Pop The Culture

Sometimes

2012-01-22T15:15:00.006-05:00

Sometimes, life isn't how you like it. Life doesn't cooperate. Life doesn't do what you'd like it to do.
This is life, uncompromising, unwilling to shift to your high demands, incapable of bending to your will.
Life is that foggy cool morning when you lock the keys in your car and you curse as loud as you can, somehow hoping that the heavens will hear the insistent whine of your profanity and lend a hand. The heavens are deaf and life isn't fair.
And the day doesn't get any better because after paying a locksmith about $50 to unlock your car door, your computer gives you endless grief and the work phone is acting up and you wish the day would end already. Oh, it's Monday, by the way. And did I mention that the weather is miserable.
You take a moment in all of the frustrations building up inside you. You take a moment because you know if you don't, you'll scream and say that nasty thing you have wanted to say to that person you can't stand and this is the exact vulnerable time you're more apt to say that thing instead of keeping your mouth shut and your toxic thoughts from leaking out.
You take a moment because sometimes this life will beat you so that you want to throw a punch. Pound life senseless. Do your best Mike Tyson impression on the shitty day you've had so far.
You take a moment because you realize that life is longer and broader than this moment when everything seems aimed against you, when you feel God himself has decided that this is the day he will transform you into the 21st-century Job.
You take a moment because at this moment it ain't that serious. It never was. This is life and sometimes, life can suck the light out of you. Life can bend you so far you feel like you might break.
You take a moment to listen to the beating of your heart, feel the cold air prickling your skin and watch the greyness of the fog appear to hug the buildings in the downtown skyline.
Life isn't some puppet you pull the strings on. Life isn't some toy you toss around. Life isn't a game that you try to win.
Life is that thing you live as best as you can, pushing past the bad times knowing that the good times are around the corner, that the joy is contained in the small moments.
Life is the rain of cars breaking down and supervisors pissing you off and disease ravishing your body and the prospect of death coming to claim you or loved ones. But life also is the sunshine in the face-to-face conversation with an old friend or the unexpected new friend you just made, the hard laughter that feels like your stomach is caving in, the exhilaration of dancing to the music of your own rapidly-beating heart. Life is the first second of the first moment that you realized you fell in love.
Life is in the living. And sometimes you just have to dive in knowing you don't always have to be in control.

My Word

2011-12-21T17:24:00.004-05:00

I was standing in front of the mirror trying to memorize my own words. The words were in the form of a poem I had written years ago but had never committed to memory.
A friend recently asked why, and I had no good answer. She wondered why you wouldn't memorize your own poem. After all, these are your words. They flowed from your mind.
That made sense and so here I stood, repeating lines and lines of my poem like a mantra. I recited them in a rhythm to some invisible beat in my head.
And slowly, I felt some power rise within me, some feeling I had never felt when I read this poem from paper.
The power came from a feeling that I owned the words I was speaking. The words weren't on paper anymore.
They were in me. They had always been in me. They were in me the moment I first wrote the poem so many years ago. And they remained in me as I fiddled with the words in order to capture perfectly what I wanted to say.
Not only are you owning your words, you are owning your truth, your voice, your right to say what you want to say and let it hang there for the world to absorb.
Take it or leave it, you say. But I will be heard.
One of my favorite movies of the last few years is "Book of Eli" starring Denzel Washington. (Forgive me but I'm about to spoil it for you if you haven't seen it). The movie takes place in an apocalyptic future where no one reads and books are rare. But Washington, a loner on some kind of weird righteous path, has a book, The Bible. An evil man played by Gary Oldman wants that book because he knows the power of the words contained in it.
At the end, Oldman gets the book, and when he opens it, there are no words. Washington is blind and he has memorized the entire Bible. The Word of God is in him, and no one can take that Word away from him.
Writers all their lives are chasing to find their voice. They dabble in the words of other writers, taking a little here and there, all the while trying to master who they are and what their truth is.
They're trying to find the words that will say who they are, the words that will synthesize their essence, encompass the experiences they had that made them who they are.
This is a long process that never really ends. But maybe it begins by owning the words you have written. Owning them and not apologizing for them. Owning them and yelling them out on the stage that is your life.
Only you can say what you say in the way that you say it. No one else can speak your words for you. And no one should try.

Stop This Train

2011-10-14T11:49:00.005-05:00

Yesterday it was summer. Just the other day it was the beginning of another year and a few seconds from now I will have gray hair and I'll be staring down at the end of my life and figuring out whether I did anything worth remembering.
Time, as one of my friends told me, seems to fly by quickly, so fast that life is a blur and you're desperately trying to catch up.
You sleep too long in the mornings and you fear you're missing something, that the day is now too short to fill up with all the things you have to do or you want to do but don't have the gumption or the guts or the motivation to do.
This past August, I turned 39 and during that birthday week, I was at my mother's house, spending time with her and doing my own little quiet celebration (I've never been the balloon and birthday cake kind of guy).
One night, I noticed a high school picture of me. My face is thinner, hair shorter than it is now, with a slight mustache and no goatee. Large almost square-like glasses awkwardly frame my face. I wince.
I almost forgot I looked like that all those years ago (could it be nearly 20 years ago). I imagined at that moment what I would have said to my younger self. I wondered if I would have given him a preview of all the things he would face over the next few years.
You know, the lost frantic and fun years of college, the conversations you think were so deep only because you were slightly intoxicated, the drunk people who took you to a Waffle House early in the morning one night just for the heck of it, the friend you almost lost because you were too immature to notice your obnoxious behavior, the moment you felt your blackness acutely because for the first time you were one of a few blacks on a predominantly white campus?
Would I have told him about those first couple of years of true adulthood when you moved to a small town that had no bars or clubs and you were the first black reporter at the newspaper you worked at and you only realized that fact the Sunday you stepped into one of the oldest black churches in the area? Would I have warned him about the years where you wondered whether this journalism thing was the thing for him?
Would I have told him about the small dark moments when he felt God had abandoned him and he was all alone and no one understood his pain and he felt he had no friends who would understand him? Would I have warned him about that stupid financial purchase that wrecked him for years afterward? Would I have warned him about any of the ups and downs, the trials and tribulations, the missteps, the small triumphs, the beauty and the ugliness of the life he was going to live for the next 20 years?
I don't think so. Because all of that made me who I am. And here I am, 20 years later, a blink in the eye life has moved so fast. I'm just trying to keep everything in focus but nothing stands still. Because I don't stand still. I keep changing. The world around me keeps changing. Nothing ever stays the same.
Sometimes, I want to have that remote control that Adam Sandler's character had in the movie Click so I could pause or rewind, so the dumb words I said to that girl back there were never said or the decision I made never was made.
But maybe we waste the time we have wishing we could go back to that time before and change things and that if we changed things, our lives would be better. Maybe so. Maybe not. Truth is we'll never know because we can never go back. We can only move forward, hopefully having learned whatever lessons we were meant to learn.
I remember looking at that picture and thinking, dude, you have no idea what kind of roller coaster you're going to ride. But if I'd known, I would have never gotten on. Yes, I might have missed out on the pain. But I'd also have missed out on the joy. And that just won't do.

Saying Goodbye

2011-09-10T17:51:00.004-05:00

I felt like I was at a wake but I wasn't mourning a loved one. I was mourning the closing of a store, one that I had watched slowly dying over a year or more as the book selections got thinner and the CDs and DVDS became nearly non-existent.
And this day was the last day, the sun shining through the large windows into a store where hardly anything was left. The middle of the store was like a desert, nothing but carpet for yards. Men moved empty bookshelves off the floor. I saw red brick where large wooden shelves full of books used to be.
A young girl bounced playfully off a blue wall in the now-gone music section. I didn't bother going by the coffee shop I spent lazy Sunday afternoons drinking a small white chocolate mocha and reading books I had grabbed off the shelf. The cafe had closed two months ago soon after Borders announced it was liquidating its 399 store.
And here I was mourning this place, this thing that had never spoken, this place I had never hugged, but a place where I sought solace after a long day at work, perusing new magazines, rummaging through the new books at the table near the front, and lounging in the too-comfortable seats scattered throughout the store.
Borders was a place of memories collected over years. I made friends here, some long gone and some still very much present. I had deep conversations with people in the coffee shop and read whole books I never bought. Here I looked longingly at a curly-haired law student I never got the gumption to ask out.
And I asked out another girl who unfortunately had a boyfriend but who nonetheless praised my approach of riffing off an Alicia Keys song (and no, I won't tell you which one because I'd like to use that approach again if you don't mind).
This is the place where I met a stranger and had a one-time connection I'll never forget and I still smile when I think of those wonderful moments we had together talking and laughing.
Borders was my refuge from the stresses of the world, the place I got lost in other people's words instead of the ones I wrote for a living. The place I discovered new voices and fell in love again with the ones I had forgotten in the blur of living.
So here I was in mourning as I scoured the last remnants of a once booming store, grabbing six books to buy for a $1 a piece. I breathed in the emptiness and locked into my head what used to be that wasn't there anymore.
And I walked out the door one last time and didn't look back because I have new memories to make.

Ain't Hard To Tell

2011-07-15T17:06:00.004-05:00

The beat dropped, and my head started nodding. Immediately, because the beat was like that. And the rapper flowed like water with lyrics that teased my brain with verbal riddles I dissected later. This was love at first sight.
I was in high school, and though hip-hop poured from radio stations, I hadn't paid much attention until I heard A Tribe Called Quest's "The Low End Theory." Music CDs weren't around, so that group's second album was condensed into a small cassette that I wore out over the dozens of times I played it, as I tried memorizing every line Q-Tip and Phife Dawg spit.
No swagger contest. Just two guys rapping about their lives over jazzy horns, funky basslines and boom-bap drums.
There's nothing like that first love, and there's nothing like that first heart break, leaving you bruised like someone beat the crap out of you. Feels like betrayal, like your first love slept with your best friend. But it doesn't matter. You go back because you're hooked to that feeling you had when you popped in the cassette.
You remember where you were when you heard Nas' "Illmatic." The haunting beat on "One Love," Nas' poetic letter to his friend locked up, Q-Tip's monotone the chorus. The bleak chorus of "Life's A Bitch" contrasted with the remnants of hope found in Nas' gratefulness for another year of life and the possibility that better days might exist for his future offspring. You remember you were in college with a group of your friends, the beat bursting out of the tape deck and rumbling through every inch of the car.
You recall every lyric of Pete Rock and C.L. Smooth's classic "They Reminisce Over You." Even now, nearly 20 years after you heard it, and your body instinctively moves to the beat. It feels good, feels just like love. It feels like you're home.
So everytime you turn on the hip-hop station, you search for that feeling and you end up wanting to curse because the music has changed, because the lyrics aren't there, because it's all about hot beats and hotter hooks. A Tribe Called Quest is long gone and the group isn't coming back.
You feel old. You're like your parents saying remember back in the old days when music was good, when hip-hop was like that instead of like this. Remember? You find yourselves giving people younger than you history lessons, telling them the first time you heard A Tribe Called Quest, and you get sad when they look in your face as if saying what are you talking about. This is ancient history to them but very much now to you. Because the moments are here, not 20 years ago, but here, still pumping through your veins, your heart bearing the bruises of being hurt all those times you turned on the radio and the hip-hop you listened to is nowhere to be found.
But Mos Def said hip-hop is us, didn't he? He said it lives in each one of us, didn't he? So why am I heart-broken? Why am I defining hip-hop by what I hear on the radio? When I hear Elzhi bringing a freshness to an old classic, I realize that hip-hop is both past, present and future intertwined. Hip-hop is ever expansive, evolving but also reaching back into the past to pull something new.
And I realize that this is me also. I'm hip-hop in the sense that I'm evolving just as much as hip-hop. I pull from my past, take what's useful and throw the rest away, and make something new. Making something better. Make a better me.
And just like that I'm in love again.

Keep moving

2011-07-08T13:03:00.002-05:00

I can't keep still. I am a restless spirit sometimes. My eyes dart. I'm always looking. I'm always moving, unless I'm in front of the television watching mindless reality TV like the entertainingly awful "Basketball Wives."
I'm always waiting to see when the next shoe is going to drop. Such is life.
Sometimes things are going so well you're afraid when the bad stuff inevitably comes. I grew up with the idea that storms are always brewing, that days of sunlight are always interrupted by thunder and lightning. You always have to prepare to get wet.
So it was that this nice sustained period of goodness was going to be interrupted by a bit of crappiness. But the problem I had was that I couldn't enjoy the good times because I was girding myself for the bad.
That's not the way you live life. You live in the moment, dive into it and splash that happiness on your face for as long as it lasts. Because you need to have that happy memory to sustain you in the sad times. You'll have to have something to flashback to so you remember that even in the dark recesses of your deepest sadness, there's a glimmer of hope that better days will come.
Let go of the idea that things will always be the way they always are. Life is a twister and you have to twist with it, riding through the rough spots until you get to the peace that you know is somewhere in the midst of the chaos.
Just a few weeks ago, I found out a bit of bad news about the company I work for (while I was on vacation). But there's nothing I can do. I still have a job. I still have a roof over my head. I still have friends who for some reason like my weird ass.
And I believe that things are going to work out. In the meantime, I enjoy the hell out of life. Laugh as hard as I can. Smile until my face crinkles. Be as sarcastic in my monotone voice as I can. Write. Love. Be.
Keep moving because in this life, you can't stop.

Getting to Happy

2011-03-05T13:57:00.004-05:00

Sometimes you don't want to smile. Sometimes you just aren't feeling it, the muscles in your face stretched thin by the stress you faced during the week.
Smiling can be hard when inside you want to rage, inside you want to punch someone, inside you want to cry or yell or throw a lamp upside someone's head.
There are days when smiling is harder than it seems, when the force it takes to make the tips of your lips go up instead of down doesn't seem worth it.
I remember one day a couple of years ago I was walking in Borders (my favorite place in the world) when an older woman told me I should smile. Apparently, I wasn't grinning enough. I wanted to tell her to screw off.
Don't get self-righteous. I'm sure there's a long list of people you wanted to tell to screw off as well and were tempted to replace the word "screw" with a much more succinct and vulgar verb.
And truth is there are days when you will feel sad and you will get mad at the world. And on those days, you will want to either smack yourself for some dumb thing you did or smack someone else for their stupidity.
This is life and this is the way life is. Smiling when you don't feel the joy that brings the smile isn't worth it. You might as well just frown.
Being able to smile in the face of life's storms is about having something more than happiness, something more than a temporary feelilng.
Being able to smile is about having a foundation upon which you face difficulties. It's about having an outlook that says this isn't going to last. This feeling, this circumstance, is not permanent.
Smiling is only the outer manisfestation of the inner work you have to do, as Terry McMillan puts it, to get to happy. You have to see life as half full and not half empty. You have to see that the darkness surrounding you won't last because there is light; you just have to chip at the crap in your life that's keeping you from getting to that light.
You either live or you die. And dying doesn't have to mean literally. It could mean spiritually. Death could simply mean allowing your soul to perish because you decided that this life isn't worth it.
Again, you either live or you die, and it's a choice you make every day. You live when you push open the walls of your heart and love. You live when you control your reaction to whatever crap life puts in your path.
You live when you feel the pain enough to learn from it and let it go, knowing that whatever the next chapter in your life only begins when you turn the page.
Smiling is a life-long journey of finding your joy, that effervescent thing that makes you you, and smiling comes from walking in the confidence that this is the right path, this is the right moment, this is the right you.

Walking

2011-02-21T19:59:00.002-05:00

On Valentine's Day, I was sick. That achey-breaky feeling was all through my body and I could barely get out of bed. Hell, I had to keep telling my body to crawl itself out of bed so I could grab my phone and call my boss to tell her I wouldn't be coming in. My body said, umm that could wait. Let's just lay here for a bit.
Eventually, I did move...to the couch where I stayed for most of the day, fighting off body chills and sinus headache with Tylenol and chicken noodle soup. But I didn't feel like doing much of anything. This day, my body wanted to chill.
Being sick often forces us to slow down. We run through our days and we become blurs to ourselves, never slowing down to appreciate those seconds and minutes we have before us.
We don't walk. We race. Walking is that underappreciated aspect of movement. When you walk, you have to think a little about the steps you have before you, the breeze blowing through your clothes, the space between where you are and where you hope to be.
Walking, taking the journey from no where to somewhere, and sometimes, the weight of life makes the walking harder. But at other times, the joy makes the walking easier. And sometimes, it doesn't matter because the walking is the point.
Putting one foot in front of the other is more than half the battle. It's when we stop walking, when we stop moving, that we stop living, that we give up on life.
Walk, breathe, move. What else are you going to do?

Someday We'll All Be Free

2011-01-08T13:55:00.002-05:00

Either before or after has there been a voice quite like Donny Hathaway, a voice so smooth and soulful, a voice that gets you right there, that unspecified, unspeakable, indescribable place that only you know is there because you can feel it.

It's that need for the kind of freedom that Hathaway sings about in this song. It's a longing for something that's not quite arrived yet. He tells me and you to hang on as the world spins and make sure that the spin doesn't spin you right out of existence, knock you on your ass. Because life is like that, the world is like that.

I feel better when I hear this song. Hathaway's voice is so soothing you want to float away with it to whatever world he is occupying because it has to be better than this. He sings like heaven has got to be.

The song reminds me of a poem by Mariahadessa Ekere Tallie in which she speaks about wanting to "walk barefoot where barefoot has no name/a place where soul on earth is natural." And she finds that the place she has envisioned is already there inside of her.

I think that's where freedom lies. It's not always external. It's not always actual handcuffs and chains that bind us. It's us.

The time in which Hathaway sang this song was one of immense social upheaval. Blacks were fighting for their rights. Protests over the Vietnam War were heating up.

But the song is relevant today because it is centered around how we react to the chaos in our lives. That chaos could be political and social issues we are passionate about. And the chaos could be your own personal life, the stresses we encounter daily that drive us nearly insane.

"Hang on to the world as it spins around/ Just don't let the spin get you down/Things are moving fast/ Hang on tight and you will last." Because the hope is, our faith tells us, that someday we'll all be free. And maybe it's in telling our souls that that we are free already.

Because the truth is you can't be free if you don't think that it's possible. You can't be free if once the chains are cut off, you still act as if you're still a slave. You can't be free if you don't believe you're free, you don't feel you're free, you don't see you're free.

Freedom is not just a physical thing. It's a mental thing. It's a soul thing. As Ekere Tallie tells us, "stroll barefoot" into your lives "leaving behind thieves and tyrants trying to control it."

Coded Language

2011-01-01T16:43:00.002-05:00

Words matter. In church, I learned over and over again that life and death are in the power of the tongue.

And too seldom we don't pay attention to the words we use or the ones that we hear.

Saul Williams reminds us of the power of words in the best sense. Let us take his message into the new year.

Hanging In

2010-12-09T14:26:00.002-05:00

This "faith in God" thing can be a confounding, frustrating pain at times. Faith in what? Because the world you live in is filled sometimes with gut-wrenching pain. And it isn't the turmoil in the wider world that gets you. It's the close-to-the-bone crap that levels you.

Here you have Freddie, (played by the lovely Cree Summers), praying to God to save Kim's father, a cop now lying in the hospital from a gunshot wound. And after a night of worry, Kim's dad pulls through.

But he's paralyzed, and that plain pisses off Freddie, much like us when life doesn't go exactly along the straight path we think it should go. Instead, we face unexpected twists in the journey that kicks us all off balance.

And yes, like Freddie, we're pissed. We're angry. We're ready to throw in this "faith" thing. Dwayne, with the ever-present flip-down shades, tells Freddie the story of how he prayed as a kid for a fancy new toy for Christmas and never got it. He got a coat.

But that winter coat kept him warm through a very cold winter. Then he tells her this gem. Sometimes when we pray, we get what we want. Sometimes, we get what we need. And sometimes we just get what we get. God helps us hang in there with what we get.

I always liked that. Because too many times, we waste energy trying to figure out why God is putting us through something. Maybe it's a test. Maybe it's not.

Who knows except God? And maybe after all is said and done, you figure out what God was doing and you learn whatever lesson you were supposed to learn and you become stronger in the end.

But again, who knows except God? Life is life and it isn't fair all the time. Good people get cancer. Bad people live to 100. You can't control what life throws at you.

But you can control what you throw back. Are you going to throw back anger and sadness and bitterness and hate. Or are you going to throw back love? Are you going to throw back peace? Are you going to throw back joy?

Faith can't be too hard that it can't bend in strong winds. Because life isn't going to break you, if you let it. You just have to keep moving. Don't stop.

No Love

2010-10-16T12:51:00.002-05:00

I remember laughter, loud and stinging laughter on school buses, and I felt alone because they weren't laughing with me, they were laughing at me. And it didn't matter what it was. It could have been the Hammer-time pants I was wearing that my cousin bought me for Christmas. It could have been my face pock-marked with pus-filled acne. It could have been the speech impediment I struggled with in elementary school.

It could have been any number of things that all tied into who I was at that particular time, young, awkward, not cool, kind of weird, uncomfortable as hell in my own skin. And my skin was thin, and sometimes I cried, not yet to the point where I could get my Kanye West on, that arrogant pain in the ass mojo.

I was me and I hated me, hated being me sometimes to the point that I fantasized about being someone else. Wished I had super powers to crush these bastards and silence the laughter. Leave them stunned at my greatness while I smirked at the awesomeness of the devastation I left in their wake.

That was then, when the sounds of laughter felt like needles pricking my skin, felt like punches against my face. That was then, when the teasing was relentless, and I felt like no one knew my pain. That was then, when I learned to still the tears and put on the stone face, act like this wasn't bothering me, even though it was.

This is now, years later, my love for myself a rebuke to the hatred I endured. This is now, when those bastards have now grown up and carved out whatever life they had. I wish them well. Because they can't hurt me no more.

They weren't perfect and neither was I. We were young, lost in a world we didn't quite understand. We didn't know the power of words to hurt and maim. Hell, we didn't know ourselves. We were just kids who didn't know how to be ourselves because we were too afraid. So all we did was go with the crowd and not against it.

This is now, when the acne has long gone and I don't know where those crappy Hammer-time multicolored disaster pants are. I am letting go because I like me, most of the times when I don't make mistakes, when I don't hurt people in the same way others hurt me. I love the human frailties and imperfections that make me who I am. And every bit of laughter at my expense toughened my skin, made me ready, in a way, to face the slings that would continue to be thrown as I grew older. Some slings pierced but didn't break me. Others crumbled before they got to me.

That's life, but only part of it. The other part are the hugs coming from the other direction, the sounds of laughter from people who share their joy with you and are not trying to stab you in the back.

Truth is, the love I have is stronger than the hate you bring.

No matter what you do, you can't hurt me no more.

Blues for Her

2010-08-14T13:30:00.004-05:00

She was a breathless wonder that left you speechless when she walked in, and every word you tried to utter sounded like stuttered utterances. It wasn't even eloquence but coherence that left you, mouth a slippery, slivery mess, throat clogged shut, eyes stuck in a trance.

This is what happens when a woman whose physical beauty is perfectly aligned with substance. She ain't Jessica Simpson bimbo but Nia Long and here you are hoping to be Larenz Tate on the microphone, all wanting to be the blues in her left thigh trying to be the funk in her right.

And this is good funk, the funk Parliament Funkadelic sung about, the funk that's hard to describe but you know it when you see it and you know it when you feel it. And you feel it when she walks into the room. You feel it when she smiles that smile at you.

It doesn't even matter that at this moment, you don't know her name. But you know that you will, that some invisible force will jumpstart your feet to walking over to her. Who cares if you have no idea what you will say when you are face to face with her? Something will dribble out, a simple hello to start off with, a witty phrase, anything to get her attention.

Because when she walked in, the atmosphere changed. There was a charge, and your blues turned to jazzy joy. Plans fell through and you decided to improvise, be spontaneous, and see where that took you. And you hoped all that took you to her and her to you and maybe this improvisation might lead to some beautiful music.

You stopped breathing when she appeared (you really didn't; it just felt like you did) and you weren't going to take another breath unless that breath brought forth words to say what you needed to say to her.

Because she was a breathless wonder that left you speechless, you had to say something. Is that all right? Yes, that's fine.

Chasing Me

2010-07-24T14:27:00.004-05:00

You know the cliche. Time stands still. But it's true as well. Time stops. It pauses in the moments that seem like agonizing hours between what you want to say and what you do say. And sometimes, particularly in the matters of the heart, you struggle with the words. You manage to stumble and stutter because the words you're about to say, the ones that are about to leave your lips, well you can't take them back, no matter how hard you try. Those words, "I love you," are stuck out there, hanging in the air between you and the person to whom you said those words.

And also hanging there is the aftermath of those words, the consequences of that "I love you." Obligation attaches to those words. Responsibility and commitment are behind those words, and if you don't mean them, you don't say them.

You don't say them because you fear your heart crushing if she rejects you, walks out the door, leaving your face twisted in pain. You stepped up and she stepped on the love you held out ever so gently.

But that's the risk you take when you dare love someone. You risk pain to get joy. It's like the quick shock of pain you feel when you put your shoulder back into place. You have to get through the hurt in order to feel the relief that comes immediately after.

Love is that thing where you just have to dive in and hope you don't drown. You have to push through the fear and have faith that this thing you put your soul into will survive, even when you know that there are no guarantees, that 10 years from the moment you said those words, this thing could fall apart. Hell, it could dissipate in the seconds after you say those words.

"I love you." Those words rarely pass my lips to any woman. I'm like all those sorry-assed men in romantic comedies, the ones with the walls built up over years of hurt and who are about to lose the "one," the one they're supposed to be with for the rest of their lives if only they could muster up the courage to say "I love you."

Closest I've gotten is "I like you," like you enough to kiss you, like you enough to hold your hands along busy city streets, like you enough to hold you in my arms on crowded dance floors. But not enough to turn like into love for the rest of my life.

I haven't crossed that threshold yet. So I look at this scene in Kevin Smith's highly underrated film, Chasing Amy, and am chilled at Holden's speech, even though I've seen it dozens of times over the years.

This is no cheesy Jerry Maguire/Tom Cruise "You complete me" speech followed by the "You had me at hello" from Renee Zellweger (God, that was cheesy and vomit-inducing dialogue created by the folks who give you Hallmark cards but I have to admit I was moved the first time I saw it).

No, what Holden (played by Ben Affleck who apparently can be a decent actor when he's not masquerading as an action star) gives is a dangerous, impossibly eloquent declaration of love in a way I wish I could if I were ever in the position of trying to convince a lesbian to go straight for me. And he knows what he's risking. He could lose a friendship. This could completely blow up in his face, and homegirl might just come to the conclusion that dude's a nutjob who has a "puppy-dog" crush as well as a frat-boy fantasy of making out with a lesbian.

The fact that it doesn't all come shattering down on his head (at least in that moment) is not surprising considering that this is a movie after all. Miracles happen all the time in movies, no matter how implausible they might seem.

But what gets me everytime is the unbelievable honesty and sincerity captured in that speech, the "oh screw it and go for it" bravado that Holden displays.

Sometimes in this life, you have to damn the consequences and do what John Mayer says, say what you feel. Say it with so much force and soul and guts and everything else that the other person has to hear you, has to see you and feel you. You have to spit, spill, leak it out so whatever you have inside of you fills the cup of life.

Yeah, that was hokey but that doesn't mean it's no less true. And it doesn't mean you pour out your soul to just anybody. That person has to be worth hearing your truth.

You'll know it, just as Holden knew it, that this moment, this pause between saying what you feel and saying nothing at all, could change your life in unimaginable ways and that the risk was worth it.

Because in the end, not saying anything when you should be saying everything is your voice wasted.

The poet Audre Lorde once said this in her poem, A Litany for Survival: "When we are loved, we are afraid love will vanish/ when we are alone, we are afraid love will never return/ and when we speak we are afraid our words will never be heard nor welcomed/ but when we are silent, we are still afraid/ so it is better to speak remembering we were never meant to survive."

So speak.

Good Mike Hunting

2010-07-03T11:57:00.002-05:00

"Some people call them imperfections but that's the good stuff." -- Sean, Good Will Hunting
I love that line. It comes from a scene in Good Will Hunting where Sean is telling Will about his wife and how she used to fart in bed. He tells Will that one time his wife farted so loud that it woke her up. That was three years ago, he tells Will, and that's the things he most remembers, those imperfections only he knew about his wife. And he calls those imperfections the "good stuff."
How can imperfections be considered the "good stuff"? How can imperfection be considered good? We spend our lives trying to be perfect, trying to make the right decisions, trying to live the straight and narrow, trying to make up for the mistakes of our past.
But we often forget we're human, that we're flawed, that we are almost bound to screw up. That doesn't mean we don't take responsibility for our choices and it doesn't mean that some people screw up on such a grand scale that they deserve whatever is coming to them (i.e. people who continuously break the law, the ones who murder and rape and pillage without any concern for anyone else's welfare).
I'm talking about imperfection, the little quirks in our DNA that make us who we are, make us the strange, irritating, intriguing people we are.
I sometimes cringe at my high school self, the one who wore Hammer-like pants my cousin gave me as a Christmas gift my freshman year. Laughter from my classmates still ring my ears. I was acne-scarred, nerdy, and annoying. I harassed women on a regular basis because I was too chicken-shit to pursue them properly. At times, I was quiet to the point of being mute and other times, I was a wiseacre hiding my self-esteem issues.
And at 37, I'm still weird, but much more confident in the imperfections I have. At the very least, I'm more aware of the imperfections that I need to change and the imperfections that are simply a part of who I am.
The woman I marry will unfortunately find me a verbal equivalent of William Faulkner, given to stream-of-conscious conversations that flit from one topic to another like some kid afflicted with ADD. She will find me often disorganized to the point of insanity and hopelessly movie-obsessed. But I hope that the craziness that inhabits me will be balanced by the good qualities I do have. Knowing my imperfections allows me to accept the imperfections of another.
In my younger days, I imagined my wife to be some combination of Halle Berry, Ananda Lewis, Sanaa Lathan and Angela Bassett, all examples of exceptionally beautiful, strong, intelligent black women.
But at least in the case of Halle Berry, I realized that no matter how beautiful yo appear outside, you might have some issues on the interior. After all, Halle Berry has been through two very public relationships (David Justice and Eric Benet) that ended horribly and probably left some emotional scars.
I've learned you have to look beyond the finely-shaped behind and the bouncy breasts and the piercing eyes. Dive deep and find the soul beneath. Relish the imperfections.
Because in the end, those imperfections, the secrets that you and your significant other share, are the ones that you will cherish after the lust has faded. Good Will Hunting is a movie about acknowledging and accepting your past for what it was and moving on, seeing how that past shaped you as a person for good and bad, and seeing your imperfections not as a curse but as an indelible part of who you are. It is what it is. And you have a choice. You wallow in the pity-party of why you couldn't be someone else. Or you accept who you are, change the really bad stuff, and get comfortable in your skin. Because it's the only skin you got.

Note on the blog

2010-05-31T12:33:00.002-05:00

Five years ago, I started this blog on a whim. I didn't know what it would be, but I just wanted to have a venue for my pop-culture-obsessed thoughts.
The blog eventually settled into a space for my thoughts on the latest movies. Often, in the minutes after sitting through a two-hour movie, I would rush back and fire off a missive about either how wonderful and entertaining the movie was (The Dark Knight) or how crappy and awful it was (Seven Pounds, so bad but interesting that I wrote about that movie twice).
But I think now is the time to rethink the purpose of this blog, which I haven't updated since April. Maybe I'm burned out. Maybe I've run out of things to say.
Maybe this is the end. But it isn't the end yet. I need some time to refresh. Until then, this space will be a bit empty. Sorry about that.
Let me concentrate on other writing, both my full-time paid gig and my off-time scribblings that sometimes turn into poetry and other times turn into just mush.

Basquiat

2010-04-17T13:18:00.005-05:00

I haven't written in this spot for a good minute. I don't have much of an excuse, except that I haven't seen much that's given me any motivation or inspiration to blog. It's not that I haven't seen any good movies lately, but none have been so good or so bad that I had, just had, to write about them.

That was the case until last night when as part of the Riverrun International Film Festival that's taking place here in good ole Winston-Salem, I had the chance to see the documentary Basquiat: The Radiant Child.

Jean-Michel Basquiant took the art world by storm in the early 1980s with his graffiti-styled paintings and drawings, a brilliant tapestry of work that spoke of the turbulent and exciting times in which he lived. He was only 27 of a drug overdose, another in a long line of geniuses who shined bright but burned quick.

As I saw watching the movie, I was taken in by the story of a man who grew up in the streets and managed to survive by his wits, who by raw unbridled talent made a name for himself first on the walls and trains of New York with the enigmatic tag of SAMO and then later in some of the most elite art museums.

Years ago, I saw the movie Basquiat, directed by artist and friend Julian Schnabel and starring Jeffrey Wright, who captured the nervous energy of Basquiat. But it is one to see Wright portray Basquiat but quite another to see Basquiat himself in archival footage and never-before-seen interviews.

We see a man who sought fame and found it not to his liking, a black man struggling to find his place in an elite white art world that kept defining him and his work.

Director Tamra Davis, through interviews with his friends, follows Basquiat's childhood in New York to his untimely death. In between, she allows us into his world, filled with late-night parties with his friend, Fab Five Freddy, and his insane work ethic.

The result is a nuanced portrait of an exceedingly complex artist, someone who wanted people to understand his work and to hear his voice. He wanted to succeed, no doubt, but he wanted to succeed on his own terms and to make uncompromising work.

The subtitle of this movie has it right. Basquiat was a radiant child, an artist whose work was too brilliant even now for this world, who created art that we still talk about.

And I find myself so much the better for being exposed to who he was and what he was about.

Roger Ebert

2010-02-20T15:55:00.006-05:00

Roger Ebert cannot speak.

The acclaimed film critic lost his voice to complications from thyroid cancer four years ago. He can no longer relish solid food, drink good wine or talk about his favorite movies.

But in a way, his voice is still there, even if he can no longer move his lips. That's clear from this beautifully-rendered profile in the latest issue of Esquire.

I grew up on Roger Ebert and Gene Siskel. Their show, "At The Movies," was required viewing for this budding movie enthusiast. I had to see if they gave thumbs up or thumbs down to the latest movies.

Siskel and Ebert were a contrast of physicality. Siskel was nearly bald and slim and given to harsh take-downs of films. Ebert had silver hair, a round face and a softer tone. They were like the good cop/bad cop tag team of film criticism.

But they knew their stuff and they were fair. Their arguments were well-constructed and not too high-falutin' for the average viewer. They just loved movies. It was that simple.

And I loved movies too. I didn't always agree with them. I still don't understand why Ebert loved Eyes Wide Shut, that strange film from the late Stanley Kubrick focused on marriage and S&M and that featured the now-divorced Tom Cruise and Nicole Kidman.

Chris Jones, who wrote the profile, captures a man finding new ways to communicate other than through his lips. Ebert scribbles his thoughts on Post-it notes while watching Pedro Almodovar's film, Broken Embraces. He taps out his musings on a blog, keeping his voice alive via the World Wide Web, a distant yet intimate form of dialogue.

And with his wife, Chaz, there is an ease of communication where words aren't needed that comes from 16 years of marriage.

This is no against-all-odds tale, some cliched-filled happy-go-lucky story. Instead, what emerges is Ebert as a man taking it one day at a time, dealing as best as he can with the crappy cards he has been dealt with.

He gets angry. He gets frustrated. You can see it in the shaking of his hands and the desperate grab for paper to put down this thoughts, even though the moment he starts writing, the feelings have already started to dissipate.

The picture that accompanies the story shows Ebert with large smiling eyes staring back at us. His face is thinner than I remember and it slopes into a weird V shape, the result of his lower jaw being taken out years ago because of the cancer.

I imagine him to be a loud voice locked in a quiet body bursting at the seams to make noise. But there are more ways to make noise than with your mouth. He writes. He scribbles. He taps his fingers across the keyboards on his computer.

Ebert can no longer speak but we hear him nonetheless.

Up In The Air

2010-01-23T16:20:00.003-05:00

Ryan Bingham has the bliss life, the kind we all think we would want, the one where we can live out of our suitcases and fly anywhere we wanted to, piling up frequent flier miles and staying in swank hotels.

In Up In The Air, Bingham (played with ever-easy charm by George Clooney) lives this life at a cost: He works for a company that other companies hire to fire people. And Bingham does his job very well, giving speeches about people who built empires who started right where Mr. or Ms. Laid-Off Worker is sitting.

It is a cold job he does with dignity and to do that job, he lives a disconnected existence.

And everything is swell, until his company decides that it would be cheaper to do the firings via video conference rather than in person. That threatens Bingham's out-of-suitcase lifestyle.

Plus, love, in the form of another corporate downsizer named Alex, also shakes up his obligation-free life of arrested development.

As directed by Jason Reitman (who gained enormous critical acclaim with his Oscar-nominated film Juno), this movie flits from sexy comedy to a screen version of the book Bowling Alone, which detailed the collapse of the American community.

Critics have hailed this as Clooney's best performance. That's hype, but it is a good performance, one that taps into Clooney's persona as the never-going-to-marry bachelor. The brilliance of his performance is he shows through Bingham the dark side of such a persistently solo existence.

It is only when he falls in love with Alex (sexy smart Vera Farmiga) that he realizes maybe the way he has gone about his life was wrongheaded and wronghearted.

Reitman, thankfully, keeps the movie from getting all mushy, and part of that comes from the real-life people who play the employees who get fired, their emotions red-hot. That decision grounds the movie, so to speak. He manages to sneak in a message or two about the devastation our ever-shrinking economy is having on every day Americans in a story about our increasing isolation from each other, the ease in which we hurt each other primarily because we've lost that need to connect in a meaningful way.

We're all about text messages and Facebook friending and twittering our lives instead of living our lives. And in the end, all that flying, all that living out of the suitcase, gets old and empty.

It is a important message that Reitman delivers without preachiness and with plenty of humor. And it makes me think I should probably fly more.

Book of Eli

2010-01-17T15:54:00.002-05:00

Book of Eli is a parable parading as an action flick, a mediation on the importance of literacy buried beneath decapitations done in silhouette.

And it is all cool and never preachy.

This is the first feature from the Hughes Brothers in nine years, the creative forces behind Menance To Society and From Hell.

Allen and Albert Hughes, in their new movie, decided to go western and apocalyptic, the result of some mysterious nuclear holocaust 30 years prior.

Denzel Washington is the titular Eli, a lone warrior in the tradition of Mad Max, armed with a gun, a blade and the last Bible on the planet. He has walked deserted roads and burnt-out landscapes littered with the remains of a world no one knows anymore.

Thirty years ago, a voice (presumably God) told Eli to head west with that Bible so that it may one day do good and be the key to mankind's salvation. And he has kept that path and cut the hands off anyone who dared touch him or what he simply refers to as the book.

We've seen apocalypse on the screen many times, men and women reduced to savages killing each other over scraps of food. The recently-released The Road covers much of the same ground the Hughes Brothers deal with here.

But the difference here is that it is not just water and food that are scarce resources; books no longer exist. And the villain, Carnegie (played by the wonderful and often creepy Gary Oldman) is the only other person in the film who knows and appreciates the power of books and the knowledge contained within.

Carnegie is the would-be dictator of a small town into which Eli enters, and once Carnegie finds out that Eli has the only Bible in the world, he sets out to do whatever it takes to get that book, knowing that he might be able to use it to control people.

Given the subject matter, it is surprising that the movie isn't as ponderous as one might think. The Hughes Brothers make ample room for humor and for cool action sequences that show Eli is rather deadly with his blade.

The cinematography is evocative, as one would expect from the Hughes Brothers.

And there is a twist at the end that won't be revealed here that, at least for me, deepened the movie.

No, the movie isn't all that deep but I found it fascinating and thought-provoking, a cool action flick that easily pleases those who love to think and those who just love a good knife fight and those who happen to love both.

Mourning Blockbuster

2009-12-31T12:55:00.003-05:00

Blockbuster is closing. Not all of them, just the one around the corner, the one less than five minutes away that I could go to late at night when I wanted to feed my movie fix.

A large "Store Closing" banner hangs outside the building. Employees are overseeing the liquidation of everything in the store. In the windows are posters promoting discounts as high as 80 percent. And I am in mourning.

I know all about Netflix and everytime I go to Harris Teeter, I see the Redbox vending machines. But, for me, there was nothing like going to Blockbuster or Hollywood Video.

I cherished those moments of browsing, your eyes going over all those titles, some big studio blockbusters and others more independent fare. One night it might be the latest Michael Bay movie. Another night, it could be some obscure movie I had never heard of.

And of course, there have been plenty of times when the movies I picked absolutely sucked, such stinkers that the word "stinker" doesn't even do them justice.

But others have been wonderful movie-watching experiences, full of rich indelible characters and superb acting.

I found them through browsing, and that's why I loved Blockbuster. I could spend an hour just walking around, trying to choose, patient in my search.

The first time I used Redbox was this week. I got The Hangover, a hilariously raunchy movie. I struggled with how to use it. I stood at the Harris Teeter an embarrassing long time trying to figure it all out. And I was frustrated with the limited number of titles. You just had to choose quickly as a line formed behind you or just go empty-handed.

That never happened at Blockbuster. Not that you didn't go home empty-handed some nights. But you had the time to figure out what you wanted.

And the joy came when you happened upon some great movie you might not have discovered if you hadn't spent all that time browsing.

We live in this world where patience is a rarity. Time rushes by us, and we have to make these rapid choices. You can't wait and see.

The good things, the wonderful things, in life --- you don't see them right away. You have to browse because the beauty of life appears in unexpected places. You have to walk around searching a bit before you find it, whatever that it is.

And when you find it, whether it's that right movie, or that right person you want to spend the rest of your life with, you know it and you're happy that you took the time to find it.

That's why I'm mourning Blockbuster. I hate having to go to Redbox or order movies from Netflix. I want to walk around for awhile, pick something up, look at it for awhile, put it back, pick something else up, then rent it and see what happens. I may like it or I may hate it.

But no one ever said searching for gems was going to be easy. I guess I'll have to find my gems somewhere else.

Avatar

2009-12-21T19:02:00.004-05:00

Avatar is gorgeous, absolutely breathtaking at times, seamless in its beauty, but the film is also pedestrian in its storytelling, predictable and weighed down by wooden dialogue and ham-fisted moralizing.

This is James Cameron's masterpiece, his comeback since he made the mammoth hit Titanic that catapulted Leonardo Di Caprio to fame so many years ago and the first two Terminator movies. The movie is price tagged at $230 million and was years in the making, with Cameron waiting for the technology to catch up to his imagination.

The result is a film vibrant with color and jaw-dropping special effects that look even better in 3D version. The magic is in how the special effects fade into the background, awe-inspiring in how realistic they appear.

But the special effects are supposed to aid in the telling of the story, and the story is simply this -- evil American corporation goes to Pandora to steal a mineral known as "unobtanium" that is key to Earth's survival. Standing in the way are blue-skinned gazelle-like creatures known as The Na'vi, and they're not about to watch their world be ravaged by these human colonizers.

Jake Sully (played by Sam Worthington, who unfortunately was in that money-losing Terminator sequel this summer) is a paraplegic Marine recruited to go to Pandora and take his twin brother's place in a cool scientific experiment.

Scientists have spent years growing this Avatars, half-human, half-Na'vi, bodies into which human minds are implanted. Sully is the guinea pig and his mission is to befriend The Na'vi and convince them to relocate so their land can be scraped away.

Sully jumps at the chance to be in a body that walks and runs through lush jungles and leaps onto lizard-like creatures that fly into blue skies. But his plans to complete his mission go sideways when he meets beautiful Na'vi warrior (Zoe Saldana) and falls in love.

Of course, falling in love leads to outright rebellion against his superiors when he realizes what they're doing is wrong.

And for all the awesome CGI, it doesn't obscure the fact that this movie is unfailingly predictable. The dialogue is awful at times, though some humor manages to get through.

Cameron does remember that he is making popcorn entertainment, and he fills the screen with action sequences geek-lovers everywhere will adore.

But all of that stuff can't make up for the lack of a story you really care about. Take away the CGI, and you have Braveheart, without Mel Gibson. You have 300, without the bare abs.

Yes, Cameron makes incredible strides in the use of motion-capture technology that other filmmakers will be studying for years. But this isn't some gnarly breakthrough in terms of storytelling.

It is cliched to the point of numbness. It is knock-you-over-the-head pro-environmentalism to the point that Al Gore might get annoyed. Umm.. the Earth is precious, we are connected to the land, yada yada yada. We get the point and we might even agree with you but please don't preach.

Avatar is a good movie, for the most part, a lovely way to spend a weekend afternoon, lost in the magic of moviemaking. But next time, Cameron should spend more time on the story and less time on the expensive CGI.

The Princess & The Frog

2009-12-12T13:15:00.004-05:00

Everyone knows what to expect from a Disney movie; they expect to transported to a magical place where dreams come true if you wish upon a star, a place where Prince Charming sweeps a young woman off her feet and they live happily ever after.

And in that sense, The Princess & The Frog is no different from the Snow Whites and Cinderellas of the past. Except this time our heroine is a black woman.

For some, that might not make much difference, but to black women who grew up watching Disney movies that only showcased white beauty, this historical milestone means a lot.

But it won't mean anything if the movie isn't good. Luckily, in this case, it is.

The Princess & The Frog is retro, capturing that two-dimensional animation audiences haven't seen in many years. It is classic both in style and narrative.

Anika Noki Rose is Tiana, a native of New Orleans who dreams of making her late father's dream of opening a restaurant come true. She isn't a princess in the traditional sense. Tiana is a hardworking girl who saves her money and refuses to party.

Into her life comes a prince transformed into a frog, thanks to a evil voodoo conman played by Keith David. Of course, we know how the story goes -- princess kisses frog and frog turns into prince.

Well, not exactly. Tiana turning into a frog too in this scenario and together, fussing almost all the way, Tiana and the prince begin a journey to become human again. They encounter a cast of characters including a Creole-speaking light bug and a trumpet-playing alligator.

The movie is infused with New Orleans culture, from the food to the music, and I found myself swept away in show-stopping musical numbers, many blessed with the powerful voice of Anika Noki Rose (who wowed audiences a couple years ago in Dreamgirls).

Disney movies are often predictable and this one is no different. But we enjoy the journey and we laugh and go aww along the way.

The performances are universally wonderful (even Oprah Winfrey in a small role as Tiana's mother) as our heroine slowly begins to learn that love is the most important thing in the world.

G-rated films are not my fare (ummm.... Die Hard is at the top of my favorite movie list and that's about as far from Disney as you can get). But I enjoyed this movie, and not just because we have a black woman in a Disney film.

It is because the movie is good, entertaining and with a message all us adults could stand to learn.

Precious

2009-11-22T15:33:00.004-05:00

Black folks are sensitive about our image, and for good reason. Our history is one of misrepresentation, of dehumanization, one in which the act of a single bad apple is used to denigrate the entire race.

And when you look to Hollywood, you see a legacy of images seared into our public consciousness, one that elevates buffoonery and obscures our dignity. So anyone surprised by the controversy surrounding the movie Precious: Based on the Novel Push by Sapphire just hasn't been paying attention.

Here we have a story about a obese, illiterate black girl who has birthed two children by her own father and endures horrifying physical and sexual abuse by her mother, poor dysfunctional black people living in the grittiest of conditions.

Precious exists, and so does her mother, Mary, and her father, Carl. They exist even though we don't want to see them. They exist even though we pretend they are as invisible as Ralph Ellison's narrator in Invisible Man.

The problem is that when it comes to Hollywood, it seems as if that's the only image we see, as if every black family is that messed up, that we all live in the ghetto, that bullets fly all the time in all of our neighborhoods. And when that happens, all the nuance of black life is lost.

This is why us black folk are so sensitive and it's why some people have reacted to Precious like this guy.

It was in this context that I approached the film, directed by the ever-provocative Lee Daniels, who made the equally controversial Monsters Ball. That movie garnered Halle Berry an Academy Award in a performance some raved as powerfully raw and others criticized as playing into the most awful stereotypes surrounding black women.

Given all the controversy about this movie, I ended up carried away by the simplicity of the storytelling and the pain-drenched performances by everyone. Daniels knows something all good storytellers know -- less is more.

He shows restraint in places where the novel itself is unflinchingly graphic. The abuse is there, but he pulls back just a bit.

More importantly, he allows Precious to tell her story. That's where the power of the novel and this movie lies, in Precious' voice, her ever-growing ability to tell her tale, both of tragedy and triumph.

It is in her broken English that she founds, gradually, the power of words.

Daniels allows us entry into her world, her confusion about her circumstance, her desire for something better, her anger at her abuse, her fantasies of being a superstar with a light-skinned boyfriend. Precious is a girl who knows not the meaning of her name, who is bowed down in self-hatred, who has never known love.

As teacher Blue Rain, who heads up an alternative school that Precious is sent to, Paula Patton is the shining light of love that Precious needs. And so are the others who come into her life, the students in Ms. Rain's classroom, the nurse (played by rocker Lenny Kravitz) and the social worker (portrayed by a nearly unrecognizable Mariah Carey).

But the revelation is Gabourey Sidibe, a relative newcomer in the game of acting, who fully inhabits Precious in a performance transforms stereotype into fully-realized human.

And comedian Monique gives a horrifying and heartbreaking performance as Mary, Precious' abusive mother who is wholly ignorant to her monstrous behavior.

But the movie isn't without its problems. I wonder, as others have, why the good characters in this movie, such as teacher Blue Rain, are light-skinned, while Precious and her parents, the most dysfunctional people in the movie, are all dark-skinned. Lee Daniels has said in interviews that he has had issues with colorism, that discrimination that black people practice against each other, and it shows in his casting.

The other problem I have is the ending. We find Precious dealing with the fact that she is HIV positive in a movie set in the late 1980s. I wondered what would happen to her? How long would it be before she died? Would she complete her education? Would she find work? Would she find a way to take care of her two children, one of which has down syndrome?

Neither the movie nor the novel answers those questions. We are only left with the hope that Precious' new-found determination and desire for better things will help her overcome her obstacles.

But in the end, I liked the movie. I saw the movie as art, as one that challenges us and moves us beyond our comfort zones, to get to a truth we may otherwise not want to see. I don't want to see just positive images of black people. And I don't want to see just negative images of us.

I want to see us as who we really are, human beings, flawed, some of us good, some of us bad, some of us in-between, complex, complicated, four-fourths man and woman. Human. The bottom line is that all of our stories deserve to be told, not just this one.

This Is It

2009-11-16T15:10:00.005-05:00

I wanted to keep Michael Jackson frozen in time, just as he looked on the cover of his pop masterpiece, Thriller. There, he was dressed in a white suit with a black shirt, his brown skin smooth, his eyes intense, his aura all innocent, a singer still somewhat a child but also on the brink of coming into his own as a young man.
But the Michael Jackson who died at the age of 50 was something far different. His nose was halfway gone, his skin turned vanilla, the Jheri curl replaced with straight black hair. His face was skeletal. He didn't look human even though he was, no matter what anyone might say. His musical genius had long been obscured by his weirdness, the child-molestation charges he successfully fought, the money problems, the drama, oh the drama.
When he died, I mourned the death of an incredible entertainer who poured his soul into his music, and I tried to forget about the strange being he became in the eyes of many. So when This Is It, a documentary of his last days rehearsing for his 50-city tour, arrived in theaters, I didn't want to see it. I didn't want to see Michael Jackson at his worst.
I finally gave in recently, however, my curiosity getting the best of me.
And what I found was that the Michael Jackson of old had never left, despite the media representations of his rather odd behavior. The passion that informed his life was ever present.
What the film shows is a man still at the top of his game, even if in a few days, his life would end. We saw what could be when a genius pushes for perfection. We saw what happens when magic is allowed to flourish.
I still cringed at the sight of Michael Jackson. He is scarily thin, and we never get to look into those eyes of his because in every scene he wears sunglasses.
But that tender voice of his is there. He, in that quiet way of his, sweetly admonishes when the music isn't quite right or something else is off in the performance. He tells a young guitarist that it is her time to shine.
The moments I remember the most are the performances, where we see that even with age, his dance movements are as sharp as ever. That falsetto voice of his still brims with soul.
Kenny Ortega, who was the producer for Michael Jackson's comeback, edits this archival footage with care and sensitivity, allowing us a rare glimpse of an artist in his rawest creative mode. We get caught up in the excitement of seeing Michael Jackson and his collaborators birthing something ambitious, something that, if Michael Jackson had lived, would have blown the eye-sockets out of anyone who had the pleasure of seeing it live.
That, we know all to well now, never happened. On June 25 of this year, Michael Jackson died. And the most heartbreaking footage of the movie is seeing dancers auditioning for the show talk about how overjoyed they are to have the chance to be on stage with Michael, their inspiration to dance, shout and shake their bodies to the ground. We see them almost delirious at the time they get to spend with Michael and you feel sad knowing that these are Michael Jackson's final days.
Yet, here is This Is It, a lasting testament to remind us that however strange, however odd, however troubled Michael Jackson may have been, he was also the penultimate entertainer, someone who gave us the beauty of his musical soul, who touched us all with his vision.

Before Sunrise

2009-11-12T14:37:00.008-05:00

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

2009-11-02T19:29:00.003-05:00

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

2009-10-28T17:59:00.004-05:00

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

2009-10-20T12:48:00.002-05:00

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

2009-09-26T13:33:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-12T12:40:00.003-05:00

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

2009-09-07T10:58:00.002-05:00

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.

Halloween II

2009-08-29T11:22:00.002-05:00

There's no excuse for neglecting a blog. None whatsoever. But it happens, especially in a summer where movies have not inspired me to write much.

In short order, though I did love 500 Days of Summer and the new Transformers, though for vastly different reasons. I refused to watch G.I. Joe, it's sheer awfulness revealed in the trailer, which is never a good sign.

And finally, there's Rob Zombie's Halloween II. Two years ago, Zombie gave us back Michael Myers, the William Shatner-wearing mass murderer that stalked Jamie Lee Curtis in that 1978 movie. It was a brutal, slash-happy remake, brought down only by Zombie's insistence that we must understand the monster. Monsters are not made to be understood. They are made to kill and scare the living crap out of us.

The sequel picks up where the last movie left us, with Laurie Strobe (this time played by Scott Taylor-Compton) all bloody and hysterical and in the hospital. But unlike the original Halloween II, this movie takes up the action a year later.

Laurie Strobe is in therapy and haunted by nightmares, and our dear Dr. Loomis is hawking a book on Michael Myers in which he reveals that Strobe is Michael Myers' long-lost sister, Angel.

Of course, Michael Myers, bullet-proof as he is, isn't dead, as some insist. He's alive and just waiting to come back to Haddonfield to kill some more and reclaim his sister.

Zombie is good at creating tension from dark hallways and blood-soaked floors. The violence is immediate and undeniably in-your-face.

And it is often unnecessarily graphic. Myers plunges his knife into his victims a sickening number of times that it ceases to be scary and becomes increasingly just gross.

We even see Myers eat a dog. That's just too much.

But when Zombie focuses on Myers' bloody reign of terror, the movie works. The acting is a bit over-the-top but effective. We get a sense of how a traumatic event changes people.

And there's a clever (okay, somewhat clever) twist at the end that brings the whole thing home and maybe, maybe, makes room for a sequel.

Michael Jackson

2009-06-26T14:13:00.004-05:00

The gloved one is gone, the one who bedazzled the world with his moves and touched the world with his music.

Michael Jackson was and is a pop culture icon, one so entrenched in our everyday language and existence that his death leaves a hole immediately felt by anyone who ever listened to that falsetto voice of his.

As a kid, I mimicked his dances, trying to get that moonwalk just right. I remember the night his video/mini-movie "Thriller"premiered. I ran into the bathroom as Michael Jackson's angelic face transformed into that of a monstrous werewolf to terrorize the beautiful Ola Ray. And I came back just in time as he did those smooth dance moves in zombie makeup.

I also remember when Michael Jackson electrified the world with his hit-making performance of "Billie Jean" on the 25th Anniversary of Motown, how he moonwalked across the stage in perfect motion, effortlessly.

Those moments I held dear as I saw his career decline, his later albums never reaching the success of Thriller. I cringed as his face became lighter and his nose narrower, the plastic surgery turning a handsome man into a human skeleton.

His behavior could not be explained. That massive amusement park home of his that he called Neverland and to which he brought children whom he was later accused of molesting. The now strange marriage he had to Lisa Marie Presley and the uncomfortable kiss they shared on MTV. The shot of him danging one of his sons out of a hotel balcony.

Michael Jackson was, no doubt, a disturbed man, a man twisted inside out by a dysfunctional childhood marked by early success and an abusive father. He never learned how to be an adult because he had never had a chance to be a child.

And throughout his life, he chased youth. He feared growing older.

It is something, though, that we all fear, our youth fading, the aches and pains of age creeping up on us. Many of us spend our lives keeping a little bit of that youth in plastic surgeries and injections of Botox or just sitting out in the sun to get that nice tan line.

We chase youth because we loved our innocence. We loved that time when things seemed simple, when the complexities of adulthood hadn't tarnished our rainbow-colored view of the world.

Michael Jackson touched us because we loved that he looked at the world with child-like wonder, that he believed love was so powerful that hate could not win.

Being grown up sometimes robs us of that belief. We become cynical, hardened by life's rough blows. But Michael Jackson had an optimism that good conquers evil, that one person could truly change the world if he cared enough.

And in many ways, Michael Jackson did change the world. He did change us. There was a purity in the pop confections that he made. Love was always the theme in his music, love of self, love of a woman, love of humanity. It was always there, for all to see.

So as disturbed as I was by the weirdness of Michael Jackson's behavior, I was always touched by his music, the songs that made you dance ("Don't Stop Until You Get Enough" and "Remember the Time") and the ones that made you think ("Man in the Mirror") .

It is hard, now in the immediacy of his death, to measure the impact Michael Jackson had on us. I just know there would be no Justin Timberlake, Usher or Chris Brown without him. There would be no New Edition, New Kids on The Block or InSync, without him. I know that pop music divided into two eras --- pre-Michael Jackson and post-Michael Jackson. The landscape of pop music changed when he came on the scene. The possibilities for what pop music was expanded under his tutelage.

Michael Jackson gave us entertainment performed with a perfectionist's excellence. He gave us his all on and off the stage, and in the end, we forgave him his eccentricities because his music was about love and we were in love with him.

Today, I am still wrapping my head around his death. He was too full of life to ever die. And really, as I listen to that voice of his, that beautifully sweet voice full of wonder, he is yet alive, telling me life ain't so bad at all. Let the madness of the music get to you.

I will, Michael, I will.

The Taking of Pelham 123

2009-06-13T12:00:00.004-05:00

Tony Scott is known for action movies that whiplash audiences with spinning cameras and flashes of images broken up with brief glimpses of character.

Here in The Taking of Pelham 123, Scott is no different, going for the jugular as much as possible.

But what keeps the movie from turning into another shallow blockbuster are the performances. Scott picks his actors well, and he couldn't have gotten a better actor than Denzel Washington, who has appeared in a number of Scott's movies. Washington grounds the movie and allows the audience to gloss over those logic holes that always appear in summer blockbuster.

This is also a remake of a movie I never saw, the 1974 thriller of the same name that starred the late Walter Matthau in the Denzel Washington role.

Washington is Walter Garber, a New York City subway dispatcher who happens to be there when Ryder, played by an amped-up John Travolta, hijacks a subway train, threatening to kill passengers if he doesn't get $10 million in an hour.

The heart of the story lies in the relationship that's built between Garber and Ryder. It's a tense one as Ryder cajoles and menaces all in one breath, while Garber tries to be the voice of calm in a chaotic situation.

Scott builds the tension well and breaks it every once and a while with large helpings of gallows humor.

Washington has mastered the art of playing decent guys who have a smidgen of a dark side. It's no different here, as we soon find out that Garber has been demoted after being accused of taking a bribe.

And there's more to Ryder, of course, than what we at first see, but you'll have to see the movie to find that out.

The supporting cast includes John Turturro as a hostage negotiator and James Gandolfini as the New York City mayor who is part Rudy Guliani and part Michael Bloomberg, and they all give good performances.

The weak leak, to be honest, is Travolta. He overacts and instead of being scary, he ends up being unintentionally funny, especially when he continues to utter one particular profanity that starts with "mother."

That's a minor quibble, though. I watched this movie after only having five hours of sleep, and not once did I fade out. This I consider an accomplishment.

Being whiplashed, at least in this movie, isn't always a bad thing.

Terminator Salvation/Star Trek

2009-05-10T13:02:00.004-05:00

Arnold Schwarzenegger, you should have come back. And Christian Bale, you should have stuck to being The Dark Knight.

Either scenario might have salvaged Terminator Salvation from being a tired reshoot instead of the thrilling sci-fi adventure it could have been.

Bale stars as John Connor, who is destined to be the leader of the resistance against Skynet, the computer program that went nuts, took over the world and got machines killing humans. The year is 2018, and Connor is not that leader yet, just a cog in the resistance movement.

Soon, he comes face to face with Marcus (played by Sam Worthington), a mysterious man who turns out to be more machine than human (or is he?). Also in the mix is Kyle Reese (Anton Yelchin). Fans of the Terminator series know that Reese was once played by Michael Biehn in the 1984 classic who goes back in time to save Connor's mother, Sarah, from Arnold and then ends up getting her pregnant before getting himself killed. Her child? John Connor.

You get all that because this time travel business can get a bit confusing. Eventually, Connor and Marcus will have to work together to save Reese because if Reese dies, Connor won't exist.

This could have been all heady cool stuff but director McG paints the whole movie in a dull gray that is supposed to represent how apocalyptic everything is.

Bale plays Connor with an unceasing intensity. What marked the first two Terminator movies was a quirky sense of humor underneath all the world-is-ending foreboding.

Not here. Things are just dark. Which makes the movie a long, lumbering, angst-filled experience for the audience, with sparks of well-filmed action thrown in.

Star Trek, on the other hand, is everything a sci-fi movie should be. It is a true reboot, finding something in the classic television series that's fresh. We see old characters in new light, mostly because they're played by younger actors. But also because we see them at the beginning of their lives: Spock as a young man struggling between his human and Vulcan sides, Kirk as a James Dean kind of rebel looking for purpose in his life.

J.J. Abrams directs the movie with a verve, ably bringing new insights to old material. And all the while, he makes a damn good action movie, one filled with thrills and characters you care about.

Abrams succeeds where McG fails. He builds characters. He shows relationships. He makes their struggles relatable. McG gives us a Connor who keeps us at a distance, who we are never allowed to see inside. So in the end, we don't root for him. We don't care about him at all.

Only through Marcus do we get a glimpse of a compelling character, a man/machine who causes all around him to question who is really human.

Emotion rules the day in Star Trek, spilling all over the place just as easily as the blood that's spilled. But in Terminator Salvation, only blood is spilled, and the emotions are kept firmly in check.

And we are so much the less for it.

Wolverine

2009-05-03T13:45:00.003-05:00

The claws are dull.

Or at least that's my conclusion after seeing the underwhelming X-Men Origins: Wolverine.

Wolverine is supposed to be a bad-ass, the beserker-angry superhero with the enigmatic past, the retractable claws and the indestructible adamantium-lined skeleton that makes him hard to kill.

And yet, this bad-ass is watered down, the joy of seeing him rip apart some bad guys muted, all by a sucky script and confusing directing by Gavin Hood, who was responsible for the much better art-house film, Tsotsi, a few years back. Some directors have successfully made the jump from independent film making to the big leagues (David Fincher comes to mind, for example).

Hood isn't one of those cats.

He doesn't film action that well so that you're on the edge of your seat in awe of what's on the screen. The film, instead, felt flat, though there were some action sequences that did thrill to the bone, especially the fight scenes between Wolverine and his brother, Victor (aka Sabretooth), who desperately needs a manicure (a man shouldn't have nails that long).

And Hugh Jackman tries mightily to imbue his Wolverine with enough soul to make audience members, both fan and non fan alike, give a damn about what happens to his character. Liev Schreiber gives his Victor a charismatic snarl, and the movie lights up a bit everytime he's on the screen.

Ryan Reynolds as the sword-swiveling Wade and Will.I.Am as John Wraith make their mark in the short time that they have in the movie.

The real problem is the script. The story just isn't compelling. Not that I expect the why-so-serious philosophical underpinnings of The Dark Knight. But here, we get no explanation about why Wolverine and Victor hate each other so much. We gain no more insight into Wolverine that we didn't get from the previous three X-Men movies. And the climactic fight scene was merely meh.

Don't get me wrong. The movie wasn't awful. We'll save that descriptive to movies that truly deserve it like Daredevil or The Punisher.

But for a movie that was so anticipated that it got leaked online, I was expecting more. I wanted sharper claws.

Obsessed

2009-04-25T12:26:00.004-05:00

The new movie, Obsessed, is tripe. Trash. Not anywhere close to being Oscar bait. But it is well-made tripe. Entertaining tripe. And you know where this movie is going the moment you plop your behind in the seat.
This is an over-the-top, crowd-pleasing movie that teases and taunts its way to the grand finale that everyone is blood-thirsty for -- that catfight between Beyonce Knowles (aka Sasha Fierce) and Ali Larter, who plays the femme fatal.
A much milder rip-off of Fatal Attraction, the film features Idris Elba as Derek, a happily married man (you would be happy too if you were married to the fineness that is Beyonce) with a new house, a successful career and a son named Kyle.
All is perfect until Larter's Lisa comes into his life, a cute blond who is temping at his agency. Somehow, she ends up being a permanent and very seductive presence in his life, tempting him with racy e-mails and saucy come-ons accompanied with sneaking a drug into his drink. Unlike Fatal Attraction, nothing happens between Derek and Lisa, despite Lisa's fervent attempts.
But that doesn't stop Lisa from creating some crazy fantasy in her head that Derek and she are destined to be together, if only Derek's wife, Sharon, wasn't in the way.
And that's when Beyonce shines. This ain't deep. Beyonce gives Sharon that around-the-way, don't mess with my man kind of attitude. That ready to take her earrings and serve some self-righteous beatdowns swagger that only Sasha Fierce can bring.
Too bad it takes a lot of shouting and not-too-subtle attempts by Lisa before the showdown comes in the last 15 minutes of the film.
Elba and Beyonce have some nice scenes together, and Larter does a good job of making Lisa the kind of sick bitch we like to see get her comeuppance at the end. Plus, the catfight is worth the wait. Trust me.
Predictable? Absolutely. Poor script? No doubt. Entertaining? Hell yes. And even with blood trickling down her chin, Beyonce is still gorgeous.

State of Play

2009-04-19T14:02:00.003-05:00

For more than a decade, I have toiled away as a reporter, scribbling away in my notebook, talking to all kinds of people, filling a blank screen with words that turn into a story against tight deadlines. I am a journalist, and as I watched the new movie, State of Play, I looked for the tiny details that rang true in Russell Crowe's Cal McAffrey, the grizzled reporter for the fictional Washington Globe.

And there was much that I recognized in myself -- the disorganized chaos of a desk, the gallows humor of a newsroom and the somewhat gritty work of loosening the lips of sources for information. A little over-the-top for dramatic effect but mostly accurate, except for the constant worry of being shot at.

This is a typical political potboiler done well by Kevin McDonald, who also directed the brilliant The Last King of Scotland. Here we find McAffrey trying to help his former college roommate, Sen. Stephen Collins, who is caught in a scandal after his lead researcher and mistress ends up dead. Collins also happens to be on a committee investigating a Blackwater-like company accused of committing fraud and atrocities in its work in Iraq.

As with most political thrillers, McAffrey stumbles upon a grand wide-ranging conspiracy whose tentacles reach the highest levels of government. Helping McAffrey is young political blogger, Della Frye (played by the always wonderful Rachel McAdams). McAffrey and Frye develop an uneasy working relationship, the just-the-facts veteran reporter versus the gossip-mongering blogger.

And as they work together to find the truth in all this mess, McDonald also finds time to enter into the debate about the on-going crisis in the news industry, a crisis that I am unfortunately all too familiar with. Newspapers are dying, and there's legitimate concern that investigative journalism may be dying with it, as the business model for newspapers crumbles quickly in a sour economy.

Business concerns crop up against the expensive, time-consuming work that goes into producing quality journalism, and we see that very clearly as McAffrey and Frye plug along, sometimes in the face of grave danger.

The twists come fast and furious in this movie, which moves at a rapid pace that hardly ever drags. There are holes, but the performances, particularly from Crowe and the lovely Helen Mirren, as McAffrey's boss, Cameron Lynne, makes you forgive them, for the most part. (Side note: I can't, however, quite forgive the shot of the black woman wearing rollers in the newsroom. Something's just not right about that.)

Like All The President's Men, this movie shows the power of quality journalism to inform us so that we can make better decisions. I shudder to think what our democracy would look like without it.

I Love You, Man

2009-03-26T13:14:00.003-05:00

The world of dude friendship is simple yet complicated, governed by its own set of unspoken rules. And as for how to cultivate dude friendships, well there are no rules or any guidelines. You just, for some weird reason, start hanging out together.

Unless you happen to be one of those guys who gets along better with women than he does with men, and that is where you find real-estate agent Peter Klaven in the raunchy and sweet film, I Love You, Man.

Klaven (Paul Rudd) is engaged to his gorgeous girlfriend, Zooey (the lovely Rashida Jones) and as he prepares for the wedding, he realizes he has no suitable candidate for a best man because he'd rather make fancy coffee drinks for his women friends than shoot pool with the guys.

In fact, poor Klaven is what you'd might call a metrosexual, a straight guy very in tune to his feminine side but completely straight.

What is a man with only female friends to do? Well, you go on a man date, of course. A series of man dates until you find the perfect male friend who will be your best man.

This could have been a disaster of a movie, but Rudd plays Klavin with such sweet sincerity that you can't help but root for him. And you cheer when he finally meets his soul dude, Sydney Fife, somewhat of a successful loser who mooches food at Klaven's open houses.

Fife is 365 degrees the opposite of Klaven. He lives in a trailer, refuses to pick up his dog's poop and likes to yell really loud in public, causing all sorts of embarrassment for anyone who decides to be his friend.

Yet, as played by Jason Segel (the star of Forgetting Sarah Marshall), Sydney has a sweet sensitive side hidden beneath all of that grossness. And the dude-esque chemistry between Rudd and Segel is just hot. Well, maybe not hot. Umm, adorable? Oh, screw it. The chemistry works.

And the movie works, in a sort of predictable romantic comedy way, except we're talking about guys, though this isn't the comedic version of Brokeback Mountain. In an funny way, the movie gets at the awkwardness of male friendships, the facade of masculinity we guys use to keep our distance, to not express our feelings because hey, only women do that sort of thing.

But men need love, too. They need man love, and in this movie, you can be man enough to say I love you to another dude and still be a man.

Awwww, ain't that so sweet.

Watchmen

2009-03-07T13:52:00.003-05:00

Watchmen, for all the hype the past few months, is simply a good movie but not great, dragged down as it is by an all-too faithful rendering on screen of the infamous graphic novel of the same name and the hard-to-please expectations of comic book fans worldwide.

And it is by far way too long.

Director Zach Snyder wanted to make a movie that gives tribute to the many-layered graphic novel it is based upon. He wanted to create the ultimate superhero movie, a disturbing meditation on what superheroes would look like and be like in the real world. What kind of impact would they have on history and would we be better off because they were here and real? Or are superheroes just like us, just as messed up as we are?

Well, the answer is maybe and maybe not.

Between 1986 and 1987, Watchmen came out in 12 issues, each one telling a complex story of a world in which Richard Nixon is serving his fifth term and the United States is in a nuclear standoff with Russia. Dr. Manhattan, a physicist turned naked blue Superman via some freak accident, singlehandedly wins the Vietnam War but is now increasingly detached from humanity.

And The Comedian, a right-wing sociopathic mercenary, is murdered.

The story begins with The Comedian's death, and Rorschach, a paranoid masked avenger who has no remorse for killing the scum of the earth, wants to find out who's knocking off costumed heroes. He recruits other Watchmen, long retired after a 1977 federal law banned superheroes, to find the answers.

The movie flashes back and forth in time, revealing the origins of first the Minutemen and then years later the Watchmen. In addition to The Comedian, Rorschach, Dr. Manhattan, there's also Nite Owl, a Batman-like character who's now a middle-aged man longing for the glory days, and Silk Spectre, who relunctantly dons the costume her mother wore back in the day and who is in a strangely distant relationship with Dr. Manhattan.

The upshot: A grand conspiracy is uncovered, and a surprising villain reveals himself.

The movie picks up steam in the second half. The action is well shot and the performances aren't half-bad.

But for all of Zach Snyder's efforts, the movie doesn't wow. The plot drags in places, and you really wonder what all the hype was about.

The Dark Knight was better, with incredible action set pieces, a truly frightening villain, and a superhero faced with impossible choices. It was a dark ride that stayed with you months after you saw it.

In Watchmen, we have an absurdly dysfunctional family of superheroes, some good, some sick but kind of lovable in a weird way, some just lost souls trying to find their way in a corrupt world. And in the end, you wonder what the message was, what the meaning behind it all was. Then you discover it was just a lot of silly ballyhoo, well filmed but forgettable nonetheless.

Madea Goes To Jail

2009-02-22T13:34:00.004-05:00

Maybe Tyler Perry needs to hang up the wig.

His latest movie, Madea Goes to Jail, which is based on his hit play of the same name, is a hilarious mess that suffers from a thin script and a weak ending.

Perry has talent and ambition, both of which have led him to unparalleled success. He has built a loyal following that has catapulted his movies to box office glory and made him a name outside of the hard-to-break Hollywood movie studio system.

He, like Frank Sinatra, did it his way.

But Madea has, in many ways, become a creative crutch for Perry, a way to clumsily mix in broad humor with tear-jerker drama. It has worked in powerful ways in his previous movies, The Diary of a Mad Black Woman, and Madea's Family Reunion. And Madea is as funny as ever in Madea Goes To Jail.

But the story that surrounds Madea's antics is just not up to par. In the movie, Derek Luke portrays Joshua, a young prosecutor whose life is going smoothly. He is successful and he is about to marry another ambitious prosecutor by the name of Linda (Ion Overman).

Life is almost perfect until Candace (Keshia Knight Pulliam) shows up. Candace is a childhood friend who once had a promising future but is now addicted to drugs and working as a prostitute. Joshua is moved to help her but Linda urges Joshua to look the other way and tells him Candace and every poor person like her dug the ditch that they find themselves stuck in.

Meanwhile, Madea leads police on a car chase and then later dumps the car of a woman who stole her parking space at K-Mart. And she goes to jail (the title is indeed literal).

As is true in most Tyler Perry movies, predictability rules. You could, if you wanted to, write the script yourself. We know Madea and Candace will cross paths. We know Joshua is in love with Candace. We know Candace has a dark secret that led her on the path she is on. We know that in the end, God will fix everything if you have faith and believe and take responsibility for the choices you have made. All of these are good messages that Perry unfortunately piles on a bit too thick.

The movie is entertaining. Madea is a trip, and Perry knows what his audience wants and delivers it.

Yet as funny as Madea is, it doesn't make up for the weak script and the huge lapses in logic that you see. There's no gray in Perry's movies. The characters are either saintly good or demon-seed bad.

And no matter how awfully deep the situation, it somehow works out in the end, like the movie is a sitcom with the problem fixed in under 30 minutes. I don't mind happy endings but I do mind happy endings that aren't well-earned and lack credibility. A drama has to have some level of believability or else it doesn't move you. Or at least, it doesn't move me.

I applaud Perry for what he has been able to do in movies. I think it is important. But Perry has to do better than this. Take the wig off now, Mr. Perry.

He's Just Not That Into You

2009-02-07T12:11:00.004-05:00

The whole thing started with a six-word phrase uttered on an episode of that chicky show, Sex and The City, which turned into a bestselling self-help book which in turn became a movie starring Ben Affleck and Jennifer Aniston. Don't you just love Hollywood?

"He's just not that into you" cut through all the perceived crappiness of dating, the messiness, the mixed signals, the overanalyzing, the nonsensical rules we try to follow.

The complicated became simple. If you're a woman and a man doesn't call you after the first date, guess what, he's just not that interested in you, as Alex (Justin Long), a bar manager, tells hapless unlucky-in-love Gigi (Gennifer Goodwin) after his best friend, Conor, fails to call her after a first date.

Oh, how I wish the movie were so simple. But it's not. The film gives us a grand cast of characters in various stages of relationships. We have the aforementioned Gigi, who had a disastrous date with Conor, a real-estate developer who is hopelessly in love with Anna. Anna is having an affair with Ben, who is married to Janine, who happens to be friends with Gigi and Beth. And Beth desperately wants her long-time boyfriend, Neil, to marry her, which is tough because Neil doesn't believe in marriage. And oh, there's Mary, played by Drew Barrymore, who's being rejected by seven different kinds of technologies.

Got all that?

Despite all the scattered-yet-linked storylines, the movie actually works for quite a while before it all collapses into romantic-comedy cliches.

The director Ken Kwapis manages to create nice moments and the dialogue is pretty witty. Jennifer Connelly, who plays Janine, brings some depth to her character, and the whole storyline with Beth and Neil works mainly because of the chemistry between Jennifer Aniston and Ben Affleck, though it ends way too neatly and, at least for me, is a cop-out to appease some women who believe marriage-averse boyfriends will eventually cave in and pop the question if they really really are into you. Wouldn't it be nice if a movie like this didn't take the easy way out?

Justin Long brings an incredible amount of charm to Alex as he dishes out harsh dating advice to heartbroken Gigi who is oblivious to what she is doing wrong. Gennifer Goodwin gives her Gigi so cute and adorable and human even as we cringe at every embarrassing act of desperation perpetually single Gigi performs in her pursuit of love.

But we forgive her because we all know what it is like to like someone and hope beyond hope that he or she likes us back.

Too bad the movie soon runs out of ideas near the end, the edginess fading into predictability and dullness. We know how this movie is going to end. Unfortunately, it takes about 15 to 20 more minutes of tidying up loose ends before we get to it.

Just goes to show that as simple and as wonderful a phrase "He's Just Not That Into You" may be, it might not make a movie that we might be into.

Notorious

2009-01-17T11:03:00.003-05:00

Notorious, the new biopic about rapper Christopher Wallace, manages to peel the complicated man from the bigger-than-life myth. He was Biggie Smalls, Frank White, the Notorious B.I.G., smooth as the silky sheets he bedded many ladies on, the consummate charmer who could get away with the line, "black and ugly as ever, however," the gangsta rapper whose clever wordplay and poignant story-telling abilities grabbed fans' attention and never let go.

He was all of that, but as the movie shows, he was more. Wallace, played by rapper-turned-actor Jamal Woolard in his first starring role, was also that nerdy Catholic school boy with a strict Jamaican mother (Angela Bassett who, unfortunately, plays her without the Jamaican accent ) who finds himself lured into the dangerous street life of drug hustling. Cash rules everything around Wallace's world, and he succumbs to the addiction of making fast cash, so much that he even deals drugs to a pregnant woman.

We follow him as he goes from negative to positive, avoiding a long jail bid only because his friend believes in him so much that he is willing to serve that bid for him. And we see him connect with Sean Combs (known as Puffy in those days and ably played by Derek Luke), the dance-crazy ambitious producer who founds Bad Boy Entertainment and makes Wallace a star.

We all know how this will end, with Wallace shot to death on March 9, 1997, from a still-unknown shooter on the streets of Los Angeles, six months after his former friend and greatest rival, Tupac Shakur is shot to death in Las Vegas.

Yet, for a little while, we reminisce on the heady days of hip-hop's glory in the mid-1990s, when "we won't stop" seemed like fulfilled prophecy, when thought went into lyrics, when beats banged, when pop collided with the grittiness of gangsta rap.

But this isn't a whitewash, or at least not much of a whitewash as we would expect from a movie produced by Voletta Wallace, Biggie's mother, and Sean Combs. As directed by George Tillman, Wallace is somewhat of a little boy trapped in a big man's body, not sure yet how to be a man.

He cheats on his wife, Faith Evans, and plays his girl-on-the-side, Lil Kim (who by the way is upset at the way she is portrayed in the film) with shuddering coldness. And he deals poorly with baby mama drama, neglecting his children as he pursues his dream of rap superstardom.

Not all is good with this movie. Tillman breezes through the East Coast-West Coast battle and the subsequent death of Shakur, who comes across as a paranoid nutjob, not the well-read son of a Black Panther who flitted between ignorance and intelligence. Shakur's enigmatic allure is never felt, as much as Anthony Mackie tries. He is a side note never fully realized.

Even more troubling is this notion that Wallace was ready to turn a new leaf in his music, a near-fatal car accident forcing him to deal with the responsibility his talent lay at his feet. The movie is filled with scenes of Wallace's best friend exhorting him to take better care of his daughter followed by a scene in which he tells his daughter to never let a man call her a bitch. And on the night of his death, we see him make calls to the women of his life, trying to make amends and become a better man.

It all comes across as a little off-putting, this redemption song, for in his CD, Life After Death, he still spun gangsta tales and misogynistic boasts of sexual conquest. So forgive me if I don't quite buy it.

The power of the movie lies in Woolard's performance, in his ability to embody the man behind the myth, behind all the smooth talk. He finds the scared kid underneath the facade. He finds the layers that reveal the complexities of a literally larger than life individual. He wasn't a saint and he wasn't a monster. He was somewhere in between, just like all of us, a born sinner, a black male misunderstood.

And for the most part, it is all good.

Seven Pounds Revisited

2009-01-04T22:06:00.003-05:00

Editor's Note: This contains spoilers, lots of them.

Against my better judgment, I saw Seven Pounds again, thinking maybe this time I would get the movie. I didn't. But it's been hard to say why because no one wants to spoil the twist.

Well, sorry, I am going to have to be the spoiler (and those who don't want to be spoiled, please read the editor's note).

I give a lot of credit to Will Smith for deciding to go after a challenging role like this, portraying someone who is decidedly off his rocker. Too bad the end result comes off as so shallow and self-serving, instead of as selfless as the writers may have meant this to be.

Smith is Ben Thomas, an IRS agent. At least that's what we think. In reality, he is Tim, a once-successful aeronautical engineer who had a beautiful wife and lived the good life. All that ended, when he tried driving and using his Blackberry at the same time. He ends up causing a massive car accident that kills both his wife and a family of six in a van.

Tim is distraught, filled with overwhelming guilt. And in his depression, he decides upon a nutty plan of redemption. He will donate his organs to complete strangers, including his heart after he commits suicide.

His mission is accomplished through harsh measures. He poses as his brother, Ben, who is an IRS agent. He culls through financial and medical information, and then he confronts people in bizarre ways to see if they truly deserve his "gift."

At the beginning of the movie, he calls up Ezra, a blind telemarketer played by Woody Harrelson. He interrogates him, makes appalling comments about his being Jewish and asks him teasingly whether he's even had sex. The behavior is infuriating.

And through the movie, as the tale is told through flashbacks, you try to figure out Smith's motivations. You see easily that he is troubled. Smith scrunches up his face to show Tim's immense pain. And you are completely drawn in, no doubt.

The movie brightens when he meets Emily Posa, played by Rosario Dawson in a luminous performance. Posa has congenital heart failure. She's dying and needs a heart transplant. Tim slowly and with reluctance falls in love. It is here that we see some of Tim's humanity coming back. He is being resurrected in some way by Posa's love.

Unfortunately, this bit of happiness doesn't last long. Tim goes through with his plan. He dumps ice into the tub, fills the tub with water and plops in with a jellyfish that ultimately kills him in the most painful way. And Posa has a heart from the man she just made love to hours before.

Tim is presented as somehow being heroic in his actions, selfless in fact. Yet, he is not. This is a man who is emotionally damaged. We know that his logic is affected by his ever-consuming guilt over what he did.

How his best friend, Dan, played by Barry Peppers, agreed to go along with Tim's plan is never really explained. All we get is scenes of Dan weeping as he makes the legal arrangements that allow Tim to donate his organs. We never know whether Dan ever really tried to talk Tim out of his plan or try to get him help. Why would anyone agree to a plan that involves their best friend committing suicide?

Somehow, the audience is supposed to see Tim as a Christ-like figure who gives his life for others, albiet this is a Christ-like figure who is tremendously flawed. Yet, Jesus Christ was following a larger plan laid out by God and it is one that he willingly accepted. Tim, on the other hand, is operating out of a viscerally painful place. He is doing this to assuage his guilt. He is selfish, caring nothing about how his choice will affect those who love him and want to help him.

Some may say that Tim killed himself because he knew he was the only person who could save Posa's life, that his heart was the perfect match. In other words, he did this out of a deep abiding love for Posa and that he would rather see her live a long time without him than a short time with him. I get that.

Yet, the fact remains that in the end, he made this decision, this awful decision, while suffering from deep depression, and I find that problematic. Morally, I was outraged that this film seemed to, even if not intentionally, make suicide kind of okay. It isn't nor is it ever.

Tim is not a hero. He is not a matyr. He is a man who was crying out for help, and no one heard him. He was looking for redemption and he finds it by doing the most self-destructing thing possible. He figures the best way to help people is by killing himself.

Both times I saw this movie, I kept wondering what the message was supposed to be. I kept wondering what I was supposed to get out of it. I kept wondering how Tim could have the audacity to appoint himself a judge of good character of people he doesn't even know.

And in addition, his decision to kill himself seems to be an overreaction to a mistake, horrible as it is, that any one of us is capable of making.

There is no doubt that he was broken. I just wish someone was there to help put him back together again.

Seven Pounds

2008-12-20T15:55:00.004-05:00

Will Smith can do almost anything, except make the ending of Seven Pounds easy to swallow. It is mawkish, emotionally manipulative and ridiculous.

Harsh? Yes, but how else would you react after sitting through two hours of a film that begins with the main character calling 911 to report his own suicide?

Smith plays Ben Thomas, an IRS agent down in the dumps over a tragic mistake he made. He has embarked on a plan to help seven strangers.

Smith, to his credit, masks all the qualities that he usually has at his disposal, mainly his considerable charm and sense of humor. We see only glimpses. The rest of the time, Smith is sullen, using bits of his charm to intrude into the lives of strangers to determine if they are in fact good people. It is an intense performance that keeps you engaged throughout much of the film.

You are pulled into the mystery of who Ben Thomas is and what he is doing. At times, he is rude; other times, kind. You, as the viewer, are continually thrown off.

But the director, Gabriele Muccino, shows his hands way too early, and by the first half, the audience has figured out Thomas' secret and what he plans to do. And so the film drags for another hour, as Thomas falls in love with Emily Posa, a vibrant woman with congenital heart failure. He wants to help her, but his plan hits a bump when he develops feelings for her.

Rosario Dawson plays Emily not as a victim but a woman who is trying to face her grim situation with a bit of hope. Her relationship with Thomas brings new life, however brief, to a man run down with grief.

Then the twist comes, not much of a shock, but one that is polarizing. Some in the audience will be touched. Others, like me, will just feel ripped off. The movie never earns the emotional payoff it is seeking. In many ways, the film is a cop out and you don't have once ounce of sympathy for the decision Thomas makes at the end, however altruistic it might seem.

What is this film trying to say? I don't know. The message of redemption is muddled by a main character who somehow sees himself as some flawed Christ-figure who can make amends through masochistic suffering.

I applaud Smith for taking chances with his acting and trying dark roles. But this just doesn't work.

Twilight

2008-11-23T14:31:00.005-05:00

Twilight, the first in a four-book series by Stephanie Meyer, is the Romeo and Juliet for the tween generation.

Except, Romeo hates sunlight and must tame his desire to suck the blood of his Juliet. Talk about a compelling reason to stay abstinent.

On the movie screen, the love affair of Bella and Edward plays out, much like it did in the book. But those who aren't fans of the series won't become fans because of this movie.

The film, as directed by Catherine Hardwicke, gets the angst of teenage life, especially in Bella (played brilliantly by Kristen Stewart). As the movie begins, Bella moves from Arizona to a small town called Forks to be with her father, who also happens to be the sheriff.

She has no friends, she is awkward and given to fits of clumsiness. And worst of all, she gets a beat-up red pick-up truck to ride around in.

On her first day of class, she meets Edward Cullen, a pale-faced heartthrob who almost becomes sick at the sight of her. Not a good impression, but Bella finds herself both disgusted and drawn to the mystery man.

It certainly doesn't hurt that Edward saves her life in a way that physics just can't explain. By the time she discovers Edward's secret -- he's a vampire who prefers animal blood -- she is "unconditionally and irrevocably" in love with him.

This is where things get tricky. Maybe in the 600-plus page book the movie is based on, we can believe that real love exists between Edward and Bella. But not in a two hour movie do you fully believe it.

The tension comes in the desires of both being unfulfilled because Edward cannot risk hurting his love by loving her. He cannot lose control even though every bit of his body wants to. Their love is unrequited.

But the "bite me so I can be with you forever" is a bit much to take, and guys dragged to this movie by their girlfriends will have to sit through an hour and a half of this overwrought dialogue to get to any action. And unfortunately, the action sucks. The special effects are awful and cheesy beyond belief. No teeth are bared, and all we get is a bunch of flying vampires. What is this? Super Vampire.

Nothing in this movie made me curious about the books or made me interested in seeing the

sequel. Maybe this is because I am not a teenage girl all in love with the whole idea of Edward Cullen. Oh well. Forgive me.

But I like vampire movies, and this wasn't one of the best. Sorry. I need something to sink my teeth in.

Quantum of Solace

2008-11-15T14:10:00.003-05:00

In Casino Royale, Daniel Craig gave James Bond something he had never had before -- edge, a smoldering rough, dare I say, thuggish quality missing in the more debonair, witty and smooth incarnations of Bonds past (i.e. Sean Connery).

And that edge is on full angry display in Quantum of Solace, an adrenaline-rush of a sequel that rarely stops for quiet introspection.

Not once does Bond say his signature line, "Bond, James Bond." He's way too busy going rogue, driving his boss, M (played by the always wonderful Judi Dench) crazy and killing people in awfully messy ways.

I was never much of a James Bond fan to begin with, but through Craig, we saw a James Bond that was more visceral and vulnerable, one who fell in love with a beautiful woman only to have her betray him and then die.

The new movie takes up where the last one left off, with Bond mourning the death of his lover, Vesper, and intently searching for her killer. What he discovers is a much greater conspiracy than he could have ever imagined, one that lurks in dark places.

At the center is Dominic Greene, a pseudo-environmentalist who is more interested in the kind of green that stacks. Joining Bond in his adventures is a different kind of Bond girl who, for a change, doesn't bed Bond because she's too focused on seeking revenge for the violent tragedies of her own life.

Marc Foster, the director of such moody pieces as Monster's Ball, gives us an action thriller with an actor's heart. He simply gives space for Craig to work.

Craig gives a muscular performance, both literally and figuratively, saying much in a simple look or gesture. And his scenes with M pop off the screen.

As a friend pointed out, this movie very much reminds one of the Bourne movies, very action packed with thrilling chases and bloody fist fights. I agree but I also think this movie continues an interesting reimagining of the Bond character.

Here, Bond has layers that we see peeled back. We see a heart beating behind the cold exterior. We discover glimpses of Bond's humanity that were hidden in other incarnations.

No, Quantum of Solace isn't nearly as good as Casino Royale, but it does very much leave you wanting to see what other secrets lie behind the seemingly inscrutable facade of 007.

Zach & Miri Make a Porno

2008-11-02T18:06:00.003-05:00

In the mind of Kevin Smith, crude and sweet occupy the same space. His films reflect that. Look past the profanity of Dogma, and you will find a semi-serious meditation on religion and spirituality.

Chasing Amy, a testosterone-drenched film about a man who falls in love with a lesbian, has one of the most heart-felt and eloquent declarations of love (from Ben Affleck, no less) from a man to a woman I have heard in quite some time.

And here we have Zach & Miri Make a Porno, which sums up the plot pretty well.

Zach (Seth Rogen of Knocked Up fame) and Miri (Elizabeth Banks who plays Laura Bush in Oliver Stone's W.) are best friends with dead-end jobs who struggle to pay the bills. When their lights go out and the rent is due, they decide they're going to make a porno featuring the two of them having sex.

Yes, there's nudity and yes, there are crude jokes galore. And there are actual porno stars like Traci Lords, who can blow bubbles, just not from her mouth.

The real center of the story is Zach and Miri and how the simple act of sex changes their relationship forever.

This is a syrupy sweet love story about two friends discovering that they might be more suited as lovers. But the trip from friends to lovers is littered with scatological humor that is not meant to be heard or seen by the innocent. Hey, this is about making a porno and it is rated R for a reason.

Banks is the perfect straight woman, and Rogen plays the same lovable slacker he always seems to play in every movie, but you have to admit he is good at it.

The jokes fall flat in the beginning but build up steam throughout. And Smith's usual cast of characters join in on the fun, including Jason Mewes, who usually plays the Jay of Jay and Silent Bob but here plays Lester who has a certain talent that only fans of pornos can appreciate.

We all know what's going to happen at the end, but the sweetness at the end of this crude machine feels worth it.

And after enduring all of that trashy talk, you somehow come out of the movie smelling good. That's a talent Kevin Smith can be proud of.

The Secret Life of Bees

2008-10-25T11:10:00.002-05:00

There is a quiet power to The Secret Life of Bees that sometimes threatens to spill over into over-the-top melodrama and pure sappiness.

It doesn't and that is a credit to the performances of the all-star cast anchored by rapper/actress Queen Latifah and Dakota Fanning, who is growing up to become a fine actress.

The movie, directed by Gina Prince Bythewood, is based on the novel by Sue Monk Kidd. The story is set in South Carolina in the 1960s when blacks were still fighting for their citizenship rights.

Fanning plays Lily Owens, a 14-year-old white girl carrying a dark secret who loves to write and is fascinated by the bees that swirl into her room one night.

Her father is abusive to her and crippled by the tragic loss of his wife years ago. Owens yearns to get away, and after Rosaleen, the black housekeeper played by Jennifer Hudson, is beaten and then arrested for trying to vote, Lily and Rosaleen run away to a small South Carolina town that is somehow connected to Lily's mother.

In that town, they find the Boatwright sisters, three black women who run a successful honey-making business. August Boatwright (Queen Latifah) is the oldest sister, followed by June (a feisty Alicia Keys), a civil-rights activist too serious for love, and May (Sophie Okonedo) who feels so deeply that she has built a wailing wall outside the house to cry her blues away.

The sisters offer a welcoming home in which Lily and Rosaleen can heal and find comfort. And August is the one who becomes a deep well of knowledge for Lily who must finally deal with the pain she has buried for so long.

Nothing really comes as a surprise in this movie. Even the death of a major character later in the movie isn't that much of a shock.

But in the end, it doesn't matter. Strong performances by all help keep the sappiness at bay, especially Queen Latifah, who could have easily allowed her character to fall into a stereotypical black mammy. She instead brings a complexity to her role. As does Alicia Keys, who gives June some layers as a woman too focused to focus on the fact that she needs love in her life.

Okonedo has the hardest job of all but finds the balance between being Sean Penn in I Am Sam and Dustin Hoffman in Rainman. She manages to maintain May's dignity and grace in a role that could have, in other hands, dispensed with both.

And the ending is just right, a wonderful high note in a movie that manages not to fall flat.

Miracle at St. Anna

2008-10-13T19:43:00.003-05:00

Spike Lee is not subtle. His movies yell, pound you over the head to get your attention. If you wonder why, pick up Ralph Wiley's Why Black People Tend To Shout.

His intention is to provoke and he has done it in compelling ways, from Do The Right Thing to his most commercial outing, Inside Man. And Miracle at St. Anna is no different.

This story of an all-black Army unit fighting in Italy during World War II begins with an old man sitting in his apartment watching John Wayne in the movie, The Longest Day. Anger is sketched out in the wrinkles of his face as he quietly says, "We fought for this country too."

That sentiment is the theme that runs through this movie, an acknowledgement that black men sacrificed their lives for a country that refused to treat them as U.S. citizens.

A few minutes later, that old man, working in New York at a post office, inexplicably shoots another man. In his apartment is the head of a statute in Italy that's been missing since 1944.

And it is to this time that we are taken, where the old man is now a young Cpl. Hector Negron fighting as part of the all-black 92nd Infantry Division in Italy. The mystery of that statute head and why he shot that man will be solved by going back in time.

In 1944, alongside Negron is Sgt. Bishop Cummings (Michael Ealy), 2nd Staff Sgt. Aubrey Stamps (Derek Luke) and Private First Class Sam Train (Omar Benson Miller).

The four men soon find themselves trapped in an Italian village even as German forces plan a secret counterattack. Train forges a special relationship with a young boy he finds in a barn. And Cummings and Stamps boil over how to deal with an America that treats Germans better than black Americans as well as fight over the affections of an Italian woman.

Lee packs a lot into the film and sometimes the effort pays off. Especially poignant are the burgeoning relationship between the boy, Angelo, and Train.

And Lee gets at in powerful ways how ironic it is that black Americans feel freer in Italy than they do in their own country. No more is that hit home than in a scene in Louisian where the soldiers come to get something to eat and then are refused, even as German prisoners are given top-shelf service. The racism is of the in-your-face variety and it stings.

But this movie is not just about racism. It is about the tragedy of war and the humanity that sometimes rises out of that muck. We see evil in its worst form at the massacre at St. Anna where Nazi soldiers shot men, women and children begging for their lives.

Yet we also see compassion and the power of human kindness in a harsh world of betrayal and brutality.

There is a rough beauty in this film anchored by Lee's powerful direction, a more than appropriate score and wonderfully rendered cinematography.

Unfortunately, Lee may have been too ambitious, which is not a bad thing if you can hold your movie together. That doesn't happen. The film falls apart in the later half with an over-the-top ending, sentimental in ways Lee has never been and ripped from the much better The Shawshank Redemption. Even worse, having Stamps and Cummings fight over a woman doesn't reveal anything about their characters but only serves to distract from the seriousness of the movie.

Here, Lee forgets the simple power of a story beautifully told. He forgets to pull back.

But that's Lee, never suble, always yelling, resulting in a film that's sometimes too noisy for its own good.

Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist

2008-10-05T13:41:00.002-05:00

Michael Cera may become the teenage romantic comedy hero of a new generation, possessing a sweet geeky charm no woman can apparently resist.

Or at least the women in the last few movies he's appeared in, including the wildly successful Juno, which also made Ellen Page a star.

In Nick and Norah's Infinite Playlist, he plays Nick, who plays in a band called The Jerkoffs. He makes mix CDs for his cheating girlfriend that he continues to pine after to the disgust of his fellow bandmates, who know he deserves someone better.

And someone better comes in the form of Norah, played by Kat Dennings, who scoops up Nick's mix CDs after his girlfriend throws them away.

As you can tell by the title, Nick and Norah are destined for each other. But their journey of love is filled with all kinds of wacky obstacles as they make their way to see fav band Where's Fluffy, which is playing somewhere that night.

First, though, Norah and Nick must find Norah's friend, Caroline (played by Ari Graynor), a perpetual drunk who has what we might tactfully call a special attachment to her gum. Her alcohol-fueled adventures are some of the most hilarious and outrageous and most enjoyable parts of this movie, and Graynor goes all out in her role, never pulling back regardless of how horrible she ends up looking. That is the essence of any comic actor.

Michael Cera and Kat Dennings display a cute chemistry toward each other, and when they finally do figure out how they feel about each other, it seems real, not forced, not fake.

This is a sweet movie without being an overly cheesy, puke-fest of romantic comedy cliche. And it doesn't hurt that the music rocks.

Eagle Eye

2008-09-29T10:04:00.004-05:00

Eagle Eye, the new star vehicle for Shia Lebouf, tries very hard to not only be an action movie, but an action movie with a relevant message for our time about the loss of privacy and government overreaction.

And that would have been nice if the message wasn't beaten over a head near the end with characters giving nauseating didactic messages.

At least, the movie works well as pop entertainment, messy and forgettable the moment you walk out of the theater.

Shia Lebouf is Jerry Shaw, a charming slacker who wiles his days playing poker with his friends, working at a dead-end job at a Kinkos-like copy store and struggling to pay his rent. He also just buried his twin brother, who was in the military and much more ambitious. Then one day, Shaw goes to the ATM and finds $751,000 in his banking account. Soon, his apartment is crammed with boxes filled with weapons and he winds up in the custody of the FBI. And worse of all, a mysterious woman keeps calling and telling him to do various things like jump out of a building and slam his body to the floor before something crashes through the room he is in.

The same mysterious woman is calling Rachel, played by Michelle Monaghan, also telling her to do certain things or her son will die.

For awhile, the action is breathtaking as the two dodge bullets and end up in bruising car chases, with a cranky FBI agent played by Billy Bob Thorton hot on their tails.

Director DJ Caruso ratchets up the action here, obviously getting his tips from quick-cutting king Michael Bay. The result is shaky camera work, confusing audiences about what actually is happening on screen. Not a good thing. Felt like being on a bad roller coaster ride than watching a thrilling action movie.

Thank God Shia Lebouf has such a likable quality, a quick-wittedness and Joe Blow relatability that you find yourself rooting for the guy even in a movie as wacky as this one.

The plot meanders a bit before getting to its central thesis about the dangers of government having too much surveillance. Will Smith's Enemy of The State covered similar territory in a much better way.

And it's sad that the ultimate villain here takes its inspiration from 2001: A Space Odyssey. Oh, no, the computer is going to get me. Please, let's get a grip.

Here's how you enjoy Eagle Eye. Don't think too much either during the movie or immediately afterward. You'll only be disappointed.

The Family That Preys

2008-09-14T18:34:00.002-05:00

Tyler Perry is not known for being subtle. Far from in fact. His movies, many based on his popular gospel plays, are soap operas with plenty of broad over-the-top comedy, often featuring Perry as big-busted, pistol-carrying Madea, his most famous character.

Madea is nowhere to be found in Perry's latest creation, The Family That Preys (and if you didn't get that play on the word pray, well, you might need prayer).

The film centers on two families, one working class and the other wealthy. Charlotte, played by Kathy Bates, heads up the wealthy family, running a successful construction firm and butting heads with her spoiled son, William, played with snarling charm by Cole Hauser.

Alice (portrayed by the always wonderful Alfre Woodard) runs a diner and tries to instill old-fashioned values into her two daughters. Sanaa Lathan is Andrea, a financial accountant at the construction company who is carrying on an affair with William. She also chooses to run down her hardworking husband, Chris, who has dreams of starting a construction business of her own.

With all of this Dynasty-like drama going on, Charlotte decides this would be the perfect time for her and Alice to on a road-trip to see the country. So amid the seriousness, we see Charlotte trying to get Alice, the teetotaler, drunk, and then we see Alice drag Charlotte to get baptized.

There are no real surprises in Tyler Perry's movies. We know something is wrong with Charlotte. We know that all the secrets are going to come out. And we know someone is going to get slapped or punched or get hot grits thrown on them.

Perry isn't a sophisticated story-teller and doesn't deal well with complexities or nuances. He does, however, know what his audiences want and he delivers that with panache.

His movies are filled with messages of hope and faith and he has become better at delivering those messages without the heavy-handedness of his previous efforts.

And this time, he builds on the success he had with Why Did I Get Married instead of the clunker he had with Meet The Browns.

But he still has a way to go as a director. In this movie, we have long camera sweeps that seem to go nowhere but eventually find their way from one character to another, as music swells. He goes the other extreme of director Michael Bay, who is known for cutting his scenes so much that if you blinked you'd miss most of the movie.

Those technical flaws don't much matter to Perry's core audience. When my friend and I saw the movie, a woman talked throughout, like she was at home looking at one of her favorite afternoon soaps. She talked back at the screen, cheering on Charlotte and calling her Big Mama.

Good entertainment with a message. What else can you ask for?

I'm Through with White Girls

2008-08-30T12:04:00.004-05:00

One night, as I was browsing through Blockbuster, I had another reason why I don't do Netflix, much to the befuddlement of my friends who are well-aware of my movie-obsessed ways. It was all in the title, I'm Through with White Girls (The Inevitable Undoing of Jay Brooks).

Maybe I might have found this jewel through Netflix, but I highly doubt it. And like buying a CD off one hot single, I rented this movie based off just the title.

Sometimes you have to take a risk, which could end up in the catastrophe of a two-hour waste of time.

Or it could end up being the best time of your life, or close to it.

I'm Through with White Girls, the first feature by Jennifer Sharp, is surprisingly sweet romantic comedy about much more than the title might suggest.

Written by Courtney Lilly, the film centers on Jay Brooks, played to perfection by Anthony Montgomery, a black guy obsessed with graphic novels and indie rock and who dates too many white women to count. As one character suggests, the only black woman he may have kissed is his mother.

But what's nice here is that Jay Brooks isn't portrayed as some self-hating Clarence Thomas, which would have been the easy road to take here. As he says in the film, he dates white women because it seems as if black women don't dig him, and in the world in which he operates, he doesn't come across many black women at all.

That is until he starts Operation Brown Sugar. After his last break-up, in which he pens his Dear Jane letter on a yellow pad while his girlfriend is in the shower, he starts to rethink the way he runs his romantic life. He decides to go cold-turkey on white women, who he blames for his love woes.

He finally finds his match in author Catherine Williamson, a beautiful woman with blue-streaked dreadlocks who talks like a Valley girl. Jay Brooks falls hard and begs (literally) like Mars Blackmon in Spike Lee's She's Gotta Have It for a shot at love.

Lia Johnson, who plays Catherine, is a joy to behold on the screen. She exudes intelligence and vulnerability, and the chemistry between Catherine and Jay feels real.

Soon, Jay, not knowing a good thing when he has it, inadvertently starts sabotaging his chances with Catherine. And thus is revealed the real problem Jay has. It's not with white women; it's with commitment.

That journey to Jay Brooks undoing is a breezy one, full of insights about the silliness of stereotypes and the beauty of finding love and the freedom that comes with dance.

Tropic Thunder

2008-08-17T22:30:00.003-05:00

Tropic Thunder is satire overload, often funny but sometimes way over the head of the average viewer.

Perhaps that's the way Ben Stiller, the director, wanted, and he just about pulls it off.

His latest movie centers on the filming of a Vietnam War picture, replete with explosions, tough-guy talk, gore and drooling death scenes.

The movie goes haywire when half the set is blown up and the director decides to put his self-important actors in the middle of the jungle to shoot guerrilla style.

Those actors are a bunch of has-beens hoping for redemption. Stiller is muscle-bound Tugg Speedman, an action star on the rebound from a failed Oscar bid as a buck-toothed mentally-challenged guy named Simple Jack.

Jack Black plays Jeff Portnoy, a heroin-addicted comedian known for playing all the characters of a flatulent-happy family named The Fatties. And Robert Downey Jr. is a Method-acting Australian who is so convinced of his abilities that he decides to surgically darken his skin to play a black soldier.

Rounding out the cast is Jay Baruchel who plays Kevin Sandusky and Brandon T. Jackson who plays rapper Alpa Chino, who has his own energy drink, Booty Sweat.

There's really no plot other than the actors trying to find authenticity in their characters while being chased by real thugs with real guns shooting real bullets in a real jungle.

Eventually, Tugg Speedman ends up captured and the other actors have to save him.

And chaos ensues.

In the process, Stiller has a ball skewering the shallowness of Hollywood greed and the narcissism of some A-list actors. Tom Cruise even humiliates himself in an unrecognizable role as a bald-headed profanity-spewing studio head who loves to shake his butt to crass rap songs. (Just to see Tom Cruise dance is worth the ticket price alone).

Some of the jokes either fall flat or are just too insidery for most people to get. But more jokes work than not. And the energy of the cast is enough to pull the movie through its more dull moments.

Downey is clearly the star in one of the most controversial roles. Blackface isn't something you should mess with, given the history of blackface as a way to dehumanize African-Americans for centuries. But Downey doesn't go overboard and Alpa Chino is always there to challenge him.

About the funniest scene in the movie is when Lazarus explains to Speedman why he didn't win the Oscar.

Tropic Thunder should have been funnier, should have been grab your stomach as you roll on the floor funny, but it isn't. It is, however, eyes tear up every now and then funny, and sometimes, that's funny enough.

The X-Files: I Want To Believe

2008-07-26T16:04:00.005-05:00

There's something out there. That was the whole premise of The X-Files, the sci-fi series that ran for nine seasons.

FBI agents Fox Mulder and Dana Scully investigated mysteries that couldn't easily be explained by CSI-like forensics. The beauty of the show was in the tension between Scully and Mulder. Scully was the scientistwho constantly searched for the rational explanation.

And it was that rationalism that sometimes saved Mulder, the conspiracy-theorist haunted by his sister's kidnapping by aliens, from going over the edge.

Some shows were stand-alone exploration of things that go bump in the night. Others were about that large maze-like government cover-up involving shadowy figures such as The Smoking Man. In the midst of all that was the relationship between Mulder and Scully, at first platonic and then something more.

Ten years ago, Chis Carter, the creator, brought the series to the big screen in a plot tied to the show. It was a movie that pushed the series ahead, answering some questions and brining up new ones.

This time, The X-Files: I Want To Believe, junks all that conspiracy stuff. Instead, this is a standard episode stretched out to an hour and some change.

If only this movie was a better episode. But it isn't.

The movie picks up years after the series left off. Mulder and Scully are no longer with the FBI, the X-Files unit having been shut down. Mulder lives in isolation, throwing pencils to the ceiling, not shaving and clipping news articles. Scully is a surgeon trying to save the life of a sick boy.

Then a federal agent goes missing, and Scully is asked to find Mulder. And just like that, Mulder and Scully are back again, fulfilling their roles as believer and skeptic, respectively.

Added to that the fact that Scully and Mulder are a couple, their tension taking on a new dimension. In the center of the action is a defrocked pedophile priest played by Billy Connolly, who is given to visions he believes are sent by God.

Well, are they or is this priest a nut? That and Frankenstein-like human experimentation are essentially the plot here. No aliens to be found and certainly no conspiracy.

That's disappointing, putting it nicely. Even for what is a stretched-out episode, this movie doesn't hold much muster.

The script is weak, and Carter doesn't even try to engender much suspense. The series could be scary when it wanted, the bogeyman jumping out at you when you least expected. The twists were real twists, and when the credits ran, you felt a little unsettled, as if all the monsters hadn't been caught.

No monsters here, and the effort to bring some meaning to the relationship between Mulder and Scully ultimately fails. The climax is unsatisfying, and the ending doesn't haunt. The movie fades as soon as the end credits come on.

Some things should be left alone.

The Dark Knight

2008-07-19T15:09:00.003-05:00

Batman is a peculiar character in comic-book mythology. Unlike most superheroes, he is merely a very well-trained fighting machine with nifty gadgets, a sort of James Bond in a suit. He has no superpowers, just a tragic backstory about a boy who saw his parents slaughtered by punks and grew up to be a playboy billionaire who moonlights as a bat.

Tim Burton more than a decade ago gave us his vision of Bruce Wayne/Batman, full of Gothic stylings and over-the-top acting by Jack Nicholson as The Joker. The movie was light and heavy at the same time, the idea that Bruce Wayne might be off his rocker lurking beneath.

But when Christopher Nolan got a hold of the Batman franchise (after director Joel Schumacher ruined it), he gave us less of the Batman and more of Bruce Wayne in Batman Begins. Wayne became flesh, flawed yet noble as protagonists tend to be in tragedies.

Nolan gave us an imaginative reinvention of a beloved superhero. In The Dark Knight, he gives us so much more.

Much has been made about the performance of the late Heath Ledger as The Joker in this film. Some say it's Oscar-worthy. Others wonder if the praise is coming simply because Ledger died a young age.

Well, the performance is all that. Ledger's Joker is much scarier, more twisted and just plain creepier than Nicholson's 1989 version. The make-up is smeared, and The Joker licks his lips and talks in the skin-crawling voice of a man rotting from the inside out.

He is the perfect villain for the Batman. The Joker is an agent of chaos, a madman whose only purpose in life is to watch the world burn. In Burton's Batman, we know how The Joker got that smile. In Nolan's version, we're not quite sure. The Joker tells two different stories, both equally creepy. He is a villain allergic to rationality. He lives by his own twisted logic.

Batman is Gotham City's guardian. He wants to restore order. The Joker wants to blow it up. How does the good guy catch a criminal who revels in anarchy, who ups the ante at every chance?

What makes Nolan's recent venture into the Batman franchise is that this doesn't feel like a summer blockbuster. Yes, we have the elaborate action sequences that look authentic and not CGI'ed to death. We have kung-fu fighting (or whatever martial arts Batman uses in this film). We have romance. We have all the elements you want in a superhero movie.

But we have something more. We have a director interested in the spaces between black and white.

There are no easy answers in The Dark Knight. Bruce Wayne wants to give up being Batman, let hard-charging DA Harvey Dent be the white knight, and maybe he can get his girl, Rachel Dawes back.

Life is never that easy, doesn't operate that way, and even though this is comic-book fantasy, it feels more than any recent super-hero movie like the real world.

Dent says this in the middle of the movie: "Either you die the hero or you live just long enough to become the villain."

That applies not only to Dent, who eventually becomes the scarred villain Two-Face, but to Batman himself. The idea of doing the greatest good for the greatest number is fully explored in this film. Batman is not Superman saving some damsel in distress, and The Joker isn't some villain with plans for world domination. As Alfred says, some men just want to see the world burn.

The Dark Knight lives up to 1/3rd of its title. This is one dark, near-depression levels super-hero movie. Not that there isn't fun. The Joker is a lot of fun. He's just not fun to be around. Neither is the Batman.

We have here a movie with layers, pulp with Shakespearean aspirations, a superhero who has both physical and psychic wounds that are not easily healed. And we have evil that is hard to defeat because it becomes bolder the more Batman fights it.

Heavy stuff for a summer blockbuster, indeed. Oh well, why so serious?

Hancock/Hellboy

2008-07-12T12:53:00.005-05:00

So far this has been a great summer for superheroes. Iron Man, with Robert Downey Jr. in the title role was fun with an edge. The Incredible Hulk delivered the smashing good time we had wanted in Ang Lee's much maligned attempt five years ago.

And now we have Hancock and Hellboy II: The Golden Army, a way to whet our appetites before the main feast that opens later this month, The Dark Knight.

First up is Hancock, where Will Smith plays a different kind of superhero, the mean kind that is. Smith has always gotten by on his considerable charm and charisma, which have helped him maintain his status as summer box-office king for years.

Here he plays John Hancock, a drunk whose uniform is apparently the latest in bum fashion. He saves lives as any superhero does, but he also has a filthy mouth and causes destruction while he saves lives. And as a result, people in Los Angeles hate him.

All except Ray Embrey, the do-gooder PR guy. Hancock saves Embrey's life and Embrey decides that he'll pay Hancock back by doing some image makeover.

It's pretty much impossible to hate Will Smith, even when he's playing a jerk like Hancock. And the first part of the movie is full of hilarious bits where Hancock tries his darndest to be nice and polite and not use the "F" word too much, all while doing his Superman thing.

Then a twist (why must there always be a twist) comes in the second half that's halfway cool if it had been executed with a little more panache.

And there's a rather vague origin story that doesn't make much sense the more you think about it. The movie with the intriguing premise turns into just another conventional superhero movie with a disappointing villain and lots of mushy talk about responsibility and the consequences of your actions.

It seems as if Peter Berg, the director, got confused about what kind of movie he wanted to make, a comedy or drama or some combination of both. Who knows?

Will Smith does deliver but you wish he could have delivered in a much better movie.

Hellboy II: The Golden Army, on the other hand, is a visual delight. Director Guillermo Del Toro has a gift for creating a magical world in which weirdness is normal.

Ron Perlman plays the red guy with horns, a supposed spawn of Satan who manages to do good with a wiseacre, kick-butt attitude.

The mythology is dense. Long long time ago, man made a peace treaty with the freaks. Man can have the cities and the monsters that go bump in the night can have the forests. Everyone agreed except this pale-faced dude named Prince Nuada, a real party-ruiner who moves like Bruce Lee. Centuries ago, he went into exile.

Now he's returned, looking for the pieces of a crown that put together has the power to awaken the dreaded, indestructible Golden Army.

Back for action, besides Hellboy, is his fiery (literally) girlfriend Liz, the gill-faced bookworm Abe, and Johann Kraus, who is all fog and no substance (again literally).

In short, Nuada hates humans and wants to destroy the world (as most villains want to do). And Hellboy and his gang have to stop him.

So the plot isn't that original, but Del Toro's vision is, full of fantastical creatures in weird shapes. One creature's face looks like half of a moon crater. Another appears to carry London on his head.

And there's this wondrous creature who torments the city and has this incredible transformation that I won't spoil for you.

Perlman gives the horn-headed Hellboy a lovable sourness and boyish charm. Plus, he and Selma Blair, who plays Liz, have good chemistry. Their arguments are a lot of fun and a little dangerous.

This is a wild, gorgeously shot ride, an art film masquerading as a summer blockbuster.

Wanted

2008-06-28T14:17:00.004-05:00

Angelina Jolie is one hot mama. She exudes a sexy confidence virtually unmatched by any actress working today. She, simply put, has swagger.

And all that swagger is on full, fleshy display in Wanted, one wacked-out train ride of an action movie.

It is the pure definition of mindless, the laws of physics non-existent in this fantasy realm of bloody violence.

The film centers on Wesley Gibson (Scottish actor James McAvoy using a very fine American accent), an account manager wiling away his miserable life in an dead-end job, living in an apartment that rumbles because of the train rushes along just above, and stuck in a relationship with a girlfriend who's sleeping with his best friend.

He doesn't care about anything, and that fact alone is what concerns him.

Into his life walks Fox (played by Jolie), telling him that his father was in a secret organization of assassins and that he's about to be killed by the same guy who murdered his dad.

So begins Gibson's journey from wimp to assassin, a brutal one filled with beat downs and bloody hands while learning how to shoot a target on a curve.

Morgan Freeman is Sloane, the leader of what's called The Fraternity, an ancient organization that get messages in looms on who to kill, the idea being the person they kill today could mean saving thousands of lives later.

Okay, doesn't make much sense considering that this crew of assassins missed out on Stalin, Hitler and Idi Amin. Stuff it. Logic doesn't exist here, at least not in the world that director Timur Bekmambetov.

Instead, Bekmambetov is interested more in octane-fueled action filled with ridiculous stunts, like the one with the car flipping over a bunch of police cars and then landing on the side of a bus as it turns over and then driving off. Yeah, that happens in real life.

Again (repeat like a mantra), logic doesn't exist here.

Taking elements of The Matrix and other action movies, Bekmambetov has created a cool action flick that entertains with a little bit of good acting thrown in.

McAvoy gives his Gibson enough of that regular guy shtick to make us root for him every step of the way. His character does the things that all of smucks who want more out of life wish we could do.

And Jolie, as Fox, sizzles every time she's on the screen, making all of us guys real jealous of Brad Pitt. Lucky bastard.

The Incredible Hulk

2008-06-21T11:56:00.005-05:00

Ang Lee's The Hulk was a brilliant, messy failure, an ambitious flop of monumental proportions. Instead of the full-fledged superhero flick many had hoped for, Lee's film was more focused on damaged father-son relationships and suppressed emotional drama that flared up in grass-colored skin and ever-bulging muscles. And the last half-hour was nothing more than a therapy session masquerading as a climactic fight scene ending in a mass bubble of angst being blown away by missiles (yes, that's what literally happened).

The idea of rebooting such a critical and commercial disaster seems an impossible task, close to crazy in fact. But Louis Leterrier, the director of The Transporter 2 and Unleashed, has succeeded where Ang Lee five years ago failed.

Armed with a great cast that's led by Edward Norton as the tortured soul Dr. Bruce Banner, Leterrier ditches the psychoanalysis and cuts to the action. And boy does this movie have action.

We don't have to wait almost an hour before Banner starts bursting out of his clothes and gets all green on us. It happens within the first 40 minutes of the movie.

The origin story is told in the opening credits. The movie opens with Banner as a fugitive working at a bottling company in Brazil and trying to come up with a cure. Hot after him is General Thaddeus Ross, who considers Banner's body the property of the U.S. government. Soon, he's found out, and the chase begins, from Brazil back to the United States.

Emil Blonsky, played by Tim Roth, is an aging soldier who gets a glimpse of The Hulk and wants some of that power. Eventually, he bulks out and becomes the menacing, even more frightening The Abominator.

Leterrier knows that audiences want to see Hulk smash, and Hulk does indeed smash a lot. This is a darker Hulk, much scarier in his power. The action is swift, and Leterrier keeps a nice, rollicking pace.

Elements of the old television show, the one with Bill Bixby and Lou Ferrigno, sneak in. We hear the haunting "Lonely Man" theme, and when Banner changes into the Hulk, his eyes go green. And Ferrigno himself makes a memorable cameo.

What the television show got right and what the movie includes is Banner's overwhelming angst over this dark side of himself, this rage that makes him rip his clothes. Norton plays that well. We feel for Banner and his unending struggle to keep himself under control.

Liv Tyler does a good job as Betty Ross, Banner's girlfriend, though here she mostly acts with her incredibly expressive eyes, all flush with emotion.

William Hurt brings heft to his role as General Ross, and Roth is great as Blonsky.

And plus, this movie is a lot of fun, with sprinkles of humor here and there, something mostly missing in Ang Lee's version.

Reports have surfaced that Norton is none too happy about this version of the movie. He had lobbied for a longer, more dialogue-intensive version, but the studios nixed it. And this time, I have to agree with the studios. The movie is lean, it's action-oriented, it's what people want to see.

And unlike Ang Lee's Hulk, this Hulk rocks.

Sex and The City

2008-06-13T23:36:00.003-05:00

Yes, I saw Sex and The City, and I'm man enough to admit I actually wanted to see it, to be immersed in all that estrogen. It is not unfamiliar to me, a guy who grew up in a family of women, whose nickname was Man because he was the only testosterone in the house.

So, with my friend, Tracie, along for the ride, I indulged in a movie filled to the brim with girl talk about relationships, sex and fashion.

For those who don't know, the movie is based on the HBO series of the same name, where for six seasons, we followed the lives of four fabulous women and their search for love. At the center of the drama was Carrie Bradshaw, played to perfection by Sarah Jessica Parker, the writer. We also have Miranda, the workaholic attorney, Charlotte, the ever-optimistic cheerleader of the group, and Samantha, the sexually ravenous diva and drama queen.

Together, they were fierce, always ready to love and dish dirt about it over lunch at a New York restaurant.

The movie picks up about three years after the show ended. The women are all ensconced in various relationships, particularly Carrie and her Mr. Big (played by Chris Noth, of Law & Order fame). Samantha is with her boy-toy actor in California, Miranda is with her hubby and their child, and Charlotte is enjoying bliss with her husband and adopted daughter.

All seems well in the world, even more so after Mr. Big nonchalantly pops the big question and Carrie goes out in search of the perfect wedding dress.

Without spoiling the fun, not all goes exactly as planned. Hearts are broken and vows betrayed, and the movie goes down a quite unexpected dark path.

Michael Patrick Smith, the director, has a difficult job in keeping up with four women without letting the movie drag. He does this ably, and he is only helped by a great cast.

What worked in the show works in the movie, a flavorful dish of colorful (literally, in some cases) sex talk, biting wit and hard-earned tears.

But more important than that is the fact that women are at the center of the action, not mere centerpieces. These are grown women dealing with grown-up issues in ways both mature and childish, blossoming and wilting in the ebb and flow of what we like to call life.

And in this movie, we see these women coming into their own, finding their own way, taking responsibility for their mistakes and moving on, in exceptional heels, of course.

So, yeah, I saw it and I liked it. I'm man enough to admit it, though it does help to have a beautiful woman to see it with.

Indiana Jones

2008-05-25T12:19:00.004-05:00

Action films these days are nothing more than special-effects-laden excuses to spend money to make money, hoping audiences will see past the lack of character development or plot to plop down their hard-earned dollars for empty entertainment.

So to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull is to immerse yourself into something that feels like worthwhile pop entertainment, a rollercoaster ride of the senses, an escape from the earth-bound concerns of life.

You are transported and thus reminded of the reasons why you started going to the movies in the first place.

Steven Spielberg is a master of this, though oftentimes clumsy and not at all poetic. But you don't go to an Indiana Jones movie for poetry. You go to see that fedora and that whip and his wild adventures to find gnarly treasure.

In 1981, with Indiana Jones and the Raiders of the Lost Ark, Spielberg and George Lucas created a new template for blockbuster movies, grabbing your attention from the first frame and not letting go until the very end. Jones was a rough-and-tumble archeologist who loved field research, the ones where he ran from big rolling rocks and ducked bullets with a wink of his eye and a smirk on his face. And he had his female students swooning enough that one had the words "love you" etched on her eyelids.

In this third sequel, 19 years in the making, Harrison Ford is back in his iconic role, his face bearing the weathered look of the 65-year-old man he is today. Don't fret. Ford eases back into character and cracks his whip with the same snap as he did when Indiana Jones first burst on the scene in 1981.

This time, he's just narrowly escaped from his new enemies, the Communists (the movie is set in 1957, and the Nazis are long gone), and he comes back to his job as a professor only to find he has been fired. Preparing to go on a long vacation, Jones bumps into Mutt Williams, ably played by hot-new talent Shia Lebouf, who tells him about a long-lost colleague, Professor Oxley.

Jones and Williams, a greaser given to sliding a coke-drenched comb through his hair, head to Peru to start looking for Oxley and the mystery behind the Crystal Skull, an artifact that might maintain the keys to other-worldly knowledge. The Russians are after the skull as well.

Near escapes and gunfights ensue, and in the middle of all this, Marian Ravenwood, Mutt's mother and Jones' one-time lover from the Raiders of the Lost Ark days, returns, wanting to slap and kiss Jones all at the same time.

Spielberg crafts his action set pieces with panache, a brilliant mix of hilarity and tingly suspense. Jones hasn't lost his wit, and Lebouf infuses the film with a nice youthful energy.

The special-effects don't overwhelm the movie, although there is one vine-swinging scene that looks awfully fake. The story doesn't make much sense, with lots of X-Files mumbo-jumbo, but who cares.

This is all about adventure and love and the space between the spaces. Here, we look for magic, and Spielberg gives it to us in abundance, the movie never really dragging even if it goes for more than two hours.

You find yourself lost in another world, hoping you never have to come back.

Iron Man

2008-05-03T12:10:00.003-05:00

Long ago, in some distant time called my childhood, I had an eclectic comic book collection. I never took good care of them, the pages being a bit tattered. The collection is gone now, but one stands out in my mind, and that's Iron Man. The first panel of that comic book had Tony Stark slumping at his desk, a nearly-empty bottle of alcohol close by. I was hooked.

So I had to see the big-screen version of Iron Man that opened Friday. Just had to.

Now these days, super hero movies from the Marvel comics pantheon haven't fared well, except for the first two Spiderman movies, Hellboy and all of the X-Men movies. Many of us fans choose to forget Ang Lee's angst-filled Hulk or the horribly executed The Punisher and Daredevil.

Thank God for Robert Downey Jr., who steps into the role of Tony Stark/Iron Man. He's an actor's actor.

Plus, it helps that he has this backstory of being a drunken, drugged mess of a man once upon a time. That past makes him the perfect person to play the boozing playboy billionaire genius Tony Stark is.

He's quick with the quips and loves a good time, especially if it involves a romp in the sack with a gorgeous gal. Stark is head of Stark Industries, the largest weapons-maker in the world. He's amoral, with no concern for making profit out of war.

That is until he ends up being kidnapped by Middle Eastern terrorists in Afghanistan, his heart connected to a carburetor to keep shrapnel from penetrating it. Stark realizes that his weapons are being used by his country's enemies to do evil.

Well, he builds himself a suit, makes his escape and then builds a better suit, a sleeker, shinier one colored with hot-rod red, and becomes Iron Man.

Yes, it all sounds silly, but then again, all comic books are that way. But the dialogue, for a change, is sharp and witty, and Downey gives the movie the sort of dramatic oomph you don't see in many blockbusters.

The chemistry between him and Gwyneth Paltrow, who plays his red-headed assistant Pepper Potts, is one of the best things about the movies. And you can't go wrong with Jeff Bridges, who plays the sly villain Obadiah Stane. Terrence Howard is a bit underused but more than makes his presence known.

Jon Favreau, the director, gives the film a subversive, independent feel to the movie, even if it is all a bit predictable. The special-effects serve the plot well, though the climax is a disappointment.

The ending, however, which of course makes room for the inevitable sequel, is a hoot. I can hardly wait for Downey to suit up yet again.

Baby Mama

2008-04-25T17:48:00.003-05:00

I'm not exactly sure when "baby mama" replaced "mother" or "wife" as a term of endearment, but it is firmly established in the pop culture lexicon. And it was only a matter of time before a movie called Baby Mama was made.

Thank God it's a movie starring Tina Fey, the sexiest female comedian working these days, and one of the sharpest.

Here, Fey plays a hard-working career woman who at 37 realizes she really wants a baby, especially after she keeps bumping into one cute infant after another in her daily walk. But she has no man and can't adopt a child.

So she decides on the best next alternative: She hires a woman to be her surrogate. That woman, Angie, is played by Amy Poehler. Angie is the exact opposite of Fey's character, Kate. She's pretty much white trash, with a "common-law husband," and no manners.

Poehler and Fey have great chemistry, and the movie fleshes out the characters so they aren't simply stereotypes. We find depth in both of them.

Granted, the trajectory of the movie is rather predictable, especially after Kate bumps into Rob, played by Greg Kinnear, the owner of a fruit drink shop.

Steve Martin is wonderful as Kate's boss, a New Age CEO given to finding the essence of a shell and giving his employees the reward of staring into his eyes for five uninterrupted minutes.

The razor-sharp writing and the strong cast keep the movie on a steady pace to the inevitable end, thus giving some fresh meaning to "baby mama."

Stop-Loss

2008-03-31T19:46:00.003-05:00

Five years ago, the United States invaded Iraq. Five years later, the United States is still there, the violence seemingly getting worse. More than 4,000 soldiers are dead. The war is a major issue in the presidential race, the two Democratic candidates arguing for withdrawal and the presumptive Republican nominee saying we need to stay and not so easily admit defeat.

In her new movie, Stop-Loss, Kimberly Pierce, best known for her 1999 film Boys Don't Cry, goes beyond the rhetoric by focusing on the soldiers, their pain and struggles, the cost they pay for fighting a seemingly endless war.

In the film, Ryan Phillipe plays Brandon King, a soldier who has already seen two tours in Iraq. This last tour ended with several of his men dead in an ambush. King returns home to Texas, anxious to start a new life and leave the war back in Iraq.

But he can't quite escape. As soon as he's home, he's told he has to go back. King has been stop-lossed, a policy that allows the military to ship back soldiers even if their contract is up. The policy of stop-loss is essentially a back-door draft to make up for the shortage of soldiers.

King is livid. He's served his country long enough. He's seen too many awful things. His buddies are already struggling to adjust to a life that doesn't involve dodging bullets or seeing friends blown up by IEDs.

King decides, against the wishes of his best friend, Steve, played by Channing Tatum, to go AWOL, jumping in the car with Steve's girlfriend, and heading to Washington, D.C.

Along the way, he and his buddies deal with the boiling emotions felt by many veterans just returning home from war, the guilt and anger and post-traumatic stress disorder, the too-vivid images of death and destruction they have witnessed, the sheer senselessness of war itself.

To Pierce's credit, this isn't knee-jerk anti-war. These characters are red-blooded Americans who rushed to join the military and fight, like many did, after 911. As one character says, we might as well kill 'em in Iraq so we won't have to kill 'em in Texas.

The film's power is in how it shows these men's strong patriotism slowly disintegrate into frustration, confusion and disillusionment. They don't understand why they're fighting or more importantly, how long.

King, the moral center of the movie, fights within himself the sense of loyalty he has for the military and his friends and the feeling, ever growing inside him, that he just doesn't want to fight anymore, that he's done his time and he needs to move on.

The movie is melodramatic in some places, but the performances are strong, the tears well-earned. Pierce has pulled together a poignant movie that refuses to beat you over the head with its message. It just tells a story, making the personal very much political.

Meet The Browns

2008-03-22T00:39:00.003-05:00

I love Angela Bassett. She, to this black man, is the epitome of strong black woman, providing support for her man but not afraid to walk away if she feels in anyway disrespected. Her eyes flash with anger one moment and soften with tears in the next.

Her chiseled physique belies the emotional strength she has within. She is a woman in all her complexities, human in the most beautiful way possible.

And that's why I was happy to see her in a leading role, something Bassett hasn't had in quite some time, underservedly so.

In Tyler Perry's new movie, Meet The Browns, Bassett plays Brenda, a single mother struggling to raise her three kids. Bills are piling up, and she can hardly afford daycare for her youngest. And just when things couldn't get any worse, she's laid off after the company she works for moves jobs overseas.

Tragedy provides the silver lining. She gets a letter telling her that the father she never knew has died and she needs to come to Georgia for the funeral.

When she arrives, she meets Leroy Brown, who is given to wearing too-tight shirts and pants that look like they were made from multi-colored quilts, and his crazy family.

As with all other Tyler Perry movies, there's a message, or at least a couple of them about faith in God and importance of family. Perry has always managed to mix in over-the-top humor with soap-opera drama effectively.

But he ultimately fails in this movie. The writing and direction feels rushed and forced. Some laughs are to be had, but many of the jokes fall flat.

Rick Fox is Angela Bassett's love interest, a former pro-basketball player trying to help her 17-year-old son improve his basketball skills for a shot at the pros while also trying to woo Brenda's heart. Fox, however, isn't the greatest actor, and the two fail to light any sparks.

And the problems are too simply solved in this movie. Now, no one expects realism from Perry, but we also don't expect to see one character get shot in one scene and run up and down the court like nothing happened in the next. We don't expect silly little obstacles in a burgeoning romance crop up that go away as easily as brushing some dust off the countertop.

When that happens, why root for anyone? You know things are going to work out anyway. Just give it five minutes.

The script feels as if it was undeveloped, and by the time the movie ends, you sense something is just missing. At the very least, you end up with stiff dialogue and contrived situations.

That's not to say the movie wasn't entertaining. It was. But after last year's much-better made Why Did I Get Married, arguably Perry's best movie to date, I came away from Meet The Browns disappointed and expecting more.

And Angela Bassett, my future wife if she ever divorces Courtney B. Vance (not likely at all), deserves better.

Persepolis

2008-03-08T12:11:00.003-05:00

Out of pain comes art, often engaging visceral art, and that maxim is no doubt true of Persepolis, a beautifully rendered animated feature based on Marjane Sarapti's graphic novel of the same name.

It is set in Iran during the Islamic revolution, and Sarapti is but a nine-year-old child, rambunctious and still somewhat innocence.

But that innocence is shattered, as she learns about the brutal tyranny of the Shah. People all around her are rising up to overthrow the Shah and his dictatorship.

And the Shah does fall, but replaces that dictatorship, as Sarapti and her family quickly learn, is far worse. Fundamentalists impose their own vision of how life should be and brook no dissent. Women cover themselves in veils and are expected to be silent. Sarapti, however, can't keep her mouth shut, and as a result, she gets into plenty of trouble.

These are dangerous times, and her family eventually send Sarapti off to Austria for school, to protect her and give her a chance at a life.

Sarapti becomes a woman, finds her voice and discovers punk rock. She falls in love and has her heart broken, and soon, realizes, that as much as she hates Iran, she loves it, and returns.

But things haven't improved, and though she finds a way to thrive, she leaves again, knowing she cannot live within the limits the Iranian government proscribes.

Sarapti and the director Vincent Paronnaud have imbued this story, as painful as it often is, with a sharp and biting sense of humor. The political is balanced with the personal. We learn large chunks about Iranian history but we never lose site of Sarapti's intense struggle to be who she is in a society that doesn't always accept her.

We find here an Iran that we both love and hate, a country filled with horrific violence but also love. This is the message Sarapti sends over and over again throughout the movie: home is home, no matter how much it hurt you, how much it abused you. You have a connection to your home that cannot be denied. It is a physical place but home also exists in your mind and heart and cannot easily be forgotten.

And neither will you, once you see this movie.

Thriller

2008-02-23T11:53:00.003-05:00

As a child, Michael Jackson scared me. On the night his 15-minute epic music video premiered, I ran into the bathroom, too frightened to see his nails turn into claws or whiskers come out of his skin as sweet-voiced Michael Jackson transformed into a werewolf before the lovely eyes of Ola Ray.

And those yellow eyes with the black slit chilled me to the core.

Yet, as scared as I was, I couldn't stay away. I wanted to see Michael sing and dance, work that magic that only he could do.

In the 1980s, Michael Jackson was the man. He could do no wrong. He was supernaturally gifted, his feet blessed by God to move in ways no mere mortal could. His voice, velvety in its soaring falsetto, floated easily over pop melodies, assured in its force, measured in its power.

His music videos were main events, families gathering around the television set to see what this wunderkind would come up with next to thrill us and take us on that Disney-like musical journey.

And believe it or not, no one, no one, was ashamed to do the moonwalk. Hell, we struggled to make our feet glide as smoothly as his. We wanted to be Michael, both Jackson and Jordan, though I stopped at getting a jheri curl (ain't no hair of mine gonna drip).

And now Thriller, his mega-selling album, a classic that remains relevant today, is 25 years old. Michael Jackson will turn 50 this year, and a lot has changed.

Usher, Chris Brown and Justin Timberlake, clearly inspired by MJ, have taken the mantle of pop entertainers, combining song and dance into one irressistable package.

And the man himself? I am still scared of him, but for different reasons. He hasn't transformed into a werewolf but merely a caricature of youth refusing to mature. His narrow nose, his straightened hair, and his lightened skin have long erased the handsome young man we used to know. Allegations of child molestation and just plain bizarre behavior distract and disgust us so much that memories of MJ's greatness fade.

I hardly believe Thriller is 25 years old. Such a lifetime ago it seems, when we believed in the magic of entertainment, that we saw Michael Jackson as some supernatural entity.

We didn't see, though, that he was only human. Not God, not a freak, but pain in flesh, flawed beyond what we could even imagine, hidden for far too long behind our own hopes and dreams all encased inside one man.

For me, Thriller still thrills, fills me with the innocence of childhood, a time when adult concerns seemed far away and I could fear in the confines of my home the evil monsters out to get me. And that magic was possible.

Atonement: Hated It

2008-02-03T14:48:00.001-05:00

I walked into Atonement with high expectations, fed by Oscar buzz and a friend's recommendation.

I left disappointed. The tale told here is sad and tragic, and Joe Wright, the director, milks the pathos for all it is worth. The cast is filled with bright actors such as James McAvoy and Keira Knightly and newcomer Saoirse Ronan who give pitch-perfect performances.

The problem lies in the story, or more accurately, in how the story is told. Going back and forth in time, we learn about the unrequited love of Cecillia and Robbie, whose lives are forever damaged by the lie told by Cecillia's sister, Briony.

It is a lie that lands Robbie in prison and then in the middle of World War II while Cecillia works as a nurse treating injured soldiers. Over several years, we see the two come teasingly close to living happily ever after before being torn apart by circumstances beyond their control.

And at the center of their unhappiness is Briony, a prickly little girl whose narcissistic quest for attention leads her to ruin two people's lives. The rest of her life is spent trying to seek some kind of penance.

But I never quite muster any kind of sympathy for Briony or her guilt. Not once does she ever come forward to tell the truth. The pain of other people are mere canvases for her to tell the stories she never got to write fully as a child.

And though James McAvoy and Keira Knightly pour themselves into their roles with an incredible fervor, the weight of their tragedy lives never grasped me. The non-linear narrative wasn't as effective as Joe Wright thought it could be in painting a portrait of painful consequences stemming from one awful lie.

In fact, it was distracting, keeping one at a distance instead of drawing one into the interior lives of these characters.

And Briony, when we encounter her at the end as a dying novelist still trying to salve her guilt, comes across not sad but pathetic, a coward who couldn't be bothered with the bravery to tell the truth.

I certainly may be wrong in my conclusion, and if I am, there is much to atone for. But I just didn't get it.

The Case of the Sad Movie

2008-01-27T23:44:00.000-05:00

Films are pretty bleak these days, and Robin Givhan, award-winnng fashion writer for The Washington Post, tells us why. Bleak is good but today, even though I should watch There Will Be Blood, which has managed to sneak into my little city of Winston-Salem, I opted for more fun fare, namely the dance movie with heart, How She Move.

Cloverfield

2008-01-19T13:19:00.000-05:00

YouTube is the new diary, or so it seems in Cloverfield, a Godzilla-like monster movie tailor-made for a generation used to video-taping their lives.

Here, we follow a group of successful 20 something Manhattans celebrating one of their own who has nabbed a cool new job in Japan.

The revelry is caught on tape as a guy named Hud lugs around a video camera. Partying soons turns into running when power outages and earthquakes intrude.

Turns out a monster is terrorizing Manhattan, knocking down buildings and beheading the Statue of Liberty.

Everything, and I mean everything, is seen through Hud's eyes via the camera. The result made my friend's head hurt. But it also gives the film a surreal touch in the first hour or so, leaving the audience with only glimpses of the mysterious monster stomping his way through the city.

The acting isn't Oscar-worthy in the least, and most of the characters are either forgettable or immensely annoying, like Hud.

But the feeling of dread is ever-present, a steady knot in the stomach, with the occassional kick in the gut when the monster gets a little too close to the camera.

Produced by Alias-creator J.J. Abrams and directed by Matt Reeves, Cloverfield is a throwback to the Godzilla movies of the past with some edge.

Does everything make sense? Of course not; this is a monster movie, and you yell at characters who insist on going toward the monster instead of away. And the small efforts at character development don't work. We don't see these films to care about people; we see them to see people get sidewiped by big teeth and sharp claws.

And on that front, the movie delivers, a gnarly scarefest with an indie spirit.

First Sunday

2008-01-12T14:09:00.000-05:00

Some have called David Talbert the next Tyler Perry, though he scoffs at such comparisons.

And for good reason. His first film, First Sunday, isn't nearly as preachy as many of Tyler Perry's films. Nor is it as funny.

Ice Cube, who seems to have a permanent scowl etched on his face, is Durell, an ex-con trying to keep his baby mama from leaving Baltimore for Atlanta with his son. Durell can't leave the state because of his probation.

His sidekick is LeeJohn, played by Tracy Morgan, a comic blessed with often manic energy.

Durell's girlfriend needs about $17,000 to pay off her debts and keep her from leaving. And LeeJohn is indebted to some Jamaican gangsters.

They hatch a plan to rob the local church. As is often the case, the plan goes haywire and they end up taking the pastor and a bunch of church members hostage. Hilarity ensues.

Well, not as much as one would hope, unfortunately. Tracy Morgan manages to get some laughs, but the real star of this movie is pimp-worshipping comedian Katt Williams, who plays a effeminate choir director. His facial contortions are a hoot, and the script gives him the best lines.

When Williams appears on the screen, there's a guaranteed belly laugh or two.

Loretta Devine, as the church secretary, has one sweet, tear-inducing scene with Morgan's character.

Talbert does a decent job of pulling out some good performances out of the actors, who include the always-great Chi McBride as the pastor, Malinda Williams as his daughter and Regina Hall as Durell's ex-girlfriend. Plus, the movie thankfully moves along at a rapid pace, before the audience can even begin to detect the obvious holes in the plot.

Somehow, despite the problems, Talbert manages to effectively slip in positive messages about faith and accountability in a movie dependent on the most part on very broad comedy.

But Talbert hasn't mastered the formula yet, and by the end, the movie all but falls apart, with a sappy happy ending that just doesn't feel earned. Which means that instead of saying Amen after walking out of the theater, you might be more apt to say what a shame.

Juno

2008-01-06T22:50:00.000-05:00

Juno MacGuff is what every girl would want to be at 16, if she had her dialogue written for her by snappy ex-stripper turned wunderkind writer Diablo Cody. Well, except she's pregnant by her kind-of boyfriend Paulie Bleeker and she finds her adoptive parents through the classified section.

Somehow, this all holds together in Jason Reitman's wonderfully realized Juno. Named after the queen of the Roman gods, Juno is a smart-alecky teenager with a snappy comeback for everyone. And when she is unexpectedly pregnant, she deals with the situation in her own plucky way. After being scared away from the abortion clinic, she finds Vanessa and Mark. Vanessa, played by Jennifer Garner, desperately wants to be a mother. Mark, played by Jason Bateman, may or may not be ready.

Backed by her no-nonsense father and kick-ass stepmother, Juno maneuvers through her nine-months of pregnancy. Ellen Page gives an audience-pleasing performance that revels in Juno's hyperarticulate banter, but the real joy that Page provides is her slowly tearing away the facade Juno's snarkiness hides. She's just a girl still not sure who she is. She wonders if she is in love and she is naive to the complexities of adult relationships.

Reitman balances the laughter with the pathos. My only quibble is that sometimes Juno is too smart-alecky, making it hard to relate to her. After all, real teenagers don't talk like this. At least I didn't when I was that age and no one I knew did either.

Dawson's Creek had this problem. The teenagers gave impossibly eloquent soliloques reminiscent more of Shakespeare than any of the slang-driven drivel one expects of young people these days. Juno's comebacks are entertaining but surreal, and keep her at arms length for most of the film.

Nonetheless, you do begin to care for her, as Diablo Cody's script begins to reveal the confused teenager underneath all of the tough talk.

And then this all becomes real and touching and poignant. And every girl will want to be just like Juno. Well, maybe they'll skip the unplanned pregnancy part, though.

The Great Debaters

2007-12-28T12:22:00.000-05:00

In college, I relished debate. After all, college was the best place for it. Those four years gave one time and space to hash out with others all those great ideas, to engage with those who saw the world differently from your own, to have your mind changed or not. But more important than anything, college was the time where you found your voice and figured out what you believed in. And if you didn't, well, at least you had a good enough time about which you could tell your children and grandchildren years from now.

I was reminded of those long-ago college years of mine as I watched Denzel Washington's The Great Debaters. I remembered that sweet thrill of both of hearing scintillating new ideas and seeing beautiful young ladies.

Yet, there's more here than fun college times in this movie. We are taken to Marshall, Texas, where on Wiley College, Denzel Washington's Melvin Tolson is trying to mold the young minds of black students in 1935, a time when Jim Crow segregation was at its height.

Washington's second directorial effort tells the mostly true story of Tolson's efforts to revive a debate team goes virtually undefeated and eventually beats a predominantly white college team. This is your typical root-for-the-underdog kind of movie, a Rocky where the weapons are words instead of fists.

What saves the movie from sinking into soggy sap is Washington's remarkable restraint. He has confidence in the power of the story that he doesn't need to be heavy-handed here.

And the performances he draws from his young actors (Jurnee Smollett, Denzel Whitaker and Nate Parker) are good. Nate Parker's Henry Lowe is a hot-headed womanizing drunk with a natural gift at debating. Denzel Whitaker plays James Farmer Jr., an awkward young man striving to find his own voice amid the thunderous one of his scholarly and authoritarian father, played by Forest Whitaker. (Note: This is the same James Farmer Jr. who eventually grows up to found the Congress of Racial Equality, one of the premier civil-rights organizations in this country). And Jurnee Smollett, who has grown into a striking young woman since her debut years ago in Eve's Bayou, plays Samantha Booke, who has dreams of being a lawyer. All of them have their various arcs in the story, each finding the power of their words.

And at the center is Melvin B. Tolson, a professor dedicated to helping his students find and keep their righteous minds. Tolson could have been your typical motivational teacher but Washington gives him a bit of complexity that makes him vastly more interesting and bit more unpredictable than what one might expect in a movie such as this.

Tolson's not only a professor and a poet but also a radical, spending his nights organizing sharecroppers and his days being a hard taskmaster to his students.

Washington manages to retain control of all these myriad elements and merge them into a compelling narrative.

And he lets us know in subtle but hard-to-forget ways that this is not the best time to be black. One of the most powerful scenes in this movie is when Tolson and his students encounter a lynching. It's a small haunting pause to a mostly uplifting movie. But Washington puts it there to remind the audience the harsh world in which these people live, that to be black was sometimes a tightrope between life and horrific death, that to survive was an accomplishment in and of itself.

But the other part of the story is that despite those obstacles, black people like Tolson and his students dared to achieve, to be great, to be young, gifted and black.

They, of course, win, this time against Harvard (though in real life, it was actually USC). We know the win is coming, but we forgive the predictability. We've been on their journey, and thus, the victory is oh, so sweet.

I Am Legend

2007-12-15T16:11:00.000-05:00

If by seeing I Am Legend you are hoping for a typical Hollywood blockbuster, you might slightly disappointed.

For the first two-thirds of this new Will Smith movie, there are no huge explosions, no smart-alecky hero spouting off cool one-liners. Instead, we see Will Smith barrelling down deserted Manhattan streets. Grass sprout from concrete, abandoned cars line the streets and Union Square Station sits empty. Quiet has replaced the usual noisy bustle of New York.

And Smith's Robert Neville is quite possibly the last man on earth. It has been this way for three years after a virus thought to cure cancer ended up wiping out much of humanity. All that's left are Neville and vampire-like zombies that roam the streets at night while Neville holes up with his dog, Sam, in his townhouse.

Like No Country for Old Men, this is a meditation wrapped in the framework of a thriller. Francis Lawrence, the director, gives you all the shocks to your system you'd expect from a sci-fi/monster movie.

But what's truly terrifying here is Neville's slow descent into paranoia, the disintegration of his sanity, as he continues to live day in and day out alone, his only companion being a dog.

Most of Neville's days are spent going after deer, sending out distress signals and working on a cure. At night, he quarantines himself in his house, sometimes sleeping in a bathtub with a rifle nearby, as the monsters play outside.

Will Smith has almost made a cottage industry of single-handedly saving the world, first in Independence Day and again in Men In Black, with a few cop-buddy films like Bad Boys thrown in for good measure. And in all of those movies, Smith gets by with a disarming charm and certain invincibility.

That's all gone in this movie. We see Smith vulnerable, afraid, just about to crack. His is a dark performance, similar in some ways to the one he crafted in The Pursuit of Happiness.

Yet, as he always does, he lets some light into the darkness, imbuing Neville with a likability that allows the audience to put up with him alone for long stretches of time.

It's only in the last half that the movie goes from meditative to action-packed, as the zombies move in. Unfortunately, the zombies never seen real, the CGI effects a little too obvious. And Lawrence packs the end of the movie with a heavy-handed spirituality that doesn't quite work.

Up until then, I Am Legend is a thrill ride and if you have to have someone be the last man on earth, you couldn't do worse than Will Smith.

No Country for Old Men

2007-12-01T14:09:00.000-05:00

In No Country for Old Men, the quiet haunts. All you hear is the bark of a dog, the rush of the river or the quick whoosh of an air gun.

The quiet haunts because that is when evil flourishes, when no one can hear it. The Coen brothers relish the quiet, make effective use of silence to make the horror more real.

And that horror is in the person of Anton Chigurh, possibly the most frightening villain ever placed on screen.

It is Javier Bardem's flat expression, piercing wide eyes and few spoken words that make Chigurh so bloodcurdling cold. He is a psychopath as brutally relentless as Halloween's Michael Meyers and as twistedly logical as Hannibal Lector in Silence of the Lambs.

And in this adaptation of Cormac McCarthy's novel, Chigurh is in pursuit of Llewelyn Moss, a loser of a welder who happens upon $2 million in drug money.

Moss takes the cash and soon starts running. But Chigurh is death personified, armed with an air gun and a hard-to-shake determination to catch his prey.

Sheriff Ed Tom Bell is the moral center of this tale. He is ready to retire when he hears of the mess that Moss has gotten himself into and he tries to help.

But even he knows that evil is inevitable and he has grown weary of the world he lives in, one that has gotten worse and not better the longer he breathes air.

The violence is bloody as Chigurh closes in on Moss, slaying anyone who gets in his way. But the violence isn't shocking. Instead, what turns your blood cold is the all-encompassing weight of the evil in the world.

It overwhelms everyone in its path. You can't escape it anymore than you can escape coin-tossing Chigurh.

Can evil ever be defeated, or do you at some point learn to live with it, carve out the little good you can find in this life? These are the questions In the Country of Old Men asks. They aren't easy questions, and the answers are as hard as the desolate land these characters live in.

The Coen brothers take you on a long, harsh journey where the ending isn't certain to be good. But with brilliant performances and breath-taking pacing, they have crafted a movie that stays with you.

It is the quiet haunts you, all the way down to your bones.

American Gangster

2007-11-03T17:51:00.000-05:00

Gangsters fascinate us, at least on film. We can enjoy their outsider status, their ballsy rebellion against civilized society. Look at Scarface, Brian De Palma's epic about a Cuban immigrant who, simply by his almost reckless, in-your-face ambition, conquers the dope game and enriches himself and his family. And even when he goes down in a blaze of bullets, it is a glorious demise, his famous line, "Say hello to my little friends," etched forever in our collective memory.

So it should not surprise anyone the near-numbing buzz surrounding American Gangster, starring actor heavyweights Denzel Washington and Russell Crowe with Ridley Scott directing.

Just the names alone draw one in, but those are just cherries on top of a scrumptious dessert.

Here we see the rise and fall of Frank Lucas, a country boy from North Carolina who served as the driver and bodyguard of infamous Harlem gangster Bumpy Johnson (famously played by Laurence Fishburne in Hoodlum). Bumpy was beloved in Harlem. He was a refined gangster, his brutal violence muted by his occasional philosophical ruminations and his penchant for poetry.

In 1969, Bumpy Johnson dies, and Frank Lucas decides to make a name for himself, but like Frank Sinatra, he does it his way. He has tired of begging the Mafia a cut in the heroin game. His solution is textbook profit maximization -- cut out the middleman and then put out a better product than the competition and sell it at a lower price.

Soon, he corners the heroin game, taking in a $1 million a day. As played by Washington, Frank Lucas is a Southern gentleman, one who puts family first, who takes his sweet mother (played in fine form by Ruby Dee) to church every Sunday, who dresses nice and who is way smarter than his enemies.

On his tail is Richie Roberts, played by Russell Crowe. Roberts is an honest cop, the kind who returns $1 million, even as his more corrupt brethren look at him in disgust.

Scott's film is one of parallels. The acclaimed director switches back and forth between Lucas' rise to the top and Roberts' dogged pursuit of Lucas amid struggling his personal demons.

The movie clocks in at more than two hours, but Scott keeps a quick pace, sometimes too quick.

Washington's performance is good as always, but his characterization is a bit opaque. We either see him loving his family or coldly calculating his next move, which sometimes requires a bullet in the head of some knucklehead who crossed him.

Crowe's Roberts comes across as a bit more human, his flaws and motivations clearer.

Yet, it is clear that Washington is the star. We instinctively cheer his every victory, and even when he falls, we still love Lucas. How could we not? He does what every man and woman wants to do -- win on his own terms and answer to no one. We are drawn to bad guys because they are outsiders; they find a way where there is no way to succeed. And they do it with an irresistible charm.

Frank Lucas epitomizes that, as made clear in this 2000 New York Magazine article.

Scott certainly tries to clue us in on the horrific damage Lucas wrought in his own city, the thousands of overdoses caused by his product. And he does his best to show that there are consequences to what Lucas did.

But it is all to naught. We love our gangsters, even when they lose.

30 Days of Night

2007-10-27T13:01:00.000-05:00

Creeps come out on Halloween, particularly the bloodsucking, flesh-tearing, human-killing kind.

Vampires are the scariest of them all. But you're safe as long as the sun is out. Unless you live in Barrow, Alaska, where the sun goes down for a month, hence the title of the new movie, 30 Days of Night, the latest contribution to the vampire genre.

No, the movie doens't always make sense, and you scream at the screen a character makes the wrong move and gets his or her neck chomped on as a result.

But you don't go to horror movies for logic; you go for a jump-out-of-your-seat good time. And this movie succeeds darn well on that criteria.

Josh Hartnett plays Eben, the local sheriff who still pines for his estranged wife, played by Melissa George. They and others find themselves stranded as a band of vampires led by Marlow descend for a month of good old blood sucking.

The killings are fast and furious with lots of gore splashing everywhere. The acting is decent, and the vampires are scary.

David Slade, who directed the masterful Hard Candy, ratchets up the suspense nicely but he does start to run out of steam a bit as Day 1 stretches into Day 17.

But the movie never really drags, and the performances are enough to keep audiences engaged.

Danny Huston convinces as the lead vampire, even if he doesn't say hardly a word of English through the whole movie.

The friend I saw this movie with didn't quite like the ending. I won't give it away, but it is a bit darker than usual. But I didn't mind. It was something different, just like the entire movie.

No great meanings were gleaned from the movie, but this wasn't a deep movie anyway --- just mindless entertainment, which, by the way, is the point.

Gone Baby Gone

2007-10-21T13:52:00.000-05:00

Ben Affleck is the slacker actor, the one who showed promise at one point long time ago but keeps making crap like Gigli while his partner Matt Damon has since gone on to box-office glory as superspy Jason Bourne.

But he may have finally, finally redeemed himself --- behind the camera instead of in front of it.

His directoral debut, Gone Baby Gone, is a near masterpiece, a brooding police procedral of surprising depth.

Based on Dennis Lehane's novel of the same name, the movie centers around 31-year-old Patrick Kenzie, a Boston native who specializes in finding people. He's effective because he knows the gritty landscape of his city. He and his girlfriend, Angie (Michelle Monaghan), are hired by a couple who want the two detectives to "augment" the investigation into their nieces' disappearance.

Their investigation is complicated in many ways, the first of which involves a drug-addicted mother whose parenting skills are lacking, to say the least.

Nothing is as simple as it seems, and the lines between right and wrong blur real quick.

Ben Affleck makes the city as much of a character as the actors. The Boston accents are thick, and he beautifully captures the rhythm of Boston slang.

We feel as if we walk the same seedy streets as Patrick, played here by Affleck's younger brother, Casey.

And that sense of place only helps the performances, especially Casey's, pop off the screen. You see everyone's flaws, but you don't necessarily hate them for it. They are fully-drawn human beings grappling with life's shades of gray where the right thing may seem like the wrong thing and the wrong thing may seem like the right thing.

Affleck reminds us in suble and not so subtle ways that the life of a little girl is at stake at every turn, and at times, the suspence is heart-stopping. But it's not just the bullets that fly that make you gulp; the decisions these characters have to make, ones morally complex with no easy answers, leave you thinking long after the final credits roll.

That Ben Affleck makes those choices palpable and believable is a testament to this beginning director's skill. The script, written by Affleck and Aaron Stockard, is a sparkling blend of rip-crackling humor and potent pathos.

Like Mystic River, also based on a Lehane novel, Gone Baby Gone haunts you with the decisions we make in life and their consequences. It haunts you because you realize that doing the right thing doesn't guarantee that everything will work out in the end. Such is life.

But Ben Affleck getting behind the camera is probably one of the best decisions he's made in quite a long time.

Why Did I Get Married

2007-10-13T22:01:00.001-05:00

Tyler Perry has perfected what KRS-One once called edutainment. Perry knows how to sneak a message in between uproarious laughs and soap-opera drama.

Perry confounded critics when his first movie, The Diary of a Mad Black Woman, adapted from one of his many gospel plays, packed movie houses across the country.

His movies, just as his plays, combined broad, over-the-top comedy with tear-jerker drama and come-to-Jesus moments. And in the center of at least two of his movies and many of his plays was Madea, a pistol-packing grandmamma who mangled Bible verses and whipped plenty of behind.

But in his last two movies, Perry sidelined Madea, whom he played, and has managed to make more mainstream movies that still stick to his major themes about faith and giving everything to God.

His latest one centers around four couples, all college friends, who gather in Colorado to talk about their marriages. You have Patricia, a best-selling author and successful psychiatrist who seems to have a perfect marriage with her husband, Gavin, an architect.

Angela and Marcus argue all the time, mostly about Marcus' ex-girlfriend and mother of his children. Then there's Terry and Diane, who is much too busy as a high-powered attorney to spend time with her husband or her daughter.

And finally, we have Mike and Sheila, whose confidence is crushed both by her husband's adultery and his cruel words about her weight.

Over the course of the weekend, secrets are revealed, some obvious and some not so obvious. The highlight of the film is Angela, played by Tasha Smith. She is a firecracker, not afraid to say what she thinks, even if it might be the wrong time to say it. Some of the biggest laughs come from words out of her mouth.

But the real revelation is singer Jill Scott. The poetess/songstress started her career on the stage, so it shouldn't be a surprise that she can act. The pain Sheila feels is etched indelibly in Scott's face. She is the moral and emotional center of the movie, and her transformation from victim to victor is one of the most powerful story arcs in the film.

Perry has never been a subtle storyteller, aiming to tell more instead of show more. But he has become better, and the performances he gets out of his talented cast are worth the price of admission alone.

What he can't do is end this movie very well. Wounds that were opened during that Colorado weekend are too easily patched by the end of the movie. Apparently, a good cry and hug is all you need to get a marriage back on the right track. In real life, issues like adultery require a little more than that to overcome. Life ain't a sitcom.

Yet, give Perry some credit. In a world where we see people get married and divorced in a matter of months, it is refreshing to see a director like Perry point out that marriage is serious business and not something to enter into lightly.

And it's much more entertaining to sitting through an episode of Dr. Phill.

The Brave One

2007-09-22T19:32:00.000-05:00

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

2007-09-01T19:39:00.000-05:00

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.

Not Another Werewolf Movie

2007-08-11T18:20:00.000-05:00

Werewolves fascinate me. Of course, I loved the cool idea of seeing a man sprout fur on his back at the sight of a full moon. But it was also this deeper idea of man transforming into beast, the primitive side of man being allowed to burst from the inside and roam free.

When I was young, I read these pamphlets about the making of horror movies, and one of them was about The Wolf Man, that classic starring Lon Chaney Jr. as a man who is bitten by a werewolf and becomes one himself. Amid the camp was a tragedy. We see a good man who against his better nature commits murder every time the moon is full.

A gypsy tells him what he has become and that he is destined to harm the very thing he loves. The only way he can end it all is to kill himself.

Years later, I watched An American Werewolf in London, by far my favorite of the genre. Masterfully directed by John Landis, the movie centers on two American students backpacking through Europe. A trip through the foggy and dark moors leaves one dead and another cursed with a need to feast on human flesh. The make-up effects by Rick Baker are a highlight, and the transformation scene is one of the best I have ever seen in a werewolf movie. Landis mixed in wonderful degrees humor and horror. I laughed and covered my eyes simultaneously.

But beyond The Howling, there hasn't been a decent werewolf movie in years. The Howling produced increasingly non-sensical sequels, and then there was that unfortunate sequel to An American Werewolf in London, which simply moved the horrific proceedings to Paris.

A few years ago, director Wes Craven, creator of that hilarious knife-fingered menace to teenage dreams Freddy Kruger, attempted to revive the genre with Cursed. Even with popular stars such as Christina Ricci and Jonathan Jackson, the movie more than lived up to its title, flopping at the box office. Critics thrashed it, deservedly so. The fact that it was PG-13 didn't help matters, and the special effects were horrid.

I held out hope, however small it may have been, that the recent release Skinwalkers might be the werewolf movie I have been waiting for since An American Werewolf in London. The trailers looked good, and the werewolves looked hairy and scary enough.

How wrong I was. This is worse than Cursed. The dialogue stinks and the acting, except for Elias Koteas, is awful. And the werewolves themselves look ridiculous. Instead of werewolves, they look like fur-bodied actors wearing hideous dog masks.

The story, if you can call it that, is that werewolves, here called skinwalkers, are rooted in American Indian culture. Two groups of werewolves have been battling each other for years. One group loves being werewolves while the other sees being skinwalkers as a curse.

A boy who is half-skinwalker and half-human will turn 13 at the time of the red full moon and it is he who holds the key to ending the curse of the skinwalkers.

The bad-boy skinwalkers want the kid dead, and the good ones attempt to protect him.

A potentially good werewolf movie, or a good movie period, is here somewhere in this mess. But with a clueless director (Jim Isaacs, whose last movie was the surprisingly entertaining Jason X) and a useless script full of cliche and no scares, finding that rough shape of a movie is really, really hard.

I still dream of seeing a good werewolf movie someday, one that's scary and has a cool transformation scene and a decent story. Until then, maybe I should go rent An American Werewolf of London and sing "Blue Moon" for old times sake.

Bourne Kicks Major Behind

2007-08-07T18:16:00.000-05:00

Summers are known for sequels, and this summer has been one of threequels -- Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, The Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End.

Some are good and others are really, really bad. The Bourne Ultimatum just happens to be really, really good.

Again, we follow reluctant government assassin Jason Bourne as he tries to remember his past. This time, he's as close as he's ever been to figuring out the truth.

Played by Matt Damon, Bourne is brutal, jaw-droppingly so at times, but he's also remorseful. He doesn't like killing. He kills because he has to survive.

And ever since The Bourne Identity, he's been wanting to know why he kills and who made him who he is.

As always, there's someone who's chasing him and hoping he'd just die. That someone is Noah Vosen, played by David Straithairn, a CIA big-wig who runs an office in Manhattan. He is cold and calculating and willing to kill anyone to get close enough to Bourne and kill him.

Pamela Landy is the opposite, a hard-edged CIA agent with a moral center, played by Joan Allen. She begins suspecting that Bourne has been done wrong and risks her career to help him.

Under the direction of Paul Greengrass, precious little time is set aside for poignant moments or small talk. But Greengrass manages to imbue Bourne with complexities that make him more human.

Bourne isn't bond. He's a one-woman guy who still mourns the death of his girlfriend in the last film, The Bourne Supremacy. And he's no Arnold Swartznegger-like killing machine.

That doesn't mean no action. Oh, there's action. Hard-hitting, in-your-face action. Greengrass's documentary-style direction puts you in every lip-flesh-chewing action sequence. The car chases are particularly exhilarating, and you feel each smash of car metal as if you were in the back seat.

More importantly, Greengrass gives that hard-to-quantify quality we call soul. This is no simple popcorn movie that you forget once you have left the movie theater.

Bourne is doing, at some level, what all of us are doing: trying to figure out who we are and where we fit in.

Jason Bourne, in the end, is all of us searching for the truth of our lives in a chaotic world.

I Know Who Killed Me

2007-07-29T13:43:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-15T22:11:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-08T18:28:00.000-05:00

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

2007-07-07T13:01:00.000-05:00

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.

Mika Brzezinski of MNSBC rips Paris report

2007-06-30T12:04:00.001-05:00

Okay, maybe poor Mika went a little overboard, all with paper shredding and playing with a lighter. But aren't we all just a little cazy over Paris. She spends three weeks in jail and we're outraged, just outraged, about her whining, her celebrity, her outrageous actions, her hard-to-believe repentence.
Who cares? We care because Paris entertains us, allows us to laugh at somebody else, to feel a bit superior. We snark and wonder how she could be so famous for essentially being dumb, blonde and rich. We snark and we're outraged at such a circumstance.
The truth is, however, that we made her who she is. We decided that we had to pay attention. So, really, are we outraged at her or at ourselves for playing a part in creating the Paris we so adore and abhor at the same time.

1408

2007-06-23T17:49:00.000-05:00

I remember the first time I was truly scared. It was after watching The Exorcist II: The Heretic. Seeing all those locusts swirling around Linda Blair, while this eerie music played in the background, freaked me out. And though it may sound nonsensical, I somehow equated that music with the theme from Flashdance, the one that goes "She's a maniac, maniac..."
Years later, I've come to realize what everyone else knew: The Exorcist II: The Heretic was awful and stupid and could only make sense if you were drunk, really drunk.
It takes much to scare me or freak me out. See, I get a thrill out of watching gorefests and get a kick out of a nice horror flick.
But not too many movies these days leave you with the creepy chill in your bones after you walk out of the theater.
Then there's 1408, a crisply-told tale of sheer terror. Based on a Stephen King short story, the movie tells the story of Mike Enslin, a debunker of ghost tales who recently lost his daughter. He gets a post card about 1408, a room at The Dublin, a hotel in New York. He goes to check it out, despite the protests of the general manager, played ably by Samuel L. Jackson.
Enslin, played by John Cusack, is a morose, sarcastic fellow, not given to easy scares. But then the alarm clock starts ticking off 60 minutes, and his hand gets slammed by the window, and he starts seeing ghostly figures jump out of the window.
Pretty soon, his skepticism dissipates and is replaced by screams and crying and just plain panic.
Mikael Hafstrom, who directed the sleazy and forgettable Derailed, keeps the scares coming, all the while mixing in the backstory of Enslin's masked grief.
That's not difficult, considering Stephen King wrote the story. King has never neglected his characters, making them authentically human. You actually care whether they live or die.
The scares weren't get-under-the-seat kind of scares. They were the kind that sink in deep long after the movie is over.
I might just have to make sure that the next hotel I stay in doesn't have a 1408. You never know.

Killing Me Softly

2007-06-16T12:15:00.000-05:00

Heather Graham. Joseph Fiennes. How could you go wrong?

Really wrong, as I found out when I watched Killing Me Softly. It is a shame but sometimes good actors find themselves in horrid movies.

In this one, Graham plays a young American working as a website designer in London. She has a good life with a boyfriend who adores her. But apparently he doesn't adore her enough, for after one look at Adam, a celebrity mountain climber played by Fiennes, she's at his pad having wild, furious and freakish sex with the guy. And she can't get enough, spending her lunch break with Adam.

At times, you think this is trying for the depth of Unfaithful, a much-better movie starring Diane Lane as a woman who has a torrid affair with a stranger. Really, this is just an excuse to see Graham naked a bunch of times.

Then the movie starts becoming a male version of Fatal Attraction, with Fiennes as the obsessed lover.

Luckily, no rabbits are cooked.

They might as well have been, as silly as this movie becomes. And of course, there's a maddeningly nutjob of a twist at the end involving family secrets.

By this time, even with two good actors, you just throw up your hands. What a waste of talent.

Bug

2007-05-27T18:34:00.000-05:00

Ashley Judd is one fearless actress.

That's the only good thing that comes out of Bug, a nutty, conspiracy-obsessed wack-job of a movie directed by William Friedkin, whose last hit was the horrific The Exorcist more than 30 years ago.

Bug is about bugs. But it's not a horror movie. This is more of a pschological study of two lovebirds driven to pure madness.

Judd plays Agnes, a waitress at a lesbian bar in town who has been literally beat down by life. Her son disappeared almost 10 years ago, and her ex-husband, played by Harry Connick Jr., terrorizes her. Agnes numbs her pain with booze and cocaine in a seedy motel room.

A bright spot of hope comes in the form of Peter, played by Michael Shannon, a quiet, unassuming man introduced to her by one of her friends.

Agnes and Peter inexplicably become lovers, and soon after, Peter reveals himself to be certifiably looney, a victim of nonsensical conspiracy theories about the government implanting bugs, aphids to be exact, in his bloodstream.

Agnes, so desperate to be loved, believes him and gets sucked into Peter's paranoia, eventually covering her motel room in alumninum foil and scratching her skin bloody.

Believe it or not, this mess of a movie was based on a play by Tracy Letts. Hopefully, this plays better on the stage because on the screen, the plot falls flat.

As Agnes and Peter dive deeper into madness, the movie becomes laughable. This is a love story, strange as it may seem.

But we have no room for compassion here. Peter spins convoluted conspiracy theories so unhinged that we stop caring about what he's trying to say. And we stop caring why Agnes is stupid enough to fall for his raving, bug-eyed (sorry, couldn't resist) rants.

The only saving grace in this movie is Ashley Judd. She strips herself naked, both literally and emotionally. She is Agnes, desperately in love with a nutcase. And you believe that love, no matter how illogical it is, no matter what depraved depths her love goes.

It is a courageous move for Judd, an actress who has shown in most of her roles an intelligence and a willingness to just go there.

But a performance can't save this movie. It is too weird, too wacky, too freaky, to even care when the credits roll.

28 Weeks Later

2007-05-20T20:04:00.000-05:00

28 Weeks Later, the sequel to 28 Days Later, is just as horrific as the first, full of red-eyed raging zombies spewing blood and chomping on human flesh. Exactly what you expect from a zombie movie, right?

And so much more.

In the tradition of George Romero, this film is really a documentation of what happens when a civilization devolves into madness, when powerful men lose all sense of proportion on how to use their power. Zombies aren't the ones we're frightened of. It's the humans.

The movie picks up 28 weeks after the first movie ended. The zombies have starved themsevles to death, and the rage virus seems to have gone away. A U.S.-led NATO team arrives in Britain and sets up a quarantine for the survivors.

Don, played by Robert Carlyle, is one of them. At the movie's adrenaline-pulsing beginning, Don turns out to be a coward, leaving behind his wife and others to die. He's soon reunited with his two children, who happened to have been out of the country when the rage virus broke out.

All seems good. But this is a zombie movie, so the mushy happy-moments turn into nasty, flesh-eating moments. The virus returns, and Don pays for his cowardice in unexpected ways.

In what some might liken as a commentary on the ongoing Iraq War, the military reacts to the virus outbreak in ways similar to dropping a bomb when a bullet would have sufficed.

There's havoc and chaos and lots of blood. Humans become targets. Right and wrong blur. And civilization collapse.

We are jump in our seats at those fast-moving zombies, and the shaky-camera technique is effective in putting us right where the action is, though it's a bit overused.

But the true terror is in seeing what happens when order vanishes and bullets become indiscriminate in whose skin they pierce.

This is about life not mattering as much anymore. It's about becoming numb to suffering because you're too busy saving your own neck. It's about what happens when violence begets violence and the room for compassion shrinks.

This is not a perfect movie. The first had more oomph. The characters felt more real, especially the one played by Cillian Murphy.

Yet, this, like the first one, while not terribly deep, leaves you with a chill in your bones that doesn't come just from the sight of really scary zombies. It comes from seeing man's inhumanity to his fellow man.

Spiderman 3

2007-05-05T14:06:00.000-05:00

Sequels are tricky, particularly when you're talking about the second sequel in a blockbuster franchise such as Spiderman.

I mean, can there be any art to such a money machine? Well, Sam Raimi, who has helmed the first two Spidey adventures, seems to think so.

Here, in Spiderman 3, is a delicate balance between art and commerce, between heartwarming story and eyes-dazzling special effects.

At the heart of the last two Spiderman movies is Peter Parker, played by Tobey Mcguire. Parker is the nerdy kid in high school who got picked on all time. That is until he gets bit by a radioactive spider and starts climbing the walls and swinging in skin-tight suits. The first film captured how a scrawny little kid becomes a hero.

The second film was how he balanced being Spidey and being Petey. And this latest film, well, it's all about Parker growing up and becoming a man.

When the film starts, Peter has it good. He has the girl, Mary Jane Watson, played by Kirsten Dunst. He has a good job and everyone loves Spidey. He has swagger. He's confident.

Of course, not everyone likes Spidey, including his former best friend, Harry Osborne, who believes Peter killed his father, i.e. the Green Goblin. And there's Venom and Sandman. Plus, there's Peter, who becomes his worst enemy after some icky black stuff gets on him and brings out his aggressive, jerky side.

As with most sequels, the special effects are bigger and better than ever, but Raimi makes sure things don't go overboard. Raimi also is juggling a lot of balls in the air, and unfortunately, the movie suffers a bit for it.

Venom, Sandman, the Green Goblin -- there's too many villains. It would be nice to have Spidey fight just one villain, as he did in Spiderman 2, with Doc Ock.

No, he has to fight three. And he has to battle himself.

Somehow, though, Raimi manages to keep reign over things for most of the movie, and the humanity of Peter Parker isn't ignored in the grand sweep of the movie. You feel his struggle. You root for Peter and Mary Jane to work things out. See, this movie is all about forgiveness and redemption and finding the hero in yourself.

It's just prettied up by all the fancy action sequences and web-swinging. There's a story here and not just a thin plot disguised by cool special effects.

Even at more than two hours, the movie breezes by almost effortlessly. My only advice to Raimi is for him to resist the temptation to make another sequel.

Just ignore that little black substance in Hollywood that's called greed.

Grindhouse

2007-04-07T19:48:00.000-05:00

I wanted to see it again.

That's what I thought immediately after seeing Grindhouse, a three-hour ode to gushing blood, gratuitous nudity and eye-popping action. Robert Rodriguez and Quentin Tarantino co-directed.

They wanted to give homage to the movies they grew up watching, those double-features that circulated through theaters so much that the film was scratchy and reels of the film, the parts that contained much of the sex, ended up missing.

Rodriguez directs Planet Terror, a silly rambunctious romp about zombies and a hot go-go dancer, played by the sexy Rose McGowan, with a machine gun for a leg. Freddy Rodriguez is the gun-slinging hero, El Wray. And from the first frame to the last, the screen is splashed with either zombies chewing on flesh or our heroes blasting them away with bloody gusto. This movie is not for the faint of heart.

It's a virtual rollercoaster ride of rollicking action where logic, plot and dialogue matter little. This is simply pure stupid fun.

And it sets everything up for Quentin Tarantino's feature, Death Proof. Kurt Russell is Stuntman Mike (yes, he's a stuntman), a psychotic who has death-proofed his car, meaning he can crash into anything and won't get killed. The people he rams his car into aren't so lucky. Nor are the people who are unfortunate to ride with him.

As in all Tarantino movies, there's a lot of talk. Lots of talk between women, very strong and sexual women who don't take crap from anyone.

One thing Tarantino has always prided himself on is his ability to write dialogue. He has reason to pride himself. Anyone who has seen Pulp Fiction or Reservoir Dogs or Jackie Brown knows that the best part of those films is the cool interaction between characters. He uses dialogue as a way to reveal character and just to have people say cool things. The characters become, in a sense, real.

And he's just flat-out funny.

Lucky for us that the dialogue is also leading somewhere. And that somewhere happens to be out on the road for one of the most thrilling car chases of all time. Tracie Thoms, alone, is worth seeing this movie. She gets the best lines. And she plays a far-different character than the last time we saw her on the big screen, as the lawyer in the movie adaptation of the play, Rent.

This time, she's balls-to-the-walls tough.

Russell is good as well, cool and smooth, giving a performance reminiscent of his infamous Snake Plissken role in Escape from New York.

And the ending was the most satisfying one I have seen in quite a long time. I walked out of the theater pumped. It was a true movie experience, the kind any action junkie craves.

I wanted to see it again.

Pride

2007-04-01T14:06:00.000-05:00

You have seen this before, dozens of times before. It is a well-worn movie formula, this tale of young knuckleheads whipped into shape by a hard-driving but caring coach. You know the story so well you can almost see that slow-motion climax when the struggling basketball/football/whatever sport you want team comes from behind and wins the championship.
Cheers go up, girlfriends hug their boyfriends and maybe, the coach sheds a tear. And then the credits roll.
So when you go see Pride, expect nothing different. Except for the fact that the action happens in the water instead of out on the field.
What lulls you into this mostly by-the-books movie is Terrence Howard's portrayal of Jim Ellis, the real-life coach who started a swim team at a Pennsylvania recreation center that was about to be torn down.
Howard, as he has shown in so many other roles, has an undeniable charisma and presence on screen. He's hard to ignore.
As the movie starts, Ellis is struggling to find a job. His attempts to teach at a prep school fail, and he ends up cleaning up Marcus Foster Recreation Center, which the city has deemed unfit to remain open. Outside, young men shoot hoops, and when those hoops come down, Ellis invites them to swim in the pool inside.
Slowly, he transforms them from clowns to serious swimmers, and in the process, teaches them about responsibility and yes, pride.
All of this could conceivably become corny and cliched and downright mushy, if it weren't for Howard's performance. He brings some dark shadings to a character that could have easily been way too saintly. He shares a comfortable chemistry with Kimberly Elise, who shines as a councilwoman who initially supports tearing down the center.
And Bernie Mac brings a softness to his portrayal as the hard-edged maintenance man.
There's more depth in this movie than you would expect. And unlike other movies, the emotion doesn't seem contrived. The tears that come feel well-earned.
You have seen this before, but this time, you don't mind seeing it again.

Reign Over Me

2007-03-28T20:16:00.000-05:00

The first shot of Adam Sandler in Reign Over Me is of him breezing through the streets of New York on a scooter, his grizzled face frozen in childlike wonderment and his Bob Dylan-like gray hair seemingly undisturbed by the wind.
Sandler plays Charlie Fineman, a former dentist reduced to an almost autistic state of grief over the loss of his wife and three children in the Sept. 11 attack.
One day, his college roommate, Alan Johnson, played here by the always wonderful Don Cheadle, bumps into him on the street, but Charlie doesn't recognize him.
Alan's a dentist with a loving wife and two adorable daughters. His life appears perfect, but Alan is bored and longs for the freedom he sees in Charlie's carefree existence.
Alan slowly becomes a part of Charlie's life, and the movie is about the connection two people have and how they help bring each other back to life.
This is Sandler's stab at being a serious actor, after years of comedies.
And the risk almost pays off. Sandler makes Charlie endearing and charismatic and funny. And the direction from Mike Binder helps Sandler or the film from becoming too maudlin.
Yet, there's still a one-noteness about Sandler's acting. Either he's telling dirty jokes or he's throwing a temper tantrum.
Unlike Robin Williams or other comedians-turned-actors, Sandler can't get the nuances; he only finds the extremes, making his performances a bit over the top.
What does make Sandler's performance work is the underlying sweetness he finds in the most hard-to-like characters he plays. That comes shining through here.
It is what makes him consistently watchable here, as Charlie slowly, slowly gets back in touch with his soul.

Hip-Hop Is Dead

2007-03-04T18:20:00.000-05:00

Hip-Hop Is Dead, or so says Nas on his latest CD. And it seems many agree with him.
Rap sales slid 21 percent from 2005 to 2006, according to a recent Associated Press story. But this is beyond just rap sales or just criticism from old folks who don't like what their sons and daughter and nieces and nephews listen to.
I admit that my ears shut down and my eyes glazed over whenever I heard the likes of Stanley Crouch or the late C. Dolores Tucker decry the misogny and violence in mainstream rap music. I would retort that that they needed to listen to A Tribe Called Quest or C.L. Smooth and Pete Rock or Public Enemy. They needed to listen to the totality of hip-hop and not just rip one small segment of it.
But back then there was some semblance of balance in the music, but my 34-year-old ears don't detect that same balance today.
This isn't a new argument. Rap music reflects the society it thrives in, and our society loves sex and violence. It loves to degrade and objectify women. We were never as high-brow as we would like ourselves to be; we always loved to dwell, for a time, in the gutter.
But though I am far from becoming a Stanley Crouch, I find myself nodding my head more to his arguments and less to the rap I listen to on the radio. I can say to myself all I want to that there's more to hip-hop than Lil' Jon, Ying Yang Twins and Nelly. We have Talib Kweli, Mos Def, The Roots and Common.
Yeah, that's nice to say and nice to believe, but the fact is that Nelly sells and Mos Def doesn't. Ain't no club playing Little Brother. We would rather hear Yung Joc.
When I turn on BET, I see too much booty-shaking. I see too much tough-guy "I've been shot 9 times" talk. Too much money flying around and too much icy watches being displayed.
That's all our young people see or hear. That's all I hear when I turn on the radio.
And I can't pretend that it doesn't affect me. Curses flow too easily out of my mouth these days because when I review a CD, all I hear half the time are curses. I fight constantly to maintain a humanistic view of women against the barrage of music videos that show nothing but jiggling flesh.
I figure that if all of this stuff is affecting me, then it most definitely is affecting people who aren't oftentimes exposed to Lupe Fiascos of the world.
I am torn, and I think many people feel the same way. We both love and hate the music that we sweated to on dance floors. We reminisce about what drew us to hip-hop and cringe at where hip-hop is.
We hold tight to our old-school rap and come close to sounding like our mothers and fathers who used to tell us to shut that crap off when we were young. We don't want to be like those old fogies who just hate whatever the young people love.
But there are times when I feel like I am becoming that. I fear for the day when I might just give up all hope in hip-hop, declare it dead just like Nas.
I'm not there yet, though. Mos Def said hip-hop is us. If hip-hop dies, then we die. And we have to choose to live.
The first step in that choice is recognizing the awfully negative direction hip-hop seems to be going. We don't have to be Stanley Crouch, forever trashing the art form. We also don't have to be Russell Simmons, who turns a blind eye to hip-hop's problems.
What we do have to have is a honest dialogue. We have to talk about the violence, the sex and the misogny in the music and what kind of effect it has on us and our children.
We have to take it upon ourselves to resurrect hip-hop, to let it live, not only for us but for our childrens' children.

Oscar: The Week After

2007-03-03T13:40:00.000-05:00

So Alan Arkin, who played the dirty old grandfather in Little Miss Sunshine, won best supporting actor.
It was a nice surprise. Okay, maybe it wasn't a nice surprise for Eddie Murphy. Some say that Murphy putting out the awful Norbit doomed his chances. Who knows? Maybe it just wasn't his time. What I do hope is that his loss doesn't prompt Murphy from going after more challenging fare. His performance in Dreamgirls proved that he is capable of much more than what he puts out.
There were no surprise when Jennifer Hudson and Forest Whitaker won best supporting actress and best actor, respectively.
J. Hud was gracious and humble and thanked God a lot. I wish her all the success in the world, but the reality is that she has a mighty hill to climb not to be typecast for Effie White-like roles from now on. Hers was such a breakout, powerhouse role that many directors might not be able to see her in anything else.
Forest Whitaker, by far, gave the most heartfelt speech of the night. He comes across as a gentle man that it is a testamont to his acting abilities that he credibly portrayed such a frightening dictator as Idi Amin.
He deserved that award for what I would call a couragious performance, one that sought to find the humanity in a monster.
The highlight of the night, of course, had to have been the long-begged for win by Martin Scorsese for The Departed. He should have napped the award years ago for much better films than The Departed, which also won best picture. A colleague of mine said the movie was really just about a bunch of thugs.
And to a point, I agree. There's really nothing deep about The Departed. It's a cat-and-mouse thriller, with tough-guy dialogue and bloody violence. The performances by Matt Damon, Jack Nicholson, Mark Wahlberg and Leonardo DiCaprio make this film work.
The time was just right to honor the guy, and I'm glad he finally won some recognition for his years of hard work.
Now, the next cat who needs to win an Oscar is Spike Lee. Anybody out there listening?