Who was William Shakespeare?

Questions about William Shakespeare’s identity have been floating around since the 19th century with guesses as varied as Francis Bacon and Christopher Marlowe. In 2007 Time Magazine reported on the public emergence of some 300 Shakespeare skeptics asking to be taken seriously. Among the signatories to that 2007 “Declaration of Reasonable Doubt” was Shakespearian actor Derek Jacobi who gives the prologue and epilogue that frame the story of Anonymous.

Opening near the end of Queen Elizabeth I’s reign, we’re rapidly introduced to a wide cast of characters, both noble and not, including playwrite Ben Jonson (Sebastian Armesto) who is plucked out of near obscurity by Edward de Vere (Rhys Ifans), the 17th Earl of Oxford, who chooses Jonson to serve has his theatrical beard paying the struggling playwrite handsomely to present de Vere’s plays as his own.

Both the backstory and the current struggles to position the correct man to inherit the throne from a rapidly decaying Elizabeth (Vanessa Redgrave) intertwine with the political nature of de Vere’s plays.

Taken in by William Cecil (David Thewlis) after his father’s death, the young de Vere (Jamie Campbell Bower) agrees to marry Cecil’s only daughter as part of the price for covering up the killing of a houseman the Puritan Cecil had sent to de Vere’s chambers to find out if the young man was, indeed, composing plays and poems in defiance of Cecil’s wishes.

Young de Vere catches the eye of a younger Elizabeth (played in a wonderful bit of casting by Redgrave’s daughter Joely Richardson) leading to a torrid affair which results in the Queen’s pregnancy. Shunned for reasons not known to him when she is sent off to have the child away from the court’s prying eyes, de Vere begins a revenge affair with one of the Queen’s maids only to be exposed upon her return to London and banished from court for the remainder of his life. Before returning to his wife, de Vere manages to pry out of William Cecil information about his offspring, the Earl of Southampton (Xavier Samuel) who in the film’s current time line allies himself with the Earl of Essex (Sam Reid) in his bid for Elizabeth’s throne.

Jonson, meanwhile, has an attack of conscience revealing to a middling theater actor named William Shakespeare (Rafe Spall) that he is just the front for the aristocrat who has actually penned the first brilliant play, Henry V, staged. Shakespeare, seizing the moment, steps into the spotlight as the groundlings call for the playwrite setting in motion what we are to believe is the biggest literary fraud ever perpetrated on the world.

Tensions mount as more of de Vere’s plays are staged and Robert Cecil (Edward Hogg), the hunchbacked son of William, takes over as Elizabeth’s closest advisor after his father’s death. Maneuvering to have both the Earl of Essex and the Earl of Southampton eliminated in favor of his candidate for King, James of Scotland, Cecil manipulates de Vere with the unwitting help of Ben Johnson.

The outcome of the story is, of course, known: James of Scotland becomes James I of England, Scotland, and Wales, William Shakespeare becomes the greatest author who ever lived, and Ben Jonson becomes England’s first Poet Laureate. While Anonymous makes an interesting case that Edward de Vere was the true author behind the words we attribute to William Shakespeare the movie also posits one stunning, unbelievable fact that can’t be revealed without spoiling the end of the film; the timing along strains credulity.

Anonymous is beautifully crafted and acted and a grown-up intellectual exercise into one of literary history’s greatest mysteries.

Let me say this up front: Olivia Wilde is not hard on the eyes. Olivia Wilde in skin tight clothing that features randomly glowing strips of light is especially not hard on the eyes. But even in IMAX 3D she wasn’t the coolest thing about Tron: Legacy.

The coolest thing about Tron: Legacy wasn’t the light cycle races, nor was it the batons that allowed Sam Flynn (Garrett Hedlund) and Quorra (Olivia Wilde) to transform into light cycles or equally impressive individual flying machines in a single pull. No, the coolest thing about Tron: Legacy is the hooded coat Kevin Flynn (Jeff Bridges) wears when he leaves his remote hideaway and returns to “the grid.” Black as night on the outside and glowing from the inside, it’s the perfect metaphor for the movie’s themes and also the perfect indicator of one of the things wrong with Tron: Legacy.

Meant to catch the audience up on events since the ending of the first Tron film, Legacy opens in 1989 with expository back story in which Kevin Flynn tells his son Sam of the world he’s created inside the grid and the entities he’s programmed and is working with to help him create this world. Kevin’s disappearance and the subsequent take over of his company Encom by its board of directors.

Crash cut to 2010 as Sam breaks into Encom, hacks into the company’s server farm, releases the new version of its operating system onto the Internet just before the international press conference launching the same piece of software, and base jumps off the Encom tower. It’s clear that Encom as run by it’s board, a key member of which is Edward Dillinger (Cillian Murphy in an uncredited role), the son of Ed Dillinger (David Warner) the meglomanic programmer who stole Kevin Flynn’s video game ideas, is a stand-in for Microsoft in the film’s dichotomy between the proprietary view of software and the view that information should be free.

A page received by Alan Bradley (Bruce Boxleitner), the creator of the original Tron security program, from Flynn’s arcade leads Sam to his father’s secret office and a sequence of technological events transfer Sam to the digital world of the grid, and it’s in the grid that the film’s themes start to come to light.

In his search for his father Sam finds that the utopia his father was trying to create in the digital world is far from ideal. Clu (played by a digitally de-aged Jeff Bridges) has taken over the world his user programmed and turned it into his own little martial fiefdom with the help of his enforcer Rinzler. Kevin Flynn, meanwhile, has taken on a protege in the form of Quorra and has withdrawn to the badlands beyond the grid in an effort to frustrate Clu and keep him locked inside the digital world. In his withdrawal from the world he’s created, Flynn has embraced several concepts key to Eastern religions chief among them that sometimes the best course of action is to do nothing, a concept that escapes Sam.

This clash of concepts: action vs. inaction, what constitutes perfection and whether or not we should be striving for it, what it means to be strong, the value of life, and the real nature of identity are the major themes the writers of Tron: Legacy tried to wrap in a tech/action film wrapper. Unfortunately, they get the balance just wrong enough for the themes to seem heavy handed in the context in which they are presented. And that’s really too bad because they’re themes that American culture could benefit from exploring.

Too, the writers and casting directors combined to semi-cheat the timeline of the first Tron film in which Kevin Flynn was a carefree bachelor in 1982 and almost immediately a widower and father of a newborn son by casting an child actor, Owen Best, who at 13 is way too old to play a 7 year-old Sam Flynn.

Tron: Legacy is worth seeing if you’re a geek interested in either digital technology or in how fabulous the Tron universe looks updated using today’s technology. It should be noted that I saw this movie on in an IMAX theater and 3D was the only option for a screen that size. 3D technology is moderately well used here but not absolutely necessary to enjoy the visual improvements.

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.

Curse Of The Golden Flower

Brought to us by Yimou Zhang (Hero, House of Flying Daggers),
Curse Of The Golden Flower takes the director’s obsession with color and theme to new heights. The film centers on the ruling family in the 10th century in the late states of the Tang Dynasty. The Emperor (Chow Yun Fat) returns from the country unexpectedly with his second son on the pretext of celebrating the Chrysanthemum Festival with his family. Tt seems as the film unspools that his real motive has more to do with uncovering what has been going on at the palace between the Empress (Gong Li) and her step-son, and heir to the throne, Crown Prince Wan (Liu Ye).

Suffice it to say that while this film is visually beautiful if entirely impractical (I really don’t think they had plastic translucent columns lighted from the inside in the 10th century) if you look at it as the Chinese version of The Lion In Winter (possibly the best, and first, dysfunctional family Christmas movie ever) as was suggested by the reviewer at The Washington Post you’ll get the most out of the betrayals, machinations, and scenery chewing.

What I found most remarkable about this film, though, was not the overstylized presentation of Chinese themes, nor the fact that it is the most expensive film ever made in China. No, what is most remarkable is the stepping back from the wire work and aerial acrobatics that have come to mark what we expect from Chinese films. Yes, there is a certain amount of this stylized fighting in this film but the climatic battle scene is really more traditional tactics, the kind of thing we would have expected from Bruce Lee in his hey day, rather than the completely gravity defying stunts popularized by films like Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon and The Matrix.

Despite its visual beauty, despite the honor and irony inherent in the resolution of the film’s fairly standard betrayal/double-cross/triple cross/red herring/secret scheme/surprise mover plot, Curse Of The Golden Flower is overlong and more than moderately tedious. If you walk in not expecting too much you won’t be dissatisfied.

Night At The Museum

Let me confess up front: I am predisposed to dislike any movie in which pivotal plot points hinge on the behavior of a monkey.

There. I said it. Everything is not better with monkies. It is unfortunate that the minds behind Night At The Museum don’t agree with me.

Finding himself in need of work to keep from being evicted and, more importantly in the movie world, keep the respect of his 10 year-old son, Larry Daley (Ben Stiller) winds up with what promises to be one of the coolest jobs ever: night guard at the Museum of Natural History in Manhattan. Sounds pretty dull, right? Walk around, make sure things are locked up, probably punch a clock as you make your rounds. Except…everything in the museum comes alive at night courtesy of the magic tablet of Ahkmenrah (Rami Malek).

Chaos ensues as Larry at first proves himself to be the loser his son is beginning to believe he is: he fails to follow the instructions left him by the three geriatric security guards, Cecil (Dick Van Dyke), Gus (Mickey Rooney (who knew he was still alive!)) and Reginald (Bill Cobbs), whose jobs have been consolidated into the one for which Larry has been hired; he nearly gets himself fired after the first night on the job; he’s bested by a Capaucin monkey with a penchant for stealing keys, and his claims about what happens at the museum at night go unsupported, at first, when he tries to share this miraculous world with his son Nick (Jake Cherry).

Taking his role as father/peace maker/responsible adult way too seriously, Larry relies heavily on advice from Teddy Roosevelt (Robing Williams sleep walking through what isn’t much of a role until the very end of the film) regarding his place in life and in the museum. The moralizing about taking chances, standing up for what you believe in, and recognizing that sometimes you must reach beyond what you believe is your potential is thick enough to cut with a dull plastic food court supplied knife.

I think that fact that this film sat atop the box office in the U.S. for three weeks running and has grossed nearly $186M in four weeks of release says more about what isn’t available out there than what is for this film is no where near that good. Editing of many of the subplots, such as the one featuring tiny cowboy Jedediah (frequent Stiller collaborated Owen Wilson in an uncredited role) and his feud with General Octavius (Steve Coogan), and expanding some others, like the budding potential love story between Larry and Rebecca (Carla Gugino), a museum docent with an unfinished dissertation on Sacajawea (Mizuo Peck) (who just happens to come to life each night inside the Lewis and Clark exhibit), could have made this film a tight, family-friendly comedy instead of the lesson laden day-old pastry that it is.

For not living up to the potential of its basic idea, and for giving me way too much monkey and not nearly enough T-Rex as overgrown dog, 1 out of 5.

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.