I Know Who Killed Me

Here, we gather to mourn the career of Lindsay Lohan. Okay, it's not that serious, just another case of a teen celebrity gone wild. First Paris and now Lindsay.

The difference is that Lindsay actually has talent, if you scrape away all the tales of wild partying, scandolous tongue-wrestling and more with boys and drunken driving.

That talent is evident in I Know Who Killed Me, where Lohan gives just a glimpse of what she can do as an actor.

Too bad it's only a glimpse, for the movie is a complete mess. Even the trailers couldn't quite hide the movie's sheer crappiness.

Lohan plays Aubrey, a studious, no-sex-having girl intent on becoming a famous writer. We see her tapping away on her keyboard and reading her work to her bemused classmates. In the small town she lives in, a girl has gone missing. Soon, the girl's body is found, causing the town folks to fear that a serial killer is on the loose.

Aubrey soon becomes the next victim. After a football game, she's abducted and tortured. She later wakes up in a hospital, missing part of her leg and part of her arm.

Here's the kicker, though: Aubrey claims to be Dakota, confusing her parents and the investigators. And Dakota isn't Little Miss Sunshine. She's a stripper whose mother was a crackhead and who now spends her nights swiveling up and down a pole and doing naughty Monica Lewinsky-like things with cigarettes.

And she loves sex, which makes Aubrey's boyfriend more than happy, as we all see in what has to be the most unintentionally hilarious sex scene to come out this year.

Aubrey/Dakota eventually sets out to find out who kidnapped her in what turns out to be a by-the-books thriller we've seen too many times before.

And the twist (there always has to be a twist in these things) is out-of-the-world absurb and so silly that you're tempted to scream at the screen, "Really? Pu-Leeze."

Lohan, however, does manage to give a decent performance as she essentially plays two people. And if the plot had been better written, this could have been a good B-movie, something tantalizing but instantly forgettable.

Instead, it is only mildly interesting for the mere fact that Lohan is, oohh, playing a stripper who manages not to take all of her clothes off. To those guys whose sole purpose in life was to see Lohan naked, this is not the movie for you.

And it really isn't much of a movie for anyone.

So, in the end, my advice to Lohan, beyond sounding like Jane Fonda and telling her to stop partying so much, is to please pick better scripts. You're not Paris. You have talent. You deserve better. Really.

Sicko: Just Plain Sick

You either love Michael Moore or you hate him. He's a big man, both literally and figuratively, who doesn't operate in areas of gray. Being subtle is not in his nature.

Anyone who has seen Bowling for Columbine or Fahrenheit 911 knows that.

And his latest documentary, Sicko, is no different.

This time, Moore takes on America's health care system with his own bombastic sense of injustice.

Yet, this film is more effective than his others. For one, Moore isn't seen that much in the film, until the last truly over-the-top half-hour.

But a huge chunk of the movie is just about ordinary folks struggling against a confusing and profit-hungry health-care system. One man cuts the tops of his ring finger and his middle finger off and has a doctor tell him it will be a lot cheaper to put the ring finger back on than the middle finger.

We meet one couple forced to live in their daughter's storage room after medical bills causes them to lose their home.

We see a medical insurance reviewer talk about a health-insurance company that rewards those who deny claims.

And we see how better the health care systems in other industrialized countries are. You go in, the doctors treat you and you pay nothing. France, Britain, Canada and Cuba.

Moore is simply amazed, and we are as well. To Moore, other countries put a higher premium on providing health care than our own country.

In America, the premium is on making as much money as you can, and screw the little guy.

What compells you to watch is the fact that Moore, for the most part, keeps his mouth closed. He lets real people tell their stories. And many of them are heart-breaking and outrageous, the kind of stories that make you want to stomp out of the theaters and march on Washington.

The debate on health care is a complex one, but Moore,with even doses of humor and anger, boils it down to one simple question: Why can't arguably the greatest country in the world do a better job of providing health care?

It's a good question. What is Moore's answer? Well, it seems to be that we should be more like Canada, France, Britain and other countries that provide free health care.

But of course, that health care isn't exactly free. The health care is paid for through much higher taxes.

And I suspect that things aren't as tranquil as Moore makes it appear in the movie. He doesn't really explore some of the problems those health care systems have. He gives the impression of a utopia in many of those places, and I doubt that's the case.

What you can't argue with and what Moore makes abundantly clear is that the health-care system in the United States is broken. Nearly 50 million Americans have no health insurance, and the ones who do have to go through a maze of complicated rules about what can be covered and what can't be covered. Employers are increasing co-pays, meaning people are having to pay more for their health care out of their own pockets. And lord help you if you happen to have a pre-existing condition or even the sympton of one that you forget to tell your health insurance about.

There has to be a better way, and while you can quibble with Moore on the cure, you can't dispute the diagnosis: the health-care system is just plain sick.

More Than Meets The Eye

When I was a kid and still believed in Santa Claus, I asked one year for a Transformer, one of those cool toys that turned from car to robot and back again. This was the 1980s, and I, like many other kids, was enthralled by Optimus Prime, Megatron and the whole Autobot/Decepticon drama.

I guess I was a good boy because that Christmas, my wish was granted. I had a small yellow sports car that doubled as a mean fighting robot.

More than 20 years later, Michael Bay, king of attention-span-shortening action movies such as Bad Boys, The Rock and Armageddon, brings us Transformers.

Sam, played by Shia Lebouf, is a nerdy kid trying to get the hot girl. He pays $4,000 for a rusty-looking Camaro that seems to love schlocky pop music. Boy, do his eyes pop wide open when he finds out that his car is actually an alien robot named Bumblebee.

And he has a few friends named Jazz, Ratchett and Ironhide. And let's not forget Mr. Massive Truck, otherwise known as Optimus Prime.

For those who didn't grow up on the Transformers, here's the deal. The Autobots and the Decepticons once lived on this planet far, far, way far away called Cybertron. Megatron, the baddie here, decided to be a real pain and cause all this war and suffering. Oh, and there's this Cube thing that could ruin a planet or two if it got in the wrong hands. Well, the Cube ends up on earth, and the Transformers follow.

Bay has never been an artsy director. He goes for the big bangs and the quick-cutting to pump things up, and sometimes it works and oftentimes, it gives the viewer a headache.

He does tone it down some, and Lebouf is just a likable actor who pulls off funny one-liners as he deals with a weird car and a beautiful girl all at the same time.

But for all the anticpation and anxiety Transformers have had about a live-action movie, this movie is simply okay. I wasn't blown away at all and I felt a bit of numbness from all the over-the-top action.

Plus, the dialogue that the Transformers are given is just atrocious. As a friend of mine pointed out, Optimus Prime wouldn't say "My bad," as he does at one point in the movie.

As I sat for the two-hour-plus movie, I kept wanting more than what I was seeing on the screen. Some magic, the kind of magic you can't get out of throwing CGI effects here and there.

This, unfortunately, comes close to the predictable, empty and way-too commercial summer blockbusters we've grown accustomed. Product-placement becomes more important than logical plot lines and character development.

And that's a shame. One of my favorite cartoons deserved better.

Yippee-ki-yay

John McClane was the tough-talking, authority-ignoring, pain-in-the-ass New Jersey cop with the estranged wife in 1988's Diehard, an action movie that sets the standards for all action movies that followed.

As played by Willis, McClane was just a regular guy, never one to be the hero, but who manned up and got the job done anyhow. He was no muscle-bound machine-like superhero like the ones Sylvester Stallone and Arnold Swartzneggar played. He was scared out of his mind and flawed and bloodied, a man caught in an impossible situation. Maybe we couldn't relate to all the bullets flying, but we could relate and root for McClane. He had soul.

And he still does, as evidenced by Live Free or Die Hard. Sequels, by and large, suck, never living up to the spirit of the original. But this one comes awfully close.

It helps that McClane's luck hasn't changed much. His marriage is over, he still clashes with authority, and he and his now-grown daughter don't quite get along.

He's back in New Jersey, spying on his daughter and her not-quite-respectful date, when he's called to pick up a hacker named Matthew Farrell, played by Justin Long. Before long, McClane is shooting and cursing as things blow up around him, and Farrell is running after him.

Turns out a former Homeland Security employer Thomas Gabriel is still upset that his warnings about security problems went ignored. All he got for his troubles was his reputation ripped to shreds. Best thing he can do, he figures, is shut down the country's whole electronic infrastructure, knocking out cell phones, traffic lights, computers, the whole nine yards.

McClane, of course, has to stop him, and he's the perfect guy. He hates cell phones.

Len Wiseman, director of those weird Underworld movies starring his wife, Kate Beckinsale, punches up the action with eye-popping action sequences, like the one where a car flies through the air and slices through a helicopter. And the nice thing is he doesn't use a lot of fancy CGI effects. This is old-school, and it's cool.

I wish the dialogue was better, but what's there is pretty good. Long is a likable actor and he gets plenty of funny lines. Willis, at 52, still makes a believable action star, even if all the action isn't quite believable (yeah, the thing about the car slicing through the helicopter. Don't think that would happen in real life).

But this is an action movie. You have to suspend disbelief and just go for the ride.

And Live Free or Die Hard is one of the best rides out this summer.