The 2008 Kraemer Movie Awards, Part II - The Best

All in all, 2008 was a great year for cinema - probably a hair short of the top tier of 1999, 2004, & 2007, but arguably fourth best of the last decade. Great action movies, dramas, comedies, thrillers, sci-fi / fantasy; every genre had solid representation, and while there was a fair share of letdowns and overrated movies at year's end, the good outweighed the bad, and the following were my favorites:

TOP 25 BEST MOVIES OF 2008

#25 - DEATH RACE


Guilty pleasure. Fuck you, what do you want me to say?

#24 - ROLE MODELS


I'm an unapologetic Paul Rudd enthusiast and it was a minor thrill to see him step up to the leading man plate. The first couple acts of Role Models are funny if a bit generic but it then explodes into one of the most batshit crazy and hilarious comedic climaxes of the year, an extended sequence of fantasy warfare (I shit you not, Role Models virgins) that alone demands its placement on this list.

#23 - HELLBOY II: THE GOLDEN ARMY


Abandoning the first film's Lovecraftian horror motif in favor of more of a modern high fantasy with elves, goblins, golems, and forest gods, Hellboy II is a lot of fun. Guillermo del Toro marries innovative prosthetics and makeup with remarkably imaginative art direction, creature design, and epic sets where other filmmakers today might just use lazy CGI to fill in the gaps, along with plenty of well-shot action and fight scenes - the film is a lot stronger than its own screenplay - and it's easy to see why Peter Jackson selected him to carry on his work in The Hobbit.

#22 - TRANSSIBERIAN


A taut, gripping thriller with a cold, ethereal, otherwordly setting. Reminded me of Christopher Nolan's "Alaskan noir" from Insomnia, except with a tighter and more exciting screenplay. Corrupt cops, drugs, infidelity, torture, murder, all on a goddamn train; that's what thrillers are all about, baby.

#21 - QUANTUM OF SOLACE


Bond's 22nd adventure is a definite step down from Casino Royale (which I still count as my favorite movie of 2006) with shakeycam action scenes and forgettable villains, but it's still Bond, and Bond is sacred. The introduction of Quantum, a new SPECTRE-style evil organization, hopefully bodes well for future films, we get more screentime from Jeffrey Wright's badass Felix Leiter, a classic scene at the opera where Bond compromises a whole cell of Quantum operatives at once, and of course more of Daniel Craig's hard-edged reinterpretation of Bond. Let's hope Bond 23 can distill the best elements of both Casino and Quantum into something even better.

#20 - FROST/NIXON


A rare example of an obvious filmed play actually working as a movie, Frost/Nixon succeeds despite a few unnecessarily expositional cinematic flourishes on the strength of Michael Sheen/Frank Langella as the titular Frost/Nixon, and the rising tension as the interview moves towards Watergate leads to one of the most satisfying cinematic climaxes of the year.

#19 - PINEAPPLE EXPRESS


Pure action-comedy is a great, underrated commodity at the multiplex, and when it's done right and perfectly balances the two elements as David Gordon Green, Seth Rogen, and Evan Goldberg managed to do here, it gives such a complete cinematic experience you're still grinning hours after the movie is over. Much of the credit goes to James Franco, who delivers in addle-brained pothead Saul Silver one of the funniest pure and undiluted dumb guys in the last decade of film.

#18 - RACHEL GETTING MARRIED


Rachel Getting Married is unusual and bold as a low-key drama that actually has the balls to make its protagonist Kym rather unlikable - she basically tries to do the right thing, sure, but she's a truly pathetic, burned-out drug addict with zero social skills, volatile, overdramatic, and prone to crashing cars. And Anne Hathaway plays Kym's worst aspects to the hilt, abandoning any trace of Hollywood glamour or dignity and letting the soul-crushing awkwardness spill out across the whole film as she tries (and largely fails) to have a normal weekend away from the rehab facility at her sister's wedding. It's a minor gem, particularly Hathaway's performance.

#17 - THE BANK JOB


A muscular, entertaining heist movie that gives way to a crackling thriller, and proof that Jason Statham isn't just the dumb action man and can act in some legitimately great stuff. Also, I'm just gonna say it, Saffron Burrows is retardedly hot, and I enjoyed looking at her for the duration of the film.

#16 - MILK


A political biopic done right, doing justice to Harvey Milk's life and legacy by focusing primarily on his consolidation of political power in San Francisco, his campaigns and election, and his successful fight against California's Proposition 6 that would have allowed firing teachers on the basis of sexual orientation. Sean Penn does a great job as the man himself and as long as you can block out Diego Luna's character it's a wonderful film.

#15 - RAMBO


First, Sylvester Stallone wiped clean the stench of Rocky V with the great Rocky Balboa, and now proceeds to do the same to Rambo III with the first Rambo movie in twenty goddamn years! Stallone understands 80s action - it's in his blood - and he abandons pretension and makes a movie about Rambo fuckin' killing people. A Burmese paramilitary group captures a group of Christian missionaries, so John Rambo does what John Rambo does best and slaughters half the fucking nation of Burma to rescue them. Hundreds dead. Brain matter and skull fragments fly, arrows shot through eyeballs, limbs flayed, people burned to the crisp with flamethrowers, crucifixion, sliced into lunch meat and fed to the pigs, bones shatter into so many white splinters, gore and viscera spewing like grotesque geysers from hell, and the rivers of Burma run red with the blood of a thousand murdered bad guys. I am speechless. I am in awe. I bow to Stallone's magnificence, I am not worthy.

#14 - VICKY CRISTINA BARCELONA


I'm actually surprised myself to be putting Woody Allen's very small and very intimate faux-Spanish melodrama this high on my list; it's intellectual junk food and I initially enjoyed it no more than a number of other summer movies, but it's percolated in my mind since then whereas other films have been forgotten and I must say it's a fine, warm, funny movie for grown-ups. Rebecca Hall and Javier Bardem are both wonderful. Scarlett Johansson is consistently unremarkable but as long as being Woody's muse keeps him producing films like this and Match Point in contrast to his mediocre 90s output, I say keep at it.

#13 - MAN ON WIRE


In 1974, tightrope-walker Philippe Petit fulfilled a dream by illegally setting up and walking across a rope stretched between the two towers of the World Trade Center, a quarter-mile in the sky with no safety net and nothing keeping his feet in place amid the beating winds but sheer adrenaline, and Man on Wire chronicles his feat with verve. Assembling vintage film, photographs, and modern interviews with all the people involved, it has all the tension of a fun heist movie and in the end a genuinely moving, inspirational moment as he steps out onto that wire. 2008's finest documentary.

#12 - TROPIC THUNDER


A fully balls-out, epic, big-budget, explosive comedy that calls to mind the spirit of the 80s. It's bloody and profane and relies on some degree of behind-the-scenes Hollywood knowledge to fully enjoy, and I'm almost surprised a studio took a gamble on it, but I'm glad they did because what a funny movie. Particularly Robert Downey Jr. playing an Australian actor playing a black man who in one scene pretends to be an Asian farmer with a faux-Asian via faux-black accent. Robert Downey Jr. is awesome. Even the stuffy-ass Academy nominated him for Best Supporting Actor for it!

#11 - SEX DRIVE


This is probably where my own genre biases come starkly into focus, and I'm aware that no one else in the country ranked Sex Drive anywhere near their top ten of 2008, but what do I care? It's no Superbad but excepting that masterpiece it's one of the better "teensploitation" movies of the decade, and I was cheered by every generic, cum-drenched second of it.

#10 - LET THE RIGHT ONE IN


Spitting in the face of everything American cinema suggests horror movies should be, the Swedish vampire film Let the Right One In is a slow-burning, deliberately-paced, eerie, atmospheric experience. The story of a bullied, lonely youth who befriends a girl who turns out to be a vampire - and a REAL vampire, who has to drink human blood for substinance, can't enter without an invitation, and sunlight immediately burns, nothing like the shitty Twilight non-vampires - is equal parts haunting and moving, punctuating its quiet, snowy atmosphere with effectively rare moments of gore and horror. An intoxicating, otherworldly experience.

#9 - FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL


I loved Forgetting Sarah Marshall because it was the most I laughed in a theater last year, and I like laughing. That's it.

#8 - BURN AFTER READING


In a comedy nearly as pitch-black as Fargo, the Coen brothers deliver a delightfully wicked satire of stuffy CIA thrillers, reveling in the absurdity of what it would be like if a MacGuffin (in this case a CD full of what is assumed to be "secret CIA shit") got into the hands of some dumb, ordinary people who didn't know what to do with it and tried to blackmail the CIA in retaliation. Intrigue, spying, deception, theft, and murder all ensue, all played for absurd humor, and it's an awesome and hilarious movie.

#7 - GRAN TORINO


Clint Eastwood's most entertaining performance ever? Sure, the first-time newbs surrounding him mostly couldn't act their way out of paper bags, but when I'm too busy roaring with laughter at Clint's latest gravelly-voiced, politically incorrect line to hear what they're saying anyway, who cares? Yes, Gran Torino is stuffed to the absolute brim with cliché and archetype, character arcs we've seen play out a million times before, and if you removed Dirty Harry from the equation it could go fuck a goat for all I care, but taking all this into careful consideration I could care less; I loved this goddamn movie. Go figure that Clint's most purely entertaining movie in years would be the one snubbed by the Academy.

#6 - IRON MAN


Pure, unleaded, guilt-free entertainment, that's what Iron Man is. Standing only behind Christopher Nolan's Batman duology, Spider-Man 2, and The Incredibles as my fifth favorite superhero movie of all time, Iron Man is not an innovative or thematically ambitious experience in the least, but what it is is junk food at its most evolved level. Robert Downey Jr. is hilarious and awesome as Tony Stark; the most entertaining action movie leading performance since Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean. Jon Favreau shoots the action scenes in a clean, classical, eternally entertaining style free from any trace of the fast-cutting or shakeycam fads. There's as many laughs as most full-blooded comedies. The special effects are Industrial Light & Magic at the height of their powers. Even the romantic interest is peppy and likable! I haven't had so much pure fun at the theater in years.

#5 - IN BRUGES


A terrific, moving, blackly hilarious, deftly-written, woefully underrated thriller-comedy about the vacation two hitmen take to the "fucking fairy tale town" of Bruges, Belgium. I dare not give away any of the movie's twists or surprises, even the motivation for why they are on the vacation, because this is a film that should be experienced pure from the first frame to the ending, but suffice to say the sensation of laughing out loud one second and being gripped by cold tension the next is a rare treat. If not for Heath Ledger's Joker, Ralph Fiennes' Harry in this movie would be my favorite cinematic villain of '08.

#4 - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE


What's this - a critically lauded, much-hyped, poised-for-Oscar-gold-film that's actually a really, really good movie? Yes, it's true, it exists! The Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? flashback structure is one of the most clever narrative frameworks I've seen in a movie in ages, and Jamal and Latika are a couple you can genuinely like and root for. It's going to get jerked off plenty tomorrow night on the Oscars, so I'll just leave it at saying that it says a lot that it warrants the jerking off.

#3 - THE WRESTLER


Nostalgia has consumed and possibly ruined the life of Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, and the once-great wrestler's attempts to reach out to his estranged daughter may not be enough in the face of his inability to let go of the eternal fantasy of the 80s and accept his own age and limitations. It's a simple premise for a film, but it's a moving and great experience thanks to Mickey Rourke's truly stunning performance as Randy; an achingly real, Daniel Day-Lewis caliber performance that should be pictured in the dictionary next to "method acting."

#2 - WALL•E


WALL•E is art. Well, the first half of WALL•E is art (and taken of its own accord would probably rank #2 on this list), the second half of WALL•E is a somewhat more traditional but still way, way above average animated movie, and taken as a whole the movie might just be the greatest combination of hard science fiction and romantic comedy that has ever or will ever be made; Isaac Asimov by way of Charlie Chaplin. Temporarily removing the lukewarm Cars from the equation, Pixar has in The Incredibles, Ratatouille, and WALL•E delivered one of the most incredible one-two-three knockout punches of mind-blowingly great cinema in the long annals of the medium.

#1 - THE DARK KNIGHT


You're shocked, I know, you didn't see this one coming. When it comes right down to it, stripping Nolan's second Batman movie of all the hype, all the viral marketing, all the anticipation, Heath Ledger's death, reducing everything to the root experience of sitting there in the theater last July watching the movie, you have the concrete and inescapable fact that no other movie last year had me so awed, overtaken by the epic scope and splendor of the story, utterly riveted and involved for every second, and ready to watch it again the second I stepped out of the theater. Yes, I identified flaws and a few weak points on subsequent viewings, as did we all, and I make no claim that it's perfect, but The Dark Knight is still a momentously ambitious and enthralling crime epic with a truly stellar villain, and anyone who argues that any other movie from 2008 will continue to be as frequently watched in 2058 is empirically wrong. That's all there is to it.



TOP 5 LEADING PERFORMANCES OF 2008

#5 - Chiwetel Ejiofor, REDBELT - You likely haven't heard of this movie, and that's fine (it made like four dollars at the box office), but Chiwetel Ejiofor is one of the best semi-underground actors there is and he delivers David Mamet's muscular dialogue like a pro.

#4 - Anne Hathaway, RACHEL GETTING MARRIED - Utterly unpretentious, utterly unglamorous, intensely naturalistic. It's a shame she doesn't have any chance at the Best Actress Oscar because she deserves it.

#3 - Clint Eastwood, GRAN TORINO - Clint Eastwood gravels out every politically incorrect, darkly comic line in a sickening rasp, and although it's broad and arguably even overacted, it's outrageously entertaining. To say he outshines the actors surrounding him would be an understatement like saying the Sears Tower would be the tallest building in a small African village; it's an acting slaughter of everyone else onscreen. Rugged, classical Hollywood masculinity that convinces me that a man creeping towards eighty can kick the shit out of men fifty+ years his junior, and if that isn't badass, I don't know what is.

#2 - Robert Downey Jr., IRON MAN - It's difficult to identify exactly what makes Robert Downey Jr. so good; he's not exactly subtle or naturalistic, nor is he broad or theatrical, but his line readings just WORK, always, they're always entertaining. Tony Stark is the best superhero leading performance of all time.

#1 - Mickey Rourke, THE WRESTLER - Method acting rarely reaches this caliber, and I can honestly say that it's hard for me to determine whether I was more impressed by Mickey Rourke in this movie or Daniel Day-Lewis in There Will Be Blood. A character study this raw and intimate lives or dies entirely on the strength of its leading actor, and Rourke makes it one of the finest pictures of the year.



TOP 5 SUPPORTING PERFORMANCES OF 2008

#5 - James Franco, PINEAPPLE EXPRESS - Goddamn hysterical performance as what boils down to just a dumb guy. Made me laugh with damn near every line.

#4 - Brad Pitt, BURN AFTER READING - Goddamn hysterical performance as what boils down to just a dumb guy. Made me laugh with damn near every line.

#3 - Ralph Fiennes, IN BRUGES - Fiennes is vastly entertaining as Harry, a brutal hitman / crime boss with principles. He only comes in in the last act of the movie but proceeds to own and dominate every frame from there on out, even up against an actor the caliber of Brendan Gleeson. It helps that he has all the best lines in the movie. We should be so lucky for all our crime movie villains to be so badass.

#2 - Robert Downey Jr., TROPIC THUNDER - "To be a moron. To be moronical. An imbecile. Like the dumbest motherfucker that ever lived."

#1 - Heath Ledger, THE DARK KNIGHT - Instantaneously rocketing to the shortlist of the best villains in the history of film, Ledger's simultaneously hilarious, wicked, terrifying interpretation of the Joker is unquestionable proof that you don't need any superpowers to be full-blown supervillain. He trumps Batman several times, plunges Gotham into anarchy and chaos, organizes the downfall of Harvey Dent, takes control of the mob, orchestrates simultaneous assassinations of key city leaders, blows up hospitals, and when he says "This is MY city," you believe every word of it, because this guy is a goddamn SUPERVILLAIN, a cackling, evil, flamboyant, gloriously entertaining supervillain.



TOP 5 SCREENPLAYS OF 2008

#5 - FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL - Although critics are loath to admit it, writing good comedy is really, really fucking hard, and when a movie keeps me consistently laughing without a missing a beat for two hours it warrants kudos and applause.

#4 - SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE - As I said, although the romantic plot may be a classical story, the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? framing device is completely new; something I've never seen before, ever.

#3 - BURN AFTER READING - Immensely clever CIA thriller satire, incorporating lots of characters and subplots without ever becoming convoluted, driving each dangling plot thread towards the madcap conclusion where everything collides in a glorious trainwreck. Satire done right.

#2 - THE DARK KNIGHT - It's dense, it's thematically ambitious, it's dark and brutal, it has a dozen endlessly quotable lines (most from the Joker, not surprisingly), it's even laugh-out-loud funny at points. The best crime epic screenplay since Heat.

#1 - IN BRUGES - The combination of crime thriller and comedy reminds me of vintage Tarantino, but without ever seeming like a knock-off. Centering the drama around a small handful of characters while keeping it brisk, quotable, funny, and completely unpredictable, this is a real masterpiece of a screenplay, one worthy of reading in text format just to study the structure of. I love it.



TOP 5 DIRECTORS OF 2008

#5 - Clint Eastwood, GRAN TORINO - Eastwood's performance and lean, easygoing directorial style salvage the creaky Frankenstein of cliché and melodrama that is Gran Torino's script, and when a director can mine gold from a chunk of lead, well, that's a good goddamn director.

#4 - Sylvester Stallone, RAMBO - As far as I can tell, Rambo has no screenplay, nor does it need one; it's a blood-and-viscera soaked festival of screams and grunts and guttural monosyllabic noises, Rambo killing everyone in sight, pure testosterone pleasure. Stallone gets it. He doesn't hold back and soaks the fucking thing in gore like I haven't seen in an action movie since, well, ever. Even as he ages out of starring, may he continue directing action films for two decades to come.

#3 - Danny Boyle, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE - Exotic, energetic, emotional. Danny Boyle's incredibly lively, vibrant directorial style in this film warrants the Best Director Oscar he's going to win tomorrow.

#2 - Andrew Stanton, WALL•E - The first forty or so minutes of WALL•E are told almost entirely free from dialogue or voice actors; it's all in Stanton's hands. He delivers truly and completely with a haunting, desolate world given life by a remarkably charming main character, some of the best pure visual filmmaking in years regardless of whether in live film or animation. It's a stunning artistic achievement.

#1 - Christopher Nolan, THE DARK KNIGHT - You know what I like? That Nolan proved that you can pony up the dough to rent buildings and streets in a real live city, film real stuntmen doing stunts and riding Batpods, flip real trucks and throw real SWAT vans into the river, actually film in Hong Kong for your scene set in Hong Kong, actually blow up a hospital-sized building for your hospital explosion, and do it all without resorting to nothing but CGI and bluescreens, and people will be there to watch your movie in droves. I love to see real stuff happening onscreen in an action movie in this day and age.



TOP 10 BEST MOVIE MOMENTS OF 2008 - Spoilers!

#10 - Randy gets stitched up, THE WRESTLER - Not only are the emotions raw in The Wrestler, so is the wrestling, and the scene where Randy gets cleaned and stitched up after a match while flashbacks show the fight's use of chairs, ladders, barbed wire, and a staple gun is equal parts cringe-inducing and fascinating, what these men go through in staged exhibitions for the sake of entertainment.

#9 - Jason Segel shows the full monty, FORGETTING SARAH MARSHALL - The eternal nudity rule of thumb: Female nudity is erotic. Male nudity is funny. The penis is the funniest thing of all.

#8 - Jamal kisses Latika, SLUMDOG MILLIONAIRE - I'm not normally a sucker for cinematic romance - someone ask me what I think about The Notebook sometime if you'd like an earful - but when you've been following a pair for over a decade of their lives, constantly gravitating around and just missing each other, what could be a better ending?

#7 - Tony Stark reveals Iron Man's identity, IRON MAN - Struggling to get through the military's phony briefing in front of a room full of press, Tony Stark gives up and announces to the world that "I am Iron Man," smiles, and we cut to credits. I'm so used to secret identities I didn't see that one coming AT ALL, I was floored. What an awesome ending!

#6 - "Never go full retard," TROPIC THUNDER - Robert Downey Jr. says everything I've always thought about actors playing retarded characters in movies with a straightforward eloquence I could never dream of. Pure brilliance.

#5 - Crossing the wire, MAN ON WIRE - We spend ninety minutes with Philippe Petit as he practices his tightrope walking, outlines his dream of crossing the ultimate gap, plans the best way to sneak into the World Trade Center and get the rope between the two towers, his numerous close calls with security and nearly failing to get the rope up on time, the setting of the wire, and when he finally takes those initial steps over the void, sure, it's illegal, but what could be a more perfect climactic moment?

#4 - Brad Pitt gets his brains blown out, BURN AFTER READING - Howls of laughter in the audience instantaneously turned into gasps of horror! Completely unexpected plot twist, fucking brilliant!

#3 - Nixon tacitly admits guilt, FROST/NIXON - They sort of give it away at the end of the trailer (okay, completely give it away, what the fuck trailer?), but that doesn't make it any less a perfect moment.

#2 - "Define dancing," WALL•E - Although I've said that the first half of WALL•E is the superior act, the film's best scene - a scene that like the spaghetti kiss between the dogs in Lady and the Tramp will endure through cinematic history - occurs in the latter half when WALL•E and EVE find themselves floating in deep space. Wielding a fire extinguisher, WALL•E propels himself around the lights and engines of the space ship while EVE follows him in a dance as a rather stellar song plays; sublime, beautiful, artistic filmmaking, profoundly moving and elegant. And this is coming from someone who hates dancing!

#1 - FIVE WAY TIE! The Joker's pencil trick; The Joker's bank heist; Batman flips Joker's truck; The Joker blows up a hospital; "Why so serious?," THE DARK KNIGHT - This is the Joker's world, we're all just living in it.

The 2008 Kraemer Movie Awards, Part I - The Worst

With the Academy Awards right around the corner, the time has come for me to unveil my own personal worsts and bests of 2008 in cinema. Naturally, we'll start with the bad and work our way towards a brighter tomorrow. I haven't seen The Hottie & the Nottie, so you'll excuse its exclusion, but I have endured following timeless works of art:

TOP 10 WORST MOVIES OF 2008

#10 - AMERICAN TEEN


American Teen, the beloved documentary hit of the Sundance Film Festival, was a critical darling for probing deep into the lives of high school teens, revealing stunning, lurid, intimate information such as that teens sit around having stilted conversations about nothing interesting, stir up insipid drama and idle gossip, go to lame parties, go to the prom, get into college, and graduate. Holy shit, thanks American Teen, how fucking fascinating! I didn't know any of that! I needed to spend 95 minutes watching a fucking documentary about it!

#9 - YES MAN


NO.

#8 - PUNISHER: WAR ZONE


It's a nebulous line between what makes a good brainless action movie ala Transporter 2 or Rambo and what makes a bad one ala Transporter 3 or Punisher: War Zone - I've seen 'em all, I'm as close to a scholar on the subject as anyone I know, and even I struggle to identify what the magic touch is - but a solid rule of thumb is that if I feel a stark relief when the credits roll that I no longer have to watch the movie, then what I've just watched was not good. Punisher: War Zone isn't offensively awful, exactly, it didn't make me angry, but outside of a few moments of gore it's remarkably sedate in the face of its own nonstop loudness, failing to present a single remotely interesting character, fight scene, or action scenario.

#7 - THE SPIRIT


The Spirit is Frank Miller making a movie ripping off the style of Robert Rodriguez adapting Miller's graphic novel in Sin City (which is kind of weird if you think about it, like if Tolkein was still alive and made a bad fantasy movie ripping off Peter Jackson's Lord of the Rings). But what Miller doesn't have is an eye for filmmaking, and he delivers in The Spirit the limpest and blandest cops 'n' robbers superhero tale of the decade; what it might look like if you accidentally smeared feces all over Sin City then made a Xerox of the Xerox of the Xerox of the Xerox of that original shit-smeared film - and this is coming from someone who didn't even love Sin City.

#6 - THE READER


The latest, laziest, and most offensively brazen hitchhiker on the Holocaust chic bandwagon, The Reader is the most sickeningly mawkish melodrama I've seen in years, making Crash's Oscar-baiting look understated and subtle in comparison. About half of all critics proceeded to fawn over it nonetheless; burn these critics' estates to the ground and salt the earth.

#5 - COLLEGE


Here's how you make a College: take equal parts Animal House, Revenge of the Nerds, and Superbad. Mix all three together thoroughly. Now completely miss the point and remove every single element that made any of these films likable and funny in the first place. Congratulations, you made one College.

#4 - THE HAPPENING


Yes, M. Night Shyamalan's latest disaster is a step upward from Lady in the Water, but much in the same way as drinking a bucket of piss would be a step upward from drinking a bathtub of diarrhea and vomit. The story of earth's plants revolting against humankind could be a lot of fun, the stuff of B-movie legend, but M. Night just couldn't resist and had to try to make it a straight-faced, deadly-serious parable about the environment, resulting in the worst horror film and (largely thanks to Mark Wahlberg's hideous, wide-eyed overacting) best unintentional comedy of 2008.

#3 - THE X-FILES: I WANT TO BELIEVE


More like, The X-Files: I Want to Borelieve. Or, The X-Files: I Want to Leave the Theater. Or, The X-Files: I Can't Believe I Paid Money For This. Or, most straight-to-the-point: The X-Files: Proof that Sometimes a Dead Series Should Stay Dead and No One Needs to See Its Decomposed Corpse Humiliatingly Shambling About, although I admit that last one's a little big for a marquee.

#2 - DISASTER MOVIE


I already typed my 1,000 words on Disaster Movie, I decline to type any more, except to reiterate that, yes, Aaron & Jason truly are the worst.

#1 - BABYLON A.D.


Discounting the eldritch abomination that is Manderlay, not since Dreamcatcher and Van Helsing have I hated a cinematic experience with such ferocity; truly, thoroughly, and unequivocally detested every second of a film with the ire that I would normally reserve for someone who ass-raped my cat. Yes, Disaster Movie presents less competence in the basic fundamentals of using cinematic language such as sets, continuity, and acting to construct a film, but it's Babylon A.D. that is horror packaged in a celluloid reel, such a mind-numbingly deafening, stupid, contemptible, nonsensical experience that I can't imagine how a studio actually had the courage to release it.

If I was a studio head and someone presented Babylon A.D. to me and said "Here's my film!", I would douse the master reel in kerosine, light the flame, run electromagnets over all the hard drives with the footage on them, burn the sets to the ground, track and destroy every script, and hire professionals to erase the paper trail showing I was ever associated with the film's production. Showing Babylon A.D. to enemy combatants could classify as a war crime under the Geneva Convention. If Barack Obama said he liked Babylon A.D. I would have voted for John McCain. Babylon A.D. couldn't be any worse if it was a flaming harpoon carrying the AIDS virus shot from a cannon through your heart. Basically, what I'm trying to say is that it's not a well-made film.



TOP 5 WORST PERFORMANCES OF 2008

#5 - Diego Luna, MILK - I'm as pro-gay as can be; I support the complete, unconditional, and unequivocal legalization of gay marriage and gay adoption and gay anything else in every city and county in the country, and I not only voted against California's Proposition 8, I actively campaigned against it. I say this to make the significance of it clear when I say that Diego Luna's whiny, prissy, screeching, crying, pissy, giggling little queen in the otherwise solid political biopic Milk made me feel virulently homophobic.

#4 - Renée Zellweger, APPALOOSA - Little did I know that Renée Zellweger has super powers! The power to immediately snip the balls off of what up until her stepping onscreen had been a solid Western and turn it into a weepy fucking chick flick!

#3 - Thandie Newton, W. - Thandie Newton's bizarre, grotesquely over-the-top portrayal of Condoleezza Rice would be perfectly at home in Saturday Night Live. But it's not in Saturday Night Live, it's in a dramatic biopic of George W. Bush where everyone else is playing their roles straight as an arrow, and it couldn't be any more out of place if it was Ace Ventura spouting his catchphrases at the ghetto in Schindler's List.

#2 - Natalya Rudakova, TRANSPORTER 3 - Sorry, no, I prefer it when my action movie romantic interests with all-English dialogue can speak English.

#1 - Mark Wahlberg, THE HAPPENING - Legendary bad acting. Wahlberg vacantly delivers all his dialogue like he's literally in a green screen void with no clue what the movie is about, no context for any of the lines he's saying, no idea who or where the other characters will be, and has been the given the lines for the first time ten seconds earlier, and the plot, settings, and other actors were all added around him in post-production. Should be shown in acting classes as a cautionary tale. Makes Hayden Christensen in Episode II look like Daniel Day-Lewis in Gangs of New York.



TOP 5 WORST MOVIE MOMENTS OF 2008

# 5 - "I HAVE DOOOUUUUUUUBBTTTT!!!!!", DOUBT - I didn't like Doubt's blunted Oscar-baiting even before the final thirty seconds, but when the film has the chance to go out with a modicum of dignity after a conversation between Meryl Streep and Amy Adams quietly underscoring Streep's doubt about her campaign against a suspected pedophile priest, Meryl Streep literally looks up while bawling and cries to the heavens that "I HAAAVE DOOOOOUUUUUUUBTTT!!!!!" while the camera cranes out until we fade to credits in a way that finally gives Episode III's legendary Darth Vader "NOOOOOO!!!" a twin sister. A genuine cringe-inducing moment.

#4 - Samuel L. Jackson gives a booming villainous world domination speech while wearing a Nazi uniform and torturing a kitten, THE SPIRIT - Frank Miller, uh, isn't fond of subtle villains.

#3 - I'm Fucking Matt Damon "parody," DISASTER MOVIE - Just... just fucking watch.

#2 - Vampire baseball, TWILIGHT - About ninety minutes into Twilight, the Cullen vampire clan realizes that their movie is merely kitschy and hasn't yet achieved true awfulness, so they drag Bella out to a baseball field during a thunderstorm where they show her "vampire baseball." Vampire baseball. VAMPIRE BASEBALL. What's worse is that the movie explains that they can only play during thunderstorms because the vampires are so strong that otherwise the sound of them hitting the baseballs would be too loud and reveal their identities to the town, and actually treats this as a serious revelation without a hint of humor or irony. What's worse is the following three-minute music video-styled vampire baseball montage. What's even worse is that the Twilight novels have been at the very top of Amazon's best-selling books list for like four months now. If there is a god may he douse America with nuclear fire and hurl the charred remains into the depths of space, never to be heard from again.

#1 - The credits roll, BABYLON A.D. - Listen, I know it's hypocritical for me to ask for more of a movie I hated, but as much as I hated it, I expected it to have the fucking decency to CONCLUDE somehow, rather than just panning up to the sky and rolling the credits at a moment so arbitrary it made No Country for Old Men's ending look like Return of the King in comparison. The difference is that No Country's ending had a point, Babylon A.D.'s has no point. And when the credits rolled, the horror of what I saw overtook me, my head swam with the awfulness of this ungodly hate crime against cinema, my heart grew heavy, and I wept.

The Reader

AROOOOOOGGA my bad movie alarm just went off! It was The Reader that set it off!! If I were to tell you that there was a movie starring Kate Winslet and Ralph Fiennes that was an Academy Award nominee for Best Picture, you would be forgiven for your ignorance in assuming that maybe it would be a good or at least watchable film. Don't feel shamed, we all make mistakes. Let's start at the beginning.

Act one: Hanna, a.k.a. Kate Winslet, is an illiterate former Nazi prison guard living in West Germany in 1958 (now, I make no claims to be a literacy scholar, but I doubt many WWII officers were fucking illiterate), where she encounters a strapping teenage lad called Michael. She devirginizes the droopy-eyed youth and proceeds to fuck him a whole lot in exchange for him reading to her. Huh. Okay, sure, whatever. This part of the movie will probably at least keep you awake because Kate Winslet doesn't really wear any clothes for the first twenty minutes or so.

Act two: Five years later, Michael is a law student and accompanies his class to observe a trial, which, wouldn't you goddamn know it, turns out to be that of Kate Winslet, whose war crimes have finally caught up to her. This act is sort of like the first act except instead of being thirty minutes it's over an hour, and instead of sex there's a trial, and instead of reading to her Michael watches the trial, and instead of being awake the audience is asleep. This act is where the movie makes crystal clear to the Academy us that it's about the Holocaust - HEAR THAT, ACADEMY AUDIENCE? THE HOLOCAUST.

Act three: Over the next thirty or so years, Michael (now an adult played by Ralph Fiennes) communes with Hanna (now serving a life sentence in prison) by recording books on tape and mailing them to her so she can listen to him read like they did in 1958. Shoot me in the head now, please. This act contains the single densest collection of touching piano strings swelling up during emotional conversations that I've ever seen in one film. I couldn't fucking believe it.

The Reader is mawkish, cloying melodrama it its absolute nadir, manipulatively trying to pummel tears out any unwitting audience member while simultaneously debasing itself for the Academy's pleasure. It's so sappy you could pour it on your pancakes, it's so soapy you could bathe with it, and it's just about the closest I've ever come to inadvertently suiciding by rolling my eyes so hard they explode out the top of my skull.

But someone at the Academy must have gotten wind that this movie is about the Holocaust, so of course, it must be a Masterpiece. Best Picture and Best Director nominations, here we come! The Academy, reliable as the rotation of the earth, as the sun setting in the west. Even the fucking critical response was tepid, and when the critics can see through hamfisted melodrama, you know it's no good. But no, nominate The Wrestler? Why, that's too indie! Nominate The Dark Knight? Why, that's too mainstream! The Holocaust drama it is.

Here's my new dream: I want to make a dumb-as-nails action movie, think Transporter 2 or Death Race. A badass hero beats up generic Eurotrash villains in a series of kung fu battles and car chases with no plot or decent dialogue. Then, right at the end of the movie, the hero turns to the camera and clearly says, "the Holocaust." BOOM, smash cut to end credits. I'm 98.5% sure that this movie would get an Academy Award nomination for Best Picture.

Basically, what I'm getting at is that The Reader can gargle my spunk.


1 Star out of 5

The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

A melancholy but intermittently enchanting fairy tale, The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is certainly a flawed work that struggles to coalesce around a central theme, but nonetheless succeeds on the strength of its mood, performances, and the clever idea at the center.

For those who live beneath rocks, the titular character in Benjamin Button literally lives his life backwards, being born a shriveled geriatric and then growing younger by the day, into middle age, then a young man, then finally into a child and a baby. We follow his entire life through most of the 1900s, particularly when he crosses paths with his true love / soul mate Daisy (whose name I'll assume is a Great Gatsby reference). That Benjamin Button smells a lot like Forrest Gump is no surprise seeing as the two films share a screenwriter, and it's similarly engaging as a kind of whirlwind tour through American history, albeit with a more interesting gimmick for our protagonist.

The movie wouldn't work if the central romance between Benjamin and Daisy didn't enchant, but it does thanks to the talent and ethereal beauty of Cate Blanchett. She brings class and elegance to everything she touches. Brad Pitt does fairly good work too, although everyone knows Pitt is at his best when he plays crazy; Button is more of a blank slate. The third star of the film is the makeup and special effects work that's used to range both Blanchett and Pitt's ages from teens / early twenties to elderly, and some of it is pretty stunning, particularly the de-aging effects. Pitt looks like he did in Thelma & Louise again near the end of the film, and the "teen" Blanchett is uncanny.

Where the film struggles is in trying to impart deeper ideas beyond its plot. It seems to be trying to make powerful statements about death, love, and the randomness of life, but no idea ever really takes shape beyond the ephemeral. The only theme the movie imparts in the end seems to be "live life to its fullest!", which, while perfectly good advice, didn't really need to be told via the story of a backwards-aging man. The enjoyable aspect of the film is what's plain on the surface; the love story and the backwards-aging scenario.

It's also a little overlong, marching towards three hours. David Fincher is a GREAT director, make no mistake, but in a career where all of the highlights are dark, twisted, intense crime stories with plot twists and pitch-black humor (Se7en, Fight Club, Zodiac, etc.), maudlin fairy tale is something entirely outside of his comfort zone and perhaps specific skill set, and he occasionally overcompensates by mistaking slowness for emotional resonance. Slightly more judicious editing probably could have harmlessly sliced twenty minutes from the final cut.

So ultimately, I admit that I would have rather seen The Wrestler, The Dark Knight, or even Gran Torino taking Benjamin Button's place as Best Picture nominee (not that it matters, since it obviously won't win, but as they say, it's an honor just to be nominated). I do however see it as a fine fairy tale; overrated, much as Forrest Gump was back in 1994, but like Gump a likable movie nonetheless.


3 Stars out of 5

The Spirit

We all have a filter somewhere between our brains and mouths, hopefully catching the better part of our thoughts before they escape in words and reveal our insane and perverted sides to the outside world; to protect us from shame and embarrassment. For once-great graphic novelist Frank Miller, Robert Rodriguez and Zack Snyder served this purpose in distilling his comic books to the screen with Sin City and 300. But in Frank Miller's The Spirit, written AND directed by Frank Miller, there exists no such buffer, no one to save him from his worst impulses, leaving Miller's artistic soul to sit grotesquely naked onscreen. It ain't pretty.

The plot is simple: there's a superhero named The Spirit and a supervillain named The Octopus, both have super healing ala Wolverine or Claire Bennett, and they fight a bunch in a city. That's all. It doesn't take a detective to discern from the trailer that Miller is ripping off the visual style of Rodriguez adapting his work in Sin City (albeit with no talent for staging or photographing action, resulting in some of the worst fight scenes of the decade), but it goes way beyond that; in fact, the whole movie is essentially the PG-13 CliffsNotes of Sin City, with all moral grey helpfully removed and all characters streamlined into pure and undiluted Frank Miller clichés:

The women on both sides are all cock-hungry whores ready to spread their legs for the impossibly smooth hero at his word (in one case he literally seduces a female assassin sent to kill him with one sentence spoken in French). Samuel L. Jackson's villain grandstands and gives booming "we're not so different, you and I" speeches to the captured hero while wearing a Nazi uniform and torturing a kitten (this literally happens, I'm not exaggerating). The Spirit considers his city to be a cesspool, the dregs of humanity, yet they all worship him. The police are useless. The dialogue is pure Dick Tracy 1940s pulp noir cops 'n' robbers cliché.

Essentially, it's Frank Miller lost his fucking mind at the expense of making an even remotely watchable film - whether or not 1986's The Dark Knight Returns was a fluke great graphic novel from a crazy person or Frank Miller is a fallen genius, a grotesque parody of what he once was like the obese, bloated Marlon Brando at the end of his life, is the only thing that remains up for debate.

But what isn't up for debate is that The Spirit is an awful movie. Not a cash-in, mind you, because it smells almost nothing of studio intervention; it seems to be a truly pure vision of its writer-director. A shockingly dull and bad and utterly pure work, one man vomiting forth his juvenile cops 'n' robbers soul for everyone to point and laugh at. An ill fate for an artist who was once considered to be among the geniuses of his medium.


1 Star out of 5

Frost/Nixon

Like Doubt, Frost/Nixon is a filmed play, and outside of a few minor cinematic flourishes and fleshed-out edges it's obvious from the word go. But in contrast to Doubt's clumsy, blunted attempts at thematic depth, Frost/Nixon is a completely straightforward (arguably too much so at points) chronicling of a real event; everything is right up there on the screen. And it's successful not so much because of the story surrounding the Frost/Nixon interviews as because the two leading actors lend the interview itself the depth and weight to turn it into a riveting intellectual duel, a classic David & Goliath story.

As the film depicts it, when David Frost suggests the possibility of an interview with Nixon, the shamed ex-president sees it as chance to deftly juggle and parry softball questions, a chance to vindicate himself in the eyes of history using a lightweight talk show host as a stepping stone. From the get-go the momentum is on Nixon's side of the interview and Frost's plans seem to be failing. But (real-life spoiler?) in the final stage of the interview Frost comes at him with unexpected questions and evidence, and Nixon's defenses crumble for a brief but essential moment.

Now, I'm nowhere near as familiar with Richard Nixon, his presidency, Watergate, or the aftermath as the generations before me, nor would I ever pretend to be (I was a little kid when he died after all), so I can't comment from any experience on the anger at Nixon after Ford's pardoning or the degree to which the Frost interviews actually gave any closure to the American people, but the movie gives it the weight of an unofficial trial, a moment of truth for Richard Nixon wherein he blinked and tacitly admitted guilt. However much fidelity it may have to real events, it makes for one of the finest cinematic climaxes of 2008, a real breath-holding moment of peaking tension and relief.

All credit goes to Frank Langella and Michael Sheen. It's a two-man show - yeah, there's Kevin Bacon, Sam Rockwell, Rebecca Hall, and others in supporting roles, but it really comes down to Frost and Nixon alone in the interview. Sheen does a good job playing the lovable underdog but it's Langella who has the bigger challenge and brings out the big guns, embodying Tricky Dick with screen-filling electricity. It's incredibly broad and theatrical and exact the opposite of, say, Mickey Rourke's subtle method acting in The Wrestler, but he plays the gradually crumbling Goliath with fire that warranted his Best Actor nomination.

All is not well, however. As I said, this is a blunt, straightforward movie, too much so at points. Rather than leaving certain (however obvious) things unsaid, Ron Howard gives the actors documentary-style talking heads intercut through the film, giving sometimes exhausting and unnecessary exposition on the Frost/Nixon interview.

Beyond that, the screenwriter (and original playwright) Peter Morgan has inserted a completely fictional drunken, rambling, confessional phone call from Nixon to Frost before the final portion of the interview, which is not only silly and superfluous extrapolation, but which, worse, implies that the interview's shifting momentum was due not to Frost and his team's own skill and preparation but due to a drunken mistake from Nixon that never happened. These flaws (which could honestly just be cleanly edited out of the movie without a trace, and would still leave a 105-minute movie) unfortunately hold Frost/Nixon back from potential greatness to the level of goodness.

Also, pardon my bluntness: I'll love Ron Howard forever for his role in Arrested Development's inception (and Willow, of course), but his nomination for Best Director for this movie is a fucking joke. I'm not saying it's badly directed at all, but the centerpiece of the movie is two guys sitting across from each other in chairs in a suburban house, talking. Saving Private Ryan this is not.

All that said, it's still an often engaging, occasionally riveting, and exceptionally well-acted work. I'd definitely give it a recommendation, particularly to political buffs or anyone who, like me, didn't live any of this and for whom it's pure and fascinating history.


3 Stars out of 5

The Wrestler

The Wrestler abandons the experimental visuals and editing that previously characterized Darren Aronofsky's filmography in Pi, Requiem for a Dream, and The Fountain, and instead delivers in a stark, lean vérité style one of the greatest character studies to grace screens this decade. It's not a work entirely free from cliché, but Randy 'The Ram' Robinson, the titular wrestler, is depicted in such a raw, sad, and cinematically elegant way that his plight becomes one of the finest cinematic stories of 2008, the underdog story of an aging athlete free from swelling melodrama; the cold mirror of Rocky Balboa.

Randy is a living fossil. Not because he's particularly old in the grand scheme of things, hovering somewhere in his late fifties, but because he steadfastly refuses to evolve, clinging desperately and defiantly to the specter of the 80s, which he speaks of with awed reverence usually reserved for myth. That was a decade when he was a master showman, the hero of his fake sport, the idol of thousands of wrestling fans, and even a playable character in an NES wrestling game (which he still owns and plays, a last, tenuous link to his glory days).

But times have not been kind to The Ram, and the once-great entertainer now makes ends meet via a grocery store job he loathes. He can't make rent, sleeps in his van, and his only daughter won't speak to him. Refusing to acknowledge present circumstances, he continues sculpting and injecting steroids, working increasingly dire off-circuit wrestling shows to smaller and smaller crowds, pursuing the dream of getting back on top of a game that's long since left him behind. To watch Randy try to sell VHS tapes of old fights to a handful of aged fans at a depressing, sparsely-attended wrestling convention is to see how far behind the world has left the wrestler, how nostalgia can consume a man from the inside until nothing remains but a husk.

Lest I make The Wrestler sound too dry and dreary for its own good, I'll emphasize that there's plenty of laughter here, both with The Ram and at his expense, or, in the case of one scene where he brings his own touch of showmanship to his detested deli counter job, possibly both. He's a dumb old slab of beef and the movie never takes pains to make him more likable than such a creature would be in real life, but the juxtaposition of Randy and the exotic modern world often generates a warmly humorous friction, as seen when a neighborhood boy tries to explain to Randy the existence of post-NES video games, or when he clumsily theorizes that his daughter might be a lesbian due to her female roommate.

The wrestling matches are merely a framing device, not the point of the movie, and it's made perfectly clear that they're carefully rigged and scripted down to the weapons the wrestlers will use on each other. But the backstage view of the "sport" is fascinating and the fights are brutal despite their rigged nature, with the chairs, tables, ladders, barbed wire, and in one case staple gun that the wrestlers use on each other as real as the blood they beget. These wrestlers are showmen of a selfless order who sacrifice their bodies at the expense of much pain to entertain, and this element of the movie is engrossing, particularly watching Randy get sewn and stitched up after one particularly bloody match while exchanging pleasantries with the man who just brutalized him onstage.

But why The Wrestler truly works so well comes down to one element: Mickey Rourke. He's in every scene, damn near every frame of the movie and carries the entire thing on his shoulders, and I don't for one moment hesitate to say that it stands right up with Daniel Day-Lewis's performances in Gangs of New York and There Will Be Blood as one of the absolute best of the decade; method acting at its evolved, jaw-dropping peak. To say he deserves the Oscar is a hilarious understatement. He brings unparalleled depth and emotion to the character and, while the movie isn't quite a one-man show (Marisa Tomei is also very good as the stripper Randy befriends, who, as a stripper in her forties, is quickly becoming as antiquated as the wrestler in his fifties), it's as close as anything I've seen all year.

The Wrestler is a fine addition to Aronofsky's already-impressive filmography, and stands with the best raw and undiluted character studies in the annals of film and literature too. It's a great movie.


5 Stars out of 5

Milk

Milk succeeds as a political biopic because it is first and foremost a political biopic, declining to follow Harvey Milk from the cradle to the grave (it does follow him to the grave, obviously - it would be difficult not to seeing as his assassination occurred right after his greatest political victory) but instead keeping the focus squarely on his runs for office and his fight against California's eerily familiar Proposition 6. I've seen one too many biopics that hamfistedly psychoanalyze and exhaustingly depict the lead character's childhood and adolescent woes, but Milk instead uses one man's journey to show that social change via politics is, however rare and unlikely, possible.

Sean Penn plays Harvey Milk with his usual tightly controlled line readings that occasionally flirt with overacting and risk making him seem like some kind of uncanny valley acting automaton, and yes, his highly affected gay lisp often sounds cringe-inducingly close to his I Am Sam retard lisp, but it's mostly in his big speech scenes; in one-on-one dialogue he mellows out and does a good job, shaping a clear and distinct character. None of the other characters particularly stand out, which is fair seeing as the film is Milk's story, with Josh Brolin's portrayal of political colleague-turned-assassin Dan White being the most interesting and Diego Luna as Milk's whiny, histrionic boyfriend being the film's low point without question.

But for however lukewarm I may feel about certain characters and performances, where Milk thrives is in its portrayal of San Francisco on the edge of a minor social revolution and showing the growth of a grassroots political network; the often unpleasant grittiness of putting together a campaign, consolidating political power in a neighborhood, and the struggle against vile social conservatism. Milk's campaigns are engaging but the fight against Proposition 6 that takes up the back half of the film is some of the best political cinema I've seen in years (okay, if you ignore Diego Luna, anyway), even giving us a contemptible real-life villain in the subhuman shitstain Anita Bryant, seen solely via real archived footage much as Joe McCarthy was in Good Night, and Good Luck.

There's a part of me that wants to dislike Milk on the basis of it being another Sean Penn prestige picture - I admit an inherent bias against anything that smells like Oscar bait, just as surely as most film critics have an inherent bias against action movies - but although the movie may be Oscar-friendly it's impossible to deny for a moment that in this post-Proposition 8 world it's depressingly, achingly relevant. As relevant as ever, if not more so, by showing us how little public views on something as innocuous as homosexuality have changed in thirty years. We hardly need reminding in the age of President Obama that grassroots political activism can have great impact, but Milk does serve as a well-made cinematic reminder that when social prejudice comes along, no one has to roll over and take it.


3 Stars out of 5

Doubt

I didn't enjoy Doubt because it was boring. Yes, Meryl Streep, Philip Seymour Hoffman, and Amy Adams are three of the greatest actors of their respective generations and genders, and their performances are very fine, but it's all in service of a story that lies dead on the screen, attempting thematic nuance with all the subtlety of a battle axe, inspiring eye rolls where it aims for sympathy, and reeking with the overwhelming, fetid stench of Oscar bait.

It's 1964, and Philip Seymour Hoffman is Father Flynn, the relatively young, popular priest at a Catholic church in the Bronx. But Meryl Streep's Sister Aloysius comes to suspect that Flynn has molested one of the boys in the parish - the first black boy ever to join the parish, mind you! - albeit without a shred of evidence; all she has is her certainty.

Good lord, where do I start? Religion, clergy molestation, even racism, all housed in a period piece, with lots of shouting and crying by award-winning actors. It's a shame the title "For Your Consideration" was already taken. Doubt begs to be prestigious from the first frame, positively getting down on its knees and fellating the Academy by the time the credits roll, so it goes without saying that most critics happily ate it up.

The problem isn't so much that it tries to tackle controversial subjects as that it comes at them without any interesting viewpoint or conclusion. I'm well aware that love of Christ and love of underage cock are inextricably bound, and that as one dons the clerical collar, child molestation will follow as surely as night follows day. I don't need a movie to tell me that. Nor are the film's attempted ruminations on doubt and certainly via Sister Aloysius followed through with any interesting coda, only Meryl Streep breaking down and blubbering to Amy Adams through her tears that "I have dooouubbt!!", to make certain the theme is sledgehammered firmly enough into the viewer's skull.

Doubt throws a bunch of artsy prestige topics together onto celluloid, grinds it up like trail mix, and expects to be lauded for it. Well, not me. I "doubt" I'll ever watch this groaner again, delightful pun.


2 Stars out of 5

Gran Torino

In lesser hands than Clint Eastwood's, the screenplay for Gran Torino could have been the blueprint for a mawkish cliché storm - the story of a racist, lonely old man who learns tolerance, love, and compassion in the twilight of his life. Indeed, Torino is preposterous on its head, written in broad, often predictable strokes with tired, played-out character arcs, littered with newbie supporting actors who just barely keep their dignity intact while trying to emote.

It's also one of 2008's sublime entertainments, an applause-worthy spectacle of political incorrectness, black comedy, unapologetic badassery, and Clint Eastwood growling his way to one of the best (and perhaps the most purely entertaining) performances of his career.

Clint is Walt Kowalski, a grizzled old veteran with a mile-wide mean streak, vulgar and racist, a man fully at home pointing a rifle and telling kids to "get off my lawn," who finds that his dilapidated Michigan suburb has become poor and populated almost entirely by Asian immigrants, with gang violence on the rise. But when he saves the Hmong boy next door, Thao, from a gang, he becomes a reluctant hero to the neighborhood and friend to his Hmong neighbors. His defenses break down and he gradually becomes a father figure, teaching Thao how to stand up for himself, get girls, and make his way in the world. But the gang eventually returns to pay their debt to Thao with bullets, and only Walt can save Thao's family.

The plot is trite enough to make you gag, but the reason the movie works - gloriously, completely works - is because it is hysterical. Clint Eastwood's cheerfully thrown bombs of "gook," "spook," and "zipperhead" towards every minority that crosses his path spit directly in the face of anything resembling common decency without shame or apology, and although we acknowledge what a horrible person Walt Kowalski is his obliviousness to the way you're supposed to talk and behave in civilized modern society is wickedly entertaining; Dirty Harry filtered through the lens of George Wallace.

Imagine any other elderly actor in the leading role, even a talented one, the movie falls to pieces. No, this movie absolutely had to have Clint Eastwood in it, delivering all his lines through sickening gravel, exuding a raw, classical masculinity long since lost to Hollywood. When he rasps out lines like, "Ever notice how you come across somebody once in a while you shouldn't have fucked with?!", "I used to stack fucks like you five feet high in Korea, used you for sandbags," or, "I'm no hero. I was just trying to get that babbling gook off my lawn!", without any hint of a smile, I guffawed drunkenly and it was all I could do not to stand and applaud.

Far from maudlin, Eastwood turns Gran Torino into one of 2008's great black comedies and delivers in Walt Kowalski one of American cinema's classic unadulterated bastards with a heart of gold. If this is truly Clint's final performance, he went out on a wholly delightful note. Gran Torino, for all its clichés and faults, is an unadulterated guilty pleasure that left me grinning like an idiot.


4 Stars out of 5

Slumdog Millionaire

Slumdog Millionaire is a rare treat - a critical darling seemingly poised to sweep up the Academy Award for Best Picture that really is a legitimately great, genuinely delightful film. Okay, in all fairness, the Academy made very good selections the last two years with The Departed and No Country for Old Men, but they still have a lot of explaining to do before they're excused for Crash, apparently the greatest American film of 2005(?!!).

But Slumdog Millionaire, in stark contrast to the brutal cynicism of Departed and No Country, is a feel-good fairy tale from stem to stern (albeit one twinged with the same occasional violence and darkness as many fairy tales of old); a character study that's Charles Dickens meets City of God meets game shows with the very lightest gloss of crime story and mystery to it. If it does win Best Picture it will be a change of pace befitting this cautiously optimistic post-Obama era.

When an eighteen-year-old Indian slumdog named Jamal correctly answers his way to the final question on Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? - yes, the very same sickeningly ubiquitous gameshow that went out of vogue a decade ago - he's plucked up on suspicion of cheating by a couple of cops who try to beat a confession out of him, instead getting his life story, told in flashbacks that take up the large majority of the film and explain how he had the knowledge to answer each question. It's a remarkably clever and original narrative structure.

The story of Jamal's life begins as the dark tale of living in violent, crime-ridden slums, something strongly reminiscent of City of God, but it gradually sheds its hard edge and mutates into a quixotic love story between Jamal and Latika, a lost love from his childhood. It's generic on its surface but executed with rare tenderness and emotion that, although it's not as original as the Who Wants to Be a Millionaire? framing device, made Jamal and Latika form one of perhaps two or three cinematic couples from 2008 I liked well enough to genuinely root for.

The screenplay is wonderful and the actors are all very good, but it's Danny Boyle's energetic, lively direction that fills the movie with remarkable vibrance. At times the manner of shooting, American music, and rapid cutting even give it the light flavor of a music video, which I've heard some on message boards accuse of being gimmicky, but I found it superb. Award nominations for Best Director, Best Cinematography, and Best Editing are all warranted. Boyle milks the screenplay for warmth, emotion, and suspense and keeps things moving a crackling pace.

It's hard not to admire Boyle's uncommon genre versatility, tackling everything from drug cautionary tale (Trainspotting) to zombie horror (28 Days Later) to heartwarming family film (Millions) to hard science fiction (Sunshine) and now Slumdog Millionaire, his best film to date. Shred your cynicism when you see it, and don't overanalyze or take it too seriously because it is at its heart a crowd-pleasing fairy tale (for my part, the only real flaw in the film is that I thought the final game show question was laughably easy), and I think you'll find it as I did to be one of the better films of 2008.


5 Stars out of 5

Transporter 3

Jason Statham's Death Race was released in August and I went without shame, crackled in glee at the nonsensical carnage, and enjoyed, assuming it would be the warm-up to winter's real Jason Statham action treat: Transporter 3. Unfortunately, I was wrong. Believe it or not, Death Race is actually the better of the two films. Transporter 3 has its intermittent highs but it's ultimately a crashing disappointment.

Now for the record, I fucking love Transporter 2. Not only does it have Jason Statham at his most impossibly badass, but it has action sequences so surreal and ridiculous as to be among the funniest film scenes of the decade, martial arts galore, a hilariously over-the-top evil plot by an equally hilarious Eurotrash villain, one of the greatest henchwomen ever in Lola the Lingerie Assassin, hysterical cheeseball dialogue, and Amber Valletta. It's so bad it's good, yes, but it's so good via its badness that I think I love it without a shred of irony. It's extravagant action packaged exactly right for the 21st century.

And its sequel Transporter 3 starts decently enough itself - we get our first kills a minute or two in as a couple innocent bystanders accidentally stumble across the villain's plan, we meet Jason Statham, it's flowing. Then Statham gets in his first brawl and something horrible happens - shakeycam.

Yes, that excrementitious specter of The Bourne Supremacy rears its ugly head yet again. First it vomited its bile all over my beloved James Bond series in Quantum of Solace - a movie I enjoyed, but for the first time since 1962's Dr. No it was a 007 I enjoyed in spite of most the action scenes rather than because of them - and now it's attacked Frank Martin.

My grin immediately fell as the camera began wildly chucking and convulsing, ruining the fight choreography, with the editor helpfully cutting twelve times a second to fully obscure the vomitous mass. A sad day for action fans everywhere. Casino Royale and Iron Man blissfully ignored the shakeycam fad, but Transporter 3 is fully infected. Some of the chase sequences escape relatively unscathed but the martial arts battles are brutalized.

For comparison, look at the opening brawl from Transporter 2. The camera is either static within its shot or smoothly pans and tilts to capture the action, the shot cutting no more frequently than it needs to - it's a thing of beauty. So why and how did objectively good filmmaking become passé? All I can say is fuck you Bourne Supremacy, you ruined everything.

Back to Transporter 3, our villain is an eco-terrorist / rogue capitalist who plans to coerce a European politician into signing a bill permitting the dumping of radioactive waste all over the country. He kidnaps the politician's redheaded daughter and Jason Statham, straps bombs to both, and forces Statham to transport her to the drop point under threat of detonation. What he didn't count on is the fact that Jason Statham is a badass martial arts superhero who kills his henchman and fucks up his plan real bad like.

(Curiously, as a side note, this is one of several 2008 films with eco themes, from the wonderful (WALL·E), to the mediocre (Transporter 3), to the apocalyptically awful (The Happening). Kudos to Al Gore; only a few years back his eco themes were sequestered to their own documentary, now they've permeated fiction.)

This plot begets the film's second problem though. She's freckled, she has red hair, she can barely speak English, and her name is Natalya Rudakova, the truly awful actress playing the kidnapped daughter. Action movie romantic interests tend to be forgettable at worst, but this performance is so hideous that it effectively grinds the movie to a screeching halt every time she opens her mouth, which is unfortunately a fucking lot seeing as she's in the car with Statham the whole movie. Did I mention that she's obviously not fluent in English and is just phonetically sounding out her dialogue?

Never mind what I said about Thandie Newton in W., in Miss Rudakova we have found 2008's definitive Razzie for Worst Actress. Now I've never cast a big-budget action movie, but I fucking refuse to believe that they couldn't have found an attractive Russian redhead who can fucking speak English and act. Natalya Rudakova is awful and annoying, and since this is a PG-13 franchise she doesn't even have the common decency to get her tits out.

Outside of the shakeycam and the politician's daughter, the film is fine, a mildly amusing action yarn. Jason Statham is badass beyond the furthest reaches of human reckoning and certainly the one man I would go gay for, and there are a few neat action sequences, especially one scene where a bad guy tries to steal Statham's car and kidnap the girl and Statham has to catch up to his own car on foot. But the shakeycam and that annoying chick permeate and undermine everything. Transporter 2 will live on forever as one of the decade's finest, but it is with a single, masculine tear and a heavy heart that I am forced to give Transporter 3 the thumbs down it deserves.


1 Star out of 5

Bolt

Disney's Bolt represents a brazen act of self-cannibalism, Disney regurgitating the plots of two of their own early-mid 90s classics, Toy Story and Homeward Bound, and stitching them together into a Frankenstein beast of a film. The facts of the case:

Toy Story is about a toy, Buzz Lightyear, who has been led to believe with all his being that he is an astronaut. He is forced on a journey during which he realizes he is not an astronaut and comes to terms with being a toy. Homeward Bound is about a dog, Chance, who winds up separated across the country from his owner. With his two animal companions, including a sassy, sarcastic cat, he goes on an epic adventure, makes it home, and has a joyous reunion with his family.

Bolt is about a dog, Bolt, who has been led to believe with all his being that he is a superhero, and who winds up separated across the country from his owner. With his two animal companions, including a sassy, sarcastic cat, he goes on an epic adventure during which he realizes he is not a superhero and comes to terms with being a dog. He makes it home and has a joyous reunion with his family.

If the character and journey arcs of Buzz Lightyear and Chance got one another pregnant, their spawn would be Bolt. I realize that kids these days haven't even seen fucking Homeward Bound so they won't notice (and in a related note that I'm getting older by the minute), but come on now, Disney.

Outside of that, the movie's not bad. Not great, either, as the action scenes feel shoehorned in, it's predictable, there's no real conflict, and it just flat-out lacks the vibrant originality of Pixar's recent all-time classics like Ratatouille, WALL·E, and The Incredibles. But the animation is nice, the characters are fairly likable, and there's several funny moments interspersed throughout.

Make no mistake though, this is a kids movie, not a family movie. Children around five and six will enjoy it the most, laugh the most, and notice the flaws the least. I have no idea what the people on message boards I frequent ejaculating about Bolt being Pixar-quality were talking about, because it's not, but hey, I'm shocked to see Disney Animation Studios display signs of competence and something resembling a beating pulse these days too.


2 Stars out of 5

Twilight

Edward Cullen appeared onscreen, his cheekbones sharp enough to cut ice, his hair more gelled than any mortal man, his skin coated in flour, and a million tween girls got wet for the first time. Make no mistake about it, Twilight is nothing if not family-friendly softcore gothic porn for tweens and lonely fat goth chicks to masturbate to for the first or five thousandth time, respectively, with the inhumanly gorgeous Edward Cullen at the center of it all, the camera drinking in his every feature in gently-lit soft focus to make America's collective vagina leak grotesque fluids onto the theater floor, the fish-scented aftermath to be mopped up all night by some unfortunate janitor.

Bella Swan moves to Forks, Washington. She's a thin, attractive, husky-voiced supermodel by any standard, so of course she's lonely and unhappy, if only so that the aforementioned three-hundred pound seventeen year old girl with the Hot Topic sweatshirt and nose ring can relate to her. Then she meets the vampire clans who make nest in Forks, and specifically the impossibly dreamy Edward, who the camera devours in constant, pornographic detail. The two have an illicit, torrid love affair and he battles evil vampires to save her. That rumble you felt just now is our obese goth teenager causing a 5.6 magnitude earthquake as she swoons from the romance of it all.

These "vampires" drink blood and have super strength and speed, but other than that they happily skirt every convention of the genre. They don't need to sleep in a coffin. If garlic or silver hurt them the movie makes no mention of it. Animal blood nourishes them just as well as human. They sure as hell don't need an invitation to enter. And perhaps most outrageously, sunlight has no ill physical effects, merely making them glitter like a fucking Christmas tree. Indeed, the solitary ill effect of vampirism in the Twilight universe seems to be permanent pasty white makeup and ruby-red lipstick.

Honestly, the first two-thirds of the movie achieve a heightened kitsch value that almost makes them grotesquely entertaining, with Edward leering at Bella while she sleeps like a psychopathic stalker and it being depicted as romantic, explaining the absurd "rules" of this universe's vampires in exhausting detail, and giving an absolutely hilariously over-the-top monologue to Bella about how he can't stand to be around her because of how good her blood smells and how much he wants to eat her. The kinky sexual tension builds to fiery levels and the smell of tuna lingers strong in the theater.

Then comes the baseball scene. The fucking baseball scene.

The Cullen vampire clan brings Bella out to a field where they play "vampire baseball," and, Jesus fuck, I can't believe a human being came up with this and removing myself from my body and looking down on myself I can't believe I'm fucking typing these words because Jesus Christ, the vampires have to play baseball during thunderstorms only because they are so strong that the sound of their bats hitting the baseballs is too loud and they need thunder to mask the noise from the town! We witness an absolutely horrifying three-minute music video where the vampires hit the baseballs miles into the outfield and the basemen run with super-speed special effects straight out of the latest episode of Smallville to catch them. Mouth agape in abject horror, I couldn't believe what I was witnessing, my howls of laughter met with glares from the tween estrogen brigade.

Then some evil vampires show up and decide to make Bella their snack, and we witness a godawful fight scene that I have never seen before, unless of course you count the latest episode of Smallville again, and we're subjected to dreadful dialogue like "You're faster than the others... but not stronger!", followed by "I'm strong enough to kill you!" from Edward. I'm not making this fucking shit up, you can see it yourself at the end of the trailer.

Then, after Edward saves Bella, we follow up with a fucking prom scene, and end with Edward and Bella making out in a fucking gazebo. Bella asks Edward to bite her neck and turn her into a vampire too, he leans in like his going to do it, and then kisses her neck instead. Two dozen girls in the audience cum. Fade to credits, and I'm left in awe of what I've just seen. I honestly never heard of this Twilight saga until about two months before the movie came out, and I feel like I'm in some sort of Twilight Zone (no pun intended) alternate reality where this is actually considered to be "the next Harry Potter," but if stupid shit like Eragon can become popular, I guess anything is possible. Even so, vampire baseball, what the shitting fuck.

To be fair and give whatever credit where it is due, Kristen Stewart and Robert Pattinson acquit themselves just fine in the leading roles, seem to be good actors, and have decent enough chemistry despite the howlingly awful dialogue they have to work with. Twilight will probably skate just clear of my bottom ten movies of 2008 thanks entirely to them. Okay, them, and the fact that this shit was fucking hilarious. They say a sequel, New Moon, may be coming as soon as this winter, and I'll be standing right there at the front of the line alongside our fat goth teenager friend, because this fucking shit is too outrageous to miss. Vampire baseball. Seriously. Kill me now, fiction can never top this.


1 Stars out of 5

Role Models

Role Models is actually a really funny movie! I'm cheerfully surprised to be able to report that, because the trailer was pretty generic, as is the film's plot, but execution trumps idea. It's got consistent laughs from one end to the other and it actually earns them through clever writing and well-sketched characters rather than aggressive and constant vulgarity - there's nudity and profanity, sure, but strip the nudity and profanity from Role Models, you'd still have a funny movie, strip the nudity and profanity from Zack & Miri Make a Porno, you wouldn't have anything.

Paul Rudd plays the same droll, sarcastic guy he plays in everything, Seann William Scott plays Stifler with a different name again, Christopher Mintz-Plasse (aka McLovin) plays a nerd, Elizabeth Banks plays the supportive girlfriend, and so on. Paul Rudd and Seann William Scott are apathetic losers who cause an accident and are forced to mentor two kids for a month or go to jail. They resent the idea at first but come to care about their kids and everyone comes out of the experience better people, happy ending, roll credits, applause and tears, etc.

Generic as I said, but it's all forgivable because the whole thing is funny. The characters and actors are funny, the situations they find themselves in are funny, the dialogue is funny, with a hint of surrealism to some of the proceedings. Paul Rudd in particular continues to be MVP of any comedy he's in, and no other actor alive as far as I'm concerned can deliver a dry and sarcastic line the way he can; a snide, vaguely-douchey observation, a self-loathing aside, whatever it is Paul Rudd knocks it way out of the park. It's nice to see him as a main protagonist.

The movie does have a unique crux in that the kid played by McLovin is involved in LARPing (live-action role playing), something I've never seen in a big-screen movie before, where teenagers and lonely middle-aged men dress up in Dungeons & Dragons outfits and go to war. Paul Rudd's character inadvertently stirs up the inner politics of the LARPing community and causes a mess, and is forced to join the war along with McLovin to try to put things right. It all leads to one of the most ludicrous and funniest climactic sequences of the year, a sort of parody of the big fantasy battles in Lord of the Rings (and the shitty knockoff battles in Narnia and Eragon and so on) that had me laughing for fifteen minutes straight.

So if you like Paul Rudd and like laughing, then check out Role Models and you won't be disappointed. And if you don't like Paul Rudd, then seriously, you have bad taste in things, don't read my blog.


3 Stars out of 5

Zack & Miri Make a Porno

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W.

To admire Oliver's Stone's President Bush biopic W. is to admire a few interesting trees in lieu of the gnarled and desolate forest around them. The film's overall narrative is insanely chaotic, messy, and structureless, trying too hard to be a character study to be an effective political exposé and trying too hard be a political exposé to be an effective character study, but there are a few individually fascinating scenes and a handful of solid performances.

The film is divided into two separate and intercut halves, one about W.'s personal life, alcoholism, relationship with Laura, and daddy issues, taking place from his Yale undergrad days through his election to the Texas governorship in 1994, and the other taking place from 2002 - 2004 and about his administration and the beginnings of the Iraq War (his dubious "election" to the presidency and 9/11 are skipped over). The political half is the more interesting of the two; Bush's alcoholism doesn't really grab me that much, his daddy issues with George H.W. Bush come across as 90% fictional extrapolation, and although I like Elizabeth Banks she's absurdly young to be playing Laura Bush.

It's in the 2002 - 2004 segment that the meat and potatoes of the film lie. That George W. Bush is the worst president in the history of the United States of America is indisputable fact and beyond questioning, and Oliver Stone thankfully doesn't condescend to us by drilling that in beyond what is necessary. He does toy with the source of this ineptitude, however. Bush is portrayed as a bumbling good old boy in over his head and controlled solely by his cabinet, and while I don't doubt the in over his head part is accurate, it's an unjust absolving of Bush's sins to act like he wasn't aware of what he was doing when he invaded Iraq. He's dumb but I don't believe he's that dumb.

Looking for heroes and villains, Oliver Stone foregoes any hint of subtlety, opting to depict Colin Powell an angel descended from heaven to take his place amid the villains of Bush's cabinet, a living saint who tried to fight the Iraq War to the end, and Dick Cheney as an evil overlord giving ominous, booming speeches in front of global maps about the need for an American Empire. You practically expect John Williams' Imperial March to start playing. Now, I respect General Powell for endorsing Barack Obama and I detest Dick Cheney as much as anyone, but I don't buy either of these depictions. Colin Powell gave that stupid speech about WMDs - there is blood on his hands too - and as bad as Dick Cheney may be the Emperor Palpatine-style depiction is just absurd.

However, despite the ridiculousness of their depictions, Jeffrey Wright and Richard Dreyfuss may do the best work in the film as, respectively, Powell and Cheney, which made me wish that more of the film took place in the 2002 - 2004 timeframe and less in Bush's booze-soaked background story where they never appear. Josh Brolin's Bush isn't half-bad either. He comes across as a little too intelligent as points but he does a good job more or less with the facial expression and voice and general vibe. No other performance in the film lingers in my memory in the least except for Thandie Newton's hideously bizarre, borderline grotesque depiction of Condi Rice, an absurd caricature so over the top that it wouldn't pass muster on Saturday Night Live. I don't know if she thought the movie was a comedy or what, but she surely deserves to sweep the Razzie Worst Actress award off its feet.

Now, there are moments of policy discussion, particularly one tense immediate pre-war conversation between Powell and Cheney, that I found fascinating. But it's unfortunate that looking back on the movie I can barely remember any of the pre-White House material that takes up half the film. Bush the man is just a pampered rich kid and frankly not that interesting. I think that more historical distance and perspective is needed before a film like this. The movie was engaging enough during its runtime but I am unlikely to ever watch it again and it will have no enduring cultural value whatsoever.


2 Stars out of 5

Sex Drive

Listen closely, America, for I shall let you in a minor cinematic secret: Sex Drive, the teen sex / road trip comedy from several weeks back that you probably didn't see (judging from its $8.4m box office haul), is actually a really good movie and one of my favorite comedies of 2008, right up there with Tropic Thunder and Pineapple Express. In fact it has an above-average shot at making the cut for my top ten favorite films of the year. Critical response was lukewarm, but film critics are in general spineless follow-the-leader lemmings, so who gives a shit.

I'll be first to admit that the skeletal plot is utterly generic: Ian, an awkward-yet-well-meaning high school nerd, is about to graduate a virgin, to his eternal shame. But a slutty girl on the Internet offers to have sex with him, so Ian and his two friends steal his brother's car to drive across the country so he can get laid, with his brother in hot pursuit to cockblock. Various road trip shenanigans ensue; car problems, angry rednecks, crazy hitchhikers, thieves, a pitstop in an Amish village, the characters getting arrested, etc., all in pursuit of the legendary pussy. Basically, a combination of the high school virgin plot and road trip plot you've seen a hundred times each.

But the immense charm of the movie lies not in originality, of which there is little, but in wonderful execution, specifically in surprisingly nuanced and really, really likable protagonists. The three friends who share the bulk of the film's screen time have solid comic rhythm and chemistry together and consistently great dialogue that's never too witty or cute or eye-rollingly vulgar just for the sake of vulgarity. And perhaps most importantly, outside of their grand theft auto they come across as genuinely good, warm, likable people with a believable friendship.

One of Ian's two friends and road trip companions is Felicia, a girl who he's secretly had a crush on for years, and it doesn't take a fucking genius to figure out where the direction of the story is going as the two longtime friends bond on their mission for Ian to sleep with an Internet skank he's never met, but again, the execution is charming and it's essentially impossible not to root for the pair.

The casting is superb. Ian is played by Josh Zuckerman, who I'd never heard of or seen in anything before Sex Drive, but he calls to mind the neurotic, awkward charm of John Cusack in his teen movies a couple decades back. His two friends are played by Clark Duke of Clark & Michael fame, who does ribald vulgarity (as all cinematic best friends must) with cheerful spunk, and Amanda Crew, who I also hadn't heard of but who has terrific chemistry with Zuckerman. James Marsden (of Cyclops in X-Men fame) plays Ian's lunatic homophobic older brother and is hilarious.

I also enjoyed the movie's depiction of the Internet; even in 2008 the treatment of modern technology by 95% of Hollywood movies is nothing short of embarrassing, and it was good to see a mainstream comedy comfortably, confidently, and more or less accurately incorporate instant messenger, blogs, and YouTube into the plot.

But ultimately what I enjoyed is that there's hardly a shred of cynicism in the movie. It's filthy as hell, yes, as a teen sex comedy must be; there's boners and blowjobs and piss porn and a scat fetishist and naked breasts aplenty, but it's nearly Capraesque in its unyielding faith in the essential goodness of humanity. Except for a couple thieves basically everyone our heroes meet on their journey ends up being good at heart and helping them on their way, from the psychopathic older brother to a seemingly homicidal redneck to prison inmates.

In that way it's basically the opposite of the shitty teen comedy College from this summer that was so inherently vile it made me feel positively grimy to watch. Beneath Sex Drive's cum-drenched exterior beats an idealistic heart. Not to mention it's funny as hell, not as hysterical as last year's Superbad, but a very fine teen comedy that I hope finds more success on DVD.


4 Stars out of 5

Body of Lies

The thing that surprised me about Body of Lies is that despite the pedigree of Ridley Scott and Leonardo DiCaprio it's actually a really, really conventional terrorism thriller. The trailer, for the first time in the history of movie trailers, actually deceives to make the movie look more complicated and nuanced than it really is, like it's about CIA corruption and Russell Crowe is the bad guy or something. It's really not; Crowe and Leo have a tense working relationship but the bad guys are Islamic terrorists in the Middle East and the main plot of the movie is Leo infiltrating and compromising their cell to get them all dead, and that's it. There's no anti-war message or anything and it could be easily be taken for right-wing jerk off fodder without much argument.

And I say good. I saw another terrorism thriller this year, Traitor with Don Cheadle, that tried to be supremely deep and have a powerful message about "not all Muslims are terrorists," "terrorists have motivation worth examining," "terrorists are people too," and so on and so forth, but not being a drool-soaked idiot I already knew all these things and the constant appeals to liberal guilt just felt heavy-handed and had me rolling my eyes. Sometimes you just want to see some terrorists get deaded and that's what Body of Lies is, albeit with pretty good acting and production values and a light political gloss.

A lot of the other reviews remarked on the density of the plot and said they struggled to follow the movie. I don't know if all movie critics are retarded or what but there's absolutely nothing difficult to follow about the story - there's a lot of technobabble and subtitled Arabic dialogue, I guess, but this isn't fucking Syriana; there's an evil terrorist leader who's obviously a stand-in for bin Laden and Leo spies and pulls some strings to infiltrate them, that's it. Like Traitor, the action scenes are relatively few and far between, quick, violent, and vaguely Bourne flavored.

I definitely respect the path Leo DiCaprio has taken with his career. After Titanic he could have sat on his balls or done any stupid crap he wanted but (thanks largely to Martin Scorsese) he's stuck with quality material like Gangs of New York, Catch Me If You Can, The Departed, Blood Diamond. He's grown as a performer and made a solid secret agent here. No other performance in the movie is memorable, including Russell Crowe's strictly workmanlike coldhearted CIA director.

However, I did mildly enjoy it. There's some spying, there's some gunfights, there's some explosions. It has a dusty, dirty, gritty feel in the cinematography and production design that makes you feel the Middle East location. If you really wanna watch a movie about terrorism, you could do much worse.


3 Stars out of 5

Appaloosa

I have to disagree with the critical establishment when it comes to Ed Harris' new Western Appaloosa - I didn't hate it, but I found it rather plodding and jumbled with a lot of painfully dull stretches and an extended romantic subplot gone hideously awry. I suspect its fairly warm critical reception is due more to the Western genre being a sacred cow of American cinema than anything else.

It starts out promising enough with Profion Jeremy Irons running an evil gang that holds a small frontier town in a reign of terror. Ed Harris and Viggo Mortensen are two freelance gunmen who roll into town and agree to uphold the law. I like all those actors (especially Viggo Mortensen, who brings immense gravitas and is the best thing in the movie), so so far so good. There's a couple gunfights, some dudes get killed, and they capture Jeremy Irons. They have to hold him in the jail cell until a judge can arrive in town and hold his trial, but before then all of Jeremy Irons' men are coming to break him out of jail with violence if need be. The stage seems set for badass Western action.

Then Renée Zellweger shows up and everything goes to shit, all the simmering tension drained instantly out of the movie and replaced with lovey dovey romance scenes between Zellweger and Harris, an awkward romantic triangle subplot, and the narrative going scattershot in every direction. Renée Zellweger is also just really, really annoying in the movie, whiny and prissy and unlikable; I think we're supposed to root for her and Ed Harris as a couple but I found her to be one of the most repulsive movie characters of the year.

From that point to the end of the film I never quite figured out what the plot was supposed to be; it goes all over the place, too introspective to be an action movie, too much movement be a character study, too much romance to be masculine, too much testosterone to be a chick flick, with little mood or tension to speak of. As I said, Viggo Mortensen is pretty badass all the way. And the movie ends in a gunfight between him and Jeremy Irons, which is cool and all, but by that point the engine had powered to a shuddering halt and I just didn't care anymore. If you want a badass Western, please just Netflix last year's 3:10 to Yuma instead.


2 Stars out of 5