Culture

The Green Zone is what action movies are supposed to look like. A suspenseful, high-voltage, in-your-face action drama with a plausible scenario, this may be the best action flick I've ever seen. And if film editor Christopher Rouse doesn't get an Academy Award for his work, there is no justice in this world.
With a premise inspired by the real-life events found in Rajiv Chandrasekaran's 2006 book Imperial Life in the Emerald City, Green Zone is the story of a U.S. Army officer who went rogue after discovering faulty intelligence and was instrumental in blowing the lid off the truth behind WMDs during the same year the Pentagon and the White House were declaring “mission accomplished.” The movie takes its cues from the ignorance and objectives that came from inside the Green Zone, a safety area including the old Republican Palace where American decision-makers were cut off from Iraqi reality.

How to describe Remember Me? It's this decade's Cruel Intentions. There's the snappy, self-conscious dialogue and the ambitious plotting and the self-important ending. And, oh, what a self-important ending there is. However, it's not as crass as other reviewers will have you believe and certainly not as tasteless as they are righteously suggesting. It's actually darn creatively executed, and if only it had finished just two or three brief scenes earlier it would be just fine, and interesting.
Robert Pattinson plays Tyler, a New-York-bohemian-apartment-dwelling, chain-smoking, wittily verbose, terribly well-read, 21-year-old Strand bookstore employee who scribbles endlessly in dirty notebooks and rides a bike. Emilie de Ravin plays Ally, the daughter of the cop who arrests Tyler during a drunken brawl, and who Tyler decides to date on a dare. She has a patchy personality, mostly hanging on two points: That she likes to eat her dessert before her main course in restaurants, and that she witnessed the murder of her mother on a subway platform. Tyler has a mean, distant dad played by Pierce Brosnan, a very likeably precocious little sister and a brother who committed suicide. The pair are brought closer when Ally's father flips out and hits her, and yet closer by the mutual mess that ensues.

Tim Burton's Alice In Wonderland is a film so half-assed, so slap-dash, so unbearably boring that I can't even care enough to fully concentrate on writing this review. I am distracting myself with the Oscars – and finding even the interpretative dance sequence to the soundtrack of The Hurt Locker miles more entertaining than the tepid trash Burton is peddling as an adaptation of Lewis Carroll's fascinating classic.
The self-consciously wacky director takes a tale brimming with images, historical and cultural references, poems, songs and extraordinary invention, reduces it to a handful of glib catchphrases, then repeats these ad nauseam – while constantly informing us of what has happened, what will happen and what is happening in the style of one of those reality TV shows desperately low on interesting content. Think of all the bits you love from the book, or the Disney cartoon even; well you won't find them here – Burton instead sees fit to strike out the original story and replace it with a CliffsNotes sequel.

Going into Brooklyn's Finest I didn't expect something special, but I came out somewhat amazed at how bland it really was. It's a lame attempt at combining Training Day and Crash that comes off like a mediocre television crime drama.
Finest begins with an ominous black car silhouetted in front of a New York cityscape, as Vincent D'Onofrio delivers a foreboding monologue about what's “righter and wronger” in the fight between cops and lawbreakers. We lose his character quickly, but then a trio of stories begins. We get Dugan (Richard Gere), a drunken suicidal “doesn't-give-a-shit” loser cop with seven days left before retirement and Sal (Ethan Hawke), a Catholic-guilt-ridden, crooked, sociopathic narcotics cop ready to kill and swindle money for the good of his pregnant wife and growing family. Then there's Tango (Don Cheadle), a conflicted undercover cop deep into the drug scene, dealing with the dilemma of busting his long-lost pal Caz (Wesley Snipes) who once saved his life. Tango and Caz… get it? Other stereotypical characters are Will Patton as the grizzled nice guy detective and Ellen Barkin, resembling a cornered bulldog, doing her tough-mama-agent routine.