THE GIRL WHO PLAYED WITH FIRE: 2 ½ STARS

“The Girl Who Played with Fire,” much-anticipated follow-up to “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” is much like one of Sweden’s other great exports—the IKEA Billy bookcase system. It has lots of pieces, but not all of them fit.

The story picks up a year after “Dragon Tattoo”” left off. Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace) is back in Sweden after lamming it around the world. She’s been deep undercover; not even Mikael Blomkvist  (Michael Nyqvist) knew where she was or what she’s been up to. Of course as soon as she touches down on Swedish soil her life gets complicated and by extension so does Blomkvist’s. She becomes the main suspect in a triple murder and Blomkvist, trying to get to the bottom of the case encounters human traffickers, Russian gangsters, motorcycle thugs, drugs and even a brute with an unusual genetic disorder. These people lead very dramatic and dangerous lives.

Despite the large number of story shards and characters “The Girl Who Played with Fire” is much more straightforward than “Dragon Tattoo.” It’s cluttered yet simplistic, stretching every plot point past its breaking point. Long meaningful stares are traded, dialogue that sounds torn from the Hardboiled Crime Writers Almanac is exchanged and tepid action ensues, all leading up to a “Murder She Wrote” climax where everyone spills the beans. It’s a disappointment because even at well over two hours “Dragon Tattoo” was gripping and exciting but at just over two hours “Fire” feels much longer. It is not as taut as “Dragon Tattoo” or as interesting.    

One of the things that made “Dragon Tattoo” so compelling was the partnership (and budding relationship) of Blomkvist and Salander. We watched as they became the Swedish “Hart to Hart,” battling the bad guys and perhaps even developing feelings for one another, but save for the occasional e-mail “Fire” keeps them apart and the movie suffers in the absence of their chemistry.

Salander, the punk rock computer hacker with, surprise (!), an attitude, is one of the better female characters to come along in recent years, but “Fire” blunts her effectiveness. She spends endless hours hiding in her apartment smoking Camel cigarettes when she should be out kicking butt. Where’s the fierceness from the first film?  
 
The film looks good—director Daniel Alfredson keeps the austere look of the first film intact—but on a technical note some of the subtitles are hard to read—white letters on white backgrounds are not a good idea!

By eliminating the book’s emphasis on systemic sexism and homophobia in favor of a basic crime story “The Girl Who Played with Fire” has none of the dramatic oomph of the first film. Worse, it has managed to make the main characters, so appealing in the first film, less interesting.

GROWN UPS: 2 STARS

The once edgy comics of “Saturday Night Live” have gotten older and a little rounder in the middle but judging by their work in the ironically named “Grown Ups” they haven’t actually grown up.

Adam Sandler, Chris Rock, David Spade, Kevin James and Rob Schneider star in this celebration of arrested adolescence as five friend s reunited at the funeral of the beloved high school basketball coach. All married, except for the childlike Spade, they are at different stages of their lives. Schneider is a new age guru with a much older wife, Rock is a henpecked house husband, Sandler the hottest agent in Hollywood, with the hot wife (Salma Hayek) and James is the fat guy who falls down a lot. Like, a lot a lot. To spread their coach’s ashes they head to a cottage by a lake to spend the weekend, reconnect and endlessly trade good natured jibes. Over the course of the Fourth of July weekend their spoiled kids learn to live without cell phones, the boys play a dangerous game with a bow and arrow and ogle Schneider’s babelicious daughters.

“Grown Ups” isn’t quite rude enough for the Apatow crowd, but yet, not quite family friendly enough for grandma and the kids. For every outrageous joke about breast milk there’s a faux emotive or cutesy kid moment. The one liners come fast and furious—these guys only seem to be able to communicate by busting one another’s chops—but for the first hour there is precious little in the way of real jokes. It’s titter worthy rather than laugh out loud funny.

The guys have good chemistry, which they should, having spent years doing live television together, but it looks like the kind of movie that might have been more fun to make than to watch. These are (mostly) likeable actors but they’re not doing their most likeable work here. Sandler, for instance ruins a funny moment when his daughter says, “I want to get chocolate wasted!” with a snorting reaction that steps on the joke.

In the second hour Sandler is in heart warming mode but even this comes off as false. He spends the whole movie shrugging off his “Mr. Hollywood” nickname, but then in the climax—and I’ll be careful not to give anything away here—acts like a rich city slicker doing the local yokels a favor.

Luckily Sandler regular Steve Buscemi and the mangling of the name of a Canadian city provide some silly laughs.
 
“Grown Ups” is lowbrow with warm and fuzzy aspirations but misses the mark.

GET HIM TO THE GREEK: 3 ½ STARS

There was a time when rock stars behaved like rock stars. They didn’t guest edit the “Globe and Mail” or appear on “American Idol.” In the good old days they trashed hotels rooms, drove Roll Royces into swimming pools and bit the heads off of bats. In other words they behaved like Aldous Snow (Russell Brand) the decadent singer who first rock ‘n’ rolled all night in “Saving Sarah Marshall” and now parties every day in “Get Him to the Greek.”  

Jonah Hill plays Aaron Green, a record company intern sent to London to accompany his idol, the washed up rock star Aldous Snow, to New York for an appearance on the “Today” show and then on to Los Angeles for his comeback concert at the Greek Theatre. Between “sips of naughty water,” condoms of heroin hidden in awkward places and all the sex, barf and rock ‘n’ roll two people can possibly cram into 72 hours the trip goes horribly wrong. Imagine if “The Hangover” starred Keith Moon and Jim Morrison and you get the idea.

Brand and Hill are the name brand comics in the credits, but another actor, not known for yukking it up, actually almost walks away with the movie. As the grizzled record label president Sergio Roma—a jaded executive who has been there, done that—Sean 'P. Diddy' Combs swoops in from time to time to deliver many of the film’s best lines. He’s at his best in the manic Las Vegas drugapalooza sequence—they smoke a giant spliff called a “Jeffrey,” so named because the name sounds safe but packs a punch; much like Jeffrey Dalhmer I guess—when he’s out of control and really letting go of his finely honed P-Diddy image.

Not that Brand and Hill don’t get laughs—they get plenty—but they are also required to bring some heart to what is essentially an R-rated raunchy comedy. The romantic scenes, the pining for their exes and the heart-to-heart talks, could work, but they don’t in this movie. Rock ‘n’ roll is a vicious game and “Get Him to the Greek” is best when it is loud and proud and sticks with the three chord comedy. Nobody wants to hear the Ramones backed by a symphony orchestra and likewise we don’t need to hear Snow complaining about the lonely life of a rock star. Screenwriter and director Nicholas Stoller would have done well to wonder “What would Keith Richards do?” from time to time and cut the mushy stuff.

Otherwise “Get Him to the Greek” is a rock ‘n’ roll romp, and while it doesn’t exactly have enough rock ‘n’ roll attitude—it’s more The Monkees than Led Zeppelin—it does provide one great lyric line, “When the world slips you a Jeffrey / Stroke the furry wall,” a great old school soundtrack—“Personality Crisis” by the New York Dolls, T. Rex’s “20th Century Boy”—lots of good inappropriate jokes and some fun cameos.      

GUNLESS: 2 ½ STARS

In its opening minutes “Gunless,” the new Paul Gross film, simultaneously pays homage to and has fun with the spaghetti westerns of Sergio Leone. The dusty landscape and stark camera work look lifted from “A Fistful of Dollars” and the opening credit pays direct homage to the Italian master. A red hot branding iron embosses the words “Once Upon a Time in the West” across the screen. However, with a quick flip of the compass dial—and by superimposing the word “North” over “West”—the movies takes a sharp turn away from Leone territory and into the Great White North. Call it a Poutine Western if you like, but with that one simple change “Gunless” becomes a uniquely Canadian western.    

Paul Gross plays The Montana Kid, an American gunslinger who comes North and finds nobility and becomes, well, gunless. Wanted by bounty hunters he drifts north, taking refuge in a small one horse town. He’s a tough, ornery killer who lives by the code of the gun, but after spending time with the locals and a goofy Mountie (Dustin Milligan)—particularly with the fetching Jane (Sienna Guillory)—he realizes he doesn’t need his firearm to live. His resolve his challenged when his arch enemy Ben Cutler (Callum Keith Rennie) shows up to take the Kid back to the US, dead or alive.

“Gunless” is silly. Not “Blazing Saddles” silly, but a man says to his horse, “You’ve got carrot breath” silly. The first half of the film is played strictly for laughs, and while much of it isn’t that successful, Gross does do the finest face plant in the history of Canadian cinema. The humor seems to be aimed at kids but I’m not sure children will be that interested in the story of a gunslinger, his code of honor and a widow who builds a windmill.

The “Benny Hill” humor is largely put on hold for the middle part of the movie when it becomes like an eager-to-please Bollywood movie, mixing romance, action, humor and even a dance sequence. It’s all over the place and while some of the transitions from farce to sincerity to gun slinging are kind of jarring, the movie retains a kind of goofy charm throughout.

Gross, despite his background in light comedy on “Due South,” is most effective here not when he is playing around, but when he is deadly serious. A number of scenes leading up to the pivotal show down show him in full-on Clint Eastwood “Unforgiven” mode, twirling his peace maker while trying to come to grips with all the blood he has spilled in his life. They don’t exactly fit the tone of the scenes that came before, or the scenes to follow, but it is a good indicator that Gross can play a slightly darker character than the nice guy roles he usually takes on.       

“Gunless” is probably the most Canadian western ever made. It’s a story about a gunslinger that is anti gun—boy, is the NRA going to hate this movie—and anti violence. More to the point, however, the story is used to display the subtleties of Canadian and American relations.

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO: 4 STARS

If you think Swedish cinema is all isolation and despair, a tortured Bergmanesque look at the human condition, think again. In recent years directors like Lukas Moodysson and films such as “Let the Right One In” have redefined Scandinavian movies; quietly leaving behind the icy introspection typical of the best known filmmakers from that part of the world. The latest Swedish film to gain international notice is “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo,” a truly thrilling thriller based on a best selling novel.

In the opening minutes of the film Mikael Blomkvist (Michael Nyqvist), a muck raking journalist for the controversial Millennium magazine, loses a libel case brought against him by a Swedish industrialist. Before he begins his three month prison sentence he is offered an intriguing job. Hired by Henrik Vanger (Sven-Bertil Taube), the scion of an industrial dynasty, he is charged with solving a forty-year-old murder. In the late sixties Vanger’s favorite niece disappeared, leaving no trace except for framed, pressed flowers which arrive every year on Henrik’s birthday. It is a cold case, one that the police haven’t been able to solve, but Vanger feels that Blomkvist’s dogged style might be able to uncover some new clues. Aiding the journalist in his search is Lisbeth Salander (Noomi Rapace), a trouble computer hacker with a massive tattoo of a dragon on her back.

“The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo” is a pulp thriller, complete with Nazis, bible references and bondage. There’s nothing terribly highbrow about it, but there is a certain elegance to how director Niels Arden Oplev slowly unfurls the clues, stretching the story tautly over the two-a-half-hour running time. The plot shouldn’t work; it has story shards all over the place—the verdict in the libel case, the hacker and her evil parole officer, the disappearance—but Oplev keeps the storytelling as crisp as the sound of a boot crunching on the snow that envelopes the landscape.

Top it off with some terrific performances—particularly from Rapace and Taube—some melodrama and as twisted a bad guy as we’ve seen since “Silence of the Lamb’s” Buffalo Bill and you have a slow burning mystery that builds to an explosive climax.   

If this was an American film (and it will be soon) the disgraced, but dogged reporter might be played by Jeremy Renner, the computer hacker by Kristen Strewart and the obsessed industrialist by Christopher Plummer, and you know what, it wouldn’t be any better than the Swedish version. See it in its original language before Hollywood snaps it up and ruins it.

GREENBERG: 2 ½ STARS

“Greenberg,” the new film from “Squid and the Whale” director Noah Baumbach, is the kind of navel gazer where upper middle class people spend a great deal of time wondering what they’re going to do with their lives. The movie sees Ben Stiller in “master thespian” mode playing the title role; a character so disagreeable he makes Larry David seem like Tinkerbelle.

In this story of Yuppie angst Roger Greenberg (Ben Stiller) is fresh out of treatment for depression. Determined to “try and do nothing for a while,” he takes on the easiest job he can find—house sitting for his brother while his sibling is on business in Vietnam. It should be six easy, breezy weeks, but nothing in this guy’s life is easy breezy. Between a sick dog, an alienated best friend and his brother’s assistant Florence (played by mumblecore queen Greta Gerwig), he is reduced to a pile of misanthropic neurosis. Fighting off happiness wherever it may appear in his miserable life he alternately seduces and rejects Florence, playing her like a yoyo.  

“Greenberg” benefits from Baumbach’s ear for dialogue and his insight into the human condition, it’s just too bad he wasted his talents on these two characters. Placing lines like “youth is wasted on the young… life is wasted on people,” in Roger’s mouth is clever and almost makes you like Roger, but Stiller plays him as such a self pitying sad sack; so socially awkward to the extreme with an anger management problem to boot, it is impossible to get onside with him. Stiller’s best work has been characterized by tetchy characters, but in his comedies the angry edges are smoothed out by an underlying sweetness he brings to his roles. “Greenberg,” the film and the character, are much more grown up than Stiller usually plays, but that maturity has brought with it an unpleasant edge.

In Florence Greta Gerwig has found an aimless character that seems to have stepped out of one of the low budget mumblecore films she is best known for. She’s a doormat with enough self awareness to realize that she “has to stop doing things because they feel good” but seems to be unable to find the inner strength to improve her life or her choice of men. Gerwig, in an extremely natural and unselfconscious performance, however, plays her with no small amount of charm. The way she strokes the dog with her foot as they wait for the vet to see them is touching, subtle and very real. It’s as un-Hollywood a performance as we’re ever likely to see in a Ben Stiller movie.

The most convincing relationship in the film occurs between Greenberg and Ivan ((Rhys Ifans) an old friend and former band mate. Their scenes overflow with the well worn familiarity of two old friends who have grown apart.  

The trailer makes “Greenberg” look much more like a Ben Stiller comedy than it actually is. While well made and intermittently amusing it is more a rambling character study of the kind of people you would normally spend your time trying to avoid.

GREEN ZONE: 3 STARS

“Green Zone” starts with a bang. Or more rightly stated, a series of bangs. Set in Bagdad on the first night of the shock and awe campaign, the opening minutes are a harrowing portrait of what it must be like to be under massive fire. It’s a frenetic beginning, shot in a wild cinema verite style, which will leave many in the audience wishing someone would buy director Paul Greengrass a tripod. 

Matt Damon, reuniting with Greengrass after two Jason Bourne thrillers, is Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller. He’s a good soldier who allows creeping doubt about the existence of Weapons of Mass Destruction to force him to go rouge. Breaking ranks from the Pentagon he aligns himself with a CIA Middle East expert Army Chief Warrant Officer Roy Miller to try and ferret out the complicated truth. At odds with Miller is Clark Poundstone (Greg Kinnear), a freshly scrubbed Penatgon appointee who won’t let the soldier’s misgivings get in the way of his mission to bring democracy to Iraq. 

Nobody shoots action like Greengrass. He breathed new life into the spy genre with the Bourne films, using handheld camera to put the viewer in the action. Shooting where most action directors fear to tread—in tight, claustrophobic spaces for example—he brings a breathless documentary feel to his films that has redefined how we watch action on screen. That’s mostly a good thing, but for all the excitement that his whiplash camera style creates it occasionally leaves me hungry for an image or two that doesn’t look as though the camera was attached to a yoyo. His gritty style works for the gritty material in “Green Zone” but despite the masterful editing I found Greengrass’s propulsive approach overshadowed the story.

The action scenes are tense, but when the action stops, (which, frankly, isn’t very often) even the dialogue scenes move with the velocity of a bullet shot from a gun. It’s pedal to metal all the way with little regard to the nuances of storytelling.

Inspired by—it takes too many liberties with the text to be called “based on”—Rajiv Chandrasekaran's book "Imperial Life in the Emerald City" it is a straightforward story that dumbs down the story of Bush era Iraq policies to the level of a cut rate James Bond flick. The added political intrigue elevates things a tad but the addition of several characters right out of central casting makes one long for the days before every CIA operative character had a weary smile and a jaded heart.

Damon is comfortable mixing the game faced soldier with an earnest side and acquits himself well, particularly when in the actions scenes. By this time he and Greengrass must have a shorthand on set that allows them to blend character and action, and here it works.

The same can’t be said for Brendan Gleeson as CIA veteran Martin Brown. Gleeson, a fine actor, doesn’t have any action scenes, and seems to be an afterthought to the director who places such hoary old clichés as, “Don’t be so naive,” in his mouth. Ditto Amy Ryan as a Wall Street Journal writer. It seems if the characters aren’t shooting a gun or in constant motion than Greengrass doesn’t know exactly what to do with them.

There is no question that “Green Zone” is an adrenalized action film. Unfortunately it oversteps its reach when it tries to go highbrow with the political intrigue.

THE GHOST WRITER: 4 STARS

Given director Roman Polanski’s recent legal troubles it’s hard not to infer some deeper meaning into the plight of “The Ghost Writer’s” ex-Prime Minister (Pierce Brosnan) accused of war crimes. In a moment of art imitating life Adam Lang’s lawyer says, “I strongly advise you not to travel to any country with extradition policies.” If Polanski had listened to that advice he might not have had to finish editing this movie from a jail in Switzerland.

Within Lang there are echoes of Tony Blair. He’s a popular, if controversial ex-Prime Minister—“He wasn’t a politician,” says the ghost writer, “he was a craze.”—with a ten million dollar book deal and a dead co-writer. The late journalist was found washed up on shore near Lang’s remote Cape Cod beach house under very mysterious circumstances. Pitch hitting for the late writer is Ewan McGregor’s character—he doesn’t have a name in the film—a professional ghost writer whose biggest hit was a biography of a magician called “He Came, He Sawed, He Conquered.”  His job is to turn “incoherent rambling into a book.” Soon, however, his job is complicated when Lang is accused of war crimes by a former colleague. Untangling facts that may (or may not) place his own life in danger he turns from writer-for-hire to investigative journalist.

There is so much to like in “The Ghost Writer” that the few lapses in credulity are easy to forgive. I mean, are we really to believe that a massive conspiracy could be figured out using google? What’s next? Sherlock Holmes using Ask Jeeves? Apart from that bit of silliness Polanski has crafted a film that can comfortably sit beside “Three Days of the Condor” and “The Parallax View” for political intrigue.

The pacing is deliberate, not slow, but deliberate. Clues are doled out carefully, keeping red herrings to a minimum and allowing suspense to build with each new nugget of information. Tension and paranoia build with every scene. This is the man who made “Repulsion” and “Rosemary’s Baby,” so he knows how to make the mundane sinister. Ringing phones and loud raps on doors create an ominous atmosphere where danger is around every corner.

Add to that some interesting work to show the futility of the writer’s job. Watch in the background, the director places a gardener endlessly sweeping up dead leaves from the compound’s many patios, only to have them blow out of his wheel barrel every time he makes any progress. It’s a clever metaphor for the writer’s Sisyphean search for the truth. As he gets in over his head, trying to unravel years of twisted political strategy, I wanted to paraphrase Polanski’s most famous movie, “Chinatown.” “Forget it, writer. It’s politics.”        

McGregor, who has played a writer twice before in “Moulin Rouge,” later in “The Men Who Stare at Goats,” is convincing but really shines when he is working opposite Pierce Brosnan. I’m willing to overlook Brosnan’s recent turn as a half man / half horse in “Percy Jackson and the Olympians” when he can be this good. He looks like a politician, like he was made for photo ops in front of private jets, waving to his constituents, but it is in the cat-and-mouse dialogue between Lang and the writer that he does his best work.

“The Ghost Writer” is Polanski’s first film in five years, and for those willing to judge the art, not the artist, it is as satisfying a thriller as we’ll see this year.

GENTLEMEN BRONCOS: 2 STARS

“Gentlemen Broncos” is a coming-of-age, sci fi comedy about plagiarism. It’s also the latest film from “Napoleon Dynamite” director Jared Hess. That means it’s even more idiosyncratic than the description given in the first line of this review.

Written by Jared and (wife) Jerusha Hess “Gentlemen Broncos” tells the story of aspiring fantasy writer and home schooled teenage outcast Benjamin Purvis (Michael Angarano). He writes strange sci fi stories that lead people to ask if “some kind of weird surgery” inspired his work. After attending Cletus Fest, a fantasy convention where he hoped to pick up writing tips from his hero, writer Dr. Ronald Chevalier (Jemaine Clement), his creative life becomes complicated when his novel, “Yeast Lords,” is turned into an extremely low budget film, and plagiarized by Chevalier.

Up until now Hess’s films have been strange slices of life buoyed by strong comic performances and some good jokes. But what felt so fresh in “Napoleon Dynamite”—the oddball comic timing and unconventional American Grotesque casting—this time out feels gimmicky, as if Hess and company are masking a lack of original ideas with his tried and true and, by now, on his third film, somewhat tired trademarks. As a filmmaker he has a unique voice but, like the drunk guy at the party who speaks louder than everyone else to get his point across, Hess is stylistically shouting to cover a lack of jokes.   

Angarano, a talented young actor in the Michael Cera mode, is fine here but gets bowled over by a cast of curiosities. Jennifer Coolidge, as Benjamin’s mother rides the line between eccentric affectation and real life, raising a few laughs along the way, but Jemaine Clement, best known as half of “Flight of the Concords,” is nothing but eccentric affectation and hilariously so.

His take on the über pretentious novelist—who sounds like “Logan’s Run” era Michael York and signs off his speeches with the coda `May the glistening dome of the Borg queen shine her light on us all,”—is over-the-top and silly, but brings the funny.

In a tutorial to a class of aspiring writers he speaks of “the power of the suffix” when creating names for fantasy stories. Adding the suffix “onius,” “ainous” or “anous” he says, will yield the perfect name. For example, “bronco,” becomes “broncanous,” probably the best new word of the 21st century.

Unfortunately that’s the highlight, and that joke was given away in the trailer. “Gentleman Broncos” left me wanting more and less of Hess—more of the freshness he displayed in his earlier work, less of his clichéd trademarks.

GOOD HAIR: 3 ½ STARS

On the surface Good Hair sounds like the thinnest idea for a movie since Andy Warhol documented 24 hours in the life of the Empire State Building using only one static shot. Comedian Chris Rock’s look at the African-American hair industry could have been a bit on the gimmicky side but he and director Jeff Stilson wring every ounce of interest from the subject.

Inspired by his young daughter asking, “Daddy, how come I don't have good hair?,” Rock uses gentle humor to examine the relationship black women have with their hair. He interviews everyone from teen star Raven-Symoné to author Maya Angelou to decipher why and how African-American women go to such lengths to modify their hair. They discuss weaves—hair extensions described as “the graduation of the wig”—and relaxer, a potion used to straighten hair for a more “European look” that several women refer to as “creamy crack” because of their dependence on the toxic balm.

It’s all rather light and breezy and would be kind of inconsequential if Rock and company hadn’t broadened the film to examine how hair care in the African-American community became a billion dollar industry and why more of the businesses that feed this industry aren’t black owned. “There’s something wrong when we can’t control something as basic as the hair on our heads,” says Al Sharpton (called the “Dalai Lama of Relaxer”).

Good Hair works because it cleverly uses a study of African-American hair culture as the gateway to examine larger issues of race without ever sounding preachy or pedantic. Is it perfect? No, a hair competition that bookends the film could easily have been shortened or cut altogether, but it’s worth the price of admission to watch Rock talk hair—male and female—with the folks at a barbershop or hear Ice-T talking about getting a mug shot taken while wearing curlers.
 
Ultimately Good Hair’s most important message is summed up by Al Sharpton who says, “The stuff on top of their heads isn’t as important as the stuff inside their heads.

G-FORCE: 1 STAR

Popular culture has frequently paid homage to the lowly rodent. The Captain and Tennille scored a hit with Muskrat Love, their ode to arvicoline amour and Michael Jackson rode to the top of the charts on rat back with the tune Ben, possibly the only love song to a rat ever released.

Ben, of course, was the theme song to the 1972 movie of the same name. It was the sequel to Willard, the original “revolución de las ratas” flick. Ben and Willard, along with Stuart Little, Mr. Gopher, the burrowing terror from Caddyshack, Rizzo the Rat, Despereaux Tilling, Fievel Mousekewitz, the gang from Once Upon a Forest and of course, the biggest rodent star of all, Mickey Mouse, have left their mark in movie theatres. This weekend a new set of rodents that go by the collective name G-Force hope to do for guinea pigs what March of the Penguins did for tuxedo clad furry birds.

This mix of live action and animation from hotshot producer Jerry Bruckheimer centers on a team of trained secret agent guinea pigs. There’s team Leader Darwin (voiced by Sam Rockwell), Juarez (Penélope Cruz), Blaster (30 Rock’s Tracy Morgan) and mole Speckles (1996 Best Actor Nicolas Cage). In the midst of their biggest US government assignment ever—stopping evil billionaire Leonard Saber (Bill Nighy), from destroying the world with household appliances—they are shut down and sent to a pet shop. There they go rogue, hooking up with Hurley (Jon Favreau) and hamster Bucky (Steve Buscemi) and get back to the business of saving the world.

On the cute scale the G-Force members are somewhere between Ratatouille and Stuart Little, which is to say they are quite adorable. Pet stores should brace themselves for a run on guinea pigs but I couldn’t help but think that the rodents are less characters than prototypes for action figures and other toys. As is so often the case with bad kid’s films, more thought seems to have been given to the spin off toys kids will want after they leave the theatre than what is actually up on the screen.

The story is silly, but really, what did you expect from a film about crime fighting guinea pigs? It’s not the story that brings G-Force down, but the flat, bored performances.

The live actors aren’t the focus of the movie, but Wil Arnett and Bill Nighy do little more than simply show up and Zach Galifanikis blows whatever street cred he built up after his bizarre breakout performance in The Hangover.

The voice cast includes not one, but two Oscar winners, which may be an indication that the recession has finally taken root in Hollywood. When the best gig Penelope Cruz can get involves saying lines like “Oh, I have to save his fur again?” you know times are tight for a-listers.

Voice work wise only Nicolas Cage seems to be putting in much effort, doing a kind of Pee Wee Herman impression as the brianiac mole Speckles and Steve Buscemi has a naturally good cartoon voice but the other actors blow through their lines as if they had something better to do elsewhere.

The 3-D is sharp but other than a few fun stereoscopic gags it adds nothing to the movie except $3 to the price of the ticket.

G-Force has some good messages for kids about believing in yourself and the importance of family, but they are wrapped in a frenetic and cynical excuse for a movie that ends by setting itself up for a sequel which, if there is a patron saint of film critics, will never happen.

THE GIRLFRIEND EXPERIENCE: 2 STARS

No one can accuse Steven Soderbergh of being predictable. His last movie, Che, was a four hour art film based on the book Reminiscences of the Cuban Revolutionary War by Ernesto 'Che' Guevara. Before that was Ocean’s 13, a fluffy money-maker starring every a-lister in Hollywood. His new film, The Girlfriend Experience, is a blink-and-you’ll-miss-it (it’s only 80 minutes) impressionistic look at the life of a call girl played by a porn star whose previous credits include Don’t Make Me Beg and Secretary's Day 3 to mention two of the more dignified titles. Unlike Michael “Blow ‘em up real good” Bay or Brent “Chris Tucker is a genius” Ratner you never know quite what to expect from Soderbergh.

In some cases the results of his cinematic noodling are fascinating; Bubble was a little seen but riveting character study. Other times his auteur ways get the better of him. Full Frontal was an early and well intentioned stab at digital filmmaking but fell just short of success. The Girlfriend Experience falls somewhere between the two.

Leaving the conventions of his mainstream films behind Soderbergh presents a few days in the life of an up-and-coming escort named Chelsea (Sasha Grey), a business minded hooker who provides “the girlfriend experience.” She behaves like her client’s girlfriend, providing emotional (if artificial) intimacy in return for a fat paycheck. In her “real” life she is in a committed relationship with personal trainer Chris (Chris Santos) but their bond may be broken when she steps over a line and becomes attracted to one of her married clients.

On the level of a character study it’s an interesting look at the effect of selling not just your body, but also your emotions to the highest bidder. Chelsea lives in a superficial world—if she wasn’t attractive she wouldn’t be able to ply her trade—but unfortunately as a character she’s also deeply superficial and, dot over dot dot, not very interesting.

Grey, with her French manicure, thumb ring and the longest eyelashes this side of Bridget Bardot, wants to present the character as sophisticated but is more high school Lolita than New York high brow. Her performance is a notch above Debbie Does Dallas but Meryl Streep doesn’t need to worry about losing roles to her.

In the end The Girlfriend Experience, with its fractured timelines, wobbly camera moves and abrupt ending feels more like a tour through some of New York’s nicer hotel rooms, bars and restaurants than a genuine look at a real person.

GHOSTS OF GIRLFRIENDS PAST: 0 STARS

A quick on-line search will reveal something interesting about the posters for some of Matthew McConaughey films. The artwork for Failure to Launch, How to Lose a Guy in Ten Days and his new one, Ghosts of Girlfriends Past are all the same! The female faces have changed along the way, but Mr. McConaughey’s pose remains fixed—back to the girl, leaning on his co-star with a cocky grin on his face. I know movie stars are particular about how they like to be photographed, but surely a man of Mr. McConaughey’s physical charms could come up with a more original pose. But if it isn’t about vanity then it must be something else. After watching Ghosts of Girlfriends Past I knew what it was—the posters are all the same because THE MOVIES ARE ALL THE SAME! Eureka! Not since Drew Barrymore has one actor recycled a rom com formula so shamelessly, or so often.

This time out McConaughey is Connor Mead, a womanizing photographer who “swims in a lake of sex” every night. He believes love makes you weak and marriage is a corrupt and hateful institution that should be abolished. While at his brother’s wedding strange things start to happen—he is confronted by his past, present and future. His past, in the form of his lifelong friend and onetime paramour Jenny Perotti (Jennifer Garner), is very real, but all others may be figments of his drunken imagination—this guy drinks scotch like a sailor on shore leave—or are they some kind of divine intervention to force him to feel things he “hasn’t felt in a long time, like feelings”?

I don’t usually judge movies before I see them, but this one just had stink written all over it, from the bad title to the crappy trailer. When I found out that it was originally supposed to star Ben Affleck but was shelved after Gigli stunk up theaters back in 2003 my worst fears were confirmed. Could there be anything worse than a Affleck hand me down? Judging by this movie, the answer is no. Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is the worst movie to come down the pike in some time.

As usual McConaughey is playing a “charming” scamp with something to learn. In this case his lesson would involve learning how to be a real character and not simply a mish mash of the worst kind of grotesque lounge lizard clichés left over from a bad seventies sitcom. He’s coasted through a number of these poorly conceived rom coms on the strength of his pecs and pearly whites but this represents a new low. He smarms his way through the first hour and fifteen minutes before busting out his sincere face for the film’s finale. If he did something, anything grin worthy along the way I wouldn’t have to bash his performance so, but this isn’t a performance, it’s simply a succession of facial ticks.

Micheal Douglas doesn’t fare much better. What was he thinking? Really. Did he read the script and think “I’d be proud to put this next my other work. Let’s see… Fatal Attraction, The China Sydrome, Wall Street and Ghosts of Girlfriends Past. That’ll dress up the resume a little bit” It doesn’t compute. I expect this kind of garbage from McConaughey but not Douglas. He plays McConaughey’s randy dead uncle, sort of a cross between Hugh Hefner and Robert Evans and is just as charming as you’d imagine that unholy marriage to be.

The only real ray of sunshine here is Jennifer Garner, who frankly, should have known better.

The Ghosts of Girlfriends Past is mirthless and worthless. Save your money.

GRAN TORINO: 2 STARS

There has been much written about Clint Eastwood’s later career. Well into his 70s the man has become a seemingly unstoppable movie making machine, directing, producing and scoring eight movies in eight years. In this millennium he’s won two Oscars and starred in four films. To put his output in perspective with another actor of his age, Gene Hackman hasn’t made a movie in four years and recently announced his retirement. Clint’s latest, Gran Torino, his second film of the year, suggests that maybe he should take a break. All work and no play, it seems, has made Clint a dull boy.

The movie icon plays Walt Kowalski, a recently widowed Korean War vet who finds himself with little to do but sit on his front porch drinking beer and scowling at the neighbors. After forty years at Ford his job is gone, his friends are mostly dead and the ones who are still alive moved out away years ago, replaced by the Asian immigrants who now live on either side of him. He’s a piece of work. Racist, crotchety and blunt he’s unloved by all including his yuppie son. His life takes an unexpected left turn when he comes to the rescue of a young Asian boy (Bee Vang) who is being harassed by gang members.  

After a slow start Gran Torino picks up some speed as Walter’s preconceptions of his neighbors begins to change, but unlike other grumpy old man movies Walter never entirely drops his racist bullying. It’s the opposite of politically correct and will likely offend many viewers, but as a director and actor Clint has the courage to stay true to his character. I just wish the character was a bit more interesting.

Eastwood brings touches of several past characters to Walter. He’s part Insp. 'Dirty' Harry Callahan, part Frankie Million Dollar Baby Dunn and part Philo Any Which Way You Can Beddoe. In other words he’s tough but tender with a goofy edge that seems at odds with Walter’s hard external shell. The camera loves Eastwood, and even though he’s hammier than a MacDonald’s Pork & Cheese Toastie, he brings some life to a character that we’ve all seen before.

Gran Torino is an uneven film that slowly builds toward a predictable and not very convincing climax. Eastwood anchors the movie with a greatest hits kind of performance that lacks the subtlety of his recent work but will likely please long time Clint fans who’ll be happy to see him back in full-on scowl mode.

GHOST TOWN: 2 ½ STARS

Ghost Town, a new comedy starring Brit com sensation Ricky Gervais, Téa Leoni and Greg Kinnear, follows in the footsteps of the ghostly romances of the 1940s. In movies like Here Comes Mr. Jordan and Down to Earth ghostly apparitions had a hand in changing people’s lives and helping romance blossom. It’s an old concept given a shiny new treatment by Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull screenwriter, turned director David Koepp.

Kinnear plays Frank, a high powered New York businessman who seems to love his I-Phone more than his wife Gwen (Leoni). When he is killed in a freak accident he discovers that his body can’t make its final journey until all his business is settled on Earth. Enter Bertram Pincus D.D.S. (Gervais) a persnickety dentist with zero people skills. When a simple medical procedure leaves him dead on the operating table for two minutes he awakens with the strange ability to see the newly departed. They’re everywhere. These lost souls wander the streets looking for some way to communicate with their loved ones so they can prepare for the trip to the beyond. Frank latches on to Bertram, initially using him to spy on his widow until he realizes that the dentist is falling in love with Gwen. Frank must learn to give up his controlling ways and let Gwen go before he can rest in peace.

Ghost Town begins as a straight-up comedy and slowly, over its 103 minute running time, turns into a romantic comedy, heavy on the romance, light on the comedy. As the romance angle increases the laugh per minute ratio decreases to the point where, I think, it’s not accurate to call the film a comedy in its final moments.

Gervais is given free reign to flaunt his trademarked misanthropic schitick, but only up to a point. This is his first lead in an American film and it is interesting to see how his acerbic wit is shaped and softened by Hollywood. “[I’m] just what America wants,” he said in a recent interview, “a fat, British, middle-aged comedian trying to be a semi-romantic lead.” If he had been allowed to play up to his strengths—obnoxious and uncomfortable wit—instead of being made palatable for Gladys in Minnesota by smoothing out his patented rough edges Ghost Town might have been a much better movie. Instead of being an effective vehicle for Gervais’s humor, though, the movie made me want to go home and watch his sitcom Extras on DVD.    

Ghost Town isn’t a terrible movie, just a misguided and forgettable one.

GET SMART: 2 ½ STARS

Turning a beloved television show into a film isn’t as easy as simply writing a longer, feature length script. For every Sex and the City or X Files that successfully makes the leap from small to big screens, there’s a Bewitched, Mod Squad or The Honeymooners, all ideas that should have worked but failed to find audiences. Or, in the parlance of Maxwell Smart, “They missed it by that much…”

The new big screen adaptation of Agent Smart’s exploits, Get Smart, is loosely based on the 1960s television series and while it tries to be all things to all people—there’s slapstick, action, romance, The Rock!—what it doesn’t try to be, for better and for worse, is a photocopy of the original series.   

In the new film evil doers KAOS infiltrate the super-secret offices of CONTROL and learn the identity of each of their working agents. The only two uncompromised operatives left are Agent 99, an expert spy who was recently rendered unrecognizable after massive reconstructive plastic surgery—unless of course you saw Brokeback Mountain or The Devil Wears Prada and you’ll note she looks just like Anne Hathaway—and Maxwell Smart (Steve Carell), a desk-bound analyst who recently passed his field agent exam. The future of CONTROL and the free world rests in their hands as they do battle with KAOS head honcho Siegfried (Terence Stamp).

Fans of the television show will be pleased that many of the touchstones from the series are firmly in place. Max uses a shoe phone; there’s a new, but not entirely improved cone-of-silence and, of course, the catchphrases—“Sorry about that Chief,” “Missed it by that much,” and “Would you believe…”—are all intact.

What has changed is the tone. Get Smart has the silly jokes and the pratfalls of the series, but it can’t seem to decide whether it is a full-on comedy or an action film, or both. Either way it is an uneasy mix topped off with an unconvincing romance that only muddies the waters even more. Just when the movie works up a head of comedy steam it is often sidelined by a full-on action sequence and vice-a-versa.

Carell puts his own spin on the character which actually has little to do with the original Agent 86, Maxwell Smart. As played by Don Adams in the series and a couple of reunion movies—The Nude Bomb and the TV movie Get Smart, Again—Smart was an ironically named klutz who prevailed against evil not because he was clever or talented but because he was a self-confident fool who usually got lucky. Carell’s take on the character is different and it changes everything.

His Maxwell Smart is smart; a dedicated worker bee who tries harder than everybody else and prevails because of perseverance. It’s a small change but it inverts the character from someone an audience enjoys laughing at to someone who tries to make the audience laugh with him. That one change sucks much of the anarchic spirit of the series out of the big screen treatment, leaving us with a rather generic spy spoof.

That being said there are some good things about Get Smart. Carell makes good use of his innate comic timing and brings a straight-faced charm to the role, but I wish they hadn’t called him Maxwell Smart. By any other name I would likely have thought this was an interesting comic creation but, frankly, he pales by comparison to Adams who imprinted his take on the character on an entire generation’s consciousness. For those unfamiliar with the original show, however, and there are likely many younger audience members who have never had the pleasure, Carell’s Maxwell Smart will become the new standard should this movie spin off into a sequel or two.

There is much to enjoy in Get Smart; there are some good gags, a nice nod or two to the television series, some good action and even an improbable but fun explanation regarding the gap in age between Agent 99 and 86, but for old timers like me who grew up on the television series it doesn’t feel like the real deal.  

THE GRAND DVD: 3 STARS

Director Zak Penn has taken a page from Christopher Guest’s Best in Show playbook and made an improvised film set in the world of a high stakes poker tournament at the Rabbit’s Foot Hotel in Las Vegas.

Woody Harrelson is One Eyed Jack Faro, a drug-addled heir to a Las Vegas casino. He has squandered his inheritance—on bad investments like a theme hotel/casino based on the Chicago Fire and wild partying—now may lose the business his father built up from nothing. To earn some desperately needed money he enters a tourney playing opposite a cast of characters that include Werner Herzog as a sadistic cardsharp called The German; Dennis Farina as a Vegas old-timer who longs for the days when the mob ran Sin City; Yakov Achmed (Seinfeld’s Jason Alexander), a man of undetermined ethnicity, and Cheryl Hines and David Cross as brother-and-sister competitors with an overbearing father, Seth Schwartzman (Gabe Kaplan).

Working from a script that was only 29 pages long, more a treatment really than a script, Penn determined the course of the action by staging a fake Las Vegas poker championship with the actors, in character, playing a real poker match up to determine the winner. It’s not quite as exciting as the Texas Hold' Em shows that are all over television these days, but it is much funnier.

Among the highlights are Herzog’s delightfully unhinged performance as a man who needs “to kill something each day” and travels with a menagerie of small animals, and Ray Romano as the insecure husband of the Hines character but this is Harrelson’s movie.

His strange portrayal of Jack Faro brings to mind his delightfully off kilter turn as Woody on Cheers. He has an easy-going charm and a way with a line that makes even the more outrageous moments of this story seem almost plausible.

The Grand doesn’t quite measure up the Christopher Guest’s films—he’s the master at balancing the silly with the poignant—but it will work just fine as a stop gap while the master works on his next release.

THE GOLDEN COMPASS: 3 STARS

The Golden Compass, starring Nicole Kidman and Daniel Craig, is the latest trilogy-in-the-making to grace theatres. Based on a series of books called His Dark Materials by British author and atheist Philip Pullman the film comes to audiences riding a wave of controversy.

Although The Golden Compass won the Carnegie Medal for children's literature and by public vote, (by readers from North America, Europe, Asia and Australia), the title of “best children's book of the past 70 years,” several schools have banned the book (including some in Canada) because of a perceived anti-religion bias. I haven’t read the books, but based on the movie the plot appears to be nothing more than a simple adventure story in which good battles evil.

Set in a world that seems to have been ripped from the deepest recesses of Jules Verne’s imagination, The Golden Compass takes place in an alternate reality England in which giant zeppelins ferry people from place to place and everyone has an ever-present “daemon,” an animal spirit, like a witch's familiar, that reflects the power, significance, and personality of its human. This imaginative world is beautifully rendered in the film—there can’t be one second of the movie that has not been retouched by CGI—and is a treat for the eyes.   

As for the story, it centers on Lyra (Dakota Blue Richards), a wild child orphan living with her adventurer-scientist uncle Lord Asriel, (Daniel Craig) at Jordan College. While she is out causing trouble with her pals, he has discovered a link between golden cosmic dust in the Arctic Circle and other mystical parallel worlds. The existence of other worlds goes counter to the teachings of the Orwellian ruling class, known as the Magisterium, who want his expedition to the north stopped one way or another. At this time Lyra is given the last remaining Alethiometer, or Golden Compass, a device that can enable her “to see what others wish to hide.”

Just as Lyra’s BFF Roger disappears, the icily mysterious Mrs. Coulter (Nicole Kidman) visits the school. She whisks Lyra off to a magnificent mansion with the promise of taking her to the northland to meet her uncle. When it becomes clear that Mrs. Coulter may not be as kind as she initially appeared, Lyra sneaks away, and begins the search for her friend and uncle with the help of some unlikely allies including an armor-wearing polar bear king (voiced by Ian McKellen), a dirigible flying cowboy (Sam Elliott) and airborne witches.
The final battle scene is intense, although a little more kid-friendly than anything in Lord of the Rings, pitting the forces of good—Lyra and her friends—against evil—everyone else. It’s a satisfying conclusion to the story if only the movie had stopped there.

Instead the action continues after the battle with a scene in which the willful Lyra describes how she’ll “set things right.” She goes on to remind us of several plot threads we may have forgotten about after the spectacle of the battle.

Trouble is she doesn’t plan on doing any of this stuff until the next movie. She sets up the sequel as the picture fades to black. I understand that New Line intends to spin this into a trio of films, but the way it stands this one doesn’t feel like it ends, so much as it just trails off without feeling finished. It feels like a cheat to fool people into paying to see the next movie to find out story info that should have been in this one. It’s an old trick, but it left a bad taste in my mouth.

Filmmakers with an eye toward creating an on going cycle of movies should refer back to Peter Jackson’s Lord of the Rings films, which were so finely crafted they can stand on their own individually or work as a connected series.

Before the cliffhanger ending deflated my mood I had a good time at The Golden Compass. The special effects are plentiful and well executed and mesh well with the live action.

First timer Dakota Blue Richards has the Artful Dodger act down pat, although I wonder where she picked up an accent that sounds like cockney crossed with James Cagney gangster slang seeing that the only home she’s ever known is the posh Jordan College where everyone else speaks as though channeling Queen Victoria.  

Nicole Kidman appears to be one Botox shot away from total facial paralysis, but she plays a villain—she’s mean to kids and even slaps a monkey!—even more terrifying than her namesake, American political chatterbox Ann Coulter. She, like Daniel Craig, doesn’t have much screen time, but makes the most of her appearances.

Yes, The Golden Compass has its moments; it’s just too bad that the film’s final moments are such a let down.

GOOD LUCK CHUCK: 0 STARS

Romantic comedies are the most reliably predictable form of movie entertainment. The template for many 21st century rom coms goes something like this: Boy meets girl. Boy loses Girl. Boy realizes the error of his ways and runs through a busy airport to win back the heart of his soul mate who is about to start a new life elsewhere. We’ve seen it a thousand times and usually know how the movie will end before it even starts, so the challenge for filmmakers is to keep the journey interesting. How the lovers wind up together is as important as why.

Good Luck Chuck follows the formula to a tee—everything except the interesting journey part.

Internet comedy sensation Dane Cook plays Chuck, who as a youngster refused to kiss a Siouxsie Sioux wannabe during a hot-and-heavy game of spin the bottle. Hurt and embarrassed she placed a hex on him. To paraphrase—for a ten-year-old she has a pretty good sense of the dramatic—she says that every woman he sleeps with will dump him and marry the next man they meet. Twenty years later the curse seems to have taken hold. He’s a rich, successful, but single dentist who exists on a diet of casual sex with women who ditch him and immediately fall into the arms of Mr. Right. When he meets Cam Wexler (Jessica Alba) a beautiful but clumsy penguin trainer (I’m not kidding) he realizes how empty his life of one-night-stands has been. He loves her, but is convinced that if he consummates the relationship he’ll lose her to another man.   

Unlike Knocked Up from earlier this year Good Luck Chuck doesn’t have one moment in it that rings true. Everything in this movie is contrived, from the premise to the silly attitude of the film that women are so desperate to find a man that they would debase themselves with Chuck on the off-chance that a tryst with him could lead to nuptial bliss to the dull leading actors.

None of it connects and at the base of it there is no humanity here. Cook and Alba lack on-screen chemistry and are blander than plain oatmeal. Because no sparks fly between them it’s hard to buy into the love story and with no believable romantic moments it’s not quite a romance and with no laughs—you know you’re in trouble when the characters on screen are laughing more than the audience—it’s not really a comedy.

So what is it then? At best it is a chance for teenage boys to ogle some gratuitously topless women. At worst it is an unfunny sex farce that cries out for the deft touch of The 40 Year Old Virgin director Judd Apatow who seems to understand how to make a raunchy comedy with real heart.

GEORGIA RULE: 2 ½ STARS

In the new dramedy from director Garry Marshall, Lindsay Lohan plays Rachel, a young foul-mouthed booze-hound with a rebellious streak. In other words, if you believe TMZ.com and the other gossip rags, it’s art imitating life.

Instead of shipping her off to a teen boot camp her mother (Felicity Huffman) does something much worse. She arranges for Rachel to stay with her grandmother (Jane Fonda) in the hopes that some good old fashioned common sense will do the girl some good. Grandma Georgia is a bit of a tyrant, a woman who lives by a very strict moral code, propped up with more rules than Carter has little liver pills.

At first Rachel doesn’t seem cut out for small town life. She seduces a local Mormon boy, is rude to everyone and dresses as though she’s about to go clubbing on the Sunset Strip, not to a potluck supper at the local church. When a dark secret is revealed about her past, we begin to understand why she is such a handful, but it could have serious repercussions for everyone in her life.    

The trailer for Georgia Rule makes it look like a heart-warming comedy, but that’s a bit misleading. There are some laughs, but the dark subject matter, including alcoholism, nymphomania and child molestation, keep the tone of the movie on the heavy-duty side. Marshall has been down this road before, he did, after all make a feel-good movie about prostitution called Pretty Woman, but here his instincts let him down. The characters are all too shrill to bond with an audience; the cross generational relationships are way too two dimensional; the supporting characters are little more than plot devices to move the story from point “a” to point “b” and the all-is-well-that-ends-well final act rings false.

His best move was the casting of Lohan in the Lolita role. She plays off her tabloid image nicely, although overall her Rachel is a little one-note. To be fair, it’s not really her fault. The script gives her little to do other than play that old chestnut, the spoiled brat who is actually wise and wonderful underneath the heavy veil of her snotty attitude.

Huffman brings more to her role as a desperate mother, daughter and wife, trying to sort out the mess she’s made of her life, while at the same time trying to salvage what’s left of her shredded relationships with Rachel and Georgia. Fonda fares better as the cantankerous moral center of the film. In some scenes she seems to be channeling her father’s famous “old coot” role in On Golden Pond.

Ultimately though, Georgia Rule is Lohan’s movie, and while it doesn’t shed much light on the character in the film, it may offer a glimpse of what it’s like hang out with Lohan on a Saturday night.

GHOST RIDER: 2 ½ STARS

A couple of years ago it was reported that Nicolas Cage would play the title role in the rebooting of the Superman franchise. He didn’t get the part, the unknown Brandon Routh became the Man of Steel instead, but he didn’t give up on the idea of playing a superhero. He’s a big time comic book aficionado so he lobbied to star in Ghost Rider, Marvel comic’s story about Johnny Blaze, a daredevil motorcyclist who becomes a bounty hunter for the devil, and won the role from Johnny Depp who was originally slated to play the flame-headed vigilante.  

Johnny Blaze is a complicated character. He sold his soul not for the usual reasons—power or wealth—but for the love. His father, and motorcycle mentor, was being consumed by cancer and had only days to live when one day the young Blaze was visited by a man who looked very much like Peter Fonda. The Easy Rider star, playing the Devil, offers Blaze a deal: his soul for a cure to his father’s illness. Of course when you deal with the Devil you don’t always get what you bargain for, as Blaze soon discovers.

The trade dooms him to an empty life, void of love and other worldly pleasures. Worse, when confronted with evil Johnny Blaze turns into the fiery Ghost Rider, a skeletal form covered in fire rather than flesh. That kind of thing can make relationships kind of dodgy, even if your love interest is an old flame that reenters your life years after you abandoned her.

I’d like to say that Cage “lights up the screen” or something witty like that and mean something more than his head is on fire for most of the movie, but there is something quite odd about this performance. He seems to be having fun with the part, but the movie has tone problems and most of them stem from Cage’s quirky performance.

Ghost Rider can’t quite make up its mind whether it wants to be a comedy, a romance or a supernatural action flick. It tries to be all three, but when the main character’s most noticeable trait is a flaming skull for a head it’s hard to take any of it seriously. And maybe we’re not meant to take it seriously, but with a better-realized story Ghost Rider may have caught fire.  

THE GOOD SHEPHERD: 3 STARS

The Good Shepherd is a spy movie without the bells and whistles we’ve come to expect from our favorite undercover operatives. There are no elaborate chase scenes a la James Bond, no cool gadgets like Ethan Hunt’s presto-chango masks in the Mission Impossible movies, not even the great scenery of the Bourne Supremacy. In fact the only thing The Good German shares with any of those movies is star Matt Damon, who has traded his Bourne identity for that of Edward Wilson, one of the (fictional) founders of the CIA.

The Good Shepherd is a movie about secrets and duplicitous men who live in a shady underworld where nothing is as it seems. Director Robert De Niro, in his first stint behind the camera in over a decade, has delivered a long, thoughtful movie about the paper pushers who fought the cold war from behind desks.

Damon is a stone-faced bureaucrat who is involved at the very highest levels of espionage. De Niro dispenses with most of the spy movie conventions to tell a complex story of this man’s career and private life. From a life groomed for clandestine politics first as a member of the Scull and Bones Club at Yale to counter-intelligence in WW2 to the Bay of Pigs to the sexual politics of feeling trapped in an unhappy marriage while feeling guilty about carrying on affairs, The Good Shepherd covers it all.

It’s an ambitious story, but the movie over-reaches in its attempts to present a well-rounded portrait of this man’s life. The time frame leap frogs constantly and it isn’t always clear whether we’re in the past or present, but I found the espionage story interesting enough to keep me engaged in the confusing story.

THE GOOD GERMAN
4 STARS FOR AUDACITY
3 FOR EXECUTION
3 ½ STARS OVERALL

If you think they don’t make ‘em like they used to, well, you’d be wrong. Director Steven Soderbergh and his muse, George Clooney have produced a film that uses the 1942 Michael Curtiz film Casablanca as the standard.

The Good German isn’t a remake, it’s a tribute to the films of the late 1940s that uses exactly the same technology (or lack thereof) as the golden age of Hollywood—the same lenses, the same atmospheric lighting, the same rat-a-tat-tat style of dialogue, the same everything.
    
Soderbergh nails the look of the period, but the film’s frankness and subject matter would never have been green lit back in the day. Based upon the novel of the same name by Joseph Kanon The Good German is about an American military journalist (Clooney) covering the Potsdam Conference in post-war Berlin. He is drawn into a murder investigation involving his former mistress (Cate Blanchett) and his driver (Tobey McGuire). That could be the plot of any number of film noirs, but Soderbergh adds in elements that would have made studio boss Harry Warner blush.

His idea was to make a retro film with the increased creative freedom that filmmakers enjoy today. That means nudity, bad language and more overt violence. It’s a more realistic take on the story, but the modern sensibility inserted into this authentic looking black and white noir is jarring. Clooney and Blanchett look like golden age movie stars—she seems to be channeling Dietrich—but behave more like Brat Packers than Rat Packers.     

The movie as a whole comes off more as an experiment to please film geeks than mainstream entertainment, but in an age where cookie-cutter movies rule I’ll take one of Soderbergh’s strange (and not entirely successful) experiments any day.  

GREASE DVD: 4 STARS

It might be the most famous summer romance in movie history.

Even though John Travolta was 24 and Olivia Newton John was 30 when they made Grease, they played Danny and Sandy, teenage sweethearts who meet on summer break. He’s a greaser, she a squeaky-clean exchange student from Australia. They have a fling, but when the falls comes, and they find themselves at the same school Danny thinks he’s too cool for the virtuous Sandy.

Grease is filled with all the icons of 1950s America—hot rods, leather jackets and malt shops—and some great songs, good light romantic comedy but it is the cast that makes the movie memorable. John Travolta channels a fleet-footed Elvis Presley, while Olivia Newton John is a composite of the best of sexy-but-sweet 50s stars like Annette Funicello and Sandra Dee.

The newly released DVD features loads of extras and comes wrapped in an authentic T-Birds black leather jacket.   

GOOD NIGHT, AND GOOD LUCK ON DVD: 4 STARS

During the most recent Oscars Jon Stewart’s joked, “Two of the movies nominated for this year’s Best Picture are about journalists in a relentless pursuit of the truth… and of course they’re both period pieces.” The films he was referring to were Capote and Good Night, and Good Luck, the latter of which is out on DVD this week in a beautiful black and white transfer.

The story of famed television journalist Edward R. Murrow and his on-air battle with Communist baiting Senator Joe McCarthy which led to McCarthy’s downfall isn’t a biography of either man but a narrowly focused story about the power of television of do good and the rights of the state verses person freedom. Shot through a haze of cigarette smoke this quietly affecting story feels so intimate because of co-writer and director George Clooney’s use of extreme close-ups and the choice to set 99 percent of the film in the smoke clouded CBS television studios in New York. This intimacy slowly turns to paranoia as the film takes on a claustrophobic feel that heightens the paranoia felt by Murrow who feels he is not being supported by the upper CBS brass and McCarthy who sees Communists around every corner.

This fifty-year old story feels amazingly fresh and relevant for today particularly in regard to its views on civil liberties and the existence of an acute socio-political chasm in the United States. Clooney, however, famous for his liberal politics, allows his characters to do the talking, but doesn’t preach. When Murrow says "We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason," it is completely organic to the story and not necessarily a comment on more recent concerns like the Patriot Act. Clooney does what great directors do, he simply tells the story in a very straightforward way and allows the viewer to draw his or her own conclusions.

Good Night, and Good Luck is good entertainment, well acted by David Strathairn and a solid ensemble cast, but, more importantly is also a cautionary tale. Clooney is subtly reminding us that those who do not learn from history are doomed to repeat it, or as Bob Marley said, “if you don’t know your past, you don’t know your future.”

Glory Road: 3 Stars. There are certain clichés that people have come to expect from sports movies; the tense final game which usually goes into overtime and the winner and loser are separated by only one or two points; a gruff but caring coach; the misfit team members. Glory Road features all those and more. Very loosely based on the true story of Texas Western coach Don Haskins, who in 1966, led the first all African-American starting line-up for a college basketball team to an NCAA national championship. It's a good story and an interesting way to present a story about race relations in 1960s America, but filmmaker James Gartner, under the watchful eye of producer Jerry Bruckheimer, adds too much material to this paint-by-numbers script that is geared to manipulate the audience into feeling inspired. That being said, the basketball sequences are good, and Desperate Housewives fans will get a chance to see Mehcad Brooks in a solid supporting role.

GET RICH OR DIE TRYIN’: 2 STARS

In the past classically trained actor Samuel L. Jackson has blasted rappers who take on movie roles with little or no acting experience. I haven’t always agreed with his take on musicians turned thespians—Mos Def and Will Smith are credible actors—but after seeing Get Rich or Die Tryin’ I see his point. In this rap to riches story loosely based on Curtis “50 Cent” Jackson’s life, the rapper’s face is a blank slate that conveys little emotion. In one scene of the movie his grandmother says, “When I look into your eyes I don’t know what you’re thinking.” I agree with her. Co-star Terrence Howard is a terrific actor whose presence in the movie only emphasizes the rapper’s lack of ability. The performance possibly could have been saved if they had let him do what he does best—rap. For a film about a young man who dreams of being a hip hop star there is surprisingly little music here. There’s more talking about rapping than actual rapping and we only catch one short glimpse of 50 Cent in his natural habitat—on-stage.

This is a classic story about an alienated youth who wants to rise above the bad hand life has dealt to him—a drug dealing mother who is killed early on, a job as a low-level drug pusher—which could have been compelling, but instead comes across as clichéd.      

GUESS WHO

I have a rule, The flashier the press kit, the worse the movie, and Guess Who has a very flashy press kit. It is a faux leather bound book with cut-outs of Ashton Kutcher and Bernie Mac that move when you open the front cover. In this case, however, you can’t judge the book by its cover, or a movie by its press kit.

Guess Who takes its inspiration, but very little else from the 1967 Stanley Kramer directed Guess Who’s Coming to Dinner, with Spencer Tracey, Sidney Poitier, and Katharine Hepburn. That one was a socially aware film, which tackled heavy racial issues with a mix of humor and drama. In 2005 the movie has been remade into an off the wall, disposable comedy starring Ashton Kutcher and Bernie Mac which inverts the original idea by having an African-American family face the entrance of a white boyfriend into their home.

The father is played by Bernie Mac—and I don’t know why he bothers with character names in movies because he essentially just plays himself in everything. He should simply call himself Bernie Mac and be done with it. Fortunately he’s really good at being Bernie Mac and here he is fun to watch. As the boyfriend, Ashton Kutcher looks good in clothes and doesn’t bump into the furniture.

The tone of the film is a little weird—somewhere between Meet the Parents and Father of the Bride, managing to be both trite and the earnest at the same time.

It lacks the import or backbone of the original, yet Guess Who still manages to say something sensible about tolerance while being fluffy and fast moving.

I liked this movie more than I thought I would.

GIGLI

Many critics have taken pot shots at movie Gigli. Not me. I think Gigli is an important movie. The kind of picture that should be studied at film schools as an example of what happens when well intentioned filmmakers go horribly, horribly off the rails.   

Gigli (rhymes with “really”) is a train wreck all right, a movie so flawed it is hard not to poke fun at it. Rather than take the low road, (although I’m not sure I’ll be able to help myself), I thought I would have a look at why the movie is so deliciously awful.

Several pundits have proposed that the movie is taking such a drubbing in a hard-hearted reaction to Jennifer Lopez and her fiancée Ben Affleck’s newfound tabloid overexposure. I don’t agree. I wish them joy. I wish them a long marriage. I just wish they had made a good movie.

On Monday August 4 after the abysmal opening week-end tally had come in, Columbia spokesperson Steve Elzer announced, “We gave it our all, and it didn’t work. The filmmakers, the stars and the studio did everything we could to support this film.” No you didn’t Steve. You didn’t make a good movie. And that is what it boils down to.

So what’s wrong with Gigli?

Starting at the top we have Bennifer, known individually as J Lo and Ben Affleck. While the only awards that either of them are likely to win this year will be of the “Golden Raspberry” variety, both are competent actors. The kind of actor who has been helming Hollywood movies for decades, they are movie stars. For every Brando or DeNiro there are hundreds of others who job it is to simply look good and not bump into the furniture. Bennifer fits into this mold. In Gigli they look good, and seem to have their motor skills intact, but both seem in need of a Stella Adler refresher course.

Affleck, who shines when playing “Joe Average” roles, doesn’t bring any weight or believability to Larry Gigli. I didn’t buy him as a thug, and I certainly didn’t buy his accent which changed more often than his wardrobe.

J Lo doesn’t fare much better. As Ricki, a contract-killer lesbian with a suicidal girlfriend, she seems to be posing more than acting. It’s like watching one of her Glow ads come to life, only not as interesting.

Much of the blame here must rest directly on the shoulders of writer / director Martin Brest. The once solid director of films like Beverly Hills Cop and Midnight Run appears to be trying to test the endurance of his audience. Apparently anything he once knew about pacing or editing was thrown out the window sometime around the time he made Meet Joe Black. Mix the painful pacing with some ham fisted editing and you are left wondering if this film actually had a director. Gigli is easily half an hour too long, but feels much longer because of large dollops of repetitive dialogue and long “emotional” takes where it seems Lopez and Affleck are engaged in a staring contest. This might be a rare example of a film that could be radically shortened for DVD release and improved.

There isn’t much about Gigli that works. From the title that no one seems to be able to pronounce to the Archie Bunker-esque attitude regarding the mentally challenged and lesbians it is a failed exercise, and the only two people I could possibly imagine thoroughly enjoying it are the other media “it” couple Guy Ritchie and Madonna. Maybe now people will forget how appalling Swept Away was…

GRINDHOUSE: 4 STARS

To understand the wild new movie from co-directors Quentin Tarantino and Robert Rodriguez first you have to understand the premise. They have made a good old-fashioned exploitation movie double bill, complete with scratchy film and missing reels. They’ve recreated the grind house experience for an audience that may be too young to remember the days before multi-plexes dotted the landscape and people went to local theatres where movies were two for the price of one.

What is a grind house you ask? You may have been in a grindhouse theatre and not even known it.

If the ushers in the theatre carried a flashlight in one hand and a two by four (known as the “peacekeeper”) in the other, chances are, you were in a grind house.

If they played Santa Claus Conquers the Martians in July, that’s a grind house.

If there were gaps in the story, or if the reels were out of order, you were in a grind house.  

Most of those seedy theatres are gone now, but you can relive the experience in the new film Grindhouse, a double feature of two new films aged to look like classic exploitation fare, complete with coming attraction trailers. The only thing missing is the usher with the two by four.

The first film, Planet Terror is Robert Rodriguez’s riff on the zombie genre. Set in a small, dark Texas town on the edge of nowhere the story begins when a toxic bio-chemical weapon that turns God-fearing citizens into flesh-starved zombies is unleashed on the public. The fate of the world rests in the hands of band of vigilantes led by a plucky Go-Go dancer named Cherry (Rose McGowan) and her mysterious companion, and former boyfriend, Wray (Freddy Rodriguez).   

Director Rodriguez kicks out the jams, layering one over-the-top exploitation cliché over another. Where else would you see a one legged Go-Go dancer with a machine gun prosthetic who uses stripper moves to avoid getting shot? McGown plays Cherry as the ultimate b-movie babe—beautiful, dangerous and just slightly silly (although you wouldn’t tell her that, she’d likely blow you into a million pieces). With her is Wray, the enigmatic hero, whose back-story is cleverly omitted because of a missing reel. Together they battle creatures that resemble past their expiration date versions of The Toxic Avenger. It’s gooey, ghastly and gross and darkly funny.

Between the first and second features are trailers for make-believe movies. Splat Pack directors Rob Zombie and Edgar Wright contribute funny and outrageous promos for Werewolf Women of the SS and Don’t! respectively. Eli Roth contributes a third twisted trailer that is exactly what you would expect from the warped mind that gave us movies like Hostel and Cabin Fever.

Filling out the bottom of the bill is Quentin Tarantino’s tribute to the killer car movies of the 1970s, Death Proof. Kurt Russell dusts off his badass image, retired after making a string of movies like Escape from LA, to play Stuntman Mike, a psychopath with a 1972 Chevy Nova. The stuntman’s MO is simple; he befriends and stalks women before using his car to commit vehicular murder. When he targets a couple of female stunt drivers, however, he may have bitten off more than he can chew.

Tarantino’s film is the more textured of the two. Whereas Rodriguez’s film takes off like a rocket, Death Proof takes its time. Like its Austin locale, the movie is laid back and just a little quirky. We meet radio DJ Jungle Julia (Sydney Poitier) and her friends who are chillin’ out, getting high and making girl talk. When Arlene (Vanessa Ferlito) agrees to give Stuntman Mike a lap-dance, she inadvertently seals the fate of her and her friends.

From there Mike turns his attention to four gal pals who are working on a nearby movie set. They literally give him a run for his money in one of the most exciting car chases in recent memory. The movie’s languid pace evaporates like water in the hot Texas sun as Tarantino skillfully turns Death Proof into an action packed revenge drama.  

Despite some star power—Sin City’s Rosario Dawson is the above-the-title name—it’s a relative new comer who steals the movie. Stuntwoman Zoë Bell, who doubled for Uma Thurman in the Kill Bill movies, plays herself and it is her presence that lends the movie much of its oomph. The realism of her dangerous looking stunts—Tarantino filmed all her dialogue scenes first just in case she was hurt (or worse) during the elaborate car chase scene—kicks the movie up a notch and drew cheers from the audience I saw the movie with.

Planet Terror and Death Proof are both clearly labors of love for the directors. From the insane plots to the faded film stock to the missing reels, they have nailed the look and feel of 70s exploitation flicks. Both directors are smart enough not to take to the mickey out of the movies. The outrageous material is played straight, with the actors and directors taking the story seriously. The result is a certain earnestness in the performances that transcends campiness.
 
Grindhouse succeeds because it creates an entire atmosphere, whisking the viewer away to a different time and place where ushers carried two-by-fours.