BABIES: 2 ½ STARS

“Babies” the new documentary film by Thomas Balmes, may be the purest documentary to come down the pike this year. Released to theatres just in time for Mother’s Day it is an unadorned look, with no bells and whistles—or should that be rattles and diapers?—at a year in the life of  four infants growing up in Mongolia, Namibia, San Francisco and Tokyo, respectively.

Like the title suggests this is all about babies. There is no dialogue, no narration, no point of view. It is ninety minutes of babies crying, peeing, sleeping, playing… you know, the things that infants do. Some will find the footage adorable, others, like me, will find “Babies” to be the big screen equivalent of watching home movies (only without the proud parents cooing in the background).

Not that it isn’t well shot, it is. Balmes frames every shot beautifully and there is a real intimacy in his photography. This is as up close and personal as we should ever get with stranger’s kids, but as cozy as the movie may feel I couldn’t help but imagine that this would have worked better as a short film. The endless montage of babies going about their business—sometimes literally—wears thin after the first twenty minutes.

It is interesting to see the differing parenting methods and the natural curiosity of the kids among other things, but the film misses prime opportunities to really explore the cultural and sociological differences in its subjects.

Is “Babies” cute? Yes for a short while. But without a sense of drama, conflict or insight it is little more than a Baby’s First Year photo album come to life. 

THE BACK UP PLAN: 2 STARS

I’m trying my best to understand the romantic comedy. Since January I (and by extension, anyone else who went to the theatre and bought tickets) have been punished by a series of clichéd, hackneyed, tired, worn-out, stale, pedestrian, corny, banal, unoriginal… well, you get the idea… rom coms with titles like “Leap Year,” “When in Rome” and “The Bounty Hunter.” The latest one to come down the pike is “The Back Up Plan,” a movie that begs the question: When do romantic comedy traditions stop being funny, or romantic and become clichés?

Set in NYC (as all great rom coms are) but mostly shot in LA (I guess New York was busy that day) the Rom Com Script Generator ™ gives us Zoe, (Jennifer Lopez), a well-to-do, thirty-something pet store owner with a good apartment, a cute dog and a clothing budget that would bankrupt Ivanka Trump. What she doesn’t have is a child. With no husband or suitable boyfriend in the picture she turns to a fertility clinic but wouldn’t you know it, on the very day that sperm sample CRO104 becomes the baby daddy she meets the man of her dreams in the most NYC of ways—when he tries to scoop her cab. He’s Stan (Alex O'Loughlin) an eco friendly goat cheese vendor with a sculpted torso and a winning smile. She becomes his girlfriend and cheese muse, he becomes the de facto father to the child growing in her belly. They fall in love, fight, get back together again and rinse and repeat.

Structurally “The Back Up Plan” is so by-the-book it seems to transcend formula and almost work its way into heartfelt homage. By adhering so closely to the tried-and-true rom com playbook—unlikely couple meets, falls in love, breaks up and (SPOILER! but only if you’ve never seen a romantic comedy!) gets back to together—it becomes the latest entry in Hollywood’s ongoing exercise in seeing how many ways the same story can be slightly reshaped, recycled and recast before audiences revolt.

Not that “The Back Up Plan” is the worst of the crop. It may share a story skeleton with several other recent films, but nothing plumbs the depths of “Leap Year,” a film so bad even its star Matthew Goode has released a statement urging audiences not to see it. It’s even better than “The Bounty Hunter” but despite a few genuinely funny moments—a group for single mothers, or women without “penis partners” is a highpoint—it relies on the usual mix of slapstick and romance (often in the same scene) and does neither of them very convincingly.    

It’s the kind of movie set in pregnant lady land where women are unable control their cravings and the Rom Com Script Generator ™ spits out dreaded exchanges like: “You’re not making any sense.” “No, all of a sudden everything makes sense.” It’s not that it’s bad exactly, it’s just that we’ve seen it all before.

THE BOUNTY HUNTER: 2 STARS

During the screening of “The Bounty Hunter,” a new romantic comedy from Jennifer Aniston and Gerard Butler, I had a feeling I have never experienced before. I found myself wishing be-mulleted reality star Duane ‘Dog’ Chapman would make a cameo appearance and bring some much needed entertainment value to this movie. Not that I’m much of a fan of the A&E bounty hunter show, but his puka shell necklaces and flamboyant hairstyle might have spiced this lame action comedy up.  

The premise is simple. Butler is the titular character, a former cop so down on his luck he takes a gig tracking down his ex-wife (and alleged real-life girlfriend) Aniston, for a payday of five thousand dollars. She’s an ambitious newspaper reporter who will let nothing get in the way of getting a story—including a court date. When she skips court to follow a lead a warrant is issued for her arrest. Enter Butler. He finds her easily, but a funny thing happens on the way back to jail—the pair begins to appreciate one another again. Imagine a humdrum sitcom version of “Duplicity” or “Mr. & Mrs. Smith” and you get the idea.  

“The Bounty Hunter” doesn’t really know what it wants to be. Is it a romantic comedy? Sort of. Is it an action picture? Kinda. Is it a road movie? Hmmmm, maybe. In fact it’s all those things and less. This truly is a case of the whole being lesser than the sum of its parts.

Aniston and Butler play classic screwball comedy characters, gamely indulging in fast paced repartee and some light farce, but it all feels very “been there, done that.” How many more times can the line “You’re crazy!” be answered with “Maybe I am?” before it takes top dishonors as the Movie Cliché of the Year? The script is on autopilot and even the usually charming Aniston and Butler can’t make these characters interesting. It’s scene after scene of endless (and often unfunny) bickering, very tepid action and screwball situations that seem like we’ve seen them before.   

There is the odd bright spot. Christine Baranski sparkles as Aniston’s mom, a be-dazzled Atlantic City lounge singer and raises the movie’s temperature from frigid to temperate when she’s on screen and a dinner scene at a honeymoon hotel has some heat to it, but it comes too late in the movie to make much difference.

“The Bounty Hunter” is an almost instantly forgettable film, one that relies on the appeal of Aniston’s short skirts and Butler’s abs more than a decent script or interesting story.

BROOKLYN’S FINEST: 2 STARS

As soon as I saw the name of director Antoine Fuqua in the opening credits I sensed that “Brooklyn’s Finest” probably wasn’t going to celebrate the up side of policing in the NY borough. The “Training Day” director is a specialist when it comes to portraying dirty cops on screen, and here he showcases the “finest” policemen in Brooklyn’s 65th precinct, that is, if by “finest” you mean alcoholic, angsty, murderous and suicidal.

Mixing three stories Fuqua introduces Sal (Ethan Hawke), Eddie (Richard Gere) and Tango (Don Cheadle), three cops at different stages of their careers. The only thing that connects them is a station house in the 65th Precinct and severe dysfunction. Sal is a narco cop, tormented by the things he must do to support his growing family. Eddie is a burn out who clearly hasn’t taken his own advice of “not taking the job home” after work and Tango is an undercover cop who is close to being consumed by the job. The three struggle both personally and professionally until a fateful night when they end up in the same apartment block.

The bad cop drama became popular in the seventies and with only a few tweaks story wise has persevered to this day. Fuqua focuses on three characters straight out of Central Casting—the cop with nothing to live for, who is just days away from retirement, the policeman who turns bad to make extra money to help his family and the undercover officer who gets too close to the criminals he is supposed to arrest.

Clichés one and all, but the bad cop genre is one big gun toting cliché, and like romantic comedies, another formula based species, the trick is to make the characters as interesting as possible to disguise the banalities of their story arcs. On this score “Brooklyn’s Finest” is two thirds successful.

First, the good. Don Cheadle takes a hackneyed character—the angry street cop—and gives him some fire; a cliché, yes, but an unpredictable one. Cheadle deserves better material than this but he makes the best of it.

Ditto Ethan Hawke who can do desperate on-screen as well as any actor working today.

The weakest of the three is Gere’s Eddie. Gere isn’t an exactly magnetic actor at the best of times but here he simply isn’t believable as a man who wakes up, has a shot of scotch with a gun barrel chaser. The early morning drinking and pseudo suicide attempts are meant to give us insight into the character but come off as tired images recycled from better movies.

“Brooklyn’s Finest” is not a return to form for Fuqua after the career high of “Training Day” nine years ago and the professional sink hole he’s been in ever since.

THE BOOK OF ELI: 2 STARS

Eli (Denzel Washington) is a regular post apocalyptic man. He walks the Earth, heading west, stopping only occasionally to read his book, dine on a meal of hairless cat, try on some dead man’s shoes and reign bloody carnage down on anyone who tries to stop him from enjoying his simple pleasures.

Like “The Road,” another film about a man making his way through a dystopian world, in “The Book of Eli,” we never find out how the world ended. We’re told it’s been thirty years since “the flash” and since then everything has pretty much fallen apart. Rogue gangs roam the desolate landscape, cannibalism is rampant—you can tell the cannibals because their hands shake from eating too much human flesh—and there are only small pockets of life left. One such pocket is a town run by Carnegie (Gary Oldman), a despot desperate to lay his hands on Eli’s prize possession—a book.

As the title would suggest “The Book of Eli” is V-E-R-Y Old Testament. Call it Neo Christian Post Apocalyptic if you like, but like the good book that lies at the center of the story, the movie is full of prophets, morals and righteous smiting. This is a metaphysical story with a few action scenes (but only a few, the trailer implies this is an all-out action flick and that is simply not the case) about the power of religion to both inspire and control people’s hearts.

Eli uses the book (SPOILER: it’s the last copy of the bible) as comfort and a reason to stay alive. Perhaps he’s a prophet, perhaps not, but he is the keeper of the book and it is a responsibility he takes very seriously even if he doesn’t realize why.  

Carnegie, on the other hand, understands the power of the book’s words to, as he says, strike fear into the “heart of the weak and desperate.” For him it is the key to the complete control of the citizens of his town. He is, very likely, a Republican.

Bringing this world to, well, if not exactly vivid life—it is shot with a color palette that includes grey and various other shades of grey—is Washington and Oldman. Denzel is a bit too subdued to really sell the idea that he is a coiled spring of righteous  power but that’s OK because Gary Oldman keeps things lively, chewing the scenery every time he is on screen. He’s a Jim Jones character, equal parts charisma and menace and the film benefits from his presence.  

Unfortunately the same can’t be said for the female leads. As mother and daughter Jennifer Beals and Mila Kunis are the film’s acting Achilles heel. Kunis, in particular is miscast. Despite providing some visual interest, she is out of her depth here and brings little of the charm or magnetism she displayed in last year’s “Forgetting Sarah Marshal.”

Better is Tom Waits in an awesome cameo as a shop keeper who trades in contraband, like KFC wetnaps and old Zippo lighters. These items take on an increased value in this bleak world and Waits, with his craggily face and scorched vocal chords, brings increased value to his brief scenes.

“The Book of Eli” is a strange movie. It’s being sold as an actioner, but is actually a timely movie about how religion can be used for both good and evil. It may have been more effective with a bit more action and a tad less philosophy and without its series of false endings and while it may be filled with thought provoking ideas it doesn’t feel well enough thought out to work as a whole.

BROTHERS: 4 STARS

Director Jim Sheridan may have figured out a way around the war-on-terror movie jinx that has kept everything from “Jar Head” to “In the Valley of Elah” and “Lions for Lambs” off the top ten box office list. He turns the volume way down, making a quiet movie that keeps the action to a minimum and lets the emotion of the piece to the talking. Oh, and he’s cast three appealing actors, Spiderman, Prince Dastan and Senator Padmé Amidala (that’s Tobey Maguire, Jake Gyllenhaal and Natalie Portman to you) doing some of the best work of their collective careers.

For the purposes of the story Gyllenhaal and Maguire are Cain and Able, diametrically opposed brothers. Tommy (Gyllenhaal) is a bad seed, freshly released from prison after a bank robbery gone wrong. Sam (Maguire) is a captain in the Marines, a former high school football star, husband to Grace (Portman) and father to two adorable daughters (Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare). When Sam’s Black Hawk helicopter is shot down in Afghanistan’s Pamir Mountains he is presumed dead. Back home Tommy tries to fill the gap left by his brother, playing dad to the kids and platonically comforting Grace. The twist is that Sam is not dead; he’s been captured and tortured by Taliban fighters. When he is liberated and brought back to the States, his easy, warm smile is gone, replaced by paranoid volatility.    

“Brothers” is a slow burn of a movie. Dialogue driven, the action moves slowly, allowing us to get a good sense of who these people are and why they behave the way they do. Lots of biographical information is delivered, but much is left to our imaginations. Tommy, for instance, is just out of jail, but we never find out the details of his crime. Instead as Sam and Tommy drive past a bank Sam asks, “Are you ever gonna apologize to that woman?” and we get the whole picture.

The movie is ripe with such moments. When Grace confronts her dead husband’s closet for the first time it is played silently, but packs a wallop. Sheridan isn’t afraid to let the audience think for themselves, and imagine how they would react in similar situations. Call it “method watching” if you like, it demands the audience to fill in the blanks, and it is an effective way to tell an emotional story.

It’s an emotional story, but not a complicated one. Sheridan even has Grace say at one point, “I am such a cliché,” and she’s right. Many of the characters are by-the-book—there’s the bad boy who finds redemption through family, the hard-as-nails former military man—but these actors add shades of grey to otherwise black-and-white renderings. Gyllenhaal brings warmth to a character who shouldn’t have any, Portman has a strong veneer but there is sadness in her eyes and Maguire, despite a tendency to be a bit bug-eyed effectively portrays Sam’s confusion. “I can’t be there,” he says of his home. “They don’t understand me. Nobody understands me.”

The supporting cast is equally strong. Sam Sheppard still has a profile worthy of Mount Rushmore, but now has the beer belly to go with it and it gives his character some heft, literally and figuratively but it is Bailee Madison and Taylor Geare as daughters Isabelle and Elsie who really shine. They are remarkably endearing without giving the kind of precious performances that mar so many kid’s roles.

“Brothers” isn’t a war movie it’s a movie about what happens after war, and in its own quiet way shows the toll war takes on not only the people overseas but those who stay home as well. 

THE BLIND SIDE: 3 ½ STARS

“The Blind Side” is Sandra Bullock’s third movie this year, following “The Proposal,” a fun rom com that became her biggest hit to date and “All About Steve,” a critical flop that nonetheless showed she can be charming despite a terrible script. This time around she brings a different set of acting chops to play Leigh Anne Tuohy, a big-hearted but tough-as-nails Memphis mom.

Based on a true story, “The Blind Side” centers on teenager Michael “Big Mike” Oher (Quinton Aaron), an inner city teen on his way to becoming a statistic. He’s been tossed around from foster home to foster home, forgotten about and neglected. After earning admission to a Christian private school based on his athletic ability, he still feels lost, a lone African-American in a sea of white faces. It isn’t until he is spotted by a guardian angel in the form of Leigh Anne Tuohy that his life takes a dramatic left turn. After a chance meeting she realizes that he has no where to live and invites him to her family’s home for the night. One night turns into a lifetime, as Michael becomes part of the family.

“The Blind Side” is a hokey movie. Most of the characters are stereotypes and the dramatic arc is so simple a five year old could see how this story is going to end up, but despite its Hallmark feel it’s also a crowd pleasing four Kleenex tear-jerker. It’s a mix-and-match assortment of themes and styles—there’s the fish-out-of-water story, the inspirational sports tale, a family drama and a study of race and class in America. Phew. There’s a lot going on but Bullock and newcomer Quinton Aaron are the glue that hold it all together.

Bullock has transformed herself here. The cute and cuddly edge of her rom coms is gone, replaced with a mane of blonde hair and a take no prisoners attitude. Even her voice has a harder edge to it than usual. It’s the kind of performance she’s been hinting at ever since her dramatic turn in “Crash” and one that could earn her awards in the coming months. 

As Big Mike Quinton Aaron not only brings an imposing physicality to the role but also a tender side. He’s a gentle giant with a warm smile who gets the audience on side with him from the get go. The whole story hinges on whether or not viewers care about Big Mike and will want to go on his life journey. Aaron wins us over early on and holds our attention in a quiet, understated performance.

“The Blind Side” isn’t a great movie, there’s too much emotional manipulation and huge problems seem to get solved a little too easily for it to be 100 percent believable, but it is an entertaining movie anchored by two very good, but very different actors. 

BAD LIEUTENANT: PORT OF CALL NEW ORLEANS: 3 ½ STARS

By the time Nicolas Cage screeches, “Shoot him again! His soul is still dancing!” near the end of “Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” his master class of extreme acting reaches its apex. This is the performance that Cage has been slowly working toward; a koo koo bananas performance that makes his demented work in “Knowing” look restrained. But you know what? It works.

Set in post Katrina New Orleans, Cage is Terence McDonagh a good, but wild cop who injures his back saving a drowning prisoner in a flooded jail. Soon he becomes addicted to pain killers, then coke, then anything that will ease his aching back. When he can no longer easily get drugs from the evidence room at work for him and his prostitute girlfriend (Eva Mendes) he goes off the deep end, falling into an abyss of sex, drugs and gambling. Throughout it all he works to solve the case of a family of murdered Senagalese immigrants. “Just because he likes to get high,” says Stevie Pruit (Val Kilmer), “doesn’t stop him being the po-lice.”     

“Bad Lieutenant: Port of Call New Orleans” doesn’t have the same operatic madness as Brian DePalma’s “Scarface,” it’s too down and dirty for that, but it does have an unhinged quality that makes it the most surprising film of the year. The police procedural portion of the story is fairly straightforward, but Cage’s acting—which is as big as the 44 Magnum he has permanently wedged in his belt—and director Werner Herzog’s surreal touches, like a hallucination scene complete with close-ups of iguanas, a Tom Jones soundtrack and a bug eyed Cage, make it a memorable experience.

Finding the tone of the film may be the most challenging part of finding enjoyment here. It’s gritty and silly, but unlike the film it is very loosely based on, Abel Ferarra’s cult classic “Bad Lieutenant,” it doesn’t take itself very seriously. That’s not apparent at first, but when Cage physically abuses an elderly woman, shrieking, “I’m trying to be courteous but I’m beginning to think that’s getting in the way of me being effective,” while coked out of his mind, it becomes obvious that this is a satire of bad cop movies like “Narc” or “Training Day.”

Seen as parody, the film’s richness and don’t-give-a-damn energy—even if the plot points don’t always add up—make it one of the more unusual and entertaining movies of the year.

BOONDOCK SAINTS 2: ALL SAINTS DAY: 1 STAR

Quentin Tarantino what have you wrought? Every now and again a movie comes around by one of Tarantino’s acolytes that tries to emulate the master, but, instead, slips into parody. “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” is such a movie. The only thing that prevents director Troy Duffy’s follow up to the original cult film from being an out-and-out send-up of Tarantino’s tough guy revenge genre pictures is the absence of Leslie Nielsen.   

Ten years after the first installment the pious but deadly MacManus brothers, Connor and Murphy (Sean Patrick Flanery and Norman Reedus) are back on American soil after a long exile in rural Ireland. They had been living a quiet life, tending sheep (I’m not kidding) and letting their hair grow to unruly lengths, but when their favorite Boston priest is killed they leave the sheep behind and return to their former lives as vigilante Mafioso killers. Joining them are new recruit Romeo (Clifton Collins Jr.), Southern belle and FBI special agent, Eunice Bloom (Julie Benz) and Poppa M (Billy Connolly). Bullets, bad accents and religious iconography abound as they bring their own brand of justice to the mean streets of Boston.

Duffy hasn’t made a movie since 1999 and it shows. “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” plays like a bloated 1990’s Mötley Crüe music video, complete with slow motion sequences and Julie Benz in FBI issue dominatrix heels. The only things missing are dry ice and a drum solo, and I’m pretty sure those will be in the director’s cut.

Story wise it has all the depth of a UFC match and is just about as well acted. Everyone from the above the title credits does their worst work here, and Peter Fonda actually hands in a career ending performance as The Roman, an enigmatic figure who appears at the end of the film. And when, exactly, did Billy Connolly become a Rompin’ Ronnie Hawkins impersonator? Even Clifton Collins Jr, a gifted actor who shone very brightly recently in “Sunshine Cleaning” doesn’t fare very well, although, to be fair, it’s hard to shine when you have to recite lines like, “This isn’t rocket surgery, you know.” Ouch. That line would make Ed Wood Jr. proud.

Maybe I have it wrong. Maybe Duffy meant to make a tough guy parody, but it doesn’t feel that way. It feels more like fourth rate Tarantino. All the trademarks are here. There’s the movie references—QT cites an exotic blend of kung fu movies, Goddard and 70s exploitation; Duffy references “Panic Room,” a middling 2002 Jody Foster thriller. Then there’s the “hip” soundtrack—Tarantino mines a deep well of soundtrack and pop music, Duffy doesn’t. It just all feels like warmed over leftovers.

In what may be the defining scene of “Boondock Saints II: All Saints Day” Judd Nelson, as mafia boss Concezio Yakavetta, reenacts the famous Al Capone baseball bat scene from “The Untouchables,” only this time, instead of a Louisville slugger he uses a salami to make his point. And that choice pretty much sums up the entire movie—ham-fisted and meat headed.

THE BOX: 0 STARS

I had a couple of questions after seeing “The Box,” a new existential thriller starring Cameron Diaz.

First: What the hell was that?

Second: Is it possible for a once promising director to completely forget how to make a movie?

Here’s the scoop. Diaz and James Marsden play Norma and Arthur Lewis. They’re a regular family; he wants to be an astronaut, she’s a teacher specializing in existential literature who lost four toes in a horrible X-Ray incident. One day, early in the morning, a mysterious box is delivered to their door. Inside the box is a device that looks like the “Deal or No Deal” buzzer along with a note that reads “Mr. Steward will call on you at 5 pm.” At precisely five the doorbell rings and the bringer of the box, Mr. Steward (Frank Langella) is at the door. He’s a nattily dressed charmer, but there’s something strange about him. For starters he has a facial disfigurement that makes Harvey “Two-Face” Dent look like a Fabio. But there’s more. He calmly explains that she has twenty-four hours to make a decision. If she presses the button she’ll be given one million tax free dollars. There’s a hitch though. Someone, somewhere will die. If she doesn’t press the button he’ll return in one day, collect the box and that will be that. From that point on it is a story of buttons, bloody noses and prosthetic feet. Oh yeah, it’s also about choices and consequences.

“The Box” wants to be a deep multi-layered horror fantasy about the human condition, the afterlife and fate but bites off more than it can chew. The button test is meant to reveal not only the essence of human nature but apparently, the very heart of what it is to be human, or something like that. I’m not exactly sure because by the time we got to that point in the story I was already thinking about what I wanted for lunch the next day. No thrills, no chills, just bored sighs.    

Cameron Diaz’s performance made me long for the days when she danced in her underwear in the first reel of all of her movies and Frank Langella is clearly slumming it for a paycheque here but “Donnie Darko” director Richard Kelly is the real problem. It’s looking more and more like “Darko,” the stylish sci fi mystery that rightfully earned Kelly a cult following, was a fluke. “The Box” is so painfully dull, so silly and overwrought it’s as if there was no director.

Like the movie suggests, there are consequences for every action. I wonder what the consequences will be for making a movie as bad as “The Box.”

THE BOYS ARE BACK: 3 ½ STARS

For the first time in recent memory Clive Owen isn’t relying on his physical side to carry a movie. He doesn’t kick, punch or shoot his way through “The Boys Are Back.” The only pain he inflicts here is emotional.

Based on a true story, Clive Owen plays Joe Warr a top sportswriter with a perfect life. He travels the world covering sporting events, has a beautiful wife and a young child. When his wife (Laura Fraser) is diagnosed with cancer and succumbs to the disease after a short fight Joe’s life is turned upside down. The existence he knew disappears, replaced by a new reality which only makes the longing for his late wife all the more acute. When a son from his first marriage arrives he must learn how to be a father to two kids he barely knows. “Shouldn’t the state intervene to make sure a woman looks after children?” he says. On a more mundane level, the housework comes as a shock, even though, as he says, “I’ve watched so much of it over the years.”    

“The Boys Are Back” shows a side of Owen we haven’t seen for a while. He’s spent the last few years on the action tip, making movies like “Shoot ‘Em Up” and “Sin City,” violent films that relied on cartoon theatrics. They’re entertaining but “The Boys Are Back” is something different. It showcases Owen’s intensity but the theatrics have been packed away with the weapons and what’s left is an emotionally raw study of a man who learns that “life is a journey that must be traveled no matter how bad the road.”

The gravitas he brings to his action roles works well here as his character shifts from light hearted father to widowed single guardian of two. He shows his versatility, breaking fee of the typecasting that has kept him in action movies, and hands in his best performance since 2006’s “Children of Men.”  

Equally impressive is Nicholas McAnulty as the six-year-old recipient of Joe’s questionable parenting skills. In his acting debut McAnulty gives a completely natural performance. Rupert Grint look-a-like George MacKay also fares well as a teen rebel who just wants to get to know his dad.   

“The Boys Are Back” does a good job at showing what it is like to lose someone and have that person remain in your life even when they aren’t physically present. It is a study of grief and how to best deal with a sudden profound loss, but at the end of the day it is the performances that recommend the movie.

BANDSLAM: 3 STARS

Bandslam is three-quarters of an entertaining movie. It’s too long and has three too many dead spots, but given the low expectations I had going in to see a rock and roll high school fable headlined by two Disney stars, I was pleasantly surprised. It’s not a complete waste of time and the Bowie songs on the soundtrack rock.

At the beginning of the film Will Burton (Gaelan Connell) is a loner with a David Bowie fixation. His high school career has been spent either being bullied or ignored by his classmates and his long e-mails to Bowie’s fan site are the only thing that keeps him on an even keel. When he moves to a new school in a new state it looks like it will be same old until he meets Charlotte Banks (Aly Michalka) and romantic interest Sa5m (Vanessa Hudgens), two classmates who recognize that he has something to offer. Charlotte asks him to manage the band she wants to enter in Bandslam, the annual battle of the bands. How popular is the event? “It’s like Texas High School Football big,” says one character. Charlotte is determined to beat her ex-boyfriend’s band and Will is the kind of Phil Spector musical wiz kid that might be able to give her the edge.

Bandslam is part Disney show, part Monkees, part music video and part Mickey and Judy. There’s a lot going on here, and not all of it is good, but the stuff that is good is worth a peek.

First the bad. Bandslam is half-an-hour too long. Some montage chopping would have worked wonders to bring down the occasionally bordering-on-torturous hour and fifty minute running time. The end could have been tightened up considerably. The battle of the bands sequence drags on and on and not only does it feel extended, the bands look far too old and far too slick to be high school students.

Next is the music. Early on the soundtrack rocks; nicely selected cuts by Bowie, The Velvet Underground and Nick Drake are unexpected and ear friendly, and even one of the fictional band’s tunes called Amphetamine tunes it up to eleven, but as time wears on the music begins to sound a bit too Tin Pan Alley for a rock flick.   

There is also a tone problem and I don’t mean as in pitch. The movie can’t seem to decide whether it wants to be a Disney movie or a teen indie flick with a good soundtrack. It often has the attitude and look of an indie but careens into Disney land when it over sentimentalizes the kiddie romance. The mushy stuff is a little too Mickey Mouse, not enough Bowie.

Having said all that I have to point out that most times when the movie begins to slip into cliché and cheese it rights itself with a snappy line or an unexpected plot twist.

Add to that a very appealing performance by newcomer Gaelan Connell as outcast Will and you have a movie that I was determined to hate but couldn’t. Bandslam is a surprisingly fun little music movie that is just a couple of notes away from being completely in tune.

BRUNO: 3 STARS

It’s impossible to review Sacha Baron Cohen’s films—Ali G Indahouse, Borat and now, Brüno—without first describing his trademarked brand of humor. His wild style of social commentary rides the thin line between bad taste and very bad taste. It’s also frequently very funny in a squirm-inducing way. The set-up is simple. In character he elicits embarrassing, often racist or downright inane reactions from people not in on the joke, and as un-pc as the results of these interviews are, he is simply using irreverent, ambush comedy to hold a mirror up to society.

His guerilla modus operandi is guaranteed to ruffle a few feathers—he’s been sued by some of his unwitting subjects for everything from libel to slander, invasion of privacy, fraud, negligent misrepresentation, negligent infliction of emotional distress and more—but I guess that’s the price he’s pays for exposing human foibles.

Brüno is another exposé. Where Borat gave us an inside look at bigotry and Western hypocrisy, the ulterior motive lurking just beneath the fake eyelashes and chaps of Brüno is an unveiling of homophobia.

Like Borat the set-up for Bruno involves a television reporter coming to America. In this case it’s Bruno (Sacha Baron Cohen), a campy fame-seeking fashionista who wants to be “the biggest Austrian superstar since Hitler.” When his Austrian TV show is axed (“For the second time the world had turned its back on Austria’s most famous man.”) he goes on an outrageous quest for fame that sees him try to negotiate peace in the Middle East, make a sex tape with Presidential hopeful Ron Paul, get involved with a charity which “doesn’t require much effort” and adopt an African baby. When those labors lead nowhere he has an epiphany; reasoning that all the greatest stars in Hollywood are straight, he opts for gay “deprogramming.” Along the way he meets a martial arts teacher who compares gays to terrorists, a wild group of swingers and others until he takes one last shot at fame as Straight Dave, host of a Man Slammin’ Max Out Ultimate Fighting and “Straight Pride” television show based in Arkansas.

For those fearing that fame may have dulled Baron Cohen’s edge, I can tell you it hasn’t. Bruno is chock-a-block with OMG!! moments—by that I mean those “Oh my God I can’t believe he just did that” moments—but as funny as the movie is there are more cringe worthy gags than actual funny jokes. His jab about finding the next Darfur, “maybe Dar-five” is smart and funny, but his long conversation about it with the two emptiest headed publicists ever, isn’t. Other gags have a been-there-done-that feel. The Velcro suit and Dallas talk show stunts are funny but ruined by over exposure in trailers and ads.

That’s not to day there isn’t lots to laugh at—Baron Cohen is the most fearless comics working today or maybe ever—but Bruno is ultimately less satisfying than Borat. It feels more episodic, more mean spirited and more staged than its successful cousin.
 
Bruno will amuse most, enrage some—one man stormed out of the screening I was at yelling, “This is the stupidest thing ever!”—and offend many, often all at the same time, but despite some advance press the gay community has little to fear.  

The gay stereotypes presented in the film are so over-the-top it is hard to imagine anyone taking them seriously and even though this extremely silly movie has a serious mission—to expose homophobia—the last thing it wants is to be taken seriously. 

THE BROTHERS BLOOM: 3 STARS

Director Rian Johnson’s two feature films, the underrated Brick and The Brothers Bloom, (in theatres this weekend) exist in the intersection of quirky and film noir. Brick saw Joseph Gordon-Levitt play a high school loner with a knack for hard boiled dialogue. “I've got all five senses and I slept last night; that puts me six up against the lot of you,” he says to a school yard bully, seemingly channeling Raymond Chandler. The Brothers Bloom is just as idiosyncratic but more accessibly so. Starring Mark Ruffalo and Adrien Brody as the titular Blooms it’s a story of deceit, love and finding the perfect con game.

The film begins with a bravura prologue detailing the rough and tumble upbringing of the orphan Bloom Brothers. Bounced from one foster home to the next—one ex-guardian puts down “larceny” as the reason for sending the kids away—they discover a talent for grifting. Cut to twenty years later. They are now seasoned con men. Steve (Ruffalo) loves the work and creates elaborate Dostefsky-esque plots for their swindles. Bloom (Brody) is less involved. He looks up to his older brother but is having a crisis. He feels he has only ever lived life as a character in his brother’s scams. He wants more—he wants an unwritten life. The classic “let’s get together for one last job” brings them in contact with Penelope Stamp (Rachel Weisz), an eccentric shut-in with lots of liquid assets, who will change their lives.

The Brothers Bloom is willfully anachronistic. That’s a fancy way of saying quirky. The con artists seem to have stepped out of a 1930s crime movie, both in dress and behavior. The movie is set in modern day, but like Brick, pays homage to the caper films of yesteryear.

The other characters are just as strange. Penelope is a chainsaw juggling femme fatale who lives alone in a giant New Jersey estate. Rinko Kikuchi is Bang Bang, a mostly mute demolitions expert. Robbie Coltrane plays The Curator, a man so mysterious the lights dim whenever he enters a room and Diamond Dog (Maximilian Schell) has a crystal dangling where his right eye should be. Oh, and did I mention that there’s a camel who drinks whiskey?  

The set-up and execution feel very artificial, but luckily, the characters transcend the script’s quirks to bring the material alive. The first hour of its 109 minute running time is a wild ride, alive with humor, beautiful photography, interesting characters and many twists and turns. The last fifty minutes less so.

In its second half the story gets bogged down with too many cons and an unsatisfying pay-off. The Brothers Bloom is worth a look—the acting is great and it looks beautiful—but it feels more like an under developed Wes Anderson film than a fully realized Rian Johnson movie.

BRIDE WARS: 1 STAR

The only thing more popular than going to a wedding is going to see a wedding on the big screen. My Big Fat Greek Wedding is one of the highest grossing independent films ever and movies like The Wedding Singer, Father of the Bride and Four Weddings and a Funeral have ridden the bridal train all the way to the top of the box office. This weekend 20th Century Fox is hoping that a combination of bridal bouquets and star power will pack ‘em in to see Bride Wars, a new comedy starring Kate Hudson and Anne Hathaway.

They play Liv and Emma, childhood friends with the shared fantasy of June weddings at The Plaza Hotel. When it comes time to tie the knot with their respective fiancées it looks as though that dream will finally come true. Dates are booked, dresses are purchased and flowers ordered. Everything is perfect until a scheduling error is discovered—their wedding dates had been booked for the same day—and one of them must change to another venue. When neither is willing to move dirty nuptial tricks ensue and the bride wars begin.

Bride Wars is like an extended episode of Bridezillas with more appealing leads. The old cliché about temperamental brides is amplified by a thousand, pushing the limits of how far brides will go to make sure their perfect days is, in fact perfect.

Even though it is set in a world were being engaged is the most important thing in a woman’s life—just one of many old fashioned ideas wedged into the script—the movie isn’t really about weddings, or the horrible things these two do to one another. It’s actually about friendship and finding a person who will always love you no matter what. It’s a good thing there’s some weightier subtext here because the comedy side of things pretty much falls flat.

Kate Hudson can do this sort of material in her sleep, and brings some energy and charm to the role but little else. Candice Bergen continues her winning ways as a supporting actor who steals every scene she’s in. As in The Women and Sex and the City she provides the film’s best line—it begins with, “A wedding marks the first day of the rest of your life… you have been dead until now…”—and generally shows up the younger actors in every scene.      

As for Anne Hathaway, Bride Wars feels like a giant step backward after her delicate and layered performance in Rachel Getting Married. I know girls just wanna have fun, and after serious turns in Rachel and the psychological thriller Passengers she perhaps was looking to hone her comedy chops, but Bride Wars plays along the same lines as a sitcom and we’ve simply come to expect more from her.

There is even some talk in the blogosphere that this stale performance could actually harm her chances with Oscar voters à la the Eddie Murphy Norbit snafu. Many blame his failure to take home an Oscar for his work in Dreamgirls on Norbit, which was released the same weekend that many voters were filling out their ballots. Let’s hope the Academy gets it right this time and chooses to celebrate Hathaway’s star turn in Rachel and not punish her for taking on thoroughly average work like Bride Wars.

Bride Wars marks the beginning of the January doldrums. After an exciting movie season that saw the release of interesting movies like The Wrestler it’s always a bit of a slap in the face when the b-material gets dumped into theatres. Bride Wars is little more than a sitcom premise stretched to feature length.

BEDTIME STORIES: 1 STAR

Billy Madison was the first proper Adam Sandler movie. He made a handful of films before that, mostly supporting roles in forgettable comedies, but Billy Madison was the turning point. It made him a bankable movie star and established the formula for so many of his future films. If you’ve seen Billy Madison you’ve essentially seen Happy Gilmour, The Wedding Singer, Mr.Deeds and his new one, Bedtime Stories.

In many ways Sandler is the most ecological of movie stars for the way he recycles the same movie, only with different names, so many times. You know the drill: an angry downtrodden loser reaches deep down to prove himself, in the process winning the girl while also getting comeuppance against a smarmy rich guy who gets in his way. It’s been a winning formula… until now.

This time out Sandler is Skeeter Bronson, a handyman in a hotel formerly owned by his father. His dad (Jonathan Pryce) sold their failing family business to Barry Nottingham (Richard Griffiths) on the condition that one day his son would be promoted to general manager. Twenty five years later he’s still working as a handyman with little prospect of ever moving to the front office. When his sister (Courteney Cox), a school principal loses her job and is forced to go out of state to find another, she asks Skeeter to baby-sit her two kids. When the bedtime stories he tells the kids magically start top come true he tries to manipulate the stories for his own benefit.     
Bedtime Stories is a big budget Disney fantasy with an all-starish cast of good actors that falls completely flat. It’s not simply that we’ve seen it all before—and we have—it’s that it isn’t funny. Doubt, the story of an accused pedophile priest that also opened on Christmas Day, has more laughs per minute than this poor excuse for a family comedy.

Where to start?

How about with Guy Pierce in the most obvious “I only did it for the money” performance of the year. Or seeing Jonathan Pryce wasted in a cameo only made me long for the glory days when he starred in interesting movies like Brazil. Or maybe with Richard Griffiths who seems to be channeling Benny Hill.

As for Sandler, well, I was put in the mind of Jerry Lewis, but the old Jerry Lewis who pathetically mugs for the camera and not the funny Jerry of Martin and Lewis. Sandler has proven that he is capable of much more than this. After seeing his work in Reign Over Me it’s disappointing to watch him revert back to his old habits—pulling faces and speaking in goofy voices—for an hour and a half.

Bedtime Stories goes where many Adam Sandler have gone before. Director Adam Shankman—the former choreographer and Hairspray helmer—thought he was making a fantasy for the whole family, but instead, has made an overly familiar film that succeeds only in being fantastically unfunny.  

BOLT:
FOR DOG LOVERS: 3 ½ STARS
FOR CAT LOVERS: 1 STAR

It’s time for the cats of the world to unite against stereotyping in movies. Too often on film cats are portrayed as bad, the personification of evil. Ever since Sylvester was introduced to the Tweety Bird cartoon cats have gotten a bad rap. Remember Cats and Dogs, the movie about an evil army of cats poised to take over the world? Or how about the scheming cat from Babe or the twin evil Siamese cats from Lady and the Tramp? Even Garfield is portrayed as lazy and cynical. It’s time for this denigration of our feline friends to stop! Unfortunately the new movie Bolt from the folks at Disney perpetrates the unfounded and cruel stereotypes of cats as sinister and manipulative.

The hero of the movie is, of course, a dog. He’s Bolt (the voice of John Travolta), the pampered titular star of the television show Bolt. His character is a mix of the Six Million Dollar Man and The Littlest Hobo. He’s a super dog with super powers, but he’s also a method actor, so to get the best possible performance from him producers use special effects to make Bolt think he is actually a super dog with a sound barrier breaking Super Bark and other powers. That means no re-shoots and no second takes. “If the dog believes it,” says Bolt’s director, “the audience will believe it.” All goes well until one day when Bolt escapes from the set in search of his “person” and co-star Penny (voiced by Miley Cyrus). Thus begins a cross country search, accompanied by Rhino (voice by Mark Walton), a star struck hamster and Mittens (voiced by Susie Essman), the obligatory mean cat or “degenerate creature of darkness” as one character calls her. When Bolt realizes that he doesn’t have super powers and that his life of fighting evil has been a sham he wonders, “If I don’t chase bad guys, what am I?” Luckily for Bolt and the reputation of cats everywhere Mittens redeems herself and is able to help him find happiness as a regular dog.

Bolt is a lushly animated story with genuine laughs for both adults and kids. It starts off with a bang with an action packed clip from the Bolt television show in which the canine defies gravity, defuses bombs, stops automobiles with his steel reinforced head and generally saves the day. It’s a wild ride that had the children in the audience I saw it with squealing, although it may be a bit intense for really young kids.

As I noted in my review of Madagascar Escape 2 Africa, in Bolt it isn’t the above-the-title stars that carry the show, but the supporting characters. Madagascar wouldn’t be nearly as much fun without the penguins and Bolt would be much less interesting without Rhino, Mittens and a variety of pigeons from the dim-witted New York birds to the slick screenwriting rats-with-wings Bolt and company meet in Los Angeles. Seasoned voice actors like Mark Walton give these characters some real oomph, unlike Travolta and Cyrus who provide recognizable voices but little else. The movie’s biggest laughs come from the supporting cast, and Rhino, the determinedly loyal hamster deserves his own movie.

Bolt, despite its treatment of cats as the Rodney Dangerfield of the animal kingdom—they just can’t get no respect—is solid entertainment for the whole family.   

THE BOY IN THE STRIPED PAJAMAS: 3 STARS

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas began its journey to the big screen as a children’s book. A children’s book about the Holocaust. As unlikely as that might sound, it is a well regarded, bestselling book that teaches kids not only about the Final Solution but also about issues regarding culture and identity. Its messages of tolerance are being taught in schools in Britain and so far the book has sold over three million copies. The film version—rated 14A for mature themes and disturbing content—stars two remarkable child actors, Son of Rambo’s Asa Butterfield and newcomer Jack Scanlon, and has a powerful ending that, once seen, will not soon be forgotten.

Bruno (Butterfield) is the precocious son of a high ranking Nazi official (David Thewlis) with dreams of becoming an explorer. When the family is relocated to a country posting Bruno starts his new life by exploring the grounds of his new house. Next door he discovers a “farm”—actually a concentration camp—and befriends Shmuel (Scanlon), a young Jewish boy in “striped pajamas” on the other side of an electrified fence. Neither boy understands why the fence divides them and bond over a mutual need for friendship and compassion. When Shmuel’s father disappears one day Bruno is determined to help his friend locate his missing dad.

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas isn’t a typical wartime drama. Director Mark Herman (Little Voice, Brassed Off) takes his time setting up the situation—a family living next door to a notorious death camp— gradually doling out the details of everyday life in a Nazi household. We see the story through eight-year-old Bruno’s eyes, and while he may be slow to realize what his father does for a living, the horror of the situation grows as the film progresses. In fact, the movie picks up steam from a slow start—perhaps too slow for the first hour—to climax with a breathless and breathtakingly shocking finale. 

For the most part Herman avoids the trite sentimentality of Life is Beautiful, another Holocaust film involving children, but in taking great pains to present the Nazi atrocities in a way that children will be able to understand he oversimplifies a complicated and brutal part of our recent past. For instance I’d suggest that the portrayal of the father, a Nazi commandant, is almost too sympathetic. Of course Bruno loves his father, and we’re seeing the story through his eyes, but the result of that relationship may have been some unexpected empathy for a man whose job was to exterminate an entire race of people. David Thewlis plays the commandant as a family man with a job to do, the very embodiment of the “banality of evil,” but the character isn’t defined enough for us to understand how a man can love his family and yet make it his life’s work to destroy other people’s families.

Another sticking point with me is the complete lack of German accents. The entire cast speaks very proper Queen’s English with accents that sound more Sloan Ranger than Teutonic. It’s an old trope, left over from the days when Brits were cast as the bad guys, but here it sounds mannered and out of place.   

The Boy in the Striped Pajamas is a valiant attempt to tell a small scale story about an unimaginably huge period in our history, and while it may drag in places, it has its heart in the right place and a devastating ending that will take your breath away.

BODY OF LIES: 3 ½ STARS

When looking back at great director – actor relationships it’s safe to comment that most often directors typecast their favorite stars time and time again. For example in the twenty or so films John Ford and John Wayne collaborated on the actor was never required to stray too far from his heroic cowboy persona. Martin Scorese and Robert De Niro have shaken things up a bit more in their eight movies together, but their most successful outings have usually involved wise guys and crime. The same can’t be said of Ridley Scott and Russell Crowe. Since their first teaming, the sword and sandal epic Gladiator, the pair have made three more films, a romantic comedy called A Good Year, American Gangster, a true life crime drama, and their latest, a contemporary spy thriller titled Body of Lies. It’s a diverse body of work that defies the usual typecasting of actors by directors.

Crowe plays Ed Hoffman, a manipulative CIA puppet master, who sends his top field operative Roger Ferris (Leonardo DiCaprio) to Jordan to locate a high-ranking terrorist named Al-Saleem. On the ground in the Middle East Ferris is helped in his mission by Hani Salaam (Mark Strong) the head of Jordan's secret service leading to a cultural, moral and operational battle between the three powerful men.

Based on Washington Post columnist David Ignatius's 2007 novel Body of Lies the film is an echo of the great political intrigue movies of the Nixon-era like The Parallax View and Three Days of the Condor. It is essentially a convoluted Cold War story of dishonesty, game playing and loyalty filtered through a post 9/11 global reality. Its plot and deceit machinations are as twisted as a winding mountain road, so step out for a quick trip to the bathroom or to reload on popcorn at your own risk. You could have trouble catching up when you come back. Those willing to follow along, however, will find much here to like.

Key to the film’s success is the performance of Leonardo DiCaprio, the former child star who in recent years has gone from strength to strength. His work here and in movies like Catch Me If You Can and The Aviator is almost enough to make me forgive him for his brief, but indelibly stamped time as Hollywood’s ubiquitous teen matinee idol. As Roger Ferris he convincingly speaks Arabic and has the grit to make the character believable.   

Crowe also fares well, although his role is less showy. As the CIA mastermind he is stationed in the US and as such, his role is mostly comprised of barking orders into a cell phone. It’s a challenging part to pull off convincingly and keep entertaining, but Crowe adds some unexpected humor into the generally grim proceedings. In the two or three brief scenes the two actors share they display great chemistry, suggesting that they would make a great pairing in film that gives them more of a chance to play off one another.

Body of Lies features director Scott’s trademarked high visual style, has edge-of-your-seat action scenes and a smarter-than-usual take on the culture of disinformation and ever-shifting alliances that characterizes Middle Eastern covert operations. More interesting than that—and perhaps more surprising, given that it is an American film about the Middle East—it avoids making moral judgments or taking sides, preferring to allow the audience to come to their own conclusions.

BLINDNESS: 2 ½ STARS

I have often joked that the Toronto Film Festival wouldn't be the same without Don McKellar. Every year since I can remember he has a movie playing at the fest, and this year is no different. This year he returns with Blindness, a film he adapted from the 1995 novel of the same name by José Saramago about an epidemic that causes blindness in a modern city, resulting in the collapse of society. Directed by Fernando Meirelles, who made one of my favorite TIFF films ever, City of God, a few years ago, it stars McKellar, Mark Ruffalo, Julianne Moore and Danny Glover along with an international cast.

The Canadian-Brazilian-Japanese co-production opened the Cannes film festival this year to middling reviews but should fare better with the hometown crowd.

Director Meirelles is unfailing stylish in his presentation of this highly metaphorical work, so, ironically a movie about Blindness is a treat for the eyes. His handling of the story and view of the humanity of the characters is challenging, but a tad disengaged to make the film’s social commentary truly effective. He avoids the clichés of most horror films—Blindness would likely have been a much different movie in the hands of George A. Romero or the like—instead delivering a thoughtful film that doesn’t quite live up to the intensity and promise of the novel.

BURN AFTER READING: 2 ½ STARS

One of the big buzz films from last year’s Toronto International Film Festival was No Country for Old Men from directors Joel and Ethan Coen.  After going on to win a load of Academy Awards they returned to TIFF this year but with a much different kind of film. Burn After Reading is a crime caper film that has more to do with their previous films like Raising Arizona than the dark feel of No Country. They call it the third paret of their “idiot trilogy” which began with O Brother Where Art Thou and Intolerable Cruelty. 

Set in Washington DC, the film, which stars George Clooney, Brad Pitt and Tilda Swinton, sees a disk containing the memoirs of bitter ex-CIA analyst Osborne Cox (John Malkovich) falling into the hands of two greedy gym employees (Pitt and Frances McDormand) who attempt to sell it, first to Cox then to the Russians. Their plot has far reaching effects, complicating not only their lives but that of philandering Treasury Department employee Harry Pfarrer (Clooney) and his mistress, Cox's wife Katie (Swinton).

Burn After Reading comes with high expectations. The Coens made their name mixing off-beat comedy with crime stories; Fargo was an Academy Award winner, Raising Arizona redefined quirky and The Big Lebowski is a cult classic. Add to that pedigree an all star cast ripe with Oscar winners and tabloid favorites and you have the makings of a classic Coen Brothers film, right? 

Unfortunately the answer is “no.”

Burn After Reading has moments of greatness—Pitt makes goofy look good, Swinton is icy perfection and J.K. Simmons as the head of the CIA walks away with the movie—but is less than the sum of its parts. 

I know I am about to commit film critic heresy, but I found the film’s overly clever story left me cold. Fargo and Raising Arizona succeeded because the Coens made the audience feel empathy for the lovable—and sometimes not so lovable—losers that populated those films. Burn After Reading, on the other hand, has contempt for all its characters. They are all awful people who more or less deserve their respective fates. What’s lacking is warmth. What’s lacking is compassion. What’s lacking is the magical Coen Brothers touch.

Burn After Reading isn’t a waste of time, but it is middling Coen Brothers.

BAGHEAD: 3 STARS

Baghead is a new mumblecore film that mixes comedy with horror. Comedy and horror you probably understand, but unless you’ve been hanging around the Slamdance Film Festival “mumblecore” is likely a bit of a mystery. It is, by definition, true independent film; shot in sequence on digital video cameras with improvised dialogue and a do-it-yourself philosophy. Most feature twenty-something nonprofessional actors and a production value that makes the Dogme 95 films look like slick Michael Bay movies.

Among the best known proponents of mumblecore are the Duplass Brothers the team behind 2005’s breakout hit The Puffy Chair. Baghead is their sixth film in six years.
 
The action begins when four wannabe actors—Chad (Steve Zissis), Catherine (Elise Muller), Matt (Ross Partridge) and Michelle (Greta Gerwig)—watch as their friend Jett Gartner’s movie wins an award at the Los Angeles Underground Film Festival. Envious of his success the four figure they can write something even better than their friend’s award winning film. “If Jett can do it,” says the cocky Matt, “we can do it.”  

They decide to hide out at a cabin in Big Bear, California to brainstorm a script that will kick start their careers and make them stars. Soon, though, things take a strange turn as a person with an old brown paper bag over their head begins stalking them. In the beginning they think “baghead” is one of the guys playing a practical joke, but when the friends start disappearing the mysterious figure becomes much more menacing.

Baghead is kind of a mindbender of a po-mo concept. In it four real unknown actors star in a movie about four fictional unknown actors. The fictional actors decide to make a horror movie about a guy with a bag over his head, while the real actors are starring in a horror movie about a guy with a bag over his head. It’s like that famous M.C. Escher painting of the hands drawing one another; one can’t exist with out the other.

The framework of the story is classic mumblecore, which values realistic personal relationships over and above the genre aspects of the plot. The sexual tension between the four characters—it’s kind of a romantic quadrangle—frays nerves and opens the door to the kind of atmosphere of mistrust that allows the mysterious baghead to really get under all their skins. The build-up to the climax is slow, but focuses more on the interpersonal dealings of the four than the stranger with a grocery bag on his head outside.

Like the great low budget horror films of the 1970s Baghead proudly uses a documentary technique to draw the viewer in and place them smack dab in the middle of the action. The low-fi production only offers up low-fi thrills, but the interaction of the characters is natural and interesting enough to earn Baghead a recommendation. 

THE DARK KNIGHT: 4 ½ STARS

In my review of the first installment of the revived Caped Crusader franchise I wrote, “I went in to Batman Begins expecting a lot and left wanting less—less psychological babble, a lesser running time and less of Liam Neeson’s ridiculously wispy goatee.” For the new episode, The Dark Knight, director Christopher Nolan has kept most of the stuff that bugged me about the first movie (except for the wispy goatee part, which is, thankfully, is no where to be seen) but has, this time around, created a tour-de-force that left me running for my thesaurus to find new words for awesome.     

Its two-and-a-half running time makes it the longest of the summer blockbusters but, unlike Get Smart or Sex and the City, there isn’t a wasted second or extraneous scene. The film takes off like a turbo charged Batmobile, opening with an exciting bank heist, and doesn’t let up until the end credits.

Following the robbery, in which $68 million dollars of the mob’s money is stolen, the triumvirate of Batman (Christian Bale), Lieutenant Jim Gordon (Gary Oldham) and District Attorney Harvey Dent (Aaron Eckhart) take a broom to the streets of Gotham in an effort to, once and for all, put an end to crime in their city. After mass arrests the crime fighting trio comes up against their greatest foe yet, The Joker (Heath Ledger), a psychopath with a sinister scar in place of a smile, who forces Batman and Dent to push the boundaries of their professional crime fighting ethics.    

Since 9/11 the world has spent a great deal of time pondering good and evil, and so does The Dark Knight. It is the first true, post 9/11 superhero movie; one that looks at the use of chaos as a tool of terrorism while exploring the paper thin line between good and evil.

Dispensing with the jocularity of Iron Man, the CGI action of The Incredible Hulk and Hancock’s sense of irony, The Dark Knight is a serious film with a positively Shakespearean exploration of the ethics of good and evil that raises timely questions in these unsettled times. Mainly, to what lengths can heroes go as they fight crime before they stop being heroes and become vigilantes? When is it OK to break the rules to stop evil? Batman and Dent grapple with these questions (more than, say, Rumsfeld or Bush ever did) as the Joker pushes them closer to the edge of their moral boundaries.

The Joker’s biggest question is one for the ages. Can bad guys exist without the good guys?

“I don't want to kill you,” the Joker tells Batman, by way of an answer. “You complete me.”  

But don’t get the idea that The Dark Knight is only a treatise on the nature of villainy. It is that, but the ideas about good and evil are wrapped around a popcorn movie that is packed with great action, thrills and good performances.

Christian Bale fills out the Batsuit better this time around, skillfully portraying the moral tug of war the character plays with his conscience while ably pulling off Batman’s outrageous feats of physical prowess. Bale may be the only contemporary actor who can convincingly pull off ennui one second and then pilot a supercharged motorcycle up the side of a building the next.

New franchise addition Maggie Gyllenhaal, stepping in for Katie Holmes, brings a feistiness to the character of Bruce Wayne’s oldest friend and soul mate Rachel Dawes. Aaron Eckhart in a dual role does a nice job of playing the transformation from the virtuous DA Dent to the twisted morality of the considerably creepier Harvey-Two Face. Old pros Michael Caine and Morgan Freeman, as Bruce Wayne’s trusted butler and equipment designer respectively, round out the cast, both handing in effortless performances.

Of course the cast member everyone wants to see is Heath Ledger as the Joker in his last completed performance. I always felt Batman Begins was marred by the lack of a great villain, but this time around the inclusion of Ledger’s Joker guarantees on-screen fireworks for The Dark Knight.

Whereas Jack Nicholson’s Joker was a pop culture icon for the prosperous 80s and 90s, Ledger’s Joker is a super villain for the new millennium; a terrorist, more interested in creating chaos than in anything else.

He’s a disfigured bad man—“What doesn’t kill you only makes you stranger,” he says—who when he isn’t killing people—his preferred weapon is a knife because it’s up-close-and personal—keeps busy creating elaborate schemes to test the moral fiber of the men who want to put him behind bars. Ledger strips the character of Nicholson’s cartoon persona, re-imagining him as a fiendish lunatic. From the slash of red lipstick where his mouth should be to the caked white make-up that obscures his face Ledger’s Joker is an unhinged creation that will likely inspire nightmares. It’s a bravura performance that sees the late actor working at the top of his game as he creates the definitive version of the character (sorry to any Cesar Romero fans who may disagree).

The Dark Knight is a rare beast. It’s a summer blockbuster with equal parts brain and brawn.   

BRIDESHEAD REVISITED: 3 STARS

The first ever big screen mounting of the Evelyn Waugh novel Brideshead Revisited comes with great expectation. The book was chosen by Time as one of the “All-time 100 Novels” and the 1981 mini-series placed tenth in the 100 Greatest British Television Programs by the British Film Institute.

In the new version Matthew Goode is Charles Ryder, the role previously taken by Jeremy Irons in the mini-series. He is a middle class man from London drawn into the rarified world of the British upper class after he befriends the charismatic, but troubled Sebastian Marchmain (Ben Whishaw). At Brideshead, the luxurious Marchmain family estate, Ryder meets Sebastian’s younger sister, the beautiful Julia and his domineering mother (Emma Thompson), and his life is changed forever. Over the next decade Ryder learns first hand about the poison that lies beneath the prim and proper façade of the British upper crust as he, Sebastian and Julia try to bridge the deep rooted spiritual and social traditions that divide them and complicate their lives.   

The new movie, ten hours shorter than the mini-series, compresses the 368 page novel into a tidy 135 minute film which plays fast and loose with the source material. Fans of the book will be pleased to know that Aloysius the teddy bear makes an appearance, and the ideas about repression, aristocracy and religion remain in place but may be less happy with other liberties taken by the filmmakers. Compressing the novel into feature length forced some changes to the time line of the story as presented in the book, but the core of the book remains untouched.

Handsomely translated for the screen—the film was shot at the grand Howard Castle, also the location of the mini series—the cinematography is lush, the period clothes suitably glamorous, the sets beautiful. More than just a Masterpiece Theatre treat for the eyes, the new Brideshead is wonderfully performed by a troupe comprised of British newcomers and old pros.

Goode plays Ryder as a low key, but unfailingly polite social climber with a conscience. Once he enters the gates of Brideshead he knows that he will never again be happy unless he is embraced by those who live within. The tragedy of his life is that while the upper crust inhabitants may love him, he will never truly be one of them. Goode slowly allows the complexity of his character to surface as he is drawn back to Brideshead year after year in his search or meaning in his life.
As Sebastian, the spoiled British eccentric—at one point he sends a telegram to Ryder saying he is near death, when in fact he only “broke a bone in his foot so small it doesn’t even have a name”—Ben Whishaw appears so fragile, both physically and emotionally, that the the weight of his responsibilities to his family and his religion seem ready to break him in half.

Hayley Atwell’s take on love interest Julia is dignified and yet sultry, but it is Emma Thompson as the formidable Lady Marchmain who dominates the screen. Hers is a supporting role with a relatively small amount of screen time, but Thompson makes the most of her scenes and walks away with the picture. With her starched delivery and arched eyebrows lines like, “Mr. Ryder, what form do your pleasures take?” or “Vulgar is not the same as funny,” become the verbal equivalent of a slap across the face.  

Brideshead Revisited is sourced from material that is more than sixty years old and features spats, snoods and Model Ts but its themes of religious fundamentalism, pursuit of individualism and happiness, sexual tolerance and class are as current as anything on screens at your local multi-plex.

BATMAN GOTHAM KNIGHT (TWO DISC SPECIAL EDITION): 2 ½ STARS

Billed as the “First-Ever PG-13 Batman Animated Movie,” Batman Gothan Knight is meant to act as a bridge between Batman Begins and The Dark Knight. Composed of six 15-minute short films, each by a different director, writer, and illustrator, this anime-inspired direct-to-DVD anthology film is meant to be watched as a whole.

Don’t let the phrase “direct-to-DVD” scare you off. Warner and DC comics have assembled a top flight gallery of talent, including   Batman Begins writer David S. Goyer, Academy Award-nominated Josh A History of Violence Olsen, and comic book scribe Brian Azzarello to create one cohesive movie that is a little darker than the Saturday morning cartoons.

Chronicling Batman’s evolution from neophyte superhero to the Dark Knight, the six stories see him pitted against fearsome foes like Scarecrow, Killer Croc and Deadshot. High points include Working Through Pain from director Toshiyuki Kubooka which sees Batman reflecting on events in his life after a near fatal gunshot; the beautiful and elegant animation of Deadshot and the first segment and Have I Got a Story For You in which a number of kids at a Skateboard park describe their wildly different takes on their encounters with Batman.

Not all the stories are top notch—Crossfire is too talky and the Killer Croc animation is weak—but it does play well as a whole, building up slowly in intensity with each story. For Batman fans Batman Gotham Knight is worth a look, and should serve as an interesting appetizer until The Dark Knight opens.

BRUCE AND LLOYD OUT OF CONTROL DVD

Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control isn’t so much a movie as it is a marketing experiment. Released just two weeks after the big screen success of Get Smart, it isn’t a sequel but a parallel story. The question is whether or not audiences who enjoyed the big screen outing will want to shell out a few more bucks to see a direct-to-video movie with some of the same characters. If so it could open the floodgates for more of this sort of thing. Imagine a Knocked Up knock off featuring only the three stoner roommates, but not the more likeable above-the-title stars Seth Rogen or Kathryn Heigl, and you get the idea.

Bruce and Lloyd (Masi Oka) and (Nate Torrence) are bumbling research and development nerds—sort of like Q from the James Bond movies—at CONTROL, the super secret spy organization that also employs Maxwell Smart. When the invisibility cloak they have recently perfected goes missing the pair must get it back before it falls into the hands of evil-doers KAOS.

My main complaint about the recent adaptation of Get Smart is that it wasn’t Get Smarty enough; that it differed from the classic television show so much that it should have been called something else and avoided the obvious comparison to the series.

Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control, however, has more of the scent of the original television series—corny jokes, outlandish inventions and two heroes that get by despite their ineptness—but none of its spirit. The level of humor here doesn’t even rise to Naked Gun levels, let alone Get Smart as written by its creators Mel Brooks and Buck Henry. I wondered while watching if it was designed for kids, but there are several examples of language and situations that seemed unsuitable for the age the jokes seemed to be aimed at. It’s not raunchy at all, but a number of one-liners are off color enough to make the parents of ten year olds blush. So, if it’s not for kids and not really funny enough to keep older attention spans engaged, who is it for? 

It’s a direct to video release, which means we’re getting the b-team here. Steve Carell, The Rock and Alan Arkin are no where to be seen—although Anne Hathaway makes a gratuitous and uncredited appearance—instead we get Larry Miller, Patrick Warburton and a director whose past credits include the Closet Full of Hell episode of Dharma and Greg. Rent Bruce and Lloyd Out of Control with lowered expectations and you may not be too disappointed; better yet check out the original series on disc and settle in for a night of real retro laughs.

THE BUCKET LIST mini review

The Bucket List is the story of two terminally ill men played by Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman who, faced with death, form an unlikely friendship and discover what it’s really like to be alive. It’s sort of The Grim Reaper meets The Odd Couple.
These guys are great actors, but let’s face it, neither of them are doing anything we haven’t seen them do a million times before. Freeman does the narration; Nicholson plays the wacky guy who hides emotional pain under a flamboyant front. They don’t embarrass themselves here, they’re both too good for that, but they don’t do anything interesting or fresh either.

In the end it’s a predictable movie that seems to try and manipulate the viewer into bursting into tears when really he or she might only be trying to suppress yawns.

THE BUTTERFLY AND THE DIVING BELL mini review

Another unlikely Christmas release, based on a true story, about the editor of French Elle, Jean-Dominique Bauby (Mathieu Amalric), a man with a glamorous life overflowing with beautiful women, exotic travel and cash. Without warning he was struck down in his mid-forties by a massive stroke that left him with “locked-in” syndrome—paralyzed from head to toe but completely lucid and mentally alert.

With the help of a resourceful nurse he learned to communicate by using his one functional body part—his left eyelid. Using a painstaking method the nurse would read the alphabet to him and he would then blink when they hit on the letter he was thinking of to slowly form words, sentences and then paragraphs. Using this method he wrote a book about his experience with “locked-in” syndrome.

Sounds like a downer, but this is one of the movies of the year, brimming with great performances and beautifully directed by Julian Schnabel it comes complete with an uplifting feel that you wouldn’t necessarily expect from this kind of story. Unlike The Bucket List, The Diving Bell and The Butterfly never stoops to audience manipulation, it simply presents the story in a simple, heartfelt way and allows the viewer to follow their own feelings rather than have the filmmaker try to tell them how they should be reacting.

BABY MAMA: 2 STARS

Baby Mama is a great example of a formulaic comedy almost saved by a very likeable cast.

SNLers Tina Fey and Amy Poehler headline the story of Kate (Fey), a single, infertile—she’s told she only has a million-to-one chance of getting pregnant—thirty-seven year old businesswoman so desperate to have a baby she hires Angie, an inappropriate South Philly wild child (Poehler) to be her surrogate.   

When Angie’s and her boyfriend split she lands on Kate’s doorstep looking for a place to stay. Kate welcomes her into her newly baby proofed luxury apartment and tries to smooth out some of Angie’s rough edges—no more hair dye or Red Bull—in an attempt to turn her into the perfect expectant mom.

Baby Mama is well cast with Fey, Poehler, love interest Greg Kinnear and comic relief Steve Martin handing in admirable performances, but you just have to wonder what they could have done if they had been given a script equal to their talents. They squeeze out whatever humor and heart there is to be had here, but the laughs are scarce and the situations so predictable—Poehler and Fey sing  Girls Just Wanna Have Fun… big surprise!—so clichéd that by the end the main feeling I was left with was disappointment because of the movie held so much promise and delivered so little. 

Baby Mama isn’t a complete waste of time, Poehler has some inspired moments, but it is a big waste of a talented cast.

BEN X: 3 ½ STARS

With Ben X Belgian director Nic Balthazar presents a character study of a young man terrorized by school yard bullies. The slapstick of the similarly themed Drillbit Taylor has been stripped from the story and what emerges is an engrossing look at the effect of classroom harassment and the role that modern technology plays in exacerbating the problem but also providing an escape from the harsh reality of life as the brunt of someone else’s joke.

Based on a stage play that ran for 250 performances in Belgium and shot pseudo documentary style the film slowly unveils the life of Benny (Greg Timmermans) a young wide eyed student we soon learn suffers from Asperger Syndrome, one of several autism spectrum disorders characterized by difficulties in social interaction and by restricted, stereotyped interests and activities. The brunt of cruel and humiliating hazing, school, where he is called “the man from Mars,” is a living hell for him and he only feels alive when he retreats into the world of an on-line sword-and-sorcery game called ArchLord. “He’s an extraordinary person,” says his doctor in one of the film’s many documentary talking-head style inserts, “who fights to be ‘normal.’” “Think of him as a computer that’s been configured differently,” says another. 

When the bullying reaches a breaking point after a particularly humiliating stunt is posted on the internet, Benny—he’s only known as Ben X on-line, although the name has double meaning. Ben X sounds phonetically like ‘I am nothing’ in Dutch—must enlist the help of a possibly imaginary girlfriend and his harried parents to come up with an extreme solution to not only an end his torment, but to bring comeuppance to the bullies who have abused him.

Ben X isn’t a predictable movie. It constantly veers off into unexpected territory but remains compelling and believable because of Balthazar’s effective direction and lead performance by Timmermans.

Balthazar nails the scary, overwhelming world that Benny lives in with creative use of sound and visual effects, and his handling of the gaming portions of the film, integrated into Benny’s life, seems like a necessary addition to the film instead of a gimmick. It’s all so nicely handled that the filmmaker’s determination for the story to wrap on a high note seems like an odd choice given the brutal power of the story’s earlier moments. The happy ending isn’t as effective as it could be, and while it doesn’t sour the whole experience, it just makes it feel slightly less plausible.

At the core of it all is Greg Timmermans in his screen debut. Despite being obviously a few years too old for the role, he delivers a quietly powerful performance that relies on his ability to use his expressive eyes to show us Benny’s thought process. It’s a brave, unsentimental performance about a young man trying to learn to fake real feelings that never feels false or forced.

Ben X presented in Dutch with English subtitles is an audacious film that only falters when it tries to be a crowd pleaser.

BE KIND REWIND: 2 ½ STARS

Michel Gondry, the French director best known for fanciful films like Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind and eye-popping videos for Bjork, Massive Attack and The Chemical Brothers has, with Be Kind Rewind, made his most conventional movie to date. That’s not to say his sense of whimsy has disappeared—any film that recreates Fats Waller’s life using human hands for piano keys (more on that later) isn’t exactly blockbuster material—but the storyline seems more rooted in reality and not so much in dreamland this time around.

Passaic, New Jersey video store clerk Mike (Mos Def) and bumbling junk dealer Jerry (Jack Black) are longtime friends. Jerry jeopardizes Mike’s job and the future of the shop when he accidentally becomes magnetized (!) and erases the store’s entire inventory of VHS tapes. To prevent their most loyal customer, Ms. Kimberley (Mia Farrow), from telling the store’s owner, Mr. Fletcher (Danny Glover) that the store’s entire stock is worthless, they decide to make their own versions of the store’s most popular titles.

Armed with an ancient looking video camera and homemade props they re-create or “Swede”—Jerry nonsensically tells a customer the tapes are imported from Sweden—a number of well-known films including The Lion King, Rush Hour, Ghostbusters, Back to the Future, Driving Miss Daisy, Robocop and, my favorite, When We Were Kings and in the process become local heroes. The tapes become so popular they attract unwanted attention from a Hollywood studio who accuses the pair of illegally bootlegging the movies. Faced with bankruptcy and the loss of their beloved store, the duo makes one last film. With the help of the entire community they produce an epic biography of Mike’s hero, Fats Waller.

Gondry’s signature style is all over Be Kind Rewind. The film is a treasure chest of inventive visuals from the strange piano with white and black fingers substituting for keys—even Salvador Dali would be knocked back by that image—to a breathtaking real time montage of the best bits of their homemade movies. Gondry’s work here, as always, is a treat for the eyes. Luckily the film’s visual inventiveness makes up for the lapses in the story.

I love the ideas at play here—that film can be a unifying, communal art form which bridges race, religion and can even soften the hearts of bureaucrats (see the film’s final two minutes) that a movie with heart trumps Michael Bay’s expensive bombast every time. I love all that, sentimental as it may be, it really plays to my inner film geek, but      Be Kind Rewind’s Achilles heel is the difficulty Gondry has in switching from the magic realism of the piece back into the more earthbound aspects of the story. Still, despite the awkward storytelling the movie has a gentle, heartfelt vibe that is hard to resist, particularly if you’re a movie fan.

BALLS OF FURY: 1 ½ STARS

There was a time when Christopher Walken’s name on the marquee meant quality. Think The Deer Hunter, The Dead Zone or King of New York. Oh, how things have changed. He’s a great performer, but in recent years he has allowed his quirky personality and off beat vocal pattern to take precedence over real acting. In short, he has stopped acting and become a personality. His movie choices of late have been erratic. A supporting role as an existential TV repairman in Click, an idiosyncratic campaign manager in Man of the Year opposite Robin Williams and even a joke shop operator married to John Travolta in Hairspray. Eccentric roles all, but they all pale by comparison to his latest outing, a silly hybrid of Enter the Dragon and The Karate Kid with a dash of The Keystone Cops thrown in called Balls of Fury.

Walken plays the evil Feng, crime family boss and table tennis fanatic who bets heavily on child ping pong prodigy Randy Dakota (Dan Fogler) to win a major tournament. When the youngster suffers a humiliating defeat at that destroys his career Feng kills the youngster’s father to satisfy a gambling debt.

Cut to 19 years later. Dakota is a ping pong performer at a Las Vegas dive when he is recruited by a CIA agent (George Lopez) to infiltrate Feng’s super secret ping pong play-offs and help bring down Feng’s crime syndicate.

This is an extremely silly movie, and I don’t have no trouble with silly as long as it’s funny, but that’s where things go south in Balls of Fury. There are some laughs, but instead of the wall-to-wall guffaws the trailer promises, the jokes are few and far between. Walken, dressed in a series of outrageous Madame Butterfly inspired gowns, should be hilarious, but he settles for strange rather than funny. He really needs to be a bit more discerning when it comes to choosing scripts.

As Randy Dakota Tony Award winner Dan Fogler comes across as the poor man’s Jack Black. He has Black’s tubby-but-agile style down pat, but doesn’t deliver the charm or the grace of the School of Rock star. His resemblance to Black becomes distracting when it becomes obvious that this might have been a funnier movie if the filmmakers had just spent the money for the real Jack Black instead of settling for a pale, frizzy haired imitation.

Balls of Fury is the first table tennis movie to come out of Hollywood since Forrest Gump, but I don’t expect its modestly funny charms are going to spark a revival of this long-neglected genre.

BOURNE ULTIMATUM: 3 STARS

With a plot that seems to have been cribbed from a Spy Movies for Dummies book The Bourne Ultimatum is the weakest of the three Jason Bourne movies. The pulse racing action of the first two installments is still very much in evidence, but the proceedings are brought down by a poor script that could have used a run through the de-clichéifer before cameras rolled.

When we join Jason Bourne (Matt Damon) he’s still on the run. He’s been on the lam for three years ever since he was fished out of the ocean, left for dead with a bad case of amnesia. In his search to reclaim his lost identity he’s slowly putting together the shattered pieces of his life, leaving a trail of havoc and death behind him. He’s a highly trained ex-CIA operative, he knows that much, and in the new Bourne he continues his search of self discovery. On the path to his self awareness a journalist is shot in a crowded train station, cars fly through the air, get blown up and do any number of unnatural and unsafe maneuvers and Bourne displays the kind of fighting technique that would make Hulk Hogan run for cover.

The problem here isn’t Damon, after three installments his minimal portrayal of Bourne is honed to a science, or the action scenes; it’s the cliché ridden writing that bogs down the CIA scenes. When Bourne is in the field the movie is self assured and exciting, but when the “action” heads back to CIA HQ and the behind-the-scenes efforts to locate and exterminate Bourne the movie skids to a halt.

Oscar nominated David Strathairn is perfectly cast as the head of a black ops group empowered with a license to kill; a man whose calm exterior masks his internal viciousness. He’s a great actor, but unfortunately every line that comes out of his mouth here sounds like something recycled from other spy movies. When he barks “We’re on lockdown!” or “I want the area shut down in a four block radius” I wondered what he could have done with the part had he been given something even halfway interesting in terms of a script.

Director Paul United 93 Greengrass knows how to shoot action. There is a hand-to-hand combat scene in Morocco that is as exciting, chaotic and violent as any sequence in the Bourne movies, I just wish he had spent more time on the moments between the mayhem.

BECOMING JANE: 3 STARS

119 years after her death Jane Austin remains one of the most indemand writers in Hollywood. Although she only wrote six novels, but IMDB lists no fewer than 39 adaptations of her work for the screen. The appetite for her work is so fierce that now that the books have been made, re-made, adapted once again and updated a la Bridget Jones’ Diary, filmmakers have found a new source of Austinonia to exploit—her letters. Becoming Jane, a new movie starring The Devil Wears Prada’s Anne Hathaway at Austin and James Last King of Scotland McAvoy as Tom Lefroy , the only man she ever really loved.
 
Hathaway plays Austin as a 22 year old who must decide between marrying for love or for money. Her paramour Lefroy is a penniless lawyer in training, who, while rakishly charming, must depend on an allowance from his rich uncle to survive. Mr. Wisley (Laurence Fox) a socially awkward but wealthy young man is in love with the pretty Jane, and hopes that one day her affection for him will blossom. Not likely. She’s head over heels for Lefroy, even though her mother tells her, “Affection is desirable, money is absolutely indispensable.”

Becoming Jane is an affecting portrait, in a Masterpiece Theatre kind of way, of the early years of one of the world’s most beloved authors. Based on her letters to her sister Cassandra it is rich with the kind of details abou6t her life that should win over Austin-heads, while more casual viewers may enjoy the romantic twists and turns of the plot. Hathaway is fine in the title role, and avoids the wrinkled-nose mannered kind of performance that ultimately sucked a lot of the fun out of Renee Zellweger’s performance as Beatrix Potter earlier this year. She plays the young Austin as a headstrong woman with much more verve than is usually ascribed to her. Despite the mannerisms of the time—the curtseys etc—Hathaway plays Austin as a thoroughly modern woman trapped in a pre-feminist world.

Her chemistry with McAvoy is strong, much like the prickly dynamics between Elizabeth Bennett and Mr. Darcy in Pride & Prejudice. He makes the most of his naturally raffish smile and charming manner handing in a performance that sparkles but actually digs a little deeper to really bring the playboy he’s portrayed as in the script to life. When the story switches from romantic cat and mouse to romantic tragedy and McAvoy’s true feelings for Jane are revealed it’s a touching and well played moment.

Becoming Jane may disturb Austinophiles who might feel that the writer’s name has been exploited to sell a story that is essentially a costume drama with none of the wit and finesse of an actual Austin story, but less fanatical eyes will find a likeable, although slight romance about the true nature of love. 

BLOOD DIAMOND: 3 STARS

Great chefs know that the best food is usually created using a minimum of ingredients. Even if the ingredients are of the highest quality too many flavors confuses the palate and ruins the meal. So it is in movies. Director Ed Zwick has taken top-flight ingredients—a cast that includes Oscar nominees Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Hounsou with Oscar winner Jennifer Connelly, beautiful African locations and a worthy story—but he’s too heavy-handed with the spices, and almost ruins the stew.

In the last couple of years there have been many films about Africa’s troubled recent history. We’ve seen Hotel Rwanda, Catch a Fire, The Last King of Scotland even the documentary Shake Hands with the Devil, but none have touched on the trade in conflict diamonds. Set in 1999 Blood Diamond takes us inside the trade of western African in Liberia and Sierra Leone.

DiCaprio plays Danny Archer, a South African soldier of fortune that has turned to the lucrative but dangerous job of diamond smuggling between Sierra Leone and Liberia. Busted by border guards and thrown into jail he comes into contact with Solomon Vandy (Hounsou), a fisherman who was enslaved by the radical RUF to work in their illegal mining camps sifting for “blood diamonds” which would then be sold to legitimate sources to raise money for arms. While working at the camp Solomon managed to find and secret away a rare pink diamond the size of a bird’s egg. Archer sees this valuable diamond as his ticket out of war torn Africa. Along the way an American journalist played by Connolly and his growing friendship with Solomon raises his awareness to his part in the horror. It makes for an odd mix of straight out action and social commentary.

Zwick tries to take on the ills of the region—trade in blood diamonds, the use of children in the infantry—coupled with commentary on the West’s exploitation of the continent’s mineral resources, the responsibility of consumers understand the human cost of their purchases as well as the monetary and the personal stories of each of the characters. Throw in an almost love story and you have spoiled the broth with too many ingredients.

Each of the lead actors does good work here—although Jennifer Connolly’s war correspondent must to have an unseen hairdresser traveling with her—and several of the action sequences are spectacular, but in regard to the social and political comment of the film, Zwick seems to have bitten off more than he could chew.

Borat: Cultural Learnings of America for Make Benefit Glorious Nation of Kazakhstan

Mix equal parts of Archie Bunker with the Wild and Crazy Guys from vintage Saturday Night Live and you get Borat. As you probably know by now—20th Century Fox has been quite aggressive in getting the word out— Borat Sagdiyev is a reporter from Kazakhstan sent to the United States to make a documentary about life in America. Once there he becomes obsessed with Pamela Anderson and travels across the country to meet her and make “sexytime.”

He’s the outrageously mustachioed creation of Sasha Baron Cohen, a fearless British guerilla comic, who plants himself in real situations and under the pretext of learning about America spouts incredibly, gobsmackingly ignorant statements in broken English. The amazing—and amazingly funny—thing about the film is how often regular people agree with him. At a rodeo in Virginia he gets cheers from the crowd when he announces that “Premier George W. Bush will drink the blood of every man, woman and child in Iraq,” and there is a scene in a Winnebago with a group of frat boys that made me despair for the next generation.    

Not since Archie first called Mike Stivic a “meathead” has a mainstream entertainment used comedy so effectively to expose the racist, gun-obsessed, misogynist, gay-bashing, anti-Semitic, ignorant heartland of America. Although it should be noted that I’m sure we’re only seeing one one-millionth of the footage shot and all the people who disagreed with Borat’s boorish ramblings were left on the cutting room floor.

This movie is not for the easily upset. Borat is an equal opportunity offender, it’s raunchy and coarse, but also insightful and those who get the joke will be rewarded with breathless laughter. Borat is funny, spleen-bursting funny, although you may catch yourself wondering if these are the kind of jokes you should be laughing at.

BECAUSE I SAID SO:  - 2 STARS

Movies this bad don’t get released… they escape. The story, which picks the bones of everything from Something’s Gotta Give (sans Jack Nicholson) to Fiddler on the Roof, never met a cliché it didn’t love or a situation too hackneyed to be inserted into the mix.

Diane Keaton plays a single mother who raised three beautiful daughters. Her oldest, Maggie (The Gilmour Girls’ Lauren Graham) and middle child Mae (Maggie Mae, get it?) played by Piper “Coyote Ugly” Perabo lead perfect romantic comedy lives—they have great jobs, handsome husbands and seem set to happily ride off into the sunset.  That leaves the third daughter, the Cinderella of the bunch, Milly, the quirky daughter who can’t seem to find a man. Mom, fearful that her youngest won’t ever find happiness decides to act as a pimp… er… I mean set her daughter up with a man. Romantic entanglements ensue as Mom chooses a wealthy but emotionally detached architect and Milly falls for a penniless but warm-hearted musician. Who do you think she’ll end up with?

It’s a fairly standard romantic comedy set-up, although, just as The Holiday did last year, has at its core the notion that women cannot be fulfilled unless they have a man in their lives. The idea is that Diane Keaton is a cranky old maid who has given up on any hope of love in her life and she is trying to steer her children away from her fate. It’s an intrinsically misogynist concept that seems to be the basis for more and more romantic comedies these days.

The gender politics of the piece notwithstanding, there isn’t much to like about this movie. The comedy, which often veers into slapstick, falls flat, the story is predictable, the characters right out of central casting. Diane Keaton—it should be noted has been nominated for Best Actress four times and won in 1978 for a truly the great rom com Annie Hall—delivers the worst performance of her long career. Perhaps she stands out so much because the other actors are barely given characters to work with, and thusly blend into the scenery, but her over-the-top shrieky performance brought to mind bad sitcom acting. She makes Bozo the Clown look subtle and nuanced.

Why shouldn’t you go see this movie? I’ll use a running gag from the movie as my answer: “Because I Said So…”


 

BIG BAD LOVE

A surreal movie based on a short story collection by Mississippi writer Larry Brown. Arliss Howard directs and stars as Leon Barlow, a drunken writer who struggles with the demands of his ex-wife (Debra Winger), his children and his best friend (Paul LeMat). He is a failure on almost every level –
certainly personally and professionally – and Howard doesn’t shy away from his protagonist’s shortcomings. The resulting film is a meandering look at the creative process, and how one man messed up his life. It’s a well crafted directorial debut from Howard who handles this quiet tale of an artist's redemption with a firm hand.

BIGGIE AND TUPAC

Your enjoyment of Biggie and Tupac is directly related to your enjoyment of director Nick Broomfield and his bumbling passive-aggressive approach to ambush journalism. He dominates the movie, integrating himself into the story in his search to uncover the culprits behind the slaying of the Notorious BIG and Tupac Shakur, two of hip hop’s brightest stars, gunned down within months of one another. Six years after the murders no arrests have been made, and while Broomfield offers some possible suspects, he stops short of any definitive conclusion. He suggests several motives for the killings, but the point of the film is to chronicle his investigation – to present the facts and open a new dialogue about the culture of violence that is prevalent in hip hop – rather than pointing the finger at one guilty party. I find Broomfield’s approach highly entertaining, and while he veers off course occasionally – there is a long pointless sequence with an ex-girlfriend of two LAPD officers allegedly tied to Tupac’s murder that hinges on the sex lives of the officers, not their criminal behaviour – you have to admire his bravado in chasing down interviews in backrooms, prison yards, anywhere the story takes him. In the film’s final third there is an interview with Suge Knight, head honcho at Death Row Records, a leading rap label. Knight was in prison at the time, and didn’t want to do the interview, but through sheer persistence Broomfield got him on camera. You can sense the tension in the sequence. The camera is noticeable jittery, as though the camera operator was have an anxiety attack while shooting, and Broomfield is unusually subdued. Knight begins benignly enough with a “message for the kids” which slowly disintegrates into a hate filled diatribe and death threat against rap artist Snoop Dogg. It is powerful footage, and worth the price of admission.

BIRTHDAY GIRL

This is a strange one. Ben Chaplin (no relation to the legendary comedian) is a shy Englishman who hooks up with a Russian mail order bride (Nicole Kidman). The movie seems to be a quirky romantic comedy until it suddenly morphs into a crime drama, a chase movie and extremely dark farce. It’s a bit of a mess, but is saved by Chaplin’s sad sack portrayal of the love sick John, and French actors Vincent Cassel and Mathieu Kassovitz as the Russian bad guys. Nicole Kidman continues to impress, and even though she doesn’t speak a word of English for the first hour of Birthday Girl her expressive face says it all.

BLADE II

Darker and more gruesome than the original, Blade II delivers an intoxicating blend of horror, butt kicking martial arts and comic book sensibility. Wesley Snipes is back as the half vampire half human “Daywalker” whose life’s mission is to hunt and eliminate the undead. Also making a return appearance is Kris Kristofferson as his sagely sidekick Whistler. Mexican Director Guillermo del Toro amps up the action, inserting incredibly violent, but entertaining fight scenes every ten minutes or so. The story is outlandish but remains true to the movie’s comic book roots – which means it makes enough sense while you are watching it, but doesn’t hold up to close scrutiny at the coffee shop post theatre.

BLUE CRUSH

No one was more surprised than me that I enjoyed Blue Crush. It is a by-the-numbers teen drama about three Hawaiian wahinis who have crappy day jobs to the pay the rent and support their surfing addiction. One of them, Anne Marie (Kate Bosworth) was a child champion of the sport, but stopped competing when she was almost killed when she lost control of her board and bashed her head on a rock. Now after a break of three years she’s signed up to ride the big waves in the island’s largest surfing competition. She’s in training until she meets a young, rich football player who sweeps her off her feet. Story wise Blue Crush falls flat when it is on land, but the surfing scenes are spectacular. There are a few little twists that set this apart from the usual teen fare – the girls have decidedly unglamorous jobs as hotel maids, and live in a grotty little shack – but don’t expect to be wowed by the plot. Think of it as The Wide World of Sports with dialogue.

BOLLYWOOD / HOLLYWOOD

Toronto-based director Deepa Mehta is best know for making controversial, searing dramas like Fire and Earth, and has earned a reputation as the new voice of Indian cinema. Her latest film is a change of pace. Set in Canada, Bollywood / Hollywood is a comedy that infuses a North American sensibility to the conventional Bollywood formula. Cultures clash in the film as Rahul (Rahul Khanna), a wealthy Indian-Canadian man tries to appease his family by hiring a “Spanish” escort to pose as his Indian fiancée at his sister’s wedding. Mix a good-sized dollop of Pretty Woman with some sparkling song-and-dance routines and the result is a light-hearted romp that reinvents the tried and true Bollywood recipe. Some nice work from the young leads, while Ranjit Chowdhry, as the female impersonating butler and the late Dina Pathak provide comic relief. 

THE BOURNE IDENTITY

This film version of Robert Ludlum’s 1980 spy thriller is equal parts brains and brawn. Matt Damon, as John Bourne, a CIA black ops spy who suffers from amnesia and spends the film piecing together the last two weeks of his life, uses his intellect as much as his fists. This is a smart movie, made even better by some wise choices for director and star. Doug Liman, director of Swingers and Go brings a refreshing excitement to this tired old genre, and manages to deliver some unexpected thrills. Franka Potente (best known for Run Lola Run) as Maria, a young woman who unwittingly finds herself involved in international intrigue, hands in a star making performance. As a viewer her character is the only one in the film that we can relate to; she’s an ordinary person put in extraordinary circumstances. Look for Clive Owen in a cameo as The Professor, a hired killer sent to assassinate Bourne. In his three or four lines of dialogue he talks about the moral quandaries of his line of work. It’s a beautifully acted moment, and a nice twist on the usual killer-for-hire character.

BOWLING FOR COLUMBINE

This is an extremely effective, if not rambling film that asks the question “Are we (America) a nation of gun nuts, or are we just nuts?” Director Michael Moore uses the massacre at Columbine High School in Littleton, Colorado as a jumping off point, then takes us on a journey that includes stops in Michigan, where it seems everyone owns a gun, a sit-in at K-Mart’s corporate headquarters and an amusing side trip to Moore’s idealized Canada. This movie is all over the place, and offers very few answers to the difficult questions it asks, but I think it was Moore’s strategy to present the facts and figures and get people thinking for themselves. Moore’s everyman appearance is put to good use in the film’s most effective scene. He talks his way into gun-nut Charlton Heston’s house for an interview, claiming to be a member of the NRA. Once inside he gradually warms Heston up before asking the hard questions about the consequences of living in a heavily armed society. Heston stiffens, ending the interview and walking away. Moore’s camera follows Heston as he shuffles down a long hall. The Grand Wizard of the NRA is revealed to for what he is, an old man, and not the Moses of the gun movement. It’s impressive footage that caps a film full of powerful images and ideas.

BROTHERHOOD OF THE WOLF

Brotherhood of the Wolf is all over the place. It’s a French Revolution/ horror/ martial arts epic with style to burn, and makes up for the gaping holes in its story with sheer energy and sensory assault. Director Christophe Gans packs every moment of Brotherhood of the Wolf with either bone crunching action, (imagine if John Woo had directed Dangerous Liaisons), or some crazy audio / visual effects or busy scenes with beautiful people. Gans knows how to amuse the eye, he just isn’t much of a storyteller, but Brotherhood of the Wolf is so entertaining that we’ll forgive him just this once.
BURIAL SOCIETY

Burial Society is a film noir, a bargain basement emulation of early Coen Brothers style. It tells the story of loans manager Sheldon Krasner (Rob LaBelle), a man of quiet desperation who embezzles money from the wrong people. In an effort to elude the gangsters who are searching for him he conceives an elaborate plan to join the Chevrah Kadisha or Burial Society made up of devout Jewish men who prepare dead bodies for burial.

As expected with this kind of film there are twists a plenty, but none are really surprising. This kind of quirky film noir piece has become stock – we know to look for the twists and turns and when they do come, they’re not that surprising. We’ve seen this kind of story many times, but director Nicholas Rasz at least shakes things up visually, using several showy shots that break up the functional monotony of the story. In one scene as Krasner is putting money into a bag it is seen from the bag’s perspective. Not necessary, but a tricky little shot nonetheless.    

Rob LaBelle is fine as the nebbishy Krasner, and at 82 minutes Burial Society flies by, but doesn’t leave any lasting impression.

BREAKING AND ENTERING
Jude Law (reunited with director Anthony Minghella for a third time) plays a world-weary architect who reevaluates his life following a series of break-ins at his office. Determined to recover his stolen laptop, which contains his “whole life,” he embarks on an unorthodox investigation that leads to an affair with the mother of a suspect. Breaking and Entering is a multi-layered story about immigration in the new England, the fragility of relationships and how a mother’s love trumps all. It’s a bit too ambitious, casting its net too wide to fully explore all of these topics, but steady direction from Minghella and top-flight performances from co-stars Ray Winstone and Juliette Binoche save the day. 

BOBBY: 2 ½ STARS
Bobby is an ambitious attempt to reenact the day Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated at the Ambassador Hotel in Los Angeles on June 5, 1968. Director Emilio Estevez has assembled a extensive ensemble cast, featuring vets like William H. Macy, Harry Belefonte and Anthony Hopkins to Brat Packers like Christian Slater and Demi Moore to hot young stars such as Lindsay Lohan and Elijah Wood to up and comers like Shia LaBeouf and Joshua Jackson who play people who were in the hotel the night Kennedy was killed.

Estevez, who wrote and directed Bobby, was only six years old when Kennedy was assassinated so it might be his lack of personal experience with the era that gives Bobby it almost hopelessly earnest tone. The late 60s were a politically charged time, fuelled by protests, assassinations and civil unrest, but Estevez’s account of the time is simplistic, with stock characters—the racist kitchen manager, the wise old doorman—spouting dialogue that sounds as though it was written for a history textbook and not a feature film.

When Lohan’s character says, “If marrying you tonight keeps you from going to Vietnam, then it's worth it,” before she walks down the aisle with a recently drafted Elijah Wood, it’s difficult not to imagine even a Harlequin romance writer cringing at the clichéd line.

With 22 characters Bobby is too populated by half. Many of the stories are superfluous and don’t add anything to the film except star power and running time. It’s a snapshot of the time that needs some serious cropping.    

Despite the needlessly sprawling story, it’s hard to really dislike a movie this earnest, a film that wears its heart on its sleeve. While cinematic greatness might not be evident, Bobby’s message of peace and justice shines through.

BEERFEST: 3 STARS

Beerfest is rude, vulgar, sophomoric and stupid and I mean that in the best possible way. It is also quite hilarious, if you think beer coming out of your nose is funny.

Beerfest uncovers the underground world of international drinking games when an unwitting group of Americans travels to Germany to partake in Oktoberfest. When it is discovered that they are descended from an unpopular relative of the Beerfest head honcho they must defend the honor of their family. They spend a year training and return to chug their way to victory.

This is a movie for people who find The Three Stooges too complicated or those who think Adam Sandler is too highbrow. The Broken Lizard comedy troupe who wrote, directed and star in Beerfest are some of the funniest guys in movies NOT named Will Ferrell and Jack Black but their brand of humor is R-rated and not for anyone with a weak stomach.

Their movies have more to do with puke and pratfalls than carefully thought out punch lines, but what did you expect from a movie called Beerfest? Subtlety? Witty repartee? Keep looking. Beerfest is a love it or leave it kind of movie. If you bought the DVD of Old School and have watched it more than once, you’re ready for Beerfest. If the idea of watching Old School more than once offends your delicate sensibilities then maybe you should go see Idelwild instead this weekend.

BON COP BAD COP: 3 STARS

Bon Cop Bad Cop is an interesting hybrid of a film. As the title suggests it is bilingual, blending both of Canada’s official languages and shining a spotlight on our two solitudes, while taking it’s cues from American action films.

When a dead body is found draped over the sign that delineates the border between Quebec and Ontario, the two provincial police forces are forced to work together to find the killer. We meet Martin Ward (Colm Feore), the WASPy Ontario cop who plays by the book and David Bouchard (Patrick Huard), his free-wheeling French counter-part who threw away the rule book a long time ago. They don’t like one another but over time they embrace the other’s differences and become a team.

If that sounds familiar it should because it is the basis of literally hundreds of buddy films from Lethal Weapon onwards. We’ve seen most of this before, but placing it in Canada against the background of French-English relations gives Bon Cop Bad Cop most of its zip. The movie pokes fun at the clichés that Ontarians are uptight and overly polite while French-Canadians are wild and laissez-faire, treating the differences with humor.

In this the movie is aided greatly by its French lead actor, Patrick Huard. A noted comedian in Quebec, Huard has an easy charm and rubber face that can flip on a dime from good-natured and goofy to hard-edged and dangerous. He’s a great choice to play the rule-bending cop who has both a light and dark side to his personality. Also well cast is Colm Feore as Martin Ward, the Ontario cop. Feore ensures that his character isn’t simply a cliché but a well-rounded person who slowly realizes that underneath it all feels that he is better than his French neighbor. Together they have good chemistry.

The best part of the film is definitely watching these two actors work together and they are so good they deflect criticism away from the preposterous story. It turns out the body draped over the border sign was just the first victim of a hockey-obsessed serial killer who has set out to kill hockey executives who are selling Canadian teams to American owners. It doesn’t get more Canadian than that. What’s next, the Maple Syrup Madman?

Bon Cop Bad Cop is an attempt to do something that is done all too rarely in this country—make a homegrown film that will appeal to Canadians. It is a blatantly commercial film that has all the elements of American blockbusters and poutine jokes.

THE BREAK-UP: 2 STARS

Is there a film title this year riper with pathos than The Break-Up? It seems like just yesterday that Jennifer Aniston and Brad Pitt were announcing that their Hollywood romance was on the rocks, generating screaming headlines in the tabloids. Now those headlines have been paraphrased into a movie title, released just a week after Aniston’s former flame has a child with his scarlet woman, Angelina Jolie. It’s almost as if the great publicist in the sky said, “OK, I’ll cut you a break here. Your last two movies have flopped so here is an ironic title and a serendipitous birth to stir up some hype. Good luck.”

The Break-Up is being marketed as a romantic comedy, but really it is more a battle of the sexes—make that exes—with more in common with The War of the Roses, a nasty divorce movie from a decade ago, than a traditional romantic comedy. Imagine if Ingmar Bergman had directed When Harry Met Sally.

The romance part of the film is dismissed early on with a montage of pictures of the couple in their salad days, holding hands, kissing, on vacation. The viewer gets the idea that they were once a happy pair, but fifteen minutes into the film after a screaming match following a disastrous dinner party their union is shattered. Brooke (Aniston) still loves Gary (Vaughn) but wants him to learn to respect her. He’s a man-child who doesn’t get it and their relationship frays into a he said/she said battle in which ownership of their beautiful condo becomes the main issue.

The movie has an odd tone, at once playing on the strengths of its stars—Vaughn is once again the fast-talking charmer, Aniston the pretty, girl-next-door type—while also playing them against type. Vaughn crosses the line from charmer to homophobic jerk, a guy so obnoxious the audience is actually happy during a scene in which he gets beaten up. Aniston effortlessly handles the comedic portion of her role and is quite good in the dramatic bits, but I’m not sure that given her recent real-life romantic history that audiences want to see Rachel… rather Aniston break down into tears over a man.

There are laughs here, particularly in the scenes between Vaughn and his Swingers’ co-star Jon Favreau, but they are generally followed by long stretches of uncomfortable tension. Because we see so little of the couple in the honeymoon phase of the relationship, when things go sour we don’t really care. It’s like watching strangers argue in a restaurant. You may be compelled to look in that train wreck kind of way, but ultimately it is unaffecting.

This is a perfect date movie if you plan on dumping the person you’re with when the movie is over.

BASIC INSTINCT II: ½ STAR

Basic Instinct II is the kind of movie that gives sequels a bad name. Made a decade-and-a-half after the original burned up cinema screens with Sharon Stone’s memorable, if naughty leg crossing scene, this follow-up is way past its expiration date.

Sharon Stone is the only member of the original cast desperate enough to reprise her role in this shabby excuse for a movie. She plays Catherine Tramell, the murderous writer from the first film, now living in London, and once again under investigation for murder. She manipulates her state appointed psychiatrist into becoming her sex slave and sucks him into a world of lies and deception. Tramell is a vixen who controls people with her sexuality and when that fails, an ice pick.

Stone appears to have torn a page from the soap-opera textbook of come-hither acting. Her forced attempts at sexiness don’t come off well—the bedroom eyes have seen better days—and she has zero chemistry with her co-star and on-screen boy-toy David Morrisey.

Stone’s performance is ridiculous but she is not helped by a script that requires her to intone some of the dumbest dialogue in recent memory. “Some guys are into blondes,” she says with a straight face, “and some guys are into killers.” 

Basic Instinct II lacks the trashy verve that director Paul Verhoeven brought to the original. His sense of European eroticism penetrates every frame of the 1992 film shattering the political correctness of the time and drawing people into an unapologetically brutal and lurid world. The original was dirty, controversial, wickedly funny and established Sharon Stone the “it” girl of the early nineties. The sequel is dull and should make Stone a favorite at this year’s Razzie Awards.

Simply put, Basic Instinct II basically stinks.

BEOWULF AND GRENDEL: 3 STARS

Beowulf and Grendel is a film adaptation of the first epic poem in the English language. It’s about a king who, having killed a terrifying troll, recruits the help of a foreign warrior named Beowulf to battle the unforgiving son of the troll he murdered.

From its opening minutes, a chapter subtitled A Hate is Born, Beowulf and Grendel could have been an effective allegory for racism and the fear of anything that is different, but is stymied by its delivery. Director Sturla Gunnarsson makes great use of the rocky landscapes of Iceland, where the film was shot, and successfully cast Gerard Butler as the heroic Beowulf and Stellan Skarsgard as the broken-down king but fails to impart any real empathy for Grendel, the revenge-seeking troll. If the audience doesn’t feel for the character then the story becomes strictly about revenge and not anything deeper.

There are some memorable scenes. After Grendel sees his father killed he takes a souvenir to remember his dad—his head!—and the rocky scenery is beautiful, perfectly complimenting the brutal story.     

BEOWULF AND GRENDEL: 3 STARS

Beowulf and Grendel is a film adaptation of the first epic poem in the English language. It’s about a king who, having killed a terrifying troll, recruits the help of a foreign warrior named Beowulf to battle the unforgiving son of the troll he murdered.

From its opening minutes, a chapter subtitled A Hate is Born, Beowulf and Grendel could have been an effective allegory for racism and the fear of anything that is different, but is stymied by its delivery. Director Sturla Gunnarsson makes great use of the rocky landscapes of Iceland, where the film was shot, and successfully cast Gerard Butler as the heroic Beowulf and Stellan Skarsgard as the broken-down king but fails to impart any real empathy for Grendel, the revenge-seeking troll. If the audience doesn’t feel for the character then the story becomes strictly about revenge and not anything deeper.

There are some memorable scenes. After Grendel sees his father killed he takes a souvenir to remember his dad—his head!—and the rocky scenery is beautiful, perfectly complimenting the brutal story.     

BAD NEWS BEARS: 2 ½ STARS

Nobody plays a likeable scumbag like Billy Bob Thornton. From a murderous hillbilly to a drunken, foul-mouthed Santa, he has made a career of playing eccentric curmudgeons, and he has perfected the art of being repellent, but somehow strangely charming. In this remake of the much-loved 1976 Walter Matthau comedy, Thornton is a natural as the booze-soaked Little League coach who finds himself managing a ragtag team of potty-mouthed misfits. He’s the kind of guy who wears a t-shirt that reads “She Looked Better Last Night” to Little League practice, and builds “team spirit” by getting the kids to do the dirty work in his extermination business.

The script stays faithful to the original movie—although in keeping with the times, is probably a little more vulgar. Bad Santa scribes Glenn Ficarra and John Requa know how to write for Thornton, keeping him just on the right side of the film’s PG-13 rating with dialogue peppered with the kind of profanity and slurs Matthau would never have dreamed of saying on screen.

The remake also takes liberties with the original movie’s line-up of players—the fat kid, the nerd etc—adding in characters that better reflect today’s cultural landscape. There is an Armenian kid, a boy in an electric wheel-chair and a youngster who appears to be a few runs short an inning and for the most part the kids are foul-mouthed little hellions who will likely inspire parents to send their adolescent kids to boot camp just to make sure they don’t turn out like this bunch.   

The recent Bad News Bears shares much with its predecessor, but with a contemporary edge. It delights in confronting—and stomping on—the kind of political correctness that simply didn’t exist in 1976 when the first one was made and in that sense is a film that is very much of it’s time—a little edgier, a little meaner, but just as funny.

BEWITCHED

Bewitched is an attempt to side-step the usual pitfalls of turning a beloved television show into a movie. Will Ferrell stars as Jack Wyatt, a spoiled movie star whose career has seen better days. In hope of comeback he takes on the role of Darren in a television update of Bewitched. Prompted by his agent, Wyatt insists that a newcomer play Samantha, and he finds the perfect person in the form of Isabel, played by Nicole Kidman. Here’s the twist—Isabel is a real-life witch who is trying to go straight and give up witchcraft in return for a normal life. Here the hilarity begins. Or, at least it should.  

God help me, as much as I like Nicole Kidman, she simply isn’t funny. She excels in heavy, meatier roles like Anna in the underrated Birth from last year, but when it comes to lighter fare like The Stepford Wives and Bewitched she proves that she’s no Groucho Marx.

Will Ferrell tries hard for the laughs here—maybe too hard. He’s a performer that I like watching—I thought Elf and Anchorman were both hilarious—but, sadly, I’m beginning to realize that a little Will goes a long way. The one two punch of Kicking and Screaming, his lame soccer-dad movie from May and now this is more hammyness than even Porky Pig could handle.

Bewitched is a uneasy mixture of special effects movie and romantic comedy without ever really committing to either one.

BATMAN BEGINS

I went into Batman Begins expecting a lot and left the theatre wanting less—less psychological babble, less backstory and less of Liam Neeson’s ridiculously wispy goatee. Director Christopher Nolan’s movie—he’s best known for making an edgy little thriller called Momento—thankfully has more in common with the Tim Burton Batmans than the unwatchable Joel Schumacher campfests that ruined this franchise a few years ago. Still, I found Batman Begins to be a little too somber and so heavy it almost threatens to collapse in on itself.

In an effort to clearly define why Bruce Wayne becomes Batman Nolan spends the first hour of the film creating an elaborately plotted, although kind of dull backstory for the character. By the time Wayne finally becomes the Caped Crusader I wanted to scream, ‘I get it! He’s afraid of bats and wants revenge for the death of his parents.’ It is the simplest story of all the classic comic book heroes and yet here Nolan muddies the water with unnecessary detail. I would have liked to have been able to see more of the action scenes, but they are so murky—shot in the dark and mostly in close-up—that I found it difficult to get too engaged with what I was seeing on screen. 

Christian Bale, best known for his role as Patrick Bateman in American Psycho, is the new Batman. He’s a little too Johnny-one-note for my tastes, but holds his own against the previous big screen Batmans. He’s got the dark edge Michael Keaton brought to the role, the youthful physicality of Val Kilmer and seems to have crawled out of the same blessed genetic gene pool as George Clooney.

Batman Begins is definitely a better comic book adaptation than Daredevil or Electra; admirable in its emphasis on character over gadgetry, and is ambitious for a summer blockbuster, but for me, unfortunately it never quite takes flight.

THE BROTHERS GRIMM: 4 STARS

Terry Gilliam, the only American member of the legendary Monty Python comedy troupe, likes to create new worlds—places in which the real and the unreal co-exist comfortably. Rent Brazil, 12 Monkeys or The Fisher King and you’ll find fact and fantasy bashing heads, each struggling to stake their territory in the story’s plot. In his first film in seven years, The Brothers Grimm, he walks the same path.

Played by Matt Damon and Heath Ledger, Will and Jake Grimm are 18th century Ghostbusters, a pair of charlatans who bilk simple country folk out of their money by conducting phony exorcisms of ghosts and demons. Their days as con men come to an abrupt end when they are captured by Napoleon’s Army and sentenced to death. Instead of facing a gruesome execution they agree to rid the forest in a nearby town of its evil spirits. Faced with real supernatural forces their brand of ghostbusting is put to the test. 

The script is a mix-and-match pastiche of classic fables such as Jack and the Bean Stalk, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and Rapunzel, and while it doesn’t always work—Matt Damon’s accent comes and goes with the frequency of a shuttle bus and why hire someone as beautiful as Monica Bellucci and then cover her with zombie makeup for most of the film—but Gilliam’s sense of wonder and playfulness seeps through and makes The Brothers Grimm a welcome change from the bland remakes and sequels that have cluttered up the multi-plexes this summer.