Culture

There’s a place where I can go…It took Lakeview Terrace to remind me that we didn't know how good we
had it in the early 1990s. The Soviet Union and the Berlin Wall had
crumbled, leaving post-Cold War America without a real international
threat; terrorism was a vague concept. Yet if you were to judge by the
movies, we were all buckets of free-floating anxiety convinced that
everyone around us would stab us in the neck with a letter opener if we
looked at them sideways.

Yes, it was the golden age of the
"fill-in-the-blank from hell" thriller-that time when your babysitter
(The Hand That Rocks the Cradle), your roommate (Single White Female),
your co-worker (The Temp), the girl next door (The Crush) or your kid's
new stepparent (Domestic Disturbance) was a psycho-in-waiting. Lakeview
Terrace appears in an age when paranoia seems just a bit more
justified, and you'd think that there would be room to re-explore the
genre in light of this. Instead, we get more or less what we would have
gotten 18 years ago: middling melodrama too concerned with providing
visceral kicks to uncover anything truly psychologically insightful.

Even the dynamic duo can’t save this disaster. Expectations abound for a movie co-starring Al Pacino and Robert De
Niro. Their only recent movie together, Heat, although considered
brilliant by most observers, had just one scene in which they were on
screen together. In their new film Righteous Kill, they are Siamese
twins, cop buddies, together in virtually every scene.

And let's be
honest, these two can carry a mediocre film on their collective backs.
They both have careers which need no buoying up, and if any two actors
working today could be called living legends, it's probably these two.
What's
not derivative these days in a cop movie? We start with the killings of
people whom the world would not miss: child rapists, Russian mobsters,
a seedy collection of low lives whose deaths probably serve to improve
the lives of others in New York.

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.