Terrorist attacks on President Obama

Friday the 13th of March white house was under attacked by terrorist.
Intelligence believe them to be from north Korea though president Obama was not harmed in any way but this present a major security issue.
CIA is investigating the matter though this has been kept quite as to not create panic to the American citizens

Top Ten Movies of all time

Heres my list of top ten movies of all time

1) The Lord of the rings trilogy

2) Titanic

3) The Shawshank Redemption

4) The Prestige

5) The Gladiator

6) The Godfather

7) The Dark Knight

8) Fight Club

9) Braveheart

10) The Usual Suspects

Donkey Punch

Despite my predilection for stories of the perverse and profane, I feel it is not my place to describe to any sort of public the act that gives director Oliver Blackburn's scrappy debut its name. For those who have spent any small amount of time in a frathouse, you know what a donkey punch is and have suggested engaging in it after at least three keggers. For the rest of you, these are the sort of things Wikipedia, if not the Internet itself, was made for. For the price of a movie ticket, however, you can now have a rather scummy British DJ explain it to you and then, a few scenes later, witness the event in all its glory.

A lesser filmmaker could have done nothing more than give the film its title and gone home. You'd certainly think that was the case from the film's opening notes: Three scantily-clad Brit birds (Nichola Burley, Jaime Winstone, Sian Breckin), on vacation in Spain, decide to take a spin on a yacht with a pack of tanned Aeropostale-types (Robert Boulter, Tom Burke, Julian Morris, Jay Taylor) with hits of ecstasy, a few Heinekens, and a DJ setup in tow.

While the more soulful pair (Burley and Boulter) spend some personal time on the stern, the rest of the group head downstairs for a wholesome orgy that crescendos with the youngest member (Morris) attempting the titular move, with fatal results. The body is then thrown to sea and the brood is sent into hysteria as they decide what to do with videotaped evidence of what happened. The law of the land being bros-before-hoes, the men band together while the surviving women employ knives, flare guns, and (why not?) a small boat engine to rid themselves of these hyper-masculine horndogs.

Like The Signal and All the Boys Love Mandy Lane, Donkey Punch is endemic of an inventive sect of the indie horror/thriller genre that, while often embedded in conventional scenarios, finds ways to minutely upend certain archetypes, reconsider mood and tone, and conjure suspense through crafty visuals and character development rather than piercing sound design and crass editing schemes. As the film transitions from the blissed-out daylight to the harrowing night, Blackburn carefully transitions his camera from shots taking in the entire bodies of the bikini-clad cohorts to close-ups of their panicked faces and wounds, including an agonizing shot of a piece of glass being pulled out of a knee and a flare burrowing into and shooting sparks out of a man's chest.

The fourth film in Magnet's ongoing Six Shooter series (which includes one of last year's best films, Let the Right One In, and the immensely entertaining Timecrimes), Donkey Punch is ultimately too minor and inconsequential a work to be taken seriously, too constricted by its own premise and unwilling to do away with certain totems. It does, however, serve as a thankful reprieve to the junkyard of Christmas season holdovers and studio mistake-purging that January so often affords the audience. Since nothing could be as good as the film's title, that's at least a small surprise.



Needs more Eeyore.

Yonkers Joe

Making a film about a scam artist is probably a lot like being one -- no matter how solid an idea seems, it's really all about the execution. The life of a cheat lends itself to high drama and conflict, but it can also be riddled with clichés. Throw in a mentally disabled son and a shot at the big score, and you've got a combination of storylines so obvious, they seem destined to fail. But Yonkers Joe doesn't fail. It's a spunky little indie that succeeds past its cheap conventions.

Both the credit and the blame go to writer-director Robert Celestino. His cornball plot shouldn't work, but his direction, especially with actors, does. Chazz Palminteri (Celestino's executive producer) is the title guy, a gambling stiff with an amazing ability to cheat crap games. He'll belly up to a table, pull some David Blaine-like moves to drop tainted dice into a game, and make a fortune. Unfortunately, Atlantic City security has his number, and private games are too small for his ambitions.

Enter Joe's 19-year-old mentally challenged son, Joe Jr. (Tom Guiry), staying with Dad after being booted from assisted living for being crude and violent. If Joe Sr.. can't straighten Junior out -- or make enough cash to pay for an alternative -- his gambling lifestyle will be seriously impeded. But if Joe can pull off one giant payday in Vegas…

You get the picture. Despite all the seen-it-before ideas, Yonkers Joe feels just a little different. Palminteri, an actor who telegraphs the "tough guy" image too often, softens here and lets his age (56) work for him, conveying a good sense of last-chance desperation and an inability to change. He's thinner and more wrinkled than in, say, The Usual Suspects, looking like a guy who's suffered too many bad bets, too many lonely nights.

He's countered well by Guiry, who understands that his rougher, more ridiculous lines ("Suck on a bowl of cocks!") are meant to deliver comic relief without cheating Joe Jr.'s intensity. Unfortunately, Guiry's performance is poorly timed; any able-minded actor playing a retarded character will now be judged by the infamous "Never go full retard" recommendation offered in Tropic Thunder. That said, I can't comment on whether someone of Joe Jr.'s intellect would react with the actions and comments we see here.

But suspending disbelief is not a problem with Yonkers Joe. You'll need it to get caught up in the assorted sleight-of-hand scams from swapping cards to palming dice. Celestino pulls back the curtain for us and never goes too far in explaining a scenario, letting Palminteri and buddy Michael Lerner chit-chat with their cheaters' lingo. It's all clear once the game's afoot.

Celestino is to be commended for keeping Yonkers Joe moving, with just a touch of awkwardness that balances out some run-of-the-mill dialogue. But his greatest achievement is in casting Christine Lahti as Joe's friend Janice. With honest and pursed-lip strength, Lahti reminds us how important she can be to a film, with a performance that recalls her achievement in Sidney Lumet's Running on Empty more than 20 years ago.

If you can watch Yonkers Joe without thinking it's a mild Rain Man rip-off, you'll enjoy a film that could have been plagued with plot issues, but rises above it. Hey, sometimes it's a crap shoot.



Let's get this bus going. Wapner's coming on.

Cargo 200

The lone indie release to butt heads this weekend with Edward Zwick's shallowly-scripted Defiance -- a revival of Nicholas Ray's lost technicolor opus Bigger Than Life not withstanding -- Cargo 200, the latest from Russian crime artisan Aleksei Balabanov, trades in the hired-gun thrills of the director's popular Brother trilogy for a highball of venomous gallows humor and satiric perversity.

Left in the dense thicket of Brezhnev's sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan, the term "cargo 200" was given to soldiers who found their way back to the motherland in zinc-lined coffins. Fitting, then, is the opening scene which sees a discussion of the cultural climate between two phantoms of a de-Stalinized USSR: two brothers, one a high-ranking member of the Party (Yuri Stepanov) and the other a professor of scientific atheism at a local university (Leonid Gromov). It's the latter's trip to Leninsk that finds him on the side of the road, garnering help from God-lovin' distillers (Aleksei Serebryakov and Natalya Akimova) and their Vietnamese servant (Mikhail Skryabin).

As the professor goes ten rounds with the distiller over the existence of the Almighty, Valera (Leonid Bichevin) steps out on his fiancé with her friend Angelica (Agniya Kuznetsova). A few spins at the discotheque, a long swig of booze and a quick hook-up later, the two are on their way to Valera's uncle's house to get "the good stuff." In classic interlocking fashion, the uncle happens to be the Commie-baiting distiller who has just sent the professor on his way home. Valera passes out on the floor while all the men begin to leer at his lady fair. It's the farmer's friend Zhurov (Aleksei Poluyan, a natural, plain-faced deviant), a Captain in the Party, who shoots the servant only moments before he forces poor Angelica to get on all fours and penetrates her with an empty bottle.

What at first appears to be a moderate Red remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is quickly impregnated with satirical lunacy so grim that one might call it Russia's answer to American Psycho. Valera, an embodiment of yearning bourgeois ethos with his CCCP t-shirt already looking vintage, ditches the scene while Angelica becomes a "love" slave for Zhurov and the distiller goes down for his servant's murder. One of film's culminating images, a naked Angelica wailing, handcuffed to a bed and surrounded by a swarm of black flies and rotting corpses, is so bleak and horrifying that you might think Francis Bacon served as DP.

Merciless in his eccentric brutality, Balabanov pirouettes on the line between dissent and patriotism. Made as a reaction to a burgeoning nostalgia for the days of wine and Bolsheviks, Cargo 200 is minor and discombobulated by its own outrage, but it is that very same outrage that gives it its rabid urgency. That the film flourishes from controlled dread to flailing hysteria and finally lands at its ominous (or is that hopeful?) coda is thanks to Balabanov's focus even in the most hectic of scenarios. More engaging and effective than its French equivalent (Frontier(s)), Cargo 200 sees the emergence of wicked days to come in the eyes of the erstwhile Union that, between Brezhnev's death in 1982 and Gorbachev's mid-'80s perestroika, found itself without leaders, hope, or conscience.

Aka Gruz 200.

Eden Log

Credit where credit's due: Franck Vestiel's Eden Log grabs your attention immediately and doesn't relax its grip for a solid 20 minutes. A man (Clovis Cornillac) awakes in a pool of muck with a light pulsing on him every two seconds or so. He is in a cave of some sort but not much more can be gathered. That is until he finds the pulsating light that is emanating from a small contraption wrapped around a dead man's shoulder. Stumbling upon a small gated area, a simulation tells him that he is helping with the titular project and that he must go on, tangling with all manner of chuds and super guards along the way. The revelations continue, but this is about the point where you might consider walking into the theater bathroom, taking out your trusty Swiss Army knife and performing seppuku.

The trials and tribulations that face the man, who eventually finds out his name is Tolbiac, are those more suited that of a video game programmer than a young filmmaker. It is eventually established that Eden Log is some sort of natural habitat that holds a large plant with rejuvenating sap and roots that release a toxin that turns humans into the roving chuds. Among the monsters and the guards running around, Tolbiac encounters a being in what looks like a hazmat suit who ends up being a rogue female worker. Together, they attempt to find a way out of the labyrinthine root system, just as Tolbiac begins to feel the effects of the toxins.

There are more happenings that include a few carcasses filled with roots and some elongated video entries featuring the guards and Tolbiac. The latter goes a long way to destroying all the provocation that had been built up by the film's strong opening. Mainly corresponding in fits of grumbles, moans, and grunts, Cornillac's performance is ostensibly one of simple physical presence, and it calls for nothing but to summon the ability to run, mutter and, every once in awhile, tangle with a monster. It's an uninteresting performance that puts more stress on Vestiel's direction and writing than the French first-timer may want.

In 2006, Vestiel served as a first assistant director on Ils, one of the most acute and harrowing horror-tinged thrillers to come from France in the last decade. Eden Log deploys a similar scenario in that it is seemingly based in real time and revolves around one figure running away from a pack of intruders, though it is one set in a post-apocalyptic eco-nightmare rather than a country mansion. There are many reasons that Eden Log fails where Ils soared, but the most damning is that nothing ever seems to be at stake for Tolbiac. The monsters attack him about as often as they leave him alone and we're never quite sure what to make of the character's declining mental state besides a mildly violent outburst every so often. The audience isn't allowed to like or dislike the character in any capacity until the very end, and by then the cheat has already settled in. Like a video game, Eden Log accepts no emotional stakes in its premise and gives the viewer only the simple task of reaching its finale. At 98 minutes, a conclusion about an hour earlier would have been far more merciful.

The Class

Based on the French best-seller Entre le Murs, which literally translates into "Between the Walls," Laurent Cantet's The Class casts the author of that book, François Bégaudeau, in the role of himself as a real-life inner-city high school teacher embedded in the trenches of the war between classical education and the ever-changing face of modern culture. What initially bears the components of a typical retread of white-teacher-inspires-multi-ethnic-students melodrama turns out to be something much funnier than one might expect from the director of brooding dramas the likes of Time Out and Human Resources.

Cantet spent months auditing Bégaudeau's classes and ended-up casting many of the students as themselves in the film. Like many of its egregious American counterparts (Dangerous Minds and Freedom Writers, to name a few), Cantet has outfitted Bégaudeau with a melting pot of cultural and racial variants to contend with, including a goth and a smart Asian kid. Unlike those films, however, there is no effort to pigeonhole these identities, nor is there any effort to sanctify François. Though it garners much of its action through simple debate, one of the film's central dramas concerns François accusing two of his students of "acting like skanks." The teacher never becomes characterized as sinner or saint, and it reveals a great deal of depth in Cantet's material.

Cantet keeps the camera on a tight leash, rarely venturing outside Bégaudeau's classroom. The little history we are given about the students is delivered in boyish braggadocio, excited chatter, and whispered rumors. At one point, a gaggle of Bégaudeau's students bully the teacher by berating him about a popular rumor that he's gay. Thanks to Cantet's unrelenting focus, we are never told if Bégaudeau is gay, a Sarkozy supporter, or has a German granduncle who fought in the Battle of the Bulge.

Later on, it's the violent outburst of one of François' more outspoken students that becomes a concern, prompting a meeting over possible expulsion. Accompanied by a mother who can speak only scattered French phrases, the student becomes the lynchpin of the movie when it is argued whether or not he should be kicked out of the school. This orderly tribunal allows for high-minded debate between François and his colleagues, but the teacher gets the business from his students. Hopelessly unable to find common ground, Bégaudeau and his fiery teens allow for one of the more simple and engaging looks at the victories and turmoils of democracy to ever be put on the screen.

Though its ideas on the political majority prove fascinating and hugely entertaining, it's ultimately the film's clashing concern over education that elevates The Class from simple intrigue to a work of fervent discourse. Bégaudeau attempts to teach the students through classical texts, including The Diary of Anne Frank, but he is consistently overcome by a rambunctious, Internet-educated culture. So weak is Bégaudeau's own confidence in classical teaching that when one of his more sassy students quotes Plato's Republic, he is completely dumbfounded. Similar is Cantet's reaction to the hyper-modern, surprisingly well-rounded discussions that the kids often initiate, discussions in which François is scrambling simply to keep up. It begs the question: What shall we do if the teachers are the ones who need a better education?

Aka Entre les murs.



The heads of the class.

Gomorrah

A mob film that's as far from the genre's standard operating procedure as could be imagined, Gomorrah paints a bleak and impressionistic picture of a society not just riddled with gangsters, but crippled by them. Not only are the gangsters shown here resolutely unglamorous, they're disloyal, cowardly, and frequently downright stupid; if there were any cops around in this world, these guys wouldn't last a day. But the Neapolitan towns the film sets itself in seem hardly the kind of place capable of mustering a vigorous law enforcement response to the random brutality and open-air drug markets. Instead, the society appears little more than a host body for the Camorra (the particularly thuggish Neapolitan version of the Mafia), existing only to provide more euros for the weekly take and bodies for the slaughter.

Based on the nonfiction book by Roberto Saviano, Matteo Garrone's film -- a huge hit in its native Italy and Gran Prix winner at Cannes -- doesn't try to establish any empathetic connection to its characters, rare for journalistic cinema of this kind. Instead, Garrone works overtime to distance the viewer from the sadistic toughs and clueless young recruits he portrays, which helps the film's 100-proof venom to go down straight.

Split into five different narratives that share little but a general setting, and shot in a disconcertingly spooky docudrama manner (if there were such a thing as gothic cinema verite, this would be it) Gomorrah is a fractured experience right from the beginning. Characters are hurled at the viewer in such a tangle, utterly shorn of context or even background music, that one is a good half-hour in before the storylines begin to unravel. They're mostly the kind of stories about day-to-day Camorra life that one might expect. There are the two young punks obsessed with Scarface (the international criminal-artistic common denominator) who start pulling their own scams, only to fall afoul of the local boss. Or the young innocent who tragically graduates from grocery delivers to gang lookout.

But while these plots have a dirty poignancy of their own, it's the screenplay's more offbeat stories that are the most affecting. In one, a tailor whose boss owes money to the Camorra, freelances at night teaching in a factory full of Chinese workers busy turning out designer knockoffs. Another has a young initiate being schooled by a gentlemanly older gangster on the fine art of procuring toxic waste and dumping it in resolutely unsafe sites -- not only a huge money-maker for the Camorra but a massive, ticking, cancerous, environmental time bomb for Italy -- at one point even using clueless young children to drive the contaminated trucks.

Most other films would utilize the courtly man to symbolize some false image of an idealized earlier gangster, holding the line against the barbarians of today. But as Gomorrah makes clear over and again, this is not an organization with any need for romantic notions of honor. They exist only to make money off anything possible, whether it's fake designer goods, drug dealing, robbery, extortion, or hurling barrels of carcinogens into the ground where they can leach into the water supply. It's a million dirty little scams that, all taken together, appear to squeeze out the opportunity for any legitimate society to function.

Gomorrah is the mob movie as postapocalyptic warning, shot with dark precision inside dingy and overcrowded apartment complexes whose crumbling concrete and peeling paint make a mockery of the beautiful landscape outside. There's an echo here of J.G. Ballard's fiction, with dead-eyed little street punks making life-or-death decisions with a shrug amidst the rubble.

The film's sprawling length and stately pacing can make some parts of it tough going. But Garrone builds his momentum in masterful fashion, building towards the film's sad, devastating finale with jabs of jolting bloodshed and arbitrary tragedy. The fact that he does it all without for a second exploiting, City of God-style, any of the violence depicted, is all the more impressive.

Aka Gomorra.



The new Cosa Nostra.

Cargo 200

The lone indie release to butt heads this weekend with Edward Zwick's shallowly-scripted Defiance -- a revival of Nicholas Ray's lost technicolor opus Bigger Than Life not withstanding -- Cargo 200, the latest from Russian crime artisan Aleksei Balabanov, trades in the hired-gun thrills of the director's popular Brother trilogy for a highball of venomous gallows humor and satiric perversity.

Left in the dense thicket of Brezhnev's sanctioned invasion of Afghanistan, the term "cargo 200" was given to soldiers who found their way back to the motherland in zinc-lined coffins. Fitting, then, is the opening scene which sees a discussion of the cultural climate between two phantoms of a de-Stalinized USSR: two brothers, one a high-ranking member of the Party (Yuri Stepanov) and the other a professor of scientific atheism at a local university (Leonid Gromov). It's the latter's trip to Leninsk that finds him on the side of the road, garnering help from God-lovin' distillers (Aleksei Serebryakov and Natalya Akimova) and their Vietnamese servant (Mikhail Skryabin).

As the professor goes ten rounds with the distiller over the existence of the Almighty, Valera (Leonid Bichevin) steps out on his fiancé with her friend Angelica (Agniya Kuznetsova). A few spins at the discotheque, a long swig of booze and a quick hook-up later, the two are on their way to Valera's uncle's house to get "the good stuff." In classic interlocking fashion, the uncle happens to be the Commie-baiting distiller who has just sent the professor on his way home. Valera passes out on the floor while all the men begin to leer at his lady fair. It's the farmer's friend Zhurov (Aleksei Poluyan, a natural, plain-faced deviant), a Captain in the Party, who shoots the servant only moments before he forces poor Angelica to get on all fours and penetrates her with an empty bottle.

What at first appears to be a moderate Red remake of The Texas Chainsaw Massacre is quickly impregnated with satirical lunacy so grim that one might call it Russia's answer to American Psycho. Valera, an embodiment of yearning bourgeois ethos with his CCCP t-shirt already looking vintage, ditches the scene while Angelica becomes a "love" slave for Zhurov and the distiller goes down for his servant's murder. One of film's culminating images, a naked Angelica wailing, handcuffed to a bed and surrounded by a swarm of black flies and rotting corpses, is so bleak and horrifying that you might think Francis Bacon served as DP.

Merciless in his eccentric brutality, Balabanov pirouettes on the line between dissent and patriotism. Made as a reaction to a burgeoning nostalgia for the days of wine and Bolsheviks, Cargo 200 is minor and discombobulated by its own outrage, but it is that very same outrage that gives it its rabid urgency. That the film flourishes from controlled dread to flailing hysteria and finally lands at its ominous (or is that hopeful?) coda is thanks to Balabanov's focus even in the most hectic of scenarios. More engaging and effective than its French equivalent (Frontier(s)), Cargo 200 sees the emergence of wicked days to come in the eyes of the erstwhile Union that, between Brezhnev's death in 1982 and Gorbachev's mid-'80s perestroika, found itself without leaders, hope, or conscience.

Aka Gruz 200.

Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa

To a film critic, the mainstream is like a ravenous shark with a defective hypothalamus. As long as Hollywood seeds the entertainment waters with chum, the masses will feed and feed until their dead, lifeless eyes roll back in their head. Examples of this baffling binge and purge are released every year -- inexplicable, unexplainable crowd-pleasers like Wild Hogs, Norbit, and Night at the Museum. Now comes Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa, the even louder, more obnoxious sequel to Dreamworks' loud, obnoxious CG original. This is a film about more: More already dated pop culture references, more digitally-rendered eye candy, more abject pandering to a seemingly easy-to-satisfy demographic.

After being stranded on the tiny, titular African island, our four heroes -- egomaniacal lion Alex (Ben Stiller), hypochondriac giraffe Melmen (David Schwimmer), smart alecky zebra Marty (Chris Rock), and lovelorn hippo Gloria (Jada Pinkett Smith) -- are finally headed home. On a junk airplane refurbished by those pesky penguins, self-proclaimed King Julien (Sacha Baron Cohen), along with his right-hand advisor Maurice (Cedric the Entertainer) will take the quartet back to New York. Of course, things don't go as planned, and everyone ends up in the middle of a wildlife preserve in Africa. There, Alex meets up with his dad (Bernie Mac), mom (Sherrie Shepherd), and conniving Uncle Makunga (Alec Baldwin). When the fun-loving feline fails at the tribe's right of passage, however, it's clear these big city critters need to get back to Manhattan, and fast.

Like being beaten over the head with a bag of frosting-covered baby bunnies, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa is so cutesy pie relentless it puts the Terminator to shame. This is a big screen experience so kid-oriented it should come with a pacifier and a selection of Huggies. It goes for the easy, unimaginative laughs and then barely succeeds at finding said funny business. Instead, it supports the cackles from chaos theory of comedy. Just scream and yell a lot while offering a great deal of visual busy work and baby's tiny brain will bray with manipulated happiness. As part of this year's pack of computer generated cartoons, it can't compare to Kung Fu Panda or Wall-E. In fact, it doesn't even compete with The Lion King, the 2D Disney delight from which Escape 2 Africa cribs most of its plot.

And this doesn't even begin to address the inappropriate nature of some of the material. The sexualization of cartoon animals hasn't been this blatant since Bugs Bunny gussied up to seduce Elmer Fudd, and do we really need to see a female hippo get horny over a possible hunky partner? Or how about a penguin's unnatural lust for a dashboard ornament? Even worse, danger is everpresent here, whether it's from poachers, volcanoes, drought, misguided sea creatures, or a little old lady who beats the living snot out of the characters every chance she gets (the most deplorable element of this shrill spectacle). Why PETA wastes its time protesting the Olsen twins and not taking on Madagascar's animal bashing is a mystery.

Still, if it makes the wee ones happy and keeps their parents at bay, no one will really complain. Madagascar 2 will make money, and the cast will reconvene in a couple of years to make the already unnecessary three-quel. At least there is no questioning the visual approach; the movie looks amazing. As an example of the technological leaps and bounds the genre has experienced, the images are astounding. But this is a movie relying on its wit, not its vistas, to keep audiences interested. In that regard, Madagascar: Escape 2 Africa plays it safe. It's the viewer who'll be sorry.



Your table will be ready in 15 minutes.

Zack and Miri Make a Porno

Zack and Miri Make a Porno is the latest film by Kevin Smith and, for better or for worse, it's the same movie the 38-year-old New Jersey native has been making for the last 14 years. That isn't to say there aren't changes. The setting is no longer his beloved hometown and the characters, though certainly of the same mindset, are not members of the director's View Askew universe. There is also the matter of Seth Rogen who constitutes, with the lone exception of Ben Affleck, the only bona fide movie star Smith has cast in a leading role to date. That being said, I'm sure Rogen would let out a chuckle at the thought of himself as any sort of star.

As with most of the filmmaker's oeuvre, all you need to know is in the title. Zack (Rogen) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks) are best friends, living together and working crap jobs in Pittsburgh. They barely make rent and often substitute frivolous pleasures like sex toys and hockey skates in lieu of water and heat. It's at a high school reunion that they reconnect with Miri's high-school crush Bobby Long (Brandon Routh of Superman Returns) and his lover (Justin Long), both gay porn stars earning six-digit incomes in Los Angeles. At a bar afterwards, Zack realizes that a similar career path would solve Miri's and his financial troubles.

Employing his co-worker Delaney (the great Craig Robinson) as a producer and his hockey teammate Deacon (Jeff Anderson) as DP, Zack begins casting his film with the likes of stripper Stacey (real life porn starlet Katie Morgan), a theater actor (Ricky Mabe), a woman who can blow bubbles out of her nether regions (Traci Lords), and Lester (Jason Mewes), a man who can reach full erection in three seconds. Trouble lurks its head, though, when Zack and Miri do a scene together and things get all warm and gooey. For clarification, I'm talking about emotions.

Smith has said many times that a recurring theme in his films is the difference between having sex and making love. Zack and Miri boldfaces that thesis, but it's also a scrappy fable about independent filmmaking, both in perception and production. Making movies has always been a dirty business, but it looks clean in the end. Independent features aren't afforded the luxury of the buff and shine. By equating it with the lowest and cheapest (not to mention most profitable) form of filmmaking, Smith debases the self-importance of independent filmmaking while simultaneously creating a very entertaining indie rom-com.

As a filmmaker, Smith can be earnest and hectic, but he's an extremely talented screenwriter and he's always picked able comic talent to smooth out his heart-on-sleeve mannerisms. Rogen, who came to Hollywood as a Smith fanboy, brings along many of the tropes of his Apatow clan, but he fits with Smith's crew beautifully; his sharp, chummy sarcasm fits just as well with Mewes and Anderson as it has with Peter Segal and Jonah Hill. But, with the exception of chronic scene-stealer Robinson, this is Banks' show. The soon-to-be Laura Bush (in W.) has a lush, fickle voice that accents her sharp timing and emotional range. She matches Rogen's sailor's mouth, note for note, but she also possesses a graceful subtlety that is vital to Miri's growing feelings for Zack. Though she tends towards flighty characters, Banks's talents reach beyond levity.

Though it tends towards the inconsequential, Zack and Miri finds Smith more consistent than many of his contemporaries, especially in terms of focus. There are some minor problems: his wont to crank '90s alt-rock at every given moment often dismantles his tone, and the film's penultimate gross-out (you'll know it when you see it) seems oddly out-of-place. These are things that trouble his craft but Smith's greatest asset has always been his sincerity, and underneath all the bodily fluid, Zack and Miri are the porn-loving, alcoholic lovebirds we all hope still exist. Just, ya know, without the stains.



What do you mean, "Herpes"?

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired

Among the many fascinating things about the HBO documentary Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired is its withering scorn for the jackal-like press packs that surrounded Polanski throughout the legal ordeal he went through in Los Angeles in 1977-1978. What's fascinating is how positively quaint and charming it all seems compared to the world we live in today. What would happen if an A-list movie director drugged, raped, and sodomized a 13-year-old girl in Jack Nicholson's Jacuzzi in today's media environment? It would be all TMZ, Perez Hilton, and cable punditry all the time.

Of course, the press wasn't Polanski's biggest problem at the time. The documentary indicts the legal system itself, and especially the presiding judge, Laurence Rittenband, whose reputation is dragged through the mud here. It would be fascinating to hear his response were he still alive. In his place, we get detailed recollections from police investigators, attorneys from both sides, and the victim herself. (Polanski, however, did not participate.)

It was young Samantha Gailey who agreed to do the Jacuzzi photo shoot with Polanski, and her report of what happened that day is what got him arrested. Initially laughing it off as a prudish reaction from a girl who seemed "to know what she was doing," Polanski was soon deep in it as the press villainized him, explored the various "perversions" of his life and films, and reopened old wounds about the shocking murder of his lovely wife Sharon Tate by the Manson family eight years earlier. What was up with this short, creepy European with the beady eyes and the funny accent?

A Holocaust survivor who had found salvation through film and had become the hottest director in town with such hits as Chinatown and Rosemary's Baby, Polanski was soon persona non grata, bouncing from hearing to hearing as Judge Rittenband looked for a way to get him into prison as soon as possible, eventually accepting a guilty plea on a single charge as a go-ahead to commit Polanski to 90 days of psychological testing to see if he had a social disorder. The documentary lets both the district attorney and Polanski's lawyer expound in depth on Rittenband's treacherous tactics and his concern about protecting his reputation above all else. So dismayed were the two opponents that they eventually found themselves meeting in the courthouse hallway to discuss ways to get Rittenband thrown off the case.

Fearful that the spiteful Rittenband had even more incentive to lock him away with a stiffer sentence when he was released after just 42 days and enjoyed the freedom to travel to Europe to work on a new picture, Polanski eventually ditched his last courtroom appearance and flew off to France, never to return. He's been there ever since, flourishing and even winning an Oscar for directing The Pianist.

Roman Polanski: Wanted and Desired doesn't forgive Polanski for his crimes. Instead, it makes the case that no matter what happened, it was clear from day one that with that judge and in that environment, Polanski could never have gotten fair treatment. That being the case, the film goes easy on Polanski for running away and choosing exile over uncertain justice. It's a great and somewhat Kafkaesque story that Polanski might have enjoyed directing... had it been fiction.



Dead or alive!

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.