Before Sunrise

I remember her, that sweet smile, the slender figure, the walk in the park on a fall day more than a decade ago.

What I don't remember is her name. I was in college at the time, in a small town, and she was a prospective student coming in for a day or two to see if she liked my college enough to attend. For some reason, I was her guide for the day, showing her around, and in those hours, there was this irresistible connection, a magnet drawing us together.

We talked and laughed as we walked from campus into the streets of that small town, holding hands, my skin tingling with a nice warmth.

Later, however, in the dorm room where she was staying, she asked me about an upperclassman she was interested in, apparently a much more handsome guy than me, who I also knew to be a bit of a ladies man. It was a gut-punch but I smiled anyway. The pain eventually faded, as she did, because she ended up going to another school. I never saw her again.

I thought about that girl as I watched Before Sunrise, the 1994 film by Richard Linklater, the genius behind cult-classic Dazed and Confused.

The movie centered on Jesse and Celine (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), two strangers who meet on a train destined for Vienna. Jesse is a backpacking American headed to Vienna for his flight back home. And Celine is a French grad student who just got back from visiting her grandmother.

Jesse sparks up a conversation with Celine. The chemistry is undeniable. The connection is there, and when the train stops at Vienna, Jesse invites Celine to accompany him until his flight leaves the next morning.

And so they do, their conversation going from heady to bawdy and everything in between, those moments of laughter interspersed with quiet moments when the two hit that sweet spot of intimacy.

This isn't your typical romantic comedy. Jesse and Celine don't hook up within the first hour of the movie, then break up and finally rush toward each other in some inane climax after realizing they're meant to spend the rest of their lives together.

The connection here is at first intellectual and gradually moves toward romance and there's no guarantee that they will end up together forever at the end.

In fact, they very well may never see each other again.

What I loved about the movie is that the connection isn't purely physical. There's this unexplainable emotional intimacy that develops between the two, some special chemistry drawing the two together and making it hard to let go.

There's a rhythm here, a rapid back and forth marked by pauses and brief and poignant moments of vulnerability. There's joy simply to be in one another's presence, something that I just don't think Facebook-based relationships can replicate (even though I admit to being a Facebook addict in need of Dr. Drew-like intervention).

At the end, Jesse and Celine promise to meet back in Vienna in six months. They never do. We know this, of course, because Richard Linklater decided to make a sequel called, appropriately enough, Before Sunset.

I saw this movie several years ago, way before I ever saw Before Sunrise. It was the rare sequel done years after the original that actually worked in that there's an added emotional tension, a history just surging beneath the surface of the characters' interactions.

Life got in the way and changed Jesse and Celine in surprising ways, but the connection was still there. They pick up where they left off more than a decade earlier, as if they never left each other at the train station at Vienna.

But they did and they can never go back. They have to live with the choices they made. Yet, the scene I loved the most is the ending, where they bask in the moment, an ecstasy of joy of that connection made so many years ago that never went away.

Before Sunrise and its subsequent sequel, I think, reminds us of the importance of searching for the bliss in those connections, even if some may be fleeting. This is where life is. This is where joy is. This is what we will remember when we see our lives coming to an end, and the more we have of them, the richer our lives are.

Paranormal Activity

Maybe scary is like beauty; it is in the eye of the beholder.

Lots of people have said that the new movie, Paranormal Activity, is scary, like for real scary, like The Blair Witch Project scary.

Sorry but The Blair Witch Project was never all that scary to begin with, and Paranormal Activity, also shot in that cinema-verite style, isn't either. The movie is not even creepy, the kind of creepy that keeps you up at night in a darkened house or apartment, jumping at strange sounds.

Suffice it to say, I slept well after seeing this movie.

The movie, the one made for just $11,000 but topped the box office this weekend, is about a young couple, Katie and Micah, who hear weird things go bump in the night. It turns out that Katie has been haunted by some demon/ghost thing ever since she was little that followed her every place she has lived, including the nice little home she has made with Micah.

Micah decides to set up a camera in the bedroom to record what happens. He also follows his girlfriend around during the day with the camera. Oh, how romantic. Look at how cute she is when she's brushing her teeth.

The audience knows going in that the ending is not so bright for this young couple since we are looking at footage that police found after some horrible occurrence. We just have to slog through the movie to find out what that is.

The concept is cool. And the director, Oren Pi, does manage some legitimate chilly moments, but nothing that jolts you out of the seat until the very end.

Katie Featherston and Micah Stoat, the newby actors who play the couple, have an easy-going chemistry together that grounds the movie and avoids reality-TV cliche.

But despite Katie's well-rehearsed screams, the movie lacks suspense. I hardly cared what happened to the couple because I wasn't invested in them or their survival.

And while the ending (which like any good movie critic, I won't reveal) does provide a juicy climax, it comes too little, too late.

Like The Blair Witch Project, this movie feels like a gimmick, a well-executed one, that in the end amounts to bleh.

Good Hair

When Angela Davis wore her hair in an Afro in the 1970s, she wasn't trying to be cute. She was making a political statement. She was black and proud.

For black folks, our hair has historical baggage, going from slavery to now. Many black women have struggled with the age-old question of whether to straighten their hair or keep it natural, to relax or not to relax.

As comedian Paul Mooney says, "If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they're not happy."

Stories abound of black women not being accepted at their place of business because they chose to wear their hair natural. Straight hair is in; the natural is out, or so it seems.

Good hair. It is a phrase fraught with pain for many black folks who grew up in a world where the standard of beauty was Marilyn Monroe, white dress blowing around her with fluffy blond hair.

And when Chris Rock heard one of his daughters say she wanted to have good hair, he decided to make a movie about it, called appropriately enough, Good Hair.

Rock takes his camera inside beauty salons across the country and to a flamboyant hair show competition in Atlanta that's held every year. The documentary also includes interviews with famous black women such as the divine Nia Long (yes, divine is my word and Miss Nia is divinely fine, in my humble opinion, but I digress) discussing their hair issues.

One of the interesting facts one learns is that some black women pay $1,000 for a hair weave and that most of that hair comes from India, where women routinely cut their hair off in a religious ritual. And one theme Rock hits on repeatedly (almost a little too much, for my taste) is how you never, ever touch a black woman's hair, not even during sex, unless you're that good in bed and you better be good. And even then...well, you get the point.

This is Chris Rock so the laughs come frequent and hard. But behind the laughs, Rock manages to sneak in some thought-provoking messages. We see soda cans dissolve in sodium hydroxide, the main ingredient in hair relaxer, and then we see relaxer being smothered into a young girl's hair.

We see that black people spend billions of dollars on hair products even though we don't control the manufacturing or the distribution.

Heavy stuff, though he could have been a little heavier, as a writer friend of mine argues, doing a better job making the historical connections and pointing out that back in the day hair texture could mean more for a black person's social status than skin color. In other words, the kink in your hair could make or break you.

The strength of the film comes from Rock's travels to India and his interviews with black women, particularly actress Tracie Thoms who talks about her decision to wear her hair natural. There's laughter but Rock gets at the desire to feel beautiful, the innate confidence boost one gets when your hair is right and the pain you feel when society tells you that your hair is wrong.

A black woman's hair is her glory, Maya Angelou says in the movie. Indeed, it is.

Where The Wild Things Are

I remember Max in his wolf suit tearing through a bedroom that changed into a jungle populated by monstrous creatures who turned out to be rather friendly. And in that imagined jungle, Max and his creature friends began their wild rumpus.

The book was Where The Wild Things Are, written by Maurice Sendak, and it remains one of my favorite reads from my childhood.

Spike Jonze, the crazy genius behind Being John Malkovich, manages to preserve the beautiful essence of that book in his screen version.

Max is played by newcomer Max Records, and the movie fills out the thin volume of pictures and words it is based on. Max has a mother (Catherine Keener) struggling to raise her son and daughter, balance her career and date.

Max is a rambunctious child, struggling with all those intoxicating emotions most nine-year-old boys are apt to have. He is needy and independent, his loneliness assuaged by his wandering imagination.

One night, Max acts a fool, standing on the kitchen counter in his wolf suit while his mother tries to spend time with her boyfriend. He bites her on the shoulder and runs out into the street.

He sees a boat on water and sails to a faraway island where he meets those creatures, who at first want to eat him up but stop when he announces that he is a king with great power.

And this is when the wild rumpus begins.

Max runs wild with these creatures, led by Carol (voiced by a profanity-abstinent James Gandolfini). Rounding out the cast of monsters are KW (Lauren Ambrose), Judith (Catherine O'Hara), Alexander (Paul Dano), and Ira (Forest Whitaker), and Douglas (Chris Cooper).

For awhile, they all run through the jungle, causing fun-filled destruction. But underneath the fun is dysfunction, just like the dysfunction Max was running away from.

And this is where Spike Jonze, with help from a script written by Dave Eggers, shines, embodying his movie with both fantasy and raw emotion.

This is a kid's movie in lots of ways but it isn't. There are scary moments of disturbing behavior and circumstance.

Max isn't some lovable cute child. He's real, at least the way Max Records plays him, full of rage and immaturity, lost in the confusion of his life.

And the monsters have their own deep-seated insecurities, particularly Carol, full of jealous anger and an unbearable sadness.

I don't know how Spike Jonze did it but the movie somehow works, the fantasy and the reality all mixed together some kind of filmic stew. This world feels real even if it is only the result of Max's imagination.

And we, the audience, allow ourselves to be carried along on Max's journey fueled by pain and loneliness and the need we all have to know we are loved.

The movie ends, as the book does, with Max coming home to a hot bowl of soup, safe, loved, happy. Just as I was when I left the movie.

Fame

Remakes suck, and unfortunately, Fame, the teenybopper, PG-rated update to the 1980s R-rated original, is the rule and not the exception.

Not that there aren't nice dance moves and good singing, especially from Naturi Naughton, a member of the now defunct-pop group 3LW and last seen playing the naughty rapper Lil' Kim in Notorious.

As in the original, this film follows a bunch of kids with dreams of fame, for lack of a better word, as they go through four years at New York's High School of Performing Arts. There's singing and dancing in the cafeteria, though strangely no singing and dancing in the streets and on top of taxicabs that we relished in the original.

Dreams get crushed, hearts broken, in the brutal world of the performing arts. Like Debbie Allen said, "You want fame? Well, fame costs and right here is where you start paying it... in sweat."

But the 1980s version had memorable characters you cared about, like Leroy, (played in the movie and on the series by the late Gene Anthony Ray) the kid from the rough side of the streets who had raw dancing ability, a rebel's attitude and soul. You had the incomparable Irene Cara, who played Coco in the film and sang that song "Fame (Can You Feel It)."

The film delved into dark topics, including homosexuality, the pressures to be thin in the dance industry, suicide and the exploitation of naive students willing to do almost anything to get the glitter and the glam.

All that is lost in this smiley-faced remake. Glimpses of the character's lives are seen but never the whole, the movie so busy getting to the dancing and singing that the kids obsessed with American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance want to see.

The original Fame was edgy and real. The remake is a movie thrown together to appease the masses, drained of any soul, any passion, and nothing but cliches.

Good actors such as Charles S. Dutton, Bebe Neuwirth, Megan Mullally and Kelsey Grammer make do with what they have, which isn't much. And some of the fresh faces stand out, such as Naturi Naughton and Collins Penne, who plays Malik, an angry aspiring rapper/actor who starts off with an interesting story arc but one that never goes anywhere. But it's not enough to save this skeleton of a movie.

Hollywood these days is littered with remakes and unnecessary sequels. Word is that a remake of the horror/comedy classic An American Werewolf in London is in the works, the idea of which is more frightening than the actual movie, which is pretty scary itself.

Fame is a very good reason for Hollywood to just stop doing remakes. Try being original for once. Oh, that's right...this is Hollywood we're talking about.

I Can Do Bad All Bad By Myself

Almost every Tyler Perry movie is the same, with maybe the exception of The Family That Preys -- at the center is a woman, so beat down and bitter over the pain caused by some bitch of a man that she can't see the sweet, beautiful love of the handsome guy (always one with washboard abs) standing right in front of her.

The formula works, because every single one of Perry's movies, even the awful Madea Goes To Jail, has seen box-office gold.

His newest one, I Can Do Bad All By Myself, sticks to that well-worn formula and with powerful performances by the fiesty Taraji P. Henson, it works.

Henson plays April, an alcoholic, selfish nightclub singer haunted by a painful past and is currently sleeping with a married man, played by Brian White.

She is not in the mood when Madea drops her niece and two nephews at her doorstep after her mother, who has been raising them, disappears.

Anyone who has seen a Tyler Perry movie shouldn't be too surprised at what happens next. Angels come into her life in all forms, including a fine-looking handyman named Sandino, played by Adam Rodriguez (who's most known for his role as Delko on CSI: Miami).

It is Sandino, as well as her pastor (played by gospel singer Marvin Winans), her friend Tanya (the incomparable Mary J. Blige) and Wilma (the lovely Gladys Knight) who push her into taking control of her life and opening her heart to the possibility of love.

The script is rife with cliches and over-the-top melodrama, all Tyler Perry standards. But in this case, Perry is getting better at holding back, even sidelining audiences' favorite character, Madea, for long stretches of the film.

And that's a good thing because it gives Henson room to do her own thing. And it is a thing she does well. Henson dives into her character's pain and makes it real, even if the dialogue doesn't do her performance justice.

Her's is a journey that feels real and when she finally makes her breakthrough, you feel as if she has truly earned it. But we could have done without her singing along to an old gospel song in her house as her pastor sings the same song at his church down the street. It reminded me too much of that scene in The Color Purple, the one where Shug comes down from the juke joint to the church, singing that song, "God Is Trying To Tell You Something," and embracing her estranged father. Just a bit too much there, Tyler.

But there's no doubt Tyler Perry knows how to entertain his audiences. He packs this movie not only with uproarious hilarity but also poignant moments and soaring musical performances by Knight, Winans and Blige. On the night I saw the movie, audience members waved their hands and clapped as if they were at a concert or at church.

Anyone confused as to how the movie will eventually play out just hasn't been paying attention. Of course, April will find love, with Sandino. Of course, she'll finally decide to take care of her sister's children. And of course, faith in God will give April the strength to finally kick out her abusive boyfriend.

I wish Tyler Perry would make movies with a little bit more sophistication, that he would allow for nuance and tone down the melodrama, especially now that he is going to helm a film version of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Isn't Enuf.

Here's hoping this movie is a sign of better things to come.

Extract

Office Space is a classic, a box-office bomb that took off within the hallowed walls of Blockbuster. Mike Judge, the creator of the doofus duo, Beavis and Butthead, directed this hilarious take on cubicle culture and the misery of working.

It was for Joe and Julie Schmos everywhere to relish in the awfulness that is the modern-day workplace.

Judge is back with another movie, Extract, this time from the employer's point of view. The always affable and charming Jason Bateman is Joel, the owner of a extract-flavor manufacturing company whose wife won't sleep with him and is tempted to sell his company.

More problems come his way when a freak accident causes one of his employees to lose one of his nuts, literally.

A smooth con-artist with a pretty face (Mila Kunis) comes along and convinces said employee to sue the company, thus jeopardizing the sale.

And in the midst of all this, Joel, in a drunken state, decides to hire a guy to be the pool guy and to umm ... service his wife so he can feel less guilty when he has an affair with the beautiful con-artist.

Sounds like a good premise? It is, but the movie ends up as a long-winded bore. The only bright spot comes from Ben Affleck, who plays Joel's friend. He actually gives one of his best performances, one so good you're want to give the dude an Oscar.

But Judge doesn't give you anyone to root for in this movie as he did in Office Space. The movie meanders quite a bit, as if it is high on pot, never truly landing anywhere.

There is one laugh-out-loud moment near the end, provided by the underused Kristin Weig, who plays Joel's no-sex-having wife.

Extract just fades away once the credits start rolling, a film that relies too much on the idea that we the public might want to get in the shoes of our employers. We just don't care.