Even if the Disney shadow, dimmed as it is of late, didn't still hang over almost all children's movies that come out, the mastery displayed by such successful movies as Shrek (I & II) shows that, in order to compete, today's family fare must reach beyond just talking down to a target audience which, given the writing of some of these lately, must be half-steamed potatoes.  This film falls into that bog.  And yes, I am aware that the original story was written by the director's son, and brilliantly given he was just a child, but even the world's most respected authors accept an editor's touch here and there.  Add to that the antiquated method of 3D presentation that involves paper-board shades with one red lens and one blue one that washes out all colors and gives the film an odd sort of sepia-tinted tone (as opposed the newer method of lenses with opposed polarization that leaves all colors intact) and you have a grave disappointment.

Max is a little boy whom, because of bickering parents and the ridicule of bullies, has retreated into the world of his dreams, which he faithfully records in a journal.  But when that journal is stolen and vandalized by his nemesis, Linus, the world Max created therein, Drool ("Where Kids Rule") is threatened and his two heroes, half-boy-half-shark Sharkboy and the fiery Lavagirl, break through to reality to bring Max back to save them all.  But on Drool Max is at a loss for what he, a mere boy, can do to save an entire world from the villains Mr. Electric and Minus.

The film's' "real" world - the one during which you do NOT wear your special Sharkboy (for the boys) or Lavagirl (for the girls) glasses - is suffused with vibrant color, especially Lavagirl herself who is not only beautiful but striking with flaming pink hair, which makes the dream world all the more disappointing after we put our 3D sunglasses to see the rest of the film in virtual black and white.  But that is only half of the film's problems.  The writing could have stood a once- or thrice-over by more experienced writers who could have established some sort of continuity of theme and punched up the dialog to make the storyline of the film rise to the level of the F/X budget.  The plot is stilted, with crossed goals that may have been meant to seem like twists but just gave the whole movie a sort of arbitrary feel, and the spoken words rang flat, with no verve, no color (oddly like the 3D portions of the movie itself) and no life.  And, something that infuriates me about children's movies, it speaks down to an audience that is bound to consist of more diversity than Mrs. Brown's kindergarten class around the corner.  Today, those wishing to make a family movie need to learn the skill of speaking to the whole range of ages from toddler to mom and dad, a skill mastered by much better films than this one.

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There are musicals that begin on the stage and then get translated for the screen, usually with a great amount of success (Oklahoma!, West Side Story, Chicago), but only recently have musicals that first appeared on film translated well to the stage, for which we largely have Disney Studios to thank (Beauty and The Beast, The Lion King, etc.)  In The Phantom of the Opera, we have a movie that was translated to the stage as a musical that was then translated back to film once again.  And it works as a musical in ways that a straightforward remake of the classic horror film would not have worked.

On his death, Christine's father enlisted the help of a mysterious mentor to look after and train his daughter in the opera, little knowing that this guardianship would soon turn to obsession.  Christine excels in the opera, little knowing that it is due to the machinations of the man known only to others as The Phantom.  As her mentor, her Angel of Music, he becomes ever more controlling and demanding of her, and becomes enraged with jealousy when Christine falls in love with a young man from her past.  As punishment to her and the others in the company, and as a grand scheme to have Christine for his own once and for all, the Phantom stages an elaborate opera of his own, in which he can star with Christine and spirit her away.

Okay, the plot doesn't make much sense, agreed.  For example, if the Phantom wants Christine, why doesn't he take her away like he did at the beginning of the movie and never return?  And why, after Christine's lover so effectively defended himself at the cemetery, was the Phantom able to overcome him so easily in the sewers at the end?  This is what lost this movie that fifth star and kept it from being perfect.  Otherwise, the movie is visually stunning and the music is just plain beautiful to listen to.  The Phantom isn't a particularly good singer, but he's passable and the others are well worth listening to.  This movie won't change your mind about musicals - if you like musicals, you'll like this one, and if you don't, you won't.

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Once upon a time people would often learn to dance by placing numbered footprints on the floor, and the instructor would tell them where to place their feet by calling out a number.  Sort of the predecessor to Twister, I guess.  The thing is, this taught people where to place their feet, what steps to make and in what order, but it didn't teach them style: the swivel of the hips, the graceful sweep of an arm, the dip of a head, etc.  The things that make dancing really fun to do and to watch, without which it's really boring.  "Are We There Yet" follows all of the necessary steps for a formula family film, and even throws in a few curves that we don't normally expect.  There is some mild originality here.  But in the end you're still left with a formula film, and little more.

Nick is the owner of a sports memorabilia store who is doing well enough to buy a brand new SUV for cash, of whom it is also worthy to note that he hates kids.  But when he hopes to impress the woman he so desperately wants to date by offering to take her children, a pair of brats who have made it their mission to keep Mom single until Dad decides to return to them, to meet her in Vancouver for New Years Eve, where she'll be working, the SUV and Nick himself are in for some real punishment.

There are some genuinely touching moments here, for example when the little girl reveals unexpectedly that she can sing like a diva and Nick finds himself actually impressed.  The movie isn't entirely without charm, and there is a truly inventive device in the form of an animated bobble-head doll who gives us insight into Nick's thoughts by voicing them in witty ways, and you will almost find yourself looking forward to the next time he speaks.  But in the end the predictability of the plot and the flat sort of way it hits every step without fail and without much flair or style, makes the movie one that may divert for 90 minutes or so, but be forgotten rather easily as well.

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Sometimes you just want some mindless entertainment.  But even at those times, you can be offended by a movie that takes you're mindlessness for granted to such a degree it nearly becomes insulting.  Even mindless entertainment needs a certain degree of continuity and logic and street-smarts to it.  This movie is a perfect example of shallow, meaningless fun that still stays smart and intelligent enough that you don't feel taken advantage of.  In fact this movie is so tight, so well choreographed, with absolutely perfect spot-on timing from beginning to end, that it actually deserves a special trip to the theater to see it.

Run by a burnout sergeant who uses drugs and alcohol to blunt the pain of having previously lead subordinates to their death, Precinct 13 is scheduled to be decommissioned at midnight on New Years Eve.  Stripped of computers and furniture and just about everything but the barest of essentials, manned by a skeleton crew of three, the sergeant, his secretary and an aging cop who announces he is retiring that night as well, the old building is socked in for the night by a killer blizzard.  When a prison bus pulls up with a famous gang leader as cargo, unable to make it to the prison in the weather, the sergeant reluctantly allows the driver and his assistant to put their prisoners up in the precinct's cells in the basement until the weather lets up.  A police psychiatrist, stopping by for her scheduled interview with the sergeant before going on to a party, is also obliged to stay the night as well.  The night shows signs of passing quietly until an army of armed and armored men appear outside and begin to try to get inside to the prisoners.  At first it appears that the gang leader's men have appeared to spring him, but as the small mismatched band of frightened occupants of Precinct 13 struggle to defend it, they soon discover something much more sinister is going on.

Sure there are holes in the plot, for example how could a squad of rogue policemen requisition a helicopter, its pilot and repelling gear without drawing suspicious attention from headquarters?  But never mind that, this movie is a perfect example of how much the audience is willing to overlook as long as you give them a smart, well-constructed plot that is well-paced, well choreographed and just in general well made.  If you've already seen all the movies you intended to see this month, make a special trip to see this one, you won't regret it.

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Yet another historical epic by Scorcese, while purporting to be a look at the life of America's most famous eccentric millionaire, Howard Hughs, this movie tells the story, primarily, of his fight with the airline industry.  As such, it accomplishes it's task more effectively than most movies.  That the entertainment aspect of this film lags a little in places doesn't entirely ruin a movie that is visually amazing and at times gripping and really very interesting.

The movie shows Hughs' perfectionism when he shoots Hollywood's most expensive silent movie to date, and then reshoots the entire film for sound.  At first we get the impression of a young, impetuous man with no respect for money, but we later see how really very smart and savvy he was in business as well as engineering and avionics.  We also see, in his fight with other airlines and eventually with Congress itself, a man with the ability to cut through the crap and deal with reality and make that reality clear for everyone else to see.  What they don't show you in this film is how effective Hughs was in turning the tables on Senator Brewster, whose political career was eventually utterly destroyed by Hughs' candid accusations during the hearings against him.

The movie has many delights for the eyes, from the beauty of some of the movie stars that Hughs dated to the dogfight scenes during the filming of Hell's Angels, to the flight of Hugh's greatest airplane, the Hercules, dubbed by the press The Spruce Goose.  As I mentioned, there are some scenes that tend to drag on a little longer than in entertaining, but when the action picks up again you're glad it does and you're invested all over again.  SO in the end this is a strong enough movie for me to recommend.

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There's nothing new here, though I am hearing the exact same complaints about foul-mouthed children as I heard when the first version of this movie came out with Walter Mathau in the Buttermaker role and an intriguing teen-aged Tatum O'Niel in the role of Samantha.  Back then it was both shocking and subversively funny, even more so because it was the first time many adults heard what most playground supervisors had been hearing for years: language that would shock a sailor coming out of the mouths of virtual babes.  I was just a kid at the time, so none of it was shocking to me because I heard it all day every day on the playground myself.  This new one, though, lacks some teeth because we are much more jaded these days.

Buttermaker is a down-and-out rodent exterminator and alcoholic hired to coach a team of the misfit brats no one else wants in the little league except one do-gooder mom who sued the league to allow everyone to play regardless of ability.  Thinking this will be an easy buck, Buttermaker puts in the minimum effort in training these kids, but when he sees their angst at losing their first game he is inspired to try a little harder...but only just a little.  It is only his rivalry with another coach, a nightmare over-competitive type, that puts Buttermaker on his feet again and begin coaching the team in earnest.  He recruits the daughter of an ex-flame and a rebel dirt-biker and things begin to come together for the team.  But will the drive to win drag Buttermaker down tot he level of his arch-enemy?

There is little here we haven't seen in other movies, though it's kind of fun to see this movie in a new, updated form.  The original was entertaining for what it was at the time, and even spawned three undeserved and ill-conceived sequels, and this one is at least as entertaining as that one.  But it isn't anything memorable, quotable, or keep-able in your own library when it comes out on DVD.  I wouldn't begrudge you if you wanted to see this one, although there is much more memorable fare out there currently on which to spend a hard earned dollar.  Just don't expect it to add much to your existance.

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I can understand a director not wanting to make a straight remake of an original, wildly popular television series.  I mean, Tom Cruise took an ensemble-piece like Mission: Impossible, bastardized it into yet another one-man vanity piece for himself, and made millions of dollars.  But this movie isn't even an attempt at a remake.  The movie is about events surrounding the remake of the Bewitched series for television.  Certainly it tries to introduce some of the same elements, but in the end becomes yet another excuse for Ferrell to prance around the screen playing the same tantrum-prone whiner he has played in other films.

When fallen star Jack Wyatt is tapped to star as Darrin in the new Bewitched series, his agent encourages him to let his ego run amok.  As such, Jack insists the show be about him, not the witch wife.  So he hires an unknown, Isabel, unaware that Isabel, is, indeed, a real witch who is seeking life amidst mortals in order to find true love.  But when Isabel catches on that she is being used, she turns the tables on Jack.

Now let me get this straight: Samantha is to be played by Isabel, who really is a witch; her father is every bit the playboy Samantha's was, but unlike Samantha, Isabel's mother is never around; Endora, Samantha's mother, is played by Iris, who also really is a witch; coincidentally, both Samantha and Isabel have a bumbling Aunt Clara; and if that isn't confusing enough, the character of Uncle Arthur from the new series has somehow found a way to enter the real world and drive Jack's car recklessly all over town.  Is that about it?  This movie has cute moments, and cuts of Elizabeth Montgomery from the original series along side of shots of Kidman repeatedly remind us just how much they really do look alike.  But over all this movies suffers from not being enough about the original Bewitched series it is supposed to be about and trying too hard to not disappoint fans by bringing in the old characters in one form or other.  The entire plot could be written on the back of a matchbook, it is that inconsequential.  Overall this is a failed attempted that tries to be smart and original but ends up outwitting itself.  They would have been better off staying strictly within the milieu of the original series and just updating it.  It would have been refreshing to see Samantha the uber-hottie and Darin the hotshot advertising exec dating in today's promiscuous and media-driven society.  Instead we get milquetoast.

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Well, this review certainly isn't going to make me the most popular kid on the block, but much as other critics loved this movie, I frankly, well, just didn't.  Not that much, anyway.  I am one who much preferred Tim Burton's original vision of the comic book milieu before Joel Schumacher took it and made silly, ridiculous, vomit-flavored cotton candy out of it.  Burton's vision of Batman presented a circus-gone-horribly-bad atmosphere that somehow suited the cock-eyed insanity of a vigilante who dresses like a bat to fight criminals equally as mad as he is.  This version tries too hard to make it all somehow sensible and believable, like it is perfectly logical and understandable once you just understand what led up to it or something.  Like a psychotic explaining in a perfectly civilized voice why he did the crazy things he did.

After witnessing the deaths of his parents Bruce Wayne takes to heart the lecture on fear by Gotham's crime boss and travels the world acquainting himself with criminals in an attempt to understand them.  He is tapped by Ra's al-Gul, leader of a league of amoral Shadow Warriors, to join their effort to rid the world of corruption and evil, but Bruce decides he cannot subscribe to their kind of all-or-nothing justice and returns to Gotham to pursue his own brand of vigilantism.  Gotham has become an even greater hive of crime and injustice than before he left and while Bruce enlists the help of the only honest cop in Gotham, an assistant DA with whom he has childhood ties, a brilliant if forgotten scientist from his own company, and, of course, his inimitable butler, Alfred, he seeks to build his secret persona as Batman.  For this first outing he is up against the Scarecrow, a psychologist who uses psychotropic drugs to make his victims think his burlap mask has come alive with maggots.  He also runs afoul of other also-rans that he can warm his knuckles up on until the script says he can move on to the climax.  There is an additional side-story involving the ownership of Wayne Enterprises which adds little to the story.

Why don't I like this version of the Batman saga?  Where do I begin?  Do I start with the fight choreography, which is sloppy, clumsy and not very interesting to watch?  Or do I first talk about Christain Bale, who is sort of funny looking anyway but who, in the Batman mask, looks like some mouth-breathing, drooling nerd in an ill-fitting Halloween costume?  How about Katie Holmes who, cute as she may be, really needs to learn not to smirk through all of her lines, especially those that are intended to be dramatic?  Gary Oldman as the future Commissioner Gordon comes off with the sort of aw-shucks sidekick clumsiness of Festus on Gunsmoke.  And what exactly was so reprehensible about Rutger Hauer as the Chairman of the Board of Wayne Enterprises?  Like any good businessman he was seeking to grow the business by taking it public.  Yes, he tried to cover-up the loss of a particularly dangerous weapon and fired Morgan Freeman, whom we are supposed to like, but while unethical it could hardly be construed as evil, maybe worthy of being fired but not ridiculed in the way he was.  I guess in the final analysis, I dislike this movie because, with the exception of some of the supporting cast, such as Michael Caine as Alfred and Morgan Freeman as the scientist, I just didn't grow to like or care much about any of the other characters.  Bale's Wayne especially came off as spoiled and self-indulgent, with the childish luxury of castigating himself for the death of his parents by traveling the globe.  The whole thing was just a goopy, busy, cluttered, ugly mess.

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Regular readers know my criteria for reviewing remakes, which is one question: what is gained by making a remake of this movie?  In other words, can anything be added to or improved on the experience of the first film, or can the story be looked at from another angle that makes it fresh and interesting?  It has to be more than just advances in special effects, or that now we can do it in color instead of black and white.  And I'm afraid that the excuse of making the story more accessible to modern viewers is not in and of itself a strong enough reason.

The Bucket family are dirt poor and live in a leaning, nearly-fallen one room shack in the shadow of the mysterious Wonka chocolate factory.  Grandpa Joe tells stories of the time when the factory employed nearly the entire town, including himself, until Willie Wonka closed the factory due to spies stealing his secret recipes.  Then one day the factory reopened, only no one was rehired, and yet still chocolate began to be shipped out once more out of the factory.  Who works there now? And who is the reclusive Willie Wonka?  Well, Charlie gets the chance to find out as he and four other children are the lucky finders of five golden tickets to visit the factory and be taken on a tour by none other than Willie Wonka himself, an eccentric who may or may not be dangerously unbalanced.  As the children one by one fall victim to their own character flaws and the dangers of the factory itself, one wonders if anyone will be left standing at the end to receive their prize of a lifetime of Wonka Chocolate.

The movie is visually weird and wonderful, the story is darker and more twisted than the first, and the children are arguably more crisply and colorfully defined in this one than the first.  But when the first movie, "Willie Wonka and the Chocolate Factory," came out as a musical I thought that if any children's story lent itself to a musical format it was that one, and I was delighted.  Although there are musical numbers in this remake, strictly by the Oompah Loompahs, it is not a musical, and these musical numbers are also darker (though, paradoxically, the very pointed morals the songs introduced in the first movie have had their teeth somewhat pulled in this one, making them less barbed.)  The Oompah Loompahs themselves are no longer whimsically colorful men in silly flared pants, but are all portrayed by a single man (Roy) who is creepy in his stone-faced performance, even while singing and dancing around with as many as fifty clones of himself.  In the end, the answer to my question about remakes, for this one at least, is no, this version really adds very little to the experience of the first one, and in trying to be darker and weirder has simply failed to be even as good.

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Inspirational?  Touching?  Exciting?  Gripping?  Yes, yes, yes, perhaps.  But aside from that and some pretty good acting - not great, but pretty good - what do we really have here?

James Braddock's story of a Depression-era rise from infamy as a fighter who "coulda been a contender" but didn't quite make it to World Boxing Champion is a true one.  After a series of injuries keeps Braddock from making it big his family falls on hard times, so hard that his wife actually "farms out" the kids at one point until Braddock goes begging, literally hat-in-hand, amongst his old boxing buddies in order to bring them back home.  Then his old promoter manages to get him a "one-time-only" fight with a real contender that, against the odds, Braddock actually manages to win without any time to train at all.  This earns him entre back into the fight game and this time, for the sake of a devoted wife and loving children, he's determined not to let this second chance slip away.

The story is a pretty simple and straightforward one in spite of attempts to take side roads into the world of food riots and early attempts at unionization or workers.  The acting is competent and even well-done, but not "wow."  Yes, there are moments that bring a tear to the eye, a thrill to the old pacemaker, and even a cheer or two.  Craig Bierko puts in a surprising performance as the bad guy.  But given the simplicity of the story I couldn't help thinking afterwards that the movie was all emotional devices, one filmmaker's trick after another to manipulate the emotions of the audience, and little more.  In fact the entire story could have been told in, maybe, half the time, and been just as stirring.  Yes, I know it is based on the life of a real man, but it isn't by any means a biography.  Given the lack of surprises, the rest is all smoke and mirrors to make the audience "feel" this way then wrench them over that way, then spin them around the other way.  All emotional trickery and precious little actual substance.  A good film, but not as good as what else is on the menu this summer.

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Why is it the best movies get very little promotion?  These are important movies that every movie audience ought to see, in my opinion, to show them what real cinema not only could be, but maybe what it really should be.  Crash is just such a movie.

The story follows several people of a wide range of ethnic backgrounds through a two-day period in Los Angeles in which they each collide with the other in interesting ways, both literally and metaphorically.  The movie uses coincidence and serendipity to explore many facets of racism and bigotry and how, in spite of the close quarters in which we live, how little we really know or understand those of another race.

This movie has moments of very real horror, not gore, but that dawning, creeping realization that you have done something truly horrendous to another person, hurt them deeply without even realizing it.  We get to see how sometimes our own self-absorption creates barriers to true understanding of others.  It is more effective than almost any movie I have ever seen at illustrating how we insulate ourselves from others we don't know, and how that very insulation is the harm caused to us an others.  We get so engrossed in our own petty little wants and needs that we don't concern ourselves with the wants or needs of others.  It is also a movie with moments of sudden and unexpected warmth and deep humanity.  It shows us how rich our lives could truly be if we just opened ourselves up to others and set our fears and preconceived notions of others, notions based on race or imagines class distinction, aside.  The film comes at us from unexpected directions, and because of this gets under the tough barriers we have had to put up around our emotions.  It affects us.  If you see no other movie this summer, make this one a priority.

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Okay, let's face it, the original television series was right down there on a level with shows like "Hee-Haw."  It was never a high-brow enterprise to begin with, just a weekly excuse to choreograph car chase scenes for a television audience with the mental capacity of a six-year-old.  It was my sister who pointed out to me that the tires of the General Lee, Bo and Luke Duke's famous Dodge Charger, squealed when making every turn, even when on a dirt road.  So the question a filmmaker contemplating a cinematic treatment of this booger-picking hoedown needs to ask himself is, "Do I remain faithful to the inanity of the original, or do I at least try to lift the concept out of the trailer park and into some semblance of real entertainment?"

Bootlegging cousins Bo, Luke and Daisy and their moonshine-brewing Uncle Jesse Duke cross proverbial swords with the crooked Assemblyman of Hazard County, Georgia, Jefferson Davis Hogg, known to the local Sheriff and Police as "Boss" Hogg, who is running a political shell-game to slip through a county ordinance permitting strip-mining of land he has seized from surrounding farms.  With the help of their sooped-up 1969 Dodge Charger known as The General Lee, the Dukes and their friends run the authorities ragged as they race the clock to beat Boss Hogg at his own game.

Director Hal Needham didn't even try to improve on his source material in the least, but delivered to fans of the original series exactly what they might expect, and letting the rest of the discriminating cinema audience down in the process.  The movie takes no risks, doesn't even harken back to its predecessor, but simply lifts the series right out of the early 1980's and plants it right in our laps unchanged.  If anything could have used fresh, inspired retelling with some smarts to go along with its heart, this remake really needed it, and didn't get it.  The performances if one dimensional, aren't even the worst of it.  There is nothing on the screen, be it plot or action or acting, that makes this movie worth your dollar.

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Sequel - sort of - to last year's Daredevil, this film isn't anywhere near as good as that near miss was.  Garner is fetching but overrated as a sex-symbol, in my opinion, and though good with going from ice-maiden to little girl in a single bat of an eyelash, her acting range is rather limited.  This movie is meant to be a showcase for her and depending on what you expect of her as an actress it is a competent one, but as a movie it's barely entertaining.

Elektra is resurrected using an ancient Buddhist monk's trick and trained to be a great fighter, then inexplicably kicked out of the dojo by her sensei, she becomes a highly in-demand assassin with an agent, no less.  When hired to kill a handsome and charming man and his beautiful and spunky teenaged daughter Elektra decides to protect them from further assassination attempts instead, without ever expressing any curiosity as to why these two would be hunted the way they are.  Her own friend and colleague heroically gives up his life while maintaining the same inexplicable dearth of curiosity.  It seems the girl is actually a child prodigy, which for the purposes of this movies means she is a more efficient killer at her age than anyone else.  She is being hunted for no other reason than this by a corporation who is threatened by her for reasons never explained.

This is a dismal foray into the world of comic books.  The film seems to hold that martial arts and the ability to kill in efficient and creative ways is a high calling, and the young girl who shows promise of being the best their ever was is a treasure to be cherished.  No, she can't do advance trigonometry at a glance, paint a great masterpiece or write a play that touches the spirit of millions of audiences.  She can kill more efficiently than anyone else and that is all that she can do.  And this threatens a major corporation housed in a penthouse made of old-fashioned thatch atop a modern high-rise for reasons never revealed, enough that they send magical assassins after her.  People sacrifice their lives for no higher moral purpose than to preserve the life of this young assassin prodigy and great battles are fought for her.  But the holes in this plot are big enough to fly a 747 through, and the flimsy attempts at a gothic atmosphere seems grimy and obscene.

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Okay, it is abundantly clear that this movie was made for fans of the comic books this movie was based on and for few others.  It pretty much established the characters, their super powers and their inter-group dynamics...and their primary enemy.   But not much else was accomplished or, to be fair, even attempted by this movie.

Reed Richards is as bad at business as he is good at science and must go begging to the soulless capitalist Victor Von Doom for financing to accomplish his scientific ideals.  But when a study of a plasma cloud aboard Von Doom's space station goes awry, Richards and the crew of the station, including Von Doom himself, are altered at the DNA level, giving each a unique set of super powers, among them invisibility, flame-control, and unearthly strength.  Now as Richards struggles with discovering a means of returning them to their normal selves, he must contend with the childish antics of a rebel colleague who revels in his new powers, a desperately depressed friend who hates his transformation, romance, about which he has no clue whatever, and the threat of his arch-enemy who has decided to use his powers to separate Richards once and for all from his life.

There is little to say about this movie because so little effort was put into making a movie.  It is almost a documentary, except that this is all fiction.  What little plot there is isn't really resolved.  This is all setup for future episodes.  The problem is that such films as this, which only set up sequels and don't actually entertain in and of themselves cheat the audience who comes to be entertained.  You would miss little by missing this one entirely and waiting for the sequel, which we can only hope will have some semblance of a real plot to it.

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This is a smart, substantial look at relationships and commitment masquerading as a romantic comedy.  The novel on which the script is based is by Nick Hornby ("High Fidelity" and "About a Boy") and had I known this going in my expectations would have been higher. As it was I found myself very pleasantly surprised.  I was also relieved to find Fallon likeable and less manic than in past films.

This one is about the romance between a grade school teacher - he - and a high powered executive - she.  There is more than one obstacle to eternal bliss.  First, there is the caste system of ambition versus the perceived lack of it, most often imagined by those who consider themselves in some sort of higher caste because of their high-profile careers.  Then there is the fact that she is hot and he...not.  But what becomes the biggest hurdle to surmount for them is his genetically ingrained obsession with the Boston Red Sox baseball team.

It was refreshing to find a romantic comedy that didn't start with the premise of a misunderstanding or a lie.  These two know who each other are and aside from some perfectly normal paranoia at the onset of any new relationship there is no real obfuscation or hidden agenda.  Just two people earnest about finding someone to love.  That then leave only one thing for the movie to be about, the one thing that truly make a romance fascinating and engrossing to watch, and that is the mystery of how to make a relationship work in the face of nothing more momentous or cosmic that our own personal foibles and eccentricities.  This film explores those well, and Fallon and Barrymore are skilled and well cast in their roles.   The film even sidesteps what could have ended up being a truly typical and cheesy ending reconciliation by filming it in the documentary style of your typical sports cast as it is covered on television in the midst of a real Red Sox game.  This one is worthy of your time and attention.

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On the heels of a literal downpour of romantic comedies in which some sort of secret or lie or misunderstanding thrusts two people together against their will, sometimes repeatedly, until they give in a fall in love, come a movie more about relationships than about coincidence.  This movie has two people already in love, about to face obstacles to that love and we get to witness how they succeed...or fail...at navigating those obstacles.

Theresa and Simon are about to spend a week with her parents in New Jersey for the first time.  The problem isn't that Theresa is black and Simon is about as white as a white man gets, it is that Theresa hasn't told her parents yet.  Even in this supposedly enlightened time one has to ask, as Simon does, why Theresa would so pointedly leave such an important detail out, and this is just one of the boulders downstream.  Percy, Theresa's father, is all about making sure his little girl is looked after well, and not only is Simon white, but he quit his job one day before the trip to visit Theresa's family.  The growing tensions between Percy and Simon start out comical and quickly become tragic and uncomfortable.  Theresa and Simon are finally faced with the realities of the challenges ahead of them as an interracial couple.

This film sort of sneaks up on you.  At first it seems as if Percy is being unreasonably racist in his reaction to finding out that Simon is white, but the movie doesn't reduce itself to clichés of right and wrong.  It isn't long before we see first hand that Percy isn't entirely unreasonable in his concerns for their ability to survive in the world as an interracial couple.  His tactics may seem cruel, especially when he manipulates Simon into telling several racist jokes at the dinner table, one of which goes too far.  But we can see how much Percy loves his daughter and in the end his objections aren't lost on us, nor are they lost on Theresa and Simon.  If nothing else, Percy forces the two young people to take a much more realistic look at the nature of their relationship and what it means to their future together.  This is a smart film and surprisingly warm and romantic.  In fact it is one of the most satisfyingly romantic films I think I have seen in quite some time.

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This is standard Disney fare.  The only problem with it is that today's family movies, even those from Disney, have moved beyond the standard into more sophisticated territory.  Movies rated G any more are either documentaries or animated films that are strictly for the ankle-biters and not for consumption by anyone above the age of, say, birth.

Maggie, daughter of a stock-car racing legacy that has fallen on hard times, picks Herbie from a junk yard as her college graduation present more because he is the last car remaining that will run than because she really wants him.  But it doesn't take long for her to realize that the little '55 VW Bug is a free agent, doing just what he darn-well pleases in spite of the wishes of his owner.  And what Herbie wants more than anything else is to race with the big boys.  Maggie's problem is that her father chauvinistically insists that she get a real job instead of wasting her life on a racetrack like he and his famous father did.  So Maggie must take on the mystery persona of Max in order to take Herbie to the top of the racing circuit.

The Disney writers didn't stretch when they wrote this one...heck, they barely even warmed up the keys of their word-processors.  With the likes of Lohan and Keaton, one expects much more than this.  What we get is a plot that is even watered down from the original sixty-something first in the series.  What this film needed was a quirky mechanic, like Buddy Hacket, or a memorable villain like the late, great Terry Thomas, or some real pathos like when Herbie tried to leap from the Golden Gate Bridge in the first movie.  Aside from all too few glimpses of Lohan's scrumptious legs, we get nothing to make this movie stand out and be remembered.

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There have been several different adaptations of Douglas Adams' hilarious book: a radio program, a television miniseries, and two theatrical releases, one exclusively in England and the latest, this one, worldwide.  The question is, does the dry, very British wit of the sci-fi spoof translate to the screen.  The answer is yes...and no.

Arthur Dent awakens to find his house has been scheduled for demolition to make way for a new expressway, that his best friend is actually an alien from a planet somewhere in the vicinity of Betelgeuse, and that his entire planet has been scheduled for demolition to make way for a hyperspace expressway.  As Earth is destroyed Arthur's friend takes him hitchhiking through the galaxy, where Arthur meets Trillian, a girl he almost met a year ago before she was whisked away by Zaphod Beeblebrox, the president of the galaxy.  Now the four, with a depressed robot along for company, must rescue Zaphod's second head (yes, he has two heads) by finding the POV gun, a weapon that makes other's see things from your point of view.  And maybe along the way the they will find the ultimate question of life, the universe, and everything, to which the answer is...42.

When one reads the book, one gets a sense of the manic energy that one witnesses on the screen, but since we can read at our own pace and reread passages that we find entertaining, we don't really get the full impact of the insane, breakneck speed at which the plot moves.  The movie brings this to alarming light.  Because of the speed at which the plot moves I wonder how many viewers who have not read the book may miss some of the funny bits.  The movie gamely tries to help the audience keep up to speed by providing a voiceover that explains things, but since this voice is sometimes the voice of The Hitchiker's Guide itself, a book with everything anyone would ever want to know about the universe in it, this can sometimes add to the confusion.  Still, I don't agree with critics who say that only fans of the book will enjoy the movie.  It's cute and lighthearted and even optimistic about life, the universe, and everything.  If nothing else kids will get a kick out of the kooky visuals.

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I have always said that whenever a director or producer set their minds on making a remake, and this applies to remakes of TV series as well as movies, the most important question that needs to be asked is, "Why?"  The only reason that I can think of for doing so is if there is not only the intent but the possibility of improving upon the original.  Now I'll admit that the original television series on which this film is based is well before my time, but I have seen some reruns and I have a friend who is very much a fan of the series.  I was also a big fan of the old Flintstones cartoons as a child.  Joseph Hanna of Hanna-Barbara, the producing team responsible for The Flintstones, was once accused by a television critic of basing his cartoon on The Honeymooners, to which his response was the equivalent of, "No duh!"  So I do have at least some insight into what made the old series so successful in its time.

Ralph Kramden is the proverbial dreamer who, in an attempt to rise above his current station as a city bus driver, falls like a rube for just about any get-rich-quick scheme that crosses his path.  Ed Norton is his good-hearted if not-so-bright neighbor who is more interested in helping his best friend succeed in his hair-brained misadventures than in succeeding himself.  Alice and Trixie are, respectively, their much more sensible and grounded, long-suffering wives who have found a duplex in which both couples can live if only they can come up with the down-payment.  The problem is that Ralph has spent his and Alice's entire life savings on his schemes, and if he doesn't find a way to make the money back before the deadline, the kindly old women who is selling the house will be forced to sign it over to a developer who is not exactly evil, but is not long in the ethics department either.

So, why remake the series into a modern movie?  Beats me.  What was a timely and, okay I'll even grant somewhat timeless, TV series was successful because of the truths it was able to make itself about in the modest, non-ambitious setting of Ralph and Alice's apartment.  While this may make for entertaining and lively television comedy, such a thing doesn't translate to film so easily.  The filmmakers knew this, and so in order to make the movie they broke the story out of its somewhat claustrophobic setting into the wider scope of New York City itself.  But in doing so most of the charms of the little series has been lost.  In an attempt to retain at least some of that charm, the writer and director kept the story provincial and small, even pulling the teeth of the one antagonist, Eric Stoltz as the real estate developer, so that he really seems no more than a simple businessman trying to do his job, not executing anywhere near the level of dirty tricks he could have done to win and make himself truly nasty.  The end result is a simple little movie that, while charming and warm in its own way, is somewhat anemic when compared to most other modern comedies and simply does not do justice to the original series.  I do think, however, that the original series might translate better to a live stage performance (hint to anyone out there who might be reading.)

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I'll admit to a bias: I don't care for horror movies as a rule.  It isn't because they are scary, but in fact quite the opposite, they very rarely are very scary.  Since the 1970's the trend in horror has been to replace gore with any real suspense or horror.  Indeed there were moments in the drama Crash that contained more real horror than all of the moments of supposed horror in HOW combined.

Six college students, among them an estranged brother and sister, get waylaid on their way to a football game by two psychotic brothers.  One has inherited his mother's skill at wax sculpture and the other has a lust for blood.  Between them they have filled the abandoned town in which they live with wax figures that are actually victims that have been kidnapped by one brother and coated in wax and re-sculpted by the other, some alive at the time.

This movies adds nothing original to the genre with the possible exception of a rather intriguing climax that I won't give away except to say it happens in a house entirely made of wax and a fire breaks out.  'Nuff said.  Much has been made of Paris Hilton's appearance in this film, but she actually has a very small role, and though her acting isn't great, it certainly isn't any worse than anyone else in the film.  In the end this is an innocuous little movie with relatively little gore compared to some, but no real horror either.  It is almost entirely the visually interesting ending sequences that got this movie a couple of extra stars, and in fact the ending may well make the entire movie worth sitting through.  You'll have to decide that for yourself.

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There are movies who seem to miss their own point, as if the director expects the audience to get what's so touching and heartwarming about the plot even as the characters themselves miss it entirely.  The problem with this is that the audience usually does get it and then can't understand why the characters are so stupid and dense that they don't.  This comes from directors who want to make a subtle film that makes a point but doesn't hit the audience over the head with it.  As noble as this goal may be, making the character dense and obtuse is not the way to do it.  It only makes a movie that is frustrating to watch.

Quaid plays a seasoned ad sales veteran with a low-pressure approach that may not bring in the hot, dynamic, superstar advertising dollars but keeps the magazine well stocked with good, solid, reliable, and steady revenues.  Grace plays the hotshot, wet-behind-the-ears business school graduate who is given Quaid's job.  To is credit, the young man recognizes valuable experience when he sees it and keeps his older colleague on-board as wingman and erstwhile mentor even as the new owners of the magazine take a scorched-earth approach to productivity enhancement, firing employees almost as fast as they can.  When Grace's wife leaves him he finds himself adrift socially and gloms onto Quaid's family, even to the point of falling in love with the older daughter.  This brings on conflict in the office and strain in the family.

Ultimately this is a movie about one's life-compass.  It does a good job of showing the new modern ethical dilemma, which is once you have done everything they tell you to do to become a success in life, college, job, wife, house, car, etc., where do you go from there?  Grace's character is a man without a life's compass, but in Quaid he sees where he wants to eventually end up.  Throughout the movie he is begging for just a little help in finding the right path to that goal, and for some reason Quaid's character can only roll his eyes at the ironies that keep arising over a man working for a boss young enough to be his son.  In fact, his own self-absorption leads to the breakup of the burgeoning romance between his daughter and the younger man.  Okay fine, but even when they finally crack that one big deal together at the end of the movie, the older man still refuses to take the younger under his wing and they end up long-distance friends on opposite ends of the country.  Overall a very disappointing and unsatisfying film.

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Thrillers can be profound or not, they can be enlightening...or not, they can even be shocking or not, but one thing a thriller must be is suspenseful.  The audience must care for the main character(s) and must perceive that he/she/they are in very real immanent danger.  There must be circumstances we can identify and a building of tension toward a climax that has us on the edge of our seat.  "The Interpreter" misses the mark on almost every count.

Silvia Broom (Kidman) is an interpreter at the UN who, having grown up in Africa, is an expert on African languages, including some rather obscure ones.  When she returns to the interpreter's booth to retrieve some personal affects in the dead of night and overhears whispered threats to a soon to be visiting African dignitary, she becomes a target as well.  Secret Service Agent Keller (Penn) is assigned to determine how credible this threat is and thwart it.

Agent Keller asks a very apt question when Silvia first reports what she overheard, in effect observing the incredible coincidence that conspirators should be discussing their plot in a room full of microphones just in time to be overheard by one of the perhaps eight people in the country who understands their obscure language.  This part of the script subscribes to a cheater's trick in thrillers that says that all we have to do is remark on coincidences in order to dispel any lack of believability they may introduce into the plot.  This coincidence, which could have introduced a rather intriguing plot point or subplot, is never mentioned again and never explained.  Likewise, aside from a rather lukewarm chase in which her Vespa is nearly rear-ended by the bad guy and an incident in which an intruder appears on her fire-escape wearing one of her African mask wall hangings, we don't get the sense that either Silvia or the authorities consider her to be in any real danger.  Certainly she's being terrorized, but if the bad guys wanted her dead, the could have killed her during the mask incident rather than just playing Halloween early.  Which begs the question, if they are willing to kill just about everyone else in their way, including one of their own, why would they hesitate to kill her?  It is also interesting how she somehow knows where to be and when to make her own last stand when supposedly the endangered African dignitary should have already been dead long before he reached her hiding place.

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SciFi as a genre of movie actually encompasses several different sub-genres.  You have your hard-SciFi that includes lots of highly technical and scientific fact on which to base it's concept (Sphere, Contact, etc.), you have space opera which is romantic daring-do bordering on mythic (Star Wars, Star Trek, etc.), then there's space horror (Alien, Predator, etc.), and then you have the genre into which this film fits, SciFi Thriller, in the company of such films as I, Robot and Minority Report.  I point this out because even among fans of SciFi there is going to be a split between those who like this film and those who don't.  I submit that those who do not based on it's scientific impossibility or plot inconsistencies and plot holes are missing the entire point of this movie.

When his best friend, the stunningly beautiful Jordan (Johansson), is selected to leave the protected environment in which they live and go to The Island, the only uncontaminated place left on Earth but on which there is only limited space, Lincoln's (McGregor) own curiosity leads him to discover that those so selected are actually killed instead of sent to some tropical paradise.  In a daring rescue, Lincoln spirits Jordan away and finds a way out of the facility in which they live only to find the outside world is not poisoned at all.  They track down a technician (Buscemi) from the facility that befriended Lincoln and the man tells them that they are clones of wealthy people in the real world, kept for replacement parts in case they are mortally injured.  Now Lincoln and Jordan must escape the highly trained mercenaries that have been set on their trail and find some way to survive in a world as alien to them as another planet.

This is a fun movie, intended as nothing but pure escapist entertainment.  We need movies like this and in point of fact these are my favorite kinds of movies, the kind that totally suspend reality and whisk us away to a reality that couldn't possibly exists but is just fun to imagine and explore.  The kind of reality that allows that two people of admitted athletic prowess but childlike intellects can somehow evade highly trained mercenaries, fly jet-cycles they've never even seen before in their lives and  ultimately outwit scientists with multiple doctorate degrees.  Who cares if it is impossible?  As long as the movie stays true to it's own internal logic, this is the stuff of which fantasy is made, and I love it unconditionally.  One note: if this movie reminds you of Logan's Run (1976) you aren't the only one.

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It is often fun to see celebrities play themselves in the movies, especially when they are willing to act the fool and lampoon their own image.  Mike Ditka, former coach of the Chicago Bears, gets the award for this one.  Although he shouts and rails and acts foolish, just like he did in real life, he still manages to be the only one of the three main characters in this movie to end it with his dignity intact.  But his performance is a bright spot in a movie with precious few bright spots.

Phil (Ferrel) is so incensed when his uber-competitive father transfers Phil's son to another little league soccer team that he agrees to coach the other team to ensure that his some gets some playtime.  To that end he taps Mike Ditka, his father's neighborhood arch-rival, to be his assistant coach.  However, when the latent competitiveness Phil inherited from his father is awakened by Ditka's own competitive drive and by copious amounts of caffeinated coffee, Phil meets and exceeds the worse excesses in which his father ever indulged.

When I saw the previews to the movies and knew I would have to see and review it, I sat down and I wrote out my prediction of the plot, sealed it in a envelope and gave it to a friend.  After seeing the film I had him open that envelope.  The note read, "Man coaches son's team against father, becomes even more competitive than his father until some plot device makes him see how much he has become like his dad and he repents of his ways."  Okay, so the formula was easy to guess from the previews, so what?  There is nothing wrong with a movie that follows a formula, as long as that movie can find some way to transcend the formula, take it to a new and original and, most importantly, entertaining place.  Though this movie gamely tries to deliver with some truly laugh out loud moments, it fails to rise above just another formula comedy.  To those who disagree, ask yourself in all honesty, do you really think you'll remember and be talking about this movie a year from now?  Six months?  Three?  Even next week?  I didn't think so.

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When all is said and done, movies are a form of communication.  As such, the only real criteria for whether a film is successful or not should be whether it effectively communicated the director's message to his audience.  But we all know that isn't so.  There are other criteria, such as, for example, was the message the director wanted to communicate worth the audience's time in hearing it.  I didn't want to see this movie when I saw the previews.  From them I saw only a war movie with lots of fighting and killing and whispered oaths and threats with the microphone-gain turned high to emphasize their intensity.  I resisted seeing this movie as much as I could, but in the end I knew I would be doing a disservice to the few who read these reviews if I did not review it.  It turns out to miss it would have been a mistake.

A medieval blacksmith mourning the suicide of his wife after the death of their child is driven to join the crusades in the Middle East where he inherits the lands of a ducal father he barely knew and falls in love with the queen of Jerusalem.  As the knights of the Templar order finally succeed in destroying the fragile peace between the Christians who hold Jerusalem and the hostile Muslims surrounding it, the blacksmith-turned-duke is called upon to lead the defense of the walled city against the coming siege.

It is both the elegant simplicity of the story and it's hidden, deeper complexities that make this movie work.  The previews did not serve the film well because they primarily featured the fight scenes, when it turns out there are less of these than there are moments of great visual splendor and genuine drama.  Bloom plays a a quiet man with deep convictions who rises to the occasion and does what is right, what is expected of him, as in the end we must all do.  But though he says little, we see the change in him from a man of deep faith to one of troubled doubt.  After the final battle he says to a bishop of the church, "You have taught me much about religion, Father."  It is a simple statement, and yet by knowing what he has gone through we see the deeper implications of this statement, that it actually damns religion rather than praises it.  My only complaint is that we see the fanaticism of early Christianity that is rarely faithfully portrayed in film, and yet little enough of the matching fanaticism in the Muslims, fanaticism we are all witness of in modern times.  Still, this is a sweeping epic and a very good story, one well worth seeing.

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An interesting sequel to Romero's first two zombie offerings, Night of the Living Dead and Dawn of the Dead, Land takes an Escape from New York approach to portraying a world in which the surviving living have adapted to life among the walking dead and largely take them for granted.

Fiddler's Green is a high-rise complex in which the wealthy can live, shop, work and play completely insulated from the world outside while huddled in a walled city at the base of the tower, the less fortunate take what leavings they can get in exchange for serving those in power.  Among them, trained raiding parties make forays out into the abandoned cities to collect food, medicines and luxury items.  But when Cholo (Leguizamo), the leader of one of these bands of loose-knit mercenaries, seeks entrée into Fiddler's Green, having saved his money, he is told by the top man, Kaufman (Hopper), sort of a cross between Mayor and CEO, that the waiting list is long.  Cholo suspects racism, given he is Hispanic, or elitism, given his is less than cultured, or both and so hijacks the armed and armored vehicle known as Dead Reckoning to turn it on the residents of Fiddler's Green unless a ransom is paid. Jack Riley (Baker), also a raiding party leader, who only wants to quit and move to Canada, is ordered by Kaufman to recover Dead Reckoning.  Meanwhile, one of the zombies has begun to think and reason, however slowly and crudely still, and is beginning to teach the other zombies how to fight back.  As Riley tracks Cholo, the walking dead have penetrated the city and soon not even the privileged residents of Fiddler's Green are safe any more.

Some of this movie is pure brilliance, such as the way the zombie leader pieces together things and leads the others on a raid of the city - you can see those rusty old cogs just a-tryin' to churn!  Some of it has Hollywood's typical preadolescent view of life and the difference between rich and poor, for example we are clearly expected to take pleasure in repeated scenes of rich people getting crunched and munched by the cannibalistic walking dead, as if they deserve such a fate merely for being rich, regardless of what other qualities they may have to offer society.  But Romero has a way of satisfying those who go to such movies just for the gore while still managing to make the movie about more than just that.  He always gives us interesting and engaging characters and a plot that is complex enough to make sitting through the rest of it all worthwhile.  I'm not a fan of horror movies, but I have always liked the Living Dead series, and this is a grand addition to it.  It's a fun and worthy summer diversion.  This movie is billed as the third in a trilogy, but c'mon, does anyone really believe the sequels are going to stop here?  I doubt it, and I hope not.

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This film barely eked by with three stars, and that mostly on the strength of scenery, cinematography, and performances, not so much on the writing.  Based on the popular series of children's books, the film seems unfinished somehow, as if every scene was just one detail short of being perfect.

The movies actually covers the first three books, mixing up the events just a little for dramatic effect.  In short, the parents of the unfortunate Bauedelaire children are killed in a fire and they must live with relatives.  However it appears that at least one of their relatives, Count Olaf, is interested only in the rather hefty fortune left behind by the parents.  The orphans, the incredibly resourceful Violet, the enormously knowledgeable Klaus, and baby Sunny who sports a set of remarkably sharp and strong choppers, have an inordinately hard time getting grown-ups to listen to them and are always called upon to take matters into their own hands to save the day.  In the end, Olaf traps Violet into a fake/real wedding, unless the orphans can find a way to stop him.

The world in which the Bauedelaire orphans live is a strange, claustrophobic, twisted version of the real world, a weird mixture of Victorian architecture and ancient mechanics that seem as if they should run on steam instead of gasoline or electricity.  It is a darkly beautiful landscape and one well befitting the story.  The costumes are equally as strange, taking the real and shunting it subtly just over the border to the surreal.  The acting is also deliciously over the top, expected of Jim Carrey but delightfully surprising by the likes of Meryl Streep and Dustin Hoffman.  The special effects are also wonderfully fun to watch.  But the dialog just doesn't match the visuals, with the possible exception of Count Olaf, who deals his prose with a perfectly timed sliminess that best suits his character.  The rest of the dialog is depressingly pedestrian, especially the subtitled translations of baby Sunny's attempts to speak, which are nowhere near as clever as they could have been, indeed should have been.  In the end your kids will love this movie, and you might have fun watching it too, but don't expect to come away feeling in any way enlightened or uplifted.

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Often I hear critics say that remakes of movies should be judged on their own merits and not as they compare to the original.  In my opinion, the director of a remake better get used to comparisons to the original because such comparisons are inevitable, fair or unfair.  And in that sense such a comparison becomes almost obligatory for a critic like me who has seen both films.  Not to make that comparison is to do my readers (both of you...LOL) a disservice.

Paul Crewe is a washed up professional quarterback who ended his career amid scandal and his freedom in a stint of drunk-driving televised for all to see in shades of OJ Simpson.  Now the warden wants him to coach the inmates in a scrimmage against the guards league team in a pre-season warm-up game that soon becomes a media event because of Crewe's fame.  During training and the game itself, loyalties, character, and endurance will be tested to the limits, on both sides, with honor becoming the ultimate coin of victory.

From the onset let me say that the original film would have earned three stars from me in its day, too, and as such one can say that in my never-to-be-mistaken-as-humble-opinion this film is every bit as good as the original.  But the way I look at it, the only reason to remake a film is to somehow elevated the new one above its predecessor.  If one doesn't do that, then one has failed.  This film doesn't improve on the prior film much at all.  It doesn't stink, but it falls well short of greatness, too.  For those wondering, this one does follow the previous one relatively faithfully, with momentary departures in order to update sequences that are meant to be raunchy and shocking.  They even toy with fans of the prior film when Caretaker (Rock) turns on the light bulb in Crewe's cell and taps it when it won't light up.  The result is unexpected and thus refreshes the impact of this obligatory scene, for those who know what I mean.  All in all fans of the previous film will not be disappointed, but those expecting more might be.

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In a single weekend we are treated to a remarkably well done flick for chicks (The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants) and the penultimate guy flick, "Lords of Dogtown."  Whereas I strongly recommended that guys go see the Sisterhood, I also recommend that women go see the Lords, though I don't think they will be as enlightened here as the men will be there, still they will find it surprisingly touching.

Based on true events, the movie revolves around four friends who live in the slums of Venice Beach, California and get little or no respect from the older surfers until the owner of a surfboard shop decides to put together a competitive skateboarding team.  It doesn't take long for the boys to rise to the top of the sport and be courted by the top sponsors in the industry.  In the process they all rush headlong into a crash course in loyalty, greed, exploitation and fame, and none will come out on the other side unchanged.

Very well-done cinematics, and yet anyone coming to see spectacular skateboarding stunts will be disappointed.  This is a movie about the early days of the sport when competitors were still only just exploring the possibilities of what could be done.  Today 'boarders get plenty of air and hang-time, but back then the boards rarely left the deck.  The acting is superb, especially Ledger as a laid-back board-designer and shop owner who discovers ambition late and has his prospects swiped out from under him by greedier, slicker operators than himself.  The film pulls no punches and no one comes out clean in the end.  The film is about something deeper than coming of age or learning wisdom at the school of hard knocks.  It is about humanity, friendship and keeping a firm grip on your own self-identity in the face of those who would seduce you for their own gain.

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Who would have ever thought they'd make a romantic comedy aimed at 12-year-olds?  Okay, these mental-midgets have sex, which we at least hope our own twelve-year-olds aren't doing, but in all other ways they have the mental capacity of a pair of middle-schoolers.  She starts the movie as the Wonder Bread version of a goth-chick and he dreams of the dot-com fast-track selling, of all things, diapers on the Internet.  Together they may make a cute couple, but god-forbid these two vacuous intellects should perpetuate their genes by mating!

When Oliver meets Emily she climbs into an airplane restroom with him before they've even spoken a word to each other.  They spend time together in New York flirting and saying stupid things to each other and all that really matters about these early scenes is that they have an excuse to meet years later, because he makes a bet with her that he will be successful in six years.  She doesn't wait that long as she develops the habit of calling Oliver whenever she breaks up with a boyfriend, and the habit is contagious as he returns the favor.  But circumstances always seem to conspire to keep them apart until they finally decide nothing is as important as being together and, well, happily ever after.

Yes, there is a certain cute chemistry between them, but this kind of wide-eyed innocence has no place in the modern world.  These two portray the kind of simplicity of thought and shallowness of foresight that may have been forgivable in the 1950's but that today would leave one vulnerable to some truly despicable emotional predators.  That neither of these two encounter any of this prodigious breed of human sewage is incredible, and they simply float along through life like soap bubbles, and equally as complex and substantial.  See it for a first date, where things should be kept light and carefree, but don't expect anything more of this movie, it simply isn't equipped to deliver it.

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These days, when animated films range from such things as Shrek and A Shark's Tale to films like Madagascar, it begins to seem as if animated films need a rating system all of their own.  Only in this case, "appropriate for adults" would mean can anyone from age, say, 11 on up sit through the movie without chewing off their own legs in extreme boredom.  Madagascar isn't...quite...that bad, but almost.

A zebra at the Central Park Zoo in New York City longs to see "The Wild" against the advice of his citified friends, a celebrity lion, a hypochondriac giraffe, and a hippopotamus with a street-girl attitude.  When the zebra slips away to catch a train out of town, his three friends catch up to him just as the police do and the four, plus a few stragglers, are shipped off to a game preserve in Africa.  Unfortunately, a mutiny staged by some determined if misguided penguins throws the ship off course and the Zebra and his friends end up on the island of Madagascar, the REAL wilds.  Now, as hunger begins to bring the differences between friends and, well, food into stark relief, friendships are threatened every bit as much as survival.

To it's credit, the film doesn't fall back on the tired old cuteness of alliterative names: Leo the Lion, Zach the Zebra, Harriet the Hippo, etc.  But that is hardly enough to redeem it.  This film is very much aimed at the little ones, say, anyone under 10.  And I think the previews could have hinted at that a little more, instead of seducing us adults to our figurative cinematic doom by comparing itself to Shrek.  For that alone it lost a couple of stars, above.  But another star went just because I am not nor can I expected to be any sort of an authority, self-styled or otherwise, on children's fare.  Much as I love the little ankle-biters, I bitterly abhor anyone who speaks down to them, like one would a dog or a senile old man with one marble left.  This movie, in my opinion, pretty much does that.

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The sequel to the distinctly uncomfortable and therefore dismally un-funny Meet The Parents, this movie doesn't go over the top with uncomfortable moments like the original, but it really offers us very little that's original, either.  All of the funniest moments are shown in the preview, and whenever that happens I always ask myself why they didn't hire the trailer-editors to make the movie instead of spending all that money on a big-name director.

In this episode, Stiller and Danner are the young engaged couple who have only just managed to gain her father's blessing on the coming nuptials, but the peace is a precarious one.  We know it from the last film and here they continue to walk on eggshells, because the bride-to-be's father is an ex-CIA operative with real control issues.  Now they are on their way to meet the groom's parents, a pair of hippie-hold-overs who are very touchy-feely and basically just the opposite of the straight-laced De Niro and his wife.  As expected, a series of interjoined subplots arise to cause conflict and misunderstandings that are supposed to be funny.

The beginning of the film is original.  After Murphy's Law on steroids cuts loose in the last film, this one opens with everything going just right for the young couple.  They manage to hit all green lights on their way to the airport, then just as they arrive at the security checkpoint a new line is opened and they are called up front, and finally the flight is overbooked and they are bumped to first class.  This becomes funny because instead of being a string of happy coincidences, these happenstances becomes ominous and foreboding.  Stiller does a good job of showing both his superstition and his attempts to keep a positive outlook with just his shifting eyes.  The problem is that though w don't know exactly what is coming we know misfortune is, so that when it does come this cute device becomes less foreshadowing and more predictability.  It isn't that the movie isn't funny, just that it isn't funny enough.  I did smile a couple of times, but not once did I even so much as chortle.

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The story of a battle of wills between the two most important women in a man's life, his mother and his bride, might be something with which women can identify and at which women can laugh, but it is also something with which men can identify and something they may find it a little too uncomfortably close to to home at which to laugh.  He may find himself pointing at the screen and laughing in maniacal glee, "Yes!  That's you, Mom!  That's you, Honey!  Yes!" not aware that the insanity to which they have nearly been driven is foaming at the corners of his mouth.

In the film Charlotte (Charlie) meets and falls for Dr. Perfect and all seems happily ever after until he proposes to her in front of his mother who is struggling with the end of a lifelong media career and a need to reconnect with a son she didn't have time for when he was younger.  Viola (Mom) decides Charlie is an obstacle to the rekindling of her relationship with her son and, faking an illness that forces her to live with the newly engaged couple, sets out to drive the younger girl crazy with sleep depravation and her own feigned emotional neediness.  But she has underestimated Charlie, who is shortly on to her and the real war begins.

Little time is given to the development of the relationship between Charlie (Lopez) and Kevin,(Vartan) and in fact the fiancé/son has a relatively small role in the film.  The movie is about the women and their battle of wills to determine who will come first in the man's life.  Kevin seems largely clueless to and unaffected by the war waging all around him and little time or thought is given by anyone to his preferences on the issue.  This movie missed an opportunity.  In fact, it missed its calling.  In order to be successful, the film really needed to go over the top.  Instead of the two women poisoning one another and trapping each other into embarrassing but otherwise easily recovered dilemmas, things that are worth a mere smile or a chuckle, if that, we really needed to see the battle escalate to thrown dishes, shattered windows, exploding plumbing and even the house burning down.  Kevin could have been caught in the middle, playing the role of the man driven mad by the rivalry of the two most important women in his life  We needed to see the hyperbole of which real slapstick comedy is made.  Without it, we leave this movie pretty much as we came, in want of some good comedic entertainment.

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With the advances made in computer effects, action movies have pretty much been reduced to whose computer can produce the loudest, biggest, most outlandish-looking action sequences.  When a genre has been reduced like this, the only things that are left to distinguish one film from the next is story and acting.  Interestingly, the films then become an exercise in originality and form, which is what films should be.  This movie is pretty typical in the F/X department, and so rises to the occasion admirably well in both story and acting.

The film opens with John and Jane Smith in marriage counseling because the fizz has gone out of their union.  Ironically, what puts the fizz back in is not regular sessions with a therapist, but trying to kill each other.  You see, Mr. and Mrs. Smith have a secret, even from each other: they are each top assassins for opposing interests.  When they are both assigned the same target they end up targeting each other, but in the end they discover that the reawakened passion they feel for each other won't let them kill each other.  So they join forces to fight the army sent after them when they each fail their mission.

The film doesn't tell us exactly what opposing agencies the two Smiths work for, but it is immaterial.  What sparks in this movie is some really interesting writing, some spot-on pacing, and the undeniable chemistry between Pitt and Jolie (sorry, Jennifer!)  The movie like's its story and doesn't rush through it.  It takes time to study only the most interesting aspects of each of its turns, from what it would be like to be an assassin and a suburban housewife at the same time, to the sheer awe and disorientation of finding out your spouse's biggest secret, to how things change when you decide to try to keep a relationship that until now has been all based on lies.  Interspersed among the action man and wife carry on an ongoing dialog about the truths they never shared with each other, all of it both engaging and funny.  It's hard not to like these two, as they are both equal measures of tough and vulnerable with each other.  I have glanced at the reviews of other critics and it is clear to me they just don't get it.  This is a fun, well written and well acted movie.  It deserves your summer dollar.

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I consistently find myself at odds with the mainstream critics.  Usually I am the lover of the quirky RomCom (romantic comedy) while they are panning it, but this week we have switched roles.

Sarah comes from a tight knit family whose mother has passed but whose father is still very much alive and available to them.  She has two sisters, one of whom is married and the other of whom is engaged, and everyone seems deeply concerned that Sarah hasn't even dated since her divorce three years ago.  Finally, her older sister places her personal ad on the Internet and Sarah finds herself encountering all sorts of goofballs who circulate within the Internet dating world, including one 61-yea-old whose paramour misread her age and thinks she is 16.  Among her dates she meets Jake, another recently divorced man who, aside from his intensity, more closely approaches normal compared to everyone else she has met so far.  But just as things seem to be starting well with Jake, Sarah also meets Bobby, the father of one of her pre-school students, and he's not only normal, but dreamy as well.

This movie had good intentions, and it should have been heartwarming and romantic and funny.  This is a movie in which everyone is a hopeless romantic who believes that there is no greater avocation than romance.  Even the counter clerk at the local grocery store deli takes an avid interest in Sarah's loneliness.  But there is something creepy about this movie from the opening shot when Sarah is surrounded by her father, her sisters and their men and everyone is pushing picture of men on her, promoting their qualities for her to consider to the leading man who would much rather sit around all night watching Dr. Zhivago over and over again - a movie that is excruciatingly painful for any red-blooded American male to sit through even once - instead of dating the hot women of which his best friend seems to be able to find an endless supply.  Jake shows up on Sarah's doorstep unannounced when their telephone conversation is cut short and she doesn't find this alarming in the least.  Her father dates three women at once - and when I say at once, I mean all at the same family Thanksgiving table.  Rather than quirky an romantic the timing of this movie failed to charm me and in fact gave me the creeps.  In a RomCom, I like to have at least some basis for believing that all of this could conceivably happen in the real world, but with such unbelievable characters and such awkward timing this movie seemed so fake I felt like a nosy editor looking over the writer's shoulder at a work in progress, not a final, polished piece.

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Though I don't necessarily penalize a movie for following time honored Hollywood formulas, like anyone I am refreshed by those that do not do so.  This film doesn't seem to follow any but the most basic formula, in that it has a beginning, a central conflict, a climax, a resolution, and an end, but other than that does not seem formulaic at all, or at least no formula to which I have yet been privy.  But that is not all that this charming little movie has to recommend it.

16-year-old Holly and her 7-year-old sister have come to recognize the plaintive strains of Patsy Cline on their mother's stereo as a sign that it's time to begin packing to move, because once more mom's heart has been broken by a man.  But now, as they arrive a Brooklyn, New York, a place they clearly have been before because mom's coworkers, at least, seem to know her on arrival, Holly has decided she is tired of leaving friends and school every six months or so just because her mom can't seem to find the perfect guy.  So Holly decides to create one, using her friend's uncle as a model for her mom's non-existent secret admirer.  But nothing goes as smoothly as Holly expects, as she struggles with real men trying to put the moves on her mom and mom's own need for real companionship, not just an imaginary one.  Add to that the fact that, when a certain boy begins to get too close, Holly discovers she has inherited her mom's need to run, only Holly wants to run from intimacy instead of toward it.

This is a wonderful little flick with a lot of messages much deeper that the obvious stated one, literally written on a blackboard, of lies and the traps they can get us into.  There are messages of commitment, of mother-daughter love, of parenting and what we teach or children by example, and others.  It is very noteworthy that the teenagers in the movie aren't vapid shells of humanity interested in nothing so much as the mall and having sex before their time, but have their own sort of wisdom born of experience, granted not vast experience, but inevitable experience nonetheless.  It is also commendable that the movie addresses the difference between being independent versus being utterly helpless without someone, and the mother's own initial unwillingness to stand alone doesn't belie the fact that she is doing just that, raising two children alone, in spite of her almost blind desperation for a man.  The final resolution of all of this is sort of unrealistically neat and packaged, but not in the way that you may expect.  And who cares if it is?  This is a good little movie, if not necessarily a great one, and one that mothers and daughters, especially, should see together.  I also want to say a word of compliment about Hilary Duff, who so far has shown none of the rush to grow up that some of her contemporaries have shown, and also shows a knack for picking projects that are more than just empty, forgettable entertainment as well.

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A formula film proffering the ages-old moral that if you accept who your are and work hard you will excel in life, Racing Stripes isn't as good as many other movies that tell the same story.  I'm a closet Hayden Panettiere fan and I'll go see just about anything she's in.  She has a presence that I think makes her a natural movie star.  Would that I were >mumble-mumble< years younger than I am!  And this is a good film for her fans to see, because she is definitely in transition from child star to young woman in this film.  There is a secret behind her smile that almost seems crooked at times, like Katie Holmes.  The rest of the cast is good, but the animal part of the story, which is the greater part of the movie, falls flat.

Stripes is a zebra who is found accidentally abandoned as a baby by a traveling circus and is brought home by a farmer to be raised by his daughter.  The farm turns out to be adjacent to a horse racing track and Stripes of course grows up with dreams of becoming a race horse.  But just like Rudolph, none of the other horses will let him play.  So the other animals on the farm, including two dung-loving horseflies and a mob-connected pelican, pitch in to train Stripes and to trick the farmer and his daughter into giving the zebra a chance to run in the big race.

There are two films here, the one about the humans and their interpersonal relationships, and this part of the film is well written, well acted and touching.  The only flaw with this part of the story is the antique, low-tech, tiny farm, which anyone who knows modern economics knows isn't anywhere near large enough to be a productive source of income for a gnat, much less a man and his teenaged daughter.  If they are living on his savings from having been a famous horse-trainer in the past, then why does he bother to use a horse to till a patch of field so small he could just as quickly hoe it by hand?  The other film is meant to be the main part of the movie, aimed at the kids.  These are the live-action animals whose mouths have been animated to make them appear as if they are talking.  The problem with this part of the film is that is was aimed at kids, or at what an adult with minimal exposure to kids thinks kids would like.  The Rocky-esque storyline is fine, but the dialog is dismally inane and unimaginative. This is what drags this movie down to a mere two stars.

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I suppose we are no longer shocked by animated children's films rated higher than G.  This one, like many others that have come down the pike recently, is visually stunning and has moments of manic hilarity that are truly ingenious and entertaining.  However these things are beginning to become cliché these days, and it is quickly becoming not enough for a movie to just be clever and visually innovative.  We are starting to want some very real insight and intelligence to these movies.  Witness the vastly wider success of such films as Shrek.

In this movie, Rodney is a robot from what in robot world probably equates to the midwest. Robot world is slowly breaking down because the once beloved Big Weld, the entrepreneur who once provided spare parts for robots in need, is no longer producing those spare parts. Instead, only upgrades are available, because upgrades have a wider profit margin for the company. Rodney sets out for Robot City to confront Big Weld with a new invention and soon finds himself in high demand as the only robot able to repair other robots. It turns out the Big Weld's assistant is now in charge, and he is not pleased when he finds out Rodney is thwarting his attempts to gouge the populace, so he sets out with armies of robots to stop Rodney. Rodney and his new friends must find a way to stop the exploitation of his people.

One of the things that bothered me about this movie was the almost endless gender-swapping jokes.  It became so common in the film it lost what little power it had to make us laugh in the first place.  At worst it almost smacked of a subversive attempt to somehow numb little minds to the very real objections many parents have to gender-distortion.  At the very least it got redundant and frankly distracting, even annoying.  But beyond that the film itself, while admittedly funny in many places, had very little to add to the whole pantheon of animated films at our disposal.  Aside from the visuals there was little here of any originality or insight.  In the end, ground-breaking techniques aside, this ends up being a cartoon, little more and little less.

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Perhaps I'm getting old, but it seems to me that a movie named after an entire region should be more, I don't know, epic, on the order of "Lawrence of Arabia."  It seems like a rather broad title for an action movie, to me.  But then that really has little to do with whether the movie itself is a good one.

McConaughy is Dirk Pitt, the unbeatable hero with the name of a soap opera hunk.  Pitt is a dive expert and treasure hunter who travels to Africa in search of a vanished ironside ship from the Civil War that supposedly traversed the ocean only to be grounded in the Sahara desert when the river it was following dried up.  While there he and his trusty sidekick run afoul of an African dictator and a French industrialist who are responsible for poisoning the water of the entire region in a con that supposedly eliminates radioactive waste but instead merely converts it into an equally toxic form.  Confronted with tanks, armored helicopters and entire armies, armed only with their wits, the two help a beautiful environmental scientist gather the evidence needed to expose the coming ecological disaster.

One would think that with the classics as their guide Hollywood would be able to make action flicks rivaling the greats made as much as twenty years ago, movies like "Raiders of the Lost Ark" and "Romancing the Stone."  This one is missing much of the charm of those older films.  First, and this is more personal opinion than objective fact, Penelope Cruz may be a nice person and is very pretty in her own right, but she is not attractive in an universal sense, and her lock-jawed cadence of speech makes her sound frozen in ice from toes to chin.  She does not come off as particularly charming or likeable.  McConaughy is personable and Zahn makes a good buffoon, but I didn't buy their camaraderie, which seemed forced and canned to me, artificial.  The film is fun to watch, but rather implausible.  Why, for example, does the bad guy decide out of the blue that it is time to explode his factory and flee?  Of what use is the female scientist to him as a hostage?  Maybe I over-think these movies, but in the end there is no denying that the movie that can stand up to such close scrutiny is infinitely more entertaining and rewarding than those that don't bother to try to make sense.

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Beware, with gratuitous violence and references to child molestation, mutilation and cannibalism, this one is rated a very hard 'R'.  Other critics love the style of this film, it's groundbreaking visuals and atmosphere.  I couldn't get past the cheesy dialog, the stupid storylines, and the blatant unapologetic misogyny of it all.  Still, the movie does have some things to recommend it.

The film follows three storylines, three tough and uncompromising men, each of which utters to himself something to the effect of "show them what you're made of", three men striving to rise to the occasion when the easier thing would clearly have been to just turn and walk away.  One cop (Willis) is seemingly killed after rescuing a little 9-year-old girl from a rapist only to awaken from a 13-year coma to find the same girl, now all grown up and working as a stripper, in peril once more from the same vile creep.  Another is a mentally deficient, nearly impossible to kill hulk (Rourke) out to avenge the murder of a hooker who was the only women to ever treat him kindly.  The third (Owen) is fresh out of prison and quickly gets mixed up with a bunch of hookers who inadvertently kill a hero cop, which act threatens to disrupt the fragile balance of peace between the cops and the street people.

First off, every female in this film is either a hooker or a stripper, or both.  This is a purely twelve-year-old view of the world, in which women can only survive through sex, and it bothered me.  I did, however, like the conflict in the Rourke character as he runs out of medication and tries to reason through his growing mental haze to accomplish the revenge he set out for himself.  The rest of the film was stylish, yes, but otherwise full of stupid dialog and vapid plots.  And violence, great big heaping, reeking piles of violence.  One of these days it would be nice to see a film both stylish AND smart.  Until then, see Sin City, just don't take it too seriously.

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More men, and especially boys, should go see chick-flicks.  They won't, but they should.  Not that I subscribe to the whole attempted feminization of men that has gone on for the last quarter-of-a-century or more, in point of fact I don't, such movement never know where to stop and nearly always go overboard, as it has in the case in question (Phil Donahue and Alan Alda, for example, are traitors to their sex.)  No, but that also doesn't mean that I don't think men have a lot to learn about women, and if nothing else movies like this one would go a long way toward educating them about what makes women in general who they are.

On finding that one pair of jeans fits all of them, four disparate young friends decide the pants are magic and agree to share them as they all travel to different corners of the world for summer vacation.  Tibby, the anti-establishment rebel, stays home to work at Walman's and ends up discovering another way of looking at the world through the eyes of one special 12-year-old girl.  Carmen, the intellectual, spends the summer with her dad, his very suburbian fiance' and her two children and finally finds the courage to confront her father about his abandonment of her and her mother.  Bridget, the athlete, seeks the attention of an off-limits counselor at soccer camp and discovers that as fast as she runs she can't escape grief over her mother's suicide years before.  Lena, the shy artist, learns that her accepting her own out beauty doesn't necessarily mean she won't be accepted on the basis of her talent as well.  This is the summer that these four girls come of age, and the traveling pants will bear witness to it all.

It is refreshing to see a film that portrays dialog the way real teenage girls talk to ach other, all talking at once, finishing each other's sentences and still able, by some miracle, to hear everything everyone else says and respond to it.  Although Lively's performance is a little like a deer caught in headlights, the rest of the girls do remarkably well, especially Jenna Boyd as Baily, the 12-year-old with eyes that seem to have seen as much as an 80-year-old and who has a mysterious thirst for the life stories of other people.  The grown-ups in this movie are scarce, as they should be, simply also-rans when up against the life-forces of these four hurricanes aborning.  A very well-done movie, well-acted and well-told.  Well worth seeing.

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One of the reasons Disney Studios is so successful at the family film genre is that they take the genre seriously, they don't look down on it or belittle it, confusing stupid silliness as kid-like humor.  Though this movie stumbles in its climax and does incorporate some of that silliness, the bulk of it views very much like the very successful Harry Potter movies.

Son of the "world's most famous super heroes," Will Stronghold is at first mortified to be relegated to the ranks of sidekick when his powers fail to manifest themselves by his first day at Sky High, High School for the kids of super heroes.  But no sooner does he make friends there and a bout with the son of his father's arch-enemy brings his super-strength to the fore and he is transferred to hero status and given a whole new schedule.  While Will struggles with the typical teenage dilemma between popularity and loyalty to one's friends, between the hottest chick in school and his childhood gal-pal, a sinister plot is brewing to imprison his family and retrain all of the students of Sky High on the side of evil.  Can Will regain the trust of his friends in time to thwart the plan?

This is a delightful movie.  Disney Studios holds itself to strict standard, not compromising or cheating on its theme and continuity.  The metaphors between a regular teenager's life and that of a teenage super hero come thick and well developed and the plot encompasses more than a single thin thread of conflict, but intertwines them expertly to keep an intelligent audience engaged and invested in the story.  We are also treated to some delightful performances by the teachers, two of whom are alums of the Canadian comedy troupe The Boys in the Hall and the principal of the school is none other than Lynda Carter herself, who waits until late in the movie to drop the line we are all waiting to hear, "After all, I'm not Wonder Woman!"  This is a fantastic, entertaining movie of which I can only hope there will be a string of sequels, keeping up with the Harry Potter franchise.

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The Star Wars franchise has easily become an American institution, with now six films, several television specials, billions of dollars of merchandising, not to mention some of the greatest leaps forward in technology including computer animation and sound reproduction.  In the past we are used to such amok corporate tendrils emanating from a single project to ultimately lead to the compromise of that project.  Disney, for example, has become synonymous with releasing sequels to movies which didn't need it and for which almost no one was clamoring and almost always ending up releasing them directly to video because of the lack of public interest (see The Jungle Book, The Little Mermaid, Aladdin, Beauty and the Beast, etc., etc., etc.)  So has the Star Wars series of films suffered this fate?

In this episode, which is number three in the chronology of the series' own milieu and number six in real world chronology, Anakin Skywalker finds himself torn between loyalty to the Jedi, specifically his own mentor, Obi Wan Kenobi, and the Republic, embodied by Supreme Chancellor Palpatine.  It seems the Jedi have become suspicious of the Chancelor's bid for power and Palpatine has become suspicious of Jedi loyalty to his war against the separatists.  As Anakin is forced to choose a side, he is more and more seduced by the dark side of the Force, which seems to offer powers that the Jedi's won't dabble in, the power, for example, to save Anakin's secret wife, Padme, from certain death at childbirth.  Finally, his inner conflict will erupt into the war against the separatists itself as the Jedi are declared enemies of the republic and set for extinction.

All the politics aside, anyone who doesn't know that Palpatine is also Darth Sidious, a Sith lord, who wants to lead Anakin, one of the most powerful Jedi to come along in centuries, into the dark side of the Force, just hasn't been paying close attention.  In fact this may be the first movie since The Passion of the Christ in which attending audiences already know the ending of the movie (Jesus dies and Anakin turns to the dark side, becoming Darth Vader), and yet they go anyway.  They go to the movie not to see the ending but to actually see the movie itself, the process by which the ending is brought about.  It is somewhat encouraging to a writer and an existentialist like me, who continues to argue that everything you do is more about the process than the outcome (which is not to say the outcome has no importance...anyway...)  Thankfully, the movie returns from the more stately pace of episode II to the nearly non-stop action of the other four films, and everything is tied up very neatly in the end, including how C-3PO, having been witness to events until now, seems to remember none of them in episode IV.  We are even presented with the same classic tableau of the rising twin moons of Tatooine that sent chills up the spine of most SciFi buffs in the first movie.  The process by which Anakin becomes Vader is very satisfyingly done, so well done in fact that the movie comes complete with its own sense of closing the loop, of completing a cycle, of coming home again.  My recommendation of whether or not to see it?  Would you really take my advice?  This is the kind of movie that people will see, or not see, based on their own investment in the franchise, not on what some self-styled movie critic may say.  So just enjoy.  I did.

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With plot-holes one could sail the aircraft carrier USS Abraham Lincoln through, this movie is more like eating really, really stinky Swiss cheese than doing just about anything even remotely worthwhile, like, oh I don't know, dealing playing cards with your toes, for example.  The movie completely ignores such things as rules of engagement, aerodynamics, or just plain human logic, never mind that fact that enemies seem so completely incompetent that it's a wonder the US even felt the need to develop advanced weaponry at all, when clearly a well-aimed sling-shot would have done just as well.

Three top Navy pilots hand-picked to test-fly experimental stealth fighters learn that their new fourth member is a completely automated plane called Edi (pronounced like Eddie, because it's a male plane, I suppose, though who checked and how they did so is somewhat of a mystery...but I digress...)  Of course, in a SciFi gimick so old it farts dust - as we used to say in sixth grade - on their very first mission Edi gets hit by lightening and voila! his brain gets scrambled and suddenly he's thinking for himself, picking missions all by himself and just in general being a very, very bad boy.  Then, in a scene right out of the the Bible, one of the pilots pulls a thorn out of the proverbial lion's paw - in this case he puts out a small fire on Edi's wing by setting off a rocket in the water while Edi flies low so that the splash puts out the fire - and suddenly he has regained Edi's loyalty, just in time to save the pretty girl from certain doom at the hands of those wascally North Koreans.

The star the previews exploit to get you into the theater, Jamie Fox, doesn't even live to see the second half of the movie, and by the end we the audience wished we'd joined him.  The pilots roam the globe free to simply attack any target they darn well please - or to refuse to - without any repercussions.  When a pilot ejects at mach-3 - that's three-times the speed of sound - they remain conscious enough to give us a blow-by-blow account of the debris of their plane falling past them, falling, incidentally, much faster than the pilot is falling, and full in the face of Newton's laws of physics.  Some flying blimp or dirigible that seems to just circle in the sky waiting for someone, anyone to come by and use it to refuel is damaged by Edi in order to refuel and no one seems to notice, not even the crew of the blimp, if there is one, or is it unmanned, which seems unlikely, I don't know, we never get a glimpse inside.  It would take forever to enumerator all of the holes in this abysmally dumb movie and it wasn't worth the two hours I spent much less an additional eternity critiquing it.  Just take my word for it, don't go see this one, save your money.

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This is a movie that actually has the gall to argue for passivism while portraying some of the most brutal violence ever filmed, to present sublime innocence on the same strip of celluloid as deepest depravity, to compare and contrast uncompromised compassion with uncompromising cruelty.  It is a testament to Luc Besson, writer and producer, that this film does it so successfully that it is easily one of the must-see movies of the year.

Danny-boy (Li) has been raised like a trained attack dog by Uncle Bart (Hoskins) complete with collar that keeps him passive but that, when removed, unleashes Danny into the perfect, relentless killing machine.  But when Bart's enemies kill him Danny runs away to find himself befriended by a kindly piano tuner (Freeman) and his young step-daughter (Condon).  As Danny is exposed to a life bereft of cruelty and killing and filled with music and love, memories of his mother begin to return to him.  But when Bart returns, not dead after all and demanding Danny return home, Danny must somehow reconcile the two vastly different worlds and find a place for himself in one while protecting it and all he has come to love from the bloody violence of the other.

Li does a admirable job of portraying the ignorant innocence of Danny even as he kills for the pleasure of his master, and keeping the same tone to that innocence as he discovers the wider, more pleasant world of the piano tuner.  The scene in which Danny utterly ignores a fight that breaks out in a convenience store, explaining later, "They weren't fighting me," continues in the same tone, and yet the scene in which Victoria, the piano tuner's step-daughter, removes Danny's collar for the first time is fraught with the same deadly tension as the earlier fight-club-esque fight scenes.  The film is so superbly assembled that we, the audience, find ourselves rooting for Danny to fight to protect himself and those he loves even as we are rooting for him to find a way to stop fighting and live in the peaceful world of music that is open to him.  A masterful piece of filmmaking that, I repeat, is a must see for the year.

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With an amazing shot of the entire Earth reflected in the single drop of dew on the face of a leaf, War of the Worlds opens with a brief introductory narration by the powerful voice of Morgan Freeman sounding distinctly Orson-Wells-like.  From this first shot we suspect but cannot honestly know the visual treat (and, frankly, terror) that is in store for us over the next 117 minutes.  On some levels this is one of the most terrifying movies I have ever seen, and on an equal number of levels one of the better.

Ray (Cruise) is a New York blue-collar dock-crane operator who, for reasons that aren't shared with us, has sort of abdicated all adult responsibilities, including being involved in the lives of his teenage son and preteen daughter (Fanning.)  When they are left with him, again for reasons unexplained, while their mother and stepfather go to visit the grandparents in Boston he barely puts in any effort at all to interact with them, returning their resentment with equal apparent dislike.  But when strange, thunder-less lightening heralds the rise of gigantic tripod-vehicles whose heat rays vaporize people instantaneously Ray must rise to the occasion, somehow protecting his children as they flee North, the tripods and panicked mobs on their heels at every step, trying to make it to Boston where Mom is and presumed safety.

The visual and audio effects of this movie are so stunning that it takes big performances to compete.  Luckily Cruise and Fanning are up to the task.  A common term for the enjoyment of action films is that "it kept you on the edge of your seat", but this one kept me climbing the back of mine, trying to get as far away as possible from the violence and destruction so realistically portrayed on the screen.  At first, even Ray's own children don't trust him, seeming to initially stay with him only because he happens to be running the same direction they are.  His daughter repeatedly turns to her big brother for comfort and protection, leaving dad out in the cold, until Ray's son leaves them to join the soldiers resisting the tripods and father and daughter are force to rely on each other for survival.  All this interpersonal drama against some the most epic, mind-shattering destruction I have ever seen on film.  This movie simply must be seen to be appreciated.  Don't wait for video, as, just like Lawrence of Arabia and Star Wars, this sort of cinematic wizardry will undoubtedly lose something when translated onto the small screen.

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Okay, right from the start I will say that this isn't a great movie, but as a comedy it succeeds in its goal in that it is funny.  Since in the end that is really all a comedy sets out to be, I had to give it three stars out of the possible five.  But the movie really could have been so much more than it was, with many lost opportunities that could have been exploited to make a truly great and memorable film.

Two best friends who make crashing weddings a cross between a science and an sporting event akin to the Olympics suddenly find they may have just outwitted themselves when crashing the wedding of the oldest of a powerful politician's daughters when one finds he is falling in love with one of the two remaining daughters and  the other in ensnared by the clinging, seemingly unbalanced virginal youngest daughter.  They find themselves staying on the family estate for the entire weekend, with their covers becoming more and more precarious as time goes on.  If they are discovered, they will have made a very, very powerful enemy in the politician.

How do you cast Christopher Walken and not exploit his uniquely weird and inspired comedic persona, regulating him to the role of an also-ran?  I don't know, but this director managed to squander the rare opportunity that could have made his movie many notches better than it has turned out to be.  There is little sense of danger from Walken when he should have been one of the critical fulcrums of tension in the film, the risk that these poseurs might be caught by this powerful and none-too-scrupulous politician.  The bad guy, the boyfriend of one of the sisters, is so evil and so self-absorbed one wonders how the girls fell for him in the first place, which is a common short-sightedness in many romantic comedies.  This one tries to be romantic, but with the final wedding crashed at the very end, which is poetic, I guess, given the them of the film, we are already tired of seeing people stealing the thunder of other peoples' moments and making it all about themselves.  So much of this film could have been rearranged, retooled, tightened, and just in general made better.  Still, you will laugh.

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As a horror film this one ranks pretty lukewarm.  Don't get me wrong, there are some creepy moments, even some startling ones, but to be effective horror movies need to seduce an audience.  They need to creep up on them, tension-wise, and ratchet up that tension incrementally with each successive scene until the climax brings it all to a peak and scares them the most.

Jonathan Rivers (Keaton) has loses his wife in an apparent slip and fall into a river, and he is inconsolable until he meets a man who claims to have recorded Anna calling to her husband from beyond the grave.  After this electronics-psychic is killed Jonathan takes up the torch and begins recording the voices and images of the dead himself, seeking his dead wife.  But when he discovers the images he sees are not of the dead but of future murders that he can prevent, he comes afoul of some pretty powerful and angry supernatural forces.

This movie does a pretty poor job of ratcheting up the tension.  There is a great gap in the middle where, try as he might, Jonathan is recording nothing but white noise.  This point could have been made more efficiently than dragging it out the way the movie does, because this protracted sequence lets go of tension that should be building instead.  Additionally, this seems less important in horror movies, but there are great holes in the logic of the film, and a great number of things that simply go unexplained.  For example, the movie seems to be implying that the bad guys only select victims who are trying to contact the dead, and if that is the case how did they fixate on Anna in the first place, who was doing nothing of the kind?  At any rate, this is not a scary movie, or not as scary as one might expect it to be.

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Action movies are supposed to move at a breakneck pace, and as such do not have a lot of time for character or plot development.  So it is understood and universally forgiven that such movies employ simplistic plot devices and cardboard-cutout character profiles, so that the movie can get to the action that much quicker and keep it moving from beginning to end.  It is one of the reasons that I generally do not like these movies.  This one is no exception.

Darius Stone is in prison for mutiny and treason until he is broken out by NSA agent Gibbons to be the new Agent XXX.  His mission, to prevent the assassination of the president during his State of the Union address at the US Capitol.  To do this, Darius employs old neighborhood friends and suped up cars reminiscent of this director's earlier movie, The Fast and the Furious.

This plot is so full of holes that it cannot be forgiven with the same aplomb as other action movies.  Why would such an attempt be made 1) during a nationally televised speech when the president is liable to be watched more closely than ever by everyone in the country, never mind the Secret Service, and 2) at one of the most secure locations in the country, second only perhaps to the White House itself?  Where is the press when explosions and shots are fired inside and on the deck of an aircraft carrier in an international harbor?  How can a bullet train travel 220 miles per hour and not cross a single intersection where cars would be too slow to get out of the way, or on tracks only rated at 60 MPH (Amtrack statistics)?  Ice Cube may be a good sidekick or villain, but as the good guy he just doesn't hack it, and as a sex symbol at whom women are supposedly throwing themselves he is just plain painful to watch.  This one is a candidate for the Razzies (http://www.razzies.com/) if I ever saw one.

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