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Director: Robert Rodriguez

Starring: Freddy Rodriguez, Rose McGowan, Marley Shelton, Josh Brolin, Michael Biehn,

Planet Terror has split from its Grindhouse shell to shine on its own. As I’m not much of a fan of zombie films, I thought that I would not enjoy it as much when I wasn’t giddy over the arrival of another Tarantino work. I was wrong. This is a very entertaining piece, either in concert with Death Proof, or on its own. This film, written and directed by Rodriguez, is simultaneously silly, ridiculous, overblown and irresistible. Look for solid suspense and surprisingly good character development.

A little town has a mysterious visit by a military unit, and before you know it the hospital is overrun with people showing signs of a rapid, maddening and terrifying disease. The unfortunate people caught in this mess include a stripper, Cherry Darling (Rose McGowan), and a mysterious tow truck driver who may or not be named El Wray (Rodriguez). Soon the survivors are fighting for their lives, and to keep all of their appendages.

Planet Terror is imaginative, outrageous and gross. Clever dialog and a wonderful tongue in cheek approach makes it all work and this film should appeal to action fans, zombie fans and those who appreciated Robert Rodriguez’s earlier works, like Desperado and Dusk to Dawn. All that, plus you get that cool Machete trailer. maybe Rodriguez will make that one next.

Starring: Keanu Reeves, Patrick Swayze, Gary Busey, Lori Petty

Director: Kathryn Bigelow

A pretty poor action effort, but not without some redeeming qualities (Lori Petty makes a really cute surfer girl). The characters are interesting enough, this could have been a good movie if the story didn’t turn to crap like this morning’s breakfast.
Reeves is Johnny Utah, a college football star turned FBI agent chasing bank robbers in beach land CA., and Swayze is Bodhi, surfing pied piper spouting Budha-like philosophies and yapping about the ultimate rush. He befriends Utah who is the first FBI agent in history to go undercover using his own name. The first half of this movie is a little low on logic (ok, its very low on logic), but interesting characters and some good action scenes make it a decent flick. At some point, though (probably pretty close to the point that a bad guy lights a gas pump nozzle and uses it as a flamethrower instead of blowing his dumb ass a block away), it flies off the track like a Hot Wheels car at a five- year-old’s birthday party. Following that, it gets as dumb as any movie you can imagine and nothing anyone does makes any sense at all. I tried shaking my head, but that didn’t help. It still made no damn sense.
Like Buddha teaches us, after viewing this dog, I knew I had to let it go. You know, the whole non-attachment thing. Not too tough in this case. This is a weak effort from two actors who have done a lot better than this, but the tragedy is that a decent writer could have made it a hit.

Director: Robert Zemeckis

Starring: Tom Hanks, Eddie Deezen, Nona Gaye

Robert Zemeckis has a new toy and its called Enhanced Motion Capture. This film is completely digitized and is an impressive achievement, but the end result is just slightly creepy looking. That is not the big problem here, however. The story is flat and try as they might to spice it up with lots of fast-moving, out-of-control wild race scenes, but it doesn’t change the fact that little happens here and that the characters are poorly developed. Tom Hanks is a talented actor, but lacks the high-energy, chameleon ability to pull off the challenge of multiple characters.

An unnamed boy is faltering with his belief in Santa one Christmas Eve and finds himself being invited onto a magical train for a trip to The North Pole. Along the way, he meets a stern, but kind, conductor (Tom Hanks reads both roles) and a clever girl (Nona Gaye). There is not much of a story, here and the whole film lacks impact.

Many people were impressed with this technologically advanced feature, but the accomplishment in that area is not enough. The boring, undeveloped story ultimately results in a disappointing end result.

Starring: Sandra Bullock, Julian McMahon, Shyann McClure, Courtney Taylor Burress

Director: Mennan Yapo

I guess my question is why. This show gives us scenes of a wife and her young children dealing with the death of their husband/father. Why do I want to see this? What entertainment value does it have? What can it teach me? Maybe, it’s just my own view, but these scenes are as fun as a funeral to me. As a matter of fact, they have a funeral scene, too. Perfect.
Sandra Bullock is Linda Hanson, a housewife living a picture perfect suburban life complete with stained glass bumblebees and an SUV. Her world is rocked when police arrive to inform her that her husband, Jim, played by McMahon has been killed in a car accident. The story really picks up the next day, though, which turns out to be before the Jim’s death. The days continue to alternate before and after the death all in the same week. This has to be one of the craziest weeks in cinematic history. This jumbling of the story is good and really keeps the viewer guessing as more and more questions arise.
Clever enough writing, but too depressing for me. The story isn’t clear enough at the end, which also doesn’t really offer enough of a payoff for the emotional roller coaster ride that we were taken on. Bullock and her fellow cast members did a good job with a decent script, but you have to enjoy a handkerchief with your mysteries.

Pride (2007) *½
Director: Sunu Gonera

Starring: Terrence Howard, Bernie Mac, Kimberly Elise, Tom Arnold, Brandon Fobbs

Making a movie about a swim team is a pretty risky venture, and this one needed a stronger script to avoid sinking steadily to the bottom of the pool. Howard does okay in the lead role and Bernie Mac is pretty good in his first dramatic role, but an actor without a script is like a carpenter without any tools. There just isn’t much they can do.

Terrence Howard is Jim Ellis in this true story about a former competitive swimmer who forms a swim team at a doomed inner city rec club in the early 70s. Every tired cliché is pulled out in an attempt to make this movie a winner, but the underdog swimming team had a far better chance at success than this movie which plays out a like a forgettable movie of the week. The story fits together like a puzzle with half the pieces mising and the direction has all the artistic inspiration of a traffic light.

Sports formula films seem like the easiest things to put together, but they are not. The makers only have a narrow window of untapped potential in which to leave their mark. This means they have to find a new angle, interesting characters, memorable dialogue or new story twists. This movie never succeeds at this. Its attempts at originality are plugged in like a fan in the middle of an air-conditioned living room. They just don’t fit.

Director: Rob Reiner

Starring: Carey Elwes, Robin Wright Penn, Mandy Patinkin, Chris Sarandon, Andre The Giant, Christopher Guest, Wallace Shawn, Fred Savage, Peter Falk

The Princess Bride is a funny, and well-written family classic that will be enjoyed by all. Sure, there are some parts that undeniably cheesy and silly, but that’s part of its charm. The direction is outstanding and the acting is good, but what really shines here is the writing! The characters and dialog take this simple story to another level, and are the main reasons for its enduring popularity.

This movie starts out with a kindly grandfather (Peter Falk) reading a story to his under-the-weather and reluctant grandson (The Wonder Years, Fred Savage). The medieval-fantasy story is about a farm boy named Wesley (Carey Elwes), who falls in love with a beautiful girl (Robin Wright Penn). The two are separated, and she, believing him to be dead, is engaged to marry the Kingdom’s evil prince. When she is kidnapped by three not-so-bad, and very funny, characters, however, it is Wesley that rescues her. It is not happily ever after, yet, however. The story is just starting! Look for great roles by Mandy Patinkin as Inigo ‘You-killed-my-father-prepare-to-die’ Montoya and by Andre The Giant playing, you guessed it, a giant. There are also several cameos by the likes of Billy Crystal and Carol Kane. The end result is a captivating and wonderfully entertaining family-friendly story of torture, betrayal, revenge and, most of all, true love.

This is a must-see. If you have never seen it despite all the recommendations that you have no doubt heard, it is time for you to take the trek to video store and pick this one up.

Director: Marc Levin

I hate racism. For that matter, I hate all discrimination, but racism is the dumbest of them all, because it is based on nothing but preconceived notions. Apparently, Marc Levin hates racism, too. This documentary attacks an inflammatory, anti-Semitic 19th century work, which has been debunked many times, but continues to circulate propagating the idea that Jews have a master plan to take over the world. Well, if they are to succeed they will have to outwit and outlast other contenders like the Freemasons, the Shriners (Oh wait, they are the masons too), alien invaders and multi-national corporations (except they really are taking over the world by subverting the democratic process and buying up all major media sources). The point here is valid, and the back story is interesting. Levin is a good interviewer for these radical fools, whom he calmly just lets talk themselves into looking like stars from Dumber and Dumber. The feature itself, however, needed more focus, and would have benefited by having more historical facts.

The Protocols of Zion, as mentioned above, was a 19th century writing that supposedly detailed the plan of Jewish leaders to take over the world. Though debunked as the work of imaginative bigots long ago, it continues to circulate. Levin talks to a chorus of idiots who talk about why they believe it to be true and about their opinions of Jewish people and their misconceptions of world events. Levin talks to other groups, as well, showing hatred runs on both sides and from many different directions.

Levin’s feature rambles off in many directions, when I would have rather learned more about the origins and history of this ludicrous document and maybe heard some scholarly views on how it has managed to endure, besides hearing its echoes coming from the mouths of closed minded idiots. Not light viewing, but good for socially-minded, intelligent people.

Starring: Hugh Jackman, Christian Bale, Michael Caine, Piper Perabo, Scarlett Johansson

Director: Christopher Nolan

This is as clever a movie as I have ever seen. There are countless turns and counter-turns, and if that were not enough, it is also has flashbacks, unfortunately it also gets slow and this makes it difficult to keep the focus needed to follow the complicated story, at least for a slow-witted, ADD viewer such as myself, who has enough trouble driving with all those cool signs around.
Christian Bale and Hugh Jackman are Alfred and Robert, two magicians that are both rivals and co-workers. When death strikes the act, they become bitter rivals and begin competing obsessively with the stakes climbing higher and higher. Others are drawn into their dark battle and suffer for it. The twists just keep coming and just when you think the movie is over, there is another twist.
This is a smart, well-acted drama, but its strength becomes its weakness as any lapse in concentration, which is difficult to avoid with a dark slow moving film, can cause you to lose a little understanding of the intricate plot. It is still worth seeing when you are wide-awake and able to give it your undivided attention. You might have to wait until the kids get older.

Primeval (2007) *½
Director: Michael Katleman

Starring: Dominic Purcell, Brooke Langton, Orlando Jones, Jurgen Prochnow, Gideon Emery, Gabriel Malema,

Primeval starts out as a croc version of Jaws, but morphs into an African civil war, kinda crossing with Blood Diamond. The story is not good enough to hold my attention and the characters are not interesting. There is plenty of action, but it seems to go on and on and on and on and…. well, you get the idea.

Dominic Purcell is Tim Manfrey, the whiniest character in film since Bill Paxton in Aliens. He plays a reporter who really doesn’t want to go to Africa to do a story on a crocodile with a huge appetite for humans. The plan is to take a couple experts, a cameraman and pick up a Steven Irwin type in Africa and bring the man killer back alive. This is a shaky plan to begin with, but gets a shakier as the group lands in the middle of local skirmishing. There is an awful lot of missing with machine guns, rocket launchers, etc.

Hardened action junkies may not mind this one, but it really has nothing else to recommend it. It shamelessly rips off Jaws countless times, so in the end all it did was put me in the mood to watch Jaws again.

Director: Quentin Tarantino

Starring: John Travolta, Samuel L. Jackson, Bruce Willis, Uma Thurman, Ving Rhames, Tim Roth, Amanda Plummer

Quentin Tarantino has become the most influential filmmaker of his age and it is largely on the strength of this masterpiece. Amazing dialogue, that can be so mundane and shockingly causal, delivered by interesting and well-developed characters that are anything but mundane, is Tarantino’s greatest strength and he uses it to great effect in this feature. His direction is smooth and subtly innovative and the actors are uniformly excellent.

Tarantino tells several interconnected stories in a non-linear fashion which include John Travolta as a hood just returning from a three year European hiatus, Bruce Willis as a fighter hired to throw a bout and Samuel L. Jackson as a smooth killer experiencing a “moment of clarity”. The stories are good, but the characters and dialogue are what we are really watching here and they are both well worth it.

One of my all-time favorite movies and its falls on that list for many people, but its language and disturbing violent scenes make unsuitable for some viewers. My own rule with objectionable material in cinema is that it is ok as long as it is in the context of the story and not used to replace the story (exploitive). If somehow you have not seen Pulp Fiction, and are not avoiding it on the basis of moral objections, you should see it today and see it again tomorrow. You are way behind.