Culture

It says it's from Justin Timberlake. Taken completely lives up to its title. You will feel taken for every penny you spent and every second you wasted sitting through this movie. It definitely will make my top ten worst movie list for 2009. Taken will stretch your patience like a balloon to the popping point. Not to mention the paranoid message it sends to anyone considering a vacation in Europe.

Bryan Mills (Liam Neeson) is a retired moody guy with a secret past. It's never clear as to where he retired from. Mercenaries? CIA Black Ops? Secret agent school? He refers to himself as "a preventer," so you be the judge. He wants to become closer to his daughter Kim (Maggie Grace), and then overprotects her, much to the dismay of his ex-wife (Famke Janssen) and her new husband (Xander Berkeley). The first 20 minutes setup of sad divorce woes and cute eye glances between Mills and Kim were way too cute and excruciatingly long. The 50-minute wedding scene in Deer Hunter suddenly didn't seem so bad. A subplot has Mills moonlighting as a bodyguard to Kim's favorite chick rock star, an attempt to bring them all together. But then Kim goes and gets kidnapped on a European trip and Mills has to go all Rambo using his special "skills" to save her from a white slave trade syndicate (of course). So with spy-gizmos, big fists and guns a blazin', Mills heads off to Paris.

Rub a dub dub. By the time young Emily Browning - the Australian waif who stars in The
Uninvited - sees her 8th or 9th scary, decaying corpse come to life I
begin to wonder if anyone ever considered late-stage anorexia as a
cause for these hallucinations. Between last month's The Unborn
(featuring the sharp-hipped Odette Yustman) and this movie, I am now
certain that a steady diet of pizza and pancakes can ward off ghosts.

Unfortunately
the requisite beanpole heroine isn't the only well-beaten path that
this film walks. Like other post-holiday horror releases we're treated
to basic thriller formulas, teen drinking, PG-13 half-nudity - along
with more scared-stiff and seemingly starving protagonists who should
probably stop at a deli on the way to the police station.

DiCaprio returns for another season of mad men. It's been ten years since Kevin Spacey got his head blown off in
American Beauty, and director Sam Mendes still has a lot more to say
about living inside the box. And while he doesn't cover much new
territory here, at least he hasn't lost his melancholy spirit.

Revolutionary
Road, Mendes' latest take on how rough it can be when carpet swatches
and cul-de-sacs run your life, stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet
as Frank and April Wheeler, a married couple living in a nondescript
suburb outside of New York City in the mid 1950s. The film opens with a
high-angle night shot and a '40s-era ballad cutting through the
soundtrack. I only remember this mundane detail because that also
describes the opening scene in The Shawshank Redemption. Point being,
both are essentially prison movies.

Has anyone seen my stapler?Part of the draw for The Wrestler is how close the storyline tracks
Rourke's real life rollercoaster. After his rise to fame in the '80s,
followed by his boxing stint and subsequent weird-guy tabloid filler,
Mickey had been reduced to bad movies and bit parts. There are a few in
which he truly shined, such as Marv in Sin City, and stunning
performances in The Pledge, Spin, Animal Factory and Get Carter. In The
Wrestler he finally puts all his cards on the table, hanging himself
out like a skinned deer for us to gawk at. It's the proverbial car
wreck and we're unable to avert our eyes.

The plot of The Wrestler is
nothing new. It follows a familiar comeback formula, but it shines by
turning convention on its head. We shudder at the thought of Rourke's
battered character Randy "The Ram" Robinson stepping in the ring again
for a few wrinkled dollar bills and nearly cheer when he contemplates
retirement. But the gritty realism, honest performances and tight
storytelling drive this moving character study. We know Randy's time
has come and gone, but he doesn't. The parallels to Rourke begin
immediately - physically battered, broken down, beat up, empty and
drained, he still clings to some kind of hope for redemption, or at
least another shot.