11/5/09:  "There's a good reason why, every time you turn on a news program of any kind, you are relentlessly assaulted by talking heads hitting their talking points hard.  If they persuade you, that's great, but an equally important goal is to create a sense that “everybody's saying...” whatever it is they're selling.  And if you don't agree, to plant a niggling voice in the back of your head cautioning you against expressing your opposing view in public, lest “everybody” look down on your for holding it.  For instance, one struggles in vain to find an unqualified fan of filmmaker Michael Moore.  His movies are great, most critics will tell you, but, you know, he's Michael Moore.  There's no question that, in public, the Oscar-winning director is often his own worst enemy for precisely the same reason his movies work so well:  a near supernatural level of self-confidence and righteous indignation over the unholy deeds of Big Business and its' political allies.  And his opponents, often the spokespeople for Big Business and its' political allies, have a field day making it seem wrong somehow to back this crazy fat guy in his crusade.  Funny thing is, while his new film Capitalism:  A Love Story, packs a punch, it also demonstrates that past successes like Fahrenheit 9/11 and Sicko were not the mad, impassioned wails against injustice that they seemed."  MORE

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

8/16/10:  "Good movies tend to send you out of the theater asking questions, about the human condition, the filmmaker's intentions, or your opinion about the things the story leaves to your imagination.  Bad movies leave you asking other questions:  why didn't it work, why didn't the filmmakers see what was going wrong, and how would you fix it in their place.  Awful movies leave you asking more basic questions:  like what?  why?  and how?  Cats and Dogs:  The Revenge of Kitty Galore arrives nine years after the original C&D was a mildly entertaining summer diversion that hasn't been part of the zeitgeist for about eight and three-quarters years.  So, the obvious litany of whys:  why do a sequel?  Why do it now?  And why make it such an utterly abominable waste of time?  Why, for that matter, did an impressive roster of voice talent agree to participate?  And why is anybody paying a $2.50-$6.00 surcharge to see this disaster retrofitted for 3D (I caught it at a drive-in)?  Or you could stick to the basics, watch the credits roll and simply ask, “What?!?”

Diggs (voice of James Marsden) is a hotshot K9 police dog who doesn't take orders and ends up being taken away from his human partner Shane (Chris O'Donnell) and sent to the kennel."  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

11/11/09:  "So, as you can tell, I'm a Christmas Carol Fanboy.  I'm going to watch each new version not so much the way, say, you would, but with an eye toward how it handles each and every nook and cranny of the Dickens story, how it compares to all the other famous versions (and not-so-famous, although even I haven't scratched the surface of seeing the dozens and dozens of outside-the-box adaptations), and, most importantly, how much it makes me cry.  Robert Zemeckis' new A Christmas Carol, the first filming to use motion capture animation and 3D, doesn't exactly storm the gates of the Citizen Kane of Christmas Carols, 1951's Scrooge (now generally called A Christmas Carol and henceforth to be referred to as “The Alastair Sim version”) or my cult favorite, 1992's The Muppet Christmas Carol.  But it does nail two of the five main sections of the story, do a perfectly good job with two others, and sports some great small moments that Carol junkies like me will really appreciate.  For those studying Zemeckis' one-man technological revolution, motion capture continues to make strides but is not quite there yet, and the 3D here is less innovative than in his previous outing, Beowulf.  Time for the plot synopsis.  All together now:" 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

8/16/10:  "Because they simultaneously demand full disclosure and offer absolute judgment, families are hothouses for the care and nurturing of secrets.  That also makes them prime settings for indie dramedies like City Island, which is all about the way every member of a New York family hides something significant about themselves from the rest.  While Raymond De Felitta's film is never quite as clever as it wishes and contains one seriously misjudged subplot, it's filled with good performances and high spirits, and is the kind of movie most people drawn to indie comedies genuinely enjoy. 

Prison Guard Vince Rizzo (Andy Garcia) claims he's got a weekly card game so his wife Joyce (Julianna Margulies) doesn't know the truth:  he's taking an acting class under the instruction of Michael Malakov (Alan Arkin).  There, he's assigned, along with partner Molly (Emily Mortimer) to create a monologue about his deepest, darkest secret.  Perhaps he might choose the secret of Tony Nardella (Steven Strait), his son through a long-ended relationship who turns up in jail.  Tony only needs someone to take him in to get early release, and the guilt-ridden Vince does so without telling the kid or his family the secret, instead insisting that he's hired him as a live-in carpenter." MORE

4/9/10:  "Movie moguls, like Greek Gods, shape our cinemagoing destinies with their slightest whims.  For us, it's about being transported and entertained.  For them, it's all about the money.  And current thinking about where that money is to be found leads in every way to Warner Bros.' Clash of the Titans.  It's a remake of a well-known, if not necessarily well-loved, old title from the studio vaults (although only shareholders and accountants believe there's actually a difference between money spent paying writers for original ideas and paying the same writers to reimagine ideas other writers had for you decades before).  It's filled with name actors, including the red-hot star of all-time Box Office Champ Avatar.  And even better, it's in 3D!  Well, it's kinda in 3D (we'll get to that later) but it looks the same on the poster either way.  To put it mildly, from the suits' point of view, the Clash of the Titans we paid our money to see couldn't be more of a cynical money grab.  Congratulations, then, to director Louis Leterrier and his writers (Travis Beacham, Phil Hay and Matt Manfredi are credited) for doing their best to give us our money's worth, seeing in Clash not only a chance to restage the famous scenes from the original with modern big-budget flair, but also to explore themes of the relationship between Gods and Men that really resonate in our world of haves and have-nots." 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

2/15/09:  "I don't have any kids, and haven't been one (for the purposes of this discussion, when I say “kid”, I'm not talking teenagers) for about 25 years.  As such, I've been known to be a bit of an alarmist when it comes to what's “too scary for kids”.  But suffice it to say that Coraline, the latest stop-motion animated feature from Nightmare Before Christmas director Henry Selick, is pretty much the scariest thing that's ever been rated PG.  It's also the honest-to-goodness Masterpiece of his art form, a brilliant horror fairy tale (based on a book by Neil Gaiman) both terrifying and magical.  Digital 3D (care of RealD) proves a natural for the stop-motion world, making its' detail and texture all the more remarkable.  I spent most of this great, great movie on the edge of my seat, the kids should take Gaiman's advice that, if it gets too scary, “hold Mom's hand.”

Young Coraline Jones ( voice of Dakota Fanning) has just moved, along with her Mother (Teri Hatcher) and Father (John Hodgman), to a creepy old house duplexed off to include aging showgirls Miss Spink (Jennifer Saunders) and Miss Forcible (Dawn French) in the basement and mouse trainer Mr. Bobinsky (Ian McShane) on the other side.  The Jones parents write gardening articles, although they're much too busy to actually garden, or to pay attention to their daughter."  MORE

5/3/09: "Funny thing about 2006's Jason Statham vehicle Crank:  for all its' pretensions to ultra-violent, hopped-up NC-17-baiting anarchism, I found that it kinda laid there.  Sure, writer/directors Mark Neveldine and Brian Taylor used all the fancy camera tricks at their disposal and tossed blood and sex about with reckless abandon, but at the end of the day their story was still just a stock tale of a poisoned hitman chasing generic criminal goons with a nasty streak that got in the way of a couple of great leading characters.  But as I often say, sometimes the best sequels are to movies I didn't like, and here's another example.  From opening credits that play out the final moments of its' predecessor like the welcome screen of a Nintendo-era video game, Crank:  High Voltage is 90-odd minutes of pure cinematic anarchy.  It doesn't all work; in fact there were moments I couldn't even stand to watch.  But for all the horror and violence they've put onscreen, Neveldine and Taylor have also finally licked the tone necessary to make a movie like this work. Crank:  High Voltage is like the grossest, coarsest Looney Tune ever.

TV News Reporter Fish Halman (John de Lancie) gives us the Breaking News:  Chev Chelios (Jason Statham) fell from a helicopter, slammed into the sidewalk and was whisked away in an ambulance miraculously alive.  How did it happen?" MORE

2/15/10: "Movies are about storytelling, and as such they have the flow of stories.  Be they happy, sad or downright tragic, even the ones that resonate most with our own experiences still bear the mark of the filmmaker as puppet master, moving the characters to their assorted destinies.  To truly break out of that feeling, a film must combine extraordinary performances with a certain gift for telling a tale that is neither too up- or downbeat, one that has the true randomness of life as it is lived, as opposed to how it is written.  I can count on one hand the times at the movies when I've felt as pulled in by the reality of a story as I was by Crazy Heart, Scott Cooper's tale of a beaten-down country music star's wake-up call to the possibilities life still holds for him.  Jeff Bridges is nothing less than stunning as that singer, a bundle of self-pity and stubborn hope trying to get out.  But this is no one-man show, and his supporting players join him and their director in weaving a tale that feels like it's actually going on somewhere outside the theater's walls.

Years ago, Bad Blake (Jeff Bridges) was a star, a beloved singer-songwriter who packed auditoriums and launched the career of his sideman Tommy Sweet (Colin Farrell)." MORE

10/30/09: "We live in our little box of reality with the illusion that 500 channels of TV, the Internet and something like 1.5 bazillion publications at our disposal has put the entire world at our fingertips.  But that's just an illusion:  truth be told, there's so much going on at any given time we could never hope to know even a fraction of the most pressing crises gripping the world we live in.  So we rely on those tiny windows of perception, an online, televised and print media that's mostly parroting the same stories over and over, and increasingly few of them about things of real consequence. Crude, an impressive new documentary from Joe Berlinger, is primarily focused on a legal battle between the indigenous people of Ecuador and the Chevron corporation over a staggering level of fatal contamination done to their water supply.  But, even more interestingly, it's also about the way a cause, even a just one, must be sold to compete for that precious public and charitable attention that is the lifeblood of any uphill struggle. Crude will educate you on the Ecuadorans crisis, but it will also educate you on how you become educated about any issue of global importance, and that's what makes this great little documentary more than just another sad story." 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

8/25/09:  "Admit it.  If you're reading this review, you've thought about it.  If you were able to scrape together a shoestring budget, a fast-moving crew and a cast of people you found along the way, just what kind of low-budget movie would you make?  Maybe you'd go all Robert Rodriguez and try to remake The Matrix for a buck ninety-eight.  Maybe you'd look for some kind of clever story that takes place entirely in a stuck elevator.  Or, if you were debuting writer-director Jason Shahinfar, you might dabble in a bit of Southern Neorealism.  Sure, he's not particularly interested in the aftermath of the Franco regime, but all the other hallmarks of the post-WWII Italian filmmaking movement are in abundant supply in Cut From Home:  amateur actors playing variations on themselves, a plot made up of a series of encounters rather than a straight narrative through-line, real locations, available lighting (OK, we're getting into the territory of Neorealism's modern, self-absorbed cousin Dogme 95 there) and a focus on the world of the poor and downtrodden.  As a filmmaking experiment, Cut From Home is a rousing success.  It looks great, the actors acquit themselves well, and its' largely improvised scenes have the snap and rhythm of real life.  It's less successful as a story, too long at a lean 84 minutes and a bit too coy for its' own good." MORE