THE LAST AIRBENDER: 0 STARS

M. Night Shyamalan has said “The Last Airbender,” in theatres this weekend, will be the first of a trilogy. A mix of action and spiritualism it will be, he says, his “Lord of the Rings.” I’m here to tell you, this ain’t no “LOTR.” It’s barely “Police Academy” standard let alone anything that could be compared to Peter Jackson’s richly layered epic.

The story begins with the discovery of Aang (Noah Ringer) a young boy with a distinctive tattoo marking his head and back. He’s been frozen in a block of ice for one hundred years and is unaware that the evil Fire Nation has waged a war on his home, the Earth Kingdom. Along with his new companions, Katara (Nicola Peltz), her brother Sokka (Jackson Rathbone), he flies around on a large creature that looks like a “Where the Wild Things Are” reject, fighting for the land and trying to stay one step ahead of Prince Zuko (Dev Patel) a disgraced royal who thinks capturing the boy will restore his honor. You see, Aang is the last of his kind. He’s the Avatar, the only person alive with the ability to “bend” all four elements. Unfrozen Avatar boy would be an asset to the Fire Nation army, but it is his destiny to supply order to his war torn world.

Based on an animated television series, “The Last Airbender” struggles to wedge three seasons worth of “bender” mythology into a ninety minute movie. To bring the audience up to speed Shyamalan provides endless exposition. In fact, there is very little dialogue in the first hour that isn’t setting up the history, motives and abilities of the characters. Conversational it isn’t. It’s a lot of “What is the spirit world grandma?” and “Aren’t there spirits here?” followed by long winded explanations delivered with a gravitas that wouldn’t be out of place in a community theatre production of “Sweeney Todd.” Add some narration and location intertitles to the questions and exposition and it’s obvious Shyamalan has broken the golden rule of filmmaking—show me don’t tell me. He shows us plenty, but unfortunately tells us even more.    
 
He isn’t aided in the storytelling by a wooden cast of young actors who seem to have been hired more for their athletic ability than their acting chops. Even Dev Patel, such a winning presence in “Slumdog Millionaire,” is reduced to spending most of the movie simply screeching and glowering. When the other acrobatic actors aren’t over emoting they spend their time engaged in an elaborate game of Rock, Paper, Scissors battling with earth, wind and fire, the elements, not the funk band, to win control of the Earth Kingdom.

Even the murky 3D doesn’t add much, once again proving that stereoscopic images cannot rescue a weak story or mask poor acting.

“The Last Airbender” is my first seat belt movie of the season—that’s a movie so misguided, so off the mark you need a seat belt to keep you in your chair for the entire movie. Shyamalan really should have released the movie at Thanksgiving because it’s a turkey—but you won’t want a second helping.

LETTERS TO JULIET: 3 STARS

If Nicholas Sparks ever wrote a romantic comedy it might be something like “Letters to Juliet.” Mixing an “it’s never too late to find true love” motif and other Spark’s standards like unopened letters and long lost love with some light comedy combines the best of what passes for romance on screen these days. Don’t get me wrong, it’s not exactly “Doctor Zhivago,” or even “When Harry Met Sally,” but it ain’t “Leap Year” either, and that’s a good thing.

“Mama Mia’s” Amanda Seyfried is Sophie, a pretty young fact checker at The New Yorker with secret ambitions to become a writer. She’s engaged to a workaholic chef (Gael García Bernal) who says he wants to “reinvent the noodle.” Taking a pre-honeymoon in Verona, Italy—he’ll be too busy to go after they tie the knot—they drift apart. He becomes engrossed in the food culture of Italy, she with The Secretaries of Juliet, a group of women who answer letters from the lovelorn left at the Juliet Balcony. When Sophie discovers a letter from 1957 her reply to Claire (Vanessa Redgrave) prompts the now grandmother to return to Italy after fifty years to search for her long lost love Lorenzo. Sensing a story Sophie tags along with Claire and her obnoxious grandson (Christopher Egan) as they search for Claire’s soul mate in the Tuscan countryside.

“Letters to Juliet” is essentially a romantic road trip through Tuscany which is lovely and takes your mind off the predictable story that is playing out in front of the luscious scenery. The love stories, (That’s right! SPOILER! There’s two of them!), move along pretty much as you expect they are going to, but while the progression of the narrative may be a tad stale the movie has more to offer than, to paraphrase Paul McCartney, silly love stories.

Beautiful scenery aside the movie is anchored by two very different performances. As Claire—described by her cheeky grandson as “Churchill in a dress”—Vanessa Redgrave does a nice job at showing steely determination, vulnerability and a lovely frailness. She is playing someone with a lifetime of experience and isn’t afraid to allow disappointment and sorrow as well as wisdom and joy shine through in her luminous performance.

On the other end of the scale is Amanda Seyfried, as the fresh-faced Sophie, a young person with hardly any experience. Seyfried is refreshingly natural and believable as a person experiencing their first life altering event.
As for the supporting cast, Egan doesn’t add much more than an iffy English accent and a strong jawline, Bernal is a caricature and Nero isn’t on screen long enough to make that much of an impression, but no matter, the movie works best when Seyfried and Redgrave are on screen together.

You’ll know how “Letters to Juliet” is going to end before the opening credits have rolled but in its quiet moments—as in a scene where Claire brushes Sophie’s hair—it transcend the clichés of the script and unearths some genuine heart.

THE LOSERS: 3 STARS

Everything about “The Losers” is exaggerated. Things don’t explode, they burst into fiery mushroom clouds. The body count is in the triple digits and why use a machine gun when you can use a bazooka? It has all the elements of a regular action flick, just more and, as an added bonus, one of the bad guys is from Quebec.

At the beginning of the film The Losers are five highly trained special ops soldiers (Jeffrey Dean Morgan, Chris Evans, Idris Elba, Columbus Short, and Oscar Jaenada)—calling them losers is like calling a tall guy Shorty—on a mission in Bolivia. Their job is to locate and mark a terrorist’s den so the air force can swoop in and lay down a heap of shock and awe. Minutes before bombs are scheduled to drop a busload of underage children arrive at the compound. The Losers try and call off the raid, but the high command—a man named Max (Jason Patrick)—refuses. Several very loud noises later The Losers are forced to fake their own deaths and go rogue. When a mysterious stranger (Zoe Saldana) shows up with a proposition they see a way to reenter the United States and get their revenge on Max.

Of course there’s more to the story than that. There’s next generation weapons, more international locations than a James Bond movie and an internationally wanted bazooka toting bad girl who dresses like a Guess model. This is a comic book movie—it’s based on a Vertigo DC series—with comic book characters and a silly premise. The bad guy is engineering a global conflict to bring peace to the US. Huh? Duct tape saves the day (Red Green would be so proud). Double huh?

It’s all a bit silly but since the movie doesn’t take itself seriously neither should we. It’s a fun ride that while bigger isn’t necessarily better. There’s a bit too much slo mo—I think it’s time we finally put an end to the “Reservoir Dogs” slo motion shot of the team walking toward the camera—the ending is clearly set up for a sequel and the supposed good guys seem to take a bit too much pleasure in killing.   

On the upside, however, the cast seems to be having a good time alternately delivering tough guy lines—“You’re going to die very badly”—and typical action movie one liners—“Everybody except for PETA wants her dead” with loads of enthusiasm.  

Actor wise as Clay Jeffrey Dean Morgan picks up where his character in “Watchmen” left off, and Zoe Saldana adds to her action movie reputation in a highly physical role that proves that Hit Girl isn’t the most lethal female in the theatres this week. Idris Elba provides the closest thing to a fully rounded character, mostly because he isn’t saddled with the one-liners the other guys have to spout.

“The Losers” is an action packed comic book romp that would make a better Saturday afternoon matinee than date night movie.

THE LAST SONG: 2 STARS

"The Last Song" has all the trademarks of a Nicholas Sparks romance. There's a love story between rich and poor, disease, divorce, unopened letters and a character who’s just "trying to feel something again." And it has Miley Cyrus sans her blonde Hannah Montana wig. This time out she's an angry musical prodigy spending a summer vacation with her father, a man she barely knows.  

Cyrus is Ronnie Miller, a troubled teen—“Her grades are in the toilet and she doesn't have a friend without a pierced something,” says her mother—sent to stay with her estranged father for the summer in a small Southern beach town. She's angry at her dad, and despite being a gifted pianist and a earning a scholarship to Julliard, she hasn't played the piano for ages. She mopes around the small town until she meets Will, a chiseled volleyball player who helps her rescue a nest of sea turtle eggs. (I'm not kidding.) Through wildlife and mud fights they form an on-again-off-again relationship despite their differences. Enter into the mix a terminal illness, a burned church and a jealous ex and you have a story worthy of the Nicholas Sparks Story Generator™.

"The Last Song" features Miley Cyrus in the kind of role Kristen Stewart excels in. The brooding, moody teenager act that Stewart has down pat doesn't come as easily to Cyrus who pitches her performance somewhere between an episode of “Hannah Montana” and a TV disease-of-the-week movie. Given the pre-hype for the film I assumed this would be her adult debut, but given the tone of her performance the transition from child star to grown-up actress continues at a glacial pace. She has several emotional scenes here, and sheds a tear or two, but mostly her performance relies on tricks learned on the Disney stage—eye rolling, running her hands through her hair and flashing her toothy smile. She has a movie star’s charisma and warmth, but not the acting chops.

Greg Kinnear is there for support, but even he looks mildly bewildered at the Sparkisms in the script. It’s a mixed bag of every romance cliché known to man, except, the Fabulous Gay Confidant™. In his / her place is the wise little brother played by Bobby Coleman.  

But, having said all that, a movie like “The Last Song” isn’t about the plot or the acting or the clichés. It’s like an Elvis movie. It’s about the phenomenon that is Miley. Disney is very carefully easing her from TV star to movie star, and if the projects don’t exactly radiate an adult sensibility, who cares? They are counting on the long term success. There is plenty of time for her to mature along with her fans, who, I’m sure, Disney hopes are in the Miley game for the long term.

THE LOVELY BONES: 3 STARS

If the latest film from “Lord of the Rings” director Peter Jackson is to be believed the afterlife looks a lot like a Pink Floyd album cover from the late 1970s. In “The Lovely Bones,” a loose adaptation of the bestselling book by Alice Sebold, he goes heavy on the computer generated imagery to create a slick looking world, which despite the best efforts of the cast, is almost bereft of emotion.

In case you’re not a member of Oprah’s book club, who chose “The Lovely Bones” and propelled it up the best seller charts like a rocket, it is the story of Susie Salmon (“like the fish”) a 14 year old girl murdered in suburban Pennsylvania in 1973. Susie, however, didn’t go quietly into the long goodnight. From a place somewhere between Heaven and Earth she watches over her distraught family and tries to guide them through their time of despair.

Some of the now controversial CGI—early trade reviews called the film indulgent and “evocative of “The Sound of Music” or “The Wizard of Oz” one moment, “The Little Prince” or “Teletubbies” the next”—is quite beautiful and some of it is overkill. When Susie is making her arrival in “her heaven” it is a beautiful representation of a spirit floating away. Hugh shots of her never-to-be boyfriend Ray, reflected in a body of water that separates them and Ray again on a gazebo, surrounded by an undulating landscape, are a bit heavy handed. Jackson is the real deal, a skilled filmmaker and visualist, but he has to learn to trust the story and not let the technology do the talking.

Performance wise Jackson has cast well and gets good, solid work from his actors, particularly Rachel Weisz     as the grieving mother, Susan Sarandon as the boozy grandmother and Rose McIver as the spunky sister Lindsey but it is the two central roles that the whole movie hinges on.

As the murderous Mr. Harvey Stanley Tucci is creepy; all twitchy movements and squeaky voiced. He’s Norman Bates without the overbearing Mom and wonderfully cast. Tucci, it appears can do anything. Earlier this year he played Julia Child’s loving diplomat husband in “Julie & Julia” and held his own opposite Meryl Streep. Now he’s the creepiest bad guy this year since Hans Landa drank a glass of milk with a French farmer in “Inglourious Basterds.”

At the heart of the film, however, is an arresting central performance by Saoirse Ronan as Susie, the little girl who never got to kiss a boy or see her fifteenth birthday. Her luminous presence gives the film whatever soul it has and her generous screen presence is a good tonic for the effects heavy scenes she plays in the “in between,” the blue horizon between heaven and earth.

“The Lovely Bones” should have been a better movie. It’s not terrible, mind you; it just doesn’t push the emotional buttons that a story about the murder of a young person should. Jackson is still in epic “LOTR” mode, taking a small, intimate movie and needlessly cluttering it up with bigger than life images that get in the way of the feeling of the piece.

LEAP YEAR: 1 STAR

“Leap Year”, a new opposites-attract-romantic-comedy, stars Amy Adams and Matthew Goode as the metaphoric oil and water. She’s a perfectionist, he isn’t. She pushy, he’s laid back. She doesn’t do quaint very well, he’s... well, quaint. It’s the standard rom com set up, but instead of the usual New York setting director Anand Tucker places the action in the picturesque Irish country side.

The action begins in Boston where uptight Anna (Adams) has become tired of waiting for her yuppie-scum cardiologist boyfriend of four years to propose.  Taking matter into her own hands and citing an obscure Irish tradition that declares it impossible for a man to refuse a woman’s proposal on Leap Day she decides to ambush him on February 29 while he is in Dublin on business. Delayed by bad weather she lands in a remote Irish village and begins the long road trip to Dublin accompanied by Declan (Goode), a rough hewn local who agrees to take her to the big city in return for enough money to save his failing pub.

Rom coms are predictable beasts. We know who is going to end up with who, because if we don’t, I guess it would be a romantic suspense movie and who would pay to see that? The trick to making an effective rom com is to keep the ride interesting all the up to the final, and inevitable, loving embrace between the two leads. At this “Leap Year” is only partially successful.

Adams and Goode have the lion’s share of screen time and while they are both charming, good actors, neither is doing their best work here. Where is the interesting Adams of “Sunshine Cleaning”? Or “Enchanted’s” lovable Adams? For that matter as a love interest Goode was far more effective with one-tenth of the screen time in “A Single Man, “ and generated way more heat as Charles Ryder in the generally restrained “Brideshead Revisited” from a couple of years ago. Both put up a good fight but are beaten by material that is beneath them. Amy Adams deserves better than to share a scene with a herd of unresponsive cows.

Worst of all, for actors of Adams and Goode’s stature, neither really makes the material her or his own. I could imagine any number of actors playing these parts and for this movie to really work I shouldn’t have been able to imagine that the movie would have pretty much the same if it had starred Renee Zellweger and Gerard Butler.  

“Leap Year” isn’t absolutely terrible, in fact for a January rom com it’s a step up from “New in Town” or “27 Dresses”, but it is really average; just another mildly amusing, predictable entry in a generally mindless genre that badly needs a shot in the arm. If only Quentin Tarantino would make a romantic comedy...

LAW ABIDING CITIZEN: 1 ½ STARS

Director F. Gary Gray doesn’t waste any precious time getting to “Law Abiding Citizen’s” action. About thirty seconds into the movie there is a scene of striking ultra-violence that sets up the revenge story which is to follow. It’s just too bad that he allows the pace to go downhill after the opening scene. It’s a thriller without many thrills.

Gerard Butler and his finely carved abdominal muscles play Clyde Shelton the law abiding citizen referred to in the title. His life is changed forever after a home invasion leaves his wife and small child dead. When Assistant DA Nick Rice (Jamie Foxx), a slick up-and-coming lawyer at the DA’s office, makes a deal with one of the killers to testify against his partner in return for a reduced sentence it doesn’t sit well with Clyde. Cut to ten years later. Bad things start happening to everyone involved in the case, starting with the bad guys who both perish in excruciating ways. Clyde is arrested and confesses. That should be the end of it, but very bad things continue to happen. By the time Nick figures out how Clyde is doling out his own form of cruel and unusual punishment from jail it may be too late to save his own life.

There are a lot of words that could be used to describe “Law Abiding Citizen.” Here are some of them: goofy, implausible, ludicrous, inane, far-fetched, daft, nonsensical, illogical, preposterous, outlandish… I could go on, but you get the point. The story is a little silly, but that’s OK. It’s a revenge flick and if it was loaded with wall-to-wall action and some fun dialogue I could deal with the silliness. Look at “Taken” from earlier this year. Silly, silly, silly but fun in a check your brain at the door kind of way.

Unfortunately “Law Abiding Citizen” doesn’t have that kind of verve. There’s too much lag time between the big action set pieces. Every time the movie works up a head of steam the momentum evaporates into talky and mostly badly written dialogue sequences.

A red pencil could have made this script much more palatable but it’s likely that if you removed every line where a characters states the obvious and mundane there’s be very little left, dialogue wise. It’s the kind of movie that shows you a bomb with a cell phone trigger. Comments on it and then, for good measure, has another character say something like, “Do you mean to tell me that if that cell phone rings the bomb will go off?” Anyone who’s ever watched “Mission Impossible” or any other thriller involving bad guys and bombs knows that yes, if the cell phone rings the bomb will go off. It’s movie watching 101. You know it just like you know that the guy in the red shirt will always be the first to die on any given episode of “Star Trek.”

When the characters aren’t speaking in clichés they’re trying to comment on the state of a broken justice system that could let a child killer off with a light sentence. It’s an interesting premise for a revenge film, but again, Wimmer overplays his hand, putting sentences like, “I’m going to bring the whole diseased, corrupt temple down on your head! It’s going to be biblical” into Butler’s mouth.

Too bad the action isn’t as over-the-top as the dialogue. If so “Law Abiding Citizen” might have had a chance to be a great bad movie, as it is, it’s just a bad movie.

LITTLE ASHES: 2 STARS

If not for the success of kiddie vampire flick Twilight you would likely NOT be reading this review for a movie about the unrequited love affair between poet Federico García Lorca (Javier Beltran) and superstar surrealist Salvador Dalí (Robert Pattinson). Little Ashes was shot long before star Robert Pattison became the Twilight heart throb du jour and his presence saved this movie from languishing on a shelf or becoming a budget art house DVD release. Just as Madonna’s popularity created a thirst for her pre-fame film A Certain Sacrifice, Pattison’s popularity ensures that this unremarkable film will find an audience.   

When the story begins it is 1922. Dalí, Lorca and future filmmaker Luis Buñuel (Matthew McNulty) are schoolmates at an art school in Madrid. They are an intense bunch; artists who are looking to find the passion that will inform their later and greater work.

Dalí is already a young fop, dressed head to toe in ruffles topped with a Theda Bara hair do. At age 18 he is confronting the conventions of the day and given to pronouncements like, “I am the savior of modern art.” Lorca and Buñuel are less flamboyant, but just as driven. Over time an attraction develops between Dalí and Lorca but their mutual feelings are made difficult by a fascist law that forbids homosexuality, the disapproval of Buñuel and Dalí’s growing ambition to conquer the art world.

As young, idealistic artists the three school mates adopt an artistic manifesto of “no limits” as their code for pushing the edges of creative expression and life experience but for a movie about exploring new ideas Little Ashes is remarkably limited. The set-up is standard biopic. Characters meet, fall in love, there’s some conflict and bang, credits roll. It’s all very straightforward despite the character’s lip service to surrealism, Dada and anarchy. The real Dalí would roll over in his grave to be portrayed in such a standard film.

Pattison, at least, brings a certain strangeness to his portrayal of Dalí. It is, however, an unforgiving part to play. He throws himself into the role, but because Dalí was a flamboyant peacock whose eccentricities manifested themselves in physical affectations Pattison ends up playing the surface Dalí, popping his eyes and speaking strangely. His mimicry resembles a pretentious youngster not a true iconoclast.
 
Dalí is one of the most important and outrageous figures of recent art history and yet here he looks silly when he should be imposing. Pattison simply isn’t a seasoned enough actor to really breathe life into a character based on a larger than life man. Dalí once said “every morning upon awakening, I experience a supreme pleasure: that of being Salvador Dalí” but Pattison isn’t able to convey that “supreme pleasure.”    

Little Ashes is an admirable effort but is sunk by an overly long running time, some awkward performances and bland direction. There is an interesting story to be told about Dalí and the “construction of his genius” but this isn’t it.

THE LAST HOUSE ON THE LEFT: 1 STAR

2009 may go down in history as the year of the unnecessary horror remake. It’s only mid-March and already we’ve seen a re-do of My Bloody Valentine, updated to include 3-D blood and gore and a new take on Jason Voorhees reign of terror in Friday the 13th. Coming soon are reimaginings of the George A. Romero classic The Crazies, Children of the Corn and (God help us) Alfred Hitchcock’s The Birds from producer Michael Bay. This weekend sees a new version of The Last House on the Left, the terrifying Wes Craven movie from 1972 that was so gruesome it was banned for 32 years in Australia. 

The story is a simple tale of revenge. Horrifying revenge. After kidnapping and torturing two young women a gang of thrill killers led by escaped convict Krug (Garret Dillahunt) inadvertently find shelter at the summer home of the parents of one of the victims. “What are the odds, man,” says a taunting Krug. The couple—Monica Potter and Tony Goldwyn as Emma and John Collingwood—don’t bother to call 911, instead they all manner of creative ways to get even with the thugs, including death by microwave!

How times have changed. The original Last House on the Left was a depraved unpleasant little movie—a dirty little movie with the production value of a snuff film—that took a strong stomach to endure. It caused an uproar and was banned in many places. The new film, also unpleasant and depraved, is getting a wide release and will likely be playing at a multi-plex near you this weekend.  

It’s a little too slick to be truly revolting, but the arty shots of wounds being cauterized and close-ups of the sexual violence border on the stomach turning. It’s a nasty piece of work that, unlike some of the other remakes of recent months isn’t played for laughs. Friday the 13th, for instance had some good gross fun moments. What’s missing from Last House are not the gross moments, but the fun that can be had at a good silly slasher flick.

The first 45 minutes contain enough violence to keep even the most hardcore gore hound happy and make everyone else squirm in their seats, but what the movie doesn’t do is set up a sense of dread. Bad things are going to happen, that’s obvious, but instead of building toward those moments the film limps along when the fists aren’t flying. Long dull stretches precede and proceed the movie’s big set pieces and it isn’t until the second half, when the revenge theme kicks in, that the movie works up a head of steam.

The manner of violence should grab connoisseurs of the genre. Who knew kitchen appliances were such effective means of offing bad guys? The Collingwood family’s motto seems to be: “Wherever I try and kill my guests, they seem to like my kitchen best.” But by the end of it all, after witnessing a year’s worth of terrible violence in a mere 100 minutes I had to wonder who the real psychos were—the bad guys with the guys, the “good guys” with the deadly microwave or us for paying twelve dollars to see it acted out on screen.

LAST CHANCE HARVEY: 2 ½ STARS

By and large romantic comedies are the domain of the young. Sally was 28 when she met Harry and Julia Roberts was just 23 when she starred in Pretty Woman. A new movie called Last Chance Harvey sees Stranger than Fiction co-stars Dustin Hoffman and Emma Thompson—aged 71 and 49 respectively—bet that audiences will want to see a slightly more mature romance play itself out on screen.

Harvey Shine (Hoffman) is the kind of guy who always looks like an unmade bed. He’s been beaten up by life, and if it wasn’t for bad luck this guy wouldn’t have no luck at all. In the past twenty-four hours he’s been fired from his job, missed a plane and been told that he won’t be walking his daughter down the aisle at her wedding. Meanwhile Kate Walker (Thompson) is an unhappy single woman with a boring job and an overbearing mother. Her best friend Una, who tries in vain to set her up on blind dates, says that the endless phone calls from Kate’s mother are “human contraception” and the reason she can’t find love. Kate and Harvey couldn’t be any more different, he’s a brash American, she’s a blunt, but reserved Brit, but when they meet perhaps opposites will attract.

Last Chance Harvey is a slight movie. It follows the conventions of romantic comedies we’ve seen a thousand times—two unlikely people beating the odds to become a happy couple by the time the credits roll. Dorky Harry meets beautiful Sally. Pretty Woman of the Night meets and is seduced by suave rich guy. You get the idea. You usually know how the movie will end before it even starts, so the challenge for filmmakers is to keep the journey interesting. How the lovers wind up together is as important as why.

To that end Last Chance Harvey does a charming, if slightly forgettable job of bringing these two together. Their courtship is fast paced and not without its roadblocks, these are, after all, two older people who bring a lifetime of baggage to the relationship. Unlike most romantic comedies in which happily-ever-after absolutes are woven into the story, these two are mature enough to know that their romance might not be forever. When she asks how their relationship will work, he says, in a refreshingly honest bit of romantic comedy dialogue “I have no idea.”

Hoffman has the schlep routine down pat but it is Emma Thompson who eats this movie like Pac Man. She’s better than the script, bringing an emotional honesty to a thinly written character.
 
Last Chance Harvey is a schmaltzy little movie, but is buoyed by the work of these two old pros who add considerable charm to the hackneyed proceedings.

LAKEVIEW TERRACE: 2 ½ STARS

Bad neighbors. We’ve all had them. People who play loud music at 3 am or park in your spot. They’re a pain but a bit of pulsating bass through your bedroom wall in the middle of the night is nothing compared to the unneighborly jihad Abel Turner (Samuel L. Jackson)     unleashes on Chris and Lisa Mattson (Patrick Wilson and Kerry Washington) in the new film Lakeview Terrace.  

When Chris and Lisa moved to Lakeview Heights they were excited to own their California dream home. That excitement soon diminishes as their neighbor Able mounts a slow and steady psychological war on the young couple aimed at getting them to sell the house and leave his neighborhood. They soon come to surmise that Able, a decorated LAPD policeman and self-appointed neighbor watchdog, disapproves of their interracial relationship. As his harassment escalates the couple decides to fight back with tragic results.

A well cast movie should leave the viewer unable to imagine anyone else in a particular role. For example it’s impossible to picture someone other than Eddie Murphy in Beverly Hills Cop, even though the role of Axel Foley was originally offered to Sylvester Stallone. Or could you imagine anyone replacing Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life? Nope, neither can I. Those actors brought something to those roles that made them special and unforgettable. In Lakeview Terrace the special something Samuel L. Jackson brings to the part of Able is his glare. Jackson has a fixed stare that could melt granite and it transforms his character from stock bad guy to unpredictable menace.

Jackson’s intimidating screen presence is the thing that elevates Lakeview Terrace from average thriller to effective urban horror film. It’s the key to the film’s success. Wilson and Washington are fine as the young, upwardly mobile couple, but any number of actors could have filled those roles. Jackson, however, makes the role his own, and in doing so does something director Neil LaBute couldn’t—make this movie compelling.

The story is average and in most ways predictable. Although there is nothing here that even comes close to the ineptitude LaBute displayed in his last big screen outing The Wicker Man, without the inspired casting of Jackson I’m afraid there wouldn’t be much to this movie. It plays on the kind of real life fear brought to your front doorstep also capitalized on in movies like Fatal Attraction or Play Misty for Me, but it’s a bit too talky and takes a bit too long to get to the juicy climax.

Lakeview Terrace is a forgettable thriller rescued by a joyously malevolent performance from Samuel L. Jackson.

THE LONGSHOTS: 2 ½ STARS

Blame Rocky for the state of sports movies. The come-from-behind-to-win-or-almost-win the big game was used very effectively in the first (and most recent) Rocky movies but unfortunately filmmakers have been using that set-up as a plot template ever since. That’s more than thirty years of inspirational coaches and underdog players. The sports and that faces change, it’s just the story that remains the essentially same. The Longshots is the latest movie to recycle the tired formula to tell the real-life story of the first girl to compete in the Pop Warner football tournament.

Ice Cube is Curtis Plummer, a former high school football star whose dreams of a professional career were cut short by injury. On a downward spiral since his accident, he rediscovers a sense of purpose by molding his socially awkward niece (Akeelah and the Bee’s Keke Palmer) into the star quarterback for the local team, the Minden Browns. When she leads the team to the Pop Warner Super Bowl she not only gives Curtis a new lease on life, but inspires her entire hometown. 

The most amazing thing about The Longshots isn’t the story—we’ve seen and heard it all before—nor is it the performances—Ice Cube is fine and Palmer is engagingly natural; no, the most striking thing about the movie is its director. If the name Fred Durst sounds familiar it’s because maybe you spent some time slam dancing to his nu metal band Limp Bizkit’s hit Re-arranged or maybe you downloaded his notorious sex tape off the net. The rock star and bon vivant of the 90s has matured into family friendly filmmaker in the new millennium.

The man who once choked out lyrics ripe with scatological references and used the Anglo-Saxon word for sexual intercourse 48 times in one three minute and fifty second tune has mellowed into the kind of director that has his characters say things like “If we got heart we got everything we need!” He shows an unexpected light touch, but by the time we get to the inevitable “What are you running from,” speech the build-up of clichés threatens to squash any goodwill the movie garnered in its better moments. 

The Longshots isn’t a horrible movie, it’s just really average. Durst does his job adequately, giving the whole thing a kind of music video slickness, but despite Palmer’s efforts and Ice Cube’s likeability the whole thing feels like something we’ve seen before, and is quite forgettable. 

THE LOVE GURU: 2 STARS

Comedies don’t usually come with the kind of baggage that is dogging The Love Guru. It hits theatres cursed with a trailer only a mother could love, negative babble from bloggers and fighting against the strong reactions of Hindus, who, in India called for the film to be banned. Is the movie worth all the fuss? As the Guru Pitka himself might tell the naysayers, “To be enlightened you must first lighten up.”

The Love Guru is an extremely silly comedy that features jokes so old many were likely originally written in Sanskrit centuries ago, but it is so relentlessly upbeat, so good natured—and at 88 minutes, mercifully short—that it makes up in exuberance what it lacks in originality or actual laughs. 

In the film self-help expert Guru Pitka (Mike Myers)—an orphaned American raised by gurus in an ashram in India—is hired by Toronto Maple Leafs owner Jane Bullard (Jessica Alba) and Coach Cherkov (Verne Troyer) to reunite star hockey player Darren Roanoke (Romany Malco) and his estranged wife (Meagan Good). It seems after their split Roanoke’s wife took up with a rival, L.A. Kings star goalie Jacques “Le Coq” Grande (Justin Timberlake), and the thought of the two of them together has sent the Maple Leaf into a tailspin both personally and professionally. Pitka must work his mojo on Roanoke and his wife before the beginning of the Stanley Cup Finals if the Leafs have a chance at breaking the 40-year-old “Bullard Curse” and winning the championship.

The Love Guru will bring a smile to your face from time to time, and maybe even a few laughs but the comedy world has changed since Myers last unveiled a new character. In a movie landscape populated by Judd Apatow comedies, movies based in the real world with real world situations and laughs, The Love Guru seems antiquated, like a relic from a different time. It’s broad, anything-for-a-laugh ethos has more to do with Benny Hill than Seth Rogen—another Canadian vying for the King of Comedy crown—and feels about as relevant as a Carry On movie.

The structure of the movie and many of the jokes and situations seem familiar, as though they have been borrowed from Austin Powers and retooled for Guru Pitka. That sense of familiarity with the jokes may be a comfort to some viewers who might see it as a “greatest hits” repackaging of their old favorite jokes, but I was left with a strange sense of déjà vu, as though I had seen it all before, and it was funnier the last time.
Myers is never any less than 100% committed to the role, and his devotion to the character is obvious. He’s in it to win it, but the outrageousness of the character is overwhelmed by an endless stream (no pun intended) of urination and bathroom humor, short gags at the expense of 32-inch co-star Verne Troyer and penis jokes. The humor here can only be described as shameless and juvenile, but if the idea of two elephants having very public sex amuses you, then The Love Guru may be perfect for you.

In an unusual marketing move The Love Guru is being released opposite Steve Carell in Get Smart. The big studios usually try and avoid opening two similar movies on the same weekend but here are two of comedy’s biggest stars going head-to-head. Both films have their virtues; both are retro—Get Smart is based on a 60s sitcom, The Love Guru’s jokes seem somehow, let’s say, traditional—and both stars have considerable audience goodwill. Which will win out? Perhaps it depends on how enlightened, or not, your comedy tastes are. 

LICENSE TO WED: ZERO! STARS

Sadie (Mandy Moore) and Ben (John Krasinski) are young, good-looking and in love. Before they tie the knot Sadie insists that they submit to a marriage preparation course taught by Reverend Frank (Robin Williams). Trouble is the lessons seem to be designed to drive them further apart rather than bring them together. Will they survive Rev. Frank’s teachings and walk down the aisle or will Sadie get cold feet?

I think you already know the answer and that’s the problem with License to Wed. It is the very definition of banal, formulaic romantic comedy and it is one of the worst movies of the year, and that’s saying something in a year that gave us The Hills Have Eyes 2, Wild Hogs and The Reaping.
I don’t even know where to begin describing what’s wrong here, but I’ll give it a go. Firstly someone has to tell Robin Williams to stop. Just stop making every movie that comes down the pike. Please take the time to read the scripts before agreeing to show up on set and grab the paycheck. He makes too many movies, and hasn’t been funny on film for a very long time.

His Rev. Frank is an obsessive control freak disguised as a care giver who should be arrested and thrown in jail, not entrusted with the welfare of young people. Fine. It’s a comedic premise gone wrong. I can accept that. What I can’t accept is how unfunny the movie, and Robin Williams is. The people writing the movie and particularly Rev. Frank’s dialogue seem to have simply swallowed a Henny Youngman joke book, regurgitating gags that we’ve seen and heard many times before and never need to see or hear again.

John Krasinski, so funny as Jim on The Office, and Mandy Moore are both wasted in forgettable, bland leading roles. The only high point is the inclusion of several of Krasinski’s Office cast mates in small supporting roles. As a snotty jewelry store clerk, a nagging wife and overweight belly dancer they inject a small dose of much needed humor to the story, but it’s not enough to rescue this turkey.

License to Wed is wrongheaded on many levels—it’s a silly look at married life, the characters are immature and bland—but it’s biggest sin is that it simply isn’t funny.

LIVE FREE OR DIE HARD: 4 STARS

John McClane (Bruce Willis) may be the toughest man ever seen on screen. Over the course of four Die Hard movies he’s been shot, run over with a variety of vehicles, pushed down elevator shafts, blown up, hurled through windows, karate chopped and generally brutalized. In the newest installment of the series, Die Hard or Live Free the punishment continues. He’s older now and a bit of a dinosaur, as one of the bad guys notes, he’s “a Timex watch in a digital world.” That may be true, but like the fabled watch, this guy can take a licking and keep on ticking.

His indestructibleness is a key element to the Die Hard movies. You know nothing catastrophic is ever going to happen to the guy, so the question isn’t will he survive, it’s how will he survive? It doesn’t give anything away to let you know that the good guys win and the bad guys lose at the end of Live Free or Die Hard, you know that going in. What is important here are the stunts, the crazy action scenes and how many things blow up. On those levels the movie delivers. 

This time he is up against a group of homegrown terrorists, led by a disgruntled ex-government worker and master computer hacker (Timothy Olyphant).  This tech wizard has launched an evil plan to disrupt the entire United States with a massive bit of computer hackery called a “Fire Sale” so named because in order for it to be successful everything must go—telecommunications, gas and electric services, nuclear energy and even satellites. This is a plan twice as evil as anything your average James Bond villain could concoct.   

McClane finds himself tangled up in this whole plot when he is ordered by the FBI to contact a young computer hacker (Justin Long, riffing on his smug Mac commercial persona) who may have been an unwitting accessory to the Armageddon. When it becomes clear that the FBI aren’t the only ones interested in him McClane has to unleash his unique brand of survivalist skills to insure that the kid lives and America doesn’t fall victim to a computer geek with a God complex.

There’s no villain as great as Hans Gruber (Alan Rickman in the first Die Hard), or catchphrase as memorable as “yippee-ki-yay…” but the presence of Willis (who has good chemistry with his sidekick Long) makes this a worthwhile sequel. 

Lone wolf cop John McClane may be the role Bruce Willis was born to play. Steely-eyed and heroic, he’s a charismatic everyman, who knows how to take down a helicopter with a police car, but who would rather be spending his time with his family if only the bad guys would leave him alone. In his fourth time out as McClane, Willis continues to charm, blending all-out action with sly one-liners and as much sex appeal as one bleeding, beaten man can muster.

Die Hard or Live Free is a fun thrill ride of a movie and the best sequel so far this summer.

LUST, CAUTION: 3 STARS

Director Ang Lee is a restless spirit. His twelve films have seen him change genres faster than most of us change our underwear. His past films include a big budget comic book adaptation, a Chinese martial arts epic, a Civil War drama, an Academy Award winning period piece, and, of course, the gay cowboy movie. He’s on the move again for his new film, Lust, Caution, this time to 1940s Shanghai.

Based on a short story by Eileen Chang, Lust, Caution is a sprawling espionage thriller set in WWII-era Shanghai. A young freedom fighter, Wang Jiazhi (Tang Wei), places herself in harm’s way to infiltrate the life of a powerful political figure, Mr. Yee (Tony Leung). Their relationship becomes complicated when her hatred leads to a twisted kind of respect, and perhaps even love.

Lust, Caution is a beautifully made, ambitious film, but doesn’t have quite enough interesting story to warrant its two-and-a-half-hour running time. Lee takes his time setting up the story, slowly drawing the viewer into a world of political intrigue. He carefully sets the stage, using film language borrowed from the great political thrillers of the 1940s and lighting leading lady Tang Wei as though she was a femme fatale from a film noir.

For my money he’s too cautious with the set up. The first hour, while beautiful looking, is unfocussed and rambling. The essence of the story is quite simple, and in some ways bears a striking similarity to the Paul Verhoeven film Black Book from earlier this year. We have a politically aware young woman who uses her feminine charms to woo a highly placed enemy. She hates him enough to want him dead, and yet is entranced by him. The emotion is complicated, but the story isn’t.

It should also be mentioned that Lee has not shied away from the sexual nature of the unusual couple’s relationship. The sex scenes can only be described as just this side of hard-core, and certainly contains more S&M than you usually get from Academy Award winning directors.

Lust, Caution has its moments—the brutal stabbing of a suspected spy, some beautifully directed scenes of the women passing the time by playing mah jong—and some charismatic performances from its leads, but is too diluted to be truly effective or moving.

LIONS FOR LAMBS: ½ STAR

Lions for Lambs has a tagline that reads like the moral from one of Aesop’s fables: If you don't STAND for something, you might FALL for anything. Directed by Robert Redford—his first stint behind the camera in seven years—and starring mega stars Redford, Tom Cruise and Meryl Streep, the film weaves three stories together to underline the importance of courage, honesty and standing up for what is right and what you believe in.

Cruise and Streep play a Republican Senator with a new plan for victory in the Middle East and a skeptical reporter. Redford is a college professor who spends his running time debating with a bright, but lazy student while Michael Peña and Derek Luke play college students who enlist in the army to help serve their country.

I’d say Redford balances these three storylines, but there’s nothing balanced about Lions for Lambs, and that’s OK, this isn’t a documentary and the filmmaker is entitled to his point of view. So instead of finding a way to juggle these story threads he jumps back and forth between them willy-nilly.

The problem with making socially conscious films is that occasionally the passion of the message trumps the director’s instincts as a filmmaker. Redford is clearly preaching from a hate the war but support the troops platform, but unfortunately it really feels like we’re being preached to. He forgoes most of the action, instead presenting one of the stagiest and wordiest movies of the year; pedantic beyond belief.

It’s more of a pastiche than a movie, with ideas bouncing off the viewer hard and fast from a number of sources. The trouble is the ideas seem hackneyed as though we’ve heard it all before. The script presents the idea that the press, by reporting on every move of the White House, may actually simply be acting as a PR arm of the government; that America’s kids don’t have a sense of social responsibility anymore, oh, and that old chestnut, War is Hell. It’s simplistic and for all its wordy bluster is about as deep as a lunch tray.

Lions for Lambs was clearly designed to spark debate among its viewers, but I would guess the only quest they’ll be asking when they leave the theatre is, “Why didn’t we go see No Country for Old Men instead?”

LOVE IN THE TIME OF CHOLERA: 1 ½ STARS

The overriding theme of Love in the Time of Cholera, the new film from 4 Weddings and a Funeral director Mike Newell, is that true love never dies. Nice sentiment to be sure, but unfortunately for viewers of this sprawling adaptation of the wildly popular novel by Nobel Prize Winner Gabriel Garcia Marquez, my love for the film died about an hour before the movie ended.

To keep the running time of the film to 139 minutes Newell and team cut and slashed away at the book’s 50-year timeline, altering storylines somewhat—for example, Dr. Juvenal Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) dies from a fall rather than natural causes—eliminating characters and generally condensing the novel’s 368 pages into a more cinematic form. Happily the power of love theme hasn’t been lost; unhappily they have chosen to highlight the story’s melodramatic elements, adopting a style more appropriate to a daytime soap than a high minded literary adaptation.

Set in 1878 in the Columbian town of Cartagena during a cholera epidemic, the film is the saga of young Fiorentino’s (Unax Ugalde) love for Fermina (Giovanna Mezzogiorno). They fall deeply in love, but when her domineering father (John Leguziamo) discovers their affair he spirits her away to a small mountain town far from the admiring hands of her young suitor. There she meets and marries the handsome Dr. Urbino (Benjamin Bratt) who provides well for her but occasionally strays outside the boundaries of their marriage.

Over the next few decades the heartbroken Fiorentino (Javier Bardem as the adult character) finds success in business but none in his personal life.  He remains a bachelor, but an endless (and well catalogued) string of one-night stands and brief affairs only accentuates the aching love he still feels for Fermina.

When Dr. Urbino unexpectedly dies Fiorentino seizes the chance to rekindle his long dormant love affair with Fermina.

Love in the Time of Cholera has none of the charm of the novel. Although lushly photographed mostly on location in Columbia, the film lurches along from one scene to the next with little regard to pacing or coherent storytelling. At 139 minutes it feels twice as long because of the disjointed way Newell unrolls the story. The film leaps from year to year like a gazelle chasing its prey, the characters age rapidly (with unusually obvious makeup) and several scenes simply don’t belong. A love scene between Bardem and beauty queen Laura Harring as the buxom Sara Noriega seems to only have been included to give Newell the opportunity to show the former Miss USA winner topless.

Bardem, so effective as the psycho killer in No Country for Old Men commits himself fully to the role of the heartsick Fiorentino but is undone by a weak script and an almost total lack of chemistry between him and his paramour co-star Giovanna Mezzogiorno. No sparks fly between the two and it is hard to believe that anyone would spend a lifetime pursuing such a flaccid relationship and since that pairing is at the core of the film, its failure brings the whole enterprise down.       

Love in the Time of Cholera is a missed opportunity to turn a literary masterpiece into a masterful—although in this case I’d even settle for good or even bearable—movie. 

LEATHERHEADS: 2 ½ STARS

Leatherheads takes us back to 1925 when college football ruled while the allegedly professional players were mostly thugs who played drunk and thought nothing of brawling during regulation play. They were kind of like hockey players only without the sticks.

George Clooney, who also directed the picture, is Dodge Connolly, the over-the-hill captain of the Duluth Bulldogs, a rough and tumble team on the verge of bankruptcy. To increase the team’s popularity he recruits college ball’s most popular player, Princeton’s Carter “The Bullet” Rutherford (The Office’s John Krasinski). Carter isn’t just famous as a ball player, he’s also a war hero who apparently got a whole platoon of Germans to surrender. He the all-American hero, but one Chicago Tribune editor thinks his story is too good to be true and sends impish reporter Lexie “I’m not really the homemaker type” Littleton (Renee Zellweger) to “break the myth of the boy hero.”

As Lexie searches for her story, Carter and Connolly become rivals on the field and for Miss Littleton’s affection.

As a director Clooney nails the period and the conventions of screwball comedy. Taking a page or two from the playbooks of Howard Hawks, George Cukor and Frank Capra, the masters of the madcap genre, Clooney hits most of the right notes. He populates the movie with colorful characters in great looking clothes, sets up a love triangle and even throws in some farce. The movie looks great, touched with a beautiful nostalgic glow and the dialogue is snappy—it’s just too bad the pacing isn’t.

For all its attention to period detail and the splendor of the production design, Leatherheads falls flat, devoid of any of the free-for-all spirit of the rowdy brand of football that is the basis of the story. The cast hands in nice performances—Zellweger’s pouty lips are perfect for the period and Clooney has put away serious George in favor of the pratfalling goofy George—but they are often undone by scenes that last too long. Look up the definition of screwball comedies and you’ll see the word “snappy” used to describe both the pace and the dialogue. Clooney only got it half right.

Marketing wise Leatherheads should have had been a field goal. You have football for the guys and George Clooney for the gals, but despite Clooney’s obvious love for the genre it feels more like an incomplete pass.

THE LAKE HOUSE: 3 STARS

No one has spent as much time on screen jumping from dimension to dimension as Keanu Reeves. All the way back to Bill and Ted’s excellent time traveling adventures through to Neo in the Matrix and Constantine his characters have tripped the light fantastic, jumping from one plane to the another. His latest film, The Lake House, is a romance so you’d think that all the time shifting mumbo jumbo would be put aside, but think again. In The Lake House Reeves and co-star Sandra Bullock have the ultimate long distance relationship.

Based on Lee Hyeon-seung's 2000 Korean film Il Mare, The Lake House is the story of Bullock, a forlorn doctor and Reeves, a frustrated architect. In common they have a beautiful house on a quiet lake. It’s been in his family for years and she has rented it while interning at a nearby hospital. When she moves out she leaves a courtesy note in the mailbox asking the owner to forward any mail that may get misdirected to that address. An exchange of letters begins and it becomes obvious that something is off. Somehow our leads have been swept into a time tunnel—he’s living in 2004, she’s in 2006. Unlike the last time they shared a marquee—1994’s Speed—there is no madman on a speeding bus to keep them apart. This time it’s meta-physical.

Meta-physical romance isn’t a new genre—there have been others like Frequency and Somewhere in Time—but the thing all those movies have in common is the difficulty of keeping the romance passionate when the two leads are rarely in the same time zone. The Lake House makes the best use of that sense of longing for something that may, or may not be real, and tries hard to generate some heat between the Bullock and Reeves. Their physical encounters should appeal to the romantics in the audience who will be rooting for them to figure out the physics and get together.

The Lake House has a bit of a tone problem in trying to tell too many stories at once. The addition of Christopher Plummer—who might enjoy a little mustard with his hammy performance—as an uncaring father gets in the way of the magical romance. On the plus side the movie has a slow, deliberate style and despite some editing that seems like it was borrowed from a 1980s wedding video, unfolds into a passionate romance.

LADY IN THE WATER: 3 STARS

Lady in the Water is a story originally conceived by Sixth Sense director M. Night Shyamalan for his children. It’s a modern fairy tale about an unassuming building manager, Cleveland Heep (Paul Giamatti), who saves an ethereal young woman (Bryce Dallas Howard) from danger only to discover that she a narf, a character from a bedtime story who is trying to make the perilous journey from our world back to hers. Heep and the tenants of the apartment complex work together to protect their new delicate friend from the scrunt, a deadly creature who is determined to prevent her from returning home.
The Lady in the Water is easily the oddest and most audacious film of the summer blockbuster season. Shyamalan is one of the most successful directors of the last decade, having huge hits with films like The Sixth Sense and Signs that were heavy on atmosphere and surprising plots twists but in Lady in the Lake he plays it straight, more or less. Don’t expect a twist at the end—the last Shyamalan film, The Village, was ruined for me because I spent the whole movie anticipating the twist and never connected with the plot—but the story isn’t exactly clear-cut.

The viewer is asked to follow a fable that unfolds slowly, and is filled unusual characters and strange mythology. It’s the soul of the movie and it will either work for you or it won’t. I thought the mythology was a bit too contrived, and a little bit too much like watching a long game of Dungeons and Dragons, complete with narfs, beasts, guilds, and healers. The intricate fable slows down the story, getting in the way of the moral—that people should consider their purpose on earth—and gets increasingly ludicrous as the movie plods along.

The main reason to watch is to see good actors doing good work. Paul Giamatti hands in another likeable performance that shows why he is one of the best actors working in mainstream movies today. Bryce Dallas Howard as the title character has a naturally brittle otherworldly look that works very well. In supporting roles Bob Balaban is amusing as an self-important film critic (is there any other kind?) who meets a nasty end—I’m sure Shyamalan enjoyed writing that part after the lambasting he took on his last film—and the director himself takes on his largest (and most ego stroking) part to date as a writer destined to become a prophet of sorts.

 Lady in the Water is a frustrating movie. It’s not awful by any means, it has good performances and it looks beautiful, but it isn’t really successful either. What’s missing here is a strong hand in terms of interesting story telling. At it’s best it is a refreshing attempt to steer a summer blockbuster into more interesting ground, but at it’s worst does what all bedtime fables are supposed to do—put you to sleep. 

LITTLE MAN: 0 STARS

The Wayans Brothers, Keenan, Marlon and Shawn are the most successful comedy team in Hollywood. From In Living Color through to I’m Gonna Get You Sucka to the Scary Movie series and now Little Man, the Wayans have elevated lowbrow comedy to new heights. Not since the Marx Brothers have a family gone to such lengths to make us laugh.  

In Little Man a well-meaning Chicago couple find a youngster abandoned on their doorstep. What they don’t realize is that the toddler isn’t a toddler but a vertically challenged hardened jewel thief who has come to the house to recover the Queen Diamond. He and his partner-in-crime dumped the jewel in the wife’s purse to avoid being caught by the police and now they want it back.

Hilarity anyone? Anyone?

Little Man is a great example of a movie concept that should have remained an idea for a skit. Had the Wayans done a five-minute version of this on In Living Color there would have been a few laughs before the commercial break. As it is now you have to pay 12 bucks to watch commercials before the movie starts and then wait patiently for 90 minutes for the laughs to start.  

Little Man is short on laughs. Not for lack of trying. The Wayans are funny guys who just aren’t doing their best work here. It’s a one joke movie with too much mugging for the camera; too many jokes involving diapers and their contents, and too many men getting kicked in the nether regions. Once is funny. Ten times is obnoxious.

You don’t go to see a movie about two-foot-six-inch tall jewel thief looking for subtlety and nuance, so I knew what to expect—toilet humor, slapstick and rude jokes—but I expected them to be funny. I didn’t even pay for this movie and I wanted my money back.

Instead of going to the theatre to see Little Man this weekend, stay home and rent Little Big Man with Dustin Hoffman, or Little Man Tate directed by Jody Foster, or even The Man Who Knew Too Little. Just don’t waste your money on Little Man.

LOOK, UP IN THE SKY!: THE AMAZING STORY OF SUPERMAN DVD: 3 STARS

First aired on A&E in a shorter form, this Kevin Spacey-narrated documentary covers the entire history of Superman. Issued on DVD the day before the theatrical release of Superman Returns the cynical among us might think this is a cleverly disguised commercial for the Bryan Singer film. And you’d be partially right. Look, Up in the Sky does plug both Superman Returns and Smallville, (both owned by Warner Brothers) but at least has the decency to wait until the end of the documentary to do so. Up until then the Kevin Burns (he did the “making of” extras for Planet of the Apes, Cleopatra and Star Wars DVDs) directed doc is a fascinating and detailed look at the man of Steel from his first appearance in a Shuster and Siegel short story through to present day. There are rare clips from the Superpups show, which thankfully never made it to air, with dogs dressed as the superhero and the infamous musical comedy It's a Bird! It's a Plane! It's Superman! in which Superman sang and danced while fighting crime!

Look, Up in the Sky is essentially a really good DVD extra stretched to feature length, but it does have enough interesting footage and behind the scenes material to recommend it.

The Lord of War DVD

In Lord of War Nicolas Cage stars as Yuri Orlov, a charming guy who rises to the top of his field in the death-dealing world of gunrunning. Defending his profession he notes that his wares kill fewer people than cigarettes and alcohol, and that he’s never sold anything to Osama Bin Laden because “he was always bouncing cheques.” The lighter moments, however, are tempered with scenes that aggressively show that damage guns do. One particularly effective montage follows a bullet from the manufacturing phase straight through to the gun which shoots it at a young man’s head.

The film received middling reviews when it came out theatrically—it gets a 58% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes—but actually plays much better on DVD. Mixing the dark humor of Catch 22—The first and most important rule of gun running is: Never get shot with your own merchandise—with Cage’s anti-hero gives this the feel of an HBO movie of the week. Lord of War is dramatically flawed, but thought provoking and inventive enough to be worth a rental.

Last Holiday: Weirdly paced story about a woman who is diagnosed with a deadly disease and given only three weeks to live. She decides to make the most of the short time she has left and goes to a $4000 a night European hotel to see a side of life that she had only ever dreamed about. Once there she hob knobs with the rich and powerful--including the morally corrupt owner of the department store she used to work for--who think she is a wealthy socialite. The film is meant to be a life affirming fantasy, and on that level it succeeds, but mostly because Queen Latifah is so charming and so watchable on screen. If you took her out of the equation Last Holiday would be more like a vacation from hell.

The Legend of Zorro

The Legend of Zorro is a sequel to the popular Antonio Banderas and Catherine Zeta-Jones Mask of Zorro film of 1998. Like its predecessor the new film is an action adventure romp that blends romance, outrageous stunts and slapstick humor. It feels like a throwback to the Disney films of the 1960’s—lots of bloodless action to keep the kids interested; the bad guys are really bad and get their deserved comeuppance and there’s even a bit of a history lesson in there as well.

LUCKY YOU: 1 ½ STARS

In Lucky You Eric Bana plays a professional card shark trying to raise enough money to compete in the World Series of Poker at a Las Vegas hotel. Things haven’t been going well for him. His father, poker legend LC Cheever (Robert Duvall) is back in town; he loses a ten thousand dollar bet; the girl of his dreams, lounge singer Billie (Drew Barrymore), dumps him when he steals money from her and he gets roughed up by some Vegas thugs. If it wasn’t for bad luck, he wouldn’t have no luck at all.

Fortune, however, favors the bold, especially in Hollywood, and he finds a way to come up with the money, play kissy face with Billie and get his private life in order all in one marathon two hour plus movie. It’s Cincinnati Kid-lite, a movie about the gritty sub-culture of Vegas gamblers that is completely without grit.

Director Curtis Hanson, best known as the helmer behind L.A. Confidential and 8 Mile, has succeeded in the past by creating interesting, richly textured worlds for his movies to inhabit. The former wouldn’t have been as effective if not for the lush, sexy and dangerous Los Angeles he created, and the latter’s grungy depiction of the wrong side of Detroit’s tracks added a great deal of flavor to that film. Both seemed authentic and were integral parts of those movies. Lucky You isn’t so fortunate to have such a well defined sense of place. Las Vegas is probably the least authentic city on the planet. Everything there is artifice, which should create interesting possibilities to for a director to place some real people in amongst the surreal surroundings. Instead Hanson’s Las Vegas is populated by characters we’ve seen before—wacky locals who’ll bet on anything, the down-on-his-luck gambler, and the supportive love interest.   
Eric Bana has been given four shots at A-list stardom in the past few years—more than anyone else I can think of—and yet leaves virtually no impression on me as a viewer. I wanted to like him in The Hulk, but found his performance flat. I barely remember him in Troy even though he was second billed to Brad Pitt and in Munich he, once again, failed to impress. As Huck in Luck You, a gambling addicted poker player with deep personal issues, we should understand his compulsion. Instead he spouts a handful of catch-phrases which are suppose to shed light on his compulsion, but end up sounding more like excuses than explanations. Unfortunately Bana just isn’t strong enough or interesting enough an actor to carry this kind of material.
Barrymore is wasted in a supporting role that requires little more from her than to be the resilient and supportive girlfriend.

Third billed lead Robert Duvall, however, schools both these younger actors in how to walk through material like this with your dignity intact. His performance as L.C. Cheever is the highlight of the film.

Lucky You? Lucky you if you don’t have to sit through this.

THE LOOKOUT: 2 ½ STARS

The Lookout is the strangest crime drama to come along so far this year. At the beginning of the film Chris Pratt, played by former Third Rock from the Sun star Joseph Gordon-Levitt, is the guy you love to hate—he has a rich father, a beautiful girlfriend, good-looking friends and a fast car. Life is perfect until he causes a car accident that claims his friends and leaves him with severe brain damage.

Years later Chris’ mangled mind leaves him confused and filled with anger. Simple tasks throw him and he longs for his past life, even though he can’t quite remember what it was like. Working as a night janitor at a local bank he muddles through his job with the aid of an ever-present notebook in which he makes the reminder notes that help him cope. When a charismatic former friend (Matthew Goode) maneuvers him into taking part in robbing the bank, Chris thinks he is taking steps toward controlling his life. He doesn’t realize he’s being manipulated until it is too late.  

The shadow of Christopher Nolan’s Memento hangs heavy over The Lookout. The lack of short-term memory is a central plot device in both films. Memento’s hero using upside down tattoos and Polaroids to jog his memory while The Lookout uses a more practical, (although cinematically less exciting) solution: a notebook. The difference in the way the two characters jog their shattered memories is much like the difference between the movies. Memento is a much showier film. The Lookout is more low-key relying on the performances to propel the story rather than theatrics.

Gordon-Levitt has transformed from sit-com star to one of the best actors of his generation. Recent turns in Mysterious Skin and Brick show a young actor taking chances. In The Lookout, he goes further, deepening his work, creating a person whose character has been shattered. It’s a subtle, well-crafted performance that is always interesting.

Also interesting are Jeff Daniels as Chris’ out-spoken blind roommate, Isla Fissher as the moll with the unlikely name of Luvlee Lemons and British actor Matthew Goode as the charismatic baddie who lures Chris into hot water.

The Lookout isn’t, however, quite as good as the sum of its parts. The great acting and atmospheric cinematography aren’t enough to elevate a story that starts off promisingly but slowly works its way through to a hackneyed and labored ending.

THE LAST KING OF SCOTLAND: 3 ½ STARS

You can always tell its awards season when the biopics start hitting the theatres. Biographies are powerful Oscar magnets. The Academy has always been a sucker for a true-to-life story. Since the beginning of the Academy’s history 1 in 7 films nominated for Best Picture have been life stories and once designated, 1 in 5 go on to win. In the last two years alone Oscars went to actors portraying Ray Charles, Truman Capote and June Carter Cash. Next in line for Oscar consideration, in the Best Actor category at least, should be Forest Whitaker’s true-to-life look at Ugandan dictator Idi Amin’s rise to power in The Last King of Scotland.

The story begins with a young Scottish doctor who travels to Uganda to do charity work and winds up as the newly minted dictator Amin’s personal physician. Based upon the novel by Giles Foden, The Last King of Scotland places the fictional MD into a historical setting.

James McAvoy, who people will remember as Tumnnus in The Chronicles of Narnia last year, plays a doctor who starts out with the best of intentions but soon finds himself implicit in Amin’s madness as the body count around him grows. Director Kevin MacDonald takes us into Amin’s inner circle, allowing us to see the dictator’s descent into madness from the point-of-view of an objective observer. The doctor acts as a filter through which the viewer learns about the evil of Amin.

We meet the larger- than-life Amin just as he has come to power. He is a captivating figure, a man of the people, whose speechifying can whip a crowd into a frenzy. The doctor, swept away by Amin’s charisma, agrees to work with him to create a new health care system for Uganda. Soon the cracks in Amin’s personality reveal the cruelty of his reign.

McAvoy may be the leading man, but Forest Whitaker’s brilliant performance as Amin is at the heart of this film. He shows us the duality of Amin, the man who on one hand was a magnetic, charismatic leader and on the other a cold-blooded killer who ordered the deaths of 300,000 people during his reign of terror. It is a complex and richly realized performance that elevates the movie from standard biopic to Oscar caliber film.

LARA CROFT TOMB RAIDER: THE CRADLE OF LIFE

Anyone who saw Lara Croft: Tomb Raider will agree that it didn’t make a great deal of sense. That apparently didn’t matter to the people who flocked to the multi-plex to see Angelina Jolie run in slow motion and hang upside down while fighting bad guys. Enough people agreed that trifles like plot and believability were secondary to seeing Jolie battling a frantic robot that a sequel was commissioned.

I’m tickled to report that Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life not only has one of the longest titles of the summer, but also has a story that almost makes sense! Not that we demand much from these movies. The story is simply a peg to hang Ms Jolie’s bikini on while temples crash, motorcycles rev and people defy gravity, flying through the air as Lara Croft punches a shark. It’s a popcorn movie, not Dostoyevsky, although at times this movie feels as long as a Russian novel.  
Here’s the story as I remember it… Somewhere between diving in a skintight silver wetsuit and riding side-saddle on her English country estate archeologist Croft learns that a shining golden globe – which she had in her possession, then lost – is actually a map to the mysterious Cradle of Life where the famous Pandora’s Box is said to be hidden. While wearing a natty kimono Croft learns that former Nobel Prize winner and “modern day Dr. Mengele” Jonathan Reiss (Ciaran Hinds), has the orb and is close to uncovering its secret. She must don a skin-tight motorcycle jacket and find him, before he discovers the deadly secret of Pandora’s Box and sells its poison to the highest bidder. 
For support Lara entices an old flame named Gerrard (Terry Butler), currently doing time in a Siberian ultra-high security prison for crimes against the state. Looking fetching in a white fur trimmed winter coat she offers him freedom and a great deal of money to help her. Thus begins their whirlwind world tour of destruction as the dynamic duo travel to Mainland China, Hong Kong, and Africa in their attempt to recover the globe and unlock its secrets.
Dutch director Jan de Bont (Speed, Twister) makes good use of the scenery – both Ms Jolie and the international locales – showcasing the beauty and the danger of each. A nicely staged gun battle involves inventive use of a neon sign and a pole vault to a helicopter; another scene shows the couple “flying” over the skyline of Shanghai. In both cases de Bont actually shows us the action. If Charlie’s Angels director McG had shot those scenes we would have seen a glimpse of the helicopter blade, a quick cut of someone flying through the air and heard the whoosh of a bullet as it cut through the air. My major complaint with recent action sequences is that we don’t actually get to see anything. It’s all fast cuts and loud techno music. Jan de Bont avoids that trap, allowing the scenes to play out, and while sometimes they drag on a bit too long, at least we know what we are looking at.

Angelina Jolie plays Lara Croft like a Barbi doll come to life, batteries, but no heart included. She is powerful, sexy, agile, adventurous and no-nonsense (as Gerrard learns the hard way), but like the videogame character she is based on, doesn’t seem to have any emotional life under the pretty façade. Unlike that other famous cinematic archaeologist, the quirky Indiana Jones, there is no vulnerability to Croft at all.

Jolie’s beautiful face is a blank slate, expressionless for most of the film with only the occasional arching of an eyebrow to remind us that a real person lives beneath her perfect skin. Perhaps in the foreseeable Lara Croft Tomb Raider 3: The Saga Continues In More Exotic Lands she will transcend her computer generated origins, and we’ll get a glimpse of the real person behind that raised eyebrow. 

Lara Croft Tomb Raider: The Cradle of Life is like its name, a bit too long, and kind of silly, but a vast improvement on its predecessor.
LAST ORDERS

Based on a Booker Prize winning novel by Graham Swift, Last Orders examines the way people express their grief when a close friend passes away. Jack (Michael Caine) dies, leaving behind his childhood friends (Bob Hoskins, David Hemmings and Tom Courtenay), a wife (Helen Mirren) and reserved son (Ray Winstone). His friends and son take his ashes to Margate, a two-hour drive outside of London. Along the way, through flashbacks, we learn of the complex roles that these men have played in each other’s lives. Although it is a heartbreaking ride, there is nothing morose about this movie. The old friends argue and tell jokes, remembering Jack in their own unique ways. The common thread being that while they are sad he died, they are even happier that he had lived and graced their lives. The superior acting skills of Hoskins, Hemmings, Courtenay and Winstone rescue the film from director Fred Schepisi’s languid direction. Helen Mirren (who doesn’t accompany the guys on their ash-scattering mission) shines in her scenes with her hospitalized daughter. If only Schepisi had picked up the pace a little this could have been a real winner. As it is Last Orders is only marginally recommended.

LEGALLY BLONDE 2: RED, WHITE AND BLONDE

A better title for this movie would have been Legally Bland. The makers of the sequel to 2001’s surprise hit comedy Legally Blonde seem to have pushed the new film through the dreaded “movie de-flavourizer,” sucking all the charisma, fun and worst of all, the humour, out of the script. Even Reese Witherspoon, who charmed her way into the Hollywood a-list as pretty-in-pink Elle Woods in the first instalment, seems flat and uninspired.

The story, such that it is, holds a bit of comedic promise. Woods, the not-so-ditzy blonde, wants to invite the mother of her closet friend to her upcoming wedding. That friend is, of course her dog Bruiser, and unfortunately the mother is trapped in an animal testing facility. After trying to convince her stuffy law firm to take action against the laboratory, and getting herself fired in the process, she decides to take on Washington. From here on in the movie follows the pattern established by the original, minus the jokes. As Elle tries to get an animal rights bill passed in congress she is pitted against a series of sit-com worthy characters that are eventually won over by the perky fashionista.

It’s all very trite, which is fine, this is a summer teen movie after all, but the complete absence of chuckle worthy material makes what should have been a light and airy film float like a lead balloon. Not even the reliable Bob Newhart as the wise doorman can wrestle a laugh out of this script.

Making a sequel can be a nasty, unforgiving business – in this case the original was as sweet and gooey as pink cotton candy while Legally Blonde 2: Red, White and Blonde is a sugarless retread.

LEVITY

I hate it when actors that I really like appear in terrible movies. On paper Levity sounds like it might have something going for it. Billy Bob Thornton, an actor who in 2001 alone handed in three very good but very different performances in The Man Who Wasn’t There, Monster’s Ball and Bandits. He’s versatile and not afraid to take risks. Morgan Freeman is a journeyman who is always good, even when the material is beneath him. Director Ed Soloman is best known as a comedy writer, having made us giggle with the Bill and Ted movies as well as the first Charlie’s Angels film. Why then would he step out of his field to write and direct a painstakingly earnest movie about an ex-con’s search for redemption? And how is it possible to take two actors that I really like, Thornton and Freeman and make them almost unwatchable? This is what happens when an inexperienced director decides to make an art-house film. Don’t be fooled by the title, there isn’t a laugh in sight. The inappropriately named Levity limps along for ninety minutes, with the only compelling action happening just seconds before the credits roll. To paraphrase my co-host Geoff Pevere, the only thing this movie did was bring me 100 minutes closer to my death.

LUCKY NUMBER SLEVIN: 3 ½ STARS

The Slevin of the title is an unfortunate guy played by Josh Hartnett who happens to find himself in the wrong place at the wrong time and winds up involved with some very bad men. With the help of a curious neighbor, a world-weary hit man and two warring crime bosses he tries to extricate himself from this messy situation.

This is a hard-boiled crime drama in the vein of The Usual Suspects and Lock Stock and Two Smoking Barrels, which means that it is bloody, darkly funny and will keep you guessing. The film is a bit of a roller coaster ride of mistaken identities and convoluted plotlines, but near the end when the labyrinthine story starts to fall into place, revealing surprising connections and unlikely alliances the movie pays off.

The script sometimes veers off in Tarantino land with too many clever pop culture references to comic books and old movies, and over-written unusually articulate gangsters, but the actors here rise above the script. Ben Kingsley and Morgan Freeman both play mafia kingpins with gusto, chewing the scenery so much I feared that Kingsley might actually bite through the screen. Bruce Willis makes the best of his usual cool-guy persona, this time as a hit man, and Josh Hartnett, an actor who seems to have been teetering on the edge of stardom for a while now, gives the most likeable and best performance of his career so far.

Lucky Number Slevin isn’t destined to become a classic genre picture in the way that The Usual Suspects of Memento have, but it is a cool movie with really fun performances.

LOOKING FOR COMEDY IN THE MUSLIM WORLD: 2 STARS

Albert Brooks stars in the movie with the most audacious title of the season. In the film the comedian is called upon to attend a secret State Department meeting regarding the shape of humor in the Muslim world. His mission, should he accept it, is to spend a month in India and Pakistan and then write a 500-page report on what tickles the Muslim funny bone. What seems to be a plum government assignment is soon revealed to be less than ideal as Brooks begins his travels in hospitality class and finds himself stuck in an office behind a large call center in New Delhi.

The premise of this mockumentary is to shatter the idea that Muslim equals terrorist in the post 9/11 world. Brooks attempts this not with sharp satire, but with the loping rhythms of his understated comedy. In the end all we really discover that humor is global even if the things that make North Americans laugh leave Indian audiences straight faced.
Brooks is a legendary comedy writer, and his self-depreciating humor relies on a perfect set-up to really drive the punch line home. Looking for Comedy is a great premise looking for a great way to present the comedy. There are funny lines and several funny situations—such as when Brooks auditions for the lead role in Harvey for director Penny Marshall—but the movie as a whole doesn’t hold together and as a viewer I found myself looking for the comedy in Looking for Comedy in the Muslim World.