Why Did I Get Married

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Real Michael Myers

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not Another Werewolf Movie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Sicko: Just Plain Sick

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

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

And his latest documentary, Sicko, is no different.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

More Than Meets The Eye

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Yippee-ki-yay

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Mika Brzezinski of MNSBC rips Paris report

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?

Oscar Night

Predictions are always tricky and none are trickier than figuring out who's going home with the golden statue.
Nominations are all over the place, and the picture with the most nominations, Dreamgirls, didn't even get a best picture nod.
Here are my predictions, though slightly ill-informed since I didn't see all of the movies nominated this year.
Some, of course, are easy. Helen Mirren is going to win best actress. Jennifer Hudson is going to win best supporting actress. And hardly anyone would argue that they don't deserve the accolades they've gotten.
I haven't seen The Queen but I have seen Helen Mirren's work in other movies and she is good. She embodies completely every role she takes on, and from I have heard, she does no different in The Queen.
Hudson was great as Effie White in Dreamgirls. She not only tackles that gut-busting anthem "And I Am Telling You," with the same power that Jennifer Holiday had when she sang it more than 20 years ago on Broadway. Hudson brings both a sassiness and vulnerablility to White's downward turn over the course of the movie.
Eddie Murphy will get best supporting actor. I wasn't blown away by his performance but he did bring a pathos to James "Thunder" Early that went beyond a simplistic James Brown impersonation. He dug deep. Let's hope Oscar voters forgive him for the literally bloated Norbit that just came out.
As for best actor, some say Peter O'Toole, giving him the award he should have gotten years ago. But I'll say Forest Whitaker. He captured all the complexities of Ugandan dictator Idi Amin. Whitaker was able to create a full-drawn character and make him breathe and seem real. Any other actor might have played over the top and turned Amin into a caricature. Whitaker makes him human.
The best picture and best director are harder to call this year. I love The Departed. Gritty with a twisted sense of humor. It was Martin Scorsese at his best and he deserves to win best director.
I'm predicting Babel will win best picture. Sad to say that I haven't seen Babel nor Clint Eastwood's Letters from Iwo Jima. But I'd bet on Babel -- essentially this year's Crash.
And Mr. Dirty Harry, a fine director, has certainly by this time won enough awards, as grand achievement as his two movies about World War II was.
Well, there you go. Love 'em or leave 'em, those are my picks.

Daddy's Little Girls

There's no secret to Tyler Perry's success. His formula is simple, and people who go see his films know what to expect: Broad comedy, gut-wrenching drama and gospel-soaked happy endings.
His latest film, Daddy's Little Girls, is no different.
Idris Elba, best known for his role as Stringer Bell in The Wire, plays Monte, a mechanic struggling to fulfill his dreams and raise his three daughters.
It's not long before his path crosses that of Julia, played by the oh-so fine Gabrielle Union, who is a high-powered, ambitious attorney. She works hard and is frustrated with the fact that she can't seem to find a good man.
Monte becomes her driver, and their relationship, as typical in most romantic comedies, has a really rough beginning. But soon, Julia finds herself pulled into Monte's increasing drama with Jennifer, his children's mother, an unbelievably cruel witch played by Tasha Smith. And before you know, Monte is in family court fighting for custody with Julia as his pro-bono attorney.
Jennifer wants full custody of the children with her drug-dealer boyfriend, Joseph.
In Tyler Perry's world, the good people are really good and the bad people are really, truly evil. But Perry isn't necessarily interested in sophisticated art. He wants to entertain.
And in that, he is a true genius.
Union and Elba have a nice chemistry and bring depth to characters that might have been tired cliches with less-talented actors. Louis Gossett Jr. also elevates often trite material as Willie, the owner of the auto shop where Monte works.
The performances are so good you almost can look past the many script problems the film has. Only after you leave the theater do you start poking the large plot holes in the script. Here's just one example: Julia finds out a secret about Monte's past that proves critical in the custody battle. Yet, if Julia is Monte's attorney, surely, she would have done enough homework on Monte's past that she wouldn't get blindsided in court.
And the happy ending, the one where Monte and Julia are reunited and Monte gets his kids back, just doesn't wash.
Yet, the movie works because it has heart and the message that Perry is trying to send is a good one. It's about taking back one's community; it's about having faith when things seem bleak; it's about changing the negative perceptions of black men.
It's about celebrating parents who do their very best to raise their children.
Perry does what he does best -- he makes you laugh and makes you think at the same time.

Notes on a Scandal

Friendship is a tricky thing, especially when one is based on manipulation, deceit and utter desperation. That's the case in Notes on a Scandal.
Judi Dench plays Barbara Covett, a sad, lonely teacher who writes pithy observations in her diary and pines for love and companionship.
Soon, she meets Sheba, played by Cate Blanchett, the new art teacher at the school. At first, Barbara finds her frumpy and snobby but eventually becomes consumed with infatuation.
Sheba is in a passionless marriage, stuck in the routine of taking care of her children, one of whom has down syndrome. She longs for more and she finds it in one of her promising art students, Steven Connelly.
She begins a torrid affair with Steven, and Barbara finds out and uses that information against Sheba.
Barbara discovers the very thing that will keep Sheba close: the promise of friendship tinged with the threat of revealing a secret. It is a tension that drives the movie, as Barbara digs her needy claws into every aspect of Sheba's life, demanding Sheba's attention at even the most inopportune times.
Dench is a masterful actress, a hard-to-ignore presence in every scene, playing Barbara as a woman obsessed only because she feels trapped by her loneliness.
And Blanchett does well in the awfully hard role of a woman who risks her marriage and her career to have sex with a teenager. Yet, Blanchett makes Sheba utterly human, and you see the desperation and sadness she has that her life hasn't turned out quite the way she would have dreamed.
The chemistry between Dench and Blanchett is electric in every scene, and it is that electricity that keeps the audience invested in the movie, even when things go a little over the top at the end.
The word that kept coming to mind to describe this movie is delicious. Yummy. Delectable. The movie isn't all that deep. Instead, it is a sweet, sweet treat, down to the very last taste.

The Last King of Scotland

Idi Amin was a monster, evil incarnate, the Ugandan ruler responsible for the deaths of 300,000 of his own people during his horrific reign in the 1970s.
Amin is also human. That humanity oozes out of the powerful performance of Golden Globe winner Forest Whitaker in The Last King of Scotland.
The movie, based on the novel of the same name, centers on the odd relationship between Amin and Dr. Nicholas Garrigan, a Scot who arrives in Uganda looking for adventure.
He gets more than what he bargains for when Amin, after a chance encounter, hires Garrigan as his personal doctor.
As played by Whitaker, Amin swings from childlike charm to paranoid delusion. He is a man who sees enemies all around and embraces Garrigan as one of the few he can trust.
Garrigan finds himself lulled into the heady early days of Amin's regime, and we experience with him what it must have felt like to see the optimism and joy found in an independent African nation.
But slowly, the veil falls away, and Garrigan begins to see the cracks in Amin's empire and the bloody mess of Amin's madness.
Whitaker grabs hold of all the complexities that made up Amin's psyche. He scares and fascinates at the same time.
James McAvoy's portrayal of Garrigan is good, showing a naive, reckless young man blinded by the pleasures of being close to such power.
But this is Whitaker's movie, a terrifying tour-de-force full of heart. Never has evil looked so good.

Freedom Writers

I rolled my eyes the first time I saw the preview for Freedom Writers, the new movie starring Hilary Swank.
This is just a retread of Dangerous Minds, which starred Michelle Pfieffer and featured that song by Coolio that jacked a sample from Stevie Wonder, I thought. Oh, god, must we once again see another movie about some white saint of a teacher who goes into the inner-city and saves all the poor black, Latino and Asian kids.
But this movie, though predictable, does manage to avoid many of the cliches and add some freshness to a tired concept.
The film takes place just after the L.A. riots in the 1990s. Swank is Erin Gruwell, an idealistic young teacher just starting out. She is put in charge of one of the roughest group of students at the school. On her first day, she's dressed in a red dress with pearls, a look that doesn't impress the students.
Time, however, changes everything, and soon, she fully engages the students by making them write journals about their experiences.
Through the journals, we hear the students' voices. We get to know them beyond the simple stereotypes often thrashed about in such movies. They become fully-realized human beings.
That gives the movie depth. Not much depth but some is better than nothing.
And that depth helps propel the movie through the predictability that still creeps in, the will-she-leave-or-won't-she-leave theatrics in the last half of the movie.
April Lee Hernandez, who plays Eva, gives a heart-wrenching performance as a student in a gang who must make a choice, one that may alienate her from her family. She alone makes the movie worth watching.
Swank thankfully portrays Erin as a complex human being. Her incredible dedication to her students hurts her marriage. She has a wonderful scene with Patrick Dempsy (otherwise known as Dr. McDreamy) as her husband. It feels real and raw and helps cut away all the saintliness of Swank's character.
So yes, this is like Dangerous Minds, but in so many ways, it isn't.

We're Your Dreamgirls

Dreamgirls establishes one thing and one thing only, with no debate: American Idol-reject Jennifer Hudson can sang. And her rendition of And I Am Telling You rivals Jennifer Holliday's performance of that signature song in the Broadway version, filling it with the power and soul that this power ballad deserves.
Jennifer Hudson's portrayal of Effie White, the diva deemed too bold and black and heavy-voiced by manager Curtis Taylor to be lead singer, is the heart of this movie, and Hudson imbues White with a sultry sensuality as well as a break-your-heart vulnerability.
But the rest of the movie, driven as it is by strong performances by nearly everyone, just doesn't have that spark.
Unlike the jazzy Chicago, for which director Bill Condon wrote the script, Dreamgirls wilts its way from stage to screen. The freshness that marked the Broadway show seems outdated some 20 years later.
Its strengths, however, are still evident in the film version. The issues surrounding black music are just as relevant now as they were when the play premiered Dec. 20, 1981. Curtis Taylor has big dreams and makes bold and controversial moves to put a black all-girl group on the pop charts (i.e. making Deena (played by Beyonce Knowles) the lead singer instead of Effie White. And going pop also means diluting the gospel-tinged sound that the group initially had.
In the background, you see bits and pieces of the times in which Dreamgirls is set. You see a record of Martin Luther King's iconic I Have A Dream speech being pressed. Riots rage throughout the country after King is assassinated. And the cold-hard reality of what it takes to make it big and all the compromises that entails are ever-present.
After all, this is a movie about dreams and about the choices we make to make those dreams possible. And it is about pain, when those dreams begin to turn into harsh nightmares.
That pain is etched into the performance of Eddie Murphy as James "Thunder" Early, a James Brown-like singer. Thunder's wild and crazy performances enliven the film, and you'll get a kick out of seeing Murphy sing something other than "Party All The Time." But it is in the moments when Early begins to realize that his time in the spotlight is rapidly fading that you see a depth in Murphy that you haven't seen before.
It's not a performance that knocks you over, and much of what you see in this film is not too much different than what Murphy has done in the past. But it is nice to see Murphy tackle a challenging role like this.
By far, the most disappointing performance in the movie comes from Beyonce Knowles. Much has been written about how she lost weight and worked on this character. But the end result is just as vacant and wooden as anything she has done before this film. You never get an idea of what's going on inside Deena. Beyonce tries to act with her eyes, which would be fine if her eyes weren't open so wide all the time.
The only time we get some goosebumps is when she sings "Listen."
As for the film, Condon moves the action along pretty quickly, a major achievement for a movie that runs more than two hours. The musical set pieces are well done, and there are some nice moments. Jamie Foxx gives Curtis Taylor a nice snake-oily charm and shows good chemistry with Hudson's Effie White.
But none of this is enough to elevate Dreamgirls from being a good movie to being a great one.

The Pursuit of Happyness

Chris Gardner's life was all about pursuit of happiness, that little phrase found in the Declaration of Independence. There was never any guarantee that he was going to get happiness, but he sure went after it with all he had.
Gardner's pursuit is at the center of the new movie, The Pursuit of Happyness, with Will Smith starring as the real-life Gardner. Jaden Smith, Will's son, plays Gardner's son in the movie.
This is a Horatio Algiers-type story, a tale of the great lengths a man will go to achieve greatness.
And though we know what the end result will be, the story is in the journey. And what a journey it is.
As played by Smith, Gardner is a bright man who makes boneheaded decisions, like the one where he puts his family's savings into selling a bone-density scanner that doctors actually don't need. The IRS is after him, he's two months behind on rent and his car is towed away for unpaid parking tickets. Plus, his wife, played by Thandie Newton, is about to leave him.
Could things get any worse? Yes, they do. But the silver lining is an intership at Dean Witter, where Gardner hopes to become a stockbroker.
Obstacle after obstacle falls in his path. Gardner loses his wife and his home and he's working as an unpaid intern, so no money is coming in. The burden of raising his son amid all of his failures as a man is seen through Smith's nearly crumbling face.
This is by far one of Smith's most serious roles. His charm and good looks do him no good here. Smith gives a powerful performance as a man who struggles to make a better life for himself and his son.
Smith disappears into his role, though glimpses of what has made Smith such a likable star over the years can be gleaned. Jaden Smith is a natural on the screen, effortless in his performance.
The ending.... well, we all know that Gardner's pursuit is not in vain, but that beautiful moment of tear-filled joy feels well-earned.

Bloody Diamonds

Some might say diamonds are a girl's best friend, but after watching the brutally violent Blood Diamond, the new film starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Djimon Haunsou, you might start thinking otherwise.
DiCaprio is DannyArcher, a diamond smuggler from Zimbabwe. Haunsou is Solomon Vandy, a man who is forced to work in the mines after his family is taken by rebels. One day, Vandy finds a large pink diamond, which becomes his only bargaining chip once he finds out his son has been taken to become a soldier in the rebel army.
Director Ed Zwick, who has made a reputation for making politically-conscious movies, tackles the issue of conflict diamonds.
Conflict diamonds are diamonds that are mined in areas controlled by rebel groups trying to overthrow a government. Those diamonds illegally find their way into the marketplace, and the money from the trade goes toward buying arms and other things that help keep a civil war going.
Archer cares about getting paid and he doesn't much care, at least not initially, that the diamonds he smuggles are funding wars. Maddie Brown, played by Jennifer Connelly, does care and pricks at Archer's conscience and charms him in helping her to expose the whole mess.
Vandy, however, is at the center of it all, with his pink diamond and his all-consuming search for his family.
As with all things, the personal is the political, and it is through the prisms of these three people that Zwick peels back the carnage and exploitation created by conflict diamonds.
The movie's title is a literal one. Blood is spilled from the first frame to nearly the last. The most disturbing part of the movie is seeing children brainwashed by rebels into becoming cold-blooded killers. Their innocence is sucked out of them bit by bit and replaced with a horrifying numbness to murder.
DiCaprio gives one hell of a performance, proving once and for all that he is no longer that fresh-faced kid in Titanic. He is a grown-ass man, rough and reckless and ultimately decent.
Hansou is both strong and vulnerable, risking his life and that of others as he goes to the heights of sheer nuttiness to save his son. And Connelly's Brown is passionate and headstrong with just enough tenderness to make you still care.
Zwick keeps a quick pace throughout, which is remarkable for a movie that is over two hours long. He would have, however, done well to shave off maybe a half-hour instead of having such a corny ending.
But that's a minor complaint to a movie that delivers a truly powerful story about the price we pay for the sparkles on our fingers and around our necks.

Casino Royale

Bond, James Bond.
Those words are the trademark phrase of debonair secret service agent James Bond, played over the years by Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan and now blond-haired Daniel Craig.
Consternation ensued when Craig was chosen as the next James Bond. Forget his intense ocean-blue eyes. Critics, instead, focused on his blonde hair and less-than-smooth look.
Could this be the James Bond of the 21st century? Indeed, he could be, as Craig ably shows in Casino Royale.
As directed by Martin Campbell, this movie reimagines James Bond, strips away the boring invincibility and replaces it with a skin-scrapped vulnerability.
This Bond is much darker and more human than we have ever seen him. He gets tortured; he gets his heart broken; and he fouls up big time.
We see a man primed to kill slowly and painfully learn the sophisticated art of being a British spy.
Eva Green is the love interest and she is no mere Bond girl. Green bristles with intelligence, and the chemistry between her and Craig is hot and more importantly, believable.
And unlike other Bond movies, their relationship is the emotional core of the film.
What Campbell has done is ground Bond in a bit more reality. No huge special effects are found here, thankfully.
And they are not needed. The action sequences are well-done, Campbell putting enough suspense to keep interest.
But it is Craig's Bond that you can't take your eyes off, a refreshingly darker Bond who we see just finding his fit in a tuxedo.

Stranger Than Fiction

I love Will Ferrell. I never saw much of him on Saturday Night Live but in his movies, he has this lovably sweet innocence. And it doesn't matter that he might be running naked, as he famously did in Old School. You forgive him and laugh right along with him because he just seems like a nice guy.
That helps him a great deal in his new movie, Stranger Than Fiction. Ferrell plays Harold Crick, an IRS agent who lives his life by the numbers. He gets up at the same time every morning and goes to bed the same time every night. He even times his coffee breaks.
He is alone and he just so happens to be a character in somebody's book. That someone is Karen Eiffel, played by Emma Thompson. Eiffel is a reclusive author plagued by writer's block.
Her problem: She can't figure out how to kill Crick. And Crick can't seem to get Eiffel's eloquent narration out of his head.
Yes, this is all rather odd, and the movie never seeks to explain how Crick could be a character in Eiffel's novel.
But the good thing is Crick is a fully-fleshed character. Ferrell restrains himself. No wilding-out antics here.
Instead, Ferrell brings a certain level of pathos to the character. Here's a guy who suddenly has to confront his own death and he finally decides he really wants to live. Plus, he has love in his life.
Thompson just literally sinks into her character. She has a gaunt and desperate look about her throughout the whole movie, her character driven almost to the point of insanity with writer's block.
Queen Latifah, Dustin Hoffman and Maggie Gyllenhaal all bring their enormous talents to bear as supporting actors.
Yes, the ending is corny but somehow you don't mind, especially when the journey has been such a fun ride.

Sawing through another sequel

I turned away from the screen more than watched it when I went to see Saw III today. Here's the man chained to the walls of a small room with hooks piercing his arms, legs, ankles, sides and chin. A bomb will blow in a minute and some change and he must rip those hooks off to get out in time.
A woman trapped in a contraption hooked into her ribcage must dip her hand into acid to retrieve a rapidly dissolving key at the bottom.
And a naked woman is chained in an ice room as freezing water is sprayed on her. And all of this is the work of our villain played ably by Tobin Bell.
The first movie had one hell of a devilish twist, and Saw II boasted a nice performance by Danny Walhberg, but the third, while at times clever, shows that this series may have run its course.
After all, you know what you're going to get: a series of nasty little tests that end with somebody's head crushed or arm twisted almost clear off. And though it might be fun to think what you might do in any of those crappy situations where you have to decide between screaming your head off or smashing your foot in to get out of an ankle chain, you don't want to keep seeing the same thing over and over again.
Bottom line: for all of its twists and turns, Saw III is horrifying only in its predictability. The graphic violence is not meant to scare but to shock.
Nowhere is there any sense of tension. Nowhere is there any investment in character. Nowhere is there much good acting, unless you count Tobin Bell's skin-crawlingly creepy performance.
A co-worker couldn't believe I liked Hostel. She thought it was close to pornography with all the gratuitous nudity. And yes, there is gratuitous nudity.
But I will argue that the movie's second half is thick with suspense, and the first time I saw it, I didn't know what was going to happen. I squirmed, I jumped and I was completely undone by the movie's final beyond-intense 15 minutes.
From Saw III, all I got was a tease for another sequel. I think it's time to put an end to this franchise. Please. This can't go on like Friday the 13th.

The Departed

Martin Scorsese doesn't make movies easy to watch. You squirm in your seat, but just like a car wreck on the road, you can't turn your eyes away. In fact, you slow your car just to get a better look.
And Scorsese's new movie, The Departed, is that way. In many ways, this is vintage Scorsese, a movie that delves into the grittiness of life and finds poetry.
The Departed is actually a remake, or better yet a reimagining, of a Hong Kong movie called Infernal Affairs.
Leonardo DiCaprio, who has appeared in Scorsese's past two movies, is Billy Costigan, a kid from South Boston whose family upbringing wasn't the best. Nevertheless, he wants to become a cop and ends up going undercover to infiltrate mob boss's Frank Costello's inner circle.
Matt Damon is Colin Sullivan, another ambitious cop who is also a rat for Costello, played with eye-brow raising bluster by Jack Nicholson.
Costigan and Sullivan have never met but their lives are destined to collide, as Costigan borrows deeper into the Costello and Sullivan is entrusted to find the undercover cop Costello suspects is working against him.
This is a movie about corruption that runs deep and wide and rips apart everyone in its path, even those who try to do the right thing.
The performances are raw and the language vibrant, tought talk masking vulnerability.
And Jack Nicholson, as he always does, is hilarious and sinister all in the same time, snarling out his lines with gusto.
No, there is no happy ending in this movie, but with most Scorsese movies, there rarely is.
But the journey is one well worth taking because with Scorsese, the beauty lurks in the ugly.

No Flavor in Love

I try not to watch Flavor of Love. But I can't help it. Same thing with The Bachelor. Both shows have pretend-to-be ladies nearly falling out of their dresses (okay, on Flavor of Love, the women most times have barely anything on in the first place) for some guy.
Now on The Bachelor, the guy is reasonably good looking.
On Flavor of Love, the guy is Flavor Flav, once the best hype man any politically conscious rap group like Public Enemy can have. Now, the 47-year-old recovering drug addict is an enemy to himself, a has-been who has morphed into a caricature.
But who cares what the guy looks like. This is reality television and viewers are lulled into believing romance is women acting like fools for some guy they just met, that soulmates will be found when relationships from these reality television shows wither the moment the cameras vanish.
Of course, this is a guy's fantasy, to have dozens of women clamoring for the chance to be his bride forever, or at least for the moment. And we in our living rooms have great fun laughing at the women snipe and bitch and claw at each other like dogs fighting over the last chicken bone.
And I wonder as I look at all of this what these shows say about women. Of course, some will argue that these women choose to go on this show, for whatever reason. It could be that they really dig the guy (hard to believe, I'm sorry to say, about Flavor Flav). Some hope this will be their big break. Or they think this will be something to tell the grandkids when they're older.
Regardless, the fact is that these women are in a sense degrading themselves. Yes, that's a strong statement but what else can you call it.
What woman, in her right mind, would voluntarily give away all the power in the dating situation that she has in real life?
See, in real life, the guy is supposed to ask the girl. He's supposed to brush off that nagging fear of rejection and talk to that girl in the bar, the bookstore, wherever, talk to her and get her number and call her later and ask her out and try to kiss her, knowing all the while that the woman has the right and the power to say no. And the guy has to pick his ego off the floor when "no" in whatever polite way the woman says it comes from her lips and he has to move on to the next woman and the next woman until he gets that "yes."
I mean, that's what real life is. Real life isn't a man having a pick of 25 women and he gets to eliminate half the first night and the remaining 11 have to smile, bat their eyes, shake their behind, and laugh at bland jokes until they get their man. What crap.
A female friend of mine nagged a boyfriend by being a real bitch. She ignored him ruthlessly for weeks and when she finally did give the guy a chance, she wouldn't let him kiss her for a long time.
Okay, maybe that's a bit too far but you get the idea.
I want a woman who I feel comfortable approaching but I also want a woman who leaves me wanting more. So sorry, the girl who has her breasts falling out so much you can see nipple or who has the tip of her thong hanging out of her too-tight pants ain't going to get any play. Smells desperate.

United 93: A Journey into pain and heroism

On Sept. 10, I finally sat down to watch United 93, a raw journey into the confusion and surrealism of Sept. 11.
Paul Greengrass, in almost documentary style, paints a portrait of those moments before the planes hit the Twin Towers and the Pentagon, and it is a chilling one.
What hits you is how normal everything is. You see people yapping on the phones as they wait to board the plane. And while on the plane, you see them eating, working on their laptops and talking with each other. You see the two pilots, one who hopes to see his children and wife soon and another who can't wait for an upcoming vacation.
These were people who, like many of us on Sept. 11, were going about their day, never knowing that this would be the day that they died.
And as the plane finally takes off, you also see the news of the attacks come into focus slowly. One plane and then another suddenly veer off course, and you can hear someone saying something about a hijacking, but the message is garbled.
You see the disbelief in people's eyes as they see first one plane and then another crash into the Twin Towers.
You see the news begin, in bits, to make its way to the passengers on United 93, who have already watched four hijackers kill the pilots and take over the plane.
And as you watch, you wonder what you would do if you knew that the plane you were on was going to crash on purpose as part of some terrorist act. You wonder who you would call and what you would say in those last moments before your life ended.
You wonder if you would have the courage to do something to prevent the terrorists from succeeding in their plans, even if you knew that doing so would result in your death.
Greengrass is not interested in political sloganeering in this movie. What he does do is immerse you in the confounding reality of that day, where you couldn't quite believe what was happenening, when you were trying desperately to dig out of this tragedy some greater meaning.
This is a difficult movie to watch, precisely because it only happened five years ago. You still remember where you were and what you were doing when you learned about the attacks.
United 93 is a vivid reminder, a tale of both pain and awe-inspiring herorism.

Idlewild is indeed wild

Andre 3000 and Big Boi, who make up the rap duo OutKast, have always lived up to their group name, stretching what we consider hip-hop to far-out extremes. And here's the thing: they manage to sell millions of record by predictably being unpredictable.
Which brings us to their new movie, Idlewild, a brilliant mess of a movie.
Andre is Percival, a piano player who is a mortician by day, slaving away for his dad, played by an underused Ben Vereen. Big Boi plays his friend, Rooster, who spends his nights running "Church," the local jukejoint, cheating on his wife and drinking way too much hooch.
Into all this enters Trumpy played by the always mesmerizing and menacing Terrence Howard (a friend wondered how he is so good at playing bad) who is the film's villain.
Percival and Rooster now have to figure out how to keep from getting killed.
Now, all of this is set in the 1930s Prohibition era, though you may have a hard time believing that with all the rapping Big Boi does in the movie. Yes, there's rapping but again what else would you expect from an OutKast movie.
Horns blast, Big Boi raps, Andre gets drenched in rain and men and women jitterbug all over the place. And somehow, this movie works, with visual treats provided by first-time movie director Bryan Barber, who infuses his debut with all the tricks of the trade he learned while making music videos.
As my friend and I walked out of the theater, we had a hard time describing exactly what we saw. But we liked it. We were never bored.
Again, what else would you expect of OutKast?

Snakes on a Plane

Snakes on a Plane was and is one of most hyped movies ever and even better, the movie actually lives up to the hype.
Of course with a movie in which the plot is summed up perfectly in the title, how could the movie not exceed expectations.
This is not Shakespeare -- not even close.
Snakes on a Plane is good, squirm-in-your-seat fun, the kind of movie made for screaming at the sceen while eating buttery popcorn.
Samuel L. Jackson does what he does best: exude cool. He's certain to be the coolest 57-year-old in the world who is blessed with the jealousy-inducing ability to say a particular profanity with a potent eloquence, one honed by years of practice.
The movie is cheesy, no doubt, with at least one scene of gratutuitous nudity and lots of gore and sight gags.
Yet, the movie works, mixing in humor with suspense.
And judging by the audience I saw the movie with recently, the fans loved every minute of the movie. They cheered when Samuel Jackson said that line everyone had waited with baited breath throughouth the movie: I've had enough of these mother(bleep) snakes on this mother(bleep) plane. That line, thanks to the power of the Internet, has become a cult classic long before the movie even came out.
Is this the future of moviemaking, where fans have the power to shape a movie? Don't know. But Snakes on a Plane works and it works well.

Descending into Vice

Miami Vice, the series, epitomized style. You may not remember the story lines but the pastel suits that Don Johnson and Philip Michael Thomas wore on this 1980s series were unforgettable.
Thankfully, Michael Mann, the mind behind that series, decided to do something too many directors don't do: He went about as far from remaking the series for the big screen as he could.
The movie of the same name might bear some outlines of similarity but that's about it.
Instead, Mann has created a dark world in which good and evil blur, where doing your job and living your life has little to separate them from each other.
A few critics have blasted the movie, but I found myself drawn into the world Mann is creating here.
Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx don't do much here, and you wish Naomie Harris, so good in Pirates of the Carribbean: Dead Man's Chest, had more time on screen. But the minimalism works, and the action set pieces have the power and the ability to shock you out of your senses.
And the mix of music and gorgeous cinematography puts you into the queasy underbelly of undercover police work, the compromises and sacrifices you make to get the job done.
It is a compelling piece of work, one I want to revisit soon.
And then there's The Descent, your basic horror flick. But it is also something more, thank goodness.
Here, we follow six women into the mountains after one has suffered a tragic loss. They go spelunking into the caves and find themselves trapped, squeezing themselves through small passageways as they look for a way out.
One by one, they fall victim to blind flesh-eating monsters.
Yet, as the movie slowly sets up in the beginning, the women are victim to much more than monsters. They have little pent-up demons of their own, secrets they have that will devastate them more than the monsters will.
And the slow beginning sets up for a psychologically tense finale, one you don't often seen in slasher flicks such as this.
What a sweet surprise.