Cynical Cinema

There have been 52 half-hour episodes of Transformers Cybertron, a Japanese animated Transformers program. All 52 of those episodes are now on DVD in the Transformers Cybertron Ultimate Collection, out today, July 22nd, from Paramount Home Entertainment. It’s one of those shows that has a lot of flashy colours and tough-guy posing, all with the Transformers. Very frenetic, very confusing, and every episode is almost exactly the same. The Transformers characters in this series are different from the ones we have come to know and love - no Bumblebee! But there is of course an Optimus Prime and a Megatron, there are Autobots and Decepticons, and of course everyone ends up on Earth.

The basic idea of the series is that the population of the Transformers’ home planet, Cybertron, is threatened by a black hole and evacuated, and all the Transformers are sent to Earth. In order to save their home planet (and also, of course, the Universe), the good-guy Autobots must find the five Cyber Planet Keys, which will give them enough power to stop the marauding black hole and save all of existence. But Megatron, the evil leader of the evil Decepticons, has the map that shows where the Cyber Planet Keys are located in the universe. We can only assume that if he were to get his hands on these artifacts, he would use them to destroy the universe and everything inside it. We really don’t know though. For all we know, he would use the massive power of the Cyber Planet Keys to open a successful car parts lot, and to finagle an invitation to the Playboy Mansion. Who knows?

All in all, this show is extremely confusing. I was constantly aware that the show had been translated from the Japanese, because the translation of certain words is…strange. Something I don’t understand though are the voices. These are mechanical transforming robot aliens from across the universe. Why are some of them Irish, others are hicks, others are British…it doesn’t make sense! And one of the characters really sounds like he’s voiced by Larry the Cable Guy. The theme song is one of the worst in TV history. It’s that old Transformers song, you know - “more than meets the eye…robots in disguise”, and so forth. But it’s updated for today’s world, which means it’s been given a cheesy R&B beat and hook, and there’s rap in it. Although, the rapper actually doesn’t say anything. He just says “Transformers! Transformers! Transformers! Transformers!” You would think they could have afforded a lyricist. I’m sure you don’t need Tupac to do your song, but this thing is as painful as that moment in Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles II when Vanilla Ice was “freestyling” on stage and started rapping “Go Ninja! Go Ninja! Go Ninja! Go Ninja!” for eleven minutes.

In fact, the rest of the series seems to be plagued with a similar lack of writers. Every single episode, Optimus Prime says “Transformers! Transform and Roll Out!” at least four times. Also, every time the Transformers are about to do anything - like go for a picnic, order pizza or watch Three’s Company, whatever it is they do - he yells “Transformers! Sound off!” And then each of the Autobots steps forward and yells their own name. This really takes up a lot of time, and it’s just irritating. Like, why are they doing this? Is it simply because some exec behind the scenes thinks it adds a bad-ass extra bit to the scenes where the colours are flashing and the Transformers are punching the air? I don’t get it. And I don’t get this show. At all.

This summer, we’re pretty spoiled when it comes to the big, blockbuster comic book movies.  Iron Man was absolutely fantastic, and The Dark Knight is the best comic book flick ever made.  And looked at in that light, the re-release of The Punisher, special extended edition, would be easy to overlook.  And perhaps that’s for the best.  Now, I must say I have always had a soft spot in my heart for the original Punisher, starring Dolph Lundgren in 1989.  That scene where he’s being tortured on that table, and the bad guys are about to do that comic book thing where they leave the room, assuming he’s going to die.  And through the pain, and the horror, he yells at their departing backs;  “Hey!  HEY!  Have a nice day.”  Magnificently idiotic!

And although there are parts of the new Punisher that are aggressively mediocre enough to be kind of funny, and there are moments that actually verge on the magnificently idiotic, the movie just doesn’t have enough of those moments to justify watching it.  This new, extended edition, appears to have added a whole new story line.  One which requires a major military scene in Kuwait to start the movie and set up this story line.  And yet, that scene was never filmed.  Too expensive, you see.  So what they have done is photograph the actors, and they’ve animated the scene to kick off the movie.  The main problem with that is that not only does it feel tacked on, but it also makes that whole story line tacked on, and they were probably right to cut it out in the first cut of the movie.

This movie was too long the first time.  Now they’ve added an extra twenty minutes, making it interminable.  It just isn’t compelling enough to get me to sit there for two hours plus.  Thomas Jane is OK as the comic book hero (who has no superpowers or special abilities, except…anger?)  And John Travolta is alright as the Comic Book villain, Howard Saint.  But there are so many bothersome moments in the film.  If Saint wants the Punisher dead so badly, why does he send one person at a time?  Why not send his whole team?  And if the Punisher keeps losing all these fights, isn’t he more the Punished than the Punisher?  And why does he go to such great lengths to mess with the minds of his targets when he’s just going to walk in and blow them away three days later anyway?

Not only was this movie average at best the first time around, it has become even more bloated and obnoxious this time.  While it’s an easy DVD to watch when you’ve shut off your brain, there is no real redeeming value to this film or DVD edition.  Even the special features are weak - all we get is a “making-of” nine minute feature about this extended edition, which involves picture taking and drawing.  Boring.  Just like the movie.  It came out July 15th from Alliance Films.

Sleepwalking came out Tuesday the 15th from Alliance Films.  And while I want to like it, and I want to recommend it, I just can’t.  It’s a movie that almost gets there and almost succeeds, but in this case a near-miss is as good as a mile.  You know, horseshoes and hand grenades and so forth.  It’s the story of Tara Reedy, a young girl played by Annasophia Robb, whose mother Joleen (Charlize Theron) is a pretty awful mom.  After her boyfriend is arrested on drug charges, Joleen and Tara are evicted from their house and have no place to go.  They move in with Joleen’s brother James (Nick Stahl), but after a couple of days Joleen is gone.  She has taken off on her daughter, leaving her stuck with James, who has no idea what to do with a 12-year-old child.

The relationship between Stahl and Robb is a great one.  It is awkwardly sweet, tender yet clueless.  And while initially he is the one making all the sacrifices for her, and she’s kind of the twelve-year-old jerk, eventually she comes around and helps him as much as he helps her.  Stahl is terrific as the unstable, meek loser of an uncle, and Annasophia Robb is absolutely wonderful as the young girl.  (You might remember her from her terrific performance in Bridge To Terabithia.)  Theron is great as the absentee filthy neglectful possible-prostitute mother.  Which means the movie feels like it’s building toward something intense.  Something that reveals the whole story, that explains Joleen and James and why they now are the way they are.

And it seems like this moment is coming.  James has lost his job, has been evicted from his place, and has nowhere to go with young Tara, so he takes her on a road trip to see his dad (and Joleen’s) at his farm a few states over.  We know that this will lead to a watershed moment, either a reconciliation with a father that has been wronged, or a confrontation with a father that has wronged his kids.  We don’t really know until we get there.  And when we do get there, the final resolution is, in a way, even more intense that we would have expected.  And, in another way, much less intense.  You see, the father is played by Dennis Hopper.  And unfortunately, he portrays the father as a complete cartoon character. 

The entire film, up until that point, hinged on the father.  Every other character has deep issues and serious damage, all of which can be traced back to this father.  Stahl, Robb, and Theron have all turned in deeply nuanced, wonderfully emotional performances to this point.  Things are hinted at but never said.  And now here comes the big resolution where we find out for sure what has happened…and Hopper shows up as Dr. Evil from Austin Powers!  I don’t think this is his fault.  I think his character was written that way and that this is how the movie was supposed to go.  And when we get that major, watershed moment, it’s a far more over-the-top intense scene than we could ever have imagined.  And yet - the questions we have remain unanswered!

This is a movie that I think gives it’s audience an awful lot of credit.  Thinking that just hinting at certain things and creating damaged characters is enough for us to piece together, for ourselves, just what this father did.  And we probably can.  But the lack of a real resolution with acutal confirmation of our suspicions left me feeling ripped off.  The final scenes all of a sudden feel unnecessary, rather than a real climax.  And that means we sat through the rest of the movie for almost nothing.  With so many good performances and so much development leading up to this big final showdown, we needed more.  A lot more.

I recently made a bold statemtent about WALL-E.  I suggested that it is the greatest animated kids movie ever made.  I am preparing to go out on a limb here once again and make a similar statement about the new Batman flick.  This movie IS the best movie based on a comic book.  Ever.  Picking up where Batman Begins left off, The Dark Knight ups the ante in a huge way.  And where Batman Begins gave us a new, darker, more brooding and conflicted Batman, this movie makes him the darkest, most intense ”good guy” we’ve seen in a long time.

The hype over this movie has been astounding.  Batman Begins of course did a massive box office - More than 200 million overall.  But it found an even bigger audience on DVD, and that means this film will be a serious contender for biggest movie of this summer.  And my prediction here is that it will be.  Amid all the hype for the new Indiana Jones, Iron Man, WALL-E, and countless other blockbusters, The Dark Knight will trump them all.  This is, and will be, the best and biggest movie of the summer.

This is the best movie of Christopher Nolan’s directorial career.  I have liked everything he’s done - Insomnia, Memento, The Prestige, and of course Batman Begins.  But this is a step up from all of those.  This is the best movie of Christian Bale’s career.  He’s been a wonderful actor for a long time, and he has given better performances in more challenging roles (Rescue Dawn, 3:10 To Yuma, American Psycho), but his Batman remains the best ever portrayal.  Same goes for Maggie Gyllenhaal and Aaron Eckhardt.  And this may seem like an asinine statement at first, but I am going to make it anyway.  This is the best movie of Michael Caine’s career also.  I know it sounds insane, and he’s clearly had better and more challenging roles personally, but I dare you to name a better movie in which he starred.

 I can’t say the same for Morgan Freeman, since he was in The Shawshank Redemption and Million Dollar Baby and Unforgiven and Dreamcatcher.  Which brings me to Heath Ledger.  Of course, The Dark Knight has benefited from the publicity surrounding his death, and it will certainly add to the box-office totals here.  But what could have been looked on as a performance made larger by Ledger’s untimely death becomes exactly the opposite.  His death looms larger over cinema in general because of this performance.

Not only is this Ledger’s best movie, it is his best role, best performance, best everything.  His joker is no Jack Nicholson Joker.  Whereas Nicholson was magnetic and charming and insane and larger than life in the Tim Burton - Michael Keaton Batman movie, it was still a role he could have done in his sleep.  (Nicholson was basically playing the exact same character in The Departed, wasn’t he?)  But Ledger’s Joker goes much, much deeper.  His makeup alone is worth the price of admission.  No pancake clown makeup for him, this is the look of a demented individual who wouldn’t be out of place as the villain in one of those idiotic Saw movies.

In fact, a few times in this film, the Joker enacts scenarios that wouldn’t be out of place in one of those idiotic Saw movies.  One of the things I have always hated about sequels is the fact that with the first movie out of the way, there is no longer any need for character development.  Which means the second installment is all explosions and chase scenes.  In The Dark Knight, however, the Joker needs no character development.  This is what makes him so bad, so evil and so genuinely scary.  He just IS.  We think, just for a moment, that we’re getting some kind of “window into his soul” - you know, mommy never cared enough, and daddy was a mean drunk - that kind of thing - but that’s nothing more than a red herring, one that we are relieved to find out is just another manifestation of the Joker’s lunacy.

Ledger is all tics and quirks and leering evil as the Joker.  He has a certain amount of charm in his vocabulary, but not in his demeanor or his soul.  He positively oozes a sinister vibe.  And his motivations are the key to the sheer evil of his character.  The Joker is not motivated by money or power or any of the things that a standard villain has to explain their behaviour.  He is motivated simply by things that amuse him, and the fact that those things include murder, mayhem and chaos make him impossible to categorize, or for any of the other characters to really understand.  As Michael Caine says in one impressive speech:  “Some people just want to see the world burn”.

Batman undergoes a little bit of development here though - coming face to face with this incredible Joker, a lunatic that at first doesn’t seem to be a real problem, but eventually forces everyone, including Batman, to take a look within themselves and really examine their true nature.  And Bale spends the entire movie looking at the two sides of his own persona - a theme that recurs with most of the characters in the film.  But the real transformation in the film belongs to Aaron Eckhart as crusading D.A. Harvey Dent, who metamorphasizes from squeaky clean tough guy into the villain known as Two-Face.  He is part of a love triangle involving Maggie Gyllenhaal (standing in for Katie Holmes as Rachel Dawes) and Bale as Bruce Wayne/Batman.

The action sequences are terrific, but they are not what drives the story.  The relationships between characters do.  The standoffs between Harvey Dent and Detective Gordon (Gary Oldman) are almost as intense and interesting as those between Batman and the Joker.  This really is the Joker’s movie, and had Heath Ledger been alive today, this film would have catapulted him into the upper echelons of actors.  I think he will be up for an Oscar for this performance, and I think he should win it as well, but it will be bittersweet.  Again, not because he died and is therefore the sentimental favourite, but because the defining performance of his career was tragically his last.

Batman Begins was a revelation in comic book movies because of the incredible cast and different tone.  The Dark Knight has an even more brilliant cast, and a darker tone, and it’s just the ideas and feelings of that first movie done to perfection.  It is a meditation on human nature, the nature of heroism, the herd mentality of the masses, the courage to take a different direction, and a movie that has many parallels to today’s reality.  While I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a genuine social commentary, it certainly touches on enough contemporary morays to feel as though it hits home.  This will be the best movie of the summer, and will stand the test of time as the greatest comic book movie ever made.

Invisible Target, out Tuesday from Alliance Films and Dragon Dynasty, fits almost all of the conventions of modern Hong Kong action cinema.  It opens with a gigantic explosion.  It involves a veteran cop, a rookie cop, and a “renegade” cop.  It pays lip service to themes of family and brotherhood.  The central motivation of every single character in the movie is revenge.  There are three hero cops, two corrupt cops, and three hundred and ninety-one dead cops.  And the final scene is a massive, insane, climactic shootout that lasts almost forty minutes.  So that’s the standarad stuff you find in just about every one of these movies.  Unfortunately, Invisible Target rarely rises above the level of average action fare in any other respect.

There are some cool stars here - Jacky Wu Jing, a fantastic fighter who recently appeared in the film Fatal Contact, is the cut-throat bad guy.  Nicholas Tse and Shawn Yue are quite good as the veteran cop and the “renegade” cop.  But perhaps the biggest surprise is Jaycee Chan, son of Jackie Chan.  He plays the rookie cop in a remarkable performance.  He is quite convincingly wide-eyed and innocent as the young cop who gets swept up into the middle of a war between a couple of cops and a crazy, bloodthirsty gang of bad guys.  The world of Chinese cinema is populated with dozens of people who, for no good reason, will attack cops with machetes.  There are also the truly bad people, who will murder fifty cops in two minutes as part of a getaway.  These are the bad guys here.  As they are in every one of these movies.

The motivation to take down these evil gangs comes not from the fact that you’ve just lost fifty co-workers.  And the police department can’t get behind a massive effort to take out these mass murderers.  No, it usually comes down to just two or three guys who take matters into their own hands.  And they are motivated to take out this gang because their fiancee has been killed, or their brother.  So it is personal vengeance.  The kind that just can’t come from seeing all your co-workers slaughtered.  In this case, it’s fairly well done, with a few bothersome details.  First of all, in the kung-fu fight scenes, there are bizarre sound effects thrown in out of nowhere.  Like someone yelling da-da-da-da into a microphone.  It’s weird.  And the story is a little incoherent, in that it features what seem to be dozens of unintentional red herrings.

All of which adds up to a decent action film, but nothing special.  The fights are good and well choreographed, the bad guys are convincingly evil, and the plot holes can be glossed over with the suspension of disbelief that everyone who watches one of these movies must bring with them.

The theory is sound.  You take one major event, then show it from several different perspectives, or “vantage points”.  It worked to perfection in Akira Kurosawa’s brilliant existentialist visionary examination of the nature of truth, 1950’s Rashomon.  It worked almost as well in Zhang Yimou’s magnificent 2002 Chinese kung-fu epic, Hero.  And it has been done well, in various forms, in dozens of other movies like Run Lola Run.  But in Vantage Point, director Pete Travis shows us exactly how NOT to do a movie in this way.

Vantage Point starts out in a promising way.  Sigourney Weaver is a newswoman manning a trailer outside a plaza in Spain where the American preisdent is scheduled to give an address as part of some kind of summit conference.  Just as he begins his speech, the president is shot by a sniper, and all hell breaks loose.  A bomb goes off in the podium and…we get pulled back to the start of the film, this time from a different vantage point.  Now we are riding along with Dennis Quaid, a secret service bodyguard who recently took a bullet for this same president and became a national hero.

Then we see tourist video shot by Forest Whitaker (although we don’t really see the whole thing through the eyes of his video camera, we see him holding it.  Why not show the video footage?  At least it would be different.)  Also giving their perspectives are the president himself (a wooden William Hurt), a local Spanish cop whose job it is to protect the mayor of this town, the assassin who is sent to do the dirty work, and the terrorists.  And others.

Which means we see the same beginning.  Again and again.  And it gets more and more tedious.  Each perspective we see gives us just a few more clues to the total plot, each time leaving us with some kind of mysterious cliffhanger until we see the next vantage point.  And as the pieces of the puzzle fall into place, it becomes more and more obvious, glaringly so, that nothing about this movie makes any sense at all.  Not that the scenes don’t fit together - they do.  The story becomes somwhat of a whole picture by the time the movie ends.  But no reasonable person could accept that this is the actual story.

First of all, we would have to believe that it is remarkably easy to assassinate a president.  I’ve gone on a ride-along with the RCMP in their Prime Minister motorcade, one step down from their President of the United States motorcade.  Trust me, it is not easy to shoot a president.  And certainly not in this manner.  Secondly, this extremely well-planned attack relies on the fact that upon the shooting of the president, the secret service will immediately panic to the point where someone can walk up and place a bomb in the president’s rectum.  Which is essentially what they would have us believe.

Then, we are asked to believe that one well-armed Rambo type (or, more accurately, Chow Yun Fat from The Killer type) can take out several hotel floors worth of secret service agents on his own.  Silently.  And that the bad guys, once they had actually succeeded in their massively daring and brutally violent plan, having slaughtered many hundreds of innocent citizens, would risk their getaway just to avoid…well.  I won’t give away the ending here.

But it wouldn’t really matter if I did.  After all, the ending is telegraphed from the very beginning.  Dennis Quaid is obviously that Secret Service guy who is going to step up and save the day at the end of the film - we know this, everyone knows this - we know what has happened to the president long before the movie tells us.  We know who is really responsible before we’re supposed to.  We know who the good guys are and who the bad guys are from the get-go.  And even then, when it finally plays out the way we fully expect it to play out, it’s even more ludicrous than we could have imagined.

And finally, adding insult to injury, thy set up the president to appear like an incarnation of George W. Bush.  the protests that accompany his visit to Spain.  The placard-wavers and the “World’s #1 Terrorist” signs and the vitriol in the streets.  You see, this president is hated.  And there is a big deal made over this at the beginning of the film, having to do with the censorship of the news and so forth.  Then we’re asked to believe, just a few minutes later, that this president actually is the antithesis of Bush.  That he is a smart, moderate and decent man who does NOT want to listen to his advisors, who are telling him to attack Morocco.  Yes, Morocco.  And he gives a speech about “we don’t need to show strength.  We need to have strength.”  Or some crap like that.  So which is he?  Ah, who cares?

The thing that made Rashomon and Hero brilliant was that the same exact actions were presented with different motivations so that we could see them from a different character’s perspective.  Audiences are left to decide for themselves which version of events is the truth, or whether the truth can ever truly be determined in any case.  But each character had a different feeling about the same events, which made the events themselves different.  But Vantage Point doesn’t do this.  So we watch the same events over and over, without any new insight, just new “clues”.  And it makes no difference if we’re watching through William Hurt’s eyes or Forest Whitaker’s.  They’re basically just shooting the same scene, over and over, from different camera angles.  Which is pretty boring.

Everything about this film is totally ludicrous, and every new “clue” we get about the real identities and motivations of the bad guys makes us care less and less about the final act of the movie.  And when it does, it relies so heavily on coincidence and implausible actions that it’s laughable.  The whole movie would be laughable, if only it didn’t take itself so seriously.  Which is the main problem.  Vantage Point wants so badly to make this movie seem as realistic as possible, when the connection between reality and this plot is like the connection between the Leaning Tower of Pisa and my fridge.  Vantage Point is an absolute turd of a movie.

Oh yeah - Matthew Fox.  From Lost.  You know what’s interesting about him?

The Bank Job (9/10):  Yet another Jason Statham shoot-em-up action pic, only…good.  Really, really good.

Step Up 2 the Streets:  Rebellious street dancer wins the hearts and minds of the hardcore hoods…and gets the guy…in this follow-up to the amazingly successful (considering) movie Step Up.  The only thing saving this film?  It isn’t called Step Up 2:  Tha Streets. 

Shutter:  Newlyweds uncover other-worldly imagery in their photographs after a deadly accident. Their hesitation to investigate deeper quickly manifest into warnings they should stop.  At which point you may well want to stop watching.

College Road Trip:  Martin Lawrence has recently starred in Wild Hogs, Big Momma’s House 2, National Security and Rebound.  Do we really want to see him in anything else?  Especially this?

Penelope:  Christina Ricci has a pig nose.  Even with a pig nose, she is still blazingly hot.  After watching Black Snake Moan, she could have a cauliflower ear, two lazy eyes, six missing teeth, a pig nose and a massive neck-goiter and still be blazingly hot.

Sleepwalking (5/10):  Charlize Theron is a disillusioned single mother who abandons her 12-year-old daughter to the care of her shiftless younger brother James.  The involvement of Theron and Woody Harrelson is good, but Dennis Hopper is a cartoon Evil Dad.

Asylum:  Six college students discover that their dorm room was once an insane asylum where people were tortured and…wait, sorry.  Six college co-eds discover that…ah forget it.

Invisible Target (6/10):  A renegade cop, a young officer, and a veteran detective are thrown together to try to take down Hong Kong’s most lethal mercenary gang and their ruthless leader.  These Dragon Dynasty pictures have been quite good of late, even if they always involve a “renegade cop”.

Journey to the Centre of the Earth:  A quickie movie made in Canada to complement the release of the big-ass 3D blockbuster this weekend.

Evening Shade Season One (6/10):  Burt Reynolds is surprisingly not-awful in this sitcom from the early 90s.

Reno 9-11 Season Five (6/10):  A show which tries to jump the shark with every successive episode, but hasn’t managed to become irrelevant or unfunny yet.  Despite it’s best efforts.

Also out:

Bratz Interactive:  Lil’ Bratz Party Time
Trapped Ashes
The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down
Insanitarium
30 Days

Next week:

21
Paranoid Park
My Blueberry Nights
Delirious
Robot Chicken:  Star Wars
Picture This
Shark Swarm (2/10)
Spaced:  The Complete Series
Bone Dry
Chaotic Ana
Cut Off
Emotional Arithmetic
The Hammer
Turn The River
Transformers Cybertron:  The Ultimate Collection (3/10)

The fifth season of Reno 911 opens with the star of the show, Lieutenant Jim Dangle, jumping a shark. Actually jumping a shark, on foot, as a way to raise money for autism. In fact, the theme of him jumping a shark returns several times during the season. As most of you know, “jumping the shark” is a metaphor that means a show has passed it’s expiry date and it’s time to yank it from the airwaves. But Reno 911, amazingly, has not reached it’s expiry date. It has not yet jumped the shark. This is still one of the funniest shows on television, and season five is as good as ever. There are some hilarious set-ups and payoffs during this season.

Deputy Trudy Wiegel has a baby, having been artificially inseminated at the sperm bank, in order to sell it for cash. The father of this baby is apparently one of the other officers in the Reno department, although we never find out who it is. Later on in the season, she meets up with her real father for the first time. He is a gigantic, wise, philosophizing native man who may also be a rapist. The ladies file a grievance about the kevlar vests, which are interfering with their ability to do their jobs. This leads to some new, boob-enhancing kevlar for the female officers, and leads to some very funny comedy. And the episode where the gang breaks up the stuffed-bunny cocaine ring has to be seen to be appreciated.

Of course, there are several jokes that don’t work as well, like the recurring character of the big fat effeminate shirtless gay guy who keeps trying to get the cops to pick up young boys for him. Or the episode where the intentionally unattractive Deputy Wiegel goes undercover as a creepy schoolgirl on a bus to try to apprehend a serial bum-pincher. But this is to be expected with this kind of largely improvised sketch comedy, and Reno 911 continues to be more hit than miss. And George Lopez appears in this season, doing a fantastic turn as the embattled and possibly homicidal mayor. Reno 911 is not the best show on Comedy Central, but it’s just what you would expect. Crude, offensive, and mostly funny. Season Five comes out tomorrow, July 15th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

I’ve always had a problem with Burt Reynolds. Much as I appreciate the long, successful career he’s managed to have, I dislike him. I have liked him in exactly two movies. Deliverance and Boogie Nights. That’s it. I think my biggest problem with Reynolds is exactly that. He was brilliant in Deliverance. And then he spent the rest of his career smiling, scowling and flexing his way through Fuzz, Gator, Stroker Ace, and City Heat. A terrible string of movies that, for me, ruined any legacy he had as an actor in favour of a legacy as a flash-in-the-plan box office draw. I always found him irritating, and so when I picked up Season One of Evening Shade, I was excited to savage this Burt Reynolds sit-com from the early 90s. This was going to be awful, and I was going to enjoy every minute of it!

But boy, was I ever disappointed. Evening Shade is actually…surprisingly good. Which was really disappointing. And Burt Reynolds was actually…decent. And this show features some of my favourite actors of all time! Ossie Davis, Hal Holbrook, Marilu Henner, Charles Durning, and (in Season Two), Hilary Swank. Reynolds plays Wood Newton, (a name which sounds like it comes out of an Archie comic), a retired football star who now works as a coach in the small town of Evening Shade. Marilu Henner is his wife, Ossie Davis is the owner of the local greasy spoon, Charles Durning is the town doctor, and Hal Holbrook is crusty and magnificent as Newton’s father-in-law.

What makes this show good is the fact that although it’s a sit-com, it doesn’t smack of sit-com at all times. The laugh track is the only reminder that it is in fact a comedy. And the laughs come at the right times, when something funny actually happens. The rest of the time, the show is actually trying to tell a story, and let the laughs come where they may. Which is the way to make a good sit-com. (The way to make a great sit-com is when the laughs come all the time and still don’t ever feel forced, like Seinfeld.) So you get decent stories, featuring interesting characters played by fantastic actors, and that in itself made this a good show. Despite the involvement of Burt Reynolds.

And he’s really not half bad here. His banter with Marilu Henner, and especially with Hal Holbrook, rings true. His persona is pretty fitting to him - it really was the part he was born to play. Wooden cartoon ex-football star. Like The Rock today. However, although Ossie Davis and Holbrook and Durning create some memorable characters, there are others on the periphery that are so cartoonish and irritating that they make the show obnoxious whenever they’re around. Reynolds’ assistant coach, Herman Stiles. Aunt Frieda. And the local stripper, Fontana Beausoleil. (Also a Dick Tracy name, no?) And a town HAS to be small when it has ONE local stripper. Where does she strip? There can’t really be a peeler bar with just one peeler, can there? I have never seen a sign that says “Live! Nude! Girl!”

Anyway, Evening Shade is by no means a classic TV show, but it’s pretty good. Which is better than I expected. And Reynolds is decent. Which is more than I can say for most of his movies. Even Episode Six of Season One can’t bring this show right down to the level of say…Wings. Episode Six is all bout Burt Reynolds’ moustache. No joke. And it features a guest appearance by Ted McGinley. (Jefferson D’Arcy from Married With Children.) That episode alone could kill this show and season entirely. Ted McGinley and the moustache? Thank God that one wasn’t the pilot episode! But Evening Shade succeeds despite some really rotten ideas like that one, and Season One is worth picking up. It comes out Tuesday, July 15th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The Ruins (3/10):  A bad horror movie with no scares, unnecessary grossness, and boring actors.  For the most part, a complete waste of time.

Charlie Bartlett (6/10):  A high school loser kid becomes a hero at school by giving other kids prescription drugs and dispensing psychological advice.  A funny premise is wasted, but Anton Yelchin is mesmerizing as Charlie Bartlett.

Superhero Movie (2/10):  Yet another in a seemingly unending series of incredibly horrible spoofs on blockbusters.  Don’t let the cover fool you.  There is almost no Pam Anderson or Leslie Nielsen.  And no reason to watch.

Funny Games:  Could go either way.  Tim Roth and Naomi Watts are a couple terrorized in their house by weird, Clockwork-Orangy, white-gloved killers.

Stop-Loss (8/10):  Best movie coming out today.  Ryan Philippe and Joseph Gordon-Levitt are amazing in a movie about soldiers who get “stop-lossed” - sent back to Iraq when they are supposed to get discharged.

Batman:  Gotham Knight:  Animated series of stories about Batman, that connect with each other somehow.  Some well-respected Japanese directors came together here, it could be surprisingly good.

The Tracey Fragments (4/10):  Ambitious but infuriating film from Bruce McDonald (Hard Core Logo) starring Ellen Page (Juno) as a girl searching for her lost little brother.  Artsy, strange, and impossible to watch.

Romulus, My Father (4/10):  A bothersome movie with great performances.  Franke Potente, Eric Bana, and the kid are all great, but the movie is so slow, ponderous, and heavy that it loses any resonance it might have had.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad (8/10):  A fascinating look at the heavy metal band Acrassicauda, Baghdad’s only heacy metal band, who have to contend with guns and bombings and politics just to rehearse.

Meerkat Manor:  Season One (8/10):  One of the coolest shows on TV right now.  Like a soap-opera reality show and nature documentary all in one, about a family of meerkats living in South Africa.

Meerkat Manor:  The Story Begins (7/10):  A DVD that really, just goes along with the TV show.  This is the back story of the meerkats that star in the TV series.  Narrated by Whoopi Goldberg.

Cannon:  Season One, Volume One (5/10):  Another old detective show I don’t get.  William Conrad is fat, slow, and crotchety, and he solves crimes.  That’s it.

Jake and the Fatman, Season One (4/10):  Lame 80s show, also starring William Conrad.  He’s still fat - hence, the Fatman.  Jake is a pale copy of Remington Steele.  This show is a pale copy of everything.

Fearless:  Director’s Cut (8/10):  If you’ve already seen this Jet Li martial arts epic, it’s worth revisiting.  The director’s cut makes it substantially better.

Also out:

The Backyardigans Mighty Match-up
Blind Eye
Dungeon Girl
Impact Point
Shaggy and Scooby Doo Get a Clue Vol. 2
Towards Darkness
Bella
Bonneville
Late Fragment
Story of Lost Souls

Next Week:

The Bank Job (9/10)
Step Up 2 The Streets
Shutter
College Road Trip
Penelope
Sleepwalking (5/10)
Asylum
Bratz Interactive:  Lil’ Bratz Party Time
30 Days
Insanitarium
Journey to the Centre of the Earth
The Boys and Girls Guide to Getting Down
Invisible Target (6/10)
Trapped Ashes

In every movie about soldiers returning from war, there has to be some kind of traumatic war event before they go home. That way, the fact that they’re all messed up makes more sense to us. There have been many amazing movies about soldiers returning from war, the best of which was The Deer Hunter. Of late, the war in Iraq has provided some great films about this, the best one being In The Valley of Elah. And now we get Stop-Loss, another film about soldiers being messed up and freaking out when they get home, and it’s almost as good. And it does start off with that traumatic event, one which we see in more and more flashbacks as the movie continues.

The practice of Stop-Loss is one that has affected almost 100,000 American soldiers since the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan began. Basically, it’s (as Ryan Philippe says in the film) a back-door draft. Soldiers who have completed their tours of duty get stop-lossed, which means that just as they are about to get discharged from the military, they get yanked back in and sent back to the war, whether they want to go or not. In the film, Brandon (Ryan Philippe) is one of those soldiers. A fine sergeant, loved by his friends and his soldiers, respected in the military, he returns from Iraq to his home, a small town in middle-America. The soldiers that fought with him are all, apparently, from the same small town. These include his life-long best friend Steve (Channing Tatum), and their buddy Tommy (Joseph Gordon-Levitt).

Instantly, upon their return from the war, they show how messed up they are in ways we’ve all seen before. Tommy starts fights with everybody. Steve gets really drunk and believes he’s still in the war, and digs a big hole in his front yard. And Brandon still has a useful role, as the guy who keeps all his friends together and makes sure they stay alive and reasonably sane. (Think DeNiro in Deer Hunter.) Within days of the guys being back in the States, Tommy’s wife has left him and he’s drinking himself to death. Steve has beaten his girlfriend Michele (Abbie Cornish), and only Brandon’s intervention has saved any of them. And then Brandon gets stop-lossed.

Faced with the prospect of going back to Iraq, now he starts to lose it too. His resistance at first seems to be based entirely on principle. The practice of stop-lossing soldiers is cruel. Once their tour of duty is complete, they have done exactly what they’ve signed on to do. They’re done. To force them back into action really is nothing but a draft, and his decision to run is basically, at first, a protest against the draft. What they’re doing isn’t right, so he basically refuses to comply. We discover, as the movie goes on, that he has other reasons, of course. Like that Big Traumatic Event that we saw at the beginning of the film. He can’t go back because he can’t shoot people any more. He can’t stay home, because the army will simply arrest him and send him back anyway. So his only option is to go on the run, with some vague idea about how to get out of this.

And his idea, as he goes AWOL, really is vague. Steve’s girlfriend Michele accompanies him on his trip, because she believes in what he’s doing. Basically, however, the stop-loss laws mean that his flight can take him only one place - either Canada or Mexico. And once he goes, he’s basically in witness protection, because he can’t contact his family at all. He can’t ever return home. He will have to get a new identity and new papers, and start his life all over. Which is, of course, a tough decision to make. While he and Michele are on the run though, things at home are starting to turn bad. Steve has re-enlisted for another tour of duty. Like so many characters in these movies, he no longer feels comfortable anywhere but in Iraq, fighting.

Tommy has also tried to re-enlist for the same reason. Everyone hates him at home now, so he has nowhere else to turn. However, the reason they hate him is that he’s a jerk, he’s messed up, he beats people up all the time, and he gets drunk out of his mind before plowing his car into buildings and stores around town. Joseph Gordon-Levitt is developing into one of the great character actors in movies. He is the most magnetic and believable character in Stop-Loss, especially next to Channing Tatum, whose character feels re-hashed and obvious. Tommy could be as cliched as Steve, but Gordon-Levitt rises above. The main problem with the movie is that he isn’t given enough to do. As the most compelling character in the film, it would have been nice to see a lot more of his story, rather than jumping from one mess to another.

The big problem with Steve and Tommy, of course, is that Brandon is no longer around. Brandon’s gone AWOL, and without his calming influence to guide them, they begin to come apart at the seams. This is fairly indicative of their mindsets anyway. They are also two guys who can’t really function without taking orders any more. They have no real minds of their own, and unless their lives are structured for them and planned out, they can’t manage. Which is why Steve re-enlists and Tommy falls to pieces. When Tommy gets dishonourably discharged, and therefore is unable to go back to the war, he really loses it. (Which sort of begs the question - why doesn’t Phillippe do this too? Instead of going on the run, just get really drunk and do stupid stuff and get kicked out of the army!)

In the end, Stop-Loss asks a very tough question. If people are depending on you, and you take off on them for the right reasons, are you really doing the right thing? A political movie with a specific ambition, it resonates with some great performances, mostly from Ryan Philippe, Abbie Cornish, and Joseph Gordon-Levitt. It’s not on the level of In The Valley of Elah, but it’s very, very good. Stop-Loss will not end up being a classic, but it’s well worth a rental. It comes out July 8th, Tuesday, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The biggest problem with The Ruins is that it tries to be something it’s not. And by that I mean - it tries to be something new. And it isn’t. You see there are four hot college kids…stop me if you’ve heard this before…who go on a vacation to a foreign country…still with me?…and decide to check out an area off the beaten track that isn’t on the maps or the tourist brochures…is it different yet? Is it new? No? OK, how about this - there are plants. That kill people! Which is a little different. I guess. But the plants are not used for the scares. In fact, nothing is really used to scare us. And it’s supposed to be a horror movie. This supposed horror movie comes out July 8th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.

The thing is - the plants could actually BE scary if they were used well. The plants are able to imitate people, and cell phone rings, in order to lure people to their doom. This could be scary, or at least interesting. But this takes up about four minutes of the 93 minute running time. So the rest of the time we have the standard hot-teen-in-a-foreign-country horror cliches. Like, the fact that each of the hot kids takes turns being the sane one while everyone around is losing their minds. And the standard, gratuitous boob shot. The boob shot wouldn’t have made sense later on in the film, so they get it out of the way in a totally gratuitous way as early as possible. Then the cheesy, ridiculous lines that are supposed to be prescient - “four Americans on vacation don’t just disappear!” Come ON!

Then, of course, the torture-porn. The one kid, you see, is studying to be a doctor. So he knows when legs need to be amputated. Which is a great excuse for some seriously disgusting, over-the-top gory detail, which proves to be useless anyway, and certainly not scary. So, where does the “horror” come from? It isn’t the plants, because although they’re the villains, they’re underused. It doesn’t come from the gory gross useless flesh-cutting. And it doesn’t come from the people, who are just annoying. The best they can do are some vaguely creepy medical explanations from the vaguely creepy wannabe-doctor guy. So - there are no scares. And no scares in a horror movie makes for a bad horror movie. And The Ruins is certainly a bad horror movie.

The first five minutes of The Tracey Fragments are all over the place. Pictures in pictures, fragmented story, bizarre “fragmented” filming. And while you have no idea what’s going on, it makes you want to watch. What’s happening? All we really know is that Ellen Page is wearing only a shower curtain, at the back of a bus, searching for her missing younger brother, who thinks he’s a dog. Which all seems very interesting, and really made me excited for the rest of the movie, when it was going to turn into a traditional narrative and explain the story, and stop with this bizarre fragmented filming. And it does explain the story. But it doesn’t have a traditional narrative. And the fragmented editing does not stop. Ever. In the whole movie.

I don’t mind unconventional narrative. I don’t mind jumping through time, disjointed stories, or bizarre filming techniques. But this was too much. Too much weird, most of it seemingly for the sake of being weird. Her father is a jerk, her mother is a seemingly catatonic chain smoker, there is a creepy pimp, a hooker on a bus, a new hot boy in school who looks like Lou Reed, a bizarre transvestite psychiatrist, high school bullies, George Strombolopolous, a big fat clown at a birthday party, a crow, a lowlife named Lance from Toronto, a bar fight, a peeler bar, a crazy drunk who stands on his head, a strange sit-com intro out of nowhere, a rapist, and a ton of other weird things. All of this thrown at us in fragments, in picture-in-picture style, with overwhelming results. We have no idea what to focus on, which I suppose is the point.

But then we get to the end, which is incredibly sad and rotten and brutal, but it doesn’t carry the emotional resonance that it should, because we’re so offput by the strange filming style throughout the film that we really don’t have anything invested in any of the characters. Her little brother is cute, sure. And Lance is basically a good guy. And we like Ellen Page (Tracey) just because she’s Ellen Page and she’s always pretty awesome. But what should be a terribly devastating end to a movie just feels disconcerting and irritating. And I was kind of sorry I’d sat through the entire movie just to get there.

The movie isn’t terrible. It’s artsy and well-acted and ambitious. But it’s almost impossible to watch, and it’s almost impossible to connect with any characters. I think there’s a good movie in here, but Bruce McDonald, the director, is trying so hard to be artistic that he loses sight of what that good movie really is. McDonald has done some really good work in his Canadian career - Highway 61, Hard Core Logo, but here he is just reaching too far. The Tracey Fragments is ambitious and interesting, but it isn’t good. It comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films.

Superhero Movie comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films. And it’s better than Epic Movie. For a moment there, I almost said that this was the equivalent of saying it’s better than nothing. But then I realized that I was wrong. Superhero Movie, despite being superior to Epic Movie, is not better than nothing. You are far better off watching nothing. In fact, you are better off seeing nothing, doing nothing, touching nothing and sitting in a sensory deprivation box for an hour and a half than you would be watching Superhero Movie. There are three main reasons it’s better than Epic Movie.

First, it has a story line. A loose, crappy one, but at least it’s there. Secondly, it’s reasonably understated without as many disgusting gross-out “jokes”. And third, I smirked once, when a guy spoofed that Tom Cruise Scientology video that has been circulating the web. That guy was really good. This was one more smirk than I had at Date Movie, which makes it a guffaw-fest compared to Epic Movie. The basic premise here is that superhero movies are going to be spoofed. So the people in charge of the film wrote a list of superhero movies. Spiderman was big at the time, let’s make that the main one. Let’s see…X-Men, Batman, The Fantastic Four, Iron Man…any more comic book movies we can think of? Nope? OK, let’s go.

So they take the nerdy photographer from Spiderman and turn him into the hero, with the hot girl he lusts after and the superpowers. Then they take the villain and put him in an Iron Man costume. And they throw in the guy who lights himself on fire from Fantastic Four, and add the parents-getting-killed bit from Batman. Then they add Professor Xavier from X-Men, and we’ve got ourselves a movie! Wait - you have the characters, now shouldn’t you write something for them to do? No? Just having them means the movie’s already done? OK…now, to be fair, there are twists. The Professor Xavier character is black, and cheats on his wife. The Fantastic Four guy sits on a Batman-esque gargoyle atop a Gotham-esque city. And the parent-killing is done to comedic effect. Sorry. “Comedic” effect. So…sound funny so far?

The cover of the DVD box features Leslie Nielsen, who at some point had some weight in movie spoofs, weight that disappeared when he starred in Spy Hard and Mr. Magoo in the mid-nineties. And even he’s only in this crap for about nine minutes. Pamela Anderson is prominently displayed on the box as well, because she is the second-biggest name in the film. She is on screen for maybe four seconds, total. No one else in the movie is useful or of note, so forget any further description of the cast.

The thing is, this would be a great premise for a film. With the abundance of comic book movies that have been brought to the big screen lately, there is ample material for a spoof. And at certain points, Superhero Movie seems to get that, if only for a moment. Like the big final scene where the real heroes crash into a nerdy superhero convention. There are some great comedic possibilities! But then…nothing. And that’s what this movie is. Just like Date Movie and Epic Movie and Meet The Spartans, this movie is a whole lot of nothing. Well, except that it’s worse than nothing. In that it will make you stupider simply by watching it.

Why do I bring up Epic Movie and Date Movie constantly? Well, because the people who distributed this DVD were smart about one thing. They did NOT mention those two piles of garbage on the DVD case. They mentioned Airplane!, which the producer, David Zucker, did indeed direct, and The Naked Gun, which he directed as well. They also mention Scary Movie, because their director wrote Scary Movie 3 and Scary Movie 4, which were no classics by any means, but was miles above this turd. However, in the years since those films came out, the producers and directors have obviously found something to like in the Epic and Date Movie and Meet The Spartans mold, and they have employed it here. With disastrous results. Seeing Scary Movie and The Naked Gun on a DVD box might make you want to rent this. Which is where I come in. To warn you against it. This movie will make you thirty percent dumber overnight, leaving you so badly illiterate that you won’t be able to write me a comment to say “you told me so”.

Heavy Metal in Baghdad is a fascinating, totally new look at the war in Iraq, focused on a heavy metal band named Acrassicauda. The DVD comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films, and is well worth watching. Not just for heavy metal fans, or political watchers, or documentary afficionados. This movie is great for everyone. Frankly, I’m not a big fan of the music of Acrassicauda (whose name, in Arabic, is a type of venomous black scorpion). I just don’t dig that crazy super-heavy, unintelligible, screaming death metal. At the same time, I recognize the skills of their guitar player, and I think that musically these guys are terrific, given their circumstances.

And those circumstances are crazy. They began playing in Iraq, pouring their love of American heavy metal into their music, wearing shirts that, on the right day at the right time, could get them killed. Metallica, Iron Maiden, Slayer. These are not bands that are tolerated by the repressive Islamic fundamentalists over in those parts. In 2005, shortly after the fall of Saddam Hussein’s government, VICE magazine teamed up with Acrassicauda to put on a rock concert. The show was a huge success, a sell out, and a year later Suroosh Alvi, the founder of VICE magazine, teamed up with the head of VICE films, Eddy Moretti, to travel back to Baghdad and see what had happened to the band in the intervening year.

What they find is disturbing and sad. The band doesn’t practice. They didn’t mind practicing under the threat of sniper fire, bombs and murder. But onec their rehearsal space was actually bombed, how much practice were they going to get in anyway? The film becomes more a tale of survival than a tale of heavy metal headbanging awesomeness. One of the only films out there that focuses on the youth culture in Iraq, and how the war is affecting those people. This film started out, really, as a magazine article for VICE, which you get in the booklet that comes along with the DVD. And the film makers are clearly not hugely experienced with this kind of filming. Their love for the band and the guys in it is constantly apparent, and their zeal for their “crazy mission” keeps coming through again and again. It’s a little intrusive, frankly, when we want to hear about Iraq and the band and their story more than anything else.

And in this sense, Heavy Metal In Baghdad succeeds despite itself. The story is so amazing, and the window into this world in Iraq has rarely been seen. Not the heavy metal world as such, but rather the world of teenagers and young adults who love many parts of Western culture, who hated Saddam Hussein, who buy bootlegged Metallica records, and who are unable to stand alone on the streets at night for fear of being killed. This is the world these guys inhabit, and this is the world we get to see through their eyes. The film follows them as they are forced to flee as refugees to Damascus, and the more laid-back interviews with the band members there reveal some seriously thoughtful, intelligent people who just want to make their music. They understand the situation they are in, they don’t want to make political statements with their music (although sometimes they are forced to do so), they just want to bang their heads and rock hard.

The personable, charming nature of these guys is the driving force of the movie, and they prove to be very engaging, interesting documentary subjects. They are not the low-brow, dumb-ass metalheads many of us have come to believe are par for the course. And they are not the West-hating, prayer five times a day, war crying Iraqis that so many of us have seen in the media. Heavy Metal In Baghdad is not about the war, or about heavy metal, or about Iraqis or Americans or religion. It’s about people. And it’s amazing.

Romulus, My Father comes out tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films. It’s the story of a young boy and his father and his mother, and it isn’t exactly heartwarming. But it is pretty good. Romulus is played by Eric Bana (Munich), who gives a good performance as the father of a young boy. His son is played by Kodi Smit-McPhee, who also gives a good performance, as does his mother, played by the gorgeous Franke Potente (The Bourne Identity). The performances are great, the cinematography is great, and the story is interesting. But for all that, this movie is awfully ponderous. There is very little humour, and very few light moments to take some of the weight off.

Romulus is having trouble keeping his depressive wife by his side. Potente is having sex with different men, including Bana’s best friend, which of course puts a serious burden on both her husband and son. The young boy struggles to understand his situation, but as he gets shuffled from one life to another to another, he has trouble keeping it together. So you’ve got a depressed, sex-addicted mother, and a depressed, full-of-rage father, struggling to raise a young boy. Which is depressing for all of us. The young boy is the lone bright spot in the movie, with his ability to remain amazingly happy given the circumstances. But it isn’t enough to lift the movie above it’s slow, deliberate pacing and crushingly bleak outlook.

With all this emotional baggage carried around by the main characters, it would be good if we, the audience, had some emotional investment in the film. That way, we could identify, at the very least, with the young boy. But the slow pacing prevents us from making that connection. And so at the end of the film, we have no idea, really, what we are supposed to take away from the movie. This is the true story of the childhood of Raymond Gaita, who grew up to be a successful author. Is that what we’re supposed to take from this? That young Raymond grew up to make a success of himself? Was it because of this chaos? Despite it? We have no idea. The drama in the film is too inert for us to spot any real defining moments in the young boy’s life.

It’s too bad, really. Great acting, great camera work, a true story - it all adds up to one boring, puzzling movie.

Meerkat Manor is really, really cool. It’s a lot of things - nature show, documentary, soap opera, and a reality show rolled into one. Cambridge University has been following a family of meerkats in South Africa for the past decade, filming their every move and examining their social behaviour. You might ask, as I did, what is the point of expending that many resources just to find out how meerkats live over the course of a decade? How do you justify this to your bosses who hand out the money? And I think the researchers may have come to this conclusion also. So they decided to justify the entire experiment and at the same time actually make some money by turning the meerkat society into a reality TV show, one that runs on the Animal Planet network. Season One of that show comes out on DVD tomorrow, July 8th, from Alliance Films, and I highly recommend picking it up.

Meerkats, for those of you who don’t know (and I didn’t either until I first saw this show) are tiny little animals that live in the Kalahari desert in South Africa. They are related to the mongoose, make barking noises like dogs, and live in a very complex social environment. Their society is like many human things. It’s like the mafia - you go against the family, you better look out. It’s like a street gang - rival gangs come on our turf, it’s war. It’s like a cult - the leaders are the only ones allowed to have sex, and woe unto all others who do. And it’s like one of those weird communes, where all the women take care of all the babies and breast feed them. And all of this is captured on film for the series, and delivered to us in 13 episodes in the first season of Meerkat Manor.

These creatures are awfully cute, and they have babies all the time, and those are really cute too, so there’s that. But it’s more than just cute animals doing cute things. After a while, you begin to identify with individuals in the group, cheer for them to defeat their enemies, and mourn the loss of the ones who die. (And there are some who die - after all, it is nature.) It’s like a really good, really natural, reality soap opera without irritating people. Which is terrific! Now, I watched all five hours of this show, in one night, with my girlfriend. And it does get a little repetitive. Some of the same information is bound to be repeated if you watch the entire series at once. (She said, before the final episode - I hope this wraps up nicely! And I told her that it was nature, you couldn’t really make them follow a script. And then it wrapped up with a cliffhanger! We have to get season 2 now!)

It’s narrated by Sean Astin (that other hobbit from Lord of the Rings), and he does a good job of keeping the story going when the animals can’t talk for themselves. Again, it will seem repetitive if you watch them all at once. Like hasn’t he used the phrase “discretion is the better part of valour” at least three times now? But it’s very possible that you will want to watch it all at once, because this show is addictive. Pick it up on DVD tomorrow, it’s worth your while. Oh, and your family’s too. The kids might cry a little - you know, with the deaths and all - but they’ll love it.

Released the same day as Season One of Meerkat Manor, the great Animal Planet TV show, is the DVD Meerkat Manor: The Story Begins, which is a documentary that tells the story of the meerkats before the TV show. At a little over an hour long, it is much easier to get a full picture of meerkat society from this film than from the full five hours of the TV show. Both are really good, but The Story Begins is a little more brutal in terms of the deaths (and murders) of some meerkats. This one is narrated by Whoopi Goldberg, who cracks a few lame jokes early on. Thank goodness they dispense with that fairly fast.

Flower is the star of Meerkat Manor, the dominant female who leads the family. The Story Begins is her own, personal Scarface, tracing her rise to power a the top of the meerkat world. (Not quite as swift and brutal a rise as that of Scarface, to be sure.) This documentary would be great for people who are mildly interested and don’t want to sit through the entire TV series, or possibly for people who are obsessive about the TV series and want to know every detail. All in all, the two are very complementary, and I can’t wait for Season Two!

Fearless is directed by Ronny Yu, a man who has directed several Asian martial arts classics, but who has recently become corrupted by Hollywood. He is the man behind Freddy vs. Jason and Bride of Chucky, two of the better entries in otherwise terrible movie franchises. Fearless is said to be the last martial arts picture Jet Li will ever make, and this is a shame. Fearless succeeds only because Jet Li is fantastic. Not only is he a great fighter, but he is also the right type of actor for the role. He plays real-life martial arts legend Huo Yuanjia, the man who created the Chin Woo martial arts school in Shanghai at the turn of the century. Yuanjia became a hero in China when he fought a series of highly publicized fights against foreign fighters.

When I first watched Fearless, I thought this was the weakest in Jet Li’s impressive “wushu” kung-fu movie resume. It was good, and the fights were the best part of the film, and handled brilliantly, and the filming made Fearless a visual treat. Unfortunately, the film didn’t really get interesting until the very end. Now, however, Alliance Films is releasing Fearless: The Director’s Cut on July 8th, and it has all of a sudden become much, much better. 35 minutes of additional footage has been added, which fills out the story to such a degree that the entire movie is transformed. We are now far more invested in the character, seeing his transformation in greater detail.

Yuanjia is the child of a great wushu master, who is the champion of their village of Tianjin. His father forbids him from practicing kung-fu, so he must train in secret, with the help of his best friend Nong (Dong Yong). When he sees his father lose a match because he wouldn’t destroy his opponent, young Yuanjia vows to do everything he can to glorify the honour of his family, and vows never to lose a fight in his life. And he doesn’t. As he grows into an adult, fighting in these wushu competitions has become an obsession for him. Nong tries to warn him about the dangers, and begs him to relax and back off, but Yuanjua won’t listen. When a reckless fight leads to tragedy all around, Yuanjia is ashamed, and goes into self-imposed exile, and almost dies. He is found in the country and nursed back to health by a kind family with a lovely blind daughter. He learns a lot about life through this little country village, and learns even more about wushu and about himself.

Now on the right path, and fully understanding the potential of wushu to unify rather than to divide, he returns to civilization with the goal of establishing a school of martial arts. By this time, China has been taken over by Western influence, and the need for national unity is enormous. Yuanjia is determined to do what he can to help provide this national unity, and agrees to fight a series of highly publicized fights against Western fighters in order to defend Chinese honour. He is no longer out to promote himself, or his family name, he is now using wushu to defend and promote all of China.

The new edition of Fearless comes in a two-disc set. The second DVD is the exact same disc that was released in 2006, the “unrated” edition, with the unrated version, the theatrical version, and a featurette called “A Fearless Journey”. The only thing that is new here is the first disc, the actual director’s cut. And that makes it completely worthwhile. The director’s cut transforms Fearless from merely being a decent entry into the kung-fu movie canon, into being a wonderful, heartfelt historical document that really resonates. Whether you’ve seen Fearless before or not, now is the time to pick it up on DVD.

I have been trying my best to figure out the popularity of Cannon. Season One, Volume One, gets released tomorrow by Paramount Home Entertainment, along with William Conrad’s other big series, Jake and the Fatman. Another one I don’t understand. Cannon was certainly better than Jake and the Fatman, but really all it could manage was being…decent. At best! Conrad plays Frank Cannon, a private detective who has apparently been fired from the police force for being too fat. At the beginning of each episode, he takes a case - charging lots of money to rich clients and very little to poor ones - and then follows the clues, talks to some people, and gets it solved within an hour. Which is fine, but where’s the interesting part? The part that makes it different from other private eye TV shows?

Maybe it’s the fact that he’s fat. Not many of the TV private eyes were fat. But, like I said in a review a few months ago about Mannix, Conrad’s Cannon suffers from the same lack of discernible talents. He isn’t especially smart - he always meets someone who tells him what he needs to know - he isn’t tougher than everyone else, or faster, or more deadly. So…he’s fatter? Is that really it? This series was a Quinn Martin production, and he did many that were better. Like last week’s release, Streets of San Francisco. I said that Cannon is better than Jake and the Fatman, and it is. Mostly because it’s not specifically irritating. But watching Season One, Volume One, really did make me question the reasons for it’s existence.