The Brave One

We deplore violence yet we cheer it. All depends on who holds the gun, or at least that seems to be the message of The Brave One, the tale of a woman who loses her sense of moral certitude when violence disrupts the illusion of the world in which she lived.

Jodie Foster plays New York public radio host Erica Bain. She has a lovely life, delivering her poetic observations about the city over the airwaves and spending time with her handsome doctor husband, David, and their dog.

Then one night, they walk through a tunnel in the park, and thugs brutally beat them both. David dies. Erica ends up in the hospital with purplish bruises on her face.

But the physical wounds don't cover her psychic ones. She is forever changed, her view of the world warped 180 degrees.

She, for the first time in her life, feels unsafe in the city she loves. And to protect herself, she finds a gun. She, as she says in the movie, is now a stranger unto herself, someone unrecognizable. She has forged an entirely new identity.

She has become a vigilante, and when she fires her gun into the thugs she encounters in the days and weeks after her attack, she learns to love the power that surges within her with every bullet that launches forward and into bad people's flesh.

Director Neil Jordan seems to be trying to say something more meaningful than those Death Wish movies of the 1970s with Charles Bronson. That something is set in Foster's steely face and sharp blue eyes, as she portrays a woman determined not to be a victim and take back some measure of the confidence she once had moving through the city.

And into this mix enters Detective Mercer, played by the always-intense Terrence Howard. Foster and Howard bring an energy and chemistry that makes everytime they appear onscreen together electric. Mercer is the moral center of the movie, a troubled man who nonetheless has tried to do the right thing and abide by the law he has sworn to uphold. It's not easy, especially when he sees the bad guys not get punished.

So we have a tension automatically between these two characters, Erica Bain, the woman willing to take the law into her own hands, and Mercer, the law man who reluctantly wants the criminal justice system to work, no matter how frustratingly slow it seems.

Jordan allows space for Foster to play her strenghths as an actress. It is within her small muscular frame that Foster creates a woman both strong and weak, hard and fragile. Erica Bain is confused about her place in the world, and her gun, in a sense, is her anchor.

But it is in the ending where Jordan fails us. This whole confrontation builds throughout the whole movie between Howard and Foster, and Jordan takes the easy way out.

No, I won't give away the ending. What I will say is that it wasn't nearly as satisfying of an ending as I was expecting. And in the end, I had little sense of what exactly the kind of message Jordan was sending. We have no clue as to what kind of person Erica Bain becomes at the end, how this violence she has experienced and has dished out has changed her.

I left the theater neither deploring nor cheering for a film that started out strong but ended as every other vigilante movie did.

The Real Michael Myers

Michael Myers was introduced to us on Halloween night in 1963. Outside a small white house in Haddonfield, Ill., Myers, only 6, watches his big sister in the kitchen, playing kissy-face with her boyfriend. Soon, they traipse happily upstairs. Tonight, with the parents gone, they want to do naughtier things than just kiss. Then, to our horror, we see tiny hands reach into a cabinet drawer and pull out a large knife.

On his way to his sister's room, Myers picks up a clown's mask, cover's his face and then encounters his topless sister. The knife descends over and over again into her flesh. Breathing heavily, Myers rushes down the steps, out the door and into the front yard, his face blank and his hands holding a bloodied knife as his mother and father look in shock.

This was the beginning of John Carpenter's slasher classic, Halloween, made in 1978 for little more than $300,000. It went on to earn more than $50 million at the box office and spawned really awful sequels.

We all remember the iconic Michael Myers, his face obscured by a white-painted Captain Kirk mask, stalking nerdy, virginal Laurie Strobe, played by Jamie Lee Curtis, and her much hornier friends on Halloween, the night when the boogeyman came out for real.

It was scary, full of jump-out-of-your-seat moments. But Carpenter was remarkably restrained. No gushes of blood, no severed heads, were to be found in this movie. Halloween is old-fashioned now in a world of Saws and Hostels, where directors depend more on shock value to frighten, instead of dread-inducing suspense.

Then Rob Zombie, the heavy-metalist turned auteur director, comes along to remake, or as he puts it, reimagine Carpenter's masterpiece. He does this by delving into Michael Myers' past, figuring out how a small boy tranformed himself into a cold, efficient killing machine who loves to wear masks.

So in Zombie's Halloween, we're introduced to Myers as a 10-year-old, chubby-faced with stringy dirty-blonde hair. His father is dead. His mother is a stripper who has since fallen in love with a drunken prick played over-the-top by William Forsythe. His big sister is an oversexed hottie. At school, Myers is mercilessly picked on by bullies, and when he starts torturing rats as a way to cry out for help, his stressed-out mother ignores the not-so-suble signs that her dear-old son may be turning into a psycho.

It doesn't take long for Myers to go from killing rats to killing people, bashing one bully with a tree branch. And then on Halloween night, he goes bonkers, cutting his stepfather's throat, pummeling his sister's boyfrined with an aluminum baseball bat and stabbing his sister 17 times.

Dr. Samuel Loomis (played in the original by the late Donald Pleasance and now replaced by Malcom McDowell) is the psychiatrist who tries to help Myers at the mental institution he is now confined to. He holds him and jokes with him with hopes to break through to Myers' inner turmoil. But it is to no avail. And 18 years later, Myers is a big brute of a man, silent and the very embodiment of evil.

The rest of the story follows just as the original -- Myers breaking out and going on a rampage through Haddonfield on a quest to find his baby sister, Laurie Strobe, this time played by Scout Taylor-Compton.

Zombie says his motivation was to humanize Michael Myers. A noble attempt but it fails. Myers was scarier when he was just a mute monster, his eyes the blackest ones Dr. Loomis had ever seen.

Here, we have just cliche. Poor Michael Myers had a crappy childhood and killing people indiscriminately is his way of lashing out. Great pschoanalysis there, Zombie.

The biggest problem here is that despite all Zombie's reimagining, we have the same-old tired Michael Myers. He doesn't say anything. He has no personality. He just walks and kills, walks and kills.

The violence is visceral and much less stylized than it was in the original Halloween. And while not as gory as some of the torture movies we've become accustomed to these days, Zombie's version is far bloodier than Carpenter's.

But the movie just feels empty and soulless, like Myers. We still don't understand what made Myers evil. And we don't care. Even sadder is the short shrift Laurie Strobe gets in this movie. Instead, she becomes a stupid girl who screams at all the wrong times.

Let's just hope for this one thing: No sequels, please.