Film

I left Bangkok Dangerous with several questions. First, why are remakes of Asian films in such high demand? It seems like an exercise in intentionally wasting time and money. Beyond that, why do Asian filmmakers like Takashi Shimizu (The Grudge) and now The Pang Brothers remake their own movies? Americanization saps the mystique and charisma out of the originals. We didn't see John Woo come over here and start re-making all of his flicks. (No, he had the good foresight to make new, crappy American movies.) And what's the deal with Nicholas Cage? I remember a time when he was good. The problem is that he has made so many bad movies that it's getting hard to tell if he can even make a good movie. If he can, Bangkok Dangerous isn't it.
Bangkok is the moody and dark story of a lonely hit-man, Joe (Cage), who decides to befriend his chosen courier (Shahkrit Yamnarm) because he "sees himself in him." Yeah, right. The sidekick-mentor-teacher-pupil strains believability. Everyone knows a hit-man cannot trust anyone, yet right away he befriends some kid. Here we have yet another in a string of hit-man movies wherein the dude doing the killing gains a conscience somehow along the line of work, breaks all his own rules and then gets into trouble with the bad guys. The only sensible way is to shoot it out. No plot twists, no tricks, just straight forward storytelling no matter how farfetched and ridiculous it gets.

Pity poor Joel and Ethan Coen. You make a masterpiece or two, and people start expecting it from you every time out.
Let's face it: Part of being a great artist in any field is the burden of high expectations. If you're Bob Dylan, and you produce an album that's merely good stuff by any other standard, the pundits will be lined up to shrug, "Meh, it's no Blonde on Blonde."
And in contemporary cinema, that's what you face if you're the Coens. Jon Favreau funnels Robert Downey Jr.'s Iron Man performance into a halfway competent comic-book movie, and he's the second coming of Steven Spielberg. Burn After Reading, on the other hand … well, it's no No Country for Old Men. Over 23 years of filmmaking, the Coens' worst movies-The Ladykillers, Intolerable Cruelty-have been better than anything 90 percent of filmmakers will ever make. Discovery-or its cousin, the comeback-makes so much more interesting a story than sustained quality.
Yet here the brothers are again, turning out another goofy, predictably unpredictable caper about people in over their heads. It all begins with Osborne Cox (John Malkovich), a hot-tempered CIA analyst whose demotion inspires his resignation, and plans for a tell-all memoir. But the notes for Cox's book wind up on the same disk as financial information for his wife Katie's (Tilda Swinton) planned divorce proceedings, which all inadvertently winds up in the hands of two D.C.-area fitness center employees. For Linda Litzke (Frances McDormand), the information could be the key to paying for the cosmetic surgery she longs for; and for her co-worker Chad (Brad Pitt) … well, it's something cool to do.

Separate ways, worlds apart. Traitor works well on two very important levels: one, as just good old fashioned thriller with a wide variety of settings - London, Marseilles, Yemen, Toronto, and of course Washington DC - and two, it reminds us in not-so-subtle ways that the people who brought us 9/11 haven't gone away.

But the issue here is confused morality. How do you reconcile a seemingly good man doing heinous things?

Guy Pearce (LA Confidential) and Don Cheadle (Crash) head this international terrorism story, with one my of my favorite actors, Jeff Daniels (The Squid and The Whale) in a small but critical role.

Cheadle plays Samir Horn, an American-educated Muslim, who comes to terrorism early in his life after witnessing the car bombing of a family member. Reminiscent of all those "why is this good guy doing bad stuff" political thrillers, we start trying to wrestle with that question early on in the film as we find Horn in the company of some very unsavory characters.

Horn shows up on the radar of FBI agent Roy Clayton (Pearce). It is their relationship, the nuances of good and evil in the world, where loyalties really lie, and the complications of the "truth" which make this one of the more fascinating and believable international thrillers I have seen in recent years.

To laugh or not to laugh. Hamlet 2 is a mixed bag of treats, missed opportunities, inspired comic genius, dull plodding and failed timing. In short, some parts are good, while others…not so much.

The film starts off with a collage of the "work" of actor Dana Marchz (Steve Coogan) including infomercials and roles in Xena, showing real humorous potential. Cut to the present where he is a depressed but optimistic dweeb acting teacher in Tucson. He is on the verge of losing the drama department due to the lack of talent in his plays (stage versions of movies like Erin Brockovich) plus fiscal cutbacks and a really mad, conservative principal (the always underrated Marshall Bell) who hates his guts. He then inadvertently adopts a bunch of inner-city kids into his class and comes up with the idea to do a sequel to Hamlet. Since everyone dies in the first one, as we all know, Marchz (his name is constantly mispronounced) solves that problem with a time machine, Jesus and a lot of gay references.

Steve Coogan is brilliant in the lead role, but perhaps too brilliant - he is given way too much leeway to over act. At first it works, but then it becomes tedious and overkill. Coogan's character drains you of any sympathy and after a while you just want to punch him in the face. As Marchz's wife Brie, Katherine Keener does her smartest and bitchiest person in the room shtick (nothing new there), and drinks a margarita that's the size of a Herculean goblet. Then there's Elizabeth Shue, playing herself, and has given up on acting and become a nurse. This is, thankfully, underplayed.

The new David Carradine?This remake has so little in common with its predecessor and so much in common with crunch-fisted driving movies that it almost defies comparison. Almost. The original, Death Race 2000, starred David Carradine and Sylvester Stallone as rivals in a cheesy, campy, primary colored, Roger Corman scuzz-fest that although stupid was also a laugh a minute. This version, however, is dead set on being dead serious.

The minimal plot is laid out as so: Ex-race car driver Jensen Ames (Jason Statham) is framed for murder and taken to the Terminal Island penitentiary to replace Frankenstein (the dead-by-the-first-car-crash driver), and participate in the highest rated show on TV via prison: DEATH RACE. Warden Hennessey (Joan Allen bringing the term "ice queen" to new heights) promises him release papers if he dons the frank-mask and drives. They're all here: the rivals, the bad guys, the worse guys, the goodhearted guys, the evil warden, the buffoon guard. It's stuff we've all seen before, so Race applies the majority of its focus on car racing. As with the original, this one pits Frankenstein against Machine Gun Joe (Tyrese Gibson) and a few deadbeat contestants. Oddly though, after the initial action sequence, the rest of the scenes seem to stay at the same level: spin out, shoot, curse, quick edit, floor-it, curse, smash-into, blow-up, etc.

I survived high school. I didn't know anything about American Teen, but with that title I was hoping Kristen Bell had a lead role. Somebody should have warned me. I hate documentaries. It's a character flaw. I hate self-awareness books; and of course high school is self-awareness on steroids around every locker-lined hallway and family dinner crisis. I don't like animation and this film has flotsam and jetsam of animation sprinkled about. Even with all that going against it and without Kristen Bell or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I liked Nanette Burstein's slick movie of high school angst. It was interesting. It was entertaining, maybe a bit enlightening and a trifle compelling at times. Some of the scenes and relationships seemed forced or even scripted, but so does my life at times. I'm always calling for rewrites and a stand-in.

The press info on the film has lines that remind me of the loudspeaker in M*A*S*H giving plots to morale boosting films in Korea. "Documentary follows the lives of four teenagers in one small town in Indiana….We see the insecurities, the cliques, the jealousies, the first loves and heartbreaks, and the struggle to make profound decisions about the future." Isn't that what everyone remembers about high school-all those damn profound decisions about the future? If we only knew then that events and not agonizing decisions sweep us along in life, we could have had more time for beer and sex.

It's senior year in a Midwest high school. There will be cruelty, humor, strangeness, scary moments, more talk of sex than actual sex, a dash of drinking, and a pinch of smoking. Yeah, some things never change. But a funny thing happened on the way to gym class. I ran across real people who could somehow carry on with their lives, perhaps not quietly but at times with desperation, and pay little attention to microphones and technicians and cameras. That is one thing that has changed in today's world: everyone is on camera; everyone is on the web.

With a promising beginning scene and dazzling credits, Mirrors looked like it was going to deliver. I was actually smiling and nodding to myself that this was going to be the horror flick I'd been waiting for. Nothing could be further from the truth.

Ben Carson (Kiefer Sutherland) an alcoholic cop on leave of absence for the accidental killing of his partner, living with his sister Angela (Amy Smart), separated from his wife Amy (Paula Patton) and kids, is somewhat unstable. To take his mind off his troubles, he takes a job as a night watchman at the Mayflower department store, a gigantic burned out but ornately columned building. The inside charred ruins manage to look pretty haunting with disfigured mannequins everywhere and a ton of mirrors. The history behind the store is textbook ghost story: a lot of innocent lives were lost in a fire. Maybe their spirits are trapped in the mirrors and want out.

The director (Alexandre Aja), who I HAD nothing but respect for, flounders badly here. His first two movies, Haute Tension and the re-dux of Hills Have Eyes were above par, showing extremely ground breaking vision, cool camera work, supreme editing and lots of mind-numbing gore. Mirrors seemed like it was going to take this path. Aja throws in R-rated risks, bloodletting like crazy, but then plays it safe reeling it in, like the stupid plot would hold its own. You'd think with gore, nudity and NYC you couldn't go wrong. Instead Aja falls back on tired old horror movie conventions: slow moving flashlights, investigating dark corners, looking into mirrors over and over and quick jump scare tactics.

Oh, to be that cigarette.Vicky Christina Barcelona continues what seems to be Woody Allen's never-ending introspective into the long and winding road of love's labors lost and found and lost again and forever talked about. The prolific and diminutive Woodman has been regurgitating his New York City neuroses across the screen on an almost annual basis for more than 40 years.

The film begins and continues with a narrator. Other than the name Chuck Norris in the opening credits, there is nothing that makes me cringe in dreaded anticipation more than voice-over. If I had wanted a novel on tape, I would have gone to the Bend Library. I was glad that VCB didn't have Allen the actor in it. He has become a sad caricature of himself. But there he was, taking over an early scene in a restaurant. The character Vicky, played by the Brit actress Rebecca Hall, was doing Woody better than Soon-Yi ever could. She had the same lines, tensions, the facial expressions, the fears, constrained tone, and probably the same NY shrink. Ten minutes, and the movie was burdened with a monotone narrator filling in this sketchy New Yorker short story pretending to be a movie, and a tall, female version of Allen. I moved against the wall separating my theater from the one showing Mamma Mia and pressed my ear deep into the dried popcorn oil stains in the hope that Meryl Streep's wailing ABBA tunes would drown out the nonsense Allen was forcing his actors to inflict on the six of us in the auditorium. I longed to be in the next theater with the middle-aged, cat-owning women singing along with Meryl and Pierce.

I eventually overcame Hall's imitation of Allen to marvel at her perfect American accent and ability to play a short, neurotic New Yorker, even at 5'9". Patricia Clark was perfect in her limited screen time playing a woman trapped in a loveless life of quiet desperation. Scarlett Johansson, I think she was saying something but I'm sorry. Anytime she's on the screen, I have this humming in my ears, and breathing and time both stop.

Jungle boogie. In the decade since he became a household name Ben Stiller has drifted primarily towards two comfortably generic personas: the tightly-wound, put-upon Everyman (see: Meet the Parents, Night at the Museum) and the preening buffoon (see: Zoolander, Starsky & Hutch). All the world loves a clown, and Stiller has been content to be one, nuance be damned.

Tropic Thunder, however, finds Stiller as star, co-writer and director attempting a skewering of Hollywood - a genre that requires a scalpel, where he favors blunt instruments. The set-up casts Stiller in buffoon mode as Tugg Speedman, an action-film star whose box-office clout is running out of steam and whose attempt at "serious actor" respectability playing mentally-challenged in Simple Jack flopped miserably. He's leading the ensemble in a Vietnam War drama titled Tropic Thunder, along with co-stars — including multi-Oscar winner Kirk Lazarus (Robert Downey, Jr.), a Method maniac who had his pigment altered to play an African-American soldier; and heroin-addicted comedy actor Jeff Portnoy (Jack Black) — who are causing just as much trouble for rookie director Damien Cockburn (Steve Coogan). So Cockburn and the movie's grizzled technical advisor (Nick Nolte) decide to drop the actors into the jungle for a more guerilla-style filming technique — where they promptly encounter real danger in the form of a well-armed drug operation.

The opening 10 minutes hold out the promise of one of the year's most hilarious comedies, including a trio of faux movie trailers introducing the preferred milieu for each of the three principal actors. Lazarus and Tobey Maguire make cow eyes at each other as closeted gay monks in Satan's Abbey; Portnoy plays multiple flatulent, fat-suited characters in a vicious swipe at Eddie Murphy. Even the early moments of over-the-top violence from the movie-within-the-movie — a bayonet-slashed private (Jay Baruchel) tries to gather his intestines, and Speedman's character goes down in a hail of Platoon-inspired gunfire — are funny in context. Give Stiller a full-length feature of cinematic parody sketches, and it'd kill.

Truth is, we ran out of waterboards. The Apatow comedy train chugs along with a new installment, Pineapple Express.

You cannot get more of a skeletal plot here. Dale Denton (Seth Rogen), a 26-year-old process server with an inexplicable high school girlfriend, witnesses a murder while on the job and exits the scene leaving a roach of Pineapple Express, the ultimate killer weed. Turns out his subpoena target is the dealer that supplies his connection, Saul (James Franco). Soon they're on the run from cops, drug crime warlords, evil Asians, and whoever else crosses their path. Almost all the dialogue seemed or was ad-libbed, reminiscent of "Curb Your Enthusiasm," but lacking Larry David's Seinfeld-esque plot twists.

I have to admit there are some redeemable qualities James Franco was excellent as the weeded-out dumber-than-dirt dope dealer. As of late, Franco seems typecast to play the guy possessed with angst and inner turmoil in most of his characters (Spiderman, Annapolis) in contrast to his slacker role on Apatow's late 1990s television gem Freaks and Geeks. It was refreshing to see him in this role of weed-soaked, dim-witted, likable, grinning idiot-it was almost like getting to know Brad Pitt's character from True Romance. And Danny McBride (Fist Foot Way) as Red, the middle-man drug connection, steals the show playing part tough guy drug dealer part wimp-ass squealer.