Morgan P Salvo

The Bourne Legacy opened this week with Jeremy Renner taking over the reins from Matt Damon as rogue super spy, David Bourne. Renner caught our eye with his mesmerizing performances in The Hurt Locker and The Town, both of which got him nominated for Oscars. But he has plenty of lesser-known titles to his credit. If you’re like me, you knew some of these movies before going into The Hurt Locker. Others not so much, but they’re worth a look if you like Renner, whose ability to simultaneously blend into a cast while delivering stand out performances is a rare trait. And, when Renner turns it up, watch out.

Just like its hero Douglas Quaid (Colin Farrell), Total Recall has a ton of problems. Quaid has a boring rut of a life and wants a change…some action. The film has that in spades, the problem is the lack of substance.
The film’s main flaw lies in the filmmakers’ public proclamation that this not a remake. Rather, claims director Len Wiseman, it’s a more faithful interpretation of sci-fi author Philip K. Dick’s short story, We Can Remember It for You Wholesale.
There is just one problem with that claim, namely that Dick, who is now deceased, was around to help write the original screenplay.

1) When Verhoeven was still Dutch and still good:
The Fourth Man,
This crazy, surreal, very cool movie is about life, death and sex. Jeroen Krabbé plays a man who has visions of impending danger and begins an affair with a mysterious woman, (Renée Soutendijk) who may lead him to his doom.
Soldier of Orange
Offering the first glimpse of a young Rutger Hauer, this is an excellent film about the horrors of war. A character-driven story about Germans invading the Netherlands and a group of six university friends caught up in the events that follow. Also starring Jeroen Krabbé.

Just because Oliver Stone makes movies look cool doesn’t mean he always makes cool movies. Savages falls somewhere in between cool and ludicrous. O.K., let’s just say it has its moments. Weaving between overtly dark secrecy and over-the-top camp, Savages delivers a cartoonish version of deadly violent subject matter.
When Stone isn’t making some valiant statement in a lavish production (think JFK and Wall Street) he tears his style down to its bare essentials. With Savages, he dishes out a pretty standard story about drug dealing and a kidnap/hostage situation, but he isn’t trying to sell the viewer on much of anything with the use of black-and-white-to-color storytelling, non-linear editing and multiple film stocks.

The craziest thing about this movie is the film doesn’t live up to the campiness conveyed by the title. Abraham Lincoln: Vampire Hunter is so deadly serious that it should be ashamed of itself.
It’s as if The History Channel morphed into a bad action movie with the now standard Matrix-like effects. Sure there’s blood spraying and wild wire-work fight choreography. But this kung fu kickery attributed to an influential historical figure is a trend that has got to stop. How far will Hollywood take this trend of putting real people in completely farfetched scenarios á la the recent Raven where Edgar Allan Poe helped fight crime?

Sometimes a filmmaker’s lofty ideas get in the way of execution. Such is the case with Hysteria, a flick that just scratches the surface of the never-ending fun and/or pathos that should be derived from such a touchy subject matter. Director Tanya Wexler tells the story of the invention of the first vibrator with quaintness and cuteness instead of the raging satire it so richly deserves. The opening prologue of “based on a true story” is followed by the smug … “really,” leading us to believe that this might be a flick with wit and vigor. What we get instead is a romantic comedy period piece with the vibrator saga as backdrop. Personally, I feel the Victorian period is patently boring unless a werewolf gnaws on someone’s neck.

Bernie has a trifecta of actors that I usually can’t stand (Jack Black, Mathew McConaughey, and Shirley MacLaine) and a director who has never impressed me (Richard Linklater). To be honest, Linklater has perturbed me in a way no other director has with his fingernails-on-a-blackboard, over-wordy agendas and use of mostly bad acting to deliver the goods. All this has changed, at least for the most part, with Bernie.
The film is based on the true story of Bernie Tiede (Black). Bernie is an assistant funeral director (“they don’t call them morticians anymore”) in Carthage Texas, a singer for the church choir, an actor in the town’s community theater and an all-around nice guy seeking acceptance. Without giving too much away, Bernie befriends the town’s meanest widow, Mrs. Nugent (MacLaine), who’s rolling in dough.

First-time Director Rupert Sanders creates a Ridley Scott-like (see above) vision with a non-stop onslaught of different lands and sets of CGI greatness. There’s an impressive Dark Forest with its twisting gnarled branches, nasty monstrous troll and clams that ooze motor oil. The Enchanted Forest is something altogether spectacular with its fairies, mushrooms-with-bulging- eyeballs and a stag-like creature with tree branches for horns. This is a psychedelic Disney-like fairyland that looks like H.R. Pufnstuf on acid.

Oren Peli has ruined my movie-going experience one time too many. The dude responsible for the Paranormal Activity atrocities has had me running screaming down the aisles in disgust rather than fright. But now Peli has nearly redeemed himself by producing and co-writing the screenplay for Chernobyl Diaries. This flick is nowhere near as bad as I had anticipated; in fact it’s downright fun.
Looking like we’re in found footage territory from the get-go, this is merely a trick to help set up the characters on a European vacation, though found footage is wisely incorporated again later. We begin with the formulaic technique of spending time with couples vacationing before they’re detoured from Moscow and treated to mutated cannibalistic humanistic underground dwellers. (C.H.U.D. Remember?)

Director Joseph Cedar offers a dazzlingly fresh take on filmmaking with Footnote, a whirlwind of dynamics surrounding mind games, intellectual suffering and guilt.
This flick is a mind-bending chess game between two rival scholars who just happen to be father (Shlomo Bar-Abba) and son (Lior Ashkenazi). But don’t let that fool you. These two are scholars who read about reading, write about writing and live and breathe investigation into both. The scholars are focused on the Talmud transcripts, the central texts of mainstream Judaism that document discussions pertaining to Jewish law, ethics, philosophy, customs and history.