THE EDGE OF DARKNESS

Dishonest advertising makes you believe that Edge of Darkness is just another vengeance with a bang thriller. Instead this paranoia thriller is far from the conventional assembly line, far from the routine and far from the mediocre. Protracted detours and an unnecessary extended length of two full hours keep this from being a complete success. But its aim to explore big issues of corporate illegal action and its interlocked political support, while achieving this with fairly original perspectives, grips your mental interest.

Up to this point, commercials have emphasized Mel Gibson pursuing his daughter’s killer with a “Death Wish” rage in his eye. Warner Bros. advertisements have not given you the proper impression that this is a complicated, and complex, conspiracy investigation where corrupt government and corporate malfeasance is involved. In other words, it aspires to be more. It aspires to be a 70's film.

You’ve seen enough movies where you can sniff out hackneyed corrupt government plots, but somehow this movie is layered and multifaceted. While the movie paints a primary villain into focus it generally contains a varietal range of villains, some more intrinsic to the girl’s death than others. Emma (Bojana Novakovic) is the girl, peculiarly sick but not necessarily contagious, who arrives home to visit her father Thomas Craven (Gibson, in his first lead role since “Signs”), a veteran Boston police detective. Not before long she is gunned down execution style.

Evidently poisoned and simultaneously targeted by contract killers, Emma seems to have been hiding disreputable secrets in regards to the fictional corporation she worked for called Northmoor. While only an intern at the research compound, it nevertheless is a high security clearance job that required absolute compliance. We gather that she was killed because she leaked information to activists. The media, and detective law enforcement, are already persuaded that Thomas was the supposed target in the shooting and that Emma’s death was a mistake.

Drama surrounding Northmoor is intriguing as we become vaguely oriented as to what is produced – it is one of those fictional sinister corporations that masquerades nuclear and weapons development with green peace. But in a later series of clandestine meetings held between a Northmoor executive and government operatives, the film finds its niche in plausibility. The script is by William Monahan (“The Departed”) and Andrew Bovell (“Lantana”), who collaboratively create intelligent layers of high crimes.

Yet at its most primal level, the movie just wants to see Craven break the rules so he can bust some heads. You might join in on some cruel applause when Craven pours poisoned milk down the throat of a bad guy. As this grey-haired lethal weapon, Gibson is really good in the movie constantly brewing with elevating intensity, and he’s got the Boston accent down pat.

But it is one of those movies that is way too reverent with its Boston accents, and some of the supporting players get you lost. Caterina Scorsone, as one of Emma’s former associates, lays on the accent in such a heavy-handed way that you can’t wait till she stops acting. Ray Winstone, that British actor, isn’t doing the Boston accent but his dialogue readings come off in a mumble – although he does have an interesting character to play as a guy who has in his longtime experience conducted both good and evil in his professional endeavors.

Other weaknesses slow down the momentum of the movie, none more evidently as the repetitive scenes of Gibson imagining Emma as a young girl again filling his presence. And it cannot but helped be mentioned that the script, in attempt to pipe up “mystery,” comprises characters who withhold telephone contacts (i.e., information) from Craven in a way that makes the audience feel as if the movie simply must be longer than it has to be. Emma’s surviving boyfriend (Shawn Roberts), who never leaves his flat despite being in danger, is signature as the stubborn paranoid and as a cloying irritant to the audience.

You might feel let down by such bumpy supporting characters carrying on with needlessly protracted anxiety fits. It’s the smart dialogue, the high corruption stuff, that keeps you riveted when “Edge of Darkness” is able to stick to its essentials.

It helps that Danny Huston (“The Constant Gardener,” “Children of Men”), with his seething intellectual-snob persona, portrays a figure of white collar evil. Martin Campbell, the director of “Casino Royale,” furnishes the Huston character with a magnificent office, with its glossy interiors and looming glass window view. Somehow Huston and that office stand out. Let’s recap: Superb work by Gibson and Huston, a screenplay with ideas, and hmm, that office.

Visit the official Edge of Darkness site at

http://edge-of-darkness.warnerbros.com/

Grade: B-

THE BOOK OF ELI

The Book of Eli is post-apocalyptic sci-fi with a drifting hero (with an initial undisclosed purpose) traveling west, and he is embodied by none other than Denzel Washington as the title character. This is a violent and graphic film, with gray skies and brown deserts, desaturated from realistic colors to the point that some of the visuals look black & white. In an early deadly encounter as Eli faces off some homicidal scavengers underneath a bridge, it is filmed in high contrast so the actors are pitch-black while the desolate landscape serves as backdrop.

Interesting how much more involving this opening action scene are in comparison to other movies of this nature. This probably has to do with a steady and fixed camera where you can appreciate the elaborate choreography taking place before your eyes. There are no choppy and chaotic editing techniques, and for an abundance of the movie, you can sense the filmmakers’ disciplined strategy.

This is the fifth film by the Hughes Brothers (“Menace II Society,” “From Hell”) who if anything depend upon a regimented style. But enough about them, let’s go onto the story. As if it was the old west once again, Eli stumbles into a town to do some trades with the intent to immediately get the hell out of there. It is amusing that in the future, KFC wet napkin packets carry a certain value. Eli makes the wrong decision to enter the local pub to get some water and soon enough Carnegie (Gary Oldman), the lord of the town, wants Eli to join his side and work for him.

Tension of the story persuasively arises when Carnegie makes any threat or coercion to get Eli to stay. Eli just wants to head for the road and a new girl, the barmaid, Solara (Mila Kunis, with improbably perfect skin) wants to accompany him. The story structure gets routine – one band of baddies chase the good guys down in the desert that all leads to the inevitable shoot-out. But the movie deserves a nod for creating a shoot-out that is technically unique, with the camera doing an unbroken, virtual figure-8 camera loop-around.

Second act violence is all triggered by the Carnegie character. But Oldman suggests something interesting with his character, he makes Carnegie a man who you once believed was good until he lost his sanity and corrupted himself with lordly power, but he is literate and cultivated man in contrast to a wasteland of degenerates. Oldman’s hook on the character is subtle, and the movie doesn’t rest to contemplate this idea thoroughly, but if you look deep you will see it. This is not to take away anything from Washington who is terrific as this saintly, baddass and a self-appointed apostle. An apostle with a gun, if this is something you can accept.

Maybe Eli becomes something more than an apostle though, it’s up for debate. The conclusion of the movie is actually very bold. It goes further, into more transcendent territory, than the usual post-apocalyptic movie. This is a surprise for a movie coming out in January, where studios unleash their dogs. This is a movie that is not a dog, but you still have to chew on some preposterous stuff. Such as, why do roughnecks with only pipes and hacksaws approach Eli, who clearly has a gun? Why does Solara choose such an inopportune moment to recite a prayer? And what’s with that laughable final twist, revealed in ultra-tight close-up of Eli, that is anything but gratuitous?

Still, genre fans are going to eat this up and appreciate its evocative visual style as well as for the reflective religious elements. It is uncommon for an action movie to depend crucially on adversaries vying for scripture. But ardently the script by Gary Whitta makes a good case that the Bible could be the greatest book ever written due to its intellectual content and influential language. Audiences looking for plot holes will find “Book of Eli” a crock, but the kind of substance the movie has is very bold indeed. It also goes without saying the movie is very entertaining.

Click here to go to Book of Eli official website.

Grade: B

BEST FILMS OF THE DECADE

Everybody’s doing them, but I am most passionate about mine. Or at least that’s what I say about my own work. I was at such a peak at ten that I couldn’t limit it to that number, so I have a top 20. There were too many films that needed another look around, another write-up, so why punish those? The unpredictable discovery: The great director of the decade is Kim Ki-Duk, of South Korea. True, Korean film is largely unchartered territory for American viewers. But by branching out, there are limitless revelations. My guarantee is that you'll start demanding more quality out of American films, especially after your introduction to Kim Ki-Duk.

1. Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter... and Spring (2003) – Kim Ki-Duk's transforming experience can be carried with you in your heart and mind, day to day, for now and for the future, from birth to old age. After seeing it, and letting yourself digest it, the euphoria of discovery might be your new birth. In the world's most unseen beautiful location, set on a Buddhist pagoda floating on a lake, a monk (Yeong-su Oh) cares after a young boy (Jong-ho Kim) raising to be a monk. We see their daily rituals and then we see broken rituals. As the seasons pass, we see the film leap years ahead. We witness the faults of the young boy and then his journey to renewal. We witness the joys of sex, the joys of solitude, and maybe the pain that lies in-between. The value of self-purpose and destiny, the value of waiting years for a revolving door to happen and the value of waiting years for penance. Inside us all, the history of self-betrayal and the hopeful acceptance of inner peace.

2. No Country for Old Men (2007) – For all those people who couldn’t grasp the ending it is this: Tommy Lee Jones’ Sheriff Bell is disillusioned that he never found God in old age and that retirement before professional closure with indefinitely haunt him. Then there’s the matter of the satchel that caused the killing spree, the film never says outright who ended up with it, but the answer is right there: Who would give a ten-year old boy a hundred dollar bill (following the car accident), if you didn’t have $2 million to spare? Long after the film’s events, serial killer Anton Chigurh (Javier Bardem) will spend the rest of his life attracting violence wherever he goes. It’s part of his chiseled and engraved nature. Just as it was written in Llewelyn Moss (Josh Brolin) that drinking and cheating on his wife is his engraved nature. The paradox of fatalism and predestination makes this perfectly shot and structured Coen Brothers’ film their magnum opus.

3. Mulholland Dr. (2001) – In the opening image a mythical old-fashioned notion of Hollywood is fancied, the kind that doesn’t exist anymore. Introduced are Naomi Watts, as Betty, the dreamer, and, Laura Elena Harring, as the woman of desire. What most people didn’t understand is that the movie is a dream until it wakes up at just under the two hour mark. We then meet our true heroine, not a pretty Dixie but a woman mired in shabbiness and delusion. The trance-out cowboy scene, the lecherous near carnal violation-audition scene, the Silencio… Leave it to David Lynch to prove surrealism can break the outer stratosphere of what is artistically possible. One of the supreme mindbenders of our time.

4. 3-Iron (2005) – Could be the most spiritually beautiful love story ever made. Korean filmmaker Kim Ki-Duk is a master of silence (and meditation), it’s as if his characters have been so betrayed by their past that they have lost the willingness to speak anymore. In this humane meets the divine fable, a young drifter breaks into peoples homes not to rob but to live vicariously through others, an abused wife seeking solace away from her terminally unhappy marriage joins him on his expeditions. Their newly dependent needs coalesce beautifully.

5. Memento (2001) – It’s like a knotty Robert Matheson or Ray Bradbury story redressed as an expressionistic film noir. Short term memory man Leonard Shelby (Guy Pearce), using tattoos as his memory roadmap, dedicates vengeance to his wife’s death but doesn’t figure that he has sucked himself into an anguished circular vortex. As the ultimate puzzle movie to challenge the notion of Attention Deficit Disorder moviegoing, it could take countless hours to tidy up the motivations of its characters and yet it all fits together in mesmerizing style by director Christopher Nolan.

6. Downfall (2005) – Thunderously violent docudrama of Hitler’s final days and the fall of the Third Reich, and fearlessly, shows the viewer the face of evil at its peak of desperation. Bruno Ganz is the first actor that has ever successfully taken on the impossible task of portraying the 20th century’s greatest monster – his alternating measures of courtliness and impromptu rage is astonishing. What shocked me was the epidemic of suicides within Hitler’s bunker at the end. Here is a conditioned mindset of people who came to believe that reaching the end of the war meant surrendering to death was a necessity.

7. The Dark Knight (2008) – The adrenaline is drumming incessantly, but that’s probably due to the immediacy of conflicts: There are always three or four noir-flavored plots toppled on top of each other simultaneously. Christopher Nolan’s sophisticated Batman epic is all throbbing operatic action, drama and music synthesis, featuring startling spirals into downfall and consequence. Here is promise that a superhero movie can actually be more capable of being more dramatically dynamic and seismic in tragic catastrophe than the ordinary prestige drama. Heath Ledger’s Joker is such a disturbing creation that he hotwires into your nerves – he’s a godless anarchist, irredeemably evil, rendering an entire city under duress.

8. The Three Burials of Melquiades Estrada (2005) – Border patrol cop with a racist callousness shoots Melquiades, a rather insignificant person, but even an insignificant person deserves to be treated to an honorable burial. Tommy Lee Jones, as a ranch hand, makes sure this deed is respected. Thematically rich, particularly sprawling when it travels horseback in the open range, with a shrewdly constructed backwards and forwards timeline that recalls “Pulp Fiction” or “Amores Perros” for the purpose of turning introduced small events, when progressed, into something of larger scope. The only film that actor Tommy Lee Jones has directed, with his decree that living on the fringes can be a beautiful and transforming place.

9. Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon (2000) – Exquisitely photographed martial arts abound in this landmark mythology fantasy where swordsmen leap and fly all in the pursuit of an invaluable master’s sword, with forbidden love as a distressed undercurrent and sweeping vistas as its prevailing eye candy. Zhang Ziyi is the fiery understudy trading sedentary aristocracy for wild escapade, and Michelle Yeoh is the aging woman hero who guides with a patient hand. Other films of the genre have attempted more in terms of scaling hefty armies for widescreen combat, but no other picture has mastered the art of finesse to such dazzling perfection. Directed by Ang Lee ("The Ice Storm," "Brokeback Mountain").

10. Requiem for a Dream (2000) – Four descend into a degradation vortex, with director Darren Aronofsky not so much tracking them as he does wiring the viewer into their subjective head rush. The “hip-hop” montages pioneered by Aronofsky, dislocates the characters while at the same time piping you into decadent exhilaration. I can’t think of a another movie that puts on such an intense hypnotic spell on the viewer’s brain, or another movie that so uncompromisingly depicts addicts surrendering their eternal souls for a fix. This is the only place that I can say that percussive violin music, by Clint Mansell, is lacerating.

11. Monster (2003) – Aileen Wuornos spat-on childhood was so depraved that by the time she became a street whore it was not a stretch to her that murder of her johns was any less an uncommon act in her mind frame, Wournos bawling that the world has victimized her. In one of the all-time great performances, Charlize Theron transforms her hair, her face, her body and even her inner spirit order to extraordinarily become, from the inside-out, Wuornos as the volatile and deranged killer.

12. The Squid and the Whale (2005) – In a cogitative critic’s perspective, it is a mistake to seek out movies that only contain good and righteous characters as regular digestion. In this mordantly funny film, two selfish parents played by Jeff Daniels and Laura Linney split and then carelessly yank around their kids’ emotions, depicting this is utmost a movie cataloging about how to not live your life. Jesse Eisenberg is the older of two sons who learns he can step away from his dad’s dominion and make his own choices.

13. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind (2004) – Jim Carrey and Kate Winslet are the mismatched couple whom are so torn to pieces after a break-up that they decide, one at a time, to go in for a memory erasure procedure so they can forget the heartbreak. Behold the surreal dazzle, yet the uppermost achievement is its enchanting idea that romantic attraction is an instinct that is impossible to escape. Carrey and Winslet, are certainly an unlikely pair, yet it is cosmic destiny that they find each other despite all lobotomized obstacles.

14. Sideways (2004) – Trouble and temptation in wine country, acerbic comedy that is both literate and broad. Paul Giamatti is the self-doubting loser Miles, Thomas Hayden Church is the egotistical womanizer Jack looking to score before his wedding. Arguably a scrutiny of why good guys make friends with bad guys except that, in all its beguiling grey area, Miles is too much of a grumpy kvetch to be good and Jack is too pathetic to be deemed totally bad. Ultimately, it is the best comedy made about that rare sparkling commodity: finding the perfect buzz.

15. A History of Violence (2005) – Dissection of violence and sexuality by David Cronenberg, that distinctive iconoclastic director of metaphors. Viggo Mortensen is perfect as the placid small town diner owner who proves to be unflinching in response to immediate violence. Yet his life succumbs to disillusion. His children come to not trust his identity, his wife feels intimately violated. William Hurt, as the crime boss brother oozing with sleaze, gives perhaps the greatest 8-and-a-half minute performance ever to be put on film. 

16. An Inconvenient Truth (2006) – The global warming awareness documentary with spokesperson Al Gore who gives us a multimedia lesson – a state-of-the-art slide show involving computerized charts, photos, archival footage, cartoons – parceled into a comprehensive yet accessible language that doesn’t lose us in rhetoric, but rather engages us in its full, imperative and urgent scope.

17. The Departed (2006) – Martin Scorsese’s rhapsodically orchestrated thriller set in underworld Boston where the character motives are double-sided, the violence is savage, the bonds of loyalty tremulous and precarious, the dialogue chomp and bawdy. Scorsese is peerless in his juggling of multiple storylines, and from top to bottom, his cast is hot-blooded bravado.

18. The Pianist (2002) – You’ve seen many other Holocaust films that span the war in broad strokes, this Roman Polanski film depicts the rare small pockets not seen in other war movies, following Wladyslaw Szpilman (Adrien Brody) as he makes move-and-hide refuge within the margins for the remainder of the war.

19. Spirited Away (2002) – Visionary Japanese anime by Hayao Miyazaki is an imagination spectacle that out-rabbit-holes “Alice in Wonderland.” Centering on a bratty lost girl – she must learn to overcome her helpless, clingy dependence on her parents – astray in a strange world that blows your mind and hums your heart at the same time.

20. The Isle (2000) and The Bow (2005) – Two more by Korean master Kim Ki-Duk. Both films deal with turning love into possession and reducing sex to body parts. Both films also contain, in their climaxes, shocking symbolic shots that will take days, if not weeks, to contemplate. You will by turn have feelings of love, hate, admiration, repulsion, curiosity and disturbance during two of Ki-Duk’s most challenging avante-garde pieces.

This encompasses a collection of what I feel to be essential and ground-breaking films. And yet, there is surprise that the following directors each made one or two films that deserved consideration on the list and yet barely missed the cut: Paul Thomas Anderson, Danny Boyle, Paul Greengrass, Richard Linklater and Steven Spielberg.

The greatest guilty pleasure of the decade is Mike Judge’s Idiocracy (2006, pic above). The ugliest film that I have ever loved! But really, nothing to feel guilty about, because I really honestly do think that it is the “1984” of our generation. Mike Judge, meet George Orwell. And then, Korean filmmaker Chan Wook-Park’s Oldboy (2005, pic below) could be the most influential thriller of our times – an almost perfect movie that just missed the cut as well but nevertheless deserves a shout-out. Then some more, I am compelled to mention another Korean film that I just discovered: Ha Yu's Marriage is a Crazy Thing (2002) which has the dialogue of a rich and tasty Richard Linklater film only that it just happens to be Korean. How come I can't stop? Before the Devil Knows You're Dead (2007) with Philip Seymour Hoffman and Julia (2009) with Tilda Swinton are two of the best pieces of acting that I have seen. 

BEST & WORST FILMS OF 2009

It was a year when genre movies trumped “important” prestige films. The best “important” one is number #4 on my list, and it doesn’t conduct itself as a message-laden film – it thrills and exhilarates then respects you to extract the message. Certainly there are a few other important films that deserve a place in the canon of 2009 releases. How do I list these anyway? My method is, the closer you get to number #1, the more exhilarating the movie was to me. In some years the real important movies are the ones that entertain the hell out of you. These are the eternal classics:

BEST OF 2009

1. Paranormal Activity – If you think like I do then you will agree that “The Shining” and “The Exorcist” are on Tier One as the greatest horror films ever made. “Paranormal” can now take the lead at the top of Tier Two. Taking place entirely inside a San Diego home where one boyfriend records infinitely with his video camera toy and a girlfriend haunted by the unknown, the film slowly creeps on you until it builds to unrelieved terror. As a result, the loudest screams in a movie theater you’ve heard in years if you were lucky enough to see this in a packed house. The fact that the best film of the year was principally made for $11,000 goes to say that if you live long enough you will eventually find something to surprise you. Yet there certainly must be a reason why the film rattles your nervous system so effectively. It has a way of tapping into fears that you thought were long dormant, and then extrapolating them. In a word: Primal.

2. Inglorious Basterds – Quentin Tarantino, giving good name to agonizing suspense as well as to stylistic homage, compiled a perfect cast for an awesome assembly of characters in this boyhood fantasy of American G.I.’s kicking Nazi ass in a fictional WWII. The opening sequence between Colonel Landa (Christoph Waltz, the best villain Q.T. has ever created) and the French farmer is the best written sequence this year or perhaps in many years. Never before has there been a movie character that has used ingratiating qualities to such powerful, ironically menacing effect.

3. Observe and Report – Black comedy comparable to Martin Scorsese’s “The King of Comedy,” by some others compared to “Taxi Driver,” one of those films you can’t see its greatness until you’ve seen it two, three, maybe five or six times. As long as you believe that a comedy isn’t required to have likeable characters then you will be knocked punch-drunk by Seth Rogen’s bi-polar mall cop. Here’s a guy who honestly and truly believes that his anti-social behavior is social normalcy. Second endorsement: Tarantino praised it as one of his faves of the year.

4. The Hurt Locker – Authentically filmed in the shrapnel littered conditions of the Middle East, the mesmerizing Jeremy Renner is the leader of a bomb disposal team in Baghdad. The title is symbolic of Renner’s obsession with mementos of his past assignments, but the film digs deeper into his paradoxical compulsion to risk-take for the sake of risk-taking – he’s a field operative who thrives on the adrenaline. The most haunting final shot at the movies this year. Kathryn Bigelow will likely become the first woman to ever win the Best Director Oscar.

5. Bruno –Sacha Baron Cohen is the preeminent avante-garde performer of our time, battery-ramming his character into real world encounters and eliciting shocked reactions from onlookers. It’s not the plot that’s important, it’s the anything goes quasi-documentary method that is which here veers into what should be called borderline documentary. By turns outrageous and side-splitting, then fascinating and intolerable, this is perhaps the only comedy that could be seen as a puke-your-guts-out rollercoaster ride and ask for seconds.

6. Departures – This Japanese film touched my heart more than any other this year, containing scenes that I am forever grateful for. While it initially stirred me upon my first viewing, I had no idea how much I really loved it until I reviewed the similarly themed but vacuous “My Sister’s Keeper” two months later. Failed cellist Diago (Masahiro Motoki, gentle and superb) is a nokanshi, a man who performs ceremonial washing of corpses before their burial. It remains uplifting and spiriting even despite its cadaverous theme possibly because it honors and cherishes the memory of the dead, while soothing the hearts of the living.

7. Up in the Air – George Clooney as a termination specialist who travels nearly every day of the year, embracing his roaming lifestyle. He meets Vera Farmiga, also a woman of non-commitments. Jason Reitman (“Thank You for Smoking,” “Juno”) is once again the director of a smart, devious comedy that this time taking us all over the map, both literally and thematically.

8. Public Enemies – Underrated. Contains some of the most ironically beautiful and evocative cinematography of the year, while seducing you into the art deco texture of the 1930’s. Christian Bale is a stiff as the agent on pursuit, but Johnny Depp as John Dillinger is the embodiment of criminal cool, a bank robber who saw recklessness and exhilaration as one and the same.

9. Precious – For those few people out there who thought “Juno” was too insincere and irresponsible (I don’t know how you could, it’s only a comedy) here’s an honest heartbreaking reel: a portrait of an obese 16-year old Harlem girl who becomes a mother to two children. Gabourey Sidibe turns the title morose inward character into a revelation, but one of the year’s great performances belongs to Mo’Nique who channels short-fuse fury as the abusive, oppressive mother.

10. Invictus – A Nelson Mandela biopic could have existed without giving us the marketing hook of rugby, but still, the two have been honorably integrated. And Morgan Freeman delivers one of his great performances. But highest praise to director Clint Eastwood’s awe-inspiring location shooting.




Overlooked:

Julia – Is she the best living actress today? Tilda Swinton is a pitiless, self-absorbed alcoholic-cum-tramp who commits the hefty crime of kidnap-and-ransom which snowballs into multiple heftier crimes. The year’s best under-the-radar thriller, although it is more of a human wreckage character study. In a sane world she would win the Best Actress Oscar. Erick Zonca, the director, also deserves to be taken seriously. This film reminds one of the Coen's first film "Blood Simple."

Milestones:

Best Documentary: “Tyson”

Best Animated Film: “Fantastic Mr. Fox”

Best Actor and Supporting Actor: Jeremy Renner in “The Hurt Locker” and Christoph Waltz in “Inglorious Basterds”

Best Actress and Supporting Actress: Tilda Swinton in “Julia” and Mo’Nique in “Precious”

Best Cameo: Harrison Ford in “Bruno”

Most Surprising Robert DeNiro caliber classic performance: Seth Rogen in “Observe and Report”

Best Montage: “Observe and Report” exhibiting Rogen’s off-medication nihilism followed by the beatdown of hooligan skateboarders.

Best Artistic use of Black & White: The opening sequence in “Antichrist”

Best Musical Interlude: “(500) Days of Summer”

Best Love Scene: Drew Barrymore directed the underwater tableau in “Whip It”

Best Sex Scene: The Korean vampire movie “Thirst” by Chan-Wook Park

Twenty dick jokes too many: “Funny People”

Two Hundred Eyebrow Twitches too many: Kristen Stewart in “New Moon”

Worst Films of the Year:

1. Miss March – So smutty and juvenile it makes you almost wonder for a moment if Playboy has ever been sexy.

2. Flame & Citron – Danish film replete with the most idiotic WWII clichés in ages. A blockbuster in its native country, this marks proof that the Danish are capable of having just as much bad taste as Americans when it comes to overhyped and shallow action spectacle. Then it takes itself so damn seriously.

3. 17 Again – Pervasively stupid. Characters adamantly act without thinking. Characters react slow when introduced to new surroundings. Characters demonstrate absent memories outside of a two-minute time span. Zac Efron is a "star" but so what.
4. Management – Jennifer Aniston and Steve Zahn comedy that loses its sense of priority. To makes us laugh, to make insightful human observations.
5. Away We Go – John Krasinski and Maya Rudolph are a couple with a baby on the way and obnoxious supporting characters along the way, against director Sam Mendes’ washed-out color palette. The most literate movie on this worst list, yet so dreary it’s soul-crushing.

SHERLOCK HOLMES

Sherlock Holmes plunges you into the plot without warming you up or seducing you into 1890’s London, slapping together shots incoherently until you don’t care what is happening. Instead of sleuthing and puzzle-solving, the audience is treated to a reckless action scene. The dialogue is also zippy and breathless (and incoherent), and Robert Downey Jr. in the lead role as Sherlock even mumbles his words in an early scene where he insults Jude Law’s female companion (Law plays Dr. John Watson). While actors certainly appear debonair they are nevertheless surrounded by a sloppy production.

Worth mentioning right away is that there are precisely four good scenes in the movie, and surprisingly, three of those are action scenes. Dame Irene (Rachel McAdams) is swinging from a meat hook on one scene in a charnel house and Sherlock Action Hero has to set her free in time before she gets shredded by blades. That was a highlight, and that is not to sound sarcastic. It really is a good scene.

Also good moments are a scene featuring a runaway boat sinking into the bay, and a climactic scene jousting on the rafters. If you haven’t figured it out by now, let’s make it clear that Sherlock Holmes has been made into an Action Hero for this generation leaving the cleverness of sleuthing to past adaptations. Certainly there is a little bit of sleuthing, and the finale where he puts the pieces together is exuberantly executed. But did we really need to see Holmes in a boxing match? The snap and crackle direction by Guy Ritchie (“Snatch”) predisposes that it must be so.

That’s really for the Ritchie fans that enjoy his overblown theatrics, but for keen viewers, the Ritchie overall style is frenetic and chaotic (the mere snap and crackle editing is saved for shots of bone-breaking). Ritchie doesn’t care if you brew over the mystery of the film, he just wants to smash excess at your senses. As for the mystery, Lord Blackwood (Mark Strong) has been executed by hanging but continues to terrorize London from beyond the grave. Death, you see, has only made him stronger. But Sherlock figures that Blackwood must have been getting help from somewhere other than from his gift of Black Magic.

But sometimes a superfast pace just makes time stand still. What’s lost is fresh Holmes and Watkins camaraderie. McAdams is adrift in randomly shuffled scenes. The Hans Zimmer score is endless lightning, it also never stops to breath. Although Zimmer does echo notes from Ennio Morricone’s score from “Once Upon a Time in the West.” Moreover, what is lost is any satisfying sense of cleverness.

In a production overrun with bombast, what you will nonetheless recognize is the set design of the film which is meticulous in detail. The film’s display of 1890’s London looks as real as the history books. It’s the actors who are contemporary, and the action and style that is ultra-modern. For those readers looking for nothing but sheer entertainment, why are you bothering to look anywhere else but “Avatar” for this holiday season?

Click Here to go to official Sherlock Holmes website

Grade: C

THE IMAGINARIUM OF DOCTOR PARNASSUS

Even shots of beauty have a tinge of off-putting perversity in Terry Gilliam’s world. Gilliam wants to crush and decimate the idea of a fairy tale with his latest The Imaginarium of Doctor Parnassus. The film will more likely be remembered as Heath Ledger’s final film. Johnny Depp, Jude Law and Colin Farrell stepped in as substitute for Ledger’s non-completed scenes which are mostly the fantasy ones, sometimes masquerading in disguise or aided by CGI to fill in for Ledger’s character.

“Parnassus” is an original idea by Gilliam and co-writer Charles McKeown that revolves around a travelling stage show. Once you go backstage, you fall into a magical alternate world that’s like an id extension of the Candyland game. It’s a place where Gilliam, like he did in “Brazil” and “The Adventures of Baron Munchausen,” unleashes his whacked surrealist imagination.

Yet Gilliam finds it necessary to open the movie with a demonstration of cruel and mean behavior as a couple of drunks attempt to trash the stage of Parnassus’ (Christopher Plummer, in white goatee). Other travelling players include Percy (Vern Troyer) as the midget who deploys wisecracks. Anton (Andrew Garfield) and Valentina (Lily Cole) are the hormonal teenagers. New to the pack, Tony (Ledger) is an amnesiac who joins the gang until he can figure out where he can from and why he stumbled.

What can be said when Ledger has more charisma than anybody in the troupe, even Parnassus himself, who is the dullest of dullest of eponymous characters? This is in no way a demonstration of Ledger’s greatest acting (“Brokeback Mountain” and “The Dark Knight” are proof of his endurance), but in a movie replete with magic tricks, Ledger’s star burns brightest.

You never want to be a part of the ordinary scenes as these guys travel through London. The dialogue is garble, often nonsensical or grandiose. “He doesn’t want to rule the world. He wants the world to rule itself.” Gilliam’s visual sense is more cluttered than ever – it’s oppressive, assaultive. If “Parnassus” is worth bothering to look at it is for some of its technical work (in the fantasy sequences only), not story. In brief, it is a shiftless story about making improvements to the road show, figuring out the meaning of self-identity and escaping from Tom Waits (He plays the Devil).

In regards to technical work, what you will get in the fantasy sequences are such things as mammoth staircases, funny-acting mirrors and men on elongated stilts. His neatest trick, with Depp in foreground, is an oily onyx river that morphs into a snake’s head. What poisons the film ultimately however is Gilliam’s unceasing misanthropy. This is his third bad movie in a row.

Click here to go to Doctor Parnassus official site

Grade: C-

AVATAR

The visual spectacle of Avatar is so cool that it almost becomes an overload of cool. Every shot in James Cameron’s blue world extravaganza is magnificent from left to right, packing it in, never giving into visual short-shrift. His storytelling efforts are also ambitious and extensive. But when it comes to storytelling, they are indeed efforts.

The screenplay duties by Cameron on his “Titanic” were much bolder and streamlined than they are here even if the Billy Zane character was a two-dimensional louse in a tux. In “Avatar” two villains exist, Stephen Lang merciless honcho Colonel Miles Quaritch and Giovanni Ribisi’s wormy mission director Parker Selfridge who is a nod to Paul Reiser’s character in Cameron’s “Aliens.” Besides being a far too single-minded and intractable, these are good villains.

This is the year 2154 (the human stuff, the technology feels like it), and earthlings have stationed in Pandora where mineral unobtainium must be extracted to save Earth’s energy crisis. The hero of the picture is Sam Worthington as paraplegic Jake Sully, a still enlisted Marine, who enters the Avatar program headed by Sigourney Weaver as a Ph.D. In a sensory deprivation tank, human consciousness is linked with a cloned Na’vi, a blue alien species whose characteristics include towering height, green-yellow eyes, and facilitated with spring-powered legs.

As a clone, Jake can now run and climb and do everything he used to be able to do (when he wakes up he’s a paraplegic in a tank again). As an avatar, Jake can now assimilate himself with the Na’vi people and learn from them. His first Na’vi he meets is Neytiri (Zoe Saldana), who saves his life and then introduces Jake to her people. The Na’vi are knowing that Jake’s appearance is an avatar.

What’s peculiar is that the blue people want Jake around so they can learn as much about him and he wants to learn about them. Something that Cameron fails to give us a sound and convincing motive. The script has references to “schools” where the two species integrated and failed to come to a satisfying cooperation. But the Na’vi are content in their perspective that the white man is evil. It’s true, the white man only wants the Na’vi to relocate so they can drill in their sacred land. This sets up current event overtones on what our U.S. military is doing in sections in the Middle East.

Cameron wants you to be aware of the intolerant prejudices happening today, and while it could have been cleanly inserted into his plot with subtlety, he gets bogged down in it all. Dr. Grace is the sounding board of reason, and yet while argumentative with Colonel Quaritch and Parker Selfridge, they are unsympathetic to such Na’vi social traditions and beliefs. They are going to plow the land no matter what, in fact, they decide the blow it up. What unnerved me, taking me out of the story, was that the humans become a wrecking team with no harvesting crew to collect the precious minerals after they’ve just blown up a Na’vi sanctuary.

For two-thirds of the movie you wonder where are the rest of the Na’vi people (is there only one tribe?), and when they all do come together you fail to get a sense of all its’ people as once collective force. In all that time however, you are wowed constantly by the green plant life and hybrid animals that pop in and out of the screen in persuasive realistic detail. Academic viewers will hypothesize how this and that was done with CGI, but Cameron must be today’s maestro on CGI. “Avatar” contains the best special effects in years with people and landscapes in exceptionally realistic composite shots.

“Avatar” doesn’t always work as a cohesive and tight-wired story, yet for its splendor and imagination it works as sheer entertainment. As I hinted before, there is so much cool stuff that you can for a few minutes get tired of the cool stuff on the occasions where the action doesn’t support the story. Worthington, who is like a tougher meathead version of Ewan McGregor, has enough gravitas to keep you emotionally invested. Saldana is an interesting, multi-layered character as a Na’vi until she evolves into a clichéd character. And in the closing scenes, one of the villains doesn’t get a proper comeuppance. Now I’m starting a litany. Let’s repeat that “Avatar” works as sheer entertainment and keep it at that.


Note: I reviewed “Avatar” in 3-D IMAX, and while I got tired of 3D glasses dangling on my nose, I have to admit the format was awesome. All the characters and landscapes are in full plush three-dimensional presentation. I plan on seeing it again in 2-D.

Go to the official website at http://www.avatarmovie.com/

Grade: B+