1/4/07:  "I suppose I should start by saying that I'm not really in the mainstream when it comes to the film adventures of Ian Fleming's immortal superspy James Bond.  I know this because as I was charging out of repeated viewings of Pierce Brosnan's final turn in the role, Die Another Day, shouting from the rooftops that they'd finally licked this whole Bond thing, fans worldwide (after spending their money) were declaring that the franchise had jumped the shark.  So, fans of laser-blasting killer satellites and invisible cars such as myself were told to politely find their way to the back of the bus while Brosnan was fired and the franchise “reinvented”.  Four years later, we have our sixth James Bond in the person of Daniel Craig and a gritty, sci-fi-free origin story made from Fleming's very first novel in the series, Casino Royale.

MI-6 Agent James Bond (Daniel Craig) has just successfully completed the two assassinations necessary to attain Double-O status, taking on the familiar title of Agent 007.  But he's a loose cannon, chasing a bomb maker he was supposed to detain and question onto foreign embassy soil, where he kills him rather than let him go.  The incident creates enough scandal to inspire his superior, M (Judi Dench once again) to send him on leave, but Bond won't quit following the case."  MORE

11/5/08:  "Life, as I'm sure we're all aware, is not a movie.  Tidy beginnings, middles and ends are hard to come by, and so it's the great challenge facing filmmakers trying to tell a historical story to find those perfect endpoints with which to frame compelling true life events.  Most true stories end with some kind of crawl telling us what happened in the years to follow, and you may sometimes find yourself saying “Man, I wish they'd shown that part.”  Offering the counterpoint to that thought is Clint Eastwood's Changeling, which tells a fascinating story of kidnapping, murder, corruption and mistaken identity that rocked Los Angeles in the late 20's.  Alas, it can't stop telling it, and goes on and on, hitting virtually every single incident that happened to any of the participants in the years following the story.  A good 50 minutes longer than it needs to be (and all of it on the back end), Changeling wore down most of my goodwill toward its' whip-sharp performances and Eastwood's gift for little moments of horror.  There's a good movie here, but unfortunately, it's followed by a bad one.

March, 1928:  phone switchboard supervisor Christine Collins (Angelina Jolie) is called in to work on a Saturday, leaving her young son Walter (Gattlin Griffith) home alone.  When she returns, the house is empty and there's no sign of him anywhere." MORE

1/6/08:  "One of the problems with America's political decision-making process is that it has very little understanding of cause and effect.  We love to make grand gestures, to carpet-bomb problems with money, troops, or both, but we also love to declare things “solved” and “over” in a way that the complex, one-thing-leads-to-another nature of life doesn't much allow for. Charlie Wilson's War, the fun new comic drama from director Mike Nichols and writer Aaron Sorkin, tells a nice, inspiring story of one such American victory, our covert intervention into the 1980's war between Afghanistan and the Soviet Union.  It's also smart enough to keep slyly needling us about the ways little things like Karl Marx's publication of The Communist Manifesto and local politician Charles Hazard killing young Charlie Wilson's dog helped lead to our eventually taking the Soviets' place there.

Charlie Wilson (Tom Hanks) is in Congress for three reasons:  booze, women and he hates Communists.  While enjoying a night with the first two, he happens to see a TV report with Dan Rather in Afghanistan underscoring the Mujahideen's need for advanced weaponry to repel the invading Soviets who'd created a massive refugee crisis.  Wilson's response is to use his power on the Congressional Appropriations committee to double the budget for CIA operations there to a piddling ten million dollars." MORE

1/7/07:  "When we hear the words “The end of the world”, the picture that comes to mind is generally of a flash, an explosion, an apocalypse that snuffs out all life on the planet in an instant.  Sure, some of us might linger after a nuclear or asteroid strike for a few weeks or months, but suffice it to say, it'll be quick, and it'll be painful.  Without ever really explaining how or why, Alfonso Cuaron asks us to consider an entirely different doomsday scenario in Children of Men:  one in which everyone on Earth will simply live out their lives with no future generations to replace us.

It's the year 2027, and no child has been born anywhere on Earth for 18 years.  In England, society teeters on the brink of collapse under the weight of its' own despair while an autocratic government tries to focus everyone's energy on a crusade against immigration.  Theo Faron (Clive Owen) used to be an anti-government activist, but he's now settled into a life of literally hopeless office drudgery and hanging out with his aging hippy friend Jasper (Michael Caine)." MORE

5/21/08:  "Beloved as they are by millions of fans all over the world, C.S. Lewis' Chronicles of Narnia make a dicey movie franchise since no human character appears in more than a few of the seven books and fans continue to debate which order they should be read in.  But there is at least one easy sequel, Lewis' very first follow-up to his classic The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe, which became a movie blockbuster back in 2005.  Prince Caspian reunites all four Pevensie children in an adventure that's actually more traditional and movie-friendly than its' predecessor.  While Caspian misses the sensational villainy of Tilda Swinton's White Witch (she does take a bow in a cameo), it is in most ways a better movie than Wardrobe, suggesting a long healthy franchise life if only there were more than one more book with any of the Pevensie kids in it...

A year after their unexpected departure from Narnia, sibblings Susan (Anna Popplewell), Edmund (Skandar Keynes), Peter (William Moseley) and Lucy (Georgie Henley) are struggling to readjust to their lives in WWII-era England.  But events in the kingdom conspire to bring them back.  A thousand years after they left, Narnia is ruled by humans who have driven all the magical creatures who used to live there into exile or extinction." MORE

1/19/07:  "One of the first brushes any sci-fi geek gets with the 2nd level of movie viewing (themes, metaphors, etc.) is when they realize that 1956's Godzilla, King of the Monsters is not just a movie about a man in a giant rubber suit stomping his way through Tokyo while Raymond Burr looks on in horror.  To its' Japanese filmmakers, Gojira was an attempt to examine in a fantasy context their country's brush with the apocalyptic power of the atomic bomb.  Generations of guys in big rubber suits (and their CGI successors) trampled cities with no such context, filing “city attacked by giant monster” under “really cool thing” in our movie geek brains.  As such, it's a big surprise to discover that the J.J. Abrams-produced hype machine Cloverfield is a totally back-to-basics monster mash, an attempt to examine in a fantasy context our country's brush with the senseless large-scale slaughter of the 9/11 terrorist attacks.  The trailers may have gotten you buzzing about how cool it would be to witness a monster attack from the victim's-eye view, but Cloverfield is anything but cool:  it's an intellectually claustrophobic meditation on what it means to lose your life to a tidal wave of destruction you can't hope to understand.  Points for ambition, and the movie does succeed more often than it fails.  But unlike the giant, inexplicable killing machine that drives its' plot, Cloverfield's camcorder-POV stunt structure often bites off more than it can chew." MORE

1/15/07:  "Ah, January: when a lot of Oscar contenders are still snaking their way through the Nation's movie chains... along with a fair number of titles that sounded good, for some reason just didn't work, and now sneak into theaters in heavily edited 80-odd minutes versions.  Code Name:  The Cleaner is not an Oscar contender.

Jake Rodgers (Cedric the Entertainer) awakens in a hotel room bed with no memory, a suitcase full of money, and a dead FBI agent.  Soon enough he's been whisked away to a luxurious mansion by Diane (Nicolette Sheridan), who claims to be his wife.  But she's clearly up to no good and so he escapes and is soon on the run with waitress Gina (Lucy Liu) who claims to be his girlfriend.  Memory flashes of himself and a black ops team have Jake convinced of one thing:  he's some kind of government agent.  Except that Gina insists he's really a janitor.

Code Name:  The Cleaner starts with a plot (the man with amnesia who must sort through myriad stories people are telling him about who he is) that's worked countless times in the past."  MORE

4/30/07:  "One of the reasons I go to the movies so much is that it's almost impossible to really know what's going to float my boat.  Oh, I can narrow it down, to be sure, but if there's an element about a movie (star, creative people, or, above all, plot) that appeals to me, I'll usually go and hope that the law of averages delivers me a big surprise.  Like, for instance, The Condemned.  Saddled with an awful, misleading ad campaign and pummeled by critics, the first starring vehicle for WWE wrestler “Stone Cold” Steve Austin seems pretty unpromising.  But as someone who's disdainful of all reality TV harsher than American Idol, its' plot intrigued me enough that I showed up, not expecting much.  And look what I found:  that rarest of creatures, an 80's-style red meat action flick with a brain and a real, well-articulated message.  And now I must climb out on a tiny, tiny limb and declare before the World Wide Web that, yes, The Condemned is a great movie.

The story begins with multi-media billionaire Ian Breckel (Robert Mammone) overseeing preparations for his biggest extravaganza yet:  the live, online broadcast of a new kind of reality show, The Condemned. "  MORE

1/18/07:  "**SPOILER WARNING:  The endings of this movie and Jet Li's Hero can be pretty accurately guessed after reading this review**

And now a word from the Chinese Ministry of Information...

Look, we all know that authority figures can be pretty nasty sometimes.  Their actions can lead to the deaths of tens of thousands in pointless wars of conquest and sometimes they like to poison their wives just for the sport of it.  But what you've got to keep in mind is that they ARE authority figures, and as such, they have a certain divine right to kill you whenever they choose.  You might think this isn't such a great thing.  So much so that you might even decide to rise up against them, plot to kill them, etc.  Before doing such a thing, we ask that you simply consider two facts.  1)Any such action is totally and utterly WRONG and, 2)It's also doomed to fail.  In conclusion, should you find yourself attempting such folly, kindly either commit suicide or stand nobly by while the authority figure in question has you killed.  Thank you." MORE