Category: Film/TV

Robert De Niro slows it down a little in the ultraconventional cop thriller City By the Sea. He plays Vincent LaMarca, a veteran Manhattan officer with two skeletons in his closet: one in the form of a father, the other a son.

When Vincent was a child, his father was executed for the kidnapping and accidental death of a rich family’s baby. Vincent was taken in by the arresting officer on that case and raised with a strict sense of honor, eventually joining the NYPD himself. Vincent, close to retirement, enjoys a predictable, unchallenging life, the rewards of a distinguished career on the force, and a safely noncommital relationship with his downstairs neighbor (Frances McDormand). Vincent’s routine gets shaken up when a dead drug dealer with a Long Beach, Long Island, driver’s license washes up on the banks of his turf. Vincent has painful memories of Long Beach, once a bustling tourist haven and now a decaying, beachfront ghost town. There, he has an ex-wife (Patti LuPone) and a young adult son (James Franco) he left years ago, and he hasn’t looked back — until today. It turns out that his son Joey, now a desperate junkie, is connected with the death, and Vincent must balance his duty to the force and his guilt as an abandoning father to see that justice is done.

If this all sounds familiar, there are two reasons. City By the Sea is based on a true story that was first highlighted in a 1997 Esquire article by Mike McAlary. Also, the plot is not unlike several you may have seen brought to life as TV movies. There is certainly nothing surprising here, except maybe De Niro’s understated performance. It is an exercise in restraint. There are many upsetting turns in Vincent’s life: the murder charge against his son, confronting his ex-wife again, unexpected relations, and another murder. He almost never loses his cool. Perhaps it is from years of repressing the pain of losing his father to the electric chair, the shame of living under the shadow of a murderer, and the guilt of leaving his family. De Niro navigates this emotional turf skillfully, with an almost bland detachment, until the climactic confrontation, when the stakes are at their highest and he can’t push it all away anymore.

It’s a sad day in Hollywood when grade-A actresses like Frances McDormand have to accept roles as girlfriends in paint-by-numbers police dramas (see also the wonderful Anjelica Huston in this season’s Blood Work — or, rather, don’t see it). McDormand makes the most of it and brings some honest gravity to Vincent’s need to do right by his son, but you can’t help but feel like she should be doing something worthier of her time. Delightful, though, is seeing Patti LuPone in a major film. Underrated as a screen presence, she brings some much-needed, responsible fire as Vincent’s long-suffering ex-wife.

Most interesting in City By the Sea is the young James Franco, who won an Emmy playing James Dean in a TV biopic. He’s very compelling as the good boy gone wrong, and his youthful defiance and rage at his abandonment are skillfully contrasted with De Niro’s measured and tenuous authority. Franco, incidentally, looks a lot like James Dean, and director Michael Caton-Jones goes a little overboard in making his Joey smolderingly sullen and hopeless. In fact, the film kind of reads like a Young Method Actor In Training showcase, with De Niro as the wizened guru and Franco as the attentive pupil. There’s angst aplenty. There are several shots of Joey ambling woefully down the Long Beach boardwalk accompanied by slow, mournful, bluesy jazz music and longing for love or drugs. Audience members can amuse themselves by paying close attention when the musical score switches gears from Vincent scenes (traditional movie background — violins, etc.) to Joey scenes (gritty hip hop or the mournful jazz). Once they have the pattern straight — and it is very noticeable — observe the moment when the pattern is disrupted and the jazz follows Vincent on his own sullen trip down the boardwalk. It’s fun! But it shows exactly how conventional this well-produced, well-acted film turns out to be. — Bo List

My roommate, Chris Arnold, is directing Neil LaBute’s The Shape Of Things at the University of Memphis this fall. So, in preparation for writing this review for LaBute’s film Possession, I asked for his well-researched take on what makes LaBute tick. His written response:

“Neil LaBute honestly examines the ugly truth of male/female relationships. Part of the excitement of a relationship is finding a way to compromise the inevitable battle of the sexes, but LaBute ignores this compromise. In Possession, LaBute shows this issue is timeless with the two relationships he explores.”

Thanks, Chris. Anyway, Possession is a story about two courtships — one inspiring the other. Roland Michell (Aaron Eckhart) is an earthy American visiting England on fellowship to study the Victorian poetry of the late, great Randolph Henry Ash, whose work is being celebrated upon its centenary. Ash was noted for having only one great love — his wife — but in a routine visit to the library, Roland discovers an original Ash love letter, addressed only to “Madam,” that would suggest there was another object of his affection. Prime suspect: Christabel LaMotte, freethinking prefeminist and — gasp! — lesbian. Roland takes his theory to the icy, skeptical LaMotte expert (and descendant) Maud Bailey (Gwyneth Paltrow). Bailey would like nothing more than to quash Michell’s recklessly American ideas but soon embroils herself in unraveling the mystery as they discover more old letters and retrace the hypothetical steps of the lovers from a century ago. They have competition: Ruthless colleagues and an on-again/off-again suitor of Maud’s would love nothing more than to confirm this discovery, and it’s a race against time — present and past — to find all of the right clues to authenticate the find. Along the way, amidst all of that sexy poetry and repressed British sensuality, Roland and Maud find themselves attracted to each other, and their scholarly adventures heighten the excitement of their hesitant courtship — and vice versa.

I didn’t like this movie very much on the whole. I was utterly absorbed when traveling back in time and seeing Ash and LaMotte (Jeremy Northam and Jennifer Ehle) engaged in their delicate seductions but checked my watch incessantly during the bland and awkward mating dance of the two present-day academics. Maybe this is the point: that while we 21st centurions pat ourselves on the back for progress and civilization, we haven’t learned a damn thing about matters of the heart. Nor have we excelled at expressing ourselves through language. Roland’s and Maud’s inarticulate musings and confessions pale next to the elegance and sheer beauty of the exchanges between Ash and LaMotte.

Eckhart stretches plausibility as a researcher of poetry. He comes off like a cowboy — out of place and in over his head. And while his boyish, toothy charm contrasts nicely with The Gwyneth (utterly believable as the snitty ice queen), he never quite makes the grade as a person passionate about poetry. He seems so entirely focused on disarming Maud’s aloofness that we never quite see a man in love with words, as the situation suggests.

The real show, again, is Ash and LaMotte. Northam hauntingly underplays Ash as a man of very gently expressed passions. No Byron, he. This is a necessary key to believing that a man famous for loving only his wife could develop a passion for another woman. His performance has a masculine softness, encouraging our belief that he can charm LaMotte, famous for loving only women. In turn, Ehle’s LaMotte has a wry smile that would make Mona Lisa blush.

LaBute, director and adapter (after A.S. Byatt’s prize-winning novel) also seems more interested in the past. The period cinematography is more attentive and flattering, and the relationship between the two poets seems spontaneously calculated down to the glance. This is a different kind of film for LaBute, known for his harsh and intense looks at the contemporary gender war. His work on Possession is a bit more like his direction of Nurse Betty which sought as much to bend the differences between reality and fantasy as this film does to bend past and present and the passions that transcend them altogether. — BL

The winner of the French equivalent of the Oscar for best actress, best screenplay, and best sound, Read My Lips is a postfeminist take on a classic noir outline: A mild-mannered young woman meets a rugged ex-con and leaves her humdrum middle-class existence for a life of crime. But

Seymour “Sy” Parrish (Robin Williams) in One Hour Photo is the kind of guy you typically don’t notice. If he weren’t so friendly, you might easily consign him to the blur of fast-food workers, librarians, traffic cops, and grocery cashiers who make up the collage of daily routine and who never solicit attention unless something remarkable happens.

There is little remarkable about Sy: He works as a photo-lab technician at the local SavMart and, after a day of meticulous photo processing, goes home to a solitary apartment. If he has a life outside of the barren world of the SavMart, we don’t see it. Enter the Yorkin family: Will (Michael Vartan, a less expensive Tom Cruise type), Nina (Connie Nielsen of Gladiator), and 9-year-old Jake (Dylan Smith). They are the picture-perfect family, cut right out of a catalog for stylish contemporary living. The parents are attractive and hip, and the soccer-playing son is honestly and noncloyingly adorable. “Yorkin” literally breaks down to “your kin,” and Sy, who processes their weekly rolls of film, has grown inordinately fond of them, fantasizing that they are indeed his kin. He knows their address by heart, knows when birthdays are approaching, and by having constant access to the weekly record of their happinesses, knows just about everything they do.

Eventually, Sy grows more and more comfortable in his role as invisible stalker, finding tiny ways of being nearer to them: reading a book he notices Nina buying, hanging out at the soccer field during Jake’s practice. “Sometimes, I feel like Uncle Sy,” he says to Nina of watching the family grow over the years. To Nina, this is an offhand compliment to the attractiveness of the family. To Sy, this is a nervous plea for inclusion and a staking of his intended territory. One day, however, Sy notices something in a roll of someone else’s film that poses a threat to the obliviously happy Yorkins. Sy works feverishly to devise a means by which to keep them together and punish those who would mar his image of the perfect family.

Robin Williams, with the right director and flattering material, is one of our very best actors. Usually, this involves a combination of resources that work to restrain him. Evidence: Dead Poets Society, Awakenings, and Good Will Hunting. Occasionally, he has done great work with directors who can channel all of that energy into a beautiful marriage of outrageous humor and heartrending pathos: Good Morning Vietnam, The Fisher King. After taking some missteps these last few years with overly sentimental life-affirming tear-jerkers (witness Bicentennial Man, Jakob the Liar, Patch Adams), he is branching out lately with some unexplored dark territory, as in this summer’s thriller, Insomnia.

Williams really is quite impressive here. There is a mesmerizing scene when Nina is tucking young Jake into bed and he remarks that he is sad for that friendly guy who works at the photo lab. Nina, touched by his empathy, holds him and encourages him to think good thoughts to send to Sy. The film cuts to Sy, alone in his coldly lit apartment, drinking a glass of water very slowly. The moment between Nina and Jake is so very magical that you expect those good thoughts to put a smile on Sy’s face across town. Or to inspire Sy’s stalking. Or something. What we see is Williams at his quiet best, just meticulously drinking the water. This is of enormous credit to writer/director Mark Romanek, who seems to know just what to do with Williams and his expansive range from stillness to mania. Romanek’s work is confident and deliberate throughout — rich with the cold, sterile imagery of Sy’s lonely life juxtaposed against the romantic, colorful affluence of the Yorkins and their belongings. And with the minor exception of an obvious framing device that tries to explain too much, Romanek manages to set all the right creepy tones in a mere 90 minutes. As I exited the theater, all I could think to say was “That’s a lot of heebie-jeebies to squeeze into an hour and a half.” — Bo List

Just a glance at the title of Nicole Holofcener’s sophomore film Lovely and Amazing brings images of a sappy love story to mind. Skimming over the synopsis in the press kit reveals all the ingredients for a corny chick flick. But much to my surprise, Lovely and Amazing is actually a conglomeration of scenes from the lives of three women that delve into the complexities of human relationships.

Lovely and Amazing peeks into the lives of one family as they struggle through daily battles with love, weight, careers, and acceptance. The mother (Brenda Blethyn), a weight-obsessed divorcée, spends the majority of the film recovering from liposuction surgery. Meanwhile, her three daughters go on about their very different lives. The oldest, Michelle (Catherine Keener), a thirtysomething artist in a loveless marriage, desperately takes on a job at a one-hour photo lab and eventually finds herself sleeping with her manager, a high school senior played by Donnie Darko‘s Jake Gyllenhaal. Emily (Emily Mortimer), the middle child, is an actress with appearance issues and a strange habit of picking up stray dogs. And Annie (Raven Goodwin), the youngest, is an adopted 8-year-old African American who spends most of the film wishing she were white like the rest of her family.

It is the scenes that display fairly insignificant moments that paint the best picture of these relationships. For example, in one scene, Michelle says “fuck you” to Annie, and Annie returns the sentiment. Although she’s only 8, it’s okay to cuss her sister because they’re just that: sisters. Scenes like this give an idea how weird it must be to have such a large gap in age yet still carry out a sister-to-sister relationship. Other scenes deal with much bigger issues but somehow come across as less important.

Lovely and Amazing addresses themes such as the female obsession with appearance: All of these women are intelligent and well aware that looks aren’t everything, yet they continue to obsess over weight, as many women do. And the film manages to show the beauty in making the most of the family that you’re stuck with.

Although the family is a little unrealistically dysfunctional, it makes for good cinema. And the slice-of-life scenes are put together in such a way that the film is, well, lovely and amazing. — Bianca Phillips

The Good Girl, the second film from the writer/director team of Mike White and Miguel Arteta (following the minor cult hit Chuck & Buck), is a well-intentioned if overly familiar bit of Americana, like American Beauty as faded suburban noir. Friends‘ Jennifer Aniston stars as Retail Rodeo clerk Justine in what would be the Edward G. Robinson role of the bored, frustrated, middle-class zombie who makes some bad decisions in a desperate stab at rejuvenating a stale life. Donnie Darko‘s Jake Gyllenhaal is mysterious co-worker Holden, the force that lures her astray.

But this is no archetypal noir tale of patsy and predator. Justine makes horrible decisions but eventually frees herself from the film’s tragic trajectory. And Holden (along with pretty much everyone else in the movie, including Justine) is far too dense to make good on any sinister schemes.

Aniston plays against type here as a bored regular gal grown weary of her lifeless husband and mundane job, attempting to jump-start her moribund life by engaging in an affair with the college-dropout loner Holden, who reads The Catcher In the Rye at the register and complains that his parents “don’t get him.” Justine is attracted to this (“I can see in your eyes that you hate the world,” she tells Holden. “I hate it too”) because she doesn’t think her husband gets her either and spends her days in quiet desperation, consumed with regrets. But Justine eventually realizes how disturbed and delusional Holden is and manages to extract herself from the mess of a situation she’s created, resulting in a rather sardonic “happy” ending.

The Good Girl is a well-acted character study in which Aniston gives probably her most notable screen performance (that’s not saying much, granted, though I am a huge fan of one of her previous films, the vastly underrecognized Office Space), but the film’s tone is muddled, as if White and Arteta couldn’t figure out whether they were making a Coen-style satire on service-class suburbia or a bit of hearth-and-home realism à la You Can Count On Me and In the Bedroom. More than likely, they were aiming for an ambitious seriocomic blend of both, but it doesn’t take.

Aniston gives a respectful turn as the not-so-bright 30ish clerk, and the film reciprocates with affection for Justine. And the look of the decaying Southern suburban milieu — the sub-Kmart big-box store, the modest, lived-in homes, the off-brand wardrobes — is dead-on. But the attitude the film conveys about this world makes it far too exotic, a feature only exacerbated by the cartoonish caricatures of the male characters who revolve around Justine. The most sympathetic is Justine’s stoner house-painter husband Phil (John C. Reilly, expertly playing a variation on the comical, good-hearted knucklehead he always plays). Less appealing are Holden (actually Tom, but that’s his “slave name”), who is the creepiest adolescent this side of a Todd Solondz movie, Phil’s painter buddy Bubba (the slant-faced Tim Blake Nelson), and White himself as Holy Roller security guard Corny. These are all naturally eccentric actors and all give fine performances on their own terms, but the cumulative effect is a buffoonishness that feels at odds with the film’s more emotionally serious aims. — Chris Herrington

Taking another sleek stab at the simulacra of Hollywood, Andrew Niccol (best known for penning the script to The Truman Show and helming the darkly satisfying sci-fi thriller Gattaca) here turns in a mindful but minor satire about an ambitious director whose digital star rises further and faster than his own.

Equal parts Pygmalion and Frankenstein, Simone stars Al Pacino as waning art-minded director Viktor Taransky, who’s just been set adrift in the studio climate. A once-successful filmmaker, Viktor is in dire need of a hit and has just been sent a devastating blow by the difficult star of his latest picture. When Nicola Anders (Winona Ryder) pulls out of the director’s latest picture, Viktor is left with no star and a studio suddenly unwilling to back him. When he’s canned by the head of production, who just happens to be his strangely benevolent ex-wife (Catherine Keener), Viktor is assured that his latest baby will never see the dark inside of a multiplex.

So what’s a director to do? Well, conveniently, Viktor is approached by a dying scientist with the answer to those cinematic prayers. The answer comes in the form of Simone (played by Rachel Roberts and written S1M0NE, as in “simulation one”), a beautiful, digital starlet complete with the downloadable range of every actor who’s come and gone through the Hollywood mill. With this new star, Viktor is able to recut his film and place the pixelated performer in the lead. When his picture opens, audiences are captivated with the CG beauty, who becomes an overnight sensation. But having to do double duty as the gatekeeper and creator of Simone proves bittersweet when the seemingly perfect actress goes from overshadowing the director to overtaking him.

Niccol, who demonstrated his ability to intelligently satirize the media with his snarky but slight script for The Truman Show, once again delivers an amusing, if vacuous, tale here. Refusing to explore the most interesting questions posed by his premise — namely, the postmodern implications of adding another layer of artificiality to an already artificial artform — Niccol instead opts to examine the business of Hollywood rather than its cinema. And while it’s amusing to ruminate on the pleasures of working with an actor who never gives any lip and always thanks her director first, it’s certainly not an enduring theme.

But perhaps the most irksome thing about Niccol’s film is its inability to maintain a solid stance on anything. Setting out to undercut the bottom-line nature of the business of Hollywood, which continually undercuts the “art” Pacino’s director is struggling to make, Simone ultimately champions the quick buck. Niccol’s biggest problem may be that he is too similar to his hero. — Rachel Deahl

A sprawling, ambling look at a community balanced between historical burden and the promise of “progress,” Sunshine State finds writer-director John Sayles back in the mode of his greatest film, 1996’s Lone Star. Like Lone Star, this leisurely, whip-smart, two-and-half hour epic about another quintessential American place has enough story in it to fill half-a-dozen typical Hollywood films.

Sunshine State is set on Plantation Island, Florida, a seaside combination of two adjacent communities, the mostly white Delrona Beach, littered with decaying but locally owned motels, restaurants, and bars, and Lincoln Beach, a predominantly black community that was a thriving middle-class enclave in the Jim Crow days but that has fallen on hard times in the post Civil Rights era.

Early in the film, a chance meeting occurs between the film’s two most prominent characters, dopplegangers from each side of the island, who go their separate ways without meeting again, as the film spirals out through each of their paths.

One character is Marly (The Sopranos‘ Edie Falco), who once played a mermaid in a “popular roadside attraction” but now manages the Sea-Vue Motel and Restaurant, a business founded by her retired, partially blind, Archie Bunkeresque father Furman (Ralph Waite) and her community-theater director mother Delia (Jane Alexander). Marly has been keeping an eye on “vultures” from a corporation trying to buy up property on the island to develop a “beach resort community” of gated neighborhoods and strip malls called Plantation Estates, with the Sea-Vue as their primary acquisitions target. Meanwhile, Marly is also ending a relationship with a local golf pro who is leaving to try his hand at the PGA tour and strikes up a romance with Jack (Timothy Hutton), a mild-mannered landscape architect sent by the corporation to look at the property.

Rights to the property are being secured through an under-the-table deal with a crooked county commissioner with a gambling problem and a suicidal streak, and the commissioner is married to Chamber of Commerce booster Francine (Mary Steenburgen), who is organizing Delrona Beach’s Annual Buccaneer Days, a “historical celebration” for a community with a historical legacy that consists primarily of “mass murder, rape, and slavery” (“Just Disneyfy it a little and they’ll come,” another civic booster assures her).

Meanwhile, over in Lincoln Beach, the film’s other linchpin character, Desiree (Angela Basset) has returned home from Boston with her affable anesthesiologist husband Reggie (James McDaniel) to visit her estranged mother Eunice (Mary Alice). After getting pregnant at 15, Desiree (who was once Marly’s mother’s prize student) was shipped out of town to stay with relatives by her mother and late father, who were concerned about what the scandal might do to their precarious middle-class standing. Upon her return, Desiree finds that her mother has adopted a young nephew who is in legal trouble. The nephew develops a bond with Reggie, who befriends elderly community leader Dr. Lloyd (Bill Cobbs), who is organizing a protest of the same encroaching development with which Marly is dealing. And both Reggie and Dr. Lloyd are impressed when former Florida State football star Flash Phillips (Tom Wright) returns to the community, though he brings with him secret or forgotten entanglements that relate both to the Plantation Estates development and Desiree’s past.

Got all that?

As with Lone Star, Sayles takes on more social and political issues in one film than many directors do in a career. Watching Sunshine State, one thinks of not only how rare it is these days to see a serious consideration of real-life community issues up on the screen, but of how rarely the cinema lets us see people of different races or segments of a community dealing with these issues in the same film (even if not, as is also common in real life, in the same screen space).

The richness and responsibility of Sayles’ consideration of so many vital contemporary issues — the complexity of race in a post-civil-rights era, the balance of ecology and development, the struggle over power in local politics, the way attitudes and priorities change with each generation, etc. — is so rare that it might seem tempting to embrace his good intentions at the expense of acknowledging his obvious limitations as a filmmaker. At least that’s a popular take on Sayles’ work. But the truth is that, at his best (and Sunshine State is close), Sayles’ follow-through dwarfs his deficiencies. Sayles frequent interest in focusing on communities rather than individuals is a manifestation of his lefty politics, but Sunshine State brings this community to life, its fine ensemble cast overcoming Sayles’ modest visual style and only occasionally pedantic dialogue.

With the South Texas of Lone Star, the historical discourses were apparent, but in prefab Florida they’re more hidden. But Sayles gives the same energizing and deeply satisfying portrait of a community of long-simmering tensions, in this case of a space where natives mix with new arrivals, snowbirds, retirees, and carpetbaggers, and where so much of the future seems up for grabs.

Sunshine State lacks the intensity of focus that made Lone Star so powerful: That film built to an inevitable conclusion, where Sunshine State exhausts itself in a less resolved way. And some subplots, particularly that of the county commissioner and his wife, don’t have the follow-through and payoff that you’d hope. But the way Sayles explores his matrix of community faultlines while giving way to even more intriguing personal issues is very absorbing. By the end, you’re likely to leave the theater with these characters and this community’s issues buzzing around in your head as if they made up your own neighborhood. And in an era where the movies are supposed to provide “escape,” how great it is to see a film that makes you feel more alive and more connected to the world around you. — Chris Herrington

I hope I’m in Clint Eastwood’s shape when I’m 72. Still craggily handsome, still athletic, Eastwood always manages to kick ass, solve crime, and get the girl — usually half his age. He did it all in grand style in In the Line Of Fire and does it again here in Blood Work.

Also, at 72, I hope to have as keen an insight into my abilities, mortality, and the nature of the aging process. If you have noticed the last several movies Clint has appeared in/directed, you will observe a rather unconventional and refreshing glimpse into the career of a Hollywood icon, who is totally self-aware and unafraid of the aging process. He embraces the idea of the hero riding into the sunset — of life — and his best recent efforts have been character studies of men nearing their twilight years, dusting off their guns for one last great hurrah. He won the Best Director Oscar for the elegant Unforgiven, which serves as an excellent example of a legend completing his legendary duties before embarking on a career of his own choosing — making movies that he wants to make and consequently breaking the Eastwood mold. Being an “Eastwood movie” once meant being a spaghetti Western. Then came Dirty Harry. Now, he’s making movies about men getting older but not doing so without a fight.

Blood Work, unfortunately, isn’t as good as some of his other recent efforts that meditate similarly on masculinity and aging, like Absolute Power or A Perfect World. No, this one is more like Space Cowboys, which seemed sloppy and paint-by-numbers compared with the attention to detail of Unforgiven or Midnight In the Garden Of Good and Evil.

Eastwood plays Terry McCaleb, a retired F.B.I. detective recovering from a recent heart transplant. Two years ago, McCaleb suffered a heart attack while in pursuit of a serial killer and has only now been given a heart that matches his rare blood type. Enter Graciella Rivers (Wanda De Jesus), a mysterious stranger who wants to bring McCaleb out of retirement for One Last Case to find her sister’s murderer. To any other detective, the case is an open-and-shut liquor-store robbery that never got solved. To McCaleb, the victim is the reason he is alive: It was her heart that he received. However, McCaleb still has to take it easy. He’s only two months out of his transplant, and he’s not 100 percent yet. There is an unusual scene between him and his cardiologist (Anjelica Huston — what’s she doing here?) in which she quits being his doctor because he won’t take better care of himself, blaming Graciella for wearing him down. Later, during the scene when Graciella gingerly seduces McCaleb, my friend Lisa whispered to me, “Is she trying to kill him?” This inspired a more interesting plot twist than the movie takes: that Graciella is the murderer, and she is trying to kill McCaleb slowly by overexerting him. First, by solving the crime. Then, by having sex with him. Next, tennis? Jogging? Jazzercise? This never happens in the film, unfortunately, and we are dragged instead into a rather conventional episode of one of the Law & Order spinoffs. Jeff Daniels is along for the ride as a goofy neighbor, and funnyman Paul Rodriguez plays a pointless angry cop who has some unnamed hostility toward McCaleb and, for no good reason, obstructs the investigation.

Eastwood, at his best, excels at making great use of location — from his first effort in 1971, Play Misty For Me (a much better movie and VERY scary), to Midnight In the Garden Of Good and Evil. This movie, shot throughout California, lacks basic cinematography. There are scenes in which characters stand in front of what you know is pretty scenery or interestingly flavored locale, but the camera won’t pan out so you can see it. And from a purely technical standpoint, the interior shots look cheap — recycled from some ’70s TV crime drama. Very little about Blood Work looks like it should be a film instead of a television movie, and while it is an interesting twist on the Eastwood persona to display him at this particular level of physical vulnerability, there is not enough related intrigue to justify the lame plot and shoddy production values. — Bo List

XXX opens with a scene reminiscent of certain famous spy films: a handsome, tuxedoed sophisticate dodging ethnic goons and penetrating the ominous fortress of a calculating European megavillain. Much to his chagrin, he has stumbled not into an elegant dinner party but into a pulse-pounding nightclub mosh pit. Fatally overdressed, this anonymous gentleman spy is quickly shot down by his pursuers (and subsequently passed over the hands of the punks, club-style), and the world is again thrown into whatever peril the villain had going before the clumsy arrival of the defeated undercover operative. The message to XXX‘s audience: Bond is dead. Yes, James Bond. This is not your father’s action thriller.

From the onset, you should know that if this movie looks like it will appeal to you, it probably will. XXX, the Anti-Bond, makes good on all the promises implied by its advertisements. Director Rob Cohen places no demands, intellectual or emotional, on his audience and, in gearing its marketing toward practitioners and aficionados of extreme sports, avoids accidentally reeling in viewers expecting something more refined.

There is a plot — a thin shoestring upon which to hang a series of explosions. Xander Cage (even his name is perfect for a To-The-Extreme action stud, played by the similarly labeled Vin Diesel) is an underground hero in the extreme-sports world, nabbed by the government after he broadcasts an impressive, mildly political car theft/wreck. N.S.A. agent Augustos Gibbons (Samuel L. Jackson, adding a little class) likes Cage’s baaaaaad attitude and expendable personality and puts him through a series of dangerous To-The-Extreme ordeals to see if he’s got what it takes. These tests place him, ultimately, in the middle of a Colombian drug raid, where Cage spends most of his time suspended in the air between implausible lengthy motorcycle jumps. Eventually, Cage successfully runs Gibbons’ gauntlet, displaying all the required attributes necessary for a reckless, stunt-filled suicide mission: daring, courage, cool. You see, our archvillain Yorgi (Marton Csokas) is insulated by a thick layer of fast cars and women and nearly always by a crowd of attractive/mindless ravers and thumping dance music. Thus it will take a man of Cage’s casual antiestablishmentarian savvy to charm this evil party-master busily dividing his time between joylessly overseeing his retro-’90s dance club and his world-domination club Anarchy 99!

Anarchy 99 seems to be a plot to anarchize the planet so Yorgi can monopolize the nightclub scene and sex trade, but I’m not sure, because XXX is too hip and happening for motivated villainy. Besides, isn’t it enough to destroy the free world so that everyone will sleep all day and party all night to outdated music in gloomy, angry Euro-trash hotspots? Anyway, there is the obligatory femme fatale aboard this operation, Yelena (Asia Argento), whose dedication to Yorgi’s cause provides more than meets the eye and whose icy charms Cage is determined to thaw.

As I mentioned, if this looks like your kind of movie, it probably is. Diesel won’t be winning any awards for this role (MTV Movie Awards notwithstanding) but makes a fine, athletic antihero. Plus, as a fellow shaven-headed gentleman, I fully support his newfound status as 21st-century sex symbol. If, however, XXX doesn’t look good to you, you will probably hate it. The music is loud, the explosions are big, and the attitude — as we are constantly reminded — is bad. And you know those action-hero one-liners that get said after things blow up or get shot down? There are some here that would shame Arnold Schwarzenegger.

After eluding a self-caused avalanche on a snowboard (granted, this is a very cool avalanche and subsequent escape), Cage emerges from the snow muttering, “Nothing like fresh powder.” Hardcore! My least favorite line in the movie occurs when Cage has taken over the rather impressionable Prague SWAT team and, in chastising their by-the-book methods, bellows, “Stop thinking Prague police and start thinking Playstation.” Try that one a few times at home. My favorite line occurs near the beginning, after a training scenario that Cage defeats, seeing through the facade: “No offense, but their performances were terrible!”

Amen, Brother Cage. — BL

Christian Slater is playing it cool. At the beginning of True Romance, he macks on a B girl, saying, “In Jailhouse Rock, he’s rockabilly: Mean, surly, nasty, crude. Live fast, die young, leave a good-looking corpse, you know?”

Of course, she knows. Good-looking dead kids have been popular among the young and foolish since Lord Byron plucked Percy Bysshe Shelley’s inflammable heart from the smoldering pyre and handed it to his estranged but hopelessly devoted wife Mary for safekeeping. But there’s a crucial element missing from Slater’s classic commentary: Between the amphetamine kick of the fast lane and the cold comfort of leaving a beautiful memory, at least according to the established rules of pop culture, a man must find the time to love hard. Honky-tonk heartthrob Faron Young, who, like Elvis, was once protégé to master exploiter Colonel Tom Parker, first expressed this rebellious notion in song. Of all our early pop-culture icons, James Dean and Hank Williams actually came the closest to living that sad life. Buddy Holly and Ritchie Valens don’t even come close. But poor Elvis, for having died so prematurely, lived a little too long and a little too hard to leave the best-looking corpse. And worse, he was unfortunate enough to die amid the gaudy excess of the 1970s. Being a man of his time, the last images he left behind are often so grotesque they eclipse the true Elvis. After all, who can reconcile the ghostly wail of “Mystery Train” with the jumpsuit and the jelly doughnut? Who can separate the sultry bedroom eyes from the smoking television? Not Hollywood. Since his death, filmmakers have been hard-pressed to distill much humanity from Elvis’ myth. Instead, they make him the butt of America’s biggest inside joke: Fame kills you twice. He’s either remembered as a clown (the Flying Elvises in Honeymoon In Vegas) or emulated by gun-toting badasses with chips on their shoulders (True Romance, 3000 Miles To Graceland).

Memphis filmmaker John Michael McCarthy got pretty close to the truth in his semisatirical short Elvis Meets the Beatles. McCarthy’s Elvis confronts a smug John Lennon, saying, “Let me tell you something, you funny-looking, long-haired sonuvabitch. One of these days, being John Lennon is going to mess you up, and you’ll have to pay for it.” Shortly thereafter, an angry Elvis chases the Beatles through the streets of Memphis in a surreal montage that could have been plucked directly from A Hard Day’s Night. Just as Elvis is about to catch the Fab Four, they vanish, only to reappear behind him. They are now chasing him, and he’s running hard. It’s the history of rock-and-roll boiled down to a two-minute sequence of comic-book splendor. Outside Jim Jarmusch’s ectoplasmic Elvis (a lost spirit trying to find his way back home) in Mystery Train, McCarthy’s montage is the closest any cinematic fiction has come to nailing the triumphs and tragedy of our King.

Fifteen minutes after True Romance‘s Slater makes his qualified declaration that, if his life depended on it, he’d fuck Elvis, he’s up to his eyeballs in blood and cocaine. Of course, he’s not a bad guy. He’s just in love. Anybody who’s ever seen an Elvis movie knows how quick the King was with his fists whenever a love interest was threatened. But, still, the hyperviolent aspects of recent Elvis-obsessed films are far more in keeping with the myth of Jerry Lee Lewis. In 3000 Miles To Graceland, Kevin Costner isn’t your ordinary Elvis impersonator/psychopathic killer. He’s Elvis’ bastard son, denied his rightful throne at Graceland, expressing his anger and grief through a series of explosions. He is Lucifer, God’s prettiest, deadliest angel. In Looking For Graceland, Harvey Keitel’s more gently deranged impersonator, though all too human and without the benefit of supernatural powers, saves a young man from the depths of depression and gives him a reason to live and love again. If it had been developed as a Sunday-afternoon television series, it would surely have been called Touched By an Elvis. In Honeymoon In Vegas, Elvis (in the form of Nicolas Cage) is seen as a cross between God Almighty and The Graduate‘s Benjamin Braddock, swooping down from the heavens to save his sweetheart from marrying an asshole. In The Pickup Artist, Robert Downey Jr. is accosted by a mugger in a dark alley. What does Downey do? He begins to swivel his hips and belt out an Elvis tune, that’s what. The mugger runs. The message: Don’t mess with a guy who thinks he’s Elvis; he’s nuts.

When it comes to the many faces of Elvis that Hollywood has given us, what’s not easy kitsch is all pure, candy-coated myth. Elvis fans can’t be normal, everyday people who work normal, everyday jobs and have normal, everyday problems. They are either cousin-loving, trailer-park fashion plates involved with aliens, Bigfoot, and all manner of paranormal activities (see Independence Day, Men In Black, The X-Files) or armed and dangerous. Though there have been a handful of biographical films and a reverent TV series, Hollywood has shown little interest in Elvis as anything but a gimmick. A surprising exception, given its increasingly stereotypical juxtaposition of Elvis and aliens, is Disney’s Lilo & Stitch. In it, young Lilo declares that Elvis was a model American citizen. And she’s closer to the truth than one might imagine. The poor boy from the ghettos of Memphis who became a prisoner of his own fame was certainly a concentrated American, the living embodiment of our cultural extremes: devout, carnal, generous, suddenly violent, playful, sullen, the center of the universe, and completely lost.

Hollywood has always been fond of surface, and when it comes to the legacy of Elvis Presley, it’s all they’ve scratched.

Remember the scariest scene in E.T.? I don’t mean at the end when the government shows up and wants to take E.T. away or the part where the brother finds E.T. all sick and pale by the creek. I mean the suspenseful moment at the very beginning, before the Reeses Pieces exchange, where young Elliot is out in the cornfield with his flashlight, investigating the weird noises he’s heard. As Elliot proceeds, the fog shifts a little, the corn leaves crackle, the flashlight darts hither and thither. Finally, its beam lands on the face of E.T., who makes that odd caterwauling sound — long, weird fingers waving about — and both boy and alien run in different directions. Elliot reaches his porch freaked out and out of breath, and 8-year-old me in the audience was just as freaked, breathing just as heavily. That scene gave me nightmares for weeks. Twenty years later, much of M. Night Shyamalan’s Signs (which is CHOCK-FULL of crackling-cornfield suspense) made me want to sleep with the lights on the night I saw it. The rest of Signs is corny in a less appreciable way. Think Children Of the Corn corny.

Graham Hess (Mel Gibson), an Episcopalian priest, has had a rough six months. His beloved wife was killed in a terrible car accident (more terrible than just about any in all of moviedom, it turns out), and his faith in God is so shaken that he gives up his ministry and collar for a simpler, less contemplative life with his two young children (Rory Culkin and Abigail Breslin). His brother Merrill (Joaquin Phoenix) moves in to help out and to work through some of his own losses. Suddenly, the family farm is marked by huge crop circles — the variety known to us humans as A) signs of extraterrestrial communication, B) a huge, international hoax carried out by several clever pranksters about 10 years ago, or C) the image on the cover of the Led Zeppelin CD box set. Before long, the nature and purpose of the circles are revealed (it’s not good) and the family (slowly) realizes the intentions of the visitors (bad things).

Fans of Gibson at his quirkiest (see Conspiracy Theory) will enjoy his work in Signs, where he manages to be both embarrassingly funny and miserably haunted almost at the same time. There is a scene at the dinner table, for example, where he is fed up with his scared family and proceeds to eat everything on the table to spite them. This tactic is absurd and funny, but as his family cries, he is overcome by stress and grief, and his anger dissolves into, perhaps, his first real breakdown since the death of his wife. He hugs his children, which is touching and then funny again when his brother is reluctantly dragged into the hug. Gibson manages this shift very well, but the whole movie turns as quickly as this — and that just doesn’t always work. Humor and suspense are so interchangeable here that one wishes Shyamalan would just let his moments wind down before switching gears.

Signs lacks the patience of Shyamalan’s previous, better work, and it is that sense of calm, savory, invested timing that I admire most in his films. The Sixth Sense reinvented the contemporary notion of cinematic suspense and showed that a movie can be simultaneously quiet, scary, touching, profound, and weird, and it did so verrry slowly, so that we didn’t miss anything along the way. His follow-up, Unbreakable, covered all that ground again — too similarly — and, consequently, gave signs that this Hot New Director had a smaller bag of tricks than his stunning directorial debut had suggested. He seems rushed here — to do something new or say something different. And while Signs has terrific pacing and, therefore, suspense, the narrative is too jumbled for its own good and is in need of another Shyamalan talent: skillfully withholding information until just the right moment. That was key to the captivating mysteries of both prior efforts, but it works clumsily here.

In Signs, there is supposed to be a parallel between Hess’ loss of his wife and his present dilemma — aliens — but the connections are so hackneyed and the tone of the film so inconsistent that when we finally “get it,” we don’t know if it’s supposed to be funny, triumphant, poignant, or what. Gibson and Phoenix’s brothers are so bizarre that by the time we care about them and relate to their respective demons, it’s too late: There’s an alien in the house, and it’s clobberin’ time. Shyamalan, unfortunately, withholds too much too soon and not enough too late. And his third great talent — making us wholeheartedly believe the unbelievable (ghosts, clairvoyance, superheroes, and so on) — is unfortunately traded for laughs instead of allowing us to care. — Bo List

Director Steven Soderbergh is in the midst of a historic run. With Out Of Sight, The Limey, Erin Brockovich, Traffic, and Ocean’s Eleven, he has delivered a series of sharp, smart, and visually rich mainstream entertainments in an era and milieu in which aesthetic quality and commercial accessibility rarely match up. Soderbergh has accomplished this by taking a French new-wave interest in spontaneity, naturalism, and audacious editing and combining it with a very classic Hollywood commitment to star power, storytelling, and entertainment for entertainment’s sake. The result is a series of common genre movies suffused with a blast of fresh air. It’s hard to imagine any other current American director taking escapist schlock like Ocean’s Eleven and making it so utterly charming.

In his new film, Full Frontal, Soderbergh takes his French aesthetics to the extreme in the service of investigating life in Hollywood. Soderbergh mixes digital video with 35-millimeter film, gathers actors from many of his previous films (most notably Julia Roberts and Brad Pitt), seemingly improvises scenes, and shoots it all himself. The whole thing has the indulgent air of a post-wrap home movie, and even if it holds up better in your head afterward than it does while you’re watching it, it’s still a wearying failure. Soderbergh has taken this kind of detour before, with the surreal (and far more engaging) Schizopolis, a 1997 film that seemed to clear his mind for the extraordinary commercial run that followed. So perhaps Soderbergh needs to indulge himself every few years to keep the juices flowing. If that means more movies like Out Of Sight and Erin Brockovich, it’ll be time well spent.

As experimental as Full Frontal means to be, all of the elements here are pretty familiar: There’s the behind-the-scenes look at life in Hollywood and the cameo appearances from stars as themselves (see Robert Altman’s The Player), the interlocking series of related characters (see Altman’s Short Cuts), the depiction of on-set action and a movie within the movie (see Truffaut’s Day For Night), and the digitally shot series of workshop-style improv scenes (see Alan Cumming and Jennifer Jason Leigh’s The Anniversary Party).

Full Frontal follows a series of unhappy Hollywood types over the course of a day that culminates in the 40th birthday party for a producer, Gus (David Duchovny), to whom they’re all connected. Two of the characters (Roberts and Blair Underwood) are actors in a film, Rendezvous, being produced by Gus. Rendezvous is the 35-millimeter movie within the movie (which Soderbergh uses to satirize Hollywood romantic comedies) interspersed with the digitally shot “real” scenes. Full Frontal‘s final shot implies, correctly and perhaps righteously, that the visual connection of film to fiction and video to “reality” is a sham, but if Soderbergh’s been dragging us through all this just to make that salient point, it hardly seems worth the trouble. Instead, what juice the film has comes from its fabulous actors, some of whom, particularly Catherine Keener, David Hyde Pierce, and Mary McCormack, are able to sketch characters that will stay with you long after the film’s self-referential puzzles have dissolved. — Chris Herrington

If Mike Myers stops here and ends the Austin Powers “saga” as a trilogy, he can avoid the fate of another franchise that should have left well enough alone: Beverly Hills Cop, which, by its third go-around in 1994, had fizzled. It seemed that nothing could stop Eddie Murphy through most of the ’80s. But, in 1989, he hit a snag — Harlem Nights — and then spent much of the ’90s trying to be relevant again, desperately reinventing himself along the way. My advice to Mike Myers: Quit while you’re ahead and reinvent yourself now while everyone wants to see what’s next.

Austin Powers In Goldmember has a plot somewhere: Austin has nabbed Dr. Evil (both roles are played by Myers, if for some reason you are reading this without knowing anything about the Austin Powers movies), but he must travel back to 1975 to retrieve his kidnapped father, Nigel (Michael Caine), from the clutches of the crazed Dutch super-villain appropriately named Goldmember. (His genitalia were destroyed in a smelting accident and replaced with a set made of pure gold! Evil laugh: bwahahahahahaha!) There is more plot, involving destroying the world, but it’s not very significant, since it is just a clothesline on which to hang one potty joke after another and give Austin opportunities to say “Yeah, baby! Behaaave!” and flex his “mojo.” This time around, however, Austin is teamed with Foxxy Cleopatra (Beyoncé Knowles of Destiny’s Child), an old flame he finds back in the disco-drenched days of 1975. Together, they groove their way back to the future to Dr. Evil’s newest lair to stop the world’s destruction and save Nigel, Britain’s most respected spy. The new lair, incidentally, is an amusing submarine shaped like Dr. Evil, complete with pinky finger upturned to the side of its mouth. (Guess where the missiles are launched from!) Also along the way is a subplot related to the mysterious origins of both Austin and Dr. Evil, complete with flashbacks to Austin’s early academy days, where he and Evil were roommates (hence the same age, I guess). By the end, each of the major characters undergoes an unpredictable change (one of which involves the return of Mini-Me, played by Verne Troyer), and the estranged Nigel and Austin are reconciled.

This movie is such a disappointment. Now, granted, I think that Austin Powers himself is one of the most annoying movie characters this side of JarJar Binks, so I am biased. Still, I have enjoyed these movies based not on Austin and his mojo but on the parodied spy world he lives in and on the supporting players, particularly Dr. Evil. In the first Austin Powers film, Dr. Evil was a rather clever amalgamation of the James Bond villains — bald, jumpsuited, scarred, cat-petting, weird. His forays into silliness were a means by which to laugh at the juxtaposition: Dr. Evil as relic from the past, as concerned and out-of-touch father, as inept villain. Now, Dr. Evil is only a parody of himself — a collection of ticks and quirks that come not from the Bond films but as repetitions of themselves. The treatment of the character is now infuriatingly self-aware and smugly self-amused, and the comedy comes not from inspired satire but from making fun of itself. Why the character Goldmember fails (again, Myers) is long and complicated, but, in short, he is not funny, only weird, and the target of the parody is unclear.

The addition of the classy good sport Michael Caine could have been a saving grace, but he is UTTERLY wasted here. He disappears midway through the film only to return in the last act to tie loose ends into unsatisfying knots. Maybe the writers thought that merely casting Caine was funny enough. It isn’t. He has no truly great lines, and his considerable comic talents are wasted by his all-too-brief appearances in the film.

The only real source of reliable laughter in this latest outing comes from Mini-Me. Unlike the talking pug in Men In Black II, Mini-Me is a minor character whose screen time is upped and all the better for it. He is given more to do here, and the best laughs tend to come when he is onscreen. Unfunny, however, is the introduction of Fred Savage (from TV’s The Wonder Years) as the Mole. Poor Savage relies on only one joke to justify his several minutes onscreen, and it isn’t a funny joke. Another waste is the beautiful Knowles, whose one-joke presence as a blaxploitation diva/fox never rises to the promise of her talent and never gets proper mileage out of the considerably absurd genre she represents. The joke is done once we’ve seen her and heard her name.

Unscrupulous movie-spoiling friends may want to ruin the secrets of this movie — and they all have to do with jaw-droppingly hilarious cameos — almost all of which are spent in the first 10 minutes. (If the writers knew what was good for them, they would have saved the best for last rather than let the movie grow progressively less funny as it went along.) If you must see this movie, do it fast so you can see this segment unspoiled. Everyone else, rent the 1979 Roger Moore/James Bond space film Moonraker. It’s funnier.

K-19: The Widowmaker starts off a lot like another good-ship-gone-wrong film of recent memory: Titanic. Much like the infamous luxury liner whose name has become synonymous with disaster, the Russian nuclear submarine K-19 was supposed to be the biggest and the best. K-19, like Titanic, starts off obviously but appropriately foreshadowing why the voyage is doomed from the beginning. Pride in both country and manufacturing is at play here: K-19 was a triumph of engineering and capability for a Russia desperate to assert itself as a world power at a time when World War III looked more like a looming inevitability than a worst-case scenario.

Harrison Ford is Alexei Vostrikov, a respected and feared senior navy captain brought in to supervise the finishing touches and maiden voyage of K-19 (nicknamed the Widowmaker because 10 men died in separate incidents during its construction). He relieves of his command K-19‘s Captain Mikhail Polenin (Liam Neeson) and hastens the ship’s preparations for its essential first mission: the firing of a test missile from the Arctic Circle. Vostrikov pushes the limits of both vessel and crew by crashing through the forbidding Arctic shelf and plummeting to crushing depths — all to prove to his crew that were they at war, there would be no opportunity to make mistakes, nor would there be time for fear. Tensions boil between Ford’s and Neeson’s captains. Polenin knows the limits of his craft and crew, while Vostrikov must exceed and expand them. And they are indeed tested when the reactor’s coolant system springs a leak and the lives of all aboard are weighed against the success of the mission. Vostrikov is placed in a political and logistical nightmare: If the ship explodes, it will detonate the sub’s warheads and destroy a nearby U.S. Navy destroyer — which would probably be interpreted as an act of war and could kick off WWIII. If the crew abandons the ship, they could be surrendering the Russian flagship and all of its secrets to the U.S. If they stay, they could die from hideous radiation poisoning. All the while, mutiny hangs in the air and the temperature of the reactor climbs ever closer to its terminal 1,000 degrees.

Director Kathryn Bigelow, who knows the craft of suspense (Blue Steel) and action (Point Break), has put together an effective, if unextraordinary, thriller. Tensions run high, of course, and there is plenty of expected sub-related excitement afoot — scenes with rivets popping out of the hull, water leaking, and the insanity that comes when claustrophobia and disaster combine. There is one particularly harrowing scene where men take 10-minute shifts repairing the leak in the reactor. Each enters the reactor after seeing the last worker exit, ravaged by radiation. The film is at its best when showing this kind of reality: the fear and determination of its crew, whose heroics are the kind typically reserved for movies about Americans in similar peril.

Beneath the veneer of explosions and last-second saves, however, there is a refreshingly complicated and engaging political adventure unfolding. Bigelow and screenwriter Christopher Kyle take a very objective perspective in showing us the realities of the Soviet political machine, as national priorities are juggled in favor of beating the Americans to technological superiority and control of the world’s interests — at the expense of safety and sense (a practice common in this hemisphere as well). Additionally, we are given a complex yet uncompromising treatment from both sides of the argument of the two captains, whose tensions rise to a surprising and satisfying climax, and we see that the Russian code of honor leaves no room for doubt. Ford and Neeson are a great match, both with their own brand of authority and concern. While their Russian accents leave much to be desired, their credibility as men who may hold the fate of the world in their hands is absolute. And in our current world, where that very fate sits in too many hands, this film shows us, challengingly, the honor and heroism of the “enemy” within.

— Bo List

If you see only one monster movie this summer don’t see Eight Legged Freaks. An agreeable but hackneyed comedy about giant, mutated spiders attacking a small, Southwestern mining town, Freaks hits the big screen one week after an even more ridiculous monster movie, the retro-futuristic Reign Of Fire. (Wouldn’t you have loved to have been in that pitch meeting? “It’s Matthew McConaughey fighting dragons in the future!“) And the differences between the two films are instructive: Where Reign Of Fire is a great bad movie, Freaks is merely a lazy, conventional one.

Several films over the last couple of decades have taken on material similar to that in Freaks (a community besieged by alien creatures, terrestrial or otherwise) and with a similar tone (jokey, amiable, cartoonish homage to earlier creature features) — obvious antecedents like Arachnophobia and Tremors, Tim Burton’s alien-invasion Mars Attacks!, and Joe Dante’s genre standard-bearer Gremlins among them — and all have fared better than Freaks, which reaches for freshness in what has become the stalest way possible: by incorporating oh-so familiar and half-hearted attempts at witty self-referentiality à la Scream. There’s the clip from one of those ’50s-era scare films playing on the television in the room of the preteen boy who, per convention, is the only person in town to understand what’s going on, and then there’s the same kid’s wink-wink, nudge-nudge speech about how “they never believe the kids.” And worst of all is one character’s desperately topical exclamation “It’s a spider, man” followed by a double-take just in case the viewer doesn’t get the lame pun.

Reign Of Fire, by contrast, pays truer homage to B-movie matinee fare through the utter conviction it invests in its preposterous narrative, charming partly through unpretentious fantasy escapism and partly through moments of giddy ludicrousness far more entertaining than the standard Mystery Science Theater 3000 kitsch. When ugly American McConaughey (sporting camouflage and one of those wild-eyed-Southern-boy stares) dukes it out with Englishman Christian Bale (wearing a Euroweenie turtleneck sweater!) in some fever-dream reenactment of a closed-door argument between George Bush and Tony Blair, it’s one of the most ridiculously entertaining things on the big screen this year, its unintentional comedy far outpacing any of the telegraphed laugh lines or too-familiar visual jokes found in Freaks.

Eight Legged Freaks, despite its too well-worn, genre-spoofing intentions and too by-the-numbers script, could have saved itself with its cast and its critters, but it flubs both. Kari Wuhrer (MTV’s Remote Control, countless second-grade “erotic thrillers”) and Scarlett Johansson (Ghost World) might make one of the most fetching mother/daughter tandems ever put on-screen, but the latter, especially, isn’t given enough to do here in her marginal, conventional scream-queen role. Instead, most of the action is given to the kid (Scott Terra), a Harry Potter look-alike who doesn’t register much of an impression, and David Arquette, who gives a slightly toned-down version of his standard schtick.

As far as the critters, the film is plagued by the technological “advantage” it has over the vintage B movies to which it seeks to pay tribute. While it may be cool to see the car-sized jumping spiders taking down dirt-bikers in mid-air, the dull two-dimensionality of the computer-generated spiders gets a little tiring after awhile, especially when compared to the cheaper-looking but more engaging mythic, painterly Reign Of Fire dragons (especially in scenes in which the fire-breathing baddies are viewed from a distance).

So if you’re only going to see one monster movie this summer ask yourself if you want to see a slapdash product that pays homage to great B movies (which, chances are, you haven’t even seen) or just a great B movie? — Chris Herrington

Road To Perdition, noted stage director Sam Mendes’ follow-up to his Oscar-winning debut American Beauty, is as weighty as its title. Adapted from a graphic novel by Max Allan Collins and Richard Piers Rayner, the film demonstrates that no source material is too pulpy to be transformed into the kind of overblown, meaning-mongering work that critic Manny Farber famously labeled White Elephant Art.

In look, tone, and content, Perdition is sort of a cross between American Beauty, Miller’s Crossing, and Unforgiven. It’s the square version of a Coen Brothers movie — Miller’s Crossing if it were middlebrow Oscar bait rather than a collegiate-film-buff approximation of gangster noir. And, like so many Coen films, Perdition is an intensely stylized genre homage, the overdetermined mise-en-scène of which belies a lack of heart or vision at the core.

A period gangster film set in the Prohibition-era Midwest, Perdition (which is actually a town in Illinois but so much more) stars Tom Hanks as Michael Sullivan, hit man for Irish mob boss John Rooney (Paul Newman), dutiful husband to wife Annie (Jennifer Jason Leigh), and father to sons Michael Jr. (Tyler Hoechlin) and Peter (Liam Aiken). The film is narrated by Michael Jr. and chronicles six weeks during the winter of 1931, when Sullivan’s family and career are shattered and he sets out to avenge his losses.

“Sons are put on this earth to trouble their fathers,” Rooney intones in the film’s central piece of dialogue — and the film presents three sets of father-son relationships: There is Rooney and his biological son, heir apparent Connor (Daniel Craig); Rooney and Sullivan, whom Rooney has adopted into the family and admires more than his own son (sort of like Robert Duvall’s Tom Hagen in the Godfather movies); and Sullivan and Michael Jr., who sets the plot in motion by sneaking along with his dad and Connor during a “business trip” in order to discover what his father really does for a living.

Michael Jr. witnesses trigger-happy hothead Connor murder one of Rooney’s loyal associates and his father subsequently gun down any remaining witnesses. And the discovery of Michael Jr. gives a jealous Connor the opening he needs to lash out at Sullivan and his family. After killing Annie and Peter and botching an assassination attempt on Sullivan, Connor goes into hiding and Sullivan and Michael Jr. go on the lam while Sullivan plans revenge.

But none of this conflation of family loyalties, ritualistic violence, and organized crime contains anything like the emotional or intellectual drive exhibited in the Godfather movies (or The Sopranos, for that matter, which is probably a grander popular entertainment than anything Hollywood has come up with lately). Much like with American Beauty (which I found far more entertaining –it may have been shooting fish in a barrel, but at least it had some spectacular fish), Mendes seems to have a sure idea of how to convey significance but has nothing of significance to convey.

Legendary cinematographer Conrad Hall (In Cold Blood, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid), who also shot American Beauty, seems as much the auteur here as Mendes. Indeed, Perdition is a triumph of photography and art direction more than anything else — one of those rare color films where you really notice the lighting, where the blacks are deep and dark and the browns and mahoganies burnished, where every shot is arranged and framed as if by Rembrandt. But the visual design is so meticulous and the corresponding action so stiffly mythical that the movie seems embalmed.

A doughy Hanks is dwarfed by the scenery and plays Sullivan too reserved. Hanks, despite his recent status as Hollywood nobility, has always been best when allowing his natural lightness into the role, even in “serious” films such as Cast Away and Philadelphia. Here, his Michael Sullivan is less a conflicted, tortured figure in the mold of Eastwood’s reluctant assassin in Unforgiven than a cipher. We know he suffers, but it’s mostly because the film tells us rather than because Hanks (or Mendes) shows us.

Paul Newman gives a spry, sharp performance as Rooney (he, along with Hall, is likely to be remembered come Oscar time), while Jude Law is perhaps a bit too flamboyant (though the film needs the juice) as the ghoulish hit man Maguire, whom Capone’s Chicago mob has hired to dispose of Sullivan. Jennifer Jason Leigh is fine but a little out of place in a tiny, tiny role that is, nevertheless, the most prominent female part in the film.

The film loses its own battle with sentiment, admirably fighting off what looks to be an unbearable conclusion only to end on a note no less false — a happy ending made all the more giggle-inducing by the clumsy, obvious way Mendes and screenwriter David Self set it up. And the film’s central, stated question — was Michael Sullivan “a decent man” or “no good at all” –not only allows no shades of gray, it seems almost irrelevant. Mendes has gone out of his way to portray Sullivan as a loving father who wants to shield his son from violence, but he in turn shields the viewer by artfully obscuring the savagery of Sullivan’s labor.

There’s much to admire here: A series of Robin Hood-style father-and-son bank robberies may not have the verve of similar passages in Bonnie and Clyde, an obvious influence, but are filmed with a lightness and economy that are refreshing in the context of the film, and the murder of Connor (seen after the fact in the reflection of a mirrored door) and final confrontation between Sullivan and Maguire are memorable images. And then there’s that consistently eye-popping cinematography. But I can’t say that I felt a thing. And while some filmmakers make coldness work for them because they have a critical agenda — Stanley Kubrick and Paul Verhoeven come immediately to mind — Mendes crafts a film here that is ornate but suffocating.

Men In Black was something of an anomaly: an effects-generated summer blockbuster that was actually more fun than anticipated. Like George Lucas’ recent Star Wars movies, this series is basically a cartoon, with half of every frame digitally animated. But if Star Wars‘ cartoon sensibility is that of pulpy sci-fi cover art come to life, Barry Sonnenfeld’s Men In Black is more like a space-age Looney Tunes.

Sonnenfeld’s first foray into the workings of a mythical INS for extraterrestrials was inventive and charming up until its dully conventional action climax, Will Smith’s charismatically nonchalant braggadocio and Tommy Lee Jones’ deadpan gruffness updating and improving on the salt-and-pepper buddy-flick comedy approach of Eddie Murphy and Nick Nolte in the 48 Hours movies but freeing the concept of its racially charged undertones in the course of a gentle satire on negotiating the diversity of modern urban life.

The actual plot of the first movie escapes me (some kind of saving-the-planet thing), but plot hardly mattered because we were encountering a fascinating new world for the first time and were too busy scanning the background to care how the dots were being connected; the viewer could while away an air-conditioned hour or so just taking in the cool gadgets, sleek furniture, and gaggle of alien “scum” that littered the Men In Black headquarters. Besides, the movie skipped along too briskly to get worked up about narrative lapses.

This time out, the equally slapdash and pointless plot (an evil alien has come to steal something — it’s hard to figure out exactly what — that can destroy Earth, and Smith’s and Jones’ agents Jay and Kay have to stop her) is more of a stumbling block. The film is merely a visual rehash of something we’ve already seen.

Rather than attempt to further the original story, Sonnenfeld and company seek to repeat the same formula in streamlined, dumbed-down fashion. And so most of what was fresh the first time around seems stale here. Rather than the sly gags of the first film, MIIB (as the marketers are writing it) reaches desperately for easy laughs with moments of Adam Sandler-style gross-out humor and obvious (yet unavoidably effective) crowd-pleasers like a talking pug who sings “I Will Survive” and barks along with “Who Let the Dogs Out.”

Rip Torn returns as supervising agent Zed, but in place of the dry, crisp demeanor that was so entertaining in the first film, they have him engaging in gravity-defying fight scenes à la The Matrix and uttering out-of-character comments about the Kama Sutra for the sole purpose of setting up a stupid Will Smith double take. Linda Fiorentino, who was set up as Smith’s new partner to end the first film, has been axed, unfortunately, and replaced by a game Rosario Dawson, who, as a conventional love interest, doesn’t have much to do.

There’s some good new stuff here. It’s hard to argue with the stunt casting of Lara Flynn Boyle as a reptilian alien baddie named Serleena. And her assistant, Scrad (Jackass Johnny Knoxville), is a two-headed buffoon who makes a compelling sight gag. Other moments, such as a multilimbed alien working inside a post-office sorting machine and a universe of small creatures who live within a Grand Central Terminal locker, are more reminiscent of the inventiveness of the first film.

MIIB also has an uneven tone in relation to the first movie. At times, it assumes a working knowledge of the first, and at other times, it clumsily goes out of its way to give context to the audience (“Agent Kay! He was the most dangerous man on earth, the most famous MIB agent ever,” a succession of bit players repeatedly exclaim, just in case we weren’t suitably excited about the return of Tommy Lee Jones).

The first installment of Men In Black agreeably evoked a wealth of sources — The X-Files, Joe Dante (the underrated auteur behind Gremlins and Small Soldiers), comic books, cartoons, and Sonnenfeld’s earlier Addams Family films. It was a fun movie.

The new one attains the same good-time vibe only sporadically. And what it reminds me of most is that commercial from a few years ago in which a group of Hollywood suits present a series of tie-ins and ancillary products for a film before the studio head asks about the script, to which they reply that they can knock that out in a couple of days.

The principle players have been locked up, flashy casting decisions put in place, new creatures and gadgets dreamed up, product-placement deals inked (Sprint and Burger King particularly noticeable), Will Smith single and video produced, etc. But no one seems to have spent much time figuring out why the movie needs to exist outside of its profit potential for a movie studio. If sportswriter Tony Kornheiser hadn’t beaten them to it with the title of his recent book, the studio could have tagged this Men In Black II: Back For More Cash.

— Chris Herrington

If there is one thing to aspire to in the cartoon kingdom, it is the success of The Simpsons. The formula is deceptively simple: The kiddies get bright colors and preadolescent characters; their parents get sly humor and subtle satire. And the result? A marketing bonanza. Remember the shirts that read “Don’t have a cow, man” or the dance, the Bart-man?

To reach this type of success, a show doesn’t have to be as socially aware as The Simpsons; it just has to resonate with wildly different audiences. It has to have something for everyone.

One of my friends, a 23-year-old woman, loves the Powerpuff Girls. She loves the TV show; she loves the characters; but she especially loves the merchandise. She loves to carry around her Powerpuff Girls lunchbox and wear her Powerpuff Girls T-shirt. I think she feels a connection with Buttercup, the surliest of the three Cartoon Network superheroines. The Powerpuff Girls, in other words, already has a very healthy audience of kids and “adults.” Which I guess is what makes the film a little disappointing. To adults.

Originally conceived as the Whoopass Girls (a name I rather like), The Powerpuff Girls came to Cartoon Network as a series of shorts in 1995 and as a regular series in 1998. The movie is the backstory, the prequel, or the creation myth, if you will, of Blossom, Buttercup, and Bubbles.

Professor Utonium is unhappy about Townsville’s moral decay, so he decides to create a perfect little girl whom he can raise to do good for the town. But, like the beginnings of so many superheroes, something goes wrong while he’s in the lab.

His monkey/lab assistant Jojo accidentally adds “Chemical X” to the professor’s mixture of sugar, spice, and everything nice. One explosion later, the professor has three precocious youngsters with superpowers on his hands.

Like the television show, the movie has a stylishly mod feel: The professor’s bachelor pad is straight out of a Doris Day/Rock Hudson flick with a touch of A Charlie Brown Christmas. It all hearkens back to a simpler, sweeter era, except it’s infused with non-stop action and a score full of fast rock.

What’s disappointing is that the movie is essentially a longer version of the show, and there’s nothing really new here. The girls’ creation, while not revealed in the series, came as no surprise. The plot seems to clumsily straddle catering to the show’s hard-core fans while introducing the material to new audiences. There’s a chase scene that made me realize how much animation can make live action look dull, but for the most part, the film was a tad predictable for my taste.

However, that’s my taste. The simple ideas and warmed-over concepts are perfect for the younger set. Throughout the film, the kids in the theater were laughing and giggling. And on the way out, many of them were already jumping, jabbing, and posturing, taking on the roles of the girls and their archenemy, Mojo Jojo.

I bet they’re already begging their parents to buy them the T-shirt.

— Mary Cashiola