2/6/09:  "As shown off a little in my blog, I’m a big fan of the art of Haiku, which requires one to make a poetic point in three lines of 5, 7 and 5 syllables.  Haiku requires the author to make their own personal artistic statement within a rigid stylistic construct, not unlike movie genres, which impose a strict set of narrative expectations upon filmmakers.  What separates a great genre movie from an awful one is a set of relatively small but pivotal choices in casting, setting of tone and the precise filling-in of narrative blanks.  Taken, the umpteenth Luc Besson production in which an indestructible hero tears Paris apart looking to right wrongs done to him and/or innocent civilians is exceptionally good at all three.  Start with a stellar cast led by no less than Liam Neeson, add a particularly noble set of heroes and unspeakable villains and deliver it all with a tone so unflinchingly serious and intense that the movie never once lets on how much fun it knows we’re going to have watching it and you have a first-rate revenge fantasy thrill ride.

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) has retired from his career as a CIA “Preventer” to try to reconnect with his 17-year-old daughter Kim (Maggie Grace).  Against his expert advice, she takes a trip to Europe to follow U2 on tour along with her friend Amanda (Katie Cassidy)." MORE

6/17/09:  "Some movies expand in your brain like a wet sponge after the credits roll:  you make connections, process themes, rewatch favorite scenes in your mind and generally absorb the film, resulting in an experience that's richer and more satisfying 24 hours after it ends.  Other movies would be better walled off and not considered even once after the final shot:  they get the job done while they're going on but start to sputter and lose luster upon further consideration.  The Taking of Pelham 1 2 3, the third film version of John Godley's 1973 best-seller, falls under the later category.  It's 105 slickly-made minutes of escapism with Denzel Washington and John Travolta effectively occupying roles they could play in their sleep.  It's got problems, does it ever, but old pros Tony Scott and Brian Helgeland keep the plates spinning long enough to send the people home happy.  How happy they'll be by the time they get home will vary...

It's just another day at New York's MTA transit system, with Walter Garber (Denzel Washington) working as a dispatcher for trains including the 1:23 out of Pelham Bay.  Something's not right about that train, which has cut off communication and separated in two." MORE

5/25/09:  "The franchise that began with James Cameron's 1984 sci-fi classic The Terminator has survived the collapse of two studios and two uber-production companies, producing 3 feature films and one 31-episode TV series.  With acknowledgment to the works of Harlen Ellison, all were built around the same basic plot:  good and bad warriors from the future, many of them cyborgs called Terminators, battled over the lives of Sarah Connor and her son John, who would grow up to be the leader of the resistance after a collection of intelligent machines called Skynet conquered the human race that created them.  Now, for something completely different:  Terminator Salvation fast-forwards to the year 2018, when the battle between man and machine is in full force.  Director McG presides over a fast-paced, tightly edited action extravaganza that pays clever homage to the films that preceded it while telling a nifty future tale of its' own.  Most importantly, it doesn't disappoint those of us who've been waiting to see a Terminator movie that dispenses with the preliminaries and gets down to the main event.

2003:  Death row inmate Marcus Wright (Sam Worthington) meets with terminally ill Dr. Serena Kogan (Helena Bonham Carter), who persuades him to donate his body to science." MORE

3/8/08:  "No one has defended Roland Emmerich more than I have.  Independence Day is as good a piece of pure popcorn entertainment as has ever been made.  Stargate was another grand crowd pleaser, and The Day After Tomorrow triumphs over a highly questionable screenplay with a sheer assault of end-of-the-world spectacle that just dares you to laugh (I only do so when I'm not watching it).  Even lesser works like The Patriot and Godzilla (which takes almost 90 minutes to get its' act together before ending with an amazing flourish) have had enough good qualities to earn my recommendation.  So I've always wondered what so many critics have against the German-born director and his former writing/producing partner Dean Devlin (other, of course, than their famous inability to take criticism, as Godzilla's Mayor Ebert will tell you).  Until now.  10,000 B.C., the colossally idiotic prehistoric epic Emmerich co-wrote with composer Harald Kloser, is everything his worst detractors have always claimed:  hollow spectacle filled with non-characters in the service of a story that goes back and forth between ridiculous and ridiculously generic.  The recipe:  put Stargate, Pathfinder and Apocalypto in a blender, let the results sit out in the sun for a week and add woolly mammoths.  At times, 10,000 B.C. is so bad, it'll have you looking for the hidden cameras:  even in their absence, the joke is on anybody expecting anything but a bunch of really good ideas for drinking games." MORE

1/28/08:  "The experience each person looks for at the movies falls somewhere along a certain continuum between story and experience.  On one end, there's the impulse to be “told” a story, to empathize with characters and feel the catharsis of what happens to them.  On the other, there's something we'll call “pure cinema”:  the crafts of cinematography, music, editing, art direction/costume design, visual effects and acting.  Most regular moviegoers stick far to the story end, while many who would consider themselves cinephiles are looking for the immersive experience and often prefer that it come unencumbered by conventional narrative.  They are the ones for whom There Will Be Blood, Paul Thomas Anderson's epic tale of turn of the century greed and misanthropy, will be a revelation.  It is surely awash in cinematic wonders, from one of Daniel Day-Lewis's finest performances to its' brilliantly hateful mood and uniquely dissonant score.  But the hard-core story crowd will be left to scratch their heads about what, if anything, we're to take from our 30-odd years in the company of mad oilman Daniel Plainview and the bunch of stuff that happens to him.  Those of us who lie somewhere in the middle of the spectrum can only take the good, leave the bad, and acknowledge that There Will Be Blood is well worth experiencing for all its' virtues, but destined to leave all but those most enraptured by its' cinematic spell asking “Huh?”" MORE

10/25/07:  "Studio executives are all about High Concepts:  movie ideas that can be expressed in a single, promotable catchphrase.  Sadly, we often find ourselves sitting through promotable catchphrases that take no more than fifteen minutes to prove they could never be fleshed out into a successful story, or ones that don't survive a second's rational analysis (no, I won't pay good money to learn why Dane Cook didn't think that Jessica Alba couldn't marry the next man she dated if she never stopped dating him).  But every once in a while, a movie comes along to restore your faith in these snappy little ideas.  For instance, “Vampires attack an Alaskan town during its' annual month of total darkness.”  30 Days of Night is everything that pitch promises and more:  it's tense, scary and exciting in all the right ways, and anybody who doesn't mind seeing its' hero have to take three swings to fully sever a vamp's head with an ax should have a ball.

Fictional Barlow, Alaska is the Northernmost town in the United States, and at one point each year the sun hangs so low in the sky that it does not rise for an entire month.  This year is even colder than most for the Oleson family because husband-and-wife Sheriffs Eben (Josh Hartnett) and Stella (Melissa George) are estranged."  MORE

3/13/07:  "Napoleon once said that history is a set of lies agreed upon by the winners:  tall tales that amplify heroism, intensify the threats that were overcome and vilify the losers beyond all recognition.  Exaggerated tales of the (sometimes recent, sometimes ancient) past are told to rally nations to war and rally soldiers to victory.  Through such a prism of outsized heroism and impossible villainy, writer-director Zack Snyder has adapted Frank Miller's graphic novel about the famous Battle of Thermopylae . 300 is an outrageous exercise in pure testosterone, its' every frame reaching for a transcendent coolness that often lies just beyond its' grasp.  Although about a half hour too long, it's still a wild, exciting and utterly unique adventure chock full of quotable dialog.

The story (and this is very important to understanding its' intent) is a campfire tale told by one-eyed warrior Dilios (David Wenham).  It's 480 B.C., and the city-states of Greece face a threat from the East:  the Persian Empire of the “God-King” Xerxes I (Rodrigo Santoro) has sent emissaries demanding gifts of “Earth and Water” to demonstrate submission to his rule.  King Leonidas (Gerard Butler), the mighty Spartan warrior, will not submit, and tosses Xerxes' men down a well.  From that moment, it is only a matter of time before the God-King unleashes his seemingly endless armies upon Sparta."  MORE

9/8/07:  "The sun has mostly set on the Western, which once dominated escapist moviegoing in much the same way Science Fiction does today.  In some ways, it's been a positive development for the genre, one I'm not that historically fond of, because today pretty much only the best Western screenplays are ever filmed.  Some of my favorite movies in the genre (including Open Range and the criminally underrated The Quick and the Dead) are from the last 15 years, the time after Unforgiven really cemented the notion of the Western as Moral Crucible.  In a time when life and death were daily struggles and the only law to speak of was Survival of the Fittest, characters' courage and ethics can be tested with an iconic power the modern-day drama can't match.  Such is the case in 3:10 to Yuma, which pits a timid rancher and a cunning gunman against each other in a battle of wits that will settle for both men the question of exactly who they are.

Dan Evans (Christian Bale) is at the end of his rope.  His ranch sits on land coveted by the coming railroad and the bankers have done everything they can to make it impossible for him to make his mortgage payments.  He lost half a leg in the Civil War and his wife Alice (Gretchen Mol) and older son William (Logan Lerman) no longer respect him."  MORE

8/22/09:  "Although it's been strongly recommended to me, I've never read Audrey Niffenegger's 2003 bestseller The Time Traveler's Wife.  But I did always wonder about it, because time travel is a favorite sci-fi topic of mine, and I was delighted to see Rachel McAdams, one of my favorite actresses, cast in the title role of Robert Schwentke's film version.  Having now seen it, I doubt I'll ever get around to that book; The Time Traveler's Wife is a laboriously serious and respectful filming of a story that alternates between long stretches of inertia and fits of extreme melodrama.  Pity, because there's lots of potential in the setup and the stars absolutely glow in their roles.  Fans of romance novel-style melodrama may eat this up, but for those of us who need to see a great romance dramatized rather than simply stipulated to, it's a 105-minute trip to nowhere.

As a child, Henry deTamble (Alex Ferris) vanishes from the car at the precise moment it strikes a truck, killing his mother (Michelle Nolden) behind the wheel.  For a moment, he's at home two weeks earlier and then he's back on the road, naked and terrified as the adult Henry (Eric Bana) appears to comfort him.  It seems he's been born with a genetic anomaly that causes him to jump randomly through time, drawn to key places that were important to his life." MORE

10/23/09:  "Most popular movies wield some sort of influence over the films that follow them, if in no other way because writers start including their names in their “It's X meets Y” pitches to studio executives.  But there are only a handful that can say they “changed everything” in a lasting or meaningful way.  Nothing “changes everything forever”, of course, since given a few decades something else always comes along to shift the paradigm again.  For instance, who could ever have imagined in the early 90's that animated films would be as popular as they are today and yet you'd essentially never see one that seems influenced by Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs?  The reason why?  A nuclear explosion of everything-changing proportions that hit on November 22, 1995 in the form of Pixar Entertainment's first feature-length release.  And because Toy Story did change everything for the animated films that followed, Pixar is understandably hesitant to allow their crown jewel to become old hat, in the same way George Lucas keeps giving his everything-changing Star Wars trilogy a technological makeover every few years.  Thus, here in the fall of 2009, moviegoers got a look at a double-feature of Toy Story and its' excellent sequel shined up and looking better than ever in state-of-the-art 3D.

Andy (voice of John Morris) is a little kid who loves his toys."  MORE

8/30/08:  "Not that audiences have been rushing out to see them, but the contradictions and ethical challenges of the War on Terror would seem to present enough material to keep Serious Filmmakers busy for, I don't know, the 500 years the War seems likely to last.  But as complicated as the interlocking issues of reigning in the violent fringe of Muslim extremists are for most Americans, just imagine how much more complicated they must be to the rest of the world's Islamic population.  That's the most unique wrinkle of the new thriller Traitor, which casts Don Cheadle as a man trying to do the right thing at an intersection of faith and violence where every choice seems like the wrong one.  A first-rate cast keeps things interesting despite the deliberate pace chosen by writer-director Jeffrey Nachmanoff.

Samir Horn (Don Cheadle) was born in Sudan, but his family moved to the United States after the violent death of his father.  We meet him arranging an arms sale to terrorists which ends with him in a Yemeni prison, where he refuses to cooperate with two FBI agents:  the thoughtful and religious Roy Clayton (Guy Pearce) and the brash Max Archer (Neal McDonough)."  MORE

7/3/07:  "On paper, it sounds absurd.  Not only is Transformers a movie based on a beloved line of 80's toys (not all that surprising) and produced by Steven Spielberg (the only surprise there is that he's doing it in 2007 and not 1987), but it's directed by red-meat auteur Michael Bay.  What you get is strangely close to what you'd expect based on that description:  shockingly photo-realistic transforming robots who're a little cutsier than I might have preferred, way too much comic relief, and a climactic orgy of robot vs. robot vs. human battle so staggeringly awesome it's like the filmmakers were reading my 8-year-old mind.

In Quatar, a US military base is attacked by a helicopter that transforms into a killer robot and tries to hack its' way into the US Military's top-secret computer networks.  The only survivors, led by Sergeant Lennox (Josh Duhamel), are left to fight their way across the desert to warn their superiors of what's coming.  Meanwhile, we meet young Sam Witwicky (Shia LaBeouf):  descended from a courageous arctic explorer whose artifacts he's selling off on eBay, he's about to get his first car, and hopes it'll attract the attention of the girl of his dreams, Mikaela Banes (Megan Fox).  Things break his way pretty quickly, in part because the beat-up Chevy Camaro he ends up with seems better at flirting with her than he is."  MORE

6/26/09:  "Two years ago, I wrote quite a bit about Michael Bay's Transformers, a movie of which I was aggressively of two minds.  On the one hand, it had a crude, silly desperation to be all things to all people, eating insane amounts of screen time with dreadful (and dreadfully broad) comic relief.  But on the other, it was an amazing blockbuster feast of sights and sounds, featuring action the likes of which I'd never seen before.  On balance, I liked the movie quite a bit, and even moreso once my brain made a certain amount of peace with its' silly excesses.  I don't know why, but for some reason I assumed a sequel would build upon what worked and set aside what didn't, but Transformers:  Revenge of the Fallen is actually a step backwards for the franchise.  Emphasizing allegedly crowd-pleasing nonsense like a new pair of blaxploitation robots at the expense of the characters and themes that made the original great, Revenge gets by on that fact that it's still pretty damn amazing to watch these giant robots slug it out.  But if all involved could just stop telling themselves “It's just Transformers,” and commit to these characters, we'd be mainlining awesome rather than just sampling it." MORE

11/30/08:  "As Jean-Claude Van Damme steps back to regard the wreckage of his career in JCVD, we are reminded of a cold, hard fact that confronts every action star.  No matter how good you are, most action movies are bad, and eventually they will take you down with them.  But, man, how I want Jason Statham to rise above that cold equation.  The English-born martial arts star who burst onto the scene in Lock, Stock and Two Smoking Barrels is the real deal, supercool, physically gifted and a charismatic leading man.  But the more crappy action movies a man does, the harder it is to escape the genre, and the diminishing returns are written all over Transporter 3, his latest go-round as Frank Martin, the snappy dresser who drives really fast.  He's as cool as ever, the stunts are solid and he's got a crackerjack adversary in Prison Break's Robert Knepper.  But the screenplay by Luc Besson and Robert Mark Kamen is an insult to idiocy and the passenger's seat in Frank's beloved Audi is occupied by one of the worst movie characters in many a year.  He'd better push that accelerator to the floor, because Frank Martin's franchise is circling the drain.

Poor Frank, a quiet evening at home is interrupted by a car that comes crashing through his wall."  MORE

9/12/08:  "As long as I can remember, I've had a dream that goes like this:  I show up in high school, having not attended a single class all year, on the day of the finals.  Not only must I take the tests with no idea what the material was, but I have this great aching sense that if anyone notices that I've never been there before, I'm screwed.  I'm sure you have a recurring dream or two like it yourself:  maybe not the test-taking part (my subconscious is such a cliche!), but certainly that nagging sense that you're running behind, about to be caught.  Perhaps it's this part of our collective unconscious, that feeling of having our fight-or-flight instinct caged by a society that will allow us neither option, that makes train-bound tightening-noose thrillers like Transsiberian such an enduring subgenre.  There's something about the tight quarters of a train, surrounded by strangers, with the relentless noise of the massive machine rolling over tracks, that invites paranoia.  And within those confines, director Brad Anderson, backed by a great cast, knows how to deliver suspense.  The script he con-wrote with Will Conroy isn't half as clever as it thinks it is, but it has a methodical energy and crackles with the thrills of someone else's bad dream."  MORE

8/29/08:  "Historically, no commercially unpopular movie genre is better represented than the Hollywood Satire.  It's easy enough to see why:  I loved Office Space because I work in an office, Free Enterprise because I'm a sci-fi geek and Lucky Numbers because I live in Central Pennsylvania, so why wouldn't Hollywood executives have a warped sense of the commercial viability of movies about their own lives?  But the funny thing about the traditional Hollywood satire isn't that they're insular, although they often are, but that they're so jam-packed with self-loathing.  What makes Tropic Thunder, Ben Stiller's fences-swinging action comedy, different is that while it's all-in on the vanity and insecurity of movie stars, the business's insensitivity to the disabled and minorities and the bottom-line evil of corporate moguls, it does so while providing larger insight on those characters and their world.  Better yet, it's an utterly hilarious, kick-ass summer movie at the same time.  It doesn't all work (it would be just about impossible for a movie this far out on a ledge to all work), but when it does, it's as smart as it is raucous.  And it's pretty raucous.

Production is underway on Tropic Thunder, a blockbuster Hollywood filming of the famous Vietnam memoir of Four Leaf Tayback (Nick Nolte), a Colonel Kurtz-like figure who looms in the background of the chaotic set."  MORE

4/6/09:  "I like my cheesy B-action movies the same way I like my women...  Come to think of it, there's really no way in which that statement is true, but I couldn't think of any better way to start a review of a movie like 12 Rounds, an action spectacular so cheerfully, violently retro-cheesy it's from the director of The Long Kiss Goodnight, stars a WWE wrestler and prominently features a low-budget re-enactment of the climax of Speed 2:  Cruise Control.  Now, I know what most of you are thinking:  I need to run screaming from the movie at my earliest convenience.  Well, fine, you do that, but for those of us who revel in this kind of crap, 12 Rounds is a buried treasure of unapologetic awesomeness.  John Cena revisits and improves upon the Big Ol' Goofy Lug of Unstoppable Heroism persona he established in the similarly delightful The Marine.  Those on its' wavelength are invited to check their brain at the door and strap themselves in:  12 Rounds is peddle-down junk of the highest order.

One year ago today, New Orleans Police Officer Danny Fisher (John Cena) and his partner Hank Carver (Brian White) were called to assist the FBI after a sting designed to bust terrorist mastermind Miles Jackson (Aidan Gillen) went horribly awry." MORE

1/20/08:  "Life is hard, with setbacks and disappointments at every turn.  Sometimes clinging to idealized fantasies is the only way we can keep ourselves moving forward.  I guess that's part of the reason the movies are so dear to my heart, and I'd imagine it's why so many women have a fanatical love of weddings.  Sure, everybody wants a lifetime of happiness, but you can really FOCUS on a single day when Everything Is Perfect.  Being a guy, I don't really get it myself, but I get that other people get it and as such a better movie can be made by selling me on the sincerity of one such person than on the fantasy itself.  27 Dresses is such a movie, driven by a wonderful Katherine Heigl star turn as a woman who's buried all her own hopes and dreams under a lifetime of helping others with theirs.  The rough outline of Aline Brosh McKenna's screenplay is romantic comedy rubbish that usually drives me mad, but almost any story can be pulled off by great characters who stay true to themselves, and 27 Dresses has those in spades.

Jane (Heigl) grew up looking after her little sister Tess after the death of her Mother." MORE

11/20/09:  "Let me get this out of the way up front:  we once face one of these choices that comes along every few years between recognizing that when the world ends it's not going to be because of somebody's calendar and getting all whipped into a frenzy over the idea that, yet again, The World As We Know It is down to its' last few pages of adorable kitten pictures hanging on our kitchen walls.  While you'd think the Millennium would have taught us all a thing or two about the way the world doesn't end, people are once again gripping over the fact that the Mayan calendar ends on December 21, 2012, as if it didn't have to end at some time since the empire that built it stopped putting out new editions quite some time ago.  We do get a couple of compensations for the coming apocalyptic crackpot festival, one being that it gives Chris Carter an excuse to pitch a new X-Files movie to 20th Century Fox (the series having predicted an alien invasion on that date) and it's allowed Roland Emmerich to complete the End of the World As We Know It Trilogy he began with the popcorn masterpiece Independence Day and continued with the loopy but breathtaking The Day After Tomorrow.  File 2012 under loopy but breathtaking, but when it's rolling, it delivers more disastrous bang for your ticket dollar than just about any movie ever made." MORE