Thriller

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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?