Precious

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

This Is It

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

Before Sunrise

I remember her, that sweet smile, the slender figure, the walk in the park on a fall day more than a decade ago.

What I don't remember is her name. I was in college at the time, in a small town, and she was a prospective student coming in for a day or two to see if she liked my college enough to attend. For some reason, I was her guide for the day, showing her around, and in those hours, there was this irresistible connection, a magnet drawing us together.

We talked and laughed as we walked from campus into the streets of that small town, holding hands, my skin tingling with a nice warmth.

Later, however, in the dorm room where she was staying, she asked me about an upperclassman she was interested in, apparently a much more handsome guy than me, who I also knew to be a bit of a ladies man. It was a gut-punch but I smiled anyway. The pain eventually faded, as she did, because she ended up going to another school. I never saw her again.

I thought about that girl as I watched Before Sunrise, the 1994 film by Richard Linklater, the genius behind cult-classic Dazed and Confused.

The movie centered on Jesse and Celine (played by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy), two strangers who meet on a train destined for Vienna. Jesse is a backpacking American headed to Vienna for his flight back home. And Celine is a French grad student who just got back from visiting her grandmother.

Jesse sparks up a conversation with Celine. The chemistry is undeniable. The connection is there, and when the train stops at Vienna, Jesse invites Celine to accompany him until his flight leaves the next morning.

And so they do, their conversation going from heady to bawdy and everything in between, those moments of laughter interspersed with quiet moments when the two hit that sweet spot of intimacy.

This isn't your typical romantic comedy. Jesse and Celine don't hook up within the first hour of the movie, then break up and finally rush toward each other in some inane climax after realizing they're meant to spend the rest of their lives together.

The connection here is at first intellectual and gradually moves toward romance and there's no guarantee that they will end up together forever at the end.

In fact, they very well may never see each other again.

What I loved about the movie is that the connection isn't purely physical. There's this unexplainable emotional intimacy that develops between the two, some special chemistry drawing the two together and making it hard to let go.

There's a rhythm here, a rapid back and forth marked by pauses and brief and poignant moments of vulnerability. There's joy simply to be in one another's presence, something that I just don't think Facebook-based relationships can replicate (even though I admit to being a Facebook addict in need of Dr. Drew-like intervention).

At the end, Jesse and Celine promise to meet back in Vienna in six months. They never do. We know this, of course, because Richard Linklater decided to make a sequel called, appropriately enough, Before Sunset.

I saw this movie several years ago, way before I ever saw Before Sunrise. It was the rare sequel done years after the original that actually worked in that there's an added emotional tension, a history just surging beneath the surface of the characters' interactions.

Life got in the way and changed Jesse and Celine in surprising ways, but the connection was still there. They pick up where they left off more than a decade earlier, as if they never left each other at the train station at Vienna.

But they did and they can never go back. They have to live with the choices they made. Yet, the scene I loved the most is the ending, where they bask in the moment, an ecstasy of joy of that connection made so many years ago that never went away.

Before Sunrise and its subsequent sequel, I think, reminds us of the importance of searching for the bliss in those connections, even if some may be fleeting. This is where life is. This is where joy is. This is what we will remember when we see our lives coming to an end, and the more we have of them, the richer our lives are.

Paranormal Activity

Maybe scary is like beauty; it is in the eye of the beholder.

Lots of people have said that the new movie, Paranormal Activity, is scary, like for real scary, like The Blair Witch Project scary.

Sorry but The Blair Witch Project was never all that scary to begin with, and Paranormal Activity, also shot in that cinema-verite style, isn't either. The movie is not even creepy, the kind of creepy that keeps you up at night in a darkened house or apartment, jumping at strange sounds.

Suffice it to say, I slept well after seeing this movie.

The movie, the one made for just $11,000 but topped the box office this weekend, is about a young couple, Katie and Micah, who hear weird things go bump in the night. It turns out that Katie has been haunted by some demon/ghost thing ever since she was little that followed her every place she has lived, including the nice little home she has made with Micah.

Micah decides to set up a camera in the bedroom to record what happens. He also follows his girlfriend around during the day with the camera. Oh, how romantic. Look at how cute she is when she's brushing her teeth.

The audience knows going in that the ending is not so bright for this young couple since we are looking at footage that police found after some horrible occurrence. We just have to slog through the movie to find out what that is.

The concept is cool. And the director, Oren Pi, does manage some legitimate chilly moments, but nothing that jolts you out of the seat until the very end.

Katie Featherston and Micah Stoat, the newby actors who play the couple, have an easy-going chemistry together that grounds the movie and avoids reality-TV cliche.

But despite Katie's well-rehearsed screams, the movie lacks suspense. I hardly cared what happened to the couple because I wasn't invested in them or their survival.

And while the ending (which like any good movie critic, I won't reveal) does provide a juicy climax, it comes too little, too late.

Like The Blair Witch Project, this movie feels like a gimmick, a well-executed one, that in the end amounts to bleh.

Good Hair

When Angela Davis wore her hair in an Afro in the 1970s, she wasn't trying to be cute. She was making a political statement. She was black and proud.

For black folks, our hair has historical baggage, going from slavery to now. Many black women have struggled with the age-old question of whether to straighten their hair or keep it natural, to relax or not to relax.

As comedian Paul Mooney says, "If your hair is relaxed, white people are relaxed. If your hair is nappy, they're not happy."

Stories abound of black women not being accepted at their place of business because they chose to wear their hair natural. Straight hair is in; the natural is out, or so it seems.

Good hair. It is a phrase fraught with pain for many black folks who grew up in a world where the standard of beauty was Marilyn Monroe, white dress blowing around her with fluffy blond hair.

And when Chris Rock heard one of his daughters say she wanted to have good hair, he decided to make a movie about it, called appropriately enough, Good Hair.

Rock takes his camera inside beauty salons across the country and to a flamboyant hair show competition in Atlanta that's held every year. The documentary also includes interviews with famous black women such as the divine Nia Long (yes, divine is my word and Miss Nia is divinely fine, in my humble opinion, but I digress) discussing their hair issues.

One of the interesting facts one learns is that some black women pay $1,000 for a hair weave and that most of that hair comes from India, where women routinely cut their hair off in a religious ritual. And one theme Rock hits on repeatedly (almost a little too much, for my taste) is how you never, ever touch a black woman's hair, not even during sex, unless you're that good in bed and you better be good. And even then...well, you get the point.

This is Chris Rock so the laughs come frequent and hard. But behind the laughs, Rock manages to sneak in some thought-provoking messages. We see soda cans dissolve in sodium hydroxide, the main ingredient in hair relaxer, and then we see relaxer being smothered into a young girl's hair.

We see that black people spend billions of dollars on hair products even though we don't control the manufacturing or the distribution.

Heavy stuff, though he could have been a little heavier, as a writer friend of mine argues, doing a better job making the historical connections and pointing out that back in the day hair texture could mean more for a black person's social status than skin color. In other words, the kink in your hair could make or break you.

The strength of the film comes from Rock's travels to India and his interviews with black women, particularly actress Tracie Thoms who talks about her decision to wear her hair natural. There's laughter but Rock gets at the desire to feel beautiful, the innate confidence boost one gets when your hair is right and the pain you feel when society tells you that your hair is wrong.

A black woman's hair is her glory, Maya Angelou says in the movie. Indeed, it is.

Where The Wild Things Are

I remember Max in his wolf suit tearing through a bedroom that changed into a jungle populated by monstrous creatures who turned out to be rather friendly. And in that imagined jungle, Max and his creature friends began their wild rumpus.

The book was Where The Wild Things Are, written by Maurice Sendak, and it remains one of my favorite reads from my childhood.

Spike Jonze, the crazy genius behind Being John Malkovich, manages to preserve the beautiful essence of that book in his screen version.

Max is played by newcomer Max Records, and the movie fills out the thin volume of pictures and words it is based on. Max has a mother (Catherine Keener) struggling to raise her son and daughter, balance her career and date.

Max is a rambunctious child, struggling with all those intoxicating emotions most nine-year-old boys are apt to have. He is needy and independent, his loneliness assuaged by his wandering imagination.

One night, Max acts a fool, standing on the kitchen counter in his wolf suit while his mother tries to spend time with her boyfriend. He bites her on the shoulder and runs out into the street.

He sees a boat on water and sails to a faraway island where he meets those creatures, who at first want to eat him up but stop when he announces that he is a king with great power.

And this is when the wild rumpus begins.

Max runs wild with these creatures, led by Carol (voiced by a profanity-abstinent James Gandolfini). Rounding out the cast of monsters are KW (Lauren Ambrose), Judith (Catherine O'Hara), Alexander (Paul Dano), and Ira (Forest Whitaker), and Douglas (Chris Cooper).

For awhile, they all run through the jungle, causing fun-filled destruction. But underneath the fun is dysfunction, just like the dysfunction Max was running away from.

And this is where Spike Jonze, with help from a script written by Dave Eggers, shines, embodying his movie with both fantasy and raw emotion.

This is a kid's movie in lots of ways but it isn't. There are scary moments of disturbing behavior and circumstance.

Max isn't some lovable cute child. He's real, at least the way Max Records plays him, full of rage and immaturity, lost in the confusion of his life.

And the monsters have their own deep-seated insecurities, particularly Carol, full of jealous anger and an unbearable sadness.

I don't know how Spike Jonze did it but the movie somehow works, the fantasy and the reality all mixed together some kind of filmic stew. This world feels real even if it is only the result of Max's imagination.

And we, the audience, allow ourselves to be carried along on Max's journey fueled by pain and loneliness and the need we all have to know we are loved.

The movie ends, as the book does, with Max coming home to a hot bowl of soup, safe, loved, happy. Just as I was when I left the movie.

Fame

Remakes suck, and unfortunately, Fame, the teenybopper, PG-rated update to the 1980s R-rated original, is the rule and not the exception.

Not that there aren't nice dance moves and good singing, especially from Naturi Naughton, a member of the now defunct-pop group 3LW and last seen playing the naughty rapper Lil' Kim in Notorious.

As in the original, this film follows a bunch of kids with dreams of fame, for lack of a better word, as they go through four years at New York's High School of Performing Arts. There's singing and dancing in the cafeteria, though strangely no singing and dancing in the streets and on top of taxicabs that we relished in the original.

Dreams get crushed, hearts broken, in the brutal world of the performing arts. Like Debbie Allen said, "You want fame? Well, fame costs and right here is where you start paying it... in sweat."

But the 1980s version had memorable characters you cared about, like Leroy, (played in the movie and on the series by the late Gene Anthony Ray) the kid from the rough side of the streets who had raw dancing ability, a rebel's attitude and soul. You had the incomparable Irene Cara, who played Coco in the film and sang that song "Fame (Can You Feel It)."

The film delved into dark topics, including homosexuality, the pressures to be thin in the dance industry, suicide and the exploitation of naive students willing to do almost anything to get the glitter and the glam.

All that is lost in this smiley-faced remake. Glimpses of the character's lives are seen but never the whole, the movie so busy getting to the dancing and singing that the kids obsessed with American Idol and So You Think You Can Dance want to see.

The original Fame was edgy and real. The remake is a movie thrown together to appease the masses, drained of any soul, any passion, and nothing but cliches.

Good actors such as Charles S. Dutton, Bebe Neuwirth, Megan Mullally and Kelsey Grammer make do with what they have, which isn't much. And some of the fresh faces stand out, such as Naturi Naughton and Collins Penne, who plays Malik, an angry aspiring rapper/actor who starts off with an interesting story arc but one that never goes anywhere. But it's not enough to save this skeleton of a movie.

Hollywood these days is littered with remakes and unnecessary sequels. Word is that a remake of the horror/comedy classic An American Werewolf in London is in the works, the idea of which is more frightening than the actual movie, which is pretty scary itself.

Fame is a very good reason for Hollywood to just stop doing remakes. Try being original for once. Oh, that's right...this is Hollywood we're talking about.

I Can Do Bad All Bad By Myself

Almost every Tyler Perry movie is the same, with maybe the exception of The Family That Preys -- at the center is a woman, so beat down and bitter over the pain caused by some bitch of a man that she can't see the sweet, beautiful love of the handsome guy (always one with washboard abs) standing right in front of her.

The formula works, because every single one of Perry's movies, even the awful Madea Goes To Jail, has seen box-office gold.

His newest one, I Can Do Bad All By Myself, sticks to that well-worn formula and with powerful performances by the fiesty Taraji P. Henson, it works.

Henson plays April, an alcoholic, selfish nightclub singer haunted by a painful past and is currently sleeping with a married man, played by Brian White.

She is not in the mood when Madea drops her niece and two nephews at her doorstep after her mother, who has been raising them, disappears.

Anyone who has seen a Tyler Perry movie shouldn't be too surprised at what happens next. Angels come into her life in all forms, including a fine-looking handyman named Sandino, played by Adam Rodriguez (who's most known for his role as Delko on CSI: Miami).

It is Sandino, as well as her pastor (played by gospel singer Marvin Winans), her friend Tanya (the incomparable Mary J. Blige) and Wilma (the lovely Gladys Knight) who push her into taking control of her life and opening her heart to the possibility of love.

The script is rife with cliches and over-the-top melodrama, all Tyler Perry standards. But in this case, Perry is getting better at holding back, even sidelining audiences' favorite character, Madea, for long stretches of the film.

And that's a good thing because it gives Henson room to do her own thing. And it is a thing she does well. Henson dives into her character's pain and makes it real, even if the dialogue doesn't do her performance justice.

Her's is a journey that feels real and when she finally makes her breakthrough, you feel as if she has truly earned it. But we could have done without her singing along to an old gospel song in her house as her pastor sings the same song at his church down the street. It reminded me too much of that scene in The Color Purple, the one where Shug comes down from the juke joint to the church, singing that song, "God Is Trying To Tell You Something," and embracing her estranged father. Just a bit too much there, Tyler.

But there's no doubt Tyler Perry knows how to entertain his audiences. He packs this movie not only with uproarious hilarity but also poignant moments and soaring musical performances by Knight, Winans and Blige. On the night I saw the movie, audience members waved their hands and clapped as if they were at a concert or at church.

Anyone confused as to how the movie will eventually play out just hasn't been paying attention. Of course, April will find love, with Sandino. Of course, she'll finally decide to take care of her sister's children. And of course, faith in God will give April the strength to finally kick out her abusive boyfriend.

I wish Tyler Perry would make movies with a little bit more sophistication, that he would allow for nuance and tone down the melodrama, especially now that he is going to helm a film version of Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Considered Suicide When The Rainbow Isn't Enuf.

Here's hoping this movie is a sign of better things to come.

Extract

Office Space is a classic, a box-office bomb that took off within the hallowed walls of Blockbuster. Mike Judge, the creator of the doofus duo, Beavis and Butthead, directed this hilarious take on cubicle culture and the misery of working.

It was for Joe and Julie Schmos everywhere to relish in the awfulness that is the modern-day workplace.

Judge is back with another movie, Extract, this time from the employer's point of view. The always affable and charming Jason Bateman is Joel, the owner of a extract-flavor manufacturing company whose wife won't sleep with him and is tempted to sell his company.

More problems come his way when a freak accident causes one of his employees to lose one of his nuts, literally.

A smooth con-artist with a pretty face (Mila Kunis) comes along and convinces said employee to sue the company, thus jeopardizing the sale.

And in the midst of all this, Joel, in a drunken state, decides to hire a guy to be the pool guy and to umm ... service his wife so he can feel less guilty when he has an affair with the beautiful con-artist.

Sounds like a good premise? It is, but the movie ends up as a long-winded bore. The only bright spot comes from Ben Affleck, who plays Joel's friend. He actually gives one of his best performances, one so good you're want to give the dude an Oscar.

But Judge doesn't give you anyone to root for in this movie as he did in Office Space. The movie meanders quite a bit, as if it is high on pot, never truly landing anywhere.

There is one laugh-out-loud moment near the end, provided by the underused Kristin Weig, who plays Joel's no-sex-having wife.

Extract just fades away once the credits start rolling, a film that relies too much on the idea that we the public might want to get in the shoes of our employers. We just don't care.

Halloween II

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Michael Jackson

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I will, Michael, I will.

The Taking of Pelham 123

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Terminator Salvation/Star Trek

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And we are so much the less for it.

Wolverine

The claws are dull.

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

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

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

Hood isn't one of those cats.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Obsessed

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

State of Play

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I Love You, Man

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Awwww, ain't that so sweet.

Watchmen

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

And it is by far way too long.

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

Well, the answer is maybe and maybe not.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Madea Goes To Jail

Maybe Tyler Perry needs to hang up the wig.

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

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

He, like Frank Sinatra, did it his way.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He's Just Not That Into You

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

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

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

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

Got all that?

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

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

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

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

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

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