10/26/08:  "Allow me to be immodest for a moment:  I'm one of the smartest people I know.  I read the paper every day and have a pretty good grasp of the issues, enough so that people often ask me to explain them.  But no matter how high my opinion of my own intelligence and civic-mindedness might be, I know this much:  I am not now nor will I ever be qualified to be President of the United States.  It mystifies me when people support political figures because they're “like me”:  is there anybody reading this review who's REALLY got what it takes to be President?  And if not, why would we want somebody like us to hold the highest office in the land?  Yeah, I used to think “anybody could be President,” “The country runs itself,” all that crap, but that was before George W. Bush.  W., the sensational new film from Oliver Stone, presents the 43rd President as a tragic figure who learned the cold hard truth first hand:  just because the Constitution says anybody can be President doesn't mean they should.

In the aftermath of the 9/11 terrorist attacks and the “successful” war in Afghanistan, President George W. Bush (Josh Brolin) gathers his cabinet to consider their options.  Colin Powell (Jeffrey Wright) advises caution and adherence to the diplomatic traditions of past Presidents, but his is the only moderate voice in the room." MORE

6/2/07:  "Any discussion of Waitress must begin at the end, where the final on-screen credit is a dedication to writer/director/supporting player Adrienne Shelly, who was murdered between the film's completion and its' premiere at this year's Sundance Film Festival.  Coming at the end of the confidently made, complex and ultimately uplifting comedy that would clearly have been the veteran indie actress's filmmaking breakthrough, one can't help but be struck by the tragedy.  But there's cause for celebration as well, that she left behind a film bursting at the seams with both humanity and hope, and one that will implore the generations that follow her to make the most of the time they have.

Jenna (Keri Russell) is a deeply unhappy woman, and things get worse from the moment we meet her.  Not only is she trapped in a hellish marriage to controlling loser Earl (Jeremy Sisto), but she's now pregnant with his child.  She'd been putting aside tips from her job as a waitress at Joe's Pie Diner with a dream to escape through entering and winning a pie bake-off with a $25,000.00 prize.  And Jenna sure can bake, dreaming up new pies all the time for Joe's customers." MORE

7/18/08:  "Give Pixar, the animation studio that's Hollywood's biggest reigning brand name, their due:  the creators of Toy Story, Finding Nemo, and a half-dozen other iconic hits could easily keep putting cute faces of new inanimate objects, trotting them through familiar “I need a family” storylines and wait for the cash to roll in.  But instead, they've tried to branch out.  I wasn't an admirer of last summer's “quasi-adorable rat wants to be a chef” comedy Ratatouille, but it was definitely a major step outside the Monsters, Inc./Cars formula.  Now comes an even bigger gamble, an apocalyptic sci-fi story told in the mixed silent/vocal style of Chaplin's Modern Times and even featuring a smattering of live action.  WALL-E is trying to be a lot of different things at once, and they don't always jell, but it's a fascinatingly ambitious movie, at least as interesting to think about as it is to watch (take that, Kung Fu Panda!), and it's as visually stunning as anything in the Pixar catalog.

The film begins in a vast future cityscape of garbage.  We meet a robot, specifically a Waste Allocation Load Lifter-Earth class (WALL-E, voice of Ben Burtt) who prowls the wasteland gathering trash, compressing it into little blocks and stacking them into skyscraper-sized towers.  " MORE

10/25/10:  "Much has been written about the tragic demise of the drama as a viable box office attraction, which has marginalized it to the same low-budget production level as horror movies.  Where this has been most tragic is for the great dramatic filmmakers of the time when you really could dominate the box office with a movie that said yes to grown-ups with moral conundrums and no to giant robots.  Accustomed to working on expensive productions with elite talent, they are asked to adapt or die.  So it is that Oliver Stone, once the mighty auteur of blockbusters like Platoon and Born on the 4th of July, now finds himself in a virtually for-hire position on a sequel to his own iconic hit Wall Street on which he doesn't even share screenplay credit.  Wall Street:  Money Never Sleeps is very much a committee product, swishing around a half-dozen ideas for an interesting return of Michael Douglas' iconic Gordon Gekko but never really deciding which one to go with.  With Douglas back in fine form, joined by strong performances by Shia LaBeouf and Josh Brolin, Money Never Sleeps remains interesting for most of its running time without ever generating much in the way of dramatic momentum.  Then, when it seems to have run its course, the film just keeps going and going and going, reversing, revising and copping out until closing moments that are almost embarrassing in their desperation to sell tickets.  Too bad, because its ambition to dramatize the forces the led to the 2008 Wall Street collapse is a noble one." MORE

7/8/08:  "When you put The Matrix and Fight Club into a blender, what do you get?  Amazing visuals, a whole hell of a lot of violence, and a fundamental conflict between a story of epic, selfless heroism and a black-hearted satire of impotent wage slave rage waiting for an outlet. Wanted, the English language directorial debut of Night Watch's Timur Bekmambetov, struggles with that contradiction, and often comes out on the side of stone cold sociopathy.  But the final scenes reveal that all this carnage is actually headed someplace quite interesting and the film's dazzlingly impossible homicides are something to behold, at least for a while.  What's ironic about Wanted is that while it's positioned as empty calorie Summer eye candy, it's actually one of those movies that's more interesting to discuss after seeing than it is to watch.

Our narrator is Wesley Gibson (James McAvoy), a pathetic office drone who lives in fear of his boss (Lorna Scott) and can't stand his girlfriend (Kristen Hagar), who he knows is cheating on him with his best friend (Chris Pratt).  His life is changed by a fateful trip to the pharmacy, where he's approached by Fox (Angelina Jolie), a ruthless assassin who informs him that his long-lost father (David O'Hara), a fellow assassin, was killed just the day before by a man named Cross (Thomas Krtschmann)." MORE

8/26/07:  "**SPOILER ALERT:  WHILE I WON'T COME OUT AND SAY HOW IT ENDS, IF YOU'RE PLANNING TO SEE WAR, YOU SHOULD PROBABLY DO SO BEFORE READING THIS REVIEW**

When I was a kid, any time I had two cool toys from anywhere near the same universe (a pair of dinosaurs, two robots, maybe a dinosaur and a robot; hell, any two things that were roughly the same size...) the single most important thing that I wanted to see them do was... FIGHT!!!  Even when our childish instincts seek cover behind adult rationality, the debate rages on:  who would win in a fight between Superman and Batman... Godzilla and Optimus Prime... James T. Kirk and Buffy Summers?  And from the moment a new movie action hero is introduced, he is immediately slotted into the eternal debate while we anxiously await those rare occasions when a screenplay pits one action hero against another.  Having already faced Mel Gibson (in Lethal Weapon 4, advantage Mel) and himself (in The One, obviously ending in something of a draw), Jet Li adopts his Evil Jet persona to take on The Transporter himself, big bad Jason Statham in War, a new action fest that's disappointingly light on Hero vs. Hero action, but redeems itself by pulling one hell of a rabbit out of its' hat at the end." MORE

12/28/11:  "Sports in practice may or may not be a metaphor for life, but on film they provide an incredible shorthand for our day-to-day struggles.  A guy has to process a thousand loan applications to pay his mortgage?  Bad Cinema.  A guy has to sink an impossible putt to win a golf tournament he had no business being in to save his house?  Great Cinema.  The Inspirational Sports movie is one of the most durable narrative templates because setting out to win an event, preparing to compete and actually playing the game/match/tournament is a natural three-act structure complete with a score viewers can follow.  And when it’s done well, the combination of sports drama and human drama is a hard one to beat.  Writer/Director Gavin O’Connor may have found his calling in the genre:  best known prior to 2004 for directing Janet McTeer to one of the most acclaimed performances almost no one has seen (in 1999’s Tumbleweeds), he landed the job on Disney’s Team Biopic of the 1980 US Olympic Hockey Team.  The result, Miracle, was truly transcendent in its quiet understanding of the virtues of pre-Dream Team amateur sports and the dynamics of coaching and teamwork.  O’Connor went back to standard fare with the skillfully acted but glacially-paced 2008 police thriller misfire Pride & Glory, but now he’s back where he belongs, telling a family drama through the prism of mixed martial arts in Warrior." MORE

12/10/10:  "Genres become like dances, with their steps laid out on an invisible dotted diagram on the floor beneath our moviegoing feet.  It might seem the only way to shake them up is to mash them up, pitting cowboys against aliens or Jane Austin heroines against zombies.  But sometimes combining genres only illuminates how similar they are.  Take the Western and the Samurai flick, the two components of Sngmoo Lee's debut feature The Warrior's Way.  Yes, by the time Ninjas, Cowboys and Circus Folk are slugging it out in a climactic three-way battle royal, you will know you're seeing something you haven't seen before.  But the conventions of both (silent warriors haunted by their own deadliness, damsels in distress, downtrodden townsfolk in need of saving) are fairly similar and The Warrior's Way rarely feels as novel as you might expect.  It is, however, a diverting little oater, as visually impressive as it is narratively threadbare.  It's got issues, but, given that it was shot in 2007 and narration papers over what seem to have been extensive cuts, it's best appreciated if you can simply be grateful for the awesome sight of Confederate Soldiers blasting away at airborne ninjas with Gatling Guns." MORE

3/13/09:  "The phrase “The Citizen Kane of graphic novels” has become as attached to Alan Moore & Dave Gibbons' 1986/87 comic book series Watchmen as “Greatest Film of All Time” is to Citizen Kane.  The series is as dense as it is brilliant, sporting a flashback-filled, perspective-jumping structure that helped to inspire the TV series Lost.  But because it tells a single, closed story on a gigantic scale, nobody's really thought about adapting it for TV, any more than almost 20 years of big-name directors like Terry Gilliam and Paul Greengrass were able to wrestle down a script for a big-screen version.  And thank Dr. Manhattan they waited.  Because in 2009, we find ourselves at the moment when the world, between state-of-the-art special effects capable of bringing it to smooth, believable life and a new commitment by major studios to back comic book movies with real artistic teeth, is finally ready for it.  300 director Zack Snyder has produced a movie as dense for 160 minutes as those classic comics were for 12 issues, retaining every last Watchman word and thought he can find room for while subtly nudging the story in more compact and cinematic directions when necessary.  The result may not be the Citizen Kane of Comic Book Movies, but it is a worthy addition to that growing late-00's collection of really awesome superhero flicks." MORE

1/22/11:  "Veteran watchers or the upcoming movie release schedule develop a sixth sense for a certain kind of “uh-oh” movie, one whose elements are so much better than its position on the release schedule that it can only mean the film's commercial prospects have been all but abandoned.  Case in point:  Peter Weir directs his first movie in seven years, an epic survival tale set against the backdrop of WWII-era Russia, with a cast full of award magnet performers like Ed Harris, Saoirse Ronan and Colin Farrell.  And The Way Back is opening on roughly 650 screens in mid-January, distributed by Newmarket Films, the former Passion of the Christ distributer recently revived as the art house subsidiary of Lionsgate.  The finished product could be much worse given that build-up, but it's clear why no one believed this movie would draw the attention of either moviegoers or award-granting critics groups.  It has strong elements:  the above-referenced actors are all in fine form, and Russell Boyd's cinematography is suitably stunning.  But this is far from what we've come to expect from six-time Oscar nominee Weir:  instead, it's the epitome of “good” while never even scratching greatness.  I was mostly engaged by The Way Back, although I did let loose a yawn or five during its 135-minute running time.  Fans of the genre will enjoy a glance at a much-discussed but rarely filmed part of history, and we really don't get to see enough of Harris firing on all cylinders these days." MORE

1/4/07:  "I love a good inspirational sports movie, which makes this a very good time for me to be a moviegoer.  Since the success of Remember the Titans (which, ironically, I didn't much care for) back in 2000, Hollywood has been scouring the microfiche in every newspaper's vaults looking for anything they can find with an underdog and a referee.  Most involve some improbably guy making it as a pro, or an amateur team overcoming impossible odds to play for the state championship.  While it follows the formula in many ways, We Are Marshall is something different.  It's a story of existence as victory, of being able to go on as overcoming the odds.  And it's got valuable lessons for our society, which often confuses quitting with respect.

In 1970, Marshall University was stunned when a plane carrying almost their entire football team, coaching staff and many community leaders crashed, killing everyone aboard.  Only four varsity players had remined behind, and Assistant Coach Red Dawson (Matthew Fox), who skipped the flight for a recruiting trip, wanted nothing to do with the team.  With University President Donald Dedmon (David Strathairn) under tremendous pressure to shut down the football program, enter the only coach willing to take a chance on the job:  Jack Lengyel (Matthew McConaughey).  The job seems insurmountable:  recruit virtually an entire new team, teach them to play together, and in some cases to learn the sport from scratch." MORE

11/26/11:  "A confession upfront:  I’m a big zoo guy.  Yes, I know that in a perfect world we’d live on one of two parallel planets, the other shared by animals who roamed free in their natural, unspoiled habitats.  But since we’ve outcompeted virtually every living thing on our world, zoos are a useful way to preserve biodiversity, give a home to wounded critters who wouldn’t survive in the wild, and let us spend a little time with some really cute animals.  I’m also a big Cameron Crowe guy, and I even loved his big, heartfelt folly of a box office disaster Elizabethtown, which seemed to have sent him into exile after its 2005 release.  Well, now he’s back, and back with a bang:  We Bought a Zoo shows him pulling back to more human concerns (as in his iconic blockbuster Jerry Maguire) after the metaphysical leaps of Etown and Vanilla Sky, telling a story inspired by Englishman Benjamin Mee’s memoir about his family’s 2006 purchase of Dartmoor Wildlife Park (now knows as Dartmoor Zoological Park).  Zoo is a crowd-pleasing machine, filled with “what are we gonna do now?” crises and tear-jerking solutions, but most importantly it’s got the real, beating human heart that’s the single most important attribute of Crowe’s work (don’t worry, it’s also got some Pearl Jam on the soundtrack).  Grounded by an excellent lead performance from Matt Damon, it’s filled with a colorful collection of quirky background characters and oodles of cute animals.  It’s the kind of holiday movie the whole family really should enjoy, unless of course they bristle at the mention of the word “zoo”." MORE

10/14/07:  "I often think of movie genres as being like tuning forks.  Most of us have certain ones that totally match our wavelength, and can rattle off dozens of movies in that wheelhouse that we loved while others who require convincing to go along for the ride turned up their noses.  When a movie's in “your” genre, it doesn't need much to get by:  half-decent performances, a plot that doesn't TOTALLY suck, and some of the standard scenes that all movies like it have.  James Grey's We Own the Night is a movie for people who love cop movies, particularly those that revel in the mystique of the NYPD, the most celebrated crimefighting fraternity this side of the Atlantic.  I say this not because it's specially built for those with in-depth knowledge of the genre and its' conventions but because if all things Police don't float your boat, you're likely to find the movie as boring, emotionally closed-off and cliched as I did.

NYPD veteran Burt Grusinsky (Robert Duvall) has two sons:  Joseph (Mark Wahlberg) followed him onto the force, while Bobby (Joaquin Phoenix) has made a dubious life for himself as a club manager for Russian fur merchant Marat Buzhayev (Moni Moshonov)." MORE

11/5/09:  "As I child, I remember loving Maurice Sendak's classic book Where the Wild Things Are, with its' iconic drawings of strange, otherworldly critters I can still remember today, when I haven't seen a copy  in at least 25 years.  But as Spike Jonze's movie version approached, I searched my memories trying to remember the plot, and came up empty.  Not that there's a LOT of plot (the picture-heavy tale contains only 10 sentences), but I suspect what there was kinda went over my little head while I was ooing and ahhing at those awesome critters.  Seeing Jonze's brilliant, moving film version, I reflected upon the fact that while it's a story about a kid, it's likely to find its' most receptive audience among adults.  When you're young, the world is a confusing and incomprehensible place.  And while we never entirely figure it out, a grown-up audience is more likely to see how an island of sad monsters and the angry kid who briefly becomes their King are symbols of the life-long struggle to carve out a world you can wrap your brain around.  If you choose to take your kids, don't say you weren't warned, but for audiences on its' wavelength, this is one of the best films of the year.

Young Max (Max Records) lives in a lonely world of his own imaging." MORE

9/23/09:  "Given how much time we spend lamenting that they don't make 'em like the used to, it's worthwhile from time to time to be reminded that some genres and styles have been rightly put out to pasture.  For example, the pre-Shane Black crime thriller.  Back in the day, Dirty Harry and company would be faced with some crime or other, spend two hours grimly and methodically gathering evidence while pausing from time to time to get shot at and told they're off the case, and then finally discover the culprit, usually someone close to them.  Lethal Weapon turned this paradigm on its' ear with its' emphasis on comedy and male bonding, and even once the Buddy Movie had become passe, its' predecessor had been successfully exiled to television (where its' format makes up 95% of the CBS Prime Time schedule).  But, alas, the good folks at Dark Castle Entertainment thought old school crime thrillerism would be the perfect prism through which to adapt Greg Rucka and Steve Lieber's 1998 graphic novel Whiteout.  So, while it has the novelty of a female protagonist and an Antarctic setting, Domenic Sena's film version trudges humorlessly through 100-odd minutes of stupefying boredom as US Marshall Kate Beckinsale seeks the least interesting possible resolution to the first murder on the icy continent.  Hang on to your fingers, it's gonna be a chilly ride." MORE

1/4/07:  "Escapism gets a bad wrap.  Whatever else you might have heard, taking people away from their troubles for two hours is one of the primary purposes of the movies.  Case in point:  about a month ago, I turned 35, an age that has me thinking a lot of that Franz Ferdinand lyric, “What might be is now what might have been”.  It was in this state of mind that I viewed Walt Becker's Wild Hogs, a middle-aged wish fulfillment comedy in which four guys confront their own midlife crises with a road trip that becomes a life-changing adventure.  In between laughing a lot, the movie just made me feel better.  Is there really any higher praise?

Four friends burn off steam with a little motorcycle club they call the Wild Hogs.  Doug Madsen (Tim Allen) is a stressed-out dentist.  Woody Stevens (John Travolta) was married to a supermodel, but in the wake of their divorce, he's lost all his money.  Bobby Davis (Martin Lawrence) is a plummer under the thumb of his overbearing wife (Tichina Arnold).  And Dudley Frank (William H. Macy) is a geeky computer programmer who can't get a date.  Facing eviction, Woody talks the gang into hitting the road for a drive to the Pacific Ocean.  Fate takes them to a real biker bar, where scary Jack (Ray Liotta) takes Dudley's bike.  Woody gets it back, but not before he's accidentally blown up their bar." MORE

9/6/10:  "Genres, cliches and the simple bias toward putting pretty pictures onscreen mean that poverty is rarely realistically depicted in the movies.  Rural poverty has the extra strike against it that most Hollywood writers advised to “write what you know” have never been within 200 miles of it.  When it does pop up onscreen, it's generally that “saintly poverty” rich people like to believe in, but those of us who've lived among the rural white poor know that the Hard Working Decent People who populate the cinematic countryside are far from the only residents of its real-life counterpart.  So it takes an independent filmmakers like Debra Granik, filming exclusively in the far-from-Hollywood state of Missouri with the help of dozens of “We'd like to thank...” families listed in the end credits, to create a portrait of the darkest parts of the backwoods as compellingly real as Winter's Bone.  Powered by a remarkable lead performance by young Jennifer Lawrence and an equally stunning supporting turn by veteran John Hawkes, Bone tells a classically simple story (adapted from a novel by Daniel Woodrell) and leans hard on the fact that we haven't seen this world before.  Unless, of course, it is or has ever been your back yard." MORE

3/14/10:  "As you can probably tell from any perusal of the coming release schedule, the primary purpose of most studios these days is to exploit the name value of the movies they produced in the past by creating new ones that play off their legacies.  This is particularly true in the horror genre, where virtually every major title of the last 30 years has been the subject of a recent remake (nope, not using the studios preferred term, “reimagining”.  They're remakes.  Live with it).  No studio is more closely associated with a particular period in the history of the genre than Universal's 25-year domination starting in the early 30's with Dracula and Frankenstein, leading through the 50's sci-fi boom that produced The Creature from the Black Lagoon, and they desperately want to get their own juice from those vaulted rights.  Their only real success was Stephen Sommers', OK, reimagining of The Mummy as an Indiana Jones-style adventure, but they've poured hundreds of millions into projects like the misbegotten Van Helsing and now a hundred-fifty million dollar remake of The Wolfman.  Of course, that budget almost doubled during a lengthy reshoot process in which conflicting visions of the kind of Amblin Entertainment Theme Park ride director Joe Johnston does well and an R-rated bloodbath did a battle that's not completely settled by his final cut.  The Wolfman sure does look like a hundred million bucks, and its talented cast is all kinds of awesome in their roles." MORE

2/12/09:  "When we're kids, everything is simple, pat, black and white.  Maybe that's why children of the 80's were drawn so strongly to Professional Wrestling with its' larger-than-life cartoonish heroes and villains deciding their grudges by brute force in the squared circle.  Back in those days, wrestlers wouldn't even cop to their characters and matches being a show, and just like Santa, we clung to the notion that, yes, Virginia, there is an Ultimate Warrior.  But as we get older, it all turns to gray, and no matter how hard we try to turn our heads, certain truths just insist upon being faced.  Wrestling, it turns out, is a form of scripted drama/performance art, one that an adult can both appreciate and admire.  That's not the bad part.  The bad part is the wrestling lifestyle, known as “the sickness” within the industry, a combination of performance enhancing and illicit drugs and constant physical punishment that has cut down dozens of my childhood heroes and villains in their prime.  It's hard to imagine a movie capturing this contrast between the childlike purity and adult heartbreak of Pro Wrestling better than Darren Aronofsky's The Wrestler.  His documentary-style direction and Robert D. Siegel's carefully observed screenplay set the stage, but what makes the movie remarkable is the performance of a lifetime by resurgent Mickey Rourke, who makes a lifetime of physical and emotional scars work for him as the most heartbreakingly realistic performance ever as a King of the Ring." MORE