samseescinema Reviews

Superbad (2007)

Superbad has the feeling of being absolutely effortless

[4/10 · 20 August 2007]

Superbad reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Like Knocked Up and The 40 Year Old Virgin, Superbad has the feeling of being absolutely effortless. It's a Judd Apatow requirement maybe that no joke should be choked out by its characters. Honesty and chemistry seem to be the only ingredients to his enormously profitable formula. He sits in the Producer's chair for Superbad, letting Seth Rogen and Evan Goldberg use their ten year old script and Greg Mottola direct it. But Apatow has ushered in his own era of comic productions in Hollywood. They're low-brow in their premises but entirely human and wholly sincere in their execution. Superbad is no different, pulling focus on two outcasts trying to wiggle somehow into the exclusive social hierarchy of high school before they scoot off into their separate lives at college. Girls are their only concern and like the boys of American Pie, Seth and Evan are looking only to get laid.

The simplest way to explain Seth and Evan (Jonah Hill and Michael Cera) is to say they would have no problem getting along with the stoner Ben from Knocked Up and the sexless Andy from The 40 Year Old Virgin. Molded too awkwardly to exist normally in the social world, these characters are forced into situations far outside their comfort zone. Here Seth, Evan, and their twice nerdy friend Fogell (Christopher Mintz-Plasse) are asked to score the alcohol for a party that evening at Jule's house, Seth's big crush. Depending on the fact that Fogell somehow has obtained a phony I.D., they boast that they can buy the girls whatever they want; that they do this thing all the time when, in fact, they've never set foot in a liquor store. It doesn't help that Fogell's I.D. claims that he's a 25 year old Hawaiian named McLovin. And as any teenager knows, finding alcohol is never a simple task.

The boys' shenanigans drive them deep into the night and late to the party, but glorious in their possession of alcohol for their underaged peers. These peers, thankfully, actually look like their peers. By this I mean that the extras and peripheral characters look believably under the age of twenty-one. I'm so tired of muscled, bearded thirty-somethings posing as bodacious high schoolers. The students here are entirely convincing as real live students.

The funny thing about effortlessness is that rarely is it in fact effortless. But the effort involved is so well masked that we accept it as something easy and natural. Like the previous Apatow concoctions, casting and scripting are the main players; minutely calibrated to bubble up a critical mass of on-screen chemistry for the actors to play with. Jonah Hill from previous Apatow films and Michael Cera of "Arrested Development" fame are superb choices as Seth and Evan. Director Greg Mottola handles Mr. Rogen and Mr. Golberg's script adroitly and manages to funkify what could have been a pop-music mood, bringing in music from the Bar-Kays, Rick James, Curtis Mayfield and The Roots. The result is a swell continuation of Apatow and his crew's success.

Samuel Osborn

Rush Hour 3 (2007)

This time it feels fresh. Or at least fresh enough.

[7/10 · 10 August 2007]

Rush Hour 3 reviewed by Samuel Osborn

If I'm not mistaken, Rush Hour 3 is the final sequel in a long train of franchise continuations to be released during Summer '07. With Spiderman 3, 28 Weeks Later, Pirates of the Caribbean 3, Shrek 3, Oceans 13, Live Free or Die Hard, Fantastic Four 2, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, Hostel 2, Evan Almighty, and The Bourne Ultimatum on its heels, Rush Hour 3 certainly finds itself in a thick, polluted cloud of over-sized expectations and bristling fans. It's been an exhausting Summer. But luckily, unlike Spidey and Jack Sparrow, the buzz around Detective Li and Detective Carter of Rush Hour 3 hasn't risen above a gentle hum. And with the tentpole mentality out of the way (no midnight screenings, juicy on-set rumors, profit-minded blog spoilers), the lack of heady expectation surrounding this sixth trilogy capper of the season makes Rush Hour 3 all the more tolerable.

Let's say it's like a Spring Roll: a flimsy, transparent outer-layer of action that bounds the healthy innards of comedy to make a fine, single entrée of a genre. The formula has aged; in fact, the whole genre has all but died since its advent with the original Rush Hour. But call that a blessing because Rush Hour 3 is a near-exact clone of its predecessors. It wouldn't work if we could remember the films' similarities.

That thin outer-layer of action breading involves the Parisian Triads and their attempted assassination of Ambassador Han (Tzi Ma), assigned charge of Detective Li (Jackie Chan). Driven by honor and pride and whatever else Westerners perceive the Chinese to be motivated by, Detective Li sets off to hunt the Triads to their core. Loud and racially alight, Detective Carter (Chris Tucker) tags along , using Li's investigation as a vacation from his duties as a lowly Los Angeles traffic controller.

As is standard to a buddy cop picture, the unlikely pairing of Jackie Chan to Chris Tucker is the film's lifeblood. Jeff Nathanson's script does well to load Tucker's performance with fantastic one-liners tailored to his shrieking timbre with ample opportunities for Chan to swing about as a one-man circus. This is where the two belong: with Tucker as the mouthpiece and Chan as the dropkick. Watching Jackie Chan trying to maneuver a snappy one liner is like watching him try to swallow cardboard. Not funny in the right way. And though his martial arts are still more dizzying than anything a skinny white boy like myself can imagine, Chan seems to have grown past his prime. Innocent and smiling, dying to entertain, Chan was the modern-day answer to silent-film legends. He flung himself into dastardly stunts for our gosh-wow amazement and did so with a giddy, boyish pride. He still does so here, but it's apparent that he's grown past fifty. I hate to call that a criticism since fifty-three year old stuntmen don't grow on trees, but the effects are sadly noticeable.

For a standard buddy cop picture, Brett Ratner seems the right choice as a standard director. Not especially interesting in any way (except, maybe, for ruining the X-Men franchise), Ratner directs the film rather competently. He leads it along at an efficient pace and never lets creativity stand in the way of the good, expected joke. And for this Rush Hour 3 is fine. It's no better than any other franchise decency released this Summer, but because its been six years since the last Rush Hour was released, this time it feels fresh. Or at least fresh enough.

Samuel Osborn

The Bourne Ultimatum (2007)

this truly is a magnificent flick

[9/10 · 5 August 2007]

The Bourne Ultimatum reviewed by Samuel Osborn

The auditorium in which I screened The Bourne Ultimatum was filled to capacity and humming comfortably with the floating refreshment of air conditioning when I took my seat. By the film's end, the theatre was still full to capacity but the room's temperature had risen several uncomfortable degrees. The air conditioning was furiously rattling, expelling refrigerated air as efficiently as possible, but it couldn't keep up with the perspiration-inducing intensity that the film had caused our heart-rates to rise to. The film had indirectly made the room hotter. Talk about global warming.

Stoic, solemn, and robotic, Jason Bourne returns for his trilogy capper, The Bourne Ultimatum. Less of a continuation and more of an upgrade from The Bourne Supremacy, this third installment, working off of Robert Ludlum's source material again, invents new memories for the amnesiac hero to remember. What used to be Operation Treadstone has now been upgraded to Operation Blackbriar and Mr. Bourne was (of course) involved with it in some corner of his blurry past.

As Ultimatum picks up almost immediately after Supremacy left off, Jason Bourne is still on the run, hurdling cops like leapfrog and outrunning the CIA like they were a pack of blind, one-legged cats. Falling in beside the defensive, calculating Pamela Landy (Joan Allen) as the CIA's resident Bourne expert is Noah Vosen (David Strathairn). Vosen heads up the Blackbriar gang and has hooked a reporter, Simon Ross (Paddy Considine), whose exposure stories on Bourne have uncovered confidential information. Because the information concerns Bourne's past and because it's a matter of national security, Ms. Landy, Mr. Vosen, and Mr. Bourne are all on his trail.

Director Paul Greengrass (The Bourne Supremacy, United 93) wastes zero time in mining the action from this storyline. As a filmmaker, his edit points are quick, his camera shaky, and his close-ups constant. He wants realism and he wants his action to appear in real-time. The pseudo-documentary style he's becoming known for is at its best here, muting the spectacle of his stunts to make room for believability in the play-pretend realism. And since it appears many of his stunts were actually coordinated on set—and not in front of a computer monitor—the realism is certainly accepted as, well, real.

For this reason, The Bourne Ultimatum sprints as a missile for the moon. It's fast and sometimes infuriatingly so, as it rounds plot corners at double-time, leaving us confused and choking on its dust. But all is forgiven when a clever foot-chase is launched, when Bourne kicks down the clutch of a motorcycle, as he hijacks an NYPD squad car, as he leaps from a roof, etc, etc. Luckily his stunts are as loud as they are intelligent. And since Bourne stays generally low-tech with his tricks, he becomes a sort of spy-version of MacGyver.

Though I'm not positive as to how essential this installment is to the Bourne legacy. CIA Director Ezra Kramer is discussing the Bourne subject with Ms. Landy early on in the story. Both are unsure of Bourne's importance to the agency, weighing out the possibility of giving up the search altogether. Landy mentions that maybe he's not involved with this particular quarrel at all; that this isn't Bourne's fight. Kramer shrugs, frowns, and says, "Well, let's keep looking." It seems even the fictional players are stretching their connection to Bourne to keep this story chugging. And it's true; the Bourne legacy doesn't require this story to be told. This becomes apparent when the same good joke from the second film is repeated twice more in the third; and also when the action set-pieces are nearly the same, if not extended to a more satisfying length. Like I said, this is more of an upgrade than a sequel.

But don't think I'm complaining. The intelligence of the screenplay is a damned marvel. To craft the delicate logic of such a complex CIA tale deserves a merit on its own. And so what if it's a formula their running through the Hollywood factory for another go-round? The last film was the best spy film in ages. Just imagine how good this upgraded version is. And technically The Bourne Ultimatum does have its own (very valid) storyline that jet-sets Jason from Morocco to Paris to London to Madrid and finally to good ole' Manhattan. And though what character building that's continued here may not be required viewing for any Bourne enthusiast, the power that David Strathairn most certainly is. Skeletal and sever, Strathairn's Noah Vosen is a formidable needle of a villain. He's human, as all CIA leaders claim to be, but that trait is buried beneath a permafrost mounted by his overwhelming coldness. Strathairn drives this storyline into a realm of quasi-originality, making The Bourne Ultimatum relevant enough for us to enjoy it unabashedly. Because of him we swallow again the tired conceit of Bourne's lost memory and his lingering guilt. We admit that, yeah, this truly is a magnificent flick.

Samuel Osborn

1408 (2007)

a classically styled, old-school haunt

[8/10 · 27 June 2007]

1408 Reviewed by Samuel Osborn

I remember reading the short story 1408 is based upon. It was a Stephen King yarn, bland in the way his writing gets when the prose aches to be a script. And like most of Mr. King's work, a script was made—the rights to his work apparently aren't hard to obtain from the easy-going writer. The necessary extrapolations were made, cluttering up the short story so it could fill 90 minutes of film and, voila, a movie was made. Between three screenwriters who, combined, have Reign of Fire and Agent Cody Banks to their resumes, a Swedish director with an abysmal American debut (Derailed), and a remarkably mediocre short story for source material, I had 1408 chalked up to be a joke. A sorry stab at the haunted house genre. I, of course, was wrong.

1408 isn't "torture porn" as the Saw and Hostel franchises have been deemed; it isn't a Japanese re-hash like The Ring or The Grudge; and also it's not a slasher glory days re-make like Texas Chainsaw Massacre or the upcoming Halloween. 1408 is a classically styled, old-school haunt. And it's very effective.

Mike Enslin (John Cusack) is a mythbuster for haunted houses. Once a laudable novelist, now Mr. Enslin slinks around the deepest, phoniest hotels dislodging their claims to supernatural fame. As is obligatory to any Stephen King romp, Mr. Enslin is, at heart, a troubled, middle-aged ordinary Joe. He's likable in the film noir sort of way: an agreeable prick. Life's thrown him some punches and Mr. King finds him a few rounds later, beaten but carrying on alright. Separated from his wife and without children, Mr. Enslin lives on the beach and spends his free time surfing and dressing like an idiot. He receives a postcard from The Dolphin Hotel in Manhattan one day, warning him not to enter the room 1408. Intrigued, he calls the hotel and asks for the room. The receptionist hangs up on him.

It isn't until he's pulled legal strings with his publishing house's lawyer does Mr. Enslin finally convince the hotel's manager, Mr. Olin (Samuel L. Jackson), to allow him the room for one night. 56 people have died in there, he says, either by natural death or suicide. A maid was once locked in the bathroom for no more than a few minutes. By the time Mr. Olin had gotten her out, the maid had gouged both of her eyes out. On this point, even at the risk of over-hyping his main attraction, Director Mikael Hafstrom goes to extensive efforts to make his haunted room a scare even before we set eyes upon it. So when the door finally creaks open, our stomach's already clenched and ready to fling itself up into our throats.

And from that moment on, when the key is turned and 1408 opened, we're treated to dozens of goodies from Mr. Hafstrom's big bucket of scares. The film is loaded with them. But what makes 1408 original is their enigmatic nature. There's no name or physicality to the spook that haunts 1408. It's just an awesome evil. And in this way, the curtain isn't drawn to reveal our opponent. We're never sure what we're up against. This gives the three screenwriters carte blanche on the scares their allowed to dream up.

The pacing also plays a role, as boring a point as that may seem. The scares, though abundant, do well to sneak up on us, compounding quietly behind our nerve endings where they wait to pounce. It's an old trick from the golden days, when censor boards didn't allow excessive gore or grotesque figures onto Hollywood's screens. Directors were forced to use minimalist tricks to crawl under our skin. So even though all that's wrong with 1408 early on is a preternaturally good housekeeping service, a faulty window, and an annoying clock radio, we're scared out of our wits.

But don't worry, Mr. Hafstrom doesn't rely on minimalist mumbo jumbo for 1408's full 94 minutes. The scope soon widens to a point where the reliable troops of CGI are recruited for service. The things this hotel room can do will knock your socks off. And with the ever-lovable John Cusack behind Mike Enslin, the ride's entertainment value is foolproof. And as a note on 2007, between The Hitcher, 28 Weeks Later, Mr. Brooks, Disturbia, 1408, and the upcoming Joshua, this year might be the year for horror's classy comeback.

Samuel Osborn

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer (2007)

a harmless dry heave of a sequel

[4/10 · 20 June 2007]

Fantastic Four: Rise of the Silver Surfer

Reviewed by Samuel Osborn

It's sad enough when a sequel fails to live up to the quality of its predecessor. But it's an entirely different tragedy when the predecessor, in this case the first Fantastic Four movie, contained no hint of quality to begin with. Its sequel, Rise of the Silver Surfer, is not just unnecessary, but achieves a woeful demotion from the comic book regurgitation of the original. That's right, it's even worse.

Besides the obvious financial potential of a Fantastic Four sequel, the only plausible reason for Rise of the Silver Surfer to be granted the greenlight by its studio is by way of its title character. The Silver Surfer (voiced occasionally by Laurence Fishburne) is admittedly pretty awesome. He careens from outer space as a meteor into Earth's atmosphere, zipping around the globe and impacting the land with various craters in preparation for the planet's destruction. Never mind his humane intentions and fluffy nice guy interior; the Silver Surfer is a certifiable badass. Composed entirely of candied CGI goodness, he looks like the figurine version of Terminator 2's metallic T-1000 propped up on a chrome surfboard. His sequences are the only fantastic thing about this film, making his supreme lack of appearances all the more disappointing. Instead, we're given the likes of Victor Von Doom (Julian McMahon), who still leads the contest for most stupidly overwrought name for a villain. Von Doom soaks up screen time like a diseased sponge, blocking out any opportunity for the Silver Surfer to perform his titular rise.

Returning to save the world from interplanetary surfers are the aforementioned four. Dr. Reed Richards (Ioan Gruffud) again leads the spandexed quartet, now mysteriously engaged to Jessica Alba, playing Sue Storm. Michael Chiklis and Chris Evans return as the big orange rock, Ben Grimm, and the cocky flamer, Johnny Storm. Each actor's performance lives up to the mediocrity of the first Fantastic go-round, with the exception of Michael Chiklis whose delivery has become as lifeless as the rocks he's composed of. Ms. Alba also loses some of her conviction, which probably is just an effect of the difficulty involved in manipulating a face lathered in entire bottles of golden bronzing.

Anyway, the ride isn't very lengthy at a cool 89 minutes and thus can't irritate to its full potential. It's a harmless dry heave of a sequel, amazing sometimes in its technical prowess and also amazing in its complete ineptitude for telling a story. I'd make a sly finishing pun about how un-fantastic Rise of the Silver Surfer is, but I'm sure by now the point is made. This film is bad.

Samuel Osborn

Ratatouille (2007)

Pixar Redeems Itself with Ratatouille

[8/10 · 13 June 2007]

Ratatouille reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Last year, when penning out the review for Pixar's last film, Cars, I wrote, "Let's decide that this can be Pixar's single use of the Get Out of Jail Free card. Now they're back to square one." I finished with a suggestion for "Pixar to go sit in the corner where it can hide beneath its dunce cap." Well Pixar can come out now, because it has redeemed itself with Ratatouille.

Pixar's return path to the throne is led by the likes of a sewer rat named Remy (Patton Oswalt). Remy has a taste for the finer things in life, shunning the scavenged garbage horded by his father and the rat colony. He steals away to the kitchen and the French chef, Gusteau's, cookbook, "Anyone Can Cook", whenever possible, sleuthing gourmet cooking in secret. This, however, leads to the rightful owner of the borrowed kitchen discovering Remy red-handed with the cooking utensils. Havoc is wreaked and suddenly a rifle appears, ousting Remy and his rat colony from their country living for good. But in the chaos of evacuation, Remy is separated from his family and marooned off to the city of Paris, popping out of the sewer to arrive at the very restaurant of his most admired chef, Gusteau.

Here the tales of Remy the rat and Linguini the garbage boy (Lou Romano) intertwine. On Linguini's first day at Gusteau's, he collides with the soup pot, sloshing half of it to the ground. Before any of the chefs notice, he starts refilling the pot with any and every ingredient within reach. Admiring the kitchen from his minute, mouse-sized hiding place, Remy witnesses Linguni's frankensoup. He maneuvers to the scene by means of acrobatic rodent scurrying and puts his culinary instincts to work. It isn't long before Linguini notices, watching as Remy dices at vegetables and tears at the herbs, sprinkling them with zeal into the now delicious soup. An idea is hatched between the two after the night is through. If Remy could somehow cook for Linguini in secret, then Remy could play out his dream of becoming a gourmet chef and Linguini could hold his job.

Of course, as when Mr. Incredible attempted to relive the superhero glory days in secret, hiding a sewer rat in the confines of a gourmet kitchen is no easy task. Though Mr. Incredible was dealing with much more weighty circumstances for an animated film, which is the limb found lacking in Ratatouille. The Incredibles, the animated benchmark in mastery and Writer/Director Brad Bird's first attempt with Pixar, handled more solemn themes than the chasing of one's dreams. Its characters juggled middle-aged crises and marital boredom. They felt trapped by a beaming postcard family. Such themes appeared in Little Children, where adultery and sexual catharsis reigned king. But Mr. Bird managed to channel such discontent into a whirling, comic book world of superheroes. The colors, adorable animation, and Oscar-winning sound jostled the little audiences into soaring contentment, while the adults were offered an honest, smart story to sink into. Ratatouille isn't lacking in either of these categories, as the animation is as adorable as ever, the sound as bombastically rousing as before, and the story clever and humble. But it's the maturity of its themes that's absent. This isn't a middle-aged crisis; this is a rat playing puppeteer to a freckled teenage chef.

But disappointment over Ratatouille not surpassing the likes of the best in animated film-making is hardly a criticism at all. It very nearly is a compliment. Mr. Bird has proved that he has a supreme knack for finding the animated in the droll. Ratatouille could very easily be filmed using live-action counterparts. Think Garfield in the kitchen…ick. But by dreaming up the entire affair through the computed neurons of CGI animation, a liveliness is achieved that would otherwise be ignored. Mr. Bird has made rats adorable and French cuisine not annoyingly pretentious. Such feats are magnanimous. And along the way he managed to tell a warm tale of friendship, romance (not between the rat and the boy, mind you), and the joy of cooking.

-Samuel Osborn

Ocean's Thirteen (2007)

What Ocean's Thirteen achieves is something standard, something basic.

[6/10 · 9 June 2007]

Ocean's Thirteen reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Back to basics. This seems to be the mantra for Ocean's Thirteen, which marks the end of the Ocean's trilogy. Twelve, the widely despised sequel, made the mistake of getting creative. They changed the recipe and it made the people squeamish. Critics and audiences alike were held utterly aghast. I went back to it earlier this week in preparation for Thirteen. Watch it again, I dare you. It's easily the best of the trilogy. The film is fun, inventive, and loaded with more style than a fashion magazine, which is more than I can say for Ocean's Thirteen.

It's not that Thirteen is bad. No no no. It just follows in the shoes of all the other franchise letdowns to have been released so far this Summer. Between Spiderman 3, Shrek 3, Pirates 3, and Ocean's Thirteen, a 24 hour depression hotline will have to be launched to service the needs of millions of disappointed adolescent girls.

As in Ocean's Twelve, Thirteen doesn't waste much time with back-story. Director Steven Soderbergh starts the ball rolling at once. His obsessively inventive camera zooms, tracks, dollies and swivels its way into Danny Ocean's life with great immediacy. Longtime friend and criminal companion, Reuben Tishkoff (Elliott Gould), has fallen ill. His business partner, Willie Bank (Al Pacino), has conned him into financial failure and left him on the brink of death. Bank is posed to open the hottest hotel on the Vegas strip, looking to nail another Five Diamond Award to his pedestal. Without family to assist him, Reuben turns to Danny Ocean (George Clooney) and his crew of thieves for help.

The idea is revenge, but the sort of revenge that doesn't involve a funeral. Not the sort that "is best served cold," as Tarantino would have put it. Danny wants his revenge served steaming in a fajita of clever wit and tact. His plan, hatched with longtime partner, Rusty Ryan (Brad Pitt), is to break the Bank (their pun, not mine). To rob Mr. Bank, they plan to rig each game on his casino's floor for a small window of time. Within the window, with every game rigged, and with thousands of gamblers winning rigged games, Bank could stand to lose a half billion dollars on the night of his hotel's grand opening.

As you might have noticed, the Ocean crew has abandoned the foreign vaults and international heists for a second romp in their hometown, Las Vegas. They're doing what they know best. For Steven Soderbergh, he's just doing what worked the first time around. This is fine, even if the execution is uninteresting. All the same motions are processed successfully, except that the heist, maybe due to a strangely passive Pacino delivery, comes off somewhat ho-hum. There's no big reveal at the end. No twist or turning of the tables. The heist either worked or it didn't. And that's all.

What you might not have noticed, however, are Julia Roberts and Catherine Zeta-Jones, who play the wily love interests of Danny and Rusty. Their characters are all but absent. We find the men commiserating the complexities of relationships between blueprinting their heist, one always finishing the sentence for the other, but Ms. Roberts and Ms. Zeta-Jones never show their faces. This seems to be a shame since the sly push and pull of the romances in the earlier films made for some of the more satisfying sequences. The chemistry worked. But Danny resolves to not involve Tessa (Roberts), saying "it's not her fight."

Also missing is the humor. All the old jokes return for repeat go-rounds, including the deep male camaraderie of Rusty and Danny, Linus' (Matt Damon) need to impress his thieve parents, the jock-nerd matching of Virgil and Turk (Casey Affleck and Scott Caan), and all the rest of the inside jokes Ocean fans will fondly remember. But new stabs at humor--including a bizarre sub-plot involving the violent strike of a dice factory in Mexico--fall flat. The boys are all fine at the charming and the chemistry as always, but the new material needs work. Julia Roberts posing as Julia Roberts from Ocean's Twelve was brilliant. Such comic invention seems to be on near-empty here.

What the Ocean's franchise has going for it, luckily, is its cast. Put Pitt, Clooney and Damon in front of a camera for long enough and something worth watching will happen. They're the charmers of Hollywood. Just having these three on screen all at once makes for compelling film-making. So, in all actuality, it was never possible for Ocean's Thirteen to be flat-out bad. I guess I just expected something flashier; something as mischievous and as neat as Ocean's Twelve. What Ocean's Thirteen achieves is something standard, something basic.

Samuel Osborn

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End (2007)

Lost its Charm and its Excitement

[5/10 · 24 May 2007]

Pirates of the Caribbean: At World's End reviewed by Samuel Osborn

The Pirates of the Caribbean franchise has been a menagerie of CGI magic, dreaming up seafaring worlds of swashbuckling majesty, the emptiness of such computerized beauty filled in by the drunkenly feminine charm of Jack Sparrow (Johnny Depp). His personality was big enough for all the rest of the characters, of whom consisted mostly of archetypes we'd expect from a trilogy based off an amusement park ride. The plots are confusing little numbers, spinning half-baked legends around the myriad of story arcs each character was put to. They work mostly to provide coal for the furnace of stunt-work and CGI, both of which turn clenched jaws of suspense into wide-hanging maws of amazement. The characters, even Mr. Sparrow, are corkboards for personalities to be tacked on to. There's no evolution to these people; simply punch-lines and singular motivations. But up until this third installment, the shaky equation worked. I'd give much of the credit to director Gore Verbinski, who achieved the unlikely feat of maintaining an artist's handiwork throughout the duration of the colossal project. (Does anyone remember the creative collapse of X-Men when Brett Ratner took the reigns of the trilogy?) But with At World's End, the tangle of the franchise's formula catches up. The song put on repeat that each character sings has grown tiresome. And the plot mangles itself into a confusing bundle of tedium. After 168 minutes, it becomes a strange and bizarre phenomenon to be bored by such spectacle.

Picking up where Dead Man's Chest left off, Will Turner (Orland Bloom), Elizabeth Swann (Keira Knightley), Captain Barbossa (Geoffrey Rush), and their merry band of adventurers seek to bust Jack Sparrow from the confines of Davy Jones' (Bill Nighy) locker. The path to World's End, where the locker unexplainably exists, is held within the map of Captain Sao Feng (Chow Yun-Fat), a Singaporean Pirate Lord obsessed with steam. Finagling a shadowy deal with the Captain, Will Turner manages to secure a ship and a crew to take to Jones' locker with the understanding that Mr. Sparrow will repay a longstanding debt with Sao Feng when retrieved. You see, Turner isn't saving Sparrow for the sake of their friendship. Jack has always had a thing for Turner's fiancée, Elizabeth Swann, and has never been mum on the subject. Will is instead looking to save Sparrow to, in turn, use him to free his imprisoned father on board Davy's ship, The Flying Dutchman. It hasn't been fifteen minutes and already we're confused.

Anyway, it isn't long before Jack's busted out and a new plot thread must spool out. The nine remaining pirate lords, for a reason I missed somehow, decide to hold a summit on Shipwreck Isle. And here's where things get really confusing. Between Elizabeth Swann, Jack Sparrow, Captain Barbossa, Will Turner, Lord Beckett, Tia Dalma, Captain Sao Feng, Davy Jones, Bootstrap Bill, and Norrington, there are at least ten different motives for the script to juggle. But since all ends meet at Shipwreck Isle, the entire second hour of the film is spent making deals, betraying loyalty, forging accords, and stabbing backs before the summit is held. By the arrival of the third act I managed to have caught up. And seeing the immense mound of plot the script had hauled forward, it's realized that the epic tangle of characters and motives would be impressive were it not so damned tedious.

The plot razes all traces of the franchise's main attraction: charm. Investing fully in the complex web of story, it forgets that we care little for the motives of these characters as they pertain to the plot. Sparrow wants to be a pirate forever. Fine, what else did we expect? Turner wants to free his dad. OK, that's cute, Will. Swann likes the life of a pirate and wants the torch to be carried on. Whatever, she's like that. We care for these characters most in times of their clever verbal jousting, twirling swordplay, fantastic adventures. How they strike accords and deal with British administrative law are mere obligations to a story set in the pirating world. Yet At World's End insists upon putting that piece to the puzzle front and center. It's not a cushy piece of swashbuckling wonder with which to sink our teeth deliciously into. It's a surprising wooden block that our teeth shatter upon. It's boring, in short.

But when those clouds clear and the moonlit charm returns, Pirates is still, after all, Pirates. There are moments in those final two hours of this ridiculously long-winded saga that remind us why the franchise has raked in so much money thus far. They're few, but shining. And that first hour, when Barbossa and company go to world's end to crack the lock on Jones' locker, it's glistening, rousing entertainment. But like The Matrix Trilogy a few years back, Pirates of the Caribbean winds itself into a dry wrap of self-importance, forgetting the reasons seats were filled the first time round the ride. And by the time this go-round finally comes to a halt, the excitement has all but faded.

Samuel Osborn

Shrek the Third (2007)

Same old Shrek, for better or worse

[6/10 · 21 May 2007]

Shrek the Third reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Silly green ogres apparently apply to the mantra, "Some things never change." Shrek has returned for his third outing, garbed in all the same bells and whistles that made the previous two episodes go down all fuzzy and easy. It's a nursery rhyme told in the time signature of a Top 100 pop song: clean and catchy, cute and simple, clever and empty. What worked in the first was segued to the second. And what worked in the second was bridged to the third. It's a continuation and a repeat effort, showcasing little more than hollow gumption towards the usage of puns, scatological gags, referential pop culture digs, and the successful artistry of a million well-positioned pixels. The pill goes down easy and the magic it works is enjoyable enough. But its luster has gone and the originality flattened. Like I said, some things never change. Shrek is still Shrek. But how long until that charm dims?

After marrying the princess and meeting the parents, Shrek (Mike Meyers) is now asked to be king. Far Far Away has lost its toad ruler (John Cleese) and the next in the royal line is our fat green ogre. Declining the offer on terms of being horribly unqualified for the job, Shrek is informed that after himself, a boy named Arthur (Justin Timberlake) is due to be king. I guess the list of Grimm and Disney characters to spoof had worn thin, requiring the Shrek writing-team to dig into Arthurian lore. Such myth is applied to the world of medieval high school, with Arthur (here known as Artie) playing victim to Lancelot's (John Krasinski) muscled jock glory. Guinevere (Latifa Ouaou) plays a cheerleader; the sort of girl whose vocabulary consists of "whatever" and "totally." In the shadowy background lurks Prince Charming (Rupert Everett), bitter about having lost his shot at the throne, now rallying the villains of the fairy tale kingdom for a final showdown between the palace walls of Far Far Away.

The Shrek franchise has never been one for sincerity. Its shtick is the sly punch-line; the clever in-joke that only the adults get. With its for-the-whole-family-humor and animated renditions of popular rock tunes, Shrek spreads the vulture wings of a massive demographic, mainstreaming itself for mass consumption. Here the tactic is most obviously at play. Sincerity is wholly lacking in its empty story, which plays most like the spoof of a Greatest Hits mix tape of fairy tale characters.

There's a point when Snow White—in the Shrek world, an obnoxious, caddy brunette—sings the original tune from the classic Disney picture. The old recording, scratchy and ancient, is used, reminding us of the sweetness and simplicity of those pictures. Animation didn't used to be so sly, so impatient for the next joke. Shrek is fine, all three episodes of it. It's fun, colorful and bouncily easy to digest. Filled with fiber, let's say. But it has all the viscosity of a stand-up routine. The story itself means nothing, let alone the characters. It's the jokes hidden inside, tucked in all the shadows, that matter. Shrek the Third, as Guinevere would say "is, like, so totally whatever."

Samuel Osborn

28 Weeks Later (2007)

Now this is the way to do a sequel.

[8/10 · 14 May 2007]

28 Weeks Later reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Now this is the way to do a sequel. 28 Weeks Later draws a terrific blueprint for future horror sequels to follow. As usual, it wasn't possible to bring on board the original director (Danny Boyle of Trainspotters fame) and the original writer (Alex Garland) to work on the sequel to 28 Days Later. Instead, the two worked as producers and found an apt replacement: Juan Carlos Fresnadillo. Not many saw Fresnadillo's startling feature debut, Intacto, but those who did remember it well. Intacto was compelling, dark, and precisely intelligent. The same adjectives can quite fittingly be glued upon Fresnadillo's second feature film, 28 Weeks Later.

The sequel fortunately doesn't require audiences to have seen the original. Days have turned to weeks and the story of Cillian Murphy's survival in posthumous England is finished; not continued maybe because of reasons similar to the non-return of Mr. Boyle and Mr. Garland. Anyway, 28 Weeks Later brings us up to speed with a concise recap of England's resuscitation by United States and NATO forces. The infected (i.e. Zombies) have been cleared of the island and citizens are slowly being allowed entry into what is called District 1. The United States Army inhabits this region, beginning what is a modest allegory running parallel to the present war in Iraq. The first children allowed into District 1 are Tammy and Andy (Imogen Poots and Mackintosh Muggleton), rejoining their father after separation due to the infection. Their father, Don (Robert Carlyle), we learn through the grisly opening sequence, is a selfish twerp who abandoned his wife for the sake of his singular survival. But as a peculiarity in his wife's genetic ordering renders her semi-immune to the zombies' virus, the importance of his children's safety becomes a priority to the United States Army. Without giving too much away, this peculiarity sets off a reaction that brings the virus into District 1's core, causing another gory eruption of glorious, limb-tearing zombie violence.

The plot, like in any horror sequel, requires the help of a league of peripheral characters to shore up the holes and contrivances it leaves leaking. Along with the children, there are the parents, the scientists, the Army commanders and the snipers for the screenplay to shadow as the infection pierces the confines of District 1. Luckily, Fresnadillo and his writers shrug off most of the symptoms of sequelitis, leaving only a couple glaring plot conveniences that are cause for unintentional laughter. (Explaining these plot hiccups would spoil some hearty surprises). For the most part they manage to find cleverly plausible situations for all these characters to inhabit, each setting off a reaction for the other to deal with, making for a high velocity of smart storytelling.

As in the original, the scares come as frequently as the action, with both Mr. Boyle and Mr. Fresnadillo allowing the suspense to open the throttle onto full-fledged chases and action spectacles. There's no reliance on cats jumping out of dark closets and no reliance on nauseating, bucket-filling gore. His scares are clever and always compelling. The camera is continuously hand-held, finding the candid beauty in all the Zombie-fleeing and sometimes also finding honest emotion in the characters' stories.

About the same time I screened 28 Weeks Later I was close to finishing Cormac McCarthy's Pulitzer-winning novel The Road. The book is another riff on post apocalyptic survival, a theme apparently at the forefront of pop culture's psyche. McCarthy rendered his characters subject to their environment, characters without control over their destiny, no plot convenience to allow them redemption. The novel is devastating and soulful, exciting and terrifying. 28 Weeks Later relies on convenience no more so than any other Zombie picture, but the convenience is still contrivance. The film kneels at the feet of spectacle; required to find shortcuts to flare reactions and achieve emotional benchmarks. It is more important that we don't see two zombies killed by the same means; creative extermination is more important than any character evolution.

But the comparison is maybe unfair. What is at stake artistically isn't much to 28 Weeks Later. The bottom line is still a zombie and his appetite. Except, both works employ similar devices to conjure realism: Fresnadillo's hand-held camera is the same as McCarthy's non-usage of punctuation. They're clever immersion tricks. Each auteur wants us to believe wholly in their world, zombie or not. 28 Weeks Later is near to such success as The Road, though hampered by its purpose as spectacle. The spectacle, after all is told, is still spectacular, however undeserving it may be.

Samuel Osborn

Spider-Man 3 (2007)

Though it's lighter and maybe dumber, it's still pretty and it's still electric

[7/10 · 6 May 2007]

Spiderman 3 reviewed by Samuel Osborn

My endless fascination with midnight screenings brought me to the theatre at Union Square here in Manhattan last night, standing in line with every other fanboy garbed in a Spidey costume bought from the Kmart down the street and crushing into a third row/far left seating arrangement that cricked my neck up to the gargantuan screen above. The film rolled up to speed and the requisite clapping and whoops ensued. 140 minutes and a polite applause later we filed out. All of us shook our heads, some shaking in confusion while others shook in unguarded disappointment. This, after all, was not the Spiderman 3 we had anticipated. It was something broader, something simpler, something light. But to call this third entry into the mega-franchise a complete blunder is a gross overreaction. It's more that the big gust of air Spiderman 2 inhaled in preparation for the big trilogy finish is not the same air exhaled in Spiderman 3. The film is still the same gosh-wow cinematic event it was three years ago…only this time around, things have gone a bit goofy.

Things are as they were when we left Spiderman swinging through the steel and concrete canyons of the Manhattan skyline in 2004. He's still with the budding Broadway starlet Mary Jane Watson (Kirsten Dunst) and still at odds with his best friend, Harry Osborn (James Franco), who now seeks revenge for his father's death. Peter's lost in romance and fame, anticipating a city festival in Spiderman's honor and spinning webs for him and MJ to lie upon beneath the shooting stars. He's pitching the idea of a marriage proposal to his widowed Aunt May (Rosemary Harris) and excelling in school with his lab partner/supermodel Gwen Stacy (Bryce Dallas Howard). Yep, things are good in Spidey-land; and especially good when Harry awakes from a harsh concussive coma to have forgotten Peter's involvement in his father's death. But leave a particle physics experiment and an alien meteorite alone long enough and you're bound to face a stray supervillain. So inevitably, it isn't long until Sandman (Thomas Hayden Church) and Venom are on the loose, robbing banks and infecting enterprising photographers (Topher Grace) like supervillains tend to do.

What's changed most here is the text behind the production. The original Spiderman was penned by David Koepp, screen writing veteran of Jurassic Park, Mission: Impossible and War of the Worlds. Spiderman 2 brought on board Alvin Sargent, a quieter writer known for Robert Redford's Ordinary People and the adultery riff, Unfaithful. This time around, Sam Raimi and his older brother Ivan penned the script with the help of Mr. Sargent. Sam Raimi's writing credentials include The Evil Dead, Evil Dead II, and Army of Darkness. Though all three films are giddily remembered in all the majestic cheeseball glory, none of them would be considered the right material for the third entry into this multi-billion dollar franchise. And who trusted Sam's older brother Ivan to help put this story into theatres? Ivan's a doctor, not a writer. Anyway, this family pairing gave Spiderman 3 the wily gift of Camp humor. And Camp is something like the ugly lovechild of Satire and Parody: mischievous and unwieldy. When it works, it works (e.g. Evil Dead). When it doesn't work, the backlash from the audience can be fierce. And in Spiderman 3, the backlash will be vociferous.

The sequence most in question finds Peter Parker under the control of Venom, the alien parasite that, when infected, transforms its host into the manifestation of its worst character traits. We expect the grimmer, haunting side of Spiderman to rear its head here. Instead, Raimi gives Peter the emo hair-flip and pencils in black eye-liner. He dances in the street and gives the eye to girls walking past. He goes to a jazz club and showcases his surprise piano talents, dancing on top of the piano and picking a fight with the bartender while jutting his crotch out towards the ladies. And if that weren't an awkward enough addition to the Spiderman legend, Raimi poses all of this as a quasi musical dance number. So if nothing else, it is a fascinating and hideous thing watching the colossal Spiderman franchise nearly cannibalize itself in a matter of two short scenes.

Luckily, the action sequences are nothing if not spectacles, as usual. The feats of CGI workmanship are as we've come to expect from the Spiderman franchise, the perspective whirling about as if through the eyes of a highly enraged bumble-bee. If you aren't nauseated, you'll be amazed. The villains are the best they've yet been, with Sandman showcasing the state of artistic digital animation and the creepy, parasitic Venom living up to its insatiable hype by the film's end. It's all structured so as to make the action into fresh and sugary prizes for enduring the lesser story bits forced in between.

Spiderman has always pretended to be story-driven. And in the first two films the script was convincing enough so that we shrugged our shoulders and played along. But the Raimi brothers have indulged maybe too sloppily into comic book traditions this time and have let their story stray into something of an unintended joke. But for a franchise that relies on the tent-poles of event summer cinema, Spiderman 3 is still a blissful two and a half hour block of escapist fun. Though it's lighter and maybe dumber, it's still pretty and it's still electric.

Samuel Osborn

Fracture (2007)

If Fracture were a product, somewhere upon its packaging it would read "No Assembly Required."

[7/10 · 24 April 2007]

Fracture reviewed by Samuel Osborn

As a vehicle, Fracture is a speedy little motorcycle equipped dandily with a sidecar. Ryan Gosling straddles the driver's seat, Anthony Hopkins riding shotgun. The film is an obvious vehicle for the two actors, but as they lithely slide through the genre picture it becomes apparent exactly why: Gosling and Hopkins are unshakably charming. And put to roles that play to all their strengths, Fracture becomes a mildly blissful thing, where the actors need only to read their lines for the film to work. If Fracture were a product, somewhere upon its packaging it would read "No Assembly Required."

But assembly, in the hands of Director Gregory Hoblit, does indeed occur. He compounds the courtroom genre story of a wily, ladder-climbing lawyer (Ryan Gosling) with the kind of over-the-top genre film-making that most of us thought had died with the advent of subtlety in motion pictures (i.e. sometime after German Expressionism had run its course in the thirties). He laces every angle, shadow, and credit sequence with a visual motif to exude the idea of "fracture." The villain, this time Anthony Hopkins playing a billionaire aeronautics mogul, is so diabolically detached from humanity that his hobbies include constructing complex wire contraptions to roll steel marbles through. The hero, Gosling, is fresh enough for Mr. Hoblit to slap him with a quiet southern drawl that sends the alarms for "character innocence" blaring. Even the music is a garish knock-off of television courtroom dramas like "Law & Order" and "Boston Legal." The style, though often pretty, makes us want to scream "We get it already!"

Luckily the writing from Daniel Pyne and Glenn Gers stores up enough cunning to pitch Hopkins and Gosling into several rounds of sly verbal joust. Hopkins' character, the slippery criminal genius Ted Crawford, is a sort-of reprisal of his iconic Hannibal Lecter (mind you, without the bit about cannibalism), managing to craft a defense for shooting his wife despite having given a full confession and being apprehended still with the murder weapon in hand. The young Willy Beachum (Gosling) takes the case with one foot out the door of the D.A.'s office, about to leave for the major-league law firm Wooton & Sims. He's expecting a quick conviction and treats the case like small potatoes. It isn't until he's neck-deep in quicksand and hanging from the cliff of unemployment that he realizes Crawford might have the whole case rigged.

The film reads a lot like the 1982 Paul Newman courtroom vehicle, The Verdict, with writers Pyne and Gers even mimicking David Mamet's curt, speedy dialogue. It's at times exhilarating and at other times slowed by the obligations of genre storytelling, where we wish the motions of the formula could just be skimmed over to make way for the more tasty morsels. But the vehicle runs well; it's oiled and manicured for satisfaction. No assembly required.

Samuel Osborn

Disturbia (2007)

A Competent Re-Working of the Rear Window Story for the Modern Generation

[7/10 · 16 April 2007]

Disturbia reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Talking to Dylan McDermott about The Messengers a couple months ago, the topic of remakes was brought up. I asked if people would write his film off as an Asian knock-off of Hitchcock's The Birds. He said, maybe cynically, in response: "Unfortunately, there's a whole audience out there that doesn't remember The Birds. Nobody cares. The trouble with making movies is that every ten years it's a whole new generation. It's all about getting the teenagers in the theatre. The thirteen year old girl rules this world." And so now we have Disturbia, a PG-13 remake-in-spirit of Hitchcock's Rear Window. But before we all turn the page and look for a better movie to see, allow me to clarify any misconception. The target demographic may still be the thirteen year old girl, but Disturbia is a competent re-working of Rear Window for the modern generation. Jimmy Stewart had only binoculars and a telescopic lens to perform his long-range detective work. Shia LaBeouf has a cell phone, an iPod, a digital camcorder, live video feeds, and the internet on his side. Technology is this generation's Cultural Revolution and it's shifted the way we are sensitive to those around us. Disturbia is hyper-aware of this development and employs it smartly towards a story that is valid and justified in its re-telling.

Sentenced to three months of house arrest for the summer between his Junior and Senior year at High School, Kale Brecht (Shia LaBeouf) is bored out his noggin. His mother's discontinued his Itunes account, cancelled his Xbox Live subscription and sliced the wire powering his bedroom television. The punishment arises out of Kale's raging outbreak at school that rounded out the third in a three strike penal system. Charges were pressed and Kale got slapped with an ankle bracelet that has the cops skidding up to his driveway any time he leaves the 100-foot radius surrounding his home. The only thing distracting him is the perpetually swimming next-door neighbor Ashley (Sarah Roemer), just moved-in from the city. Kale schedules his day around her swimming and yoga cycles, microwaving a bowl of popcorn and lounging in a chair with his good friend the binoculars to his eyes. She catches him one day and mutual teenaged horniness welds a friendship spent trading binos spying on the neighbors. Soon they notice some striking correlations between Mr. Turner (David Morse) across the street and the unidentified stalker lifting women from the city. Wild conspiracies are formed and soon they've launched an impromptu control center in Kale's house, playing detectives with modern technology filling their holsters.

Shia LaBeouf, the young actor steadily separating himself from his Disney Channel origins, joins Justin Chatwin (The Invisible), Adam Brody (In the Land of Women), and Joseph Gordon-Levitt (The Lookout) in a gaggle of promising young male actors with medium-sized movies releasing this month. He finishes a close second to the moody-faced, brilliant Gordon-Levitt, but nevertheless turns in a compelling argument for casting directors to place him in more leading roles for the future. The rest of the characters are also cast exceptionally well, particularly Kale's parents played by Matt Craven and an underused Carrie-Anne Moss.

Director DJ Caruso took on the ambitious, potentially pretentious project apparently without any intention of mimicking Mr. Hitchcock. His style is sometimes inspired, but mostly mainstream. The opening father-son fishing sequence is expectedly touching, lit warmly and with a pleasant orchestral score purring along with the river. The script, penned by Christopher Landon and Red Eye veteran Carl Ellsworth, pulls most of the weight cinematically. Much of our belief in Kale's character hinges on the realism of his pain over the death of his father. One scene is taken to build the connection between father and son (the fishing scene, incidentally), and another scene to kill the father off. Landon and Ellsworth ace the fishing scene with the kind of easy dialogue that's organic enough to not set us off to the father's impending doom. Finishing the one-two punch, Mr. Caruso plays his singular card of directorial pizazz and scares the hell out of us with a cruel scene of vehicular misfortune.

The rest of the film finds Mr. Caruso leaning heavily on the screenplay which switches rapidly between Kale and Ashley's romance and the terror across the neighborhood. The romance, though charming at times, is stilted with glib dialogue for Ashley. The writing pair apparently weren't too popular with the ladies in high school and understand them only well enough to make Ashley into an unrealistically seductive vixen. She isn't as human as the other characters, crippling the romantic segments significantly. And as in Red Eye, just as the tension mounts to a level of satisfying discomfort, the story unravels into an extended climax of action-film vapidity.

But Disturbia works aside from all the moving parts of its strange device as a spiritual Rear Window remake. The film finds the colorful nature of a teenaged summer spent trapped in suburbia. The obsessions and the romances are mutually desperate and, in the same way, intensely gratifying. What you find holed away in a tract-home existence at seventeen, whether it's a murderer or a first love, is something, anything to hold on to.

Samuel Osborn

Hot Fuzz (2007)

A Valiant but Sophomoric Attempt from a Growing, Very Talented Troupe of Players

[5/10 · 10 April 2007]

Hot Fuzz reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Hot Fuzz is Edgar Wright's follow-up to the clever UK cult smash Shaun of the Dead. Both films run on the same fuel, wearing the chassis of a spoof picture over a more respectful genre comedy underneath. The formula works tepidly this time around, working off a less compelling genre (what can be more compelling than zombies?) and an even less clever screenplay. The same players thankfully return though, with Simon Pegg in the lead role and Nick Frost returning as his adorable doofus foil. The whole project feels like a valiant but sophomoric attempt from a growing, very talented troupe of players and filmmakers. It's not the kind of transitional failure that's bound to oust Wright and company from the business; but the sort of disappointing follow-up that'll quench their loyalists thirst just long enough to wait for their third, hopefully much-improved outing.

Edgar Wright mentioned at the screening last Monday that he and his co-writer Simon Pegg aren't out to make parodies, just genre pictures that are funny. So the chosen genre for Hot Fuzz is the Buddy-Cop Film, popularized by the likes of Lethal Weapon, Vanishing Point, and Bad Boys. Their own version of this cop duo is Sergeant Nicholas Angel (Simon Pegg) and PC Danny Butterman (Nick Frost). Angel has been shoved out of the London Metropolitan force for being too efficient. Bill Nighy, in a sly cameo, puts it shamelessly by saying "You're making us all look bad." So Angel is relocated to the crime-free village-of-the-year, Sandford, where he meets a dorky gang of police officers sitting around their precinct chowing cake. Without crime there's little need for cops, making Angel an irrelevance. Thankfully, a glib serial killer gowned as the Grim Reaper starts decapitating villagers nightly. Though the rest of the precinct sees the deaths as unfortunate accidents, Angel insights correctly that they're the work a murderer. So as the body count rises, Angel and his cop-flick obsessed partner Butterman, start an investigation of their own.

What must be remembered is that a British cop film hasn't been released in a while, probably because police officers aren't allowed to brandish firearms in the UK, rendering much of the drama that officers unload here in the States moot. Wright capitalizes on this fact and makes it a kind of running joke throughout Hot Fuzz. Without the fingering of triggers and clinks and clanks of reloading and cocking of the gun, Wright turns to every other noise to emphasize. Car doors opening and closing, the unraveling of caution tape, and even the application of a super-stylish toothpick all get their own ridiculous sonic exaggeration. The film also gets progressively American, Wright says, the further into the mystery Angel burrows. The dialogue repeatedly gets dumbed-down from talky British humor to single-syllabic American expressions. By the end, the usually over-explanatory Angel reduces his speech to a single, grimaced word: "Idea." But it's only these clever directorial tricks that remind us that Hot Fuzz is from the same womb as Shaun of the Dead.

Bluntly, Hot Fuzz just isn't very funny. It embraces its chosen genre as fully and lovingly as Shaun of the Dead did, but without the same clever severity. The jokes generally aren't molded to fit the Buddy-Cop genre and are scooped more often from the buckets of broad, common humor. Making matters more dull, the Buddy-Cop device fails to be compelling. Sergeant Angel is cold and mechanical, but not humorously so. He's a yawn at best. And though PC Butterman fishes out most of Hot Fuzz's laughs, he isn't much more than a broad, rounded goofball. The whole thing looks fine enough, as Edgar Wright is a budding, impressive filmmaker with a lot of insightful ideas about the movies rolling off his tongue; but this project is a mild misfire.

Samuel Osborn

Grindhouse (2007)

Hits like a Spiked Hammer to the Joy Bone

[10/10 · 8 April 2007]

Grindhouse reviewed by Samuel Osborn

To see Grindhouse is to agree to a day spent at the movies. Me and my two movie-going compadres returned from the 192 minute double-feature and decided promptly upon three-hour naps. Between the film and the effect it has on your body, seeing Grindhouse is a full day excursion. So now I'm wiping the sleep from my eyes, hunched over the laptop keyboard racking my brain for adjectives to explain this whackjob picture. For now let's just keep things simple and say Grindhouse is, if nothing else, a damn fine way to spend a day.

It's only sensible to discuss the pictures separately since each is a standalone, full-length feature of a different ilk. To those who've somehow avoided The Weinstein Company's marketing blitz to promote this thing, Grindhouse is double-feature throwback to the seventies theatres of the same name. A person would buy one ticket and see two cheap, gory, exploitative romps in a row, divided only by a round of commercials and previews for coming attractions. And so indie-film legends Robert Rodriguez (The El Mariachi series, Sin City) and Quentin Tarantino (Pulp Fiction, Kill Bill) have teamed up to each make their own version of a typical entry into the grindhouse circuit, complete with missing reels, overlapping dialogue, phony commercials, and fake previews authored by directors Rob Zombie (The Devil's Rejects), Eli Roth (Hostel), and Edgar Wright (Shaun of the Dead).

Rodriguez's zombie picture, Planet Terror, hugs to the grindhouse tradition tighter than Tarantino's entry. It runs on a standard zombie storyline and works like a Land of the Dead that has enough humor to not take itself seriously. Bruce Willis has a cameo as the surprise villain, cast for the sole reason of looking irrationally badass, with other main players being Freddy Rodriguez as the frowning, muscular hero and Rose McGowan who most will recognize from the film's ads as "the chick with an effing gun for a leg." The film plays as well as any Rodriguez picture, but could stand to have a sizeable chunk removed. Mr. Rodriguez seems attuned, like Tim Burton and The Coen Brothers, to making films that are good…but only good. Not sharpened up enough to write something truly great, Rodriguez tends to put out solid pictures that leave something to be desired. In a different situation this would hardly go noticed, but up against Tarantino's Death Proof, Planet Terror is plainly inferior.

Of course, Tarantino doesn't exactly play by the rules. Though Death Proof occasionally remembers its grindhouse intentions, throwing in a stray missing reel and poorly edited bit here and there, Tarantino gets wrapped up in all his glowing indulgences at every turn. Part slasher film, part fictionalized episode of "Jackass," and part road-rage fantasy, Death Proof is a happily uneven mess of giddy amusement. It's brilliant, but impossibly so. By its end, any semblance of a story has dissolved into an empty husk of fun; like taking a straight-shot of entertainment.

There was a story to begin with, involving Stuntman Mike (Kurt Russell) stalking women to destroy beneath his "death proof" car—which replaces the knife as the Slasher film's weapon of choice. But after being on the backend of several rounds of Tarantino's absurd talent for writing dialogue, it's time to switch gears into car chase mode. The much-hyped chase--which Tarantino has reported hoping to be in the top three car-chases of all time—sheds all progression of its previous story to make way for another straight-shot of adrenaline to the face. But again, maybe Tarantino's cheating. Without giving away the twist, there's an added element to the segment that makes the chase not only fast, but also tense enough to make your palms bleed sweat. And when this extended scene ends in all its brutal majesty, Death Proof is over.

To be honest, grindhouse theatres came and went before my time. But what Tarantino and Rodriguez have assembled, in all its previews, features, and commercials, is a strange device for extreme pleasure. The films shouldn't logically work, especially Tarantino's, but they do, and furiously so. It hits like a spiked hammer to the joy bone and leaves you on a high. And like any true experience at the movies, that high doesn't fade for the rest of the day.

Samuel Osborn

I Think I Love My Wife (2007)

It'd be more appropriate for Mr. Rock to re-title his film from I Think I Love My Wife to I Think I Overestimated Myself

[4/10 · 18 March 2007]

I Think I Love My Wife reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Chris Rock is an abrasive guy; his voice especially. When he gets all worked up, his eyes wide, toothy smile yanked up into his cheeks, his voice sounds like a poodle's bark put through a cheese grater. Rock's comic timing has more to do with decibel levels than it does with pauses. So fancy my surprise when I learned that his next project would put him in the role of Richard Cooper: upper-middle class father, husband, and all-around suburbanite; the type of guy who's embarrassed to raise his voice in public. And with him also in the director's chair, adapting what's known to be a respectable French drama (Chloe in the Afternoon), I Think I Love My Wife could be a serious turning point in Chris Rock's career. The final product, however, doesn't manage to make that turn. In fact, it'd be more appropriate for Mr. Rock to re-title his film from I Think I Love My Wife to I Think I Overestimated Myself.

The film takes on the dilemma of fidelity in a bored, routine marriage. Mr. Rock manages to distill the dilemma down to a question of sex, asking "If I'm not getting sex at home, why can't I get sex elsewhere?" His wife, Brenda (Gina Torres), is a modern black mother, working as a teacher, a wife, and a mom in a Westchester neighborhood populated by white people. Rock has toned down the race-card bits here, trading in shock factor for some smart comments on the assimilation of black and white cultures.

His character, Richard Cooper, is wealthy and typically successful, constantly narrating with the sort of internal monologue Mr. Rock brought to his semi-autobiographical TV show, "Everybody Hates Chris." His thoughts wander mostly to the Manhattan women he passes by on the train to work, Rock's camera creeping always closer to the more tasty bits of the female physique. The whole of his imagination culminates into his old high school friend, Nikki Tru (Kerry Washington), dressed to kill and leaning seductively onto his office desk one afternoon. She visits unannounced, in town looking for a job recommendation from Richard. They meet for lunch and hit it off like back in the day. He's married and known to be safe and she's the party girl from high school that forgot to grow up. The meetings continue in secret, raising questions at home from Brenda and raising eyebrows from secretaries at Richard's office. The dilemma eventually mounts to the sexual caliber, where the real drama settles in.

For a product built from scratch by Chris Rock, ironically working as a pure film auteur here (a term used mostly for, ahm, good directors), I Think I Love My Wife is fairly innocuous. It probably could have even eeked out a PG-13 rating if Rock didn't have such a fascination with the F-word. And he does well by the narration, sometimes bringing an insightful honesty to the married man's dilemma and the middle-aged tragedy.

The problem lies sadly in his own performance. He isn't a good actor. His directing feels amateurish, with bizarre camera choices and a crappy comic timing that decapitates most of the jokes. The writing, paired this time with Louis C.K. ("Lucky Louie," the HBO series), deals clumsily with dialogue and stretches and scrunches up the story into an awkward timeline (for instance, it's unclear whether the last half hour is an act or an epilogue). And, the main problem, his wife character, Brenda, is so boring, so nagging and so motherly that we don't ever find the sympathy to root for her. I wanted Richard to leave her and, I'll admit, I rooted more for Nikki. We're supposed to feel sympathy for the neglected wife in this sort of film. We're supposed to come to despise the morally strained husband and love each of the women equally. That way it's a moral dilemma for both the husband and the audience. Match Point conducted this dilemma masterfully. Each member of Woody Allen's audience reacted differently to the dilemma, depending on morals of their own. Rock's picture is lopsided in this way, and it comes together like a tolerable song on the radio: just catchy enough to not turn off.

Samuel Osborn

Zodiac (2007)

A Fascinating Portrait of a Mystery by the Master of Loom

[9/10 · 1 March 2007]

Zodiac reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Consider the complications involved in making Zodiac. Fact: the Zodiac killer was never caught. Fact: Robert Graysmith, the main character, survived to write the books the film is based upon and is still alive today. These two very relevant, very essential facts are widely known. So how does a filmmaker go about making a thriller where any suspense surrounding the hero is moot, and where the audience already knows the ending? These aren't spoilers, they're circumstances. They force Zodiac into uncultivated territory, and it makes for the most beguiling mystery since…well, since the last time David Fincher made a film about serial killers (Se7en).

What first must be realized, I suppose, is that Zodiac is probably not what audiences expect. The film was meant for an Oscar slating. Planned for November 2006 release, complications in post-production and the final cut pushed it out to its present low-key March release (exact details are sketchy). Typical March fare is stuff like Ghost Rider and 300 (which, by the way, is a glorious piece of work); pulpy films without the earning power for a more lucrative summer release. What this all means for Zodiac is that audiences walk in expecting a lot of blood, a lot of violence, and a lot of hair-tearing insanity from the type of serial killer that gets a March release. Zodiac isn't that film. This isn't even what David Fincher, veteran of such cult favorites as Fight Club and Panic Room, is known for putting out. Zodiac is long (160 minutes), obsessed with tiny evidential details, and the humble owner of only three death sequences, all of which occur within the first hour. The film takes a very sober look at a serial killer, reminding us maybe of Silence of the Lambs. But let's not get too carried away. It is only March, after all.

The film begins with the grim, giddy excitement of discovering an emerging serial murderer. Jake Gyllenhaal plays Robert Graysmith, a straight-laced cartoonist at the San Francisco Chronicle, one of the three Bay Area publications that, beginning in October of 1969, Zodiac sent his infamous letters to. Paul Avery, a drunken, goofily arrogant journalist played by Robert Downey Jr., covers the murders, putting himself in the way of Inspector Bill Armstrong (Anthony Edwards) and Inspector David Toschi (Mark Ruffalo), the detectives assigned to the case. After the initial popular craze of the Zodiac plays its course, Mr. Fincher locks the story on the Inspectors' investigation. When they run out of threads and put the case reluctantly down, Mr. Graysmith picks it up, volunteering his own bizarre obsession with the killer.

Where Graysmith was meticulous with his evidence in the book, it seems Fincher here was meticulous with every element of this picture. There have been reports of him demanding, in true Kubrick style, seventy or more takes from his actors. The results, despite some disgruntled remarks from Gyllenhaal, are stunning performances from all the main players. Ruffalo, Downey Jr., Gyllenhaal, and Chloe Sevigny as Graysmith's second wife all put up careful, driven performances.

Mr. Graysmith's book, also enigmatically titled Zodiac, is essentially a documentation of case files. It's dry and painstakingly thorough (read: a back-of-your-seat, have-to-put-down thriller). And when rumors trickled out that Fincher was going to ridiculous lengths to achieve the same level of accuracy—murder sequences are supposedly accurate up to the centimeter in terms of the choreography—I admit to having some worries over the same true crime boredom of the book's adaptation.

But thankfully, Screenwriter James Vanderbilt has done a laudable job. As much as Zodiac is about the investigation, it's also about the lives of those obligated and those willing to bring the killer's identity to light. Because of this the film doesn't move like most mystery thrillers do; its pacing is steady and quietly propulsive, allowing the true evidence and mesmerizing reality of the case turn the motor. The thrills swing like mean whispers and arise from the actions of its ultra-dimensional characters.

And although Fincher might have chosen a slower, more thoughtful script, he approaches the text with the same urban Gothic loom he's famous for. The camera work tickles the dark, provocative underbelly of San Francisco at that time period, dynamically gliding through black and blue shadows and warm lamplight glow. His portrait of a mystery is wide and solemn and ponderous, but never to be mistaken with boring. Its barbs are sharp and cruelly disturbing at times. Like in The Game, Fight Club, and Se7en before it, Zodiac displays Fincher's enthrallment in our natural obsession with human destruction, be it mental or physical. And as usual, his dissection of this ironic fascination is utterly satisfying.

Samuel Osborn

The Number 23 (2007)

It's a fine two-act movie. But that third act

[6/10 · 21 February 2007]

The Number 23 reviewed by Samuel Osborn

Psychological thrillers are a tough gig. You need an ending. The build-up, the suspense, the rising action, all that squirmy paranoia, it's easy enough to build. It's the ending that's the tricky part. Films like Memento do it right; films like Fight Club, too. Their twist, the unraveled knot of anxiety that splays out in explanation and relief, comes with another bulge of knots; it leaves you breathless and troubled, disturbed if you're lucky. But without the ending, without the final flick in the nose and punch in the gut, a psycho-thriller is just a bunch of untied shoelaces.

This is the affliction born to The Number 23. It's a fine two-act movie. But that third act…with the climax all flaccid and the end a noiseless wheeze, it leaves us with that let-down feeling of something promising turned instantly to a sham. I won't give the ending away, but suffice it to say that it's summed up by the word "typical." Commonplace is the ending. And commonplace is somewhere The Number 23 has no business being.

The rest of the film is a good one; a fine looking few rolls of celluloid, in fact. Jim Carrey plays the lead, still rounding off the sharper edges of his comedy and reminding us happily of Tom Hanks' move from comedy to drama. He's a hopelessly likable actor paired gracefully with Virginia Madsen, who plays Carrey's wife and mother to his teenage son. The family lives comfortably under Agatha's (Madsen) cake shop and Walter's (Carrey) job as an animal control officer. The paranoia enters like a whisper, as feckless and unassuming as director Joel Schumacher can stand.

The famously melodramatic director is often thought of as the second-string choice for any theatrical film-making, just behind the dramatic grandmaster Baz Luhrmann (Moulin Rouge!). Schumacher revels in colors and camera tricks, over-saturating and under-saturating his images until they're hardly recognizable. The effect here is controlled, but not empty of pizazz.

The book Agatha finds (or does it find her?) when waiting for Walter outside a used bookshop is "The Number 23" by Topsy Kretts. Walter opens the novel on his day off, gorging himself on the minutiae of its hardboiled detective hero and fantasizing himself in the lead role. Schumacher indulges Walter further, fancying "The Number 23's" Detective Fingerling as a slippery-haired Mr. Carrey in a cheap suit and a dry growl. Much of the story is actually told within the novel itself, with Fingerling getting lost in the numerology surrounding the number 23 and slipping towards the inevitability of murder. Back in reality, Walter is finding uncanny resemblances between Fingerling and himself. It's as if, he once mentions, the author knows him better than he does. Agatha writes it off as an effect of good literature, but reconsiders when she finds scribbled numerology on Walter's arm one morning with the underlined words "Kill Her." He's begun to see the number everywhere. It's in his name, his social security number, his birth date, and even the day he and Agatha first met. His paranoia, once a whisper, is now a screech, and he worries for the safety of his own family.

Stop there. Just stop the film, put down your popcorn and walk away. Because that's as good as The Number 23 will get. The bouncy humor, the family drama, the rise in paranoia, the fascination in 23, it all works up until here. But it's as if Screenwriter Fernley Phillips lost the thread. It was unraveling with speed and machismo, promising to tower upwards in a great final disturbance. But instead it turned inward and ricocheted blindly backwards. Instead of opening up the throttle and letting the number have real meaning and significance, Phillips turns the plot inward and shells up the climax with a muffled grunt.

Samuel Osborn

Norbit (2007)

Succeeds in its own blandly outrageous decency

[5/10 · 11 February 2007]

Norbit reviewed by Sam Osborn

Norbit plays the same as any other multi-role vehicle that Eddie Murphy hauls into theatres every few years. Its general mediocrity is its charm; never asking anything of us as long as we don't ask much from it. Occasionally the movie will surprise us, mounting a particularly outlandish feat of slapstick antics or maybe opening the throttle on its villain to hurl repulsive hilarity at the sad protagonist. But mostly Norbit isn't more than a happy distraction. We give Mr. Murphy ten dollars and he'll dress up in silly costumes and play silly characters for ninety minutes. It's a fine deal; one that isn't especially satisfying, but not especially offensive either.

The set-up is simple enough: awkward, skinny Norbit (Eddie Murphy) loves his childhood sweetheart Kate (Thandie Newton), but is tied by the wedding band to the mountainously large revulsion-cum-wife Rasputia (also played by Murphy). The set-up, however, gets muddied by impatient screen writing, throwing in a complicated con-game to trip up the characters when it's least necessary. This involves Cuba Gooding Jr. as Kate's two-faced fiancée and Rasputia's head-busting brothers led by Terry Crews.

Simple, high-concept premises work when they're kept to their own quaint devices. Norbit doesn't need a half-baked struggle to gain ownership of an orphanage. Such contrivances are included because of the screenwriters' distrust in their principle characters. The thinking follows that if a screenwriter makes more characters and complicates the plot further than absolute necessity, the complexity will translate into quality. But they forget that beauty is often simple, and that Norbit, Kate, and Rasputia are all entertaining and dimensional enough to fill the frame themselves.

But Murphy of course is there to entertain us throughout. And he certainly gives it his all. Norbit's servile goodness is awkwardly lovable, and his wife, Rasputia, succeeds in becoming the most repugnant object since vomit. And as in any comedy, extreme versions of stereotypes work best when there's a sad truth behind them. We've seen lesser versions of Norbits and Rasputias in every one of our neighborhoods. And Director Brian Robbins plays on this truthfulness by making Norbit's town a place of sunny neutrality. There's no title or season to it; just sun, green grass, the town and the suburbs. We laugh at Rasputia because it's mean to laugh at the real-life versions of her walking their dogs past our mailboxes. And when it comes to slapstick, she works like a tube of lit dynamite. When she barrels into a picnic table, it explodes into a shower of splinters. At one point she plows through the mailman. He returns several scenes later with a broken arm, a concussion and a bruised stomach. In Iraq, Rasputia would be called a weapon of mass destruction.

She's a villain that's fun to hate and Thandie Newton is an easy figure to love. Norbit delights as the bumbling fulcrum that pivots the two back and forth. The film works fine this way, despite its thick contrivances, and succeeds in its own blandly outrageous decency.

Sam Osborn

Smokin' Aces (2006)

a work of style and violence and the colorful upchuck of the iconic hit-man character

[8/10 · 28 January 2007]

Smokin' Aces reviewed by Sam Osborn

The eleven-year old boy inside of me, the one that glues glow-in-the-dark stars to his ceiling and watches Saturday morning cartoons, adores Joe Carnahan's new picture Smokin' Aces. It's a directorial release; an indulgence of the gag reflex, satisfying all the itching twitches of any filmmaker working in the action genre. It's riddled with contrivance and clichés from other, better pictures, but Smokin' Aces imitates with ingenuity and cunning. It's strong and dark in its humor, even managing to rend some authentic tears from its players. Mr. Carnahan lashes out with this picture, bloodying his resume with a work of style and violence and the colorful upchuck of the iconic hit-man character through all its iterations.

The film works a little like Snatch—or any of Guy Ritchie's pictures for that matter--but Snatch diagnosed with violent psychosis: about a dozen contract killers, none of whom are colorless, are hired to kill Buddy "Aces" Israel. The first to do so receives $1,000,000. The specifics of the deal are fuzzy, mumbled fast and spitfire like an episode of "24" with the volume down, but the basics find Aces (Jeremy Piven) mixed up with the wrong mob boss and an upcoming testimony. Working to protect Aces are Agent Carruthers and Agent Messner (Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds), woven into a red-tape FBI bureaucracy by Stanley Locke (Andy Garcia), their boss. Anyway, word about the hit going down on Buddy Aces Israel gets around quick and soon more flavors of hit-man than a Baskin Robbins ice cream shop are running around, all looking to remove Israel's heart (one of the conditions of the contract). And so the title is more clever and synoptic than we might've originally realized: the film really is just about smokin' Aces.

It's too easy to rest on elitist laurels with a low-level January release like Smokin' Aces and write it off as cheap imitation. Any goof can see hints of Tarantino and Rodriguez, a sprinkling of Natural Born Killers, a dusting of The Usual Suspects, whispers of grindhouse projects from the seventies, and a full helping of Snatch. But how many space crusades or otherworldly enraptures can be deemed unique and bearing no resemblance to Star Wars and Lord of the Rings? Film-making is imitation; be it an imitation of reality or of the unreality of an action flick. Smokin' Aces is an imitation of the snaps, bangs, and bullet-wounds of the action genre, sometimes even doubling back on itself in realization of its shameless furor. The fun lies in its persistence. With all its characters and neat tricks for piling up body bags, you can't help but imagine Mr. Carnahan running slack-jawed through a toy store, plucking ideas and scenes from the shelves of earlier story lines, glomming them together into this furious amalgam.

Anyway, the method works, if inconsistently. As in Snatch, story plays second fiddle to style, which is the big, mean ball-hog of the court. But as he proved with his earlier film, Narc (a much quieter, reserved cop picture), Carnahan has a thickened grasp of the medium. Without diving too deep into shop-talk here, he doesn't rely on the close-up or long-shot, doesn't colorize and over-saturate to annoyance, and essentially handles his camera like a sensible, dynamic filmmaker. The film's style is instead a product of the characters, drawing Hitler mustaches onto their faces with Sharpies, blasting off .50 caliber bullets between resort hotels, and fending off kung-fu crazed, backwater adolescents (just…don't ask). Problems arise when, in between all the satisfying nonsense, Carnahan drops neatly wrapped packages of storyline. Convoluted and unnecessarily complicated, the story loops about near the end and almost loses us in the backlash.

Even more unnerving, however, are the affectations the characters have weaseled into us by the film's end. More than a dozen characters enter the resort Buddy Aces Israel is holed up in, but scant few manage to make it out. Their deaths are sometimes comical (one character has trouble wielding his chainsaw and ends up using it as an impromptu chair, for instance), but other times their deaths are troubling. Carnahan's script works best in its scenes of dialogue, which trickle almost to a halt as the bullets start flying through the extended climax; scenes with Jason Batemen as a self-deprecating lawyer, Taraji Henson as the lesbian assassin swooning over Alicia Keys, Ben Affleck and his band of reluctant barfly cronies, and Jeremy Piven spinning cards and pleading to his partner, Common. Smokin' Aces works like magic--original, unique magic--when it's not running guns blazing. And when the characters start dropping, and when Ray Liotta and Ryan Reynolds take spotlight, the tone turns from a blood-toothed grin to heavy-eyed sorrow. It's melodrama, and it's solemn enough to make some of the audience laugh in repulsion. But it's an intelligent step away from the exploitation material (genuinely satisfying as it is) that the rest of the film flings at us; and its end result is affecting and bizarrely human. And to make any character from Smokin' Aces seem human, if only for a scene or two, is something worth mentioning indeed.

Sam Osborn

The Hitcher (2007)

a good and satisfying execution of the genre motions

[7/10 · 21 January 2007]

The Hitcher reviewed by Sam Osborn

The title sequence for The Hitcher involves a jackrabbit. Not a real jackrabbit, naturally, but one rendered entirely from CGI wizardry. The creature hops twice, wiggles his nose, ruffles unconvincingly with the live-action weeds around him, and ventures out onto the nearby highway to be smeared across the pavement by a snarling motorist trailing the title slide behind him. This, the opening sequence means to say, is The Hitcher: a smudge of road kill wiped messily across the asphalt. And in the realm of promising opening sequences, this ranks near the worst. Equally cringe-inducing is the succeeding cut, where the open road is swapped for the sunny college campus, with a grinning bulk of meticulously unshaven man waving to his toned and thinned brunette prancing towards him on their way to a riotous spring break. What, we may ask, have we gotten ourselves into?

Actually, we've snuggled into a delightfully sordid affair. Despite its two misguided introductions, what follows is an intensely satisfying creep through the shady-eyed terror felt by all when stopping on the highway for a crooked thumb hitching a ride.

The aforementioned waving hunk of man is Zachary Knighton playing Jim Halsey, an everyday California college boy with a perky girlfriend, this time played by "One Tree Hill" veteran Sophia Bush. The two are more intelligent than other Slasher-film fodder, but still fall victim to a script rigged to pose manipulative lapses in judgment. Why, if those that are trying to protect you wish to put you into custody, would you run from them and wiggle into a shadowy trailer park hiding place with a psychopathic gunman close on your trail? These are questions one must obviously suspend when viewing a Slasher film, I suppose; and compared to the boys and girls of the Scream franchise and I Know What You Did Last Summer, Jim and Grace are regular valedictorians.

Anyway, the two are burning the midnight oil down a New Mexico highway, joking mirthfully at a comfortably rainy sixty mph when a black figure with a pointing thumb suddenly looms in the middle of the road. Skidding through a full rotation, Jim and Grace decide not to meddle with fate and drive off, leaving the uninjured man to find another ride. At the next gas station, however, the hitcher (Sean Bean) appears again, having picked up a ride soon after Jim and Grace departed. Posing as a wet, harmless housecat, the hitcher asks for a ride and Jim breaks down, offering to take him to the next hotel fifteen miles away. Midway through the ride, though, the hitcher—who calls himself John Ryder—holds a knife to Grace's eye and demands that Jim chant the words "I Want to Die." Jim manages his first feat of collegiate-sport heroics in response and promptly ejects John from the speeding vehicle. John is no pesky fly on the wall, however, and no man built for defeat. The hunt has only just begun, apparently, and Mr. Ryder torments the young couple and all who stand in his way for the ensuing seventy minutes.

Reminding us sometimes of the aptly titled French horror picture, High Tension, Director Dave Meyers succeeds in holding the tension extremely taut by doing very little. What's more frustrating than a scene of tight-shouldered suspense without the requisite release? It leaves us holding our breath and with no cathartic jump scare for the tension to exhale into. The screenplay does well to mount situations, however murky the logic behind them is, that work to create horrific triangles of suspense. Granted, most of the screams come from blind lunges from dark corners, the undeserving jump scare is sometimes a welcome relief to the dead silence of suspense. Meyers also steers clear (mostly) of the bloodbath antics of the Hostel and Saw franchises, only resorting to excessive gore when necessary (maybe this is a byproduct of a noticeably shabby make-up department though). His scares might not be completely genuine or entirely affective, but they work well enough to forward the story yarn towards the two momentous climaxes. Here, in a sort of symphonic car chase double sequence, Meyers' music video background gleams through. Following up on an extraordinarily appropriate line-up of songs, an iconic, industrial techno diddy pulsates through the soundscape. Cars launch and catapult in an oblivion worthy of Michael Bay destruction, with precisely chosen perspectives and split-second filmic reactions that only an old hand of the music video industry could intuit. The scene is a kind of operatic smackdown of vehicular menace, and one that leaves us in awe of our lunatic baddie.

With a limited number of lines given to John Ryder and the limited IQ dished out to the couple, The Hitcher obviously isn't attempting an innovation to the Slasher genre. But with Sean Bean doing his best lurking criminal pose as Mr. Ryder, and Sophia Bush proving that her acting is more substantial than her scarily small weight, The Hitcher is a good and satisfying execution of the genre motions.

Sam Osborn

Code Name: The Cleaner (2007)

nonsensical relief from the heavy, fading awards season

[4/10 · 5 January 2007]

Codename: The Cleaner reviewed by Sam Osborn

Welcome to January, generally known as the first of two months that consist mostly of studio duds poured discretely from the back of the release slate and into your multiplexes. Like a late August release, January and February releases generally spell 'trash,' with the best of them offering only a nonsensical relief from the heavy, fading awards season. Thus, we have Codename: The Cleaner.

It's the latest work from director Les Mayfield, a man whose earlier films (Flubber, American Outlaws, The Man) are best described as righteously mediocre. This January gem weighs in on a case of missing identity and FBI espionage with Cedric the Entertainer playing Jake Rodgers, waking up in a hotel bed with a dead FBI agent and a cut above his ear. His memory's been fried, leaving him without a name and only fragments of what looks to be a secrets ops combat mission batting around his brain. Diane—played by Nicollete Sheridan, whose beauty has been stretched and manipulated to the point of mimicking a mask from White Chicks—approaches Jake in the hotel lobby, filling him in on some important details pertaining to their supposed marriage and occupation of a bloated estate mansion. It all turns out to be farce, however, when Jake overhears Diane plotting to send Jake into cardiac arrest over a bit of information surrounding a computer chip. Soon Jake's on the run, doing his best play-pretend imitation of spy work, trying to hunt down the computer chip and unveil his own identity.

Like last year's You, Me, and Dupree, Codename: The Cleaner banks heavily on the likability of its lead, giving him the screen-time equivalent of carte blanche. But where Owen Wilson's sly, sandy-haired innocence can grow tiresome, Cedric's rotund antics are nothing if not charming. He leaps to great and often desperate lengths to mine a chuckle, but sometimes surprises us by shoveling out something truly hilarious. So it's a shame that the material surrounding him offers little more than static. Lucy Liu is superbly misused as Jake's girlfriend, rattling off forced punch-lines and rickety, unfitting "sistah" feistiness to match Ms. Sheridan's miscasting as the young, busty blonde (the joke here, I suppose, is that Ms Sheridan's peaked forty). The plot feels improvised; so weak that is seems to modify itself according to whatever improvisation Cedric throws at the script. It all comes together like a Jackie Chan Hong Kong action picture, only with Cedric the Entertainer doing the karate. It works, but only if you slouch in your seat and let your ears and eyes glaze over in a popcorn haze. It is January, after all.

Sam Osborn

The Pursuit of Happyness (2006)

flings us higher than any feel-good film in a while

[8/10 · 15 December 2006]

The Pursuit of Happiness reviewed by Sam Osborn

For a feel-good movie, The Pursuit of Happiness sure does want its audience to feel crappy. I don't mean this as a criticism. Rather, I think it's a show of intense bravery for a film stuck in a genre already soaked in sappiness. But it's a long, downhill journey for most of the film's duration, watching as Mr. Chris Gardner (Will Smith) is repeatedly pummeled under the American economic system. I suppose it follows Nietzsche's oft-repeated quote "what doesn't kill you only makes you stronger." And so, to ravage the saying entirely, if the lows of The Pursuit of Happiness doesn't kill the picture, they make its ending—you know, the feel-good part of the recipe—just that much sweeter.

The grand scheme was to tell the story of the American dream from a new perspective. Such was the motivation in bringing European director Gabriele Muccino onto the project. Feeling that Americans have drawn too close to the concept to pull any focus on it, Muccino takes a step back and looks at our American dream from a fresh perspective. The result is indeed refreshing. The movie comes without any fat around its curves. It's a slim, distilled version of the American dream, where a man—a smart, good man in whom most Americans probably see themselves—tries to better his living conditions using the American system of capitalism promised in the Constitution. It doesn't come with a side dish of romance or tragic hors d'oeuvre; just a man trying to do right by his family.

But Chris Gardner's family is quickly dispersing. Linda (Thandie Newton), his wife, leaves him early on, choosing to fend for herself rather than go down with Chris' sinking ship. She leaves him with their son Christopher (Jaden Smith), whose daycare costs $150 per month. Chris would have to sell two bone density scanners each month to pay rent, daycare and groceries. But he hasn't sold one of the wretched devices in a while and the overdue bills are piling up. Chris is good at numbers though, and can solve a Rubik Cube with astounding ease; so he applies for an internship at Dean Witter. The gig's an unpaid one, but if he gets the job at the end of the course, he's set for life. Problem is, only one in twenty interns is hired; and if you aren't hired, you can't apply for a job at any other stock brokerage firm for six months.

The script is a product of Steven Conrad, the same writer who penned last year's The Weather Man. The films are deceivingly similar, each chronicling a series of unfortunate occurrences that slowly slice at the legs of an American man. In both films, Conrad manages to find a sweet and hilarious humanity in bad days, or bad weeks, or bad years. His heroes are good men and American men, who struggle to find themselves something worth having in our system.

Much huzzah has been made over the familial pairing of Will Smith and his son in parallel father-son roles. The decision was a smart one, as their performances are as sincere as ever. Jaden may not have many lines, but it's not hard to see that he loves and believes in his father, whether he's playing Will Smith or Chris Gardner. And Mr. Smith—the older one, that is—hasn't been lying in his much-publicized interviews that this film is a turning point in his acting career. His Muhammad Ali was a force, but the role of Chris Gardner was built for him.

Make no mistake though; for the feel-good genre, The Pursuit of Happiness is a brutal, sometimes cruel entry. But I suppose that's the point, and Chris says it somewhere in the first act: that when the founders of the Constitution wrote "the pursuit of happiness" into the text, they only promised the pursuit. The chase is a long, mean one; but when the end is found, it flings us higher than any feel-good film in a while.

Samuel Osborn

Blood Diamond (2006)

Too Distracted by its own Message

[6/10 · 6 December 2006]

Blood Diamond reviewed by Sam Osborn

Films should be made to tell a story. For me, that's their only function, and it's a function that's beautiful and endless. A message film is a hindered film because it never keeps its eye on the ball. It's like taking a class where your professor is Miss Universe; your attention is directed to the right object, but never for the right reasons. In order for us to believe in a message, we must first believe in the story it has to tell.

The message in Blood Diamond, of course, has something to do with diamonds. The title, a delicious double entendre, refers to the pink hue of the diamond in question, and also to the blood spilled in trying to obtain it. The obtainer is Danny Archer (Leonardo DiCaprio), a white Zimbabwean diamond smuggler with a South African background. His charge is to hunt the diamonds down, buy them for cheap, and hump them across African state lines to sell them for an illegal profit to Van de Kaap (Marius Weyers), a two-faced diamond retailer mirroring the real-life De Beers. The diamonds involved in this trade are known as conflict diamonds, since the groups that initially profit from the sale are warlords and rebel groups who force slaves to do the requisite mining for them.

Djimon Hounsou plays Solomon Vandy, a father stolen from wife and three kids to work as a diamond miner, sifting rocks from gems in a muddy West African river. He stumbles upon the blood diamond, burying it just before a happenstance government raid puts him in a Freetown jail. Also in this jail is Danny Archer, having been caught smuggling diamonds under the skin of a goat along Sierra Leonean border. When Danny gets word that Solomon knows of the diamond's hiding place, he spins a deal to bail both of them from prison. And because Danny owes a certain Colonel Coetzee (Arnold Vosloo) some lost diamonds and Solomon's still missing his family, the two have reason to go diamond-hunting. Jennifer Connelly works her way into the story as Maddy Bowen, the frustrated journalist looking for the inside scoop on the conflict diamond trade.

DiCaprio turns in a satisfyingly ironic performance here, seeming to exploit all the reasons people despised him in the first place. He plays a would-be fraternity brother who seems to have been accidentally born into African violence. He's an overconfident prick with just enough oil-slick charm and big-bulk intensity for us not to hate him. Connelly doesn't have much to work with, granted, but her sympathetic maternal stares at Hounsou could have been laced with more condescension. But then again, maybe not. Hounsou hammers out an affecting role from the little he has to work with. The man is best when screaming and barreling through in a blood-soaked fury, and Director Zwick gives him numerous reasons to do so.

Zwick's direction is lively and strong, giving Blood Diamond a much undeserved umph. But the screenplay devolves its characters into the African sob acts we've seen played out on the Hallmark Channel before: Connelly's American journalist looking to make a difference, DiCaprio's heartless cum last-second humanitarian, and Hounsou's sad African from infomercial land. And as many lines as they can spew on about the ignorance of certain first-world nations and the schmaltzy National Geographic articles cranked out each month, their own uselessness is always underlined by the film's paucity of power. The story turns like clockwork, all mechanical and repeated, because the characters seem always on the verge of looking straight into camera, asking for a tax-deductible donation to save the victims of the conflict diamond trade.

Samuel Osborn

Apocalypto (2006)

A personification of Mel Gibson in movie form...which isn't so bad

[8/10 · 1 December 2006]

Apocalypto reviewed by Sam Osborn

I've never had the pleasure of meeting Mr. Mel Gibson. But if I had, I think I'd see Apocalypto as a filmic manifestation of himself: passionate, intense, and just a little absurd. You can tell how Gibson approaches his films, Apocalypto in particular. He charges at them like a ticked-off Toro in the bullfighter's ring. He immerses himself completely in the story's culture, going to painstaking lengths to bury us in details even when the story's as shallow as a Honduran puddle in the dry season. But I admire a filmmaker like him. There's a kind of purity in his style that insists upon long, epic, immersive pictures. Not to mention they're more violent than Mad Max on amphetamines.

Like the upcoming Children of Men, Apocalypto drops us by the collar into a civilization not our own and doesn't bother with exposition. But since the men are thongs and the women are topless, it doesn't take long for us to figure out we're in the midst of Mayan rule. Our hero is Jaguar Paw (Rudy Youngblood), a wily young man whose father has shown him the ways of the forest and the skills of the hunter. His wife, Seven (Dalia Hernandez), and their son, Turtles Run (Carlos Emilio Baez), live humbly in the village with all the rest, working and listening to the prophetic tales of the elders. This fine, happy life collapses though, as the Mayan kingdom begins ravaging its own villages for sacrifice to the gods. Take my explanation with a grain of salt however, because none of this clearly explained in the film; it's just what we manage to extrapolate from the man painted in orange lopping off heads. Anyway, while Jaguar Paw's village is being razed, he manages to lower his wife and son into a deep, unexplained hole, hiding them from the massacre. And even as he's being strung to the rest of the village's survivors and led to the acropolis for sacrifice, Jaguar Paw must plan his escape so he can rescue his family from certain death at the hands of a rainstorm.

Like his other films, Apocalypto is a simple contraption. Its surrounding details, as thick as they might be, still betray the simplicity of its story. And at its heart, Apocalypto is little more than a rowdy chase film. A good 90 minutes of it finds Jaguar Paw sprinting barefoot through the forest with a band of hunters closing in behind him. And so it's not hard to understand Touchstone's original July release slating for the film, as it probably will appeal to young men as much as to the Academy. But as Braveheart and Passion of the Christ have proved, simplicity isn't a problem for Mr. Gibson.

Either is violence, apparently. Braveheart shocked us early on with a swift beheading, and Jesus took lashings so brutal that Roger Ebert named Passion of the Christ the most violent film he had ever seen. So for Apocalypto, which pulls focus on one of the most vicious civilizations in history, violence is an obvious requisite. But, as usual with Gibson's work, the indulgence with violence brims upon excessive. It's not that I believe Mr. Gibson to be a sadist; but rather I think he has no other way as a director to channel his audience's emotions. It seems to be a weakness of his; one that puts characters second fiddle to blood and guts. Granted, in Apocalypto, a certain level of brutality is absolutely required for us to believe in Gibson's Mayan world. But there are times when the film just revels in the bloodshed.

If nothing else though, Apocalypto is earnest. From the visuals—by Dancing with Wolves veteran Dean Semler—to the decision to use a nearly dead language, and to the casting of all no-name natives, Gibson has lunged at this picture with all his might. And for the most part, it works. But somewhere along the 150 minute freight train of a picture, we may have picked up a few splinters.

Samuel Osborn