FRENCH IMMERSION: 2 STARS

It’s hard to know how the ROC will react to “French Immersion,” a new comedy from the makers of “Bon Cop, Bad Cop.” ROC, if you don’t know, is Rest of Canada, a term the small town French characters in the film use to describe any part of the country that doesn’t fall within Quebec’s borders.   

“French Immersion” sees a disparate group of five English speakers—a chef (Jacob Tierney), a flight attendant (Olunike Adeliyi), a mailman (Fred Ewanuick), a firefighter (Martha Burns) and a Member of Parliament (Gavin Crawford)—enroll at a language camp in a remote town to learn French and have a Quebecois experience. That means no English, not even “American Idol” on TV. One by one they become immersed not only in French culture but in the crazy goings on in this deceptively quiet town.

“French Immersion” is a willfully silly movie about a subject that lies at the very center of Canadian culture. It’s an equal opportunity bilingual comedy which gently, but not so subtly, pokes fun at both sides of the language issue.

It plays like a silly sitcom and like a sitcom if you scratch the surface there's not much underneath. Despite tackling one of the country's most divisive topics it doesn't add much to the language debate other than a few one liners like "I love Canada, but I hate the English.” 

FRIGHT NIGHT: 4 STARS

Think about it; Las Vegas is the perfect place for a vampire to hang out. There are no castles or creepy forests but there are lots of potential victims who don't go out until the sun goes down. It's a town that lives at night which makes it the perfect place for Jerry (Colin Farrell) the new vampire in town.

Based on Tom Holland’s 1985 camp classic original of the same name, "Fright Night" sticks to the basic plot of its namesake but this isn't a traditional vampire thriller. It's more "True Blood" than "Dracula."

High school senior Charlie (Anton Yeltin) doesn't believe his childhood friend Ed's (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) claim that Jerry, the new guy on the block, is a vampire. Doesn't believe him, that is, until their friends start to go missing. With the help of his girlfriend Amy (Imogen Poots) and a swishy vampire expert named Peter Vincent (David Tennant in the role Roddy McDowell made famous) Charlie tries to put a stake through Jerry's reign of terror.

Even though "Fright Night" starts as a high school horror, this ain't "Twilight." It's more concerned with thrills and chills and laughs than romance or teen ennui. This is a horror film, and a pretty good one too once it gets past the set up.

The first hour threatens to get bogged down by deliberate pacing and a slowish unveiling of the plot points but is rescued by engaging performances by Yeltin and Poots, and an eerie turn by Farrell. At the sixty minute mark the horror hits, the pace picks up and the blood starts spurting.

"Fright Night" is popcorn horror with just enough bite to appeal to horror audiences and more casual vampire fans.  

FINAL DESTINATION 5: 4 STARS FROM THE JUDGE FROM SPLATTERVILLE / 2 STARS FROM ME

The popularity of the splatter movies that gave birth to several late 90s/early naughts movie franchises seems to be on the wane. “Saw’s” blades have been dulled and “Hostel,” once the beastly spokesmnodel for torture-porn, is becoming an amusement park ride (seriously). Only “Final Destination” continues unabated. Despite the prominence of the word “final” in the title we’re now on number five with no end in sight.

Here’s the story, or as it is known in the “FD” world, the dull stuff that happens between the gory stuff: Someone has a premonition that all his/her good looking friends die in the most terrible way imaginable. When the vision comes true—usually preceded by the tell tale line, “Something’s wrong!”—whoever survives ends up dying anyway, in increasingly complicated ways. In “#5” a gymnast earns a 9.5 from the Splatterville judge and if you’re thinking of getting laser eye surgery any time soon… well, go see “30 Minutes of Less” instead.

What “Final Destination 5” lacks in story it makes up for in gore and cheesy special effects. It’s not enough to kill these kids, the “Final Destination” folks find it necessary to crush, spindle and mutilate them usually not just once, but twice. It’s the kind of movie which makes audiences shout, “No, you didn’t!” and “Awwwwwwwwwwwww! I can never un-see that!” usually while laughing and having a pretty good gruesome time.

If you’ve seen and enjoyed previous “Final Destination” movies then this chronicle of carnage may be for you. If you’ve never seen any of the films in the series, however, you may want to keep it that way.

FRIENDS WITH BENEFITS: 2 1/2 STARS

The success of “Black Swan” last year didn’t open the floodgates for more adventurous movies or even more psycho ballet flicks. Nope, instead it enabled the stars of that movie to go on and make two virtually identical rom coms released in the same year.

Natalie Portman teamed up with Ashton Kutcher earlier in 2011 to make “No Strings Attached,” a story about a couple who find that being friends with benefits is more complicated than they thought it would be. Now Natalie’s “Black Swan” co-star Mila Kunis and boy toy Justin Timberlake discover pretty much the same thing in a ??? movie opening this weekend. Isn’t that the actress version of wearing the same dress to the prom as your best friend?

Kunis and Timberlake are Jamie and Dylan, newly single twenty-somethings—she was dumped by her boyfriend Quincy (Andy Samberg), he by Kayla (Emma Stone)—who decide to have a relationship based entirely on sex. "It's just a physical act," says Dylan, "like playing tennis." No strings attached as Ms. Portman might say. But like many before them (including Portman and Kutcher) they soon realize that getting physical also means getting personal.

Rom coms needn't be as long winded as "Friends with Benefits." At almost two hours the inevitable conclusion--I'm not telling you want happens but if you've ever seen a romantic comedy you already know--is WAY too long in coming. The set up on these things is pretty basic, and while filmmakers have to throw in some other story elements to keep things interesting "Friends with Benefits" stretches things a little too thin.

JT and Mila acquit themselves well enough, although they don't exactly sear the screen with their chemistry. Too bad, they're both likable, attractive performers but for me they didn't seem to click, and for this story to really work sparks should be flying.

"Friends with Benefits" has some fun supporting performances--Woody Harrelson as a gay sports writer and Patricia Clarkson as Mila's free spirited mom have fun with their roles--too bad the leads aren't in on the fun as well.

FORKS OVER KNIVES: 3 STARS

Be prepared for lots of shots of fatty meats, operations and happy vegans. “Forks Over Knives,” a new documentary about the benefits of a vegan lifestyle is convincing in its message, just a little ham fisted (pun intended) in its delivery.

The film is based on the findings of Caldwell Esselstyn Jr. and T. Colin Campbell, Ph.D., two doctors who, working independently, found direct links between diet and health. Not such big news. We all know that eating a steady diet of fast food and fried chicken is bad for us, but did you know that a diet rich in fruits, vegetables and whole grains will not only help quell global warming but cure you of everything from high blood pressure to erectile dysfunction?

Writer/director Lee Fulkerson finds out first hand when he leaves his diet of Red Bulls and frat house food behind and goes veggie. In a flip flop of Morgan Spurlock’s famous all-McDonald’s-all-the-time experiment in “Supersize Me,” Fulkerson discovers that a “whole food plant based diet” makes him feel healthier and more energetic.

That’s the thrust of “Forks Over Knives” and while it is well backed up—there’s loads of case studies and testimonials, and endless data—the material is presented with all the flair of a high school hygiene movie. Remember those? Its heart is in the right place but its attempts at fair and balanced reporting are lacking—pro animal diet speakers have unappealing shots of fatty meats edited over their talking head clips—and the film occasionally suffers from shoddy production value.

Still, like Brussels sprouts the “Forks Over Knives” film is good for you. Your eyes will be opened by some of the information presented, and proves that you really can’t have your cake and eat it too… unless that cake is made with soy milk and egg replacement powders.
 
THE FIRST GRADER: 3 STARS

“The First Grader” is an inspirational movie set against the backdrop of a classroom, but unlike “Dead Poets Society” or “Coach Carter,” this time out it’s a student providing the uplift.

Based on the true story of Kimani N'gan'ga Maruge, an 84 year-old Kenyan villager and ex Mau Mau freedom fighter, “The First Grader” is the story of an elderly man’s fight to earn a fundamental right—to get an education. Denied schooling as a child, then imprisoned following a Mau Mau uprising against British imperialism in East Africa, the old man simply wants to learn to read so he may read and understand for himself a letter sent by the government offering compensation for his contribution to his country’s liberation from tyranny.

“The First Grader” might have made a good educational and motivational movie for kids but the violent scenes of British brutality are only appropriate for an older audience. The fullness of the story—and horror—are slowly revealed in flashbacks of Maruge’s life as we witness his torture and the unbearable sight of his wife and child murdered by British soldiers. Not for the kiddies, but compelling stuff.

The inspirational part of the story takes place in the present day. Maruge’s determination to get the education offered to all citizens is touching. At first he is rejected by the teachers at the school, Jane Obinchu (Naomie Harris), among them, before his resolve erodes away their objections. Then he stands up to the townsfolk who feel his presence in the kindergarten is taking teaching time away from their kids, then he must fight bureaucrats, corruption and controversy all in the effort to learn to read.

The story occasionally veers into melodrama but overall is a study in strength and dignity as personified by the old man and Jane, his young teacher.

FUNKYTOWN: 1 STAR

“Funkytown,” a new movie that chronicles the highest highs and lowest lows of Montreal’s 1970s boogie wonderland, is just as superficial and brash as the music that fuels its soundtrack.  

Patrick Huard leads the large ensemble cast playing Bastien Lavallée, the French Dick Clark of disco and host of a popular television dance show. Through Lavallée “Funkytown” weaves together a collection of characters—a flamboyantly gay trend setter, a closeted dancer and his unsuspecting girlfriend, an ambitious model and a sleazy record producer—into a story where glamorous nightlife collides with real life. After watching the movie I thought maybe the fundamentalists were right. Maybe the gyrating rhythms of disco were bad for us. They certainly are for the characters in the film. More than fallen arches and sore knees these characters suffer from everything from drug addiction to the onslaught of AIDS.

“Funkytown” is an ambitious movie which takes elements of reality—the Lavallée character is loosely based on the sad and sordid life of Montreal DJ and game show host Alain Montpetit—mixed with disco clichés. On the surface—and let’s face it, disco was all surface, no substance—the movie nails it, from the unenlightened club owner boasting on television that his disco has a “special floor for homos” to the clutter of 70s artefacts—the horn pendants, the coke snorting and wide collars—to the thumping soundtrack. It’s when we get into the substance that “Funkytown” runs into problems.

With such a mix and match of stories—I lost count after eight plot threads—it’s almost impossible to give each plotline the weight it deserves.    

As a result we get a cautionary tale about how self destructive the business of hedonism can be that plays like a cross between “Boogie Nights” and “So You Think You Can Dance” but without the weight of the former and the fun of the latter. It skims over the stories like John Travolta doing the Russian kick dance around the dance floor in “Saturday Night Fever.” Less a story than a melodramatic check list of disco culture it forgoes the opportunity to delve into any one story too deeply. It even skates over the language issues which defined Quebec in the 1970s with several veiled references to the Referendum and the story of a former star who can't get her French single played in French dance clubs.
 
"Funkytown" suffers from being too literal—for instance, the soundtrack blares the Tavares hit "Heaven Must Be Missing an Angel" as Lavallée lays eyes on his slinky love interest for the first time—and spreading itself too thin and as a result at well over two hours feels almost as long as the decade itself. 

THE FIGHTER: 3 ½ STARS

“The Fighter,” a new film starring Mark Wahlberg about a real life welterweight named Micky Ward, plays like a mix of “Raging Bull” and “Rocky.” It borrows the tough street grit from the Scorsese classic and mixes in the heart of Stallone’s crowd-pleaser to create a movie that isn’t quite as satisfying as either of its inspirations, but should get some notice at Academy Awards time.

Directed by David O. Russell, “The Fighter,” is based on the true story of boxer, “Irish” Micky Ward (Wahlberg), and his older half-brother Dickie Eklund (Christian Bale). Dickie is a local legend in their rough neighborhood of Lowell, Massachusetts, having once knocked Sugar Ray Leonard to his knees during a high profile boxing match. But now his best days are behind him. Now he’s a crack head, a charming one, but a crack head nonetheless, who allows his addiction to get in the way of Micky’s training. To advance his career Micky must make some tough decisions; more brutal than anything he’s ever had to do in the ring. He must choose between his family and his career.   

Wahlberg is at the heart of “The Fighter” and hands in a convincing performance, but it is Bale, in the showier role of the tormented and addicted Dickie who steals the movie. Pulling another of his amazing physical transformations—it can’t healthy to lose this much weight, but it is effective in the movie—he’s almost unrecognizable as the skeletal ex-boxer. It’s the first time in some while we’ve seen Bale really get under the skin of a character in a drama—forgive me, but the “Batman” and “Terminator” movies are more about the effects than nuance—that it is a treat to be reminded of how good and risk-taking an actor he really is.

The fight scenes in “The Fighter” are good, and the characters are compelling—Melissa Leo as the controlling mom is great and where did they find the seven harridans who play the sisters?—but the form is a bit too traditional to be really grabby. The underdog sports movie has been done to death and despite adding in a twist or two, like a crack head brother with a god complex, the movie pulls too many punches to be truly memorable.

FASTER: 2 STARS

The dialogue, the car chases, even the music in “Faster,” the violent new revenge flick starring Dwayne Johnson, is as pumped up as the former wrestler’s bicep and tricep muscles. It’s just too bad he doesn’t get to flex his acting muscles as much as his aforementioned arm muscles.

Johnson plays an ex-con bent on getting revenge on the people who set-up and murdered his brother following a daring bank robbery. On his tail, as he one-by-one dispatches his enemies, are two very determined cops (Billy Bob Thornton and Carla Gugino) and an eccentric assassin (Oliver Jackson-Cohen).

I’ve deliberately kept the synopsis of “Faster” brief and to-the-point because it doesn’t really hold up to a great deal of scrutiny. That’s OK, revenge movie fans aren’t going to see this movie for the plot, they’re going to see the chases, the kills and the action, and while all those elements are in place there is something not very satisfying about the movie.

The first thing that doesn’t seem right is that Johnson’s character could walk around, out in the open, blowing people away. He’s six-foot-a-hundred, heavily tattooed, looks a lot like a wrestler named The Rock and yet seems to be invisible to the police as he careens around Southern California gun in hand. I know it’s a movie, but things still have to make some sort of sense.

He’s no ninja, that’s for sure but he is an imposing presence. After trying comedy and kids movies Johnson has settled back in comfortably where he belongs, in action roles. Here he plays a stoic loner—he has so few lines he makes Marcel Marceau look like a chatterbox—who doesn’t have much to do except growl, grunt and glare, although in one scene he sheds a tear. It’s a basic performance that doesn’t require him to do anything he hasn’t done in the ring. Perhaps this is what people expect of him but it’s disappointing because after seeing his good work in other movies there seems to be a distinct lack of nuance here.

There’s also not a lot of nuance in the way he kills his victims. Revenge movies are all about the set-up and the satisfying release of seeing the bad guys get what they’ve got coming, but like Johnson’s performance, the kills are basic. In “Kill Bill” Tarantino made each and every assassination unique. Here director George Tillman Jr. usually just has Johnson point and pull the trigger. Like I said. Basic.

“Faster” is stylish and atmospheric, and even has a tense climax, but I’d take a little less muscle flexing and a bit more acting flexing.

FAIR GAME: 2 ½ STARS

“Fair Game” could be re-titled “One Hundred Minutes of Sean Penn Yelling ‘If We Don’t Tell the Truth No One Will!’” The retelling of the ripped-from-the-headlines tale of Valerie Plame (Naomi Watts), whose job as an undercover CIA agent was exposed by White House officials in an attempt to discredit her husband Joseph Wilson’s (Penn)  claim that the Bush administration had falsified information about the existence of weapons of mass destruction in Iraq, is a different kind of spy story. There are no guns, no gadgets, just words—many of the yelled by Penn—classified documents and furtive meetings on lonely park benches. It does a nice job of recreating Bush era paranoia—“We don’t want this smoking gun to turn into a mushroom cloud!”—and exploring the chasm between truth and policy, but as a drama takes way too long to get to the meat of the story. Three quarters of the movie whips past before the central event, Plame’s unceremonious unveiling as a spy, happens.

The build-up is filled with nice details, like Scooter Libby’s (David Andrews) self satisfied smirk when he puts the plan to get revenge on Plame and her husband in motion, and the insight into the life of a spy who juggles a home life with international intrigue, but it feels padded. Also, director Doug Liman has made some very strange and almost unwatchable choices in regard to the camera work. His camera is a little too restless, constantly roaming, which, I suppose, is meant to give us a “you-are-there” feeling, but instead induces motion sickness, particularly in the boardroom scenes.      

Performance wise, however, the movie is top notch. Watt works as Plame, and Penn is passionate, crafting an a performance so big it has it's own gravitational pull that asks whether Wilson was really a truth seeker or simply a self aggrandizing opportunist.

“Fair Game” is a mostly interesting look at our recent past, too bad director Liman takes too long to develop the important part of the story.

FOR COLORED GIRLS: 2 STARS

Tyler Perry is a wildly successful actor, director, producer and all round mogul whose movies make oodles of money but so far have received very little love from the award gods. His latest film, “For Colored Girls”—an adaptation of the Tony Award nominated Broadway play “For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide When the Rainbow Is Enuf”—is his most ambitious film to date but will it be enough to elevate Perry from the ranks of money maker to award winner?

Directing a sprawling ensemble cast Perry (who adapted Ntozake Shange's original script) weaves together the stories of eight African-American women as they deal with personal issues like the search for love, rape, emotional abandonment, infidelity, sexual repression and abortion. Perry retains the play’s poetic approach, mixing naturalistic dialogue and stark real-life drama with free, impressionistic verse.

“For Colored Girls” is Perry’s most accomplished and ambitious movie to date. It’s risky material, from the dire situations most of these women find themselves in (may I suggest group therapy for the cast?) to the style of language, which is likely to confound and confuse many viewers, and while he has stayed true to the tone of the play, I couldn’t help but think that this type of material would work better on stage. Much of the poetic language is beautiful or evocative—a car is described as “smelling of alcohol and ladies in heat”—but despite good performances from the cast the writing often seems too delicate to be blown up for the big screen.   

Couple that with Perry’s melodramatic touch and “For Colored Girls” loses much of its importance of message to overwrought scenes and clichés. The play was a series of monologues and the movie does not improve on the form by intertwining them or creating worlds for the characters to exist in. The choppy segues from character to character feel contrived and as a result, so do the situations that frame the monologues. Individually the stories may have power but as hard as it may be to believe after a while the viewer gets immune to the endless and continuous misery inflicted on these characters.

“For Colored Girls” earns points for ambition and good performances from the cast, particularly Thandie Newton as a troubled sex addict,  Macy Gray as the movie’s Acid Queen and Phylicia Rashad as the wise Gilda, but as bold a step as this may be in Perry’s career it isn’t nuanced or interesting enough to gather much steam come awards time.

FUBAR 2: 3 STARS

You probably went to school with some of them. Or maybe when you see them on the street you cross to the other side. They are headbangers, also known affectionately as ‘bangers. You know the type, long greasy hair with heavy metal t-shirts, who can usually be seen shot-gunning beer and yelling “just giver!” at the top of their lungs. “Fubar 2,” the long awaited follow-up to the fabulous 2002 uber-low budget mockumentary of almost the same name, reintroduces us to two ‘bangers, Dean (Paul Spence) and Terry (David Lawrence), who put a western twist on “Goin’ Down the Road” and leave their old Calgary stomping grounds for the promise of jobs in Fort McMurray. Let’s face it, these guys are easy targets for ridicule, and in the first film director Michael Dowse didn’t go for the easy jokes. He let us get involved with the characters and get to like them before dropping some very heavy plot developments on us. Unfortunately the second time around feels a bit more mean spirited, as though we’re laughing at Terry and Dean instead of with them. It’s still amusing, just not as poignant as the first film.

FLIPPED: 3 STARS

In 1986 Rob Reiner made one of the all time great movies about being a kid. “Stand By Me” was an exercise in dark edged nostalgia. Twenty years later he’s revisiting the Eisenhower and Kennedy years but leaves the dark stuff behind. “Flipped” is coming-of-age “Rashômon” filtered through “Leave it to Beaver” with a dash of “The Wonder Years” thrown in for good measure.

Set in 1960 the story begins when Bryce and his upwardly mobile family move in across the street from the Bakers and their daughter Juli (Madeline Carroll). It’s love at first sight for six-year-old Julie, who flips for Bryce’s “dazzling eyes.” Of course Bryce wants nothing to do with her; she is, after all, a girl. Juli won’t give up, however, pursuing—some might say stalking—him straight through till grade seven. Bryce does everything he can to dissuade her, until she finally gets the hint, and then, of course he develops a big time crush on her.  

Told in a he-said-she-said structure, Juli and Bryce detail the day-to-day developments in their lives from their very different points of view. Much of the film’s humor comes from the discrepancies in the way each of them perceive the way their relationship is going. The back-and-forth is a trick that should get old but somehow, because of the writing but more than that, because of the charm of the young cast.

Reiner has cast extremely well, particularly in the case of Madeline Carroll who plays Juli. It’s a tough role, one that requires the audience to believe that she is wise and articulate beyond her years. We’ve all seen precocious kids on screen before, but the thing that separates her performance from other annoying kid’s performances is the work she does behind her eyes. You can see her working through the complexities of life, trying to figure out relationships and the way the world works. It’s a remarkable and endearing performance that carries much of the movie.

The rest of the cast—Anthony Edwards, Penelope Ann Miller, John Mahoney, Aidan Quinn and Rebecca De Mornay—are effective but none feel irreplaceable in the way that Carroll does.

The he-said-she-said format won’t be for everyone, but the characters, the gentle humor of the script, the performances and the soft nostalgic glow that Reiner dabs on every frame is very appealing.

Please file under obituaries:

FURRY VENGEANCE: 0 STARS

We are gathered here today to mourn the death of the career of Brendan Fraser. In the early 1990s Mr. Fraser’s career appeared vibrant and healthy in films like “Gods and Monsters” and “Mrs. Winterbourne,” but following a career high with box office champs like “The Mummy” his career began a long, painful battle with bad material and began to look as green as the green screens it often performed in front of. With the release of “Furry Vengeance,” the battle is lost. A career, who once shared the screen with Oscar winners like Shirley MacLaine and legends like Ian McKellan, is now content work opposite angry raccoons. R.I.P. the career of Brendan Fraser.

In “Furry Vengeance” Fraser plays Dan Saunders a well meaning real estate developer who has moved his family from Chicago to the middle of nowhere to oversee the building of a subdivision. His contract is for one year, but his supposedly eco friendly, “green” boss has a different idea. He wants to clear cut the surrounding forest and build a new suburb. To prevent the destruction of their homeland the forest’s animals, led by a raccoon who fancies himself a fuzzy William Wallace, leads a campaign of psychological warfare on Saunders.   

“Furry Vengeance” is as direct-to-DVD worthy a movie as will be released theatrically this year. Ten minutes in I was wishing the movie would take a sudden turn from flaccid family friendly fare into more “When Animals Attack” mode. Nothing would have pleased me more than to see the animals rise up against the filmmakers, hijack this movie and make it a true revenge film. Twenty minutes in I was wishing I had claws, like the little furry creatures in the film, so I could claw my own eyes out.

I know “Furry Vengeance” is meant for little kids, but kids deserve better than this. In a twelve month period that has given us “Fantastic Mr. Fox” and “Where the Wild Things Are,” movies that raised the bar for children’s entertainment, a return to this mush-headed-slapstick is taking a giant step backward. With the Laugh-O-Meter™ set somewhere between the hit-in-the-crotch gags of “America’s Funniest Home Videos” and a “Knock Knock” joke, it aims to amuse developing brains but it telegraphs every joke and by the time Fraser shows up in a pink track suit with the words Yum Yum on the bum, all hope is lost.

The cast is uniformly bad, but it is Fraser who makes the biggest impression. He’s acting at a level that, I’m sure, The Three Stooges would consider over-the-top. Watching this it’s hard to imagine that this is the same actor who once dazzled in “Gods and Monsters.” Perhaps my reports of his career death are, as Mark Twain once said, “greatly exaggerated,” but he has to try harder if he wants to keep his career off the critical list.    

Go see (if you must) “Furry Vengeance” with low expectations, but be warned, it’s worse even than you think it is.

FROM PARIS WITH LOVE: 2 STARS

Last year French cinematographer-turned-director Pierre Morel brought us “Taken” a violent little Euro-centric thriller about a father who would do anything—and I mean anything—to retrieve his daughter from some very bad men. It was a down-and-dirty little flick, classed up somewhat by the presence of Liam Neeson in the lead role, and it became an unexpected lightening-in-a-bottle hit. Morel is back behind the camera with a new actioner called “From Paris With Love.” Unfortunately lightening has not struck twice.   

Like “Taken” the story is simple and leaves the action to be the real selling point. Jonathan Rhys Meyers is James Reece an aide to the US Ambassador in Paris who moonlights on the side for the FBI. He is given the biggest assignment of his secret agent career when he is partnered with Charlie Wax (John Travolta), the typical unorthodox but effective undercover movie spy. Together they go on a rampage across the streets and embassies of Paris to put a stop to a terrorist attack. Carnage ensues.

“Taken” worked not just because the action sequences were out of control, but because audiences had some empathy for Liam Neeson’s character as he was kicking butt across Europe. It was a personal mission; he was trying to get his daughter back. Here, however, Meyers and Travolta are a shadowy part of the war on terror and seem to enjoy the bloodshed a little too much. This time it’s not personal, it’s psychotic and even the inclusion of a couple of “Royale with Cheese” “Pulp Fiction” call backs won’t make us identify with these two.     

“From Paris with Love” has some cool action scenes—a killing spree in a stairwell is tense and exciting—but the paper thin story, cardboard characters and silly red herrings suck much of the fun from the movie.

John Travolta is bordering on Nicolas Cage territory here. He seems to be trying his hand at Cage’s extreme acting style, working some over-the-top theatrics into his performance, but overall he’s simply not that convincing as a devil-may-care secret agent. He can do menacing. We saw it in “Pulp Fiction”, “Blowout” and more recently in “The Taking of Pelham 1, 2, 3” but here he seems to be trying a too hard.

But at least he’s trying, which is more than can be said for Jonathan Rhys Meyers who hands in one of the more wooden performances seen on film so far this year. My advice to him: Beware of woodpeckers.
This is only Morel’s third film as a director and already he has established a set of trademarks, for better and for worse. On the plus side, he knows how to stage an action sequence and has clearly watched more than a few John Woo movies. He also has an eye for shooting in urban spaces, but compared to “Taken” with its beauty shots of Paris, “From Paris with Love” looks like it could have been made almost anywhere. With the exception of the odd Eiffel Tower shot, location wise it’s rather generic, which it shouldn’t be when you are shooting in one of the most beautiful and interesting cities in the world.   

On the minus side he’s already becoming somewhat predictable. In his movies the dinner scene always seems to end poorly for the hostess.

Despite a huge body count and a screen littered with empty shell casings “From Paris with Love” isn’t as exciting or as interesting as “Taken.”

FROZEN: 3 ½ VERY TENSE STARS

The most surprising thing about “Frozen” a new horror film from “Hatchet” director Adam Green, is that it isn’t a Canadian movie. With its vast vistas of snow, wolf attacks, two Canadian leading men and body parts getting stuck to cold steel poles, “Frozen” has Great White North written all over it.

Set on a remote ski hill in Massachusetts “Frozen’s” story is very simple. Three snowboarders—Parker (Emma Bell), her boyfriend Dan (Kevin Zegers), and his best friend Lynch (Shawn Ashmore)—get stranded on a ski lift fifty feet in the air after the hill has shut down. The resort, only open on the weekends, won’t reopen for another five days and unless they can find a way to safely get off the lift they will freeze to death.

This is situational horror. There are no monsters, just bad timing and bad decisions that force the unlucky trio to face their darkest fears—the dark, the cold, heights and the worst foe of all, Mother Nature. Director Green subtly ups the ante every minute of the film’s running time, believably building horror, both physical and psychological. Not that much happens and the action is at a minimum but “Frozen” is an extremely tense movie.

Green makes good use of the stark surroundings and sound design. I’m not sure what they used to create the squishy sound that dominates one grisly scene, but it proves conclusively that sometimes what you hear is scarier than what you see.

On the downside, the barebones story doesn’t demand the full feature length treatment. In the early moments of the film, once the lift stops suddenly, it feels like the movie will movie along quickly. Once the action starts—or, more accurately stops—the fear and tension build a little too rapidly. The three friends fall apart in seconds, panicking too soon. Green let that bit of pacing get away from him, but soon has the real horror start and gives them a reason to be on edge.

Still, at ninety minutes “Frozen” feels padded, particularly during the, occasionally interminable small talk the friends makes to take their minds off their predicament. Too often it feels like filler and worse, frequently sounds like acting school monologues. The prattling gets tiresome as the movie nears its final moments and a bit of trimming here and there could have brought this down to a lean and mean eighty minutes.        
Green has pulled good performances out of the actors, particularly from newcomer Emma Bell, who avoids the usual pitfalls of being the only female presence in a horror film.

“Frozen’s” tense story of survival will, at the very least, make you think twice about that trip to Whistler next year. Maybe Myrtle Beach would be a better choice…

FANTASTIC MR. FOX: 4 STARS

It's quite a year to be a talking fox in Hollywood. After a long absence these carnivorous mammals are coming back strong with a surreal cameo in “Antichrist” (“Chaos Reigns!”) and now a starring role in a charming new stop-motion animation from director Wes Anderson, “Fantastic Mr. Fox.”

Loosely based on a Roald “Charlie and the Chocolate Factory” Dahl story of the same name, the story involves Mr. Fox (George Clooney) a smooth talking chicken thief who is part Danny Ocean, part John Robie (look it up!). When a chicken run goes wrong and he and Mrs. Fox (Meryl Streep) get busted he tries to go straight, but after buying a tree house he can’t afford he decides to return to a life of crime for one last big job. He sets his sights on the area’s three biggest and baddest farmers: Boggis (Robin Hurlstone), Bunce (Hugo Guinness) and Bean (Michael Gambon).

This has been an extraordinary year for kid's filmed entertainment. “Up,” “Where the Wild Things Are” and “Coraline” are about as good as it gets when it comes to family films. They are movies that don’t talk down to their young audience; treat them with respect and give them a rollicking good time. You can add “Fantastic Mr. Fox” to that list.
 
Wes Anderson’s mix of deliberately old-school stop motion animation—you can see the fur moving where the animators have touched the puppet characters—gentle humor and action is unlike any other movie this year. In its pacing and style it is decidedly old fashioned, a throw back to the colorful Rankin and Bass animated Christmas specials, but without the schmaltz. I doubt you’d find an existential line like, “Now he’s just another dead rat in a dumpster behind a Chinese restaurant” in any other vintage stop motion film for kids and it is that edge that sets “Fantastic Mr. Fox” apart from the pap, like the recent “Astro Boy,” that passes for kid flicks.  

You can tell it’s a Wes Anderson film because it’s loaded with his trademark subjects—sibling rivalry and unusual parental figures abound—and it has his quirky sensibility stamped all over it—there’s a transcendentally meditating fox!—but it is the vocal performances that really bring it to life.

George Clooney brings charm, wit and warmth to Mr. Fox. He’s an unpredictable character, smooth one minute, a wild animal the next, and Clooney gives him a nice sense of mischievousness. Meryl Streep doesn’t have as much to do, but it’s worth the price of admission to hear this celebrated actress (15 Oscar nominations and 2 wins) say, “Am I being flirted with by a psychotic rat?” The deliberate, naturalistic dialogue also comes easily to supporting cast members Bill Murray, Michael Gambon and Eric Anderson (brother of Wes) who makes his debut as Kristofferson, the athletic cousin.

Its stylish looks, engaging story and over-all wonky feel made me very happy. There are few kid’s films as fantastic as “Mr. Fox.”

THE FOURTH KIND: 2 STARS

There's a lot of hooey in “The Fourth Kind.” Alien abductions and junk science but the biggest nose stretcher occurs just under a minute into the film. Milla Jovovich intros the movie calling herself "actress Milla Jovovich." She's a lot of things—beautiful woman, check, talented model, check, nice to hang out with, probably—but after seeing “The Fourth Kind” I have a hard time understanding how she and, let's say Meryl Streep, can lay claim to the same job description.

Like “Paranormal Activity,” and “The Blair Witch Project” “The Fourth Kind” is a fictional story that uses alleged documentary footage as the basis for the story. In this case it is a therapist’s session tapes, police surveillance video and interview footage with psychotherapist Dr. Emily Taylor, that forms the backbone of the film’s case for the existence of alien abductions.

Set in modern-day Nome, Alaska, the movie stars Jovovich as Dr. Taylor, whose husband was murdered in their bed as she lay helplessly nearby. Despite her emotional trauma she elects to continue her practice, which involves hypnotherapy and repeatedly telling people to “Take a deep breath and calm down.” When one of her patients kills his family and then himself, and others complain of insomnia and seeing an evil owl—How do we know its evil? Why, ominous music plays whenever it is onscreen, that’s how!—she comes to the only conclusion a trained medical professional could reach—they’ve all been abducted by aliens and then returned to earth!

It seems Nome has a bit of a reputation as a hotbed of alleged ET activity, with dozens of people going missing there each year, never to be heard of again. Apparently even the FBI, after multiple investigations into the disappearances, hasn’t been able to pinpoint why so many people vanish from the area. I don’t know either, but I would guess Sarah Palin has something to do with it.  

If “The Fourth Kind” was made in the 1950s by Roger Corman it would have been called “Aliens in Alaska” (or maybe the punchier “Alaskan Aliens”) and it might not have taken itself so seriously. Also, Corman would have known that you can’t make an alien picture and NOT SHOW ANY ALIENS! It’s an unbreakable movie rule, like the one that says the first person to die in a slasher flick will always be the trashy prom queen. Also Corman might have been able to draw a performance out of Jovovich, who is completely out of her emotional depth here. If I was her agent I’d suggest sticking to the action flicks.  

In its favor “The Fourth Kind” (which is an even closer encounter than the third kind) has some nice structural work, inventively blending the “real” footage in with the dramatized scenes, but since the director never met a dolly or hand held shot he didn’t love, much of the film’s style gets lost in hectic camerawork.

“The Fourth Kind” isn’t as successful as its other “real life” cousins, “Paranormal Activity” and “The Blair Witch Project.” It does, however, take an inventive idea and push it toward camp by taking itself WAY too seriously.  

FIGHTING: 3 STARS

If you don’t know who Channing Tatum is you’re probably older than sixteen. If you’re curious go look in your daughter’s bedroom right now. To the left of the Zac Efron shrine is very likely a poster of the buff young actor. Compared to Johnny Depp and Efron Tatum is a minor deity, a good looking guy whose main claim to fame has been a couple of teen dance movies and a guest spot on CSI: Miami. At twenty-nine-years-old the chiseled actor is now straddling the line between teen fare and adults roles. He’s had a couple of stabs at adult fame in films that failed, but his new one, Fighting, co-starring Terence Howard, is a good transitional movie for him; a film with enough action for the kids and enough grit for the adults.

Story wise Fighting doesn’t break any new ground. It’s a classic underdog story. It’s Billy Elliot with choke holds or Rocky without the gloves. Tatum is Shawn MacArthur a scrappy New York City street kid with a troubled past. When he crosses paths with small time hustler Harvey Boarden (Terrence Howard) the two go into bare knuckle fight business—Harvey has the contacts, Shawn has the fists of fury. Shawn becomes a street fighting champion but his success and money don’t ease his troubled mind.

Set in the down-and-dirty NYC unseen since movies like Across 110th Street, Fighting is the New York Rudy Giuliani tried so hard to sanitize. Hustlers are everywhere, underground fighting is big business and nothing good ever happens after 10 pm. It’s a nice, unsentimental backdrop to the story, and with handheld camera in hand director Dito Montiel takes pains to use the cityscape to create a volatile and exciting atmosphere.        

In terms of volatile Fighting certainly lives up to its name. The ouch-inducing fight scenes are brutal in their realism, with every smack and punch lovingly recorded in bone splitting surround sound. They are the film’s center pieces, but the fight scenes don’t get in the way of the story or vice versa. There’s a nice balance between the action and narrative, although a love story slows the momentum in the second half.     

The film is jam packed with naturalistic performances. Nicely cast supporting roles like Roger Guenveur Smith who seems to be channeling Christopher Walken as the sleazy bookie Jack Dancing and the scene stealing Alba Guzmán as the nosy grandmother are complimented by effective background actors (like Loud Club Wannabe and Flawless Woman Number 1) who effectively add to the film’s realistic mood.    

Tatum isn’t likely to win any trophies for his work unless the Elliptical Trainers of America bring back their Buff Awards this year but he brings his character to life, even giving him a few unexpected dimensions. Who knew street fighters were so polite?

The one to watch is Terrence Howard, who after a disappointing run of average work in films like August Rush and even Iron Man, hands in an edgy performance that mixes street smarts with some effeminate mannerisms to create his most memorable character since Hustle and Flow.  

Fighting is a better than expected drama, that, while somewhat predictable, hooks the viewer with interesting characters and UFC-style flying fists.  

FANBOYS: 2 STARS

Like Crossing Over from a few weeks ago Fanboys is another film that’s been gathering dust in the Weinstein vault for the last couple of years. Originally timed to be released on the 30th anniversary of Star Wars the movie has been the subject of chatter on the internet regarding editorial interference from the Weinstein Company—they wanted an entire storyline removed—and whether or not the film would ever be released at all.

This week marks its unveiling in Canada (it has already been seen in the US) and after seeing it I have to wonder what all the fuss was about. Fanboys is a perfectly cordial little movie that probably should have gone straight to DVD but, I imagine, finally earned its big screen release because of the involvement of several of its stars who have gone from unknowns to hot properties since the film was shot.

The story is simple. Set in 1999 four childhood friends who bonded over Star Wars concoct a plan to drive from Ohio to Marin County, California to storm George Lucas’s ranch and get an advance look at Star Wars: Episode I - The Phantom Menace. Their plan isn’t just a lark, however. This will likely be Eric’s (Sam Huntington) last hurrah before he leaves nerddom behind to take over his father’s used car empire and Linus (Chris Marquette) has been diagnosed with cancer and may not live to see the film‘s official opening. For the other members of this group—Hutch and Windows (Dan Fogler and Jay Baruchel)—the trip is a coming of age. At the beginning of the journey they are still immature guys who meet girls in Jedi chat rooms, but by the end you just have the feeling their lives will have been transformed. Joining them is Zoe (Kristen Bell), a girl-geek who not only looks great in Princess Leia’s metal bikini but also provides some much needed grounding for the boys.  

Fanboys has its moments. A battle between the Lucas hounds and their mortal enemies, Star Trek fans—the boys call them Kirk loving Spock suckers—is laugh out loud funny. It’s also lots of fun to see Seth Rogen, Danny McBride, Ethan Suplee, Kristen Bell and Jay Baruchel before they were famous and even cooler to play spot the cameos—look for geek gods Billy Dee Williams, Carrie Fisher, William Shatner and Kevin Smith—but the film is more uneven than Yoda’s crazy mixed up syntax. It plays more like a series of sketches than a full length movie.

If you enjoy the Comic Book Guy from The Simpsons then you’ll likely find a warm spot in your heart for Fanboy’s characters, but  as geekily likeable as they may be they are little more than stereotypes. Windows, of course, is “female kryptonite” and Hutch is an over-the-top Rush fan and that’s about the extent of the character development. Maybe it’s just as well because when the movie tries to stretch and introduce some poignancy into the mix it really falls flat. A clumsy metaphor comparing Eric’s car dealer dad and Darth Vader is undeveloped and unnecessary and Linus’s cancer is treated more like a plot device than a real threat to his life.

Fanboys is an occasionally funny coming-of-age story that might be best left until the DVD release.

FIRED UP: 2 ½ RAHS

Fired Up is one of those movies that sounds like it should have gone direct to video. The story of Shawn and Nick (Nicholas D'Agosto and Eric Christian Olsen) two thick-headed high school football meatheads—their motto is “Leave no girl unturned”—who side step football camp for cheerleader school seems like a perfect fit for the delete bin at your local video store, but despite a goofy premise and even goofier performances the movie skids by on its own inane charm.

It's the evolution of the Beach Party movie. The cheerleading ruse is just an excuse to showcase hard-bodied girls and nearly naked men to keep up visual interest while everyone else cracks wise. On that score it's a movie that carpet bombs the audience with jokes, firing off round after round of gags and slapstick pratfalls. Most of them misfire, but the ones that do land will raise a smile from all but the grumpiest of viewers. I

It's a hit and miss affair that knows no limits—whether it's the guys using their patented Vince Vaughn-style patter, or making crude jokes about anal beads or showing an overweight man feed his bellybutton a Twinkie. It tries for the inspired, unbridled silliness of Old School but lacks the kind of heartfelt mania that Will Ferrell brought to that movie.

On the downside the endless “catchy” lingo grates after a while. If there was a drinking game where you had to take a swig every time one of the characters said “You gotta risk it to get the biscuit,” you’d be more wasted than a cheerleader on a Mike’s Hard Lemonade binge by the end of the movie’s 90 minute running time.

Despite that Fired Up is a good Saturday afternoon matinee diversion, a cheerleader movie with a twist that isn’t afraid to be really silly.

FROST / NIXON: 4 ½ STARS

At first glance you wouldn’t imagine television presenter David Frost and disgraced ex-president Richard Nixon have much in common. Frost was a well known playboy, as famous for his off screen antics as he was for his various television shows. Nixon was, well Richard Millhouse Nixon, the only US president to ever resign the presidency. They were an odd couple who became inextricably linked in the public’s mind following an historic series of interviews that brought in the largest audience for a news interview in history. In the new film Frost / Nixon, director Ron Howard details how much alike these two men actually were. He spends time forging psychological parallels between the pair as two men from modest circumstances who rose to the top of the heap in their fields but never earned the respect they felt they deserved.

When we first meet Frost (Michael Sheen) he’s a successful talk show host in Australia. His American show had been recently cancelled and he longed for another chance at fame in the US. “Success in America is unlike success anywhere else,” he says. Meanwhile Richard Nixon is about to resign the presidency following the Watergate scandal. When Frost—and 400,000,000 other people worldwide—watched Nixon’s resignation Frost saw a chance to rehabilitate his reputation. He understands that Nixon’s Shakespearean fall from grace would make great television, and he knows how to make great TV. He plans a series of four ninety minute interviews with Nixon covering a variety of subjects, including Watergate and the subsequent cover-up. Nixon signs on, for a price, seeing the interviews with the lightweight Frost as the perfect venue to mend his battered political status.

Based on a play by The Queen screenwriter Peter Morgan Frost / Nixon is one of the rare plays that actually works better as a film. Howard opens up the story taking us to places and events that are only talked about in the stage show. His work here is enlivened after the turgid DaVinci Code, with a quick pace that keeps the wordy script moving along at a fast clip.

There’s no action to speak of, save for the verbal sparring between interviewer and interviewee in their fourth and final televised meeting, and it is here that sparks fly. Sheen, best known to North American audiences for his portrayal of Tony Blair in The Queen, gives a flamboyant performance as the showy Frost but this is Frank Langella’s movie.

In Langella’s hands Nixon, one of the most vilified public figures of the last fifty years becomes almost sympathetic and not because he is handled with kid gloves. Quite the opposite; Howard often shoots Nixon peering out from the shadows to subtly imply that he is a shady character and the script has great fun portraying the president as a money grubbing opportunist. He becomes sympathetic through Langella’s humanizing portrait. A man so often remembered in sound bites is shown here, in a commanding performance, as a real person, warts and all. He isn’t, by his own admission in the script, a likeable man, but Langella’s carefully calibrated performance unveils previously unseen aspects of his personality. In the film’s final half hour—the events leading up to the final interview and the interview itself—Langella delivers tour de force work that could win him the Oscar for Best Actor.

The timing of the release of Frost / Nixon is interesting. Obviously a December release date puts it squarely in line for Academy consideration but beyond that it is an interesting look at the sad post Oval Office life of a president who left office with a very low approval rating. George Bush, take note.

FOUR CHRISTMASES: 2 STARS

The success of movies like The Bells of St Mary’s and A Christmas Carol triggered an avalanche of Yuletide themed movies from producers eager to cash in on the spirit of the season. Every year a new one comes out and for every hit there are a Santa’s sack of stinkers like Jingle All the Way and Surviving Christmas. This year’s entry is Four Christmases, the story of two smarmy yuppies played by Vince Vaughn and Reese Witherspoon who lie to their families—“You can’t spell families without ‘lies,’” Vaughn says—to get out of spending quality time with their siblings and parents over the holidays. When they get caught in the lie they must spend four Christmases, one with each of their divorced parents.   

Every year Brad (Vaughn) and Kate (Witherspoon) sidestep family obligations at Christmas with a series of well crafted lies. They usually tell the folks they have volunteered to do charity work in third world countries but instead take off for the sunny climes of Fiji or some other exotic vacation spot. When their flight gets cancelled and they end up on the news the jig is up—they’ve been busted and have to make the rounds visiting their families. There’s Brad’s crusty old father (Robert Duvall) and his Ultimate Fighter brothers (Jon Favreau and Tim McGraw), Kate’s mother (Mary Steenburgen) and nymphomaniac aunts and grandmother, Brad’s free-loving hippie mother (Sissy Spacek) and Kate’s sensitive but aloof father (Jon Voight). Of course by the end, despite their families foibles, they realize that there is nothing more important than family.

Four Christmases tries for the tricky balance between comedy and heart-warming and almost succeeds. In its first hour it mostly goes for laughs, using Vaughn’s fast-talking jive, slap stick and some outrageous characters to keep the needle on the laugh-o-meter clicking into the red. Sprinkled throughout the four family tour are some good moments and funny situations and some sequences that strain to find the joke which is pretty much on par with an average mainstream comedy not written by Seth Rogen.

Then in the last thirty minutes it’s as if someone flicked off the funny switch and the tone suddenly shifts into heart-warming and it’s here that the movie earns a big lump of coal. The edge of the past sixty-minutes evaporates and all of a sudden we’re watching a TV movie of the week about family values. Reese Witherspoon can pull this off. She’s likeable, emanating a warm fuzzy glow when she’s on-screen. Vaughn can’t. His inborn edginess works well in something like the R-rated Wedding Crashers but falls very flat in family fare; ditto his patented mile-a-minute patter. In fact, his two funniest scenes—both mush mouthed television appearances—work because he finally drops the smart-Alec rapping.

When the movie turns mushy you have to care about the characters in order to care about their love lives, and Vaughn’s lack of warmth works against him here. You’ll see the “family is everything” message coming a mile away; the trouble is by the time it hits you may not care.

Four Christmases isn’t a truly bad movie, just a really predictable one.

FILTH AND WISDOM: NO (LUCKY) STARS

Early on in Filth and Wisdom the movie’s narrator and star A.K. (Eugene Hutz) says, “In my country we have a saying… He who licks knives will eventually cut his tongue.” In film critic land we also have a saying. “He who watches this movie all the way to the end will want to cut their eyes out…”  Filth and Wisdom is so amateurish, so poorly made that if Madonna’s name wasn’t on it as director and screenwriter you’d only be able to find it in delete bins nestled against copies of Shanghai Surprise.  

The story, such that it is, centers around three flat mates in a rundown London boarding house. A.K. (Ukrainian punk singer Hutz) is an aspiring musician by day, male dominatrix by night, while Holly (Holly Weston) is an unemployed ballet dancer who moonlights as a pole dancer and Juliette (Vicky McClure) is a pharmacist who steals drugs from her place of business to send to sick orphans in Africa.

Madonna claims Godard, Pasolini, Fellini and Visconti as her cinematic inspirations, but the slap dash nature of the film points more towards Benny Hill than any of the French New Wave or Italian neorealists she apparently so admires. From the incompetent performances to the dated, silly—and unsexy—sexual content to its Philosophy 101 meanderings Filth and Wisdom feels like cutting edge ideas… from 1982. It‘s the work yo’d expect from an overly earnest and inexperienced film student, not an international superstar who is usually anything but earnest and certainly not inexperienced.

The addition of a kickin’ soundtrack and some interesting work from the strangely charismatic Hutz cannot rescue Filth and Wisdom from the cinematic dung heap.

FLY ME TO THE MOON: 0 STARS

In a recent review for an animated film I wrote, “WALL-E is the evolution of children’s films; after this the wisecracking animals and toilet jokes of Madagascar and the like will look like relics, as current as Steamboat Willie.” After enduring the 3-D talking gnat movie Fly Me to the Moon I have to expand that description to include more of Mother Nature’s creatures, including insects.
Flies seem to have made a bit of a pop cultural comeback of late. In addition to Fly Me to the Moon, there’s also an opera based on David Cronenberg’s movie The Fly and even a reality show based on Lord of the Flies (OK, I know I’m stretching the point a bit with that last one), but even though Pixar was able to work their magic and make rats loveable in Ratatouille, but I doubt if Fly Me to the Moon will turn mosquitoes, gnats, midges or house flies into the new creature du jour.

Fly Me to the Moon is billing itself as the first animated film to be designed, created, and released exclusively in 3-D. The story of three precocious flies who stowaway on board Apollo 11 to make the inaugural journey to the moon with Buzz Aldren and Neil Armstrong is, I guess a technical achievement, I just wish the filmmakers had spent as much time on the story and characters as they did on the 3-D effects. Even then, the spotty quality of the CGI pales by comparison to other recent animated movies. In that sense Fly Me to the Moon is to WALL-E what Donkey Kong is to Grand Theft Auto and even if Fly Me to the Moon had great animation it wouldn’t make up for the painfully bad dialogue and a repetitive story.

Apart from an entertaining “Busby Berkeley in Space” dance number, Fly Me to the Moon is a pesky 85 minute waste-of-time masquerading as family entertainment.

Where’s the deet when you really need it?

THE FORBIDDEN KINGDOM: 3 ½ STARS

Think of dream teams. For a music lover it might be a duet between Miles Davis and Billie Holiday. A reader might choose a book written by Norman Mailer and edited by Hunter S. Thompson. What if, however, Miles and Billie recorded Mary Had a Little Lamb or Norman and Hunter reimagined The Little Old Lady Who Lived in a Shoe? For sure they’d be entertaining, just not exactly what fans would expect.

In that spirit I’m guessing hard core martial arts aficionados may be scratching their heads at the new film The Forbidden Kingdom. One blogger suggested that “short of digging up Bruce and Brandon” the coupling of Jet Li and Jackie Chan for the movie is the biggest news Kung Fu fans could hope for. The pairing of the two Hong Kong superstars had been rumored for years but when Li announced his retirement from martial arts movies to produce a documentary about Buddhism it seemed like it would never happen. That is until Li had a change of heart and stepped back into the ring.

The resulting match-up probably isn’t exactly what fans might have hoped for. Sure, there’s plenty of action, amazing sets and costumes and a suitably confusing mythological story, but instead of a bloody, battle heavy epic the two superstars have produced a film aimed squarely at young adults. Luckily The Forbidden Kingdom has charms that should reach beyond the usual target audience for Kung Fu films.

The movie starts in present day Boston with Jason Tripitikas (24’s Michael Angarano), a Kung Fu crazy kid—he’s at the age where he is more interested in Bruce Lee movies than girls—buying bootleg Hong Kong movies at a Chinatown pawn shop. When the store is robbed by young thugs he escapes after being given an old-fashioned fighting stick by the wounded shopkeeper. Chased by the gang he flees to top of a tall building. Staff in hand he flies off the roof only to be magically transported back to ancient China. Turns out the stick once belonged to the Chinese sage and warrior the Monkey King and now Jason must join with two warrior teachers on a dangerous mission to learn the true meaning behind Kung Fu if he hopes to return the staff to the Monkey King and go back home to Boston.

Think of it as an antediluvian Karate Kid or Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon for young adults. It’s a North Americanized version of a Hong Kong film with plenty of the Chinese mythology and pageantry of the classic martial arts films—there’s more references to Kung Fu movies here than in any two Tarantino films—filtered through a Hollywood sensibility to make it palatable for Western audiences. By and large it is successful. Some of the attempts at humor seem a little juvenile or out of place, but the battle sequences choreographed by famed action director Yuen Woo Ping—he choreographed the fights in Kill Bill, The Matrix and dozens of wild Hong Kong films—are top flight, if a little bloodless by the standards of the genre. They’re geared to entertain the eye of the younger members of the audience without the blood and guts that would earn it an R rating.

Best of all are the rowdy fight scenes between Chan and Li. There’s more wire work here than Chan’s fans will be used to—he’s always been a stickler for authenticity—but the inventiveness and style of these two old pros as they do battle is evident. Chan’s trademarked “drunken master” moves play nicely opposite Li’s more technical, precise steps. It makes for unpredictable and fun fight scenes.   

The Forbidden Kingdom may not appeal to viewers looking for an authentic Hong Kong martial arts film, but should hold appeal for families looking for something fun and different. 

FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL: 3 ½ STARS

Producer Judd Apatow has tapped into an interesting formula. His trademarked combination of raunchy humor, full frontal male nudity and rom com sentimentality has proven to be a potent elixir in past hits like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin. His latest confection, a laugh-out-loud funny break-up movie called Forgetting Sarah Marshall mines similar territory with hilarious results.  

When we first meet Peter Bretter (Freaks and Geeks’s Jason Segel) he’s a struggling musician, paying the bills by scoring a CSI rip-off called Crime Scene. He’s also dating the star of the show Sarah Marshall (Kristen Bell of Veronica Mars) who turns his life upside down when she dumps him for an outlandish pop star named Aldous Snow (Russell Brand).

To mend his broken heart he books a weekend trip to Hawaii and checks into an upmarket ocean resort. There’s only one problem— Sarah and her new flame are also staying there. Peter is saved from going over the brink by Rachael (Mila Kunis from That 70s Show) a sympathetic desk clerk also nursing a broken heart. She provides much needed emotional support and an attractive shoulder to cry on.

Will Peter’s heart heal? Will he ever finish his Dracula rock opera featuring life size vampire puppets?

I think you probably know the answers to those questions already and you haven’t even seen the movie, but Forgetting Sarah Marshall isn’t as much about the sit-comish situation as it is about the characters in the story. Bretter is completely likeable as the everyman heartsick composer. He’s equal parts vulnerability, charm and goofiness. It’s a winning combo that gets the audience on side immediately and keeps them there throughout. Kunis is warm and funny as the damaged desk clerk, British comedian Russell Brand comes very close to stealing the show as the dense rock star and Jonah Hill (Superbad) is creepily funny as the star struck hotel waiter.

Like Knocked Up and others in the Apatow cannon Forgetting Sarah Marshall serves up standard movie situations—the ex-lovers staying at the same hotel—but tweaks them with an audacious mix of outrageous vulgarity and full-on, full-Monty male nudity and sweet sentimentality that makes them a fun R-rated night out. 

FOOL’S GOLD: 1 STAR

Fool’s Gold is a microcosm of star Matthew McConaughey’s career. His “Sexiest Man Alive” good looks make him a natural for romantic comedy, while his Greek God physique lends itself to action adventure roles. He done both before so Fool’s Gold should be a welcome hybrid of his particular skills. Unfortunately the combo of having to look good while romancing Kate Hudson and doing dangerous looking stunts is too much of a good McConaughey thing.

He stars as Ben Finnegan, professional beach bum and treasure hunter fixated on finding 40 chests of sunken treasure lost in 1714 off the coast of Florida. In the search for the booty he loses his wife Tess (Kate Hudson), their boat, and, by the time they actually start to search for the treasure, our attention.

The movie needs a treasure map of its own to find its way through the silly plot involving billionaire Nigel Honeycutt (Donald Sutherland), his celebutante daughter, Gemma (Alexis Dziena), a backer in the form of a violent rap star (Kevin Hart) and a rival treasure seeker with a preposterous Southern accent named Moe (Ray Winstone). Even these good actors can’t make this wannabe screwball comedy work.

Predictable in the extreme, with ham fisted direction, clumsily staged action sequences and a characterization of an African American rapper that crosses the line from stereotyping into something bordering on racism, Fool’s Gold takes a premise that could’ve worked—good looking people in bathing suits searching for gold in against a backdrop of sun and fun—and bungles it completely. Not even legendary treasure hunter Indiana Jones could find a good movie buried under this mess.

With its fabulous scenery—set in Florida it was actually shot in Australia—and a beautiful yacht where a good chunk of the action happens, Fool’s Gold looks like one of those movies that was actually much more fun for the cast to shoot than it is for the audience to watch.  

Trust me, there’s no treasure to be found anywhere in this movie.

FRED CLAUS: 1 STAR

The success of the 1966 cartoon The Grinch Who Stole Christmas triggered an avalanche of Yuletide themed movies from producers eager to cash in on the spirit of the season. Every year a new one comes out and for every hit there are a Santa’s sack of stinkers like Jingle All the Way and Surviving Christmas. 

A year ago a new teaser trailer appeared in theatres to whet people’s appetite for a movie called Fred Claus. It was a lighthearted, fun clip featuring Fred (Vince Vaughn) and his brother Santa (Paul Giamatti) playfully yukking it up for the camera. It was a funny, warm scene that helped drive memories of the odious Christmas with the Krumps from the section of my brain that catalogues Xmas movies.

The casting of these two unlikely actors playing brothers seemed inspired and the supporting cast included no fewer than four Oscar nominees or winners. It seemed like a winner. Unfortunately, like so many previous failed holiday themed movies Fred Claus is naughtier than nice. It’s as though The Grinch, not satisfied with stealing Christmas from Whoville, swooped down on this movie and stole all the humor.

Vaughn, playing the title role, reprises his usual fast talking character—he’s part charmer, part con man who dreams of opening his own business, an OTB Parlor. Trouble is, he’s $50,000 short of the start-up money, so to raise money he dons a Santa hat, creates a fake charity and hits the pavement, silver bell and donation bucket in hand. After a dust-up with some other sidewalk Santas he winds up in jail with only one option for bail—his brother.

Fred has been estranged from his sibling (he’s an independent Claus or perhaps even Claustrofobic) ever since Nick cut down his favorite pine to make the first-ever Christmas tree. Wouldn’t that make them hundreds of years old, you ask? Why yes, apparently when Nick was made a Saint his entire family was frozen in time—they never age. Since then Fred has been living under the shadow of his younger brother.

St. Nick not only antes up the bail, but agrees to loan Fred the $50,000 he needs to open the OTB if he comes to the North Pole and works for the cash. Of course Fred agrees, and during his trip to Santa’s home turf befriends a lovesick elf (suffering from low elf esteem no doubt), and throws the whole operation into chaos to the point where Christmas is almost cancelled. By the end of the movie, however, everyone has learned valuable lessons about the importance of family, co-operation and acceptance.

Fred Claus earns a big lump of coal in almost every department. I don’t know what happened between the time the teaser trailer hit the multiplex and the film was released, but all the charm captured in that one scene we saw a year ago—which isn’t in the movie by the way—has been sucked out of the final product. Even the film’s funniest scene, a Siblings Anonymous meeting with cameos by Frank Stallone, Roger Clinton and Stephen Baldwin is poorly paced and not as effective as it could be.

The problems start from the top down. Vaughn’s inborn edginess works well in something like the R-rated Wedding Crashers but falls very flat in family fare; ditto his patented mile-a-minute patter. Director David Dobkin uses Vaughn’s size—he’s 6' 5"—to good effect, however, taking every opportunity to hang the actor’s long legs over the edge of the tiny elf beds, but apart from some of the physical comedy Vaughn seems to be on auto pilot.

Co-lead Giamatti, tries hard but doesn’t fare much better than Vaughn. Crammed into a Santa suit (with disturbingly swollen hands) he resembles an overstuffed Christmas goose. It’s a shame; Giamatti is a great actor capable of much, much more than this. I wonder if his acting teachers at Yale ever imagined him delivering the line, “Ho, ho ho! I’m not gonna listen to no!”

Fred Claus uses the worst kind of manipulative holiday motifs to try and force the audience to care about these cardboard characters. There’s the orphaned young boy searching for a family, the bad-boy looking for redemption and the grinchy businessman. These stereotypes are the staple of every Yuletide story from A Christmas Carol on up and can be effective, it’s just too bad they weren’t put to better use here. Fred Claus exactly the nightmare before Christmas, but if you spend your money on this one, yule be sorry.

FRACTURE: 3 STARS

Here’s the dilemma: You’re a young assistant DA who is something of a wizard in the courtroom. In your last case before leaving public service for a high paying job at a fancy legal firm you are faced with a man who is clearly guilty, but you just can’t put your finger on the crucial piece of evidence that will put him on death row. How far do you go to put him behind bars? Such is the question facing Oscar nominated Canadian Ryan Gosling in the new courtroom thriller Fracture.

Fracture doesn’t exactly break new ground in the legal drama genre—Primal Fear, also from director Gregory Hoblit, tread the same ground a decade ago—but there’s no grounds for a dismissal either. The movie’s premise may be a little frayed around the edges and the are more than a couple of fissures in Fracture’s plot, but the performances of the film’s leads, Gosling and Anthony Hopkins, make it worth the price of admission.   

Hopkins plays Ted Crawford, a wealthy aeronautical engineer, who discovers his wife is having an affair. When she returns home one night after some afternoon delight with her cop lover, Hopkins calmly and coolly shoots her in the face. The police arrive, he confesses and is arrested. It should be an open and shut case, but of course there’d be no movie if it were that simple. What may look like a crime of passion was actually a well thought out execution, and difficult to prove.

Hopkins plays Crawford as though he was portraying Hannibal Lecter’s creepy brother—he’s cunning, has a genius level IQ and an annoying condescending tone. When he bests Gosling’s smarty-pants Willie Beachum in a game of wits, he sneers by way of consolation, “Even a broken clock gets the time right twice a day.”

There is an echo of the Lecter – Starling tension in the interaction between Hopkins and Gosling, and while nothing in this movie comes close to the atmosphere of dread in Silence of the Lambs it is fun to watch these two great actors spar.

They really are the main reason to see Fracture. The big twist at the end is pure Jessica Fletcher and not particularly shocking—anyone schooled in the Law and Order brand of courtroom maneuvering could figure out Beachum’s next move before he does—but the stylishly shot movie does offer interesting character studies and a satisfying finale.    

FACTORY GIRL: 3 STARS

During her short life Edie Sedgwick was a complex character who was many things to many people. She was an heiress, a drug addict, Vogue’s “Youthquaker” of 1965, one of Andy Warhol’s Superstars, the Queen of underground art scene and a relative of one of the signatories of the Declaration of Independence. She was the darling of hip New York society who battled mental illness. She was a poor little rich girl who lived at the seedy Chelsea Hotel. In death she became a legend.

A new film, Factory Girl, attempts to present Sedgwick in all her multifaceted glory, but only manages to skim the surface. Director George Hickenlooper is clearly in love with the topic and the times and it shows. The movie made me want to time travel back to 1966 New York to check out the art scene and go to at least one of the parties shown in the movie. He has recreated Warhol’s famous tinfoil-wall papered factory with great care and taken pains to get the small stuff right. It’s the larger details that the movie has trouble with.

The basic problem here is that the two main characters—Edie and Andy—are presented as one dimensional people, so self-obsessed and emotionally detached that it’s hard for the audience to care one way or another about them. By the time Edie’s life starts to spin out of control it’s too late for her and the audience. Never given the chance to connect with her on a level other than the superficial her downfall seems somehow inevitable and contrived.

Superficially though, the main actors nail it. They look great, Guy Pierce mimics Warhol’s frail, pale-skinned cool to a tee, while Sienna Miller (who’s actually much prettier than Edie was) brings the glamour and enchantment to Edie that made the real-life Edie so interesting. Too bad they didn’t dig a little deeper.       

Factory Girl is all surface and no heart, but it’s a pretty good surface.

FIDDLER ON THE ROOF: 2 DISC COLLECTOR’S EDITION: 4 STARS

Based on a series of short stories by a Ukrainian writer, the musical Fiddler on the Roof landed on Broadway in 1964. Seven years later Canadian director Norman Jewison brought the popular story to the screen. Bolstered by popular songs like If I Were A Rich Man and To Life the movie became a big hit and was nominated for eight Academy Awards, winning three. 

This week, thirty-six years after its theatrical run Fiddler on the Roof is being re-released in a handsome two disc DVD set. It features a great transfer, terrific sound and loads of special features, including a deleted song not heard for over three decades. Better still, the DVD restores half-an-hour of the movie that was cut out for a late 70s theatrical re-release. Now running at its original three hours the story of patriarch Tevye and his efforts to find husbands for his daughters is a visual treat, features great performances and a great attention to detail.   

FREEDOM WRITERS: 2 ½ STARS

If the story of Freedom Writers seems familiar it maybe because you read true story of Erin Gruwell, a newbie teacher from a wealthy family who chose to work with inner city school kids in Los Angeles. After a rough start she finally got through to the kids by encouraging them to keep journals of their life experiences. These diaries gave the students a voice to express their inner most feelings and gave Gruwell insight into their needs. Using the knowledge gathered from the diaries she tailored a set of courses for the kids that inspired many of them to quit gang life and become productive members of society.

It might also sound familiar to you because we’ve seen lots of inspirational teacher movies—Dangerous Minds and Coach Carter (which managed to be an inspirational teacher and coach movie in one) come to mind—that have essentially the same plot.  

That’s not necessarily a bad thing. Hollywood movies tend to self-plagiarize quite successfully, changing the odd detail here and there, to create something new that seems somehow familiar.

Freedom Writers isn’t a bad movie, it just isn’t as memorable or important as the filmmakers would like to have us believe. It has some moments that resonate, a few good performances and a good message, but those qualities are wrapped up in such a standard packaging that the movie has little impact.

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION
For Your Consideration lampoons the Hollywood hype machine. When the rumor spreads around the set of Home for Purim that obscure actress Marilyn Hack’s (Catherine O’Hara) performance might be award worthy everyone catches Oscar fever. No one seems to notice that Home for Purim is awful, least of all the cast or the media who starts the Oscar feeding frenzy. Director Christopher Guest and his usual gang of collaborators (Eugene Levy, Michael McKean, Harry Shearer) expertly skewer the superficiality of tinsel town mixing hilariously self-absorbed performances with boffo laughs as they shine a light on the mania of awards season. 

THE FOUNTAIN:
2 STARS FOR CONTENT
4 STARS FOR AUDACITY
3 STARS OVERALL

The public’s reaction to The Fountain was formed months before the movie even had a release date. Director Darren Aaronofsky premiered the movie at the Venice Film Festival where it was met with a chorus of boos. The bad reaction was widely reported in the press and really shaped people’s ideas about the film. What didn’t get reported as much was that on the second night it received a standing ovation. The perceived festival snub is the public relations battle The Fountain has been fighting since Venice.

The Fountain is a difficult movie that will confound some viewers and entrance others. A love story that spans several centuries, it jumps around with wild abandon from the present day where a young doctor struggles to find a cure for his wife’s terminal illness, to 16th century France where the same couple, now a conquistador and queen search for the Fountain of Youth to the future where the doctor, now bald, floats through space in a large bubble, grappling with the vagaries of life.

This is a movie that isn’t afraid to be ponderous and pretentious, but in an era when Hollywood doesn’t try to make thoughtful movies, just successful ones, that’s not necessarily a bad thing. Aaronofsky’s metaphysical story is almost incomprehensible, but has a lot of emotion and for the adventurous viewer should appeal to the head as well as the heart.  

FOR YOUR CONSIDERATION: 3 STARS

In 1949 Life Magazine described the four grades of laughs—there’s the titter, the yowl, the belly laugh and the boffo. For Your Consideration, the new comedy from the team of Christopher Guest and Eugene Levy, is a good movie with quite a few titters, a couple of yowls, at least one belly laugh, but stops just short of big boffo laughs.

Beginning in late October every year the big movie studios take out ‘For Your Consideration’ ads in Variety and the Hollywood Reporter. Basically these ads are a way to remind Academy voters about award-worthy achievements from the past year. Those three magic words can build a career, inflate a salary and move performers from not hot to hot in a flash. This new improvised comedy from the makers of Best in Show and Waiting for Guffman details what happens when members of the Home for Purim cast are plucked from obscurity and infected with Oscar fever.

Catherine O’Hara plays the aptly named Marilyn Hack, a veteran actress whose chances of stardom are behind her. When she gets wind of an internet rumor that her performance in this overwrought melodrama might attract the attention of the Academy he long dormant hopes of stardom are awakened. The resulting award hype spreads to everyone around her and soon her co-stars are being buzzed about by award season handicappers and everyone has Oscar mania.

Guest, with his usual collaborator Eugene Levy have come up with an occasionally touching, often revealing look at the outskirts of the dream factory and its citizens. The kind of actors who struggle and are best known for playing giant dancing hot dogs on television commercials. O’Hara’s Hack is a poignant example of an actor who never broke through but refuses to give up on her dreams, convinced that celebrity is just around the corner. Harry Shearer, best known as the voice of Ned Flanders (and many others) on The Simpsons and as Derek Smalls, bass player for Spinal Tap, is Victor Allan Miller, a journeyman actor who still has to audition for radio voice work. Together they represent the 98% of the Screen Actors Guild who spend most of their careers either unemployed or underused.

For Your Consideration isn’t as drop dead funny as some of Guest’s other efforts like Best in Show but does feature great work from the ensemble cast. Catherine O’Hara just might find herself with a For Your Consideration ad in real life, while Fred Willard happily and hilariously skewers television entertainment reporters. Dependable players Eugene Levy and Jennifer Coolidge hand in wonderfully odd comic performances, but if I have a complaint about the cast it is that it is too large. The ensemble has swelled to include Ricky Gervais and Sandra Oh both good performers, both kind of wasted in throw-away roles. Gervais is one of the funniest actors working today but you wouldn’t know it from his performance here.  

For Your Consideration is a clever—I liked Harry Shearer’s line, “Oscar is the backbone of this industry, an industry not known for backbone.”—and fairly realistic look at life on the fringes of success, but it doesn’t deliver the boffo laughs of some of Guest’s other work.
FLUSHED AWAY: 3 ½ STARS

For the first time ever Aardman Animations, who gave us Wallace and Gromit and Chicken Run, have put their clay figures into storage and taken a step into the 21st century, making a film that looks a great deal like one of their homemade stop-motion extravaganzas, but is actually computer animated. Flushed Away, the story of an upper class pet mouse flushed down the loo by a bullying rat, features great animation, an all star British voice cast and something that all kids love—toilet humor.

For the “No Clay! No Way!” purists out there it should be noted that the good folks at Aardman chose to go with computer animation for Flushed Away because of the number of scenes involving water, which is nearly impossible to portray convincingly in stop motion. To lend a handmade patina to the film they used software that reproduces the 'imperfections' found in claymation like thumb prints and dropped frames.

Flushed Away does not take place in the under water world of Finding Nemo or SpongeBob. No, most of this movie happens in the London sewer, a dark and dank Ratropolis occupied by rodent citizens who are threatened with extinction by a Toad  King (Ian McKellen) who resembles a froggy Jabba the Hutt and his scheming rat henchmen. Dropped into this locality is Roddy St. James (Hugh Jackman), a snobby pet mouse from the Royal neighborhood of Kensington, who is used to the finer things in life.

Despite the best efforts of the evil Toad and his French Amphibian Ninjas to do Roddy in, he manages, with the help of an enterprising scavenger named Rita (Kate Winslet) to uncover the Toad’s nefarious plot to destroy Ratropolis and discovers that home is where the heart is, not just where all your stuff is. It’s sort of a rodent Upstairs Downstairs with Hollywood action.

Flushed Away lacks some of the cheerful charm of good old Wallace and Gromit, but what it lacks in charm it makes up for in sheer inventiveness in its action-packed story. It swirls along at quite a clip, effortlessly mixing literate verbal and visual jokes—we glimpse a cockroach reading Kafka’s Metamorphosis—with potty humor that’ll appeal to the kids. Dig a little deeper and you’ll find themes of urban loneliness, the reciprocated condescension between Brits and the French and the class system that still exists in Britain.

Worth the price of admission alone is the hilarious Greek Chorus of slugs who provide musical accompaniment for many of the scenes.      

FLAGS OF OUR FATHERS: 2 ½ STARS

Clint Eastwood’s new film Flags of Our Fathers challenges viewers to rethink their notion of the word “hero.” It’s an important message in an era where words like “hero” are thrown around willy nilly, too bad it isn’t presented in a better or more interesting film.
 
The movie explores the famous raising of the flag at Iwo Jima during a bloody 1945 battle that lasted one-month and left 6,800 Americans dead. Despite the human cost of the conflict, a photograph of five Marines and one Navy corpsman hoisting the American flag on top of Mount Suribachi became the iconic image of World War II. Using a series of flashbacks, Eastwood tells the story of the combat, the subsequent use of the three surviving flag raisers as propaganda tools by the US government and one son’s quest to uncover the story of his father’s involvement.

Most interestingly he uncovers how that famous image was used to sell the idea of victory to a country tired of war. The three surviving soldiers from the photo are labeled heroes and brought back to the US to help raise money for the war effort. The trouble is, they don’t see themselves as heroes. The real heroes, they say, are lying dead on the battlefield.

The idea of using the hero figure to sell a war is a timely and interesting idea, and will likely generate conversation post theatre, but the movie is all concept. For the most part the characters are loosely drawn and with the possible exception of Adam Beach’s character, the Native-American Ira Hayes, we don’t get to know them very well.

A confused story structure with endless flashbacks doesn’t help. Eastwood stages some very effective scenes, one in which the guys recreate the flag raising on a giant paper mache mountain in a sports stadium is particularly good, but he can’t seem to resist cutting away to battle scenes that don’t further the story.
Flags of Our Fathers is a movie about a flag raising that doesn’t wave the flag, that encourages thoughtful debate about the public face of war, but is unfortunately flawed by muddled storytelling.

FLYBOYS: 3 STARS

There was a time when heroic war movies were a Hollywood staple. In recent years, however, the cinematic war hero has fallen on hard times. Images of John Wayne valiantly defending his country have been replaced by movies like Apocalypse Now, Platoon and Jarhead that show the darker, more intense side of warfare. The new film Flyboys flies in the face of these movies, harkening back to a simpler time. It is the first WWI aviation film in over 30 years, and feels suitably old-fashioned.

Based on a true story, Flyboys is set in 1917 before the United States entered World War I. Despite the US’s non-involvement hundreds Americans volunteered to serve alongside soldiers of the Allied powers of France, England and Italy. Thirty-eight of these volunteers signed up as airmen, and became America’s first fighter pilots with a company known as the Lafayette Escadrille.

Bucking the recent trend in war pictures this is a story with nary an anti-hero in sight. James Franco (a dead ringer for James Dean) is the ringleader of the group of pilots, and he’s a good-looking pillar of strength. Ditto for most of the other guys in the platoon. They always seem to do the right thing and have an all-for-one-and-one-for-all attitude that is probably essential to survival on the battlefield, but makes for kind of a dull movie.

Early on you can predict who will live and die. The virtuous will survive while anyone with a hint of pomposity, or anyone like the red shirted crewmember on Star Trek—someone who you don’t learn anything much about—is doomed.

Flyboys isn’t a terribly interesting character study, it’s filled with stilted dialogue and some wooden acting, but the filmmakers wisely spend about half the movie’s running time in the sky, with our boys engaging in some spectacular dogfights. In those scenes the movie achieves lift-off.

The dogfights are beautifully shot and really show the bravery and skill it took for these young men to fight for something they believed in. These scenes put the viewer in the cockpit and are reminiscent of some of the classic dogfight movies like The Dawn Patrol and Hell’s Angels, which, like Flyboys, were all directed by experienced pilots.

When grounded Flyboys is as interesting as being stuck at the airport, but when it becomes air bound there are some thrills to be had. 

FINAL DESTINATION 3 DVD: MOVIE: 2 STARS
EXTRA FEATURES: 4 STARS

In the time-honored tradition of movies like Nightmare on Elm Street and Friday the 13th, The Final Destination series exists solely to find new and inventive ways of killing teenagers. Like the Ronco vegetable chopper I see on television infomercials late at night, these movies slice and dice teens with little muss and fuss, usually with just one of them surviving to star in the inevitable sequel. 

Final Destination 3, the latest in the franchise finds new and inventive ways to thin out the teenage herd including death by roller coaster and tanning bed. It’s fun in a gruesome kind of way, particularly if you don’t like teenagers. The DVD has a unique special feature that I’ve never seen before. You can watch the movie straight, just as the filmmaker intended, or you can play the “Choose Their Fate” version of the movie where you can change the outcome for some of the characters. Starting at the beginning the movie will pause at key points in the film and give you two choices that will directly effect the way the film progresses. So, for example, if you like that Kris Lemke boy who played God on Joan of Arcadia maybe you can save him from a gruesome fate. It’s a cool extra feature and one that spices up an otherwise predictable movie.

FAILURE TO LAUNCH: 3 STARS

Failure to Launch has one of those titles that begs me to poke fun. I could call it Failure to Laugh or say Failure to Launch fails to launch, but I won’t because it is actually quite an amiable romantic comedy.

Sarah Jessica Parker does a riff on her Sex in the City character Carrie Bradshaw as a woman who specializes in coaxing grown men to leave the nest. Her clients are usually the parents of man-boys who have “failed to launch.” They still live at home well past the point where they should be out on their own doing their own laundry and cooking for themselves. Matthew McConaughey is a handsome, successful thirty-something who still lives with his folks and has major relationship issues. She is hired to lure him out of his childhood bedroom, but of course there are complications.

Along the way we meet the usual rom-com suspects—his goofy friends, her slightly crazy roommate—while the story progresses in a paint-by-numbers way. There are no surprises here, just a few laughs and good-looking people falling in love, which is just as it should be otherwise this wouldn’t be a romantic comedy but a romantic tragedy.

Failure to Launch has an odd premise that wouldn’t happen in real life. As the story unfolded I had to wonder why McConaughey’s parents would go through such a complicated and potentially damaging scheme, so obviously doomed to failure to get rid of him rather than just talk to him. Of course if they did that there wouldn’t be much of a movie. 

Failure to Launch is a good romantic comedy with a bad name.

Freedomland

Freedomland is based on a big, important book by author Richard Price. At 500 pages Price had the opportunity to explore the racially charged atmosphere that erupts after a white woman says an African-American man stole her car with her 4-year-old son sleeping in the backseat.

Unfortunately the movie struggles with presenting the same incendiary material as the book. This means that many stories are started, but few are resolved. Perhaps it is the burden of trying to adapt a lengthy novel into a two-hour movie, but the filmmakers seem to be trying to cram too much story into the film. The result is a disjointed movie that tries hard to shed some light on a variety of topics such as the plight of missing children, how the police and press only seem interested in this case because the missing child was white and the alleged perpetrator was black and how racial tension bubbles just below the surface in America’s inner cities. All good topics for a film, but Freedomland would have been a better movie if writer Price and director Joe Roth had just chosen one angle on the story and stuck with it.

Headlining the film are three very good actors—Julianne Moore, Samuel L. Jackson and Edie Falco—whose uneven performances range from flat to hysterical. As a Susan Smith type of character the hollow-eyed Julianne Moore—one of the best actors of her generation—does not do her best work here. The gnashing of teeth and blankly staring into space do not a performance make. She’s better than this, and hopefully next time out she’ll be back in top form.

Old pro Jackson manages to breathe some life into a stock character, although as a policeman he seems woefully unaware of any kind of police procedure. How many times would a real cop entrust an unstable victim to strangers with the words “Keep an eye on her”?

Falco is so stoic she seems to be in a different movie. None of them is aided by the script which features lengthy, wordy speeches that seem more stage worthy than cinematic.

Freedomland feels like it was made with the best of intentions but its bumbled execution renders the material trite and superficial.   

Fun with Dick and Jane

Fun with Dick and Jane is a remake of the subversive 1977 satire starring George Segal and Jane Fonda that harped on the hypocrisies of American capitalism. It cleverly poked fun at the aerospace industry, the welfare system and televangelism. Of all the remakes in the theatres these days, and there have been a lot of them, Fun with Dick and Jane should have been the most timely. With the collapse of Enron and the internet bubble bursting this story should be social satire, but somehow it falls flatter than the foam on a day old Starbuck’s latte.

The story sees yuppies Dick and Jane, played by Jim Carrey and Téa Leoni living a comfortable suburban life. When Dick is promoted to Vice President of Communications at his corporate job the couple seem to be set for life. Unfortunately the job only lasts for twenty-four hours. Dick, and the entire company find themselves out of work when the boss brings down the company in a stock scandal. Over-extended, bankrupt and unable to find work Dick and Jane turn to armed robbery to pay their bills.

Aside from a few jabs at big business, the toll greedy corporations can take on their employees and an interesting “thank-you” list in the credits—how many times have you seen Ken Lays name in the credits of a movie?—Fun with Dick and Jane exchanges the satirical bite of the original for Jim Carrey’s patented physical humor and a revenge subplot.

Carrey makes the most of his slightly written part, and generates a few laughs here, but without him Fun with Dick and Jane wouldn’t live up to the promise of its name.

The Family Stone

Hollywood has a long standing tradition of churning out holiday films in which large, loving but dysfunctional families gather to celebrate Christmas and end up bring up old feuds, swapping girlfriends (or boyfriends) and over-cooking the turkey. So the idea for The Family Stone, a new comedy starring Diane Keaton and Sarah Jessica Parker, isn’t a new one, but despite the ring of familiarity The Family Stone works as both a comedy and a poignant family drama.

The story centers around Dermot Mulroney—the oldest and favorite Stone son—who brings his uptight girlfriend, played by Sarah Jessica Parker, home for Christmas. The Stone siblings and parents take an instant dislike to her and united in the cause of tormenting her they try to drive her away. For support she brings in her beautiful younger sister, played by Claire Danes who only complicates an already strange situation.

This is normally the kind of thing that makes me run to the theatre—to see something else—but the great ensemble cast really salvages this from the treacly depths. As Meredith Sarah Jessica Parker leaves her Sex in the City character far behind daring to be unlikable and along the way proves that there is more to her than simply being Carrie Bradshaw.

We also get a welcome glimpse of Canadian actress Rachel McAdams as the nasty Stone sister Amy. This is her third good film this year after The Wedding Crashers and Red Eye, and in it she proves that she has mastered the role of the cinematic mean girl.

There are many humorous moments but the film packs an emotional punch in the scenes between the elder Stones, played by Diane Keaton and Craig T. Nelson. In their best moment together they tell us all we need to know about their relationship in one quiet bedroom scene and one gentle touch of a scar.

FLIGHT PLAN 2 ½ STARS

I would have been able to give the new Jody Foster movie Flight Plan a better rating if I had left the theatre ten minutes before the credits rolled. For the first hour or so of the movie it is one of the best thrillers I have seen this year. The story of an airplane designer based in Germany who is taking her dead husband back to the United States for burial takes an interesting turn when the daughter she has been traveling with disappears. For most of the film it turns into a psychological drama forcing the viewer to question whether the little girl actually existed, or was simply a figment of the distraught woman’s mind. Mix in Sean Bean as the compassionate Captain, Jody Foster going all Panic Room, some post 9/11 urban dread about flying and the result is a potent thriller—until the last ten minutes. 

I’m not prepared to say what happens at the end of this film, but I am willing to say that it pushes credulity to the point of snapping. Unfortunately all the good will the film built up in the first hour evaporates at the end.

FINDING NEVERLAND

Mr. Cheekbones, Johnny Depp, plays Peter Pan author JM Barrie in this film which was nominated for Best Actor for Depp and Best Picture at this year’s Oscars. It claims to be based on a true story, but in reality has little to do with the real life events that led to the writing of the famous children’s play. Having said that though, it isn’t a history lesson, it’s a movie, and as a movie it works largely because of the performances of Depp in the lead role and Kate Winslet, who plays the mother of the boys who inspire Barrie to write the play. I think it is really easy to be cynical about a movie that is about the enshrining of boyhood, but this movie is more magical than mawkish. 

FAR FROM HEAVEN

Simply put Far From Heaven is the best movie of the year so far. Director Todd Haynes’ tribute to the “women’s films” of the 1950s shines, bringing forth issues that outraged America in 1957 when the film is set, and continue to rub people the wrong way 45 years later. Cathy (Julianne Moore) and Frank (Dennis Quaid) have the picture perfect life. He’s an executive for the (fictional) television giant Magnatech, she’s the perfectly coiffed housewife. Imagine Ozzie and Harriett. Everything is perfect until one day she finds him, shirtless, in the arms of another man. She takes solace in the company of her handsome African-American gardener Raymond (Dennis Haysbert), which sends shock waves through her snooty and prejudiced Connecticut community. Now picture Ozzie and Harriett as imagined by Norman Rockwell after a three day drinking binge. Haynes maintains a feeling of melodrama throughout the film, but never becomes campy. His even handed approach lends an air of hyper-reality to the movie, as if we are watching real life through a looking glass. It’s a stunning achievement – emotional but not ironic, simple but very effective. A beautiful score by veteran Elmer Bernstein and Mark Friedberg's amazing production design enhance an already wonderful movie experience. Julianne Moore gives the performance of her career as a housewife who watches her idyllic world crumble around her, while Dennis Quaid lets go of the macho posturing that has informed so many of his recent roles, and plays Frank as a tortured soul who doesn’t really understand why his life turned out the way it did. Dennis Haysbert (best known as presidential candidate David Palmer on 24) gives a smart, dignified performance as Raymond the gardener. Highly recommended.  

FEMME FATALE

Brian DePalma’s latest is steeped in his usual mythology – misogyny, double crosses, and voyeurism. Femme Fatale dips heavily into the film noirs of the 40s for inspiration, particularly Double Indemnity, a classic brew of duplicity, murder and adultery. But after a breathless first twenty minutes DePalma throws logic out the window and allows the movie to wander implausibly through Paris’s seedy underworld. Like the giant photo collage that the Antonio Banderas character constructs in his apartment, this movie feels like a collage of sexy (and or violent) scenes cobbled together to make a whole. It’s incomprehensible eye candy. Rebecca Romijn-Stamos as Laure the vampy thief who steals $10 million in jewels before taking off with another woman's identity, however, is one of the best scoundrels to come along in a while. She’s a long legged bad girl who laughs with glee as two men beat each other up over her. She’s a nasty piece of work who really means it when she says, “I’m a bad, bad girl.” DePalma’s use of split screens and other visual tricks keeps Femme Fatale interesting to look at, making it a work-out for the eyes, but not the mind. 

FINDING NEMO

Fish aren’t cuddly. The scales, the smell and the cold blooded nature of the species make them difficult to hug, let alone curl up with. That perception will likely change with the release of Finding Nemo, a film that will do for fish what Babe did for pigs. That is, make them seem like something more than just an accompaniment for French fries.

Pixar, (in co-operation with Disney) the clever animators behind Toy Story and  Monsters Inc, are back with a story about a young clownfish named Nemo (Alexander Gould) who gets separated from Marlin (Albert Brooks), his over protected father. With the help of Dory (Ellen DeGeneres), a blue fish with short term memory loss, Marlin desperately searches for his son. In the process he learns about himself and love while risking life and fin to find his son.

The story is typical Disney claptrap, a tale that hits the same emotional buttons that have marked kid’s films since Bambi was a fawn. But it’s not the story that recommends Finding Nemo and makes it the achievement that it is.

The script is tight and quite funny (although in a more subtle way than previous Pixar creations) but it is the visuals that overwhelm. The computer geeks at Pixar have imbued their undersea world with such feeling and splendour that it is hard to believe it isn’t real, that it is, in fact, nothing more than cleverly arranged binary code. The colours and textures of the sea literally come alive on the screen and show a real eye for detail. Particularly eye-popping is the jelly-fish sequence, a beautifully realized scene in which Marlin and Dory must navigate their way through a school of opaque stinging sea creatures.

Albert Brooks heads the cast as Marlin. He’s neurotic, not unlike many of the characters Brooks has played before, but is charmingly so. This may be his best role since Broadcast News. When he deadpans that, despite the name, clownfish aren’t really all that funny, you know the part was written for him. Ellen DeGeneres brings considerable charm to the scatterbrained Dory, while Willem Dafoe and Geoffrey Rush also contribute voices.

Finding Nemo is more than just a technical marvel; it is a computer animated film that transcends the animation to become a film which will engage the heart as well as the mind.   

FRAILTY

This is a hatchet job. Literally. Bill Paxton in his feature film directorial debut presents an eerie story involving would-be demons, religious fanaticism, fatherly love and axe wielding serial killers. It’s an accomplished thriller that manages to disturb, and keep you guessing right until the end. It wouldn’t be fair to give away any plot details – thrillers rely on the element of surprise – but suffice to say there are more twists and turns here than on any winding mountain road. Texas native Matthew McConaughey turns in strongest performance in years as the narrator, but it is Paxton as the well- meaning, but insane father who really impresses. His “everyman” approach to the character is chilling, displaying the ordinariness of evil, the kind of evil that could live next door to you or me.

FRIDA

Frida, director Julie Taymor’s look at the life of Mexican artist Frida Kahlo, is a beautiful film that proves that Salma Hayek is more than just a sex-symbol. It is her performance in the title role that saves Frida from being just another run-of-the mill biopic. She captures the spirit of the late Mexican painter in all her uni-browed glory. Films about the creative process don’t usually work, but Taymor takes the back-door approach, giving us the details of Frida’s life that inspired her to make her art – her triumphs, her pain and her bizarre relationship with Diego Rivera (Alfred Molina). We don’t often see her at work in front of an easel, but when we do we understand why she paints.

FULL FRONTAL

Director Steven Soderbergh calls Full Frontal the unofficial sequel to Sex Lies and Videotape, his groundbreaking 1989 film. Most everyone else has called it a mess, or useless waste of time. One prominent American critic even suggested this might be the worst film ever by a major director. I can’t say I agree with the harsh criticism. While I’m not exactly sure what the movie is about, and vast passages of it simply do not work, I do think it is a film with great passion and energy. Soderbergh has left behind the slickness of Ocean’s 11 and Erin Brockovich and made an experimental film that bristles with inventiveness. Not everything works, but there are several nice performances, particularly by David Hyde Pierce and Catherine Keener and I enjoyed watching an A-list director stray from the tried and true and explore rockier ground.

THE FANTASTIC 4: THE RISE OF THE SILVER SURFER: 2 ½ STARS

At the beginning of The Rise of the Silver Surfer the Fantastic Four—Mr. Fantastic, The Invisible Woman, The Thing and The Human Torch—are tabloid celebrities. They have endorsement deals, always travel in first class and their every move is followed by the press. They’re just like Paris Hilton, except that she’s in jail and they aren’t. Oh, and rather than commit crimes, they solve them, and by the end of this movie will have saved the entire world.

On the eve of the marriage between Mr. Fantastic (Ioan Gruffudd) and The Invisible Woman (Jessica Alba) strange atmospheric disturbances begin to plague the earth. Seas freeze and giant craters start to pop up everywhere. Despite the trouble the superheroes decide to go ahead with the wedding as planned. Just before the “I do’s” a shiny silver man on a shiny silver surfboard whizzes by, disrupting everything, and very nearly mussing Jessica Alba’s really fake looking blonde hair.

Some scientific mumbo jumbo later it is revealed that every time the Silver Surfer buzzes a planet, it dies eight days later. Call him Mr. Global Warming.

No one likes a deadline, but the Fan 4 jump into action, with the help of the army and their former nemesis Victor Von Doom (Nip and Tuck’s Julian McMahon) who has returned from the dead and may have some crucial information to help save the world. With time counting down the Silver Surfer will, to paraphrase Brian Wilson, have fun, fun, fun until the Fan 4 take his surfboard away.

The Rise of the Silver Surfer is a vast improvement on the first movie in this franchise, 2005’s Fantastic Four, which made a lot of money (hence the sequel) but offered little in the way of good story-telling or even interesting special effects. Neither film is as smart as any of the X-Men movies, as stylish as Spider-Man 1 or 2, or even as action-packed as Batman Begins, but they do manage to capture some of the goofy fun of the comic books. Corny jokes pepper the script, and instead of taking their usual powers seriously, the superheroes seem to have fun with them. The Invisible Girl uses her magical cloaking abilities to make a zit disappear on her wedding day and Mr. Fantastic, more colloquially know as Rubber Man really struts—or should that be stretches—his stuff on the dance floor.

Teenagers and fans of the comic books should enjoy the action sequences, the bad guy, Dr. Doom, a villain so over-the-top dramatic he makes the Phantom of the Opera look like he’s auditioning for a high school glee club, the straightforward story—there’s no background info, dark sides or any of the other stuff that often make movies based on comic books a bit of a slog—and The Silver Surfer who is just flat out cool.

Too bad the acting isn’t better—we’re looking at you Alba and Grufudd—and the dialogue a little sharper. The Fantastic Four are hugely popular comic book characters, unfortunately when translated to the screen they’re not quite fantastic, just adequate.