Drawn from Mark Millar’s hyper violent, supernatural comic of the same title, Wanted the movie drops both Millar’s supernatural elements and, frankly, the element of pure evil that made it vastly different from most of the “graphic novels” out there.

Wanted, both book and movie, is the story of Wesley Gibson a neurotic, anxiety prone, cheated upon, brow-beaten, dishrag of a man who just happens to be the son of the most talented assassin in the world. His recruitment by Fox (Angelina Jolie in a role that in the comic was clearly penned for Halle Berry) fills him and us in on the back story of The Fraternity, a group of assassins that has been operating for “thousands of years.” Their purpose: Kill one, a save thousand.

Sounds pretty far-fetched, right? This is where Hollywood had to deviate from Millar’s original text which has the Fraternity not as an altruistic order of killers descended from the practices of Christian monks but instead operating in a world where superheroes have all been conquered and The Professor has found a way to wipe the minds of everyone on the planet negating even the memory of those superheroes while he and his criminal peers who include an ancient Chinese warlord and a walking skeleton whose number one henchman is a living pile of excrement divide the planet up to rule as they see fit raping, killing, and thieving as it suits them. It is this deviation that is one of Wanted the movie’s major downfalls.

The film retains enough supernatural elements – the ability to “curve” a bullet, to jump a city block between office towers, to shoot someone from not hundreds of yards but miles away, a super-healing bath that can bring someone back from near death – that it stretches credulity even in a post-Matrix world. Granted, the stunts are amazing and it would be lovely to say that the devotion to the gun is typically American but sadly I can’t; Mark Millar is Scottish and Timur Bekmambetov, the film’s director, is Russian.

It was the necessity of making the characters and storyline even vaguely palatable to American audiences in the transition from graphic novel to film that is ultimately the film’s undoing. Wanted the comic celebrates not only the wantonness of violence but also takes pleasure in criminality for the sake of criminality; indeed, at one point Wesley, our nominal hero, wreaks violence on a bunch of police officers in a station house, including casually raping one of the female officers before he shoots her to death. This is not a set of characters or a storyline that corporate America (which is what Hollywood is) even at its most misogynistic and malevolent would dare to market.

Is it fair to judge Wanted-The Movie against Wanted-The Comic? Probably not. On its own the film is a slapdash, if intensely stylish, action film. To sharp to qualify in the “big, loud, and stupid” category, Wanted doesn’t even make for a good afternoon’s entertainment.

WALL-E is worth seeing despite or maybe because of the controversy over the movie’s messages manufactured that those not blowing hard over the non-existent edginess of the current crop of political advertisements.

Regardless of what has been written by pundits and critics from publications as diverse as Entertainment Weekly and The National Review, WALL-E is pure genius in that, like most of Pixar’s other creations, it can be viewed on a variety of levels.

On one it’s a story about perseverance, evolution, and being true to yourself: Built to clean up humanity’s mess after we’ve completely destroyed the planet – the opening sequence of wind farm turbines up to their blades in trash nicely and succinctly skewers the current hype surrounding the need to concentrate on ameliorating climate change as we completely ignore humanity’s rampant over consumption of resources that is the root of all our problems – WALL-E (Waste Allocation Lift Loader – Earth class) is the last of his kind, and in the 700+ years since he was brought online not only has he done his job, he’s also developed a personality, one that’s curious about the objects he finds, and one that is more than a little bit lonely.

Enter EVE (Extraterrestrial Vegetation Evaluator) a sleek robot that some critics say echoes Apple’s design sense. Dropped off by a large, automated probe, EVE goes about her mission with ever increasing levels of frustration which she expresses by blowing things up with her embedded laser canon. Once she determines that WALL-E isn’t a threat, she follows him back to the cargo vehicle he’s been using as living quarters, the place where he stores and categorizes all the things that have caught his eye over the years, including the one thing EVE is looking for: evidence of plant life.

It is in his sharing of the things that have intrigued him and in his protective treatment of EVE while she is in hibernation mode waiting for pickup from the automated ship that dropped her and the other EVE units off on Earth that WALL-E most obviously evidences this first way to view the movie. When one thing or set of things fails to intrigue EVE, WALL-E finds something else to share, looks for some other way to connect. He takes care of EVE because it seems like the right thing to do. Indeed, WALL-E follows EVE into space because it seems like the right decision to him not because of some programming sub-routine or because of social pressure to behave in a certain way.

On another level, and this is the level that has drawn the most criticism, WALL-E is cultural critique. From that brilliant opening sequence with the wind farm buried in trash to the fact that it’s a corporation, Buy ‘N Large a not very subtle stand-in for Wal-Mart, that runs the U.S. at least and is responsible evacuating humans from the planet to the state of humanity after 700 years of having every whim catered to by obliging robots in a hyper-controlled environment, there is no aspect of our current self-indulgence and destructive over consumption that is spared.

Of course, it is a little hypocritical of Disney, Pixar’s parent company and one of the prime pushers of plastic crap we just do not need, to make a movie criticizing over consumption while still pushing promotional tie-ins of said plastic crap. But Disney’s hypocrisy doesn’t degrade either the message, or the fact that on the final level Pixar has made a story about connecting and what it means to interact with other people.

Is WALL-E perfect? Certainly not, but it’s a damn good movie regardless of your age.

I’m going to be playing a bit of movie review catch-up for the next few entries because, well, I can, and it’s easier than thinking about something original while work is trying to squish my brain out my ears.

Reviews of the following will be forthcoming:

WALL-E
Wanted
The Dark Knight
Hancock

A workman-like remake of Hitchcock’s Rear Window for the short-attention span millennial generation, Disturbia’s pleasures lay not in the ending of the film but in the journey to the destination.Placed on three months’ of house arrest after slugging his Spanish teacher Kale’s (Shia LaBeouf) transformation from angry – and rightly so (for those of you unnerved by VW’s realistic safety commercials from last fall I recommend skipping this movie altogether. The events that open it are staged with enough intimacy to make them too realistic) – disaffected teen to keeper of the neighborhood’s secrets proves that LaBeouf is, indeed, a young actor to watch.

That LaBeouf manages to turn in a good performance is a feat accomplished in spite of not with the support of the script. The plot points that get us from Kale’s initial teenage whining – OK, so Mom (Carrie Anne Moss looking not old enough to be the mother of a 17 year-old) cuts off his XBox live account…does that necessarily mean he’ll abandon the toy altogether? Aww…Mom cancelled his iTunes account. Last time I checked Mom hadn’t cut off the internet and later the script will have us believe that she’s still buying him cell phone minutes despite the $12 per day “incarceration fee” she has to pay for his house arrest – stretch credibility. Perhaps this stems from the fact that the bulk of Director D.J. Caruso’s experience is in television. Regardless of where it comes from, it’s clear the film makers’ were in a rush to get to the meat of the story.

Turning on the premise that you never really know what is going on under your nose, Kale learns a multitude of things about his neighbors: one man is having an affair with the house keeper; the kids next door are sneaking pay-per-view porn; the lady across the street always walks her dog at the same time every day. And then there’s Robert Turner (David Morse). Turner is an enigma. Seemingly no job, mows his lawn every day, and comes and goes at all hours in the company of redheaded women young enough to be his daughter.

Is Turner the man responsible for the disappearance of a local college girl? Things Kale observes tell him yes. The Powers That Be, including a patrol officer who is cousin to Kale’s Spanish teacher, don’t believe his observations. With the help of his friend Ronnie (Aaron Yoo) and new-girl-in-town and next door Ashley (Sarah Roemer) what starts out as a game yields some grisly (and slightly unbelievable) discoveries.

Unlike Hitchcock’s classic Disturbia’s hip references (YouTube, iPods, product placements for Boost Mobile) will age the film before its time. The thrills and chills are mostly of the things produced by the art department popping out of closets variety. If you don’t go in expecting great art, or great surprises, it’s an OK way to spend 90 minutes on a rainy afternoon.

Not since Fight Club has a movie been so misrepresented by its trailers as Smokin’ Aces is by both the commercials and theatrical previews that have been advertising the film.

Sold as a race against time to see who can get their hands on Buddy “Aces” Israel (Jeremy Piven) first – the various hitters lured by the Mob’s $1M bounty on the snitch’s head or the FBI – this film is characterized by its commercials as a violent romp, a black comedy/action thriller with guns, insanity, and a lot of macho posturing. In reality Smokin’ Aces is a meditation on betrayal whose sweat slick, blood stained surface only begins to ask the question what is loyalty. And while it does have some funny moments it is most certainly not a comedy.

Betrayal is never funny and this movie heaps betrayal upon betrayal. The very foundation of the plot is, in fact, betrayal of the most basic kind: denial of responsibility in the face of fact.

Getting beyond the theme, though, Smokin’ Aces is, to a large extent, as advertised. FBI Agents Donald Carruthers (Ray Liotta) and Richard Messner (Ryan Reynolds) have been staking out Mafia don Primo Sparazza (Joseph Ruskin) for nearly three days when the call is made: put out a hit on Buddy Israel. Israel, showman, magician, three-time Entertainer of the Year, has managed over the years to weasel his way in with the wise guys left in Vegas and not content with the shadow has decided he actually wants to live the life. But as we’re told, in an interesting piece of cross-cut exposition, by bailbondsman Jack Dupree (Ben Affleck), Israel is a wanna-be and a fuck up and things go really bad for him really fast.

Turning one faction of Sparazza’s organization against another wasn’t the problem for Israel. No, it was his own criminal ventures that drew the attention of every bored FBI agent and organized crime task force within 300 miles of Vegas. This is why, when we meet him, Israel is holed up in the penthouse of a hotel on the Nevada side of Lake Tahoe waiting for Morris Mecklen (Curtis Armstrong) to call with the final word on his immunity deal – who he’ll have to snitch on, who he’ll have to give up, and what he’ll get in return.

Myriad elements, including the Tremor brothers (three walking pieces of tattooed, Aryan-nation berserker insanity), Sharice and Georgia (Alicia Keys (yes, that Alicia Keys)) (two slick sisters developing a rep in the hitman game), Lazlo Soot (Tommy Flanagan) (a master of disguise as ruthless as he is clever), and Pasquale Acosta (Nestor Carbonell) (dubbed “the plague” a hitman who when captured by Interpol chewed off his own finger prints), come together all with a coked out, paranoid, over-whored Israel at the center.

Despite having all the pieces, writer/director Joe Carnahan (Narc) never manages to make the sum worth more than the parts. He just can’t seem to get up any momentum even with a cast of many, many recognizable faces (including Andy Garcia in a role not far from the one he played in Ocean’s Eleven, Matthew Fox (virtually unrecognizable under a ghastly proto-mullet wig), Brian Bloom, Peter Berg, and Jason Bateman (who proves yet again just how underrated he has been as an actor for all these years)).

Even though it doesn’t quite deliver what it promised Smokin’ Aces is a bizarre little film that just might make you think. 3 popcorns out of 5.

This is the time of year that many movie reviewers refer to as “the dumping ground”: Hollywood dumps that which it thinks it can make money on but is unwilling to invest in on a public that has already proven that it will buy tickets to any number of shitty movies (here, here, and here among others) on the most flimsy of reasons (it’s a sequel; the girl in the poster looks hot in leather pants; it looks really violent (Oh…wait…those last two might just be my rationales…never mind)).

Fact is that from about the middle of December to Oscar time (February 25th this year) most of the country gets diddly squat to watch. Given this, it’s unsurprising that my Netflix queue has been getting quite a work out. Be that as it may, here I’ll catch up on reviews of the two things I have seen in the theater since just before Christmas.

Curse Of The Golden Flower
It’s pretty, but don’t expect too much.

Night At The Museum
So much potential wasted.

Read the rest of this entry »

I have been fascinated by time travel for as long as I can remember. Quite frankly, anyone who has regrets who isn’t fascinated by time travel and the endless potential it offers to get “it” right the second time around probably isn’t paying attention. That not paying attention is something that the makers of Déjà Vu counted on when they pumped out this limp thriller.

Called to the scene of a massive and brutal bombing of the Algiers to Canal Street ferry, Agent Doug Carlin (Denzel Washington) proves himself to be a capable investigator right off the bat as he determines that the best place to find the residue of whatever fuel was used to make the bomb that helped kill over 500 ferry passengers would be on the underside of the Crescent City Bridge. Caught in multijurisdictional hell (Carlin is ATF but, of course, the FBI, the NOPD, and the Department of Homeland Security want in on the case), Carlin is recruited by Agent Andrew Pryzwarra (Val Kilmer) for a special “task force” that makes use of experimental technology (a ring of satellites, or so they say) that allows this task force to view footage of just about anywhere – with audio – in enormous detail.

Because he’s not completely dim Carlin quickly figures out that there is more to Agent Pryzwarra’s task force than meets the eye. Indeed, the overstuffed complement of nerds Denny (Adam Goldberg), Shanti (Erika Alexander), and Gunnars (Elden Henson) have created an Einstein-Rosenberg bridge that, in theory, will fold to points in time together and greatly reduce the distance between them. How, you ask? By accident and by blacking out half of the Eastern United States.

Carlin is convinced that a murder victim, Claire Kuchever (Paula Patton), who washed up after the bombing but died before the explosion is the key to solving the ferry crime. Suffice it to say that he has our little time spys concentrate on this woman and her movements in the 4 days prior to the bombing.

I can’t begin to describe the rest of the plot because it is, simply, to trite for words. Can we send something back in time to help stop the bombing? Theoretically possible but what happens if we change something < shock and horror! > Time might branch, or even change completely. No, instead we get to watch Carlin’s partner, 4 days in the past, be murdered in cold blood by our “terrorist” Carroll Oerstadt (Jim Caviezel) (Could they have made him more Aryan?). Well, could we send a person back, someone who knows what “has happened” who might be able to prevent the bombing? Three guesses and the first two don’t count. The women in my theater were just happy to see Denzel stripped down to his t-shirt and boxers.

Possibly one of the top five most boring things in the world to watch on screen is people talking on the phone. This movie continues a disturbing trend that makes cell phones a key plot device, at one point even having a version of Carlin walking through a row of body bags in which a cell phone is ringing. Another of those top five things is watching other people watch video footage, which is essentially the middle act of this film.

Part of the reason this movie doesn’t work is that it doesn’t take into account the perennial problem with time-travel movies: the grandfather paradox (i.e.: you can’t go back in time and turn out to be your own grandfather). The Carlin at the beginning of the movie, a movie that opens with the ferry bombing, discovers things that could only have been done by the Carlin of later in the film who has traveled back in time (except, he hasn’t yet). It’s enough your head hurt.

For that, for the fact that everyone in this film except Adam Goldberg, who manages a very nice quip involving cowbell, seems completely and utterly bored, I have to give this film 1.5 popcorns out of 5.

For more info on déjà vu visit Howstuffworks.com

http://people.howstuffworks.com/question657.htm

Like many I was skeptical about the casting of Daniel Craig (Lara Croft: Tomb Raider, Layer Cake) as James Bond. He’s blond, first of all. Secondly, he seems a little too rough around the edges for the Bond we’ve come to know and love. The latter objection gets blown to bits in this second adaptation of Ian Fleming’s first 007 novel.

Beginning with Bond’s entry into the double-0 ranks, Casino Royale suffers not because of Craig’s performance but more from an uneven script that both explodes with gritty action and drags with sequences that could have been significantly shortened. Truth be told, no matter how high the stakes, no matter how well dressed the players or how well they handle the chips, watching other people play poker is just not visually engaging.

Hinging on the money laundering activities of Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen), Bond follows a trail that leads him from Africa to the Bahamas to the Casino Royale in Montenegro. It seems Msr. Le Chiffre has been playing the stock market with the money he is supposed to have been washing for his “freedom fighter” clients, money that he had hoped to make a profit from after blowing up a prototype aircraft at the Miami International Airport (a plot thwarted by Bond with the reckless abandon that is typical of this film’s action sequences). Now that Le Chiffre’s clients have come to collect, he finds it necessary to earn back their money via an invitation only high-stakes poker game.

Financed in this game by Great Britian’s Treasury Department, to the tune of 10 Million (we’re not sure if that’s Pounds Sterling, Euros, Swiss Francs, or U.S. Dollars (not that it matters)) and shepherded by Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), possibly the blandest “Bond girl” to ever hit the screen, Bond is thwarted in his pursuit of Le Chiffre by the first in a series of double-crosses. And it is from these double crosses that Bond learns the lesson that will turn him into the ruthless double-0 agent he will need to be.

That lesson: never trust anyone.

Overlong by at least thirty minutes, Casino Royale is a capable re-entry into the Bond franchise. Marked with a sly humor that is less self-conscious than anything we’ve seen since Sir Sean carried the 007 moniker, this characterization is grittier and more connected to what we’ve come to expect from an action-adventure/spy film. Craig’s Bond makes mistakes, some whoppers actually, and when he gets into a scrap he ends up showing the effects. You get the sense that he has to work for his victories. In some ways this fallibility, this humanity, makes this Bond more appealing than any of the ones who have come before him. Casino Royale is, in fact, a post-modern James Bond film that wouldn’t have been possible without all of the versions that preceded it.

Given that the price of movies has gone up to $10 for the matinee, given that no matter how hard the entertainment machine tries to convince me it’s visually interesting poker is not a spectator sport, and given that it could have been better with very little effort on the part of the filmmakers, I still found myself walking away disappointed. As such I have to give this film a 2.5 out of 5.

Christopher Guest (Waiting for Guffman, A Mighty Wind) uses a big, broad brush to paint this satire of virtually all things entertainment. Employing his usual motley cast of regulars, including Catherine O’Hara and Harry Shearer as aging has-beens, Guest creates a film within a film (something I’m really not fond of) that should be taking on Hollywood’s obsession with self-congratulatory awards ceremonies.

Shooting Home for Purim, Marilyn Hack (O’Hara) is that actress whom everyone thinks was in that movie, you know, the one with that other, more famous actress. Her role as Esther, the dying matriarch of a Jewish family in the South during World War II, is meant to be nothing more than another job, a little film, until someone reports a rumor found on that “interweb thing,” as the internet is called by the film’s clueless publicist Corey Taft (John Michael Higgins), that Hack’s performance is good enough to warrant an Oscar nomination.

Taft is the catalyst the parlays a two line blurb from someone on some web site into an appearance on a local Los Angeles morning show for Hack and Victor Allan Miller (Shearer) which through utter stupidity gets spun into a potential Oscar nod for Miller as the family’s patriarch which gets taken to another level when Variety picks up that rumor and turns it into gossip about a nod for Callie Webb (Parker Posey) who is playing the black-sheep, lesbian daughter. What ensues is an uproarious indictment of celebutainment and people’s ability to buy into the rumor that they want to be true, particularly if it is a rumor that tells them they are valuable.

Guest and co-scripter Eugene Levy, who also makes an appearance in the cast as a slimy, not very convincing agent, spend more time poking a sharp stick in the eye of the industry that has sprung up to cover Hollywood, movie review shows, night time talk shows, entertainment reports, and the like, than they do dissecting that fact that Hollywood’s denizens believe they have a right to this sort of coverage. He’s none to kind to actors, portraying them as vain luddites more concerned with appearance than what’s inside.

Sprawling and with only the vaguest sense of structure, the film feels episodic. Still, if you’re even vaguely tapped into the culture of celebrity and the massive spin that surrounds it (pictures of Katie Holmes’ and Tom Cruise’s wedding anyone?) you will not be at a lost for laughs both broad and sly during the course of this film. For that, for the fact that all roads lead back to This Is Spinal Tap and for the complete irony that this film is probably just as worthy of anything that will receive an Oscar this year I’ll give this film 3.5 popcorns out of 5.

There is nothing subtle about this film: from the themes to the set dressing to the performances Stranger Than Fiction bludgeons viewers with the message that we should squeeze every ounce of life we can out of every minute.

Taking pages from Sartre, Luigi Pirandello, and Charlie Kaufman, Stranger Than Fiction centers on Harold Crick (Will Ferrell) who is quite possibly the most boring, placid human being ever to be brought into existence.

Unless you’ve been under a rock for the last six weeks you know that we know what Harold doesn’t: he is a character in a new novel by Karen Eiffel (Emma Thompson). Eiffel’s problem, which is Harold’s saving grace, is a raging case of writer’s block. Karen is a writer of tragedies and she can’t figure out how to kill Harold Crick. Eiffel’s publishers hope that saddling her with Penny Escher (Queen Latifah), a “writer’s assistant,” will help her make her deadline, a deadline for a book on which she has ostensibly been working for over a decade.

In a turn that is less Adaptation than You’ve Got Mail, Harold, who is an IRS auditor, is assigned the case file of Ana Pascal (Maggie Gyllenhaal doing her best Meg Ryan in When Harry Met Sally (right down to the voice)) a baker who as a protest against the government calculated what percent of her taxes would go to fund programs she doesn’t support and purposely withheld that amount from her payment instead sending a letter that begins “Dear imperialist swine.”

Where Harold is bland – beige walls, white sheets, and even a beige telephone that looks like it was lifted right out of a hotel room from late-1980s Italy – Ana is bohemian complete with a sleeve tattoo that starts at her shoulder and ends at her elbow, driftwood lamps, and a guitar that she took as payment from someone or another for a batch of muffins. Ensue unlikely romance between typewriter crossed lovers.

Added to this mix is Professor Jules Hilbert (Dustin Hoffman doing a star turn at “quirky”) in the role of God for both Harold and Karen. After his unsuccessful visit to a psychiatrist it is to this professor of literary theory Harold turns and thus begins his personal odyssey into actually living. Harold’s subsequent discovery that Eiffel is writing his life and his meeting with Eiffel are where this film breaks down as it comes after Eiffel has figured out how to perfectly, poetically kill off her main character. Eiffel’s crisis of conscience (how many real people has she killed, she wonders) begs the reality question (is Harold real or a character? Is Eiffel a god? Such existential thoughts presented in such broad strokes are a bit much even for the thinking viewer to contemplate in the midst of a subplot that is entirely standard Hollywood romantic comedy fare.)

What is most shocking, though, is not just Prof. Hilbert’s advice that Harold accept his death for the greater good of literature but that Harold takes such advice with barely a ripple in his psyche (perhaps this was meant to be a comment on the placid nature of humanity in the 21st century, or perhaps it’s just too-clever for its own good writing passing for art; I’m not really sure) and that Eiffel, in turn, consults Hilbert to determine what she should do now that she has met Harold in the flesh.

The character and nature of the film’s subplot should tell you everything you need to know about how this film ends, and that is the real problem. For a film that attempts to take on the true meaning of life, death, and work the ending and plot twists are too easy, too pat, and too Hollywood for comfort. The film ends up being merely cute when it could have been a serious meditation on life in that way that true human comedy is serious yet simultaneously ridiculous.

Cute it is, though, and basically entertaining. And it is because of these things and because when confronted by Penny, who has sufferred through rainstorms, tantrums, and cartons’ worth of cigarette smoke in her job, about just how she discovered the way in which she would kill Harold Crick Eiffel replies “like anything worth writing it came without warning, method, or reason” I’ll give Stranger Than Fiction three popcorns out of five.