Morgan P Salvo

Tamara Drewe, the latest installment from director Stephen Frears, has both great moments and glaring faults. This is a black comedy adapted from a comic-strip-turned-graphic novel by Posy Simmonds, which itself is based on Thomas Hardy’s novel Far from the Maddening Crowd. In the countryside of a writer's retreat, the once ugly duckling Tamara Drewe, now a glamorous yet confused journalist with a life-changing nose job returns to sell her house. This Tamara is not to be confused with the B-horror film Tamara or its titular ax-wielding, cheerleader-killing machine, although that might have been the gimmick this flick needed.

Oddly, the only movie opening here in Bend last week was The Warrior's Way… and what a disappointment. This wannabe visually-stunning modern martial arts Western stars South Korean actor Dong-gun Jang as Yang, a Samurai warrior assassin who refuses to kill the last child of the enemy clan, adopting the baby instead. He then hides in the untamed West near a traveling circus.

You won't have to work too hard to keep up with Faster, a bullet-headed, throwaway vengeance flick that is stripped-down to the max and beefed up to the hilt from title to characters to plot. It never strives to be more, concentrating on making the most of its wild-ass look and self-imposed restrictions.

The Next Three days is an exercise in patience and tolerance. This meandering flick tells its story with painfully slow and uneventful scenes. I don't mind a slow-paced movie but it, at the very least, must be engaging. This wannabe-angst-ridden think fest just blows it.
The official synopsis goes like this: John and Lara Brennan (Russell Crowe and Elizabeth Banks) have a happy little life until she is arrested from out of nowhere and convicted of murder. Three years later, while struggling with work and raising his son alone, John (an ordinary guy/community college teacher) is still trying to establish her innocence. When her final appeal is rejected, Lara becomes suicidal, forcing John to exercise the only supremely logical option he has left: break her out of prison.

Unstoppable is the fifth collaboration of director Tony Scott and actor Denzel Washington and is merely by-the-numbers stuff. That's not to say Unstoppable isn't engaging, because as a suspenseful thriller it works fine, but it plays out as Hollywood mainstream schlock at its most finely tuned.

On what would've been John Lennon's 70th birthday, comes the docudrama Nowhere Boy, which chronicles Lennon's early years in Liverpool and the women who were instrumental in raising him. Or more aptly put, who provided him with the trauma that fueled his creativity.

Finally, the saga of Jigsaw comes full circle and the Saw franchise comes to an end. Or does it? Seriously folks, can we really trust horror movie franchises to end? Just take a gander at Jason, Freddy Kruger and Michael Myers… they won't die.
I predict that there will be more Saw movies – maybe not right away, but in the very foreseeable future – and lots of them.

In addition to wondering why My Soul to Take would be in 3D, you also have to ponder what happened to Wes Craven. His newest jaunt into the slasher/horror/teen victim genre is a major low point for this once-distinguished auteur of all things gory and smart.

In Let Me In, we have a barely rewritten version of the Swedish language film from barely two years ago, with plenty of the same scenes and dialogue. WTF? This new version is scripted and helmed by Matt Reeves, who was responsible for the shakiest camera award with the unforgettable Cloverfield, and swaps Sweden for a snowy New Mexico and shifts the time back to 1983, which is actually semi-genius because we get to listen to a bunch of classic rock songs by David Bowie, Blue Oyster Cult and Greg Khin.

Leave it to Oliver Stone to churn out a sequel for Wall Street after 23 years, and manage to make it an eccentric and sometimes compelling flick. This time it's good versus evil under the umbrella of the financial crisis and mortgage debacle. You'd think the politically savvy Stone would be all over this in a JFK conspiracy way, but instead he uses the fall of the American empire to serve as a backdrop for an old-fashioned love story. Stone's direction is far from the psychedelic onslaught of Natural Born Killers