THE A-TEAM: 3 ½ STARS

Near the end of “The A-Team,” the big screen adaptation of the inexplicably popular 1980s television show, Col. John ‘Hannibal’ Smith (Liam Neeson) intones through clenched teeth, “Overkill is underrated.” That could be the mantra for the whole movie and not just its bombastic (emphasis there on the “bomb”) climax. Overkill indeed. The explosion budget alone for “The A-Team” could probably fund ten other, less fiery movies.

In an echo of the original series, the movie follows the adventures of the Alpha Team—A-Team for short—four highly trained but unorthodox U.S. Army Special Forces soldiers framed for a crime involving the illegal importation of counterfeiting printer plates. Branded war criminals and sentenced to jail time, they hatch an elaborate escape, involving the CIA and branches of the military. Then, as federal fugitives-turned-mercenaries, seek their revenge on the men responsible for their imprisonment. Cue the explosions.

“The A-Team” is a testosterone fest that can’t even be neutralized by the presence of the comely Jessica Biel. It is about boys and their toys—which in this case happen to be rocket launchers, motorcycles and Mohawk haircuts. It’s the first real action movie of the summer. Notice I didn’t say first great action film of the summer. It’s not great, but it is a fun summer popcorn flick jam packed with the kind of pedal to the metal action that makes guys go “Whoa!” every time something blows up in an  extravagant mushroom cloud of flame and smoke.

The action sequences are rather spectacular. In one crazy scene the team “flies” a tank through the air. It’s obviously a bit of CGI trickery, and as such has less real impact than say the stunts in “The Dark Knight” which were (mostly) done without the aid of computer imagery, but the sheer “wowness” of it all will make you gobble your popcorn a bit faster.  

Of course all the action in the world doesn’t mean much if the characters aren’t interesting. Luckily the cast is, well, if not exactly Oscar caliber, enthusiastic in their renderings of the familiar television characters. As “Hannibal” Smith Liam Neeson is slumming it a bit, but is a solid presence and a believable hard man. Bradley Cooper as “Face,” a specialist in that most oxymoronic of military oxymorons—military intelligence—brings the same kind of charm to the movie as he displayed in “The Hangover,” and “District 9’s” Sharlto Copley as “Howling Mad” Murdock seems to be having some off the hook fun. Ironically only UFC superstar Quinton “Rampage” Jackson as Bosco B.A. Baracus (the role Mr. T made famous) struggles to be heard above the clatter of the action, but don’t tell him I said that. He’s the only real-life bruiser in the bunch.

“The A-Team” is not just a remake of the television show but also an entertaining love letter to the cartoon violence, the wild action, the one-liners and cardboard characters of guy oriented 80s action movies.

ALICE IN WONDERLAND: 3 STARS

I wonder if Tim Burton has a monkey butler at home. I ask this because I think anyone who can come up with the kind of flights of fancy he puts on screen probably has a monkey butler and other strange and wonderful things kicking around the house to feed his imagination. His latest film, a retelling of “Alice in Wonderland,” benefits from his rich visual style.

Using the original Lewis Carroll stories as a stepping stone, in this reimagined version of the classic tale Alice Kingsley (Mia Wasikowska) is 19 years old. She’s a dreamer in a world of pragmatists who, on the advice of her late father, tries to imagine six impossible things before breakfast each day. This sets her at odds with almost everyone, including her family who think marrying her off to the churlish and haughty Lord Hamish will settle her down. At their engagement party she flees his very public proposal, disappearing into the garden and falling down a rabbit hole into Underland. It’s her second trip to the place she calls Wonderland. Ten years previous she been there but has no memory of it. On this visit she meets an odd assortment of characters including the Cheshire Cat (Stephen Fry), the White Rabbit (Michael Sheen), Absolem, the Caterpillar (Alan Rickman) and the strangest one of all, the Mad Hatter (Johnny Depp). They convince her she needs to help them overthrow the evil Red Queen (Helena Bonham Carter) by slaying the terrifying Jabberwock (Christopher Lee).  

Burton has always made films about outsiders—think Edward Scissorhands, Ed Wood Jr. and Willy Wonka—and in Alice he has found another one to focus his camera on. As a headstrong young woman who doesn’t quite fit the mold of Victorian England she a perfect character for Burton. Like his most famous characters she lives in a world of dreams but unlike his best realized characters she isn’t nearly as interesting. As a result, despite the beautiful visuals and the eye popping 3-D, “Alice in Wonderland” is a bit of a flat line.

Sadly much of the problem lies with Wasikowska. She is delicately beautiful in a way that would very likely leave Lewis Carroll weak in the knees and after her stint on the television show “In Treatment,” we know she can act, but she rarely looks really engaged with the character. Perhaps it is that she spent the entire time acting against a green screen and didn’t get to actually interact with her co-stars very often, but she’s a little too low key to be at the center of a large, fanciful film.

It’s not a complete wash, however. Burton overloads the screen with eccentric and interesting visuals and has succeeded in creating a dream-like version of “Alice in Wonderland.” Unfortunately, like most dreams, when it’s over it’s quickly forgotten.

AVATAR: 4 ½ STARS

In the gap between James “King of the World” Cameron’s last theatrical feature, “Titanic,” and his new film, “Avatar” (in theatres this weekend) Clint Eastwood directed 11 movies, Michael Bay made 6 and even Uwe Boll, a director so reviled there is an on–line petition to prevent him from making any more films, has made fifteen in the time it took Cameron to make just one, but it’s quite a movie.

“Avatar,” based on an original idea by Cameron, is set in the 22nd century on a small planet called Pandora. Under the lush terra firma is a valuable mineral much sought after by the Avatar program—a collaboration between industry and military. Since the climate and atmosphere aren’t hospitable to humans a substitute for homosapien invaders is required. That would be living, breathing avatars of the Pandorian natives, controlled by a human “driver” through a high tech link-up that connects the driver's mind to their Avatar body. The ten feet tall, blue skinned natives, called the Na'vi— although the humans dismissively call them “blue monkeys”—are deeply connected to their planet, sharing a connection with the land and all its creatures that defies human comprehension. Only one man comes close to understanding the Na'vi. He’s Jake Sully (Sam Worthington) a former marine who lost the use of his legs in combat. Brought on board the Avatar program he is initially used as a mole to infiltrate a Na'vi community to glean information that will make the harvesting of minerals easier, but what begins as simply completing his mission and using his legs again through the avatar soon becomes something else. He learns to love not only the Na'vi people, but one Na'vi in particular, Neytiri (Zoe Saldana).   

First let’s dispel some myths. You don’t need to take Gravol with you to the movie theatre. 1.) There were rumors on the net that “Avatar’s” mix of hand held camera and 3-D was literally stomach turning. Not true. 2.) It’s not “Dances with Wolves in Space” or “Fergully” with aliens. 3.) Sight unseen people were calling it Cameron’s Folly, a three hour waste of film and money (a reported $300 million). Not true. 4.) “The Na'vi are the new Jar Jar Binks,” bloggers screamed! Also not true.  

With “Avatar” Cameron has made a sprawling epic that lives up to the hype. It is something completely new, a movie that is not a sequel, a remake or based on an existing novel; a film that sprung from Cameron’s imagination and exists on its own plane. Brett Ratner, Michael Bay and all other Hollywood hacks, hang your heads in shame.  
Cameron starts from scratch creating a whole new world with language, customs, religion and crazy creatures but never forgets that this is an action movie and not an anthological study. To that he adds allusions to the Iraq war, shock and awe policies and the Native American genocide all bundled up in one giant sci fi romance action flick.

It’s not all perfect, the dialogue is frequently 1980’s-action-movie lame, filled with clichés; there are logic lapses and Saldana’s character shifts from Ripley (remember “Alien”?) to damsel in distress in the blink of an eye, but the film’s achievements outweigh any of these misgivings.   

Despite what the early word on the movie may have been Cameron—who at this rate won’t make another film until 2221—makes the audience feel compassion for obviously computer enhanced giant blue creatures, keep our interest for almost three hours and presents a dazzling climax that’ll leave you slack jawed. 

A SINGLE MAN: 4 STARS

Tom Ford, ex-designer for Gucci and Yves Saint Laurent, founder of his own eponymous menswear line, makes his debut as a director with “A Single Man,” an adaptation of the 1964 Christopher Isherwood novel of the same name, and, as you might have guessed given his pedigree, this is a great looking film. The former fashionista hasn’t art directed it with Joel Schumacher style bombast, but with elegant good taste. He has steeped the film in beautiful people, places and things. Even an off camera voice over is done by Jon Hamm, who “People” called one of the “sexiest men of the year.” But don’t think “A Single Man” is all style and no substance. Ford paid attention to the pictures, but like another film sensualist, Pedro Almodovar, he also got the emotion of the piece right.

Set in early-’60s Los Angeles, “A Single Man,” is a slice of gay English professor George’s (Colin Firth) life. “I’m having a serious day,” he says on a smoggy LA afternoon as he makes preparations for his suicide following the sudden death of his longtime partner Jim (Matthew Goode). As he meticulously tidies up the odds and ends of his life he takes time to have dinner with Charlotte (Julianne Moore), an old friend and chat with a curious student.       

“A Single Man” is a study of grief. Ford portrays the scale of George’s loss through carefully rendered flashbacks and dream sequences, alternating between a cold color pallet for the post-Jim scenes and vibrant, lively hues for when he was still alive. It’s an old trick, but the subdued look of George’s sad life packs an emotional wallop. This is a man who, after losing his love and not being allowed to go to the funeral—it’s for “family only” he’s told—has lost the will to live. “For the first time in my life,” he says, “I can’t see my future.” His outlook is as murky and grey as the film stock.

Firth oozes repression and sadness as George. He’s low key, a shadow of the man George was before Jim’s death, but Firth adds small details that add color to his character. When he spots a dog like the one he used to share with Jim the random sense memory catapults him back to a different place and time, a happier place and time. Firth and the film do a good job at portraying the small things that keep the memory of a lost loved one alive.

“A Single Man” isn’t a feel good movie, it’s an art house picture about loss and sadness, but as one character says, “Sometimes awful things have their own kind of beauty.”

A CHRISTMAS CAROL: 2 STARS

Before I saw the Jim Carrey version of “A Christmas Carol” I wondered why remake a story that has been done so often and so well in the past. I’ve seen it and I’m still wondering.

There have been at least 21 versions of the story made for the big screen and dozens more for television. Director Robert Zemeckis and his high tech bag of motion capture tricks don’t add anything to the story, in fact, occasionally his CGI actually gets in the way.

Zemeckis wisely hasn’t toyed around with the 166-year-old story. Ebenezer Scrooge (Jim Carrey) is a miserly bah humbugger who doesn’t believe in the spirit of Christmas until he is visited by three spirits—the Ghosts of Christmas Past, Present and Future—and finds salvation in their terrifying visions.   

“A Christmas Carol” is Zemeckis’s third attempt at creating a film using motion capture—filming the actors and using their motions as a template to create a computer generated film—following “Polar Express” and “Beowulf.” “Polar Express” was meant to be a heart warming Christmas tale but exposed the problem with Zemeckis’s technique—dead CGI eyes. The weirdly lifeless animation was creepy, akin to a Christmas story performed by zombies. “Beowulf” was an improvement but like “A Christmas Carol” there are still kinks to be worked out. Chief among them is: Why bother with this at all?

On the plus side the CGI allows for camera moves that would otherwise be impossible—endless dolly shots through a Dickensian cityscape for example—and the Ghost of Christmas Present death scene is a spectacular scene of gothic creepiness, and is actually enhanced by the use of computer animation. On the minus side the Ghost of Christmas Future, a stand-out in the 1951 Alastair Sim version, is reduced to a show-offy platform for Zemeckis’s 3-D CGI magic.

My main complaint though, is the medium itself. Much of the animation looks great—the texture of Scrooge’s leather chair for instance—but there are enough artificial looking things—the flame in the fireplace or the steam from people’s mouths—that remind us that we’re watching flashing binary code and little else. Some of the characters are well animated but the work is inconsistent, occasionally looking photo realistic, but often not. Unlike live action or even hand drawn animation, there’s nothing that feels organic about motion capture, so the moments that are supposed to strike an emotional chord—like young Ebenezer dancing with his beautiful bride to be, or old Scrooge watching Bob Cratchit’s family deal with the loss of Tiny Tim—have little resonance.  

Whatever impact the movie has, and it does have the occasional moment that engages not only the eye but the heart, could have just as easily achieved with a live action cast.     

Perhaps Zemeckis should have taken the lead from one of the more famous lines from the story, “Mankind was my business,” and made the movie’s business more about mankind and less about technology.

AMELIA: 1 STAR
 
The best way to describe “Amelia”, the new Hilary Swank film about the highflying life of aviatrix Amelia Earhart, is to call it old fashioned. Set in the decade leading up to her fateful rendezvous with destiny in 1937 on her failed attempt to circumnavigate the globe, the movie seems to pay homage not only to Earhart but also to the films of that era.
 
The film lifts off with a meeting between publisher George Putnam (Richard Gere) and the then unknown Amelia (Swank). He’s looking for the next Lindberg, only this time a woman, to make a transatlantic flight and then reap the rewards of the fame that will follow. The first flight is a public relations success, but for Earhart, who didn’t actually fly the plane it’s a hollow victory. She becomes America’s Sweetheart of the Skies, famous for something she didn’t do—she didn’t actually pilot the plane—and becomes determined to stand up for female pilots and make the journey across the ocean again, solo. In time she makes the flight, becomes the world’s most famous woman and navigates not one, but two romances. The film ends with her doomed flight.
 
“Amelia” is a big, handsome picture with some great aerial photography and a couple of dramatic moments, but does little more than skim over the life of one of the more interesting characters of the twentieth century. Both personally and professionally Earhart was a rebel and a groundbreaker in a man’s world, but the film is content to serve up   clichéd motivational successories instead of real insight.
 
“Amelia” could have been many things. It could have been a study of the feminist ideal. It could have been a look at the beginnings of public relations and media celebrity. It could have been an exciting films about those magnificent women in their flying machines, but instead it a snoozy look at a woman forced to utter platitudes like, “I want to fly that beautiful bird as far as it will take me.”
 
This will not be Hilary Swank’s third Oscar win.
 
She’s working it here, putting on a clipped Kansas accent and trying to inhabit the character, but the script (and an unfortunate hairdo that makes her face look three feet long) aren’t doing here any favors. Her performance is a throwback to the kind of performances given by Rosalind Russell and Ginger Rogers in Amelia’s day. To use the vernacular of the time she’s “spunky.” Spunky, but not that interesting.
She’s playing opposite Richard Gere and honestly, is there a less interesting leading man working today? He rocks the 1930s clothes and doesn’t bump into the furniture but he and Swank have zero chemistry.
 
There is an interesting movie to be made from Amelia Earhart’s life. In fact a few interesting movies have already been made about her life, but “Amelia” isn’t one of them. It’s well made, reverential to it’s subject and perhaps, most excitingly, is possibly the best cure for insomnia since the discovery of St. John’s Wart.

ASTRO BOY: 0 STARS

It appears I have an Astro Boy sized hole in my pop culture knowledge. The character dates back to 1952 when Manga God Osamu Tezuka created the robot boy character in print before spinning him off to a successful Japanese television program in the 1960s. Since then he’s been featured in several more television shows, was listed on Empire magazine's 50 Greatest Comic Characters list and was named Japan's envoy for overseas safety. I didn’t know any of that, and after spending a grueling ninety minutes with the new Astro Boy film, I’m not interested in learning any more.

The new film is one of those dreaded North American reworkings of Asian pop culture. In it a brilliant scientist, Dr. Tenma (voiced by Nicolas Cage), loses his son to a tragic accident. Unable to cope with his loss he builds a robot in the image of his late son. Tenma doesn’t realize how creepy an idea this is until it is too late and the young robot feelings of his own. Unable to please his creator / father Astro Boy (Freddie Highmore)—complete with an astounding array of robot abilities—sets off to make his own mark on the world. Searching for acceptance he falls in with a crowd of teenage anti-robot mercenaries led by Cora (Kristen Bell), does battle with Ham Egg (Nathan Lane), a PT Barnum type who forces bots to battle one another, before returning home to save the day and hopefully earn the respect of his father.   

I was paid to watch Astro Boy and as such had to stay through to the end. If not, however, for the pay cheque and professional ethics it would have taken a seat belt to keep me in my chair through to the closing credits. Astro Boy’s deadly mix of bad writing, tepid action and uninspired voice work sinks the film despite the character’s long and storied history.

Voices for animated features are taped individually and then, through the magic of editing and sound design, spliced together to sound seamless—except in the case of Astro Boy. The voices seem like individual components and even when they do meld together there is no spark. Nicolas Cage, in particular, seems to be doing some pay cheque acting here, sounding as though he is reading from a telephone book and not a script.    

The visuals follow suit. Dull video game-esque renderings may amuse the eye of very young viewers, but anyone who laid eyeballs on Up, Kung Fu Panda or any of the other more recent interesting animated films will be under whelmed.

Astro Boy is a disappointment. It may entertain tots but older fans of the character—and fans of good animated films—beware.

A SERIOUS MAN: 3 STARS

“A Serious Man,” though being billed as a comedy, may be the bleakest film the Coen Brothers have ever made. And remember these are the guys who once stuffed someone in a wood chipper on film. The story of a man who thought he did everything right, only to be jabbed in the eye by the fickle finger of fate is a tragiomedy that shows how ruthless real life can be.

This loosely plotted slice of life involves two very bad weeks in the life of physics professor Larry Gopnick (stage actor Michael Stuhlbarg). In an escalating series of events his life is turned upside down. His neighbor is unfriendly, his son complains nonstop about the poor TV reception, his wife announces she’s leaving him for another man and the committee who decides if he will get tenure at his university has been receiving uncomplimentary letters about him. As if that wasn’t enough, his deeply depressed brother is sleeping on the couch.

Set in 1967 Minnesota “A Serious Man” is apparently a thinly veiled look at the early life of the Coens, and if this is true, they deserve the designation of tortured artists. This film is darkly funny, but a celebration of life it ain’t.

Stuhlbarg does award level work turning Larry’s misery into a compelling and fully formed portrayal of a man in torment and the film is beautifully made but this is one of the quirkier efforts—example: there’s an old Rabbi who spouts Jefferson Airplane lyrics—from the filmmaking brothers. Plotting is virtually nonexistent and the abrupt ending makes “No Country Fore Old Men’s” unexpected finale seem wordy and drawn out.

Gopnick is portrayed as a good man, someone who has always done the right thing for his family and faith but reaped none of the benefits. His kids are indifferent to him, his wife openly contemptuous and he doesn’t appear to be on the fast track at work and that’s what makes “A Serious Man” so bleak. Nobody said life was fair but Larry Gopnick never gets a break, which, I suppose is the point of the film, but the futility of life message, while thought provoking, is a serious downer.

ALL ABOUT STEVE: 3 STARS

In “All About Steve” Sandra Bullock is Mary a nerdy cruciverbalist—that’s crosswords constructor to you and me—for a local newspaper in Sacramento. She’s socially awkward, lives at home with her parents, and has an editor who tells her to try and “be normal.” In addition, she’s terminally single and has poor impulse control but, hey, she looks like Sandra Bullock so life isn’t all bad.

Her parents, in a bid to one day have grandchildren, set her up on a blind date with Mark (Bradley Cooper), a cameraman with CCN. She says as long as he isn’t “expressly hideous” she’ll give it a go. Turns out something about Steve brings out the animal in Mary but when she says “I’m going to eat you like a mountain lion” four minutes into their first date he ditches her, saying that he has to leave town for work. She’s smitten—some would say obsessed—and goes off the deep end, handing in a crossword to the paper with the title All About Steve. Sample clue: What do Steve’s lips taste like? Answer: Mint Explosion. She gets fired from her job, which of course, gives her the time to hit the road and follow Steve from town to town as he covers news stories in Texas and Oklahoma. His feelings about her change—he realizes there IS something about Mary—however, when she becomes a news story.

“All About Steve” is kind of a light hearted “Fatal Attraction”—without the boiling rabbit. It’s a screwball comedy where the action is kick started by a misunderstanding. To that list of genres road trip flick and social commentary and you begin to maybe get the idea that this movie covers a lot of ground. Thematically it’s all over the place, but the one element that holds it together is its star Sandra Bullock.

Bullock isn’t playing her usual rom com character here; instead she builds a broad caricature of a chatterbox intellectual, which in the wrong hands could have been really annoying. It’s the kind of role Renee Zellweger would have rendered unwatchable, but Bullock, though sheer charm, pulls it off.

She’s cute. When she tries to slide down a banister, fresh out of the shower, still wrapped in a towel, with predictable results, it’s not a great gag, but she sells it, just like she sells every other silly moment in this kind of inconsequential but entertaining movie.  

It’s all a bit harebrained—from the crossword metaphors and the “just accept people for what they are” moral—but a little charm goes a long way and Bullock is nothing if not charming.

The film also takes an unexpected—and not entirely believable—dramatic turn near the end that brings up echoes of Billy Wilder’s “Ace in the Hole,” and points an accusatory finger at the 24 hour news cycle that turns stories into sensationalism. It’s a bit heavy handed but since the rest of the film is feather light it balances out.

ADAM: 3 ½ STARS

Near the end of Adam the titular character (Hugh Dancy) says, “I’m not Forrest Gump you know.” True enough. Adam may have Asperger's Syndrome, but director / screenwriter Max Mayer has avoided most of the sentimental pitfalls that make the Tom Hanks movie an exercise in how not to make a movie about someone who is not “neurotypical.” Most, but not all.

The story begins just as Adam’s father has passed away. His lonely life of routine—he eats the same thing everyday and has a phobia of change—is shaken when a pretty young woman named Beth (Rose Byrne) becomes his upstairs neighbor. The two begin a romance, even though Adam, because of his Asperger's Syndrome, is unable to express his feelings. Nonetheless they create a connection; a fragile bond that stressed by her family and his job woes.

Adam had the potential to be a maudlin movie about a doomed romance but instead is a smart story about obstacles that get in the way of fulfilling relationships. To convincingly drive the story home Mayer has cast two very appealing actors in the lead roles.

Dancy has the showier part, but where he could have played Adam as simply deadpan he instead manages to bring the character to life, taking a role that could have been a collection of obsessions and awkward social interactions and molding it into a real character the audience cares about.

Dancy may have the flashier role, but Byrne brings heart to the film. Her take on Beth is simple and sweet. In a raw, but understated performance she plays a woman who is searching for truth in her life. After a complicated romantic relationship and difficulties with her father she finds Adam’s honesty—it’s a trait of his Asperger's—refreshing. His bluntness can be difficult at times, but one of the pleasures of the movie is watching the way she learns to communicate with Adam, becoming skilled at saying exactly what she means with no room for interpretation. It’s a complicated dance between the two, but one that is played for real and with little sentimentality.

Little sentiment, that is, until the end. Mayer breaks some of the rules of the usual made in Manhattan romantic film, but chooses to close with a sequence that undermines the tone established in the rest of the film. It’s not a deal breaker, the rest of the movie is too good to be ruined by a schmaltzy ending, but I would have preferred a coda that was more in line with the film’s first ninety minutes.   

FORWARD: I’ve never written a forward to a review before, but because of the large amount of mail I have received about this movie I felt it necessary. In response to the people who have e-mailed me with long tracts regarding Dan Brown’s book, the movie, The Illuminati and the veracity of the book, I point you toward the Vatican newspaper L'Osservatore Romano review of the film. They described Angels and Demons as “harmless entertainment which hardly affects the genius and mystery of Christianity.” Calling the movie “a gigantic and smart commercial operation” the review noted that it is filled with historical inaccuracies but went on to suggest that one could make a game of pointing out all of the film’s historical mistakes. I’m with them. This is a movie, not a history lesson, so there is nothing in my review about the historical accuracy of the film. It’s simply a review of a big summer thriller that a lot of people are interested in.

ANGELS AND DEMONS: 2 ½ STARS

Harvard Professor Robert Langdon (Tom Hanks) is back in action. Three years after he uncovered the complicated personal life of Jesus Christ in The Da Vinci Code he’s once again using his knowledge of symbology to unravel the mystery of a secret brotherhood called the Illuminati and prevent a terrorist act against the Vatican. What’s more, he’ll do it all in just one night. Sounds thrilling, yes?

Unfortunately it isn’t.   

Most of the elements from Dan Brown’s bestselling book Angels and Demons are in place, although several characters have been omitted and story lines reconfigured and condensed in the name of brevity.

Summarizing the story, however, brings a simplicity that sucks most of the mystery and colorful details contained in the novel from the movie. Langdon seems to be able to unravel clues, some hundreds of years old, with such ease that Angels and Demons becomes simply an elaborate game of connect-the-dots rather than a fully fleshed out story.
 
It’s a big summer movie, so we shouldn’t really expect sophisticated North by Northwest style intrigue, but since the suspense lacks the action should take up the slack. Unfortunately though, while A&D wants to be an ecclesiastical National Treasure, it contains few of the thrills of those popular Nic Cage movies. For example, one long action sequence in the Vatican Archives is about as breathtaking as you would image an action scene set in a library to be.
Director Ron Howard fills the screen with handsome images of Rome but every time the movie works up a head of steam Robert “Mr. Exposition” Langdon steps in with a long winded explanation of the history behind the various clues and symbols that sucks much of the movie’s momentum.

Angels and Demons isn’t as talky as Da Vinci Code, but its fatal flaw is the Langdon character. In the books he is the historical tour guide who provides the facts to bind the story together. On film, however, he comes across as a windbag who simply supports the story instead of adding to it.

That being said, Angels and Demons is a vast improvement over The Da Vinci Code. The pace has been ramped up and the running time chopped but even though these Dan Brown adaptations are Hanks and Howard’s most successful movies, they aren’t their best. If they choose to work together again I hope it’s in Splash 2 or Apollo 13: Off to Mars! and not another tepid Langdon adventure. 

ANVIL: THE STORY OF ANVIL: 4 STARS

The easy description of Anvil: The Story of Anvil is to call it the real-life Spinal Tap. The story of the heaviest heavy metal band you’ve never heard of bears a strong resemblance to the legendary fictional band, but it is so much more than that. It is a story of passion, of trying to beat the odds, of friendship, of hope against hope. It’s also quite funny and the music will peel the paint off theatre walls.

Steve "Lips" Kudlow and Robb Reiner met when they were just fourteen years old and have been making music together ever since. Now middle aged and road weary they have day jobs but haven’t given up on their rock and roll dreams. The Toronto based band released one of the heaviest albums in metal history, 1982’s Metal on Metal, which influenced a generation musicians including Metallica, Slayer and Anthrax, but unlike the bands they inspired Anvil’s career never took flight.

Directed by former roadie (and now Hollywood screenwriter and director) Sacha Gervasi, it’s a film that digs deeper than VH1’s Behind the Music series to fully expose the life of a working band, but the thing that really separates Anvil from the rest of the music bio pack is the more universal story of people pursuing their personal passion in the face of ostensibly overwhelming odds. The persistence and indomitable spirit of Kudlow and Reiner turn them into unlikely heroes whether you’re a metal fan or not.

Let’s face it, heavy metal is ripe for parody but Gervasi takes pains not to patronize or poke fun at the band. He treats them respectfully and in doing so has made the best rock ‘n roll documentary since Metallica: Some Kind of Monster.

ADVENTURELAND: 2 ½ STARS

Adventureland is one of those movies in which the setting—the time and place—are more interesting than the characters that populate it. Set in a rundown amusement park during the Regan years, it’s a coming of age story of James (The Squid and the Whale’s Jesse Eisenberg), a sensitive teen whose plans of moving to New York to attend grad school at Columbia are derailed when his father is downsized and money becomes tight. To get out of Pittsburgh and his stultifying suburban life he needs to get a job. Trouble is he has no skills, just a degree in Renaissance studies and, “Unless someone wants help restoring a fresco,” he says, “I'm screwed.” He eventually lands a gig at Adventureland handing out stuffed animals to the few carnival goers lucky enough to beat the amusement park’s rigged games.

The characters at the park seem like an interesting bunch. There’s the part-time musician, womanizer and maintenance man Connell (Ryan Reynolds), who claims to have jammed with Lou Reed, even though he refers to one of Reed’s best known songs as Shed A Little Love instead of Satellite of Love; his best friend from grade four Tommy Frigo (Matt Bush) who wears a t-shirt that says “I’m Frigo! Kapeesh!!” and has the unsettling habit of punching James below the belt two or three times a day; the pipe-smoking Joel (Martin Starr), a self loathing Gogol obsessed intellectual who characterizes their jobs as the “work of pathetic morons” and Em (Kirsten Stewart) a pretty but dour tomboy who favors baggy Lou Reed t-shirts.

It’s an interesting canvas but director Greg Mottola, who based the screenplay on his own experiences of working at the real-life Adventureland, doesn’t bring the same kind of zip to the situations or characters as he did in his last movie, the sublime Superbad.

Adventureland breathes the same air as its predecessor but is much different in tone. The goofy guys in Superbad are gone, replaced by James, a young boy who early on makes a mixed tape for Em of his favorite bummer songs, including Lou Reed’s doleful Pale Blues Eyes, which sets the movie’s downbeat tone.

This is not to say there aren’t humorous moments. Bill Hader shines as the larger-than-life park manager and James’s story about his mom reading his diary—he had to start writing it in Italian to throw her off—is hilarious but the overall tone is sweet rather than funny.

As James Eisenberg is appealing enough, but I’m guessing after the success of Twilight this movie will find an audience based on the popularity of co-star Kristen Stewart. Since playing Bella in the vampire franchise she’s become a hot item, and with her naturally down turned mouth she does sullen like no other young actress working today.

Adentureland, with it’s carefully picked 80s soundtrack and close attention to period details is an interesting time capsule of the decade of greed from a teenager’s perspective. I just wish I had cared more about the characters and less about the set decoration.

AUSTRALIA: 3 ½ STARS

Australia, the new film from Moulin Rouge director Baz Luhrmann is big. It’s an epic with an ambitious running time of 165 minutes that covers a lot of ground; it’s part romance, part western, part thriller, part war drama and part civil rights story. Luhrmann has superimposed the best bits of The African Queen, Gone with the Wind and Giant against the majestic backdrop of the Australian Outback.

Set in World War II era Australia the story begins when plucky English aristocrat Lady Sarah Ashley (Nicole Kidman) impulsively decides to leave her pampered life in the UK to travel to Australia to check up on her husband who has been managing a large cattle ranch deep in the Outback. What was planned as a quick trip soon changes into a life altering journey as she finds she is a widow about to inherit a failing cattle business on a million acre ranch. With the help of Drover (Hugh Jackman), a rough-and-tumble Outback cowboy, she drives 1,500 head of cattle across the brutal Outback landscape to the trading town of Darwin. That would be enough story for most movies, but not an ambitious one like Australia. Once in Darwin Sarah and Drover must contend with their deepening feelings for one another, racism, their responsibility for a young farm worker of mixed race—a “creamy” the locals call him—named Nullah (Brandon Walters) and on top of it all, World War II.    

It takes a big movie to introduce a wild bombing scene, complete with aerial acrobatics, in the last hour and not have it overshadow what has come before. When the Japanese bomb the town of Darwin Luhrmann’s camera dances through the sequence and it’s a show stopper but it doesn’t bring the movie to a halt because Luhrmann has carefully set up the story to be about the people and their relationships rather than the bombast of the bigger set pieces.

As I said, it’s big, but the intimate aspects of the story shine through—that’s Sarah Ashley’s feelings for both Drover and Nullah, her unofficially adopted son; Drover’s realization that he can’t live in the past and Nullah’s need to reconcile his heritage with his new life are the focus of the story. The rest is set dressing.

Kidman does a nice job transforming her character from prissy English aristocrat to plucky Australian cowgirl, and actually earns a few laughs along the way. She’s more naturally funny here than she ever has been in the alleged comedies she’s made in the past. Jackman, who has clearly been spending some time in the gym, plays a convincing cowboy. The most magnetic performance comes from newcomer Brandon Walters as Nullah. It’s a tricky role, one that requires the young actor to portray a mix of realism and the mysticism so crucial to his Aborigine culture.  

It’s not all sunshine and light however. Nullah’s Jar Jar Binks-esque patois grates after a while and sparks don’t exactly fly between the two leads but overall Australia is a stylish film with old-fashioned storytelling that should lend itself to multiple viewings. (Also note: No dingos were harmed in the making of this motion picture.)

APPALOOSA: 2 ½ STARS

Are there two more stronger, silenter types in modern movies than Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen? Each of these actors are a throw back to the days when cowboy stars were manly men who mean what they say and only say what they mean and nothing else.

Harris (who also directs) and Mortensen are gunmen hired to bring law and order to the City of Appaloosa, New Mexico. Their main target is cop killer Randall Bragg (Jeremy Irons), but their job is complicated when a flirtatious woman (Renée Zellweger) comes between them.

Appaloosa comes a year after 3:10 to Yuma and The Assassination of Jesse James gave the western genre a shot in the arm. It’s closer in spirit to the former than the latter—meaning that it is a straightforward genre piece that if it had been made 50 years ago would have starred Alan Ladd and Randolph Scott. Like Clint Eastwood’s The Unforgiven, Appaloosa is a great Western cow opera about men looking inside themselves to discover the true essence of their lives. It doesn’t have the gravitas of Eastwood’s classic, and the economy of dialogue between the leads—there are conversational gaps you could drive a truck through—gets a bit tiresome after a while, but Appaloosa should satisfy viewers who long for the days when men wore chaps and spittoons were a welcome decorative addition to any home. 

ALL YOU NEED IS LOVE DVD BOX SET: 4 STARS

All You Need is Love is an epic 14 hour look at the history of popular music from BBC director Tony Palmer. Spread over 5 discs the documentary series originally aired on the BBC between 1976 and 1980 and pieces together the history of rock and roll from its roots through to the end of the drug fuelled seventies. It stops just short of covering punk rock, so there’s no Sid Vicious, but it does a definitive job of covering the years leading up to and including classic rock’s golden age. That means there’’s lots of footage of bands destroying their instruments on stage, most notably The Who and Keith Emerson who undertakes to turn a Hammond Organ into matchsticks in front of an audience.

Palmer shot over 1000 hours of interviews and concert footage to create this series, and presents a scholarly, yet vibrant and complete look at the birth of rock and roll. 

ALVIN AND THE CHIPMUNKS: 1 STAR

Christmas will soon be here and with it comes the usual assortment of movies that seem to exist only to create a demand for stuffed toys, talking pens and soundtracks. First out of the gate this year is Alvin and the Chipmunks, starring Jason “My Name is Earl” Lee as a struggling songwriter who discovers three talented chipmunks—Alvin, Simon and Theodore—living in his house and rides their little furry coattails to the top of the music charts.

Brought to you by the director of Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties, Alvin and the Chipmunks is as good as you would imagine a movie from the director of Garfield: A Tail of Two Kitties to be.

A compact ninety minutes, it has the prerequisite
”heartwarming” family values message and is jam packed with all the stuff calculated to make kids laugh—loads of slapstick, poo jokes and goofy songs—the trouble is, the audience of kids I saw it with wasn’t laughing much. That’s because there’s nothing clever or interesting about Alvin and the Chipmunks. It’s aimed directly at kids, but feels more like the target is their parent’s pocketbook. The entire movie feels like a big-budget commercial for Chipmunk’s merchandise; a way to influence little Johnny’s Christmas wish list. 

It’s ironic because the movie comes with a stern anti-consumerist message. In one of the most obvious postmodern examples of life imitating art, the big-screen Chipmunks are exploited by their evil manager who tries to suck every dollar out of their popularity by marketing Chipmunk’s dolls and other products. It all feels a bit hypocritical.

Alvin and the Chipmunks will likely do well at the box office trading on its family appeal and the nostalgic goodwill generated by the name, but despite its hip cast—Jason Lee, Justin Long, David Cross and Jesse McCartney—it is little more than a holiday money grab.

ATONEMENT: 3 ½ STARS

Not since Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone has there been a novel so faithfully modified for the big screen. Atonement, adapted from the popular 2001 novel by British author Ian McEwan—sometimes called Britain’s greatest living novelist—perfectly captures the tone of the novel reproducing many scenes and much of the dialogue directly from the book.

Set in pre-World War II England Atonement begins as an idyll. A rich family with two daughters, the fetching and flirty Cecelia (Keira Knightley) and 13-year-old Briony (Saoirse Ronan), are vacationing at their rural country home. The handsome son of the family’s housekeeper Robbie Turner (James McAvoy) is the object of affection for both girls, but he only has eyes for Cecelia. When Briony catches the two in a passionate embrace she is overcome by jealousy. To keep the young lovers apart she impulsively comes up with a childish, but devastating plan to accuse him of a crime he didn’t commit.

There are serious repercussions to her impulsive of jealousy and years later she must atone for her actions.

Leading the cast is James McAvoy in a role that should catapult him to the ranks of a-list stardom. His emotionally rich take on Robbie follows the character from youthful innocence to the hardened edge of someone who was forced to grow up too quickly. There’s a range here he has never displayed before and it is one of the best performances of the year. Knightley—who looks like she was born to play 30s era flappers—is her usual charismatic self and brings much sexual energy to her scenes with McAvoy. And yes, for fans of the book, the green dress is very much on display.

Atonement is an epic tale disguised as a human drama. At its heart it is a love story, but through the trio of main characters—Robbie, Cecelia and Briony—it also tells us of the class structure of mid-century England, how deceit and remorse can ruin a life and how, sometimes, love can win out. Directed with raw power and compassion by Joe Wright, the movie is chock full of big ideas but never loses sight of the romance that is at the core of the film.

AMAZING JOURNEY: THE STORY OF THE WHO DVD: 3 STARS

Unlike The Kid’s Are Alright, the seminal 1978 Who documentary which was basically a pop art pastiche of clips and performance pieces strung together, Amazing Journey appears to have been made by sensible people. It doesn’t have the raw rock and roll energy of the first film, but what it lacks in “in-your-face” bravado it more than makes up for in biographical detail and rare footage.

Tracing the history of The Who from their humble beginnings as The Detours and The High Numbers through to their early successes as the go-to band for London’s hip young Mods, the film takes pains to explain the genesis of the band and the reasons why they became successful. There is nothing much new in the band’s overall biographical information, but what is new is the perspective of guitarist Pete Townsend and singer Roger Daltrey, the two surviving members of the original four piece combo. 

The pair who once sang, “I hope I die before I get old,” are now rock’s elder statesmen, able to look back on their lives, careers and relationships with their late band mates with a kind of perspective that is often tinged with humor but underlined with a sense of melancholy. When they speak of wild man drummer Keith Moon’s death by misadventure at the age 32 there is more than nostalgia involved, but a real sense of loss that comes from years of reflection on what went wrong.

If that makes the film sound mournful, it isn’t. This was one of the best live bands in the world, bar none, and the footage in Amazing Journey, starting with a never-before-seen clip of the band, still called The High Numbers, from 1964 and culminating with a an on-stage performance from 2007 reveals a band who burned brightest when their was an audience to entertain. Of particular interest is the movie’s spotlight (more fully explored in the excellent extras) on Keith Moon’s drumming. Best known as an offstage character that drove Roll Royces into swimming pools, the movie pulls the focus back to his musicianship, reminding us that his legacy isn’t in the path of destruction he left in hotel rooms all across the world, but the amazing sounds he created with his singular drumming ability.

Amazing Journey: The Story of The Who is probably best suited for Who fans, but people who only know the band as the guys who do the theme song for CSI will find a deeper appreciation for one of rock’s truly legendary groups.

AUGUST RUSH: 2 STARS

We’ve finally reached the tipping point where casting Robin Williams has officially become a liability. A case in point: August Rush is a perfectly acceptable modern fairy tale about an orphaned young boy (Charlie and the Chocolate Factory’s Freddie Highmore) who feels that his love of music will reunite him with his parents one day. It is a sweet idea, and Highmore with his sad eyes and apparent vulnerability is perfectly cast. If you buy into the idea that this neo-Oliver Twist could truly believe this airy-fairy idea about the magical power of music, then August Rush will work for you. Work for you, that is, until Robin Williams comes along with his Bono-wannabe hat and all his usual bluster and completely throws the movie off the rails. 

Keri Russell and Jonathan Rhys Meyers play Lyla and Louis, musicians from two different worlds. He’s a poor rock singer, she a rich cello prodigy. They meet on a rooftop overlooking NYC’s Washington Square Park, spend the night together and conceive a child. Her overbearing father conspires to keep them apart, and following a tragic car accident tells Lyla that the child was killed, while, in fact, secretly putting it up for adoption.

Eleven years later Lyla and Louis have moved on. She’s now a music teacher, unaware that her son is still alive; disillusioned he’s given up music completely. The child, convinced he can locate his parents, escapes the orphanage where he has grown up and makes off for the big city. He comes under the spell of a “musical Fagin” named Wizard (Robin Williams) who imparts new agey wisdom like “music is the harmonic connection between all living beings” and teaches the boy how to play the music that may eventually reunite him with his parents. 

You have to have a strong willingness to suspend your disbelief to buy into August Rush’s storyline, but if you can you’ll find lots here to like. Highmore is a charmer on screen, Russell and Meyers are the very definition of star-crossed and director Kirsten Sheridan gives the proceedings an agreeable fairy tale feel, but whenever Williams hits the screen it’s as though this fable’s Ogre has awoken to chew the scenery and destroy any of the good will the movie had already accrued. He’s so annoying, and in the later half of the movie, so unnecessary to the plot, that the term “over-the-top” scarcely does him justice.

August Rush is a well-meaning but clichéd film with a nice message and decent music, but is almost done in by its casting.

APOCALYPTO: 4 STARS

It’s easy to find reasons not to go see the new Mel Gibson film. His transformation from lovable leading man to movie mogul has been rocky, marked by incidents of anti-Semitism and strange behavior. In discussing Apocalypto I’m choosing to put aside the filmmaker’s controversial behavior and file this review under “Judge the Art not the Artist.”

Apocalypto shares some of the characteristics of Gibson’s last film, The Passion of the Christ—the violence, the dialogue in a long extinct language and exacting period detail—but most of all it offers up the same passion. Gibson takes the conventions of a Hollywood action movie and transports them back to pre-Columbian Central America with gusto. Instead of a standard car chase a jaguar tracks the hero. Gone is the urban jungle replaced by a real one. Apocalypto really is a thrill ride from frame one until the end.

The film starts with an ominous quote from Will Durant: “A great civilization is not conquered from without until it has destroyed itself from within.” The internal rot that quote refers to is a tribe of vicious Mayans who pillage villages, destroying entire communities before kidnapping the survivors to use as human sacrifices. One strong willed captive, Jaguar Paw, narrowly escapes a grisly sacrificial death and is pursued through the jungle by a team of killers hell bent on capturing him and “wearing his skin as a suit.”

The bulk of the film is taken up by the chase as Jaguar Paw races to return to his homeland, rescue his pregnant wife and son who were left hiding is a giant crater and avoid capture.

It’s a bloody and nail-biting sequence. Gibson doesn’t shy away from the violence—there are decapitations complete with rolling head point-of-view shots, a nasty jaguar attack that could have been featured on When Animals Go Crazy and lots of cutting and jabbing followed by spurting blood. It’s strong stuff, but in amongst the blood and guts is a strong eco message and some timely political comment about leaders who lie (Rumsfeld anyone?) and don’t always act in he best interests of their people.

ALPHA DOG: 2 ½ STARS

I don’t need a calendar to tell me when January has arrived. I have a special sense that has nothing to do with the weather or the Christmas trees left on the curb. I can tell by the movies that get released. It’s the dog days of the movie biz, a time when movie studios empty out their closets and quietly release oddball movies.

Some are so bad that they don’t actually get released… they escape, while most fall into the ho-hum category and would make better rentals than theatrical releases. Such a movie is Alpha Dog that features pop star Justin Timberlake as a tough guy who lives with his father.

Directed by Nick Cassavetes, who romanced audiences with The Notebook a couple of years ago, Alpha Dog is based on the true story of a young thug with the unlikely name of Jesse James Hollywood. Hollywood and cohorts—all renamed for the movie—impulsively kidnap the brother of a psychopathic drug runner who owes them money. Without a firm plan the kidnapping doesn’t go as planned and panic sets in.

It’s an odd little movie. One that seems to on one hand condemn the thug lifestyle portrayed by these suburban wannabes while at the same time exploiting it by throwing in many scenes of violence and nudity. Like the great cheesy exploitation flicks of the 50s and 60s Alpha Dog tries to portray a certain kind of morality, while offering up plenty of examples of how NOT to behave. It makes for kind of a schizophrenic viewing experience.

Also odd is Cassavetes’s decision to frame the movie as a documentary. It starts with an interview with the main character’s drug dealer father (well played by Bruce Willis), and unnecessarily flits back and forth between the story and the documentary elements. The story stands on its own and doesn’t need these intrusions that don’t really accomplish much except to take the viewer out of the story.

But no one is going to see this movie for its morality or style choices. The audience for this movie, and the reason, I suspect that it didn’t go straight to video is Justin Timberlake. His big screen debut, Edison, only earned a limited release in Europe and a half-hearted DVD release in the rest of the world, but that was before his last album went stratospheric and his relationship with Cameron Diaz became hot gossip. I’d bet Universal is banking on his audience to put bums in seats for this movie.

Timberlake acquits himself well enough in the movie, although as I watched I couldn’t help but wonder why he seems to be drawn to roles that seem so inappropriate for him. In Edison he played a tough guy reporter, here he plays a suburban wannabe gangster who has probably watched Scarface one too many times. He’s a charismatic performer, so he gets by in both these films relatively unscathed, but next time I’d like to see him play toward his strengths and perhaps do a romantic comedy or at least something with a lighter touch.

ARTHUR AND THE INVISIBLES: 3 STARS

Arthur and the Invisibles is a whimsical kid’s movie that blends live action with animation. It’s a story about a young boy (Freddie Highmore from Charlie and the Chocolate Factory) with a vivid imagination left to live on a Connecticut farm with his grandmother (Mia Farrow) while his parents search for work in the big city. The boy passes his time reading his missing grandfather’s diaries and daydreaming about the older man’s adventures in deepest Africa with two tribes—one giant, one small, known as the Minimoys.

When an evil real estate developer tries to foreclose on his grandmother’s land Arthur hatches a plan to use his grandfather’s papers and maps to uncover treasure buried on the property. With just 48 hours before bulldozers raze the house Arthur follows his grandfather’s instructions, shrinks himself to microscopic size and enters the world of the Minimoys to search for the treasure.

Here the movie gains some steam. Insects are as big as airplanes and one Rastafarian Minimoy sounds an awful lot like Snoop Dogg. Arthur, now equipped with a shock of white hair that makes him look more like Billy Idol than a superhero falls for a princess voiced by Madonna, does battle with a bad guy whose name no one dares utter and finds out why his grandfather mysteriously disappeared.

While it’s a relief to find a computer-animated movie that isn’t about talking animals on a quest to get home / back to Africa or fractured fairy tales Arthur and the Invisibles only delivers up to a point. A little over-long at 2 hours, the movie is exciting during its chase and action scenes but borrows a little too heavily from familiar fare like The Wizard of Oz and even Honey, I Shrunk the Kids to feel completely fresh.

THE ASTRONAUT FARMER: 3 ½ STARS

I think Billy Bob Thornton is one of the best actors working today. He too often falls back on his comfortable grumpy-drunk-guy persona in movies like Bad News Bears and Bad Santa, but when he breaks free of his tried and true tricks the results can be impressive. In the new movie from filmdom’s only twin co-directing siblings, The Polish Brothers, Thornton hands in a moving and inspirational performance as a man with his head quite literally in the clouds.

Charlie Farmer (Thornton) is an engaging eccentric, an inspirational American folk hero who won’t let anything stand between him and his dreams. A former NASA employee, he had to leave the astronaut program to run his family’s farm after the death of his father. An engineer by trade, he ran the cattle farm by day and by night built a giant rocket ship in his barn. Framer may have left NASA but his dreams of visiting outer space didn’t stop there. Farmer, his wife, (another supportive wife role for Virginia Madsen), and children become media darlings when the FBI swoop down on his operation, looking for WMDs and leak the story to the press.  

The Astronaut Farmer works on several levels. The Polish Brothers have stepped out from behind the art house veneer that informed their past work to make a film that has one foot in the mainstream, but doesn’t betray their roots. The movie is beautiful to look at, with a soft glow that feels timeless and nostalgic, but is also subversive.

When asked “Mr. Farmer, how do we know you aren't constructing a WMD?” by a NASA Committee Member, Farmer replies, “Sir, if I was building a weapon of mass destruction, you wouldn't be able to find it,” with a cutting charm that wouldn’t be out of place in Mr. Smith Goes to Washington.

The Astronaut Farmer is a warm family film that breathes new life into the hoary old “follow your dreams” storyline.

AMERICAN GANGSTER: 3 STARS

On paper American Gangster sounds like a home run. It stars two charismatic Oscar winners, re-teams Russell Crowe with his Gladiator director Ridley Scott and is written by the Oscar winning screenwriter behind Schindler’s List. That‘s all good right? Well, not exactly. Based on a true story—just like recent big winners Walk the Line, Ray and Capote—it is the kind of late-year release that seems almost guaranteed to garner Academy attention, but in reality American Gangster is less than the sum of its parts.

Denzel Washington plays Frank Lucas, the one-time driver for a Harlem mob boss who rises to the top of the drug world by flooding the streets of Manhattan with cheap, high grade heroin smuggled into the United States in the coffins of dead soldiers returning from Vietnam. He’s a dichotomy, bloodthirsty and ruthless, he also attends church every Sunday with his Mother.
 
On the other side of the street is Richie Roberts (Russell Crowe), a cop whose honesty makes him an outcast in his corrupt precinct. When his former partner dies from a drug overdose Roberts relentlessly devotes himself to ridding the streets of Lucas’s heroin.  
Inevitably their paths cross as their worlds become intertwined.
Scott takes his time with the story, laying it out over the course of 157 minutes. Length is not necessarily a bad thing as Roger Ebert once pointed out—“No good movie is too long,”—and many other crime dramas have epic running times—The Godfather is 175 minutes long, Goodfellas just slightly shorter at 145 minutes—and remained compelling right through to the end credits, but American Gangster feels like it is 157 minutes.

The difference between Scott’s movie and The Godfather or Goodfellas is that they were masterfully paced, blending the crime elements of the plot with carefully tailored stories of family life and the importance of loyalty. American Gangster tries for the same richness of story, but succeeds only in presenting a rambling first hour, cluttered with subplots and meaningless, although beautifully shot, scenes that add little to the overall story.

For instance, a fair amount of time is spent on Roberts’s troubled personal life and a drawn out custody battle. It struck me that the whole family drama aspect of Roberts’s life belonged in another movie. Excising that story thread from American Gangster could easily save half-an-hour and some wear and tear on our already strained backsides and bladders.

Sir Ridley puts some lipstick on this pig, tarting it up with great cinematography, nice attention to the 1970s period detail and well cast, although underused actors like Cuba Gooding Jr and Chiwetel Ejiofor, in supporting roles. For all its angels, however, American Gangster is simply too ambitious for its own good and is in need of a talented editor to bring out the important aspects of the story and snip the rest.

THE ASSASSINATION OF JESSE JAMES BY THE COWARD ROBERT FORD: 4 STARS

The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (hereafter known simply as TAJJBTCRF) is a beautifully ponderous revitalization of one of the screen’s most popular genres. It is a western, complete with six shooters, saloons and horses, but it has more to do with the elegiac westerns of the 1970s, movies like McCabe & Mrs. Miller and Heaven’s Gate than the recently released and action heavy 3:10 to Yuma.

TAJJBTCRF takes its time with the story of Robert Ford (Casey Affleck), the man whose obsession with fabled outlaw Jesse James (Brad Pitt) led to disillusionment, fear and ultimately the assassination referred to in the title. At 2 hours and 40 minutes TAJJBTCRF may seem overlong for the casual viewer, but the unhurried pace of the piece reveals many charms for those patient enough to sit through the whole thing.

Quiet and lyrical the movie is art house all the way. Beautifully photographed (on locations in Manitoba and Alberta) TAJJBTCRF focuses on character rather than action, trying to get a grip on why Ford shot James, not how. Through the intimate performances and narration we are given insight into the character’s motivations in a way that is usually absent from films featuring strong silent types.

Pitt shines as the conflicted Jesse James, a charismatic rebel who seems to come unwound as the film goes on, but it is the performance of Casey Affleck that steals the show. His sleepy-eyed take on Robert Ford, rife with a mix of insecurity and swagger is a star-making turn.

From the autumnal hues of the cinematography to the mournful soundtrack everything about TAJJBTCRF played in a minor chord, but despite the film’s hushed tone it quietly bristles with a sense of adventure and daring all too rare in mainstream film.

ACROSS THE UNIVERSE: 3 STARS

Blame Mama Mia.
 
Ever since Broadway producers figured out that nostalgia starved baby boomers would pay big bucks to see the songs of their youth reinterpreted for their old age, shows based on rock and pop songs have sprung up with the frequency of grey hairs on Grace Slick’s head.

We Will Rock You stitches together Queen songs, Jersey Boys is the story of The Four Seasons, illustrated with the band's top forty hits while Movin' Out is the best of Billy Joel with dancers and an orchestra. The latest classic rock catalogue to be pillaged is one of the most sacred of all—The Beatles. Taking her lead from Broadway, director Julie Taymor takes us on a Magical Mystery Tour of the tumultuous late 1960s with a soundtrack by Lennon and McCartney in the new film Across the Universe. No actual Beatles were harmed in the making of this story, but I imagine Beatles’ purists will feel hard done by.
 
Jude (Jim Sturgess) and Lucy (the amazing Evan Rachel Wood) are from different worlds. He's a dock worker in Liverpool who travels to America to find his estranged father; she's a rich kid from Ohio whose brother Max (Joe Anderson) and boyfriend are drafted and sent to Vietnam. When her boyfriend doesn’t come back she becomes involved in the anti-war movement and along the way finds new love with the visitor from England.

The music of The Beatles is no stranger to the big screen. In recent years the I Am Sam soundtrack brimmed with covers of Beatle tunes while Happy Feet, Kicking and Screaming and countless others have cannibalized the Beatles catalogue. The most famous use of their tunes is likely the film that Across the Universe’s producers would most like us to forget—the ghastly, yet tortuously enjoyable Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Heart's Club Band. Where that movie featured the likes of George Burns warbling For the Benefit of Mr. Kite, the new film has bona fide rock stars Joe Cocker and Bono making cameo appearances.
 
Across the Universe, it has to be said, doesn't look like any other movie you'll see this year. Taymor's trademarked visual sense is very much on display and will knock the eyeballs right out of your head. Colors pop, an Uncle Sam poster comes to life singing I Want You (She’s So Heavy) and football players bash one another in a hilariously over-the-top ballet of athletic grace. A draft induction scene is a virtuoso piece of filmmaking, and the song fragment She's So Heavy is so laden with metaphor it’s as subtle as a wallop from Maxwell’s fabled silver hammer.

Unfortunately the movie isn't nearly as interesting sonically as it is visually. Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge set the bar very high in its use of pop and rock, grafting together songs and genres into a unique aural landscape that gave the movie much of its punch and vigor.    Here the songs are laid out in a fairly straightforward manner. A gospel version of Let it Be is memorable, but many of the intpretations simply sound like Broadway fluff or, even worse, American Idol Does The Beatles!
 
The story lurches along, predictably, from one set piece to another, with no real purpose other than to give the exceptionally good looking cast a reason to burst into song. I'm still trying to figure out why the character of Prudence appears in the film other than to facilitate the singing of Dear Prudence. The underlying themes of the movie—the anti-war message and America's renewed image as the beacon of violent imperialism—are timely for sure, but get muddled in the trite story and the haze of boomerititus that infects every frame of the film.

Given the success of other recent boomer rock musicals, the familiar tunes of Across the Universe should be enough to please fans of musical theatre and first generation Beatles’s fans, but it is the film’s visual flair that’ll make an impression. 

A MIGHTY HEART: 4 STARS

A Mighty Heart dramatizes the manhunt launched in Pakistan when jihadists kidnapped Wall Street Journalist Daniel Pearl in January 2002.

Based on wife Mariane Pearl’s memoir of the same name, the story begins with Pearl and his pregnant wife traveling to Karachi to investigating a possible tie between “shoe bomber” Richard Reid and Sheikh Gilani. Despite repeated warnings to exercise caution and meet the Sheikh, who had connections with radical Islamic groups in the past, in a public place, Pearl is kidnapped and later brutally murdered.

The bulk of the film is Mariane Pearl’s account of the five week investigation that led up to her husband’s death. Call it CSI: Karachi, it is a police procedural with tension, excitement, but most of all, heart.

Director Michael Winterbottom’s gritty style and ever-moving camera gives the film a documentary feel and the sense of urgency of a current news story. Even though we know how the sad saga ends there is never a sense of resignation or inevitability to the story. It feels as though it is unraveling in real time, as if a news crew had unprecedented access to Pearl and the investigation. It’s harrowing, unvarnished stuff, but utterly compelling.

At the center of the film is a barely recognizable Angelina Jolie as Mariane. She is literally in disguise as Pearl’s wife—hair curled tight, minimal make-up and a French/Cuban accent—and leaves the well defined Angelina Jolie persona in the dressing room, handing in a forceful performance (maybe her best ever) that is sure to garner awards.  

A Mighty Heart is a demanding film. Unsentimental, yet heartfelt, it manages to deliver emotion and realism without a hint of manipulation on the filmmaker’s part.


   

ALL THE KING’S MEN: 2 STARS

The release of All the King’s Men is the kick-off to awards season. When the weather cools and the leaves start to turn the blockbusters and popcorn movies that clogged up the multiplexes in the summer make way for more serious-minded movies, the kind of movies that win awards.

All the King’s Men is perfect Oscar-bait. It’s based on a Pulitzer Prize winning novel by Robert Penn Warren, which was turned into Oscar’s Best Picture of 1949. The new version features a cast with no less than a dozen Oscar nominations and a few wins between them. That’s quite a pedigree. Too bad the movie doesn’t live up to its legacy.

Sean Penn plays Willie Stark, loosely based on Louisiana governor Huey P. Long. When we meet Willie he is a hick-town county treasurer who risks his job to fight corruption at Town Hall. When he reveals that a construction firm used bribery to land a contract to build a school, a school with a faulty fire escape that collapsed, killing three children, he becomes something of a folk hero. When he is approached to run for governor, he accepts, running on a “man of the people” platform that wins him favor with a large constituency that had never been considered before—rural farmers and landowners. His fiery speeches and populist politics win him the election, but his flamboyant style earns him many enemies in high places. It soon becomes clear that Willie is as corrupt and power hungry as the men he replaced.

The first hint that All the King’s Men is being positioned as an important movie with a capital “I” is the overwrought score by James Horner. This is big, orchestral film music in which violins swell as if heralding the second coming. It seems out of place, considering much of the film takes place in rural Louisiana. Perhaps a score that utilized Cajun and blues music might have been more appropriate. A few accordions, an old washboard and a swampy guitar would have created a sense of place and atmosphere that booming violins cannot.

But the music isn’t the only thing that seems overwrought. Sean Penn is a fine actor, but here he is so over-the-top it is as if he is acting in a different movie than the rest of the cast. He gives us Willie Stark in a vein-popping, arm-waving performance that suggests that maybe he should lay-off the Red Bull.

Next to his eye-popping performance the rest of the cast kind of disappears. Jude Law is serviceable as Stark’s right-hand man; Anthony Hopkins turns in one of his patented old codger performances, but Kate Winslet and Mark Ruffalo are both wasted in small roles that require little from either of them.

It pains me to thrash All the King’s Men because I think it is a movie that aspired to greatness, that tried to have something important to say, and Hollywood could really use more movies that aim high. But in the end All the King’s Men’s lofty aspirations simply make its failure so much more acute. 

THE ANT BULLY: 3 STARS

It’s been awhile since there’s been a good animated ant movie in the theatres. In 1998 there were two—Antz and A Bug’s Life—but ant lovers can rejoice as The Ant Bully comes to theatres today. Adapted from a kid’s book that the movie’s producer, Tom Hanks, used to read to his son, The Ant Bully is the story of a lonely ten-year-old boy who is bullied by the neighborhood kids so he takes out his frustrations on the only thing smaller than him—the ants in his yard. That is until the day the ants come up with a potion that cuts this anthropoid down to size—ant size. It’s kind of a Honey I Shrunk the Kids with insects.

Inventively animated—the director John A Davis seems to have taken his inspiration not from kid’s movies but from the great science fiction look of 1950’s films like The Day the Earth Stood Still—The Ant Bully features the standard moral lessons for kids about cooperation, equality and kindness, but sells those messages with a great deal of gentle humor.

The ant society is effectively compared and contrasted to the human world, displaying the differences in a hilarious scene featuring a firecracker that could be potentially devastating to the ants but makes barely a pop in the human world, and the similarities in the interpersonal relationships. The movie takes its first third to really get in gear, but with the voice work of Julia Roberts, Paul Giamatti, Nicolas Cage, Meryl Streep and Lily Tomlin it soon finds its footing.

Voice work aside the best reason to see this movie are the incredible visuals. The inner workings of the ant colony are particularly well realized, as are the incredible wasps, which look like high-tech aircrafts as much as insects.

A SCANNER DARKLY: 2 ½ STARS

In 1977 sci-fi writer Phillip K. Dick wrote a nightmarish novel about drug-fueled paranoia, Big Brother style government surveillance and personal rights based on his own experiences as a drug addict. Prolific director Richard Linklater has taken pains with this material, turning the counter culture A Scanner Darkly into an intriguingly entertaining animated movie.

At the base of the story is a highly addictive drug called Substance D, so named for causing "dumbness, despair, desertion and death". It appears that the government is weaning addicts off other drugs so they can then become hooked on the moneymaking Substance D, which the government controls the rights to. Caught in the web of the drug are the main characters, played by Keanu Reeves, Robert Downey Jr and Woody Harrelson.

The actors didn’t simply lend their voices to the film, as is the case with most traditional animation. In this case the entire movie was shot on video and then rotoscoped, a time-consuming process in which each live-action frame is painted by hand. The result is a lurid dreamscape that lends an appropriately surreal tone to the story. The look of the “scramble suit,” a psychedelic cloak that alters the wearer’s appearance, is nicely rendered by the rotoscope process.

On the downside the animation flattens some of the performances. Reeves and Winona Ryder seem to get lost under the layers of paint. Only Robert Downey Jr’s manic performance can really transcend the animation. His energy is based on something more than simply his years of real-life experience with drugs; it is a funny, sad and intelligent performance from one of the best actors working today.

A PRAIRIE HOME COMPANION: 4 STARS

A Prairie Home Companion’s story is very simple. A large company has bought the theatre and radio station that has been home to A Prairie Home Companion, a thirty-year-old homespun Mid-Western radio variety show, hosted by the eccentric GK. Week after week the tightly knit cast has told corny jokes and sung songs that range from old hat to heartfelt for a faithful audience. It is the end of an era but GK refuses to acknowledge the gravity of the night. “Every show is your last show,” he says. “That’s my philosophy.” Luckily director Robert Altman does imbue the proceedings with some weight.   
The eighty-plus Altman has been making films for more than fifty years and is still one of the most distinctive filmmakers going. His style, with its long uninterrupted tracking shots with lots of over-lapping dialogue perfectly captures the chaotic goings-on backstage and the loping rhythms of the performers onstage. In a summer filled with slick action pictures Altman’s film feels old fashioned, handmade almost, and that’s a good thing. The movie is so easy going and so enjoyable that it doesn’t draw attention to how beautifully it is made. 

Altman has populated the cast with eccentric characters—Guy Noir, the bumbling security guard who seems to have read one too many Raymond Chandler novels; Yolanda and Rhonda Johnson, the two surviving members of what was once a family singing act and the Dangerous Woman, an angel who appears on earth in the form of a woman who died while listening to the show—but somehow manages to balance the real human drama with the more ephemeral aspects of the story.

A Prairie Home Companion is so much more than a radio variety show on film. Altman turns the simple story into an allegory about death –with jokes. It’s a touching portrait of the end of a simpler era made by an 81 year-old man who understands the past and is astute enough to look into the future.

AKEELAH AND THE BEE: 3 ½ STARS

Akeelah and the Bee plays like Rocky crossed with Good Will Hunting. The latest in a string of spelling bee movies—is there a stranger genre—and coming hot on the heels of the hit documentary Spellbound and the drama Bee Season, Akeelah and the Bee is a story designed to make you cheer for the underdog.

Akeelah is a shy young girl from South Central Los Angeles who has a gift for spelling. It seems her late father had instilled in her a love of language and word games—don’t bet against her in a Scrabble match—but she tries to keep her etymologic endowment a secret in school, explaining that if she appears to be too smart the only word she’ll have to know how to spell is n-e-r-d. With some encouragement from her principal—the guy who played Booger in the Revenge of the Nerds movies—she enters the school’s spelling bee. After an easy win at her school she takes on a tutor—the brusque Lawrence Fishburne—a former champ who trains her for the national bee. 

Akeelah and the Bee is a sentimental story that occasionally feels over calculated, as though writer / director Doug Atchison is trying to cram every after school special cliché into one story—we have the virtues of hard work, good sportsmanship, following one’s dreams and of course the ever popular love conquers all, to name just a few. The story is emotionally uncomplicated, some of the characters come directly from central casting, and it doesn’t have the clout of Spellbound but there are a couple of elements that elevate this movie, making it worthy of a big screen treatment.

Clichés aside the movie does have good messages for young people. Akeelah starts her journey as a shy young girl and gradually gains confidence in her abilities and learns to trust not only herself, but also those around her. Her character teaches kids that they can opt for any path in life, and work towards any destination they choose.

The movie’s secret weapon is Keke Palmer as the wonderful wordsmith. Palmer is a natural talent who brings new life to a character that we’ve seen on-screen many times. Her performance is so guileless that it really feels like you are watching a real kid working through Akeelah’s issues. Her authentic sensitivity blunts some of the more obvious emotional manipulations and earns the film a recommendation.

AMERICAN DREAMZ: 3 STARS

If the idea of a show-tune singing suicide bomber doesn’t make you laugh, then perhaps the new satire American Dreamz might be a bit too heavy handed for you. It takes on the things that we are all reading about in the newspaper everyday, depending on which section of the paper you look at—the war in Iraq, terrorism, American Idol worship and the nasty talent scout Simon Cowell. Each are American obsessions and each are skewered.

The movie is actually made up of four stories that are tied together by the televised talent show American Dreamz. Under the guidance of its producer and host, a smarmy Hugh Grant, it has become the number one show in the world. It’s so popular that in story number two the President of the United States has to beg to secure a spot as a guest judge, a move bound to raise his popularity a few points in the polls. Plotline number three sees a young singer who will stop at nothing to win the competition, and the fourth and final piece of the puzzle involves the aforementioned show-tune singing suicide bomber.

The movie is a good-natured send-up of current American pop culture, skewering everyone from the President on down, and while there are laughs, none of them have the same edgy bite as those on an average episode of The Daily Show.

Generally good performances from the cast, including Dennis Quaid as the President who doesn’t know what the word placebo means to Willem DaFoe as his right hand man—a hybrid of Dick Cheney and Karl Rove—and Hugh Grant as the pompous television host really sell what humor there is in the script.

American Dreamz is bound to be controversial, but I think it would have been a better film if they had pulled out all the stops and really gone for it. A director like Mel Brooks in his prime would not have ridden the fence with a film like this. Think of the comic anarchy of Blazing Saddles or the original Producers. Those were movies that delighted in offending the audience to make them think. By not mining the full potential of the material American Dreamz filmmaker Paul Weitz makes us giggle but doesn’t make us think. 

ABOUT A BOY

Two stars who had huge hits in the 90s have set about to rehabilitate their somewhat treacly public personas. Robin Williams is leaving Mrs. Doubtfire behind to concentrate on more challenging dramatic roles in films like Insomnia and One Hour Photo. The other actor is Hugh Grant who created a stereotype for himself in 1994 as Charles the bumbling, clever English guy in Four Weddings and a Funeral. It’s an image he’s tried hard to shake, and he just might have done it with About A Boy. Oh, he’s still clever, and he’s still English, but now he is a trust-fund baby, who treats women miserably and hasn’t worked a day in his life. As Will, Grant brings to life one of the screen’s most unabashedly self absorbed characters. His redemption – you know he can’t stay bad forever – has the perfume of cliché to it, but Grant is so good, and the script so witty the viewer can accept the inevitable Hollywood ending. Special mention goes to Nicholas Hoult who plays the twelve-year old that finally teaches Grant that life has some meaning, and to Toni Collette who suicidal hippie mother routine is poignant without being syrupy.

ALI

Mohammed Ali is one of the most charismatic characters of the late 20th Century, and turning his life story into a movie must have been a daunting task. Ali was (and remains) a complicated man. He was the people’s champion, who thought that African-American women who dated white men should be killed. He was an American hero who refused to fight in Vietnam. He was a devout Muslim who cheated on his wives at every opportunity. In short a fascinating, thorny force of nature who declared himself to be “The Greatest.” Director Michael Mann eschews regular storytelling tricks, opting for an impressionistic take on the material. Images fly past the viewer, moving the story along, but more importantly imprinting a sense of time and place that is palatable. Will Smith is up to the job of playing the champ in the charisma department, although lacks the stature to be completely believable as a heavy-weight boxer. All in all Ali is a fitting and largely unsentimental tribute to a man who lived his life in the public arena.

ARARAT

This is Atom Egoyan’s most accomplished and daring work so far. The story of the 1915 Armenian holocaust is something that Mr. Egoyan feels passionately about, and that very fervour breaks through the iciness that has defined his other work. It is a complex, difficult movie that relies too heavily on exposition from the main characters to tell the story. Egoyan has turned the classic “show me, don’t tell me” rule of filmmaking on its head, making a wordy movie with too many tangential plots. It’s a confusing, but compelling work that works more often than it doesn’t, but threatens to collapse under the weight of its own earnestness.

ATANARJUAT:  THE FAST RUNNER   

Originally planned as a two-hour movie for Canadian television, Atanarjuat: The Fast Runner has found worldwide success, scooping up awards in Cannes and finding theatrical distribution at home, in the Netherlands, Germany and the United States. Based on an Inuit legend passed down orally through the years, this 173-minute epic is a stunning achievement for director Zacharius Kunuk. He perfectly captures the rhythms of the North, letting the story unfold slowly against a backdrop of ice and snow. Compelling both as a story and anthropologic study.     

AUSTIN POWERS IN GOLDMEMBER

If you were a fan of the first two Austin Powers movies you’re going to love Goldmember. It’s a continuation of the over-the-top silliness that made the first two so popular. Many of the same elements are in place from picture to picture – the forced perspective sight gags, the rapid fire banter between Dr. Evil and his son Scott, elaborate dance numbers – but somehow instead of feeling like we’ve seen it before it seems fresh. For the most part it is Mike Myers (in four, count ‘em, four roles this time) and his unerring sense of “the silly” that makes this material so watchable. Myers can push the envelope further than almost any other comic, and still come off as cute. Myers has elevated bathroom humour to high art. He’s Benny Hill, not Tom Green. Destiny’s Child lead singer Beyonce Knowles is Foxxy Cleopatra, Austin’s love interest in Goldmember. This is her feature film debut, and she handles herself nicely. She doesn’t have a great deal to do, but she has a lot of charisma and looks great on screen. The full Austin Powers’ repertory company is back, Michael York, Robert Wagner, Verne “Mini-Me” Troyer and Seth Green, with some new faces added. I won’t spoil the movie by giving away the cameos, but I will advise you to be on time and not miss the first 15 minutes of the movie.  

AUTO FOCUS

Auto Focus is basically like a nicely acted, snappily directed episode of E! True Hollywood Story. The account of sitcom star Bob Crane’s rise to fame, first as a DJ, then as the lead in television’s Hogan’s Heroes and fall into the pit of sex addiction and (every actor’s nightmare) dinner theatre has all the elements of great tabloid trash. Top that off with a brutal murder – that may or may not have been a direct result of his years of skirt chasing – and you’re mining pop culture gold. Auto Focus, however, takes itself a little too seriously to be great trashy fun. The movie could have been a wild romp, but director Paul Schrader chose to unfurl the film in a clinical way, which avoids the pitfalls of exploitation, but also sucks some of the fun out of the story. Greg Kinnear plays against his usual good guy type and delivers a vivid portrait of Crane as a superficially smirky shallow man only interested in his hedonistic sex life. Willem Dafoe has the art of playing the villain down to a science and hands in a creepy performance as John Carpenter, the seedy audio/visual salesman who introduced Crane to the world of orgies, swinger’s bars and the naughty possibilities of video tape.

A BEAUTIFUL MIND

John Forbes Nash Jr. was a mathematics prodigy won the Nobel Prize in economics in 1994. He was also a troubled bisexual who was diagnosed with schizophrenia. The true story of his life is hard hitting stuff, too bad barely any of the nitty gritty made it to the screen in Ron Howard’s puffy bio pic. A Beautiful Mind cleans ups Nash’s story, softening the edges and failing to provide any insight into the inner workings of this complex man. By the time we get to the third act things have degenerated into true Ron Howard hooey. The saving grace of this movie are the performances of Russell Crowe and Jennifer Connelly. They share real chemistry, and make for convincing viewing. It is hard to believe that this is the same actor who last year was brandishing a sword and fighting tigers in Gladiator. As for Connelly, well, she’s not only uncommonly beautiful, but is also capable of delivering an intelligent polished performance.

A LOT LIKE LOVE DVD: ½ STAR

If your idea of a great date is to chain smoke and drink shots of Jack Daniels then you may enjoy the kind of romance that is presented in A Lot Like Love, an entertainment that is a lot like a romantic comedy, but without real romance or much comedy. Aston Kutcher and Amanda Peet, two fetching looking young people, meet and become very familiar with one another on an airplane. That first meeting sets the pattern of the two getting together for brief flings every now and again for seven years, but every time something, or someone happens to keeps them apart. The only people more traumatized by their relationship woes than themselves is the audience that has to sit through 107 minutes of this. To see this kind of story done right, do yourself a favor and rent the double feature of Before Sunrise and Before Sunset.

 
The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D
 
This is a family film in the truest sense of the word, directed by Robert Rodriguez, produced by his wife and conceived/co-written by his eight-year-old son Racer Max. I liked this movie—even though I think anyone over the age of 12 will find the 3-D glasses more annoying than cool—and think that kids aged 10 - 14 will too. It is based on dreams and has a surreal feel, as if Salvador Dali's kid imagined the visuals, but also has a pretty good adventure story and a moral of sorts. I'm not sure that kids will get the existential jokes—like the Train of Thought etc—but certainly the parents will. The gimmick is the 3-D which Rodriguez doesn't use as liberally as he did in Spy Kids 3-D. It is mostly giant fingers which seem to come off the screen to point at you, and weird liquids that appear to fly through the air. I could have used less 3-D and David Arquette and more of George Lopez’s fun portrayal of Mr. Electricity.
 
If you liked the first Spy Kids movie, I think you'll enjoy The Adventures of Shark Boy & Lava Girl in 3-D.