Lost in Translation (Comedy,Drama)

Everyone wants to be found.
Sometimes you have to go halfway around the world to come full circle
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Bob Harris is an American film actor, far past his prime. He visits Tokyo to appear in commercials, and he meets Charlotte, the young wife of a visiting photographer. Bored and weary, Bob and Charlotte make ideal if improbable traveling companions. Charlotte is looking for "her place in life," and Bob is tolerating a mediocre stateside marriage. Both separately and together, they live the experience of the American in Tokyo. Bob and Charlotte suffer both confusion and hilarity due to the cultural and language differences between themselves and the Japanese. As the relationship between Bob and Charlotte deepens, they come to the realization that their visits to Japan, and one another, must soon end. Or must they?
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The Japanese phrase "mono no aware," is a bittersweet reference to the transience of life. It came to mind as I was watching "Lost in Translation," which is sweet and sad at the same time it is sardonic and funny. Bill Murray and Scarlett Johansson play two lost souls rattling around a Tokyo hotel in the middle of the night, who fall into conversation about their marriages, their happiness and the meaning of it all.These conversations can really only be held with strangers. We all need to talk about metaphysics, but those who know us well want details and specifics; strangers allow us to operate more vaguely on a cosmic scale. When the talk occurs between two people who could plausibly have sex together, it gathers a special charge: you can only say "I feel like I've known you for years" to someone you have not known for years. Funny, how your spouse doesn't understand the bittersweet transience of life as well as a stranger encountered in a hotel bar. Especially if drinking is involved.Murray plays Bob Harris, an American movie star in Japan to make commercials for whiskey. "Do I need to worry about you, Bob?" his wife asks over the phone. "Only if you want to," he says. She sends him urgent faxes about fabric samples. Johansson plays Charlotte, whose husband John is a photographer on assignment in Tokyo. She visits a shrine and then calls a friend in America to say, "I didn't feel anything." Then she blurts out: "I don't know who I married." She's in her early 20s, Bob's in his 50s. This is the classic set-up for a May-November romance, since in the mathematics of celebrity intergenerational dating you can take five years off the man's age for every million dollars of income. But "Lost in Translation" is too smart and thoughtful to be the kind of movie where they go to bed and we're supposed to accept that as the answer. Sofia Coppola, who wrote and directed, doesn't let them off the hook that easily. They share something as personal as their feelings rather than something as generic as their genitals.These are two wonderful performances. Bill Murray has never been better. He doesn't play "Bill Murray" or any other conventional idea of a movie star, but invents Bob Harris from the inside out, as a man both happy and sad with his life -- stuck, but resigned to being stuck. Marriage is not easy for him, and his wife's voice over the phone is on autopilot. But he loves his children. They are miracles, he confesses to Charlotte. Not his children specifically, but -- children.He is very tired, he is doing the commercials for money and hates himself for it, he has a sense of humor and can be funny, but it's a bother. She has been married only a couple of years, but it's clear that her husband thinks she's in the way. Filled with his own importance, flattered that a starlet knows his name, he leaves her behind in the hotel room because -- how does it go? -- he'll be working, and she won't have a good time if she comes along with him.Ingmar Bergman's "Scenes from a Marriage" was about a couple who met years after their divorce and found themselves "in the middle of the night in a dark house somewhere in the world." That's how Bob and Charlotte seem to me. Most of the time nobody knows where they are, or cares, and their togetherness is all that keeps them both from being lost and alone. They go to karaoke bars and drug parties, pachinko parlors and, again and again, the hotel bar. They wander Tokyo, an alien metropolis to which they lack the key. They don't talk in the long literate sentences of the characters in "Before Sunrise," but in the weary understatements of those who don't have the answers.Now from all I've said you wouldn't guess the movie is also a comedy, but it is. Basically it's a comedy of manners -- Japan's, and ours. Bob Harris goes everywhere surrounded by a cloud of white-gloved women who bow and thank him for -- allowing himself to be thanked, I guess. Then there's the director of the whiskey commercial, whose movements for some reason reminded me of Cab Calloway performing "Minnie the Moocher." And the hooker sent up to Bob's room, whose approach is melodramatic and archaic; she has obviously not studied the admirable Japanese achievements in porno. And the B-movie starlet (Anna Faris), intoxicated with her own wonderfulness.In these scenes there are opportunities for Murray to turn up the heat under his comic persona. He doesn't. He always stays in character. He is always Bob Harris, who could be funny, who could be the life of the party, who could do impressions in the karaoke bar and play games with the director of the TV commercial, but doesn't -- because being funny is what he does for a living, and right now he is too tired and sad to do it for free. Except ... a little. That's where you see the fine-tuning of Murray's performance. In a subdued, fond way, he gives us wry faint comic gestures, as if to show what he could do, if he wanted to.Well, I loved this movie. I loved the way Coppola and her actors negotiated the hazards of romance and comedy, taking what little they needed and depending for the rest on the truth of the characters. I loved the way Bob and Charlotte didn't solve their problems, but felt a little better anyway. I loved the moment near the end when Bob runs after Charlotte and says something in her ear, and we're not allowed to hear it.We shouldn't be allowed to hear it. It's between them, and by this point in the movie, they've become real enough to deserve their privacy. Maybe he gave her his phone number. Or said he loved her. Or said she was a good person. Or thanked her. Or whispered, "Had we but world enough, and time..." and left her to look up the rest of it.Download here

Stargate (Action,Adventure,Fantasy,Sci-Fi)

It Will Take You A Million Light Years From Home
It will take you a million light years from home. But will it bring you back?
Sealed and buried for all time is the key to mankind's future.
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A giant structure found in the desert has studied by various scientist for nearly fifty years and are no where near discovering what it is. Until Daniel jackson, a language expert deciphers and reveals that it's a Stargate. He also discovers how to make it work. They then learn that it's some kind interstellar transport device. Now a group of soldiers led by despondent Colonel Jack O'Neill go to the planet, also accompanying them is Jackson, who said that he can reactivate the Stargate to send them back but he forgot to mention that he needs to find the symbols and they can't find anything, so it appears that they are trapped. And if that isn't enough, some aliens arrive and capture them and have nefarious plans for Earth.
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`Stargate" is the kind of movie where a soldier can be transported to "the other side of the known universe" in a whirlpool of bizarre special effects, step into a temple on an alien planet, and say, "What a rush!" It is also the kind of movie where the sun god Ra, who has harnessed the ability to traverse the universe at the speed of light, still needs slaves to build his pyramids. And where the local equivalent of a Nubian princess is sent into the chamber of the Earth visitors, to pleasure them. Don't tell me there aren't any coincidences. The movie "Ed Wood," about the worst director of all time, was made to prepare us for "Stargate." The movie opens with the title "Egypt, 1928." (Other titles say "Present Day" and "Military Installation, Creek Mountain, Colorado" - the latter, of course, with rum-dummy-dum military music.) Scientists uncover a mysterious archeological find. Flash forward to the Present Day, where Egyptologist Daniel Jackson (James Spader), looking uncannily like John Lennon, explains his theories to experts who walk out after about two sentences.Jackson, who is considered a crackpot, is obviously the man the U.S. government would choose to translate the hieroglyphics on the secret find of that 1928 expedition - a giant circle of carved stone which is a stargate, left behind by the builders of the pyramids. And, of course, Jackson and Col. Jack O'Neil (Kurt Russell) are the guys to walk through the gate, leading a squad of soldiers with automatic weapons.The journey through time and space is done with the technique, but not the style, of a similar journey in "2001." On the other side, the Earth visitors find a desert planet ruled by the god Ra, who is played by Jaye Davidson, previously known for embodying the secret of "The Crying Game." Here, dressed like a cross between a pharaoh and a Vegas showgirl, he rules a curious society in which spaceships use pyramids as landing pads, but the citizens live like desert nomads from "Lawrence of Arabia." His voice is distorted by a synthesizer so that it drops several octaves and sounds like an elevator recording with a cold.Let's say a stargate was discovered, allowing instantaneous travel across the universe and opening onto a planet that could be inhabited by humans. What would the appropriate response be? Awe? Ambition? Curiosity? Not at all. Col. O'Neil's orders: "Track down signs of any possible danger. If I find any, blow up the stargate." The movie is so lacking in any sense of wonder that it hurtles us from one end of the universe to the other, only to end in a gunfight between the good guys and the bad guys while the colonel's bomb ticks down. (Like all movie bombs, it comes equipped with a bright red digital readout device that displays the countdown while beeping.) "Stargate" is like a film school exercise. Assignment: Conceive of the weirdest plot you can think of, and reduce it as quickly as possible to action movie cliches. If possible, include sun god Ra, and make sure something gets blowed up real good.Download here

Highlander II: The Quickening (Action,Sci-Fi)

It's a kind of magic.
It's time for a new kind of magic.
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Connor Macleod and Juan Sanchez Villa-Lobos Ramirez return in this all action sequel to 1985's Highlander. The year is 2024, and MacLeod is now a mortal old man. However the world has become a very dead planet since the creation of "the shield", an artifical ozone layer - which MacLeod supervised construction of. It turns out that MacLeod was banished from a distant past with his mentor Ramirez. MacLeod's old nemesis from the past (General Katana) travels into the future to kill Connor once an for all. MacLeod calls upon the spirit of Ramirez to help him defeat Katana, before Katana kills him. MacLeod is also aided by Louise Marcus, an environmental activist that believes the ozone layer as repaired itself and "the shield" is no longer necessary.
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Backdraft (Action,Drama,Mystery,Thriller)

In that instant it can create a hero... or cover a secret.
One breath of oxygen and it explodes in a deadly rage.
Silently behind a door, it waits.
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As a child Brian McCafferty watched his firefighter father die. Years later he joins his brother, Steven in the force by becoming a rookie firefighter. There is a history of conflict between the two brothers that is heated up by working together. With this background, a series of suspicious fires are set, each made to kill a specific person. After becoming frightened at a fire, Brian pulls strings to get into an investigative office and finds that he is now not putting out the arsonist's fires, but trying to track him down.
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Ron Howard's "Backdraft" is a movie half in love with fire, a film like "Fahrenheit 451" that finds something seductive in tendrils of smoke and boiling cauldrons of flame. Never before in the movies have I seen fire portrayed by such convincing, encompassing special effects. Unfortunately, they are at the service of an unworthy plot.If the story of this movie had risen to the level of the production values, it might really have amounted to something.The movie grafts no less than three formulas onto its wonderful action scenes. We get brothers who are rivals, two broken couples trying to find love again, and a crooked politician who may be behind a series of crimes. Each of these formulas unwinds with relentless conventionality.The movie takes place in Engine Company No. 17, based in Chicago's Chinatown, where Kurt Russell is the grizzled veteran and William Baldwin is his kid brother, a rookie fresh from the fire academy. Many years before their father died as a hero in a fire, and Baldwin, then a small boy, made the cover of Life magazine as he grasped his dad's blackened helmet while tears ran down his face.The two brothers have been rivals ever since - Russell trying to prove he is the true heir to the family's tradition of heroism, Baldwin trying to prove himself as a man. These character traits have probably not been explored in the movies more than several thousand times.Russell lives the life of an untidy bachelor, in his dad's old boat, permanently aground. He and his wife, played by Rebecca DeMornay, are still really in love with one another, but have separated because she can't count on him to be there when she needs him, because firefighting comes first in his life, and she can no longer bear the fear of what could happen to him, she loves him too much to lose him, etc. DeMornay brings more intelligence to this situation than the screenplay deserves.Meanwhile, Baldwin's former girlfriend (Jennifer Jason Leigh) now works as the aide to a powerful alderman (J.T. Walsh), who is running for mayor, apparently on a platform of slashing the budget of the fire department. And a series of mysterious fires have broken out. The canny veteran fire inspector (Robert De Niro) has determined that they were set by an expert, to create a backdraft that would instantly kill their victims with such force that the fires would then blow themselves out.If you were not born yesterday, you can probably take this information and correctly predict how everything in the movie turns out. The producers did not get their money's worth from the screenplay by Gregory Widen - unless, of course, all they wanted was a clothesline from which to hang their special effects. That's all they got. We know that the director, Ron Howard, can handle more truthful and complex plots, because he has made "Parenthood" and "Cocoon." Maybe this time he deliberately chose to make a no-brainer.But then you have the scenes involving fire. They're so good they make me recommend the movie anyway, despite its brain-damaged screenplay. With special effects and pyrotechnics coordinated by Allen Hall, a batallion of stunt men and visual experts allow the camera to plunge into the center of roaring fires, so convincingly that there is never a moment's doubt that we are surrounded by flames.What is particularly impressive is the way the filmmakers are able to convince us the stars are in the middle of the action. A conventional fire scene uses doubles and stand-ins, over-the-shoulder shots and other evasive tricks, for brief scenes showing men in the middle of a fire. Then they use closeups of the actors in front of a back-projection screen filled with flames.Similar techniques may have been used here, but they are not detectable. It actually looks as if Russell, Baldwin and the others are right there in the center of blazing tenements and exploding factories, hanging by their fingernails over boiling balls of flame.I personally doubt that anyone, even an expert firefighter, could actually survive in such conditions for more than a moment or two.And Russell's exploits are especially dubious, since he prefers not to wear a mask and likes to runs bare-faced into hell, in search of heroism. But it sure plays well.Chicago is a big city with a lot of firefighters, politicians and fire inspectors, but "Backdraft" is totally conventional as an action movie, and asks us to believe that a handful of the same characters would constantly run across one another, know one another, have histories together, and so on. This limits the number of characters, and makes it extremely easy for the audience to figure out who the bad guy is, since there aren't any extra suspects to mislead us, even if he wasn't written as such a slimy scumbag that you hate him from his first appearance on screen."Backdraft" is such a technical achievement that it will probably make its money and become a hit. What I regret is that all of the expertise lavished on this movie couldn't have been put at the service of a more intelligent story about real firemen, real working conditions, real heroism, and the real craft and art of fire-fighting.Download here

Lilo & Stitch (Animation,Comedy,Drama,Family,Sci-Fi)

He's coming to our galaxy
His Name Is Stitch
Meet Stitch. This Summer, He's Coming to OUR Planet.
There's one in every family.
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In a place far, far away, illegal genetic experiment #626 is detected: Ruthless scientist Dr. Jumba Jookiba has created a strong, intelligent, nearly indestructible and aggressive being with only one known weakness: The high density of his body makes it impossible for the experiment to swim in water. The scientist is sentenced to jail by the Grand Council of the Galactic Federation. The experiment is supposed to be transported to a prison asteroid, yet manages to escape Captain Gantu, who was supposed to deliver him there. With a stolen police cruiser (the red one), the destructive being races towards a little and already doomed planet: Earth. Stranded on Hawaii, experiment #626 can't actually do much harm: water all around, no big cities and two well-equipped representatives of the Galactic Federation already following close behind to catch him again. But Dr. Jookiba and the Earth expert Pleakley never could have guessed that earth girl Lilo adopts the experiment as dog, gives him the name Stitch and actually causes an emotional development in the little beast. Her dysfunctional family, consisting only of Lilo and her sister Nani, is about to be ripped apart by social worker Cobra Bubbles. Stitch as the new family member brings quite some action into all their lifes, and after a while, not even Pleakley and Dr. Jookiba can recognize their former target. But how shall they bring the news of failure to the Grand Councilwoman without being punished?
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Mad Max 2: The Road Warrior (Action,Adventure,Sci-Fi)

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Max is travelling in a post apocalypse Australia where Gasoline is the most valuable commodity. He becomes involved in a struggle between bandits and a town that has build defenses around a small refinery. He must cross the no man's land several times to allow them to make a dash for freedom, pursued by the bandits in their vehicles.
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"Mad Max 2" [released in the United States as "The Road Warrior"] is a film of pure action, of kinetic energy organized around the barest possible bones of a plot. It has a vision of a violent future world, but it doesn't develop that vision with characters and dialogue. It would rather plunge headlong into one of the most relentlessly aggressive movies ever made. I walked out of "Mad Max 2" a little dizzy and with my ears still ringing from the roar of the sound track; I can't say I "enjoyed" the film, but I'll hardly forget it. The movie takes place at a point in the future when civilization has collapsed, anarchy and violence reign in the world, and roaming bands of marauders kill each other for the few remaining stores of gasoline. The vehicles of these future warriors are leftovers from the world we live in now. There are motorcycles and semi-trailer trucks and oil tankers that are familiar from the highways of 1982, but there are also bizarre customized racing cars, of which the most fearsome has two steel posts on its front to which enemies can be strapped (if the car crashes, the enemies are the first to die).The road warriors of the title take their costumes and codes of conduct from a rummage sale of legends, myths, and genres: They look and act like Hell's Angels, samurai warriors, kamikaze pilots, street-gang members, cowboys, cops, and race drivers. They speak hardly at all; the movie's hero, Max, has perhaps two hundred words. Max is played by Mel Gibson, an Australian actor who starred in "Gallipoli." Before that, he made "Mad Max" for the makers of "Mad Max 2," and that film was a low-budget forerunner to this extravaganza of action and violence. Max's role in "Mad Max 2" is to behave something like a heroic cowboy might have in a classic Western. He happens upon a small band of people who are trying to protect their supplies of gasoline from the attacks of warriors who have them surrounded. Max volunteers to drive a tanker full of gasoline through the surrounding warriors and take it a few hundred miles to the coast, where they all hope to find safety. After this premise is established with a great deal of symbolism, ritual, and violence (and so few words that sometimes we have to guess what's happening), the movie arrives at its true guts. The set piece in "Mad Max 2" is an unbelievably well-sustained chase sequence that lasts for the last third of the film, as Max and his semi-trailer run a gauntlet of everything the savages can throw at them.The director of "Mad Max 2," George Miller, compares this chase sequence to Buster Keaton's "The General," and I can see what he means. Although "The General" is comedic, it's also very exciting, as Keaton, playing the engineer of a speeding locomotive, runs an endless series of variations on the basic possibilities of two trains and several sets of railroad tracks. In "Mad Max 2," there is basically a truck and a road. The pursuers and defenders have various kinds of cars and trucks to chase or defend the main truck, and the whole chase proceeds at breakneck speed as quasi-gladiators leap through the air from one racing truck to another, more often than not being crushed beneath the wheels. The special effects and stunts in this movie are spectacular; "Mad Max 2" goes on a short list with "Bullitt," "The French Connection," and the truck chase in "Raiders of the Lost Ark" as among the great chase films of modern years.What is the point of the movie? Everyone is free to interpret the action, I suppose, but I prefer to avoid thinking about the implications of gasoline shortages and the collapse of Western civilization, and to experience the movie instead as pure sensation. The filmmakers have imagined a fictional world. It operates according to its special rules and values, and we experience it. The experience is frightening, sometimes disgusting, and (if the truth be told) exhilarating. This is very skillful filmmaking, and "Mad Max 2" is a movie like no other.Download here

Bad Santa (Comedy,Crime)

Get Naughty this Holiday Season.
He doesn't care if you're naughty or nice.
He's very naughty . . . and not very nice. [DVD]
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"Bad Santa" is the story of two conmen who go on a road trip to malls dressed as Santa and his elf. Rather than spreading good cheer, the duo's motive is to rob each establishment, a strategy that becomes complicated when they encounter an 8-year-old who teaches them the true meaning of Christmas.
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The kid gives Santa a carved wooden pickle as a Christmas present."How come it's brown?" Santa asks. "Why didn't you paint it green?""It isn't painted," the kid says. "That's blood from when I cut my hand while I was making it for you."Santa is a depressed, alcoholic safecracker. The kid is not one of your cute movie kids, but an intense and needy stalker; think of Thomas the Tank Engine as a member of the Addams Family. Oh, and there's an elf, too, named Marcus. The elf is an angry dwarf who has been working with Santa for eight years, cracking the safe in a different department store every Christmas. The elf is fed up. Santa gets drunk on the job, he's boinking customers in the Plus Sizes dressing room, and whether the children throw up on Santa or he throws up on them is a toss-up, no pun intended."Bad Santa" is a demented, twisted, unreasonably funny work of comic kamikaze style, starring Billy Bob Thornton as Santa in a performance that's defiantly uncouth. His character is named Willie T. Soke; W.C. Fields would have liked that. He's a foul-mouthed, unkempt, drunken louse at the beginning of the movie and sticks to that theme all the way through. You expect a happy ending, but the ending is happy in the same sense that a man's doctors tell him he lost his legs but they were able to save his shoes.There are certain unwritten parameters governing mainstream American movies, and "Bad Santa" violates all of them. When was the last time you saw a movie Santa kicking a department store reindeer to pieces? Or using the f-word more than Eddie Griffin? Or finding a girlfriend who makes him wear his little red hat in bed because she has a Santa fetish? And for that matter, when was the last movie where a loser Santa meets a little kid, and the kid doesn't redeem the loser with his sweetness and simplicity, but attaches himself like those leeches on Bogart in "The African Queen"?Movie critics have been accused of praising weirdo movies because we are bored by movies that seem the same. There is some justice in that. But I didn't like this movie merely because it was weird and different; I liked it because it makes no compromises and takes no prisoners. And because it is funny.The director is Terry Zwigoff. He made the great documentary "Crumb," about R. Crumb, the cartoonist who is a devoted misanthrope. (Crumb drew the "American Splendor" comic books about Harvey Pekar, his equal in misanthropy.) Zwigoff also directed the quirky "Ghost World," with its unlikely romantic alliance between a teenage girl (Thora Birch) and a sour 40-ish recluse (Steve Buscemi). This is a director who makes a specialty of bitter anti-social oddballs. That he does it in comedy takes a more guts than doing it in tragedy.Zwigoff worked from an original screenplay by John Requa and Glenn Ficarra. And what is their track record, you are wondering? They co-wrote "Cats & Dogs" (2001), with its parachuting ninja cats, and their next movie is "Cats & Dogs 2: Tinkle's' Revenge." Maybe many screenwriters who do sweet PG-rated movies like "Cats & Dogs" have a script like "Bad Santa" in the bottom desk drawer, perhaps in a lead-lined box.When Billy Bob Thornton got the script, he must have read it and decided it would be career suicide. Then he put the script to his head and pulled the trigger. For him to play Hamlet would take nerve; for him to play Willie T. Soke took heroism. Wandering through the final stages of alcoholism, Willie functions only because of the determination of Marcus, who is played by Tony Cox as a crook who considers stealing to be a job and straps on his elf ears every morning to go to work.Willie and Marcus always use the same MO: They use the Santa gig to get into the store, stay after closing and crack the safe. Alas, this year the store's security chief (Bernie Mac, also ticked off most of the time) is wise to their plan and wants a cut. Because it's in his interest to keep Bad Santa in the store, he doesn't report little incidents like the reindeer-kicking to the store manager, played by the late John Ritter.Willie becomes distracted by the arrival in his life of Sue (Lauren Graham), the Santa fetishist, who picks him up at a bar. Then there's the kid (Brett Kelly), who sits on his lap, tells him he isn't Santa Claus and then doggedly insists on treating him as if he is. The kid is desperately lonely because his parents are away for reasons we understand better than he does, and he's being looked after by his comatose grandmother (Cloris Leachman). I know, I know; just last week I disapproved of the cruel treatment of the comatose baby-sitter, Mrs. Kwan, in "The Cat in the Hat," and here I am approving of the way they treat the kid's grandmother in "Bad Santa." The difference is (1) This film is funny and that film was not, and (2) That was intended for family audiences, and this one is not.Is it ever not. I imagine a few unsuspecting families will wander into it, despite the "R" rating, and I picture terrified kids running screaming down the aisles. What I can't picture is, who will attend this movie? Anybody? Movies like this are a test of taste. If you understand why "Kill Bill" is a good movie and "The Texas Chainsaw Massacre" is not, and "Bad Santa" is a good movie and "The Cat in the Hat" is not, then you have freed yourself from the belief that a movie's quality is determined by its subject matter. You instinctively understand that a movie is not about what it is about, but about how it is about it. You qualify for "Bad Santa."Download here

Starship Troopers (Action,Adventure,Sci-Fi,Thriller)

A new kind of enemy. A new kind of war.
Forget the insecticide, bring on the nukes!
In Every age their is a cause worth fighting for, but in the future the greatest threat to our survival will not be man at all. Now the youth of tomorrow must travel across the stars to face an enemy more devastating then any ever imagined.
Mankind just became an endangered species
Prepare for Battle
The only good bug is a dead bug
The paratroopers of the future are here... and their enemies aren't HUMAN
They Came to Our Planet, They destroyed our cities, But on November 7th, They'll learn, They messed, With the wrong species.
This Fall, Tristar Pictures takes you to the front lines of the next frontier.
When you battle 6 trillion enemies that will eat you alive, there are only two rules... EVERYONE FIGHTS. NO ONE QUITS.
You can't step on these ones
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Set on the future earth, Johnny rico is a young student dating a girl named Carmen. When Carmen decides to join the military in order to become a class citizen (citizenship is only achieved through serving your country), Johnny follows and joins as well. He soon realizes that he joined for the wrong reasons but just as he is about to quit, an asteroid that originated from the orbit of planet "klendathu" hits Buenos Aires (his home town) and kills his family. Johnny and his fellow troopers set out to destroy the planet's inhabitants: a type of deadly and very large scaled space bugs. Through a seemingly ordinary action flick, director paul verhoeven creates a subtle anti-war theme, that shows us a fascist and military world far more frightening than WW2's Germany, Italy or Russia, the kind of world that is actually functioning.
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``Starship Troopers'' is the most violent kiddie movie ever made. I call it a kiddie movie not to be insulting, but to be accurate: Its action, characters and values are pitched at 11-year-old science-fiction fans. That makes it true to its source. It's based on a novel for juveniles by Robert A. Heinlein. I read it to the point of memorization when I was in grade school. I have improved since then, but the story has not.The premise: Early in the next millennium, mankind is engaged in a war for survival with the Bugs, a vicious race of giant insects that colonize the galaxy by hurling their spores into space. If you seek their monument, do not look around you: Bugs have no buildings, no technology, no clothes, nothing but the ability to attack, fight, kill and propagate. They exist not as an alien civilization but as pop-up enemies in a space war.Human society recruits starship troopers to fight the Bug. Their method is to machine-gun them to death. This does not work very well. Three or four troopers will fire thousands of rounds into a Bug, which like the Energizer Bunny just keeps on comin'. Grenades work better, but I guess the troopers haven't twigged to that. You'd think a human race capable of interstellar travel might have developed an effective insecticide, but no.It doesn't really matter, since the Bugs aren't important except as props for the interminable action scenes, and as an enemy to justify the film's quasi-fascist militarism. Heinlein was of course a right-wing saberrattler, but a charming and intelligent one who wrote some of the best science fiction ever. ``Starship Troopers'' proposes a society in which citizenship is earned through military service, and values are learned on the battlefield.Heinlein intended his story for young boys, but wrote it more or less seriously. The one redeeming merit for director Paul Verhoeven's film is that by remaining faithful to Heinlein's material and period, it adds an element of sly satire. This is like the squarest but most technically advanced sci-fi movie of the 1950s, a film in which the sets and costumes look like a cross between Buck Rogers and the Archie comic books, and the characters look like they stepped out of Pepsodent ads.The film's narration is handled by a futuristic version of the TV news, crossed with the Web. After every breathless story, the cursor blinks while we're asked, ``Want to know more?'' Yes, I did. I was particularly intrigued by the way the Bugs had evolved organic launching pods that could spit their spores into space, and could also fire big globs of unidentified fiery matter at attacking space ships. Since they have no technology, these abilities must have evolved along Darwinian lines; to say they severely test the theory of evolution is putting it mildly.On the human side, we follow the adventures of a group of high-school friends from Buenos Aires. Johnny (Casper Van Dien) has a crush on Carmen (Denise Richards), but she likes the way Zander (Patrick Muldoon) looks in uniform. When she signs up to become a starship trooper, so does Johnny. They go through basic training led by an officer of the take-no-prisoners school (Michael Ironside) and then they're sent to fight the Bug. Until late in the movie, when things really get grim, Carmen wears a big wide bright smile in every single scene, as if posing for the cover of the novel. (Indeed, the whole look of the production design seems inspired by covers of the pulp space opera mags like Amazing Stories).The action sequences are heavily laden with special effects, but curiously joyless. We get the idea right away: Bugs will jump up, troopers will fire countless rounds at them, the Bugs will impale troopers with their spiny giant legs, and finally dissolve in a spray of goo. Later there are refinements, like firebreathing beetles, flying insects, and giant Bugs that erupt from the earth. All very elaborate, but the Bugs are not interesting in the way, say, that the villains in the ``Alien'' pictures were. Even their planets are boring; Bugs live on ugly rock worlds with no other living species, raising the question of what they eat.Discussing the science of ``Starship Troopers'' is beside the point. Paul Verhoeven is facing in the other direction. He wants to depict the world of the future as it might have been visualized in the mind of a kid reading Heinlein in 1956. He faithfully represents Heinlein's militarism, his Big Brother state, and a value system in which the highest good is to kill a friend before the Bugs can eat him. The underlying ideas are the most interesting aspect of the film.What's lacking is exhilaration and sheer entertainment. Unlike the ``Star Wars'' movies, which embraced a joyous vision and great comic invention, ``Starship Troopers'' doesn't resonate. It's one-dimensional. We smile at the satirical asides, but where's the warmth of human nature? The spark of genius or rebellion? If ``Star Wars'' is humanist, ``Starship Troopers'' is totalitarian.Watching a film that largely consists of interchangeable characters firing machine guns at computer-generated Bugs, I was reminded of the experience of my friend McHugh. After obtaining his degree from Indiana University, he spent the summer in the employ of Acme Bug Control in Bloomington, Ind. One hot summer day, while he was spraying insecticide under a home, a trap door opened above his head, and a housewife offered him a glass of lemonade. He crawled up, filthy and sweaty, and as he drank the lemonade, the woman told her son, ``Now, Jimmy--you study your books, or you'll end up just like him!'' I wanted to tell the troopers the same thing.Download here

U-571 (Action,Drama,War)

Heroes are ordinary men who do extraordinary things in extraordinary times.
You won't come up for air until it's over!
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In the midst of World War II, the battle below the seas rages. The Nazi's have the upper edge as the Allies are unable to crack their war codes. That is, until a wrecked U-boat sends out an SOS signal, and the Allies realise this is their chance to seize the 'enigma coding machine'. But masquerading as Nazi's and taking over the U-boat is the smallest of their problems. The action really begins when they get stranded on the U-boat.
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"U-571" is a clever wind-up toy of a movie, almost a trailer for a video game. Compared to "Das Boot" or "The Hunt for Red October," it's thin soup. The characters are perfunctory, the action is recycled straight out of standard submarine formulas, and there is one shot where a man is supposed to be drowning and you can just about see he's standing on the bottom of the studio water tank.To some degree movies like this always work, at least on a dumb action level. The German destroyer is overhead, dropping depth charges, and the crew waits in hushed suspense while the underwater explosions grow nearer. We're all sweating along with them. But hold on a minute. We saw the Nazis rolling the depth charges overboard, and they were evenly spaced. As the first ones explode at a distance, there are several seconds between each one. Then they get closer. And when the charges are right on top of the sub, they explode one right after another, like a string of firecrackers--dozens of them, as leaks spring and water gushes in and lights blink and the surround sound rocks the theater.At a moment like this, I shouldn't be thinking about the special effects. But I am. They call attention to themselves. They say the filmmakers have made a conscious decision to abandon plausibility and put on a show for the kids. And make no mistake: This is a movie for action-oriented kids. "Das Boot" and "The Hunt for Red October" were about military professionals whose personalities were crucial to the plot. The story of "U-571" is the flimsiest excuse for a fabricated action payoff. Submarine service veterans in the audience are going to be laughing their heads off.Matthew McConaughey stars as Lt. Tyler, an ambitious young man who thinks he's ready for his first command. Not so fast, says Lt. Cmdr. Dahlgren (Bill Paxton). He didn't recommend his second-in-command because he thinks he's not there yet: Not prepared, for example, to sacrifice the lives of some men to save others, or the mission. This info is imparted at one of those obligatory movie dance parties at which all the Navy guys look handsome in white dress uniforms, just before they get an emergency call back to the boat.The mission: A German U-boat is disabled in the mid-Atlantic. On board is the secret Enigma machine, used to cipher messages. The unbreakable Enigma code allows the Nazis to control the shipping lanes. The mission of Dahlgren, Tyler and their men: Disguise their U.S. sub as a Nazi vessel, get to the other sub before the German rescuers can, impersonate Germans, capture the sub with a boarding party, grab Enigma and sink the sub so the rescuers won't suspect what happened."But we're not Marine fighting men," protests one of the sailors. "Neither is the other crew," says a Marine on board, who has conveyed these instructions. "And I'll train your men." Uh, huh. In less than a week? There are no scenes of training, and I'm not sure what happened to the Marine.The details of the confrontation with the Nazi sub I will not reveal. Of course it goes without saying that Tyler gets a chance to take command and see if he has what it takes to sacrifice lives in order to save his men and his mission, etc. If you remember the vivid personalities of the sub crews in "Das Boot" and "Red October," you're going to be keenly aware that no one in this movie seems like much of an individual. When they do have dialogue, it's functional, spare and aimed at the plot. Even Harvey Keitel, as the Chief, is reduced to barking out declarative sentences.The crew members seem awfully young, awfully green, awfully fearful, and so headstrong, they border on mutiny. There's a scene where the (disguised) U.S. sub is checked out by a German reconnaissance plane, and a young sailor on the bridge panics. He's sure the plane is going to strafe them and orders the man on the deck machine gun to fire at it. His superior officer orders the gunner to stand fast. The kid screams, "Fire! Fire!" As the plane comes closer, the officer and the kid are both shouting their orders at the gunner. Without actually consulting Navy regulations, my best guess is that kid should be court-martialed.You can enjoy "U-571" as a big, dumb war movie without a brain in its head. But that doesn't stop it from looking cheesy. Producers Dino and Martha De Laurentiis and director Jonathan Mostow ("Breakdown") have counted on fast action to distract from the plausibility of most of the scenes at sea (especially shots of the raft boarding party). Inside the sub, they have the usual cliches: The sub dives to beyond its rated depth, metal plates creak and bolt heads come loose under the pressure."U-571" can't be blamed for one story element that's standard in all sub movies: The subs can be hammered, battered, shelled, depth-bombed and squeezed by pressure, and have leaks, fires, shattered gauges, ruptures, broken air hoses, weak batteries and inoperable diesel engines--but in the heat of action, everything more or less somehow works. Better than the screenplay, anyway.In case you're wondering, the German sub on display at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago is U-505, and it was boarded and captured not by submariners, but by sailors from the USS Pillsbury, part of the escort group of the carrier USS Guadalcanal. No Enigma machine was involved. That was in 1944. An Enigma machine was obtained on May 9, 1941, when HMS Bulldog captured U-110. On Aug. 23, 1941, U-570 was captured by British planes and ships, without Enigma. This fictional movie about a fictional U.S. submarine mission is followed by a mention in the end credits of those actual British missions. Oh, the British deciphered the Enigma code, too. Come to think of it, they pretty much did everything in real life that the Americans do in this movie.Download here

Hot Shots! Part Deux (Action,Comedy,War)

Grab your guns! It's Hot Shots Part Deux!
Just Deux it.
The mother of all sequels!
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Topper Harley has retired again, now living in a budhist monastery, and again he's asked to lead a special operation into Iraq, to rescue the guys who were sent to rescue the guys who were sent to rescue some prisoners left behind after the Persian Gulf War, where he will meet again with his beloved Ramada while he tries to uncover who the traitor is and kill as many Iraqis as he can.
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There is a love scene in "Hot Shots, Part Deux" in which the hero, a dashing Navy commando played by Charlie Sheen, is dining with a beautiful espionage expert played by Valeria Golino. They are having spaghetti in an Italian restaurant, and somehow they each get one end of a log strand of pasta into their mouths, and suck it in until their faces come closer, and closer . . . and they kiss.This is, of course, a famous shot stolen from "Lady and the Tramp." So is the next shot, in which Sheen lovingly uses his nose to push a meatball in the direction of his lady love. One of the pleasures of watching a spoof like this is to spot the references; it's like a quiz on pop art.The Golina character is named Ramada Rodham Hayman. The other principal female character in the movie, played by Brenda Bakke, is named Michelle Rodham Hudleston. So it goes. The movie is directed by Jim Abrahams, who was one of the perpetrators of "Airplane!" (1980), the satirical parody that spawned this and many other films, including "Top Secret!" "The Naked Gun" and the original "Hot Shots!" The current film takes "Rambo III" as its starting place, with lots of loving little touches. The Sheen character, patterned on the Stallone original, is a pumped-up man of few words, who at the beginning of the film has left his life of action and violence to live a life of contemplation with monks in a remote Eastern land. He is tracked down there by his old commanding officer, played by Richard Crenna in a repeat of his own role in "Rambo III." Sheen wants to stay where he is, until Crenna tells him a story that makes him realize he is needed for a dangerous mission in the Middle East.The story is "Goldilocks and the Three Bears." Sheen, named Topper Harley in the movie, is needed to rescue Americans who were sent in to rescue other Americans who were sent in to rescue other Americans. Why is his participation essential? "You are the best of what we have left!" In the unnamed Arab country, we see a Saddam Hussein look-alike living a life of blissful domesticity, interrupted by moments of mayhem and torture. And we join Sheen on the mission, which is constructed out of countless jokes based on the "Rambo" movies and other commando epics.There are also the usual in-jokes. Proceeding down an Asian river in a gunboat, Sheen passes another boat headed in the opposite direction. On it is his father, Martin Sheen, who starred, of course, in "Apocalypse Now," and is apparently still inside that movie as we see him. "Loved you in `Wall Street'," the father shouts, as the boats pass.Movies like this are more or less impervious to the depredations of movie critics. Either you laugh, or you don't. I laughed. Will this genre ever run out of steam? "Hot Shots Part Deux" doesn't have the high-voltage nonstop comedy of "Airplane!" and "Top Secret!," still the best of their kind, and it isn't as hard on Stallone as it could have been. But as long as the Hollywood assembly lines keep groaning, there will probably be a function for these corrective measures.Download here

Hitch (Comedy,Romance)

The cure for the common man.
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In New York, Alex Hitchen (Will Smith) is a kind of sentimental advisor, teaching each client how to date the woman of his dream. His present case is helping the clumsy Albert (Kevin James) to date the wealthy and powerful Allegra Cole (Amber Valletta). Meanwhile, Hitch has a crush on the gossip columnist Sara (Eva Mendes), who was assigned to write about Allegra. When the best girlfriend of Sara has a love disillusion with a man that Sara thinks that is a client of Hitch, she plots a revenge against Hitch and the misunderstanding leads the two couples to a conflictive situation.
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Ninety percent of what you're saying isn't coming out of your mouth.So says the Date Doctor. You communicate with your body language, your posture, your mood, your attitude about yourself. Nothing a guy can say will impress a woman nearly as much as the nonverbal messages she receives. So stand up straight, Fat Albert, and stop slumping around as if your tummy can be hidden in the shadows.



"Hitch" is a romantic comedy, timed for Valentine's Day, starring Will Smith as Alex "Hitch" Hitchens, professional dating consultant. In the cutthroat world of New York romance, where fates are decided in an instant, your average Lonely Guy needs skilled counseling. Hitch is your man. He understands women: how to get their attention, how to seem heroic in their eyes, what to tell them and what definitely not to tell them.



Some of his strategies would be right at home in a silent comedy, such as an opening Meet Cute in which a babe's beloved pet dog is apparently saved from instant death by a guy who wants to get to know her. Others are more subtle, involving inside intelligence so that you seem able to read her mind. Then there are the grand dramatic gestures.



For Hitch's client Albert (Kevin James), the romantic quarry seems forever beyond his reach. He is in love with the rich, powerful and beautiful Allegra (Amber Valletta), and surely she would not date a shy and pudgy accountant -- would she? But at a board meeting he is outraged by investment advice she is being given, and in a Grand Dramatic, etc., he resigns. That gets her attention. She's touched that the guy would care so much.



Yes, but how can Albert follow up? He's one of those guys whose shirts seem to come back from the laundry with the mustard already on them. Hitch works desperately to smooth him out, clean him up and give him some class. Meanwhile, his own romantic life is in a shambles. He's fallen in love with a really hot babe who is also smart and cynical. This is Sara (Eva Mendes), who writes for a gossip column not a million miles apart from Page Six. None of his advice seems to work for Hitch, maybe because in the game of romantic chess Sara can see more moves ahead, maybe because -- can this be possible? -- he is losing his cool by trying too hard.



"Hitch," you will have perceived, is not a great cinematic breakthrough. It depends for its appeal on the performances, and gets a certain undeserved mileage because of the likability of Will Smith and Kevin James, who are both seen with sympathy. Allegra (Valletta) is a sweetheart, too, and not as unapoproachable as she seems. But Sara is a real challenge, played by Eva Mendes as the kind of woman who seems more desireable the more she seems unattainable.



There is a purpose for a movie like "Hitch," and that purpose is to supply a pleasant and undemanding romantic comedy that you can rent next Valentine's Day. It's not a first-run destination, especially with "Bride and Prejudice" and "The Wedding Date" playing in the same multiplex. It's not that I dislike it; it's that it just doesn't seem entirely necessary.



The premise is intriguing, and for a time it seems that the Date Doctor may indeed know things about women that most men in the movies are not allowed to know, but the third act goes on autopilot just when the Doctor should be in.Download here

Lilo & Stitch (Animation,Comedy,Drama,Family,Sci-Fi)

He's coming to our galaxy
His Name Is Stitch
Meet Stitch. This Summer, He's Coming to OUR Planet.
There's one in every family.
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In a place far, far away, illegal genetic experiment #626 is detected: Ruthless scientist Dr. Jumba Jookiba has created a strong, intelligent, nearly indestructible and aggressive being with only one known weakness: The high density of his body makes it impossible for the experiment to swim in water. The scientist is sentenced to jail by the Grand Council of the Galactic Federation. The experiment is supposed to be transported to a prison asteroid, yet manages to escape Captain Gantu, who was supposed to deliver him there. With a stolen police cruiser (the red one), the destructive being races towards a little and already doomed planet: Earth. Stranded on Hawaii, experiment #626 can't actually do much harm: water all around, no big cities and two well-equipped representatives of the Galactic Federation already following close behind to catch him again. But Dr. Jookiba and the Earth expert Pleakley never could have guessed that earth girl Lilo adopts the experiment as dog, gives him the name Stitch and actually causes an emotional development in the little beast. Her dysfunctional family, consisting only of Lilo and her sister Nani, is about to be ripped apart by social worker Cobra Bubbles. Stitch as the new family member brings quite some action into all their lifes, and after a while, not even Pleakley and Dr. Jookiba can recognize their former target. But how shall they bring the news of failure to the Grand Councilwoman without being punished?
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Forever Lulu (Comedy,Romance)

First Love Lasts Forever
Two Ex-Lovers. One Open Road.
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Lulu McAfee lives in a San Francisco home for mentally-ill adults. In June 1999, she bolts for L.A. and contacts Ben Clifton, an old flame, now unhappily writing for TV and unhappily married to a psychiatrist, Claire. Ben is ready to call Lulu's doctor when she tells him they have a son, born after she became ill and their affair ended. He calls Claire to tell her he's driving Lulu to Wisconsin to meet the boy on his 16th birthday, a visit Lulu claims is arranged. On the drive, Lulu tries to rekindle the affair and restart Ben's idealism. Meanwhile, Claire boards a plane to Madison to watch her marriage collapse. Is there really a son? What emotional landmines will the trip set off?
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Stormbreaker (Action,Adventure,Family)

Rule the school. Save the world.
You're never too young to dare.
You're never too young to die.
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Based on the first of the best-selling series of Alex Rider novels by Anthony Horowitz, STORMBREAKER introduces the reluctant teenage super-spy to cinema audiences. After the death of his uncle, the 14-year-old hero is forced by the Special OperationsDivision of Britain's secret intelligence service, MI6, for a mission which will save millions of lives.
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What Dreams May Come (Drama,Fantasy,Romance)

After life there is more. The end is just the beginning.
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Soul mates Chris ('Robin Williams (I)' (qv)) and Annie ('Annabella Sciorra' (qv)) couldn't be happier, having married each other and had two wonderful children. Unforutnately, tragedy strikes when they lose them both in a car accident, and then again for Annie many years later when Chris is killed in another accident. What Chris finds is a Paradise unlike anything he ever imagined, where he is guided by Albert ('Cuba Gooding Jr.' (qv)), the first doctor he interned under and is helped to see his children once again. Unfortunately, when Annie takes her life in despair, she does not venture to the same plane of existence. Taking it upon himself to rescue her, Chris ventures into the pit of Hell with Albert and a Tracker ('Max von Sydow' (qv)) to save his wife from the damnation she doesn't even know she is forcing on herself. This is a beautiful story that reminds us that love is stronger than death.
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Vincent Ward's ``What Dreams May Come'' is so breathtaking, so beautiful, so bold in its imagination, that it's a surprise at the end to find it doesn't finally deliver. It takes us to the emotional brink but it doesn't push us over. It ends on a curiously unconvincing note--a conventional resolution in a movie that for most of its length has been daring and visionary.So, yes, I have my disappointments with it. But I would not want them to discourage you from seeing it, because this is a film that even in its imperfect form shows how movies can imagine the unknown, can lead our imaginations into wonderful places. And it contains heartbreakingly effective performances by Robin Williams and Annabella Sciorra. The movie is so good it shows us how it could have been better: It seems headed for a great leap, we can sense it coming, and then it settles. If Hollywood is determined to short-change us with an obligatory happy ending, then it shouldn't torment us with a movie that deserves better.I hesitate to reveal too many secrets, but the film's set-up has been so thoroughly publicized that by now you probably already know certain key facts. Save the review until later if you don't.The facts you know from the ads and the trailers are that Chris and Annie (Williams and Sciorra) have a Cute Meet when their boats collide on a Swiss lake. They marry. They have two children. They are happy. Then both of the children are killed in an accident. Annie has a breakdown, Chris nurses her through, art works as therapy, they are somehow patching their lives back together--and then Chris is killed.The film follows him into the next world, and creates it with visuals that seem borrowed from his own memories and imagination. In one sequence that is among the most visually exciting I have ever seen, he occupies a landscape that is a painting, and as he plucks a flower it turns to oil paint in his hand. Other parts of this world seem cheerfully assembled from the storage rooms of images we keep in our minds: Renaissance art, the pre-Raphaelites, greeting cards, angel kitsch (cherubs float past on plump clouds). Later, when Chris ventures into hell, the images are darker and more fearsome--Bosch crossed with Dali.There is a guide in the next world named Albert (Cuba Gooding Jr.). Is he all that he seems? Now we have ventured beyond the information in the ads, and I will be more circumspect. The story, inspired by a novel by Richard Matheson, is founded on the assumption that heaven exists in a state of flux, that its inhabitants assume identities that please themselves, or us; that having been bound within one identity during life, we are set free. Heaven, in one sense, means becoming who you want to be.And hell? ``Hell is for those who don't know they're dead,'' says Albert. Or they know they're dead but don't know what the deal is. Or they won't go along with the deal. Many of those in hell are guilty of the greatest sin against God, which is despair: They believe they are beyond hope.After the death of her children and husband, Annie has despaired, killed herself and gone to hell. Chris wants to find her: ``I'm her soul mate.'' Albert says that's not possible: ``Nothing will make her recognize you.'' But he acts as a guide, and Chris ventures into hell, which, like heaven, has been realized with a visual intensity and originality that is astonishing. In this film, the road to hell is paved, not with good intentions, but with the faces of the damned, bitter and complaining (the face and voice of Chris's father are played by the German director Werner Herzog).What happens then, what happens throughout the film, is like nothing you have seen before. Vincent Ward is a New Zealand director whose works have not always reached a large audience, but have always dared for big ideas and bold visuals to express them. He made ``The Navigator'' (1988), about medieval Englishmen who tunnel to escape the plague--and emerge in the present. And then, in 1993, he made the great ``Map of the Human Heart,'' about the odyssey of an Eskimo boy from Alaska in the 1930s to London in the war, and from a great love affair to high adventure.``What Dreams May Come'' ends, like ``The Navigator,'' with the characters seeking their destiny in a cathedral--but this one, like many of the film's images, is like none you have seen before. It is upside-down, the great vaulted ceilings providing a floor and a landscape. Since I have mentioned Herzog, I might as well quote his belief that our century is ``starving for great images.'' This film provides them, and also provides quiet moments of winsome human nature, as when a character played by Rosalind Chow explains why she appears to be an Asian flight attendant, and when another, played by Max Von Sydow, explains the rules of the game as he understands them.Robin Williams somehow has a quality that makes him seem at home in imaginary universes. Remember him in ``Popeye,'' ``The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,'' ``Toys,'' ``Jumanji,'' and in his animated incarnation in ``Aladdin.'' There is a muscular reality about him, despite his mercurial wit, that anchors him and makes the fantastic images around him seem almost plausible. He is good, too, at emotion: He brings us along with him. In Annabella Sciorra, he has a co-star whose own character is deeply unhappy and yet touching; her sin of despair was committed, we believe, because she loved so much and was so happy she cannot exist in the absence of those feelings.And yet, as I've suggested, the movie somehow gathers all these threads and its triumphant art direction and special effects, and then doesn't get across the finish line with them. I walked out of the theater sensing that I should have felt more, that an opportunity had been lost. ``What Dreams May Come'' takes us too far and risks too much to turn conventional at the end. It could have been better. It could perhaps have been the best film of the year. Whatever its shortcomings, it is a film to treasure.Download here

Bread and Roses (Drama)

The Balance Of Power Is About To Change.
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Maya is a quick-witted young woman who comes over the Mexican border without papers and makes her way to the LA home of her older sister Rosa. Rosa gets Maya a job as a janitor: a non-union janitorial service has the contract, the foul-mouthed supervisor can fire workers on a whim, and the service-workers' union has assigned organizer Sam Shapiro to bring its "justice for janitors" campaign to the building. Sam finds Maya a willing listener, she's also attracted to him. Rosa resists, she has an ailing husband to consider. The workers try for public support; management intimidates workers to divide and conquer. Rosa and Maya as well as workers and management may be set to collide.
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If you work in a building with janitors, how much do they get paid? Is it enough to decently support a family? Have you given any thought to the question? I haven't. Ken Loach's "Bread and Roses," a drama about a janitorial strike in Los Angeles, made me think. It suggests that the people who manage your building pay the janitors as little as they possibly can, and pass the savings on to your employers. Here is a statistic: In 1982, union janitors in Los Angeles were paid $8.50 an hour. In 1999, non-union janitors were paid $5.75. Do they have a health plan? Don't make me laugh.Under the trickle-down theory, if the boss makes millions and the janitor makes $5.75, in the long run we all benefit. How does this work in practice? A simple illustration will suffice. When both parents have to moonlight in underpaid jobs, that gives their children an opportunity to get in trouble on the streets, leading to arrests, convictions and millions of dollars pumped into the economy through the construction of new prisons and salaries for their guards. Right now America has a larger percentage of its population in prison than any other Western nation, but that is not good enough."Bread and Roses" tells its story through the eyes of Maya (Pilar Padilla), an illegal immigrant newly arrived in Los Angeles. Her sister Rosa (Elpidia Carrillo) gets her a job in a sleazy bar, but Maya is a good girl and doesn't like it: "I want to work with you cleaning the offices." Rosa gets Maya hired in a high-rise, where she has to kick back her first month's salary. Maya meets Sam (Adrien Brody), an organizer for the janitors' union, who is trying to sign up the workers in the building.For some of my readers, the key words in the previous paragraph are "illegal immigrant." Why, they are thinking, should such a person have a job in America at all, let alone complain about the low wages? This attitude is admirable in its idealism, but overlooks the fact that the economy depends on workers who will accept substandard wages. The man who hires Maya certainly knows she is illegal. That man's boss, as they say, "knows but doesn't know." The man above him doesn't know and doesn't care--he's only interested in delivering janitorial services to the building management at the lowest possible price.If the janitors were paid a decent wage plus health benefits, there would be no shortage of American citizens to take the jobs, so it is better this way, especially since the illegal workers have no rights and are easily intimidated. If the Mexican border were sealed, Los Angeles would be a city without janitors, gardeners, car washes and maids. And in Michigan, who would pick the fruit? Sam the organizer encourages Maya and her friends to organize for the union within the building--secretly, of course. Rosa, the sister, is not so enthusiastic: "We could all lose our jobs, and then who would pay the bills?" There is a juicy scene where the striking janitors invade the house-warming of a big Hollywood agency that has just taken offices in the building. Do the star clients know their agents are exploiting the workers? (Credit here to Ron Perlman and other actors who play recognizable extras.) Sam is played by Brody as a complex character, filled with anger but also with a streak of zany street comedian. He's trapped in the middle because the union's bosses, like all bosses, are basically establishment. When his boss argues that a strike might cost the union too much money, Sam snaps back: "No more $40 million to give the Democrats." Sam and Maya are drawn to each other, and there is a shy little love scene, but Ken Loach is not the kind of director to confuse his real story with the love story; he knows that no matter what happens between Sam and Maya, the janitors are still underpaid and the strike is still dangerous. That same stubborn integrity prevents him from giving the movie a conventional happy ending. Just think. If he had directed "Pearl Harbor," it would have ended sadly.Loach, from Britain, is left wing but realistic. The best scene in "Bread and Roses" argues against Sam, Maya and the union. It is a searing speech by Rosa, delivered by Carrillo with such force and shaming truth that it could not have been denied the Oscar--if the academy voters in their well-cleaned buildings ever saw movies like this. Rosa slices through Maya's idealism with hard truths, telling her sister that she worked as a prostitute to pay for Maya's education, and indeed slept with the supervisor to get Rosa her job. "I've been whoring all my life, and I'm tired," she says. Now she has a sick husband and kids to feed, and they take priority over the union and the college-boy organizer.The more you think about it, the more this movie's ending has a kind of nobility to it. Loach, who has always made films about the working class ("Riff-Raff," "My Name Is Joe," "Ladybird, Ladybird"), is too honest to believe in easy solutions. Will the union get its contract? Will Maya and Sam live happily ever after? Will the national minimum wage ever be a living wage? Will this movie change anything, or this review make you want to see it? No, probably not. But when you come in tomorrow morning, someone will have emptied your wastebasket.Download here

Cry-Baby (Comedy,Musical,Romance)

Good girls want him bad. Bad girls want him worse.
He's a doll. He's a dreamboat. He's a delinquent.
Too young to be square... Too tough to be shocked... Too late to be saved
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Allison is a "square" good girl who has decided she wants to be bad and falls hard for Cry-Baby Walker, a Greaser (or "Drape" in John Waters parlance). Spoofing Elvis movies and Juvenile Delinquency scare films of the '50s, this movie follows the adventures of Cry-Baby who, though he is sent to juvie, is determined to cross class (and taste) boundaries to get Allison back.
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It is only now that I am in a condition to appreciate the 1950s.At the time, I was too cynical. I read Mad magazine and listened to Stan Freberg and Bob & Ray, and viewed all manifestations of 1950s teenage culture with the superiority of one who had read Look Homeward, Angel and knew, even then, that you could not go home again.Now things are different. Battered and weary after the craziness of the 1960s, the self-righteousness of the 1970s and the greed of the 1980s, I want to go home again, oh, so desperately - home to that land of drive-in restaurants and Chevy Bel-Airs, making out and rock 'n' roll and drag races and Studebakers, Elvis and James Dean and black leather jackets. Not that I ever owned a black leather jacket. Even today, I do not have the nerve. Black leather suggests a degree of badness I never could aspire to.Feelings like these are what John Waters' "Cry-Baby" is about. The movie takes place in 1954, in Baltimore, at the dawn of rock 'n' roll (one is reminded of the opening scenes of "2001," at the dawn of man, an event less remarked at the time). The teenage culture is divided into three camps: the drapes, the squares, and the nerds. The drapes slick their hair into ducktails and wear black leather jackets and are proud to be juvenile delinquents. The squares wear crew cuts and want to go to college. The nerds are not made much of in "Cry-Baby," but in my memory they were the kids who wore slide rules in their pockets and collected science fiction magazines and grew up, one suspects, to be John Waters.The movie tells the story of Cry-Baby himself, played by teen idol Johnny Depp as a juvenile delinquent who forever has a tear sliding halfway down his cheek, a reminder of a grief he will live with forever,a teenage tragedy that has left its mark on his soul, a lost romance. Into his life comes Allison (Amy Locane), the good girl who has a crush on Cry-Baby and feels strange stirrings in her loins by the promise that he is as bad as they say. The movie's bad guy is the good guy, Baldwin (Stephen Mailer), who loves Allison in the right way, which is to say he loves her so boringly he might as well not love her at all.The movie's large cast (large enough to accommodate Polly Bergen and Traci Lords, David Nelson and Iggy Pop) includes Cry-Baby's grandparents (Pop and Susan Tyrrell), a rockabilly family that lives on the wrong side of the tracks and musicians who seem to be on the edge of inventing rock 'n' roll, if some one does not invent it for them. It also includes various parents, schoolmates, local tramps and sluts, and the straight-arrow types without which the 1950s would have lost their point of reference.If there is one constant in recent social history, it is that we feel nostalgia for yesterday's teenage badness even while we fear today's. As I was reading that ridiculous newsweekly cover story on rap music the other day, I found myself wishing that the hysterical old maids who wrote it could have been taken first to see "Cry-Baby," so that they could gain some insight into themselves.In every generation, teenagers find a way to express themselves and annoy adults. And the adults find in this teenage behavior signs of the collapse of civilization as they know it. "Cry-Baby," which is a good many things (including a passable imitation of a 1950s teenage exploitation movie) is, above all, a reminder of that process. Today's teenagers will grow up to be tomorrow's adults, and yet in every generation teenagers and adults seem to have as little knowledge of that ancient fact as the caterpillar has of the butterfly.It is an additional irony that humans have learned little from the insects, and the butterflies turn into the worms.Download here

Fugitive, The (Action,Crime,Thriller)

A murdered wife. A one-armed man. An obsessed detective. The chase begins.
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Catch him if you can. The Fugutive is on the run! Harrison Ford and Tommy Lee Jones race through this manhunt movie inspired by one classic TV series and which in turn inspired yet another. Ford is prison escapee Dr. Richard Kimble, a Chicago surgeon falsely convicted of killing his wife and determined to prove his innocence by leading his pursuers to the one-armed man who committed the crime. Jones is Sam Gerard, an unrelenting bloodhound of a U.S. marshal. They are hunted and hunter. Their nonstop chase has only one exhilarating speed: all-out.
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I didn't expect ``U. S. Marshals'' to be the equal of ``The Fugitive,'' and it isn't. But I hoped it would approach the taut tension of the 1993 film, and it doesn't. It has extra scenes, needless characters, an aimless plot and a solution that the hero seems to keep learning and then forgetting.The hero is Chief Deputy U.S. Marshal Sam Gerard, played by Tommy Lee Jones in a reprise of his co-starring role in ``The Fugitive.'' The fact that they made this quasi-sequel without its original star (Harrison Ford) is a tribute to the strength of Jones' presence in the earlier film, where he had more dialogue than the lead. Jones made a big impression and won an Oscar. Here he hits the same marks with the same razor-edged delivery; everything's right about his performance, except that it's in a rambling movie.Take the opening sequence, where Jones disguises himself as a fast-food chicken to supervise a stake-out of a wanted man. There's a break-in, a fight, some violence, an arrest, TV interviews, a jailing, a tavern scene to celebrate, a reprimand by his superior (Kate Nelligan)--and all for what? So that the guy they caught can be put on a plane to a Missouri prison, and Sam Gerard can be put on the same flight.Also on that plane to Missouri is another character, played by Wesley Snipes. When we first see him he's a Chicago tow-truck driver. Another driver causes a crash, the Snipes character is hospitalized, his prints are checked, and he's arrested and charged with the murders of two agents in New York. He protests that it's a case of mistaken identity. Is it? Never mind that for a moment. Stop to consider. All you need for the movie to get rolling, is to establish the Snipes character and get him on that plane with Marshal Gerard. The marshal doesn't need a lot of establishing because (1) we know him from the earlier movie, and (2) Tommy Lee Jones can establish himself with three lines of dialogue, as he did in the first film.By lingering over the chicken-suit raid, the movie has wasted time. More time is wasted by supplying a girlfriend for Snipes, played by Irene Jacob. This character is utterly superfluous. Example: She turns up at a cemetery in the middle of a shoot-out, flees with Snipes, can't make it over a wall and is left behind. (That wall ... hmmm. How can Snipes leap high enough to get atop the wall, but Jacob can't even jump high enough to reach his outstretched hand, lowered to her?) The movie gets rolling at around the 25-minute mark, with a spectacular plane crash, reminding us of the train crash in ``The Fugitive.'' One prisoner escapes: Snipes. The marshal coordinates a manhunt that looks as if it costs millions (helicopters, roadblocks for a 20-mile radius, teams combing the woods, etc.). ``We got a fugitive,'' he barks, in a line supplied as a convenience for the producers of the TV spots.The State Department gets involved, revealing that Snipes is a bigger fish than anybody thought. And the marshal is supplied with a shadow: An agent named Royce (Robert Downey Jr.), who will follow him everywhere. They spar. ``You sure you wanna get cute with me?'' the marshal asks him. And, ``I love that nickel-plated sissy pistol.'' Royce falls under the Law of Economy of Characters: A seemingly unnecessary sidekick will inevitably turn out to be--but you know how it goes.The movie settles into a chase structure, with set pieces: A confrontation in a swamp, a cat-and-mouse game in a cemetery, and a chase through an old folks' home. It's there that the Snipes character commits the Fallacy of the Climbing Fugitive (fleeing man climbs stairs, tower, scaffold, etc., even though he can't possibly escape at the top unless he can fly). There is however a reason for him to climb--a spectacular escape that would have made Batman proud.There is an explanation for all of this. We know or guess its outlines early in the film. The marshal figures it out, too (``This is a ruthless assassin who keeps going out of his way to let people live''). He even discovers videotape evidence revealing the real story. And yet, in the cemetery, even when the evil Chinese agent tries to kill the fugitive, the marshal and his men still chase Snipes. It's as if Gerard keeps absent-mindedly overlooking what he's learned earlier in the film.The result is unconvincing and disorganized. Yes, there are some spectacular stunts and slick special effects sequences. Yes, Jones is right on the money, and Snipes makes a sympathetic fugitive. But it's the story that has to pull this train, and its derailment is about as definitive as the train crash in the earlier film.Download here

Pitch Black (Action,Adventure,Horror,Sci-Fi,Thriller)

A new species of terror
Are you afraid of the dark? You will be...
Don't be afraid of the dark. Be afraid of what's in the dark.
Fight Evil With Evil
It's getting Dark
There's A New Reason To Be Afraid Of The Dark.
There's only one rule: Stay in the light
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Set in the distant future, a spaceship carrying some 40 people, mostly ones wanting to settle on other planets from their own, hits a meteor shower and crash lands on a distant planet killing all but about a dozen of them. The survivors, led by the second-in-command Carolyn Fry ('Rahda Mitchell' (qv)), find themselves on a hot and humid landscape with constant sunlight from three orbiting suns. Fry not only must help the survivors find food and water, but contend with a deadly criminal, named Riddick ('Vin Diesel' (qv)), who was being transported to a prison cell on their destination. But every 22 years, the planet's three suns go into a total eclipse for a month where darkness brings out the planet's real inhabitants; large, reptilian, vampire-like creatures that come out and dominate the surface in total darkness, killing and eating all life. The Fry and her people then must cooperate with Riddick, who has surgically enhanced eyes to see in darkness, to lead them to safety and off the planet before they all become dinner for the creatures.
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No other movie opening thrills me more than a vast ship in interstellar space. The modern visual rules for these shots were set by Stanley Kubrick's "2001," which used a detailed model moving slowly instead of a cheesy model moving fast. Kubrick had the good sense to know that sound does not travel in space, but "Star Wars," with its deep bass rumbles, demonstrated that it certainly should. And then in the "Alien" and "Star Trek" pictures and in countless others, gigantic space cruisers aimed majestically at the stars, and I felt an inner delight that has its origins in those long-ago days when I devoured pulp space opera by Robert Heinlein and such forgotten masters as Murray Leinster and Eric Frank Russell.My state of mind is best captured by a pulp mag that was defunct even before I started reading science fiction: "Thrilling Wonder Stories," without doubt the best title in the history of magazines. I hope for strange and amazing adventures. Sometimes I am gratified. More often I am disappointed. "Pitch Black," which begins in deep space and ends with a manhunt on a desert planet, falls somewhere in between: clever, done with skill, yet lacking in the cerebral imagination of the best science fiction. How sad it is that humans travel countless light years away from Earth, only to find themselves inhabiting the same tired generic conventions.The movie begins during an interstellar mission, with the crew and a dangerous prisoner all in cryo-sleep. The ship collides with a cluster of rock fragments, which penetrate the hull like BBs through cellophane. The captain and several other sleepers are terminally perforated, and Fry (Radha Mitchell) assumes command. The ship crash-lands on a planet that circles somehow within a three-star system, where at least one sun never seems to set, and the surviving crew members have to fight it out with the vicious and cunning prisoner Riddick (Vin Diesel).You may remember Diesel from "Saving Private Ryan," where he was the hard-bitten Pvt. Caparzo. He looks like a mean customer, and he is. He shares no fellow feeling with the other survivors, expresses no responsibility to them, does not consider himself in the same boat and thinks only of escaping. Oh, and his eyes have a remarkable quality: He can see in the dark. Not a very useful ability on a planet with three suns and no night, right? (Hollow laugh.) What disappointed me about "Pitch Black," directed by David Twohy, is that it didn't do more with its alien world, and less with its recycled human conflicts. I feel underwhelmed when humans land on another world and are so quickly reduced to jumping out from behind rocks at one another and playing hostage games. "Pitch Black" does have a nice look, all bleached blues and desert sands. And there are some promising story elements, one of which I am about to discuss, so you might want to set this review aside if you plan to see the movie.The spoiler commences: Yes, night does fall on the planet, every once in a long while when all three suns are in eclipse. I am not sure what complex geometries of space and trajectory are necessary for a planet to exist in a three-star system and somehow manage to maintain any continuity of climate and temperature, but never mind: What is maybe more difficult to accept is that it would develop a life form that appears only in the dark.Since sunlight is the source of heat and energy, Darwinian principles would seem severely challenged by the task of evolving living things that hibernate for 22 years between eclipses. How does a thing that lives in the dark evolve in a planet where it is almost always daytime? This is not the kind of question you're supposed to ask about "Pitch Black," but I'd rather have the answer than any 45 minutes of this movie.The story also poses the problem (less challenging from a Darwinian view, to be sure) of whether the Diesel character will cooperate with his species mates or behave entirely like a selfish gene. Whether this happens or not I leave it to you to discover. By the end of the movie, however, I was wondering if the trip had been necessary; most of the plot could be ported into a Western or a swashbuckler with little alteration.For Twohy, it's a step backward from "The Arrival" (1996), one of the smartest recent science-fiction films--one that really does develop suspense out of challenging ideas of alien conduct (space visitors are secretly warming the Earth to their comfort zone).My suggestion for his next film: an expedition to the seas beneath the ice of Io, where volcanic warmth may have allowed life to occur. Consider the physical properties of a life form that evolves under the tiny gravity of such a moon. It could be amorphous, tenuous and enormous. In sailing a stellar sub through the seas of Io, you might be navigating not toward life, but . . . through it. What would a human crew do in such a situation? Not get into fights and start chasing one another through the sub, I hope.Download here

Dune (Action,Adventure,Fantasy,Sci-Fi)

A place beyond your dreams, A movie beyond your imagination.
A world beyond your experience, beyond your imagination.
The Motion Picture Event For 1984
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Set in a distant future where life in the universe and space travel is dependent upon a spice found only on the planet Dune, this film tracks the rise of young Paul Atreides, son of good Duke Lito, from the time of his father's betrayal and murder by a rival lord, Baron Harkonnen, to his discovery of the great secret behind the planet Dune and his own destiny, which is to free the planet and its denizens of the cruel rule of the Emperor.
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"It's like a dream," my friend from Hollywood was explaining. "It doesn't make any sense, and the special effects are straight from the dime store but if you give up trying to understand it, and just sit back and let it wash around in your mind, it's not bad." That was not exactly a rave review for a movie that someone paid $40 million to make, but it put me into a receptive frame of mind for DUNE, the epic based on the novels by Frank Herbert. I was even willing to forgive the special effects for not being great; after all, in an era when George Lucas's STAR WARS has turned movies into high tech, why not a film that looks like a throwback to FLASH GORDON. It might be kind of fun.It took DUNE about nine minutes to completely strip me of my anticipation. This movie is a real mess, an incomprehensible, ugly, unstructured, pointless excursion into the murkier realms of one of the most confusing screenplays of all time. Even the color is no good; everything is seen through a sort of dusty yellow filter, as if the film was left out in the sun too long. Yes, you might say, but the action is, after all, on a desert planet where there isn't a drop of water, and there's sand everywhere. David Lean solved that problem in LAWRENCE OF ARABIA, where he made the desert look beautiful and mysterious, not shabby and drab.The movie's plot will no doubt mean more to people who've read Herbert than to those who are walking in cold. It has to do with a young hero's personal quest. He leads his people against an evil baron and tries to destroy a galaxy-wide trade in spice, a drug produced on the desert planet. Spice allows you to live indefinitely while you discover you have less and less to think about. There are various theological overtones, which are best left unexplored.The movie has so many characters, so many unexplained or incomplete relationships, and so many parallel courses of action that it's sometimes a toss-up whether we're watching a story, or just an assembly of meditations on themes introduced by the novels (the movie is like a dream). Occasionally a striking image will swim into view: The alien brain floating in brine, for example, or our first glimpse of the giant sand worms plowing through the desert. If the first look is striking, however, the movie's special effects don't stand up to scrutiny. The heads of the sand worms begin to look more and more as if they came out of the same factory that produced Kermit the Frog (they have the same mouths). An evil baron floats through the air on trajectories all too obviously controlled by wires. The spaceships in the movie are so shabby, so lacking in detail or dimension, that they look almost like those student films where plastic models are shot against a tablecloth.Nobody looks very happy in this movie. Actors stand around in ridiculous costumes, mouthing dialogue that has little or no context. They're not even given scenes that work on a self-contained basis; portentious lines of pop profundity are allowed to hang in the air unanswered, while additional characters arrive or leave on unexplained errands. DUNE looks like a project that was seriously out of control from the start. Sets were constructed, actors were hired; no usable screenplay was ever written; everybody faked it as long as they could. Some shabby special effects were thrown into the pot, and the producers crossed their fingers and hoped that everybody who has read the books will want to see the movie. Not if the word gets out, they won't.Download here

Madagascar (Adventure,Animation,Comedy,Family)

Someone's got a zoo loose.
The lemurs: They're cute. They're cuddly. They're deranged.
They weren't born in the wild... They were shipped there.
Ton On The Run
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At New York's Central Park Zoo, a lion (Stiller), a zebra (Rock), a giraffe (Schwimmer), and a hippo (Smith) are best friends and stars of the show. But when one of the animals goes missing from their cage, the other three break free to look for him, only to find themselves reunited ... on a ship en route to Africa. When their vessel is hijacked, however, the friends, who have all been raised in captivity, learn first-hand what life can be like in the wild.
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By Roger Ebert"Casino Royale" has the answers to all my complaints about the 45-year-old James Bond series, and some I hadn't even thought of. It's not that I didn't love some of the earlier films, like some, dislike others and so on, as that I was becoming less convinced that I ever had to see another one.



This movie is new from the get-go. It could be your first Bond. In fact, it was the first Bond; it was Ian Fleming's first 007 novel, and he was still discovering who the character was. The longtime Saltzman-Broccoli producing team could never get their hands on the rights until now, despite earlier misadventures by others using the same title, and maybe it's just as well, because it provides a fresh starting place. And it returns to the family fold; with her father's passing, Barbara Broccoli is producer.



Yes, Daniel Craig makes a superb Bond: Leaner, more taciturn, less sex-obsessed, able to be hurt in body and soul, not giving a damn if his martini is shaken or stirred. That doesn't make him the "best" Bond, because I've long since given up playing that pointless ranking game; Sean Connery was first to plant the flag, and that's that. But Daniel Craig is bloody damned great as Bond, in a movie that creates a new reality for the character.



Year after year, attending the new Bond was like observing a ritual. There was the opening stunt sequence that served little purpose, except to lead into the titles; the title song; Miss Moneypenny; M with an assignment of great urgency to the Crown; Q with some new gadgets; an archvillain; a series of babes, some treacherous, some doomed, all frequently in stages of undress; the villain's master-plan; Bond's certain death, and a lot of chases. It could be terrific, it could be routine, but you always knew about where you were in the formula.



With "Casino Royale," we get to the obligatory concluding lovey-dovey on the tropical sands, and then the movie pulls a screeching U-turn and starts up again with the most sensational scene I have ever seen set in Venice, or most other places. It's a movie that keeps on giving.



This time, no Moneypenny, no Q and Judi Dench is unleashed as M, given a larger role, and allowed to seem hard-eyed and disapproving to the reckless Bond. This time, no dream of world domination, but just a bleeding-eyed rat who channels money to terrorists. This time a poker game that is interrupted by the weirdest trip to the parking lot I've ever seen. This time, no laser beam inching up on Bond's netherlands, but a nasty knotted rope actually whacking his hopes of heirs.



And this time, no Monte Carlo, but Montenegro, a fictional casino resort, where Bond checks into the "Hotel Splendid," which is in fact, yes, the very same Grand Hotel Pupp in Karlovy Vary where Queen Latifah had her culinary vacation in "Last Holiday." That gives me another opportunity to display my expertise on the Czech Republic by informing you that "Pupp" is pronounced "poop," so no wonder it's the Splendid.



I never thought I would see a Bond movie where I cared, actually cared, about the people. But I care about Bond, and about Vesper Lynd (Eva Green), even though I know that (here it comes) a Martini Vesper is shaken, not stirred. Vesper Lynd, however, is definitely stirring, as she was in Bertolucci's wonderful "The Dreamers." Sometimes shaken, too. Vesper and James have a shower scene that answers, at last, why nobody in a Bond movie ever seems to have any real emotions.



A review should not be a list. So I should not enumerate all the scenes I liked. But I learn from IMDb that the special credit for the "free running" scenes of Sabastian Foucan refers to the sensational opening Madagascar foot chase in which Foucan practices parkour, or the ability to run at walls and angles and bounce off them to climb or change direction; Jackie Chan could do similar feats.



Which brings up another thing. Most of the chases and stunts in "Casino Royale" take place in something vaguely approximating real space and time. Of course I know they use doubles and deceptive camera angles and edits to cover impossibilities, but the point is: They try to make it look real. Recently, with the advent of portable cameras and computerized editing, action movies have substituted visual chaos for visual elegance.



I think the public is getting tired of action sequences that are created in post-production. I've been swamped with letters complaining about "The Bourne Ultimatum." One guy said, "Why don't critics admit they're tired of it?" Actually, we're tired of writing about how tired of it we are.



The plot centers on a marathon high-stakes poker game, in which Bond will try to deprive Le Chiffre (Mads Mikkelsen) of 10 million or more pounds that would go to finance terrorism. Le Chiffre ("The Cypher") has problems on his own, because he owes money big-time to the people who supply it to him. Director Martin Campbell builds suspense in the extended poker game by not being afraid to focus for long seconds on the eyes of the two main opponents, which is all the more effective because Le Chiffre's left eye has tears of blood, inspiring a classic Bond line. Bond's absences from the table are of more than ordinary interest.



This is Campbell's second Bond picture, after "GoldenEye" (1995), but he breaks with his own and everyone else's tradition. He's helped by Craig, who gives the sense of a hard man, wounded by life and his job, who nevertheless cares about people and right and wrong. To a certain degree, the earlier Bonds were lustful technicians. With this one, since he has a big scene involving a merchant's house in Venice, we can excuse ourselves for observing that if you prick him, he bleeds.Download here