Movie Review

Densely plotted and well shot, Inside Man echoes every other bank heist movie that has preceeded yet it still manages to be original enough to be fascinating.

Turning on a brilliant plan by Dalton Russell (Clive Owen) to rob a very specific branch of the Manhattan Trust Bank, this film is full of spot-on performances by masters of their craft. Brought in to handle the hostage situation after the bank branch is secured by a group of robbers who all answer to some variation of the name Steve, Detective Keith Frazier (Denzel Washington) is a man with problems of his own.

Under the cloud of a bust gone bad and $140,000 of missing drug money, his healthy relationship with his younger, police officer girlfriend is being complicated by her petty hood of a younger brother, and by Frazier’s seeming inability to make Detective First-Grade. Even though he’s a man in over his head, Frazier moves confidently through the situations with which he’s faced, even the most unusual one of being told by the Mayor to afford Madeline White (Jodie Foster), a woman who specializes in handling delicate problems for the incredibly wealthy, every courtesy, and in exchange, Frazier will receive his long desired promotion.

What no one counts on, not Frazier, not Madeline White, not even Manhattan Trust’s Chairman of the Board Arthur Case (Christopher Plummer), a man with much to hide, is the absolute perfection of Russell’s plan. The plot of this film turns on a twist that, once revealed, is so simple and so elegant you’ll find yourself wondering why you didn’t see it in the first place, for the clues are all there.

Good, clean direction by Spike Lee, solid cinematography by Matthew Libatique, and a superb script by Russell Gewirtz (whose previous credits include a couple of episodes of the failed Steven Bochco series Blind Justice) make Inside Man a wholly satisfying film pitched to adults. 4 out of 5 popcorns.

Visit the official site

Possibly the best publicity this movie could ever have had is the Jack Abramoff scandal. Until the man in the fedora was alleged to have given gifts in direct exchange for help with legislation that benefitted his clients I very much doubt that many people were aware of just what a lobbyist does in Washington. And even after this film, amusing as it was, I doubt that anyone will understand fully just how much of an affect industry lobbyists have on how our government functions.

Ostensibly the story of Nick Naylor (Aaron Eckhart), premiere lobbyist for the tobacco industry, Thank You For Smoking isn’t really about lobbying at all. It isn’t about corporations and the way in which they try to manipulate a government that is supposed to represent the best interests of the people. No, Thank You For Smoking is really a movie about the fact that Americans have turned off their brains and have let advertising do our thinking for us.

Nick is too much of a snake to like and to much of a charmer to hate. His philosophy of life, propounded to his son Joey (Cameron Bright, clone number 6 in Ultraviolet) is that if argued properly any point is winnable. Pay close attention to the scene in which they talk about which flavor of ice cream is better, chocolate or vanilla. If you can internalize the manner in which Nick wins the argument you will advertising-proof yourself forever.

Wrapped in an absurd plot involving a reporter willing to sleep with her source to get a story (Katie Holmes in a much hyped and utterly pedestrian sex scene that doesn’t even show any flesh), Nick’s fellow lobbyists, the Merchants of Death (Maria Bello and David Koechner), and a bill from a Senator from Vermont (William H. Macy) requiring cigarette packs to be labelled with a skull and crossbones and the word poison, a move just ridiculous enough to be plausible, Thank You For Smoking is more straight comedy than it is satire. And I’m sure watching it in DC gave it a particular edge not only with our obsession with the government but also with the high percentage of DC locations (one inspired bit of architectural casting: the FBI building as the headquarters of the Academy of Tobacco Studies).

For these things, and for the fabulous coupe of making an entire movie about cigarettes in which absolutely no one lights up, Thank You For Smoking gets a 3 out of 5 popcorns.

Visit the official site (Note: Requires Flash)

The editor who cut the trailers for this movie ought to either win an Oscar for prevarication or be taken out back and shot immediately for having the ability to make a film seem like something that it is utterly and completely not.

Based on the trailers you’d think Ultraviolet was the story of a heroine with beyond belief techno and fighting skills going against some sort of fascist government in the name of an oppressed people or cause. The lone warrior against unbelievable odds. And in some ways that’s exactly what Ultraviolet is. What the trailers don’t tell you, however, is that the entire film hinges on Violet’s (Milla Jovovich, late of Resident Evil and Resident Evil: Apocalypse, who seems to be specializing in playing mutants) thwarted maternal instincts and the ability of a cloned child, 6 (Cameron Bright), to unite two variants of homo sapiens.

At some time in the future, a world we are told in voice over that we “probably won’t understand,” the government unleashes a deadly, mutated virus which is contagious enough to start the sort of panic that was a very real possibility in the early days of AIDS, complete with the public branding and then segregation into camps of those who had survived the virus and mutated into “hemophages” (hemo referring to blood; phage being a kind of virus which acts as a parasite of bacteria, infecting them and reproducing inside them…which in this movie’s lexicon seems to be a fancy way of saying vampires). Violet is one of the survivors of this virus which seems to grant super speed, enhanced reflexes, and varying degrees of light sensitivity after someone “converts.”

Confused yet? You should be. The plot of this film is actually the weakest element of an enervated chain of cinematic tricks.

Part Hong Kong cinema, part post-Matrix disutopia, and part classic underdog with a purpose film, the basic problem is that this movie can’t decide what it wants to be. Shot on HD Video and converted to celluloid for distribution, you’d be hard pressed to find the parts of this movie, including the actors, that haven’t been touched by some sort of computer manipulation. Visually the film wants to be the same sort of stylistic triumph that The Matrix proved to be. Unfortunately, it takes the gimmicks and tropes over the edge to the point of completely dehumanizing the players.

One interesting thing the film does do, though, is color scheming. Given that the bulk of this film was crewed by Chinese filmmakers, Violet’s environment sensing wardrobe and the various colors it takes on should probably be given more weight than I can give it in interpreting the film’s visual code. Another is the concept of “flat space” which allows hemophage warriors to store multiple weapons in a collapsible null space for retrieval at any time.

Those two things, though, aren’t enough to save this mess of a film. My advice: save your $9 USD.

Visit the official site

There are a lot of theories about the Little Red Riding hood story and what the story represents. Freudian analysis most often keys in on the oedipal myth and transfer of sexual attractiveness from one generation. Sometimes, though, fairy tale is just a fairy tale, and in the case of Hoodwinked, it’s a damn funny one.

Computer generated animation, Hoodwinked is done in a slightly softer style than the one popularized by Pixar, one more akin to Blue Sky Studio’s Bunny, and is built around the essence of the Little Red Riding Hood story. Red (voice by Anne Hathaway) delivers baked treats all over the forest for Granny (Glenn Close), often running into Boingo (Andy Dick). Meanwhile, the recipe bandit is forcing smaller treat shops out of business.

The case of the recipe bandit unravels, with a nod to Rashomon, via the patient questioning of Nicky Flippers (David Ogden Stiers) and and the not so patient questioning of Chief Grizzly (Xzibit) with “help” from The Three Little Pigs, a curious raccoon, and Bill Stork who all want to know just how the The Woodsman (Jim Belushi), the Wolf (Patrick Warburton), Twitchy (Cory Edwards, one of the co-writer/co-director brains behind the film), and Red ended up in a tangle on Granny’s living room floor.

Light enough for kids, and sharp enough for adults, Hoodwinked combines the best techniques of modern animation with humor. You may even get more out of it seeing it on DVD.

Visit the official site

It is a sure sign that a movie is going to be ponderous and badly written when it begins with not one, not two, but three expository sequences. Underworld: Evolution is both of these things in addition to being hyper violent, and not in that slightly exciting, violence-as-foreplay-in-post-AIDS-cinema either; indeed, it is needlessly violent on absolutely every level.
[Read more…] about Underworld: Evolution