I thought I knew funny, but I was mistaken. Before the blessed light of Step Brothers entered my life, I knew not the sweet comedic splendors of live burial, bunk-bed catastrophe or a minivan family singing Sweet Child O' Mine in four-part harmony.
Will Ferrell plays Brennan and John C. Reilly is Dale, two unemployed full-grown manboys who each live with a widowed single parent. Brennan mooches off mom Nancy, Dale off dad Robert.
When Nancy and Robert get 
married, their live-in sons become stepbrothers, and lo, the foreheads of the world's comedy writers did submit to a mighty thwacking as their owners begged the gods of japery, "Why didn't I think of that?" There hasn't been this much fun under the same roof since the creation of the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco and Firearms.
Instead of banging the same gong throughout, though, the writing team of Ferrell, Reilly and director Adam McKay, who is maybe the second hottest comedy helmer after Judd Apatow, keeps trying new situations.
The boys are alternately sworn foes, BFFs and even sober job-holding adults. The only standing order comes from Reilly: "We're here to f - - k s - - t up!" Proclaim it, sir! Step Brothers is, by a hair, the funniest film I've seen in this year (watched it in 2009), and at least as funny as McKay's other ones, "Anchorman" and "Talladega Nights."
After fooling with night-vision goggles, one of the manboys says, "Imagine if we'd had these when we were 12." "Even better," is the reply. "We got them when we're 40!" The concept of grown men acting like boys has been done so frequently that it's nearly time for a shock-value comedy about grown men acting like grown men. But it has rarely been done properly, with the correct degree of vulgarity, social awkwardness, scowly faced mystery, aggression and Bruce Lee T-shirts. Boys are freaks. Picture Tom Hanks in a de-cornified "Big": Wouldn't his first move have been a mission for porn and beer?
There is fascination with pretty ladies, but a fog of unease when it comes to talking to them. There is much fighting - Brennan hits Dale with a bike - and the soft crackling of old bones as geezers are lightly tossed down flights of stairs. At a moment of détente, Brennan offers Dale the chance to ride with him upon "majestic and translucent steeds," while Dale responds, "I will follow you through the mists of Avalon." Brennan wants to sing, but he's t
oo shy to perform, so Dale encourages him: "Your voice - it's like a combination of Fergie and Jesus."
Brennan's rich brother Derek (language sampler: "Bro," "Not gonna happen," and "It would be kickass"), who brags that he knows Jeff Probst, becomes a hilarious foil as played by Adam Scott, who has been popping up here and there for a few years but never made his mark before. Now he's hit on a role that can pay his wages for the next decade: He's not just a tool, but a power tool.
There is too much funny here for a movie (even though it continues into the closing credits). Step Brothers should be a TV show. Given the limited career aspirations of its main characters, the demotion would be fitting.
If Michael Bay were a strip club, he'd be one of those high-class joints where all the gorgeous girls work, dancing to two-minute R&B songs while offering top-shelf champagne and primo lap dances, but never letting you do anything more than touch. If Neveldine & Taylor were a strip club, they'd be the small, cramped room with blaring rock music, one pole in the middle of the floor, a bar that pours only watered-down Tequila shots and a stage full of skanks who'll do anything for $50. They're both essentially about the same stuff -- hot chicks, violent action, pounding music and snappy visuals -- but one leaves you feeling quasi-classy and satisfied where the other leav
es you feeling like a dirty, degenerate scumbag.
Gamer is a film that's simultaneously criticizing and targeting its audience: videogamers. It predicts a future where violence and sex are so glorified that the only thing that can sate society's collective id is seeing convicts kill each other for sport. In this future, videogamers are either upper class brats or disgusting slobs, neither of which have any sense of morality. Neveldine and Taylor aren't the first to put forward this idea, of course—remember Death Race? Well you probably wont be surprised that this movie isn't any better.
In the future, where exposition seems to be a part of every nightly newscast, buildings are covered with poorly Photshopped billboards and exploding fire text. Pay-per-view is still a reliable business model. Everyone uses Minority Report-style computers. Second Life and World of Warcraft have been replaced by remote controlled humans who look like they were dressed in a Spencers. Amidst all this chaos is the leading convict-slave-superstar: Kable. He's well on his way to winning his freedom, and everyone's super excited about it.
Unfortunately, just giving a character a wife and splicing in some quick flashbacks to imply some sort of frame-up or mystery doesn't make him three-dimensional. Kable, played adequately by Gerard Butler, is just another gruff action hero out to get his wife back. That's fine, especially in a movie that's supposed to be a throwback to the good old days of action flicks, except that the action is indecipherable.
Neveldine and Taylor have the potential to among the most creative action directors in the industry—they operate the camera on rollerblades, swing it from the ceiling, and employ any number of interesting angles and pans—except that their films are edited with the pace of a hummingbird heart. Gamer's primary selling point is the action, but the film insta
ntly becomes a mess of explosions, quick zooms, video glitches, and slow motion. I understand that they were trying to recreate something like the Gears of War games on XBox 360, but what's missing is a cohesive point of view. The film is an assault on the eyes. Gamer may have failed to level-up in the story department, but it looks extremely good on a technical level. Most of the effects and stunts were done practically, and the HUD overlays during the game footage are believable enough (although way too confusing for any actual videogamer to use).FAMOUS LAST WORDS
Gamer is one of those interesting juxtapositions of positive and negative. Clearly, Gamer is a bad movie. It's filled with a stupid plot reflecting today's society, less than exemplary acting, and enough editing cuts to cause an aneurysm. I watched it, knew it was bad, knew it was derivative, and knew it was a highly polished turd; yet somehow Gamer does something right, give actual gamers a bad name.
In its amiable, quiet, PG-13 way, The Invention of Lying is a remarkably radical comedy. It opens with a series of funny, relentlessly logical episodes in a world where everyone always tells the truth, and then slips in the implication that religion is possible only in a world that has the ability to lie. Then it wraps all of this into a sweet love story.
The screenplay is filled with hysterical one liners and acerbic barbs, but the greatest achievement might be its disquietingly full-throttle satire on religion. Gervais and Robinson have shrewdly implied that in a world without lies there is no religion, an
d they use a mix of broad and subtle comedy to build on this interesting idea. The scene in which Gervais writes down the equivalent of the 10 Commandments is played for guffaws because he's doing it on pizza boxes, but a sequence in which he has to explain said rules is filled with a probing style of humor that takes no prisoners.
The Invention of Lying also has dramatic ambitions, but its fulfillment of these is a little less consistent. There is a beautiful moment in which Gervais creates the idea of heaven and eternal paradise to quell his dying mother's terror, but some of the romantic stuff with Jennifer Garner is less successful. The two have a reasonable chemistry and their first date at the start is uproarious, but the love subplot never feels as inventive or satisfying as the rest of the project. It's a very formulaic addition to an otherwise refreshing comic gambit, and the finale looks lifted out of the dreariest rom-com possible. Still it's the only genuine narrative slip-up, and by that juncture the movie has already established itself as an entertaining use of your time.
I saw the movie with my brother, who laughed a lot. I have no idea what he thought of its implications. The Invention of Lying isn't strident, ideological or argumentative; it's simply the story of a guy trying to comfort his mother and perhaps win the woman he loves. Gervais, who co-directed and co-wrote with Matthew Robinson, walks a delicate tightrope above hazardous chasms.
He's helped greatly in his balancing act by Garner's inspired, seemingly effortless, performance as a great beauty who isn't conceited or cruel but simply thinks Mark, with his pug nose, is the wrong genetic match for her children. She plans to marry Brad, who is as conventionally handsome (and boring) as Clark Kent. The film has one of those scenes at the altar ("Do you, Brad, agree to stay with Anna as long as you can?") that avoids obvious cliches by involving profound philosophical conclusions.
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Yeah, the romance doesn't fully work and it is aesthetically a bit bland. Still I've already discussed these and made it clear they don't prevent The Invention of Lying from representing a fun way to spend 99 minutes.It's a solid comedy with a superlative central concept and ultimately I regret not having gone to see it and doing my bit to stop it from flopping.
I'm not sure how many knows the 1998 dud Dead Man On Campus, though yours truly does. He's not really ashamed of it, though he does wonder why. Most critics spit on it, calling it a degrading, unfunny black comedy that seemed to rely on sophomoric sperm songs and bombastic bong use to get most of its laughs. That's pretty true, though for some reason I saw more in this neglected oddity than most people. Sad, I know.
Josh is a conscientious pre-med scholarship student who has the misfortune to land in the same dorm room with Cooper , a wealthy stoner who's completely unconcerned with his education. And they're both stuck with Kyle, a Neanderthal in pants who lives in their suite's single room, until he mercifully abandons them to shack up with his girlfriend. Josh starts out the semester taking a slew of difficult science
classes, but his ambitions are thwarted by Cooper's distracting, bon vivant ways. After disastrous midterm exam results and a nasty visit from Cooper's dad -- the king of toilet-cleaning -- both lads are in desperate need of a way out of their bad grade predicament. Enter that old collegiate canard about how you automatically get straight A's if your roommate kills himself: They embark upon a quest to find the most suicidal person on campus and move him in to Kyle's old room.
The story's not much, but this dark comedy contains moments of unexpected wit. Gosselaar gives a spirited and funny performance, as does Lochlyn Munro in the role of Cliff, one of the more promising wackos. Unlike most comedies, this one actually picks up steam about halfway through, managing to find a fresh take on such all-too-familiar campus fixtures as depressed Goths and paranoid computer geek
I know what you are thinking: the premise is as believable as Paris Hilton eventually winning an Oscar. The lame story is courtesy of Anthony Abrams and Adam Larson Broder, who must have been on some serious mind-altering substances when they brewed this up. However, I have to give them credit for daring to write a black comedy on suicide, something most films would never do. Sure, it may still come off as a shallow movie, though Dead Man On Campus still has its fair share of funny elements.
This college comedy is better than you'd expect, given the lowbrow humor and scant plot.
Although it falls far short of fulfilling its full potential as a dark comedy of desperation, Dead Man On Campus is a modestly amusing trifle that merits a passing grade as lightweight entertainment.
If you've had more than your fill by now of those cookie cutter, tearjerker music biopics that follow the inevitable trajectory from rough roots to fame, a fall from grace and final redemption, Walk Hard: The Dewey Cox Story may just have the cure. And it's ab
out time. This satirical tongue-in-check musical, spoofs movies like the Johnny Cash weepie Walk The Line and Ray's over-the-top emotional frenzy, while parodying with a vengeance the whole mystique of celebrity sainthood. Move over, Britney Spears.
John C. Reilly does Dewey Cox as an initially troubled, hilariously beer gut middle-aged teen, courtesy of a makeup department that deliberately discarded the usual ridiculously youth-enhancing makeovers here for its over-the-hill stars, relatively speaking. In a wacko Abel and Cain setup, Dewey suffers second-class status in his dysfunctional backwoods family to favored brother Daniel. One day while engaging in a little fantasy swordplay in the barn, Dewey possibly not so accidentally severs his resented sibling in two. And it's a strangely comical disaster which seals his fate as family pariah, doomed to wander the earth a moody and moping sad sack, when not happily jamming on stage.
The movie, directed by Jake Kasdan, was co-written by Kasdan and the productive Judd Apatow, and they do an interesting thing: Instead of sending everything over the top at high energy, they allow Reilly to more or less actually play the character, so that, against all expectations, some scenes actually approach real sentiment. Reilly is required to walk a tightrope; is he suffering or kidding suffering, or kidding suffering about suffering? That I'm not sure adds to t
he appeal.Walk Hard, with its raunchy comedy skit-to-screen sensibility, not surprisingly has its frequent ups and downs, but with the buoyant moments offering plenty to forgive the more stagnant interludes. Among the coolest high-lights count the variously drugged Dewey indulging in controlled substance group activity with participants parading around in assorted states of undress; and his encounter as a little kid with some seasoned elderly bluesmen in the woods who hand over the guitar, and novice Dewey's belting out a number in raspy baritone like a pro who's eight going on eighty.
Then it's on to an early gig during his loser period, worshipfully mopping up a black folks' disco. Inevitably of course, Dewey drops janitor duty and begs his way on to the stage the one night that the main attraction rapper calls in sick. Not quite getting it that he's the only white guy on the premises, Dewey indulges his own inner rapper with some
off-color race lyrics - just the way the house star always does it - and ends up, well, getting the Imus treatment, to say the least.
Equally radical but tame in intent pulled off by Apatow and Kasden from just about but not quite going off that rude deep end, is a mock-lewd episode of nasty gyrations on the same house floor. And the devilish duo is not at all shy about taking what's really going on with those highly suggestive moves, to what might actually be marinating in the dirty minds of those too much information, sexually charged dancers.
2012 is exactly what the trailers make it look like: a bombastic disaster film.
It's not so much that the Earth is destroyed, but that it's done so thoroughly. 2012, the mother of all disaster movies (and the father, and the extended family) spends half an hour on ominous set-up scenes (scientists warn, strange events occur, prophets rant and of course a family is introduced) and then 
unleashes two hours of cataclysmic special events hammering the Earth relentlessly.
It also continues a recent trend toward the wholesale destruction of famous monuments. Roland Emmerich, the director and co-writer, has been vandalizing monuments for years, as in
Independence Day, The Day After Tomorrow and Godzilla.
In all disaster movies, landmarks fall like dominos. The Empire State Building is made of rubber. The Golden Gate Bridge collapses like clockwork. Big Ben ticks his last. The Eiffel Tower? Quel dommage!
Emmerich thinks on a big scale. Yes, he destroys regular stuff. It will come as little surprise (because at this writing the film's trailer on YouTube alone had more than 7,591,413 views) that the aircraft carrier John F. Kennedy rides a tsunami onto the White House. When St. Peter's Basilica is destroyed, Leonardo's God and Adam are split apart just where their fingers touch (the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel having been moved into St. Peter's for the occasion). Then when Emmerich gets warmed up, the globe's tectonic plates shift thousands of miles, water covers the planet, and a giraffe walks aboard an ark.
Many gigantic arks have been secretly constructed
inside the Himalayas by the Chinese, funded by a global consortium, and they're the only chance of the human race surviving. Along with the animals on board, there's the maybe well-named Noah. In theory, ark ticket holders represent a cross-section of the globe, chosen democratically. In practice, this clique pulls strings to benefit the rich and connected, and wants to strand desperate poor people on the dock.Such questions pale by comparison with more alarming events. The tectonic plates shift so violently scientists can almost see them on Google Earth. This havoc requires stupendous special effects. Emmerich's budget was $250 million, and "2012" may contain more f/x in total running time than any other film. They're impressive. Not always convincing, because how can the flooding of the Himalayas be made convincing? And Emmerich gives us time to regard the effects and appreciate them, even savor them.
Emmmerich also constructs dramatic real-scale illusions, as when an earthquake fissure splits a grocery store in half. John Cusack is the hero in an elaborate sequence involving his desperate attempts to unblock a jammed h
ydraulic lift that threatens to sink the ark. He does a lot of heroic stuff in this film, especially for a novelist, like leaping a van over a yawning chasm and riding a small plane through roiling clouds of earthquake dust.The bottom line is: The movie gives you your money's worth. Is it a masterpiece? No. Is it one of the year's best? No. Does Emmerich hammer it together with his elbows from parts obtained from the Used Disaster Movie Store? Yes. But is it about as good as a movie in this genre can be? Yes. No doubt it will inflame fears about our demise on Dec. 21, 2012. I'm worried, too. Knowing my days are numbered, I'm gonna have to play Modern Warfare 6 more passionately from now on.
The following is a scientific test designed to examine your soul. Please answer the following questions as honestly as possible.
1. Describe your feelings about directors Jason Friedberg and Aaron Seltzer. In case the names do not ring a bell, please be aware that they are the two responsible for Date
Movie, Epic Movie, Meet The Spartans and now Disaster Movie.
A. Two no-talent hacks who somehow keep managing to get work that pays quite well.
B. They look just like the bees I saw yesterday.
C. The two gods of awesome.
2. Which films do you think a film called Disaster Movie should spoof?
A. Titanic, Volcano, Independence Day, Deep Impact, Armageddon and I Am Legend
B. The entire filmography of Gus Van Sant.
C. Whatever f—-ing blockbuster movies came out most recently, so that they are fresh in my mind.
3. If Hellboy, The Incredible Hulk, Batman, and other iconic movie characters of 2008 appear onscreen in a comedy, what should they do?
A. Something entertaining that justifies their appearance.
B. Paint the cobblestones on Piper Street.
C. Introduce themselves, because I'm totally going to forget who they are if they don't say whatever.
4. Seeing an Amy Winehouse look-alike burping for about one minute straight is…
A. Dumb and unfunny.
B. Smelly like a fish, but also revealing.
C. Best joke ever. Can we make it two minutes, please?
5. Disaster Movie makes a point to criticize the writing in Juno on numerous occasions. What is your reaction to this?
A. The writing in Juno may be worthy of mockery at times, but the people who made Disaster Movie have absolutely no right to criticize the writing of any film, much less Juno.
B. There are lots of good writers in Alaska.
C. Dude, that is so spot-on. I couldn't understand that whore in that movie, anyway. All those obscure references were totally over my head. Arrogant little jerk.
6. A man falls into a giant pile of fecal matter. He then utters the word, "S-t!" What is your reaction to this?
A. Quite an obvious and unfunny gag.
B. Did he have any quarte
rs in his pocket? I hope not, we wouldn't want them sullied.
C. Hahahahaha! That is brilliant, because the dude fell into a pile of s-t, and then he said, "S-t!," so it's like all connected. Haha.
7. Should every female character in a film be referred to as a bitch and/or whore at some point in a film?
A. Such demeaning language indicates a profound level of disrespect for women. Unless the film is attempting to reflect such unfortunate attitudes, no, such language should not be used.
B. If they are wearing turtles on their heads.
C. Yes, because you gotta be keeping them bitches in line.
8. Which of the three following activities appeal the most to you?
A. Reading a really good book.
B. Pondering the meaning of swiss cheese. Where are the missing pieces?
C. Kicking people in the balls.
9. Which category would you say best describes the type of humor you like?
A. Sharp satire, well-staged slapstick, witty dialogue.
B. Anything involving the word "esoteric."
C. Balls, wieners, boobies, butts, and lots of pee and poo.
10. What should a movie spoof attempt to do?
A. Satirize some of the weaker points of a film.
B. Blow bubbles until one is shaped like a queen.
C. Simply offer an amateurish version of a popular scene from a popular movie trailer, and add some sort of painfully one-dimensional sexual and/or crass context.
Okay, please tally your answers. Got it? All right, let's see how you did.
If you answered "A" to the majority of the questions, congratulations. You are permitted go on about your business, skip Disaster Movie and have children.
If you answered "B" to the majority of the questions, you are either insane or high. If the former, then you certainly need to seek help. If the latter…um…got anything for me? It's been a bad day.
If you answered "C" to the majority of the questions, then you will love this film. It will make you laugh endlessly, until you forget about it ten minutes later due to the state of your badly-damaged brain. In fact, you probably didn't make it this far, but rather quit three questions into the survey and started surfing the web for free 15-second porn clips.
Believe it or not, but 
Disaster Movie is the only recent spoof that actually lives up to its title. A painfully disastrous mess, this is just another embarrassing comedy that spends almost 90 minutes making shameless fun of the year's biggest blockbusters and celebrities. Now, I don't have anything against spoofs in general, but making fun of other flicks the correct way takes quite a bit of creativity, and that's exactly what Disaster Movie is missing.
Laughs are obviously nonexistent in this movie, and nearly every scene suffers from either disgusting slapstick humor or primitive dialogue. Whether it's an Amy Winehouse lookalike burping for 30 seconds straight, Dr. Phil trying to get laid, the Hulk losing his pants, a Juno wannabe beating a male Carrie Bradshaw, or Carmen Electra and Kim Kardashian wrestling with barely any clothes on, the list of embarrassingly bad moments is endless, really.
I feel utterly sorry for everyone who agreed to participate in this cataclysmic failure. I feel sorry for those who decided to green-light the project in the first place, and I feel sorry for those who wrote, directed and starred in it. My suggestion to them is to stop doing whatever it is they're doing, as I sincerely believe it would be for the best of all of us. You can totally hate me for being so harsh here, but this is exactly the kind of film that helps turning Hollywood into even more a shallow place than it already is.
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If you want to insult your own intelligence, go ahead and watch this, but I can only recommend you stay away from this stinker as far as possible.
There's very little here that's left to chance here. In less than four minutes, they establish who this character is and leave him dangling on the edge of death. Over the next 30 minutes, we learn Stark is whip smart, has the resources to do whatever he wants, and most of all has the passion and determination to pull it all off, no matter the cost. Now imagine that power in the hands of someone whose 
entire life has been turned inside out and the consequences of his lifelong actions have returned to haunt him 100 fold. This field is fertile beyond belief and they cultivate it well. From the opening title card to the crash of the Mark I, this is hands down the most impressive Marvel character adaptation to date. And yeah, I'm callin' you out Spidey.
Bringing Iron Man to the big screen must have been tough. Sure, the high-tech armor and all the explosions are no-brainers, but the character behind the armor is tougher to pin down. Superman and Spider-Man are likable every man, Batman is a brooding (and therefore cool) loner, and the Hulk and the X-Men are sympathetic, misunderstood monsters. But Tony Stark? He's an obnoxious bastard. He rubs people the wrong way, he makes bad decisions, and he often puts his own needs and wants above others. If you were to meet him, you'd probably think, "What a rich jerk."
So how do you make this guy a hero for audiences to root for? One option would have been to toss out the character as originally written and go in some other direction. Another option would to have made his change of heart—so to speak—in the movie a "night and day" juxtaposition, where's he's only a jerkwad before he becomes Iron Man, and then he's a newly stalwart Tony afterward. Favreau and the screenwriters, however, take the path less traveled, by sticking with an unlikable protagonist throughout. Sure, Tony sees life in a new light after his Afghanistan escape, and he's newly devoted to doing the right thing, but he's still Tony. He still loves the parties and the hot cars, and he still doesn't give a damn what anyone else thinks of him. Funny thing about unlikable protagonists—when written well, we do end up liking them in a way, simply because they're fascinating characters.
Shouldering the burden of this performance—and the entire film, really—is Robert Downey Jr. Some have said that Downey Jr. is merely playing himself in the movie, and others have drawn parallels between the actor and the fictional character. I won't disagree, but if that's wha
t he needs to inform his performance, than why not? Downey Jr. carries the movie with loads of cocky swagger, but there's just enough of a glimpse to Tony's underlying humanity seen here and there to let us know that he's not really that bad of a guy.
For as well-made and fun as this movie is, it made some serious narrative missteps during its climax, just slightly tainting the enjoyment of the overall film. As noted above, the finale does offer some action, but it's not really the big, larger-than-life set piece the movie needs at this point. The finale starts with Iron Man not at full strength, with his suit's automated system already telling him he's losing power. Wouldn't it have been more exciting to Iron Man cut loose with all his firepower, instead of being in a weakened state for the whole fight?
Even worse, it's here that the movie falls into cheesy superhero clichés, giving Paltrow embarrassing lines like "He's gone insane!" and "But you'll dieeee!!!" Likewise, Stane has an awkward line about his targeting system, which will give all the Star Wars haters nightmare flashbacks to that whole "I've got the high ground" thing. With all the careful thought and planning that went into this 
movie, it's too bad they couldn't go the extra mile for the finale.
The world needs another comic book movie like it needs another Bush administration, but if we must have one more (and the Evil Marketing Geniuses at Marvel MegaIndustries will do their utmost to ensure that we always will), Iron Man is a swell one to have. Not only is it a good comic book movie (smart and stupid, stirring and silly, intimate and spectacular), it's winning enough to engage even those who've never cared much for comic books or the movies they spawn.
Crash tells interlocking stories of whites, blacks, Latinos, Koreans, Iranians, cops and criminals, the rich and the poor, the powerful and powerless, all defined in one way or another by racism. All are victims of it, and all are guilty it. Sometimes, yes, they rise above it, although it is never that simple. 
Their negative impulses may be instinctive, their positive impulses may be dangerous, and who knows what the other person is thinking?
The result is a movie of intense fascination; we understand quickly enough who the characters are and what their lives are like, but we have no idea how they will behave, because so much depends on accident. Most movies enact rituals; we know the form and watch for variations. Crash is a movie with free will, and anything can happen. Because we care about the characters, the movie is uncanny in its ability to rope us in and get us involved.
Crash was directed by Paul Haggis, whose screenplay for Million Dollar Baby led to Academy Awards. It connects stories based on coincidence, serendipity, and luck, as the lives of the characters crash against one another other like pinballs. The movie presumes that most people feel prejudice and resentment against members of other groups, and observes the consequences of those feelings.
One thing that happens, again and again, is that peoples' assumptions prevent them from seeing the actual person standing before them. An Iranian is thought to be an Arab, although Iranians are Persian. Both the Iranian and the white wife of the district attorney believe a Mexican-American locksmith is a gang member and a crook, but he is a family man.
A black cop is having an affair with his Latina partner, but never gets it straight which country she's from. A cop thinks a light-skinned black woman is white. When a white producer tells a black TV director that a black character "doesn't sound black enough," it never occu
rs to him that the director doesn't "sound black," either. For that matter, neither do two young black men, who dress and act like college students, but have a surprise for us.
You see how it goes. Along the way, these people say exactly what they are thinking, without the filters of political correctness. The district attorney's wife is so frightened by a street encounter that she has the locks changed, then assumes the locksmith will be back with his "homies" to attack them. The white cop can't get medical care for his dying father, and accuses a black woman at his HMO with taking advantage of preferential racial treatment. The Iranian can't understand what the locksmith is trying to tell him, freaks out, and buys a gun to protect himself. The gun dealer and the Iranian get into a shouting match.
I make this sound almost like episodic TV, but Haggis writes with such directness and such a good ear for everyday speech that the characters seem real and plausible after only a few words. His cast is uniformly strong; the actors sidestep cliches and make their characters particular.
For me, the strongest performance is by Matt Dillon, as the racist cop in anguish over his father. He makes an unnecessary traffic stop when he thinks he sees the black TV director and his light-skinned wife doing something they really shouldn't be doing at the same time they're driving. True enough, but h
e wouldn't have stopped a black couple or a white couple. He humiliates the woman with an invasive body search, while her husband is forced to stand by powerless, because the cops have the guns -- Dillon, and also an unseasoned rookie, who hates what he's seeing but has to back up his partner.
That traffic stop shows Dillon's cop as vile and hateful. But later we see him trying to care for his sick father, and we understand why he explodes at the HMO worker (whose race is only an excuse for his anger). He victimizes others by exercising his power, and is impotent when it comes to helping his father. Then the plot turns ironically on itself, and both of the cops find themselves, in very different ways, saving the lives of the very same TV director and his wife. Is this just manipulative storytelling? It didn't feel that way to me, because it serves a deeper purpose than mere irony: Haggis is telling parables, in which the characters learn the lessons they have earned by their behavior.
Other cross-cutting Los Angeles stories come to mind, but Crash finds a way of its own. It shows the way we all leap to conclusions based on race -- yes, all of us, of all races, and however fair-minded we may try to be -- and we pay a price for that. If there is hope in the story, it comes because as the characters crash into one another, they learn things, mostly about themselves. Almost all of them are still alive at the end, and are better people be
cause of what has happened to them. Not happier, not calmer, not even wiser, but better. Then there are those few who kill or get killed; racism has tragedy built in.
Not many films have the possibility of making their audiences better people. I don't expect Crash to work any miracles, but I believe anyone seeing it is likely to be moved to have a little more sympathy for people not like themselves. The movie contains hurt, coldness and cruelty, but is it without hope? Not at all. Stand back and consider. All of these people, superficially so different, share the city and learn that they share similar fears and hopes. Until several hundred years ago, most people everywhere on earth never saw anybody who didn't look like them. They were not racist because, as far as they knew, there was only one race. You may have to look hard to see it, but Crash is a film about progress.
As titles of apocalyptic blockbusters go, Terminator Salvation has just the right touch of post-traumatic (and post-grammatical) doomsday cachet. It certainly sounds classier than T4: Attack of the Robots, which would have been more accurate. Even without Arnie, the latest entry into the Terminator saga is a gritty and exciting rollercoaster ride that is about as good as mindless es
capist fare gets. An improvement on T3, the film manages to honor what came before without simply replicating it. As with any Hollywood blockbuster the script has some laughably bad moments (like attempts at romantic subplots are laughable and painful to watch. The final act is quite contrived and an unnecessary cameo jars with the tone of the rest of the film) but overall it’s just plain fun.
The fourth film in the series picks up a few years after T3 with a post apocalyptic world ruled by robots intent on removing the human race from the face of the earth. The remaining survivors have banded together to form a resistance of sorts guided by the one and only John Connor - Christian Bale doing his Batman voice again. This time around it seems that the robots are much smarter than Sarah Connor ever predicted and the end of humanity may be closer than expected.
Rather than simply play like a greatest hits of Terminator moments, the film tries to mark new ground for the series. Director McG has created a dark and intense movie that does not let up. The action is nonstop and the majority of the set pieces are worthy of the Terminator legacy.
Much of the problem lies within the film's screenplay: the story simply fee
ls unfocused, as if the screenwriters weren't able to decide whether they wanted to continue following the John Connor plotline that's been the focus of the series from the onset, or branch out to follow Marcus Wright on his self-loathing mission of cybernetic vengeance. Ambition is a key component of any successful genre film, but in order to yield something truly great that ambition has to be focused. Here, the scriptwriters and director McG seem all too eager to gloss over any of the really interesting concepts in favor of having Connor do battle with Terminator sea monsters, or having Wright engage in a Road Warrior-style showdown with Terminator motorcycles.
Forget exploring the complex emotions a human would feel after discovering that he's been turned into a machine; a few lines of dialogue will suffice and give us a chance to get to the (yawn) final factory battle more quickly. It feels like a cop-out because it is. We've seen this all before, and done much better.
Yes, Terminator Salvation is an action film, but the action had better be pretty exhilarating if you're going to favor thrills over plot, and with the exception of one breathtaking sequence in a helicopter, the action in Terminator Salvation is astonishingly dull. In Charlie's Angels: Full Throttle, McG went so wild with action and special effects that he essentially created a live-action cartoon. Perhaps 
a little dose of that outrageous energy may have gone a long way in keeping the Terminator series feeling fresh and exciting; instead, it feels like he has purposefully reigned in that penchant for hyper-stylized violence in an attempt to be taken more seriously, and the result is action scenes that are filled with movement, yet devoid of excitement.
But it's a case of diminishing returns. “Salvation” so keeps its characters at arm's length that after a while it really doesn't matter what happens to them.
Anyway, most of the running time is occupied by action sequences, chase sequences, motorcycle sequences, plow-truck sequences, helicopter sequences, fighter-plane sequences, towering android sequences and fistfights. It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it.
Is it just me, or has there been a drastic and slightly unsettling change in the way filmmakers approach the horror genre in recent years? I'm not talking about the almost monthly release of remakes of classic and not-so-classic titles, more the way that everything has a music video look to it and genuine scares are replaced by excessive gore? I know this is far 
from an original complaint and horror fans have been making this argument for years, but after sitting through Return to House on Haunted Hill, I'm sorry to say the only genuine scare I had was when a piece of the chocolate I was eating went down the wrong way causing me to momentarily choke. Don't worry I'm fine now, it was my own fault, but the film itself gave me nothing, nada, zip.
Still, a lack of scares needn't be fatal if the film can still manage to entertain on some other level and this, I'm afraid it frequently struggles to do. What we have here is a haunted house movie by the numbers, a few inventive kills, and a three-way lesbian scene where two of the participants in the ménage-a-trois are ghosts. Classy!
The film sets out to explain the reason for the evil forces that control Hill House, this turns out to be the Baphomet Idol. A cursed artifact with corrupting powers, it was this idol that consumed Dr. Richard Benjamin Vannacutt when the house was still a mental hospital, resulting in his ghastly practices, leaving a steady stream of mutilated corpses. These very same victims now haunt the corridors of Hill House, brutally killing anyone who dares enter and using staples of the J-Horror genre (long hair covering all but one eye, odd or jerky movements) in an attempt to scare the viewer and failing miserably. While I can't say the film was completely horrible (it's certainly watchable), it just didn't add anything new to the horror genre or do anything particularly well—apart from the aforementioned ménage-a-trois.
In this sequel, a bunch of people end up back at the house/asylum looking for the Baphomet Idol, which is some kind of valuable (and, we discover, evil) effigy associated with the Knights Templar. No one is actually making a Return to House on Haunted Hill, since the lone survivor of that little foray blows her brains out right at the start of this film, and it's left to her sister to battle the forces of darkness and generally act like an idiot.
Yes, act like an idiot. Now, I'm 
familiar with that whole horror-movie theory, how if people didn't act like idiots, they'd use logic to survive and there'd be no movie, but the group on display here ratchets up the idiot quotient to uncomfortable levels. Camp Crystal Lake is a Mensa colony by comparison.
These characters do unfathomable things before even setting foot in the Asylum on Haunted Hill, including kidnapping the editor of an apparently high-profile magazine because her sister might (or might not) have told her something (or not). They kidnap her at gunpoint! With two muscle-bound, ex-professional-wrestling goons! And a blank-faced-and-horny lesbian! When we see this lineup of characters, we're not only tipped off as to who our first three victims will be, but we're reassured that our lust for a bit of girl flesh will be quenched by an encounter with the nubile dead.
Once at the house/asylum, we find there are basically two teams: the mercenary baddies, led by Desmond, who are there to find the idol (pronounced "bath mat" by the meatheads) and sell it for $5 million; and the non-baddies, led by Dr. Richard Hammer, who's been searching for the blasted Baphomet for 20 years and thinks it belongs in a museum. Except for the three goons, everyone has some kind of relationship with everyone else, and if this were a movie in which character and plot mattered, these relationships might lead to something.
But this movie is concerned with showing gruesome demises and lots of quick cutting. Much of the action takes place in the basement of the asylum/house, so everything has that bleak and nasty industrial look. The supernatural stuff is ridiculous
lous; people are randomly transported back in time to the horrible heyday of the asylum, while others just as randomly escape this fate. Since ghosts are not inhibited by time and space, they can pop up anywhere, but they still insist on chasing people rather than just popping up in front of them.
It's a shame this is all so shoddily done, because there could have been a fun movie here. The idea of a treasure hunt in a haunted house—not the steamy industrial basement of a haunted asylum—holds a lot of possibilities: different surprises in each room, outlandish clues, conniving characters, shifting loyalties, and so on.
Count me disappointed. Not as if I had any right to be, of course. The movie after all is called Return to House on Haunted Hill -- a title which, while evocative, doesn't even begin to sound grammatically correct.
Carrey is introduced as Carl Allen, a sad-sack bank-loan officer who still hasnt recovered emotionally from his divorce three years before. Although his pals try to nudge him out of his shell, Carls answer to virtually every overture that involves anything but staying home and renting DVDs is an evasive no.
A chance encounter with an old acquaintance inspires him to attend a self-help seminar, where a steely-eyed guru
preaches the power of saying yes to every opportunity -- forging a covenant with the shell-shocked Carl to adhere to this simple code.
Its an interesting gimmick, and there were a lot of zany humor you come to expect from a Carrey film. One thing that particularly caught my attention was the gut-busting scene with Carrey having to sing and play Jumper (Third Eye Blind remember?) to save a drop-dead man on the verge of commiting suicide. True, Third Eye Blind did it way better but Jim here, did it a hell lot funnier.
Jim Carrey works the premise for all it's worth, but it doesn't allow him to bust loose and fly. When a lawyer must tell the truth and wants desperately not to (even pou
nding himself over the head with a toilet seat to stop himself), it's funny. When a loan officer must say "yes" and wants to, where is the tension? The premise removes all opportunity for frustration, at which Carrey is a master, and reduces Carl to a programmed creature, who, as long as he follows instructions, lacks free will.Also during the film's muddled final act where the seams start to show. The narrative gets trapped in the usual, but inventively set-up, "break-up" subplot and Carrey is forced to claw his way out of the tired distraction. The comedy briefly comes to a dead halt as montages pass before finally being rejuvenated once again by supporting players, Carrey's ever-elastic rubber face and the sizzling romantic chemistry between Deschanel and Carrey – though the 17-year age difference between the performers is a bit creepy.
On the other hand, Yes Man has a message to it and it does take itself too seriously at times, but it's not a total throw away effort. Watching Carrey get goofy again is entertaining, and the chemistry between he and Deschanel is something special. Yes Man is not a great film, by any stretch, but if you're a Carrey fan, you'll probably enjoy Yes Man. You might even walk away saying yes a little more often.
The Otaku over the world just love to complain about live-action adaptations of beloved anime series, usually months – if not years – before they come out, determined to hate the final product regardless of what it is. It could be argued that they're not giving some of these projects a fair shake from the get-go; they're hating just to hate, swearing fealty to the original show or manga, convinced Hollywood just can't ever get it right.
Dragonball: Evolu
tion was no exception. Fans decried every scrap of material they could get their hands on, from leaked screencaps to shots of unpainted action figures to the teaser trailers, each time their derisive laughter and scorn growing louder and louder. A tiny handful of people remained cautiously optimistic, praying that 20th Century Fox had managed to distill the essence of the eternally popular, internationally beloved and downright legendary Dragon Ball story into a 90-minute action adventure that, while perhaps not adhering so closely to the exact plot and pacing of the original story, did provide a faithful and entertaining homage that might pave the way for increasingly loyal adaptations down the road.
Here's what happened instead: a bunch of talentless hacks with studio money slapped together a big steaming pile of baffling garbage that fails utterly on every possible level and will please no one at all.
The fans were right.
There's a lot wrong with Dragonball: Evolution, but the one huge thing that overrides nearly everything else is that the script is an absolute, unmitigated disaster. It's clear that a metric ton of material was hacked out, but this thing would need another 30 minutes rise from “unforgivably retarded” to “only mostly retarded”. If you walked into this movie cold – with only a cursory knowledge of who Goku is or what the original story is about – your jaw will be agape at what unbelievable horsecrap is unfolding before you. They explain virtually nothing. There is little to no character motivation. Things just sort of happen – it's not difficult to keep up with (once you realize the movie has no internal logic at all and is just checking off character names and plot points) it's just that so little of it feels connected or sensible at all. Stuff happens, but who cares? Earth is basically unrecognizable and looks like the first 5 minutes or so of Bill & Ted's Bogus Journey, the distant future circa 1992. None of the characters are compelling or interesting at all and they're all caught up in this big nonsense story that feels like it was written in crayon. It'd probably be easy to excuse this trash pile of a script by claiming that the original material was pretty zany too, but while Dragon Ball may have been silly and overblown, it wasn't insultingly stupid and senseless. You can't even use the ‘it's a live-action cartoon!’ excuse – compared to Dragonball: Evolution, your average episode of Chowder or Batman: The Brave and the Bold are shining examples of depth and meaning on par with the work of Dostoyevsky. Kids aren't dumb enough to fall for this.
In terms of production values, nothing there works either. The special effects are all Sci-Fi Original Movie-level quality, and the costume design is questionable to say the least. Hell, even the makeup sucks – Bulma has cosmetics plastered on like a whore in a Ratt video, all heavy rouge and electric blue eyeliner, her hair teased and highlighted to where she'd look much more comfortable writhing around on the hood of a 1987 TransAm than playing a “badass” genius scientist. The film's climactic moment – spoiler alert, it's the Kamehameha – i
s so outrageously goofy looking and badly executed that you will laugh out loud. It is perhaps the most enjoyable moment in the film, unintentionally so.
It's hard to blame the actors for their across-the-board mediocre performances when they're dealing with material this mind-boggling, but they can't be let off the hook either. Justin Chatwin occasionally delivers his ridiculous dialogue with some measure of quality but most of the film requires him to grimace and flex his neck muscles, which he apparently isn't quite capable of doing in a convincing way; imagine someone doing a bad job at faking "desperate, painful constipation" and you're about there. Emily Rossum spits her lines out like she just can't wait to get rid of them, and nobody can blame her for that, but she's less engaging than your average Power Rangers guest star. The guy playing Yamcha –Joon Park– is just not very good at this. His delivery is godawful, like the guy who's stuck playing the tired ‘surfer dude’ stereotype character in a Japanese roleplaying game from 1997, back when they'd hire convenience store employees and hobos from the local YMCA to do the voiceover work. Chow Yun-Fat does what he can, but even he stumbles over this stuff; the role requires him to behave like a cartoon character and it just comes across as trying way, way too hard.
In the end, it all boils down to one thing: this movie appeals to nobody. It was made for no one. People who aren't familiar with the Dragon Ball story at all will be so flabbergasted by what's happening that they will likely tell everyone they know that it's one of the worst movies they've ever seen. Fans who do know what the general story is will be furious at just how unbelievably badly they screwed this entire thing up. Kids are used to better writing than this in their weekday afternoon cartoons (although you may run into a kid who has never actually seen a movie before, and they might dig it until you show them another movie). It's a clunky, tiresome, badly executed, horribly written pile of shame that deserves no quarter.
In short, it's as bad as the fans said it would be. But hey it might be fun when you're hammered and surrounded by friends. Or suicidal, and need something to push you over the edge.
Mark Wahlberg stars as mild-mannered, high school science teacher Elliot Moore. While he's instructing his incredibly well-behaved and shockingly-science-happy class of inner city youth, he learns of some horrifying news: people in Central Park are killing themselves in exotic and gruesome ways.
He immediately grabs his wife Alma, his best pal and his pal's daughter, and heads for the first train out of NYC. Inexplicably, the train stops in Pennsylvania and our heroes are forced to depart and make thei
r way across the middle of nowhere, while all around them a mysterious, airborne force is driving people to feed their arms to lions in the zoo and lie prone on the ground while a lawnmower chews them up. And I submit, by the time this ridiculous movie ends, you'll be hoping for your own lawnmower to come rolling through your living room.
First up is Wahlberg, he's an idiot…of profound proportions. He makes consistently bad decisions (you couldn't wait like ten minutes before the wind stopped blowing to walk out and hug your stupid wife?) and tends to miss obvious solutions to his problems (hey, how about driving that nice new 4x4 pickup truck, instead of spending the night with that crazy woman?). Of course that's his character, Elliot, doing all those stupid things, but thanks to some legendarily bad acting from Wahlberg, I'm having trouble separating the two personas. Really, everything you've heard about his line delivery is true. It's as if Shyamalan shot a bunch of takes and used the absolute worst and most awkward to put in his film. Or maybe it was like that improv game where a director pauses an actor and has him perform the same scene in a different, outrageous fashion like "Now do it as a drunk sailor!" or "Now as monkey that speaks French!" but Shyamalan was shouting to Wahlberg "Now read your lines like you're a fifth-grader doing a play about dental hygiene!"
Just as painful is Deschane who is reduced to merely big blue eyes and wispiness. Alma may or not be slightly mentally retarded—heck, Elliot might be fighting a losing battle with a chromosome himself—and Deschanel does little to steer men in any kind of direction. Apparently Elliot and Alma are in the middle of a rough patch of their marriage, but the cause of the tension is so inane—and gives rise to a surreal monologue by Elliot about cough syrup—that with all the talk about evolution and survival of the fittest in the film I'm dumbfounded that these two tools weren't the first to go.
Or maybe the plants simply saw no danger in their existence and actually considered their continued survival and eventual propagation a boon to their herbal mission of neutralizing the human race. Oh wait, I just gave away a whole lot, didn't I? But of course you knew that the villains in The Happening are ill-tempered plant life and their evil cohort, the wind. F—-ing wind! So yeah, plants have decided to fight back against human beings for screwing up the planet and have started farting out neurotoxins that makes them kill themselves; a fact that somehow manages to escape the combined intellect of the world's greatest botanists, but doesn't elude two yokels that own a greenhouse in rural Pennsylvania.
The cast is terrible. From struggling to deliver the clunky dialogue, to looking unsure of what, exactly, it is they're supposed to be doing: this is beyond awful. Shyamalan's direction is totally lacking in merit. Scenes that are supposed to elicit fear are laughable; tension is notable by its absence, and, due as much to his wr
iting as his directing, the film lacks cohesion, with secondary characters dropping in and out of the story with total abandon and little purpose.
As ludicrous as the acting and story are, the most crippling component of The Happening is how lethally boring it is. The big action scenes involving characters running away from wind or talking to each other through an underground pipe. The closest the film gets to actual suspense is the very beginning, when the construction workers fall from the roof. But this is immediately followed by Mark Wahlberg opening his mouth and the onset of the nonsensical story. By the time Elliot pleads with a plastic plant to let his loved one take a leak in peace, we're through the looking glass, and the only hope for fun comes in more moments like it—bizarre setups designed to be deadly serious but only succeed in eliciting derisive laughter from the viewer. Fortunately—or unfortunately, depending on your capacity for intellectual self-abuse—there are plenty more to come.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
Somewhere, hidden beneath all the badness, is a message about man's total obliviousness as he heads down the path of destruction. At least I think there is, I wasn't really paying attention. Whatever you expect going into The Happening, it's way dumber. I think even Al Gore would agree with me on this one.
It's almost become a personal joke that every time a new Will Ferrell movie comes out, I want to see it but have nothing to say afterwards. I'm not quite sure exactly why this is; I think he's a brilliant comedian, and most of the movies he's made since he became an A-lister have been consistently good. But one supposes that in the world of comedy, you really don't want to know much more than whether or not it's worth watching; spoiling the set-ups (much less the punchlines) kind of ruins the experience for readers, unless you have some 
deep or profound insights about them.
I like Will Ferrell. He makes me laugh. Lots. It's rare that I don't laugh lots when I watch a Will Ferrell movie, save for Stranger Than Fiction, which can bite me. Talledega Night? Lots of laughing. Anchorman? Uhuh. And now there's this movie. I laughed at it. Lots.
Blades of Glory is very funny, and the humor is what you'd expect from Ferrell's comedies. Did you like those other films I listed in the paragraph above? Then you're probably going to like this one. The jokes are sophomoric, but funny and occasionally hyper-bizarre, e.g. the final scene. Gross-out humor and simple parodies, which sometimes seem to be overtaking the comedy genre in Hollywood, are largely missing, save for a surprise decapitation scene. That by the way, I laughed at huge.
Though there aren't as many gut-busting laughs as I expected, Blades is in the "sports underdog" tradition, with a strong enough story to carry the movie in between jokes. There are plenty of laughs; they just come more from character interaction and the inherent absurdities of competitive figure skating's pomp and circumstance than from typical Will Ferrell gags.
Looking at this cast, even if the writing had been cribbed straight from a treatise on post-modern interpretations of Biblical dispensationalism, there's a strong likelihood this movie would have still been funny. Ferrell, Heder, Arnett, Poehler, and Jenna Fischer—an All-Star lineup and each are on their game. Heder in particular shone, changing up his usual slack-jawed comic presentation, to a straight set-up man, a fine complement to his co-star's Alpha Male routine. Arnett and Poehler (married as they are) delivered, and any time an Arrested Development alum gets work is fine by me. Jenna Fischer is, of course, awesome, so need to go into much 
more depth here. Finally, Ferrell. He's certainly got his machismo-laden idiot schtick down cold, and Chazz Michael Michaels is pretty much Ricky Bobby with long hair and form-fitting sequins, and it's inspired, but at some point, homeboy's going to have to mix it up a bit.
No matter how good the actors are, Blades of Glory would have fallen flat if they'd gotten the figure skating wrong. Fortunately, they got it right. Oh, so right. It's astonishing no one's made a comedy about figure skating before. I can't think of another sport with as much built-in comedy.
FAMOUS LAST WORDS
In this era of political correctness, it would be easy to take offense to this movie's central comedic premise: that seeing two guys in spandex embracing, twirling, and lifting each other is funny. However, for a film whose main joke relies on the "ickiness" of one man touching another, it certainly celebrates the journey Michaels and MacElroy take in overcoming their hatred and hang-ups—finally giving themselves over to the intimacy of pairs skating. As a metaphor for becoming comfortable in your own skin, nothing quite beats spandex. Blades of Glory is, at heart, a buddy movie—a buddy movie where one buddy hoists the other buddy up in the air by the crotch. What can I say? That's figure skating.
Anyway, to sum up: Blades of Glory = funny.
These suckas are as cool as ice.
In Hollywood mythology, great battles wheel and turn on the actions of individual heroes. In Steven Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan, thousands of terrified and seasick men, most of them n
ew to combat, are thrown into the face of withering German fire. The landing on Omaha Beach was not about saving Pvt. Ryan. It was about saving your skin.
Four Ryan brothers go to war. Three get killed on D-Day and one is lost behind enemy lines. A commanding squad captain, John Miller (Tom Hanks) is sent to find the remaining brother, Private James Ryan. Like any good modern war film, the hero, John Miller, is a moral, upright leader who puts the safety of his squad first, and wrestles with the suicidal goals of his mission. Eight men risk their lives to save one. The resulting drama, set against the horrifying backdrop of war, is some of the best cinema to come out of Hollywood in years.
The movie's opening sequence is as graphic as any war footage I've ever seen. In fierce dread and energy it's on a par with Oliver Stone's Platoon, and in scope surpasses it--because in the bloody early stages the landing forces and the enemy never meet eye to eye, but are simply faceless masses of men who have been ordered to shoot at one another until one side is destroyed.
It’s impossible to properly describe in words the brutal honesty, the chaotic nature, and the sheer bloodbath and absurd lost of human life that took place on those beaches nearly 60 years ago. The fear of the men, of even the veteran Miller, comes through in quick snippets, all centering on Miller as he struggles through his own fears to lead his men to salvation. It is at once hellish, exciting, and painful to watch. By the time it is over, you feel as if you’ve lived through it all, and not merely watched it.
Then there is the human element. Hanks is a good choice as Capt. Miller, an English teacher who has survived experiences so unspeakable that he wonders if his wife will even recognize him. His hands tremble, he is on the brink of breakdown, but he does his best because that is his duty. All of the actors playing the men under him are effective, partly because Spielberg resists the temptation to make them zany "characters'' in the tradition of World War II movies, and makes them deliberately ordinary. Matt Damon, as Pvt. Ryan, exudes a different energy, because he has not been through the landing at Omaha Beach; as a paratrooper, he landed inland, and although he has seen action he has not gazed into the inferno.
The one thing that can be said about Saving Private Ryan is that it hu
rts. Whenever a character is shot, even a peripheral one, the audience feels it. This method of bullet squibs has been used over and over now, including in the HBO TV miniseries “Band of Brothers.” I think it’s safe to say Saving Private Ryan popularized a lot of the “war techniques” you’ve seen lately, and that the consequences of Saving Private Ryan’s brutal portrayal of war will be felt for a long time coming.
Saving Private Ryan is a powerful experience. I'm sure a lot of people will weep during it. Spielberg knows how to make audiences weep better than any director. But weeping is an incomplete response, letting the audience off the hook. This film embodies ideas. After the immediate experience begins to fade, the implications remain and grow.
Where's the sense of risking eight lives for one guy?
What, exactly, is creepy? Is it the thought of unseen eyes peering at you from a crack in the closet doorway? A nondescript car following languidly behind you on a dark, otherwise deserted road? Is it the far-off sound of a scream, or the too-close-for-comfort whir of a chainsaw? Do you get the horror heebie-jeebies from the very idea of being alone in a lightless, pitch-black environment, or did the hairs always stand up on the nape of your neck when your parents asked you to take something down into the dimly lit world of your cold, clammy basement. Maybe simple stories of missing children, lost loves, or legendary crimes get your gooseflesh good and active, or perhaps you prefer your sense of the sinister on the more vague, ephemeral side.
Whatever the case may be, you will definitely find this eerie emotion present in spine-chilling spades all throughout Silent Hill. In fact, this film is the literal definition of that fear-infused feeling. Everything that creepy is exists inside this amazing, mind-blowing movie. Who cares if it's based on something as cinematically sacrilegious as a video game? This is one of the best post-modern horror films ever made—and an incredibly effective creepfest to boot.
Make no mistake about it, Silent Hill is sensational. It's the movie The Cell wanted to be, and the video game adaptation that best recreates what such entertainment experiences effortlessly manage—that is, luring you into an unknown world and experiencing the suspense and the dread of discovering it along with the keypad-manipulated characters. In fact, it is probably good to be unfamiliar with the long-running series from Japanese manufacturer Konami. Otherwise, you will waste valuable disbelief suspension in a seemingly endless attempt to pick out all the changes—both major and minor—that have been made to the game's narrative. It's safe to say that Silent Hill is as similar to the spooky storylines it is based on as it is different. If you're curious about the modifications, surf the 'net for a few minutes. You'll come up with a far more comprehensive list than this reviewer could ever provide. If you're more interested, however, in what a sensational piece of Gothic, Grand Guignol grandstanding this movie is, how it overflows with imagination, creepiness, and invention, then read on. It is here where you will learn how a French filmmaker took a top Asian title and transformed it into one of the darkest, most delightful horror experiences in a very long time.
Christophe Gans, in only his fourth major film, suddenly steps up in the ranks of the masters of motion picture macabre with a movie that is dripping with dread, overflowing with atmosphere, and so flagrant in its fear factors that you can't help but feel the narrative slowly start sinking under your skin. From the opening sequence, where Sharon, our little girl lost, is poised on the edge of a vertigo-inspiring ledge, to her mother Rose's first steps into the ghost town of the title, we realize we are in the hands of a true cinematic visionary. Very few modern filmmakers strive for distinction in style or subjectivity. They would rather borrow from established auteurs or do the journeyman routine for the sake of a paycheck. Not Gans. He's all about the imagery, the tactile way his buildings look, the nauseating way his demonic monsters appear…and move. Using cues both old-fashioned (churches as bastions of faith, and fallen evil) and post-modern (the civil defense-style siren that warns of the impending "darkness"), he is a filmmaker who is determined to chill us to our very marrow. Pulling out all the stops, then adding a few more that he's saved especially for such an occasion, he proves that 2001's cult hit The Brotherhood of the Wolf was no fluke. In fact, Silent Hill is so amazing, it nearly wipes out all memory of that past genre-bending epic.
Naturally, a movie like this can't get by on ideas alone. We need a script we can champion while it continually chall
enges us with clearly-defined characters that are easy to identify with. Thanks to Oscar winner Roger Avary, Silent Hill is not just some sloppy collection of recognizable moments from your Sony Playstation. Instead, it's a dense, deceptive little thriller with enough mood and menace to fill a dozen derivative horror films. As a matter of fact, this is more of a waking nightmare than an actual attempt at creating a creature feature. Sure, the Silent Hill canon of terrifying creations is present (Pyramid Head, the Nurses), but because of how Avary sets up the situations, we never once doubt their existence—or their horrifying intent. Similarly, the backstory set up for Sharon and Rose (sleepwalking child, adopted under questionable, unclear circumstances) instantly draws us in. All Avary has to do is create some memorable dialogue and a few fascinating action scenes, then let Gans do the rest. Luckily, this pairing works out perfectly, leaving little room for anything other than abject terror and a decidedly unsettled aura. From Rose's first run-in with the darkness (complete with a claustrophobic corridor, a single flame, and a horde of hideous beasties) to the surreal sturm-and-drang finale, we are truly in awe of the combination of plot and pictures.
In addition, we are treated to acting that is never cheap, never over the top, and never obvious for the sake of some camp or kitsch effect. While Sean Bean has very little to do as the outsider who views Silent Hill as the deserted burg everyone believes it is, he still manages to make us understand Christopher's familial concerns. Similarly, Kim Coates is a cop keeping a lot of secrets, only to be shuttled off screen a little too soon. Obviously, Gans believes that this is a woman's picture—not a chick flick, this is a chance for a strong female perspective on things usually relegated to men. As a result, we need ladies in the leading roles, and Gans comes up with a collection of magnificent performers. As our mother in distress, Radha Mitchell never missteps, even once. She is the perfect combination of fear and determination, drawing on bravery previously unknown inside herself to rescue her languishing little girl. As Sharon, genre fixture Jodelle Ferland is equally adept at moving from innocent to wicked as the scene requires. In the background is Laurie Holden, as tough-as-nails patrol officer Cybil Bennett. She's the other audience inroad into the story, the skeptical non-believer who eventually comes around to Silent Hill's numerous horrors. Along with Alice Krige doing another top-notch psycho turn and Deborah Kara Unger as a figure important to both the town and to Sharon, we end up with an ensemble that emphasizes the uncomfortable nature of the narrative.
But the final facet that really propels this entire project into the realm of a near-masterpiece is the fantastic, fatalistic art direction and effects. The work of a myriad of incredibly gifted craftsmen, the monsters, the entities, and the domain in which they dwell are rendered so faultlessly, from their inhuman elements to their slick CGI gloss (the moments when the "darkness" takes over, with its dripping walls and disintegrating fixtures are fascinating to watch) that they take on a life all their own. When we glimpse Pyramid Man dragging his massive blade toward our heroines, or when the nurses stand poised to slice and dice with their handy razors and knives, the level of dismay is almost indefinable. When we hear the plaintive wail of the warning siren, we stiffen in our chair, wondering what horrifying images we will be bombarded with next. Yes, there is blood. Indeed, there is gruesomeness. Still, the visions in Silent Hill do more than stimulate your gore-related gag reflex. They tickle parts of the brain that post-modern horror has long since stopped trying to excite.
As much as a feast for the eyes as a twist to the mind, Silent Hill stands alone as one of the best, most visually arresting fright flicks in a very long time. Certainly there will be those who scoff at such suggestions, taking umbrage with any claims that the film is anything other than an ineffective piece of eye candy. There will be others who argue for the video game's ability to inspire fear over the Hollywood bastardization of a favored title. The truth is that Silent Hill tells a deceptively simple story, realizes it exceptionally well, and has stellar acting and effects in case a backup is needed for some narrative clarity. Sure, the conclusion is open ended, never quite clear in what it means to the characters or the situation we've just witnessed, and the fact of the matter is that the whole set up in Silent Hill has an expositional familiarity that we feel we've witnessed before (without spoilers, it's the religious fanatics as evil entities paradigm at work). Still, with someone as gifted as Gans behind the lens and a wealth of genius craftsmen in front of it, it is hard to deny the movie's many jaundiced joys. Consider it an allegory on death and dying or a straight-ahead, magnificently realized monster movie, but Silent Hill is not some sloppy tie-in to a well-known video amusement. Years from now, when the games are gone, it will live on as an example of brilliant filmmaking done with expertise and proficiency. Forget what you've read elsewhere—this is one wicked delight that deserves to be seen.
Like the cold wind that blows through the woods during a particularly unpleasant autumn twilight at the edge of a forest, or the slowly creaking closet door that shouldn't be opening by itself in the middle of the night, Silent Hill defines frightening. It is disconcer
ting, disorienting, and disturbing. It draws on images both inventive and icky to trigger our synapses and amplify the fear, and does so in service of a solid story with amazing acting. As an accomplishment it argues for Christophe Gans as a visionary as valid as Guillermo Del Toro or Terry Gilliam, highlighting his promise as a motion picture artist to watch. If you enjoy your horror on the subtle, sinister side, if the optical wonders of dead, decaying worlds stimulate your own morbid curiosities, if getting your blood coursing through your veins like natural liquid nitrogen is your idea of a good time, then take a walk through this West Virginia locale. It's guaranteed to deliver the shivers and stand as an example of what technology and talent can do when used to complement, not contradict, each other. Silent Hill is indeed sensational. It's one of the most imaginative horror films in a long time.