Cynical Cinema

“Oh professor, you’re full of whimsy.”
“Can you notice it from there?  I’m always that way after I eat radishes.”

Horse Feathers is just about the ultimate example of the Marx Brothers comedy.  Ultimate, in that in involves all of their standard comedy, all of the usual conventions, and some of the most inspired comedic pieces they have ever done.  It isn’t as good as Duck Soup, or A Night At The Opera, and it doesn’t have as many quotable lines as Animal Crackers.  But Horse Feathers is a great an example of their comedic genius as any of those films.

Horse Feathers was released in 1932, in the middle of the classic Marx Brothers run of films that included Animal Crackers, Monkey Business, Duck Soup, A Night At The Opera and A Day At The Races.  Each of those movies could be considered one of the great comedies ever made, and Horse Feathers is no exception.  The opening monologue, where Groucho takes to a podium to make a speech to the students of Huxley U, where he has just been named the school’s president, is absolutely inspired.

What amazes me most about the Marx Brothers is that their style of nonstop bonkers dialogue-driven comedy doesn’t get old.  I can watch Horse Feathers today and I may well find it funnier than did the audience in 1932.  Also, with the magic of DVD, I can slow down and pause, so if I’m laughing too hard at one joke, I can pause the film so I don’t miss the next one. 

The basic plot of Horse Feathers could be a prototype for any number of college comedies today.  Animal House and Van Wilder and what have you.  Except that in Horse Feathers, the focus isn’t on a crazy, bawdy band of students, but rather on the crazy, bawdy faculty and school president Groucho.  The basic premise is that Huxley U must win at least one football game during the year in order for Groucho to keep his job as president.  And how many times have we seen screwball gross-out comedies centred around the need to win just one football game?

In order to assure his team of the victory, Groucho plans to head down to the local speakeasy (remember, they had speakeasies in 1932) in order to recruit two local football stars.  Of course, we know he is going to get the wrong guys, and winds up with Chico and Harpo, who are anything but football stars.  His initial exchange with Chico, where they debate the password at the door to the speakeasy, is another memorable moment. 

As in all the classic Marx Brothers comedies, Chico talks with a bizarre accent and Harpo does not talk at all, but clowns around and makes little sense anyway.  Even if he could talk, he could not possibly be more insane.  When it is discovered that these two goofballs are not the two ringers, they are sent on a mission - instead of being ringers themselves, they are to kidnap the ringers for the other team.  Which leads to yet another classic scene in the football players’ apartment.

As the movie ends in a bonkers, nonsensical display of silly football-related antics, it would be easy to dismiss this as another in an endless line of early-thirties screwball comedies that can blend into one another.  But watch this on DVD, with a pause button, and you will realize that the moments that provide the bulk of the comedy in Horse Feathers are far above similar moments in contemporary movies.  This one remains a classic, although prints of the movie are apparently missing several minutes from the original, and are therefore choppy in spots.  Don’t worry about it.  It’s worth it anyway.

“When she arrives, all eyes are upon her” 

The Duchess opens with a scene at an opulent country mansion where Georgina Cavendish (Keira Knightley) is flirting with a young man named Charles Grey (Dominic Cooper).  I suppose we are supposed to, right away, assume they are already in love.  I didn’t.  I assumed they were flirting and that there was a certain amount of attraction there, and that’s it.  Not that it really matters, because almost immediately she is swept away to go marry the Duke of Devonshire, played by Ralp.  I wonder if that innocent young flirtation with Mr. Grey will be brought up again at any point during this picture?  I bet it will…

What follows is a decidedly awkward marriage-consummation scene, and then a bunch of standard period piece stuff.  (Oh yeah - this is a period piece.  The involvement of Keira Knightley should have tipped you off, since that’s all she does.)  Women can’t vote.  The Duchess is feisty and free-spirited.  The Duke is harsh and narrow-minded and unloving.  We are supposed to feel her frustration when it comes to the discrepancy in this society between the position of men and women.  It’s tough to do that, mostly because that is the main thrust of just about every similar period piece ever made.  Many of them starring Keira Knightley.

I have always disliked Keira Knightley a little bit.  And I have never really understood why.  It may have had something to do with her incredible, chemistry-free relationship with Orlando Bloom in those Pirates of the Caribbean movies.  But now I see that it is these period pieces.  It’s the fact that in every movie I see starring Keira Knightley, she is playing the same character.  The British accent, the extensive wardrobe, the feisty yet frustrated personality…it’s always the same.  You could take her out of The Duchess and throw her directly into Atonement and no one would know the difference.  I suppose when it comes to period pieces, the costumes are the stars, moreso than the actual actors.  Well.  The case could be made that it is so.

However, Keira Knightley isn’t exactly the actress who best fills out those clothes.  She’s reasonably pretty, she has an ability to look vaguely sexy, but she isn’t equipped to fill out the period-piece clothes she wears so often.  In The Duchess, she plays the Duchess of Devonshire, who was at the time a fashion icon.  At several moments in the movie, the other characters make reference to the fact that when Georgina wears a certain dress one day, every other woman will be wearing the same one tomorrow.  But I can’t really tell the difference between her clothes and those every other woman is wearing.  The only difference, as far as I can see, is that the other women have massive cleavage, and Knightley has none.

Not that I’m demanding an actress with bigger boobs.  Far from it.  But when the clothes are clearly the stars of the movie, and they are all designed with the sole intent of showing off boobs, shouldn’t the actress showcasing those clothes have some?  I’m not saying choose an actress with bigger boobs, I’m suggesting that perhaps it would be a good idea to tone down the massive cleavage on every other woman.  Just an idea.  The boobs thing is just aesthetic, and it’s distracting but it isn’t really a problem with the story.  However, Knightley’s almost-sickly skinniness is an actual problem.

You see, the story here revolves around the relationship between the Duke and Duchess and how stale and mean-spirited and tragic it all is.  They got married, not because she was young and hot, but because she was likely to bear him a son.  And he wants a male heir.  OK, that makes sense.  The male-centric society at the time, the poor understanding of the reproductive system, and the belief that if she tried hard enough she could have a boy instead of a girl.  But if the sole reason for your marriage is that your wife will be busy child-bearing, wouldn’t you want…a fat woman?  Or at least one with hips and boobs and some meat on her?  When Knightley, at one point in The Duchess, made a brief mention of the fact that she had had two miscarriages, I thought “well, of course she did”.

Here’s a woman who is expected to fire out one child a year until a boy comes along, and she has a torso the size of my forearm!  I know that at the time the world was less medically enlightened than it is today.  But they understood that, at least.  Or maybe not.  There is a pretty good scene here where Knightley first goes into labour, at the dinner table in a dining hall packed with guests.  As she starts to scream and leave the hall, Ralph Fiennes proposes a toast to the “son” who is on the way, and the guests give him a big cheer while she is still screaming just outside the door. 

Things get complicated when the Duchess can’t conceive a son, and has a few daughters.  Fiennes has had lovers all over England, and she’s cool with that, because it’s a period piece and that’s what they do.  But when he takes her best friend as a lover, in their own house, she is not cool with that.  And tension mounts.  And that Grey guy from earlier in the movie comes back into the picture…I think the movie wants us to like her friend Bess (played by the gorgeous Hayley Atwell, who has big boobs).  She is a sympathetic character, to some degree.  But Ralph Fiennes is painted as such a douche and a villain that it we just can’t accept that a nice, decent woman like Bess is supposed to be, would voluntarily sleep with him and be with him.

OK.  Enough complaining.  Because there are some things that make this movie good, especially in Blu-Ray.  The camera work is terrific, and the costumes exemplary.  There is one shot of the City of Bath that is truly remarkable (enough so that I remembered to remark upon it), and some terrific ballroom dancing scenes full of great period garb.  Fiennes is decent in what amounts to a one-dimensional role, and Knightley can, by now, play her role in her sleep.  The supporting cast is quite good, including Atwell, Cooper, and Georgina’s mother, played by the terrific Charlotte Rampling.

But as far as period pieces go, we’ve seen this all before.  A distant husband, a feisty woman, dupicitous aristocrats, and dozens upon dozens of affairs.  Some of which matter, most of which don’t.   Opulent costumes, balls and gowns, kids playing in expansive green fields in the backyards of castles, and Keira Knightley being spontaneous and charming and then crying and then being furious and then crying again.  As far as all this goes, it’s well done (and looks terrific on Blu-Ray), but there’s nothing here for people who aren’t already into period pieces.  The Duchess came out yesterday on DVD and Blu-Ray from Paramount Home Entertainment.

“Get off my lawn.” 

While I would not suggest that Clint Eastwood is big on sentimentality, he certainly knows how to elicit an emotional response from his audience without pandering to the tear-jerking conventions of Hollywood.  You can be forgiven if you cried at the end of Million Dollar Baby, but it’s worthwhile to note that Eastwood did not.  And if you did, no knock against you there, all it means is that you are not as tough as Clint Eastwood.  Which is kind of like saying you are not as good at basketball as LeBron James.  There is no shame there.

After all, being tough is what Clint Eastwood does.  It’s what he does better than anyone else who ever took to the silver screen.  There is no sight on a big screen quite like Clint narrowing his eyes and staring someone down.  There is no doubt that this is the most intimidating sight in movies, and one can almost imagine his co-stars bolting off the set, sweating profusely, and thanking their lucky stars that the guns they work with in Hollywood shoot blanks.

Another thing Clint Eastwood does better than anyone else in the world is direct himself.  If Gran Torino is the last acting role of his career, and he has said many times that it is, then we film-goers are losing out.  Not just because we will no longer be able to see one of the greatest movie icons of all time, and not just because he can still bring it as an actor.  No, we are losing because Eastwood is losing his most incredible tool as a director - himself as an actor.

Eastwood once said to Sergio Leone, when he started out in A Fistful of Dollars, “I don’t talk so good.  But I stare real good.”  And throughout his career, that has been his most dominant feature.  His body may be that of a 78-year-old, but his eyes have not changed a bit.  Nor has his flair for the bad-ass, western gunslinger style dialogue. 

At one point, he walks up to a group of gangbangers and says “ever notice how once in a while, you come across somebody you shouldn’t have f–ed with?  That’s me.”  You have no doubt that although this man is almost 80 years old, he is exactly who he says he is.  Someone these guys shouldn’t f– with.  The gangbangers realize this too.  And they split, backing down from Eastwood. 

Imagine a movie where an 80-year-old man stares down gnagbangers, and not only do you believe that this could happen, but you don’t even for a second question it.  Imagine anyone other than Eastwood delivering this line.    Hal Holbrook?  Jack Nicholson?  Forget it.  Unless it was a ridiculous, late-career comedy, no director would have the balls to even try to create a scene like this.  Unless that director is Eastwood, and he has this amazing actor to work with.  Eastwood knows what Eastwood does best.  And that is intimidating punks.

Amazingly though, Gran Torino IS something of a comedy.  Eastwood’s Walt Kowalski is a tough-as-nails old man, still living the Korean war in his head, and he is also an unrepentantly racist old bastard, a bigoted coot.  And, in his own way, he makes this quite funny for the first hour of the film.  Walt sees his granddaughter in a midriff-baring shirt at the funeral of his wife, and his twisted-mouth sneer and the menacing growl that comes out of his throat could just as easily have come from a wolf or a leopard than from a human being.

I just have to throw one thing in here - there is but one negative thing I have to say about this movie.  There is a scene (and you will know it when you see it) where a character has a Christ-like moment that is a little over the top.  But that’s it.  OK, on with the review.

His scenes with the local priest are equally funny, in a low-key way.  Walt is a man long past caring what people think of him, and with the death of his wife, the need to be polite to anyone has completely evaporated.  His savage verbal attacks on this young priest are truly amusing, as is the young man’s determination to weather the storm and eventually get through to old Walt.  He promised Walt’s wife, on her deathbed, you see, that he would convince Walt to attend confession, at least once.  And confession is not on Walt’s bucket list.

Now I feel bad for bringing up the Bucket List in this review.  That was a sad, generic, silly old-man movie, while Gran Torino might be the best old-man movie of all time.  As Eastwood growls and snarls and stares his way through everyone in his path, a Hmong family moves in next door.  The comedy continues as Eastwood and the Hmong grandmother sit on their respective porches, snarling at each other and silently hating each other from a distance.

All this changes when the young boy in the family starts to get involved with a local Hmong gang, led by his cousin.  The gang’s initiation is simple - young Thao must steal the old man’s prize possession - a 1972 Gran Torino that he treats better than his own children.  When Thao’s attempt to steal the car fails, the gang attempts a reprisal against him, that’s when Walt steps in.  As the fight spills into his yard, Eastwood steps out of his house with his shotgun, and utters perhaps the greatest bad-ass old-man line of all time:  “Get off my lawn”.

Immediately, Walt becomes a hero of the neighbourhood, people who live in fear of these gangs.  The Hmong families start bringing him tribute, and leaving it on his porch.  His furious reaction at seeing the flowers and food lined up on his stairs is magnificent.  Soon, the smart, vivacious young daughter of the Hmong family next door starts coming to see him, determined to break through his tough exterior, because she knows there’s a good man in there.

Again, big props to Eastwood for not letting this become sentinmental.  He does not, really, let the old man’s guard down, he doesn’t let him become vulnerable and soft, Walt doesn’t cry and Walt doesn’t crack.  Instead, Walt begins to take an interest in Thao and his family, and by extension he begins to take an interest in the gang that is preying on Thao and his family.  There is more humour in this part of the movie, as Eastwood tries to “man-up” Thao, who is way too “sissy” to get a job or a girl.

But of course, the big moment in the movie comes at the very end.  And I won’t ruin it for anyone because I fervently hope that people will get out to the theatre and see this one.  Suffice it to say that it is a surprising, emotional and staggeringly powerful finish that is in no way sappy or sentimental.  Clint Eastwood doesn’t do sappy and maudlin too well.  He stares real well.

Clint Eastwood doesn’t do The Notebook and P.S. I Love You.  You will not find contrived tear-jerking Kleenex moments in his films.  He does Unforgiven and Mystic River and Million Dollar Baby.  And Gran Torino stands with them all as one of the finest films of his career.  Go see it.

Pick of the week:  The Truman Show, Blu-Ray (8/10):  The only really good movie out this week, The Truman Show gets a well-deserved Blu-Ray reissue, and becomes even better.
Download The Truman Show (Blu-Ray)

Eagle Eye (review coming this week):  Shia LaBoeuf, one of the most incomprehensible superstars in film, stars in this thriller about a political assassination plot.

Ghost Town:  The always-funny Ricky Gervais stars in a movie where he plays a total jerk (the part he was born to play) who dies and does some ghost stuff.  While I’m on the subject of Ricky Gervais, check out his stand-up special on HBO Canada if you have it.  Hilarious stuff, it’s On Demand right now.

The Duchess (6/10):  Out on DVD and Blu-Ray, the Blu-Ray may be your best bet, what with the period-piece nature of the movie, with it’s big ol’ costumes and all.  Well, it’s Keira Knightley.  You know it’s gonna be a period piece.
Download The Duchess

Pulse 3 (1/10):  An absolutely abysmal movie.  The worst in an already arguably awful horror series.  And not scary at all.  Just stupid.
Download Pulse 3

Surfer, Dude:  A long-boarding surfer who likes the weed, played by Matthew McConnaughey, is com…OK, I’m just going to stop there.

Beethoven’s Big Break:  They’re still making these St. Bernard Beethoven movies?  What is this, the fortieth?

Neo Ned:  A white supremacist falls in love with a black woman at a mental institution.  Which could be a concept bananas enough to make for a good movie.  If it didn’t appear that they were taking their subject matter seriously.

Battle For Haditha:  A dramatization, from both the Iraqi and the American perspectives, of the American Marines strike on Haditha that massacred 24 men, women and children.

Poultrygeist:  Night of the Chicken Dead:  These horror-comedy-musical-silly spoofs are usually too scattershot and stupid to be enjoyable.  Here’s hoping this one’s different!

Pirates of the Great Salt Lake:  A family movie about pirates on an inland lake, and the treasure map that could lead them to bore the hell out of us all.

Comedy Central’s Roast of Bob Saget (4/10):  There was a time when these roasts were hilarious.  That time pre-dates Bob Saget, and it certainly pre-dates Comedy Central.
Download Comedy Central’s Roast of Bob Saget

Ghost (Blu-Ray) (7/10):  Yes, that Ghost.  The ultimate Chick Flick comes out today, on the ultimate Guy Technology.  Which will win out?
Download Ghost (Blu-Ray)

Days of Thunder (Blu-Ray) (6/10):  This was always a chick flick disguised as a car-racing movie.  And it was always pretty bad.  But the car racing in Blu-Ray makes it barely worthwhile.
Download Days of Thunder (Blu-Ray)

Event Horizon (Blu-Ray) (7/10):  A movie that was basically useless on DVD becomes pretty darn good on Blu-Ray.  A visual treat, with some actually scary moments.
Download Event Horizon (Blu-Ray)

Last Holiday (Blu-Ray) (4/10):  There is no reason to ever watch this movie, on Blu-Ray or otherwise.  Unless you are a rabid Queen Latifah fan.  Even then you can do better.
Download Last Holiday (Blu-Ray)

Wedding Crashers Uncorked (Blu-Ray):  This was a pretty damn funny movie.  I don’t know about the necessity of Blu-Ray for this one, but if you’re collecting…

Serenity (Blu-Ray):  This is one I still haven’t seen, but I might pick it up on Blu-Ray.  A cult hit among maniac sci-fi fans.

Next week: 

Righteous Kill
Pineapple Express (7/10)
Bangkok Dangerous
Babylon A.D.
Disaster Movie
An American Carol
The Wackness
Ping Pong Playa
Battlestar Galactica:  Season 4.0
Midnight Movie
Behind Enemy Lines:  Columbia
The Plot to Kill Hitler
Sukiyaki Western Django
Duckman 4 Season Pack
Duckman Seasons 3 & 4
Mannix Second Season
Partners
Ni Hao Kai-Lan:  Celebrate with Kai-Lan
Serial
Girl on the Bridge
Man, Woman and Child
Rhubarb
Baby, It’s You
Hurricane
French Postcards
Papa’s Delicate Condition
Daniel
Money From Home
Desperate Characters
Won Ton Ton, The Dog Who Saved Hollywood

Blu-Ray:

The Flock
Batman Anthology 1989-1997
An American Carol
The Absolute Best of Ghost Hunters
Appaloosa
Atmospheres:  Earth, Air and Water
Babylon A.D.
Bankok Dangerous
Caligula Imperial Edition
Dexter Complete First Season
Disaster Movie
Eden Lake
Friday Night Lights
The Hitcher
The Last Emperor
The Last Legion
Life Gamble
Miss Potter
Pineapple Express
Opium & the Kung-Fu Master
Ping Pong Playa
Righteous Kill
The Wackness

Having recently watched Pulse 2, and having dismayed at how bad that movie was, I find it hard to believe that anyone who watched it was left hanging.  Like, what could possibly happen now?  How are the survivors of this craziness going to live in a world without technology?  Whatever will take place now in this poor little girl’s life?  I think it is more likely that people finished watching that film and said to themselves, “I will never watch another film with Pulse in the title again”.  But then again, there are people who like Eat-More bars.  To each their own.  And for the four people who have been desperately waiting to discover how the world ends after Pulse 2, your answer has come.  To DVD.  December 30th, from Alliance Films.  Rejoice!

There are several things in this movie that insulted my intelligence, far more even than in the previous two films.  First of all, the film makers realized that the one thing every horror movie has that they didn’t have in previous episodes, was a hot chick wearing skimpy clothes.  So they made up for that in a big way, by making Brittany Finamore the star of the film and dressing her in skimpy clothes.  Secondly, the things that made for “scares” in the first films are mostly gone.  Now the scares come from a creepy farmer in an abandoned farmhouse, who comes off badly, like a friendly Leatherface from Texas Chainsaw Massacre.  Then there is the Black Snake Moan scene, the eerie similarity played for “scares”.

But it is other stuff that makes Pulse 3 so dreadful.  It is the idea that, for the past seven or eight years, the world has lived without electronic devices.  No cell phones, no PSPs, no iPods or Wi-Fi or internet or computers.  The computers and stuff are evil, you see, and will kill you.  So they have all been destroyed.  Yet when our reasonably attractive heroine picks up a laptop for the first time in her life, and begins an online conversation with a mystery guy, they both speak right away in internet lingo.  G2G!  BRB!  Well, not quite that bad.  But this girl was seven years old when the evil took over the world and the cell phones and computers were destroyed.  She has not ever seen one.  How does she know how to text message?  How does she know the conventions of internet-speak?

I think the movie is trying to say something here.  And that something is that every seventeen-year-old girl in the world, no matter the circumstances, has an instant ability to text-message.  It is engrained in them, as is internet lingo and the propensity to fall in love with faceless anonymous men over the computer after one conversation of four minutes duration.  Were I a seventeen year old girl, I would be deeply offended at this suggestion.  I am not a seventeen-year-old girl, but I really like them, so I will be offended on their behalf.  This is a little like the suggestion that was made in Me, Myself and Irene - that no matter what their upbringing, their schooling, their exposure to the outside world and their family situation, all black males will speak in ebonics upon turning sixteen.  Bo0th concepts are…let’s say…poorly thought through.

Also poorly thought through - the ending.   Spoiler Alert!  Spoiler Alert!  Here comes a very long spoiler!  I’m putting that in there for the four guys who are desperate to find out how this saga ends and are eagerly awaiting the opening of their local Blockbuster on Tuesday morning.  And I will be thorough in my description of the ending, for the thirty-one other people who watched Pulse 2 and want to know how it ends, but don’t want to sit through another of these god-awful movies.  First of all, the ending brings back a character no one cared about after the second movie.  Remember that guy who was dressed all in red, and took the dad and little girl hostage in the second film?  Yeah.  He’s back.  Anyone care about that guy?

So this weirdo is one of the sole surviving humans, and he’s the crazy militia-style survivalist we meet in so many terrible horror movies.  Usually, he lives in a cabin in the woods and looks like he can keep things safe for the nubile young teens who are being stalked by the maniac.  In this case, he lives in an all-red penthouse in Houston and looks like he can keep things safe for the nubile young teen who is being stalked by Ghosts In The Machine.  He has discovered that the apparitions that kill people can’t pass through the colour red, gives the same silly explanation about “frequency” he gave in the second movie, and reveals that he has captured one of the ghosts to “study”.  What he hopes to learn from her, we never find out.  Why is she there?  So we can tell that this guy is a bad guy.  I guess.  Like, look!  He’s torturing a poor, defenseless demon!

This guy seems to be the only hope for human kind - he has discovered two things through his obsessive militia-guy research - one is a computer program that can restore all of the affected people to life.  And the other is a way to wipe out all the demons at once.  These are demons.  Why would we care if he has captured one and is torturing it for kicks?  What difference would that make to us?  Well, to make sure he is seen as the Bad Guy, he bizarrely locks up the heroine in the same cage as the apparition.  Why?  Because…he’s a militia-type crazy guy?  I guess?  Or maybe it’s just this movie’s equivalent of the bad guy in action movies who has to shoot his own men in the head when they misbehave just so we have a reason to root against them.

But just imprisoning our tight-shirted star with a creepy apparition is not enough.  No, the real indication of the extent of this guy’s evil is his actual plan to wipe out all the machine-demons.  (Of course, this girl is horrified at the thought of wiping out all the things that are killing everyone.  For some reason, and we are not shown that reason during the movie, she believes there is…good in them…or something?  It isn’t clear.  Again, nothing in the movie has given the audience this same idea.)  And the plan that horrifies her - the way to wipe out all these people-killing machines is to…drop nuclear bombs!  eighty-seven of them, or something. 

Follow this logic, if you will.  This guy has discovered that nuclear bombs emit an electromagnetic pulse (Pulse, get it?) that will somehow destroy all these demon-creatures, and save the world.  His research indicates that the bombs must be dropped from a certain altitude, and exploded at a certain altitude in order to be effective.  This is just a quick conversation - there isn’t much to this bomb thing, but it’s the sort of logic that drives me nuts.  Now, I am no nuclear physicist, nor have I ever examined the inner workings of a nuclear bomb.  But I suspect it is one of the most complex devices on Earth, as are the planes that must deliver these bombs to their destinations around the world.  If you can’t use a cell phone, for fear that these people will come out of the phone and devour you, what makes you think you can use planes, a nuclear bomb, or the incredible level of communication required to make sure everything happens as it’s supposed to?

And then - the final insult - it actually happens.  The nuclear bombs do go off.  And the apparitions are wiped out.  And the world is safe, in a nuclear-winter sort of way.  So this means that the crazy guy was right.  And that he called the military, or whoever, I suppose on a land line, and convinced them to do this thing.  I imagine that conversation went something like this:  “Hi, American air force?  Yeah, I’ve figured out that dropping 87 nuclear bombs will wipe out all the bad things.  Oh, and also, I have created a program that will return to life the 80 percent of people who were destroyed over the past ten years.  Oh, you want to go with the bombs thing?  OK good.  Just don’t use your radios, alright?”

But then, we are supposed to believe that the bombs are a good thing.  I think.  When she finally meets the guy with whom she has been communicating, Adam, she discovers that he is one of the dead people caught in the machines.  And she brings him back to life.  And discovers that while he was in the machines, it was dark.  So she immediately figures that he must have been in hell, and not heaven, because heaven comes with a white light.  And so he must have been a bad person while he was on the Earth.  And therefore he ought to have remained dead.  And we then think that…all the people taken by this evil force were bad people?  Including her mom, her dad, and the girl she helped to escape from the torture room?  80 percent of the world belonged in hell, and they need to die?

Spoiler ends now.

For those of you who skipped the giant spoiler section, because you planned to watch this movie, I sincerely hope you reconsider.  I hope you go back, read the spoiler, and skip the movie.

When I was younger, and single, I had a poster of an Olsen twins movie up on the wall of my apartment.  The movie was called The Challenge, and I had the DVD as well.  In fact, I had several Olsen twins DVDs, and an Olsen twins puzzle, that were laying around in strategic locations that ensured that everyone who walked into my apartment would instantly notice the paraphenalia and assume I had some kind of fetish for the Olsen twins.  And I would play that up, saying some very filthy things about what I did with those posters and movies.  And some people were incredibly uncomfortable, and others laughed extremely hard.  Those who laughed became my friends for life.  At the time, the Olsen twins were 16, and the wait-until-they’re-18 countdown was on.

Now, the Olsen twins are in their 20s.  And there is no longer anything creepy (and, by extension, funny) about Olsen twins fantasies.  So I have taken down the posters and given away the DVDs to friends who were genuinely creepy enough to enjoy them for real.  There’s just no humour in the Olsen twins any more, now that they are legal.  If only someone could have told the roasters at the Comedy Central roast of Bob Saget!  If only someone could have sat them all down and said “Olsen twins jokes are irritating and tired.  Stop it.”  Especially when the extent of the “clever” when it comes to these jokes is along the lines of “Mary-Kate Olsen is super skinny because she has an eating disorder because Bob Saget touched her on the set of Full House.”  That’s not funny.  Or even shocking.  It’s stupid.

But then, most of the comedians didn’t make me laugh much at all, as they got up on stage to roast Saget, who really ought to be one of the easiest targets in showbiz.  Not only that, but he’s a “comedian” himself, so he can take the really mean stuff.  And there is a lot of mean stuff.  But a lot of the roasters seem to think they are supposed to riff on the rest of the roasters, and eventually get around to Saget.  So we get “Cloris Leachman is old and gross” jokes, and “Susie Essman is terribly ugly” jokes (by the way - really?  I think she’s quite attractive.  Maybe this is comedy I don’t understand.  Or, perhaps, it’s just comedy that sucks.)

This is the way with Jim Norton, Greg Giraldo, Jeffrey Ross, Jon Lovitz and Jeff Garlin, who does a strange but not very good bit where he pretends to be the creator of Full House.  John Stamos is the host, the “roast-master” if you will, and he is no comedian.  Then again, he is better than some of the people who “are” comedians.  Susie Essman is decent, and so is Brian Posehn, but the truly great acts are few and far between.  Gilbert Gottfried’s bit is pretty good.  Cloris Leachman’s is a bit better, but part of that is the novelty that still exists with old women making jokes about dried-up body parts and using the f- word.  There are some funny sent-in-by-tape segments from Lewis Black, Sarah Silverman and Don Rickles. 

Speaking of Rickles, he clearly seems to have the oldest routine on the tape (because he is 100), and it almost feels like one of the Sammy Davis style roasts of old for a moment.  Until we get to Norm McDonald.  His bit was absolutely, terribly unfunny.  And I laughed very, very hard.  His jokes seemed to come from an era hundreds of years before Rickles ever picked up a mic for a zinger.  They were the kind three-year-olds make these days, and he had them written down on cue cards.  There is no way to convey how funny it was to watch McDonald saying “Bob Saget has a face that is beautiful like a flower…a CAULI-flower!” 

The audience had no idea what was going on.  Every other comedian got up there and dropped f-bombs and made child-molesting jokes, and now here’e Norm McDonald with “Susie Essman may be a vegetarian, but she’s still full of bologna in my book”.  Some of the comedians really get it, but even then a few of them look totally stunned and lost.  This is the best bit on the entire DVD, which comes out December 30th from Paramount Home Entertainment, and hopefully you can find it on youtube or something.  And skip the rest of the DVD.  The Olsen twins were no longer a source of comedic gold when they turned 18.

I have always really loved The Truman Show.  Not only is it the best acting performance of Jim Carrey’s career, a case can be made that it’s the only really good one.  As Truman Burbank, Carrey is magnificent.  His entire life has been a television show, from birth until now, when he is in his thirties.  Every person in that life is a paid actor, including his wife and best friend.  He lives in a stereotypical, “perfect” version of the American Ideal Community, a place called Seahaven.  Seahaven is, in reality, a massive sound stage, a set designed by the creator of the Truman Show, Ed Harris.  The only person in the project who is not in on the secret is Truman himself, although he is beginning to suspect that something is amiss.

The other actors are wonderful as well.  Ed Harris is fantastic as Christof, the master manipulator who created this TV show, and created Truman’s life.  He is a creepy, Big Brother type figure whose control over his subject’s life is absolute.  Also great is Laura Linney, as Truman’s gorgeous wife Meryl.  The scenes where she tries to throw product placement into her conversations with Truman, because that’s the only way the show can advertise, are priceless.  But really, this is Jim Carrey’s Show.  He gives an incredibly sensitive, nuanced performance as Truman, a man trying to escape…something.  But he can’t possibly know what exactly it is he wants to escape.  All he knows is that he wants out.

The script, from Andrew Niccol, is great.  The direction, from the always-excellent Peter Weir, is top-notch and then some.  But these are the things I love about The Truman Show.  The screenplay, the direction, and some great actors.  What difference could Blu-Ray really make?  But I had forgotten just how extensive the vision was with this film.  The town of Seahaven is bright, it’s perfect, it’s 1950s-America, and it looks magnificent in HD.  The scenes toward the end where Truman is battling a contrived storm out on the open sea in a sailboat are eye-popping.

The Truman Show is a terrific movie, and well worth at the very least a rental.  Now that it’s available in the ultimate format, with the increased picture and sound quality, and that makes it well worth a purchase.  Spend your after-Christmas money on this one.

Event Horizon comes out on Blu-Ray December 30th, from Paramount Home Entertainment.  This is a horror movie from 1997 which scared quite a few people in the theatre, but then became a relic on VHS and later on DVD.  The horror of the big screen just didn’t translate into the product that was coming out of the television.  It was not as scary, it was not as weird and creepy, and it just didn’t work the way it did in the theatre.  And for the most part, the reason was that it is not a particularly well-written movie, or a terribly well-acted one.  The scares and creepiness came mostly as a result of the incredible visuals, pictures that just weren’t as scary coming out of the TV set.

Until now.  This is the kind of movie for which Blu-Ray was invented.  Now, all the freaky scary stuff that makes this movie good absolutely leaps off the screen.  The scenes with that bizarre meat-grinder looking corridor, the ones of the exploding spaceship, and the scenes where Sam Neill is moving around through the crawl space in the inner workings of the spaceship are all impressive and cool.  But the scenes that stick with you - the glimpses into the depths of hell, with the flesh-eating and torture and creepy images; the look of Sam Neill after he has gouged out his own eyes - those are ganuinely frightening again.

And it’s for that reason that Event Horizon is once again relevant, with the Blu-Ray treatment.  There are movies that scream for the Blu-Ray treatment, from 2001: A Space Odyssey in 1968, to Sunshine last year.  But those movies are just good movies, and Blu-Ray shows us exactly why they are so good.  But Event Horizon is one of the few movies where the transfer to Blu-Ray elevates the film from a bad one to a good one.  On DVD, this film was average at best.  On Blu-Ray, it is very good.

“There’s nothing stock about a stock car.” 

Tom Cruise has made a career out of making chick flicks that are disguised as movies for guys.  Top Gun, make no mistake, was a chick flick.  It just involved fighter planes and badass behaviour so that we guys could enjoy it as well.  By the time of Jerry Maguire in 1996, however, we had learned our lesson.  Sure, it involves football in some way, but it also involves Renee Zellweger.  And we know what that means - romance, crying, and girly stuff.  So, the question we have to ask ourselves is whether we, as guys, are willing to sit through the romance to get to the fighter plane or football stuff.  And in the case of Days of Thunder, the car-racing, fast-driving fast-living stuff.

And now that this film is out on Blu-Ray, I am going to say yes.  We are willing to sit through the romance.  We are willing to put up with porcelain-faced Nicole Kidman (who, at this earlier part of her career, looked a lot hotter, and a lot more like a real person than like an escaped member of your mom’s doll collection).  And we are willing to put up with Tom Cruise flashing his 1,000-watt smile all around the room at everyone, until such time as he is put in the hospital, and we worry whether that magnificent smile will be forever wiped off his face!  OK…we can tolerate all that.  For a few reasons.

One is that Nicole Kidman is certainly hot.  Not much of an actor, but hot.  Another is Robert Duvall, who is certainly not hot.  A tremendous, incredible actor, but not hot.  Then there are all those people who pop up here and there in the movie and make us think - wow!  These guys were around this long?  And then you think - oh, of course they were.  John C. Reilly, Cary Elwes, Fred Thompson.  Good times.

The main reason, of course, that we are willing to sit through Kidman and Cruise and romance and sad-sackery is that we get to see cars racing each other.  And that is also the main reason that the Blu-Ray works here.  Women can watch Tom Cruise smile at Nicole Kidman on scratchy, beat-up Beta tapes and be happy.  So Days Of Thunder will work for them in any format.  For us guys, however, it’s the car racing that makes this movie worth watching, and it’s the Blu-Ray format that makes the car-racing so awesome.  Surround sound, high-def - they weren’t built for smiling and crying and Nicole Kidman.  They were created for racing and crashing and Robert Duvall.

There are some movies that will endure for a long time, known forever as the Favourite Movies Of Women the world over.  Grease, Dirty Dancing, Titanic, The Notebook.  Ghost is one of those movies.  Have you ever met a woman or a girl who hadn’t seen Ghost?  Or one who does not love this movie?  I am guessing you haven’t.  And rightly so, this movie, more than any of those others, is actually quite good.  And that is why I have a bit of a problem with the timing of Paramount Home Entertainment’s release of the film on Blu-Ray.  Let me explain.

Blu-Ray, as it exists right now, is still in the stage where it’s a neat gadget, a new technological advancement that creates an incredible high-definition picture and sound.  One day, and that day is coming soon, Blu-Ray will be the way we get all our movies, and DVDs will become somewhat obsolete, the way VHS is today.  (The nice thing about Blu-Ray players, of course, is that they also play DVDs, so your existing collection is not obsolete.)  But right now, as the format is in the neat-gadget stage, it is almost entirely the domain of men.  Men, who like the latest techno-geek gadgets.  Men, who care about watching their football games and their Schwarzenegger movies in super-high-definition.  For the most part, we are the only ones, at this point, who care about Blu-Ray versus DVD.

Which means that not a lot of us will be rushing out to purchase Ghost on December 30th, when it is released on Blu-Ray.  95 percent of the people who own Blu-Ray players are men, and therefore 95 percent of the people who own the players will not care about Ghost.  And here’s the problem I have with the timing - we men (I assume that I personally speak for us all) are trying to get our girlfriends and wives and mistresses to embrace Blu-Ray, to care about 1080p and 1080i and the difference between the two.  And there would be no better way than to pick up a movie like Ghost so they could watch Patrick Swayze and Demi Moore do pottery in super-HD.

But the time for that has passed.  The time for that was Christmas.  And Christmas has now come and gone.  Release this Blu-Ray three weeks ago, and your sales will be at the very least respectable, with men buying it for their women for holiday gifts.  As it stands now, Paramount will have to wait until Blu-Ray becomes the pervasive technology, and women everywhere have the players, in order to see Ghost fly off the shelves.  And even then, I think most women I know will still keep their DVD copies - I know several girls who kept their dog-eared, worn, bad-tracking VHS copies of Ghost even after the DVD became available.  Sentiment, or something, I guess.

Anyway, I will let Paramount Home Entertainment worry about the marketing of this product, and I will just talk about the film.  First of all, I do like this film.  For one of those epic-romance movies that all us men find hard to watch, there is enough humour and there are enough good moments in Ghost to make it worthwhile.  Demi Moore is a sculptor-artist of some kind, and Patrick Swayze is her boyfriend.  He works at one of those nondescript, movie-style companies, where people get files thrown down on their desks, and people are asked for the “Nakamura report”, and money appears to be involved, but we have no idea what the company actually is, or what it is they do.  Moore and Swayze are just moving in together as the movie opens.

Let me just voice, right now, my major complaint with Ghost.  And that is Patrick Swayze.  To call his performance “wooden” is not entirely accurate.  After all, I have a wood carving of a water buffalo that my aunt once brought me from Africa on my shelf right now, and that carving has some personality.  It may well be more animated, and if I were to place it next to Patrick Swayze in Ghost, it would become positively fascinating in comparison.  This contrast worked extremely well for Whoopi Goldberg - if, next to Swayze in this movie, my water buffalo carving would appear to be charismatic and winsome, Whoopi positively leaps off the screen.  I think her performance was good, but probably not classic or iconic.  Yet, next to Swayze, she won an Oscar.  See?

OK.  Done with the complaints.  The rest of the movie is pretty neat, and there are some good scenes, like the ones with the crazy guy on the train.  For years, my friends and I would play the “crazy guy on the bus” game, trying to freak people out.  But this guy takes that concept to a whole new level.  Then there are the scenes where Moore and Swayze sit at her pottery wheel and mold clay together.  (The clay, for most of these scenes, is a giant phallic symbol that makes it look like they are sharing a penis.  Then, when they get too excitable and ignore what they are doing, it crumples and collapses, which is sad.)  And Whoopi’s scene at the bank is priceless.

But again, the idea of putting Ghost in HD was one that seems like it would have worked better three weeks ago.  Time will tell when it comes to Blu-Ray sales.  I guess it all depends how many people want to see Patrick Swayze suck in high definition.

There are a lot of things that bother me about Last Holiday, on Blu-Ray December 30th from Paramount Home Entertainment.  In fact, the one thing that doesn’t bother me is the star, Queen Latifah.  She is the kind of actress who is likeable, funny when she wants to be, charming when she wants to be, and always fun to watch.  She deserves more starring vehicles then she has had over her career, but this isn’t it.  Outside of Latifah herself, Last Holiday may as well be a Pauly Shore or a Carrot-Top movie.  Remember Chairman of the Board?  Last Holiday is on par with that gem in terms of story and “comedy”.

The basic premise is a very simple one.  Simple, because it’s the kind of premise that comes out of a Hollywood cookie-cutter, and makes the rest of the movie incredibly easy.  Once you set up the idea that a woman has been diagnosed with a terminal illness, and she has three weeks to live, the rest of the movie requires virtually no effort.  You send her somewhere interesting to live out her last three weeks, and then you write in “funny stuff”.  Like base jumping - get it?  It’s high up, so she’s frightened!  Or snowboarding - get it?  She doesn’t know how to snowboard, and she goes really fast and she’s frightened!  Haha, she’s screaming!

The supporting cast is a problem as well.  LL Cool J shows up as Latifah’s quasi-love-interest.  He’s the guy who works in another department in the same retail store she does, and they both like each other but they’re too shy to ask each other out…as the “love interest”, LL is more creepy than charming, with the extent of his flirtation with Latifah to stare directly at her, trying to muster up a smoldering look.  He barely speaks, and we wonder how she could be so into this vaguely unsettling guy.  And the idea that at the end of the movie he will come looking for her, having had little contact with her ever outside the selling of a barbecue, is ludicrous.

But not nearly as ludicrous as the central premise of the movie.  I get it - you have three weeks to live, and so you are going to do all the things you wanted to do in life…The Bucket List did this too, but at least that one made sense.  In this movie, she goes off to do “all the things she wants to do in life”, one of which is meeting a certain celebrity chef, played by Gerard Depardieu.  He is the chef at some thirty-star resort in Europe somewhere.  So she goes there and gets a $4,000-a-night suite, orders every form of room service and massage therapy and eats all the food that this chef prepares.  A conservative estimate of the money she spends in the two weeks she is there would be somewhere around $200,000.  Only someone who already has $200,000 could do this.  There is no way Latifah, a clerk at a retail store making (they are very specific about it) $29,000 a year, has this kind of money.  Even if she sold everything she owned.  It just doesn’t make sense.

But even if we are to suspend our disbelief enough to believe that she does indeed have enough money to spend the last couple of weeks of her life at this magnificent, opulent resort, the rest of it makes no sense either.  She has three weeks left to live, and she spends them here, at this place, doing crazy and funny things.  Fine.  But why would she spend them with these people?  She spends her time with a U.S. senator who has screwed over her community, the obnoxious bad-guy tycoon who owns her retail store, and the almost-soulless woman with whom he is having an affair.  She doesn’t like these people at all.  So why waste your past few weeks on Earth with them?  Because that allows her to change their lives, and bring sunshine into their otherwise dreary existence…garbage.

So on the one hand you have these obnoxious people having their lives changed by the appearance of a crazy, fun-loving, breath-of-fresh-air woman, like so many other characters in so many other movies, and on the other hand you have Queen Latifah falling down hills and LL Cool J trudging through snow in what is supposed to be a comedic scene.  There is nothing worthwhile about this film, Blu-Ray or otherwise, except for Latifah herself.  And I would suggest that we all wait until she is thrust into a film worthy of her talents.  Last Holiday isn’t it.

“We’s the walking, talking exigent circumstances”

There are good things and bad things about Street Kings.  I would say, about an equal number of both.  Which is why I’ve split this review down the middle and given it five stars out of ten stars.  First, the good - Hugh Laurie, Forest Whitaker, Naomie Harris, Terry Crews.  Now, the bad - none of the actors just mentioned play large roles in the movie.  Pivotal roles, yes.  But not large ones.  The large roles are played by Keanu Reeves and Chris Evans (that flaming guy from Fantastic Four).  Keanu Reeves is not terrible in this film, nor is Chris Evans, but I would certainly have liked to see more of Whitaker, Crews and Harris, and less of them.

As with most movies about cop corruption, the Big Secret is revealed only at the end.  And, as with most movies about cop corruption, it is a Big Secret we have all seen coming from the get-go.  There are some convincing moments where Reeves is conflicted, and convincingly set-upon, but these moments are almost always made less powerful and compelling by what happens next.  I’ll give an example in a few moments.  Reeves, you see, is a corrupt cop himself.  Not necessarily corrupt in the sense of taking money, but corrupt as in renegade.  As the movie opens, he wipes out an entire house of Chinese bad guys single-handedly.  He kills the ones with guns, the ones without guns, and the ones sitting on the toilet.

He is confronted afterward by his former partner, played by Terry Crews, who is black.  Crews gets in his face, questioning whether the victims in the house were armed or unarmed.  The suggestion is made that Reeves’ character is a racist, and that may be the real reason he wiped out a house full of foreigners.  Certainly, his behaviour moments before the murders was indicative of a deep-seeded racism.  But then his boss, (Forest Whitaker, who is also black) comes by, pulls Reeves away, and congratulates him enthusiastically for the killings.  His actions are totally excused, and this latent racism subplot is never really brought up again.  It just disappears.

Over and over, we see Reeves drinking from little vodka bottles as he drives around on the job.  But again, his drinking problem is never explored.  And it has nothing to do with the story at all.  It’s like the film makers said - well, he’s the star in a movie about police corruption.  So…he’d better have a dead wife and a drinking problem.  Why?  Because everyone who stars in a police corruption movie (except Serpico) has a dead wife (and possibly a dead kid as well) and a drinking problem!  Or, at the very least, one or the other.  16 Blocks, Hard To Kill, Assault on Precinct 13…the list goes on.  And on.  And on and on and on.  And Street Kings never does anything to set itself apart from any of these movies.

There is a shadowy Big Bad Guy (we all know, however, who it is right away) who apparently has a collection of Deep Dark Secrets about everyone in town.  The mayor, the police chief, all of the police captains and officials.  The secrets this man possesses are So Big that no one can touch him, despite the evil enterprises with which he is involved.  These secrets are never revealed.  We are just supposed to accept that they are powerful enough to keep this man above the law, and that it’s in everyone’s best interests to have these secrets destroyed.  Again, this is a convention of so many cop-corruption movies before this one.  But I want to think about this for a while.

Let’s suppose you have a Big Secret with which you could blackmail your chief of police and your mayor.  In my case, that would be Ottawa Police Chief Vern White and Ottawa Mayor Larry O’Brien.  Now, what kind of secret could I have that would allow me to kill and sell drugs and engage in human trafficking and fraud and embezzlement and God knows what else here in Ottawa with impunity?  Let’s suppose it’s the kind of secret that would keep White and O’Brien totally in line.  What could that be?  I suppose some sort of big crime.  Like, they got together and murdered a guy.  O’Brien cut up the body, White took the shovel and buried the garbage bag.  If this is the case, shouldn’t they be the ones we want taken down?  Why are we worried about protecting their secrets if that’s what the secret is?

And on the other side - let’s suppose the secret is something more innocuous.  Like, they’re gay lovers.  Movies still seem to think that homosexuality is a Deep Dark Secret that can be used to blackmail people in positions of power.  If you’re running for office as an anti-gay-rights Conservative, I can understand that being used for blackmail - but for everything else?  Imagine going up to the police chief and saying “if you don’t let me commit one murder a week, I will tell everyone you’re gay”.  See how far that gets you.  Basically, what I’m saying is that the “he’s got information on all of us” plot convention only works if the officials being blackmailed are as corrupt, if not moreso, than the blackmailer.  In this case, they are not.  They aren’t even in the movie.

And then the end of the movie.  Once again, the end, like everything else in Street Kings, is toweringly generic.  Once again, the actions and crimes we see have no reasonable or logical consequences.  The Big Bad Guy is revealed to be…exactly who we always knew he was.  Reeves does dozens, if not hundreds, of ethically questionable things in the final twenty minutes, but no one, not even his fresh-faced rookie sidekick, thinks to actually question them.  By the time the movie reaches it’s pre-ordained, telegraphed conclusion, we have forgotten about his dead wife and “drinking problem”.  We no longer worry about his tendency toward racism.  All of that stuff has been swept out of the door in favour of this Staggeringly Usual movie stuff. 

Because Street Kings is so powerfully standard, there is only one piece of advice I can give - if you like this sort of thing, then watch it.  If you like good movies, then don’t.

“Let me guess.  You’re the smart one.”
“No.  [giant goon looks confused]  I’m the big one.”

OK.  I understand the concept behind The Transporter.  It’s James Bond style suspension of disbelief, only with more swearing, more violence, and a more badass central character, played by Jason Statham.  I can do this.  I can suspend my disbelief when Statham miraculously, and seemingly without any ramp, puts his car up on two wheels in order to squeeze between two 18-wheelers, which miraculously don’t move out of his way when they realize there is a car driving sideways between them.  (Even Timothy Dalton used a ramp to put that 18-wheeler up on nine wheels.)  I can just sit back in my chair and say, whoa, badass, when Statham drives his car onto the top of a moving train.  All of this is fine.  I get it.

But in a movie like this, we expect certain things.  We expect ridiculous action.  Check.  We expect crazy fights where one guy beats up ten guys.  Check.  We expect badass dialogue and silly plot twists and evil leering bad guys who kill their own men just to show how evil they really are.  Check.  We expect some sort of international intrigue, and betrayals, and general mayhem and silliness.  Check.  And, above all else, we expect a sultry, sexy, gorgeous, token hot chick to wear skimpy clothes, seduce the star, and raise the heart rates of every red-blooded male in the audience.  Umm…umm…nope.  No check.  No, no, no, no.

Don’t get me wrong.  The people who made Transporter 3 did put this girl in the movie.  And Natalya Rudakova, as Valentina, is certainly attractive.  And she does indeed seduce the star and have sex with him.  But everything about it is all wrong.  When he finally deigned to sleep with her, I was actually disappointed.  Because I hated this girl.  She spends the first thirty minutes of the movie totally silent, slumped over in the car he’s driving, offering no help at all even though she knows more about their situation than he does.  She’s a prisoner too - help the guy out!  Say something!  Nope.  She’s just sour.  And annoying.  And she sleeps a lot, like she’s a narcoleptic or something.  But no one ever calls attention to that, for some reason.  They just figure - oh, she’s asleep again, and they keep doing their badass driving thing.

Once she actually does start talking, she is absolutely infuriating.  Remember that French girl in Pulp Fiction, played by Maria de Medeiros, who was Bruce Willis’ girlfriend?  Remember how painfully annoying she was?  When he gets back from killing the bad guys, and insists that they have to leave right now, because otherwise they will be killed, he doesn’t ask nicely enough, so she starts crying, and won’t get on the motorcycle?  And how he has to talk her down, sweet talk and small talk her, and they have a conversation about buttermilk pancakes before she is finally calm enough to get on the bike and they can finally get out of this very urgent, we’re-about-to-be-murdered situation?  Remember how obnoxious that was?

The great thing about Pulp Fiction, however, was that Fabienne was a character being used to make a point.  Here’s Bruce Willis, the tough, manly boxer who has killed people both in the ring and out.  He’s as badass as they come.  But when he comes home to his incredibly annoying, silly-headed numnuts of a girlfriend, he is basically subservient to her, and he will do whatever it takes to make her feel good and cater to her capricious idiocy.   It’s great.  And, thankfully, her scenes are short.  Now, imagine that girl being a constant presence in a movie.  Imagine an hour and a half of Fabienne talking about how they didn’t have blueberry pancakes so I had to get buttermilk and I’d love to have a potbelly.  Now you’re getting the picture.  This is what Natalya Rodakova brings to Transporter 3.

This is the first movie in a while where I have actively rooted for the bad guys to kill the heroine.  The last time I remember doing this was during that terrible Matthew Broderick Godzilla in the late 90s, when I was desperately rooting for Godzilla to, at the very least, take out Maria Pitillo in the most gruesome fashion imaginable.  I did not get my wish.  Oh, by the way, I am doing this for internet-hit purposes.  My bosses love the “page-hit” statistic, so I am writing this review to make sure that anyone who does a google search for “transporter+pulp fiction+godzilla” will arrive at my website.  You’re welcome boss.  Here come the page hits!

Anyway.  Rudakova is so annoying, for so long, that you no longer care when Statham beats up eleven guys.  When he sleeps with her, finally, you actually think of him as less of a man.  He becomes less badass because he slept with the hot chick.  After all - he has known her the whole movie too - how come we know that he should push her out of the car while crossing a bridge, but he thinks she is attractive enough for sex?  Even then, we could forgive him for quickly getting his rocks off with an annoying woman and then leaping back in the car and forgetting her as she explodes in the background.  But no.  Instead, Statham does the unthinkable.

It made sense when James Bond was last seen at the end of his movies rolling on the beach with the Bond Girl from the film.  They are going to have a two-week affair, before the next film begins, and everyone will be happy.  But when Jason Statham appears at the end of Transporter 3 with Valentina on his arm, now clearly in a relationship with her, he ceases to be badass.  He is no longer cool, or suave, or tough, or manly.  He has now hung up his balls for good.  He’s not even Bruce Willis in Pulp Fiction, he’s Jimmy from Pulp Fiction.  There can no longer be a Transporter 4, because he is now an official sissy.  I’m sorry to break the news to Transporter fans, but this series is now officially dead.

“Technically, that was a bombing.  At least, it sounded like it was.  Not an attack, which would imply something else.” 

War, Inc. came out with little fanfare and little attention in 2008.  It’s not the kind of movie that gets much attention, though, because it’s a bonkers, satirical, political message comedic pile of craziness.  And although I generally live movies that can be described as such, even I almost hated this film.  Calling this a black comedy is a bit of a misnomer, in the sense that it isn’t that black, and it isn’t that funny.  But it’s more dark than comedic, and yet more funny than dark.  And if that made any sense to you, you might just enjoy this film.

It’s all about a Haliburton-like company, called Tamerlane, which is, basically, in the business of war.  Tamerlane has occupied a small, Iraq-type country called Turaqistan, and is running the whole show there.  Tamerlane is owned by a Dick Cheney-esque former vice president, played by Dan Aykroyd.  There are some nice touches in this business-as-war and war-as-business scenario, like the advertising posters pasted to the sides of tanks as they rumble through the cities.  Tamerlane is having trouble with the Turaqistan Oil Minister, who is proposing building a pipeline through his country without consulting Tamerlane.  So they hire an assassin (John Cusack) to have this oil minister killed.

This is one thing I don’t like about this movie.  And other satirical movies like it.  The oil minister’s name is Omar Sharif.  Naming your characters after real people is not funny in and of itself.  What does Omar Sharif have to do with Haliburton, Cheney, Bush, et al?  Nothing.  So why bother?  Same goes for a couple of other characters, named Ooq-mi-Fay and Ooq-yu-fay.  It’s pig latin for dirty words!  Get it?  Again, why bother?  This isn’t Epic Movie here, it is ostensibly a smarter and more biting specific satire.  This crap is just distracting and unfunny.  The only character for whom the silly-name thing works is a Middle Eastern pop star named Yonica Babyyeah.  She is played ably and gamely by Hilary Duff, who is very good in the role.

The movie itself is a mishmash, as Cusack tries to assassinate his target while maintaining his cover as a Tamerlane employee charged with helping to plan Yonica’s gigantic wedding to the son of an important government official of some kind.  In the meantime, he is trying to seduce Natalie (Marisa Tomei), a gorgeous left-wing reporter who is aghast at the things Tamerlane is doing in Turaqistan.  So the comedy alternates between his love-hate courtship of Tomei, his ridiculous attempts to pacify the mercurial Yonica, and his consistently disrupted attempts to murder Sharif.

Then there is Cusack’s back story, which involves his attempts to leave the CIA, a battle to the death with Ben Kingsley, the death of his wife, the kidnapping of his daughter and the consupmtion, in shot-glass after shot-glass, of the world’s most powerful hot sauces.  Frankly, there is just too much going on, and the satire is dulled considerably by the movie’s scattershot approach.  At the same time, I found the scattershot approach entertaining, and it certainly gave the movie a very appealing bonkers feel.  But I really felt like the film needed to decide.  Either this is a scattershot bonkers film with a political warfare backdrop, or a political satire with a bonkers scattershot delivery.  But it really seems to be both.  And neither.  Which is why it isn’t as amazing as it could have been.  But it’s still pretty darn good.

“You should really let me go.” 

There are some movie roles Keanu Reeves was born to play.  Like a robot.  Or a soulless killing machine.  Or a sequioa.  When he took his first acting class, and the drama teacher did that excercise where everyone pretends they are a tree, he figured he was done, and he never progressed past that moment.  So he is now very well suited to playing trees, or robots.  And this is the biggest problem with Klaatu, the character Reeves is playing in the remake of the classic Sci-Fi movie The Day The Earth Stood Still.  Reeves apparently believes that his character is a robot.  Or someone told him that Klaatu is a robot.  Or, at the very least, a terminator-like cyborg, able to replicate the most basic of human expression.

But Klaatu, unfortunately, is not a robot.  He is an alien.  And he has come to Earth to save the planet from the people who are making it uninhabitable.  (Which is a great message for a movie, by the way.  I like that, at least.)  While here on Earth, he meets other members of the alien race to which he belongs, creatures who have, like him, taken human form in order to live amongst us human beings.  And they are emotional beings.  They speak of their love for the human race, and of their joy and elation at the fact that they have been able to live an entire life as one of us.  And Klaatu stares blankly and then moves on with his task.  Eventually, the movie’s resolution will revolve around his own personal emotions, and whether he too has found enough love for the human race to save us from ourselves.  (I won’t ruin it by telling you whether or not this happens.)

But in what should be a scene filled with emotional crisis, a heart-wrenching decision to end the film, becomes a decidedly uninteresting, totally nonchalant decision on the part of Klaatu, because Reeves still seems to believe he is a robot.  Outside Reeves, however, the movie for the most part is decent.  Jennifer Connelly is reasonably good as a scientist of some kind who gets recruited for some kind of mission because there is some kind of unknown menace threatening the Earth.  It is all very vague.  In the end, it doesn’t matter what kind of scientist she is, because she never makes use of her scientific skills in any way.  It doesn’t matter why the government recruited her for this mission, because she is quickly on the run with Klaatu.  Basically she exists as a device that will hopefully convince Reeves that humanity is worth saving.

And the main way she is supposed to do this, I suppose, is through her little son Jacob, played by Will Smith’s son Jaden, last seen playing in a movie with his father in The Pursuit of Happyness.  In this film, he is one of the most irritating kids in movie history.  He constantly fights his mother.  He hates the alien and wants the government to catch him.  He complains incessantly, and does that little-kid movie-cliche thing where he is constantly talking about his dead father, and what his real father would have done if he were here today.  And when he isn’t talking about his father, it’s OK because all the other characters are talking about him.  He misses the man, you see.  And let us never forget it.

The main thing The Day The Earth Stood Still has going for it are some pretty neat special effects, specifically a big swarm-of-locusts thing they do.  But that alone isn’t enough to make up for the shortcomings in the script.  For a movie that is ostensibly about the End Of Days, and the environmental apocalypse that we human beings have visited upon ourselves, there is an awful lot of tried-and-true movie moments.  The great Kathy Bates is badly used as the American Secretary of State, who represents the President and tries to do everything she can to thwart the intentions of this alien being.  For no good reason, other than the fact that this is what government officials do in movies.  They try to destroy everything they don’t understand.

I know, we live in the world of the Bush administration right now, and this doesn’t exactly strain credulity.  But imagine an alien being emerging from a spaceship that lands in Central Park, and asking to speak to world leaders.  We all know Bush doesn’t like talking to his “enemies”, but I think even he would meet with an alien if it asked for him by name.  Would he really send Condoleeza Rice to deal with it for him?  I don’t know.  Maybe he would.  I sure hope the aliens land after January 27th, so we never have to find out.

The Day The Earth Stood Still is not a horrible movie, and I feel like I’ve been ragging on it perhaps a little too much.  But it just isn’t memorable, it isn’t very interesting, and I am really struggling to find nice things to say about it.  John Cleese is good in his two-minute cameo…the giant alien robot thing is kinda cool…my girlfriend liked it…that’s about all I’ve got.  And I’ve been trying not to compare this movie with the 1951 original, but it’s tough because that movie was a superior effort.  This film is average at best.

“She’s judge, jury and executioner!” 

Because the world needed more reasons for Jason Statham to flex and act badass, here comes a remake of the cult hit Death Race 2000, this time called simply Death Race.  Much like in lesser movies, like The Condemned, or greater movies like The Running Man, this is a film about prisoners who fight to the death for the amusement of audiences around the world.  Taking a page from the WWE crapfest that was The Condemned, once again this fight-to-the-death has it’s success measured in the form of page hits and log-ons.  The more people tune in to watch the murderous prisoners offing each other, the more successful a venture it is.

Joan Allen goes slumming here as a prison warden who has set up this ridiculous race between prisoners.  She has constructed a series, in which prisoners earn their freedom after winning five of these races.  Of course, since we have seen similar movies many times before, we know that she will never let this happen.  This movie is strictly a hack job from all involved, from the top down.  Director Paul W. S. Anderson (NOT to be confused with Paul Thomas Anderson, director of such fine films as Boogie Nights, Punch Drunk Love, and There Will Be Blood) has his picture next to “hack” in the dictionary, thanks to his involvement with such memorable pieces as Alien Vs. Predator, and the truly dreadful Resident Evil series.

Sidebar - Paul W. S. Anderson DID direct a pretty cool movie called Event Horizon in 1997, and that is the exception that proves the rule.  It might also be the only feature he has directed that keeps him working today.  Event Horizon comes out on Blu-Ray December 30th, the only format that makes the film worthwhile, and it is worth checking out.  The rest of Anderson’s filmography includes Soldier and DOA:  Dead Or Alive, the movie with perhaps the most redundant title and the stupidest set of ass-kicking hot chicks in history.

Anyway, back to Death Race.  If I can stand writing about it any more.  So the idea here was to make a movie full of stuff that guys like.  Car chases, explosions, murder, violence, mayhem, a bunch of guys, one more badass than the next, revenge and hot chicks.  I imagine that if that last sentence is all you write on a piece of paper, before handing it to Hollywood studio executives, they will give you 40 million dollars to make your movie.  Plot and script be damned!  Who needs ‘em when you have a bunch of hot chicks in tight clothes, a bunch of badass guys cracking wise, and car chases and explosions!  In fact, you might never need to acquire a script.  Frankly, you can just pick up and go.

Now, that being said, the badass moments are pretty good.  Jason Statham, as always, plays the toughest of the tough, the baddest of the bad, the assest of the ass.  He is a former race car driver whose wife gets murdered and whose kid gets kidnapped.  This all happens after a workers-vs.-cops confrontation outside a factory, none of which has anything to do with the plot.  He is framed for the murder of his wife, so that he can be sent to prison, so he can be recruited to drive a car in the race.  With me so far?  He is there to replace a driver named “Frankenstein”, who is known for always racing with a mask on.  So, with the mask, no one will know that “Frank” has actually been killed in the last race.

Spoiler alert:  Here comes the end of the movie.

Then the logic breaks down entirely.  Here’s where things stand - “Frank” was one win away from the magic five-win mark, and his freedom.  So Joan Allen, the evil overseer of the race, bribed his sidekick with freedom to sabotage his car.  The sidekick, who is so hot that she can’t possibly be a bad person in a movie, was hoping that this sabotage would merely lose Frank the race, and not kill him.  In a race where every car has machine guns and rocket launchers and in some cases napalm, this is not a very plausible outcome.  Not only that, why would this incredibly hot chick sabotage Frank’s defenses in the car when she’s riding in it with him?  Oh.  She has an ejector seat and a parachute.  So she’ll be fine.

OK.  So Joan Allen really doesn’t want Frank to win, because the “freedom” thing is a myth.  So she sabotages his car, the logical conclusion to which will be his death.  When he does die, that’s bad for ratings, so rather than recruiting another inmate and putting the mask on him, she purposely searches out some has-been racer forgotten by most people to impersonate Frank by imprisoning him, going so far as to murder his wife to do so.  Now, she tells him all he has to do as “Frank” is to win one more race, and he (”Frank”) will have his five wins and his freedom.  And then she sends in the same gorgeous saboteur to do the same to the car.  Wouldn’t it have been just as good for the ratings if Frank had died inches from his fifth victory?  And why such an elaborate, idiotic plan?

It all serves the basic purpose of a few obvious movie devices.  First, it makes Joan Allen into the Ultimate Villain.  She would murder innocent people just for her ratings.  Also, it means that Statham is the One Innocent Man In Jail, so we feel free to root for him to escape.  But then…when the movie ends, we are also supposed to root for the other prisoner, played by Tyrese Gibson!  The psychopathic maniac who has murdered dozens of people on the track, in prison, and elsewhere.  But he is not as Evil as Joan Allen, so we certainly hope he beats her, at least.  So it’s cool that he escapes too.

End Spoiler.

The thing that makes Death Race suck is not the little things.  The idiotic plot device to get Statham into jail, the idiotic plot device to get hot chicks in tight clothes to sit in the cars with the murderous convicts, or the idiotic plot device that adds an extra element of danger to the race track.  These things are fine.  (In fact, the massive Machine Of Death that comes out of the warehouse and st