Charlie Bartlett:  A high school loser kid becomes a hero at school by giving other kids prescription drugs and dispensing psychological advice.  Could be quite funny.

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
Step Up 2 The Streets
Shutter
College Road Trip
Penelope
Sleepwalking
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
Trapped Ashes

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 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.

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.

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”.

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 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.

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.

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!

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.