Category: Film/TV

Sometimes, kid, style can get you killed.”

Words to live by in an age of roll-over SUVs, $250 tennis shoes, and Texas-sized cowboy patriotism. Such is the mantra of

“The King” — not Elvis, mind you, but a gnomish, hyperactive, bisexual Dustin Hoffman as revealed to smooth grifter Jake Vig

(Edward Burns). The King practices what he preaches, unshaven, unkempt in unflattering, rumpled short-sleeved shirts and his glasses

dangling around his neck. Jake, on the other hand, looks

reeeeal good. Nice suit, nice haircut, and just the right narrow-eyed poker face that

can effortlessly reel in equal amounts chicks and scams.

The inescapable bond between these two men: Jake has inadvertently scammed the wrong man — the King — of $150,000.

The King, in return, has had one of Jake’s team, Big Al, killed off. Jake wants revenge for his buddy’s death, and the King wants his

money back. So, Jake gutsily waltzes into the King’s lair, proposes a con that will set things aright, and the King, smitten with Jake’s

looks, moxie, and “style,” dangerous as it is, sets him to work.

The Grift: Morgan Price (Robert Forster), sleazy mob heir and oily banker — archnemesis of the King and ripe for the

plucking. The Plan: fake an upstart business that will secure a loan from an unsuspecting, horny lending officer. The Bait: luscious Rachel Weisz.

Remember her? She’s the hottie from The

Mummy and About a Boy. She’s Lily here, who casually picks Jake’s pocket one

day. Smitten, Jake seeks her out when he needs a replacement for Big Al. And who can resist Edward Burns’ smile? Few, when there’s a

$5 million payoff attached to it. That’s right. This is no paltry six-figure con. Five mil. This attracts the attention of special agent

Gunther Butan (Andy Garcia), who has been on Jake’s trail for years. The magnitude of this con is so huge and Jake’s ego so swelled that this

is just the scheme for Butan to finally nab his man. He blackmails two of Jake’s cronies (Luis Guzman and Donal Logue), dirty L.A.

cops, into setting up Jake’s fall even as they scheme for the money themselves. Jake’s plan is further complicated by the presence of

Lupus (Frankie G.), henchman of the King, assigned to assist Jake while keeping a watchful (and, again, smitten) eye on him.

Confidence is all about Jake’s meticulous navigation through this tangled web, where it is virtually impossible to tell the

spiders from the flies. As far as tangled webs go, this one is great fun.

I went on a preview night with my blue-haired pal Jesse and, in a trivia game, won a bag of

Bend It Like Beckham stuff by correctly identifying

Midnight Cowboy as Dustin Hoffman’s X-rated Oscar nomination. Sneak previews are fun, and this one was

especially so because lots and lots of kids were there with parents who were either uninformed or uninterested in the fact that this movie is

very rated-R. So, the first couple of times the F-word came up, there were some nervous titters. Then there was some rough violence,

soliciting sighs and moans. THEN there was hot lesbian sex in a show-booth at an adult club and there were gasps and squeals! In that scene,

the King scolds two female strippers for performing cunnilingually while billing themselves as actual sisters. Poor form! The King runs

a classy establishment after all. I think this moralizing satisfied concerned parents because nobody left the theater.

Confidence is a poor man’s Ocean’s

Eleven — lower budget, smaller-name cast, smaller-name director. (Oscar-winning

Steven Soderbergh of Traffic helmed

Eleven while Confidence director James Foley has

Who’s That Girl? on his résumé.) Mostly, though, what

Confidence lacks is a George Clooney. Clooney IS cool. He needs no cool lessons, nor does he have to swagger to achieve it. He’s likable, confident,

capable, and women want him while men want to be him — the measure of a true Hollywood superstar stud.

Edward Burns is a poor man’s Richard Gere, and what fails

Confidence is a lack of heart. Jake’s dilemma is entirely cold,

calculated, and without emotional payoff. It’s all about a revenge that isn’t entirely motivated and, of course, the money. More fun is

Hoffman, draining all possible glee out of his few minutes of screentime as the twitching, megalomaniacal lech. Also rewarding: watching

honey Rachel Weisz ascend the ranks to credible leading lady with more strength, style, and oomph than Burns deserves.

Regardless, there is a joy to watching

Confidence intricately unfold, with surprises at every corner and surprises within

every surprise. Check your heart at the door, and let your brain be tickled for an hour or so watching well-dressed crooks achieve their

American dream by embezzling ours. — Bo List

It was a dark and stormy night (I have always wanted to begin something with that, thanks to years of watching Snoopy struggle with his own writings.) By mysterious circumstances, 11 strangers are thrown together at a decaying hotel, trapped between flooded roads and hindered by downed phone lines. Included: an aging movie starlet (Rebecca DeMornay), her ex-cop chauffeur (John Cusack), a quarreling young newlywed couple (Clea DuVall and William Lee Scott), a convicted killer on his way to prison and his police escort (Jake Busey and Ray Liotta), the prostitute with a heart of gold (Amanda Peet), and a young boy with his mother and stepfather (Bret Loehr, Leila Kenzle, and John C. McGinley, respectively). Oh, and the buggish hotel clerk (John Hawkes).

Everyone has a secret and a problem that complicates their otherwise nightmarish stay at this generically dismal hotel. The young mother, while fixing a flat tire, gets hit by the movie star’s limo, with no hospital in sight and no way to call for help. The convict is being transported to a higher-security prison and must spend the night handcuffed to a toilet. But, as with almost all assemblies of wildly disparate individuals, people start dying horribly. Meanwhile, in another part of the state, a judge awaits the arrival of a mentally ill death-row convict who is contesting his death sentence. The storm outside provides the backdrop for some scary stories and is the odd connection between the killer in the judge’s office and the unknown murderer stalking the hotel where the guests check in but don’t check out.

Director James Mangold (Girl, Interrupted, Cop Land, Kate & Leopold) has assembled a fine cast of oddballs. Cusack emerges from the pack as the central figure in the fight to stay alive, and it is nice to see him gradually losing some of his baby fat and looking more adult and authoritative. At 37, he still looks like he could be holding up an “In Your Eyes”-blasting boombox outside some beautiful teen’s window, but he is finally maturing vocally and physically into more of a grown-up. Liotta, however, carries with him the predestination of scariness. If he’s not in a simpy comedy (Operation Dumbo Drop, Corrina Corrina), chances are he’s going to scare the bejeezus out of ya. There’s a twist here, and he’s not the villain one would expect in a Liotta-laden film, but it’s not very long before he peers those Clockwork Orange-y eyes into the sight of an impending kill. Eek! Rebecca DeMornay amuses briefly as the washed-up starlet. Upon checking in, the hotel clerk observes, “Hey, didn’t you use to be that actress?” The same could be said of DeMornay, who spent the early ’90s getting A-list work in titles like The Hand That Rocks the Cradle, Guilty As Sin, and Backdraft but disappeared from prominence and into TV and straight-to-video film. Very sad, but nice to see her back in a major release.

Identity succeeds by taking its cues from some of the greats. The environs are definitely Psycho-tic Hitchcock: Filmed somewhat obviously in a studio instead of on location, the hotel is almost archetypal in its run-downedness. It looks like people should die there, and if I were in a similar predicament (no roads, no phones), I might easily drive by it and sleep in my car, having seen too many movies where unkempt inns were hosts to murders and monsters. The plot is not unlike Agatha Christie’s Ten Little Indians (political correctness has swept the play version of this story into a new name that hints at its story: And Then There Were None) where characters drop off one by one until the murderer is revealed. This is the same device used in just about every horror movie, though more obviously adhered to here than most: The killer’s trademark is to leave the victim’s hotel key under (or in or around) the body. It’s a countdown 10, 9, 8, 7 . And, like The Sixth Sense, Identity lulls you into thinking you know exactly how everything works and then turns you upside down until you are again fooled into thinking you’ve figured it all out.

Identity is refreshing in that sense. It’s a slasher movie, yes; but an intelligent one and one that both frightens and provokes. Not in a Sixth Sense way, as there are no heartstrings to pull, but on just the right level that will make you think (though not too hard) and scare you witless without giving you nightmares. It may, however, give you pause when considering where to stay for the night when you have a flat tire in the middle of nowhere, stranded in front of a Bates-y motel. Call Triple-A.

Filmed in state-of-the-art Imax 3-D, Ghosts of the Abyss chronicles director James Cameron and his 2001 return to the ship Titanic, four years after winning a basketful of Oscars and zillions of dollars from the 1997 mega-blockbuster film Titanic. He has taken Bill Paxton with him, who serves as a kind of Everyman narrator, blankly commenting upon mundane scientific exercises and providing requisite exclamations of awe when cool things get shown — like the approach of the mini-subs to the bulkhead of the ship or light shining through intact leaded-glass windows for the first time since it sank on April 12, 1914. Paxton, one of my least favorite Hollywood actors, is not bad playing himself, though a wittier Everyman might have been found. Director Cameron and he are buddies, and Paxton was in his Titanic film, but I would have preferred that old lady Gloria Stuart or maybe Kathy Bates. There’s a movie — miles under the surface of the ocean in a tiny submarine with Kathy Bates. Not for those who squirmed during her About Schmidt hot-tub scene, perhaps, but a jazzier set-up for a film. I did not need Paxton’s observations to let me know when something was “spooky.”

One of the marvels of Cameron’s Titanic was that it was able to, for three hours, sustain the attention of an audience that already knew the ending. He successfully wove a melodramatic romance into the tragic nonfiction, combining Romeo and Juliet with our collective cultural fascination with disaster. Mine, anyway. I’m one of those who loved Titanic. I saw it three times in the theater and a couple of times on video and insist that it is a masterpiece of good, old-fashioned movie magic. All the more disappointing that there is no real story to Ghosts of the Abyss. No narrative push. The closest thing we get to suspense is the loss and subsequent rescue of one of the mission’s miniature camera robots. There were two picture-taking ‘bots on the trip, dubbed Jake and Elwood (after the Blues Brothers!), and these little floating toasters are the heroes of Ghosts of the Abyss. Elwood gets lost and his battery runs down. So Cameron and Co. devise a system by which they can use Jake to latch onto Elwood with a special hook and hopefully tow him (it) back to safety for repair. It’s a close call, but — they save him! Whew!

As for the 3-D, I can report that Ghosts of the Abyss is neat-o in that department. The glasses were gray instead of the archetypal red-and-blue combo, and they provided me with less of a headache than when I saw, say, Jaws 3-D 20 years ago. Instead of things merely popping out at you, the 3-D successfully pops you into the film, making you feel like you are on the boats, riding the waves, and actually playing volleyball with the crew of explorers. However, like the rest of this underlong 59-minute ramble, there is no big finish to the 3-D. No grand finale. The effect just kind of stops. So while it’s cool and all, it really doesn’t go anywhere and there doesn’t seem to be a compelling reason to have done this in 3-D at all, since the footage itself is sufficiently impressive. (Frankly, my subsequent visit to that pretty, retro Cordova McDonald’s provided a more eye-popping experience: the curly-haired boy at the pay window said, smiling, “Thank you very much for coming to McDonald’s. Please come again.” In my three years in Memphis, I have not experienced this brand of McDonaldian friendliness, and I soon forgot all about Bill Paxton’s 3-D head floating too close to my lap.)

Ghosts of the Abyss is a somewhat confused documentary that teeters between the clinically academic and the narrative grandeur of one of the last century’s great stories, and it never quite figures out how to marry the two or choose one. As much of a showman Cameron is, I had hoped for some kind of aesthetic payoff or reason to do this project beyond cool wreck footage (though, in truth, Titanic is disintegrating and will be gone in a matter of decades). A flimsy attempt is made here by dramatically re-creating moments in and on the ship, visually juxtaposed against the decay of the ship’s current state. Some of this is haunting, as we hear music from the voyage and see optimistic people unsuspectingly enjoying their trip, all the while superimposed against the rusted, decrepit ruins of the most glorious ship ever built. I guess this is done to make sense of the inclusion of the word “ghosts” in the title, but nothing of this can surpass the raw majesty of the dead ship itself or Cameron’s celebrated other Titanic movie. — Bo List

A sleeper hit in the U.K. last year and a graduate of last year’s Sundance film festival, Bend It Like Beckham is poised to be this year’s designated feel-good underdog hit, a girls-soccer movie guerrilla-marketed to the target audience (judging from the little Sporty Spices and their soccer moms and dads at a recent local preview screening) in order to prime a larger box-office offensive in a strategy similar to that mother of all feel-good underdog hits, My Big Fat Greek Wedding.

For those who don’t follow what the rest of the world calls football, the Beckham of the film’s title is David, the world’s biggest soccer star, the Michael Jordan of the U.K. He’s also the face that peers down from a bevy of posters on the bedroom wall of teenage suburban Londoner Jesminder “Jess” Bhamra (Parminder Nagra) in this perhaps too-gentle take on intra-family culture clash and generational tension.

Jess is the youngest daughter of a traditional Sikh family, busy preparing for the wedding of its eldest daughter (a “love match,” Jess explains to soccer teammates who assume all Hindi marriages are arranged). With one daughter following the proper path, Jess’ parents turn their attention to her misdeeds, like playing soccer in the park with neighborhood boys (which equates to “showing your bare legs to strangers,” according to Jess’ mother) instead of focusing on finding a nice Indian boy to marry and learning to prepare a full Indian meal. “Anyone can do aloo gobi, but who can bend a ball like Beckham?” Jess asks. And thus we have our driving conflict.

The pitch-meeting shorthand here is Love & Basketball meets My Big Fat Greek Wedding amid a now-standard Indian-family culture clash, and in this case the shorthand about covers everything. The culture-clash part has been done to death recently, and much better, in films such as Monsoon Wedding and East Is East, or even the excellent My Son the Fanatic, which reverses the generational dynamic. Instead, the depth of family turmoil and ethnic humor in Bend It Like Beckham is about as shallow as in My Big Fat Greek Wedding, though less pandering and, consequently, with considerably more surface charm. Monsoon Wedding is melodrama worthy of Douglas Sirk by comparison. Thank Nagra, an appealing young actress who is believable as both tomboy and love interest, and who brings an earthy charm and dry humor to the role, for carrying the film through its rough patches.

Visually, Bend It Like Beckham, directed by Gurinder Chadha, is competent but a little on the dull side. The only time the sitcom-style camerawork changes is out on the soccer field, but even then we get the standard pop-song-montage scenes, and without the jazzy rhythmic editing that made the equally formulaic girls-just-wanna-have-fun surfing flick Blue Crush a not-so-guilty pleasure. In fact, not only is there no real kinetic energy to the soccer scenes, there’s also little of the in-game context that one would expect from any sports-themed movie. If you aren’t a soccer fan heading into the film, you aren’t likely to be won over. And if you don’t know what it means to “bend it like Beckham,” you won’t know by the end of the movie, either, though I suppose that part is easy enough to figure out and assumed knowledge for the English crowd the film is made for.

But, for all of Bend It Like Beckham‘s flaws, it goes down easy. Though one wishes it were less dull and less predictable, the film manages to combine a gentleness of spirit with a lack of saccharinity that is pretty rare in mainstream movies these days.

— Chris Herrington

In A Man Apart, we have Vin Diesel as Sean Vetter — ultracool undercover agent for the DEA. He has a pretty wife, Stacy (Jacqueline Obradors), who functions in the film only to get shot and die — but not before several candlelit montages showing how IN LOVE she and Sean are. (Yawn.)

Anyway, after jailing a high-profile drug kingpin Meno, thugs are sent to Sean’s unlocked (?) beachfront home and shoot the sleeping couple. Sean takes them all out but not before being shot himself and not before his beloved Stacy is mortally wounded. Sean passes out before she dies and wakes up from a coma much later in a hospital — to be told only then of her death. It is impossible to know how long he has been in a coma, because while his facial hair is longer, someone in the hospital was kind enough to keep Diesel’s trademark pate buzzed.

Sean then becomes a Bad Cop and roughs up some people on his quest to find Stacy’s murderer. His partner Demetrius (Larenz Tate) is reluctantly along for the ride and frowningly assists Sean’s law-bending, like when he shoots the body of a man Sean has already beaten to death and then tosses the gun at the body of one of the bad guys to cover up the cause of death. What are friends for?

Sean learns that the person responsible for all the drugs and murders is a man named Diablo, which leads Sean to hijack a plane (don’t worry, it’s a bad plane) to Mexico, where he is thrust into the center of Diablo’s machinations and no-goodedness.

Diesel is a fascinating movie star. Named after a kind of gas, he is clearly the heir apparent to the brain-dead shoot-’em-up actioners of the 1980s: Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, and Bruce Willis. Sly and Ah-nuld are both in their 50s and haven’t learned how to age as Hollywood hulksters. Bruce is pushing 50 but at least has learned to act and choose worthier projects. (Though look out: Die Hard 4 is on the way.) Diesel reminds me of a favorite Schwarzenegger quote: “I am to acting what Raymond Burr is to pole-vaulting.” That’s Diesel. He is instructed, apparently, to do little more than act cool and grieve at the same time. The only real acting in the film comes from Timothy Olyphant as a fascinatingly flamboyant drug lord/salon entrepreneur named Hollywood Jack, and from a drug-sniffing Chihuahua — though now I have spoiled the film’s only two fun surprises. My sister Lucia, instant-messaging me as I started to write this review, implored me: “Say something nice about Vin Diesel in your review.” I asked, “Why?” She replied, “Because he’s my boyfriend.” Me: “May I say THAT in the review?” Her: “No. Well, okay.” This is for you, Lucia:

Diesel, while running the emotional gamut only from A to B, succeeds at diverting one from the shooting and violence of real life. After all, the plot really makes no sense beyond “Sean gets even for the murder of his wife.” He doesn’t act like a cop, and he and his partner do foolish things — as when Demetrius climbs into an attic, unarmed, to talk a crazy, gun-wielding, frightened junkie into helping them out. Earlier, when Sean calls 911 to come and save him and Stacy, he doesn’t answer when they ask what the emergency is. He wastes precious seconds staring at Stacy as she dies beautifully. But he doesn’t know she’s dying, so shouldn’t he finish the call? The ending, as well, defies all movie logic about action climaxes.

I could have seen Phone Booth instead. But all I would have done with Phone Booth is fantasize about being stuck in the booth with Colin Farrell, which I did anyway during A Man Apart. So I guess I got my money’s worth. — BL

Stan Brakhage, arguably the single most important and visible figure in the history of American avant-garde film, succumbed to cancer earlier this year. But one imagines that if he had ever been given the chance, or had the desire, to make a feature-length “narrative” film employing Hollywood stars, it might have been something like Gerry, the latest vehicle from onetime indie icon Gus Van Sant, which stars Matt Damon and Casey “brother of Ben” Affleck.

The film opens with three long, mostly silent tracking shots, each showing the same action from a different perspective. First there is a shot, from the rear, of a car as it snakes along a highway running through a deserted wilderness in what we take to be the American West. After several minutes, the film cuts to a shot of the car’s silent inhabitants –Damon and Affleck –holding this shot for several minutes. Then it cuts to a point-of-view shot through the windshield, watching the road unfurl ahead. The soundtrack is a soft, hypnotic mix of piano and strings, drops of sound falling like a light rain. It feels like the visual equivalent of a palette cleanser, and it reminds me of a story I once read about the punk band Flipper, who would reportedly begin shows by playing the same note over and over until they’d weeded out everyone in the crowd who wasn’t fully committed. The difference with Gerry is that the note never changes.

Van Sant, a wonder boy of American movies back during the days of Drugstore Cowboy and My Own Private Idaho, has fallen into an odd groove, alternating crowd-pleasing Hollywood fare with formal experiments that masquerade as commercial movies. Thus, Good Will Hunting was followed by his shot-by-shot remake of Psycho, and Finding Forrester has been followed by this, another questionable attempt at stretching his art.

Damon and Affleck are both named Gerry, seemingly longtime friends (hinted at by the comfortable, nonsensical banter that exists between them) who stop along the road for a hike in the mountains and get lost. The rest of the film is their increasingly desperate and bewildered attempt to find their way back. There are no other characters, very little dialogue, and long stretches of silent, unbroken shots, often long shots tracking the Gerrys as they trod across a landscape that seems the more epic for its many changes, a result of shooting in three different locations — the deserts of Argentina, Death Valley, and the tundra-like white salt flats of Utah.

One of Van Sant’s primary formal concerns lies in using his long takes to explore real time in a manner that films rarely do. By slowing things down to the extreme, he is, in theory, forcing the viewer to look at a film in a new way, to concentrate more, to let the eye roam over the frame rather than focus on something a director is making you look at. But it isn’t like Van Sant is the first filmmaker to have such a notion. As with Psycho, he is partly taking the fan’s role of retracing the paths of his personal icons. Van Sant has even mentioned the work of Russian filmmaker Andrei Tarkovsky, whose long tracking shots over bare land are the stuff of film-snob in-jokes, and Hungarian Béla Tarr, whose films I’ve never had the opportunity to see but who reliable sources assure me earns the hype. Another recent example of this strategy is Aleksandr Sokurov’s Russian Ark, a 90-minutes-plus digital video feature that is one continuous take, though Sokurov’s highly theatrical film is in other ways the antithesis of Van Sant’s minimalism. And the granddaddy of this style may be Michael Snow’s classic avant-garde film Wavelength, is a 45-minute-long zoom shot across a room to a photo of waves on the opposite wall.

Van Sant employs these familiar avant-garde techniques with the enthusiasm of a film student shooting a thesis, which has its charms. And one supposes that Van Sant’s film may be seen by more people than any of the above, a result of having the name “Matt Damon” on the marquee, though one doubts that even Damon can sell this Outward Bound Beckett to the masses.

Ultimately, Van Sant seems to have bitten off a bit too much. Even at his peak he didn’t seem quite as momentous an artist as American indie contemporaries Jim Jarmusch and Richard Linklater. And while those filmmakers have recently pushed the boundaries of their work to wild success, at least artistically, with Dead Man and Waking Life, respectively, Van Sant’s work comes across as more pretentious because his follow-through doesn’t match his concepts. Rather, Van Sant’s experimentation is more in line with another of his contemporaries, Steven Soderbergh, who experimented to grand effect with the almost Dada Schizopolis but who came crashing down to earth with last year’s Full Frontal, which provoked walkouts, as Gerry reportedly has.

There is a cumulative effect to the film, with so much time spent with eye-popping landscape cinematography dwarfing the film’s human protagonists: By the time the Gerrys reach the end of their journey, the viewer can feel the hard weight of the ordeal. That is, if the viewer has made it to the end as well.

I find it more than a little ironic that contemporary movie audiences, seeking escapism by means of mind-numbing movie pap, can turn to science fiction. You would think that the “science” part would imply that the film is more intelligently conceived than regular fiction. Not so. Witness: The Core. I would hate to have seen this with any kind of real scientist, as I am sure that he or she would be uncomfortably distracted by the parade of poorly conceived scientific plot calculations. However, when the Golden Gate Bridge collapses near the end (every other review of The Core mentions this, so I’m not ruining it, okay?), even a die-hard science whiz should be able to admit that it’s pretty cool.

The United States has preemptively developed a superweapon called DESTINI: a giant system of machines that can disrupt the Earth’s core and cause earthquakes in enemy countries. DESTINI, however, has gone awry, and said core has decided to stop spinning. I can’t explain how or why it spins, but there is some exposition early on that does, so you can take my word for it that this spinning business is important and that we’re screwed if it stops.

Aaron Eckhart (a poor man’s Bill Paxton, from Possession and Nurse Betty) plays Josh Keyes, a meticulously rumpled geophysics professor who is called upon by the government to explain some mysterious goings-on. In England, a rogue flock of freaked-out pigeons destroys a neighborhood. At night, the hauntingly beautiful Northern Lights can be seen everywhere. Such is what happens when the Earth’s core stops spinning. These are fun sequences (odd that such destruction is fun to watch, but it is), however audiences may squirm a bit when atmospheric disturbances force the space shuttle Endeavor to make a crash landing in the middle of Los Angeles. The scene is well-done (the shuttle gliding low over Dodger Stadium is sweet), but it’s still a little strange to see a shuttle in jeopardy so soon after our recent tragedy. Thank God it was Endeavor and not Columbia in the film. Anyway, Keyes enlists the aid of a Carl Sagan-like celebrity scientist (played smugly and over the top by Stanley Tucci) to help set the government straight on the consequences of Earth’s temperament. This is the film’s Dumb Scene. Keyes, explaining that the spinning Earth’s core provides electromagnetic microwaves that protect Earth from solar winds, asks if anyone in the room has a can of air freshener. Oddly, none of the U.S.’s top generals does, but one is found and he uses it as a flamethrower to torch a conveniently available peach to demonstrate what will happen to an unprotected Earth. The generals gasp and sigh, having apparently never before understood that the sun is hot.

The solution to the core problem: Nuke it. A dream team is developed, and, as in all movies of this variety, they are a ragtag bunch of disparate individuals who would otherwise never be found in the same kitchen. They include Hilary Swank as “Beck,” the plucky navigator from the recently salvaged shuttle, and Delroy Lindo as “Braz,” the reclusive inventor of a megalaser that can cut a hole through a mountain. A brief demonstration of this laser is proof enough for the government (and, by extension, the audience) that this laser, installed on a ship, can cut through thousands of miles on a journey to the center of the Earth. As Blanche on The Golden Girls might observe: “Let me get this straight. We can cut through thousands of miles of lava and rock with laser beams, all the way to the center of the Earth in an invincible ship with hundreds of thousands of pounds of pressure on every square inch, set off a nuclear device that restarts the entire planet, and we can’t come up with a decent-tasting fat-free cheese?”

I wanted more on-land disaster scenes. Once our team goes underground, the special effects get repetitive. Frankly, I have seen computer screensavers that are more impressive than some of the core footage. Whales are featured prominently at the beginning and end of the film and both appearances are silly. They look like cartoons at the beginning, and at the end it would seem as though a group of them makes a phone call to an aircraft carrier. I hope someone can explain this to me.

Regardless, as escapist “science” fiction, this one is okay, as it destroys the requisite amount of recognizable, iconic landmarks. (Here, the Roman Colosseum and the aforementioned bridge. Freedom-kissers everywhere may be disappointed that the Eiffel Tower is spared.) Real acting by Lindo almost spoils the fun, but otherwise The Core succeeds as good, peachy escapist fluff. — Bo List

A sensationalistic tale of street violence in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, the Brazilian import City of God seizes the viewer immediately, its energetic, explosive, instantly iconic opening sequence establishing an unmistakable tone and delivering a clear message: The City of God is a vibrant, dangerous place, and there’s no way out.

The film opens in the midst of a street festival — the swirling sounds of samba and staccato glimpses of a knife being prepped for slaughter slicing sharply against a stone as chickens in a nearby pen await decapitation and plucking. One chicken gets free from the pen and tries to escape, only to be chased by the sponsors of the festival. “In the City of God, if you run away they get you. If you stay, they get you too,” says the film’s narrator, Rocket (Alexandre Rodrigues), who finds himself face-to-face with the bird and caught between two rival gun-toting gangs: the Rio police and the adolescent drug-dealers who control the neighborhood.

Rocket, more an observer than actor, is in some ways a typical audience stand-in, but as an aspiring photographer who chose the camera over the gun to document his environment from the inside, he’s also as much a stand-in for director Fernando Meirelles, who marshaled an army of mostly adolescent nonprofessional actors for this chronicle of the street gangs formed by poor children in Rio de Janeiro. The film follows these organic criminal units from their origins on through to a full-throttle gang war that wipes out most of the central players and finally brings the conflict to the surface in the eyes of the media and government.

When Rocket is caught between the cops and gangsters in the film’s opening moments, the camera freezes on him, then the image rotates and morphs simultaneously to leap backward to the early days of the City of God, a huge housing project on the outskirts of Rio, with the older Rocket crouched in the street turning into a younger Rocket crouched in front of a soccer goal. Thus begins a long flashback that details the origins of gang life in the City of God, but just as crucial is this early and telling juxtaposition of low-tech content and high-tech style: The mise-en-scäne of the film is neorealist, but the cinematography, editing, and effects are hyperstylized, as if The Bicycle Thief had been reimagined through the post-CGI lens of Fight Club or The Matrix.

Visually, City of God is a film of tremendous ambition that rarely falters. Its use of hand-held camera and rapid editing lends the film an intimate, energetic mood and only enhances the power of the film’s few calmer moments, such as a slow, silent pan over the murdered remnants of a brothel holdup. But surrounding this primary style are myriad stylistic flourishes — the film’s promiscuous camera running the gamut from a ground-level point-of-view shot of the fleeing chicken to the detached overhead surveillance of a spy satellite as it follows the animal’s pursuers. Chopped into chapter-like segments, each with introductory titles, the film changes styles on the fly to fit different storytelling needs. One section, “The Story of the Apartment,” shows the evolution of a drug den in one static yet constantly morphing shot; another segment conveys the hierarchy of the drug trade — from messenger to lookout to soldier — with great visual rhythm and economy.

For better or worse, this is one foreign film likely to be easily accessible to American eyes precisely because of how much it borrows from the hip and hard-boiled side of Hollywood. As a gritty, wide-scope, decade-spanning gangster tale, it echoes Scorsese above all, with the film more a South American street-culture cousin to Goodfellas than a companion to that other Western Hemisphere debut showoff of recent years, Amores Perros, to which it has been compared. City of God‘s central figure, gang leader L’il Ze (Leandro Firmino da Hora), is the movie’s Joe Pesci — an asexual sociopath whose monstrous bloodlust, even as a child, seems totally unexplained by social conditions. And, like Goodfellas, City of God is also based on a true story. But the film’s time-hopping narrative and use of pop music owes as much to Tarantino. Its chaotic bloodletting is pure Peckinpah, and it may make better use of split-screen than anything since De Palma.

The City of God was built in the Sixties as a relocation program to move the poor and homeless away from tourist-friendly areas, a fact subtly alluded to in Rocket’s voiceover. There is poverty and ruin everywhere, from the dust-covered excuses for roads to the fragile, modest shacks the residents call home to the battalion of emaciated stray dogs that line the streets. There are many nods to social conditions in the film, from the obvious poverty to comments on limited employment options to intimations of police corruption, but not much is made of this. Rather than a message movie of any stripe, City of God is a relatively amoral gangster tale. The film itself doesn’t convey much palpable concern for the people on screen and, as a consequence, the viewer may not either. But this emotional blankness is used as a slate for an exercise in pure film style. The film doesn’t shy away from the brutality of its milieu; in fact, it wallows in it, exploiting the violence for cinematic kicks while only occasionally acknowledging the suffering underneath the noise. There’s enough of a disconnect here to give reflective viewers pause, but the ride is so frenetic and so gripping that you may not care until the credits roll. — Chris Herrington

The remake of Willard is weird. It starts weird, with dark, morbid funhousey opening credits a montage of images to come in the film and ends weird, with Crispin Glover singing the movie’s love theme, the Jackson 5 hit “Ben.” If you are not a rat-o-phobe and end up seeing this movie, I hope you stay for the closing credits to hear Glover’s bizarre, almost pretty take on the song, but like many in the audience the night I saw the film, you may pack up and leave before it’s over, never mind the credits.

Comparisons to Norman Bates are inevitable. Willard is a thin, awkwardly handsome young man living in a strange, huge Gothic old house with his strange, Gothic old mother. Mother is the scariest thing in the movie and solicited the most gasps when she was onscreen. She is the embodiment of our fear of age: sick, weak, thin, frail, senile, ugly. She looks to be somewhere between 70 and 1,000, so it is difficult to know exactly how old Willard is, because at 38, Glover is chronologically ambiguous forever Back to the Future‘s George McFly. He could be 25; he could be 45.

When Mother hears rats in the basement, Willard slavishly investigates. Sure enough, there are holes eaten out of everything. Conventional mousetraps don’t work. The rats are smart enough to eat the cheese and spring the trap without becoming prisoners. Glue traps catch a singular white rat. Willard becomes instantly fascinated and cannot bring himself to kill it. Tenderly, he frees the rat and names it Socrates for being so smart. Socrates does nothing particularly smart in the movie, though, and eventually finds himself in unalterable trouble, so it is puzzling that Willard perceives particular intelligence in this rat.

The smart rat of the film is Ben (named after Big Ben the clock, because this rat is huge a one-footer) who snorts and oinks and makes tiny pounding sounds when he walks to let us know that he is a big rat. Ben is jealous of Willard’s love for Socrates, and while an uneasy truce is declared between them, it is only a matter of time before Willard’s rejection of Ben in favor of Socrates gets the better of all. Willard loves Socrates, and there is a fine line between friendship and romantic love, since they sleep together and Willard is in a constant state of caressing, kissing, and holding Socrates. As my dear friend Cliff would discreetly suggest, “Those two don’t walk like buddies.”

Willard, by the way, is a loser at work. He is meek, a tad sniveling, and shows up late every day. There is a romantic interest for Willard in the office (Mulholland Drive‘s fragrant Laura Harring), who persistently tries to care for Willard but is persistently turned down in favor of his rodential yearnings. His boss, Mr. Martin (Full Metal Jacket‘s R. Lee Ermey) is a drill-sergeanty bastard who has always wanted to get rid of Willard, but since Willard’s father helped found the company, Martin has been contractually obligated to keep Willard around. This doesn’t prevent constant, public beratements and insults, however. Soon, Willard discovers that his rapport with rats is useful in revenge, and his plots quickly move from mischief to menace as Martin’s injuries against him multiply.

I thought, not liking rats, that I would be a basket case during the screening of Willard. Not so. Like I said, there is nothing in the film as frightening as Mother, and when the film focuses away from her at the halfway point, there is nothing more to fear. Being a movie about rats, I expected more grossness more poop, more gnawing, more filth. These are clean rats and very purposeful, as Willard (or Ben, once he seizes control) always has a job for them. And since this is kind of a horror movie, I expected more gore. The body count is low, and the camp is high save for Glover’s play-it-straight performance. His dedicated stare alone may make up for whatever heebie-jeebies are otherwise lacking. Fans of high terror may want to seek it elsewhere, but aficionados of rat-flavored fun will feel right at home.

I love the Academy Awards. They are like a religious holiday for me and have been ever since the first Oscar-cast I remember watching: the 1987 ceremony that honored Cher as Best Actress for Moonstruck and “(I’ve Had) The Time of My Life” from

Dirty Dancing as Best Song. I get very involved in the politics of who wins, who doesn’t, and why, and I become obsessed with what I perceive as crimes against art when the wrong person wins or when the right person wins for the wrong thing. For instance, I was miffed back in 1991 when Anthony Hopkins won Best Actor for The Silence of the Lambs over Robin Williams in The Fisher King and Nick Nolte in The Prince of Tides — /I>both of whom I shortsightedly didn’t think had more nominations in them and gave superior leading performances. The Oscars, are, after all, glorified popularity contests that juggle sentiment, innovation, and sometimes excellence. Anyway, these are the things that I think about come award time, and this is the mindset with which I complicatedly compile my predictions for this year’s winners and bemoan those films unadorned by Oscar’s sweet, golden kiss.