Minnesota 2nd Run Movie House King

I had a lot riding on seeing Extraordinary Measures, the new film about Pompe Disease directed by Tom Vaughan, written by Robert Nelson Jacobs and based on the novel by Geeta Anand, starring Brendan Fraser and Harrison Ford, released two weeks ago.

Being given a release in late January, it is clear that this movie did not have the strength to open any other time of year. It even has stiff competition for January, given that Avatar continues to dominate the box office. But now that it's been released, I wanted to at least see it for myself in the hopes of giving it a vote of confidence, and going back to tell Blake that no matter what the other critics say, I thought it was great.

Let's get it out of the way I'm a big Harrison Ford fan. I got arrested four years ago when I went to review Firewall at the Crown Block 15 Theatres in Minneapolis. I showed up an hour before the screening, and cops busted me for loitering. I wasn't charged with anything, but I had to spend the night in jail. See, going as a critic, I didn't need to purchase a ticket, so I didn't have that to show for myself. The police had to call my editor at the St. Paul Pioneer Press for him to vouch that my press pass was legit.

I would have called Blake, but he was up in Duluth with his editor, Nadine. (Actually, it was worth it for him to be gone, I think; if you saw Nadine, you'd understand.)

This time, I didn't want to take any chances. I went with my dad and actually bought the ticket. And we showed up maybe ten minutes before the screening began.

So how did I like it?



It was good.

Brendan Fraser plays John Crowley, a biotechnology executive in Portland, Oregon with a beautiful wife Aileen (Keri Russell) and three children, John Jr., Megan, and Patrick. As the film opens, Megan and Patrick are already suffering from Pompe Disease, a form of muscular distrophy in which sugar builds up in the heart, lungs, liver, and other vital organs because the body lacks a particular phosphorus enzyme to metabolize it.

John knows from research articles that most children diagnosed with Pompe don't live past the age of nine. With Megan celebrating her eighth birthday surrounded by friends in a bowling alley, he's gotten to the point where he's cautiously optomistic about keeping her alive.

Megan has a medical scare, though. Hospitalized with cold symptoms, her EKG flatlines. John and Aileen frantically tear down the deserted hospital hall calling for a doctor, nurse, or orderly to come help.

In these early hospital scenes the film hits its stride. We see real, identifiable situations where a parent has to make the painful choice of whether to spend as much time with their children as possible, or to devote a significant portion of time away from their ill children searching for a cure, which entails tracking down scientists, researchers and drug companies who may be on the cusp of a medical breakthrough.

What is the right thing to do there? I don't know if I would have done what John Crowley did, jumping on a plane to Nebraska to meet a reclusive biochemical scientist at the University of Nebraska at Lincoln. He is fortunate enough, though, to gain an audience with Dr. Robert Stonehill (Harrison Ford), who is in fact not a real person but based collectively on Dr. Arnold Reuser, Dr. Ans van der Ploeg, Dr. William Canfield, and Dr. Yuan-Tsong Chen, with the personality of Harrison Ford.

Upon finding out that John Crowley was born in New Jersey, Stonehill takes to calling him Jersey for the course of the movie, calling to mind how Han Solo would call Leia "your worshipfulness" or "princess" over the course of the Star Wars movies. Over beers in a honky-tonk Nebraska bar, Stonehill agrees to help Dr. Crowley in his research, provided that Crowley can come up with the $250,000 in up-start capital.

Crowley goes back to Portland, where his wife is at a loss for words that he would up and leave for Nebraska for two days without telling her or his boss. He digs himself out of the doghouse, with his wife, at least, by claiming to have a doctor with research on how to create the enzyme from bovine lactose.

Crowley next has to start a non-profit Pompe foundation, which he must turn into a for-profit research laboratory in order to get legitimate funding from investors. Then he has to get approval from a large drug company for production and distribution. This requires agreeing to be bought out by a drug company to ensure funding, and working with three other teams of researchers on a possible enzyme.

Fraser's Crowley comes to terms with the compromises his upstart bio-research company will have to make when they are bought out by the larger corporation, but Stonehill often has an axe to grind with people. When he has other doctors telling him about the red tape, what with the approval of the research, the selection of a trial drugs, and the supervision thereof, Stonehill often gets hot-headed, and here the film wanes.

The film ultimately belongs to Brendan Fraser, who as a father himself had the parental gaze down to a T. As Crowley, he has a breaking point after repeated run-ins with Dr. Kent Webber (Jared Harris), upper brass at the drug company that takes him on, and constantly reminds him he has to be objective about the research process. This means not pushing his children to the front of the list of prospective candidates for trial runs of the enzyme medication. Crowley finally gets his own screaming scene when accused of seeking preferential treatment as an executive. But one meltdown scene after a whole film built around keeping one's cool is more effective than ten tantrum scenes, as provided by Stonehill.

Blake was reluctant about seeing Extraordinary Measures because a white actor is cast in a role of a figure who in real life was a different race, like the Asian card counter in 21, or the black marine in World Trade Center. I guess Blake can feel vindicated there, as I imagine it would be jarring for the real John Crowley to watch this movie and see himself flying to Nebraska, which never happened, and meeting a Dr. Stonehill, who doesn't exist, and thinking to himself, "wait a minute, I hope people who go out to see this know this wasn't exactly how it happened."

I guess Extraordinary Measures almost works better if you accept it as half-factual going in, as it gets very Hollywood the further along it goes. The first forty-five minutes was pretty good, as it showed parents who grapple with a disease that ravages their children. Keep in mind, though, this miracle cure was found, and the Crowley children's lives were saved by the enzyme. So there are certain elements of the film that are simply true, no matter how preposterous they seem. Did Crowley really fly to Chicago and go up to an investor's door to get him to commit to funding? How many impulsive, desperate flights did he make to visit the biochemists wherever they were?

Extraordinary Measures were made, but upon walking out of the theatre, I was put in the Blake Gothenberg mentality to think about the movie and find the book that told the whole story. My birthday's in three days. I went to Border's and picked out the book John Crowley wrote about his experiences as a present from my mom.

Three and 1/3 stars.

When I went to see Up in the Air on December 29, 2009, it was the first film I'd seen in theatres since G.I. Joe this past August.



While currently grossing about 72 million,Up in the Air may not make quite as much money as G.I. Joe, which raked in $150 million, but I think Paramount, the studio that released both, can look at itself in the mirror with a little more respect for having made Up in the Air than it will for G.I. Joe.

George Clooney plays Ryan Bingham, a career transition counselor (he fires people), who goes around from city to city to break the news to people who have been laid off. Is it a glamourous job? ....kind of depends on how you look at it. As the film opens, we see the faces of the individuals who have gotten the news that they have to clean out their desks. We see the shock and wonder in their eyes, the scrambling to reorient themselves to a life without financial stability and the prospect of looking for a job again in an economy where there are lots of people competing for what little hiring is taking place.

Up in the Air starts out as a mirror held up to society, as Bertold Brecht would put it. In this film we see the state of our union in 2008 and 2009, with new lay-offs announced seemingly in each next front page of the newspaper.

Going from city to city to watch people break down into tears because you fired them, to me, seems like the job from hell. But Ryan Bingham makes the best of it. Keeping himself emotionally removed from the individuals who he has to fire, he has a life free of attachments. No wife, no kids, remote contact with his siblings, Ryan can be on the road for 332 days of the year, as we learned, without consequences on the domestic side. He is happily self-sufficient, we learn. I thought of Richard Jenkins in The Visitor, who has learned to be happy in his solitude. Or WALL-E, the robot who goes about his life collecting and compressing trash alone. He is only comfortable with being alone because it's all he knows.

I also thought of Al Gore in An Inconvenient Truth carrying his rolling luggage from airport to airport as I watched Ryan Bingham. He has a job to do and it requires him to lead a fast-paced life with very little luggage, literally and figuratively, to carry around. With that in mind, a job where you get to travel regularly and be carried by the energy of bustling airports, its amenities of cinnamon rolls, bagels, coffee, and newspapers, does seem kind of glamorous to me, until you bring in the aspect of firing people.

Bingham's career may be too costly for the company he works for. His boss (Jason Bateman, now a Jason Reitman company member) busts the news to him that they are going to be conducting their job terminations from their homebase in Omaha. They will do so by contacting the employee via webcast and terminate them via laptop. Bingham is incensed. He doesn't want to be stuck living in his shabby apartment, he wants to be on the road. But he tailors up his selfish reasons with the argument that people need to be face to face when learning this news.

Bingham brings his young charge, Natalie Keener (Anna Kendrick), who masterminded the project of firing over the internet, along with him to conduct the same interactions face to face, so she can see the value of having the personal gesture. The great thing about the film, directed by Jason Reitman, and co-written by him and Sheldon Turner, adapted from the novel by Walter Kirn, is that no single character holds the ethical upper hand for the entirety of the film. For example, I kind of groaned when Natalie first came into the picture. No blame to Kendrick, who was sure-handed as Natalie, but I thought her character existed solely to give Bingham a taste of his own medicine; the younger, smarter, cheaper replacement whose sleek, technological expertise would make Bingham and his methods obsolete. Then I realized it was both of them who would have much to learn about the process of letting people go. And the more we saw Natalie grapple with her new-found profession of letting people go as gracefully as possible, the more she came into focus as the most human of the film's subjects in its first half.

Letting people go takes on double meaning, actually, as the film continues. Bingham meets Alex (Vera Farmiga), a freqent flyer he honey-talks in an airport bar. In a sense, Alex and Vera are a match made in heaven. Neither one seems privy to a weighed down commitment, but they both enjoy each other's company enough to work some recurring one night stands into their busy travel schedules.

Ryan may be letting himself get too close to her, though, as he has the audacity to ask her to the wedding of his younger sister Julie (Melanie Lynsky) and Jim (Danny McBride). As Ryan shows her around his high school and his hometown in northern Wisconsin, we get the sense Ryan has really and genuinely let his guard down. He's still coy, casual, and sarcastic when he talks to her, but one gets the sense that he doesn't invite every one-night-stand into his homelife this openly. They sit and watch a basketball practice together, and he kisses her in the stairwell to the locker room. Seeing that scene in the commercial is actually what drew me to want to see Up in the Air.

I listened to Jason Reitman talk on Fresh Air with Terry Gross a month and a half ago, and he mentioned his trepidation about directing George Clooney in a scene where he has to show his true feelings. He said he didn't want Clooney to evade the task in his sleekness, and in fact Clooney gave it to him in the second take. I think I know what scene they were talking about. Clooney's Bingham is faced with the task of talking Jim out of walking away from the wedding, out of the fear of the inertia of marriage. Ryan reflects on his own affection for Alex when talking to Jim, and seeing two people together and happy makes him so badly want that for himself.

Up in the Air is not so much a love story as it is a story about love (thanks, 500 Days of Summer). It's not about gaining the girl so much as it is the lessons you learn along the way. Just seeing Ryan reevaluate his priorities makes meeting Alex worth it.

And for what it's worth, Up in the Air was made on a budget of 25 million dollars, and it made $72 million domestically. G.I. Joe cost $170 million to make. It took overseas revenue to bring that one out of the red.

Three and 2/3 stars.

The Bourne Ultimatum was the third installment of the Jason Bourne series. Matt Damon reprises his role as the spy on the run who had aborted a covert mission to take out a leader of an African country, only to be left for dead at sea, rescued by a French fishing boat, and scrambling to remember anything about who he was.

The third film, I felt, carried with it the formidable expectation of being as good as the Bourne Identity (2002), which I'd loved, and the Bourne Supremacy (2004), which I enjoyed about equally. I was not expecting Ultimatum to quite measure up to its predecessors, in spite of the critical and audience praise that surrounded it in 2007.



Let me be the first to say I have to eat crow.

The Bourne Ultimatum not only reaches the bar set by the first two Bourne movies, it raises it. And it gets off to an adrenaline-fueled start on the streets of Moscow. Bourne still suffers from amnesia, but has fuzzy memories of the missions he carried out for the CIA. His dreams are haunted by the faces of every person he has killed. He learns of a British reporter named Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), who has been following his story closely. Though the clues he has to go on are little more than words like "Blackbriar" and "Treadstone," clearly he knows more about Jason Bourne's history than Bourne does himself.

Bourne arranges for a meeting with Ross in a crowded train station. Bourne knows that the masses of people would make it harder for a sharp shooter to get a clear shot off on either of them. And Bourne knows that wherever he goes, the CIA has its operatives following his moves, tracing his calls, marking his license plates, and capturing him on camera. It hit me that with each subsequent Bourne film, the technology to track Bourne becomes that much more sophisticated, and his ability to stay under the radar that much more difficult. Yet I am endlessly amazed by Bourne's invention, agility, and improvisation. Just as quickly as the CIA has caught up with Bourne, he has bought a new cell phone and plan.

Needless to say, the CIA, as depicted in the Bourne films, has been reduced from an intelligence organization forced to take out security threats to an outfit of headhunters that will take down as many innocent lives as necessary who stand between them and the source of their threat. Even as Bourne threatens the confidientiality of the CIA, its staff, and its caseload, we grow to realize the depth of the agency's corruption as the film series continues, and how maybe the organization endowed with the responsibility of serving its government has infact converted into as nefarious a villain as the foreign adversaries.

It is to the film's credit, therefore, that we have David Straithairn as CIA Deputy Director Noah Vosen. Straithairn is an intense performer who can carry out criminal intention with the conviction of a man carrying out virtuous civic duty. He came off of a good guy streak, playing Edward R. Murrow in Good Night and Good Luck, and as Marshall University President Dedmon in We Are Marshall. I had grown to trust the man's characters, and it's unnerving to have that same quiet determination so focused on destroying an individual who they demoralized, trained to the point of memory loss, and is now justifiably coming back for answers.

It is also awesome to see the heated arguments between Vosen and Pamela Landy (Joan Allen), who has the moral awakening that maybe they've gone too far. Vosen doesn't have the same sense of humanity as Landy has, and only sees the threat it would mean to the agency's security if they left Bourne alone.

After his stop over in London, Bourne's search for answers to what is Treadstone and Blackbriar lead him to Paris, Madrid, and Tangier, Morocco. He befriends Nicky Parsons (Julia Stiles), the CIA operative who has been relocated again, this time to Germany. Nicky risks her career and personal safety in releasing confidential information to Bourne about his past. Some of this information explains a lot.

Bourne finally ends up in New York, where he poises himself to take down Blackbriar while going directly to the architect of the Treadstone program, Dr. Albert Hirsch (Albert Finney). Bourne has flashes back to training, the likes of which involved not sharp-shooting alone, but psychological brainwashing, with practice on all-too-human targets that run flagrant roughshod over the guidelines of the Geneva Convention.

It's filled with car chases, hand to hand combat, shaky cameras, assassinations, wire-taps, injuries, stunt jumps through windows, and more physical pain than any regular human could bear without injury. But that's what we want to see. We want to see Jason Bourne jump out of the flames and take it. He's built to stand up to punishment no average human ever could. We accept it, because this makes space for ethical dilemma and conscientious objection that no spy thriller up to now has.

The Bourne Ultimatum is the best of the Jason Bourne movies. And it's also one of the best of 2007. Had I the chance to update my top 50 of the decade, it would likely find its place there as well.

Four stars.

In American history, military has assumed a God-like authority to clear preexisting human settlement and govern the land as they see fit. The French and Indian War, The Mexican War, General Custer's last stand, the Trail of Tears are examples of hostile takeover that come to mind from my junior high text book.

This metaphor is hard to ignore in the new film Avatar, written and directed by James Cameron.



Like The Matrix, Star Wars, Star Trek (special attention to the 2009 installment), 2001: A Space Odyssey, and Serenity, Avatar is a unique vision set in a reality sprung totally from the rampant imagination of its auteur. Spaceships, choppers, aliens, forests, and floating mountains are conceived, constructed and displayed here as never before seen in science fiction film.

The film takes place circa 2154. Humans have colonized Pandora, a moon that revolves around the planet Polyphemus. Pandora is already occupied by the Na'vi, an indigenous alien race with blue skin, wide green eyes, dreadlocked black hair, and tails. They are primitive compared to humans, and yet their society thrives within the parameters of their environment.

The hero of our story is Jake Sully (Sam Worthington), a marine who was left paralyzed from the waist down as a consequence of a tour of duty on earth. Sully doesn't take a whole lot of interest one way or another in the politics of Pandora and its takeover by force. He just knows that his participation in the Avatar program may give him the means to walk again.

The Avatar program is an effort masterminded by Dr. Grace Augustine (Sigourney Weaver), who has through genome engineering managed to synthetically grow and develop Na'vi bodies; organs, tissue, and all; specifically for the purpose of being occupied by humans. Sound cerebral enough for you?

Jake isn't a scientist, and knows nothing about the Na'vi culture, or why a military from Earth is so anxious to assume control of the land from the Na'vi. But he's useful to the scientists and the military, because his twin brother Tom was a PhD-level researcher in the program for whom a Na'vi Avatar had been constructed. It was meant to be Tom going down to Pandora to study the ways of the people, but his untimely death leaves Augustine at once desperate and reluctant to enlist Jake's cooperation. I kind of enjoyed seeing Weaver play the part as written by Cameron; it was an archetypical brilliant scientist who was ethically activist about a cause, cocky and headstrong, unafraid of facing people down, even the colonel. Cameron cuts us a break by leaving little for us to figure out; everything about her character is revealed in the dialogue, which he also does with everyone else. But let's face it, if you bought a ticket to Avatar, you weren't going to enjoy multi-dimensional characters who interact with low-context dialogue and keep their true feelings to themselves.

When Jake is successfully transferred to his Avatar, the film at last achieves a sense of exhiliaration. I thought of the scene in Iron Man when Tony Stark first flew his suit over the Santa Monica Pier as Jake took off out of the lab, chomping at the bit to make use of his new body.

Jake does manage to get himself into some trouble while roaming about on Pandora, as he comes head to head with some of the wildlife, who mistake him as a hostile intruder. The first Na'vi he comes in contact with is Neytiri (Zoë Saldana), a Na'vi princess who knows right off the bat he is a human in an alien's body, and denounces his efforts to integrate with her society. Zoë Saldana is a good fit for this part, as she is an expert at playing characters who stubbornly defend their principles, but can be sidetracked by love and empathy.

Colonel Quaritch (Stephen Lang) is glad to have Jake accepted by the Na'vi, but for different reasons than Dr. Augustine. He wants Jake to interact with them only for the purpose of gathering knowledge of the "hostiles" and "savages" as reconaissance work. Jake had no political platform at the outset, but he soon finds himself torn between Dr. Augustine and General Quaritch. The marine side of him is trained to fight for his kind. On the other hand, he has immersed himself so thoroughly in the language, culture, and lifestyle of the Na'vi, that he isn't totally secure anymore in whether his loyalty lies with the human army or the Na'vi.

In his Avatar form, Jake falls in love with Neytiri. Neytiri, against her better judgment, falls in love with Jake, knowing full well he's a human in an Avatar body. I frequently found myself on the edge of my seat during the middle of the film, knowing that there was going to be either a clash between Jake and the colonel, or a grand falling out between Jake and the Na'vi, lying just a few scenes down the line.

To be sure, it would come down to Jake making a choice between the humans who dispatched him on his mission, and the alien race he now can't bear to see undergo attack.

My friend Blake remarked on the mindset of combat soldiers, such that they have to put the objective; be it land, government, people, or resources; above all else, including the eventual human toll. We see that Col. Quaritch will lose very little sleep over putting out hundreds upon hundreds of Na'vi men, women, and children with noxious gas or artillery, seeing as it clears the way for his army to mine the rich deposits of the mineral that, according to excavation project manager Parker Selfridge (Giovanni Ribisi), would bring shareholders 20 million dollars per unit.

Jake has his feet firmly planted in both ponds; had he not had a special ceremony with the Na'vi, and developed strong feelings for Neytiri in particular, he probably could have blindly followed the orders of Quaritch. But to Jake, they are no longer a mere infestation of creatures standing between the military and a commodity; Jake has seen the humanity of this alien race, has eaten their fruits, taken part in their ceremonies, and observed their connection to Awwa, a divine force that connects all of the aliens through nature. To sell them out to the military now would be a betrayal not only of the aliens, but of himself, as advanced as he is in accepting their way of life as his own.

The battle sequence, though spectacular, did weigh down the last forty-five minutes of the movie. I wanted to get a better portrait of the Na'vi as individuals running from the U.S. missiles, but there were so many explosions going off, it was hard to get a single human/alien subject to fix on as testamonial to the suffering.

In spite of my nitpicking, I actually found the film to have more strengths than weaknesses, and the more I've thought about it, the more I appreciated the film's agenda, in terms of humanizing the "other," and viewing their dreams and goals as significant in the grand scheme of things. Taken abstractly, this movie would actually play very well in college sociology or history classes. Really, the hamminess of the actors isn't what you're meant to judge the film on; it's the overall pastiche of new planet, human invaders, and the attempt at intercultural understanding. I may not be able to say it was the best film of the year, but it is without a doubt one of the most groundbreaking.

Three and 3/4 stars.

Day Zero is an indie movie about the hypothetical reinstatement of the draft. It stars Elijah Wood, Chris Klein, and Jon Bernthal as three friends who all get the draft notice in the mail; Aaron (Wood) is a writer struggling to make a deadline on a book, George (Chris Klein) is a lawyer, and James (Jon Bernthal) is a taxi-cab driver.

When the casting director sat down with the producers of this 2007 film, I imagine the conversation in the conference room going along the lines of "hey, let's cast this movie such that it would be the perfect Keith Muldoon movie." And the producers said, "Great! Who do we got?" And the casting director goes, "Oh, how about put Elijah Wood and Chris Klein together, and say they were childhood friends."

"Good, good," adds the producers. "Then add a new actor he's never heard of but will immediately like. Jon Bernthal as the tough cabbie."

"Hey, let's take some actresses from cable dramas he watches, like Ginnifer Goodwin from Big Love, and Elisabeth Moss from Mad Men," the movie's director puts in.

"Great, then he'll feel really proud of himself for knowing who these people are and being fans of them already," the casting director ads.




I found Day Zero on the discount rack at a store closing sale at a Blockbuster for four dollars. What a find. Elijah Wood has no shame in playing Aaron as a prototypical Elijah Wood character; that's not an insult. I love it when actors play according to type. I don't know why Jeremy Piven sought out tough-guy agent roles when he was so great as the best friend and sidekick. Harrison Ford is never better than when he's the loving father who fights against the bad guys to save his family. And Elijah Wood is at his best when he's the twitchy, nervous bespectacled protagonist who's just trying to do right by the world.

While the film focuses on Wood's character a lot, showing him going down the list of things he wants to accomplish before reporting to the draft board in thirty days, he is kept a mystery as to his background. We know he's been seeing a therapist, who really could give two shits about his well-being. His friend George (Klein) is in a decent white-collar job, but that doesn't prevent him from getting drafted. He doesn't want to leave his wife Molly (Ginnifer Goodwin) for so long of a time, given her brush with cancer five years before. Molly just wants him to do the right thing, but obviously is troubled by the possibility of him being away for two years. George goes to his father (John Rothman, so good in Easy), who has a friend in Congress. But could George live with getting out through political connections while his friends suit up and go to war?

Then there's James (Jon Bernthal), the cabbie with a checkered past, who nonetheless remains friends with Aaron and George. We learn that behind the tough guy persona is a decent man who protects his friends when they're in danger; in junior high, he got sent to reform school for putting a bully in his place. James meets Patricia (Elisabeth Moss), who picks him out in a bar and shows she's interested. James takes her back to his apartment where she meets his kid sister Mara (Sofia Vassilieva), who sees her brother's place as a safehaven from their parents, for reasons we are left to guess at.

The three friends fight often about whether it's a worthy cause to go to war. How will they handle Iraq? What if they get involved in a fire fight? What if they have to shoot someone? The film is not about the deployment itself, but the anxiety, and inner turmoil as the men prepare themselves for the assignment their country is now forcibly demanding from them. George and James fight bitterly, George seeing the war as a quagmire, and James seeing it through a holistic point of view of serving one's country. Aaron struggles too, but doesn't have the support at home to tell him whether he's doing the right thing or not. Having to figure out for himself whether his participation is justifiable sends Aaron spinning out of control as draft day nears.

I drew from Day Zero that we have to find our own meaning in the tasks that are asked of us. Whether or not our parents, spouses, brothers and sisters, or girlfriends agree with the cause, they are there for the servicemen who are deployed, and give them the positive reinforcement to withstand the demands of service in a desert land against insurgent armies. If we don't have those closest to us, what do we have to keep us going?

Day Zero was a great movie. And in the tradition of Easy, Summer, Happenstance, Love on the Side, and Game 6, it was one of those obscure finds that comes only from aimless browsing through the aisles of a video store, one amenity of a brick and mortar facility that Netflix, great as it is, can't quite replicate.

Three and 1/2 stars.

After we got through Speed Racer, Blake decided to put in a movie from the franchise the Wachowski Brothers are more readily associated with by fans of films and sci-fi; The Matrix Revolutions.



It had been a while since I watched Reloaded, but my memory was refreshed as the third one got underway. I recalled the Oracle had guided Neo to meet the Keymaker, who was integral in helping him find the Architect at the end of Reloaded, in a room with hundreds of TVs projecting the camera feed of various locations throughout the Matrix. I also remembered that Neo had a premonition of Trinity getting killed, but at the end of the second film, Neo managed to cheat fate and save her. (Now that I think about it, I am reminded of 2005's Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith, minus the element of turning over to the dark side.)

At the opening of Revolutions, Neo (Keanu Reeves) wakes up in a place called the Mobil Station, a pristine, white train station that exists as a limbo between the Matrix and the Mainframe. Meanwhile, Trinity and Morpheus hack back into the Matrix to visit the Oracle (who has been fitted with a new "shell," a new body, now played by Mary Alice, cast in the role after the death of Gloria Foster due to complications of diabetes). Trinity (Carrie-Ann Moss) and Morpheus (Lawrence Fishburne) inquire about the whereabouts of Neo. The Oracle tells them about how they need to appeal to the Merovingian for his release.

Merovingian (Lambert Wilson, still slimy as ever) playfully mocks human emotions, questioning their utility in terms of human accomplishment within the Matrix, or outside of it, for that matter.

There's a spectacular gunpoint stand-off in Club Hel between Trinity, Morpheus, Merovingian and all of his henchmen. No sooner have they brokered a bargain with this nefarious Frenchman are they boarding a train to Mobil Station, where they hope to save Neo, before the Train Man, who looks like a homeless, younger Gary Busey, can get to him.

I have to say I was moved by the level of emotion in The Matrix Revolutions. My friend Austin Podsednik at the Omaha World-Herald had told me about the film's agenda of validating love in an environment where it does not serve a visible function. Now I see what he meant. The first Matrix was very post-modern and logical, "get out of the machine," no time for real human interaction and warmth...or at least until the very end, when Trinity kissed Neo and acknowledged the Oracle's prophecy that she would fall in love with a dead man. Reloaded went a step further, showing actual physical intimacy between the pair, and showing Neo risking everything for her safety.

Now in the third one, we have a top down debate between emotion and human function. I set aside the existentialist argument of Matrix Reloaded, and accepted Neo and Trinity as a couple that had made their union one of purpose, and one of profound meaning. Both would give anything for each other, even if it meant deviating from the Oracle's prophecy. I consider them to be one of the great screen romances of my generation, up there with Jack and Rose in Titanic, Jack and Ennis in Brokeback Mountain, and Robbie and Cecilia from Atonement. In the case of Trinity and Neo, It is their lot in life to have been born as batteries in a society where humans are useless to the computers that run the Matrix, save for the energy they provide. Maybe the emotion cannot serve the computers, as Merovingian tells Trinity and Morpheus in Club Hel, but through their individuality, unity, and vigor, the free humans of Zion provide the best argument against the existence of a Matrix.

The armored suits that the soldiers in Zion use to fight off the offensive of the probes from The Matrix were sort of unintentionally comical. I thought of Dr. Robotnik in the Sonic the Hedgehog videogames of the Sega Genesis era, seeing the Zion soldiers firing off rounds of ammo in machine bodies. But hey, it's a science fiction thriller. I'm glad the Wachowski Brothers are capable of taking themselves lightly enough to include such random action in such a cerebral, philosophically heavy film.

Many filmgoers and critics found Revolutions (and Reloaded for that matter) to be a headscratcher, and no doubt, it was. But I got the basic sense of The Matrix Revolutions without needing to understand the defense tactics of the army of Zion, or how Neo hacked back into the Matrix to do battle with his other half, Agent Smith. Their aerial fight in the rain-drenched sky was visceral and compelling, and I'm a little sorry this installment didn't get the same love in the technical categories that the initial Matrix received with its four Academy Award wins in 1999.

The Matrix Revolutions comes to be about bringing an existence full circle. Neo was the chosen one to bring about an end to the machine's rule. He had to give his life to the cause, he had the sacred feminine as his guide (Trinity and the Oracle), and he had a following who would carry on after him if they would choose to hack their way out of the Matrix. I also realize parallels between this trilogy and The Truman Show and Pleasantville, two films that preceded the first Matrix by mere months, also about individuals who seek to overcome the forces that bind them to a controlled environment, one that only seems safe out of the occupants' ignorance.

I think Revolutions is my favorite of the trilogy, but it would not be as good without the foundation of the first two. For every beginning there is an end, so says a character in the film. Thus it serves as a contemplation on life itself, what we can choose to stand for, and whether we will live safe but exploited, or free and endangered, in the limited parameters of our years of life. Hats off to Larry and Andy Wachowski.

Three and 2/3 stars.

Blake, you're going to make V for Vendetta a movie night now, aren't you?

I think Revolutions is my favorite of the trilogy,

"Uh, so, Keith, what do you feel like watching?" Blake asked me after I arrived in town.

I haven't seen Blake as much lately since he left Minneapolis-St. Paul, so I thought we'd get out to see something at theatres when I went out to visit him last weekend. But he'd already seen Where the Wild Things Are with his lady friend, and his enthusiasm to check out 2012 doesn't exactly match mine. As for New Moon, well, Blake and I were kind of in agreement that a cohesive, relatable romantic drama Twilight did not make. No reason to rush out to that.

Instead, Blake had me make good on a bet to see Speed Racer. "Damn Yankees," I was thinking to myself as Blake joyfully grabbed the DVD of the 2008 Emile Hirsch family adventure and walked up to the DVD player.

The New York Yankees won the World Series, so Blake made me watch Speed Racer. And the next time I go to Davenport, Iowa, I'm supposed to get a sandwich from Hungry Hobo and a malt from Whitey's, two of the local establishments associated with what they call the Quad Cities.

In case you were wondering, if the Phillies had won the World Series, I would have made Blake watch the 2007 drama "Day Zero," starring Elijah Wood, Chris Klein, and Jon Bernthal, a movie about the reinstatement of the draft due to escalations in Iraq and Afghanistan. It's a great film, but that's another movie night for another bet.

Anyhow, first, here's my review of Speed Racer.



Speed Racer didn't presume to be anything more than a modern live-action send up of a 1960's Hanna-Barbera cartoon series. I thought of The Flintstones often while watching Speed Racer. Like with Brian Levant's 1994 cartoon-to-big-screen-live action adaptation, Speed Racer brought its source material to life with a faithful recreation of original series music, emulation of the mood and tone of its progenitor, and a broad, larger-than-life performance by John Goodman. So I wasn't holding the film's feet to the fire to be a masterpiece.

Having said that, Speed Racer was written and directed by Larry and Andy Wachowski (The Matrix trilogy). So as you might expect, Speed Racer aims a little higher than The Flintstones in terms of the humanistic elements of characters.

We see Speed as a child in the beginning, played by Nicholas Elia, who worships his older brother Rex (Scott Porter), a race car driver. He makes drawings of race cars on the letter bubbles of standardized tests. He draws flip card animation of race cars on the corners of his workbooks.

The Racer family is dealt a blow when Rex decides not to race for his dad anymore, but for the big boys, the companies. Pops Racer (John Goodman) will have none of it. He gives his son the ultimatum of staying and racing for the family name, or leaving permanently. Rex goes out the door and doesn't look back.

Painfully, the family is no where near the race track when Rex's car goes up in flames in the Crucible cup. They watch the accident happen on TV at home.

In spite of his older brother's fate, Speed grows up still loving the track. Played by Emile Hirsch as an 18 year old, Speed is put in the same position as his brother, to race for a large racing outfit in the same competition that took his brother's life. But when Speed declines sponsorship of a major corporation, the upper echelons of the organization decide to sabotage his chances on the speedway. After making a surprising alliance with Taejo Togokhan (Rain) and Racer X (Matthew Fox), the team on whose ticket he's entitled to compete in the Crucible Cup, he and his fellow drivers find themselves the direct target of the race cars financed by Royalton.

The film ascends from simple children's movie to parable about big business and their sense of entitlement to not play by the rules. I imagine someone like former Illinois governor Governor Rod Blagojevich, former Cincinnati Reds manager Pete Rose, or ex-Enron CEO Jeff Skilling watching the movie and absolutely hating it. It is defiantly preachy in its David vs. Goliath premise, but you know what? If not for the sake of lending a grander theme of moral justice to the movie, we at least want to see Speed Racer take his Mach 5 down the home stretch just to teach the big boys the simple lesson that you can't expect to win at it all the time, or at least that your rules of pay to play don't work for everyone.

While not brilliant, Speed Racer was far from the abomination some critics made it out to sound like. Rather than overwhelming, I found the visual trickery to be kind of dazzling, and the otherworldliness of the film's largely-CGI backdrop to be sort of entrancing. I also enjoyed seeing an A-list cast of Hirsch, Goodman, Susan Sarandon, and Christina Ricci, totally ham it up for, if no other reason, the opportunity to work with the Wachowski brothers.

Yes, I laughed at the unintentional sight gag of a paunchy John Goodman getting jostled around in a helicopter against a computer generated sky, and seeing him in full fight mode, twirling one of Speed Racer's adversaries like a pizza crust in a sequence as cartoonish as the green-screened surroundings. But this film was by no means a disappointment. It may not make my top ten (or even my top 20) for 2008, but that's no fault of Speed Racer. It happens to be a good movie released in a great film year.

Now, to find another sporting event to bet on to get Blake to watch Day Zero.

He leaves his youngest daughter's fist communion mass and comes upon a crowd of bystanders surrounding a police investigation. The crime scene includes his oldest daughter's car.

The day that would have been momentous for shop owner and ex-con Jimmy Markum only for one daughter's religious rite of passage is eclipsed by the murder of Jimmy's eldest daughter Katie.

The spellbinding narrative that is Mystic River, a collaborative vision first conceived in the novel by Dennis Lehane, adapted for the screen by Brian Helgeland, and directed by Clint Eastwood, is a tale of the depths of despair into which people pass at the loss of a loved one, particularly a nineteen year old daughter by a deceased first wife.

Jimmy (Sean Penn) tries to internalize the heartbreak and anguish while being questioned by police detectives Sean Devine (Kevin Bacon) and Sgt. Whitey Powers (Lawrence Fishburne). Sean and Jimmy were childhood friends. A third friend, Dave Boyle (Tim Robbins) happened to be in the same bar as Katie and her friends stopped in on the evening before she was found dead. We see Dave take just an extra long look at her as she dances on table tops swigging beer.

The film opens with an innocent image of Jimmy, Dave, and Sean playing street hockey as young boys on the outskirts of Boston in the mid 1970's. One day, while tracing their names in the cement, two ominous men with badges apprehend them. They happen to live near Dave, and offer him a ride home, under the pretenses of explaining to his parents what he was up to.

Dave is not taken home right away. He is taken to a dank basement where he undergoes hell in a handbasket before escaping four days later.

Tim Robbins does an in depth job of portraying Dave as bruised fruit. Hours after leaving the bar where he saw Katie, he arrives home, bleeding from the hand and a flesh wound on his abdomen. His wife, Celeste (Marcia Gay Harden), immediately helps him clean his wounds. He gives the story that he was mugged, and fought the guy off tooth and nail. He thinks he may have killed him.

The truth behind Dave's story becomes increasingly hard to interpret, as the details continually change depending upon who he talks to.

We do learn over the course of the police investigation that Katie (Emmy Rossum, Phantom of the Opera, The Day After Tomorrow) was shot with ammo that was fired from the same gun as one used in a liquor store hold up in 1984. The gun belonged to Ray Harris, and he had carried out the liquor store hold up with Jimmy as his accomplice. Harris later ratted Jimmy out to police in a plea bargin, and Jimmy was sent to the penitentiary for two years hard time.

Jimmy had a score to settle with Ray, and it is perceived that upon his relase, Jimmy went and found him to get even before starting over with his new life.

We are left on the edge of our seat for 90 percent of the film wondering who was behind Katie's murder? Was it someone with ties to Ray? We know that Ray's son, Ray Jr. (Thomas Guiry) was dating Katie at the time of her death, and the two were planning to move to Las Vegas. We know that Jimmy hates the whole Ray Harris family, and would have forbid his daughter from dating Ray Jr. if he had known.

Sean and Whitey's investigation carries them to the household of the Ray Harris family, and to the household of Dave Boyle. Sean is torn, because he knows it's within reason that Dave Boyle's childhood molestation may have left him with a compromised sense of right and wrong, and with that distorted moral compass, he might have carried out his pent-up rage on Katie just as a random act of violence. On the other hand, Sean and Dave are old friends. Sean painstakingly works to disprove that theory and put the possibility out of his mind for that reason.

As an audience member, I wondered to myself if Sean should have even been part of the police investigation. Since he had such long-standing ties with Jimmy, the victim's father, and with Dave, a person of interest, wouldn't it be handled with less bias by another cop? Whitey and Sean have interesting interactions based around this idea.

On the other hand, his being so close to Jimmy and Dave may give Sean the advantage of having his friends be open and trusting, and his intuition of their nature may help him discover the truth.

The film provides few easy answers to Sean's role in the investigation. I could only sit back in wonderment at the complex moral nature of the whole story. I understand what each character is going through, and why they act out as they do in the process of finding Katie Markum's killer. Jimmy's emotions don't excuse him, by any means (that statement is directed at Blake, who found the film morally unsound), for taking matters into his own hands in bringing about justice for his daughter's murder. But if I were in Jimmy's shoes, and had every reason to believe a close confidante were responsible for the death of my daughter, I wouldn't be able to exercise reason either.

With that in mind, Sean Penn blazed an intense, emotionally fraught trail of character study here. He totally absorbed the emotional journey that Jimmy Markum goes on, immersing himself in the anguish, survivor guilt, aching need, love, blind rage, and resolve in a performance that was as hard to pin down in an adjective description as it was astonishing to behold. Jimmy would keep emotions contained for scenes at a time, like a lid on a boiling pot, only to blow them off in startling moments of exposition.

Kudos also to Laura Linney, as Markum's wife, who shows herself to have the same propensity for hostility as Jimmy in complying with her husband's quest for vengeance.

Blake blamed this movie for raining on Lost in Translation's parade in their respective Oscar race. I too felt bad for Bill Murray, but I consider Lost in Translation to be career momentum for Murray's next shot. He's consistent, and will turn in a role that brings him close to the stage at the Kodak Theatre again.

As for me, I can look back with a less heavy heart. Mystic River was one of the best movies of 2003; maybe the decade.

Every year, there's at least one film I see either in theatres or on DVD that I totally embrace, but the general public either pans or forgets about totally.

For 2009, that film is Year One. I saw it on a Monday afternoon with my landlord, Andy. I hadn't seen the box-office returns for the weekend, but after seeing it, presumed it had finished strongly.

Directed by Harold Ramis (Stripes, Groundhog Day), Year One has a resignedly simple premise; with a good chunk of the Old Testament compressed to serve as this storyline's backdrop, we are introduced to our heroes Zed (Jack Black) and Oh (Michael Cera) early in the film.

Black's Zed is a hunter, and Cera's Oh is a gatherer. One day, Zed comes upon the tree of forbidden fruit, and gives in to biting from the apple. Oh tries to discourage him from it. I couldn't help but think back to the Stephen Schwartz musical Children of Eden when Zed starts to think of abstract questions he never had the critical thinking skills to even fathom before. Oh sees a danger in his newfound wonderment, and cautions him about the consequences of eating from the tree.

True to form, Zed gets banished by his community. He manages to recruit a reluctant Oh to accompany him on his journey to find a new settlement.

I loved that Jack Black and Michael Cera were granted the creative license to just be themselves while embodying the characters. Jack Black played Zed with the Jack Black antics we go to Jack Black movies to see. Likewise, Michael Cera played Oh with the same downbeat, quietly sarcastic pragmatism he brought to the screen as Evan in Superbad, Nick in Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, and to an extent, even to Paulie in Juno.

The two happen upon Cain and Abel (David Cross and Paul Rudd), who milk the fratricide parable for every last laugh possible. At first the playing of violence for physical humor seemed a bit tired, but damned if David Cross' Cain didn't win me over with his witless defense of his compromised morals, and his ambivalence regarding whether he wants Abel back or not.

Zed and Oh also happen upon Abraham and Isaac (Hank Azaria and Christopher Mintz-Plasse), who play the sacrificial lamb gag well through utilizing it for irony's sake, looking back on it with wisdom through a modern-day lense.

Of course, no Old Testament journey could be complete without a visit to the communities of Sodom and Gomorrah. Zed and Oh encounter Cain with a score to settle, which puts them in a position of vulnerability to the city's seductive vice and excess.

Oliver Platt is hilarious in a small role as the hairy, overweight, effeminate High Priest of Sodom who insists on having Zed oil him down. I can't understate the range of Platt's acting ability. How does he get from playing a television journalist entrenched in the efforts to solicit an apology from former President Nixon in Frost/Nixon to this? While a role like this may not boost his credibility (and indeed he is walking a fine line in recreating gay stereotypes for laughs), it is interesting to see just how inventive the actor is, and capable of adapting to different film genres so seamlessly.

Let's not forget the female love interests. Zed has a burgeoning romance with Maya (June Diane Raphael) when he is banished for eating the forbidden apple. Meanwhile, Oh has been working over time to impress Eema (Juno Temple, and to add to the coincidence, she does resemble Ellen Page), a young woman from his tribe who becomes a slave in Sodom.

Surprisingly, Year One does make some room for spiritual debate, as Zed and Oh question the nature of human sacrifice as the powers that be in Sodom throw live virgins to the fire in exchange for rain. But then again, this is Harold Ramis, and even his most raucious comedies often have a surprising capacity for philosophical reflection.

To answer the box office question, Year One opened behind not only The Proposal, but behind The Hangover, as it entered its third week. It got pretty safely buried. And that's why I'm proud to include it still in my top ten list for 2009.

3 and 3/4 stars.

Every Halloween, I have a tradition of seeking out something R-rated that's gripping, pulse-pounding, with a mixture of character types who are working against time to prevent the sealing of their fate.

This year is no exception. That's right, for 2009, my Halloween pick: Frost/Nixon.



Working off of a screenplay by Peter Morgan, adapted from his stage play, director Ron Howard brings the same sure-eyed sense of time and place to the set-pieces and staging of this film as he did with Apollo 13 and Cinderella Man. Working as a mock-documentary, the supporting characters, as played by their actors, supply the narration directly to the camera throughout the film.

The story begins in 1974. After months of pulling executive staff from office, avoiding the press, and denying allegations of involvement in the break-in to Democratic National Headquarters at Watergate, Richard Nixon resigns the presidency on national television. The images we're well-familiar with, of the White House press conference, and his boarding the helicopter, are all faithfully recreated by Frank Langella. Then we see Nixon's face sink as the chopper lifts off, and the White House becomes smaller in the distance. That's when the movie gets really interesting, as it seeks to imagine what was going on beyond the camera.

British entertainment television journalist David Frost (Michael Sheen) watches Nixon's resignation from Australia, where he is currently producing his popular TV show. He blithely observes that Nixon should have waited until noon to make his resignation speech, as the west coast audience would be asleep.

After leaving office, Nixon comes down with a serious case of phlebitis, and watches from his hospital bed as President Ford offers him the controversial pardon that prevented him from facing criminal charges for the Watergate break-in. American people were furious that he would never have to answer for his indiscretions in office.

The last person who would be expected to get Nixon to open up about his political misgivings would be David Frost. He was an Access Hollywood type. He had no political convictions, but he did know what kind of sensationalism would capture the mass-market television audience. So he seeks to commit former president Nixon to a series of televised interviews. Back in London, he manages to enlist the support of his producer and friend, John Birt (Matthew McFayden), to come up with a budget to put together a series of four televised interviews, one on Vietnam, one on foreign policy, one on Nixon the man, and one on (drumroll) Watergate. With the help of Birt, as well as Bob Zelnick (Oliver Platt) and James Reston, Jr. (Sam Rockwell), Frost drafts a list of questions to ask Nixon for each of the four segments.

It's interesting to watch how much Birt, Zelnick, and Reston give over of themselves into investigating Nixon's documents and activities while in office. They seem to have a score to settle, particularly Rockwell's Reston, who has watched U.S. soldiers continue to languish in Vietnam for four more years after Nixon is elected to office. He can barely bring himself to shake Nixon's hand at their first meeting.

Platt's Zelnick brings some much-welcomed comic relief to the film as he pretends to be Nixon and predicts Nixon's response to their questions.

Frost is off philandering with girlfriend Caroline Kushing (Rebecca Hall) while his journalistic crack team works out the interview details. The night before taping of the first interview in 1977, Frost takes off to attend the premiere of a movie he executive produced.

I kind of had the sense that Frost deserved to find himself in over his head when the first interview shows Nixon adroit at defending himself when questioned about Vietnam and Cambodia. We are left to wonder why Frost bothered to risk so much time and money on the interviews if he didn't have any political interest on his own behalf in driving Nixon to admit to wrong-doing. Frost seems like a huge flake for a solid hour of the film.

All the while, Nixon has Jack Brennan (Kevin Bacon), an advisor and aide, stroking his ego and giving him feedback on the interviews. I had the sense Brennan still had such faith in Nixon only because he was kept so far on the periphery of what was really happening in his administration.

While this film doesn't contain violence or bloodshed of the garden variety suspense thriller, there is a lot of slow-building tension over the course of the film; the outcome of the interviews is that only Frost or Nixon can save face. Nixon can come out smarter, and render Frost's journalistic endeavor useless. Or Frost can bring Nixon to his knees with curve balls and pointed questions backed with research into his interactions with staff.

Initially, Frost prepares better for the Watergate interview to save his own skin, but one gets the sense he develops some actual political convictions in the process. By the fourth interview session, he unwittingly finds himself in a Murrow-esque position of potentially holding a public figure accountable for the truth. The more Frost peels away at Nixon for silencing his staff, the more obvious it starts to become that he was complicit in, or at least aware of, the infiltration and bugging of the Democratic National Committee headquarters.

And here is where we see Langella at his best. Nixon has some decisions to make when he is genuinely cornered. We see the facade start to break down, and he shows a surprising amount of candor. For any human to acknowledge they have done great damage to their country is an ingratiating endeavor. But Nixon had kept such a stalwart defense for so long, one can actaully feel his insides crawling as he comes to terms with his responsibility and guilt.

I would defy Blake Gothenberg's suggestion that Frost/Nixon was boxed, gift-wrapped and handed its five Academy Award nominations, including best picture, solely because it was a Ron Howard/Peter Morgan period docudrama. For the fifty and up contingent of the voting Academy, this film was as good as an apology from the grave by Nixon. In seeing him express guilt for his decisions, this film helps anyone who read the news during Watergate move on a little bit.

Well, okay, it did rain on the parade of Wall-E and Dark Knight. But Wall-E left with an Oscar for Best Animated Feature (Andrew Stanton, director), and Dark Knight won Supporting Actor for Heath Ledger and for Sound Editing, where as Frost/Nixon, knowingly entering a bridesmaid, left winless. With the 2009 race, having ten best picture nominations will prevent this from happening again.

Here is my best of 2008 list revised.

1. Synecdoche, NY
2. The Curious Case of Benjamin Button
3. Doubt
4. The Visitor
5. The Dark Knight
6. Wall-E
7. Slumdog Millionaire
8. Leatherheads
9. The Class
10. Milk

Honorable Mentions

Get Smart
Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull
Marley and Me
Frost/Nixon
The Chronicles of Narnia: Prince Caspian
Nim's Island
Ghost Town
Forgetting Sarah Marshall
Iron Man
High School Musical 3: Senior Year
Quantum of Solace
Definitely, Maybe
Yes Man
Pineapple Express

Less than stellar:

Hancock
10,000 B.C.
Mamma Mia!
Twilight
Flash of Genius

Need to finish:

Wanted

After months of Twilight mania, it was nice to have Hollywood place attention back on a book and film series I actually followed with some level of enthusiasm.

Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince generated a lot of discussion when it came out in the middle of July of this year. Much of it revolved around how a certain character's funeral was omitted from the end of the film. I had the advantage of not having read the book. This was the same with the first two Harry Potter films as well as 2005's landmark "Goblet of Fire."
I was in no position to begrudge plotlines and events being cut for the interest of an expedient storyline packaged within a two and a half hour running time.

After the Death Eater's attack on the Millenium Bridge in London, the film is surprisingly downbeat in its opening sequences. Gone is the bombastic John Williams score, the visual effects wizardry of the owls and flying cars, the knight bus, the dementors, and the underage patronus charms that have populated the frenetic openings of the series films thus far. We see Harry quietly make the moves on a pretty teenage girl in a diner, only to have Dumbledore swoop in and take him to meet a new professor.

Horace Slughorn, played by Jim Broadbent (so great in Bridget Jones's Diary and Hot Fuzz), is brought in as the new potions teacher. The previous potions teacher, Severus Snape, (the dependable Alan Rickman) has been promoted to his coveted Defense Against the Dark Arts spot, a position in which he may or may not be capable of great destruction to Hogwarts.

A new spell book has surfaced with the inscription "This Book is the Property of the Half-Blood Prince." Harry uses this as a textbook in his Potions class, and finds the spells useful. But Hermoine is troubled by the enigma of who the half-blood prince might be. Dumbledore surmises that Harry could use the book, along with Professor Slughorn's memories, to find a possible means for defeating He Who Must Not Be Named.

Harry and Dumbledore are dependent upon witnessing one of Slughorn's memories, when a young Tom Riddle went to him for help learning a particular spell. Riddle had been learning spells from the very same copy of the textbook Harry is currently using for potions, the one engraved "property of the Half-Blood Prince." In addition to the book, Potter and Dumbledore surmise that Slughorn may be able to expose Voldemoort's Achille's Heel if they can get him drunk enough to impart that memory upon them of a young Tom Riddle coming to him for help.

This was the most dense Harry Potter film for me since Chamber of Secrets. Chock full of back story, spells, and hidden agendas, it absolutely requires a second viewing, and for my sake, a thorough reading of the book in the near future.

One element that did hold my attention, though, was the long-awaited revelation of mutual attraction between Harry and Ron's younger sister Ginny (Bonnie Wright.) Having not read the sixth book, I learned of this via word of mouth, by that my erstwhile bookworm roommate, Blake Gothenberg.

Oh, man, it was great to see those two standing before each other and breathing unsteadily, fumbling for words. There was a girl I met in college who looked a lot like Ginny Weasley who was a student worker the office over from me. That was not meant to be, but through this film, I get to watch Harry live the dream. And with all the holding and kissing that took place between them, this film proved more intoxicating of a romantic experience for me than many steamier films.

Of course Ron and Hermoine finally divulge true hidden feelings, and that was greatly satisfying as well. But I think I was less intimidated by Lavendar Brown as a romatic foil for Ron than I was Viktor Krum for Hermoine. I think Hermoine gave herself over a bit more emotionally to Krum than Weasley did to Brown (even Ron admitted Lavendar Brown was kind of obsessive), so it seemed only a matter of time before he came around.

The most gripping portion of the film for me, of course, revolved around finding the seven Horcruxes, Dumbledore's poisoning, and Harry's risky decision to go to Snapes for help. I felt Harry's angst was palpable. I've felt betrayed by professors in college who I reluctantly came to trust only to have them turn and give me a C for the course in the end. That's a weak example compared to Potter, but I'm familiar with the shame and anguish of letting one's guard down.

However, Snape's true nature is a mystery until the seventh book, of course. And I'm counting on all of you to keep your mouth shut until I read it...or see the movie...one or the other I should be able to get done in the next two years.

Three and 3/4 stars.

Typically, you have to wait until September or October for the Oscar season to kick into high gear. 2009 was an exception though. By the end of August, it was well underway, led with career-best performances by Channing Tatum, Sienna Miller, Marlon Wayans, Joseph Gordon-Levitt, Arnold Voosloo, Christopher Eccleston, Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje, and Dennis Quaid in the across-the-board smash G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra.

What's that? You're picking up on my sarcasm? Alright, yeah, it is hard to hide.

Directed by Stephen Sommers (The Mummy), G.I. Joe had promised to be an unapologetic popcorn hit, with deliberately one-note performances designed only to serve as a backdrop to explosions, aerial assaults and acts of catostrophic biological warfare. I went into this movie promising myself I'd take it with a grain of salt. And incidentally, Blake bet me breadsticks that I would at least give the film three stars. Hoping to prove I wasn't just going to freeload him for breadsticks, I went in to it trying to enjoy the film.

At the opening of our film, A NATO security council is brokering a deal with Destro, a corrupt arms dealer, who has developed this biological weapon that, when unleashed, has the power to destroy an entire city. I imagine NATO's logic in accepting such a contract is to keep their friends close, and their enemies closer. That, or they were simply too dim-witted to not be skeptical of a weapons genius with an implacable foreign accent, slicked back hair, and a steely glare.

A special ops team of army commandos led by Duke (Channing Tatum) is commissioned to transport the briefcase carrying the control sample of this weapon from Destro's drop-off site to NATO headquarters. They are baffled when a fighter jet opens fire on their convoy, and sure enough, Destro isn't so willing to part ways with his weapon after all.

A bunch of Humvees get blown to smithereens, and when Duke finally sees who was operating the plane that opened fire on him and his men, it's Ana, a woman he was once engaged to. Ana (Sienna Miller) is now the Baroness, and married to Destro.

Duke and his buddy Ripcord (Marlon Wayans) make it out alive with the package, thanks to the arrival of Scarlett (Rachel Nichols), Snake Eyes (Ray Park) and Heavy Duty (Adewale Akinnuoye-Agbaje). The two are quickly brought to meet General Hawk (Dennis Quaid), and invited to join his elite military unit made up of special operatives known as the G.I. Joe's.

The rest of the movie revolves around tracking down Destro's hidden base, retrieving the nano-technology after he steals it back, and stopping this mad man from using it to consume major world cities in his interest of global domination. But really, past the half hour mark, who cares about plot? This movie is only a loose semblance of plot details written specifically to accommodate the latest in ILM visual wizardry. If only there was a decent, coherent story line to hold it together, I might have been more involved in the aerial battles and air to ground attacks. As it was, I could feel a headache setting in over the course of the 2 hours and 10 minutes of film.

The one thing that worked in this movie was the dynamic between Duke and Ana. Duke was supposed to protect Ana's brother Rex (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) when they went into battle somewhere in the Middle East five years before. Duke sends Rex into a building to acquire information on biological warfare from some criminal mastermind, and about a minute after he goes inside, the U.S. forces arrive way too early to open fire on the mad man's hold out. Duke tries his darnedest to warn Rex in time, but is unable to spare his friend, and would-be future brother in law, from certain doom.

Duke broke the one promise he made to Ana, to look after her genius brother. His guilt was palpable, and was the heart and soul of this weak-willed movie. Then the film goes and squanders what good will it had earned from me in the third act with a twist that is backed by very shallow exploration of the transition of certain characters from good to bad.

I hold no fault against Joseph Gordon-Levitt for the weakness of this movie. Clearly he was having fun, and yet approached his cookie cutter role with utmost professionalism. In his interview with Leonard Maltin, he went out of his way to warn viewers that it did not resemble reality in the slightest, and made his work on 3rd Rock From the Sun look like a John Cassavettes movie by comparison. In getting such a respected and talented actor, though, I did hope to see the screenplay allow him to demonstrate his range a little bit more. And I realize that's asking a lot from a dumb, mindless, convoluted summer action movie.

In a reconnaissance mission going from a weapons building holdout beneath the sands of Egypt to a mission control center underneath the waters of the Arctic circle, to the streets of Paris, the Joes pursue Destro and his cohorts in breakneck fashion. But I was left with more questions than answers. Why wouldn't Duke's desire to make amends with Ana be somewhat diminished after she's responsible for the deaths of faceless soldiers under his command? I know that love prevails over all, but for Pete's sake, it shouldn't be that easy. Why would Destro even bother to negotiate a trade deal with NATO if he would only risk letting the prized weapons fall out of his hands forever? What if he hadn't succeeded in breaking into the Joe's headquarters and swiping them back?

G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra joins the ranks of Troy, Memoirs of a Geisha, and No Country for Old Men as a movie I just couldn't appreciate as much as Blake did. The fact that I don't grasp the appeal G.I. Joe holds for Blake does make his mental process all the more mysterious, which is part of the reason I'm so interested in his feedback.

Due to the fleeting moments of poignancy in the flashback sequences to Duke, Ana and Rex in happier days, the promise of romance between Ripcord and Scarlett, and the whimsy of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in a role he clearly relished, G.I. Joe: Rise of the Cobra is actually spared being the worst movie of the year by 17 Again. And to be fair, I'm already predicting I liked it better than I would like Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. But a lumbering, piece-meal assemblage of action sequences clobbered together under the alleged storyline that is G.I. Joe makes Armageddon look like a skillfully crafted piece of art.

2 and 3/4 stars.

The argument of whether everything happens because of destiny or chance has been evident in movies across decades. In Fools Rush In, Alex and Isabel had the argument. In Forrest Gump, Forrest Gump's mom and Lieutenant Dan had alternate approaches (life is a box of chocolates vs. I had a DESTINY!).

In 500 Days of Summer, the principal characters, Tom (Joseph Gordon-Levitt) and Summer (Zooey Deschanel) argue about whether destiny governs the meeting of lovers, or if it happens by chance.

I totally got Tom during this movie. Over the course of drinks at a birthday party, chance meetings, in the elevator ("I love the Smiths. The Smiths are the best."), Tom starts to think that this is all falling together for a reason.

Tom is ready to leap head first into a relationship with Summer, while she's more circumspect about defining their relationship. It's arguable that the two are in love. (Okay, well, it's official that Tom is in love with Summer, it's hard to refute that summer has strong feelings for Tom.)

The film plots the course of their relationship over roughly 500 Days, jumbling up the days so that we see Tom breaking plates at his apartment as the film opens. The first-time viewer will see this scene as hilarious, him standing dead-pan at the kitchen counter as he smashes housewares in indulgent self-pity. I imagine seeing this film a second time, though, knowing what news he'd just gotten, and feeling great empathy.

As the film goes back and forth from day 290 to day 8 to day 245 to day 21, we are left to piece together in our minds the arc of the story. I thought of Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind often. Early in their relationship, Tom purveys a sense of puppy dog neediness, a wanting for Summer to hold and kiss him and call him her boyfriend. When he does get two of the three, he's on cloud nine. The scene where he walks out of his apartment and greets everyone who passes in his favorite park is so unabashedly hilarious I found myself laughing harder and harder the more over the top it became. I can only hope Saturday Night Live has Joseph Gordon-Levitt's agent on the line to arrange for him to host, because it absolutely begs to be parodied. And even though he has the goofiest behavior when things are going well, it's impossible to get tired of Joseph Gordon-Levitt in this movie, because he shifts gears so rapidly. You don't have to wait long for him to display new emotions. It cuts rapidly to him walking out of the elevator with a death glare, reciting everything he hates about Summer. Credit is due in a large part to the screenplay and film editing where that's concerned.

Then there's Zooey Deschanel. She was very cute in Elf, Almost Famous, and Yes Man. But here, this may be the cutest I've ever seen her. Credit there goes to Zooey just for being so damn cute and likable, and to the cinematographers, for capturing her beauty so sure-handedly. She knows that she cares about Tom, and she opens up to him a great deal. What she doesn't know is whether or not she wants to spend the rest of her life with him. But she doesn't want to hurt him either. I would have liked a little more insight into what she wanted. But maybe not totally getting Summer is the point.

500 Days of Summer made me feel as earnest of an appreciation for the attraction of two individuals as I felt when I watched Kevin and Winnie on The Wonder Years when I was a kid. I can only speak for the film as far as my reaction goes. I'm interested to hear Blake and other critics do the same.

3 and 4/5 stars.

About a week and a half ago, I had a mini Sam Mendes film festival. I watched Road to Perdition on TNT, an absorbing period drama about Michael Sullivan, (Tom Hanks), a mob henchman from Rock Island, Illinois, who has to hit the road with his young son to find a new place to settle down after being targeted for murder by mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman).

Then Blake and I went to take in a screening of Away We Go, a quirky, and I dare say high-spirited, modern comedic drama about a young couple, Burt and Verona (The Office's John Krasinski and Saturday Night Live's Maya Rudolph), who are faced with unexpected pregnancy as the film opens. They are living in a drafty bungalow in a northern midwest town as the film opens.

Verona takes a look around and realizes that the lifestyle they lead is not conducive to raising a child. This is not to say they live immorally, they merely live simply. A shabby couch, magazines and a scrappy coffee table adorn their modest living room. They decide they need to relocate to an environment a little more embracing to a newborn.

It's almost fate that I happened to rewatch Road to Perdition and see Away We Go on the same day. I otherwise would have been hard pressed to find similarities between this film and any other Sam Mendes movie. Like Road to Perdition, it's about relocating for the good of a child. It observes two people hitting the open road without a set itinerary (well, okay, Verona does staple a list of cities to visit on the inside of Burt's jacket), and hoping to land on a place that is safe and secure, interspersed with protracted driving shots across beautiful if desolate landscapes. (Mendes' former director of photography, the late Conrad L. Hall, would have approved.)

While Road to Perdition was a better movie, I think Away We Go would have greater rewatchability. Blake and I have often had the discussion about the different categories of "favorite" movie, how it can be distinguished by emotional reaction to artistic brilliance (Road to Perdition, American Beauty, Atonement) or a very basic affection for a movie which makes it a first choice for repeated viewings (Big Fish, Spiderman, Get Smart).

Burt and Verona first meet with Burt's parents (Catherine O'Hara and Jeff Daniels), who have been planning to move to Antwerp, Belgium for longer than Verona's been pregnant. They don't stall their plans when they find out they're moving a month before the baby's due. It's not that they're cold and indifferent (well, okay, maybe a little indifferent), it's just that they've reached a point in their lives where their kids are raised and they want to have their own life. They'd probably love to see the baby, I imagine they'd just expect Burt and Verona to hop a plane to Belgium to bring the infant to them. Entitlement would be the best way of describing them.

Verona's parents both died when she was 22. Reasons are never given, but we can imagine anything. I choose to imagine a car accident as the easiest explanation. Given that Maya Rudolph's own mother, R&B soul singer Minnie Riperton ("Lovin' You") died of cancer when Rudolph was 6, it's easy to see what she had to draw upon for the character, the reluctance to marry, the anguish at not having mom and dad around for key moments of her life, the fondness for memories of years past.

Burt and Verona go to Phoenix, Arizona, Madison Wisconsin, and Montreal, Quebec, Canada to find an environment conducive to raising a child.

Phoenix has Verona's ex boss Lily (Allison Janney, about 360 degrees removed from her character in American Beauty), is a drinker, may have some mental instability issues (I'd diagnose her as a candidate for Tourette's), and berates her kids incessantly. Her husband (Jim Gaffigan) is actually the quiet, enigmatic equivalent of Janney's surrendered wife of American Beauty in this relationship.

Madison has Burt's "cousin" Ellen (Maggie Gyllenhaal) and her husband (Josh Hamilton), a hippie couple who allow their children in the bedroom even when children should NOT be around), and breastfeeds her newborn and her six year old (appalled dropping of jaw).

Montreal has college friends Tom and Munch (Chris Messina and Melanie Lynsky), who have a great life with four foster children, but want so badly to conceive one of their own. Tom makes a great analogy about a family and a household using pancakes and syrup.

The film did better than I expected in terms of humor. I enjoyed the awkward silences that usually followed whatever absurdity was shared by Lily, Ellen, or their respective partner. Burt and Verona would merely sit stone silent, eyebrows raised. The humor is very much in the same vein as the Office, and with that in mind, it worked to Krasinski's strengths as a comedic actor.

I have a great fondness for Away We Go. To borrow from another Jeff Daniels character, "it's minor Sam Mendes," but that's a pretty weak insult when you take into account the man's track record.

Three and 1/2 stars.

Oh my gosh! News flash: Night at the Museum 2: Battle of the Smithsonian was awesome!

I loved the first Night at the Museum, because it was not only informational and educational, but so funny and original.

I went in holding NATM2 to reasonable expectations; give me a 3 and 1/2 star film and I won't be dissatisfied.

It vaulted that handily.

Ben Stiller returns as Larry Daley, the museum guard for the American Natural History Museum at Night at the Museum 1. In the first film, Larry was a struggling inventor who took a job as night guard to pay the bills so he didn't lose custody of his son Nick (Jake Cherry). Now, Larry is living the dream, having founded Daley Devices, a company that manufactures his inventions.

Larry learns that upgrades at the American Natural History Museum are making the old exhibits obsolete. Many of them (Sacajawea, Jedediah, Octavius), are going to be shipped to the National Archives in Washington, D.C., where they will be frozen away for all time. In place of the live action exhibits, virtual exhibits will take their place.

Larry is still visibly consumed with the day to day tasks of running Daley Corp., as is evident by his frequent interruption of the living exhibits to answer his blackberry. When he finds out his friends are going to be locked away, though, he takes some time away from his all-consuming day job to try to restore them to their previous living arrangements.

Larry and son Nick work together to hatch a plan to infiltrate the Smithsonian. The first snag Larry hits is running into Brandon (pronounced Brundan, played by Jonah Hill), in a scene that felt like it fell right out of a Judd Apatow movie. I was so impressed with Hill and Stiller's comic intensity, and their ability to maintain it without once resorting to a four-letter word.

Larry busts in, finds that Dexter the Monkey had made off with the Egyptian tablet that brought the exhibits to life after dark.So they were able come to life in Washington. Now, they faced the ordeal of standing up to Kahmunrah (Hank Azaria), the Egyptian pharoah who is brother to Akmenrah from the first Night at the Museum film. Kahmunrah and his forces had been fighting against our friends from the American Natural History Museum over the tablet the night before Larry arrived in Washington. Once they're brought back to life, Kahmunrah takes the tablet and inserts it into the gates of the Underworld, hoping to unleash all of his forces.

The tablet, which looks like a giant cellphone in bronze, has a new combination. Kahmunrah asks Larry to find him the new combination, based on the inscriptions on the tablet.

Larry has acquired a new sidekick. The exhibit of Amelia Earhart (Amy Adams) accompanies him on his quest to find the new combination, which involves consulting with a number of other exhibits, including The Thinker, the Albert Einstein bobbleheads, and the Lincoln monument.

I never got around to seeing Mrs. Pettigrew Lives for a Day, but after seeing Adams' Amelia Earhart, I'm adding it to my Netflix. Adams has perfected the art of the wry, quirky Girl Friday with her spewing of depression-era figures of speech, her mannerisms, and her whip-sharp comic timing. I thought of a Conan O'Brien sketch in 2005 promoting the remake of King Kong in which he dubbed over the original films with 1930's vernacular. Much like Conan O'Brien does from time to time, Adams managed to recreate a sense of the 1930's rhythm and culture. I really hope some time in the next year she gets a seat on the couch of the Tonight Show after O'Brien takes over. I can see them bantering now. "So's your old man!" "Why ya' gotta' give me the tomatoes?"

Earhart develops strong feelings for Larry. But he knows that there can be no future for the two of them, her being an exhibit confined to the museum, him being a living breathing human being. But God help him, Larry kind of loves her back. The film is surprisingly deeper than it presumed to be in its reflection on mortality, as Larry struggles to explain to her what will happen if she flies off into sunrise. I actually fought back tears. But hell, the same happened the second time through watching Iron Man.

I haven't even mentioned Al Capone, Ivan the Terrible, Napoleon Bonaparte yet. And shame on me for neglecting to mention Bill Hader as General Custer, who is one great comic lead role away from a Golden Globe nomination in my opinion.

I had the same sense of great possibility watching Night at the Museum 2 as I did watching the Toy Story movies. This film captures the essence of moments in history, extracts the people and mixes them together, and imagines how their interactions might play out based on their attributes and reputations. It is an absolute playground for any historian. And while it's intended to be taken lightly, I imagine the discussion it would generate between intellectuals and researchers over dinner about how certain famous (and infamous) figures would really react to each other if embodied and united in the present.

2009 has been an incredible year for movies so far. It is not yet June, and with Night at the Museum 2, I write my third four star review. Props to director Shawn Levy for taking this mindbending concept and running with it.

Four stars.

One silver lining to the 2007-2008 Writer's Guild of America strike was that shut down of production on NBC's Heroes freed up Zachary Quinto's schedule to shoot the movie Star Trek.

Directed by J.J. Abrams, creator of Lost and Alias, Star Trek (2009) takes a bit of a gamble in telling an origins story for Captain Kirk, Mr. Spock, Dr. McCoy, Chekhov, Uhura, Scotty, and the crew of the Federation starship Enterprise.

As it happens, I'm not as devoted of a Star Trek fan as some other people I know, so placing new actors in time-tested role really wasn't as big of a travesty for me as it was for other people. As long as it told a good story with compelling action and human drama, I would be satisfied.

Wisely, I went in expecting something along the three and a half star line or lower. It took the pressure off of the film to impress me.

The film opens with the Federation starship U.S.S. Kelvin sustaining heavy fire from a ship emerging from a strange lightning storm. It is piloted by Nero, a Romulan with a vendetta that we find out about over the course of the film. While the Kelvin's captain disembarks to negotiate with Nero, first officer George Kirk is made acting Captain.

After negotiations turn awry, Kirk authorizes a top down evacuation of the Kelvin. His wife, nine months pregnant and going into labor, pleads for George to evacuate with her, as she needs him for the delivery. This was a heartwrenching scene, and if not for the fact I was dehydrated, I would have been in tears. Sometimes, you don't even think about what you're giving up when you have so many lives in your hands. George Kirk makes a tough decision quickly and naturally, and the emotional payoff elevates Star Trek to the level of Deep Impact or United 93.

Flash forward about twelve years, and we have a young James Kirk borrowing his step father's 300 year old automobile and hotrodding through the backroads of rural Iowa.

If this film has a flub, it is minor, but I'll bring it up anyways. Young James bails out of his father's 300 year old convertible just before it plunges over a huge cliff. First of all, how would they have kept that car from deteriorating over the course of 300 years? Alright, I admit, there are automobile museums around the world that exhibits of cars that are around 100 years old. (Autoworld at the Art History Museum in Brussels, Belgium comes to mind for me.) But would it still run? And would they still have the 20th century petroleum fuel to run it in the late 2200s?

And where in Iowa are there canyons? I'm scratching my head trying to think. I grew up across the river from Davenport, and I've been all over Iowa. There are some decent size bluffs over the Mississippi and Missouri Rivers, but no precipice with as drastic of relief as displayed in the movie.

Evidently we have some major geological events in store.

We also see Spock as a child on the Vulcan planet, the son of a Vulcan and human, and proned to ridicule by his classmates for his cross-pollinated state. It is not easy to bear the scrutiny of his classmates who are full-blooded Vulcan.

Spock and Kirk are destined to meet, of course. Both enlist in Starfleet, Kirk (Chris Pine) recruited by Captain Christopher Pike (Bruce Greenwood), following a wretched bar-room brawl; and Spock (Quinto) enlisting of his own volition, after consulting with his parents.

Kirk gets himself into trouble by hacking into a computer system and thus passing a flight simulation test created by Mr. Spock for the purpose of preparing a commander for an unwinnable battle. Kirk gets put on suspension, but his buddy, Leonard "Bones" McCoy (Karl Urban) hatches a plan to sneak Kirk onto a Starfleet ship.

It is good that Kirk is there on the ship, because starfleet sees the same lightning storm that was present when the Romulan spacecraft emerged to destroy the Kelvin 28 odd years before. Kirk is able to identify the lightning storm for what it is, while Cpt. Spock authorizes further investigation.

Man, it was awesome watching Spock and Kirk exchange words. The dialogue absolutely crackles throughout the movie.

The Romulans want to destroy the Vulcan planet using "Red Matter," the film's MacGuffin, which can be inserted into a planet's core and suck it into a black hole. You see, Nero, the Romulan ship commander, lost his planet to a black hole 130 years in the future. The black hole was created by the Red Matter, a substance Mr. Spock had created for the specific purpose of swallowing a supernova.

Anyhow, I'm getting too involved with the space logistics. The supernova will be destroyed, but so will be the Romulan planet, sucked into the black hole, Nero's pregnant wife included. Nero, being away on a mining ship, had to watch.

The black hole will also be a temporal anomaly, since Nero goes back in time 154 years to destroy the U.S.S. Kelvin. Spock is transported back 130 years, and arrives right around the time Kirk is 26 years old, and exiled from the enterprise by the young Spock. Future Spock and Kirk meet up on the snow planet Delta Vega.

The future Spock (now played by, you guessed it, Leonard Nimoy), tries to convince Kirk to assist him in fighting against the Romulans. In order to do this, he must be beamed back to the U.S.S. Enterprise and somehow get Spock to give up his chair as captain. How will Kirk do it? No, not by telling him "I met you from 130 years in the future." But by pissing him off, thus emotionally compromising him.

If I were Nero, I would have used the opportunity of going back in time to warn the Romulans about the supernova coming 154 years in the future and devise some sort of relocation/evacuation procedure in the century and a half leading up to it. But no, Nero's a supervillain, so he'd prefer to use the opportunity to stick it to the aging Spock by sucking up the Vulcan planet with a red matter black hole; that is, once he arrives through the temporal anomaly 26 years down the line.

Yes, the plot is convoluted. But it is never boring. And the aforementioned actors do a dynamite job. I particularly enjoyed the relationship between Spock and Uhura (Zoe Saldana). Saldana is good at showing sadness, anger, and fear. In a different manner from Kirk, she tries to get Spock to break down and show emotion too. I imagine the screenwriters Roberto Orci and Alex Kurtzman watching that scene and jumping up and down, thinking, "oh, my God! That's exactly how I envisioned this on paper!"

While I was filled with questions about the film's continuity and logic, I abstain from taking the film to task on its details with respect for the film's favor of feeling over logic. The film has the right sense to its actions, and allows for some breach of consistency in temporal spatial logic with the pay-off of unmined emotional possibility. Hey, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button and Being John Malkovich achieved the same end. By comparing Star Trek to those two movies, I think you know where this review is heading.

Four stars.

This weekend, I went out to visit Blake. We had originally talked about going to see X Men Origins: Wolverine, but then we came to a collective decision we weren't all that enthusiastic about it after all, and opted to stay home and watch a DVD at his apartment instead.

Blake presented me with a number of choices. There's a long list of films he has been insistent that I see. Last night, we knocked Kingdom of Heaven off that list.

Directed by Ridley Scott, Kingdom of Heaven lived up to the precedent set by this often visceral director with abundant blood, carnage, and combat. However, there's a reason I continue to return to the well that is the Ridley Scott cannon; beneath the ultra-violent exterior beats the heart of a truly human story. Again, a precedent Scott set through his remarkable resume (Gladiator, Black Hawk Down, Blade Runner, etc.)

Orlando Bloom stars as Balian of Ibelin, a blacksmith from France who goes to fight in the Crusades circa 1177 AD.

Early in the film, Balian prepares to cross the Mediterranean from Messina, Sicily. He sees Muslims bowing in prayer on the rocky shore. He asks someone what they are saying, and it roughly translated to "praise be to God, for he should be praised."

"Not all that different from our own prayers," reflects Balian.

There were tons of great moments in this film like that.

After a patient, paced set up, we see Balian land (or rather, shipwrecked) on the shores of the Holy Land (presumably present day Israel/Palestine.) He finds his way to Jerusalem, where he is appointed the successor to the Baron Godfrey of Ibelin (Liam Neeson). In fact, Bailan learns that Baron Godfrey was his father, and he was born out of wedlock.

I have to say that I thought of Batman Begins during the early training sequences in Kingdom of Heaven. Neeson's Baron Godfrey is a gruff but sensible in tutoring Bloom's Balian in the finer points of crusade warfare, much in the same nature as Neeson's Henri Dukard trained Christian Bale's Bruce Wayne to fight in the aforementioned other large-scale 2005 release.

Liam Neeson must have been busy as hell the year he had to shoot those two films back to back.

Anyhow, I digress. Balian receives welcome in Jerusalem from King Baldwin IV (Edward Norton, who is exceptional even from behind a heavy mask). Though his face and body are ravaged by Leprosy, Baldwin IV has pretty well rationalized the nature of the Christian Muslim conflict as it was in the Middle East in the 12th Century. The two religious cultures were working to establish their influence on the world front as a whole, but the cause boiled down to territorial conflict. It was a fight not over freedom of belief so much as land. So long as Muslims paid their taxes in Christian countries, they were free to worship as they wished.

I liked the message of this movie. The battles were never a fight to the death over whose God was better, but who could merely have autonomy over the Israeli city that is the point of origin for both Jesus Christ and the Prophet Mohammed. I was glad that both King Baldwin IV and Saladin, leader of the Muslim forces (Ghassan Massoud) seemed to get that.

The film could have painted itself into a corner by conveying a message that it was nobler to fight for one's religion than land. However, Ridley Scott would then have to open up a debate about whether Christians or Muslims carried the moral highground. Really, both sides are guilty of atrocities, so it would have been slanted no matter which side was presented as the morally upright. Plus, a film where Muslims and Christians attack each other out of pure intolerance would have made for an agonizing three hours. Wisely, Ridley Scott wove the story as one of Christians and Muslims fighting to preserve their collective ways of life, and dispassionately disputing over the land. (Be it praying to Jesus or Mohammed.) I thought of The New World and United 93 while watching this.

Oh, there is a villain, though. Surprisingly, it's not the Jeremy Irons character. He plays the Count of Tiberias, who is duty bound to the interests of Christians in Jerusalem. The real villain, if there is one, is the Guy of Lusignan (Marton Csokas), who does preach of Christianity's self-righteous entitlement to Jerusalem. He's married to Princess Sibylla (Eva Green), who for obvious reasons is more attracted to Orlando Bloom's character than her husband.

While it was lengthy, it was a good movie, maybe even as good as Gladiator. And while he's a generic cola when you wanted Pepsi or Coke, Orlando Bloom is adequate as the lead, and gets the monologues off with the right inflection.

Kingdom of Heaven was about as good as Gladiator, and it probably takes the #8 spot away from Crash on the top ten of 2005.

3 and 3/4 stars.

Throughout 2008, I went on a renting spree of low budget, direct to DVD movies. As a consequence, I didn't give four stars to a single movie I saw in the summer of 2008.

I guess after the emotional investment I put into the works of 2007, (good and bad movies), I felt drained. So I rented movies like "Thief Undercover," "Summer," "Easy," and "Wedding Crashers." "Fast Times at Ridgemont High" might have been the most substantial film I took home from the video store.

To quote Blake, "Life is too short to watch crappy movies." At first, I disagreed with him, following the philosophy that sometimes you just feel like watching a crappy movie.

But I made myself put Synecdoche, NY at the top of my queue on the Netflix account I just started. I knew it would require me to put my thinking cap on, but I had such great experiences with Being John Malkovich, Adaptation and Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind that I was ready to follow Charlie Kaufmann anywhere.

Written and directed by Charlie Kaufmann, Synecdoche, NY. is the tale of Caden Cotard (Philip Seymour Hoffman), a theatre director in Schenectady, NY whose career is going well, but his marriage is falling apart. His wife Adele (Catherine Keener) is an artist who makes paintings so tiny you have to look through special glasses to see them. Most of them have human subjects.

When Adele doesn't come to the opening night of Death of a Salesman, Caden is hurt but finds himself the center of attention of other women.

Adele has the opportunity to do artwork in Berlin, so she goes and takes her daughter Olive with her. Caden enters a series of romantic relationships. There's Hazel (Samantha Morton) who works in the box office and wears low-cut blouses. She's smitten with Caden very obviously from the start. There's also Claire (Michelle Williams), an actress from Death of a Salesman, who he eventually starts a new family with. And there's Tammy (Emily Watson), one of the actors in a massive new project he's starting.

Caden has received a MacArthur Grant to stage whatever theatrical production he wants. He decides to buy an enormous abandoned warehouse in Manhattan's theatre district. He hires many actors and starts staging a play about his entire life. Everything that we see happen offstage with Caden is recreated on the stage, a multitiered simulation of New York City.

The film spans across decades, and we come to realize that Caden is trying desperately to paint a portrait of his life before dying. He suffers numerous afflictions over the course of the film, and with each new twitch, infection, seizure, or injury, he becomes more compelled to leave something in this theatrical production that is lasting.

The actors become ancy to get an audience, and inexplicably stick with it for decades, even though it is clearly art for art's sake. (Like a giant, ongoing workshop.)

Caden is constantly longing for either the one he can't have or the one who got away. When he has sex with Hazel, he cries for Adele. When he's married to Claire, he worries about his daughter Olive, who grows up in Berlin and enters a destructive lesbian relationship with Maria (Jennifer Jason Leigh.)

Has Caden's entire life been wasted on this theatrical endeavor? Or has he in fact crafted a microcosm of the meaning of life? We fall in love, we fall out of love, we try to do something lasting for the world before we die. But then we die, and did anything we did amount to anything?

Caden finally gains insight into the story of his life when Sammy (Tom Noonan) comes along. He wants to play Caden. He in fact has followed Caden around for years, and does an excellent job of recreating the idiosyncracies, right down to the romances. In fact, Sammy goes so far into method acting as to share in Caden's mounting sense of inferiority.

Synecdoche, NY made me aware of how miniscule I was in the grand scheme of things- and in a way, I appreciated how humbling it was to watch this film. It also exalts the smallness of the individual as part of something much more grand, and how we all play lead roles in our own lives.

Yes, it was mindbending, thought provoking, and emotionally gripping. Like with The Tin Drum, I had to take a break midway just to process everything. And Tin Drum got a resolute thumbs down from me. With that in mind, I can accept that people like Ben Lyons and Ben Mankiewicz hated this film. There will be lots of people who hate it for reasons I understand. As an individual, though, I took a closer look at the parts of Synecdoche, NY, and saw a beauty in a father's unconditional love, an ex-husband's loneliness, and a man's mediocrity and genius. We see his sense of insignificance and great purpose all at once. And in taking a step back to observe the grand canvas that is this film, I felt it paid tribute to the smallness of the individual as part of the bigger picture of human experience.

Benjamin Button, you've had a good run. Synecdoche, NY is the best film of 2008...at the risk of drawing huge ridicule from Blake, it may be the best movie ever made.

Four and a half stars.

There are so many different angles from which you could approach Watchmen, such that the film is like a Rorshach test.

I know that's a very obvious point of entry to describing our characters. And I swear, no pun intended.

Set in an alternate 1985, the film opens with Rorschach (Jackie Earle Haley), a surviving member of the Watchmen, observing the crime scene where Edward Blake, also known as the Comedian (Jeffrey Dean Morgan), is found dead on the sidewalk below his highrise loft. If someone wanted one of the Watchmen dead, he or she is probably planning to pick them off one by one. So Rorschach collects clues in his journal, and duty bound, makes his rounds to the subsequent retired heroes. There's Dan, or Nite Owl II (Patrick Wilson), Silk Spectre II (Malin Ackerman), Dr. Manhattan (Billy Crudup, computer generated most of the time as a blue naked configuration of matter not subject to the time space continum), and Ozymandias (Matthew Goode), the superhero who capitalized his reputation as a superhero to form a multimillion dollar corporation. Among other things, he hawks action figures of himself. If any of the Watchmen rolled over and gave in to the suit and tie capitalist mentality prevalent of the '80's, it was Ozymandias.

I don't get the sense that Rorschach cared about his fellow Watchmen's well being, but he did feel a certain strain of loyalty to them. If they were to be killed off, they had the right to be informed. Then they could protect themselves.

As for Rorschach, after gaining a glimpse as to his upbringing, I wouldn't expect him to make emotional investment in anyone. His mother was a prostitute who routinely neglected him in the interest of pursuing clientele while he grew up. The neighborhood bullies tormented him for the bastard child that he was. For all the sexual exploitation, carnage and human denegration he has witnessed, though, Rorschach is remarkably well-adjusted. Looking at the film as a Rorschach test, I see Rorschach as the closest thing to a moral compass. Now a rugged adult with a mesh of spiky red hair beneath a mask that bears the inkblots of an ever-changing Rorschach test, he surveys the city streets with a disgust at the humanity laid to waste.

"The accumulated filth of all their sex and murder will foam up about their waists and all the whores and politicians will look up and shout 'save us!' ...and I'll look down and whisper...'no.'"

In this universe, Kennedy was assassinated, not by Lee Harvey Oswald, but perhaps as a plot by the right wing to enact stronger anti-Soviet policy. Once again, that's my own speculation, based on who carries out the hit.

The United States won the Vietnam War, thanks to the military industrial complex' reliance on two of the Watchmen in particular. Dr. Manhattan, who came back from a botched nuclear experiement, fights the Vietcong as a superhuman capable of mass slaughter; and the Comedian, bearing a flamethrower that could engulf scores of North Vietnamese soldiers in seconds. But because the U.S. won in this conflict, we have become isolationist, power hungry, and ultimately a threat to all nations. The Soviets feel all but duty bound to teach us a lesson with nuclear missiles. The ominous clock that indicates the threat of attack by atomic blast is set at four to midnight.

The impression I got, looking at the grand canvas that is Watchmen, is that their world is worse than the one we inhabit. In the universe of Watchmen, we have made more enemies than ever as a consequence of our brute force on the global front. In reality, we had the shame and disgrace of backing out of Vietnam in 1973, and letting Saigon fall to the North Vietnamese. But in a way, the shame and disgrace was worth it, because we revealed our vulnerability. And that has prevented us from descending into despotic fascism that we saw on display in the film and graphic novel with Nixon sweating away the inevitable loss of life that is to come when the Soviet Union and United States exchange missiles.

President Nixon must have weathered Watergate well, because he was reelected in '76, '80, and '84. We see him at the beginning of his fifth term. Soviet paranoia is at absolute fever pitch.

Rorschach figures if they can find out who killed the Comedian, they will trace the perpetrator to a motive. Was it a Russian plot? Was it U.S. military? Is there a terrorist threat someone didn't want them to find out about?

If there is a nuclear attack, will the Watchmen deem it a worthy cause to save a country that has been turned over to hustlers, organized crime and corporate greed? A scene in the 1970's, when Nite Owl II and the Comedian try to restore order results in a shoot out of rioters. The Comedian busts out a machine gun and goes to town. Nite Owl II feebly suggests that's not the preferable means of restoring order. But how many other alternatives to the Watchmen have in a world like this? The people need to be saved from themselves. In that respect, I thought of the Dark Knight often during Watchmen. Only in this world, you get a truer sense that everyone has become an assailant, and wiping them out is almost the best salvation a hero can offer.

Much was disturbing about the film, but I think the film realized that, and meant it to provoke discussion. This is not a mere comic book film. It is a philosophical lesson that is meant to be discussed in college film classes, at film conferences, and over dinner between critics.

There is a strong argument for humanity in the film, don't get me wrong. I loved the scenes between Dan and Laurie (Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II by another name.) They debate the pros and cons of going back to fight crime again, even as Nixon has repealed their contract. Dan's a science geek who grins sheepishly when Laurie comes to him after leaving Dr. Manhattan, a relationship that hit a snag, given the differentials of their physical properties.

Silk Spectre II visits her mother, Silk Spectre I (Carla Gugino, convincingly craggy in 1985, positively smoldering in flashbacks) who tells her daughter about the attempted rape by the Comedian, but also manages to portray him as a conflicted individual rather than a straight down the line wretch.

I also had a place in my heart for Dr. Manhattan, who is exiled to Mars and is blamed for spreading cancer through his experiments. Yet he lets himself be affected by the suffering on earth.

Nite Owl II and Silk Spectre II seem to understand that "yeah, while the human race has gone to waste, they are still granted the looking out for that we can offer them." So they don the latex suits and look for Rorscach, who has gotten himself incarcerated and wrongly accused of Comedian's murder. With these powers working together for actual good, maybe they can figure out just what kind of terrorist plot is to take place.

There are some astonishing battles of wills between the Watchmen here, and plausible arguments from both the heroes and villains. It is remarkable to see how some among them can reconcile mass destruction as a necessary evil, and how others feel that crimes against humanity must be brought to justice, no matter what the ends are.

God, the cast was great. I haven't even gotten into the sexual tension or the personal characteristics of the Watchmen. I only hope that my failure to elaborate will intrigue more people to go to the movie and seek answers for themselves. I would petition heavily for Jackie Earle Haley to get some Oscar consideration. The cast overall is great. But he's on a level with Heath Ledger here.

It is right to end the storyline where it is. And at the same time, I'm left wanting more. I went to this movie because Blake wanted to go so badly. But, if a recent trip to Borders for the Alan Moore/Dave Gibbons graphic novel and a Rorschach poster is any indication, I've wound up a benefactor in my own right.

Four stars.

It is a remarkable thing to see an established supporting actor known for a particular style of acting break out and go in a completely different direction.

It is especially gratifying to see this happen after years of going unnoticed, or at least underappreciated.

Richard Jenkins has just such a breakthrough with The Visitor. Known for his deep, quiet, unassuming performances, thankless roles overshadowed by bigger names and faces, it seemed he was to be relegated to the same "hey, it's that guy" status as the likes of Ben Stein, Bill Strimovich, or Chelcie Ross.

(Who is Chelcie Ross? I knew you'd ask that! He played the basketball coach Gene Hackman replaces in Hoosiers, Notre Dame football coach Dan Devine in Rudy, and he's also in The Express: The Ernie Davis Story.)

In the Visitor, Jenkins plays Walter Vale, a widowed English professor at a university in Connecticut. He teaches one section of a course. He takes piano lessons. He listens to classical music, cooks, and drinks wine.

His loneliness is palpable. And yet it's a comfortable loneliness to him. He doesn't realize how much happier he could be if he took a step outside of his element. But not knowing keeps him safe in his parameters.

Then Walter has it thrust upon him to go present a paper at a conference at NYU. It's a paper he's credited with co-authoring. But it was another professor's work, almost entirely. He merely made over the shoulder suggestions. He feels like he shouldn't be the one going down and talking about it, but his higher ups leave him with no other choice.

Walter has an apartment in New York that he doesn't go to that often. I thought of my friend Greg O'Neill, who had an apartment in the Aspen Courts complex in Macomb, Illinois, which he had to sublease. It's there, it's yours, you have it paid for, you just don't make use of it. Well, Richard arrives at his apartment the night before the conference. There are fresh flowers in a vase. He hears noises coming from the bathroom. Waaaaaaaaaaaaait a minute.

Next thing he knows, Walter is being attacked as an intruder. See, a young couple has actually been residing there for several months, under a fraudulent subleasor.

For a time the film morphs into a comedy of errors of sorts, as we see Richard and the couple awkwardly address the misunderstanding and reconcile. The boyfriend, Tarek (Haaz Sleiman), comes from Syria. He makes a living out of playing the Djembe, African bongos, in Central Park with other musicians. His girlfriend, Zainab (Danai Gurira), comes from Senegal, West Africa, and sells blankets and handmade crafts at a streetcorner market.

One day, during a lunchbreak from his conferences, Walter sees Tarek playing in the circle. Intrigued, he stays to watch for a while. Next thing he knows, he's tagging along with the middle eastern/African couple to a gig in a jazz club. Walter could have taken an interest in anything and it would have helped him out of the rut he was living in. As luck would have it, circumstance are he discovers an unwitting passion for the Djembe. He puts his heart and soul into playing, practicing late into the night in his apartment, drumming on the table during faculty meetings, even softly pounding on the counter when he goes to visit Tarek, who is taken off by NYPD to a detention center after trying to get his drums through the turnstile of the subway.

The friendship that occurs between Richard, Tarek and Zainab is extremely unlikely, and because of that it is deeply moving. What is even more moving is the friendship that transpires between Richard and Tarek's mother, Mouna (Hiam Abbass). Mouna comes comes from Detroit to be there for her son, even as she can't go visit him, due to their speculative status as immigrants. She uses Richard as an intermediary, dispatching him to hold up letters for Tarek to read through the glass.

Given that Mouna will not go back to Detroit until her son is freed, Richard does grant her the opportunity to go on with her own life. He lets her stay at his apartment, and the two begin to spend time together. It's not only the Djembe that Richard takes a healthy interest in.

I will not spoil anything about the last half hour, but suffice it to say there's a showdown between Richard and customs and immigration officials. If you've ever had a mild-mannered teacher who lost it that one time during the school year when the class was misbehaving, that's what you get here. He quietly builds toward this breakthrough over the course of the whole movie.

I can't emphasize how close to my heart a film like The Visitor is. Like Benjamin Button, it doesn't overtly play the heart strings, but it scaffolds the plot development to a point where you know what they're feeling without them needing to display it.

Writer-Director Tom McCarthy won the Independent Spirit Award for Best Director, and Richard Jenkins was nominated for an Academy Award for Best Actor. (One of a handful of decisions the Academy can be praised for this year.) Instead of providing the obvious Oscar clip, they had actor Adrian Brody deliver a moving speech acknowledging both Jenkins' performance and career. Jenkins kept a trademark poker face throughout, cracking only the faintest of smiles.

If you want to see just how affecting it is when Jenkins gives us a glimpse of what he's feeling inside, rent The Visitor.

Four Stars.