real world. He wants to rule all of mankind, and wants Mo to help him in this horrible pursuit.

Like most good ideas badly bungled, Inkheart starts out interesting and grows more irritating as it plods along. Paced like a POW death march and bereft of anything that makes movies magic -- or entertaining -- or tolerable -- this is a clear case of lax source material leading to an even more inert big screen translation. All eyes are on director Iain Softley, who showed some promise with his first feature, the early Beatles bio-pic Backbeat. But since then, his resume bears such scars as K-PAX and The Skeleton Key. Inkheart definitely goes down as his worst to date. It's a lifeless, vacuous jumble that seems purposefully confusing and, on occasion, downright indefensible.

Granted, making a serious film for "young adults" nowadays is a lot like getting said demo to give up their ever-present technological toys. The sheer impossibility baffles the mind. But where Softley strikes out is in the execution, not the idea. Though Funke's book may bear some fault, it's clear that she had more faith in her premise than anyone associated with the script. Inkheart constantly throws stunts at the camera, slight asides meant to make literature literally "come alive." But the problem is that we never really get to see the symbols being exploited. We get snippets of Peter Pan's crocodile, a brief glimpse of a Minotaur, a gratuitous shot of Oz's flying monkeys, and a unicorn. Wow.

One could easily see this in the hands of a Spielberg or a Gilliam -- someone with as much inspiration as mainstream ability. But Softley struggles, relying far too much on his average actors to enliven the material. Frasier's involvement makes one instantly think of mummies (and not in a good way), while Serkis does a decent job of playing reprehensible and villainous. The most confusing character is Dustfinger, essayed with far too much seriousness by Bettany. He maneuvers so randomly between good guy and bad that we don't know whether to root for him or hope he self-immolates.

Yet the main factor working against Inkheart is its lack of wonder and spectacle. You'd figure a film using classic characters from literature as a plot point would be something to marvel at. Unfortunately, we are only in awe of how incredibly dull and unsatisfying it is.



Next we'll be moving on to the caning.